Whether in China or the West, sometimes the most fundamental philosophical problem is left to us by language, and we only experience such philosophical problems in language.
——Yang Huilin
I think that the Chinese language itself contains a completely different structure of thinking, or a philosophical structure, than in the West. There was a French philosopher named François Jullien, who was sent by the government to China in 1975 to learn Chinese. According to his own recollection, the first Chinese he learned after he arrived in China was "What is this?" And the teacher told him that Chinese never say "what is this thing", but "what is this". The teacher said Chinese said "what is this thing" is the English "What is this", and the result is that this future philosopher is very real, he is right one by one, "what" in "what is this thing" is "what", "is" is "is", "this" is "this", "what is this", what is "thing"? The teacher said that "thing" is also "this". Didn't he say that there was already "this"? The teacher told him, "this'this' is not 'this'." So he asked what was this "this"? The teacher told him it was "something." What is that "thing"? It was East and West, east and west, so this sentence made a Frenchman completely blind at that time. He said how east and west, two completely different directions, can be combined into one, and you also told me that this is this, how is this possible? So he later recalled that he found that the Chinese language contained a huge possibility of thought, which made him feel very shocked and felt an extraordinary radical change when he had just begun to learn Chinese.
After Jullien became a philosopher, his basic philosophical thinking was related to this. That's why I say that Chinese philosophy is a relationship between the two poles. Westerners now say that the realm is the most developed in Chinese philosophy, which is a kind of thinking about relationships. So what is the most developed in Western philosophy? Yes be, that is, existence, the "is this" thing in "what is this".
So I would like to say that such a concept is actually very, very much in the Middle Chinese, and the most typical one related to Buddhism is the "world." The "world" they understand is "world," but the "world" that Buddhism says is "space-time," time and space. Therefore, in the Buddhist Scriptures, there is "the world is the flow of the world, and the boundary is the direction", which are two completely different things, which cannot be expressed in the Western language. There is also "Tianxia", and what we call "Tianxia" is actually the world, the universe, the universe or the world. "State" is also the same, "country" and "home" in the Chinese separately speaking two different concepts, but it can be combined into a word.
Taking a step further, there are actually many word phenomena in Chinese that we are not aware of, such as why is "filial piety" so important in Chinese? Because this is traditional Chinese morality and so on. But I think it's not just because of this, because in traditional morality, this is not the most critical, the most critical is the traditional philosophy, it is a traditional "relationship", not a "thing". Why? Let's look at a sentence said by Mencius, who said: "He who is able to learn what man does not learn is also able to do so; and he who knows what he does not care about knows, so does his conscience." "Therefore, conscience and conscience are natural and do not need to be learned. So where does this nature come from? He gave an example, kissing and respecting the elders, that is, we like our children, respect our elders, it is very natural. It is not a thing, not a concept, an idea or a moral lesson to be observed, but a relation. So the relationship is interesting. What is kissing? It's Ren; what is Reverence? It is righteousness. In fact, benevolence and righteousness are difficult to say clearly, and it can even be said that they cannot be fully explained. But what cannot be fully explained, what cannot be fully manifested, is revealed in the most ordinary relationship of kinship and respect, so that it has a relatively complete concept. This is a very interesting philosophical basis on which "relation" replaces "stuff."
When James was translating the Tao Te Ching, he said that the "Tao" of "the Tao is the Tao, the Very Tao" is a kind of operation in English, it is an operation, a manifestation. So in what does it work and manifest? This "Word" inspired him and reminded him of a saying in the Bible: "If you do not know love, you cannot know God", why? For God is love, of benevolence and righteousness. So what is love? It is to kiss and respect the elders, which is the simplest kind of ethical relationship between human beings. And in this relationship, you can understand what Is God, What Is Benevolence, and What Is Righteousness. I think this kind of mutual inspiration is really not to say that Chinese have traditional virtues, but that Chinese a way of traditional philosophical speculation, and this way may be different from the West, but it can inspire each other.
Whether in China or the West, sometimes the most fundamental philosophical problem is left to us by language, and we only experience such philosophical problems in language. So why is it that sometimes Chinese focus on different things than Westerners? Because our language leaves us with unique philosophical problems, the language of the West also leaves us with the West's own philosophical problems.
There was a German philosopher named Gadamer, who famously said, "What can be understood is language." Language and culture cannot be replaced by anything for a cultural identity, for the honor of a true nation. So, in 1948, when Israel was re-established, they did something earth-shattering, they didn't build the wall, they didn't build an army, they went to a group of scholars to discuss how to restore Hebrew. Because there were very few people who could speak Hebrew at that time, language was too important to maintain a national identity like Israel. Combined with Gadamer's statement that "what can be understood is language," we can know that we can only think in one language, not that we think about what Chinese is, but that we can only think about everything we can say within the framework of Chinese. Therefore, the philosophical problems left by the language of the West to the West may be different from ours, and we can only understand it by going back to the past.
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President of the Chinese Comparative Literature Society, former vice president of Chinese Min University, professor and doctoral supervisor of Chinese Min University. His research interests are in the fields of comparative literature and religion. He has presided over a number of national social science funds, key research bases of the Ministry of Education and international cooperation projects. Representative monographs include "Theological Hermeneutics", "Outline of Western Literary Theory", "The Background of Christianity and Cultural Extension", "Moving Boundaries", "History of European Medieval Literature", "History of Western Literary and Art Theory", etc.
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Editor: Niu Yajie
Review: Gao Qiaoyan
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