This essay attempts to show that the thesis of the absolute primacy of language over writing cannot be taken for granted in the Chinese context. Mainstream linguistics gives absolute priority to spoken language over written language. One of Humboldt’s key observations about the Chinese language is that, compared to Indo-European languages, its phonological system is relatively weak. To compensate for this “phonic poverty,” he noted that the Chinese language has developed the feature of “analogy of script” over millennia, using visual components in the “combination” and “derivation” of meaning. As a result, the Chinese script is not merely a “script of words” (Schrift der Worte) but also a “script of thoughts” (Gedankenschrift). Humboldt emphasizes this uniqueness by suggesting that the Chinese script has “embraced philosophical work within itself,” and that Chinese writing has evolved into an “inherent component” of the language. To understand Humboldt’s perspective, this paper first discusses the “ Lishu -transformation” (隸變), a crucial phase in the evolution of Chinese writing from its archaic styles to lishu (隸書), the classical forms we may easily recognize today. During this transformational process, many cognitive components of the original scripts have become blurred and distorted. Consequently, modern script forms often lack the clarity needed for accurate etymological analysis. This explains why, in our attempt to recover the cognitive content of the characters, we should not rely solely on the so-called “radicals” (部首), which result from the Lishu -transformation, but should supplement these “radicals” with “components” (部件), which reflect the original structure of the script. With this in mind, this paper examines a series of Chinese characters that are “abstract” to varying degrees, to see how they acquire their abstract meanings, which arguably consummate the richness of the Chinese world of meaning.
Die Mainstream Linguistik räumt der Sprache einen absoluten Vorrang gegenüber der Schrift ein. Diese Vorlesung versucht zu zeigen, dass im chinesischen Kontext diese These nicht als selbstverständlich angesehen werden kann. Wilhelm von Humboldt bemerkte zum Beispiel einmal, dass die chinesische Schrift über Jahrtausende hinweg zu einem „inhärenten Bestandteil“ der chinesischen Sprache entwickelt worden sei. Neben Humboldt werden in den Vorlesungen die Arbeiten der Linguisten Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste und Chomsky sowie die der Philosophen Husserl, Heidegger und Merleau-Ponty aufgegriffen, damit die Thematik sprachwissenschaftlich wie auch philosophisch diskutiert wird.
In European universities, courses related to Chinese philosophy are usually offered in the Department of Sinology or the Department of China Studies. In recent years, the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin has advocated the concept of “global philosophy” and has taken visionary actions to introduce courses like Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, and African Philosophy. In September 2019, I began to teach “Modern Interpretation of Chinese Philosophy” during the 2019–20 winter semester at Freie Universität Berlin, upon the invitation Prof. Stefan Gosepath from Germany’s Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS-Contestations of the Liberal Script, and Prof. Hans Feger from the Department of Philosophy.At first, I had no idea how many students would come to listen to this seminar course designed for senior undergraduate students and postgraduate students. After all, many seminars at college are often attended by only three to five students. To my surprise, its attendance stayed at around 25 students (Including students who audit) throughout the semester, indicating that German students are interested in Chinese philosophy. Though I only taught for one semester, I still felt much about lecturing on Chinese philosophy at a European university. Apart from the differences between Chinese and Western cultures and between tradition and modernity, I gained a deep understanding of the complexity of exploring the significance of Chinese philosophy in a modern context.
The article provides a philosophical interpretation of the practice of “contemplating mental activity” ( guanxin 觀心) in sixth-century Chinese Tiantai Buddhism and explains its relevance to the development of East Asian Buddhism in general. As the title suggests, the topic is about the philosophical question of the nonduality of representational and paradoxical thinking. According to Tiantai, representational thinking creates empty constructs; deconstruction reveals the unreal but does not eliminate it. Paradoxically, deconstructive contemplation recognizes that nothing real can be found in linguistic representations and therefore no “language” can be erased. From Tiantai’s soteriological perspective, the mind’s self-induced deceptions are inevitable but retain an instructive quality that must be disclosed by “contemplating the mind”. The perfection of contemplation can be achieved through the realization that construction can become deconstruction, just as deconstruction brings construction, as manifested in the textual transmission of Buddhist doctrine (Buddhadharma).
