Introduction: Literary Forms of Argument in Early China
Dirk Meyer2015, Literary Forms of Argument in Early China
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Abstract
Defining Boundaries and Relations of Textual Units: Examples from the Literary Tool-Kit of Early Chinese Argumentation 112 Joachim Gentz 5 The Philosophy of the Analytic Aperçu 158 Christoph Harbsmeier 6 Speaking of Poetry: Pattern and Argument in the "Kongzi Shilun" 175 Martin Kern 7 Structure and Anti-Structure, Convention and Counter-Convention: Clues to the Exemplary Figure's (Fayan) Construction of Yang Xiong as Classical Master 201 Michael Nylan 8 A Ragbag of Odds and Ends? Argument Structure and Philosophical Coherence in Zhuangzi 26 243 Wim De Reu 9 Truth Claim with no Claim to Truth: Text and Performance of the "Qiushui" Chapter of the Zhuangzi 297 Dirk Meyer Index 341 7 Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350-377, 370f. 8 This view can already be found in early Jesuit discussions and in reflections by philosophers such as Leibniz and Hegel. An early more systematic linguistic analysis undertakes Wilhelm von Humboldt in his letter to Abel-Rémusat in 1827 (transl.
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Literary Forms of Argument in the Tsinghua Manuscript "Tang zai Chi men" 湯在啻門
in: Li Xueqin 李學勤、Sarah Allan 艾蘭、Michael Lüdke 呂德凱 (eds.) 主編, Qinghuajian yanjiu 3: ‘Qinghua Daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian 5’ guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 清華簡研究（第三輯）——《清華大學藏戰國竹簡（伍）》國際學術研討會論文集, Shanghai: ZhongXi shuju 中西書局, 2019, pp. 194-221
The spate of texts excavated in the last decades from Warring States and Han tombs have revealed, among many other things, a particular feature of early Chinese texts which has not been equally well preserved in the Han editions of the otherwise quite reliably transmitted texts. The range of literary forms of argument used in many of the excavated texts is generally broader, richer and more diverse than the literary forms we find in most of the received record. The following chapter identifies and analyses literary forms of argument in the text Tang zai Chimen 湯在啻門 from the Tsinghua Collection. The text will first be displayed in an analytical presentation, followed by a translation, the respective literary forms will then be introduced and analysed one by one, followed by a diagrammatic presentation and final discussion.
“‘Self-refutation’ in early Chinese argumentative prose: Sidelights on the linguistic prehistory of incipient epistemology”
Modern definitions of ‘philosophy’ commonly – though by no means unanimously (cf. for an array of competing definitions for instance HWP VII, Sp. 714-31, s.v.) – build upon the diagnostic presence of ‘principled’, ‘systematic’, and ‘rational’ modes of asking questions about knowledge, ontology, ethics etc., and the presumably universal notions extrapolable from answers to them. Throughout most of the 20th century, the perceived lack of a broadly ‘epistemological’ definiens for the assignment of ancient Chinese authors, texts or ‘schools of thought’ to the category of ‘philosophy’ has formed a recurrent debating ground for its respective sinological detractors and proponents. Moreover, the very act of asking the question which forms the theme of this conference with respect to China has a long and fairly convoluted histori(ographi)cal and political prehistory, which might be traced back even beyond the Jesuit beginnings, from which Ori Sela’s masterful recent outline (“Philosophy’s Ascendancy: The Genealogy of Tetsugaku/Zhexue in Japan and China, 1870-1930 ”, Ms., Princeton, 2010) of the conflicting Chinese, Japanese, and Western narratives on the topic proceeds, i.e. well down into European Late Antiquity. To continue to pose this question, then, is deliberately reductionist in the sense that it nonchalantly disregards such historical underpinnings, and, in that it consequently “pushes careful readings of Chinese texts into a narrow corner of self-defence, predetermining the type of evidence marshalled for a question that was only asked out of the historical coincidence that China’s … desperate opening to western knowledge happened just around the time analytical philosophy flourished in the Anglophone world” (Denecke 2006: 26-7). Despite such quite well-taken caveats, I will argue that there is still a role to be played for attempts to shoulder the heavy, time-honoured European “conceptual baggage” within the “loaded stratosphere of philosophy” (ibid., 36). Rather than to retreat into seemingly cozier disciplinary environments, such as “comparative intellectual history”, “intercultural philosophy”, “ethnosemantics”, “rhetorical criticism” etc., which ostentatiously aim at overriding the entrenched universalist/relativist divide or its alleged “logocentric” conditionality, to reconstruct what was epistemological competence according to explicitly pre-imposed “Western” parameters may have the advantage of being easier falsifiable than comparative approaches to historical performance and cultural preferences. Confirming Homer Dubs’ (1892-1969) famous rejection of the idea, widespread at least since Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), that the “Failure of the Chinese to produce philosophical systems” (T’oung Pao 26, 1929, 96-109) is contingent upon the structure of their Classical language, the “narrow corner” from which I will argue for purposes of this talk is the concept of ‘self-refutation’ (bèi 悖) in Early Chinese argumentative prose, as first discussed with view to its truth-claim implications in H. Roetz’ indispensible catalogue of validity markers in Eastern Zhou texts (1993). Analysing the Old Chinese morphology underlying bèi, I will try to show that the – admittedly rare – verb transcribed by the graph 悖 is uniquely useful for truth-based definitions of philosophy in that it derives from the root of the negative bù 不, and thus assigns an immediate epistemological value to the objects within its semantic scope. I will then compare its textual usages to transitive instances of fēi 非, itself in all likelihood derived from the fusion of an early copular verb with the same negative root, bù 不. Since the definition of ‘philosophy’ is, very likely, an act of philosophizing, it is bound to end up in an endlessly spiralling loop. It is hoped that looking at it through the linguistic ruptures inevitably introduced into arguments by negation will leave us somewhat closer to the Old Chinese beginnings of that loop.
New Trends in Commentary on the Confucian Classics: Characteristics, Differences, and Significance of Rhetorically Oriented Exegeses of the Mengzi
ACTA KOREANA, 2018
Originally, East Asian intellectuals focused their attention on the philosophy of the Confucian Classics, rarely commenting on their literary aspects. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, there were three exegetical works that proposed a different approach to the Mengzi: Maengja ch’aŭi (Notes on the meanings of the Mengzi) written by Wi Paekkyu (1727–1798), a Chosŏn scholar, Mengzi lunwen written by Niu Yunzhen (1706–1758) from China, and Doku Mōshi written by Hirose Tansō (1782–1856) in Japan. These exegeses approached the Mengzi through its literary style, and commented on many literary points: rhetorical strategy, grammar, and wording. In this article, these exegetical works are referred to as “rhetorical commentaries” since they emphasized rhetoric to a much greater extent than previous commentaries. The purpose of this article is to show how the rhetorical commentaries are different from ordinary or standard commentaries, such as the works of Zhu Xi and Jiao Xun, but also to point out some differences among the three rhetorical commentaries. In addition, this study evaluates the significance of the appearance in East Asia of rhetorical commentaries in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This will be done by placing them in the context of relevant historical events and changes in literati culture from the middle ages to the early-modern period of East Asia. Thus, this article will be a first step towards an understanding of rhetorically oriented exegeses in East Asia and the relationship between these commentaries, their historical change and their intellectual history. Keywords: East Asia, the Confucian Classics, rhetorical commentaries, Mengzi, exegesis
The Zhuangzi, hermeneutics and (philological) corpus linguistics
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2015
The classical Chinese text Zhuangzi tells us that the meaning of a word, or a text, is not fixed, but consists of the many perspectives offered in debate. Each new contribution interprets what has been said and thus adds to its meaning. This is akin to the approach of modern hermeneutics. What a text means is determined by its intertextual links to previous texts, and by the traces it leaves in its subsequent interpretations. The practical approach of philology and the methodology of corpus linguistics provide the foundation of the task of interpretation, by establishing the textual evidence on which interpretation has to rest. My paper exemplifies the Zhuangzi's strategy in moving on from the textual evidence to their manifold interpretations, thus interweaving corpus linguistics, philology and hermeneutics.
" Patterning Meaning " : A Thick Description of the Tsinghua Manuscript " *Tang zai Chi/Di men " (Tang was at the Chi/Di Gate) and What It Tells Us about Thought Production in Early China
This paper provides a 'thick description' (using Clifford Geertz's notion) of " *Tang zai Chi/Di men " , which is part of the Tsinghua Manuscripts. Exploring its communicative dimensions and analysing the interplay between text and performance, this paper reconstructs the social use of " *Tang zai Chi/Di men " in the discourse of the time. The manuscript text records an imagined dialogue held at the Chi/Di Gate between King Cheng Tang and his famous official, Yi Yin, consistently introduced as 'minor minister'. The text is highly patterned and presents a conversation about the 'innately good doctrines of old and their actuality in the present'. The conversation is framed by an introductory formula commonly seen in textualised " Shu " traditions, as well as a final appraisal, which concludes the text in 'dramatic' terms (using Helmut Utzschneider's notion). The text is rhymed while the items under discussion are presented as catalogues, suggesting completeness. The well-balanced composition is at odds with the seemingly meagre content of the text, staging oddly empty phrases that leave the modern reader rather puzzled. By drawing on content-form and communication theories, and considering its performative dimensions, this paper probes the apparent conflict between the content and the form and reconstructs the strategies of Warring States communities to develop meaning through patterned text. Once contextualised, this rather peculiar text serves as a reference for meaning-construction of performance texts in the intellectual landscape of the Warring States period (ca. 453–222 BC) more globally.
A Building Block of Chinese Argumentation: Initial Fu 夫 as a Phrase Status Marker.
In analytical non-narrative discourse, various rhetorical figures have been used to mark the status of statements as either expressing general rules, exceptions, or side comments. Such status markers might be silent and structural or explicit. Markers of both types exist in classical Chinese, but they are little studied. The consequence is a loss in the precision of the understanding of the arguments proffered. This is a study of the development of initial fu 夫 into a phrase status marker for statements for which a general rather than particular validity is claimed. The methodology used aims at falsifiability. After an outline of the state of the art, the paper offers a qualitative analysis of a randomized sample of phrases in Wang Bi's (AD 226-249) commentaries on the Zhouyi and the Laozi to develop a plausibilized series of hypotheses. In a second quantitative step, these hypotheses are tested against the entire body of these two texts. The last section sketches the process by which initial fu shed its use as a demonstrative and developed into the. structuring device for the Chinese rhetoric of argument outlined above.
‘Self-Refutation’ (bèi) in Early Chinese Argumentative Prose: Sidelights on the Linguistic
Prehistory of Incipient Philosophy
R.C. Steineck, R. Weber, R.H. Gassmann & E.L. Lange, eds., Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic world, Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2018, 2018
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