Self-refutation’ (bèi) in Early Chinese argumentative prose: sidelights on the linguistic pre­history of incipient epistemology

I. At least since the 18 century, when philosophy in Europe conclusively superseded theology as the overarching metadiscipline of knowledge and wisdom on the one hand, and had to grapple with the competition of the emerging empirical sciences on the other, definitions of ‘philosophy’ took a decidedly epistemological bend. This tension, still distinctively palpable in Wittgenstein, when he categorically states that “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” and that “The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences” in 1913-14, led to the largescale demise of doctrinal definitions of philosophical knowledge in favour of its conceptualization as an “activity”, aiming at “the logical clarification of thoughts”. Definitions echoing Kant’s reification of philosophy as the absolute “science of the general principles of knowledge and of the ultimate objects attainable by knowledge” (“Wissenschaft von den letzten Zwecken der menschlichen Vernunft”) held sway throughout most of the 19 century and commonly – though by no means unanimously – built upon the diagnostic presence of ‘principled’, ‘systematic’, ‘rational’ and ‘critical’ modes of asking questions about knowledge, ontology, or ethics, and the presumably universal notions extrapolable from answers to them. Yet this consensus was soon to be shattered again by the many competing countercurrents in the 19 century, ushering in new definitions of philosophy, driven by aesthetic, historical, philological, or even political considerations, and, eventually, the reinstatement of Lebensphilosophie, with its abandonment of the enlightenment impetus and insistence on epistemological grounding, in favor of the polyvalency of hermeneutic interpretations of

-2philosophical problems.Another "escape" move was the renewed interest in perceptions, emotions and other instantiations of consciousness in the movement of phenomenology in the early, or, indeed, the radical jettisoning of any scientific or historical pretensions and the ensuing happy marriage of philosophy with literature during later phases of the 20 th century.
Thus, a non-historically contingent, "normatively" valid definition of philosophy obviously failed to stabilize, as it did during the centuries before Kant, largely due to the property that "philosophy" could never escape the questioning by itself without ending up in an infinte regress.On this "definitory loop" Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1959 booklet The wisdom of the West: 5 "We may note one peculiar feature of philosophy.If someone asks the question what is mathematics, we can give him a dictionary definition, let us say the science of number, for the sake of argument.As far as it goes this is an uncontroversial statement ... Definitions may be given in this way of any field where a body of definite knowledge exists.But philosophy cannot be so defined.Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude.The only way to find out what philosophy is, is to do philosophy." This may strike one as a quite adequate and cautionary working description to begin with.All the more astonishing, then, that it gets tacitly subverted by the author's insistence, a few pages later in the same book, that philosophy as a "tradition of scientific thinking" is found exclusively in the West.Less than a decade later, Horkheimer, who, for once, shares his approach with regard to the problem of definition with Russell, would reiterate that 6 "There is no definition of philosophy.Its definition is identified with the explicit exposition of what it has to say" ("Es gibt keine Definition der Philosophie.Ihre Definition ist identifiziert mit der expliziten Darstellung dessen, was sie zu sagen hat.")Yet after the sobering disillusionment about of the state of affairs reached after some 2500 years of definition and redefinition it is almost heartening to see that he goes on to see the role of philosophy as "a corrective of history", a reflective procedure to "save the way of humankind from becoming similar to the meaningless perambulations of the prison inmate during his relaxation hour", and to at least call the "hex of the existing" ("den Bann des Bestehenden") by its proper name. 7B. Russell, The wisdom of the West, ed. by P. Foulkes, Garden City: Dobleday & Co., 1959: 7 6 M. Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1967: 155.7 Ibid., 173, 175.
Throughout most of the late 19 th and the whole 20 th century, it was the alleged lack of a broadly "epistemological" definiens for the assignment of ancient Chinese authors, texts or 'schools of thought' to the category of 'philosophy', which formed a recurrent debating ground for its respective sinological detractors and proponents.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 highly recommendable recent outline of the conflicting Chinese, Japanese, and Western narratives on the topic proceeds8 , i.e. well down into European Late Antiquity. 9To continue to pose this question, then, is deliberately reductionist in the sense that it nonchalantly disregards the historical underpinnings which shaped the notion of philosophy during the crucial Sino-Western intellectual exchanges since the 18 th century which surrounded the appropriation of the corresponding Western discipline and its terminologies in China.Consequently, as Denecke poignantly wrote, it is a question, which "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". 10e whole history of the encounter -appropriation -rejection -re-appropriation spiral starting with the Jesuit missions and reaching its preliminary apex with the "legitimacy of Chinese philosophy debate" of the 1990ies need not be reiterated here. 11Despite the great historical and cultural interest of the debates surrounding it and the well-taken caveats which arise from a careful description of their subliminal political agendas or the analysis of their -4deliberate oversights, it seems to me 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". 12Rather 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 the "logocentric" conditionality allegedly underlying it, I think that to reconstruct what was epistemological competence according to explicitly pre-imposed "Western", or, for that matter, any predifined parameters, has the distinct advantage of being easier falsifiable than comparative approaches to historical performances and cultural preferences.While this might seem like a step back into Sela's fourth appropriation phase of "applying zhexue to China's past" 13 , which started after the full consolidation of the term by 1903 14 and gained prominence in the many attempts to write histories of Chinese philosophy after the abolishment of the state examination system after 1300 years in 1905, any attempt to uncover early historical precursors that would qualify an epistemologically grounded "philosophy" predicate today, will obviously have a quite different legroom.
On the one hand -although one cannot help feeling a nagging doubt about this in view of the current "nationology fever" (guóxué rè 國學熱) in the People's Republic -such endeaveours may today afford to rid themselves of an embedding in the politically conditioned tension between programmes of "reordering the nation's grounding" (zhěnglĭ guógù 整理國故) and those of the detractors gathering around the "across-the-board westernization" (quánpán xīfānghuà 全盤西方化) slogan during the Republican period.On the other hand, our knowledge of the most important tool in any such discussion -the early Chinese languagehas dramatically changed over the past 100 years.Finally, on a more general plane still, to assume that a foreign tradition of thought is capable of philosophizing is, as Roetz has repeatedly pointed out, not a mere matter of charity or patronizing tolerance.Any denial of such a precondition or its reduction to a particular and ultimately unappropriable Western notion of thought would unshirkably undermine claims for transcultural validity of philosphy beyond the realm of questions and experiences made by the Greeks and "the" West, writ large. 155 -III.
Most sinologists critical of an acceptance of the label of "philosophy" for the texts, arguments, and practices of pre-Qín China throughout the 20 th century (Gernet, Granet, Grimm, Moritz, Thoraval, Trauzettel, Vandermeersch, to name but of few) have, more or less explicitely, based their arguments on perceived "absences" or "deficits" of its conceptual subcomponents in China, such as a the lack of notions of truth, individuality, utopian thinking or justice.Given the prevalence of epistemological criteria within philosophy conceived as a science of science in the 20 th century, especially since the "linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy, such deficit claims, also commonly encountered with respect to science itself, as well as prima facie extra-philosophical notions such as "history", "nature", or even emotions like "shame" or "melancholy" encountered in other perennially reoopening sinological debating arenas, have typically been paired with corresponding deficit imputations targeting the capacity of the Classical Chinese language to express abstractions, sentencehood, counterfactuality, temporal reference, subjecthood, parts of speech categoriality. 16More often than not, these have been made without any sensitivity for the diachronic and diatopic stratifications of the Chinese language. 17Moreover, they have been coupled with quite naïve conflations of linguistic categories with units in the writing system used to represent them.With Granet's "emblematic" interpretation of the Chinese script (and culture) as the primary warrantor, side discourses, already incipient with Herder, von Humboldt and Steinthal have consequently evolved with Derrida, Foucault, Hansen, Luhmann, Stetter, Vandermeersch (to again cite but a few of the more well-known names), which attach the observed "propositional" deficits to the non-alphabetic nature of the script "in which" argumentation was carried out, rather than to language itself. 18Not only is the whole discourse on pictography as an obstacle to abstraction conceptually mistaken 19 , but the idea of non-16 For good catalogues of such claims, and sustained attempts at their refutation see e.g. C. Harbsmeier -6phonological processing of characters by the human brain is empirically untenable. 20th regard to the possibility of reconstructing Ancient Chinese concepts of 'truth', so crucial to most epistemological definitions of "philosophy" since the 18 th century, Harbsmeier writes after a fine survey of its subtypes and the lexical and syntactical means of expressing them: 21 "We conclude that far from finding the notion of truth inconceivable, ancient Chinese philosophers frequently asked themselves whether some statement was true or not, although they did not show the same degree of philosophical to look at the rhetoric of "self-refutation" or logical incoherence in some textual examples constructed with the help of this term, it will be necessary to understand why it was lexically and morphologically uniquely suitable to express statements self-contradiciton or -falsification.To this end, the following linguistic digression will hopefully be excused. IV.

a. paleography
The characters bèi 誖 (誖) and bèi 悖 (悖) representing the concept of 'self-refutation' in the edited literature do not seem to be reliably attested in pre-Qín epigraphical materials so Xŭ Shèn 許慎 furthermore mentions a curious associative zhòuwén 籀文-form 30 (bèi here and in two other entries 31 , where it is once glossed as a variant of bèi 誖, once as a variant of bèi 悖.Strangely enough, the latter form 悖 is not itself lemmatized in the Shuōwén text, although it not only occurs in the entries just mentioned, but also in the postface to the "dictionary". 32In the earlier synsemantic variant , the 'chaotic, rebellious' semantics would seem to be iconically coded by the flipped juxtaposition of two elements conventionally identified as huò 或. phonophoric 孛, such as , , or .The osteographical form, however, would be more properly transcribed as an inverted concatenation ꅅ of róng 戎'weapons of war' 34 or with a later unattested kăishū 楷書 normalization .The first epigraphical orthography featuring a genuine doubled huò 或 only comes from the Late Western Zhōu "Lǚ Zhòng guĭ" 旅仲簋 bronze inscription, where the character occurs as a personal name of the vessel recipee. 35us, even if we acknowledge that huò 或 (OC *ɢɢʷək) 'eventually; someone' etc., yù 域 (*ɢʷ(r)ək) 'territory' and guó 國 (*kkʷək) 'fiefdom, state' were often used interchaengeably in pre-Qín inscriptions, one can still not construe as the synsemantic depiction of two 'states' fighting against each other, as per Duàn Yùcái 段玉裁. 36If the two characters are historically related at all 37 , despite the fact that one refers to a very concrete, physical sphere and the other to language and abstraction, the replacement of the odd synsemantic character by a straightforward phonsemantic version was most likely late, and due to the orthographic cumbersomeness of writing characters like ꅅ or . 38 phonology On the phonological side, the Guăngyùn 廣韻 gives a Middle Chinese reading 蒲昧切 (i.e. MC *bwojH 39 ) for the two characters 悖 and 誖, as well as its phonophoric bèi 孛 ('comet; halo of a comet'), which would regularly reconstruct to Old Chinese *[N,m]-pp[ə,u]t-s. 40A reconstruction in *-u-is corroborated by the fact that bèi rhymes in a mixed *-uts/-ups series in one Shījīng 詩經 poem 41 , and in the following prosimetric rhyme from a famous passage on "learning" in the Lĭjì 禮記: 42

c. morphology and word formation
The Old Chinese language underwent dramatic typological changes during the pre-Qín period, which led to the rampant loss of its once abundant and productive derivational morphology, along with the concomitant rise of lexical tones ("tonogenesis"), the abandonment of a once sesquisyllabic root structure, and the subsequent creation of a new disyllabic foot structure of lexical words. 44With the exception of a few conservative peripheral dialects, especially in the Mĭn 閩 and Jìn 晉 speaking areas 45 , this process left the fairly unified languages of the early Imperial and Early Medieval periods approaching the quasi-isolating tonal typology of Middle Chinese and the Modern dialects.It is this "new" morphosyntactic shape of the language, which was eventually projected back onto the pre-Qín state of affairs by the first Western missionaries and philosophers who became interested in it,  In other words, from the bare negative root *pə-'not' a transitive, exoactive verb *p[ə,u]-t-s is first formed, literally 'to negate someone/-thing', which becomes 'to be negated, to negate oneself' after prefixation by the valency diminisher *N-.It is from this semantic basis as a verb "to negate" that both metaphorical extensions and lexicalizations 'to be rebellios, refractory', 'to go against, contravene, disrupt' vs. 'to be or become confused, incoherent, contradictory' must have arisen. 53Notice also, that medieval rhyming dictionaries note a second pronunciation for bèi 誖 -*pwojH (補妹切), though not for bèi 悖, which would preserve the expected reading for the non-intransitivized OC root *pp[ə,u]-t-s.If this is not a lexical ghost, this would mean that the active-exoactive usages with full lexical objects resulting in the Early Imperial usages as 'to be rebellios, refractory', 'to go against, contravene, disrupt' would have been neatly differentiated in the spoken language from the passive-reflexive usages going back to *N-, which developed into the 'to be or become confused, incoherent, self-contradicting'.
Just as in the case of the Old Chinese "sentence negative" fēi 非, which emerged from the fusion of the negative bù 不 (OC *pə-) with the archaic copular verb wéi (隹~唯~惟~維 *(tə)-wuj) to yield fēi 非 (< MC *pjɨj < OC *pəj), the same copula, incidentally, which was used in suī 雖 (OC *s-(tə)-wuj) "let it be the case that" → "even" and wēi 微 (OC *ma-twuj) "it has not been the case that" → "if it had non been for" in counterfactual or irrealis marking in the early literature 54 , the root of the word written by the different bèi orthographies was a negative verb derived from bù 不. V.
It was precisely against this etymological background, it would seem, that the term bèi came to operate as the most prominent expression for the the notion of logical incoherence, or 'selfrefutation' in early Chinese philosophical discourse.While it has been discussed elsewhere, mostly with respect to its usage in the Mohist canons 55 , let us briefly look at some examples today again.Just like in the case of many other notions used to make validitiy claims in Early Chinese, bèi is most often found in contexts, where the social or moral adequacy of a certain thought or action is at stake, not its propositonal logic."I have heard, that when one washes one's hair, one's heart is upside down, but when the heart is upside down, one's utterances are contradictory.Now if the lord is not washing his hair, why is it that his utterances are contradictory?"(12) 無由接之患，自以為智，智必不接。今不接而自以為智，悖。 66 "The calamity that comes from being unable to apprehend them (the wise and the worthy) is that one regards oneself as wise, while those truly wise are necessarily not apprehended.Now, it is contradictory not to recognize those who are truly wise and yet to regard oneself as wise." More importantly, it was clearly recognized, that the usage of bèi entails some kind of metadiscourse on language in language, or even, as one might be tempted to translate cí 辭 in the following example from the Lǚshì, in propositions: 67 (13) 夫辭者，意之表也。鑒其表而棄其意、悖。 68 "Now, propositions are the surface of ideas.To reflect the surface while discarding the corresponding ideas is self-contradictory." Moreover, the discourse on self-refutation was something to be tested against paradoxical propositions of the "sophists", then current in the philosophical discourse: Nowhere, however, is there any hint that it was the structure of the Chinese language itself, which would have precluded attempts at such an inquiry.Dubs has it undoubtedly right, if he writes that 77 "... we have no reason to seek in the Chinese language the cause of the failure of the Chinese to develop such philosophical systems as those of Plato or Spinoza.The Chinese language is capable of expressing whatever ideas are desired to be expressed." Benvéniste's famous much-quoted adage that "C'est ce qu'on peut dire, qui délimite et organise ce qu'on penser" 78 and that consequently the system of Greek logic ultimately rests upon the system of Indo-European inflection is clearly mistaken.Nor does the fact that the expression of self-contradiction in Old Chinese etymologically operates with a verb derived via agglutinative word formation from an underlying negative mean, of course, that a non-isolating linguistic typology is a prerequisite for the possibility of formulating precise propositions.Most speakers during the later part of the Zh u period, ō when derivational morhology was already rapidly obsolescing, were probably not even aware of its existence.And when early medieval lexicographers began at least to take notice of the derivational properties of tone change 79 left over from the earlier affixation processes, they were facing such a mess of half-genuine, half-petrified, half-analogically adjusted evidence, that they failed to establish any coherent system of the grammatical functions encoded by such derivations. 80Secondly, the importance of morphology in far.26The Shuōwén 說文 27 defines 誖 as a phonosemantic character meaning 'chaotic, rebellious' (luàn yě 亂也), and adds that it has a 'heart'-classifier variant 悖 (悖).Later allographs include a 'mouth'-variant 哱 and a secondary augmentation by shū 殳 'to stab with a spear' of the heart-determined form resulting in . 28This kind of classifier variation is well-known from other speech act and psych verbs encountered in Warring States excavated texts and simply reflects the variability of the writing system in pre-Qín China.29

( 1 )
今之教者 … ( )言及于數，進而不顧其安，使人不由其誠，教人不盡其 材；其施之也悖，其求之也佛。夫然，故隱其學而疾其師，苦其難而不 知其益也，雖終其業，其去之必速。教之不刑，其此之由乎。 "According to the system of teaching now-a-days, [the masters] (…) speak of the learners' making rapid advances, and pay no regard to their reposing (in what they have acquired).In what they lay on their learners they are not sincere, nor do they put forth all their ability in teaching them.What they inculcate is contrary to what is right, and the learners are disappointed in what they seek for."Here, bèi 悖 (*[N,m]-pp[ə,u]t-s) and fú 佛 (MC *bjut < *bət) clearly rhyme together, and they were even used synonymously in a paronomastic pun in the biography of Dōngfāng Shuò 東方朔 (154-93) in the Hànshū 漢書 slightly later: 43 (2) 夫談有悖於目 拂 (var.佛) … 於耳謬於心而便於身者 "Now, if your talking is resisting the eyes, defying the ears, running counter to one's mind, yet still convenient for the body ..." Taken together, this evidence allows for a quite confident reconstruction of *[N,m]-pp[ə,u]t-s.

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by the other affixes?In Baxter & Sagart's morphological theory, prefix *N-is a valency diminisher, i.e. a prefix typically turning a transitive verb into an intransitive verb.The phonetic consequences of this nasal prefix, which is unspecified for place (i.e. it assimilates to the following root initial) are in most environments very similar to those of the bilabial prefix *m-, which changes nonvolitional verbs into volitional, nouns into volitional verbs, and verbs into agentive nouns.52Suffix *-s, on the other hand, has mainly three functions, namely the formation of deverbal nouns out of verbs, the marking of perfective-resultative aspect in verbs, and the encoding of exoactivity, i.e. the outward direction of the verbal action.Since the end-product of the double affixation in *[N,m]-pp[ə,u]t-s is not a noun and volitionality clearly plays no role in the verb semantics of bèi, the most likely combination involved here is that of detransitivizing *N-combined with exoactive *-s.Like in the contrasts between bài 敗 < MC *paejH < OC *pprat-s 'to defeat' and bài 敗 < *baejH < *N-pprat-s 'to be defeated' or jiàng 降 < *kaewngH < *kkruŋ-s 'let downs sth., step down from' and xiáng < *haewng < *N-kkruŋ 'to submit oneself', the detransitivzed verb is commonly interpreted as (medio-)passive or reflexive.

( 69 "
14)「非而謁楹」，「有牛馬非馬也」，此惑於用名以亂實者也。驗之名約，以其所受悖 其所辭，則能禁之矣。 The flying arrow does not pass the pillar, a white horse is not a horsethese are examples of errors in the use of names that disorder objects.If we test such "Thus, the explanations of the gentleman are sufficient to discuss the truth of the worthy and the reality of the unworthy, but stop with that.They are sufficient to illustrate the factors that cause disruption of order and the causes from which disorder arises, but stop with that.They are sufficient to know the essential nature of things and what man must catch in order to live but stop with that." Albany: SUNY Press, 1993, pp.69-113.17 On the importance of diachronic sensitivity in the translation of ancient Chinese philosophical key terms see H. Köster, "Zu einigen grundbegriffen chinesischer Philosophie in Parallel zur archaisch-westlichen Vorstellungen", in: China, erlebt und erforscht.Partielle Beiträge zur kritischen Chinakunde, München (o.Vlg.), 1974: 234-255, at 235f.18 Cf.Roetz 2002, P. Schlobinski, "Zum Prinzip des Relativismus von Schriftsystemen: die chinesische Schrift und ihre Mythen", Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 20, 2001: 117-146.
, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 7, Part 1: Language and Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998; Roetz, Heiner, "Validity in Zhou Thought.On Chad Hansen and the Pragmatic Turn in Sinology", in: Hans Lenk and Gregor Paul, eds., Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 19 For two good arguments, one linguistic and one philosophical, why graphs of logographic scripts such as Chinese and Egyptian may never be meaningfully analyzed as pictographic, see W.G. Boltz, "Pictographic Myths", Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 30, 2006: 39-54 and B. Jespersen & C. Reintges 2008, preoccupation with factual truth as Westerners might expect.The Chinese regularly applied the predicate 'true' to words or statements.They often referred to the nominalized notion of truth.(…)The ancient Chinese may have Brain and Language 110, 2009, 1: 23-28.21Harbsmeier, op.cit., 207.22 Republic 4.436b: " δῆλον ὅτι ταὐτὸν τἀναντία ποιεῖν ἢ πάσχειν κατὰ ταὐτόν γε καὶ πρὸς ταὐτὸν οὐκ ἐθελήσει ἅμα." ("It is obvious that the same thing will never do or suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing and at the same time").23Metaphysics IV.1005b: "τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρξειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό , .καὶὅσα ἄλλα προσδιοπρισαιμεθ' ἄν ἔστω προσδιωπρισμένα πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείασ' " ("It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect, and all other specifications that might be made, let them be added to meet local objections .")24 Staal, Universals, check REF.

42
49jì 禮記 18: 1.15; transl.Legge 2:86.43Hànshū漢書65:2868.44See on this last point Féng Shènglì 2007 °°°REF.45Cf.L. Sagart, "Vestiges of Archaic Chinese Derivational Affixes in Modern Chinese Dialects", in: H.who almost unanimously failed to question the deceptive continuity of the logosyllabographic writing system.Consciously or not, and with or without ethnocentric undercurrents, they tended to construct Chinese as a typological antipode of Indo-European languages since the 17 th century 46 , and often built quite elaborate philosophical upon those precarious foundations.47Underatheory of Old Chinese word formation such as Sagart's48or Jīn Lĭxīn's49, the lexical root of a word in Old Chinese is minimally the *CV(C) structure stripped off all affixal materials.The reconstructible Old Chinese derivational morphology is by and large agglutinative, such that the root structure is left intact by any given affixation process, in that affixes are monofunctional in a given word formation, and since they -in opposition to the inflecting type -typically do not encode paradigms.
Chappell ed., Sinitic Grammar -Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.<behr@oas.uzh.ch>01/13/11 and 50 One does not have to be very imaginative, then, to see that the root of *[N,m]-pp[ə,u]-t-s is *p[ə,u]-t, i.e. the negative fú 弗 or bù 不, itself in all likelihood a suffixed version of the bare negative *pə-, integrating a pronominal agreement or object marker *-t-into the root. 51What, then, is the role performed 46 See for the historical backgrounds of these developments W. Behr, "Language change in premodern Chinanotes on its perception and impact on the idea of a 'constant way'", in: ACHIM MITTAG & HELWIG SCHMIDT- 60re, bèi is used as a moral classification of the state of affairs in a world in decline.It is largely synonymous with făn in the following sentence, and it needs the reciprocal pronoun xiāng at its side to fully establish the relation between the two objects compared.The focus is on the behaviour of not recognizing the logical consistency of something, not on the theory of what gives rise to such failures, as also in the following passage in the Lǚshì chūnqiū 呂氏春 54 Cf.W. Behr, "Morphological notes on the Old Chinese counterfactual", Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 30, 2006: 55-87.55Seeesp.Graham, op.cit., 199-200, and the refutation of Chad Hansen's pragmatic misreading of passage (°°°REF) below, in item 13 of his indispensable catalogue of Zhōu validity concepts by Roetz 1993: 93-95.56Huáinánzĭ淮南子11.18; transl.B.Wallacker, The Huai-nan-tzu, Book Eleven: Behavior, Culture and the Cosmos, Philadelphia: American Oriental Society, 1962: 34.Rejecting it on account of discrimination or persuasion, there will, at the end of the day, be no ground for a definite discourse about them.To obstinately fail to take notice of that is self-contradictory.Knowingly to pretend otherwise is deceptive.Scholars who are self-contradictory or deceptive may well be discriminating, but it is of no use.This is because it amounts to negate what they accept and at the same time to accept what they negate, to benefit someone and at the same time to harm his family, to safeguard someone and at the same time endanger him."It is easy to see, how from such morally loaded usages of bèi, the word could end up lexically as a mere qualifier of the ethical or ritual inappropriateness of actions: 人 )60.Even when bèi refers to language, instead of actions or beliefs, it can still tend It would be mistaken, however, to assume with Hansen that the kind of statements classified as bèi stop at this merely evaluative level.First of all, it is clear that several Warring States authors were well aware that bèi operates at the level of categories of objects, and that it is the task of the rhetorically skilled person to recognize this 58 Huáinánzĭ 淮南子 9.18/18; translation R. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983: 208.59 Xúnzĭ 荀子 23.8.5;Knoblock 3:154.…