'Self-refutation' in early Chinese argumentative prose: Sidelights on the linguistic prehistory of incipient epistemology

Abstract:

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.

Organization: Conference, What is Philosophy?, URPP “Asia and Europe”, University of Zurich

Conference End Date: Jan 16, 2011

Conference Start Date: Jan 13, 2011