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Chinese whispers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Robert Wardy
Robert Wardy
Affiliation:
St Catharine's College
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On the hideous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humourist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 38 , 1993 , pp. 149 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1993

References

Notes

1. For a useful point of entry to this protracted and convoluted battle, consult Mungello, D. E., Curious land, Jesuit accommodation and the origins of Sinology (Honolulu, 1989) 332–3Google Scholar.

2. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères, 34 volumes (Paris1702–76)Google Scholar.

3. Mungello (n. 1) 343.

4. I borrow the concept of ‘Jesuit Accommodation’ from Mungello's path-breaking book; for a comprehensive description of what the policy entailed, see the introduction to Curious land (13–20). I am indebted to him throughout for information on missionary ideology in China and its implementation.

5. Boxer, C. R., ‘Some aspects of Western historical writing on the Far East, 1500–1800’, in Historians of China and Japan, eds. Beasley, W. G. and Pulleyblank, E. G. (London, 1961) 312–15Google Scholar: Voltaire actually put Du Halde on his list of illustrious contemporaries.

6. Voltaire, , ‘De La Chine’, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris, 1964) 113Google Scholar.

7. ‘Catéchisme Chinois’, ler Entrétien, Dictionnaire philosophique, 77.

8. Mill: ‘We have a warning example in China – a nation of much talent, and, in some respects, even wisdom, owing to the rare good fortune of having been provided at an early period with a particularly good set of customs, the work, in some measure, of men to whom even the most enlightened European must accord, under certain limitations, the title of sages and philosophers. They are remarkable, too, in the excellence of their apparatus for impressing, as far as possible, the best wisdom they possess upon every mind in the community, and securing that those who have appropriated most of it shall occupy the posts of honour and power. Surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness, and must have kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the contrary, they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners' (On liberty, ch. 3 (published with The subjection of women and Chapters on socialism, ed. Collini, S. (Cambridge, 1989)) 71–2Google Scholar, emphasis added). Marx (his curious notion of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production): ‘the Oriental empires always show an unchanging social infrastructure coupled with unceasing change in the persons and tribes who managed to ascribe to themselves the political superstructure’ (from an article in Die Presse, 7 July 1862). Tennyson, : ‘Not in vain the distant beacons. Forward, forward let us range, / Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. / Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: / Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’ (Locksley Hall, ll. 181–4)Google Scholar.

9. See e.g. the T'ai P'ing Kuang Chi, completed in 978, published in 981.

10. ‘Ce livre a son lieu de naissance dans un texte de Borges. Dans le rire qui secoue à sa lecture toutes les familiarités de la pensée – de la nôtre: de celle qui a notre âge et notre géographie –, ébranlant toutes les surfaces ordonnées et tous les plans qui assagissent pour nous le foisonnement des êtres, faisant vaciller et inquiétant pour longtemps notre pratique millénaire du Même et de l'Autre … Dans l'émerveillement de cette taxonomie, ce qu'on rejoint d'un bond, ce qui, à la faveur de l'apologue, nous est indiqué comme le charme exotique d'une autre pensée, c'est la limite de la nôtre: l'impossibilité nue de penser cela’ (Les mots et les choses, une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966) 7)Google Scholar.

11. Foucault (n. 10) 7.

12. Foucault (n. 10) 7.

13. Foucault nevertheless inconsistently recognises that the latter involves ‘l'explicite référence à des paradoxes connus’ (Foucault (n. 10) 8).

14. ‘La Chine, dans notre rêve, n'est-elle pas justement le lieu privilégié de l'espace?’ (Foucault (n. 10) 10).

15. Foucualt (n. 10) 11.

16. See Webb, John, An historical essay endeavoring a probability that the language of the Empire of China is the primitive language (London, 1669) especially 24, 61–2Google Scholar.

17. See An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language, by John Wilkins, D.D., Dean of Ripon and Fellow of the Royal Society (London, 1668)Google Scholar, and Mungello, 's chapter ‘Proto-Sinology and the seventeenth-century European search for a universal language’ (Curious land, 174–207)Google Scholar.

18. Angus Graham contends – rashly, I believe – that classical Chinese is ‘perhaps nearer to symbolic logic than any other language’ (Disputers of the Tao, philosophical argument in ancient China (La Salle, Illinois, 1989) 403)Google Scholar; see my strictures in ‘The China syndrome’ (forthcoming). Chinese mathematicians participating in a seminar I conducted at the Beijing Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 1990, argued for connections between graph recognition and artificial intelligence development. ‘The China Syndrome’ formulates and evaluates ‘the guidance and constraint hypothesis’, according to which basic linguistic structure at once encourages and constrains the development of philosophical tendencies and doctrines, both fruitful and disastrous.

19. ‘Translation between unrelated languages, e.g., Hungarian and English, may be aided by traditional equations that have evolved in step with a shared culture. What is relevant rather to our purposes is radical translation, i.e., translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people … The utterances first and most surely translated in such a case are ones keyed to present events that are conspicuous to the linguist and his informant. A rabbit scurries by, the native says “Gavagai”, and the linguist notes down the sentence “Rabbit” (or “Lo, a rabbit”) as tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases' (Quine, W. V. O., Word and object (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960) 28–9)Google Scholar. Intense discussion of ‘the indeterminacy of translation’ has raged unabated since the publication of Word and object, centring primarily on the problem of whether Quine's inferences to the inscrutability of reference and the relativity of ontology are undercut by his behaviouristic predilections (for a vigorous polemic see Searle, John's ‘Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person’ (Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987) 123–46)CrossRefGoogle Scholar). What is germane to our concerns is not any opinion as to the fortunes of this argument, but rather the recognition that, in striking contrast to discussions of linguistic relativism in Chinese guise, both Quine and his critics are quite clear in agreeing about the purported status of ‘gavagai’ and in disagreeing about the proper description and analysis of the thought-experiment.

20. This claim for the supremacy of Aristotelian logic must be taken with a grain of salt. That is, ‘Aristotelian’ logic certainly did enjoy an unrivalled position; but all the impressive mediæval work on syncategoremata, consequence and supposition theory, and modal logic goes so far beyond what is actually in Aristotle himself that it would perhaps be unjust and misleading even to describe the logic of the middle ages as modified Aristotle. Nevertheless the point I want emerges unscathed, since it concerns the ruling conception of the Philosopher, not how well that conception squares with the actual history of logic.

21. Strawson, P. F., Individuals, an essay in descriptive metaphysics (London, 1959), ‘The “Grammatical Criterion”’, 139–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with Tsu-lin, Mei, ‘Subject and predicate, a grammatical preliminary’ (Philosophical Review 70 (1961) 153–75)Google Scholar and ‘Chinese grammar and the linguistic movement in philosophy’ (Review of Metaphysics 14 (1961), 463–92)Google Scholar.

22. Strawson does admit that ‘in relying upon the grammatical phrases, “substantival expression” and “expression containing a verb in the indicative mood”, the distinction [between expressions for objects and expressions for concepts] seems both parochial and unexplained: parochial, because grammatical classifications adapted to one group of languages do not necessarily fit others which may be equally rich; unexplained because grammatical classifications do not unequivocally or clearly declare their own logical rationale’ (Strawson (n. 21) 148). This is a most forthright admission, and would seem to scotch Mei Tsu-lin's critique, but Strawson nevertheless palpably fails to take his own warning about the limitations of grammar to heart, since he nowhere explains just what the ‘grammatical’ criterion can achieve within these limitations.

23. Mei Tsu-lin (n. 21).

24. Angus Graham (n. 18) 394; for discussion, see ‘The China syndrome’. In fact Graham tackles the issue of Aristotelian categories head-on (414–28), starting from the over-confident Whorfian assertion that ‘it has long been noticed, and demonstrated in detail by Benveniste, that Aristotle's categories do largely coincide with Greek grammatical forms, not all of them shared by modern languages’ (414–15). Graham's essay is substantially identical to an earlier piece, trenchantly criticised by Reding, J.-P. (‘Greek and Chinese Categories“, in Philosophy East and West vol. 36, no. 4 (1986) 349–74)Google Scholar; Graham acknowledges Reding's critique (op. cit. 415–16), but does not recognise its force.

25. See Owen, G. E. L., ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’, in his Logic, science and dialectic, collected papers in Greek philosophy, ed. Nussbaum, M. (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Nussbaum, M., ‘Saving Aristotle's Appearances’, in her The fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in Greek philosophy (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; Wardy, R., The chain of change, a study of Aristotle's Physics VII (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Lear, J., Aristotle: the desire to understand (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waterlow, S., Nature, change and agency in Aristotle's Physics: a philosophical study (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar; Irwin, T., Aristotle's first principles (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Wardy, R., ‘Transcendental dialectic: a review of Terence Irwin, Aristotle's first principles’, Phronesis 36, no. 1 (1991) 88–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. See The chain of change, 159–64. My ‘Lucretius on what atoms are not’ (CP 83 (1988) 112–28)Google Scholar discusses Lucretius' subtle handling of the perceived expressive ‘inferiority’ of Latin relative to Greek.

27. See The chain of change, 180–201.

28. Christoph Harbsmeier, in his monograph on Chinese grammar and logic, to be published in a forthcoming volume of Joseph Needham's Science and civilisation in China series.

29. See n. 18. J. Gernet, although he makes no mention of the Ming Li T'an, would doubtless answer with an emphatic ‘yes’. He asks: ‘taking a language such as Chinese as a starting-point, would it have been possible for Greek philosophy or medieval scholasticism to develop? To which the answer would probably be “no”’ (China and the Christian impact, a conflict of cultures, trans. Lloyd, J. (Cambridge, 1985) 239)Google Scholar. Uncritically endorsing Benveniste's largely outmoded and heavily criticised work, he expresses his endorsement of extreme ‘guidance and constraint’ in a form which would doom Li Chihtsao's efforts from the outset: ‘Benveniste shows that Aristotle's ten categories encompass nominal and verbal categories that are peculiar to the Greek language’ (240).

30. The Cambridge history of renaissance philosophy, eds. Schmitt, Charles and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge, 1988) 814CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. According to the Cambridge history, ‘… Argyropulos translated so loosely that he was often condemned as a paraphraser’ (77). Quite apart from the adverse comments of other scholars, Argyropulos' own advice on proper translation is somewhat alarming: ‘recte quidem sententias referentes auctoris, latius autem eas explicandas pluribusque verbis’ (from Garin, E., ‘Le traduzioni umanistiche di Aristotele nel secolo XV’, Atti dell' Accademia fiorentina di scienze morali ‘La Colombaria’ 16 (1951) 84)Google Scholar. Of the translation of the Categories itself, perhaps the very first effort after Moerbeke's (c. 1470), Minio-Paluello, has this to say: ‘Argyropulos latinitatem boëthianam per totum librum novavit, præcipue in iis quae sermonem artis logicæ non tangunt sed perspicuitati sententiarum aliquid addunt et varietate verborum nonnihil venustatis opusculo tribuunt; pronomina quoque et coniunctiones minus a Boëthio usitata pro communioribus supposuit. Sine dubio codice graeco usus est, et ex eo lectiones a Boëthii diversas latine reddidit’ (Aristoteles Latinus I.6–7, Categoriarum supplementa, ed. Minio-Paluello, L. (Bruges–Paris, 1966) lxiii–lxiv)Google Scholar.

32. I am heavily indebted to Jill Kraye of the Warburg Institute for her generous and expert help on such questions.

33. E.g. ‘Because the versions of Bruni and his colleagues threatened a breach of terminological continuity with scholastic philosophy, Alonso de Cartagena and other critics of humanist translation recommended using the Vulgate versions, partially in order to sustain a commentary tradition whose unawareness of the Greek texts or indifference to them appalled the humanists’ (the Cambridge history, 79). I have benefited from conversations with Anthony Pagden and Desmond Henry on this subject.

34. In universam dialecticam, 302.

35. Ibid., 304; this scholasticism harmonises well with Argyropulos's translation, since he was unusually tolerant of mediaevalisms, despite his de rigueur espousal of humanist style (cf. the Cambridge history, 77, 458, 778).

36. There were at least partial exceptions, notably Fr. Niccolò Longobardo; see Gernet (n. 29) 30–4 and Mungello (n. 1) 293; Étiemble, , L'Europe chinoise I: De l'Empire romain à Leibniz (Paris, 1988)Google Scholar also contains much useful information. Although there is general consensus that after the Manchu conquest missionary efforts were more or less restricted to the imperial court at one extreme and the common people at the other, Mungello and Gernet disagree over the substance, scope and longevity of Ricci's original programme. For Mungello, Jesuit Accommodation was a sincere policy, underpinned by profound doctrine on both western and Chinese sides and sincerely pursued, despite interesting modifications, by missionaries following Ricci's death. For Gernet, even Ricci was little better than a wily Jesuit, and he detects gross deception and duplicity throughout the early phases of missionary work (‘… the missionaries did deliberately encourage a certain confusion between the literal meaning of the Classics and the principles of their own religion’ (p. 51); ‘some people clearly were not duped by Ricci's tactics which consisted in “interpreting, without refuting directly”’ (p. 53, citing a letter from Ricci to Francesco Pasio, the Visitor)).

37. There is an ample and vivid description of Schall's career in Dunne, George H. S. J., Generation of giants, the story of the Jesuits in China in the last decades of the Ming Dynasty (London, 1962)Google Scholar, but it must be used with extreme caution, since the Jesuit author is not above flagrant propagandising on behalf of his order.

38. See Sivin, Nathan, ‘Copernicus in China’, Studia Copernicana 6 (1973)Google Scholar.

39. See Mungello, 's Curious land, 61Google Scholar.

40. See The Cambridge history of China, vol. I, The Ch'in and Han empires 221 B.C.–A.D. 220, eds. Twitchett, D. and Loewe, M. (Cambridge, 1986) 191–2 and 747–65Google Scholar, e.g. ‘The term Confucian school … indicated from the beginning the twofold function of preserving and handing down the ancient traditions, and of reflecting on the meaning of these traditions in a changing world order’ (p. 748).

41. Gernet, however, who displays considerable sympathy with Longobardo's resistance to Ricci's assimilationist policy, goes so far as to suggest that ‘even judging solely by the prefaces written by Christian men of letters for works by the missionaries, one is sometimes forced to the conclusion that they were converts in no more than appearance or else that, as the missionaries claimed, they did not dare to declare themselves openly’ (China and the Christian impact, 37). In fact the star example of a dubiously Christianised literatus is Li Chih-tsao himself. Gernet cites his 1628 preface for a reissue of Ricci's The true meaning of the Master of Heaven: ‘Having recognised that Ricci's ideas were in agreement with those of the neo-Confucian commentators from Zhou Dunyi to Zhu Xi, despite the fact that the missionaries had always tried to combat neo-Confucian theses, considering them to be atheistic and materialistic, Li Zhizao grants that, in his works, Ricci often expresses opinions that are different from those of “recent Confucians”. On the other hand, he goes on, “he is mysteriously in agreement with those books of Antiquity, the Suwen [a work of medicine], the Zhoubei [suanjing] [a work on mathematics], the Kaogong [ji] [a work on technology] and with Qiyuan [Zhuangzi, the Taoist philosopher] [!]”’ (China and the Christian impact, 37–8). Scholars familiar with neo-Platonic exegesis of earlier Greek philosophy might very well not experience the incredulity apparently expressed by Gernet's exclamation-point, nor share his confidence that the universalism espoused on both the Jesuit and the Chinese sides of the cultural transaction must be the product of either blanket incomprehension or insincerity. Nevertheless, Li Chih-tsao's syncretistic manifesto, even if moulded by the political pressures which inevitably shape Chinese Christian writings of the seventeenth century, provides ample confirmation of the need to approach his construal of Aristotelian writings with every caution.

42. E.g. in his anti-Stoic polemic Alexander adduces the evidence of widespread convictions, as a good Peripatetic should; but he unselfconsciously appeals not to Aristotelian ἔνδοξα, but rather to Hellenistic ἐνάργεια and … (De fato, p. 172, in Supplementum Aristotelicum 2.1–2 (Berlin, 1887), ed. Bruns, I.)Google Scholar; (ibid.)). His conception of the efficient cause, so far from being orthodox original Aristotelianism, is pervasively influenced by Stoic causal theory.

43. This generalisation, omnipresent in the literature, is based on the prefaces appended to Christian works and largely anecdotal evidence. However, my reading of the Ming Li T'an already suggests a degree of finely detailed correspondence between Latin original and Chinese translation, as well as quite precise modification in certain passages, which might very well call for a reassessment of how the missionaries worked with the literati.

44. Confucius Sinarum philosophus, 10–11, 18, 27.

45. Ibid., 14.

46. Ibid., 20.

47. Ibid., 28.

48. Ibid., 20.

49. Ibid., 35.

50. Ibid., 4–5.

51. E.g. ‘nam quia & oculos videre, & aures audire, & os manducare, & c. omnes sunt exterioris hominis seu corporis functiones; id vero, quo organa ilia functiones eiusmodi recte vel male præstant, est animus; utique hoc non constante sibi, etiam illa officio suo recte fungi non poterunt’ (ibid., 16).

52. Ibid., 40; disturbingly coupled with ‘lege naturali’, 48.

53. See Graham, Angus, ‘Textual problems’, in Later Mohist logic, ethics and science (London, 1978) 73–110Google Scholar.

54. However, even the western heirs of Aristotelianism managed to produce some startling linguistic exotica when they set about issuing logical manuals in the vernacular, e.g. this remarkable bit of ‘English’ from the militant Lever, Anglo-Saxon Raphe: ‘Gaynsaying shewsayes are two shewsayes, the one a yeasaye and the other a naysaye, changing neither foreset, backset nor verbe’ (The arte of reason, rightly termed witcraft (1573)Google Scholar; reference from Kneale, W. and Kneale, M., The development of logic (Oxford, 1962) 299)Google Scholar.

55. In universam dialecticam, 302.

56. Ming Li T'an, 251.

57. See Graham, Angus, Later Mohist logic, ethics and science, 29–30, and Disputers of the Tao, 140–1Google Scholar.

58. In universam dialecticam, 289–90.

59. I am not denying that t'i can and does bear some specialised sense(s) in various philosophical contexts. For example, Hui Shih's phrase (‘heaven and earth are one t'i’ (Chuang-tzu, ch. 33)) might very well be translated ‘heaven and earth are one unit / count as one’ (as by Graham, Angus (Later Mohist logic, ethics and science, 266)Google Scholar) rather than ‘heaven and earth are one body’. Again, the Mohist dialecticians carefully attribute a precise technical meaning to t'i in the Canons and explanations: A2, (‘A t'i (unit/individual/part) is a portion in a chien (total/collection/ whole)’ (op. cit., 265)); t‘i then recurs in the fascinating series of mathematical definitions which follow, clearly bearing a determinate technical sense (e.g. A61, ‘the tuan (starting-point) is the unit (t'i) without dimension which precedes all others’ (ibid., 310)). My point is rather that there are no grounds whatsoever for supposing that t'i has a single fixed special sense throughout the Chinese philosophical tradition (clearly it does not); and that in the absence of clear contextual indications to the contrary, it is always reasonable to suspect that it does just mean ‘body’ or ‘limbs’. Consider the current witticism about the fate of Hong Kong after reunification; will its decadent publishers issue Playboy in , ‘simplified characters’, or ‘complex characters’? Hong Kong and Taiwan have not adopted the simplified graphs introduced on the mainland; the joke turns on the employment of t'i = ‘shape’ in the neologisms for the two types of graph, with the suggestion that the Communist authorities might wish to modify the t'i of the pornographic photographs.

60. Ming Li T'an, 292.

61. Gernet illustrates his linguistic relativity with a claim of immediate relevance:‘… for the Chinese, whose language lacked inflections, the abstract concept of substance could not have the same logical necessity as it did for the European missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who were accustomed to use languages which regularly made a distinction between the adjective and the noun and who were heirs to a long scholastic tradition. To express the notions of substance and accident which were vital in proving the Christian truths and without which the missionaries considered it to be impossible to think correctly, Matteo Ricci had been obliged to resort to circumlocutions, translating substance as “that which is established of itself” (tzuli-che) and accident as “that which depends upon something else” (ilaiche). From the Chinese point of view the distinction was gratuitous and artificial since in their language nothing of the kind was suggested’ (China and the Christian impact, 243). Ricci's ‘circumlocution’ for substance is precisely the binome (tzu li); but Gernet's claim that the distinction between substance and accident could make little or no sense to the Chinese, as a consequence of purported linguistic structure, is entirely unwarranted. This is an unfortunately influential instance of making the most gross generalisations about ‘the Chinese point of view’ without any scrap of logical, linguistic or textual evidence.

62. In universam dialecticam, 304.

63. Ming Li T'an, 289.

64. In universam dialecticam, 300.

65. Ibid., 304.

66. Ibid., 300.

67. Ming Li T'an, 290.

68.

69. The comparativist scope of this topic far exceeds my meagre scholarly resources, and could only be attempted by drawing on the immense scholarship of kindly and generous colleagues. First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge the help of my collaborator Christoph Harbsmeier, who initially brought the Ming Li T'an to my attention. For help on matters logical, philological, sinological, Aristotelian and scholastic, I am heavily indebted to Catherine Atherton, Charles Aylmer, Nicholas Denyer, Desmond Henry, Jill Kraye, Mark Lewis, David McMullen, David Mungello, and Anthony Pagden. I am also grateful to the British Academy and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for my participation in their exchange scheme; they made possible a research trip to China which provided the initial inspiration for this work.