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In The Opinion Pages section of today's NYT, Contributing Op-Ed Writer Murong Xuecun has a provocative piece entitled "Corrupting the Chinese Language" (5/26/15).

His basic claim is that "Decades of… party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people’s minds and into the Chinese vernacular." The result is that, because people are conditioned to talk using phrases ready made by the party, they are conditioned to think in ways determined by the highly politicized language in which they have been immersed their entire lives. Even dissidents are reduced to "using the language of our propagandists, and not ironically."

Murong tells one story that had a particularly powerful impact on me:

Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”

Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.

It struck me as rather incongruous that two central Shanxi farmers would know the word "metaphysicist", even if they didn't understand what it meant. That's a complicated term, and even professional philosophers have to make an effort to grasp its implications. Of course, the farmer who hurled that term of abuse at his fellow villager wasn't using the English (Graeco-Latin) word; instead, he would have called the other farmer a xíng'érshàngxuézhě 形而上学者. That by itself is quite a mouthful!

I've long known that the Chinese word for "metaphysics" is xíng'érshàngxué 形而上学, but it always seemed to me to be a strange concoction to match up with the Western term: "learning of form and above". That always bothered me, but since it's a word for the philosophers to argue over, I just set it aside and didn't worry myself overmuch about it.

Parenthetically, I should note that the Western term "metaphysics" is itself somewhat vexed. Should it be singular or plural? And does it mean "what comes after physics" or "what transcends physics"?

Curious about this formulation, xíng'érshàngxué 形而上学, I did a little digging around, and I soon found that it is yet another of those countless "round-trip words" that the Japanese bequeathed to the Chinese during the modernizing / Westernizing period of the late 19th and early 20th century.

"'And the greatest Japanese export to China is…'" (8/21/12)

Also see Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 34 (October, 1992).

It was the eminent Japanese thinker, Inoue Tetsujirō 井上 哲次郎 (1855-1944), who extracted xíng'érshàng 形而上 ("form and above") from no less than the I ching / Yi jing (Book of Changes) and paired it with "metaphysics" by tacking xué 学 ("learning") on the end: xíng'érshàngxué 形而上学 ("learning of form and above"). In Japanese, this was pronounced keijijōgaku, but it was transported back to China with the pronunciation xíng'érshàngxué

It is worth contemplating what ancient heritage Chinese and Japanese are invoking whenever they refer to xíng'érshàngxué 形而上学 ("learning of form and above"). The phrase xíng'érshàng 形而上 ("form and above") comes from the first part of the "Great Treatise" (Xì cí 系辞) which is appended to the Yi jing: "Xíng'érshàng zhě wèi zhī dào, xíng'érxià zhě wèi zhī qì 形而上者谓之道，形而下者谓之器". James Legge's venerable rendering of this passage reads: "…that which is antecedent to the material form exists, we say, as an ideal method, and that which is subsequent to the material form exists, we say, as a definite thing." A more literal translation would be something like this: "that which is above form is called the Way / Tao; that which is beneath form is called a thing."

It boggles the mind to think what cultural and political baggage lies behind that insult heaped by one Shanxi farmer on another, and all over the relative worth of a bowl of rice versus a steamed bun.

[Thanks to everyone who called this article to my attention]

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