by Janadas Devan; Straits Times, Singapore, January 25, 2004
THE ancient Egyptians employed hundreds of signs in their hieroglyphic writing, as did the Sumerians in their cuneiform. Both were complex systems, which no more than a tiny portion of Egyptians and Sumerians could have mastered.
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| Janadas Devan |
Imagine a system consisting of hundreds of pictograms, or signs representing things (cow, man, woman, etc); hundreds of ideograms, or signs representing ideas (god, good, evil, etc); and goodness knows how many phonograms, or signs representing sounds which occur frequently in the spoken language.
The reduction of these hundreds of signs to the 30-odd consonants and vowels of the alphabet, sometime around 1500BC, was a godsend. The Phoenicians, who invented this phonetic writing, made it possible to signify any and every idea or thing by merely juggling with letters – and what’s more, in a way where the resultant word corresponds with its pronunciation in speech.
The letters, G-O-D, for example, spelt one way, give one both the concept, God, and tell us how to pronounce the word. The same letters, spelt another way, D-O-G, give us quite another concept and pronunciation.
How simple, efficient and miraculously flexible! It is no wonder that Western philosophers long assumed the alphabet represented a distinct advance in civilisation.
Philosopher Friedrich Hegel, for instance, equated it with the very possibility of reason. In contrast to this ‘more intelligent’ way of writing, hieroglyphic writing froze thought by attaching it to inflexible signs. Civilisations, like the Chinese, which use hieroglyphs, Hegel believed, will inevitably remain static.
Modern advocates of hanyu pinyin might agree. But they, together with Hegel, would be wrong.
The ABC was undoubtedly a blessing, but as so often happens with human inventions, it came at an enormous cost.
As 20th century philosophers, linguists and logicians have established, a great number of the errors and confusions of Western thought are due to the structure of Indo-European languages, including their adoption of phonetic writing.
The world view inscribed in Chinese characters – as well as the peculiar features of their grammar – turns out to be far closer to the reality that modern science has disclosed. An ancient language – using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonograms, like Egyptian hieroglyphs – appears to be the most modern.
Take the notions of identity, substance and essence. Western philosophy and science, beginning with the Greeks, wrestled with them obsessively. What is a thing? What is its substance or essence? Surely something cannot be simultaneously A and not A? So what is A?
Modern physics has revealed all these questions to be meaningless. The universe does not consist of ‘things’, which somehow persist through time unchanged, but rather of events, each of which can be understood only in relation to others. Einstein’s Relativity established how an observer’s perception of an event depended on his motion relative to the event; while quantum mechanics revealed a discontinuous atomic world, where an event can be defined only in terms of probability.
A specialised language, mathematics, was required to disclose this reality.
Indo-European languages could not have done so, for they created a different universe. For speakers of these languages, a ‘thing’ must have an ‘essence’, distinguishable from every other thing, because language has a word peculiar to each thing.
A ‘thing’ must have a ‘substance’ too, distinguishable from its accidental features, because there are nouns (table, rock), and there are adjectives (big, small; rough, smooth), which merely qualify nouns.
And philosophers, thinking in these languages, must consider questions of Identity and Being, because sentences consist of subjects and predicates, and there is the verb ‘to be’, which surely must refer to something: Who am I? To be or not to be? I think, therefore I am. Truth is Beauty.
The notions of identity, substance and essence, in other words, are mistaken ideas which arise from equating the structure of Indo-European language with the structure of reality. Chinese philosophers didn’t make similar mistakes, not because they were more logical, but because the language they spoke was.
Consider, for instance, the concept ‘good’. Thanks to the Phoenicians, we signify it phonetically in English as g-o-o-d. That is different from g-o-o-f, g-o-o-n or g-o-o-s-e. ‘Good’ is unique, spelt differently, pronounced differently. Surely, it must therefore refer to a unique idea. It only seems natural to ask: What is the essence of good?
But in Chinese, good is represented by a character combining the sign for ‘woman’ with the sign for ‘child’. Woman + Child = Good.
Chinese philosophy, unless influenced by other philosophies, wouldn’t dream of asking what is good, for the simple reason that good is represented in Chinese as a relation, not an essence.
As one Chinese philosopher, Chang Tung-Sun, explained some decades ago, the Chinese system of thought is ‘probably related to the nature of Chinese characters. Being ideographic, Chinese characters put emphasis on the signs and symbols of objects. The Chinese are interested in the interrelation between the different signs, without being bothered by the substance underlying them… The characteristic of Chinese thought lies in its exclusive attention to the correlational implications between different signs’.
This attention to the relations between things is further enhanced by the lack in Chinese of the verb ‘to be’, of clearly distinguishable parts of speech, of subjects and predicates. So the questions of Being and Identity didn’t arise, and Chinese didn’t crack their heads distinguishing the substance of things from their accidental features.
‘At every level, meaning stems from the way terms are combined,’ wrote historian Jacques Gernet, a professor of Chinese intellectual and social history at the College de France.
‘This is what accounts for the predominant role played by complementary pairs of opposites and correspondences in Chinese thought and above all for its fundamental relativism. Nothing has meaning except through opposition to its contrary. Everything depends upon position (wei) and timing (shi).’
How extraordinarily similar that sounds to the world view that quantum mechanics and relativity suggest.
Would Western scientists have arrived sooner at that world view if Phoenicians hadn’t invented ABC? We would never know. But it is worth remembering that Max Planck and Albert Einstein spoke German, not Chinese. The language one speaks shapes one’s world view, but it does not seem to do so coercively. We should be grateful for that, otherwise communication between different cultures would be impossible.
January 25, 2004
http://http://www.straitstimes.asia1.com/columnist/0,1886,145-231620-,00.html?
Originally published February 27, 2004