Although I’ve been an informal reader of philosophy for most of my life, only today did I connect some dots and notice that Chinese philosophers never occupied themselves with the question of Being, which has so obsessed Western philosophers. When I noticed this, my next thought was, “But of course; the Chinese language has no word for ‘be.’” Wikipedia didn’t provide any confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis, but it does narrate how Muslim philosophers struggled when adapting Greek questions of Being into their own words.
Then I asked myself: Wait, did the Chinese never really address this subject? Let’s see: Confucianism focused on practical philosophy, Taoism is rather poetry instead of proper ontology, and Buddhism did acknowledge questions about Being, but saw them as the wrong questions. I’m not sure about the pre-Confucian schools.
If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for “be,” that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions, specifically by falling into the confusion mode of mistaking words for things, a confusion mode that I’m tempted to blame Aristotle for, but I need to reread some Aristotle before I can be sure of such an accusation.
If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for “be,” that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions
Or that Eastern philosophers have spent centuries failing to ask the right questions. If language A makes it easy to ask a certain question and language B makes it hard, it doesn’t follow that it’s a bad question arising only from quirks of language A; instead it could be a good question hidden by quirks of language B (or revealed by in-this-case-beneficial quirks of language A).
It seems a stretch to put Buddhism in the category of don’t-really-care-about-Being. Rather, it’s an important point that there is no being and realizing so brings countless bliss and enlightenment.
I was under the impression that 是 was Chinese for “to be”. The nuance isn’t quite the same—you can say 是 in response to “are or aren’t you American?”, but that’s more or less subject-omission—but it seems close enough?
But my experience with Chinese includes only two years of Mandarin classes and a few podcasts; I haven’t studied the linguistics in so much detail, and that studying ended 5 years ago, so if you’re basing this on something I don’t know, I’d be glad for the correction.
I know much less Chinese than you do. Having said that:
The Chinese version of “be” lets you apply a noun predicate to your subject, but not an adjectival predicate: you can use it to say “I am a student” or “I am an American” but not “I am tired” or “I am tall;” that is, it doesn’t state the attributes of a noun but an equivalence between two nouns. To say “I am tall,” you just say “I tall.” All of the other meanings of “be” (the ones relevant to this problem are those related to the essence/existence question) are expressed with various other words in Chinese.
If that is the case I consider it pretty unlikely that this has any relevance to Chinese or Western philosophy. Especially since in Greek saying “I am tall” is basically saying “I am [something tall]” which according to your description you could also say in Chinese if you had a word for “something tall.”
Sapir-Whorf-related question:
Although I’ve been an informal reader of philosophy for most of my life, only today did I connect some dots and notice that Chinese philosophers never occupied themselves with the question of Being, which has so obsessed Western philosophers. When I noticed this, my next thought was, “But of course; the Chinese language has no word for ‘be.’” Wikipedia didn’t provide any confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis, but it does narrate how Muslim philosophers struggled when adapting Greek questions of Being into their own words.
Then I asked myself: Wait, did the Chinese never really address this subject? Let’s see: Confucianism focused on practical philosophy, Taoism is rather poetry instead of proper ontology, and Buddhism did acknowledge questions about Being, but saw them as the wrong questions. I’m not sure about the pre-Confucian schools.
If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for “be,” that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions, specifically by falling into the confusion mode of mistaking words for things, a confusion mode that I’m tempted to blame Aristotle for, but I need to reread some Aristotle before I can be sure of such an accusation.
Am I missing something here?
Or that Eastern philosophers have spent centuries failing to ask the right questions. If language A makes it easy to ask a certain question and language B makes it hard, it doesn’t follow that it’s a bad question arising only from quirks of language A; instead it could be a good question hidden by quirks of language B (or revealed by in-this-case-beneficial quirks of language A).
It seems a stretch to put Buddhism in the category of don’t-really-care-about-Being. Rather, it’s an important point that there is no being and realizing so brings countless bliss and enlightenment.
A particularity of English is that
to bemeans a lot of different things. It covers three distrinct categories in natural semantic metalanguageNow I am curious whether most of the philosophy of “Being” are merely confusions caused by conflating some of those different meanings.
I was under the impression that 是 was Chinese for “to be”. The nuance isn’t quite the same—you can say 是 in response to “are or aren’t you American?”, but that’s more or less subject-omission—but it seems close enough?
But my experience with Chinese includes only two years of Mandarin classes and a few podcasts; I haven’t studied the linguistics in so much detail, and that studying ended 5 years ago, so if you’re basing this on something I don’t know, I’d be glad for the correction.
I know much less Chinese than you do. Having said that:
The Chinese version of “be” lets you apply a noun predicate to your subject, but not an adjectival predicate: you can use it to say “I am a student” or “I am an American” but not “I am tired” or “I am tall;” that is, it doesn’t state the attributes of a noun but an equivalence between two nouns. To say “I am tall,” you just say “I tall.” All of the other meanings of “be” (the ones relevant to this problem are those related to the essence/existence question) are expressed with various other words in Chinese.
If that is the case I consider it pretty unlikely that this has any relevance to Chinese or Western philosophy. Especially since in Greek saying “I am tall” is basically saying “I am [something tall]” which according to your description you could also say in Chinese if you had a word for “something tall.”
Ah, yeah, that’s true. Adjectives exhibit verb-like behavior in several East Asian languages; that they also do this in Chinese kinda slipped my mind.