Thursday, September 30, 2010

Aristotle in China

Chinese being seen to have diverged from – almost inevitably to have fallen grievously short of – some Western achievement, and the question is then, why so? But such studies, whether they plead for the defence or for the prosecution, always impose investigative patterns which Chinese material is made to fit, usually by distortion, at best by omission.
Geoffrey Lloyd has recently subjected one large family of comparativist methodologies to blistering attack in his Demystifying Mentalities.2 I shall make my beginning with a cognate group of theories, those which cast their principles in linguistic terms, and which are of particular interest both because they prevail in philosophical studies and because their evaluation presents a special, and especially philosophical, difficulty. The mentalities approach seeks to explain a host of anthropological issues by associating a distinctive set of intellectual capacities (and limitations) with a given culture. A running theme of Lloyd’s book is that it is swiftly brought to grief by the insuperable difficulties which beset any attempt to specify a well-defined social unit to which a dominant mentality might be attributed without begging all the interesting questions. Lloyd’s moral is that in this sphere, at least, totalising tendencies are well nigh indefensible. But the hypotheses I shall scrutinise can boast at least one especially challenging feature. For, in comparison with most mentality approaches, their basic presumption that linguistic communities are relatively homogeneous is not patently outrageous.3 There is a twist, however. Their presumption will fail to be truly outrageous only if, paradoxically, it motivates interpretative strategies of a vauntingly ambitious character. We begin far beyond the range of dialectal differences, diachronic linguistics, the relation between spoken and written language, or the proprietary modes of expression of given cultural groupings. We begin with the structure of the language itself, as it were with langue rather than parole; structure must be understood as so fundamental as not to be subject to any of the enormous variations I have enumerated, on pain of losing that putative unitary theoretical entity, the language. So here is the first shift of comparativist linguistic hypotheses outside the narrow circle of the mentalities debate: their favoured terms of comparison are less vulnerable to the accusation of being mere figments of the theoretical imagination. Second, champions of linguistic comparativism do not always regard thought as intrinsically linguistic. But they do happily claim both 2 Lloyd 1990. 3 Jean-Paul Reding’s ‘Greek and Chinese Categories: A Reexamination of the Problem of Linguistic Relativism’ develops a judicious critique of what he considers over-hasty recognition of the relativistic influence exercised by particular languages on disparate philosophical traditions: ‘if categories can be discovered through a language, this does not mean that they are relative to that language; it only means that the categories mirror themselves – though imperfectly – in language. It would also be wrong to say that language channels our thinking: it rather floods it, and it is the philosopher’s duty to find the fordable places’ (Reding 1986, pp. 355–6).

Posted by Cute at 3:17 AM
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