SPEAKING
FREELY Lingualism: Changing the names of
the game By Thorsten Pattberg
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world -
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Capitalism forces people to compete for
market shares, natural resources, and human
capital. Less obvious so, they also vie for
terminologies. This is called lingualism.
Philosophy, religion, and science are
ideological concepts that serve the needs of the
dominant West, and in the past were
hardly ever challenged.
In this century, however, this could change.
Due to the former European conquest of the
world most subject people adopted European
vocabularies. The result is a large body of
"international students" that no longer have any
other concepts available to them other than
philosophy, religion, and science, to explain the
whole range of human thought. It's a bit dull.
The reduction of all the world's
vocabularies to a few inherently European words
makes it effortless for our elites to compose for
example a 'Philosophy of China' without using a
single original Chinese term.
The word
"philosophy" includes all foreign, while being
firmly rooted in the Western tradition. At the
same time the word lacks all foreignness when we
solely refer to ourselves. Thus, a book entitled
'History of Philosophy' may include a chapter on
Confucius or it may not either way it wouldn't
fail to fulfill its title's promise.
If we
asked an American, What's the world's greatest
syndicate?, she would probably answer it's the
trade unions, the Cosa Nostra, the Freemasons, or
maybe the anarchists. Actually, it's none of those
it's the philosophers.
What started in
Greece as Plato's school of philosophy eliminated
all its competitors, conspired with religion, and
is now some sort of compulsory membership-scheme
for all human societies on earth. No great thinker
of any culture can escape our label "philosopher"
even if he's not; and no scholar shall leave our
universities without a PhD a doctor of
philosophy - even if it's got nothing to do with
it.
If we consult actual history,
"philosopher" wasn't even a concept in East-Asia
before Nishi Armani translated it into Japanese
tetsukagusha around 1871. There is no
instance of the word "philosophy" (in modern
Chinese: zhexue) in any of the East-Asian
classics. Our books on "Chinese Philosophy" are
blatant forgery, and our "Departments of Eastern
Philosophy" are cruel fictions.
It's a
beautiful thing, the destruction of foreign words.
We've laid our hands on the shengren, which is
seijin in Japanese, and seng-yin in
Korean, and altered or, as the official term goes,
translated them as "Chinese philosophers",
"Japanese philosophers", "Korean philosophers".
And we have, metaphorically speaking, annihilated
China's spiritual wenming and Japan's
bunmei, which we now re-imagine in our
fashion as materialistic "civilizations".
We employ thousands of scholars, all
"doctors of philosophy", who make sure that our
"corrections" to human knowledge will look like
the original. The public couldn't tell the
difference between a shengren and a philosopher
anyway. In fact, the public cannot know what has
been omitted from their textbooks.
Perhaps
our greatest invention yet was "science". Maybe
equally admirable ideas exist in India's vast
realms of sastras and sutras, or still exist in
China's countless teachings, jiao. Yet,
people are taught it is science, a Western word
and concept, that we all should worship and aspire
to it.
Maybe "globalization" is just
another brilliant euphemism for this ongoing
destruction of non-Western ideas. We want
'economy', not jingji. We want
'globalization', not tianren heyi. They are
not the same. We demand 'democracy' in China, yet
technically this word cannot exist there.
Next is "religion". Religion is
Christianity. We all live in the year 2012 of our
Lord, Jesus Christ. The reason why we call
teachings like Buddhism or Confucianism "religion"
is simply because we want to pull our Religion
over whatever they have, to digest them, to
administer foreign knowledge in our books on
"World Religions".
It's hard to imagine
the President of the United State saying: "Allah
Bless America!"? Or the Pope calling Jesus Christ
and St Nikolas "a Buddha" and "a Shengren". Yet we
demand at all times that Muslims have a God and
that Confucius is a saint.
Our students
are conveniently told that there are "saints" and
"philosophers" all over Asia, yet evidently there
isn't a single buddha, bodhisattva, or shengren in
Europe or America. Think. What is that
probability?
Any linguist who counts,
knows that the vocabularies of the world's
languages add up, they don't overlap. Translation
is always reduction: one word acknowledged, the
other eliminated.
Here, like so often, we
rely on the power drive of our best and brightest.
In the past the conquerors were granted rights to
occupied territory. Today they are granted
contracts with some Oxford or Cambridge publishers
about the history of "something" something that
is now penned in English. What greater gift to
bestow upon a man of intellect than handing him
the sovereignty over the definition of foreign
thought.
Translation is a form of mental
cheating, and its end is always power. The power
lies in the taking away from others. Sure, true
names always beat the fake names; that's precisely
why the Chinese want to keep their true names, and
the Europeans do everything in our powers to take
those names away from them. Think about the
Western habit to switch Chinese surnames and names
around, which borders on coercion.
What
better use of an army of needy scholars who often
live off state charity than to help Europe to fill
its libraries with useful forgery. Here a book
"Religion of China"; there a book "Scientific
Revolution in China"; there another one "Chinese
Classical Philosophy"! The scholars convert
history, they distort reality, they withhold the
correct names.
Foreign key concepts like
daxue (what we call "university"),
shengren (what we call "saints") or
junzi (what we call "gentlemen") have in
their native usage unorthodox meaning. Foreign
thought like rujiao or fojiao is
unwanted thought. The "non-European" obviously
exist, but because of their non-European origins
foreign concepts make Europe feel incomplete and
uneducated.
A prominent example is Germany
which always worshipped might and started the
whole thing of Kulturwissenschaften
(meaning the science of cultures). Despite
relentlessly studying foreign cultures and
languages, the Germans only treated them as dead
objects. As a sinister side-effect, Germany, with
the exception of late American influence which was
forced upon it, always remained absolutely and
totalitarian foreign-free.
Indeed, the
most complete European sinologist is always the
one least Chinese himself. Or, have you ever met
an entomologist who is a butterfly?
Nothing must interfere with our meanings
of science, religion, and philosophy. We must
never allow foreign key terminology all those
useless shades of Eastern meanings - to influence
our public sphere and weaken our lingualism. We
call this freedom. Another one.
Dr
Thorsten Pattberg is a linguist and the
author of The East-West Dichotomy
(2009), Shengren (2011), and Inside
Peking University (2012). He is currently on
the board of the German East Asiatic Society in
Tokyo, Japan.
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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