Language,Figure,Landscape in Chinese Thought

Figuration

Despite its ubiquitous influence in the study of cultures, structuralism extracts exclusively from the operations of languages with common Indo-European origins. Broadening that to include the Chinese language recasts almost every conception of structuralism, since shape-based figuration in Chinese suggests that thought has a larger range of material carriers than sound-based signification carefully cultivated in Indo-European languages. This is perhaps most evident when we consider divergent functions of garden-landscapes. Garden-landscapes enter into Chinese thought through figuration, a process by which all things – conceptual and material – are turned into figures, an immensely large collection of shape-based irreducible units of meaning. This is significant as garden-landscapes are made into objects of scientific and aesthetic gaze in Western thought through signification, an entirely different way to assemble meaning units. Signification is a consequence of a language overlaid above, but separate from, material things; this overlaid system, made of intricate phonetic signs and usage-specific form changes, are sounds and notations of sounds, assigned by custom to signify things. This is Saussure’s langue. Signs do not carry within them inherent visual clues. This system of signification is maintained by a strong commitment to sounds and notations of sounds as the best way to form languages. While shapes possess self-sufficient and self-sustaining visual outlines, the meanings of sounds are context dependent. Individual speech assembles strings of sounds that rely on a pre-existing agreement on what these distinctive strings of sounds might mean. As such, phonetic languages have low tolerance of homonyms, unlike Chinese; with time, their sound differentiations become fine-grained. The passion for sound differentiations is the root of the love of grammar: differentiations of not just words but occasions of use, something which never seems to have been considered necessary to be spelt out precisely in the Chinese language.

The passion for fine-grained sound differentiations seems to have emerged from the spiritual value placed on breathing in the Indo-European past, evident in Vedic ritual chants. The Rig Veda, composed between 1400–1000 BCE (Jamison and Brereton, 2014) by different poets but only finding a literate form in 1646, lasted for almost 3000 years as the ritual chants at the center of a highly cultivated life entirely as an oral recitation. It refused to be written: in the midst of praising the supernatural powers of gods, the Rig Veda eulogizes the power of speech, often portraying speech as identical with cosmic and divine breath. Centuries later, Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest Upanishads, pronounces that the ‘essence of man is speech’; ‘speech and breath, the Rig and the Saman – each of these sets, clearly, is a pair in coitus’; ‘this pair in coitus unites in the syllable OM, and when a pair unites in coitus, they satisfy each other’s desire’ (Olivelle, 1996: CU 1.2–5). Instead of enthusing over the vitality of breathing, the Chinese conception seems to focus on the longevity of writing; Cao Pi (187–226), emperor of the Wei dynasty, stated that ‘life and body must reach their temporal limits, unlike writing, which is eternal’ (Cao Pi, c.211).

In the conception of the spiritual value of breathing, speech is the highest form of breathing, and it is what keeps thought ‘present’ with vitality. Writing, in contrast, relocates thought’s presence to a different materiality. Before the invention of the alphabet, writing would probably have meant writing in shapes (perhaps like the undeciphered Indus Valley script), an ‘embodiment’ that drains the vitality of thought. In Chandogya Upanishad, 8.12.2, Prajapati distinguishes the world without bodies (wind, rain-cloud, lightning, thunder) and that with bodies (everything else), and the idea that the bodiless has an independent and superior existence to the embodied. In contrast, early Chinese thought considered spirit and body as inseparable, and painstakingly preserved the body and its associated material things in tombs for fear of the spirit leaving the body. Cognition in the Vedic tradition is constructed against the body: the capacity to perceive those without bodies is framed as having the greater power. Prajapati continues to assert: ‘the faculty of smell enables him to smell’, ‘the faculty of speech enables him to speak’, ‘the faculty of hearing enables him to hear’, ‘the mind is his divine faculty of sight’ (Olivelle, 1996: CU 8.12.2).

Along the Hellenic Indo-European linguistic branch, this phonocentric epistemological framework is astonishingly similar. The ontological investigation into ‘the form that forms’, grounding the entire Greek philosophy and casting a long shadow in European philosophical developments, parallels the Vedic formulation. Unlike ancient Northern Indians, the Greeks developed writing early through an alphabet, derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, which is effective to preserve the orality of language: there is a clear and determined avoidance of all visual representations. Despite the inherent ability of the alphabet to preserve orality, anxiety is high. In Phaedrus, Plato had Socrates tell a story of Theuth presenting the invention of writing to the King of Egypt, Thamus, who was not impressed; he thought of writing as ‘an elixir not of memory but of reminding’: ‘Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence’ (275e).

Saussure’s triadization of signifier, signified, and referent inherited the speech-centric framework and gave it a ‘structure’ as perhaps the most popular modern model for the study and creation of cultural artefacts. The study of the intellectual significance of space internalized a significant influence from Saussure’s structural model. The influential Michel de Certeau articulates a version of this transition from linguistic structure to the understanding of the constructed environment in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). Here, space is an understanding through the practice of place, with place seen as ‘a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs’ (p. 117). Enunciation, a key concept of place-making, becomes an act of reading the text, a phonetic text structured with signifiers and signifieds. The enduring classic The Production of Space (1991) by Henri Lefebvre similarly prospers on the foundation of a divide between signifier and signified: here they become the perceived, the conceived, and the lived spaces. It is precisely by invoking both de Certeau’s and Lefebvre’s ‘phonetic reading’ of the constructed environment as text that a landmark collection of essays, W.J.T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power (1994), lays out a method and consequences of the reading of meanings of landscapes.

The anxiety of the homogenization and loss of things inherent in the function of the sign, as it was narrated by Plato through the King of Egypt, is also high in the late 20th century. Lyotard, in Discourse, Figure (2011 [1971]), protested against the ‘thinness’ of thought stemming from the phonetic text as a thin structure of the mind; Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1997 [1967]), called attention to the homogenization of the linguistic sign. Like the alienation of goods under the system of money, the alienation of things under the system of signs produces a self-referential felicity of a thin layer of logic. Phonocentrism purges image from the sign, and invents a separate study of image as iconology. Panofsky claims that iconology is about the meaning of art (Panofsky, 1939); but iconology is not about the meaning of art but about what is left behind when meaning is extracted from image through phonetic signs.

Figuration avoids the thinness of the sign by retaining the visual. It is not the dualistic other of the phonetic as it does not abandon sound. However, the retention of the visual decisively shifts the function of language from an all-encompassing focus on sound mechanics (grammar) to a combined investment in sounds and shapes. The substance of this shift is established by the Chinese language made of a large number of character-figures that sustain figuration from conceptual principles to material things. The 64 double trigrams in the Book of Changes (c.11th century BCE) stand at one end of the spectrum of figures with a high level of conceptualization, and characteristic natural landscapes stand at the other with a high level of articulation; both are capable of delineating cosmological significance. For instance, the Chinese character for mountain (shan, 山) captures a schematic shape with three peaks; the idea of mountain is also conceptually manifested as the seventh trigram in the Book of Changes (gen) with two lower broken lines and one upper unbroken line, visually reiterated in paintings as a type of brush stroke known as cun, appearing to be like tree fibers and bark, or rain drops and cirrus clouds, materially presented in gardens as ‘artificial mountains’ of stones and, finally, found in actual mountains. To fulfill the figurational function, it is central that the character shan retains a visual character of protruding peaks, and is consistent on each occasion of use: shan is not assigned a gender, remains the same when used as subject/object, plural/singular, past/future, possessive/non-possessive, etc. All these ideas of mountain come together, say in the form of conceptual thought on the calligraphy of a verse about shan on a painting hung on a wall in a garden with stones. Figuration renders the invocation of this unbroken chain of things and thoughts possible, to link things to meanings and meanings to things. While the character for mountains was derived from the shape of peaks and ranges, the character of the surname Wang (王) was used as the key plan shape for the layout of the Wang family residence complex in Shanxi Province (Knapp, 2004: 258), indicating a constant ‘two-way traffic’ of thought-language. These two straightforward cases are simple indications for a hugely complex operation built around the two ways of mediating between things and meanings.

While the first phenomenon – pictograms taking shape from things to images – occupies the attention of sinology and the study of the Chinese language, the second phenomenon – figuration from character to things – is rarely understood and studied. Figuration takes place in at least two stages: character occupation and thing transformation. Character occupation in space is simply the distribution of written characters in the constructed environment commonly practiced in China. Although pervasive in everyday environments, it is in the garden-landscapes that character occupation attains the highest cultivated forms. Often carved on stones or presented on boards superimposed onto garden walls, pavilions, and halls, the written characters claim their positions of primacy by insisting on this separation from both architecture and land; the poetic naming of meanings of garden-landscapes through written characters frames the ways in which these places are experienced. Thing transformation is formally subtle and structurally insistent, a process logically bonded with character occupation; this is figuration at its most profound. It forms an empire of figures that – with the parallel functioning of the writing system – turns things into writings and writings into things. It is perhaps both impossible and unconstructive to draw a clear line between language and figures here; there is nothing outside this empire of figures (Li, 2014).

The 1716 Kangxi Dictionary (Kangxi zidian) listed about 49,000 unique characters; more ambitious contemporary counting of the number of Chinese characters reached over 100,000. Based on a publication of the State Department of the Chinese government in 2013, about 8000 characters are considered in general use today, and a literate Chinese uses about 4000 to 5000 of them. This large collection of Chinese characters, although all unique, is made of components that may be repeated. Even considering the repetitive components, the Chinese language requires users to be adapted to master its large number of components, significantly more than the 20 to 30 or so alphabetic signs for phonetic languages. Although many of the Chinese characters do have image origins, many of them do not; they are used to visualize shapeless and immaterial concepts. In strong contrast with Indo-European languages which turn concrete shapes into abstractions, the Chinese language gives all abstractions a visual presence. The Chinese language straddles – like an enormous ecotone – between shape capture and thought conceptualization, between image and sound, encompassing in its spectrum poetry, calligraphy, painting, and garden-landscapes in its vast grip on cultural imaginations. Meaning-making from principles to expertise is inclusive of systems of immaterial concepts, the writing system, and the material entities in garden-landscapes. Benjamin Whorf argued that language determines thought (Whorf, 1956), leading to associated assertions regarding the Chinese language (Bloom, 1981; Hoosain, 2008). Although controversial, research on the effect of language on thought in the past decades seems to suggest a coexistence of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive formats, language is often ‘preferentially invoked’ when processing information (Gleitman and Papafragou, 2013).

Unlike other image-based languages, the Chinese language is neither minor nor dead; today, Chinese is the language with the largest number of native users with 1.3 billion people, while Spanish, with 442 million, is the second largest. This is against the background of a much more prevalent use of Indo-European languages, with approximately 3.2 billion, or 46 percent of the world population. In the late 17th century, when the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his convert Xu Guangqi began a translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry into Chinese, they had to invent a new set of Chinese terms to approximate those of geometrical abstraction entirely alien to Chinese thought. Today, resulting from an attempt to internalize Western scientism, almost all scientific concepts can be reproduced in the Chinese language that has, during the course of the 20th century, gone through extensive modifications to strengthen and systematize ‘grammatical compensations’ and to reduce the number of strokes of many characters to give it greater efficiency. Despite all these changes, the basic character of figuration of the Chinese language remains unchanged.

Sound Mechanics and Alphabetic Violence

‘The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures’, Marshall McLuhan declared enigmatically (McLuhan, 1962: 48); by adopting the alphabet, cultures acquire this imperialist tendency. McLuhan’s remark seems to be accurate when we consider the violent eradication of the Mayan hieroglyphics by the Spanish missionary Diego de Landa in the 16th century. Gripped by a fear of visual figures (an Indo-European iconoclasm absent in hieroglyphic languages) in Mayan hieroglyphics, similar to the fear of the absence of spiritual substances in Confucianism aroused in Jesuit missionaries, de Landa ordered an auto-da-fé that burned Mayan books and images, in the process eradicating the literacy of Mayan hieroglyphics. De Landa’s panic reaction to Mayan hieroglyphics is less an exception than a rule, manifested otherwise as a normative declaration of the finality of progress of the alphabet.

The longer trajectories of the development of Indo-European languages demonstrated imperial expansions since perhaps 4500 BCE. With domestication of the horse, the invention of the chariot as the crucial war machine, the Proto-Indo-European language, from the Eurasian Steppe, expanded westwards to Europe and eastwards to India; it is ‘the great linguistic-philosophical takeover’ of the world (Anthony, 2007). Major image-based languages – Anatolian hieroglyphics, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan hieroglyphics – have all been forced out of use. The survival of Chinese characters is perhaps fortuitous; geographical barriers – the Tianshan Mountain Range, the Himalaya Mountains, the Taklimakan desert, and the Mongolian desert – prevented further expansion of Indo-European languages. By the time the northern nomadic tribes invaded China in the sixth century (Northern Wei dynasty), the Chinese characters had sufficient time to mature and could not be easily replaced. What made Chinese particularly resilient is its early adaption to writing, a development that was crucially assisted by the invention of paper around 105 CE. Paper, brush and ink, connected to wrist movements, freed hieroglyphics from laborious artisan specialization to a practice with light instruments manageable easily by a single person. This enormously important development parallels perhaps the much earlier combination of reed stylus and wet clay, leading to the invention of cuneiform as the world’s first writing system. Unlike the Egyptian hieratic, the Chinese writing system is not supplementary; it is the only writing form. This additional time resulted in an immensely rich culture in a variety of forms. The non-Chinese nomadic Steppe tribes settling down in China in the sixth century adopted Chinese characters instead of replacing them, as did the Jurchen, Mongols and Manchus who took over China in the 10th century and in the 17th century.

In the past 400 years during which China and Europe have exchanged in meaningful ways, Western understanding of the Chinese language seems to have gone through three broad stages with complex overlapping: first, the Chinese language was seen to possess what the European languages lacked; second, the Chinese language was seen as backward; third, in recent decades, a ‘new materialism’ in the West finds an ally in the Chinese language.

When Europeans first encountered the Chinese language, some thought that it was a biblical language that had been lost in Europe; English architect John Webb wrote a treatise in 1669, An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language, to advance this view. This sentiment had considerable impact on European Enlightenment thinkers such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot and Quesnay, who had a high estimation of the works of Chinese thinkers (Roetz, 2005) – albeit with limited information gathered from Jesuit missionaries – because their simplicity and directness seem to have offered a healing alternative to the European sophism and religious sectarianism some believed to have given rise to frequent and violent religious wars. Leibniz seems to have thought that the European mind, with its deep passion for the fine-grain of its linguistic signs, neglected to comprehend the grounding of universal principles in reality. Leibniz was convinced that the Chinese language possessed qualities that may be used to build a true philosophical language that can bridge the difference between linguistic signs and things signified.

The majority of European writings in the past 400 years have been critical of the Chinese language. The most frequently repeated narrative has been that the Chinese language is not unique; it represents an early stage of a linguistic evolution. Francis Bacon in Advancement of Learning (1615) framed such a linguistic-philosophical progression from the hieroglyphic, to the syllabic, and to the alphabetic. In the era of European colonization, Hegel and Weber perhaps bracket the flourishing of this view, taking it to several radical forms. Hegel popularized the view that the Oriental mind is immersed in substance – unable to conceive subjectivity and freedom because of it – and this is a consequence of its language, incapable of freeing the mind (thus subjectivity) from things; Weber seized on this view and expanded it to explain why China never developed capitalism and institutions of the city (Weber, 1951). This view has had recognizable impact on sinology (Roetz, 2005), and it never seems to have faded. Extending the Hegelian and Weberian views, several 20th-century thinkers and linguists regard the Chinese language, among all languages dependent on writing visual images, as a development stabilized far too early, relying on a system that demands too much memory and too little reason, with its speech plagued by inadequate tonal differentiations and excessive homonyms. Linguists such as John DeFrancis (1986) and William Hannas (1996) claimed that the Chinese writing system is basically embryonic sematic and phonetic components in search of a fuller realization. It takes much longer and requires more discipline for a child to be proficient in the Chinese writing system, which prompted Hannas to speculate that the authoritarian political tendency in East Asia is a function of the Chinese writing system (Hannas, 2003). American Jesuit philosopher Walter Ong claimed in Orality and Literacy that there ‘can be no doubt that the [Chinese] characters will be replaced by the roman alphabet’, despite the fact that the ‘loss to literature will be enormous’ (Ong, 1982: 86). Eric Havelock, after a strong criticism of the Chinese writing system, lamented that the ‘triumph of the alphabet’ was ‘often compromised, sometimes bitterly contested, and to this day is only half won’ (Havelock, 1987).

These thoughts certainly shaped the investment of Christian missions and European imperial administrations in phoneticizing the Chinese language using the Roman alphabet. Since the 19th century, Wade-Giles and pinyin systems have been the most common ways of phoneticizing the Chinese language, and the Chinese writing system in the early 20th century was teetering on the verge of making the switch to adopting a Romanized phonetic script. The adoption of the Roman alphabet has been a crucial cultural development in Europe with the spread of Latin; in Asia, languages in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia all moved to adopt forms of Romanization of their indigenous languages. Vietnamese, a language closely linked to the Chinese language, popularized its Romanization in the 20th century based on a scheme developed by 17th-century French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660). This was the first Sinitic language to adopt the Greco-Roman alphabet.

This persistent denigration of the Chinese language seems to be obsessive in the context of the normative display of superiority common to all cultures. Derrida’s Of Grammatology – as perhaps the most penetrating analysis of this obsession – takes the discourse to an Indo-European ‘orality complex’ over the loss of the thing in the world of the phonetic sign (Derrida, 1997 [1967]). Calling it phonocentrism, Derrida pried open the well-camouflaged contradictions to uphold the primacy of speech and presence in European philosophy, and lays siege in particular on Saussure and Rousseau. Saussure’s significance is monumental; he established the study of language as a structural study of culture, and more importantly the view that the study of language is one of the phonetic languages. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure claims, ‘Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech acts’ (Saussure, 1986: 14). ‘In setting up the science of language within the overall study of speech, I have also outlined the whole of linguistics’ (Saussure, 1986: 17). Edward Sapir (1884–1939), an important founder of the study of language and thought, published an essay entitled ‘Language’ in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Sapir, 1933), and emphatically stated that, in the first place, ‘language is primarily a system of phonetic symbols for the expression of communicable thoughts and feelings’. It is entirely an area connected to the vocal behavior of the larynx. David Diringer, whose compendium of world languages provided an important milestone for the study of languages, claimed that ‘writing reproduces sounds, which come from the mouth, or unspoken thoughts, which come from the brain, by permanent visual symbols on paper, stone, metal, wood, leather, linen, or some other material’ (Diringer, 1949: 20). After reviewing a catalogue of languages in the world, he concluded that ‘Phonetic writing is a great step forward’ (Diringer, 1949: 36) in the process of moving from picture-writings to the syllabic and to the alphabetic. ‘The alphabet is the last, the most highly developed, the most convenient and the most easily adaptable system of writing’ (Diringer, 1949: 37). Walter Ong presents one of the most determined defenses of the phonocentric tradition: ‘Thoughts are nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound’ (Ong, 1982: 74). Ong argued that words without speech are consigned to death: ‘Such “things” are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection’ (Ong, 1982: 33). They are isolated: ‘Sight isolates, sound incorporates’ (Ong, 1982: 71). They run their own autonomous discourse: ‘There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before’ (Ong, 1982: 78).

Rousseau was among the most ardent defenders of the phonocentric tradition, seeing writing, while attempting to fix meaning, as doing quite the opposite: epitomizing the corruption of humanity by what had become systems of sciences and arts. Derrida charges, for instance, at the point when Rousseau claimed that speech is natural and writing is unnatural, an idea of immense consequence since the notion of ‘natural rights’ has defined the European political life in the past four centuries. Naturalness and unnaturalness are not so clear-cut, Derrida interjects, because of both the arbitrariness of the sign (both as sounds and as writing) and because of the dependency of ‘truth claims’ on ‘supplements’ that undermine their truth status. Phonetic writing and the use of signs are more idiosyncratically constructed than a natural phenomenon. The difficulties of thinking ‘naturalness’ have since received extensive and influential treatment in the works of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett.

Despite these insights, the world is unmistakably alphabetic today; the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion and Mayan hieroglyphics by David Stuart are celebrated intellectual feats largely because they have decoded the phonetic components of the hieroglyphics. We remain generally uninformed of the meanings of these writings, as figures, in their intellectual formulations of the world.

Natural Language, Grammatical Specificity, and Silent Grammar in the Mind

What is ‘preferentially invoked’ when using Chinese that is so divergent from what is invoked when speaking an Indo-European language? In the late 17th century, Leibniz (1646–1716) argued that it was closeness of the Chinese characters to thoughts (a ‘natural language’), mitigating the alienating abstraction of signifiers. In the early 19th century, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) argued that it was generality and silent grammar in the mind, allowing an entirely unknown way for the mind to function rationally. All these aspects, even considering their lack of knowledge of the Chinese language, are useful insights that are yet to attain their potentiality.

Leibniz took an unusual interest in China, perhaps being first impressed by the wisdom in the binary system in the Book of Changes. Leibniz’s interest in China was two-fold: a ‘natural theology’ and a ‘natural language’ that could lead us to a return to the care of the thing. Growing up and living in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), Leibniz sought a better religious life that transcended specific interpretations and rituals; in this sense, he found great sympathy in the broad neo-Platonic theology of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Li, 2006). During his time, new details about Chinese life were gradually being spread to Europe by Jesuits missionaries, and the Roman Catholic Church was engrossed in a ‘Chinese Rites Controversy’ about whether or not Confucianist rituals were tolerable civil events or heretic religious practices. Matteo Ricci’s assimilationist approach was at the time contested and was eventually overwhelmed by the contrary views of Nicholas Longobardi and Antonio Caballero; it is against the latter two that Leibniz wrote extensively on the notion of a ‘natural theology of the Chinese’. Leibniz believed that the Chinese had a truer spiritual relationship with the world. While the Jesuits largely believed that the Chinese practice was a denial of ‘spiritual substances’, Leibniz saw a broader principle (li, meaning rational principle) which is embodied in things (Leibniz, 1994: 76). Both in religion and in philosophy, Leibniz sensed that religious ‘truths’ were consequences of shifting linguistic predications and the Chinese culture demonstrated a stable approach to spiritual life through embodiment.

The divide between the spiritual lives in Europe and China is deep. The central feature of Indo-European religious conception, despite the enormous diversity of gods and liturgies, is the process of abstraction: the notion of a life without bodies at the center, paralleling sounds without things in languages. The Rig Veda already articulated clearly an ‘imprisonment conception’ of the human soul (atman) trapped in the vulnerabilities of the physical body, and a higher world of heaven in which anthropomorphic gods with superhuman qualities live with a much better set of principles (brahman). In all Indo-European religions, renunciation is the critical link between this duo-world framework: a lifelong struggle to transition from one to the other. It frames life – and philosophy – as processes of being and becoming. Later innovations included the notion of monasticism and enlightened beings (Jainism and Buddhism), a single god (Zoroastrianism), purification rituals (baptism), and individualization (Protestantism), yet the long-standing spiritual path remained unchanged; it serves as a powerful infrastructure for intellectual life. It is precisely this religious and philosophical connection that brought Leibniz to the news about China – he met and read almost all Jesuit authors who travelled to China – in order to reform both religion and philosophy.

For Leibniz, a new language – a universal character (characteristica universalis) – was the key to improving religion and philosophy. A universal language had been a long-stranding pursuit for European thinkers, and the English clergyman John Wilkins, the famed founder of the Royal Society, published a treatise entitled An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language in 1668. Leibniz thought that Wilkins’ attempt missed the central issue of a universal language by focusing too closely on scientific utility; instead, a true universal language should be able to function in a way that ‘all concepts and things can be put into beautiful order’ (Leibniz, 1966: 30–31). Leibniz thought that alphabetic signs are somewhat ‘unnatural’; while recognizing the tremendous demand on memory, he nevertheless thought that the Chinese language suggested a middle ground where the alphabetic language could be reformed into a universal character that brings language closer to things.

It will be convenient for the signs to be as natural as possible – e.g., for one, a point; for numbers, points; for the relations of one entity with another, lines; for the variation of angles and of extremities in lines, kinds of relations. If these are correctly and ingeniously established, this universal writing will be as easy as it is common, and will be capable of being read without any dictionary; at the same time, a fundamental knowledge of all things will be obtained. (Leibniz, 1966: 10–11)

Leibniz’s project of a universal character was understandably never realized; Frege revived the Leibnizian investigation by proposing a ‘concept script’ (Begriffsschrift) that fills the gaps between the rather disjunctive parts of a universal character: arithmetical, geometrical, and chemical symbols. This led to Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s further investigations into language and thought, but without returning to the Chinese example. If they returned to the Chinese language, they would have needed to return to an entirely different assumption: the connection between concepts and things, so desired by Leibniz, is not achieved through a language of linguistic signs, but one of an unbroken chain of thoughts, words, images, and things.

A century after Leibniz’s efforts, Abel-Rémusat, holder of the first academic chair for Chinese studies in the West (in Chinese and Manchu language and literature at the Collège de France), was immersed in a defense of the Chinese language in European academia. The charge against the Chinese language, with the rise of a grammar-centric cultural evaluation in Europe, was that it was the most imperfect for its complete lack of grammatical markers, least present among all languages. This narrative marginalized Chinese in the new Sanskrit-Greek-Latin origins of Western languages – replacing the earlier Hebrew-Greek-Latin one – that emerged at the time; it pitched Chinese (total absence of grammar) against Sanskrit (most rigorous grammar). But Abel-Rémusat was insistent, perhaps out of love for Chinese literature, that Chinese not be dismissed too hastily; he challenged his fellow scholars to study the language, and pointed out the fact that the Chinese language is one of the most abundant in Asia, and is responsible for the richest and most learned literature. Rather than seeing the absence of grammar as a problem, he saw it as ‘an advantage’: ‘German or English . . . lose a great deal by being subjected to modifications that are more varied, more precise, more rigorous, and for that very reason, less free, less rapid and less energetic’ (Joseph, 1999: 95).

Abel-Rémusat expressed his views as part of an exchange of letters with Humboldt, who did spend time acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese before he responded sympathetically to Abel-Rémusat’s assertions. Humboldt expanded and contextualized Abel-Rémusat’s point; Humboldt argued that while at first glance one may consider Chinese to be the most imperfect due to its absence of grammar, it is, by the very absence of grammatical markers, a language with its own excellence. The major advantages of Chinese, freed from grammatical markers, are to allow the mind to think in generality, thus in ‘pure logical ideas’, and by effectively performing grammar in the mind, to endow the mind with a greater ability to recognize formal linkages of speech.

Humboldt’s first point about thoughts in general rekindled Leibniz’s concern over abstraction: the fine-grained signifiers guide the mind towards a passion for linguistic constructs divorced from material reality. By not including grammatical shades in the language, Chinese is not a distraction from the endeavor to access the generality of reality.

Verbs can be used in Chinese without expressing tense, which in the expression of general ideas is always a displaced accessory; nor do verbs need to be put into the active or passive, as the two voices can be understood together in the same word. The classical languages, which can only rarely express themselves in such an indefinite manner, must use other means to bring to mind a generality they have been obliged to circumscribe with the use of a precise form. (Joseph, 1999: 113–14)

Humboldt argued that this very absence of grammar refocuses the mind toward pure logical ideas which escape the ‘structural-specific logic’ of the classical languages.

[The] seeming absence of all grammar in Chinese is precisely that [which] enhances, in the national mind, the acuteness of the ability to recognize the formal linkage of speech; whereas, on the contrary, those languages which attempt, without success, to designate grammatical relationships, are liable, rather, to put the mind to sleep, and to cloud the grammatical sense by a mingling of the materially and formally meaningful. (Humboldt, 1999: 231)

In addition, Humboldt thought that the presence of image in Chinese ‘powerfully contributes, in many cases at least, to making the relations of ideas felt, and weakening the impression of sounds’ (Joseph, 1999: 137).

Abel-Rémusat and Humboldt brought a degree of reflexivity to Chinese language which has not quite been equaled since, and the grammatological critiques of Lyotard and Derrida offered little insights from within the Chinese language. If classical languages, in formulating the first philosophical categories, defined a discourse grounded in grammatical specificity, then the entire Western philosophy seems to be a gigantic struggle to return to the generality of thought from which Chinese never seems to have departed in the first place.

More specifically, the ‘mingling of the materially and formally meaningful’, Humboldt’s main charge against the grammar-centric languages in mixing reality (materially meaningful) with grammar (formally meaningful), touches a foundational issue and opens perhaps one of the strongest potentials of Chinese: the absence of structuralism as its strength in formulating ‘relational thought’. François Jullien, in The Silent Transformations (2011), characterizes Western ontological thought as that of ruptures, dimming the conception of continuities. Thinking in relationality through generality is perhaps the primary function of figuration: by fixing each idea with a shape conceptually and materially, and by performing grammatical markers in the mind, pure relations between ideas (and not grammatical relations between signifiers) are brought to the forefront of thought.

Garden-Landscapes

The location of Chinese thought in change/in-between – crucially enabled by the material and linguistic presence of garden-landscapes – also prescribes a particular formal character for garden-landscapes. Humboldt’s ‘silent grammar in the mind’ is wholly directed toward change/in-between, a space crucially sustained by the complex process of figuration; the same operation also contains its constitution of architecture and urbanism in an entirely different way. This constitution of architecture and urbanism, made of nature and modalities of change and sustained by the strategies of assembling figures, is perhaps a version of the thickness Lyotard alluded to in Discourse, Figure. Historicism and deconstruction, the strategies of attaining thickness in Western architecture and urbanism, offers a limited critical power compared with the relocation of architecture in the conception of change.

Architecture is perhaps the most visible manifestation of the grammar-centric cultural logic of Western civilization. The Greek and Roman architectural tradition, and the great revival of Greek and Roman architecture of the European Renaissance, conceived architecture as an enterprise of proportionality of materials and typology of buildings; the excellence in these areas formed the foundation of moral and aesthetic experiences in architecture. The prevalent use of perspectival views brought an ability to visually understand proportionality as ‘design’, an idea that did not quite exist in the medieval period. Proportionality and typology are the ontology of Western architecture. They receive a legal power through building codes and planning regulations protecting rule specificity of architecture and urbanism. In this connection, the ‘orders’ of the Greek temple – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, at the heart of Greek civil and spiritual life – is consistent with Le Corbusier’s ‘modular man’ and Mies van der Rohe’s steel structural details. Design theories derived from this grammar-centric framework – from Palladio’s ‘design grammar’ of harmonious proportions, to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s compositional charts, to Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, to George Stiny’s shape grammars, and to Bill Hillier’s and Julienne Hanson’s space syntax – affirm the articulation of rule specificities as the foundation of architecture. It was to grammar that architects returned when faced with the narrowness of visual choices in 20th-century modern architecture: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used the ambiguities of semantics to reframe a more inclusive architectural discussion, and Peter Eisenman focused on syntactical complexities to provide an appearance of complexity in architectural design. In both normative and critical operations, Western architecture reproduces a similar thinness of the linguistic signs of phonetic languages, heavily relying on the conceptual model of language to justify and guide its theories and designs.

Proportionality and typology are far from a universal architectural condition; they are almost entirely absent in traditional Chinese buildings. In contrast, all traditional Chinese buildings tend to converge on the same character-figure (she 舍) in its rudimentary shapes of roof, bracket sets, columns and base. By limiting the artificiality of architecture and by preventing it from becoming its own self-referential celebration of rule specificities, something much larger can be brought to the built environment. It is this larger understanding that demands a degree of equitable presence of all life-giving and life-sustaining things. As a consequence, figuration shifts the center of architecture in China from the specificity of construction and use to the transformational processes in garden-landscapes.

The world of architecture and landscape has long cherished the private gardens in China built and modified by generations of scholar-officials since the 17th century, largely concentrated in and around the city of Suzhou (Henderson, 2013). But, at the same time, it also treats Suzhou gardens as a specialist knowledge and a source of Orientalist delight, not quite comparable to the dominant grammar-centric architectural tradition. Suzhou gardens were private residences and are made of living quarters and pleasure gardens enclosed within walls. They are not conceived as building-landscape dichotomies in the Western sense, which necessitates the typological and proportional considerations of buildings, and the perspectival views of landscape. Instead, buildings are conceived as figurative units, allowing a soaring of scale – a generality of thought in space – to encompass all other figures in the garden to resemble a notion of ten thousand things (wanwu): water, rocks, bamboo, plum trees, pine trees, koi fish, turtles, butterflies, clouds, and so on. It is in the relationality of these forms – if arranged with sufficient art – that moral and aesthetic experiences are made evident both as things, as writing, as poems, as painting, and as thought: rocks are sturdy, water is sinuous, bamboos are unyielding, and pines and plum trees are fearless of adverse weather. The stability of the building form is perhaps akin to the stability of the written character; here, the building form is immersed in the totality of all other forms. Wen Zhengming’s Thirty-one Scenes of the Garden of the Humble Administrator in Suzhou (1533) and Shen Yuan’s and Tang Dai’s Forty Scenes of Yuanmingyuan in Beijing (1736) provide us with visual examples of moral and aesthetic experiences of garden-landscapes through a diptych form of poetry and painting. The highly acclaimed 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber not only conceives its gripping plots almost entirely in the private garden of the Jia family, but also blends garden-landscapes into the unfolding of inter-personal power and love through figures in the garden and poems of the protagonists. These gardens are much less about the functional types as meticulously cared-for architectural signs separated from ‘nature’ and more about a much larger framework accessible by the generality of thought. This generality of thought, manifested in these private gardens, parallels the generality inherent in the Chinese writing system.

If the intimacy of the scholar’s garden captured the cultivation of the literati, Hangzhou’s West Lake is perhaps the best example to illustrate China’s complex thought-language as a popular imagination at large scale. The West Lake is a natural body of water surrounded by green mountains, right next to the historic city of Hangzhou; it is also an artificially dredged lake with a dense accumulation of cultural meanings which began to flourish from the 12th century (Southern Song dynasty, 1127–79). The Song dynasty as a whole (960–1279) was a deeply transformative era in Chinese history, defined by its precarious existence under the threat and the reality of invasions of the Jurchen and the Mongols; the external threat to Chinese culture also gave rise to the Song dynasty project of establishing Chinese canons and standards for the written character, Confucianism, and architecture in the context of exceptional flourishing of technological inventions and commercial initiatives. It had to do so because the Mongols cut off the Silk Roads and forced the Song to reluctantly take the maritime routes for trade. After being overwhelmed by the Jurchen, the Song dynasty moved its capital from the northern city of Kaifeng to Hangzhou (then known as Lin’an). This made the West Lake a centerpiece of Chinese cultural life which never seems to have faded (Duan, 2020), even though it may have shifted from a site for poetic pleasure established in the 12th century to that of loyalty and political failures of the Song for later dynasties (Altenburger, 2017). The normative experience of the West Lake culminates in the Ten Scenes, each narrated with a four-character phrase, immediately immersing the visitors in about 30,000 other four-character phrases (chengyu, or ‘established phrases’); in this sense, the central meanings of the West Lake are enunciated simultaneously as painterly and landscape ‘mountain-water’ (shanshui) and as writings. The West Lake is the location to which an enormous body of written characters is produced in association with its Ten Scenes. In 2004, Hangzhou Press assembled 30 volumes (21 million characters) of historical writings, to which more volumes were added in 2013 and 2016. The enthusiasm for written characters about the West Lake seems to be inexhaustible. Instead of caring for the relic as ruins, which have much higher cultural value in the West than in China, the care of the written character is China’s historic preservation and heritage conservation.

This enormous assembly of written characters and notable scenes of the West Lake illustrate the unbroken chain from thoughts to garden-landscapes. There is no doubt that the West Lake is the most valued place in China, but it is also important to understand the network of comparable places – notable and beautiful mountains and lakes – that anchor the understanding of land as places in China. The West Lake is evidence of Ten Thousand Things (wanwu) well taken care of and flourishing in the popular imagination; it is both the site of nourishment of the body (known for its lotus seeds, rice, tea, and silk) and the moral and aesthetic foundation of the mind (the poet-sage Su Shi and the Legend of the White Snake). Influential thinkers of the Song dynasty such as Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107) state that ‘ten thousand things all have their own principles, and it is easy to follow them but difficult to go against them’ (Cheng and Cheng, 1168). To some extent, the West Lake is an enormous enlargement of the scholar’s private garden, sustaining a parallel framework for a city with its architecture transformed into a figure among Ten Thousand Things, and with the occupation of the Chinese writing system in garden-landscapes to enlist the philosophical efficacy of things.

Ontology is the thought of fixity, and the spatial finality of fixity is utopia, an enormously influential conception in the Indo-European civilization. The rule specificity of composition elevated architecture from above that of landscape through perfection of type (a form of the meticulous care of the sign); utopia is defined physically as the sum total of the perfection of type in architecture. The spiritual lineage of utopia is long: the Vedic higher worlds, the Buddhist pure land, and the Judeo-Christian heaven; the intellectual lineage is similarly persistent: Plato’s Republic, Saint Augustine’s City of God, Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine. All these have a deep impact on the constructed environment: Monte Casino, Mount Athos, Grand Chartreuse as well as Chandigarh, Brasilia, Masdar; these have effectively established the canons of the Western architectural profession. Unlike spiritual practices, building utopian cities is an enormously costly practice demanding great resources and resulting in enormous environmental impact; this is one deep reason why the broader principles at stake here are critical for human life. In the past four centuries, technological advancements have exponentially increased humanity’s ability to build utopian cities at larger scale and greater speed and have constructed an economic system – perhaps best represented by neoliberalism – that profits immensely from proliferation of techno-utopias as real estate speculations. This entire urbanization process is mapped onto a much-increased human population. The conceptions of architecture and the city have never been as weighty as they are today. Humboldt mused that the explicitness of grammar in language could ‘put the mind to sleep’ through its thin logic of truth; the appearance of perfection of utopias – and the incessant pursuit of them – may indeed be a disturbing consequence of Humboldt’s mind at sleep.

When change is the substance of thought, the appearances of fixities become indeed tentative formations, both inheriting a prior condition and producing a subsequent one. Daoist thought speaks of ‘non-action’ (wuwei) to foreground change instead of fixity; this is the thought of continuities – and meaningful change encapsulated in continuities – rather than ruptures as events (Jullien, 2011). Garden-landscapes as thought-language in China has established a tradition of landscape as a distinct idea much earlier than in Europe; landscape entered into visual culture perhaps from the time of the Renaissance, emerging from its previous role as background and entering its new role as views (Jullien, 2018). China’s garden-landscapes are neither background nor view; despite the accumulation of wealth in the 17th century, architecture was never separated from garden-landscapes in China.

This positioning of architecture within garden-landscapes in China allows us to perceive with clarity the concept of ‘between’, jian (間 and 閒), a word-thought – captured here through a gate framing the sun and the moon – that is central to the Chinese conceptions of time and space. Jian qualifies both time (shijian or between two moments) and space (kongjian or between two or more fixities) by insisting on the between. This is radically different from the Western conception of the between as ‘becoming’ and ‘transition’, the indistinctly perceived and suppressed private moments between beings and locations. This perhaps explains why the Augustinian question ‘what is time?’ and the Cartesian question ‘what is space?’ have not been important in Chinese thought; these would seem to be obsessively predicational, just as the notion of the true being becomes a distraction for life. The calendar in China is marked annually by astronomical and climatic events: from the sun, the moon, stars to snow, frost, rain, to germination, maturation, and fruition; this contrasts strongly with the temporal marking with saintly and exemplary beings on Indo-European calendars. Chinese garden-landscapes materialize time and space as transformative processes in the material matters of the shifting of lights, movement of water and wind, growth and decay of plants and animals.

The concept of jian is perhaps at the foundation of the porous building boundaries in Chinese architecture: a ‘see-through’ quality of layers of openings on walls, prevalent use of screens on buildings, and the network of covered corridors. The traditional building structure enabled this porosity; the timber-framed structures are well-suited to fulfill the goal of porosity of architecture. The depth of space in Chinese garden-landscape, achieved through layout and the character of architecture, enact in material and space a similar strategy of creating ‘distances’ – the principles of ‘high-distance’ (gaoyuan, looking up), ‘deep-distance’ (shenyuan, looking behind), and ‘horizontal distance’ (pingyuan, looking beyond) – in paintings. This is in contrast with the perspectival sequences of spaces that dominate the design of Western architecture. If European architecture is the sum total of grammar-centric constructional events, Chinese architecture is an uneventfulness giving rise to a larger framework of cosmological processes. It is perhaps an indication of the prevalence of the concept of jian in Chinese architecture that the Song dynasty imperial building manual Yingzao fashi (1103) used the term, together with the term for the size of timber (cai), to define the grading of building projects. Jian can indeed offer a new constitution of architecture, and, if explored as an idea instead of as a stylistic provocation, can be a framework with a grounding in larger material systems of the planet. Space as an ontological entity seeks its essential location in thought; jian as in between fixities engages both space and fixities as a single inter-dependent operation.

Like Sun Zi’s Art of War, which tells us how to win a war by not fighting a war, Ji Cheng’s The Craft of Gardens (Yuanye, 1631) tells us to design the best architecture by not designing architecture. Not that they give up on war and architecture, but they shift the locations of war and architecture in thought to yield better results. Garden-landscapes are central for this set-up in Chinese thought; by shifting thought the spectrum from a narrow band of phonetic signifiers to a broader band of figures, the character of thought changes decisively. Thought in this sense becomes far more deeply fused with things, allowing the nature of change and efficacy of action to be present equally with events and fixities. Many forms of certainty routinely rehearsed in Western knowledge become tentative in the context of Chinese thought. The very same broadening of the spectrum of thought places garden-landscapes within the plastic power of figuration, giving rise to a distinct appearance of garden-landscapes as figures, and a very different conception of architecture and urbanism. Like military strategies, political schemes, artistic methods, and conceptual formulations, space production constitutes this larger spectrum. The nature of knowledge in the West, compelled by its missionary tendency, has rendered not only the non-West but also the non-phonetic as lack. So powerful and pervasive is this intellectual enterprise in the West that to effect a meaningful return to an unpackaged understanding of the non-phonetic we must assemble both ancient formative processes and recent polished manifestations.

The weighing of the shifting thought spectrum has led us to the weighing of thought and architecture in the form of garden-landscapes. China’s rich garden-landscape tradition now serves as a silent witness to a new understanding of the discipline of architecture and urbanism as a crucial resource against a much homogenized world. In this case, thinking with Ji Cheng, crafting garden-landscapes in Chinese thought-language begins with ‘non-design’: what the site gives (best fit, yi) and what the surroundings provide (borrow, jie). Non-design approximates the Daoist non-action; here, the call is not for the absence of action but for action with efficacy. Efficacy, unlike the impact of the plan-action-result framework, derives from a strategic use of forces contained in a specific situation; this is captured by the concept of propensity (shi), a widely used principle in the preparation of action (Jullien, 1995).

As much as garden-landscapes are shaped by thought-language, the craft of garden-landscapes offers an embodied practice in anchoring concepts and cultivating moral-aesthetic pleasure; more than collecting art and objects, and publishing books and articles, the craft of garden-landscapes was one of the first acts of establishing a scholarly reputation in China in its intellectual history. As it exists, the Chinese language of figures gives up grammatical structures in return for its capacity to operate in the realm of change/in-between. The resilience of the Chinese thought-language is testament to its unique efficacious way to make sense and make use of the world. Leibniz’s turn to the Chinese writing system came from a desire to cease the violence of the sign in religious practices; this seems to parallel today’s aspiration to halt the violence of the sign in environmental exploitation. What is gained from this sketch of figuration – at the expense of divisions of scientism – is a syncretic thought paralleling ecological thought; it is this quality that we must comprehend at a time when the divisions of scientism, riding on the expansive wave of the alphabetic sign, exercise their militant traits.