Controversy over Language: Towards Pre-Qin Semiotics

Han-liang Chang

Reprinted fromTamkang Review

VOL. XXVIII, NO. 3 (Spring 1998)Published by

Graduate School of Western Languages and LiteratureTamkang University, Republic of China

Controversy over Language: Towards Pre-Qin Semiotics

Han-liang Chang

ABSTRACT

Semiotic thinking in general can be born whenpeople become aware of the discrepancy and tensionamong different uses of language. This awareness andits expression are often enacted dramatically in thecontroversy of discourse. The discursive polemics inPre-Qin China centers around the contention of logicand rhetoric, quite similar to the fortune of thetrivi- in the medieval West.

Traditionally known as the Great Debate on Nameand Substance, the controversy should be understoodas a phenomenon of language pragmatics. Those whoparticipate in the Debate fail to communicate withone another because there is a discrepancy betweenencoding and decoding. Their polemics helps to createa textual space that includes the hidden agenda ofsemiotics.

KEY WORDS

semiotics pragmaticsrhetoric history logiccontroversy

2

FORWORD

This special issue on Chinese Semiotics has grownout of my research project on the History of Semioticsas well as a postgraduate course I have taught atNational Taiwan University and Charles University inPrague. The project, which began in 1991 with apreliminary enquiry into the concepts of the signaccording to St. Augustine (354-430), Pseudo-Dionysus (fl. ca . 500), and their Chinese counter-parts, can be regarded as a contribution to whatUmberto Eco proposed in 1983 as a world history ofsemiotics. To that extent, this joint venturepartakes in semioticians' general subscription tothe paradigm shift towards historiography since themid 1970's, in response, perhaps, to the prevailingPost- structuraIist crisis of the sign (Eco, 1984,14).

The essays in this collection primarily centeraround the great controversy over language pragmaticsin the Pre-Qin era and its aftermath. Although thecontributors were all my students in differenttimes, where method and madness are concerned, theyhave all outwitted my rhetorical connoisseurship and,in T. S. Eliot's words, "I no longer pretend that I amlearned" and I am not necessarily it miglior fabbro. The volumethen is dedicated to them.

3A history of semiotics which goes beyond the narrow

confines of the birth, growth, and if demise of thediscipline after Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)or Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) can only be readas an invention. In its dreams of the unacknowledgedand indeed untraceable origins of semiotics, thishistory maps cultural values revisited andtransferred. Such a historiography inevitably posessevere challenges for itself. First, it raises thelogical question of class: whether semiotics is anopen concept or a closed one. To answer thequestion, one needs to define semiotics. But as soonas one defines it, one has closed the concept. Butif one opts for an open concept in that anythinggoes, it would be difficult to talk about semioticsin a systematic or even sensible way. The dilemma isthus: one needs a working and workable definitionwhich is precise enough to give the discipline somerecognisable identity, but open and flexible enough toaccommodate its changing shape in various culture-specific contexts. Second, as the positivistic-mindedhistorian would argue, semiotics as a disciplinearising at the turn of the century is itself ahistorical product, and as such, it cannot beappropriated for further historical and culturalprojections. Finally, it can be argued that semi-otics, being basically a synchronic system science,writing its historiography is self-defeating for itwould not only require incompatible historicalimagination but also need to address the thorny issueof the dialectics of synchrony versus diachrony.

These are precisely the questions one can raiseabout Eco's proposals for a history of semiotics(1983). To make his world history of semioticspossible, Eco, following Roman Jakobson (1985, 2: 199-218), compromises with a definition as broad as thefollowing: any system that deals with relation de renvoi(relation of referral) of signs, including, to besure, the linguistic sign. It should be pointed out

that Jakobson, though casually alluding to aliquid statpro aliquo, in fact bases his definition on linguisticopposition and equivalence. This may give rise to thequestion whether referral should be operated intra-systemically only or it can be also operated inter-systemically. This is a crucial point not yetsatisfactorily addressed by semioticians.

Eco makes a tripartition amongst writers who can besaid to have contributed to his world history ofsemiotics. His checklist runs the gamut from"explicit" theories of signs, like those of Peirce,through "repressed" theories abstractable from writingsby his fellow pragmatists like John Dewey, and finallyto the so-called "encyclopedic semiotic practices,"including The Bible, Charles Baudelaire, and JamesJoyce. The flexibility of his definition enables Ecoto establish semiotics as a master code, aninterdisciplinary discipline (Eco prefers the termdisciplinary interdiscipline) (1978) which is capableof subsuming all branches of human knowledge.

One may certainly question the logicality of Eco'stripartition. For one thing, it fails to explain whyand how our "re-reading of the whole history ofphilosophy and maybe of many other disciplines" (80)in terms of the meta-language of (or, that is)semiotics is not sufficient to blur the distinctions,if at all, amongst object-languages. For another,such a semiotic projection would, no doubt, make a"repressed" theory "explicit," and a practicetheoretical.

In Eco's provisionary chart, which by no meansaims to be exhaustive, one finds "Indian grammarians"and "Other Oriental theories" (83) under the headingof "Explicit Theories," and "Pound and Fenollosa(ideograms)" (88) under that of "Semiotic Practices."According to this classification, the dialecticianswho were involved in the great debate (distinction)on name and substance 名 名 名 名 ( 名 ) in the fourth-thirdcenturies B.C. can be attributed to the first

category, for, authors therein, "having explicitlyrecognized the existence of a sign-relationship inlanguage and/or in many non-verbal human activities,outlined a general theory of signs or even foresawthe development of such a theory as a crucial nodefor human sciences"(79) .

With probably the only exception of Gongsun Long 名名 名 (fl. 257 B.C.), none of the philosophers hadoutlined a theory of signs, in the way, say, St.Augustine was to do some seven centuries later; butthey were all keenly aware of the relationshipbetween name and substance, a topic which needsrearticulation in logical semantics (cf. Chmielewski,1962-69, Cheng, 1965, 1987, Rieman, 1980, Hansen,1983), and, for our interest, in semiotics. Thewriters who spring to mind, in addition to GongsunLong, include the Mohists (ca. 4th-3rd centuriesB.C.), and to a lesser degree Zhuangzi 名名 (ca. 4th-3rd centuries B.C.). The latter's case is ambiguousrather than dubious because of the multifariousnature of his writing. The text of Zhuangzi issusceptible to infinite semiotic encoding anddecoding, as we shall see in the analyses thatfollow. For example, in his discussion of suchconcepts as chongyan 名 名 (repeated speech), zhiyan 名 名(rambling speech), yuyan 名名 (quoted speech), Zhuangzi isno doubt a language thinker, whilst much of hiswriting can be read, more appropriately, as practicesof literary semiotics.

A semiotic text par excellence is arguably Yijing 名名 [Thecanon of change]. The author(s) and commentators of Yi,insofar as they are concerned with the structure andfunction of the book's sign system, qualify as bonafide semioticians even according to the "restrictedhypothesis." Whilst the text of Zhuangzi as creativewriting provides space for semiotic performance,those who comment on the base-texts of Sanxuan 三三 [thethree mysteries] in the Six Dynasties have actuallyproduced meta-texts with their exegeses and are

therefore semioticians of "moderate hypothesis." Onthe other hand, Liu Xie's 名 名 (ca. 465-522) WenxinDiaolong 名 名 名 名 (Theliterary mind and the carving ofdragons) opens with a theoretical elaboration on theconcept of yi 名 (change) and xiang 名 , (resemblance) inYijing in relation to literary creation. Thus along withthe chapter entitled Yuandao 名 名 [On the origin ofDao], the whole book can be read as a text ofliterary semiotics. The relationship between Yying andWenxin Diaolong goes beyond literary indebtedness; moreimportantly, it shows how the non-verbal graphemicsigns can be invested on different levels ofsemantics for social uses. No other text better showsthis linguistic turn than the controversial Xici zhuan 名名名 [Commentary on appended phrases]. The generationof the verbal sign is well articulated in the firstchapter of Wenxin Diaolong, which indicates anunmistakable link with Yijing. A glance of the firsttwo chapters will show how the meta-language ofliterary criticism can be as figural and rhetoricalas the object-language of literature. This isprobably the most distinctive feature of the Chinesecritical language. It culminates in the ars poetica ofSikong Tu 名 名 名 (837-908) which epitomises Chineseliterati's praxis of intertextuality.

Such enumeration of authors and texts wouldprovide a long list whose merits can be assessed onlywhen individual cases are subjected to rigorousscrutiny for their theoretical implications. Beforereturning later to some of the cited texts for sampleanalyses, it is necessary to give a theoreticalaccount why certain texts are relevant to ourconcerted effort, and how these texts can begrouped, and according to what criteria. There isno accident that the historical period known asXian Qin 名名(Pre-Qin) has been singled out as an em-bryonic stage of Chinese semiotic thinking,comparable to the late Roman period and early MiddleAges. I am aware of the historical vagueness and

looseness of this period concept, but it is not my in-tention, in inventing ex nihilo the early history ofsemiotics, to be historically accurate, and theversion of history I present can only be a productof hermeneutics.

My research project is based on the assumption thatin the West "semiotics" rises from the tension amongthree language-related disciplines in the late Romanperiod, as outlined by Martianus Capella (fl. 410-39)and Boethius (ca. 480-524) (Chang 1996, 1998).These disciplines-grammar, logic, and rhetoric-arelater collectively known as the trivium. The possibleinfluence of its later Scholastic formulation onPeircian semiotics (semeiotic) has already been welldocumented (Deely 1985, Perreiah 1989, Liszka 1996,Chang 1998). Similarly, but in the non-disciplinarysense, semiotic thinking in general can be born whenpeople become aware of the discrepancy and tensionamong different uses of language, as is suggested byPaul de Man (1979). This awareness and itsexpression are often enacted dramatically in whatthe Israeli philosopher Marcelo Dascal describes asthe controversy of discourse (1990, 1996). I believethat the discursive polemics in Pre-Qin China centersaround the contention of logic and rhetoric, quitesimilar to the fortune of the trivium in themediaeval West.

Dascal (1996) identifies scientific controversiesas a mechanism of the evolution of philosophy. Thepostulate of philosophical history as a series ofcontroversies, in the manner of Kuhnian paradigmshifts, is sufficient to displace versions ofhistoriography based on empirical facts. Thus analternative version of the Pre-Qin history could bearticulated in terms of the controversies it involves.One such controversy is the great debate over name andsubstance which, registering Mencius 名名 (ca. 372-289B.C.), Xunzi 名 名 , Zhuangzi, Gongsun Long, and theMohists in a large polemical discourse (Dascal, 1996,

9), has been much discussed throughout history, andoften in relation to political philosophy.'Traditional readings aside, modernist scholars at theturn of the century, such as Zhang Taiyan 名名名 (1738--1801) and Hu Shi 名名(1891-1962), were more interested inthe logical implications of the debate. Ithappened to be the time of intellectual turmoilwhen various schools of Western "logic" were beingintroduced into China under the name of Mingxue 名名 (thescience of name), named interestingly after Mingjia 名名(the school of name) or Xingmingjia 名名名 (the school ofform and name).

Judging from this last instance of travellingtheory, we can understand why the Polish sinologistJanusz Chmielewski describes Chinese philosophy as"persuasive" rather than "demonstrative" (1962). Theterminology he uses clearly indicates the logician'sattempt at remodelling Pre-Qin philosophy in terms ofa descriptive meta-language used for that time-honoured debate between rhetoric and logic in theWest. The debate, which begins with Aristotle'swritings on logic (i.e., the three texts thatconstitute the organon) and rhetoric (e.g., Topics), hascontinued throughout the ages, now pronounced, nowmuffled; it has received renewed critical attention,especially by American neo-pragmatists, over the lasttwo decades. One is reminded, amongst other things, ofthe distinction between two critical models of"demonstration" and "persuasion" which Stanley Fishmakes (1980) in line with the Aristotlian tradition(Aristotle, 1984, 1:167).2

This opposition between logic and rhetoric gets alinguistic turn in de Man's celebrated essay"Semiology and Rhetoric" where the author casts newlight on the issue by situating it in mediaeval liberalarts education system (1979) and by introducing therole of the as-yetnon-existent discipline ofsemiotics. According to de Man, amongst the threelanguage-focussed disciplines that constitute the

trivium, logic is closer than grammar and rhetoric tothe quadrivium that accounts for the mediaevalscholar's knowledge of the world. Here he seems to besuggesting a new spectrum of relationships among theseven arts, based on their truth-claims or theirtransitivity to the world under investigation, andthat rhetoric, with the signified truth bracketed,standing at one extreme of the spectrum, is less"transitive" than any other disciplines. I believe deMan's attempt at reconstructing semiology in thetrivium has opened up a line of enquiry into thepossibility of semiotics in relation to the six artsrequired of a Confucian scholar in ancient China, orat any rate in the Pre-Qin philosophers' dispute onthe relationship between logic and rhetoric.

If an analogy may be drawn with classical andmediaeval training of trivium in the West, whererhetoric mediates and subverts grammar and logicamongst the three sciences of language, one wouldsee that the rhetorical method introduced by GongsunLong and actually practised by all writers,especially Zhuangzi, has enfeebled the other organonof dialectic promoted by the Mohists. And furthermore,as I hope to persuade in the following pages, thelogical critique with which Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and theMohists use to abuse Gongsun Long can be turnedironically against their own programmes of writing.Such sociolinguistic reflexions might give rise to anarrative why the logical school which modernChinese pragmatists like Hu Shi endorse has neverreally thrived in China.

Chinese philosophers in the fourth century B.C.could not have been aware of their Greekcontemporaries, nor possibly anticipated the neo-rhetoricians like Fish and de Man. In fact, I havetaken my cue anachronistically from de Man's writingas the point of departure for my enquiry into theChinese concepts of sign in relation to language. Ican envisage two criticisms. First, that point of

departure may prove to be a historical faux pas once westep into the education system described in Zhouli 名名[the book of rituals in Zhou dynasty].3Second,interesting as the parallelism may seem, it fails topaint the whole picture of early semiotic thinking inChina; for example, it will leave out Yijing, whichdeals explicitly with both verbal and non-verbalsigns in a more systematic way than Zhouli.

Against the first criticism, I would like tosuggest that indeed a tension between rhetoric andlogic can be detected in the writings of the Chinesedialecticians, who are curiously but logicallyconscious of the nature and functions of thelinguistic sign. And as our object of enquiry issemiotics, our model and meta-language semiotic,these texts cannot be interpreted otherwise than beingsemiotic. In the present context, there seems to beno way and no sense of getting out of suchinterpretative circle.

My response to the second criticism is morecomplex. To begin with, it may seem at first glancethat not all semiotic thinking is necessarily inspiredby the tension between logic and rhetoric, and reg-istered in a polemical discourse, nor is all semioticthinking of linguistic nature. But semiotics, as I seeit, is a systematic investigation into the nature andfunctions of signs, including both "natural" and"artificial" ones-a dated and provisional dichotomystarted by St. Augustine (1958, 34), and the signsit deals with are always already textualised, and assuch, cannot even be labelled "natural." This tex-tualised feature is true to the sign as arepresentation (e.g., the Peircian representamen+object+ interpretant), as a manifest indication fromwhich inferences about something latent can be made,and as a verbal or non-verbal gesture produced withthe intention of communication. I am not talking,though I could be, about the brute fact that all theclassical Chinese texts are written. Rather, my

assumption is that semiotics is a meta-language whichprovides a model, i.e., an abstract, hypotheticalconstruct, to represent, indeed to encode and decode,the object-language. That meta-language is oftentimeslinguistic because of language's double articulationas interpreting and interpreted systems (Benveniste1981). Thus, the seemingly puzzling case of the Yijingin relation to logic and rhetoric would be made clear.First of all, the non-verbal sign system follows itsown simple "logic" of binarism, and that simplesystem is contaminated by the rhetoric of xici 名 名(appended phrases). So from the beginning the twoformulations of logic and rhetoric have been at work.More disciplinarily, I would suggest that Y4ing beginsas a semiotic practice, and the dispute among Hanscholars' on the primacy of sign (yixiang 名名 ) or sense (yili名名 ) can be construed as another theatrical scene inthe history of philosophical controversies,especially after Wang Bi's 名名 (226-249) commentaryin the third century.

The cluster of texts which I shall deal with isrepresented by the dialecticians' polemical discourse.I shall begin with Gongsun Long and then focus onZhuangzi not only because its author participates inthe debate with the dialecticians, in which hecuriously sides with the Confucians and the Mohists,but also because the distinct literariness, therhetorical flair, of his text identifies it to be atypical counterdiscourse of the logical position whichhe holds in his criticism of Gongsun Long.' My maininterest in Zhuangzi lies in his special use of thelinguistic sign-i.e., his special signification-which renders communication impossible. My task willbe reading Zhuangzi as an instance of literarysemiotics, and examining how a semiotic reading moreexplicitly, hence more powerfully, elucidates theauthor(s)' philosophy.

The great debate over name and substance isalready a commonplace in Pre-Qin philosophy.

Chronologically, it does not begin with Gongsun Long,but his text may serve to highlight the languageissues involved.5 This text has suffered from acurious fortune in history, and the history of itsdepreciation is a reminder of the need of constantunlearning and rereading. For example, a logico-semantic remodelling of the discourse of zhengming 1l-

_~?, (Rectification of names) would make it possiblefor us to reread the concept as a problem ofdefinitional logic, which is a pre-condition for acorrect axio-matic-deductive, synthetic reasoning(Strawson, 1971). From a logical point of view, thedialectician's discussion involves the reasoningprocedure from the definitional, to thepropositional, and to the inferential logic (Epstein1990). The following is a testing case.

名名名名名名名White is [a] colour. [What we call white is what we use to name [a] colour.] (definition and proposition)名名名名名名名Colour is not form [body]. [What we use to name colour is not what we use to name form.] (inference)名名名名名名Therefore, [the name] white horse is not [the name]

horse. (inference)

The definition in question here is obviously aformal one instead of a functional one in thatclass h(wh) and that the bodily form rather thanwhiteness is a necessary condition. I haveitalicised a word (horse) or a phrase (while horse) to namethat word or phrase, or any linguistic unit. When 1say "Prague has six letters" I mean the word Prague, butnot the city Prague has six letters. Sometimes aconfusion results if one does not make clear whetherone uses a word to name itself as word or to refer to

its meaning. Apparently, Gongsun Long here is talkingabout the word white and the word horse, taking fulladvantage of the language's flexibility.

To disambiguate Gongsun Long's language, one mayprovisionally render the expression 名 名 名 名 intoEnglish, a language which more relies on grammaticalmorphemes and words, such as number and articles.There can be several English translations, but thegrammatically and logically acceptable (A) ones maynot be the appropriate ones.

1 A white horse is a horse. (A)2 The white horse is a horse. (A) 3 White horses are horses. (A)

144 White horse is horse. (UA) [Ungrammatical]5 White horse is not horse.(UA) [Ungrammatical]6 A white horse is not a horse. (UA) [Grammatical but not true because h(wh)]7 White horse is not horse. (A)

Ordinary English grammar demands that a commonnoun in singular form, which stands for an object,be governed by a definite or indefinite article the ora, and that a plural form be accordingly indicated.Therefore, 1,2,3 are all grammatical, acceptable,and meaningful, and 4, 5 and 6 either ungrammatical andunacceptable (UA) or grammatical but unacceptable.

How can one make 6 acceptable? Very easy. One cansimply desemanticise the sentence by making it notmeaningful (i.e., referential), in the same way onemakes Prague not a city, but a name. So the italicisationwhich turns 6 into 7 serves to de-semanticise, unsex,decolour, de-form, etc. that poor dear little horse,as Gongsun Long did marvellously more than 2,000years ago. Incidentally, Chinese has the advantagerather than the disadvantage of not having articles.What's more, it has the advantage of not havingdeclension. This may explain why dozens of criticshave fallen victim to that "White horse is not horse. "

Following traditional arguments, one coulddescribe Gongsun Long's articulation of theungrammatical (in English) and illogical (indefinitional logic) sentence 7 as addressing purelyname but not substance. But how does he do it? Why,he does it semiolically. The chapter opens with thesentence: 名名名名名名 ("Is the statement `White horse is nothorse' acceptable?). What is being dealt with here isnot that the real "white horse" is or isn't a"horse," but the statement consisting of two termsand one copula "White horse is not horse." If one followsde Man's advice to read the sentence "literally"(i.e., semaotically rather than semantically), thenthe statement is correct because white horse contains

two signifiers and two signifieds, or, in Peircianterms, a qualisign plus a sinsign.6 Therefore, thelogical problems of definition and proposition giveway to semiotics.

This kind of semiotic analysis is capable ofsolving many other "semantic" problems in Gongsun Long.One such case is the semiotic recoding of the logicalproblem of intension (connotation) and extension(denotation) of jian and bai 三三 (hardness and whiteness)in shi 三 (stone) in terms of the triadic relationbetween qualisign, sinsign, and legisign, the basisof which is biologically causal, hence indexical inthe truest sense (i.e., shi 三 [see] and fu 三 [touch]).The original passage reads:

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名Seeing it does not get its hardness, but gets its whiteness. Therefore, there is no hardness. Touchingit does not get its whiteness, but gets its hardness. Getting its hardness does not prove thereis whiteness.

Another case is the celebrated argument in Zhiwu lun三 三 三 . Let me first quote a few examples of logicalrereading of the statement that opens the chapter:"wu mo fei zhi er zhi fei zhi" 名名名名名名名名.

1. No thing is without class, but classes themselves are without classes. [classes being `what is pointed to' by particular things] (Chmielewski, 1962)

2. a. Not one is (that which is) not the pointing toa par

ticular thing by a name.b. Not one is (that which is) not the meaning of a

name.(Kao & Obenchain, 1975)

Apparently, both point to semantic problems of

important order. Chmielewski's rendering followsmodern logicians' discussion of the paradox of class-membership (e.g., Russell, 1937, 110 ff), and Kao andObenchain's, more interestingly for our purpose,alludes to that of the semantics of denotation insteadof naming (Lyons, 1977, I: 206ff). His translationwill lead to our alternative readings based onsemiotic recoding:

3. Every object [concept] is signified [by a signifier], but this [act of] signification is not signified [in the way that the object is signified].

4. Every object [and/or concept] is indicated, but the indicator itself is not what is indicated.

The significance of translations 3 and 4 can be seenonly when put in the contexts of Saussurian semiologyand Peircian semeiotic. We shall renounce 3 because ofthe interference of wu 名 as object which should beexterior to the sign. Unless we are allowed to con-flate the two, it would be better to substitute"concept" for "object." Translations 1, 2, and 3 showthat Gongsun Long is aware of the fact that class andmember do not belong to the same order, as white horse(white horse) is not horse (horse), and that semiosisis a process that will continue beyond the closure ofa sign.

But more significant is the idea of pointing orindicating. Zhi 三 which refers at once to the act ofindicating and the vehicle by which the act isperformed, namely the index finger, as suggested bythe graphemic sign of 名 hand. Now this mode ofsignification covers a broad semantic field ofindexicality (Sebeok, 1991, 129), the members of whichinclude index, index finger. pointing, ostension,deixis, symptom, cue, clue, track, trail,designation, and, above all, Peirce's second type ofsign, a physiologically causal or directive sign,

which is essential to speech. One could add GongsunLong and Mozi to the list of philosophers of languageand linguists (Sebeok, 140).

Peirce: indexical sign (index)Russell: ego-centric particularsNelson Goodman: indicatorHans Reichenbach: token-reflexive word Gongsun Long: zhi 三Mozi: jiu 名

As far as language pragmatics is concerned, themost popular indexical sign is to be sure deixis.It is not only a grammatical element, such as thedemonstratives, but also a discursive registershowing "the way in which interlocutors anchor whatthey talk about to the spatiotemporal context oftheir utterance" (Sebeok 141). The discursivesituation is a pre-requisite of rhetoricalpersuasion. This is probably where Zhuangzi excelsamong all the Pre-Qin rhetors because of his scene-setting device in fables and parables, which Ishall pursue later.

Gongsun Long's argument for differentiation isrefuted by the Mohists, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi. In thechapter of Xiaoqu 名 名 (Small pick), the author,supposedly one of Mozi's disciples known as Mozhe 名名or Biemo 名 名 , asserts that "A white horse is ahorse, and riding a white horse is riding a horse"(名名名名名名名名名名). Clearly the issue addressed here isdifferent from that in Gongsun Long despite theMohists' subtle distinctions among language mo-dalities. Xunzi presents an interesting case. Hebelieves a true master Yunzi) surely knows thedifference between hardness and whiteness, thicknessand non-thickness, but he has other concerns thanbeing indulged in dialectics (名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名 ) (Xunzi, Juan 1, 20). Zhuangzi launches his critique onseveral occasions. He refers to Gongsun Long in Qiwu

lun 名 名 名 (on equalising things), Qiushui 三 名 (Autumnflood), Quqie 名名 (Breaking the casket), Tianxia 三三 (Theworld), and his fellow dialectician Huizi in Xiaoyaoyou 名 名 名 (Rambling) and many other locations (GuoQingfan 名 名 名 , 1975). In fact, we owe to Zhuangzi forpreserving many otherwise lost references to thedialecticians.

In the chapter Quqie where Zhuangzi condemnsknowledge in general and rhetoric in particular,the author has this to say, “ 名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名 名名名名名名名一一” Before Gongsun Long was "rediscovered," so tospeak, zhi and ma had been glossed mainly withinZhuangzi 's context without reference to its source.Thus they mean respectively "finger" and "lot [in adraw game]" (Guo Xiang 名名, 1962, Juan 1, 15, Guo Qingfan,69). The text can be accord-ingly rendered as:"Rather than saying that his finger is not myfinger. why don't we say that his finger is not anon-finger? Rather than saying that a horse is nota horse, why don't we say that a horse is not a non-horse?" The argument is simple: It is an assertionthrough double negation. What then is the problem ofthis translation in such a text on language, or,more precisely, on the futility of language! Again,Zhuangzi is not interested in the linguistic sign asrelating signifier and signified, but in the sign'sreferent. Any enquiry into the nuance of a sign'sconstituents can be criticised as "devious argumentfor hardness and whiteness and treacherousexplication of sameness and difference" (名名名名名名名名 )(Guo Qingfan, 1975, 359). Before language can becompletely thrown out, one should be content withits referential function. That's why in Zhi beiyou 三三三(Zhi's rambling), the phonic and graphemicdistinctions of three words can be blurred becauseof their identical reference. 名名名名名名名名名名名 名名一 (zhou,plan, xian-the three words have different names [ming],but they mean the same, because they point to thesame concept [shi].) Zhuangzi would not accept the

idea that the sign-functives of signifier andsignified will put the three words' identificationinto question.

This is probably the basis of his argument inQiwu lun. The last quotation which identifies threedialectal equivalents by virtue of their sharedBedeutung at the expense of Sinn (Frege, 1980) is, how-ever, from Zhi beiyou of Waipian 名 名 (The outsidechapters). The text is a typical scene-setting(i.e., the use of dramatisation) of Zhuangzi which wehave seen in Gongsun Long.

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名

Master Dongguo asked Master Zhuang, "Where is Dao?" Zhuang replied, "It's everywhere."Dongguo pushed, "You've got to identify it." Zhuang said, "It's in ants."Dongguo asked, "Why is it so low?"Zhuang said, `It's in weeds."Dongguo asked, "Why is it even lower?" Zhuang said, "It's in bricks."Dongguo asked, "Why is it even lower?"Zhuang said, "It's in excrement and urine."

The reasoning is deductive-hypothetical. If Daois everywhere, then it is found in ants, weeds,bricks, and excrement and urine. It really haslittle to do with name (ants, weeds. etc.) andsubstance, for the substance of the name ant is thegraphemic and phonic materiality in which the nameis embedded; it is not even the concept of ant, letalone Dao. Ants, weeds, bricks, etc. can be equatedonly bier virtue of their being subject to theidentical relationship between name and referent, andthat relationship can be extended to a non-

referential concept of Dao only through aqualitative metaphysical leap. Nor can semioticrecoding provide a solution. The sign of antsconsists of its signifier, both phonemically andgraphemically, and its signified concept of ants.And how the concept of ants can in turn serve asanother signifier for the signified Dao or the Daothat is beyond signification is still unanswered.Just as zhou, xian, plan cannot be equated bier theirnon-referential semantics, ants, weeds, bricks,excrement and urine are not subject to mutualsubstitution.

This logical and semantic impasse is bypassed inthe immediatelier following text. Zhuangzi has Wushi名名 (Non-beginning) say:

Dao cannot be heard, and what is heard is notDao; Dao cannot be seen, and what is seen is notDao; Dao cannot be spoken about, and what isspoken about is not Dao. Don't you know that whatis embodied is not body? Therefore, Dao cannot benamed.

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名

How do we reconcile these two contradictorypropositions in Zhuangzi's argument? A possiblesolution would be negative meta-physics. As Dao is anunnamable totality, it cannot be named, and anydesignation is at best but a metonymy which isinterchangeable with other metonymies (e.g., excrementis ants in the Great Chain of Being!). This perhapsexplains Zhuangzi's proposal for speechlessness(wuyan 三 三 ) and the linguistic irony in which he iscaught up. Charles Morris distinguishes betweenformal analytic and mystical discourses. Theproposition "The white horse is a horse" is based onanalytic (tautological) implicates," just like themathematical discourse 2+2=4, whereas the

proposition "The white horse is not a horse" isbased on contradictory implicates, and is aninstance of what Morris terms "mystical discourse"(Morris, 1985, 187). One could say the latter is anexample of rhetoric and semiotics in the lexicalrather than formal sense of the word.

Mystical discourse does not amount to mysticismthough the latter can be encoded in the same way asthe former. Unlike Xunzi's moralistic and theMohists' utilitarian criticisms of Gongsun Long,Zhuangzi's is generally taken to be based on hisscepticism of language and belief in mysticaltranscendence. However, there is a possibility thatlanguage and transcendence, if at all, are mutuallydependent rather than exclusive. The displacement ofants, weeds, bricks, and excrement and urine is madepossible only because the linguistic signs whichrepresent them are subject to the paradigmaticsubstitution of semantic elements, and their capacityof gaining a "marvellous" access (i.e., throughanalytic implicates) and being denied an access(i.e., through contradictory implicates) to thatmysterious nonentity of Dao precisely because Dao isa nominalis in absentia, i.e., a noun without referent andreference. In other words, Dao has to fulfill thecondition of being a categorematic word in thesyntagm to qualify for semantic substitution. This ismore easily done than said because of classicalChinese's telegraphic and non-declension nature.

The following text from Xiaoyao you uses the samehost-guest dialogue device which puts Zhuangzi andHuizi, Gongsun's fellow dialectician, in thepositions of interlocutors. Huizi, the Chancellor inWe], opens the dialogue by asking Zhuang the use oftwo things.

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名……名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名。

Master Hui told Master Zhuang, "King of Wei hadgiven me some seeds of big gourd, and I hadthem sown and grown. Now the fruit was as largeas five stones. I tried to use the gourd tocontain water, but it was too heavy to carry; Ihalved it to serve as dippers, but they weretoo shallow to contain much. You can't say it wasnot big enough, but I had found it so uselessthat I smashed it. Master Zhuang said, " ... Nowyou had a gourd of five stones. Why didn't youmake a wine bowl out of it, so that with it youcould wander about in rivers and lakes (outsidepublic life)? Your mind is not liberated, so youworry about the gourd's lack of use.

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名……名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名。

Master Hui told Master Zhuang, "There is a bigtree in my yard which is called shu (Ailanthusaltissinza). Its trunk is too cankerous and itsbranches too twisted to be useful in constructionand carpentry. Left on the road, it was ignored bycarpenters. Everybody agrees that your rhetoric ispompous and useless." Master Zhuang said, " ...Now you are worried that your tree is useless. Whydon't you plant it in `Erehwon,' in the land of nowhere, in wilderness, so that you can idle by itsside and repose beneath it? Thus like all uselessthings it has no danger of being harmed. What'sthe worry then? "

In the texts, the dialectician turned politician isconcerned about material gain and utilitarianism,whereas Zhuangzi poses as a Daoist recluse. Through aninterpretant shaped and governed by the ideology hesubscribes to, each perceives the material signs ofgourd and tree entering into a series of metaphoricalsubstitutions. Thus the seeds of gourd are transformed

respectively into water container or dippers and winebowl, and the tree into wood material and means ofrepose. This metaphorisation is realised by a semicelement "wood" shared by all the signs. Thus metaphorand metonymy are mutually generated and combined inthe two narrative syntagms. Whilst Huizi's semiosisends in social and political use, Zhuangzi's in non-use, and indeed in spiritual transport.

The above texts show how Zhuangzi's epistemologyis semiotically encoded, in language rather thanbeyond language. His nonconformist ideology isencoded firstly in the primary system of "naturallanguage" and then in the secondary system of genre,e.g., such registers as the host-guest dialogue andhyperbolic fables. Its articulation is then theparticularised literary semiotics of Zhuangzi.

The first quotation above has omitted a fable whichis inserted into Zhuang and Hui's dialogue as"reported speech." Thus the discursive situationinvolving the interlocutors is much more complicatedthan it appears here and will result in differentlevels of identification in literary communication.Let me give one last example before I close thediscussion of Zhuangzi.

名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名名

Jian Wu told Lian Shu, "I have talked with Jie Yu.His speech is so exaggerated and does notcorrespond to reality; it rambles away and failsto return to the topic. 1 was so appalled by hiswords which seem to be as far-fetched as thegalaxy, as separated as the inner courtyard fromthe road outside, in short, so contrary to humannature." Lian Shu asked, "What did he say then?"[Jian Wu replied] "`In yonder distant Guye [or,Miaoguye] mountain, there lives a godly man. His

skin and flesh are like ice and snow; hisgracefulness like that of a virgin. He eats nofive grains, but takes in only wind and dew. Whenhe moves, he rides clouds and drives a dragon towander around beyond the four seas. When he stills,his concentrated spirit frees lives from diseasesand plague and brings harvests.' I think he liedand don't believe a word." Lian Shu said, "Right! Ablind man cannot tell blue from white; nor a deafman distinguish bells from drums. Are blindness anddeafness limited to our body only? One can be blindand deaf in his intelligence as well. Are you notaware that Jie Yu's words were directed at you? . .. "

This passage adequately demonstrates the rolewhich signs, especially indexical signs, play in humancognition. The audible, the visible, and the utterableare all based on the materiality of human body,without which one is unable to perceive, to hear, andto utter. There is an indexical causality from thesensible to the intelligible, and finally to theintellectual-a phenomenon long recognised by theStoics and elaborated by St. Augustine. The followingdiagram illustrates this corporeal semiosis.

25sensation → perception → conception

名名(body) 名 (intellect)visual colours symbol+/- 名名 名名名名 名名名名,(the blind)auditory sounds (bells & drums) +/- 名名 名名名名(the deaf)

sign → linguistic sign (primary system)

→ meaning allegory and fable(secondary system)

名名名名名名

Furthermore, the signification process which isactivated mainly by indexical signs, is enacted in theJakobsonian discursive situation of communication ofZhuke lunnan, where Jian Wu and Lian Shu initially playthe roles of addresser and addressee, but laterchange their roles when the reported speech isinserted. In the insertion, Jie Yu becomes theaddresser and Jian Wu the addressee.

messageAddresser AddresseeJian Wu 名名 code Lian Shu 名名

Addresser AddresseeJie Yu 名名 Jian Wu 名名

Note that the narrative chronology is broken by JianWu's reported speech of Jie Yu. Thus the addresseeJian Wu becomes the addresser who reports to thesecond addressee Lian Shu. Jie Yu's code is in-comprehensible to Jian Wu, but can be decoded by LianShu. Why? Does it not serve the poetic function ratherthan the referential function? Is not this imaginative

language, which is encoded in rhetorical figures(metaphors, similes, personifications, hyperboles,etc.), quotations, allusions, animal fables andparables, typically Zhuangzi's own language (Zhuang yu三 三 )? As his self-portrait shows in Tianxia, the rhetor isgood at "employing paradoxical explanations, terms forvastness, expressions for infinity" (名名名名名名名名名名名名名 ).Isn't it the same language of the dialecticians whom he criticisesbecause their "speech [is concealed] by rhetoric" (名名名名名)(Qiwu lun)?

This last example is of no small significanceif it is put in the context of the controversy oflanguage pragmatics of the time, which hasbedevilled everyone involved. Gongsun Long,Zhuangzi, Xunzi, the Mohists-they all participatein that language game. Whilst Zhuangzi foregroundsthe poetic function of his own rhetoric, he chargesGongsun Long for not paying due respect to language'sreferential function. Thus the polemical discoursereiterates the failure in communication because eachparticipant encodes his language in one way butdecodes others' in another. With or without alanguage theory, they have created, through their dispute overlanguage use, a textual space that includes the hiddenagenda of semiotics, whose ultimate concern is humancommunication.

NOTES

1 Dascal (1996) outlines a typology of polemical exchanges,consisting of three "ideal" types: discussion,dispute, and controversy, on the basis of thefollowing four criteria: (1) the scope of the dis-agreement; (2) the kind of content involved in it;(3) the presumed means for solving the disagreement;and (4) the ends pursued by the contenders. The greatdebate on name and substance falls more appropriatelyinto the category of dispute rather than controversybecause the divergence therein is grounded in the

contenders' incompatible language beliefs, becausethere is no possible solution to the dispute, andbecause their exchange, especially that of Zhuangzi atGongsun Long and Hui Shi 名 名 runs into heavysarcasm, and is therefore more rhetorical thanlogical.

On the other hand, one could say the debate beganas a dispute, but as the logico-linguistic issue wentout of focus without ever being solved or resolved,and was superseded by the politico-ideological issuedear to the Confucianists, the extended dispute becamea controversy.

2Obviously Fish sides with the "persuasive"rhetorician. The locus classicus is Aristotle's Topicswhere the author distinguishes between demonstrativeand dialectical deductions. In the former, reasoningproceeds from "true and primitive" premisses, and inthe latter, from "reputable opinions." The lattershould be distinguished from "contentious" deductionwhich "starts from opinions that seem to be reputable,but are not really such . . . " (1984, 1:167). Thusdemonstration and contention correspond to logic andrhetoric respectively. A more recent sequel issupplied by Dascal (1997) in his erudite survey ofWestern methodologies. He makes the distinctionbetween two types of critiques: the first is thedecontextualised logical model, the second the morecontextualised causal mode. While the first suffersfrom empirical inadequacy, the second from explanatoryinadequacy, both having dispensed with the critic.However, it can be argued that once the critic isreinstated, the distinction between the two modelswill be blurred, and logic can only give way torhetoric.

3In the absence of grammar in ancient China,rhetoric and logic remain the two discursiveprocedures which might have given rise to semiotics.This disciplinary approach which has appropriated thetrivium is not entitrely ungrounded. In ancient China,

following the tradition of the nobility, a Confucian 名Ru is supposed to master six arts. The first fourbelong to the general category of ritualistic, whilethe remaining two refer to more elementary training ofwriting and computus. If the sestrivium is comparedwith its Western counterpart of septrivium, then shu' 名(writing) falls into the category of trivium, shu4 名(numbering) and yue 名 (music) into the quadrivium. Whatabout the remaining more practical arts? In the lateMiddle Ages, the seven arts have been expanded; or onecould say some of the practical arts in Greece havebeen reinstituted. William of Conches, for one, remapsscholastic knowledge. It includes eloquence (thetrivium) and wisdom, the latter including thetheoretical quadrivium and the practical ethics,economics, and politics (Mclnerny, 1983, 270).

It makes no sense trying to draw, if possible atall, a correspondence between the two educationalsystems, but clearly there is ananalogy between thetrivium and the lower status of shu' 名, where languageplays a major role, and that between shu4 名 ( andarithmetic which serves as the foundation of thequadrivium. The role played by shu' and shu4 is in factancillary to that of the ritualistic disciplines inthat with their system-specific autonomy writing andnumber are more removed from the world of socialpraxis. Further on this, see Chang (1996).

4The dating of Gongsun Long remains controversial.Chapter I of the surviving text identifies theauthor as a shi 名 (scholarcourtier) specialising inrhetoric in the State of Zhao 名 (325-228B.C.)(名名名名名名名名名 . . .名名名名名名名名名名). Thechapter, which is entitledJifu 名 名 (Collection of footprints), comprises twonarratives in which Gongsun Long is referred to asthe third person, as can be seen from the twoChinese quotes above that open the narratives. Thetwo anecdotes then serve as two indexical signs forthe signified object of Gongsun Long. According totraditional scholars, textual and stylistic details

suggest that this chapter was a later work. Thereare a couple of references to Gongsun Long in SimaQian's 名名名(ca. 145-?) Shiji 名 名 (Histories). Zhuangzi'sQiushui 名名 (Autumn flood) records a satire on GongsunLong. As the Waipian 名 名 (Outside chapters) have beeninterpreted as writings by Zhuangzi's followers, itis possible that Gongsun Long was a contemporary ofPrince Mou 名 名 of the State of Wei (327225 B.C.),with whom the former engages in a dispute, ratherthan a generation younger than Confucius.

5 Gongsun Long's text was first recorded inHanshu yiwenzhi 名名名名名 (Records of art and literature inHistory of Han) as containing fourteen chapters. Thepresent text with six-chapter division isprobably asurvivor from the early Tang 名 Dynasty. It isinterestingto note that chapters 2, 4, 5, which arerespectively entitled Baima 名名(White horse), Tongbian 名名 (Understanding change), and Jianbai 名名 (On hardnessand whiteness), are in dialogue form, observing thegeneric convention of Dakewen 名 名 名 (A response to aguest's queries) or Zhuke lunnan 名 名 名 名 (A host-guestdialogue), not unlike the Platonic dialogues. As thename suggests, usually the dialogue is opened by theguest. This "dialogical structure" is a stylisticregister of the polemical discourse which oftenappears in philosophical controversies. But Dascal(1996) suggests that the use of dramatis personaedoes not qualify such texts to be genuinelydialogical. The point is how one defines dialogism.Dascal's use confines it to actual disputativediscursive situations in pragmatics. On the otherhand, if dialogism is by necessity an inherent featureof discourse, i.e., language in social use, then eventhe two other chapters, Zhiwu 名名 (Pointing at things)and Mingshi 名名 (On name and substance), which read asmonological arguments, can be dialogical in theBakhtinian sense.

6 Frege (1980) would say the sense (Sinne) of whitehorse and horse vary though their meanings (Bedeutungen)

overlap.

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