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From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing, Daoism has been known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, the book explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into "content" and "context."
Preface

Introduction: Defining “Arche-Semiotics”

Part I: Daoist Semiotics in Comparative Perspective

1. Ways through Language

2. Ways beyond Language

Part II: Daoist Semiotics in Early Medieval Culture

3. Tracing the Obscure

4. Traces of Transcendence

5. Sign, Translation, Enlightenment

6. The Arche-Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons

Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

China

Taoism

Literary theory

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	29 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438471945
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

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Dao and Sign in History
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Dao and Sign in History
Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China
DANIEL FRIED
Cover image: Stephen Zhang. Untitled work of Chinese calligraphy, based on lines from the Zhuangzi . Reprinted with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fried, Daniel, author.
Title: Dao and sign in history : Daoist arche-semiotics in ancient and medieval China / Daniel Fried.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058939 | ISBN 9781438471938 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471945 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages—Religious aspects—Taoism. | Semiotics—Religious aspects—Taoism. | Signs and symbols.
Classification: LCC BL1923 .F75 2018 | DDC 181/.114—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058939
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for my father
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Defining “Arche-Semiotics”
P ART O NE D AOIST S EMIOTICS IN C OMPARATIVE P ERSPECTIVE
Chapter One Ways through Language
Chapter Two Ways beyond Language
P ART T WO D AOIST S EMIOTICS IN E ARLY M EDIEVAL C ULTURE
Chapter Three Tracing the Obscure
Chapter Four Traces of Transcendence
Chapter Five Sign, Translation, Enlightenment
Chapter Six The Arche-Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book is about Daoist ideas of the sign in Chinese philosophy, religion, and literature, during a period lasting from roughly 400 BCE–550 CE. Because there is already a significant philosophical discussion in the scholarly literature about Daoism’s relation to modern continental philosophy, I have included significant discussion of the relevance of the continental tradition to this strand of Chinese thought.
As one might expect from such a description, this project is highly interdisciplinary in scope—and I hope that it manifests a few of the strengths that the best interdisciplinary work can. My goal was to trace one discourse across all kinds of materials, to explain how it evolved, and I believe that this makes sense in the context of ancient and medieval China. There was certainly a well-established genre system that arose during the period covered by this study, but there was little sense of different “fields” of thought corresponding to modern disciplinary divisions. I think it can be healthy to bring alien perspectives to bear on a text (otherwise, I would not have engaged with Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida in chapters 1 and 2 ). However, automatic projection of modern categories onto the past can be distorting—if this study had stuck only to materials that we would consider “philosophy,” “religion,” or “literature,” it would not have done a good job of explaining how Daoist discourses of the sign played out in the early medieval period.
Of course, whatever its strengths, I am quite certain that this study does share the weaknesses inherent in interdisciplinary and comparative work. It covers many fields, over a period of almost of a millennium, and therefore there is much that it must skip over. There are many potentially relevant issues and texts which I have knowingly passed by, for lack of space. Although I have also tried to consult as much scholarship as possible in all these fields, in both Chinese and English, there are practical limits to how much one can plausibly incorporate. I am sure that specialists in one field or another will wonder how I could have missed this or that seminal work on a given author or text. The sad and honest answer in most cases would simply be that I am unsatisfyingly human, and have limits as to how much I can cover in even a broad-ranging study.
What this book will attempt to do is to trace one discourse around signs (linguistic and nonlinguistic) through a long period in early Chinese history and suggest some ways in which the history of that discourse might inform contemporary thinking about language. Beyond that general description of my project, an explanation of my terms is in order. In calling this work an examination of “Daoist arche-semiotics,” I need to be clear about what is meant by “Daoist” and “arche-semiotics,” since neither word is meaningful without specification.
Herrlee Creel once remarked that Daoism “does not denote a school, but a whole congeries of doctrines,” 1 and scholarship of recent decades has continued to prove this judgment correct, by finding all kinds of separable strands from different sources buried within the texts traditionally labelled “Daoist.” For the purposes of this study, I will use the term Daoist in a deliberately flattened and simplified way, referring to patterns of influence from and allusion to the standard received texts of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi , without regard to the circumstances in which those texts were originally composed. This is a definition that does not very well fit either the standard definitions of “philosophical Daoism” ( daojia sixiang ), largely comprised of the philosophy of those early texts themselves, along with later secular and intellectual engagements with them, or “religious Daoism” ( daojiao ), the series of religious movements that began the worship of Laozi and considered his book, along with Zhuangzi’s and various other texts, to be sacred scripture. Isabelle Robinet has argued that this division does not adequately recognize the discursive unity of the tradition and the “cumulative and integrative process of its evolution”; 2 I would add that a recognition of Daoism as one of three major religious/philosophical “teachings” only came about very slowly over the course of the Six Dynasties period examined in the second half of this study. I am less interested in self-identification of individual writers than I am in the continuity of ideas; hence, while chapters 3 and 4 discuss writers who can be retrospectively identified as philosophical and religious Daoists, chapter 5 examines writers whose self-conscious identity as Buddhists was so firm that they felt no threat from explicit reference to or engagement with the Laozi and Zhuangzi . If a new term is needed to describe this focus, I would call it “discursive Daoism.”
By “arche-semiotics,” I mean ideas of and social practices surrounding signification which are advanced in the absence of a cogent theory of how signs function together as a system. For most of the history of premodern thought, both in Europe and China, discussion of the nature of signs focused almost entirely on how one given meaning was attached to and discernible from its outer linguistic shell, without any reference to a contextual system. The dissemination of the term semiotics dates only to Peirce and Saussure, and hence has rarely been given modern scholarly consideration outside of the assumption of systems in which signs necessarily operate; and if I were to use this word to discuss unsystematic theories of signification, it would cause confusion. I hesitate to employ a broader term such as language to name what I am discussing, both because most aspects of language (phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, etc.) are not addressed at all, and because many of the signs referred to by texts used in this study are nonlinguistic. Hence, I have had to resort reluctantly to the neologism “arche-semiotics” to describe early Chinese theories of signification (when discussing modern and postmodern approaches, the conventional “semiotics” is retained). I am indebted to Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing” for this term, but do not mean to imply that arche-semiotics could be one branch of a grammatology devoted to arche-writing. My usage is intended to be evocative and homologous rather than rigorously subsidiary. Just as arche-writing is a process of absence-making, which inhabits writing but also even the presence of ordinary speech, arche-semiotics might be considered the Daoist reluctance to make or acknowledge signs, which haunts assumptions about how signs come to be. Because this neologism deserves further grounding and justification, the Introduction below will be dedicated to explaining the concept at length and how it is used in this book.
A full chapter outline will also be reserved until the end of the Introduction, but here it can be briefly said that that Introduction, as well as chapters 1 and 2 , are more theoretical and general. They deal simultaneously with Warring States philosophy and modern continental philosophy, and hence will be of greatest interest to those who work in comparative philosophy, literary theory, and early Chinese civilization. Chapters 3 through 6 , in contrast, examine how Daoist arche-semiotics played out in all kinds of contexts from the second through sixth centuries CE. Those chapters will be of greatest interest to specialists in Chinese literature and religion of the early medieval period. Nonetheless, I hope that most of this book can remain accessible to scholars in any humanities field. To that end, I have segmented each chapter into sections that lean more toward comparative philosophy, and those which lean more toward Sinology. As much as possible, technical discussions of field-specif