LOGIC, LANGUAGE, AND GRAMMAR IN EARLY CHINA.

• Author: BOLTZ, WILLIAM G.

In examining what he calls the "logical features" and "logical concepts" of the Classical Chinese language Christoph Harbsmeier has shown in this volume of Science and Civilisation in China that "logic is logic" and that, like mathematics, physics, and chemistry, for example, logic in China is no different from logic in the West in its primary, fundamental nature. Whatever differences there may appear to be are secondary matters of bow logical propositions are expressed in the language and of the accidental fact of the particular concerns of extant texts. An analysis of the logical features of Classical Chinese becomes a useful and revealing part of a comparative study of grammar in Classical Chinese and in the principal Western classical languages, Greek and Latin, and in English. Grammars may differ; the meanings of words and of syntactic constructions may differ, and as a consequence logical propositions may appear to be formulated in different ways in Chinese and English (or other Western languages), but the underlying premises and conclusions of logical reasoning are language independent, and the logical features of the Classical Chinese language reflect linguistic universals.

EARLY IN HIS OPENING SECTION ON "Method" Christoph Harbsmeier quotes the late Y. R. Chao's well-known quip that "...while aiming at finding out how Chinese logic operates, we shall probably end up with finding out how logic operates in Chinese" (p. 7). [1] Harbsmeier then apologizes: "I am afraid that I have ended up as Y. R. Chao feared...." One could do worse than end up as Y. R. Chao expected (not "feared"), and Professor Harbsmeier might well look more generously on the results of his own labors, because, as the universality of mathematics and physics would suggest, and as Chao implied and Harbsmeier himself has demonstrated in the work under review, "logic is logic," irrespective of the language in which it operates. How logical propositions, arguments, and conclusions are expressed may depend on linguistic structure, but logic itself is not language specific. Chao explored this briefly in relation to modern Chinese; Harbsmeier in this volume explores the same thing extensively in relation to Classical Chinese. The volume is, as readers of Science and Civilisation in China will expect, a survey. If the survey has also a thesis to argue, it is precisely this claim that "logic, like chemistry, is basically the same subject in China and in Greece" (p. 7).

Given this thesis, implicit throughout the book, there is a sense in which this volume bears more fundamentally on the grand theme of the Science and Civilisation in China enterprise than any of the many others that have appeared so far. From the very beginning of the venture Joseph Needham seems to have suspected that what he saw as the failure of China to develop a rigorous form of logical thinking comparable to that of the Greeks was part of the explanation for the differences in scientific development between China and the West, and that this (as he saw it) failure was in some yet-to-be-determined way a consequence of the "nature" of the Chinese language. Needham expressed this cautiously, yet with unmistakable suspicions implied, when in 1956 he anticipated the present volume: "At a later stage (Sect. 49) we shall enquire how far the differences of linguistic structure between Chinese and the Indo-European languages had influence on the differences between Chinese and Western logical formulations." [2] If we understand by Needham's use of the word "formulations" merely "expressions" or "reflections," then his remark is no different from Chao's mention of "how logic operates in Chinese," and Harbsmeier has examined this question in extenso within the confines of this single, if hefty, volume. But if we understand Needham to have meant something deeper, having to do with the nature of logic itself, then the question becomes one of differences between "Chinese logic" and "Western logic" and the answer to Needham's "how far?" Harbsmeier has shown to be "not far at all; in fact, not at all." In this regard Harbsmeier's book answers one of the fundamental questions that motivated Needham's endeavor from its inception more than forty years ago.

The work is organized in a very straightforward way. Introductory comments on "Method" (pp. 1-26) include a short section on the history of Western studies of Classical Chinese language and logic, and a discussion of the Classical Chinese language itself (pp. 26-107). Harbsmeier then surveys what he calls the "Logical Features of the Classical Chinese Language" (pp. 107-73), e.g., "negation," "quantification," "grammatical categories." This is followed by a section called "Logical Concepts" (pp. 173-260), for instance, "the sentence," "truth," "meaning," "necessity." These two sections, "Logical Features" and "Logical Concepts," are both approached as aspects of the classical language. The focus then shifts to texts, with sections on "Logical Practice" (pp. 261-86) and "Logical Theory" (pp. 286-358). The penultimate section of the work is a substantial presentation of "Chinese Buddhist Logic" (pp. 358-408), and the final section consists of Harbsmeier's brief "Concluding Reflections" (pp. 408-20).

Taken in the aggregate, these sections offer the reader a comprehensive, carefully laid out survey of logic as it is reflected in the language and texts of the classical and early Buddhist periods of Chinese intellectual and literary history. As might be expected in a work of such magnitude and substance, some sections are done better than others, and almost every section could be expanded. Speaking generally, the preliminary material, through page 107, including that on the non-logic-related aspects of the Chinese language itself and on Chinese characters, is rather superficially done; the parts from page 107 on, which treat the "logic material" proper, are more solidly presented.

Harbsmeier's discussion of the study of Classical Chinese language and logic in the West is slim, often little more than a briefly annotated chronological listing of names, primary texts, and secondary scholarship. The sections on historical phonology and historical syntax seem curiously haphazard in their references to modern scholarship. The discussions of the language and of the Chinese writing system tend also to be over-general, over-brief, and occasionally idiosyncratic, as for example, when Harbsmeier says "But Chinese calligraphy has a deeper metaphysical dimension. It touches the nerve of morphemes and aspires to reach the profound cosmic essence of things" (p. 39). It is not clear to me what this means, if anything, much less how it bears on language and logic. The section on stylistic parallelism (pp. 103-7) is a welcome exception to the sketchiness of many of these other preliminary sections. Here Harbsmeier draws attention to the importance of an often-overlooked aspect of Classical Chinese writ ing with a well-developed presentation, pointing out that "to some extent this syntactic repetitiveness compensates for the absence of morphology to make syntactic relations palpable and explicit..." (p. 104). An important corollary is that semantic relations also are often made explicit, if not "palpable," in the same way.

When Harbsmeier turns his attention to the logical features of the Classical Chinese language, he inevitably and naturally treats them in grammatical terms, attesting to the unarguable fact that grammar is the first reflection of logic in language. He begins with negation, identifying the simple propositional form of negation as "Not-p." He then invokes the Aristotelian term apophasis 'negation' and gives Aristotle's definition: "a negation... is a statement denying something of something" (p. 107). As Harbsmeier notes, while few cultures have had occasion to formulate an abstract concept of negation as explicitly as the Greeks did, all natural languages seem to have ways to deny or negate sentences, and Classical Chinese is no exception.

Harbsmeier identifies fei [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as the word in Classical Chinese that comes closest in meaning to Aristotle's apophasis. He goes on to say that fei is not often used in "the technical sense" of "to deny, negate," but tends to be used rather in the meaning "to disapprove, criticize" (p. 108). The distinction that he means to draw, presumably, is that while fei is used in an everyday sense of "to express disapproval of or disagreement with" or "to contradict," it is not used in any formal way that matches Aristotle's apophasis to describe an abstract notion of the same thing, to wit, "negation." This is true sensu stricto since early China is not, as Harbsmeier points out, one of those few cultures to have formulated explicitly the logical concept of negation.

The Greek word is morphologically analyzable as the prefix apo-, 'against, contrary to' or 'averse to' (literally, "[turning] away from") + phasis 'speech, talk, speaking'. Chinese fei [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [less than] *par is the root of, among other apparent cognates, the word feei [less than] *par? [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to condemn, disapprove of, slander'. Sheu Shenn [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] glosses feei [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Shuowen (ca. A.D. 100) as banq [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'to speak ill of', but Duann Yuhtsair [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1735-1815) in his commentary to this entry says [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "the verbal sense of feei [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is fei [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'to negate'; it means 'to negate the substance of something'." [3] Duann's comment suggests the absolute n egation associated with both Chinese fei and Greek apophasis, but not the existential negation...