Comment by popalchemist
3 days ago
Western culture is predicated on a sort of positivist metaphysics, and our language reflects that. Whereas in the east, the langauges and cultures have both long ago (as in, thousands of years ago) assimilated the precepts of non-dualism, which brings with it a greater degree of subtlety, through its embedded understanding of equanimity, dependent arising, and so on. It's a different ontological root, and therefore a different schema altogether.
Knowing what I know of you guys in NZ, a lot of that sort of thinking has made its way into popular understanding by way of encounters with the Maori people, and some of it has to do with more modern notions of pluralism, and some of it has to do with British politeness.
All that to say, it is not your fault nor the Americans fault that there's a gap in understanding. It's the byproduct of where those two schemas do not connect.
The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things, like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas. It's just as silly to be overly dismissive of the language you're familiar with as it is to be overly dismissive of others.
How about tripartism of ideas?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08886...
https://www.academia.edu/45462252/The_Logic_Structure_of_Tao...
Okay, these are probably posthoc retcons
I've just noticed this hierarchal tripartism so I'm happy to see that other people have retconned it too.
> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome.
The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...
It is pretty unanimously agreed by linguists that all language is equally expressive, which makes sense considering they were all made by humans to do the same thing.
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Thank you. Exactly the frame of reference I was speaking from.
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Ever read Plato?
Indeed but we have veered far from Plato's school of thought ever since the dualism of Descartes and it was further reinforced by the rise in materialism following the "death of god" and the discovery of the atom.
I hear you on that, but it's not like Laozi's thought is particularly useful to Chinese capitalism, either. Certainly any remnant gestures towards the dialectics of Marx by the CCP are farcical. We can allow for some local variance, of course, while still seeing the vulgarization of the whole world, so to speak. I think it's important to appreciate that the seed of dialectical thought can never be vanquished; Kant accidentally paved the way for Hegel's abolition of Cartesian dualism, and Hegel had no problem making use of the German language, so seemingly divorced from Plato's Greek, to do that. Dialectical thought can't help but appear over and over again, no matter the language, because all language is a product of the real world.
Again, it would be a mistake to not afford some degree of autonomy to language. The question is to what degree language is free to structure the world. Ultimately any language, I believe, can be expanded to express whatever new ideas arise in society, so that it is the real conditions that have ultimate power "in the last instance".
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