An Analysis of “Cultural Genes” Based on the Structure of the Symbolic System

Cassirer regarded symbolic activity as the most representative feature of human life, holding that all the development of culture depends on this condition. Geertz inherited Cassirer’s view; his interpretation of culture “represents a development within anthropology that converges with certain other developments in the social sciences and the humanities,” which Thompson summarized thus: “Culture is the pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms—including actions, utterances, and meaningful objects of every kind—by virtue of which people communicate with one another and share experiences, conceptions, and beliefs.” This means that the most basic constituent of culture is the symbol, and the characteristics of the symbolic system determine the characteristics of the culture. One may go further and say that the most primitive, most basic symbolic system of human beings is the “cultural gene”: it is precisely this that determines the relation between human and world, determines the human interpretation of the world, and determines the genesis, creation, and development of culture; and the distinctiveness of a people’s most primitive, most basic symbolic system determines the distinctiveness of that people’s culture. By grasping the “cultural gene,” therefore, we can compare Chinese and Western culture, gain a deeper understanding of Chinese traditional culture, and more consciously absorb the essence of that tradition while undertaking new cultural creation.

I.

The most primitive, most basic symbolic system of human beings is composed of behavior-language (action, posture, expression, sound) and speech-act. The relation between human and world has a process of development and evolution. As a living existence, the human being, like other organisms, must establish a relation of matter and energy exchange with the environment through its own bodily activity, so as to sustain its survival. In this process, those modes of behavior beneficial to life are continually imitated and repeated among the group, become structured, and thereby acquire a meaning shared by the group, forming a language in the broad sense: “behavior-language.” Behavior-language, then, is in fact “structured behavior”; it establishes difference through “body information” (the sense of movement). Because behavior-language is constructed in the process of the body’s dealings with the environment, it is closely bound up with body and environment, and is itself a bodily state within a particular environment; it sediments into the common experience of the organism and at the same time becomes the way of relating to the world, of representing the organism’s inner states and the organism’s relation to the world—a “language” the organism enjoys, a special “language” in which bodily behavior and representation are fused, and which had already formed in the pre-human era.

As a special language, behavior-language can only attach to the body; it is bodily performance, and between behavior and body there is no dividing line. This language, lacking “independence,” is powerless to separate human from world, powerless to construct the world into the human being’s clarified “object-world”; rather, it relates to the world through behavior, and in the process of dealing with the world (being-in-the-world, Dasein) it structures the world by means of the structure of behavior-language and takes it into the body, thereby apprehending the world, coordinating the relation between bodily behavior and world, and establishing the earliest model of the human-world relation. Since behavior-language cannot construct the human being’s object-world, conversely it also cannot construct human consciousness; it can only constitute unconscious experience (behavior-language memory), forming an unconscious structure—for any consciousness is consciousness of an object (including a virtual object), and apart from an object, consciousness has nothing to inhere in and loses the ground of its existence. The experience sedimented by behavior-language memory can only be unconscious experience. This human way of directly grasping the world through behavior-language is “intuition” or “comprehension.” When the human being structures the world through behavior-language, in essence it endows the world with its own form of life and form of feeling, so that the world acquires vitality and affectivity—this is “empathy.” This way of structuring the world through behavior-language and taking it into the body, fusing with the world into one, and establishing a non-objective relation in order to feel and grasp the world, is precisely what we call “lived experience” (tiyan). In this relation of the oneness of thing and self, the human being need not objectify the world, need not pass through its own consciousness or will, but directly makes a bodily “instinctive” response. Intuition, comprehension, empathy, lived experience, and instinct are therefore founded on behavior-language; they are the various “non-objective” activities in which human and world fuse. It is precisely behavior-language that constructs the most primordial relation between human and world, while intuition, comprehension, empathy, lived experience, and instinct are our descriptions of the nature, mode of operation, and function of behavior-language.

Speech-act is generated on the basis of behavior-language, and especially of vocal behavior. As the sphere of activity expands and mutual intercourse grows ever more complex, the human being cannot but classify and generalize the unconscious experience constructed by behavior-language, condensing it into more abstract concepts—and thus speech-act is born. The dual character of vocal behavior—at once closely linked to the body yet relatively detachable—makes it possible for it to evolve into “concept / sound-image” and to establish its own difference through “concept / sound-image,” finally, through growing abstraction, breaking away from the body and gaining relative independence. This is an extremely crucial step in the human being’s becoming human.

Speech-act, possessing relative “independence,” is utterly different from behavior-language in nature, mode of operation, and functional features: by its difference it distinguishes the world from the human, and further distinguishes the myriad things, constructing the human being’s “object-world” and, at the same time, reflexively constructing human consciousness. Human consciousness and the object-world are formed simultaneously in the process of speech-act’s generation; the three stand in a relation of synchronous construction, and the structure of speech-act determines the structure of human consciousness and the structure of the world. A brand-new objective relation between human and world is thus formed; the world begins to present itself clearly before the human being in the manner of an object of consciousness—this is precisely the root of what modern Western philosophy calls “the world is constructed by language.” In the process by which the world becomes the human being’s object, the human being also begins to grow into a subject with the capacity for self-conscious action, and the subject-object relation is gradually established within speech-act. One may say that speech-act was originally constructed by automatically classifying unconscious experience, and so becomes the system of difference by which human beings consciously classify the world. From this point on, the human being can not only actively observe and know the world, greatly raising its own cognitive capacity, but can also forcibly peel its own behavior away from the body, abstract it out, and regard it as an object of cognition and interpretation; it can examine and reflect on behavior in relation to purpose, consequence, and environment, and thereby adjust and master behavior, continually improving human practical capacity. Within speech-act are nurtured the human capacities of observation, cognition, reflection, critique, analysis, and inference. And it is precisely in the examination and reflection on the relation of behavior to purpose, consequence, and environment that the human being judges the rationality of its own behavior and begins to advance toward becoming a rational subject. Thus humanity is no longer a being-in-itself but becomes a self-conscious, self-determining existence, freed from the blind, instinctive activity of following nature, and unfolds purposive cultural creation.

Speech-act both severs the originally unified relation of human and world, creating a fissure between them, and re-relates human and world, reconstructing the world and reorganizing the human-world relation by means of the structure of speech-act, establishing a subject-object dualistic, objective relation. This frees the human being from inherent, immediate, narrow relations and wins it vast freedom, powerfully expanding the scope of human activity, broadening its vision, and extending its world; the human being is at last lifted out of the finite space of its bodily presence and the unbroken duration of the present, gaining the possibility of simultaneously possessing present, past, and future, and possessing the infinite space of the real and the virtual—while speech-act itself becomes the most flexible, most effective tool by which the human being represents the world and communicates. What we call analytic thinking is in fact rooted in the differentiating function of language, and logical inference is inseparable from the operation of linguistic concepts. Correspondingly, the status of behavior-language is thereby debased and marginalized; the unconscious character of behavior-language seems to destine it to the inevitable fate of being neglected and concealed.

Yet speech-act has not thereby replaced the increasingly dormant behavior-language; the two kinds of behavior (language) still coexist, jointly constructing the extremely intricate and changeable relation between human and world. At the opening of I and Thou, Martin Buber points out directly: “To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives the twofold world; for the twofold is his attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the two basic words he can speak. The basic words are not single words but word pairs. One basic word is the word pair I–Thou. The other basic word is the word pair I–It … Hence the I of man is also twofold.” The twofold relation between human and world of which Buber speaks: the one is the human being’s primordial relation of fusion with the world—the non-objective relation, that is, the “I–Thou” relation; the other is the subject-object-divided relation between human and world—the objective relation, that is, the “I–It” relation. In essence, this twofold relation is constructed by the two kinds of behavior (language): speech-act and behavior-language. It is precisely these two kinds of behavior (language) that endow the human being with a twofold attitude and establish a twofold relation with the world. Buber keenly noticed the complexity of the human-world relation; regrettably, constrained by Western habits of thought, he still set out from linguistic centrism to seek the cause, and, at a loss, coined the word pair “I–Thou” in an attempt to escape the predicament of language.

The differentiating function of speech-act wins it immense power; having presented a world of myriad forms to humanity, it still, by its inertia, keeps dividing the various domains and objects, ceaselessly disenchanting the world, constructing one discipline and one body of knowledge after another, sweeping away every mystery and sanctity. Just as the various domains and objects are continually divided, the gods are expelled, the sacred is stripped of its solemn vestments, the aura dissipates, and the world thereby becomes lifeless and unpoetic, collapsing into scattered shards. Even human life, and the human subjectivity that speech-act built with its own hands, are dismembered by language itself, withering into a heap of remains and empty husks. From the standpoint of ultimate cause, it is precisely speech-act that, having brought the human being into modernity, then sternly casts it into the fragments of the postmodern. Whether the reason inaugurated by the Enlightenment or the aftermath the Enlightenment bequeathed, behind both lurks the trace of speech-act.

The difference in nature between speech-act and behavior-language causes a cleavage between them: though the two communicate and cooperate, they are incommensurable, and they bring about the cleavage of consciousness and the unconscious, of reason and sensibility, of spirit and body. Even so, behavior-language remains an indispensable symbolic activity of humankind; it always accompanies speech-act silently, jointly participating in human activity and jointly constructing the human-world relation. Only, in the contest between the two kinds of behavior (language), speech-act, with its clamorous posture, increasingly seizes the dominant position. In the relation between human and world, cleavage begins to overwhelm fusion, conflict to overwhelm harmony, and the ecological balance is increasingly broken. The critique that aesthetic modernity directs at enlightenment modernity in fact implies a summons to behavior-language—an intention to heal, by means of behavior-language, the ever-deepening fissure between human and world, to rebuild an intimate, harmonious relation between human and world, and to recover the lost primordial mysterious experience and poetic existence.

Human behavior-language and speech-act respectively shape the human being’s unconscious structure and conscious structure, and together become humanity’s most basic symbolic system. Behind all human sensations—whether sight, hearing, or touch—these two kinds of behavior (language) lie hidden; all the other varied symbolic activities take these two as their paradigm, being merely extensions and expansions of the medium. The human being cannot establish a relation with the world directly without these two kinds of behavior (language); whatever cannot be structured by them is inevitably excluded beyond the threshold of sensation. In How the Body Knows Its Mind, Sian Beilock concretely expounds “embodied cognition,” pointing out: “When we see, hear, read, or even think of anything bad, we ourselves ‘experience’ such an experience. These reactions appear not only in the brain; they also extend to our facial expressions and postures. Bodily posture in turn sends signals to the brain telling it how we feel. This is why, when we read a sad story or watch a sad film, we always show the emotion on our faces. But when we cannot feel this experience—when the face does not give off the feedback that could change our thoughts—the processing of emotion is obstructed. An important link in interpreting emotional information disappears.” Embodied-cognition theory, with the help of experiment, discovered the connection between body and human cognitive activity. In fact, the reason the body can intervene in human cognition is that the body constructs the world through behavior-language, and thereby directly apprehends the world and provides a foundation for cognitive activity. Beilock’s point—that in reading a story or watching a film our reception of the work’s emotion is always closely linked to and interacts with facial expression, that is, with behavior-language—further shows that, for sensation and cognition alike, behavior-language and speech-act are equally indispensable.

The focus of the doubts cast on embodied-cognition theory lies in its denial that “representation” is indispensable in the process of cognition. The chief reason is that this theory overlooks the fact that bodily behavior is at the same time a special mode of representation—a representation in which bodily behavior and the representational sign are fused and overlapping, one body serving two roles: a non-mediating medium, a special, non-discrete “language.” The relation between human and world was originally constructed jointly by these two—behavior-language and speech-act; the human being’s existential activity and thinking activity stand within the cosmos jointly constructed by these two kinds of behavior (language), and all activity is inseparable from them, while human experience is founded on their coordinated operation. The relation between human and world constructed by these two kinds of behavior (language) determines the human being’s state of existence, determines its sensation, determines its thinking, and determines all human activity. The mystery of human culture is hidden in the tension structure of these two kinds of behavior (language), determined by this “cultural gene.”

II.

However, the overall structure formed by the cooperation of speech-act and behavior-language is by no means constant and unchanging; between the two there is a relation of mutual contest, and its tension structure and tendency determine the distinctiveness of the cultural and intellectual activity of different eras, different peoples, and different types—determine the different ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Saussure regarded language as constituted by the two poles of vocabulary and grammar, with the languages of various peoples occupying different positions between them. In essence, this two-pole relation is produced by the relational structure in which the two kinds of behavior (language) combine; we may fully replace this two-pole relation with the two poles constituted by behavior-language and speech-act, so that the languages of different peoples, by their different positions (different modes of classification and degrees of abstraction), relate differently to the two poles, embodying the different overall structures and tendencies between behavior-language and speech-act. The more abstract a people’s language, the further it departs from behavior-language, the stronger its independence, and the stronger its reflexivity—so that, in the process of reflecting on language itself, it continually perfects the precision and logicality of linguistic expression and strengthens grammatical structure. By comparison, a people’s language with a lower degree of abstraction is more closely related to behavior-language and lays more weight on vocabulary. The cultural gene of different peoples lies hidden in the overall structure in which the two kinds of behavior (language) combine. The emphasis on the importance of speech-act constitutes the characteristic of Western culture and of Western thinking, and influences the view of the world’s origin. In the ancient Greek period, Thales proposed the “substrate,” Anaximander the “boundless,” Pythagoras “number,” in order to think the origin of the world and the foundation of the myriad things. But these reflections themselves presupposed the world as an “object”; that is, when the philosophers began to philosophize, they had already, inadvertently, employed “objective” thinking and fallen into the trap laid by speech-act. For only under the action of speech-act does the world present itself as the human being’s “object-world,” making it possible to think such questions as “substrate,” “boundless,” and “number.” As soon as one names “what” the world is, one has already entered linguistic “conceptualization.” As for Plato, he directly linked “Idea” with “concept” (name), thinking the Idea by means of the concept. These ontological reflections, which take the world’s origin, essence, and structure as objects of inquiry, are in essence all “objective” thinking, premised on and grounded in speech-act—which destines Western thought to the fate, hard to escape, of linguistic centrism and rational centrism.

When people found that knowing the world and seeking truth purely from the objective object is unreliable—because such cognition and seeking are themselves conditioned by human subjectivity—they turned instead to interrogate the human being itself, to explore the human capacity for subjective cognition, attempting to establish the identity of thought and being; and this led to philosophy’s epistemological turn. Philosophy’s turn from ontology to epistemology is, to be sure, inseparable from religious reform and the evolution of social-historical circumstances; but these factors are only external causes, jointly prompting scholars, from outside, to turn their gaze to the human being itself. Yet although the object of reflection changed, the basis and mode of reflection did not: it was merely a matter of taking the human being, the human psyche, human capacity, the human mode of cognition and thinking as “objects” to be examined and analyzed. Kant, for instance, relied on categories delimited by language: cognition, will, feeling, to construct his theoretical edifice. Husserl’s phenomenology seems to seek to escape the cleavage of subject and object, consciousness and object; yet by setting the “transcendental universal structure of consciousness” as its research goal and advocating the disclosure of this structure through “first-person” subjective description, it shows that he still failed to leap out of the quagmire of speech-act. The “intersubjectivity” of which phenomenology speaks is by no means the chaotic state of “the fusion of thing and self”; whether this “subject” be transcendental, psychological, or interactively co-present, it can only be the result of language’s differentiating, positioning, and constructing the human-world relation. The phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden directly explored language as the aesthetic “medium,” analyzing the stratified structure of the “intentional object.” Heidegger, with astonishing boldness, declared the fallacy of traditional ontology and replaced the core of the question, “beings” (that which is), with “Being” (to be), exploring truth from within the human being’s existential activity (Dasein’s being-in-the-world)—which indeed implies a misgiving about and evasion of the linguistic concept. For once philosophy thinks “beings,” it touches the question “what is it?” and is bound to fall into the snare of the linguistic concept. By turning the question to “Being,” Heidegger avoided the question “what is it?” and avoided “conceptualization.” Unlike phenomenology, Heidegger disparaged “subjectivity,” holding that subjectivity is precisely the root of the cleavage between human and world—for with a subject there is an object, and cleavage becomes unavoidable. To avoid this state of cleavage, he proposed the structure of “Dasein’s being-in-the-world” to describe the state of existence, holding that the human being is originally one with the world, can only exist within the world, and apprehends in dealing with the world—whereby the earth is opened up and truth manifested. “In understanding and discoursing on the thing, we must first suspend everything we insert between ourselves and the thing. Only thus can we immerse ourselves in the unconcealed self-showing of the thing.” Heidegger regarded this “direct encounter with the thing” as the primary condition of interpretation. This seems to imply a disparagement of language, for once language intervenes it inevitably, by its difference, carries out differentiation, again creating a fissure between human and world. But Heidegger, after all, failed to leap out of Western linguistic centrism; in the end he still linked truth with language, regarding language as the “house of Being,” thereby creating a contradiction within his theory. Or rather, he was only wary of “conceptualization” (beings) and did not negate verbal activity—indeed, he was enamored of poetic verbal activity, enamored of the “primordial saying” (Sage). As Perniola says of Heidegger: “For the essence of language is precisely ‘to let the entity show itself.’ Phenomenology is hermeneutics because it is inseparably bound to language.”

Against Western rational centrism, Husserl points out: “All Western irrationalism is in the last analysis still rational, only it has not attained a certain (deeper) self-awareness of reason. Without reason there would be no Western culture as a whole.” We may say, going one step deeper: without the emphasis on the central status of language there would be no emphasis on reason, and no Western culture as a whole. Within the overall structure in which behavior-language and speech-act combine, the tendency to stress the dominant role of speech-act constitutes the distinctive individuality of the Western cultural gene; it determines the thinking characteristics and cultural characteristics of Westerners. Philosophy’s epistemological turn and the rise of phenomenology pushed the human being itself and the human-world relation to the focal point of theoretical attention, and only then did scholars discover that what lay athwart human and world, all along concealing the truth of the world, was none other than the language created by human beings themselves—that from the moment of birth the human being wears these tinted spectacles to view the world and itself, unable to know and think apart from language. This is the linguistic turn of philosophy. Language at last moves from the concealed backstage of thought to the front stage, rising from carrier and tool to protagonist, becoming the core of philosophical reflection. “This mainstream of modern philosophy began with Kant’s replacement of the structure of the world by the structure of the mind, continued with C. I. Lewis’s replacement of the structure of the mind by the structure of concepts, and now goes further, replacing the structure of concepts by the structures of the many symbolic systems of science, philosophy, art, perception, and everyday discourse.” Goodman highly succinctly summed up the developmental course of modern Western philosophy. The problem is this: for Western scholars, even though there exist many symbolic systems, they still view and interpret these systems according to the paradigm of speech-act, which inevitably obscures the distinctive nature and important role of behavior-language and falls into linguistic centrism and rational centrism. Since the arch-culprit concealing the truth of the world is language, analytic philosophy too points its blade straight at language. In their eyes the crux lies in the linguistic concepts people use daily. A great many everyday concepts are not strictly logically posited but acquired in daily life; their boundaries are vague and their meanings shift unstably—precisely what analytic philosophy must clarify and cure. Yet in the past we actually took them as natural grounds of legitimacy, and from there set out to think the world’s origin, the essence of the myriad things and of all manner of linguistic derivatives—is this not absurd? And it is precisely within the linguistic sign that all manner of power-manipulation hides, covertly producing deep-rooted intellectual prejudice and social injustice pervading every nook and cranny. Thus language was pushed onto the defendant’s bench and became the object of interrogation. At this point Western philosophy pushed its own reflection to the extreme. It questioned language, yet did not escape the cage of language. Such practices as John Searle’s interpretation of the structure of civilization through speech-act, and narratology’s overflowing the bounds of literary studies to be crudely applied to sociology, psychology, and many other fields, are in fact all rooted in linguistic centrism and rational centrism, rooted in the distinctive individuality of the Western cultural gene. (From an essential standpoint, knowledge is the use of language’s differentiating function to “classify”: classifying animals, plants, heavenly bodies, the organs of the human body produces zoology, botany, astronomy, medicine, and so on. What is called a change of scientific paradigm is fundamentally, first of all, a change in the principle of classification. But language can equally be used to fabricate illusion, to manufacture mystery and sanctity and delude the mind—only this is a distortion and abuse of language’s nature.)

III.

On the question of the relation between human and world and the origin of the world, the ancient Chinese philosophers seem to stand at the very summit of Western scholars’ reflection: from the outset they did not lightly trust language, but both revered language and saw its limitations. Laozi well understood the mystery here and remained ever on guard against language. In discussing the world’s origin and law, Laozi could not but use language to express it, and could only, reluctantly, name it “the Dao.” “Dao,” the Shuowen explains, is “the road one walks; from chuo and shou; what reaches through to one is called dao.” This symbolic, metaphorical formulation stresses the importance of the “walking of the road” that relates and threads through human and world. Only by means of the Dao can the human reach the world, establish a relation with the world, and apprehend and grasp the world in dealing with it; all human behaviors occur on the road, and can occur only on the road. At the same time, Laozi clearly realized that this naming is a stopgap, a doing of what cannot be done: “I do not know its name; I style it ‘Dao,’ and forcing a name upon it I call it ‘great.’ Great means passing on; passing on means going far; going far means returning.” The world’s origin and law are Dao, great, passing, far, returning—and yet it is also not anything that a single linguistic concept can express; it cannot be stated in language or delimited by concept, cannot even be explained by the boundless “great,” but can only be apprehended in relation to the human, in the action of passing, going far, and returning. The world itself is non-conceptual and non-linguistic. Laozi placed himself in a paradoxical predicament, attempting to transcend language through language, and through both naming and negating the naming to inspire the reader to approach the Dao in person. Language is not only, as analytic philosophy holds, worthy of doubt, in need of clearing and curing; it is itself the barrier lying athwart human and world that must be crossed. To truly grasp the Dao, one cannot but transcend language.

The Dao is not only non-linguistic and non-conceptual but also non-figurative; the human senses cannot grasp it. Laozi says: “Looked at but not seen, it is called the invisible (yi); listened to but not heard, it is called the inaudible (xi); grasped at but not got, it is called the subtle (wei). These three cannot be further probed, and so merge into one.” The “merge into one” here does not mean that the world is self-unified, but that human and world are mingled and fused into one, that the world is not the human being’s object-world. When human and world fuse into one, entering the realm of transforming together with things, of no-thing and no-self, all the barriers of language collapse of themselves, all conceptual boundaries are annulled, and the world no longer exists as an “object.” At that moment, every sound becomes the “great tone” of soundlessness, every image is transformed into the “great image” of the formless. In this “non-objective” fused state, the human being is in fact already situated within the Dao, and the Dao is likewise placed within the human; human and Dao are identical, and the senses become an utterly needless redundancy. Distrust of language inevitably leads to distrust of perception. The world humans perceive is the object-world constructed through linguistic differentiation; in classifying, condensing, and abstracting unconscious experience into linguistic concepts, humanity both loses much precious experience and smuggles in not a few prejudices, dismantling the intimate human-world relation and re-fixing it anew. This determines that the object-world differentiated and constructed by language is itself unreliable—so how can human perception be reliable? The human senses cannot escape the entanglement of language. Were we to renounce language, then human and world could not be differentiated, the world could not be constructed into the human being’s object-world, and human consciousness could not arise; though the world would still exist as it is, it could only exist in the manner of “nothing”—wordless, soundless, formless, imageless. The world is not thereby absent; rather it is no longer the human being’s object of consciousness or of sensation—it is itself “non-object.” This non-objective world is precisely Laozi’s “nothing” (wu), the chaotic state of the oneness of thing and self, dim and indistinct, omnipresent and ceaselessly circulating, yet unspeakable and imperceptible. Only by means of the thing-self fusion constructed by behavior-language can the human, bypassing speech-act, directly grasp the world, grasp “nothing” (the Dao). It is precisely behavior-language that establishes a relation with the world in its own way; its non-conceptual, non-independent character determines that it can fuse human and world to experience and apprehend the world; and because behavior-language can only construct the unconscious, although for human consciousness the world remains “nothing,” in fact it has already constituted unconscious experience and intuitively apprehended the Dao. Once speech-act intervenes, the fissure between human and world is formed, the world becomes the object of human consciousness and perception, “nothing” is transformed into “being,” the myriad things are thereby born, and the Dao recedes from view.

Discussing Wang Bi’s Outline of the Laozi, Mou Zongsan offered this interpretation: “The Dao has a duality: first ‘nothing,’ second ‘being.’ Nothing is not dead nothing, so by its marvelous functioning it displays a directional being; being is not fixed being, so it is directional yet without direction, and again merges back into nothing. Its directional being is highlighted only by ‘relating to the myriad things and willing to make them so’ … yet the directional is not a fixed direction, and being is not a fixed being, so it can merge into nothing. Being and nothing, mother and beginning, are perfectly rounded into one—this is called the mysterious.” Mou Zongsan accurately points out the duality of the Dao: “nothing” and “being” coexist, the “directional” (objective relation) and the “non-directional” (non-objective relation) interchange, and the change of being and nothing originates in the transformation of “directionality” (the intentional relation)—yet he still did not reveal the cause of the change of “directionality.” In fact the root lies precisely in the change of the dominant relation between speech-act and behavior-language. As the dominant relation of the two kinds of behavior (language) shifts, the formed “image” in the objective relation turns into the formless “great image” in the non-objective relation, and “being” is transformed into “nothing.”

Zhuangzi, of one lineage with Laozi, likewise held: “The Dao cannot be heard; what is heard is not it. The Dao cannot be seen; what is seen is not it. The Dao cannot be spoken; what is spoken is not it.” The “Heaven and Earth” chapter of the Zhuangzi tells this story: “The Yellow Emperor roamed north of the Red Water, ascended the hill of Kunlun and gazed south; on returning home he lost his dark pearl. He sent Knowledge to seek it, but Knowledge could not find it; he sent Li Zhu (Keen Sight) to seek it, but could not find it; he sent Chigou (Eloquence) to seek it, but could not find it. Then he sent Xiangwang (Shadowy-Indistinct), and Xiangwang found it.” Guo Songtao comments: “Knowledge sought it with the spirit; Li Zhu sought it through form and shadow; Chigou sought it through sound and report—and so the more they sought, the further it receded. Xiangwang, as if having form, as if formless, therefore found it at a glance.” The “dark pearl” figures the Dao, which human intelligence, the senses, and speech all fail to seek out; only the as-if-formed, as-if-formless “Xiangwang” can find it. Clearly, this “Xiangwang,” detached from intellect, senses, and speech, is precisely Laozi’s “great image”—a non-objective fused state between human and world, constructible only by the distinctive symbolic system, behavior-language. In Zhuangzi’s writing, the cook carving the ox, Wheelwright Bian hewing a wheel, Woodworker Qing carving the bell-stand, and so on, all stress again and again such a conception: that consummate, transcendent skill requires precisely “meeting it with the spirit and not looking with the eyes, the faculties of sense stopping while the spirit moves as it will,” and should even reach the realm of “sitting in forgetfulness”—“dismissing the limbs, dispelling the intelligence, leaving form behind and casting off knowledge, identical with the Great Thoroughfare.” This too is the supreme realm in which “Heaven and Earth are born together with me, and the myriad things are one with me.” Only by suspending intellect and perception, transcending the actual linguistic context, excluding all external interference, and thoroughly changing the state of cleavage between human and world to attain this supreme realm, can the creative potential stored within unconscious experience (behavior-language memory) freely gush forth unrestrained—and this is precisely the supremely beautiful state that the ancient Chinese philosophers tirelessly sought.

On the understanding of the world’s origin and the Dao, there is no fundamental divergence between Confucius and the Confucians on the one hand and Laozi and Zhuangzi on the other; they likewise hold the conception of “the unity of Heaven and humanity.” “The Chinese reality is only ‘one undivided whole’; he sees ‘cosmos’ and ‘human life’ as fused into one. Fused into one, there is no ‘inner and outer,’ no ‘that and this,’ and therefore no so-called ‘leaving the world or entering it.’ This is what the Chinese call ‘the unity of Heaven and humanity.’” One may say that the understanding of the “Dao” constitutes the very essence of Chinese culture, and the emphasis on the non-objective relation between human and world, the emphasis on the foundational status of behavior-language in symbolic activity, is precisely the distinctive individuality of the Chinese cultural gene. Expounding Zhuangzi’s aesthetics, Peng Feng points out that the “Dao” is a non-objective existence: “Precisely because the Dao is not an object, any activity that pursues the Dao as an object runs counter to it. Nor is the Dao a special thing; the natural existence of any thing is the Dao—this is very evident in Zhuangzi’s concept of ‘the piping of Heaven.’” Lin Guanghua gives a similar reading of the “Dao” in the Laozi: “In the Daoist view, instrumental language precisely obscures the ‘Dao.’ For instrumental language is built on the epistemological foundation of the subject-object division; the moment one begins to speak with it, one presupposes the subject-object division. Such speech must have a definite referent and purpose; it arises from the human need to recognize an object, and is therefore objectifying. The ‘Dao’ is not an object standing over against us as subjects; before human beings came to be, its existence had nothing to do with language; after human beings came to be, it is the ‘world’ in which we already live, a world from which the human cannot truly stand out so as to turn back and look at the ‘Dao’—as we cannot light a lamp to see what darkness looks like. Otherwise we are like one riding a donkey in search of a donkey, never to find the ‘Dao.’ Herein lies the mystery of the Dao; in this sense the present essay uses a modern term to describe it: the ‘non-objectified’ Dao.” Peng Feng and Lin Guanghua correctly grasp the “non-objectified” character of the Laozi-Zhuangzi “Dao”; what we must further ask is: how is this non-objective relation formed? How exactly do we grasp the non-objectified Dao? Tracing it to the root, apart from behavior-language, the non-objective relation between human and world cannot be constructed, and the human being cannot apprehend the non-objectified Dao.

Similar to the views of Peng Feng and Lin Guanghua, the French sinologist François Jullien expounds the “non-object” character of ancient Chinese painting. Discussing brush-and-ink and form-and-color, he holds that in the process of painting it is not keenness of eye or the mind’s planning and conception that occupies the supreme place, but first of all the inner work of concentration, refinement, and pure authenticity; and its success depends not so much on the deftness, precision, and excellence of the brush-wielding hand as on a principle of movement: “It begins at a more upstream stage, transmitting the pulse of the heart, without the least loss, all the way to the tension that activates form; to wield the brush is the same operational art as to wield the axe or the knife.” In this process, “body-language relates to breath, and it is this that controls the painting.” Jullien keenly sensed that “body-language” relates to breath and to the brush-and-ink and non-objectivity of painting; but regrettably he failed to probe further into body-language (behavior-language), failed to discover its distinctive nature, mode of operation, and functional features, and failed to realize that it is precisely the distinctiveness of body-language (behavior-language) that brings the painter into accord with nature, makes brush-and-ink the natural extension of body-language (behavior-language), and finally endows the painting with its “non-object” character, thereby producing the distinctiveness of Chinese painting. Instead, he reduced Chinese painting to the image of “idea” (yi) and located its root in “breath–energy.” Although this “breath–energy” is likewise formless, traceless, flowing and transforming, ceaselessly generative, it has already degenerated, in Jullien’s eyes, into an objective reality, distinct from the symbolically suggestive, as-if-present-as-if-absent “qi” of Chinese literary and painting theory, and still further removed from the unspeakable “Dao,” deviating from the spirit of Chinese art and falling anew into the snare of the linguistic logos. Jullien seemed about to cross the frontier between Chinese and Western art and to penetrate the true meaning of Chinese painting, yet in the end was still barred within the demonic spell of language, missing the truth.

IV.

Comparing the relations among Zhuangzi, Mystery Learning (xuanxue), and Chan, Li Zehou concluded thus: “The orientation and summit of Chinese philosophy is not religion but aesthetics. The path by which Chinese philosophical thought formed runs not from cognition and morality to religion, but from these to the aesthetic, attaining an aesthetic attitude toward life and an aesthetic realm of life. This aesthetic attitude and realm of life differ from logical cognition and speculative reason, and from achievement, morality, and practical reason, and also from the ‘absolute spirit’ (religion) divorced from the sensible world. It is in the world yet beyond the world, beyond the sensible yet not apart from feeling; the high point it reaches is an optimism, positive, not mysterious, a joy united with great nature.” The distinctiveness of the path by which Chinese philosophical thought formed is rooted in the distinctiveness of the structure of the most primitive, most basic symbolic system: within this structure, behavior-language plays a foundational role, which thereby determines the conception of the unity of Heaven and humanity and determines the orientation and summit of philosophical thought.

Here we are not seeking to compare the superiority or inferiority of Chinese and Western culture and thought, but to discriminate the differences of the two sides, holding that the root of the differences in Chinese and Western culture and thought lies in the difference of the symbolic system, in the difference of the overall structure and tendency in which the two kinds of behavior (language) combine, whence the subtle difference of the Chinese and Western cultural genes. This difference determines the relation between human and world, determines the cosmos of human existential activity and its mode, and thereby influences the cognition of the world. Cassirer says: “All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already formed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosopher, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him. This immediate dependence is harder to recognize than is anything indirectly created by the mind for conscious thought.” Benveniste, from another angle, expounds the close relation between culture and language: “Symbolization—that is, language is precisely the domain of meaning. And in the last analysis, the whole mechanism of culture is a mechanism of a symbolic nature … it is as though a semantics ran through all these elements of culture and organized them, organized them at many levels.” For the Western peoples, speech-act occupies the dominant position in the overall structure of symbolic activity, and thereby obscures the distinctiveness and importance of behavior-language. It is not that Western scholars failed to notice behavior-language, but that they inevitably viewed and interpreted it by the paradigm of speech-act. Benveniste once arbitrarily declared: “No semiotics of sound, color, or image can be expressed through sound, color, or image themselves. The semiotics of any non-linguistic system must avail itself of the medium of language, and can therefore exist only through, and within, the semiotics of language … Language is the interpretant of all other linguistic and non-linguistic systems.” To interpret all other linguistic or non-linguistic systems by the paradigm of language has, to be sure, a certain degree of reasonableness, yet it alone effaces the distinctiveness of behavior-language, simplifying and distorting the complex, changeable relation between human and world—and this is the true root of Western linguistic centrism and rational centrism. Nevertheless, speech-act is the ground of the human being’s cognitive, reflective, and critical capacities; and it is precisely the reliance on and emphasis on speech-act that enabled Westerners, in reflection and critique, to break through existing thought, construct one grand intellectual system after another, push theoretical cognition ever toward new peaks, and usher in the flourishing of the natural sciences.

In Chinese culture and thought, behavior-language plainly has an extremely important foundational status, and it is precisely this feature that kept the ancient philosophers from falling into Western linguistic centrism, enabling them aptly and correctly to grasp the primordial relation between human and world and to apprehend the relation between human and Dao. Only by means of behavior-language can humanity truly apprehend the Dao; and the distinctiveness of behavior-language is, moreover, not discoverable by logical analysis alone—it must be apprehended through intuition and comprehension, that is, by means of behavior-language itself. Therefore, facing squarely the limitations of speech-act, valuing the special character of behavior-language, and attempting to grasp the unspeakable, imperceptible Dao through the great image and Xiangwang—this let our ancient sages win the initiative at the very start; yet, because reflection and critique were deficient, it also retarded the subsequent development of thought. The Chinese people created a splendid culture of thought as early as the pre-Qin era, but thereafter the peaks were not seen again; scholars often “transmitted but did not create.” This is, to be sure, related to the intellectual control of the Qin, Han, and later periods, but more fundamentally it is because intellectual fruits gained by apprehension cannot, by apprehension itself, carry out reflective critique and logical deduction. The human cognitive capacity needs the whetstone of critique and rigorous logical inference, whereas apprehension can hardly be wedded to reflection and critique, still less be compatible with logical inference; it needs unconscious intuition to break through the repression of intellect. “In the pursuit of learning one increases day by day; in the pursuit of the Dao one decreases day by day”—this cannot but stifle intellectual critique and new creation, and, more seriously, obstruct the construction of the rational subject and the development of the natural sciences.

To carry forward Chinese culture, one must truly discern its essence, and this first requires cultural self-examination and cultural self-awareness, before any talk of cultural inheritance and promotion. When we find the gene of Chinese culture in the most primitive, most fundamental symbolic activity, it becomes possible to identify and clarify the essence and the dross in traditional culture, to change the state of rupture between ancient civilization and the modern, and to infuse new vitality into an ancient culture that has become a relic. The genesis, creation, and development of culture are inseparable from the cooperation of the two kinds of behavior (language)—speech-act and behavior-language—and neither may be neglected. Only by setting out from this cultural gene, the overall structure of the symbolic system, can we compare Chinese and Western culture more deeply, draw on the strengths of both, fully tap the never-exhausted potential of the two kinds of behavior (language), better combine the creative impetus stored in behavior-language with the reflection and critique of speech-act, and—in the coordination and complementarity of the two, in new cultural creation—bring the human being itself ever closer to perfection.