Some declare that “language is the tool of communication” and “language is the tool of thought,” and so bestow upon language its highest honor. Yet, unexpectedly, once language declines into a mere tool, it loses its original exuberant vitality and withers by the day into gray and dried-out wood. Language is not merely a tool; it not only will not let itself be arranged and driven at will, but in turn often covertly toys with man and makes a fool of him. “The words and letters of language are as cunning as a snake.” To deal with language is like dancing in attendance on a snake. Language is a world, an existence that ceaselessly lives and grows. Man and language are forever in a relation of myriad transformations. When man treats language well, language too gives man spiritual shelter and consolation of the heart; when man enslaves language, language turns instead into man's cage. Language seems to possess a self-opposed double character, and according to the changes of the relation it unfolds all manner of different countenances.
1. Divinity and Instrumentality
Genesis has a record like this: God created heaven and earth. At first the form of heaven and earth was chaotic and dim, shrouded in darkness. God said, “Let there be light!” and thereupon light appeared, and heaven and earth became distinct. Here, God obtained light not by some other means but by language. Language is sacred; it has the most primal creative power. Without language, the myriad things of heaven and earth would still be chaotic and unclear. Without language, neither human society nor the society's human beings could form. Man lives in the world of language. The bounds of language are the bounds of man. The state of language's existence is also the state of man's spirit. The divinity of language gestates man's subjectivity, while the disreputable dissolution of language conduces to man's self-abandonment and sinking, to the collapse of reason and the disintegration of society. To guard the dignity of language and to maintain the divinity of language are one and the same thing. Such phrases as “the Son of Heaven makes no jest,” “the gentleman is grave in his promises,” “a single word, the nine sacred tripods,” and “a team of swift horses cannot overtake the tongue,” all trace back to the divine feature of language. Because language has divinity, in the hands of the sorcerer it became a magic spell of boundless efficacy for summoning gods and driving off demons; in the ordinary household it became the auspicious spring-couplets and peach-charms pasted up to ward off evil and pray for blessing. Those auspicious characters pasted year after year at the door are by no means only the expression of a fine wish; more fundamentally, they spring from man's conviction of the divinity of language, the belief that language has the power to bring happiness to humankind — just as the single phrase “open sesame” could open the gate of a hidden treasure-trove and bring its dazzling jewels suddenly before your eyes.
In The New Science, Vico, from the angle of cultural anthropology, made a profound reflection on the origin of human thought and language. He holds that in the most ancient “age of the gods,” man's power of imagination was strongest and his power of reasoning weakest, and out of ignorance of the world he always displayed concrete things as substantial existences infused with life by a god, so that each thing partook of divinity. The language formed under the influence of this divine notion therefore also carried divinity. Primal myth and language are one and the same. Vico cited the research of Varro: among the Latins three myriad names of gods had been collected, and the Latins, relying on this set of vocabulary, expressed all the needs of living; the Greek gods too numbered three myriad, and they took every stone, water-source, brook, and plant for a god. Vico therefore inferred: “The myths of the Greeks and the Latins must surely be true hieroglyphs, or the alphabet of the gods.” [1]
Cassirer further developed Vico's view. He holds that language and myth are both founded upon intuitive experience. Primitive man could not yet freely dominate intuitive material with his intellect, discover the connections among things, and so transcend the limits of intuitive experience; on the contrary, he was captured by the intuition that suddenly came to the fore. At this moment, the self pours its whole energy and force into this single object, lives within this single object, sinks into this single object, the whole heart filled with fear, hope, excitement, or fascination, “bewitched” by it. Once this highly concentrated impulse is released, the subject's inner emotional state is objectified as a god or demon appearing face to face before the mind, and at the same time condenses into a word. “Even after language and myth have risen far above the momentary intuition limited by sense, even after they have both long broken through their original fetters, they must still for a long time be inseparably wound about one another.” [2] The common headstream of language and myth, and their long inseparable entanglement, decided the divine character of language.
The divinity of language is most universally manifested in primitive man's experience of the mysterious power of language. Primitive man did not take language for a concept or a simple label, but always saw it as a concrete, substantial, sacred thing. Language had a mysterious power, and therefore one could not utter at will one's own name or another's; even the name of the dead could not be used. To utter someone's name meant to touch his very person directly, meant to commit violence upon him, to force him to appear and so possibly bring great danger. The so-called “taboo” of later ages is the residue of this mysterious experience. The names of other existing things were likewise so. The Santal of India, meeting a leopard or tiger while hunting, would call out “cat” or something else. The Warramunga of Australia, when conversing, avoided directly calling out the true names of those addressed; for to use the true name would make one lose control over the snake and instead be devoured by it. When a North American Cherokee was bitten by a rattlesnake, he would say only, “I have been pricked by a thorn,” and when he killed an eagle, he would say, “I have killed a snowbird.” This was done in order to deceive the souls of the rattlesnake and the eagle. [3]
With the development of man's cognitive ability, primitive thinking gradually dissolved, and language began to separate from what it signified. But the divinity of language did not entirely fall away and fade. Man always could employ language to distinguish himself from the animals, and thereby called himself the “lord of the myriad things.” Language is the ground on which man wins his unique dignity, and is the guardian-god maintaining his own dignity. With language, man's experience could condense and his perception become clear, as Heidegger says: “The word keeps and preserves all things within existence; if there were no such word, then the wholeness of things — that is, the ‘world’ — would sink into a dim darkness; including ‘I,’ that is, the ‘I’ that brings to the borderland the wonders and dreams that others have met, and bears them toward the source of the name, would also sink into a dim darkness.” [4] Language lets the world be named and lets the myriad things be distinguished; the world thereby becomes man's world and presents itself to man. At the same time, man and object, man and world, are also distinguished. Language plays an indispensable, important role in the differentiation of man and world. Man not only relies on language to distinguish himself from the world of objects, but always relies on language or myth to measure the world, to know the world, to rule the world in imagination; on the other hand, he also relies on language to know himself and to gestate the self. Language is a sacred light; it is what makes the chaotic, dim heart-mind shine; language is also a road of divinity, what brings human feeling to the myriad things and makes the myriad things kin and near to man. The divine feature and the human feature of language illumine man's soul, moisten man's self, condense man's self, and gradually cultivate man's subjectivity, until at last man becomes an existence with infinite cognitive power and inexhaustible force.
The divinity of language gestates man's subjectivity; and man, having gained subjectivity — like the genie released from Solomon's bottle — willfully intends to bring all things, including language, into the compass of his conquest and servitude. The greater the role language plays for man's existence, the more man tends to take language as his own tool, striving to tame it, use it, drive it at will, alter and regulate it. Language became an object cruelly enslaved, and its divine light dimmed by the day. One may say that the decline of language is, to a degree, the bitter fruit brewed by language's own divine feature. Precisely because language is wondrous and sacred, the man who, by virtue of language, has divine power also becomes the lord of the myriad things, a god standing above all existence. And once man becomes the lord, becomes a god, the crisis of the disreputable decline of language is latent; man ceaselessly inflates the self and gradually forgets the divinity and mystery of language. Thereupon man no longer reveres language, but instead takes a legalistic, manipulating attitude toward it; language becomes the product of man's arbitrary fashioning, an extremely compliant and obedient tool. The divinity and instrumentality of language wax and wane against each other and are mutually opposed; language sways between these two opposed poles. The fading of language's divinity makes man enslave language as a tool; and once degraded into a tool, language's divinity is fated to be forced into hiding.
As a tool, convenience, determinacy, and clarity are its own proper nature; therefore it is laterally pressed, pruned, and trimmed, chained into logical links and woven into a network of structure. The language-tool becomes a tightly organized system, and the word becomes a vacant position within the system, decided by the system, having no divinity but only instrumentality and servility, even losing its own independent life, all its value embodied only in linguistic relations. The word, and even language, has gradually shrunk into a pale concept, a floating empty sound, a formless, gray, nearly congealed network of structure. Of course, this is not to say that the divinity of language utterly ceases to exist. In the process of language's decline into a tool, divinity is gradually worn away, but it is still always hidden, preserved within such linguistic forms as the contract, the covenant, and the law, and especially comes prominently to the fore in poetic language. Divinity and instrumentality are always in a relation of mutual hiding and mutual waxing-and-waning.
2. Disclosure and Concealment
In the essay “Logos,” Heidegger made a systematic study of the word logos. He holds that sound, voicing, sign, and representation all cannot reveal the essence of language. In the early Greek period, logos meant both “to say” and “to let something appear.” That is to say, in the early period, the appearing of things was because of saying, and the saying of language was also the appearing of things. Saying and appearing were synonymous. Man possesses language, and things thereby appear to man, and the world thereby opens to man. The saying of language must first be heard by man, and man's self also opens. Language says, man listens to language saying, and then follows in saying: language becomes the closest neighbor of man's existence. “Once man, thinking, looks around at existence, he immediately touches language, and with language goes to regulate what is disclosed by the regulating side of language.” [5] On the contrary, apart from language, world and man's self both sink into the deep abyss of darkness. “Even if we were born with a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, a thousand hands, and many other sense-organs and organs, so long as our essence is not rooted in the power of speech, all existence would still be closed to us.” [6]
In Gadamer's view, man's process of understanding is precisely the process of seeking a common language; man's whole experience of the world has linguistic character. “The world itself is embodied in language. The linguistic experience of the world is ‘absolute.’ It transcends all relativity set in existence, because it embraces all things-in-themselves, forever displaying within some relation… therefore, the basic relation of language and world by no means signifies that the world becomes the object of language. The thing taken as the object of cognition and statement is, rather, always already embraced by the linguistic world-horizon.” [7] Without language, man cannot enter the activity of understanding, cannot gain experience; man, though living within the world, is yet in a chaotically closed-off state. On one hand, man cannot distinguish himself from the world; on the other, the world is to man also a veil, a separation. Only through language can man distinguish, experience, and understand the world. “Language gave us the first entrance toward the object; it is as though a magic spell opened the gate of the world of conceptual understanding.” [8] Therefore, without language, man is not yet a man in the sense of existence — or rather, not yet “man”; without language, the world too is not yet man's world. “The bounds of language are the bounds of the world.”
Likewise, it is also because of language that man can carry out self-reflection and self-understanding. Through language, the originally dim, indistinct inner experience is raised into conscious awareness; the subconscious too is combed, analyzed, and interpreted by language. Although the heart's black box still far from being fully revealed, deeply hiding much mystery, and although the normativity of language leaks out and even suppresses much unconscious content, language, after all, ceaselessly provides the possibility of excavating these deep connotations. The bounds of language are likewise the bounds of man's self-conscious world. The development of language, the broadening of the domain of language, the enrichment of language, all ceaselessly broaden man's inner and outer world. As Marx says: “‘Spirit’ was, from the very start, unlucky, fated to be ‘entangled’ by matter, which here manifests itself as vibrating layers of air, sound — in short, language. Language and consciousness have an equally long history; language is a practical consciousness, a real consciousness that exists for others and, only therefore, also for myself.” [9]
Language opens man's inner and outer worlds, making these two worlds interconnected, intercommunicating, mutually reflecting, mutually merging; and so man becomes man, and the world becomes man's world. At the same time, language also sets the bounds of man's inner and outer worlds, sets the territory of man's cognitive activity and spiritual freedom; the expansion of man's inner and outer worlds and the enlargement of spiritual freedom must necessarily rely on linguistic innovation. From this angle, the impact and breakthrough that the “May Fourth” New Culture Movement made upon classical written Chinese has a significance far beyond the pursuit of the unity of writing and speech, and beyond using vernacular to spread new foreign thought; its spiritual essence lies in this: the new language produced by this linguistic revolution and linguistic innovation transcended both classical written Chinese and the original vernacular, thereby forming a — though not yet mature — wholly new linguistic form, which provided the possibility of opening new spiritual domains and excavating a new world of the heart. Its deep cause is precisely the pursuit of spiritual freedom and the longing for a new spiritual realm.
Yet language is, after all, the intermediary between man and world, and because of this intermediary the directness of the relation of man and world is changed. Language both connects man with world and separates man from world. Once man's connection with the world is transformed from the direct animal-state relation into an indirect relation taking language as intermediary, it greatly strengthens man's communion with, knowledge of, and grasp of the world, and enlarges the scope of communion, cognition, and grasp; but language, as intermediary, cannot possibly be pure and transparent. As Humboldt says, language is a worldview; man views the world through the colored lens of language. This too decides that the world both can be illuminated and disclosed by language, and is subject to language's filtering, distortion, coloring, deformation. The world by no means lies bare and direct before man with its true face; it is displayed through the refraction of a particular language, and so is, to a degree, obstructed and concealed.
When Gadamer discussed the relation of word and thing, he pointed out that in the time of the ancients and in early Greek philosophy, the unity of word and thing was taken as self-evident, and language itself had a “thingliness” (Sachlichkeit). By Plato's time, the splitting of word and thing began. [10] The splitting of word and thing made language indeterminate; this both provided infinite possibility for the word's gaining a rich connotation and also conduced to the word's gradually turning into a hollow concept or label. On one hand, the primal sensuous connotation of the word fades by the day; on the other, habitual notions and prejudices gradually accumulate within language. Especially when language is woven into a network of structure suspended above the material world, language and the world become ever more remote. Therefore the intermediary of language is neither identical with thing and world nor condenses the living primal experience about thing and world; language itself becomes no longer pure and transparent: habit and prejudice, along with language, conceal thing and world; and language's fixed pattern and order forcibly trim and distort the world.
In Renderings of Words in the Human World (Renjian Cihua), Wang Guowei raised the distinction of the “veiled” (ge) and the “unveiled” (buge). He says: “The fault of the scene-painting of such masters as Meixi and Mengchuang lies wholly in the single word ‘veiled.’” “The poems of Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun are unveiled; the poems of Su Dongpo are unveiled.” “When every word lies right before the eyes, that is the unveiled.” The “unveiled” is language's power to summon and disclose existence: it summons existence before our eyes and sets it under the light. For example, “by the pond grows spring grass” renders, in plain language, the irrepressible, quietly burgeoning, vibrant scene of the spring grasses; while “from the empty beam falls swallow-mud” renders the desolate scene vividly before the reader's brow. So Wang Guowei praises them as “wondrous, and nothing but unveiled.” Here, the “unveiled” refers to language's power of disclosure; it makes the reader's perception suddenly open and makes existence appear vividly before the eyes. And the scene-writing of Jiang Kui — “the four-and-twenty bridges are still there; the heart of the wave sways, the cold moon makes no sound,” “a few peaks in clear bitterness, weighing whether to bring the dusk-rain” — and “the high tree's late cicada speaks of the news of the west wind,” “though lofty in tone, yet like viewing flowers through mist, in the end veiled by one layer” [11] — the “veiled” is both constrained by the poet's power of depiction and at the same time constrained by language itself. Language's hiding of, and appearing of, existence binds the poet, often leaving him helpless before the infinitely rich, ever-changing sensuous world.
The duality of language's disclosure and concealment is most clearly manifested in the process of the generation of metaphor.
Gottfried Benn, in his poem “A Word,” evokes how a word, a sentence, rises out of a cipher — a familiar life, an abrupt meaning — at which the sun halts, the spheres fall silent, and all things gather toward the word. The birth of every new word is accompanied by a rich, vivid vitality, and with its light illuminates a whole sensuous heaven and earth. The word gathers man's experience; the word summons man and thing into a luminous mutual place. When a word awakens a new feature of the object, that feature suddenly comes to the fore in a previously unseen freshness. In Water Margin, “Black Whirlwind” and “White Streak in the Waves,” simple metaphorical nicknames, make the character's image leap forth in our eyes; “frost on a donkey-dung pellet” renders alive the powdered, made-up face of “Third Fairy Aunt” in The Marriage of Young Blacky. Gao Xinyong holds: “Comparison (or metaphor) is the most effective, most basic cognitive operation; it lets us, in the flash of analogy, reach a new insight into things, advance from the known to the unknown, and turn the unknowable into the knowable.” [12] Comparison and metaphor, as a device of defamiliarization, do not function, as Russian Formalism says, to increase perceptual difficulty and prolong perceptual time. Comparison and metaphor, by their strangeness, of course increase the difficulty of perception; but while negating our habitual way of perceiving and our old perceptual experience, they at the same time open another wholly new dimension of perception, letting man, “in the flash of analogy, reach a new insight into things.”
Yet, in the process of language's ceaseless living and growing, some repeatedly used words ceaselessly age, fade in luster, and lose vitality, becoming stale, cliché linguistic husks, even losing life. When the word “comrade” was first introduced and used, it contained how deep a meaning and feeling — a single address of “comrade” was enough to bring tears. Likewise, the two characters for “exploitation” were once spattered with blood and shocking to the heart. Yet before long, “comrade” became a content-pale courtesy address, used to anyone, its meaning nearly equal to a mere “hey,” no longer containing the sense of “sharing a common aim.” “Exploitation” too came to express only a plain economic relation; the blood-tinge originally contained within the relation among people had already vanished, until people no longer even felt it to be a metaphor. With the “aging” of the word, its power to disclose perception and disclose existence gradually wanes. Thereupon, perception becomes numb, habitualized; existence is hidden, concealed. In fact, however richly expressive language may be, while it discloses certain features of the object, it must necessarily omit and obstruct certain other features. Disclosure and concealment too are in a relation of mutual hiding.
3. Liberation and Despotism
Language both liberates man and enslaves man. Language distinguishes man from world and distinguishes the object; this gives man a fundamental liberation. Man is no longer bound to the world of things, no longer crawling before the sensuous object, but raises himself up from the world of objects and rises above the world. Without language, man cannot make this distinction, and so cannot clearly perceive the world, still less know the world, and so cannot gain his own liberation. And the splitting of word and thing makes man's liberation greatly advance a step; man can recall the past or long for the future beyond the present, just as Cassirer says: “Only the use of the sign in expression can produce the possibility of looking forward and looking back.” [13] Language is not a sensuous reality, yet it can arouse human sensibility, and because it has shed sensuous directness and acquired a free feature, man's imagination has the vast space to soar freely. Compared with painting and other signs, language sheds the material burden more thoroughly; its degree of freedom and its transcendence are far greater. Language is the wing of man's thinking, association, and fantasy; therefore, with language, man has a space of thought and imagination far vaster than the physical world in which he lives. This is a boundless free domain of man. Man, occupying this free world, becomes a transcendent existence.
“Every word is a road of transcendence.” [14] Through the word, man can both enter deeply into the self and transcend the self; both enter deeply into nature and transcend nature; both enter deeply into society and transcend society; both enter deeply into history and transcend history. The word signifies the world of objects, leading us to approach and know the world of objects. The word constructs the world of language, a world of language that is both connected with the world of objects and yet different from it, suspended above the world of objects. In this kingdom of language, man's finitude in temporal and spatial existence is overcome; man is no longer a finite material existence, for he has found a road toward liberation, toward eternity. “In the community of language, what humankind first finds is its charter of freedom.” [15]
Language not only liberates man from the material world, ushering him into the free domain of time and space, but also liberates man from the confinement of the self. In Schaff's Introduction to Linguistics is recorded the experience of the congenitally deaf and blind Helen Keller as she first learned the word “water”; she said: “This living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, and joy, and let it gain liberation.” [16] It is precisely language that, for the first time, opened the world to Helen Keller and made it her world; it is precisely language that let Helen Keller gain her own true life. Language is the freest channel for communicating man's inner world and outer world. Language contains a “geological stratification,” and it is precisely in this wondrous, richly-bestowing world of language that the bounds of man's inner world and the external objective world are torn down, and man gains the best communion and merging — just as Heidegger says, heaven, earth, man, and god gather together in language.
Language is historically formed; within language is accumulated the sediment of social-historical culture, and there exists a historically-cast inertia. “Not only can the individual not change it in the slightest even if he wishes, but the masses too cannot exercise their sovereignty over any single word; whatever language may be like, the masses are all bound together with it.” [17] Language-habit and language-rules are the necessary premise of language's becoming a tool of communication; only by following certain habits and rules can language be understood and communed. At the same time, it is precisely in the process of communion that language-habits and rules are ceaselessly strengthened. Language-habit and language-rules become a compulsory force that man cannot but obey. Therefore some hold that it is not “man speaks language,” but “man speaks following language,” and even “language speaks man.” Man cannot do without language; man is set within the world of language. The moment man opens his mouth, or thinks, or has a flashing notion, language has already intervened. Even man's perception of the external world cannot do without language, for the perceived world is distinguished and delimited precisely through language. Thereupon, language-habit and language-rules not only rule the communion of man with man, but also constrain man's thought and perception. “Every man is the prisoner of his own language.” [18]
Language's despotism over man is also manifested in language's unknowingly, imperceptibly imposing ideology upon man. In Rhetoric and Literary Reading, Gao Xinyong proposes: “Value and ideology are carried by language, are cast into language; and language cannot be changed all at once, so the value it carries is also ceaselessly internalized, accepted by us as a part of nature, and is therefore relatively hard to break.” [19] For example, in modern society, with the spread of language, the notions of commercial society are also smuggled in. “Investment” originally was used only in economic activity, but now, with “healthy investment,” “intellectual investment,” and even “talent investment,” “emotional investment,” the “emotion” that was once held to be sacred and pure has now also become a kind of “capital,” whose outlay is only to exchange for and obtain a rich “profit.” As for “market,” once the word was extended from “vegetable market” and “poultry-and-egg market” to “talent market,” talent too became a commodity to be bought and sold. Yet people accepted it with extreme calm and ease, not feeling that this is a profanation of man, still less associating it with the historical “slave market,” and even taking their own high “price-tag” as an honor. Compared with social despotism, language's despotism over man is formless, and also more comprehensive, more inner, penetrating to the marrow. It chains man's thinking and makes him willingly bow before the authority of language.
4. Selflessness and Selfhood
Language is “dialogic”; so long as it is used for dialogue, it must be what man holds in common and not what is one's own private property. One may say that the moment man opens his mouth to speak, he has already left the self and fallen into the quagmire of the public. In the essay “Man and Language,” Gadamer holds that one of the basic features of language is “selflessness.” He says: man, to speak, must surely be speaking to someone, and this must be understandable by others. What others cannot understand is not speaking. Therefore, “in this sense one may say, speaking does not belong to the domain of ‘I’ but to the domain of ‘we.’” “The spiritual reality of language is precisely the spirit that unifies me and you.” [20]
This “plural” feature of language endows it with a great condensing power. A common language integrates man with man into a social whole and constructs a common cultural tradition and spiritual realm. Language becomes the most effective coalescent of a people. In the Old Testament of the Bible, God, by changing the tongue of the people below, made their speech mutually unintelligible and human society scatter, so that in the end the Tower of Babel reaching to heaven could not be built. If language fell into chaos and entirely lost the feature of “our common possession,” then human society would collapse and disintegrate, the ground of man's existence would be shaken, and man could not survive.
On the other hand, language is also spoken and written by each concrete man. Every man always speaks and writes in his own unique “my” way. According to his own aims, setting out from his own understanding of language, he uses language in his own way and stamps upon language the imprint of his personal style. (The “selflessness” and “selfhood” of this essay are by no means aimed respectively at the two levels Saussure proposed — “language” [langue] and “speech” [parole] — but are discussed only at the level of “speech.”) Within Saussure's discourse on language is contained the following thought: “Language is not an objective existence, not a substance, but a value, and therefore language is precisely the discovery of individuality.” [21] As a value, language cannot possibly be “neutral”; it must necessarily be permeated by the experience, evaluation, and emotion of the language-user — that is, stamped with the user's personal imprint. The writer and poet deliberately pursue the individual feature of language, lauding the so-called “original-creation work”; Du Fu's “if the words do not startle, I will not rest till death” precisely displays language's “selfhood.” One may say that whether one forms one's own linguistic style is a mark of whether a writer is mature, and the uniqueness and richness of style is often an important expression of a writer's creative power. Whether it be the cold, steep sharpness of Lu Xun's language, the pure authentic Beijing dialect of Lao She's humor, or the passion-filled surging current of Ba Jin's language, their unique linguistic styles all have an irreplaceability. As Bakhtin says: “Behind every utterance, every speech-genre (style), every voicing, there hides the (typical, unique) living individuality of the speaker.” [22] Gadamer too saw this point. In a later essay, “Semantics and Hermeneutics,” he pointed out that within language there exist two mutually conflicting tendencies: “One of these two tendencies is the continuous individualizing tendency within language; the other is the essential tendency of language, namely, the tendency to fix meaning by convention. For very evidently, what is most basic for the life of language is that we can never possibly speak apart from the convention of language: a person who speaks a private language no one can understand simply is not speaking. But on the other hand, a person who chooses words by convention and loses the power and appeal of speaking — for him too, the individualization of language will appear only along with the vocabulary of language and the way of communion.” [23] Here, Gadamer correctly pointed out the two mutually contradictory tendencies in language; but in his view these two tendencies are evidently unequal: conventionalization — that is, “selflessness” — is the basic, essential tendency, bearing upon the life of language, while individualization — that is, “selfhood” — is non-essential, an added ornament. In fact, this view is somewhat one-sided. Linguistic individualization is by no means an added, dispensable thing; it likewise bears upon the life of language and is a basic tendency. Without the individualizing tendency, language loses its source-water; it degenerates into a lifeless thing, even finally becoming a fossilized, dead language. Only when both are possessed at once will language be ceaselessly new amid its conflict, living and growing without end.
5. Self-Forgetting and Self-Display
As a tool, while language signifies the object, it is itself forgotten and vanishes. In everyday life, language is used by man only as a means, and people are too familiar with it, even to the point of forgetting its independent value as a means. When language signifies a real object, language seems no longer to have the necessity of existing; it seems to become a shadow attached to the real object, a shadow with no life, no weight, no independent existence of its own. So Ricoeur says: “Language is seeking to vanish; it seeks to die as an object.” [24] This is precisely what Zhuangzi called “catching the fish and forgetting the fish-trap.” Ingarden calls this language's “perspectival foreshortening”; Gadamer calls it language's “self-forgetting.” He says: “Language has an essential self-forgetting.” “Living language is utterly unconscious of the structure, grammar, and syntax of language that linguistics studies.” Not only do we not notice linguistic structure, grammar, and syntax; if the sound used is one of everyday habit, we likewise neglect its existence. “The more vivid language is, the less we can notice it.” [25]
But language is, after all, an existence, a unique existence with sound or writing as its material carrier. Sound and writing both have their own sensuous quality; although in everyday use they often retreat behind, they may always at any moment display themselves. Especially when language is no longer used as a means or tool but has its own independent value, its sensuous feature suddenly comes to the fore — as in the musical rhythm of poetry. The art of Chinese calligraphy is likewise so. Richards holds that poetry “is an intermediary of intuitive language; it can substantially transmit feeling.” [26] Ingarden regards the literary work as a “multi-layered construction,” and this multi-layered construction takes precisely the language of the literary work, situated in aesthetic-intentional connections, as its starting point, constructed and displayed by language. He says: “The literary work is a multi-layered construction. It includes (a) the layer of word-sound and phonetic formation, together with a higher-order phenomenon; (b) the layer of meaning-units: the layer of sentence-meaning and the meaning of whole groups of sentences; (c) the layer of schematized aspects, through which the various objects depicted by the work are presented; (d) the layer of objects depicted in the intentional states of affairs projected by the sentences.” In Ingarden's view, each of these layers contains aesthetic-value qualities, and together they constitute the work's special “polyphony.” [27] That is to say, in the literary work, language is no longer “transparent”; it does not point toward the real object and vanish, but, within the aesthetic intention, fully displays its own multi-layeredness, displays the aesthetic feature of each layer, and thereby constructs a polyphonic harmony. Language is not always transparent, without independent value and self-forgetting; it also displays itself, displays its own “geological” layers, and the whole body shines with sensuous light, displaying its own independent value.
6. Language Is a Chameleon
Language is many-sided and ever-changing; it has a seemingly self-opposed double character: it has both “divinity” and “instrumentality,” both “disclosure” and “concealment,” both the power of “liberation” and the harm of “despotism,” both “selfhood” and “selflessness,” and it both makes for “self-forgetting” and can “self-display.” Language is simply a chameleon, ceaselessly changing its different countenances. Among these opposed dualities, “divinity” and “instrumentality” is the most basic pair of contradictions, and it decides the conversion of the other pairs; while the conversion of “divinity” and “instrumentality” depends precisely on the change in the relation between man and language. So long as man takes language as a tool, a means, language's divinity vanishes; language no longer has independent value, because man attends only to what language signifies and states, and need not attend to language itself. Language becomes “transparent,” “self-forgetting.” As the tool we all use in common, language must follow a common order, common rules, and accord with common logic; otherwise it cannot be used for everyday communion. Linguistic order, rules, and logic in turn bind and suppress man himself. When man takes language as a tool, as a slave, language likewise takes man as a slave. The language of “selflessness” intends to homogenize man into a “we” of unified specification, having only commonality and lacking individuality (for example, the language of the Cultural Revolution), and to empty the individual into a “selfless” individual (for example, bureaucratic language). Human nature withers, man's sensibility shrinks; an impoverished human nature can face only an impoverished world, and a pale sensibility can face only a pale world. The world will by no means open to a man whose humanity and sensibility have withered; it fades, it conceals itself.
On the contrary, once man no longer regards language as a tool but treats it as the “Thou” of which Martin Buber speaks, the independent value of language itself comes to display. In the “I—Thou” relation — that is, in the aesthetic-intentional relation — the “geological layers” that language contains come to the fore; it newly recovers its own life, recovers its divinity and magic. Language's rich aesthetic layers are constructed into Ingarden's “polyphonic harmony” and Heidegger's so-called “poetic existence,” thereby sheltering humankind's free spirit and nourishing man's sensibility. After language becomes independent, its value depends on its own feature, that is, on “selfhood.” The more distinct the feature of “mine,” the higher the independent value language has. Therefore, “defamiliarization” too became an important path by which literary language gains its poetic feature. The independence of language is anti-order, anti-norm; it tends toward a free republic of language transcending logical norms, and at the root releases man's spiritual fetters. Like the magic wand that turns iron to gold, language that has shed instrumentality and regained divinity restores to humankind a sensuously brilliant, poetic world.