Zhu Dong: How can symbolic ideas under cultural mutual vision not ask things?
China News Service, Beijing, April 8 Title: How can symbolic ideas under cultural mutual vision not ask questions?
Author Zhu Dong, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University
Human beings live in a world of meaning constructed by various symbols, and symbol concepts and symbolic ideas exist in both ancient and modern times in the West. In the West, such as the ancient Greek Hippocrates' idea of syndrome symbols, Aristotle's idea of linguistic logic symbols, etc. The Inmingology of the East, such as ancient India, also contains a wealth of symbolic ideas. Since the pre-Qin era in China, the sages have used symbol systems to construct the meaning world of the Chinese nation.
The construction of the Chinese semiotic tradition is actually a process of dialogue. The semiotic pioneer Pierce once pointed out: "Thought is actually unfolded in the form of dialogue, and dialogue is essentially composed of symbols." "From the perspective of the inheritance and dissemination of human culture, the semiotic ideas of the East and the West have been continuously exchanged and integrated in history, and the ideas of semiotics are also of enlightening significance for resolving cultural conflicts in today's world."
Chinese civilization has bred rich symbolic ideas
The chinese nation's more than 5,000 years of civilization history has bred profound semiotic ideological resources. The Chinese ancestors created the all-encompassing symbol system of "Zhou Yi" in the practice of looking up and looking down, and created the all-encompassing symbolic interpretation system of "Five Elements" in analogical reasoning, but these are only spontaneous symbol applications, and the real fruitful thinking of the symbol system and entering the "semiotics" stage is in the era of great changes in the Spring and Autumn Warring States.
Hangzhou Baguatu Ruins Park. Photo by China News Service
After all, the spontaneous use of symbols to communicate and construct social meaning activities is the basic feature of human society, and when humans began to pay attention to the relationship between symbols and meaning, they entered the conscious stage of semiotics. After the Spring and Autumn Period, the etiquette system collapsed, the social disorder, the existing etiquette system could not effectively maintain the social order, there was a rupture between the inherent cultural symbols and meanings, Laozi, Confucius and other wise people began to think about the etiquette culture, the etiquette system became the object of observation and investigation, so that the etiquette system turned into the stage of etiquette. People began to think about the mechanism of the meaningful activity of the ritual system, that is, from the stage of spontaneous use of symbols to the stage of semiotic consciousness.
Therefore, although we say that symbolic activities have always accompanied human society, the history of thinking about the relationship between symbols and meaning is not as long as that of human beings themselves using symbols to communicate and disseminate meaning. Strictly speaking, it was the wise men of the Axial Age who opened the door to speculation about the ritual symbol system and its function, such as Plato and Aristotle in the West, Lao Tzu and Confucius in China. With the reflection of historians and Confucian scholars on the etiquette system from the Spring and Autumn Period onwards, the rise of etiquette, the ancestors of China turned to the stage of semiotics consciousness.
Although chinese philosophers did not put forward academic concepts similar to modern semiotics, they began to pay attention to the relationship between symbols and meaning very early on, and carried out fruitful thinking, forming unique academic issues and discourse methods, such as the relationship between form and name, the relationship between name and reality, the relationship between finger and object, the relationship between mind and matter, and the relationship between etiquette, ceremonial instruments and etiquette, which is the basis of the chinese semiotics theory.
The 2021 public sacrifice ceremony was held in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Photo by Yuan Yun, China News Service
The center of gravity of modern semiotics shifted to China
Semiotics, as a discipline that studies the ideographic mechanism of human society, has nothing to do with it, and human beings use symbolic ideography to synchronize with the development of human society. There are two main sources of modern semiotics, one is the linguistic semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and the other is the philosophical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, both of which have evolved over the decades until the 1960s, semiotics as a discipline finally emerged. Because semiotics has strong interdisciplinary methodological characteristics, as well as strong practicality and operability, it has been rapidly accepted by the academic circles of many countries in the world, and has gradually formed an international academic trend.
Chinese concept of the discipline of "semiotics" comes from a 1926 article by Zhao Yuanren entitled "Outline of Semiotics". According to Professor Zhao Yiheng of Sichuan University, Zhao Yuanren was independent of Saussure and Pierce in proposing this discipline, and was an independent proposer of Chinese semiotics. The study of semiotics in China did not develop well after Zhao Yuanren, and it was not until the 1980s, with the rise of cultural fever, that semiotics began to receive renewed attention in Chinese academic circles, and developed rapidly, in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, literature, and philosophy. Judging from the development of Chinese semiotics in this century for more than two decades, China has become an important center for international semiotic research, german scholar Roland Posner pointed out that China will become the "power house" of world semiotic research (translated as "important town"), and British scholar Paul Cobley also pointed out that "the focus of semiotics has shifted to China".
Modern semiotics originated in Europe and the United States, but developed rapidly in China, on the one hand, because China has a rich semiotic heritage, on the other hand, the era background of the comprehensive development of political, economic and cultural development in the new era provides a good opportunity for the rapid development of Chinese semiotics. In the past 20 years, Chinese society as a whole has been in a period of rapid change and rapid development, and correspondingly, the international pattern and international system are also undergoing profound changes, and semiotics has just adapted to the needs of the era of innovation and integration of humanities and social sciences under the background of great changes.
U.S. social networking giant Facebook Inc. (Facebook) announced that the company has changed its name to Meta (Metacosm) and the iconic "thumb" logo at its headquarters has also been replaced by a new logo similar to the "infinite symbol" (∞). Photo by Liu Guanguan, a reporter of the China News Service
Eastern and Western symbolic ideas learn from each other in exchange
Before the birth of modern semiotics, human society conducted an in-depth investigation of the relationship between symbols and meaning. The term semiotics comes from the ancient Greek semiotikos, and it is already mentioned in Plato's Craterus and Aristotle's Treatise on Instruments, Poetics, and Rhetoric. After Aristotle, the Stoics distinguished and discussed the different functions of symbols such as pronunciation, properties, and objects, and the semiotic discussion in the Roman period was mainly carried out within the framework of rhetoric, and Augustine's definition of symbols directly affected Saussure's conception of symbols; in the 17th century, Locke first introduced the word semiotics into English in the Theory of Human Understanding, and Locke's semiotics was an important source of Pierce's semiotic thought.
Linguistics was once an important part of ancient Indian culture, and Sanskrit dominated ancient Indian languages. After the introduction of Sanskrit and its grammatical system to Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, modern comparative linguistics emerged, which flooded a large number of linguists, including Saussure. Pierce and Saussure were the pioneers of modern semiotics, which shows that their semiotic ideas were influenced by traditional culture.
Buddhist tantric pagoda tiles inscribed in Sanskrit and tabular tiles. Photo by Liu Ranyang, a reporter from China News Service
The Chinese national culture has a long history, the ancestors of the Chinese nation learned to use the symbol model to guide the practice of production and life very early in the exchange with the natural world, and in the axial era, they carried out fruitful reflections on the relationship between symbols and meaning, leaving a rich semiotic heritage and completing the ethical turn of ancient Chinese semiotic thought.
The study of semiotics in modern China was also produced by the integration of Cultural Exchanges between China and the West. The study of semiotics in Chinese academic circles began with the translation and study of Western semiotic theories in the linguistic community, especially Saussure's theory of linguistic semiotics, which had a great influence in China. Since the beginning of this century, Chinese academic circles have paid more attention to the mutual interpretation of Chinese and Western semiotics, paid attention to the cultural context based on Chinese characteristics, and theoretically eclectic, gradually opening up a path of semiotics research with Chinese characteristics.
Semiotic ideas have enlightening implications for the dialogue of civilizations today
The cultural world created by human beings, including material culture, institutional culture and spiritual culture, is actually constructed by symbols. The culture of a nation is, in its form, the sum of its way of life and modes of expression, which embodies its way of thinking and ideas. The cultural characteristics and national character of the Chinese nation are shaped by its unique culture, and the culture of the nation is determined by its symbol mechanism and way of thinking, such as the image thinking mode of the Chinese nation, focusing on integrity, synchronicity, multi-dimensional perspective, etc. In this way, by deeply examining a nation's semiotic thoughts, we can fundamentally grasp its thinking laws and cultural characteristics, which is more conducive to exchanges and mutual learning between heterogeneous cultures.
In a larger scope, the difference and diversity of symbol resources is also an important embodiment of the cultural differences of various ethnic groups and the diversity of global meaning, the so-called seeking common ground while reserving differences is to respect the differences and pluralism of the symbol system, and try to maintain the richness of global culture. The ancestors said that "harmony with real beings, the same is not continued", that is, to emphasize diversity and oppose unity. The world of unity lacks differences, cannot form a world of rich meaning, and cannot provide symbolic impetus for development. Man is a symbolic animal that pursues meaning, the so-called five-color writing, five sounds into music, five tastes into food, mostly pay attention to the diversity of differences to form a unity of the "and", if there is only one color, one tone, one taste, it is difficult to form a colorful living world.
Photo by Han Shiyuan, China News Service
The in-depth development of today's semiotics is closely related to the rapid development and change of political economy and cultural media at home and abroad, and contemporary culture is a highly symbolic culture driven by digital technology. Digital space is the largest network of symbols woven by human beings so far, human beings in the digital space, basically bid farewell to the material world and arrived at the symbol world, digital survival of human beings is not in the material space, but in the digital coding of the main symbol space, the more developed the digital symbol code, the more distant the human society from the real material space.
Metacosm is the digitization and symbolization process of the real world, with the development of the metacosm, human society will enter a highly symbolic survival of the world, which will be a higher dimension of reality and virtual interaction and integration of the world, explore the future survival and development of human society, semiotics will also contribute its unique academic wisdom. (End)
About the Author:
Zhu Dong is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University. He is mainly engaged in the teaching and research of ancient Chinese thought and culture, and the dissemination of semiotics. He presided over the completion of one national social science fund project and participated in a number of major bidding projects of the national social science fund. He has won a Youth Achievement Award of the 8th Outstanding Achievement Award of Scientific Research in Colleges and Universities of the Ministry of Education. He has published 3 works such as "Research on Pre-Qin Symbolic Thought" and "TheOry of the History of Ancient Chinese Symbolic Thought", edited many books such as "Semiotic Fields" and other works, and published more than 50 academic papers in various journals.