Haining Langzhong Lou Guanyan, over eight years old, healthy and refreshing, good at reading, good at making friends, well-read, and wonderful. We have known each other for many years, and he once accompanied me to watch the tide of Qiantang, visit the old people's residences, talk about the past and present of Haining, and talk about the local Wuyin and Yue language. For more than 20 years, he has used his spare time to complete a number of papers on etymology, exegesis, phonology, and archaeology. "The New Certificate" is nearing completion. A few days ago, I was given a copy to hear different opinions. I don't understand etymology, exegesis and other things, and I am even more of a layman when I am so detailed that I speak Wu Yin Yue. But since there is such a book, and it is dedicated to "me", as a philosophical researcher, I am naturally very interested.
It's a question of exegesis, but it's also a matter of philosophy
After reading several chapters, I found that there were at least two problems that Hegel discussed or wanted to solve in his Phenomenology of Spirit, so I did not take the liberty of distinguishing the philosophical understanding of the "の" in speech and the "I" in words in origin. In the colloquial expression of modern people, "の" in many dialects means "I". I was born in Xi'an, and the people of Xi'an pronounce "の" when they say "I".
Mr. Lou keenly discovered: "Historically, you (two, ear) and he (it, snake) have been enlightened early, but the main "I" has always been vague. This may be a problem in exegesis, but it is more of a philosophical one.
What is "I"? Hegel said, "I am a kind of epistemic function", and to know, first of all, is to know "this one" or "that one" around us, which Hegel called "perceptual certainty". You or he (tree or house) are the first to be recognized as "perceptual certainty"; Knowing, here can also be simply understood as "seeing": I see him and you (tree or house) because he and you exist there, but "seeing" him or yours "seeing" is what we cannot see. When mothers teach their children to recognize things, they usually point to "this one" or "that one" and ask, "What is this?" When you point to your child and ask, "Who is this?" Children usually say, "It's Apple or Round," instead of "This is me." So Hegel directly says that the object that exists as him or you really exists, and that the "seeing" of seeing him or you, i.e., "I", can exist or may not exist (cf. Phenomenology of Spirit, A. Consciousness, Chapter 1, "Sensuous Certainty: The One and the Meaning"). Therefore, human beings will only "see" themselves in the end, that is, they have the consciousness of themselves, and know that the existence of the self is the ultimate basis for the existence of all external things such as him or you, trees or houses. When the "I" disappears, so does the external object. Of course, there are others, and others can still see the existence of foreign objects. Although this is already a very simple truth or common sense, it is not that when children see their father and mother, they can understand that there is such a relationship between the existence of father and mother and their own existence. Compared with the existence of father and mother, one's own existence can only be realized last, and even think that whether there is oneself or not, father and mother will exist. This is the first question that Hegel first clarified when he first talked about philosophy, when he talked about "this one and the meaning of this one". Some people spend their entire lives unaware of the stakes of this issue.
The first thing to do is to think of man as a conscious animal
On the second question, Mr. Lou borrowed the opinions of Western scholars such as Darwin and Herder, and also believed that "language is a gradual process of natural selection, which originates from the imitation of various sounds of nature by human beings", and "the earliest words of human beings were produced by imitating the sounds of the objective world, especially the sounds of animals".
As a result, Mr. Lou was amazed that the natural Chinese vowel "I" and the "の" of Ou Ming were exactly the same sound, and even the tone was surprisingly consistent. So, he guessed that this "I", that is, "の", originated from the chirping of seagulls.
It is impossible not to admit that this is a very bold and challenging guess. The general logic is that man receives language from the teacher of nature, and repeats the sounds of nature, especially animals, entirely through hearing (without which it is impossible to invent language, and hearing is precisely between touch and sight in transmitting information). Because man cannot invent sounds, he can only discover and imitate them. "With the sense of touch as a companion, the visual proximity, and the hearing sense as the primary organ that facilitates the achievement of language, we can listen and think at the same time, and these organs are combined, and it is not far from becoming language, and we become creatures with language."
Is that so? Is it completely passive to accept and imitate nature in becoming a "creature with language"? Existence, cause and effect, truth, justice, logic, from which animal voices can be imitated? And without such language, how can people listen and think at the same time? Without language, one cannot think at all. You could say that these words (concepts) were heard from ancient people or foreigners. But where did the ancients and foreigners hear about it? This is what I heard from Moses, from God. But what we heard from Moses and from God also needs to know the meaning of "の" or any kind of pronunciation in the world, and know the meaning of "this one" or "that one." Otherwise, just pronouncing (whatever it is) won't help. Moreover, because "listening" disappears instantly, only by turning it into words (bone inscriptions and oracle bone inscriptions mentioned by Mr. Lou) and into pictures (rock paintings of the ancients) can future generations learn and think about the sound is this word, and understand its meaning. Mr. Lou said that it is after people have the "I" of speech that they create a "me" of words, and then they have civilization. In fact, the "I" of speech has to refer to and meaning, what does it refer to? What does that mean? If you are not aware of these problems, it doesn't matter much if you have a "me" with or without words.
The most important thing in this is to first see people as conscious animals, and to be aware that they are conscious, so that they have self-awareness. What is Consciousness? Hegel said that consciousness is desire. What is desire? It is desire, hope, purpose, power, imagination, love, and acknowledgment (the demand for acknowledgment as well as the acknowledgment of others). Axel Hornett wrote a book called "Recognition", which summarizes the history of European ideas since the modern era, starting with the "loss of the self" (as Rousseau said, "Man is born free, but he is always in chains"; Sartre even saw the closed side of human beings, so he said that "others are hell"), to "self-control" (the moral admonition of ancient China is the most obvious, such as "do not look at incivility", etc.), and then to "self-regulation" (such as Kant's moral categorical imperative, such as the mutual recognition in Hegel's master-slave relationship, explaining why a person will carry out moral self-limitation for the sake of others, such as what love is all about, etc.), behind all this is the activity of consciousness, It is the power of consciousness that demands recognition (which is why the values of freedom, equality, and fraternity are pursued). Hornett's book explains the history of ideas throughout Europe, that is, the history of the development of consciousness. The premise is that people are conscious, and consciousness is inseparable from the recourse to language and its meaning.
How did you change from "me" to "we"
As for where the language comes from, it is really not a question that philosophy can answer.
The word "I" is most closely related to how it changed from "I" to "we". Chen Xuanliang specifically talked about the glyph of the Chinese character "I" in "80 of Solving 100 Characters": "I, the one who follows Ge, takes Ge and holds himself." So the word "I" has a relationship with weapons, with self-control, that is, with guarding and defending; Further, from the oracle bone inscriptions, it is said that in very early antiquity, "I" itself was a weapon; Later, it evolved into "flag" and "military flag", so "I" became a member of the queue of "my own people". He concluded that although "I" is a pronoun, it is plural, and in modern Chinese, it means "our army", "mainland", "our side", and so on. For example, in the expressions of "I do not distinguish between the enemy and the enemy" and "the enemy advances and I retreat", the "I" here is the plural "we". He believes that the Chinese language does not have sex, number, and case, and does not pay attention to distinguishing between singular and plural numbers in pronouns. Xu Shen directly trained "wu" as "me" in the "Shuowen", and in ancient times, the singular first person also expressed "yu", "self", "self", "under the bottom", "contemptible", "slave", "concubine", etc., indicating that the singular first person attaches importance to the speaker's own identity, which is inseparable from the hierarchical concept of society. It was only in the modern vernacular literary revolution that the "I" appeared, and this positive effect of eliminating the concept of hierarchy appeared. The plural meaning of "we" representing "us" has been preserved. (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the social science newspaper, the full text can be found in the social science newspaper and its official website)