Today Facebook officially announced that it will change its name to Meta to better serve the main thrust of its connected users. The name change is reminiscent of the concept of meta-universe, which has been popular in recent months. It is conceivable that in the near future, there will be a wave of chasing Meta.
不过早在互联网圈追捧meta之前，meta就在人文学界大放异彩，后者充斥着缀以meta的术语，如meta-narrative（元叙述）、meta-language（元语言）、meta-history（此“元史学”与蒙古人无关）等等。 If you look at their definitions one by one, you will not only fall into the quagmire of disciplinary terminology, but also difficult to glimpse the whole leopard. So this article starts from the origin and history of meta, and talks about how to translate and understand meta. This topic is rather jerky, but I am fascinated by the logic and history behind the phenomenon of language, and I can only try to make it as vivid and interesting as possible, hoping to benefit the same interested monarchs.
Meta has two mainstream translations, the mainland translation is "yuan", the Taiwan translation is "post-design", interestingly, these two translations, in fact, correspond to the two meanings of meta: self-referential and transcending. The dual meaning of meta extending from the Greek word μετά (after) is inseparable from meta's earliest compound word metaphysics (metaphysics). In fact, the translation of "metaphysics" is very interesting, and it belongs to a literal paraphrase. It is said to be literal, because "form" and "upper" correspond exactly to physics (knowledge of nature) and meta (above). If it is a paraphrase, it is because it also exemplifies the I Ching: "The metaphysical is called the Tao, and the metaphysical is called the instrument", which is like the so-called "Geyi" method that the congregations compared with Middle-earth thought when Buddhism first entered China. In this way, "metaphysics" can be described as a good translation of the magic hand. Like the more successful literal translations of Buddhism such as Nirvana, Bodhisattva, etc., "metaphysics" has been completely internalized into modern Chinese to the point where it sounds less "straight" anymore. (Many people say that they are familiar with metaphysics, but they still don't know what they are talking about, because the word is still a literal translation after all, just like bodhi is something that most people can't say))
Returning to the word metaphysics, Metaphysics is Aristotle's treatise on metaphysics, but he himself does not recognize the word metaphysics and has not compiled it into a collection. Aristotle grouped this section into four categories: First Philosophy, First Science, Wisdom, and Technology. A hundred years later, Greek scholars compiled it into volumes and named it τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ (after physics), which was intended to remind the students of the time that they must first learn the contents of Aristotle's book Physics (Physics) before they could learn τὰ μετὰ φυσικὰ, that is, Metaphysics in English.
In this way, the meaning of meta in Metaphysics is very simple, that is, the original Greek meaning (after). The Taiwanese translation of "post-establishment" is closer in form. But this is not enough to explain the meaning of the terms meta-history, meta-logic, which are not advanced courses in history or logic, let alone the joking concepts of meta-joke. The evolution of this involves the evolution of natural language.
Ever since Metaphysics (Metaphysics) went from being an Aristotle book to a major category of philosophical study, the understanding of metaphysics has inevitably been influenced by the nature of metaphysics. In particular, due to the limitations of information dissemination and book collection, there are very few ancient people who understand the origin of the name metaphysics in the Middle Ages (modern people can quickly understand by flipping through professional research). Therefore, there was a wrong Latin annotation at that time, which annotated τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ as "science beyond nature", which obviously misunderstood the original meaning of this collection, but alluded to the simple belief that "the end of science is metaphysics" that netizens are talking about.
However, from the perspective of a long time span, people who use language may make mistakes, but language itself does not matter whether it is right or wrong, which is itself a phenomenon accumulated by the usage habits of generations in history. It is therefore interesting that meta was used to embellish the metaphysics book, but in turn was redefined by the metaphysics discipline. I have to say that this is a bit of a Zen so-called "I once saw Guo Xiang zhu Zhuangzi, but it was Zhuangzi zhu Guo xiang" taste.
Since metaphysics is a science beyond natural science, meta nature has a transcendence, which is also what the Taiwanese translation of "post-design" tries to express. The "post-design" not only retains the meta "in... The meaning of "after" also highlights the transcendent connotation set outside the original category. More than that, natural science itself belongs to the category of science, and since metaphysics is a science beyond nature, (i.e., a science beyond science), there is a self-contained nature embedded in it. In fact, this self-referentiality has become the main use of the term meta today, such as my aforementioned meta-freedom (about the freedom of freedom), meta-joke (about jokes about jokes), which belongs to this category. As far as self-involvement is concerned, the mainland translation of "yuan" is better than "post-setting".
This cyclical staircase is a good example of meta's self-involvement
Although I jokingly mentioned at first that meta-history has nothing to do with the Mongol metahistory, they are still quite subtly related. The name of the country of the Yuan Dynasty takes the meaning of "DaZha Qianyuan" in "Yi". Kublai Khan said:
Those who have a kingdom in the past, or the place where they have arisen, or the seal they have received, are not enough to be law-abiding, so they are called yuan. The yuan is said to be big, and the big is not enough, and the yuan is called big to the end.
The original meaning of the Yuan was to be extremely large, so the Mongols used it to express the grandeur of the empire. Fortunately, Kublai Khan believed that "greatness is not enough", otherwise Chinese history would have had one more dynasty.
Returning to the point, if meta is translated as "yuan", then this "big pole" of "yuan" can depict the wide extension of the concept of meta. From the point of view of self-referentiality, meta is a further abstraction of the original concept, such as abstract algebra in mathematics, which can be regarded as algebra for algebra. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in elementary algebra all need to be redefined, and at a higher level of abstraction, elementary algebra becomes a special case of the abstract level, and its most basic laws no longer hold, such as a + b is not necessarily equal to b + a. Using non-mathematical examples, the American historical theorist Hayden White used the concept of meta-history to express and study the basic patterns of people writing history, dividing them into subcategories. Although Hayden White's books are far more abstract than ordinary historical works, they also cover a much wider range (basically any history book can be analyzed by his theory, regardless of the limitations of space and time). In short, a higher level of abstraction of a concept greatly expands its original extension (and of course becomes more difficult in form). Meta This extension of "big pole also" is in line with the original meaning of "yuan". At the same time, "yuan" also has a basic and essential meaning, and also meets the requirements of self-involvement.
It is worth noting that the self-involvement and transcendence derived from metaphysics are phenomena that have already occurred in English, and the mainland and Taiwan only focus on one of these points in translation. Conversely, to capture the original meaning of meta, it is necessary to combine the two translations of "meta" and "post-design". Generally speaking, people discuss the quality of translation by combing through the original text, and this article reshapes the understanding of the original text through translation, which is also a kind of meta.
Having said this, it may be a bit boring, but my personal research is related to jokes, so let's take a meta-joke example to relax:
A duck, a cowboy and a gay went into a bar together. The bartender saw the three of them seated and came over. But no one spoke, and the bartender waited and did not speak, and the scene was extremely embarrassing.
After ten minutes, the bartender couldn't help himself and angrily exclaimed:
"Did you fucking make a joke?!"
This is the bottom joke I told Lao Mei, and the laugh point itself is based on the American joke as a whole (so it is a joke about the joke). Ducks, cowboys, and gay are all regular (but rarely simultaneously) of American jokes, and bars are common scenes of American jokes. When the duck cowboy gay joke three giants appeared in the bar at the same time, Americans will expect what exactly burst the stem appeared, the plot of "no one speaks" is even more appetizing, and finally the answer is revealed, the fucking unfathomable do not speak just because they have gone to the wrong joke set. But when I told the Chinese, the response was more general, because of the lack of corresponding background experience.
China certainly has its own meta-joke, although people may not be aware of it, for example:
Why is the protagonist of every joke Bob?
Because the people with low laughter points began to laugh when they saw Xiaoming.
Jokes are essentially a narrative. However, the above joke jumps out of the context of storytelling, points out the existence of the "low laugh point" audience outside the story, so as to take advantage of the sensitivity of the person listening to the joke for the joke knowledge of "Xiaoming" to trigger the laugh point, which is also meta-joke. Of course, americans certainly can't understand this joke, but I've also heard an English passage with a very similar structure, which was told by a philosophy professor:
Today I am ganna teach you how to tell a joke. First, if you have an animal in your joke… make it a duck!
I was confused when I listened to it five years ago, and the American students around me laughed uncontrollably. Now that I think about it, the duck who co-authored the United States is China's Xiaoming, the giant of the laughing altar.
Readers who are familiar with drama theory may perceive that this form of meta-joke often appears in stage interactions. To put it simply, it is like dekuunsha's cross-talk is halfway through and suddenly thrown to the audience, or the characters in "The Legend of Wulin" interact with the camera many times:
For example, in the 20th episode of Wulin Wai Chuan, Tong Xiangyu does not admit what he has said, and Guo Furong directly asks the cameraman to play back the video
Theoretically, this is the alienation technique emphasized by the German dramatist Eugen Bertholt Friedrich Brecht, that is, deliberately interrupting the audience's immersion in the theatrical stage and creating a defamiliarizing interactive effect. Corresponding to this is Stanislavsky's classic school, which requires actors to perform "selflessly" to create a sense of full immersion. That's why Zhou Xingchi in "The King of Comedy" is so fascinated by his "On the Self-cultivation of Actors". (The third system represented by Mei Lanfang is also emphasized in China, not only is not immersive, nor is it switched between immersion and interaction, but a completely non-immersive performance, Peking Opera actors are fully aware of the existence of the stage and have no intention of eliminating this "estrangement" with the audience, so they call the three major systems Messbu)
The distancing effect hopes that the audience is fully aware of the existence of the stage and obtains a unique viewing experience between immersion and alienation, which coincides with the "stream of consciousness" in text creation. For example, in his classic stream-of-consciousness play Six Roles in Search of a Playwright, Pirandello directly takes the abstract "role" as the role of his own script, which can be described as a meta-trio about the role, the stage, and the play.
The above meta-jokes, dissociations, and meta in the context of stream of consciousness mainly embody self-involvement, that is, X about X. However, it should be pointed out that the popular expression "X about X" is ambiguous, and let's look at a thinking question:
If meta is about X, then what is the difference between meta-history and historiography and historiography?
The difference is not only there, but also big. The reason for this is that the word "about" itself is ambiguous. The history of historiography is the history of the writing of history by predecessors, and it is also a kind of history. Metahistory is a theory about the writing of history by predecessors, and it is not history itself. The former "about" is the proximity of content, and the latter "about" is the formal logical connection. Therefore, it is not enough to understand meta only in terms of self-involvement, relatively speaking, the term historiography represents pure self-involvement (about the history of history); meta-history is not only self-involved, but also has the transcendence suggested by "post-establishment" (it is no longer history, but a theory). This again shows that the two translations of "meta" and "post-design" (in fact, equivalent to two annotations) are indispensable for our understanding of meta.
In general, the word meta is now affixed in academic discussions, and its meaning is both self-involved (meta) and transcendent (post-set) and more former. Of course, there are counterexamples, such as meta-economics, which are not "economics about economics" but more like economics that transcend economics. As mentioned earlier, the meaning of language is always fluid, there is no right or wrong in the long-term vision, and every word is a theory and a history.
Meta is a kind of thinking, with this kind of thinking to see the world is like an extra layer of filters, everything can be meta, enjoy it.
A passage on the Internet says:
A person who often releases pigeons this time actually has no pigeons, which is also a kind of pigeon.
I said that in this case we can call it "meta pigeon".