Language, Truth, and Literary Interpretation: A Cross-cultural Examination

Reflections on the philosophy of language in China and the West suggest that philosophers’ critiques of language center on two issues: its inadequacy and its metaphoricity. The former indicates the inability of the signifier to capture the multiplicity of the signified, whereas the latter reflects the semantic surplus of the signifier over its referent. While modern Western philosophers focus on the metaphoricity, frequently referred to as the “play,” of the sign, philosophers in traditional China targeted what they believed to be the inherent inadequacies of words in their discussions. ¹ Both aspects of language are considered the cause of equivocal or ineffective speech, and thus of impediment to correct understanding, and yet philosophers of the two cultural traditions have come to different conclusions about reading or literary study.

To Western philosophers and literary critics, the metaphoricity of language incurs a serious problem for reading. Because the sign, in its incessant play, always points to more than is needed to the point that its real reference is blurred or covered up, correct reading of a literary text becomes impossible. Such phrases, frequently appearing in contemporary critical writings as “the tyranny of words,” “the indeterminacy of meaning,” and “the unreadable text,” testify to the widespread concern about the problems of language in the West. On the other hand, despite their acute awareness of the intrinsic deficiency of words, Chinese philosophers and poets never gave up their hope in the efficacy of writing and literary understanding. Indeed, the enterprise of creative writing and literary criticism boomed in China at the time when the philosophical aphorism that “words do not exhaust meaning” (yan bu jin yi) was brought home to almost every poet and critic flourishing between the third and fourth centuries. For the following one and a half millennia the question of the objectivity of meaning, the crux of Western post-structuralist discourse and quarrels, has never been raised in Chinese philosophical or literary discussions. This wide contrast of outlooks on reading informed by the same disillusionment with language is rather intriguing. To account for this phenomenon this article attempts to look at the differences in the way language is perceived and practiced in China and the West. It shall also probe into the concepts of truth underlying the two cultural traditions because such an inquiry sheds some important light on the different perceptions people in the two parts of the world hold concerning language and literary practice.

Metaphoricity: The Way In or Out of the Dilemma?

It is interesting to say that while twentieth-century discoveries about the metaphoricity of language have made some Western critics conclude that “all reading is misreading” and that “there is no such a thing as an objective meaning,” this same awareness—that language is essentially metaphorical in nature, that it always says more than what it appears to—posed a solution for Chinese philosophers and poets to get out of the linguistic dilemma in which they found themselves. But before we enter the topic, let us first look at the dominant views of language in each cultural tradition. First, as Yip Wai-lim and others have demonstrated, the Chinese philosophical tradition began with a rejection of language as a reliable means for cognition and expression. ² Philosophers in ancient China viewed language, or in their own terminology, words, as an instrument for expressing ideas in the mind or describing objects in the world, but they considered them inherently limited and thus unable to carry out their tasks effectively. The earliest statement of this conception is recorded in the ancient classic the Book of Changes, where it says: “Writing does not exhaust words, and words do not exhaust meaning.” ³ Attributed to Confucius and thus also representing Confucian ideas, ⁴ this statement was elaborated, amplified, and developed into a systematic argument by Daoist (Taoist) philosophers Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi (369?-286? bc). Approaching the issue from the perspective of Dao (Tao), these founders of Daoist school viewed language as intrinsically limited in its function of representing Dao. This is because Dao, the cosmic principle or pattern, is dynamic in...