The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China

History Word by Word

Uffe Bergeton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429797859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides a conceptual history of the emergence of civilizational consciousness in early China. Focusing on how words are used in pre-Qín (before 221 BCE) texts to construct identities and negotiate relationships between a 'civilised self' and 'uncivilised others', it provides a re-examination of the origins and development of these ideas.

By adopting a novel approach to determining when civilizational consciousness emerged in pre-Qín China, this book analyzes this question in ways that establish a fresh hermeneutical dialogue between Chinese and modern European understandings of 'civilization.' Whereas previous studies have used archaeological data to place its origin somewhere between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE, this book explores changes in word meanings in texts from the pre-Qín period to reject this view. Instead, this book dates the emergence of civilizational consciousness in China to around 2, 500 years ago. In the process, new chronologies of the coining of Old Chinese terms such as 'customs, ' 'barbarians, ' and 'the Great ones, ' are proposed, which challenge anachronistic assumptions about these terms in earlier studies.

Examining important Chinese classics, such as the Analects, the Mencius and the M ò zi, as well as key historical periods and figures in the context of the concept of 'civilization, ' this book will useful to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history.

1 The coining of civilizational consciousness in modern Western Europe

As leaves in the woods are changed with the fleeting years;

the earliest fall off first: in this manner words perish with old age,

and those lately invented flourish and thrive, like men in the time of youth.

—Horace, Ars Poetica¹

At 9:40 pm on November 13, 2015, three armed men entered a theatre in Paris and began shooting at the concert audience. Eighty-nine people were killed and hundreds more wounded. Elsewhere in Paris, coordinated bombing and shooting attacks brought the death toll to 130. The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) later claimed responsibility for the killings. In response, many state leaders and politicians were quick to use the term civilization in their condemnations of these heinous acts.

In the United States, hawkish politicians described the Paris attacks as a “clash of civilizations,” drawing upon the language of political scientist Samuel Huntington.² Even before the Paris attacks, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had stated that the fight against ISIS was “about the survival of Western civilization.”³ As observed by Washington Post writer Michael Gerson, one of the goals of the attacks was to encourage a “perception of a civilizational struggle between Islam and the West.”⁴ Sadly, they were quite successful in this regard.⁵ Even statesmen who explicitly reject incendiary “clash of civilizations” rhetoric often draw upon a concept of ‘civilization.’ President Obama, for example, declared the events in Paris an “attack on the civilized world.”⁶ Obama’s statement evokes the existence of a singular “civilized world” characterized by allegedly universally accepted values and practices, which is threatened by “uncivilized” others. The concept of ‘civilization’ invoked in these passages, which we can call a universal concept of ‘civilization,’ is prescriptive: it defines how people and societies should be in order to be “civilized,” rather than simply describing how they are. It is an ideological concept that has been constructed by people inside particular social formations to cast themselves as “civilized” groups or “civilizations.” In their ethnocentric smugness, people using this concept in their discourse often assume it to be universally valid and applicable. This is why I refer to it as the “universal concept of ‘civilization.’ ” This, of course, does not mean that I share any assumption of universality.

As eloquently stated by the German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990), the “concept of civilization … expresses the self-consciousness of the West… . It sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies of ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones.”⁷

The term civilization itself is thus a key element of the engine that keeps the wheels of contemporary “Western” civilizational consciousness spinning. This chapter explores the emergence and development of this particular civilizational consciousness. What were the sociopolitical developments that paved the way for the emergence of the universal concept of ‘civilization’ in early modern Europe, and which terms were used to articulate this concept? What role did the coining of the English term civilization in the eighteenth century play in the crystallization of this language-specific Anglophone civilizational consciousness?

Since the word civilization continues to be used to express the self-consciousness of “the West,” it is not a neutral term which can be used unproblematically as an analytical category in the study of other “civilizations.”⁸ Modern European civilizational consciousness is very different from pre-Qín civilizational consciousness. To what extent is it then still possible to talk about the emergence of civilizational consciousness in pre-Qín China? A study of the emergence of the terms that articulated civilizational consciousness in modern Europe will help address this question and set the stage for the study of the coining of civilizational consciousness in pre-Qín China. Mapping the history and meanings of the semantic components of the English word civilization provides us with a metalanguage to explore the meanings of the Old Chinese words that were used in pre-Qín sources to articulate a language-specific form of civilizational consciousness. It is the first and necessary step in our approach to the cross-linguistic comparison of language-specific ‘universal’ concepts of ‘civilization’ in modern Europe and pre-Qín China as a hermeneutical dialogue between different traditions anchored in historical contexts millennia apart.

Before embarking on the comparative historical study of the various stages in the emergence and evolution of civilizational consciousness in modern Western Europe and pre-Qín China, we need to clarify a number of theoretical questions. What is collective consciousness? How can the coining of new words (or old words in new meanings) be used as source material in the historical study of changes in collective consciousness? How can we link changes in word meanings and thought to the larger sociopolitical context? What are the hermeneutical challenges faced in this kind of word-by-word approach to intellectual history? It is to these questions that I turn next before returning to the study of the coining and evolution of civilizational consciousness in early modern Europe.

The history-word-by-word approach to changes in thought

Historical research is typically conducted with texts as primary source documents. In contrast, I focus on the word as the basic unit. I am interested in how we can use lexical changes in word meanings to study historical changes in collective consciousness and social structure. This approach allows us to study the question of when civilizational consciousness emerged by looking at when the key conceptual components of language-specific concepts of ‘civilization’ were coined (or lexicalized, in linguistic jargon) as single terms.

What’s in a word?

To use words as source material in historical studies, we must be able to talk unambiguously about their different components. Words are complex, multi- layered entities consisting of bundles of phonological, semantic, and syntactic features.⁹Figure 1.1 uses the word cat to illustrate the conventions for talking about different aspects of words. First, as shown in row (a), italics are used to indicate that we are talking about the word cat. As indicated by the oval, three different constituent feature bundles make up the word cat: (b) the sound image, or phonological representation, /kæt/, which is represented as a sequence of the speech sounds /k/ /æ/ /t/ bracketed by slanted lines; (c) the concept or meaning ‘cat’

, i.e., the semantic representation of the meaning ‘cat,’ is indicated by single quotes as ‘cat’; and (d) the syntactic features of being a count noun (as opposed to a mass noun, a verb, or an adjective, and so forth).¹⁰ Beyond the three linguistic feature bundles in (b), (c), and (d), which make up a word as it is stored in the mental dictionary in the minds of speakers of English, the word cat may also have extra-linguistic aspects such as (e) referents and (f) written forms.

Word meanings, or concepts, are highly malleable and context-sensitive. A four-year-old probably does not think of her beloved Felix as a ‘domesticated, feline mammal.’ Not having learned biological taxonomy, she may instead think of a ‘furry animal that purrs when stroked, and which brings in mice from the yard.’¹¹ As discussed below, the malleability and context-sensitivity of meanings facilitate the emergence of new meanings of the word civilization in response to changes in sociopolitical context.

Figure 1.1 Conventions for talking about different aspects of words.

Syntactic features tell us how words combine to form larger phrases and sentences. For example, in addition to the meaning ‘civilization’ and the sound-image /sɪvɪlaɪzeɪʃən/, the word civilization has syntactic features characterizing it as a noun. These syntactic features tell us that the word civilization can form a noun phrase by combining with the adjective Chinese (as in Chinese civilization). Various concepts of ‘civilization’ can also be lexicalized in adjectival and verbal forms as witnessed by the adjectives civilized, civilizational, and the verb to civilize.

The concept ‘cat’ associated with the sound-image /kæt/ should not be confused with the specific physically existing cat which the noun phrase the cat may refer to when someone utters the sentence Mary is holding the cat in a specific context. As shown in (e) in Figure 1.1, small caps are used to indicate that we are talking about the referent of a word, i.e., an entity in the world referred to by the word. The concept ‘cat’ understood as ‘domesticated, feline, mammal’ is not identical to the particular white Siamese cat with blue eyes called Felix that 4-year-old Mary can hold in her lap. Similarly, the archaeological concept of ‘civilization’ is not the same as the set of physical remains that some archaeologists view as a particular civilization located in the Central Plains of China in the mid-second millennium BCE.

Finally, it is important not to confuse the ways words are written with the words themselves. Words can, and most often do, exist without writing. As shown in (f) in Figure 1.1, angled brackets < > are used to indicate the written form of a word. The string of three letters <cat> is the product of a writing system that has adapted Latin letters to write English. It is not part of the linguistic features making up the word cat. Distinguishing between writing and words is particularly important when studying the history of Chinese words. The meanings ‘pattern,’ ‘stripe(s),’ and ‘decoration’ were among the meanings of the Old Chinese word wén 文 which, as will be argued in Chapters 2–3, also in some contexts referred to a language-specific pre-Qín concept of ‘civility/civilization.’ According to the orthographic conventions of modern Mandarin, the meanings ‘pattern,’ ‘stripe(s),’ and ‘decoration,’ which used to be written with the graph <文>, are now written with the graph <紋> which is also pronounced wén. Thus, for example, the word hǔ wén ‘tiger stripes,’ which used to be written <虎文>, is now written <虎紋>. This does not mean that the graph <紋> in <虎紋> writes a completely different word from the one written as <文> in <虎文>. It simply means that the meanings ‘pattern, stripes’ of the polysemous word wén eventually came to be written with a graph different from the one writing other meanings. Since Chinese dictionaries are organized by graphs, this creates the illusion that the graphs wén <文> and wén <紋> write unrelated words.

The lexicon as historical source

Studying history word by word involves using ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The coining of civilizational consciousness in modern Western Europe
• 2 From ‘awe-inspiringly beautiful’ to ‘morally refined’: the coining of ‘civility’ in pre-Qín China
• 3 Coiners and critics of ‘civility/civilization’ (wén)
• 4 Inventing the ‘barbarian’: from ‘belligerent others’ to ‘civilizationally inferior others’
• 5 Ethnographic vocabulary of civilizational otherness: the ‘elegant’ ‘rites’ of the ‘Great ones’ versus the ‘vulgar’ ‘customs’ of the ‘barbarians’
• Conclusion
• Index