Bodily Dasein and Chinese Script Components
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Kwan Tze-wan
Abstract
In the Shuowen, one of the earliest comprehensive character dictionaries of ancient China, when discussing where the Chinese characters derive their structural components, Xu Shen proposed the dual constitutive principle of “adopting proximally from the human body, and distally from things around.” This dual emphasis of “body” and “things around” corresponds largely to the phenomenological issues of body or corporeality on the one hand, and lifeworld on the other. If we borrow Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as Being-in-the world, we can easily arrive at a reformulation of Xu Shen’s constitutive principle of the Chinese script as one that concerns “bodily Dasein.” By looking into various examples of script tokens we can further elaborate on how the Chinese make use not only of the body in general but various body parts, and how they differentiate their life world into material nature, living things, and a multifaceted world of equipment in forming a core basis of Chinese characters/components, upon which further symbolic manipulation such as “indication”, “phonetic borrowing”, semantic combination, and “annotative derivation”, etc. can be based. Finally, examples will be cited to show how in the Chinese scripts the human body (and its parts) might interact with other’s bodies (and their parts) or with “things around” (whether nature, living creatures, or artifacts) in various ways to cover the social, environmental, ritual, technical, economical, and even intellectual aspects of human experience. Bodily Dasein, so to speak, provides us with a new perspective of understanding and appreciating the entire scope of the Chinese script.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Editorial Preface
- Contents
- Preface
- Embodiment
- I. Experiencing the Living Body — 体验生命体
- The Felt Body and Embodied Communication
- Der Leib als Umschlagstelle zwischen Kultur und Natur
- Exploring Pregnant Embodiment with Phenomenology and Butoh Dance
- What are Senses and Sense Modalities?
- Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood and the Challenges of Naturalism in Pain Research
- II. Collective Bodies and Bodily Resonance — 共同一体和身体共鸣
- “… so etwas wie Leiblichkeit.”
- Mass Emotion and Shared Feelings
- On Bodily Resonance
- III. Embodiment, Mediality and Aesthetics — 具身、媒介与美学
- Aesthetic Turn
- Felt-Bodily Resonances
- Body, Language and Mediality
- Bodily Dasein and Chinese Script Components
- The Metaphor of the Net
- IV. After Heidegger — 后海德格尔
- “I” “here” and “you” “there”
- Living in the Moment
- Heidegger on the Problem of the Embodiment of God
- V. Parallels with Phenomenolgy — 与现象学的共性
- From the Analysis of the Political Embodiment in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to a Brief Comparison With Confucianism
- Phenomenology of Embodied Intersubjectivity
- Toward a Liberative Phenomenology of Zen
- VI. Complements to Phenomenology — 对现象学的补充
- The Normative Body and the Embodiment of Norms
- On the Possibility of a Disembodied Mind
- VII. Miscellaneous — 年度文选
- Criticism of Gehlen’s Theory of Instinct-Reduction and Phenomenological Clarification of the Concept of Instinct as the Genetic Origin of Embodied Consciousness
- Technology, Dao-Technē and Home
- Moral Conflicts and the Application of Ethics
- Is “Intention” Present or Not?
- The First Philosophical Word
- Bio-Bibliography
- Name Index
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Editorial Preface
- Contents
- Preface
- Embodiment
- I. Experiencing the Living Body — 体验生命体
- The Felt Body and Embodied Communication
- Der Leib als Umschlagstelle zwischen Kultur und Natur
- Exploring Pregnant Embodiment with Phenomenology and Butoh Dance
- What are Senses and Sense Modalities?
- Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood and the Challenges of Naturalism in Pain Research
- II. Collective Bodies and Bodily Resonance — 共同一体和身体共鸣
- “… so etwas wie Leiblichkeit.”
- Mass Emotion and Shared Feelings
- On Bodily Resonance
- III. Embodiment, Mediality and Aesthetics — 具身、媒介与美学
- Aesthetic Turn
- Felt-Bodily Resonances
- Body, Language and Mediality
- Bodily Dasein and Chinese Script Components
- The Metaphor of the Net
- IV. After Heidegger — 后海德格尔
- “I” “here” and “you” “there”
- Living in the Moment
- Heidegger on the Problem of the Embodiment of God
- V. Parallels with Phenomenolgy — 与现象学的共性
- From the Analysis of the Political Embodiment in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to a Brief Comparison With Confucianism
- Phenomenology of Embodied Intersubjectivity
- Toward a Liberative Phenomenology of Zen
- VI. Complements to Phenomenology — 对现象学的补充
- The Normative Body and the Embodiment of Norms
- On the Possibility of a Disembodied Mind
- VII. Miscellaneous — 年度文选
- Criticism of Gehlen’s Theory of Instinct-Reduction and Phenomenological Clarification of the Concept of Instinct as the Genetic Origin of Embodied Consciousness
- Technology, Dao-Technē and Home
- Moral Conflicts and the Application of Ethics
- Is “Intention” Present or Not?
- The First Philosophical Word
- Bio-Bibliography
- Name Index
