Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

THIS CHAPTER presents the result of a preliminary investigation. In 1982 T. P. Kasulis began the specific comparative study of the Platonic understanding of language—more precisely, of the relation between linguistic names (onomata) and objects (pragmata)—with an East Asian language philosopher, and William S.-Y. Wang did so briefly in 1989.¹ In a recent volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, Christoph Harbsmeier makes constant and telling comparisons with Greek and Sanskrit at various points of his magisterial survey of Chinese language and logic.² Despite that scholar’s compendious review of virtually all the major relevant issues pertaining to the Chinese language, the sort of modest but focused exercise attempted here is still valuable. I am aware that the Cratylus occupies only one stage of the Platonic view of language, but the dialogue undoubtedly represents the most concentrated and sustained discussion of the subject. Similarly, experts have praised chapter 22 (in traditional editions) of the Xunzi, “On the Right Use of Names,” as “the most disciplined, coherent, and by the far the best-organised discussion of naming that has come down to us from ancient China.”³ Although my discussion focuses on the Platonic dialogue and the Xunzi chapter, some references to other texts and figures cannot be avoided. What follows is a treatment of three salient issues that I want to highlight for comparative consideration of the two texts: the meaning of names, the purpose of names, and the maker of names.

According to the Western understanding stemming from Aristotle (De interpretatione 16a), we may define a linguistic appellation as a composite consisting of two elements: a phonological sign, which is the voice articulated as a symbol, and, if the language under consideration is also a written one, a scriptural sign. In a language that uses a standardized or conventionalized script (alphabet, syllabary), the scriptural sign also purports to “articulate” or represent visually the phonological component(s) of the vocal sign. This representation, moreover, must also be conventionalized: there may be an English and an American way of pronouncing the word “tomato,” but the variations cannot be multiple, let alone infinite or indefinite. Relative to such an understanding, what the Platonic dialogue reveals in certain respects is already a surprisingly modern view of linguistic names. It allows for Greek or barbarian names (i.e., phonological signs) to differ first as vocal representations (e.g., Greek hippos; French cheval; Chinese ma). But in a single linguistic system (dialektos), a sequence of sound (apart from such peculiarities as deliberate puns) does not change from day to day or from circumstance to circumstance in its designation of the object thus named.

Socrates’ discussion of onoma in the Cratylus makes clear that he is interested not merely in the fully formed words of one or many syllables as such but also in the constitutive units of a single name: namely, the alphabets themselves that, as letters (stoicheia, grammata) in the Greek system, are also names or “first names [prōta onomata],” as Socrates calls them. The interesting phenomenon emerging from Socrates’ remarks is that the structuring structures of the Greek language are, in fact, what may be thought of as layered names, and that helps explain why he wants to focus discursive attention down to the level of the letters (393d7–e9). What the lawgiver (nomothetēs) knew so well (epistēthē kalōs), according to Socrates, is how to give names appropriate to the letters. On that basis the lawgiver is said to know “how to place each name fitted by nature for each object [to hekastōi physei pephykos onoma] into sounds and syllables [phthoggous … syllabas]” (389d4–6; see also 390d11–e5).

Appropriateness here is construed as the capacity for the letter’s name, itself already as nominatum, to disclose its nature (physin dēlōsai, 393e7). Such an understanding in turn helps explain why Socrates goes to such extraordinary lengths in the dialogue to dwell on “natural” etymologies, because he believes that the articulation of the letters may bestow a measure of accuracy on the names that they help to form, by virtue of mimesis through the voice, tongue, or mouth (422d11–4233b12). As Richard Robinson has pointed out, “by ‘first names’ Plato does not mean temporally first names but logically first names, that is names which imitate their nominates directly by their sound or feel.”⁴ The rapid, rolling movement of the tongue required to pronounce the letter rō, generally expressive of motion (kinēsis, 416c1), can, for example, assist in shading the semantic content of a word in which it plays a constitutive role (e.g., tromos, trembling; rymbein, whirl). On this first level, the Socratic view validates Jacques Derrida’s charge against Platonic logocentrism as a kind of phonocentrism, more elaborately conveyed in the Phaedrus because it grants decisive priority of speech over writing. The correct use of names, one involving their most fundamental and elemental designations, is based first and foremost on voice and sound.⁵ Socrates’ definition of a name as the smallest unit of a saying (logos) in 385c and his correlative assertion that “the name is spoken as part of a true saying [to onoma ara to tou alēthous logou legetai]” exemplify this constant accentuation of oral activity. Even the cognate verb onomazein (to name, to address someone by name, to call one something) may in certain contexts acquire the sense of “to pronounce” (e.g., 421c1).

The assertions of Socrates in the Cratylus may seem to contradict certain sayings of his in the Theaetetus. In that latter dialogue devoted to probing the issue of the certainty of knowledge in terms of elements and combinations, significantly illustrated in the presumed writing system by the punning Greek terms of stoicheîon (letter) and syllabē (syllable), Socrates seems to contend at first that only syllables “have a rational content [logon echousa]” but letters do not (203a4) and are thus unknowable (203c). As he develops his argument, however, the philosopher comes around to exactly the opposite thesis. “Because if there are parts of anything, the whole must inevitably be all the parts” (204a8–9), the letters themselves belong indivisibly to the syllable, conceptually a “whole [holon]” and an “all [pân].” In this logical sense, the letters themselves and the syllable they combine to form become, in Socrates’ words, “single in form [monoeides] and indivisible [ameriston]” (205d1–2). His conclusion, therefore, asserts that both letters and syllables are equally “knowable and speakable [gnōstai kai rētai]” (205d11).⁶ on that basis, in fact, Socrates goes on to claim for “the elements as a class [genos]” a form of knowability and an instrumentality for knowledge that are much more important than the compounds (206b).

As with the Greek onoma, the Chinese term ming is not without ambiguity of meaning, but its discussion in ancient Chinese texts does not share in the Socratic concerns I have just described. The comparison of ancient Greece and China perforce must presume not only the vast difference in social and cultural contexts but also the obvious disparity of language. Of course, some graphs in Chinese purport to mimic directly certain kinds of sound (e.g., the familiar “kan kan goes the osprey

,” of poem 1, line 1, of the Classic of Poetry

), but unless the reader of that line happens to know in advance how to say the graph kan, nothing in the written form itself indicates its phonological property. Not being an alphabetical language, Chinese does not have a regularized system of phonemes to standardize vocalization of its written signs, even though some of the “radicals,” or graphic rudiments, may also function as phonemes or vocalization markers. A graph as a single word may indicate one phoneme, but a word composed of two or more graphs may have only one graph or portion thereof on loan as a phonetic indicator. What complicates historical phonology in Chinese, moreover, is that these indicators may vary regionally in their pronunciation.

Therefore, how are we to understand the term ming

? Although most scholarly discussions of the term seem to regard it as referring primarily to a written sign,⁷ some of the textual evidence indicates that the Chinese were not unaware of some aspects of the speech/script problem. We learn from paleography that ming itself is composed of two graphs: one for half-moon and hence the derivative meaning of dusk or evening

, and one for mouth

.⁸ The Han dictionary Shuo wen jie

(postface 100), compiled by Xu Shen

(d. 149), in a gesture not unworthy of comparison with Socrates, offers this etymological explanation: “Ming is self-designation [zi ming ye

].⁹ Dusk is dimness [ming ye

]. In dimness people do not see each other, and that is why one uses the mouth to name [oneself]” (Shuowen 56).

Although Xu Shen’s analysis of the word’s logographic parts also refers simultaneously to a vocal activity, comparable with Socrates’ assertion (Cratylus 387b6–7) that speaking is an action (to legein … tis tōn prazeōn estin), the Qing philologist Duan Yucai resolutely ties the notion of “selfdesignation” or “self-naming” to written signs. His annotation of this passage in the dictionary refers to tomb inscriptions (also ming but written as

) as the basis for Xu’s definition. It never occurred to Duan, however, that tomb inscriptions, unless planned with forethought and executed with prescience, can hardly be called self-designation. Without attempting to adjudicate the issue, we may nonetheless point out that Duan’s comment itself is based on the principle of homophonic etymology, a practice widely exploited by the ancient Chinese. Indeed, the etymological trail of this particular word for name (ming) provides a telling illustration of how several homophones are used in an almost circular fashion to gloss a single term, in the process of which the words with similar or identical vocalization are implicated in mutual explication. As another example of this principle at work, the third-century etymological glossography Shiming

(Explanations of Names), compiled by Liu Xi

, offers this definition in part 12, “Shi yanyu”

(Explanations of Language): “A name is a distinction [ming, ming ye

], that by which name and actuality may be distinguished [shi ming shi fen ming ye

]” (Shiming, 4, 26b, SBCK).

When we compare even the brief citations on ming we have gathered with the passages on etymologies in the Cratylus, similarity and difference become readily apparent. The Socratic attempt to pin down the correct meaning of words resorts to both semantic and phonological etymologies. Words are dissected according to their alleged logographic components (e.g., 421a6–8: “the word onoma seems to be a compressed sentence, signifying on hou zētēma [being for which there is a search]” [Jowett]) and their smallest units of sound. In Xu Shen’s definition of ming, the term is also analyzed anagrammatically, but the wider tradition of homophonic etymology renders linguistic and philosophical definitions more frequently than not as definitions by punning, a process that, according to one critic, forges “unexpected connections, whose suggestiveness shimmers on the borders of concepts, threatening to transform them.”¹⁰ Definitions by punning, if we may paraphrase Jonathan Culler, give us respectable folk etymologies, but their accuracy is more dependent on the speaker’s perceptual ingenuity and rhetorical cunning than on the strict science of language. Without the conventions of the alphabet as stable phonetic anchors, determining in Chinese whether an appeal to identical or approximate vocalization for semantic elucidation indicates a real cognate or merely sporting with sounds is difficult. The philosopher, politician, or even the lexicographer is free to assert authoritative and original—thus, also unsuspected—polysemia by manipulation of the phoneme. Puns, in other words, are the inventions of sophistic phonocentrism that thrives on sonic continguity and metonymity.¹¹ Of the ten terms cited from the Shuowen by Roger Ames in a recent study,¹² at least nine of them offer glosses by referring to homophones or near homophones. That principle pervades as well the vast majority of entries in Liu Xi’s Shiming. Exploited in that manner, the phoneme can be highly subversive: to the extent that a single sound unit can represent several meanings, the phoneme exists to undermine, if not utterly destroy, the semantic stability allegedly secured by the visual, scriptural sign.

My last sentence is meant to recall deliberately some of the sayings by Confucius, who, among early Chinese thinkers, was certainly one fond of punning etymologies that seem especially pithy in setting forth the crucial concepts of his sociopolitical agenda. We are all familiar with the oft-quoted assertions: ren zhe ren ye

(benevolence is people [Doctrine of the Mean, 20]); zheng zhe zheng ye

(governance is rectification [Analects 12.17]). Indeed, the punning emphasis on governance and the need for self-correction (Analects 13.13, in which zheng

may be read as a nice counterpart of the Greek orthos) lends credence to the traditional ascription to Confucius of the development of the teaching concerning the rectification or correct use of names (zheng ming

). Without going into the controversy of whether that doctrine was an interpolation by later thinkers (e.g., Arthur Waley and H. G. Creel), I want to emphasize the two sentences that end the famous passage on this doctrine (13.3). After enumerating in ascending severity the deleterious effects of incorrect names, Confucius goes on to say: “Thus the superior man will name only that which he can say something about, and he will say something about only that which he can practice. Concerning his speech, the gentleman is simply never careless [wu suo gou ye

]; that’s all.”¹³

The sentences here seem to clarify the meaning of what Confucius said just before, that “if names are not correct, then what is to be said will not flow smoothly [yan bu shun

].” To reverse the process of social decline, starting with “unreasonable” (D. C. Lau) or inappropriate discourse that is induced by incorrect names, the remedy has to be found in the action or behavior of the superior man that validates his discursive utterance. Speaking receives notice here, but it does not enjoy the logical priority assigned by Platonic philosophy to linguistic representation, because it is not concerned with the sayability of being or the nature of things, as in the case of Socratic thought (e.g., Cratylus 385b7–8). For Confucius, rather, the correct use of names represents something else. Unlike some ancient Chinese thinkers who wrestle with the more general problem of elementary semantic relations, of whether names tally with actualities (ming fu qi shi

[var.

), Confucius and his followers regard names and their use as signs of personal, and therefore, social ethos. Ineffectual speech thus becomes logically a first symptom of moral and social disorder.

This Confucian emphasis justifies my view that Xun Qing

(ca. 310–238 B.C.) may well be regarded as the most astute disciple in developing the implications of the Master’s basic insight into the use of names. When Xunzi describes the discourse of the superior man (junzi zhi yan

) in the chapter under consideration, he contends that their making names correct (zheng qi ming

) and rendering appropriate the words or phrases (dang qi yan

) only serve the purpose of expressing meaning and intention (bai qi zhi yi

). Names and phrases, in his view, are messengers (shi

) of meaning and intention, and are to be discarded in their use once communication has been made. “Act carelessly and it [i.e., name or speech] results in illicitness [gou zhi, jian ye

(XJ, chap. 22, p. 283)].”¹⁴ The ideal of the correct use of names, characteristic of Confucian thinking, now finds realization only in the superior man, a person of presumed rectitude as a user of names. Therefore, only the most consequential linkage exists between name and person because the correct use of names (zheng ming) is directly assimilated into the ethical-political activity of correcting the self (zheng shen

[Analects 12.17; 13.13]), the advocacy of which strengthens the force of Confucius’s contention in the same section that one saying (yi yan

) may almost vitalize or ruin a state (13.15).

This perspective enables us to see why Xunzi begins his remarks on the subject in the manner preserved in his book: after the obligatory rehearsal of what names were established in which previous sage dynasties, he launches at once into a series of definitions, not about name as an ordinary or general category, but about the “various names [san ming

]” that crucially account for the human person in Confucian thought (nature [xing

], the affective disposition [qing

], thinking [lü

], exertion [wei

], business [shi

], conduct [xing

], awareness [zhi¹

], knowledge [zhi ³

], capability [neng

]). In a chapter of collected sayings or teachings that purport to discuss linguistic phenomena, observations about the constitutive parts and activities of the human subject remarkably predominate. Although Xunzi himself and later writers both have spoken of the nature of things and the disposition of things (wu xing

, wu qing

), the preponderant meaning of nature and disposition in this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, has to do with the human. This figure threading through the carpet of his discourse cannot be accidental because correct names in Confucian thought are at bottom the products of the correct self.

Such an emphasis, however, may in a certain respect provide sharp contrast to the thrust of Socrates’ argument throughout the Platonic dialogue that “things have their own fixed essence [ousia], neither in relation to us nor influenced by us [ou pros hēmas oude hyph’ hēmōn], changing this way and that according to our imaginations [phantasmati], but they exist of themselves according to their own essence imposed by nature [alla kath’ hauta pros tēn autōn ousian echonta hēiper pephyken]” (386d11–e4). Whereas nature (xing

) and disposition (qing

) in Xunzi represent human attributes that are only by extension applicable to the myriad things,¹⁵ the Socratic interest is trained on things as they are in themselves, a condition for which the names of essence (ousia) and nature (physis) provide the clearest indication. The authentic meaning of those names cannot be grasped other than as signs of complete independence from human influence or even thought, a startling stipulation by Socrates that may be especially jarring to post-Wittgensteinian ears. That is why Socrates early on in the dialogue can offer his famous dictum: “That which says things as they are is true, and that which says them as they are not is false” (385b7–8). An act of ontological definition in which essence and nature are both appositely specified, a correct name is thus an eidetic name because, for Socrates, linguistic expressions must follow and serve the proper understanding or percipient grasp of ideal natures, and not the other way around.

Such a contrast with Plato may also invite rejoinders at this point. Does not Xunzi in this chapter on the correctness of names also resort to the vocabulary of name and actuality (ming, shi), a vocabulary common to many Warring State thinkers reflecting on discourse and language? Does not the use of those two terms also indicate an interest in the relation between a name as a linguistic sign and its objective nominatum? The answer to the first question has to be an unqualified yes, because Xunzi does indeed make use of the terms prominently. With respect to the second question, however, modern scholars have pointed out that Xunzi’s particular position on language and names may indicate indeed advances over the Daoist Zhuangzi’s skepticism or the Mohist theory on how names may conform to objects known through observation, explanation, or report.¹⁶ Nonetheless, Xunzi’s own succinct summation of the nature of names continues to elicit the label of nominalism for his thinking:

The way the term shi

that I translate as actuality is used in Xunzi’s observation offers the sense that “a name has no intrinsic actuality or substantiality as its object.” Summarized in such a fashion, Xunzi’s linguistic nominalism may even seem to advocate a correlative denial of the objective existence of things. Space constraints forbid me from probing further in the Chinese text for the thorny implications of language and epistemology (e.g., how do we know that things exist and how do we name or express such knowledge?), but I want to end this section on the purpose of names with the following observations.

As one works through the chapter, some of Xunzi’s concerns clearly are to pin down the functions of names. I have alluded to the communicative purpose of names in the reference to sayings of the superior man (junzi zhi yan). In another passage against an asserted background of the disappearance of sage-kings, the disorder in the world, and the rise of illicit sayings, the superior man of Xunzi’s ideal, although without political power, is obliged to counter them by disputing other discourses. The disputative effort, according to this view, arises from a graduated scale of representational dysfunction:

Although Xunzi cites many examples in the chapter of what may be construed as objective things, and thus actualities—ranging from animals such as cattle and horses to flavors and emotions—on closer examination, what he actually means by shi (actuality, intrinsic substantiality, object, reality, stuff—these have all been used to translate this elusive term) is reality that is already known, not a novel or previously unknown reality (such as a new element of the periodic table requiring linguistic identification) or a novel action (such as feeding information into a computer for the first time) for which one must labor to invent an appropriate nomenclature, the standardization of which will also grant referential stability. Xunzi’s tendency here justifies what modern scholars have observed, that the purpose he confers on names is both prescriptive and practical rather than theoretical.¹⁷

For the ancient Chinese thinker, then, names are actually reborn of exigencies, the disruptions of known conditions and states of affairs. “When nobility and baseness are not clear, when similarity and difference are not distinguished, such a condition will certainly beget the mishap of misunderstood intentions [again the communicative concern], and affairs will suffer the disaster of obstruction and abolishment. Therefore, the person of intelligence made divisions and distinctions, and instituted names to point to actuality” (XJ, p. 276). Actuality, in such a context, is not something original or new, but something (such as the paired opposites of nobility and baseness, similarity and difference) already known but now lost to social, moral, and thereby linguistic decay. That is why immediately following when Xunzi examines in a sustained fashion the various ways of conceiving how relations between names and actualities may be disturbed, disrupted, or even perverted (luan

), the language always refers to a recognizable or known condition affected by an implied agency. It is about some person who can “use names erroneously to disorder names,” or “to use actuality to disorder names,” or even “to use names to disorder actuality” (XJ, pp. 279–280). As examples of these subversive actions, Xunzi offers serially sayings such as “To kill a robber is not to kill a man,” “Mountains and marshes are level,” and “A white horse is not a horse.” That last declaration is too pointed a quotation to be missed by the student of Chinese thought. Rather than pursuing the fine point of logical analysis that will help determine the truth or falsity of a proposition, as the thinkers belonging to the School of Names had done with the white horse statement, Xunzi’s consistent Confucianism focuses on the human, social agencies that can pervert or restore linguistic order. For him, language philosophy has no independent viability other than to serve political philosophy, and thus the correctness of names seems to imply already the meaning also of the corrected names.

My reference to agency brings me to the last section of this chapter, which considers the user of names as the maker of names. Although the Platonic dialogue manifestly seems to uphold in various places a realist theory on the relation of names to things, the theory that “every thing has a correct name by nature [onomatos orthotēta einai hekastō tōn ontōv physei pephykuian]” (383a4–5), how that relation comes about, according to Socrates, depends a great deal on the lawgiver as the name giver. And, although that figure has been allegorized by some scholars to be no more than a mythical figure or a personification of human experience,¹⁸ the figure nonetheless receives too great attention in Socrates’ analysis to be regarded as merely a device of rhetoric. In his protracted discussion of the success of naming that, by definition, is also correct naming for Socrates, that achievement in turn “depends on one’s grasp of the ‘form of the Name,’ i.e., one’s insight into the essence of the nominatum, and one’s linguistic skills.”¹⁹

For this reason, the name giver is not just any ordinary individual but is compared to several kinds of professional in the dialogue. Because even actions may be regarded as a class of being (386e8–9), a professional is no ordinary craftsman; he is a person who knows how to perform an action in accordance with its proper nature (387a1–2). In passages strikingly resonant with certain strands of ancient Chinese thought, Socrates repeatedly stresses how the cutter must cut “each thing according to the nature of cutting” no less than with the “natural instrument” (387a6–7). Physis, as it is used here, has less affinity with the Chinese xing

, generally translated as “nature,” than with other key terms. Wu li

, the underlying principles of things, that Chinese and Japanese use to render the modern science of physics, brings out a large part of the equation between the Chinese and the Greek names. However, because physis, particularly as Plato uses it, has large ontological implications as well, one may argue that part of it is almost analogous also to the important concept of dao

in ancient China, the vital force or reality that not only impregnates all things but also embodies the power (de

) that can individuate and thus define different entities. In turn, the embodied or structured essence (ousia) of a differentiated entity may be seen to evoke or approximate one classical meaning of the Chinese qing

.²⁰

For the Platonic Socrates, therefore, that the name giver must follow a proper course of action based on thorough knowledge of both what he must do and of the nature of the tool or instrument (organon) by which he must accomplish his task is perfectly reasonable. Just as a weaver must master the nature and function of the shuttle, the borer his drill, and the smith his hammer and anvil, so the name giver must master names as his organon of teaching and separating realities and also ply his instrument with skill (388a-e). Such instructional and discriminatory intelligence belongs to the rarest of men and artisans, and for good reason Socrates in one breath makes the name giver (onomatourgos) and the lawgiver (nomothetēs) one and the same person (388e7–389a3). Even this conferral of identity, however, does not allow for a satisfactory closure, because further reflection on the tool-and-instrument analogy brings out the hidden hierarchy of artisans. Above the various professional craftsmen stands another class of persons who can direct and supervise, and that again in accordance with the nature of both work and workers. In the realm of names, as Socrates grandly concludes, the person who can best direct the lawgiver’s work and assess it when it is finished is none other than the dialectician, the one who knows how to make questions and answers (390c-e5).

When we rejoin Xunzi on his side, we do not hear, of course, any reference to the dialectician as such. Instead, the persons who are presumed to be the correct and effective makers of names are named as the later kings (hou wang

), the sage-kings (sheng wang

), and the superior man; they are the crucial instigators and guardians of correct names. As I have pointed out, Xunzi’s investigation into the subject is premised on an existing condition of social disorder that manifests itself also in language. He says at the beginning of his chapter, “Now that sage-kings are gone, the preservation of names is neglected, strange proposals have sprung up, the names and actualities are in chaos, and the forms of right and wrong are unclear. Thus even the law-abiding officials and the text-reciting, topic-counting Rus are in confusion. Should a kingly one arise, he would certainly follow certain old names and also create some new names” (XJ, p. 276).

The term of interest in this passage is wang zhe

, which I translate as “kingly one,” or, as Knoblock would render it, “True King.” The term, we may point out at once, is not an exclusive feature of the Xunzi, because it appears prominently in Mencius and in other contemporary thinkers. Hardly to be thought of as a real historical individual who can lay claim to rulership by birthright or inherited status, the kingly one who can resume and repeat certain activities of later kings or sage-kings is a posited figure of discourse, one who fully embodies and articulates the Confucian ideals. As in the thought of Socrates, so, too, the thought of Xunzi seeks to prescribe what must be the indispensable qualifications of the name maker. Just as Socrates asserts that “it is not for every man to give names [ouk ara pantos andros … onoma thesthai]” (388e7–389a1), but only the lawgiver under the supervision of the dialectician can do an acceptable job, so for Xunzi the task must also fall correspondingly on a special sort of person. “Therefore the way the kingly one institutes names,” he says near the beginning of the chapter, “is that when the names are fixed, actualities will be distinguished, his way will be practiced, and his intention will be known. He will then lead with caution so as to unify his people” (XJ, p. 275). We are still in the orbit of names in relation to actuality (shi), but we know what special meaning the term actually possesses. Grasping the true import of that relation, as we have seen, requires special understanding of linguistic signs and linguistic activities, but what seems most important to Xunzi is for his “kingly one” to recognize and affirm a special tradition of culture.

The very opening sentences of Xunzi’s chapter provide decisive illumination of how the accumulated cultural achievements of China’s ideal past must be held up as the foundation of correct naming. “When the later kings established names, they followed the Shang in the names of criminal law, the Zhou in the names of official rank, the Rites in the names of cultural patterns. In applying the miscellaneous names to the myriad things, they followed the regional dialects and customs of the various Xia states [i.e., China], and because of this, distant villages of different customs were able to communicate” (XJ, chap. 22, p. 274). If a “kingly one” were to flourish in Xunzi’s time or later, he could do no better than to recapitulate the practice of the “later kings.” The venerated cultural tradition in Xunzi’s discourse acquires the function of actuality (shi) that substantiates the correctness of a set of names, because they articulate what a Confucian such as Xunzi would consider to be the principles of proper governance (zheng

). These names are said to perpetuate the past, endorse the authority of centralized orthodoxy, obviate tribal difference, and domesticate linguistic otherness. Only on this basis could Xunzi present later a grandiloquent summation of how language would support politics: “Therefore, groups, names, disputations and explanations—all these are the grand patterns of usefulness, the very beginning of the kingly enterprise” (XJ, p. 281).

However divergent the ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers may be with regard to so many things relative to their respective languages and cultural traditions, the remarkable point of convergence in their thought at this juncture centers on the figure emerging from their discourse. Both have a human figure who provides solutions to the problems of language, and both thinkers have gone to great lengths, in fact, to demonstrate how their exalted figures, based on their sufficient knowledge, would bring about solutions. Dare we yield to temptation and say further that the dialectician spotlighted in the Cratylus and the wang zhe in the Xunzi are none other than some persons such as Socrates and Xun Qing themselves? A too-obvious speculation, perhaps, but I’ll let my patient reader decide.

5. Timothy M. S. Baxter writes: “The elements are the end of the process of analysis of a name into smaller names; as such they are names themselves, revealing an essence as any name should” (The “Cratylus”: Plato’s Critique of Naming, Philosophia Antiqua, ed. J. Mansfield et al., 58 [Leiden: Brill, 1992], pp. 76–77). And also: “The prôta onomata represent the limits of analysis, the smallest parts of language with semantic content; as such whether they are letters, syllables or whatever depends not on the nature of language but on that of a given nominatum” (p. 78). See also N. Bretzmann, “Plato on the Correctness of Names,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 126–138; Bretzmann calls these first names “proteronyms” but denies that they are names. Baxter disputes this last point.

6. J. N. Findlay has written: “The whole which things form can, on reflection, be nothing but the elements in the totality of their relations, and, if we know something about the whole, we ipso facto know something about all the parts. Or if, alternatively, the whole is something new and simple which supervenes upon the related parts, then it too will be an element, and unknowable as the elements of which it is held to consist. The drift of the whole argument is to discredit the strict separation of elements from complex unities which we may imagine the exact young reasoners of the Academy to have pressed for. Socrates-Plato implies, we may suggest, that the ultimate and unutterable is none the less [sic] that without which the derivative and utterable would not be utterable at all, and that it therefore, in a manner, shares in the utterability of the latter, just as the latter after a fashion shades into the unutterability of the former” (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974], p. 228).

7. By the time of Zheng Xuan

(127–200), ming

(name) and zi

(scripted word, honorific style) are regarded as synonyms, their only difference being that the former was the older term. See Zheng’s commentary in the Lun Yu Yi Shu, cited by John Makeham, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, ed. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 43. A. C. Graham, in his article “Chinese Philosophy of Language,” observes: “China provides the unique instance of philosophy of language developed in a language of uninflected words organised solely by word order and the functions of grammatical particles. In the absence of morphological features such as compel attention in Indo-European and Semitic languages, there is little to make Chinese aware of the structures of their own language” (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Hugo Steger and Herbert Ernst Wiegand [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992], 7.1:94–104). The point to be emphasized here is that such “morphological features” as indicated by “inflections” in those languages mentioned by Graham may all be units smaller or “less developed” than a full-blown word, but they are still meaningful units as temporal, gender, number, and case markers—both visually and phonetically—by reason of their alphabetical formation. The Chinese graphs, by contrast, may or may not convey such meanings in their constitutive parts.

9. The word that I translate as “designation” is also ming but written as

, which A. C. Graham defines, in its verbal form, as “to name either something to be brought about … or an already existing thing” (Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science [1978; repr., Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990], p. 196). John Knoblock offers an expanded definition: “To pronounce the state of an oracle from which the usage ‘to give a name’ to something probably derives. It also means to order an official to do something, and the mandate or charge given to such an official” (Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 3, bks. 17–32 [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994], p. 123).

20. A. C. Graham has sought to demonstrate that qing in the documents of the Warring States period often takes on the meaning of “essence,” in the sense of what is essential to a thing—and by extension, to a human person. In this sense as well, the word is analogous to the Aristotelian concept of essence, but the similarity “relates to naming, not to being” (Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature [1986; repr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990], p. 63).