The argument is sometimes put more abstractly: culture is meta-social, the
grounds which make the social possible. In tribal societies much behavior is
structured by the rules of kinship; more generally, all social life consists in
playing social games which are constituted by their rules. Often joined to this
theory is the claim that such meta-structures are historically specific; different
tribes, groups, historical epochs play different games, and live in irreducibly
distinctive worlds. Applied to the history of ideas, this line of argument for
irreducible cultural particularism takes the form that the limits and possibilities
of thinking are given by language; the nature of a syntax determines what
philosophy can be formulated in it. If this is so, then the philosophies of the
world are hermetically sealed by the distinctiveness of languages such as
Indo-European, Semitic, and Chinese.
In this argument it is the Chinese language, with its dearth of explicit
syntax, which prevented philosophies from developing formal syllogistic logic
and pursuing that route toward epistemology (Hansen, 1983). Time is elided
because verbs lack tense. Nouns do not distinguish between singular and
plural, abstract or concrete. Without the definitive article, most things appear
as mass nouns (like “water” in English), with no distinct emphasis given to
the particular (“the table”). Realms of philosophical consideration are cut off.
What is constructed in the characteristic Chinese worldview is language-em-
bedded. The same word can often be used as noun, adjective, or verb, giving
the haunting multiple meanings of Chinese poetry, while avoiding the Greco-
European style of philosophizing by piecing apart abstract distinctions. To this
quality of language is due the centrality of concepts such as Tao, a distinctively
Chinese blending of process and substance. For Chinese, no abstract metaphys-
ics is possible; its worldview is sui generis in being simultaneously concrete
and ethereal.
Yet a language is not static. New conceptual terms are produced by philo-
sophical arguments; the development of philosophy is the development of its
language. This is not to say that languages may not pose difficulties, and that
time is not taken in their overcoming; but the pace of philosophical movement
is rather slow in every part of the world, rarely making more than one
conceptual step in any 35-year generation or so. The speed of conceptual
transformation among Chinese philosophers in their most intense periods of
debate, as in the years 365–235 b.c.e., is on a par with comparable periods
elsewhere.
The argument as applied to Chinese is parochial. Other languages have
their philosophical difficulties as well. The Greeks had no words to distinguish
between “similar” and “identical”; both were rendered by ömoios, giving rise
to early problems for Pythagoreans and Sophists (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 1:230).
The copula is not present in Arabic; the Indo-European languages, however,
Introduction^ •^9