Reflection on Olson Ch 1-5 (1)

Olson (1994), when delineating the history of thinking, brought about the idea of primitive thinking indicative of the first age or stage of mankind. He cited metonymy as one of its major features. That is, primitive thinking does not differentiate between signifiers and signified and as such embraces the belief that signifiers (representation) carry some of the properties of the signified (represented) (Levy-Bruhl, 1923). This and the concept of metonymy taking signs, symbols, or images to embody the things they are representing somehow prompt me to conjecture the possible impact of Chinese writing system on ancient Chinese people.

Chinese writing system employs characters comprising lines or points to symbolize objects/concepts, as opposed to the alphabetic one adopted by western cultures. And all the characters were coined following the principles of the 6 categories of Chinese characters. Among them, pictographs (象形字) obtained their shapes by imitating the real objects in reality. For example, the pictograph, “水”(water), imitates how the water in a river looks like (or how the ancient Chinese thought it looked like). And the character“日”(sun) imitates the real sun. The speculatory original pictures of these 2 characters go as follows.




[(Original picture of the pictograph “水” water) ]










[(Original picture of the pictograph “日”(sun) ]



As can be seen, Chinese characters carry with them the physical properties of the signified objects. Therefore, parallel to what Levy-Bruhl (1923) reported about man from Bechuanaland worried that the letter might open up and talk to him, I guess ancient Chinese people might’ve also come to look at writing as sacred and magical because the real-world objects were embodied in such a way that they seem likely to come to life and dance on the papyrus (or bamboo strips) any minute. Plus, some of the characters were among the mystic forces they entertained great fear for, such as the Sun, water, fire, and the like. As such, they might worship, honor, and respect the characters (signifiers) as they did to the forces/objects in reality (signified). In turn, I guess this might also explain why literates in ancient times were better respected and looked up to – because they mastered something astonishing in the eyes of the general public.


* The pictures came from Dancing on Paper – Characters of China at http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126668/str_all.htm