martin svensson ekström - sprak.gu.se · an earlier version of this essay appeared in culture and...

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Does the Metaphor Translate?

Martin Svensson Ekström

The Flaw in the Word

Translation requires a sensibility for the similar in the dissimilar and vice versa. But how do likenesses and differences between one culture and another appear? Do they appear as sporadic overlaps between heteroge-neous discourses or as an extended series of symmetrical correspondences and disjunctions? How are we supposed to compare texts, vocabularies, and customs from different times, traditions, and places? Is there a vantage point that a translator, dialogician, or comparativist ideally should assume?

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Culture and Dialogue 1, 1 (2011). I am thankful to Martin Ovens, Gerald Cipriani, Ming Dong Gu, Wim de Reu, and the anonymous reader for State University of New York Press. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. The sequential numbering of the Shijing poems fol-lows Bernhard Karlgren’s The Book of Odes (Stockholm: The Museum of Far East-ern Antiquities, 1950). References to the Shijing, the Mao Commentary, and Zheng Xuan’s Notes are to Shi sanjia yi ji shu (SSJYJS) 詩三家義集疏, ed. Wang Xianqian 王先謙 (Taipei: Mingwen, 1988 [1915]). For a meticulous translation of the Shijing, see Karlgren, The Book of Odes. For philological analyses, see Karlgren’s Glosses on the Book of Odes (Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964) and Chen Huan 陳奐 (1786–1863), Shi Maoshizhuan shu 詩毛氏傳疏 [Annotations on Mr. Mao’s Commentary on the Odes] (Taipei: Hsüe-sheng, 1967). Some of my later examples have been analyzed, from a slightly different point of view, in “Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor: The Paradox of Divergence in Early Chinese Poetics,” Poetics Today 23, 2 (2002); in “Inscription and Re-reading: Re-reading the Inscribed (A Figure in the Chinese Philosophical Text),” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 74 (2004); and in “The Value of Misinterpretation and the Need for Re-interpretation,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 76 (2004).

46 Martin Svensson Ekström

Take, for example, the seemingly innocent concept of metaphor. A concept is, as we know, a conceptualization—a means of grasping, or coming to terms with, a certain phenomenon—and as such a concept has always its own history and presuppositions. In other words, a concept (such as metaphor) always emerges out of a certain context, and it is the prudent scholar’s responsibility never to forget that context and, as it were, provide thick rather than thin descriptions.

Let us turn to the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經). Like so many poems in the Shijing, Ode 256 (“Digni-fied,” “Yi 抑”) thematizes the connection between virtue, statecraft, and language. But if read beyond the immediate confines of its theme, the ode may also elucidate for us the intricate internal workings of language. In the fifth stanza we find the following lines:

白圭之玷 The flaw in the white jade尚可磨也 may still be polished斯言之玷 The flaw in these words不可為也 can never be worked upon1

Something out of the ordinary happens here. The word or character 玷 (dian), which in the first line refers to a flaw in a piece of jade, acquires a new or additional meaning in line three and suddenly refers to a “flaw” in speech. The composition of the character dian bears this out, since the radical—the component of a Chinese graph that indicates its meaning—is “jade” (yu 玉), which underscores the fact that dian is primarily a word denoting a blemish in jade.2

We may add that this kind of phrase-turning is not unusual in the Odes. “I am the king’s claws and teeth (予王之爪牙),” says a soldier in Ode 185; and the narrator of Ode 264 claims that “A woman with a long tongue / is a steppingstone to evil (婦有長舌, 維厲之階).”3 These are, if taken literally, monstrous statements: How can a man be “claws and teeth” or a woman’s tongue be a steppingstone? According to what logic does the human mind allow such bizarre fusions and leaps, and, conversely, how have such turns of phrase been explained in different times and traditions?

We can make two important observations at this point. On the one hand, we do not have any problem interpreting, translating, or deci-phering these lines, nor paraphrasing them: “Your words, sir, are flawed beyond repair and have done irreparable damage.” There is thus an invert-ed relation between the bizarreness and the translatability of the phrase.

47Does the Metaphor Translate?

It is transparent also to readers of a different time and tradition. On the other hand, we run into big and interesting problems if we—readers of the earliest Chinese poetry in the twenty-first century—try to describe or conceptualize this linguistic phenomenon, when a word suddenly acquires a secondary or unconventional meaning. If we choose to call it a metaphor, we must remember that “metaphor” is a concept in the sense defined earlier. That is to say, “metaphor” is not an objective tool for the analysis of linguistic phenomena regardless of cultural origins but precisely a conception that emerged from very specific assumptions about the world—in this case the larger assumptions about the world and how the human mind experiences it—that prompted Aristotle in the Poetics to develop the concept metaphora. But which were those assumptions?

Martin Heidegger provides one answer: “The metaphorical obtains only within metaphysics” (das Metaphorische gibt es nur innerhalb der Metaphysik).4 Heidegger was, of course, neither a translator nor a sinolo-gist. To him, Japan, China, and India rather played the role of the Other, against whom he could better describe the Western tradition, with its advantages and drawbacks. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s categorical claim that “the metaphorical”—that is, the concept of metaphor—can occur only within Western metaphysics is similar to categorical statements about early Chinese tradition as the absolute Other of the ancient Greek tra-dition found in certain contemporary comparative projects. The person who most clearly exemplifies this tendency is the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien. And at least one prominent sinologist, Pauline Yu, quotes with approval Heidegger’s definition of the concept of meta-phor as typically Western and metaphysical. This happens in Yu’s seminal book The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (1987).5

Let us reiterate those lines: “The flaw in these words / cannot be worked upon.” We shall come back to Yu’s work and her theory of how words like these were interpreted in early China. Let us first try to define “metaphor,” not only by turning to Aristotle, who was the person who advanced the term, but also to early Chinese tradition, from which such a conception allegedly could not have emerged. If Heidegger and Yu are correct, the Chinese tradition may provide us with a vital clue as to the philosophical background of the concept of metaphor. More specifically, what enabled the Greeks to conceptualize a turn of phrase such as “the flaw of those words” as metaphora, and what prevented early Chinese thinkers from doing the same?

Once again, a concept is a conceptualization, a way of coming to terms with a particular phenomenon. Thus when Aristotle in Peri


Poiêtikês turns the word metaphora—which literally means “transference” (of ownership), “transport,” “change” (of the moon from one phase into another)—into a concept, he is conceptualizing, or putting a name on, a linguistic phenomenon that had remained hitherto unconceptualized, at least to a certain degree.6 The canonical definition of metaphor runs as follows: “A transference [metaphora] is the application [epiphora] of a word that belongs elsewhere [or to another thing].”7 What makes pos-sible this “transference” is that between the “other thing” whose name is used in a new context and the thing whose name it replaces there is a “similarity” or “likeness” (to homoion). Aristotle says that “greatest of all [skills in rhetoric] is the metaphorical [to metaphorikon], for that alone cannot be grasped from others but is a sign of inborn cleverness [or good disposition, euphuia]. For to metaphorize well is the perception of similarity [to homoion].”8 We may use Aristotle’s concept to interpret the lines from the Shijing as a transference (metaphora) of meaning from one semantic domain (jade) to another (speech) based on what Aristotle called to homoion. In other words, since there is a similarity between a flaw in a piece of jade and a shortcoming in a statement, we can import a word that primarily belongs to the semantic realm of jade and use it to describe speech that is somehow imperfect, or “flawed.”

We may now draw a conclusion that is of great interest for us as translators and comparativists, namely, that the four lines drawn from the Shijing are perfectly analyzable in Aristotelian terms. But to con-clude naïvely that there were “metaphors” in early Chinese poetry leads us nowhere. Instead we should ask ourselves if the early Chinese read-ers of the Shijing understood the word dian in an Aristotelian manner, namely, as a metaphora. The standard sinological answer to this question has been an emphatic “no.” The metaphorical obtains only within the realm of metaphysics.

The Sinological Grand Narrative: Correlative Cosmology versus Metaphysics

Let us try to pinpoint what distinguishes early Chinese tradition from that of ancient Greece. To guide us, we shall call upon three distinguished sinologists: Henry Rosemont Jr. and Roger Ames (coauthors of a very stimulating introduction to and translation of the Confucian Analects), and François Jullien. Ames and Rosemont claim that in contrast to West-ern metaphysics “classical Chinese cosmology” is characterized by a “pri-


ority of process and change over form and stasis as the natural condition of things.”9 Furthermore, “[N]o-thing or no-body [according to early Chi-nese thought] has an essence.”10

Why is there no essentialism in early Chinese thought? This fact—if it is a fact—is to a large degree a result of the idiom in which early Chinese thought operated. Classical Greek and classical Chinese are two very different languages; François Jullien points to the absence in classi-cal Chinese of a counterpart to the Greek copula einai, or esse in Latin, “to be.” Since early Chinese tradition “never speculated upon Being (the verb ‘to be’ does not even exist in classical Chinese),” Jullien claims, it has “never conceived of Truth [la vérité].”11

In a similar spirit, Ames and Rosemont claim that the existence of the definite article in Western languages underscores the essentialism so typical of metaphysical thinking. When, for example, Westerners talk of the tree in the garden, they tend to conceive of that tree as being one and the same no matter what the external circumstances are. In short, when they see a tree in their garden, they see its static essence: the tree is always identical to itself. In classical Chinese, by contrast, things were quite different. Due to the absence of both the definite article and the existential copula “to be,” the ancient Chinese looked at a tree and saw an object that was once planted, that had grown to its present size, that would blossom in spring, drop its leaves in the autumn, and that would eventually wither and die. In other words, the Chinese saw something that was in constant transformation. The tree in the garden is a process rather than a stable being.

This is nothing less than the borderline between Western metaphys-ics and Chinese correlative cosmology. Metaphysics strives to identify individual objects, to name them, hem them in, and thus ensure that their identity is stable. For metaphysics, the notion of change is associated with a heavy dose of anxiety since it upsets the very assumption of the world as a place of stability that the Westerner lives by. The Chinese, by contrast, embrace change and transformation.

Let us once more return to the sentence “The flaw in these words.” Ames, Rosemont, and Jullien have provided us with an explanation of why the metaphorical can only exist within metaphysics. Aristotle’s definition of metaphora as the transference of a name from one thing to another can only occur within a system of thought such as Western metaphysics, which values form, stasis, and stable identities. In a system of thought of the kind that existed in early China, there can be no question of a transference of names from one thing to another. Why? Simply because


there are no discrete “things” with stable identities, which is the prereq-uisite for the metaphorical transference. This is no small matter but the very reason why it can be claimed that metaphysics and the metaphorical presuppose each other.

Although we now understand that we cannot carelessly use the concept of metaphor to analyze classical Chinese poetry since Aristo-tle’s metaphora builds on a wholly different worldview than that of early China, we still have to clarify how those four lines from the Shijing were interpreted by Chinese readers in antiquity. How come 玷 (dian) can refer to both a flaw in a piece of jade and a shortcoming, or a defect in a statement? This is where we must return to Yu’s analysis, which provides us with a solution that is brilliant in its simplicity. Like Ames, Rosemont, and Jullien, Yu is at great pains to contextualize and historicize. That is, she is fully aware of the dangers of uncritically using Western terminol-ogy and importing Western concepts that may distort the specific early Chinese way of reading poetry. Instead, she hypothesizes that the “read-ing of imagery” in the Chinese tradition was directly derivative of larger philosophical issues in early Chinese thought.

According to Yu, ancient “Chinese thought conceives of the universe as a spontaneous self-generating organism in which all phenomena exist in orderly, mutually implicating, correlative harmonies.”12 This is a pithy definition of what is commonly referred to as correlative cosmology: the notion that all things in the universe interact and spontaneously gather into correlative categories (lei 類) based on shared similarities. Yu is quite correct, of course. Lei is certainly a crucial concept in Chinese philosophy of the third century onward, and we find for example in the compendium of essays called Lüshi chunqiu (呂氏春秋, Mr. Lü’s Annals, 239 BC) pas-sages that outline what color clothes to wear, which rituals to perform, which songs to sing in accordance with the different seasons. “Things of the same lei naturally attract one another,” says Mr. Lü.13 Likewise, musical tones of the same pitch are said to “answer” each other and spontaneously form into a specific class.14 This has grave implications for the way poetic imagery was interpreted in early China, since “the connections between the subject and object or among objects, which the West has by and large credited to the creative ingenuity of the poet, are viewed in the Chinese tradition as already pre-established.”15

Only now do we fully grasp how the flaw in the jade and the “flaw” in speech are coupled in the poem. It is not through an act of transference of the linguistic meaning associated with one clearly defined object to


another, nor is it a creative act on the part of the Chinese poet, because the flawed jade and the flawed speech were always already coupled outside language. The Chinese poet is therefore not an ingenious (euphuês) fabri-cator of metaphors. Instead, the poet merely describes in literal language a categorical and cosmological relationship between jade and speech that exists before, outside, and independently of language. This can only lead to one conclusion. Although a sentence such as “These words are flawed” may look like a metaphor, it is not the case simply because the thought pattern on which the reading of imagery in early China was based—the doctrine of correlative cosmology—did not and could not conceive of a transference of meaning in the Aristotelian sense. Chinese poetry, accord-ing to this theory, is always and everywhere literal.16

This reminds us about the necessity for hermeneutical rigor in the process of translation. It reminds us that every concept is determined by its history, and that by contextualizing and historicizing a given concept in comparison with seemingly similar concepts in other traditions, one not only avoids the pitfalls of Eurocentrism or sinocentrism but also gains a deeper understanding of both traditions.

However, I must at this point express some doubt. The inclination of these scholars to contextualize and historicize is truly admirable, and they have contributed greatly to our understanding of the Greek and Chinese traditions. Yet, there is something slightly odd about the presumptions. The Greek and the Chinese traditions appear as the symmetrical nega-tions of each other. The West is metaphysical and China cosmological. The Western philosopher is an obsessive “taxonomizer” who strives to define and determine once and for all the identity of all things, whereas the Chinese thinker cherishes the constant transformations of all things. Western poetry is the result of the calculations and rhetorical skills of brilliant poets, whereas Chinese poetry is the spontaneous result of a flash of inspiration. Western poetic imagery is often metaphorical, whereas Chinese imagery is always literal. The ambition to find a decisive divid-ing line between the East and the West—what we may call comparative literature or philosophy at a macro level—yields results that strike one as being too neat. Moreover, we may ask ourselves if early Chinese language philosophy and literary theory are always derivative of correlative cosmol-ogy. Similarly, is Aristotle’s metaphora in all aspects inseparable from the thought pattern that we call metaphysics?

Let us therefore begin anew. How did early Chinese thinkers and commentators conceptualize the curious fact that a word like dian


suddenly appears to have two meanings? I suggest an answer that is quite different from those mentioned earlier, as well as an alternative to the methodology of these grand macro-level projects.

“The Similar in the Dissimilar”

“The flaw of these words / cannot be worked upon.” How did the early Confucian commentators of the Shijing explain these lines and this turn of phrase? The answer is that they pretty much did not. The Confucian commentator Mao Heng (毛亨, second century BC), famous for his sys-tematic analysis of Shijing imagery by way of the concept xing (興), was not particularly interested in the turns of phrase that a latter-day reader would call metaphorical. Why? Presumably because they are easy to inter-pret (as we have concluded) and do not invite heretical and un-Confucian readings. Mao was even less interested in formulating a theory, a logical and coherent intellectual tool, for the analysis of such phrases. Instead, the xing appears to a large degree as an instrument for Mao to take control of the often erotic Shijing odes and turn them into Confucian dogma.17

Of course, what is expressed in a so-called theory may very well be contained implicitly elsewhere and otherwise. And indeed, the four lines of Ode 256 previously mentioned may be said to contain an implicit theory of their own rhetorical modality. The expression “the flaw in these words” does not appear alone but as part of a parallel construction.

We gather from the poem that a “flaw” relates to a piece of white jade like an improper, incorrect, or insensitive remark relates to speech or words. What is called a dian (玷) is an instance of failure in either jade or speech. This kind of metaphora Aristotle called analogon, and what these lines suggest is thus that a turn of phrase such as “the flaw in these words” is an abbreviated analogy.18 Likewise, the line “I am the king’s claws and teeth” (from Ode 185) may be understood as an abbre-viation of the statement “As a soldier, I stand in the same relationship to my king as the claws and teeth do to an animal: We are the means of defense.” From another point of view, and to anticipate our forthcoming argument, we may say that the lines from Ode 256 also stress the fact that there is simultaneous similarity and difference. Although both may have a “flaw,” speech is not jade: You cannot treat speech the same way that you treat jade.

An oft-quoted passage from the “Shan shuo (善說)” chapter of The Garden of Persuasion (Shuo yuan 說苑) may clarify further the interac-


tion between similarity and difference in analogies, comparisons, similes, or metaphors:

A retainer said to King Liang, “When Master Hui discusses governmental affairs he likes to use comparisons [pi 譬]. If you forbid him to do so, he won’t be able to speak.”

The king said, “Agreed.”At the audience the following day, the king told Master

Hui, “When you, sir, discuss governmental affairs, I would like you simply to speak directly [zhi yan 直言], without comparisons.”

Master Hui said, “Suppose there is a fellow who does not know what a tan is, and he said, ‘What does a tan look like?’ and we reply, ‘A tan is like [ru 如] a tan,’ would he then understand [yu 諭]?”

The king said, “Not yet.”“But if we changed our reply, saying, ‘A tan is like a bow

but with a bamboo string,’ would he then understand?” “Possibly.”Master Hui said, “Well, the intellectual always uses what

is known to explain what is unknown, and so makes other people know it. Now you say, ‘Don’t use comparisons’—This is impossible.”

The king said, “Very well.”20

The pi (comparison) is instructive because it explores a similarity as well as a difference between an unknown object and a well-known object. This similarity is indicated by the word ru 如 (like, as, as if). If a tan is tautologically compared to a tan, the comparison fails, not simply because the one for whose benefit the comparison is made does not know what a tan is, but also because the comparison contains only similarity. The gong-bow, however, is sufficiently different and similar to the tan for the comparison to be effective and instructive. The good “comparativist” thus has to strike a balance between similarity and difference, so that what is known may be used to explain what is unknown.

Since “the Greeks” and “the Chinese” seem therefore to concur (at least in these instances) on the importance of similarity and of perceiv-ing what unites the thing one knows with things unknown, somebody bent on finding out the difference between the Chinese and the Greeks may wonder whether the similarity—that is, the homoion on which the


metaphora is founded and which makes possible Hui Shi’s comparison as well as the analogy between jade and speech—is preexisting, or whether such a similarity is something that one who is euphuês “creates,” in Yu’s words.20 We have thus been led back to the assertion that for ancient Chinese thinkers all relations and similarities between objects exist before and independently of human cognition and language. Was this also the case for the Greeks? Or, does Aristotle’s theorein (perceiving) involve an element of creation, of the construction of similarities and not simply the perception of them?21

In spite of being an interesting question, it might also lead us in the wrong direction. Let us instead turn to the phenomenon of dissimulation.

Faking—“Si-militude”

1. What Is “Faking”?

Words like ru (如) are commonplace and we—as “speech-endowed ani-mals”—could not do without them in our everyday lives.22 But they are also weirder and more complex than we usually think, since they imply both similarity (the two things compared are in some respect similar) and difference (the two things compared are after all not identical). Aristotle and Hui Shi stressed the value of perceiving the similar in the dissimi-lar. Let us therefore explore the concepts of difference and dissimulation, which are collaterally related to that of similarity. We shall begin with a short account of the concept of falsity (or faking), wei (偽), as it appears in Zuo’s Commentary (Zuozhuan 左傳) and the Zhuangzi (莊子) and sub-sequently in a later work, the Xunzi (荀子, third century BC).

In the Zuozhuan, “Duke Ding (定公), eighth year,” we find an entry about a hard-hearted general by the name of Ran Meng. At the end of a battle, instead of overseeing the retreat of the army, “Ran Meng faked an injury to his foot and returned home before the army. His older brother Hui thereupon shouted ‘Meng [was supposed to] guard the rear!’ ”23

Wei (偽) means here “to fake” or “to dissimulate” and has wholly negative connotations. Ran Meng falsifies himself; he makes it seem as though he has an injured foot, and the reader conjures up an image of him scurrying away from his soldiers with a fake limp. The similarity between a tan and a bow to which Hui Shi pointed is factual, whereas the similarity that obtains between Ran Meng and an invalid has been consciously fabricated by the general himself. It is an illusion.


In the “Zhi bei you (知北遊)” chapter of the Zhuangzi, Confucian rituality (li 禮) is dismissed in a similar vein and in similar terms. Huang Di (黃帝), the Yellow Emperor, is quoted as saying that “[to act in accor-dance with] rituality amounts to being false to each other (禮相偽也).”24 By adhering to the elaborate and rigid system of Confucian ritual rules and by interacting with other people on that basis, one engages in a form of social intercourse that is pretentious, fictitious, and fake. With the Zhuangzi, the word wei thus designates the falsification of our spon-taneously given and therefore truthful nature. Wei, in other words, is the opposite of ziran (自然), the Taoist ideal of being “this way in oneself,” of being natural and unadulterated.25

However, in the essay called “Human Nature Is Bad” (Xing e 性惡), Xunzi takes over—and for that matter overtakes—both Zhuangzi’s notion of rituality as a falsification of man’s pristine nature and the earlier ter-minology where wei is a word with patently negative connotations. Xunzi turns these terms on their heads. He claims that “Man’s inborn nature is bad, what is good therein is wei (人之性惡 , 其善者偽也).”26 With Xunzi, wei has become the very foundation of civilized society: the falsification or refinement of man’s base nature. “Rituality amounts to being false to each other,” says the Yellow Emperor. Yes, but this is exactly Xunzi’s point. If we do not abide by the farfetched, strained, and unnatural (to wit, wei) rules of rituality—if we instead act out our inborn but base instinct against each other—mankind is doomed. In Xunzi’s radical Confucian reinterpre-tation of the Zhuangzian wei, dissimulation and the work of falsification are lauded. And with our pronounced interest in the question of tropes, we note that Xunzi himself dissimulates the concept of wei, which before him meant “falsification” but which in his system of thought rather means “refinement (of a base product).” Xunzi’s radical reinterpretation of the word wei is thus an example of the “refinement” that he claims is crucial for human existence.

Let us now close in on another aspect of falsity.

2. What is “Si-militude”?

Like ru (如), the near-synonymous word si (似) is weird and paradoxical in that it may signal similarity as well as difference. In the third century BC, the paradoxical dimension of the word si was exploited in a series of philosophical essays on the problem of deceptive appearances, where it expressed, as we shall see, a contradictory stance toward illusions and lying. Si indicates similarity, for example, in the following passage from


Mr Lü’s Annals: “I have heard that when a true lord uses arms no one can see their shape, yet they accomplish their aims perfectly. . . . But when rustic people use arms, the sound of their drums is like [si] thunder, and their clamor shakes the earth.”27 The relationship indicated by the word si in this passage is obviously one of positive correspondence between two discrete entities, since the sound of the war drums employed by uncouth military men is described as being similar to the sound of thunder.28

The word si indicates similarity also in the next passage, where Men-cius makes his famous claim that the sage and the man on the street is of one kind:

Thus all things of the same category [lei] are similar [si] to each other. Why should we doubt that this is so also with regard to men? The sage and we are of the same category. Thus Master Long said, “Although a cobbler doesn’t know exactly for which feet he is making a pair of shoes, I know he won’t make a basket.” That all shoes are similar to each other is because all feet are the same.29

Although all the feet in the world are separate and individual entities, they belong to the same category (lei) and are consequently similar (si), just as the sage and the ordinary man are fundamentally alike.30 The word si thus indicates that there is a positive, unproblematic, and perhaps essential correlation between all things that belong to the same category.

The words lei and si appear together also in Mr. Lü’s tale about the virtuous Yu Rang (豫讓), who was so loyal to his former lord, Duke Zhi, that he did not hesitate to disfigure himself in order to avenge the duke’s death. In this context, however, lei does not mean “category” but is—intriguingly enough—synonymous with si in the verbal sense of “to look like, be similar to.” According to the text,

Yu Rang planned to assassinate Zhao Xiangzi [who had killed Duke Zhi], so he shaved his head and eyebrows and cut off his nose in order to alter his appearance. He assumed the identity of a beggar and went begging at his wife’s place. His wife said, “There is nothing in appearance or shape that resembles [si] my husband, but his voice—how extremely similar [lei] it is to that of my husband.” Yu Rang then swallowed burning coal to change also his voice.31


In the parlance of Yu Rang’s wife, which is also the parlance of early Chinese language philosophy and poetics, si designates the coincidence between a person’s external appearance and him- or herself—a correspon-dence that Yu Rang has wilfully manipulated and falsified. His wife is puzzled because although there is no such correspondence, although the man whose appearance presents itself to her senses does not “resemble” (si) her husband, the voice of that strange beggar is “extremely” similar (lei) to Yu Rang’s. We may venture a translation of this tale into the con-cepts of form and content. When Yu Rang mutilates himself, he alters the form (his appearance) while the content (Yu Rang’s personality) is intact. He thereby demonstrates that the bond between form and content, in this extreme case at least, is arbitrary and established by convention or habit.

In all three aforementioned examples, the key word si refers to a perceived similarity between distinct objects—in other words to a positive correspondence. By contrast, in the passages to which we now turn, the word si signals that there is a split between how something appears to be and how it actually is. Let us, at this juncture, formulate a hypothesis.

The paradoxical usage of the word si, as we are about to witness, is not coincidental but symptomatic of an important strain in early Chinese poetics, philosophy, and ritual thinking. Si refers equally to the similar-ity that unites two things and the differences that separate them. Si is thereby a word that is essentially double and furthermore a word that conceptualizes a confusing doubleness or duality. I henceforth refer to the paradoxical—albeit rich, complex, and informative—duality of the word si by translating it, as a pun, as si-militude and make it the focus in this brief attempt at a rereading of early Chinese poetics.

3. “Mistrusting Si-militude”

In the Lüshi chunqiu, the essay called “Mistrusting Si-militude” (Yi si 疑似) begins by stating that

What greatly disorients and confuses man is that things resemble [si 似] each other. What concerns the trader in jade is that ordinary stones resemble jade. . . . What concerns the enlightened ruler is that people may be skilled in sophistry and thus seem [si] to possess thorough knowledge. The ruler of a declining state only seems wise; the minister of a declining state only seems loyal. Things that resemble each other—this


is what greatly confuses the dim-witted and what spurs the sage to intense brain-racking. Thus, Mozi wept when he saw a fork in the road [dao].32

Mozi weeps at the fork in the road because what was originally one road (dao 道, also “principle” or “discourse”) has suddenly become two, and although they seem identical and have a common source, they lead to completely different places. This confusing similarity between two discrete things is si (似, si-militude). If ru for Hui Shi represented a benign, mea-sured similarity between two objects that otherwise are clearly discrete, then si for Mr. Lü is an altogether negative quality that rather blurs the distinction between things and thus confuses the human mind. Si is an evil version of ru, where similarity becomes promiscuous, furiously mul-tiplying like cancer cells. A comparison between Aristotle and Mr. Lü may enlighten us further.

Homoion and si are located at the two extremes of the spectrum of similarity. Homoion is the (deep) similarity between two things that at first glance seem different. By contrast, si is the apparent similarity between things that are really different. For Aristotle, homoion can be detected only by people who are euphuês. For Mr. Lü, being euphuês (or sagelike) is necessary in order to find difference and nuances in a world in which too many things look alike. The Chinese thinker and his Greek counterpart to a large degree speak of similar phenomena but from different points of view. How, then, do wei and si relate to each other? Does si-militude only appear spontaneously, whereas wei is contrived and manmade, as indicated by the opening passage in the “Yi si” chapter? And what has this to do with the turns of phrase that Aristotle called metaphorai—that is, linguistic transferences or transportations? The story that follows the introductory passage of “Yi si” is of great interest in this respect. It is the tale of the incompetent last king of the Western Zhou dynasty, King You (幽王, r. 795–771 BC) and the events that brought the Zhou to an end.

The capital cities of the Zhou dynasty, Feng and Hao, were close to the territory held by the Rong people. Therefore, [the royal house] and the various vassals agreed on [yue 約] build-ing a fort by the Royal Road and putting on its roof powerful drums that could be heard for miles. In the event of an attack from the Rong, the drums would spread the news, and the vassals’ troops would hasten to assist their emperor. When the Rong finally attacked, King You beat on the drums, and the


vassals’ troops duly arrived. Bao Si was exuberant and took great pleasure in the spectacle. King You desired his queen’s laughter, so he pounded the drums a great many times and the troops kept coming to the capital, only to find that there was no attack. It went so far that, when the Rong finally did attack again, no vassal responded to the king’s drum. The king expired at the foot of Black Horse Mountain, and the whole world laughed at his death. With the “No Attack” he lost the “Real Attack.”33

Exactly in what way is this an example of si-militude? What is si in this chain of events? It is the drum signal. At every turn of the story, the drum signal sounds the same while its meaning fluctuates violently. Thus the drum signal only seems to be semantically stable; it seems to mean the same thing at all times but in fact does not.34

Let us rehearse the most important events in this tale. King You makes an “agreement” (yue 約) with his vassals as to the meaning of the drum signal. The term yue is not without interest from our language-oriented perspective, since we recognize it from Xunzi’s theory of names, according to which the link between ming 名 and shi 實 (approximately, “word” and “referent”) is an “agreed-upon bond” (yue); it is conventional and manmade rather than given by nature. This is also how the drum sig-nal acquires its meaning. The two parties agree that it shall mean “attack” (or “intruder,” kou 寇), but when King You attempts to please the queen, Bao Si, he breaks that agreements and so causes a fatal glitch in the com-munication; thus the meaning of the drum signal mutates from “Real Attack” (真寇) to “No Attack” (無寇).

This tells us that si-militude is operative also in language—or at least in a system of signs very similar to language—and that signs can be misleading if they seem to mean one thing when they in fact they mean another. But the story also demonstrates that a person can consciously alter or manipulate a (linguistic) sign so that it acquires a meaning that is unconventional and, as in this case, the very opposite of its “agreed-upon” meaning. Just like the one who consciously fakes a limp (i.e., the sign of a foot injury) to escape a thorny situation, King You consciously falsifies the drum signal, namely, the sign “Attack.” Differently put, King You uses language to tell an untruth. He uses language in order to lie. And with a jolt of surprise we realize that King You’s manipulation of the drum signal is in execution and logic identical to Xunzi’s perverse-but-refined reforging of the Zhuangzian notion of wei (偽).


An “Other” Treasure

King You’s manipulation—under the rubric of si—of the drum signal is described in wholly negative terms. King You falsifies and betrays the meaning of the drum signal. It is therefore ironical that the author of another essay in the Lüshi chunqiu not only commits exactly the same crime against the linguistic code as King You but also depends upon that breach to make his philosophical point.

The essay called “Another Treasure” (Yi bao 異寶) includes a sen-tence that warrants our full attention: “It was not that the people of old lacked treasures, what they treasured was something other.”35 The pivotal words here are bao (寶) and yi (異: other, different, weird), which make up the concept of an “other” treasure. We know what a treasure is, but what is an other treasure? That dian (玷) primarily refers to a flaw in a piece of jade is indicated by the jade radical, as well as by the analogy in which a defect in speech is compared to a flaw in a piece of jade. Likewise, bao (寶) is a character whose composition of the graphs for earthenware, cowrie shells, and jade under a roof is indicative of its primary meaning, “treasure, material riches.” However, it could be suggested that although the linguistic mechanism behind these uses of dian and bao are identical, they are used for different purposes. Let us now proceed step by step.

When the Shijing poet says that “the flaw in the white jade / may still be polished,” he uses dian in its primary sense, but when he adds that “the flaw in this word / cannot be worked on,” he shifts its primary meaning. Similarly, when the author of “Another Treasure” says that “it was not that the [sagelike] ancient people lacked treasures,” bao appears in its primary sense, but when he adds—compare here King You manipulat-ing the drum signal—that “what they treasured was something other,” the primary sense is altered. There is an element of similarity in both cases: language and jade may both have defects; and material treasures and virtue (which is what the ancients “treasured”) are all valuable. In what way, then, are these uses of dian and bao different?

The stories that follow the introductory passage of the “Yi bao” chap-ter of Lüshi chunqiu tell of men who refuse the money, expensive swords, and precious stones that they are offered, with the argument that there are “other,” higher, and nobler values in life such as virtue, loyalty, and righteousness. Why, then, did the author not simply say that the “people of ancient times loved virtue, loyalty, and righteousness”? Why does he speak of “other” treasures? More precisely, why does he call virtue, loyalty, and righteousness by the name of bao—material treasures—when this, according to his own account, is precisely what they are not?


Let us return to the shifty King You. The king negates the primary meaning of the drum signal. It originally meant “Attack,” but after the king’s frivolous banging on the drum, the signal means “No Attack.” Using the word bao to designate a nontreasure is a language game in the same vein, but unlike the hapless, clueless King You, the author knows exactly what he is doing and is rhetorically very shrewd and precise. The message that he wants to convey is that the ancient sages valued virtue as we—the vulgar people of latter days—value money and jade. Therefore, in contrast to the virtuous sages of yore, we can nowadays conceptualize (the value of) virtue only in terms of material riches.

The distinction between “primary” and “secondary” meanings of words has been questioned by most contemporary theorists of the meta-phor, but in this case it is indeed the very difference between the pri-mary and secondary meaning of bao that carries the argument: Today, people can conceptualize virtue, loyalty, and righteousness only as mate-rial riches, and that is a sign of their vulgarity. Without the difference between the primary and secondary meaning of bao, this argument could not have been made.36

This, then, is the contradiction. King You is blamed for manipulating the drum signal so that “Attack” means “No Attack,” whereas the author of the “Yi bao” chapter does exactly the same thing to communicate his message of the superiority of the ancients and the vulgarity of the con-temporary world. This calls for two comments. First, the contradiction bears witness to a fundamental ambivalence toward the phenomenon of deceptive appearances (what has been called si-militude) and speech acts such as those in which dian refers to language and bao to virtue. The si-militude that obtains between jade and ordinary stones is a cause of frustration and confusion in everyday life. However, although tropes such as dian or bao in the aforementioned texts may be classified as instances of si-militude, they are nonetheless necessary in language, as evidenced by the author’s abusive use of bao.

Second, the difference between Ode 256 and “Yi bao” corresponds to the difference between ru (or homoion) and si, between benign, controlled, and instructive similarity and a si-militude where the apparent likeness between virtue and material riches is an illusion. When the word “flaw” is used to describe a defect in language, the foremost aim of the poet is to indicate a similarity between jade and speech (which, we might add, is not obvious since speech, unlike jade, is invisible). When the author uses bao to describe virtue, his objective is to highlight the difference between the two. This point will be obvious in the example drawn from the Mencius with which we now shall conclude.


In the “Jin xin 盡心” chapter, bao appears in a similar context, this time with an interesting twist that bears upon our discussion of tropes and their relation to primary and secondary meaning. “Mencius said: ‘Three are the treasures of the feudal lords—the land, the people, and the government. Whoever treasures pearls and jade will surely bring harm to himself.’ ”37 Linguistically, this is a moment of sheer perversion. Mencius claims that anyone who “treasures pearls and jade”—any speaker, that is, who abides by the primary meaning of the word bao—is in danger.38 But by now we have come to know the “weird” (yi 異) and “falsifying” (wei 偽) logic that governs Mencius’s discourse at this point.

Like Mr. Lü, Mencius recognizes that bao primarily refers to mate-rial treasures such as “pearls and jade,” and uses this fact to make his point: A feudal lord should treasure “other” treasures. Again, difference itself is productive, as the antagonism between primary meaning (pearls and jade) and secondary meaning (virtue, the earth) is not forgotten but instead highlighted and thematized. In other words, when Mencius states that “three are the treasures of the feudal lords—the land, the people, and the government,” he abuses the word bao but does so inconspicuously. Still, by adding “[w]hoever treasures pearls and jade will surely bring harm to himself,” he draws attention to the difference that exists between the primary and secondary senses of bao and makes it work in his favor, namely, as an expression of the difference between virtue and pearls, and between a good and a bad ruler.

The Yiwei (以為) and the Videtur

As rhetoricians, Xunzi, Mencius, and Mr. Lü were anticipated by the leg-endary minister Zi Han (子罕), who in a passage from Mr. Zuo’s Commen-tary (circa fourth century BC) exposes the logic of the “treasure” whose extraordinary value paradoxically resides in the fact that it is not a real treasure. However, in order to bring out what is specific in this passage, let us again engage in cross-cultural dialogue. Sappho’s “Fragment 31” (“Phainetai Moi”) celebrates a woman whose beau “appears [phainetai] as a God” to the narrator. The first line of this poem was translated into Latin by Catullus as ille mi par esse deo videtur: “he is seen [videtur] by me to be the equal of a god.” Despite the difference between phainetai and videtur, we note that in both versions the narrator entertains a private conception of the lover of the object of her desire. The man appears to the poetess as a god, yet this “appearance” is not an illusion or an instance of


si-militude—her eyes are not taken in by a deceptive object—but a private, subjective fantasy entertained by the poetess herself and of which she is fully aware. Is this—namely, the ability to and proclivity for subjective fantasizing—a trait that separates ancient Greece from early China?

Zi Han, as quoted in Zuo’s Commentary, suggests otherwise:

Someone in Song found a piece of jade and gave it to Zi Han. Zi Han refused it. The person who had presented it to him said, “I have shown this to a jade expert and he considered [yiwei 以為] it a treasure [that it was valuable], so I had the boldness of presenting it to you.” Zi Han said, “I consider not being greedy a treasure whereas you consider jade a treasure. If you gave it to me, then we’d both lose a treasure. Better, then, that each of us hold on to our personal treasure.”39

The first instance of yiwei, “the jade expert considered it a treasure,” is simply an expert’s appraisal of the piece of jade as something valuable, a genuine treasure, and it is made in accordance with the conventional usage of language. However, when Zi Han uses the same words (yi . . . wei) the object is instead the word bao itself, the meaning of which he then pro-ceeds to overturn. Thus, in this passage the words yi . . . wei (以 . . . 為) signal that two people have different and subjective conceptualizations of the same object and also of the word bao.

Thus, on the linguistic level Zi Han plays a role similar to that of King You: He redefines the concept of “treasure,” which primarily refers to material riches but in his conception refers precisely to its opposite, namely, the absence of valuable objects. By refusing the gift, he also refuses the conventional meaning of the word “treasure.” He therefore changes the sociolinguistic “agreement” (yue). Zi Han (and King You) is here doing exactly the same as Xunzi does with the word wei. In the terminology of the myth of King You, the act of redefining the meaning of bao produces si-militude. We are thus again faced with a contradictory attitude toward si-militude: It is annoying and puzzling when it appears in everyday life, but useful, startling, and indeed necessary as a rhetorical strategy.

Does the Metaphor Translate? Transportation on a Forking Road

Does the metaphor translate? As a trope: Yes, obviously. “The flaw in these words / cannot be worked upon” is as understandable and translucent


as the Chinese original. Does the concept of metaphor translate? Per-haps, but only with difficulty and if one assumes a particular angle and method. Let us reread Pauline Yu’s dictum about the early Chinese anti-Aristotelian view of tropes: “the connections between the subject and object or among objects, which the West has by and large credited to the creative ingenuity of the poet, are viewed in the Chinese tradition as already pre-established.”40

Like Ames, Rosemont, and Jullien, Yu is here practicing compara-tive poetics at the macro level. She seizes upon a fundamental component of correlative cosmology and draws a perfectly logical conclusion as to how early Chinese thinkers viewed phrases such as “the flaw in these words.” But our close, almost obsessive readings—comparative poetics at the micro level—suggest something very different, namely, that the Chinese tradition represented in the Lüshi chunqiu held that a word like dian (or bao or wei) acquires its “other” meaning through an act of dou-bling that is quite conscious, “creative,” and “ingenious.” It would not be farfetched to elevate the story of King You and the drum signal to the status of the primeval Chinese myth about how words may be manipu-lated. This story indeed contains a thinking (if not a fully fledged “theory”) about Chinese “tropes,” and it may indicate a need for a methodological shift from macro-level generalizations to “obsessive,” micro-level readings. The macro-level analysis presupposes that early Chinese thinking about language was inseparable from, and derivative of, the larger philosophi-cal assumptions of that time. But the question of whether the “connec-tion” between jade and speech, or treasure and virtue, or falsification and refinement, is “preestablished” is in this context irrelevant. According to the myth of King You, a word or sign (such as dian) changes its meaning through a willful manipulation of the original “agreement” through which the word’s meaning was established and conventionalized; this manipula-tion appears on the level of language and has nothing to do with larger issues such as correlative cosmology. Moreover, a comparative poetics at the micro level would explore the internal contradictions in traditions and texts—Aristotle’s theory of metaphora, for instance, is not without paradoxes—as well as the overlaps that may exist between different texts and traditions.41

We may now formulate another hypothesis. What Aristotle called metaphora was conceived of differently in early China. Or perhaps we should say that the early Chinese thinking about the weird uses of the words “flaw,” “falsity,” and “treasure” in the passages previously mentioned was distributed and configured differently than in ancient Greece. In lieu


of a “strong,” comprehensive, and unifying theory such as Aristotle’s meta-phora, we have in early Chinese texts several fragmentary theories of the language acts that we as a habit call metaphorical, tropological, or figural. What we find is not limited to Hui Shi’s commonsense theory of similarity (ru) or to the equally sensible theory of analogy in the four lines from the Shijing poem; we also find a plethora of images and stories that, under the rubric of si-militude, indirectly conceptualize the following linguistic “phenomena”: the forking road, the stone that looks like jade, the shifty drum signal, and the “other” treasure. And there are even more of those in Mr. Lü’s Annals and Xunzi: grave, ghost, and corpse. They constitute a scattered theory, a nonsystematized thinking of tropes of which they are themselves examples and parts.42

Dian, bao, and wei are thus words that double, deviate, and fork—words that seem to have their usual meaning but whose significance has been consciously altered. Even so, although duality and deceptive appear-ances may prevent us from a unified perception of the world and although si-militude greatly confuses Mozi, it also constitutes in the realm of lan-guage a possibility for a peculiar, “other” mode of communication. King You’s altering the meaning of the drum signal is surely destructive, but put in another context it becomes creative and instructive. By manipulat-ing the word bao, by calling virtue an “other” treasure, Mr. Lü can in an economical and condensed act of language conceptualize the difference between vulgar material riches and the spiritual “treasure” that is virtue.

“Flaw,” “falsity,” “treasure”: these are words that, like the forked road that suddenly stretches out before Mozi, split into two parts with different destinations but with the same outward appearance. Perhaps this imagery is not irreconcilable with Aristotle’s notion of the metaphor as a carrying over, or a trans-ference (meta-pherein) from one place to an-other.

Notes

1. Wang Xianqian, Shi sanjia yi ji shu, 932–33. 2. Even if one hypothesizes that the jade radical was added at a later stage

to a primitive version of dian (written as 占), it shows that the people who formed or reformed the Chinese written script thought of “flaw-in-jade” as the primary meaning of dian. A variant of this graph, written as 㓠 with the dao 刀 (“knife”) radical, appears in the Shuowen jiezi (second century BC), glossed as “deficiency” (que 缺). This further proves our hypothesis, since “flaw” is here associated with knife, or with the damage inflicted by a knife, but not with language or words.


In what otherwise is a highly freethinking and perceptive series of com-parative studies, Jean-Paul Reding claims that, with regard to the early Chine-se tradition, “It is impossible . . . to define the literal and the figurative . . . for there is no such distinction in Chinese . . . in Chinese the need for spelling out [a word’s] literal sense . . . is never felt.” Comparative Essays in Early Greek and Chinese Rational Thinking (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 165. My argument is rather the opposite, that a tension between primary and secondary meanings was acutely felt, and exploited, by early Chinese writers.

3. Wang, SSJYJS, 641 (following Zheng Xuan’s reading of Ode 185) and 991.

4. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), 89.

5. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 17. Yu is here quoting Jacques Derrida’s quotation of Heidegger (“La mythologie blanche,” Poétique 5 [1971]). Heidegger is referring to what he considers the typically metaphysical distinc-tion between sensible and nonsensible, on which the concept of metaphor in his view also rests. Cecile Sun’s 2011 study, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), is largely a synthesis and consolidation of the conclusions drawn by the aforementioned scholars. Early Chinese poetry and poetics are said to be rooted in “the primordial resonance between man and nature universally embraced in Chinese culture,” and the “cru-cial distinction” between the Western and the Chinese traditions lies in the fact that “both lyrical relationships intersect at the point of expressing inner reality through correlation with outer reality” (105).

6. The definitions of metaphora are taken from George Henry Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Prior to Aristotle, metaphora appears in a similar sense in Isocrates (fl. 370 BC). For an enlightening discussion of metaphora, see John T. Kirby, “Aristotle on Metaphor,” The American Journal of Philology 118, 4 (Winter 1997): 517–54. See also Stephen Halliwell’s translation of the Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

7. Poetics 1457b. We note, with Kirby, the somewhat tautological definition of metaphora as epiphora. We also note another circularity and overlapping: trans-latio is the Latin “translation” of metaphora and thus designates two fundamental movements of linguistic transportation, one phenomenological and conceptual, the other idiomatic, hermeneutic, and intercultural. The person who calls a dis-gusting man a swine “trans-lates,” “trans-ports,” or carries over a set of perceived characteristics—the inarticulate grunts and the filthiness of the animal rolling in mud—from one realm (that of the animal) to another (that of man). In the other kind of translation, the translator carries a literary work over from one language and cultural setting to another.

8. Poetics 1459a. 9. Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A

Philosophical Translation (A New Translation Based on the Dingzhou Fragments


and Other Recent Archaeological Finds—With an Introduction) (New York: Bal-lantine Books, 1998), 230n1.

10. Ibid., 24.11. “[P]arce qu’elle [la Chine] n’a pas pensé l’être (le verbe être lui-même

n’existant pas en chinois classique), elle n’a conçu la vérité.” François Jullien, Un Sage est sans idée (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 105.

12. Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 33.13. In the context of this essay, “Mr. Lü” refers metonymically to the book

that bears his name. For a translation (including the Chinese original), see John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2000).

14. “Lei categories naturally attract each other. Things of the same qi ether will assemble together; sounds that compare will answer each other. Strike a gong note and [another] gong will vibrate, strike a jue note and [another] jue will vibrate 類固相召。氣同則合，聲比則應。鼓宮而宮動，鼓角而角動。” “Ying tong 應同,” Lüshi chunqiu, ed. and commentary, Chen Qiyou (Taipei: Huazhen, 1988), 678.

15. Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, and Reviews (CLEAR) 3, 2 (July 1981): 224.

16. See here Haun Saussy’s important and perceptive discussion of Yu and the “question of Chinese allegory,” The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chap. 1.

17. Mao’s Commentary and the concept of xing are analyzed in Martin Svensson Ekström, “Hermeneutica/Hermetica Serica: A Study of the Shijing and the Mao School of Confucian Hermeneutics” (Diss., Stockholm University, 1996). A revised version of this study is underway.

18. Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b.19. 客謂梁王曰：“惠子之言事也善譬，王使無譬，則不能言矣。”

王曰：“諾。”明日見，謂惠子曰：“願先生言事則直言耳，無譬也。”惠子曰：“今有人於此而不知彈者，曰：“彈之狀何若？”應曰：“彈之狀如彈。”諭乎？’王曰：‘未諭也。’ ‘於是更應曰： “彈之狀如弓而以竹為弦。“則知乎？”王曰：“可知矣。”惠子曰：“夫說者固以其所知，諭其所不知，而使人知之。今王曰無譬則不可矣。”王曰：“善。”

Liu Xiang, Shuo yuan duben, trans. and commentary, Chao Sung-tso (Tai-pei: Sanmin, 1996), 381 (“Shan shuo [shui] 善說” chap.).

20. The question is, does to homoion mean “similarity” or “that which is the same”? If homoion refers to an essential affinity between things that appear to be different, then the Aristotelian “metaphorizer” does not “create” the connection between the things that coincide in a metaphor but merely reveals it. We note, furthermore, that elsewhere in the Poetics the concept of euphuia is associated not only with the creative faculty implicit in the word poiein (to make, fabricate) but also with a certain passivity and plasticity. Aristotle says that hê poiêtikê comes from people who are euphuês because they are “easily impressionable” (or easily molded, euplastos).


21. See Max Black’s famous statement: “the metaphor creates the similarity.” Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 37.

22. With a respectful nod to Paul Ricoeur, we may call words like ru and si semblance copulas. See Ricoeur’s important insight that

“To be like/as” must be treated as a metaphorical modality of the copula itself; the “like/as” is not just the comparative term among the terms, but is included in the verb to be, whose force it alters. . . . As we recall, for Aristotle, metaphor is not an abbreviated simile, but simile is a weakened metaphor.

Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Crea-tion of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 1994 [1975]), 248.

23. “冉猛偽傷足而先。其兄會乃呼曰猛也殿。” Zuozhuan, Shisan jing zhushu, ed. Ruan Yuan (Peking: Peking University Press, 1999), vol. 7, 1572.

24. Zhuangzi jijie (Peking: Zhonghua, 1961), vol. 3, 731.25. On the early Chinese notions of wei and ziran, see the important study

by Hermann-Josef Röllicke, Selbst-Erweisung: Der Ursprung des ziran-Gedankens in der chinesischen Philosophie des 4. und 3. Jhs. v. Chr. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996).

26. Xunzi jijie, ed. and annotated, Wang Xianqian (Peking: Zhonghua, 1988), 414.

27. “嘗聞君子之用兵，莫見其形，其功已成 . . . 野人之用兵也，鼓聲則似雷，號呼則動地。” Chen Qiyou 陳奇猷 (annotation), Lüshi chunqiu jiao shi呂氏春秋校釋 (Taipei: Huazheng, 1988), “Qi xian 期賢” chap., 1447.

28. In this context si refers to an apparent similarity between the sound of thunder and the cacophony of arms, that is, to a similarity discernable by the senses. However, in the phrase “[X] bears similarity to this” (有似於此), which is frequent in Mr. Lü’s Annals, si may refer to a more abstract and nonapparent similarity between two things or situations. Conversely, the Greek word homoios may refer to physical similarities, accessible to the eyes, as in the description of the dying Euphorbus in chapter 17 of the Iliad, his “hair resembling that of the Graces” (komai Charitessin homoiai).

29. “故凡同類者舉相似也。何獨至於人而疑之？聖人與我同類者。故龍子曰‘不知足而為屨，我知其不為蕢也。’ 屨之相似，天下之足同也。” Mengzi zhengyi (Peking: Zhonghua, 1987), vol. 2, 763.

30. We note that Mencius here speaks of feet, which are “the same” (tong), and shoes, which are “similar” (si). The feet are the model for which the shoes are made. The relation between feet and shoes is, however, organic and one of proximity.

31. “豫讓欲殺趙襄子，滅鬚去眉，自刑以變其容，為乞人而往乞於其妻之所。其妻曰‘狀貌無似吾夫者，其音何類吾夫之甚也’。又吞炭以變其音。” Chen Qiyou, Lüshi chunqiu jiao shi, “Chi jun (恃君),” 1322–23. The story continues thus:

His friend said: “The path you have taken is hard and will yield no results. One could well say that you have resolve but not that you have wisdom. If you


would instead use your talent and seek service with Xiangzi, he would surely become close to you, and you could use that to carry out your plan. This would be very simple and your efforts would surely be rewarded.” Yu Rang replied with a laugh: “This would amount to seeking revenge for someone who once recognized your merits against someone who has now also recognized your merits, that is to say to hurting one’s new lord for the sake of one’s old lord. It would be an unprec-edented muddling of the ethics of the relationship between lord and subject, and the very reason for which I would do such a thing would be lost. The reason I do it is to illustrate the ethics of ruler and subject, not to take the easy way out.” 其友謂之曰 “子之所道甚難而無功。謂子有志則然矣，謂子智則不然。以子之材而索事襄子，襄子必近子，子得近而行所欲，此甚易而功必成。” 豫讓笑而應之曰“是先知報後知也，為故君賊新君矣，大亂君臣之義者無此，失吾所為為之矣。凡吾所為為此者，所以明君臣之義也，非從易也。”

32. “使大迷惑者，必物之相似也。玉人之所患，患石之似玉者 . . . 賢主之所患，患人之博聞辯言而似通者。亡國之主似智，亡國之臣似忠。相似之物，此愚者之所大惑，而聖人之所加慮也。故墨子見歧道而哭之。” Lüshi chunqiu jiao shi, 1497–1504. The title could possibly be transcribed as “Ni si (擬似),” “Imitation and Similitude.”

33. Ibid. 周宅酆鎬近戎人，與諸侯約，為高葆禱於王路，置鼓其上，遠近相聞。即戎寇至，傳鼓相告，諸侯之兵皆至救天子。戎寇當至，幽王擊鼓，諸侯之兵皆至，褒姒大說，喜之。幽王欲褒姒之笑也，因數擊鼓，諸侯之兵數至而無寇。至於後戎寇真至，幽王擊鼓，諸侯兵不至。幽王之身，乃死於麗山之下，為天下笑。此夫以無寇失真寇者也。

34. At first glance it may seem that the agreed-upon meaning of the drum signal (“Attack!”) is constant at all times and for all parties, and that King You merely fails to honor that agreement. This, however, is not the point that Mr. Lü is making. In each of the stories that make up this chapter, si-militude emerges as the result of a discrepancy between appearance and actuality, or between sign and signatum. This story does not take as its theme the mendacity of an incom-petent king but the si-militude that appears as a consequence of his manipulation of a sign, and this instance of si-militude is inconceivable without a change of meaning of that sign.

35. “古之人非無寶也，其所寶者異也。” Lüshi chunqiu jiao shi, 551.36. As an alternative to George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s rather rigid

theory of literary metaphor in More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), see Paul Gordon’s The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).

37. “孟子曰‘諸侯之寶三：土地，人民，政事。寶珠玉者，殃必及身。’ ” Mengzi zhengyi (Peking: Zhonghua, 1987), vol. 2, 1001.

38. See the untranslatable albeit “paraphrasable” passages lao wu lao (老吾老: “treat my elders as elders [should be treated]”) and you wu you (幼吾幼: “treat my juniors as juniors [should be treated]”) in “Liang Hui wang (梁惠王), Mengzi zhengyi, vol. 1, 86; and also Confucius’s remark that “the gu-goblet does


not [perform as / look like a] gu” (gu bu gu 觚不觚) in Lun yu (論語) “Yong ye (雍也),” Shisan jing zhushu, vol. 10, 80. The ideal of the absolute tautology in these passages clashes noticeably against Mencius’s (linguistically perverse) claim that those who “treat pearls and jade as treasures (寶珠玉)” are in danger.

39. “宋人或得玉，獻諸子罕。子罕弗受，獻玉者曰’以示玉人，玉人以為寶也，故敢獻之’ 。子罕曰’我以不貪為寶，爾以玉為寶。若以與我，皆喪寶也，不若人有其寶。’ ” Zuozhuan, Duke Xiang, fifteenth year, Shisan jing zhushu, vol. 7, 936.

40. Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry,” 224.41. See my “Inscription and Re-reading,” 132–34.42. See my “Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor” and “Inscription and Re-reading.”

martin svensson ekström - sprak.gu.se · an earlier version of this essay appeared in culture and...

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