Passive creation (mass communication) and active creation (scholarly invention).
There are two active modes of creation: the natural-history style of “defining by pointing to the thing” and defining concepts through concepts. The latter is a way of abbreviating some meaning that was originally associated with a long string of concepts like A, B, C, D, E, F, or even with an allusion, or even with an entire philosophical system, into a convenient concept.
Why create new concepts? Very simple: because the old concepts are not enough. If an intuition is so unfamiliar that people cannot naturally and smoothly place it in its proper position within the net of concepts, then one can only create a new dwelling place for it.
If the creation takes the form of defining by pointing to the thing, then because the new concept and the new intuition are mutually related, once the new intuition is absorbed into the system of life, the new concept will likewise be absorbed into the system of concepts. But if one defines concepts through concepts, then the position of the new concept within the net of concepts depends on the way it is defined rather than on changes in life. For this reason, a newly created concept cannot guarantee an effective connection with the life-world; that is to say, it may be completely empty and utterly meaningless. For example, if I set up a new concept, “o ala,” to mean “a pure and brave green square circle,” then one really has no idea what one is doing.
The reason for creating new concepts is that old concepts are “not enough,” or, to put it another way, introducing new concepts can make it more satisfying and convenient for people to use concepts. And the purpose for which people use concepts is recording and communication; what concepts ultimately record and communicate is “intuition.” Therefore, the activity of creating new concepts must ultimately be judged by how much better it promotes people’s access to intuition. Concepts are the medium and bridge of recording and communication.
Creating concepts—that is, embedding a new concept into the existing conceptual network, or assigning new meaning (that is, a new “linkage”) to an old concept—may possibly make the entire network more tangled, making the relation between the conceptual net and intuition even dimmer; but it may also open up previously blocked or obscure linkages, further straighten out the lines of the conceptual net, and make the conceptual net more lucid and transparent. The quality of creative activity should be measured by this standard.
Compared with Western languages, modern Chinese has the most distinctive way of constructing new concepts. Since Chinese characters are arguably closed, one need only rearrange existing characters and words to create new concepts, and such new concepts are naturally compelled to maintain broad connections with older concepts. But Western languages can easily create new concepts that are hard to associate with any old concepts at all; this linguistic feature may have stimulated Western civilization’s achievements in abstract thought. Yet modern Chinese may also reveal new possibilities for the future of philosophy.
August 9, 2008
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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