For the new classification scheme and why I call it “categories,” see “Categories and Hypertext Scholarship in the Network Age.”
The present structure was built up while I was moving house; it has not yet undergone any deeper reflection or polishing, and is merely its roughest version. It will certainly keep being adjusted in the future. By the way, since copying the category structure when a blog is imported or exported is the most troublesome part and difficult to handle, when I make minor tweaks on the main blog, the sub-base and the backup probably will not be updated in sync right away; I’ll likely only synchronize them when there are major changes or after a number of changes have accumulated.
The present classification structure has three main categories: thought, history, and poetry. Master Ye Lao has a famous book called Thought, History, Poetry, which is precisely an introduction to phenomenology—existentialism, though in the book the meaning of those three characters in the title does not seem to have been specially spelled out. I borrow these three characters not because I was influenced by Ye Lao (I only thought of that book after I had started using them), but out of my own considerations.
Thought, history, and poetry can be said to be the three most basic paths. By path I mean “the Way” or logos, and here in particular the way to truth, the path of seeking truth. The possible ways of reaching truth may perhaps not be limited to these three, but those that proceed through speech, through words, are probably just these three paths—no more and no less.
The road to truth has many other forms as well, for example meditation, practice, production and repair, but all these others lie beyond the domain of speech. There are also many forms of verbal speech, for example drama, novels, flattery, and sophistry; these do not point toward truth-seeking. A novel may indeed provoke deep reflection, but it relies precisely on the method of fiction; if a novelist wishes to make truth the goal, then he cannot escape the categories of thought, history, or poetry.
Of course, the various categories are not neatly partitioned off from one another. The same work can certainly be both poetic and historical, or think on the basis of history, and so on; this is also reflected in my blog’s classification system. More strictly speaking, there is no absolutely pure thought or wholly independent history. And yet, in both the ideal and the practical sense, we can indeed divide them into three paths and regard them as three distinct ways.
There are also certain unequal relations among these three paths. Traditionally, only the path of “thought” concerns the search for truth; “history” can barely also count as a rational activity, while “poetry” is often placed in the realm of the irrational. Yet in terms of the grounding relation, their positions may perhaps need to be reversed. Poetry is in fact the most primordial rationality: it is the most direct exercise of reason’s capacity—to speak things through words. History, by contrast, describes and records things under conditions in which words and things are already linked together. As for thought, it is the reconsideration and reflection upon things once descriptions of them have already been established.
What I mean here by “poetry” does not refer to poems as a specific form of verse and song. You will be disappointed to find that in my blog you cannot find that sort of poetry. Of course, that kind of poetry is also a form of “poetry”; however, it is a standardized kind of poetry, and a “poem” that merely has a format is not necessarily what I mean by “poetry” in its primordial sense as a path toward truth. The process of refinement undertaken merely to conform to form or to sound pleasing may not belong to the path of truth-seeking (these refinements of poetic lines are, in another sense, also activities of truth-seeking, but they belong to a different dimension from poetry’s original truth—for example, the historian’s task of recording and organizing ancient truthful speech also aims at truth, yet the historian’s truth-seeking lies in seeking how to reveal ancient speech as faithfully as possible, whereas the truth sought in the ancient speech itself has nothing to do with the truth sought by the historian’s editorial activity.)
In my view, poetic activity in its primordial sense is the expression of intention or intentioned feeling. “Poetry expresses aspiration, song prolongs speech,” as the saying goes, (zhi means intent.) poetry is simply the utterance of one’s mind. And such expression has never been some ready-made correspondence, as if every intention in the heart had a corresponding word sticker pasted on top of it, and expressing oneself merely meant turning over that stickered side of the intention to show it. There is no ready-made correspondence between intention and word, but neither is their correspondence wholly arbitrary. At every moment, there are always some words that can more truly express what lies in the heart, while other words cannot adequately express it. The activity of “poetry” is precisely to accomplish this most primordial and most profound task—to seek the most faithful relation between intention and words. We may, in a popular sense, understand the meaning of poetry as “lyric expression,” but this does not mean that it is irrational. “Emotion”—feelings, moods, states of mind—is something “irrational,” but the “expression” of emotion is by no means irrational; it is instead the most fundamental and most original link in rational activity (please try to understand “reason” here as a verb; if we were to use just this one character, 理, directly, that would be best). Any more complex, more advanced form of “reasoning” must be built upon the primordial relation between words and inward intention; and any reconsideration of these relations must also presuppose that some relation has already shown itself.
“History,” then, is the next level of truth-seeking activity. The activity of history is the recording of events. It should be noted that “history,” as one of the three basic routes, is also history in its primordial sense—namely, the activity of recording events. As for history in the ordinary sense, if it is reflection on past events, or even articles on historiography in the sense of reflection on methods of historical writing, I place those under the category of “thought.” If I were to write a history like a historian and record the events of humankind’s past, that too would fall under the category of “history”; but I am not a historian, so under my category of “history” there are basically only records of myself and the things around me, and you will not find works of historiographical compilation there.
What is called “recording events” is nothing more than writing things down with appropriate words. If “poetry” is preserved, it can also be said to be a kind of record, but at most it is a record of “mood,” and has not yet become a record of “events.” Even when something that looks like an “event” appears in a poem, that is not the aim of the poem. (Of course, the epic that records and expresses emotions at the same time is another matter.) For example, lines like “raising my head, I gaze at the bright moon,” “At noon, hoeing grain under the sun,” as poems, by no means aim to record the process of such an action’s occurrence. Poetry aims at expression, while history aims at narration of events; what history cares about is how to faithfully record events through words. This demand for “truth” tends toward a certain stance of “objectivity,” as opposed to the “subjectivity” of lyric expression. But subjectivity does not mean “false” or “untrue”; rather, it is truth on another level. The pursuit of truth on the objective level is precisely built upon the foundation of a truth already established on the subjective level. For instance, when I write “In such-and-such year and month, Gu Chi completed the relocation of the blog,” if one says this sentence forms an objective description, then certain subjective agreements had already taken place beforehand. For one thing, how do I properly use the word “completed”? What state does this word depict? What does “relocation” refer to? If the word is appropriate for moving a house, why is it equally apt for a blog? How can the depiction of “completion” and the metaphor of “relocation” be effective? How can they be faithful? The reason these words can be fittingly and faithfully used is fundamentally not the work of “history.” Of course, you can define them through another series of words—for example, defining such-and-such a situation as “completed”—but what kind of event can properly be called “such-and-such a situation”? Fundamentally, this is a matter of mood. It can only be that you look at this word and feel that it very faithfully expresses your intention, and then it is appropriate. This is the activity of poetry. And to go further and use these words, which have already been “subjectively” won, to “objectively” describe events—that is the activity of history.
As for “thought,” it is of course a truth-seeking activity on an even higher level. What it pursues is not the faithfulness of expression or the factuality of narration, but the general “truth.” “Thought” is always some kind of “reflection”; that is to say, before thought unfolds, there has always already been some insight, and only when we are able to become aware of our own ready-made modes of knowing does thought become possible. In our preconceptions there are ready-made links between words and things, and established patterns for reporting events. Of course, the activity of weighing one’s expression or narration belongs to poetry and history, because those acts of weighing are not first and foremost some theoretical or conceptual activity. When I carefully consider whether I should express something with “completed” or with “finished,” I am merely weighing things in my mind, or using my hand, using my senses to compare. Here, words are the object and result of my weighing, while the process of weighing itself has not yet been articulated in words. If I want to characterize the process or method of weighing itself in words, and then further “weigh” whether this very weighing is reasonable, then I have entered the category of thought.
The above offers a rough explanation of the purposes and considerations behind the three root categories in Suixuan’s current classification structure. I’ll explain the more detailed levels later.
December 16, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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