The Distanting and Severing of “This”

Today in the discussion session, Ban Jingqi gave a presentation, and I could clearly feel that Jingqi was in high spirits—especially at the very end, when he hoisted up the blackboard to discuss Heidegger, he looked full of swagger and dash, seeming even more spirited than before he fell ill. Congratulations, congratulations~

After the classroom discussion, Jingqi also sent emails and posted on Weibo to continue the discussion, and I wrote a long response as well. Since he is also happy to publish it publicly, I might as well repost it on the blog too~ As for Jingqi’s original text, I have directly pasted his long Weibo post here (see the end); below is my response:

I admit that “this” and “that” do have a function of revealing a situation, and I am not very receptive to the concept of “formal indication.” In my understanding, the role played by “this” and “that” is rather what Heidegger called “de-severance,” namely “making distant in order to bring near”: a “this” immediately sets us at a distance from the nearest thing in the surrounding world, while that thing is nonetheless hiding there.

If this role of “de-severance” is what is meant by formal indication, then I certainly agree. But what I do not agree with is Jingqi’s giving this particular word an overly special status—“This da is a ‘formal indication word.’ Only formal indication words can bring about existence in the phenomenological sense.”

If in certain circumstances, especially in classical Chinese, words like “this” and “is” can often be omitted, must we then insist that this is an “ellipsis”? Must forms of expression that omit these words necessarily be regarded as incomplete?

Or rather, are expressive forms that “omit” these words also complete and full in themselves, also functioning to de-sever, or, to put it another way, also carrying out so-called formal indication? In fact, what does that is the “language” itself (or nonverbal actions, etc.) as used in a specific context, rather than some additional grammatical link within the language?

Western languages contain many add-ons that Chinese does not have, such as gender, singular and plural, tense, and so on. Once tense is added, a sentence acquires a certain temporal positioning; but Chinese, without tense, can equally evoke a certain temporal positioning, and this sense of time is supplied by the context. Similarly, even without adding “this” or “that,” one can likewise evoke a spatial positioning. What performs this role of “de-severing” and “orienting” is less the added prefixes or suffixes themselves than the entire context.

From a West-centric perspective, Chinese linguistic structure is then seen as “elliptical,” as some kind of incomplete form. But if Chinese itself is also full and complete, or if it is phenomenologically more original in its revealing significance, then we may as well regard the various cumbersome grammatical links in Western languages as additional, superfluous.

What these superfluous grammatical links do is precisely isolate the sentence; hence Westerners tend to understand language as “propositions.” A proposition is a statement stripped away from its situation, and “this” is precisely what performs this stripping-away. When we say “This table is square,” the sentence is more easily understood as a single, complete proposition with an independent truth value. But when we say “Table, square,” it becomes difficult to understand it as an independent proposition; we need to know what its context is, for example: “There is a table and a chair beside the blackboard; table, square; chair, round.” When we look at the phrase “table, square” in isolation, what we are doing is not omitting anything, but cutting it off—separating a stretch of speech from its context and examining it on its own.

Simply put, consider the relation among these three sentences:
1. “(There is a table beside the blackboard), square.”
2. “(There is a table beside the blackboard), that table is square.”
3. “The table beside the blackboard is square.”
Jingqi’s line of thought may be that 1 is an elliptical form of 2, and 3 is the strict form of 2. But I think 1 is already complete, 2 is an optional addition to 1, while 3 is a truncation of 1, achieved through 2. As for the task of revealing, it is already completed in 1; it is already completed at the moment one points at the table and says “square.” And 2, far from adding contextual guidance to 1, de-contextualizes it, making the statement capable of being independently extracted and ultimately taking the form of 3, becoming a “proposition.”

The style of analytic philosophy treats “propositions” as the basic form of language, while non-propositional language is regarded as a derivative, elliptical form of proposition. Heidegger’s line of thought (for example, the analysis of propositions in Being and Time), by contrast, treats “propositions” as one of language’s most specialized derivative forms.

Below is Jingqi’s original text:

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.