Excerpt from Rainstorm of Tomorrow (Dong): All Questions Are Involved with Logos

 

Core Question: What language should we use to describe the material nature of the world? 

If we advocate that this world is fundamentally material—which is to say that all the objects described in our everyday language are essentially matter—we soon become embattled by difficulties of semantics. Some words refer to very “concrete” substances and engender no dispute, such as “apple.” There are few who would confuse apples with pears. However, it is undeniable that many highly “abstract” and “conceptual” words are also used in our daily linguistic practices, such as “thought” and “virtue,” along with those that are harder to define, such as the aforementioned “mind” or “mental activity.” Moreover, there are other words that seem familiar and specific; yet, their material realities have always been questioned. Examples of this category would include “light,” “time,” “space,” etc. 

In trying to prove that every word indicates a being of matter, we may argue that the referents of those highly “abstract” and “conceptual” words do not exist in reality and that their creation actually reflects our abuse of the language. According to standard and proper linguistic practices, we should try our best to avoid using such words and even remove them from our vocabulary to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Let’s look at an example:

What is the “mind”? The mind is the communication process that neuron cells conduct through bioelectric currents. Renyuan Dong 26 Bioelectric currents run through the irregular pathways and structures of our nervous system to calculate, memorize and perform other functions just like the computer executes the program. Therefore, the “mind” is immaterial. Similarly, the wind is the flow of air. There is only “air” in the world. There is actually no such thing as “wind,” but we are accustomed to taking the “wind” as matter as well (Running Mustang, 2010, n.p.). 

The “wind” is not material in the author’s opinion, so the word should not exist. Instead, we should rephrase the word “wind” as “the flowing state of air.” “Breeze” should likewise be rephrased as “a gentle flow of air,” and “hurricane” as “a violent flow of air,” resulting in very lengthy terms and even longer sentences. Nevertheless, such rephrasing cannot accommodate all immaterial words. Here is one counterexample: the arrival of the young researcher gave the decadent academy a second “wind.” It would be awkward to say, “the arrival of the young researcher gave the decadent academy a second ‘flowing state of air.’” 

Do you still remember the two definitions I gave for “mental activity” earlier? 

(1) Bioelectric currents as a physical property of positive voltage conducted along neural pathways. 

(2) Ions in directional movement along the neurons that generate and propagate the bioelectric currents. 

The reason why I would prefer the second definition, even though it is not as intuitive as the first, is that it restitutes the “mind” or “mental activities” to the being of matter in a status of specific motion. I could therefore use the word “mind” to confidently refer to the groups of chemical ions performing complex movements within the nervous system, thereby simplifying my language. The author of the quote above adopts the first definition; he refers to “bioelectric current” as a more appropriate alternative to the immaterial definition of “mind.” However, simply stating “bioelectric current” implies an intangible property that belies its foundation in the movement of chemical ions—essentially a phenomenon provoked by matter. If he truly advocated for the removal of abstract referents, every time he wanted to convey the meaning of “mind,” “thought,” or even “bioelectric current,” he would instead write, “the directional movements of chemical ions across the neuronal membrane that is propagated along irregular pathways of connected neurons and structures of the nervous system,” which is a pretty lengthy statement. 

The practice of discarding and rephrasing is not uncommon in philosophical research. For example, many scholars think that concepts such as “time” and “space” do not actually exist in the objective world and are merely derivatives of the human imagination to help us better understand the world and its happenings. From their perspective, such words ought to be excluded from linguistics. (We will return to the concepts of “time” and “space” in the final chapter of this part.) However, substituting words corresponding to “mental” properties with those indicating “material” properties diminishes the conciseness and efficiency of language expression. Therefore, before making such a replacement, we need to determine whether such words can even be redefined as “material” properties—in other words, we would have to prove that every word in linguistics refers to a being of matter. I would first like to validate the following point of view: All “happenings,” including “actions” (where the subject is usually human) and “phenomena” (where the subject is usually a natural object), are material as long as the subjects triggering the happenings are material entities. As for the first definition of “mental activity,” the positive voltage conducted along neural pathways, it is not under proof; the agent of such an action or phenomenon is a physical property or energy instead of matter. We usually define a “happening” as “the specific serial movement conducted by a material subject.” We state “the specific serial movement” first only to emphasize that, no matter whoever or whatever the specific subject is (as long as it is material), a “happening” occurs as the result of a specific choreography completed by the subject. We tend to break down the whole serial movement into several steps to facilitate understanding: the start, the development, the end, and the aftermath. When educating our children, we stress the importance of recognizing these steps so that they can distinguish when a happening begins from when it ends. The subject may continue to move or act after one happening ends, but whatever they do does not concern the previously completed happening; rather, the subject is participating in another irrelevant “happening.” Children without prepossessions, however, will assign extravagantly trivial steps to the entirety of the unknown serial movement; so trivial, that it finally reaches a point where a static subject assumes a specific posture for each unit of time— just like how we make animations by continuously flipping through pages of static pictures. For the children, the “happening” is “the material subject carrying out a series of postures in chronological order”—that is, “the material subject completing a specific serial movement.” We would not judge their cognition to be wrong in the objective sense, but rather recognize that the parts they emphasize (the material subject) are different from those on which we place emphasis (the serial movement). By “emphasis” we are referring to something subjective that has nothing to do with facts. Therefore, in the objective cognition of a “happening,” the definition as “the specific serial movement conducted by a material subject” is equivalent to the definition, “the material subject (unspecified but recognized to be matter) completing a specific serial movement.” “The wind is the flow of air” is equivalent to “the wind is the air that flows.” The air remains air despite any displacement during its flow, thus maintaining its “material property” during the whole serial movement. The wind, as the air of motional status, is a being of matter as well. Therefore, the word “wind,” due to its material property, has its own right to exist.

Based on this validation, we could further prove that all the vocabulary derived from detailed “actions” or “phenomena” are material—even the words that seem highly “abstract” and “conceptual.” Let us consider the word “virtue” as an example. What would come to mind if you were asked to enumerate specific virtues? In China, language teachers humorously summed up cliché cases common in students’ essays: return a wallet to its owner, offer one’s seat to an elder, buy food for a beggar, help the blind avoid a barrier, do the chores for your mother, honor agreements to the letter, etc. (The subject of this rhyme is hidden since they do not need to be specified—in most cases, the heroes are the students themselves.) So how does the word “virtue” actually come into being? Let’s suppose that a language teacher is correcting his students’ journals. After he finished the first 10, he found that all of them had bragged about returning wallets casually found on the street to their respective owners as an exemplar of goodness. He then complained to other colleagues in the office, “These students’ mindsets are far too narrow. Besides the theme of returning a wallet to its owner, isn’t there anything else they could think of? Such as sharing their class notes with one another?” It was not long before he realized that he had complained too early. The next 10 journals lauded feats of yielding bus seats to elders, and the following five featured students helping their busy mothers with chores. Venting to his colleagues afterward, he repaired to a phrasing that would save him the time and trouble of reiterating the themes with which both he and his colleagues had already been too-well acquainted, “These students’ mindsets are far too narrow. Besides entries singing praises of ‘virtue,’ isn’t there anything else they could think of? Such as sharing their class notes with one another?” As you can see, “virtue” is introduced to summarize actions with the same common property and characteristic. It is noteworthy that ‘virtue’ does not refer to the common property or characteristic that these actions share, but rather to the actions themselves, which rank far more than three. In fact, “virtue” refers to all the countless actions that feature the common property and characteristic of being praiseworthy. Since “virtue” can be restituted to a collection of different actions of identical material property, it is material in essence as well.

However, say that one of the teacher’s colleagues was not familiar with the word “virtue” and asked what it meant. If the teacher answered, “Virtue refers to the action/behavior reflecting superb moral standards,” he gave a definition of “virtue” as an equivalent (the necessary and sufficient condition) to the word “virtue.” Each detailed action cited in the rhyme above serves as a component and necessary condition of “virtue”; yet, “virtue” entails much more than the circumscribed list of actions. It is because of the very fact that the components of “virtue” cannot be exhausted that we would like to define it once and for all. If we study the word “virtue” from its definition, we encounter words of ambiguous semantics, such as “superb,” “moral,” and “standard,” which in turn induce us to regard “virtue” as a spiritual concept of an abstract composition, as if it were an innate idea bestowed by a god upon his favored mankind. As a consequence, we as human beings would be captured in an illusory theory of good-nature. But as long as we find specific actions constituting “virtue” in our daily life, we will find the fundamentals of its material property in the objective world. 

-- continued in the book

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