Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The Significant Difference in Chinese and Greek Thoughts

The Chinese alphabet is non properly so called but an ideogram collection of "thousands of incompatible characters" (Matalene 791). For a Chinese to be literate, he or she mustiness check a large set of nonrepetitive characters, which implies an obligation to memorize "the culture itself" (792).

The Western linguistic structure that originated in Greece did not spring forth fully formed. It evolved "from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about uncertain or disgruntled deities. For a foresightful time the human instinct to understand was thwarted [because] . . . both tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad" (Sagan 173-4). At about viosterol BC, however, in the Greek colonial islands of Ionia, there began a doctrinal demythologization of the cosmos that was "one of the great ideas of the human species." Sagan continues:

The populace is knowable, the ancients argued, because it exhibits an internal order: there are regularities in genius that permit its secrets to be uncovered. Nature is not entirely unpredictable; there are rules even she must obey (Sagan 175).

The Ionian revolution "made Cosmos out of Chaos" (Sagan 175). and then "free inquiry"--plus refinement of the Phoenician alphabet--emerged, though by no means did it dispose of superstition (Socrates was condemned as an atheist). What survived vis-?-vis superstition was what Whi


Empty, yet it gives a make out that never fails;

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free P, 1967.
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It is as difficult to restrain Taoist thought for analysis and explication as it is to capture the Platonic Ideal Forms, and for the same reason. Plato's dialogues, comments Whitehead, "do not bear the aspect of patient induction from the facts. They are dominated by assumption and dialectics" (136). But it turned out that his pupil Aristotle could not do enough to systematize ways of dealing with facts. Laotse's relativism, meanwhile, is radical:

The Taoist view of reality is that what changes and cannot be trusted is exactly what seems the or so real: the palpable, physical universe or sentient experience. What is hence the most authentic reality of being, is the "core," or what cannot be see palpably. In Chinese thought one seems therefore attached to yield to the poetry of the incomprehensible. In Greek thought, one seems preferably more inclined to figure out a commodity way of thinking about it.

Wells, H. G. A Short tale of the World. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.


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