I. Introduction

In a visit to China in 2001, postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced an argument with the following statement: 中国没有哲学，但/只有思想.[1] The original sentence, spoken in French, is now lost, leaving us with merely a translation of his thinking—did he mean 但 or 只? We are presented with two meanings:

China has no philosophy; it only has thought.
China has no philosophy, but it has thought.

This conjunction splits the difference between two extremely different worldviews, the former stressing an absence of phenomenological investigation for Derrida, and the latter implying an alternative, contending system of the world. The only/but dichotomy is not mere semantics; it outlines a dialectic discourse belying each culture. For the West, philosophical inquiry was inherently logocentric, relying on reason and logical investigation to arrive at truths. Comparatively, Eastern philosophy relies on morals that, unlike their Western counterparts, do not derive from rigid assumptions but moral truisms that manifest the Dao. Scholars like Hegel became infamous for their critique of Chinese philosophy, and the effects were not lost upon Chinese scholars. Derrida’s opposing debater, Mr. Wong, replied that《论语》只是道德箴言[2] or the Analects only serve as a moral motto[3], seeming to concede to Derrida’s opening remarks that Confucianism itself did not serve as a “proper” philosophy.

Does China have philosophy? At surface-level, the answer should be undoubtedly yes, but what is meant by philosophy? The question requires a sophisticated understanding of what philosophy as such refers to. This essay will analyze the Western ideal of a transcendental Logos, and the eastern unifying Dao in efforts to understand how the two halves of the world differ in concepts of metaphysical and ontological inquiry. To remain focused, we will explicitly be looking at the relationship each concept has to their respective philosophy’s origin of the world, and how language plays a significant role in that regard. First, we will attempt to first provide a linear narrative that shows the etymology of philosophy in China and its early interpretation as an attempt to distinguish itself from Eastern roots; afterwards, we will devote significant effort to compare logos and Dao to understand where they differ; finally, we will conclude with how their construction impacts language itself in the East and West. Throughout the paper, we will rely on a mix of etymological and epistemological concepts from both perspectives in order to best illuminate the similarities between logos an Dao, in hopes to reveal how these foundations have shaped each cultures’ respective worldview.

Etymology: Arrival in Japan

The term “philosophy” did not arrive in East Asia until 1800s via Christian missionaries in Japan. When it did, the word landed on the ears of Nishi Amane, a seminal Japanese enlightenment thinker who took it upon himself to translate the term. Fragmented drafts of a lecture given in 1862 list options as 理學 rigaku and 窮理學 kyūrigaku, but he brought these options explicitly to reject them, as their construction relied on the fundamentally Confucian notion of 理. Instead, Nishi opted for a direct translation as 希哲學 kitetsugaku, literally love of wisdom-learning, and within a year, he discarded the 希, or love, where arrive at the modern 哲學 tetsugaku, or 哲学 in modern Mandarin. In omitting the philo- root in favor of 學, or science/wisdom, he wrote:

The thing that clarifies 天道人道 tendō jindō and establishes the method for teaching is 斐鹵蘇比 hirosohī, which I translate as 哲學 tetsugaku, the subject discussed since antiquity in the West.

Here, we note two important ideas. Firstly, Nishi’s preoccupation was to avoid Confucian terminology. But in doing so, he changed philosophy’s definition from philosophia to the way 道 (michi) of 學 (gaku). In other words, philosophy’s teleology morphed from love of wisdom during investigation to the learning gained as a result of the investigation. From this, we can state that in attempting to distinguish philosophy as separate from Confucian thought, Nishi’s version of philosophy, 哲學, translated the word away from the original meaning. The second observation regards the original conception of 哲學. Recall from above that 理學 rigaku was explicitly rejected for containing 理, an overtly Confucian term. But in Nishi’s letter, he states that 哲學 is a direct translation of 天道人道, or the way of heaven and the way of humanity. A few decades later, in 1888, the lexicon contained within curriculum at Tokyo University enters China, and 哲学 along with it, solidifying the modern 哲学 as the most accurate depiction of philosophy throughout East Asia. What we will find is that Nishi’s tie back to the concept of 道 proved interesting in more ways than one.

II. Cosmogenesis of dao and Logos:

How Language Shapes or Doesn’t Shape the East and West Worlds’ Oriigin

Being enacted through Logos:

Attempting to construct such a comparison between Eastern and Western philosophy seems unfair, since the road to modernization—and its osmosis of ideology—was paved by Westerners, so the evaluation standard is inherently Western. In its original form coined by Heraclitus, logos is notoriously difficult to describe, characterized as prior to heaven or earth—a “divine” law that “governs the Universe.” Heraclitus’s description concludes with a non-description: “it is what it is.”[5] This claim that logos itself is divine is no exaggeration: the Bible references the Word as something being synonymous with God. To quote John 1:1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. [6]

In the past, there has been substantive scholarly debate on the last four words of this passage, known as Hymn to the Word. “The Word was God” is the most commonly referenced translation, but the Greek original text removes an article before θεός, "God,” leading to other more emphatic translations such as, the King James Version’s “God was the Word,” Amplified Bible’s “the Word was God Himself,” or Contemporary English Version’s “the Word…was truly God.” Calvinist theologian Gordon Clark in the 20th century went even further[7], famously translating the Hymn as, “In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God,” rejecting the notion that logic per se is a distinct, secular concept superimposed on to Christian text. Instead, these translations suggest the opposite to be true: logos is the transcendental ideal foundational to Christian dogma. “The Word became flesh [the Son] and made his dwelling among us.”[8] Through this perspective, we can understand Genesis I. The structure of this famous creation mythos is: In the beginning, God spoke X into being, and X is seen as good. Such a structure shows that the first line to be a normative claim: The Word itself creates, and that act of creation through the Word is “good”. Psalm 33:6 states, “By the word (logos) of the Lord were the heavens established, and all the host of them by the spirit (pneuma) of his mouth.”

What is apparent is that the world is ontologically and cosmo-genetically created through the conception of logos. This is to say, in the West, the universal truth of, well, truth itself pervades and forms divinity of Being itself, and it is this idea that creates the distance between Heaven and Earth, the Divine and the Worldly, the Future and the Present, God and man, and more, establishing the atomistic dualism between what is and what is not.

Is Logos the 道: The pain points of translation

Above, we showed Heraclitus’s metaphysical conception of the logos as an origin point of Christianity. If we assume that Christianity formed a significant amount of Western society, then it is no stretch to say that it is difficult to understand Western philosophy without first conceptualizing logos. If we reexamine the Hymn of the Word in this light, interesting questions reveal themselves:

Greek: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος.
English: In the beginning there was the Word
Chinese: 太初有道[9]

Here, the underlined Logos/Word is translated into 道[10]. More directly, “In the beginning there was the Dao.” Such a translation was created with good reason. The two ideas have striking similarities, particularly when one considers Laozi’s famous idea that 道生一，一生二，二生三，三生万物[11]. In other words, Dao births one (the “way”), one births two, two births three, and three births ten thousand things. As a result, Dao like logos is an origin point for everything—but I will attempt to demonstrate that despite similar characteristics, the viewpoint that one can be translated into the other is flawed, and that each concept is so unique that to attempt to translate them confuses the original meaning.

A brief digression may be useful before further discussion. The following dialogue constructed by phenomenologist Heidegger introduces a strong argument for not clumsily translating across cultures. Heidegger, who once quipped that German is more Greek than Greek for its sophistication in deep philosophical concepts, hosts a conversation between a Japanese and an inquirer.[12]

Inquirer: The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself…
Japanese: Now I am beginning to understand better where you smell the danger. The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about.
Inquirer: Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than East Asian man.
Japanese: Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so.
Inquirer: And so, a dialogue from house to house remains impossible.

This passage shows remarkable insight for a few reasons. His essential argument is that Western historicity is trapped by its own conception. Investigations into what lays beyond Western ideology can only be performed with Western tools—i.e. Language, with its enriched logos. Attempts to manifest understanding beyond the prison of language will lead to misunderstanding. A few sentences later, he states, “…I now see still more clearly the danger that the language of our dialogue might persistently destroy the possibility of saying that of which we are speaking.”[13] European thought concerning non-European thought will be performed with European logic, leading to a prisoned monologue for both interlocutors.

Heidegger’s prognostication was accurate in another key takeaway. Hidden within his statement is that “language is clumsily hidden in the house of Being”. For the German philosopher, this Being remained at the center of his life’s work—to understand Beings “concerned with their own Being,” [14] or his Dasein. To describe language per se as that which dwells within Being is explicitly Western is to assume the concept of Being exists in Eastern ideology as well, demonstrating the extent to which Heidegger’s language imprisonment description is true. Indeed, Chinese philosophy seems to be more centered not on Being but on Becoming.

Becoming through Naming and Unnaming in Dao:

Lao Zi’s concerns in Daoism share a common motivation: he too is in search of an origin or pervasive principle for the continual change of the world. Unlike Heraclitus’s logos, Lao Zi’s approach does not assume an approach “behind” this transformation for the principle—instead, the principle is the transformation. His dialectics show the world made up of two inseparable parts, a day and night or a black and white. Said differently, Lao Zi is not focused on why things change but rather change per se as the primary characteristic. Change here is, like Dao, difficult to describe and a clumsy English adaptation of the text. Daoism does not concern a universal ideal or transcendental above the cyclical nature of the world (i.e. Being-there in Heideggerian terms). Instead, the focus point is a sense of becoming, the Dao, as the default state.

It is worth stating that in the short paragraph above, I have already used loose terms like change, transformation, cycle, and the Way as translations of Dao, but all of these are inadequate representations. In order to continue my argument, I will use these abstractions in order to progress, keeping in mind that an overarching theme of this paper is the untranslatable-ness of concepts like Logos and Dao.

In discussing this subject, Professors Jia Yuxin and Jia Xuelai write, “Ontologically, Dao is neither being nor beingless, but both being and beingless”:

孔德之容，惟道是从。
道之为物，惟恍惟惚。
惚兮恍兮，其中有象；
恍兮惚兮，其中有物；
窈兮冥兮，其中有情；
其情甚真，其中有信[15]。
As a ‘thing’ Tao is vague and unclear;
Unclear and vague, yet within it is a symbol;
Vague and unclear, yet within it is a thing;
Obscure and dark, yet within it is an essence.
Its essence is truly authentic and within it is what is reliable. [16]

The language described here continues, seemingly defining Dao not by anything concrete but rather by a nothingness and namelessness prior to all else. But how do we begin to conceptualize an all-pervasive nothingness that also underlies the generative origin of the universe[17]? Dao is described as the One 一, bringing 阴 ying 阳 yang into existence and 气 qi in harmony, and this namelessness of Dao is the foundation (root) on which all else is built. To understand this further, we must look to another passage:

有物混成，先天地生。
寂兮寥兮，独立而不改，周行而不殆，可以为天下母。
吾不知其名，字之曰道，强为之名，曰大。
大曰逝，逝曰远，远曰反。
故道大，天大，地大，人亦大。
域中有四大，而人居其一焉。
人法地，地法天，无法道，道法自然。[18]
There is something formed inchoate;
Generated before heaven and earth;
Silent, hush, void, ah!
Standing alone and not changing,
Turning round and round and not tiring.
It may be the mother of all under heaven.
I do not know its name so I shall call it Tao (the Way). If pressed I would name it ‘great.’[19]

This passage provides a cosmo-genetic view of the beginning in Daoist philosophy. In this passage, Dao is chaos, a form before heaven and earth—described as inchoate. And the act of naming this phenomenon leads it to become the creator (mother) of the world. In this regard, Dao is both the unnamed that existed as the origin and the named that designated it so. In reading 无名，天地之始；有名，王无之母, we se that namelessness is the origin of the world, and the act of naming is the mother of all things. Thus, Lao Zi is describing the full meaning of Dao as something language is incapable of describing—rather, it is only expressed metaphorically through the human interaction with environment through naming, instead of because of naming like the West. This philosophy of 无为 (non-action) and 无名 (namelessness) are described several times throughout his dialectical approach in being accordance with nature: achieve non-action by allowing for the natural occurrence of things.

At this point, the language is becoming too abstract for comprehension. Part of that is due to the frustration of Dao’s description, but let’s take a simple example to explicate the idea of actionless activity or wordless teaching further. Regarding 无为 non-action, in Chapter 3, Lao Zi writes that, “The more prohibitions there are, the more ritual avoidances. The more laws are made, the more thieves and bandits there will be, therefore, as I do nothing, the people will of themselves be transformed…through Non-action in governing, all things will fall into place and take care of themselves.”[20] In other words, what Non-action and Non-name describe is not a lack of action or a lack of naming, but a lack of active (unnatural) action or a lack of active naming. In Western terminology, such this activeness is counter to the idiom of “go with the flow,” or at least to not oppose the flow. Through this idea, we can also understand 无名 namelessness. Throughout his work, Lao Zi makes clear his bias against language[21], but 名 acts as a necessary signifier of objects that, in signifying anything, necessarily creates contradictions. As a result, naming itself becomes an active, performative act which leads to disorder in the form of debate. But, “Dao does not compete, and yet it skillfully achieves victory. It does not speak, and yet it skillfully responds. It does not invite, yet everything comes by itself.”[22] In other words, Naming leads to contradiction; contradiction invites argumentation; argumentation is “doomed to a dead end.”[23] For Chinese thinkers, argumentation itself may attempt to elevate symbols and words to the level of meaning, but meaning is a mysterious, formless, and soundless Dao, which bends to no will. Understanding the symbol of the moon, for example, requires one to wait until nightfall to experience it, and when we experience it, we will know its meaning is impalpable and incomprehensible through words[24]. Meaning is not argumentative; it is silent—experienced only when one feels the unity with the surrounding environment. “Speech that argues falls short of its aim.”[25]

In Eastern philosophy, concepts of Difficult and easy, Long and short, High and low, Pitch and mode, etc. all determine and create one another, “Therefore, the Sage relies on actionless activity; carries on wordless teaching”[26]. Cosmos itself is arranged in accordance with an ordered hierarchy of absolute integration, and the less willful action we take against it, the more we will discover the Dao.

The importance and difference between Dao and Logos of language

Evident in the analysis above are undeniable parallels between the Dao and the Logos. The two emphasize the performative force language has in shaping the world[27] in a eerily similar structure, via creation models that go from chaos or darkness towards existence. The process of this “nameless → name” in the East requires Dao as the origin of foundation, and the process of “darkness → light” requires Logos as that which “speaks” the universe into Being. It’s no wonder why the Chinese bible cited above translated the two into each other.

But while both philosophies are reliant on the power of language to shape the world, their divergences begin in form rather than structure. The core idea that separates Logos from Dao is, frustratingly, that Dao describes itself as indescribable, as nameless and unspeakable. On the other hand, logos’ Greek roots of legein means discourse and to speak. In the West, God speaks everything into Being. In the East, the generation of the world happens as a result of a chaotic Dao, requiring Name to identify as a generated result but not the prerequisite origin. In other words, the transcendental ideal above all life is the Dao, which is not above the world but what connects the world, its omnipresence and everydayness impossible to pinpoint; on the other spectrum is Speech itself, seemingly divine above the world, yet also so prevalent in everyday enaction. God continually speaks while Dao is speechless. Their creative forces in establishing the world are the same, but their essences are almost opposite.

III. Philosophy as a Basis for Society

How Modern Culture is Shaped by The Philosophical Relationship of Language

The Whole or The Part

The previous section was pulled into the world of metaphysic and symbolism out of necessity, but they point to a foundation for societal norms in each respective culture. Above, 道 was shown to be an experiential philosophy considering the whole, while logos an analytical one determining the positive one (i.e. Seen in E pluribus unum or One from many, America’s motto). Lao Zi’s extensive use of paradoxical claims of form and formlessness promotes a central notion of cyclicality and dialecticism. The 阴阳 Ying Yang are considered together, in a holistic world view considering every opposing element. Conversely, Western philosophy is analytic, built by atomism up until the 19th century with a fundamental belief in the divisibility of ontologically distinct objects. This rational philosophy divides the world into atoms, then builds on the rationally coherent ones. Such divisibility is what allows Western thinkers to, for example, separate Man from nature and study nature[28] separate from Man, giving rise to the Western man’s predisposition towards continuous, active judgment and evaluation in normative terms through linear thinking. Eastern ideology, conversely, cannot separate a this from that—instead, this is in that, and that is in this. Man is not separated from nature: man is nature and nature is man. An apt description follows from the ancient Lü Shi Chun Qiu 呂氏春秋 text:

The world is not one person’s world but the world’s world. The harmony of Yingyang does not grow just one type. Sweet dew and timely rain are not partial to one thing. The birth of the myriad peoples does not favor one person.[29]

Through analyzing these discussions of logos and Dao, we can see the basis of terms like individualism and collectivism which now dominate conversations surrounding cultural osmosis. More tellingly, it provides a basis for understanding conversation as such in the globalized world of today.

Modern implications of the different essences of Dao and Logos

Does China have philosophy? Heidegger would suggest that this very question written in English makes the proposition itself clumsy. A significant portion of this paper was dedicated to each concept’s relationship with Language itself, and the cosmos-generating properties of it. Established above, both rely on the same inherent structure of bringing the world into being/becoming via language, but the similarities end there. The interesting question to ask now is what modern philosophical implications there are for the teleology of Dao and Logos. How have these two concepts shaped modern society? (For brevity, we will exclude scientific Enlightenment, though that is certainly an important point.)

Lao Zi’s central claim focuses on the meaning of experience, almost similar to Heidegger’s Dasein[30], as profound for the performative function of language. It was namelessness and indefinable Dao that generates the Heaven and Earth, and the feeling of being within that unity cannot be trapped within linguistic symbolism. Paradoxically, Lao Zi also claims that language comes into being with the origin of the world, and through that non-action action, or the un-worded words can the natural Dao be understood. While frustrating to grasp, these abstractions are made clear through the experiential philosophy core to Eastern lifestyle—a unity not distinct from everyday living. Meanwhile, Western thinkers metaphorize language itself as Divine, ultimately manifesting the world through the Word. Word draws action, action investigates the world, and the world reveals itself as a result.

In summation, we have two fundamental approaches to Language: meaning through abstraction and experience (道), or analysis derived from the love of investigation (Logos). Here, we can see modern dialogue’s roots. At the same time Confucian stated that “Words often cause trouble…Fancy words and embellished styles do not bear virtues,” [31] thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were a continent away, prioritizing the function of language and argumentation in pursuit of reason. Eastern ideology uses abstract rhetoric to extract the meaning behind experiences, which may be why it is so common in everyday Chinese dialogue to employ high level abstract idioms known as 成语. Language is holistic, inseparable from all communication between man and man, man and nature—the unity of all. Speech is not for exploration, but for experience: a metaphorical logic, almost. This could be the leading reason why Chinese society and other Confucian-influenced cultures emphasize speech as a means for social integration, harmony, and unity. All of these ideals dismiss language as a rhetorical chisel to sculpt arguments: such aggressive action will never reveal the Dao. The word 道 itself depicts a person walking: in other words, the person is experiencing nature.

But in constituting Western metaphysics, logos derives from the Greek word legein, which can be interpreted as “discourse.” In other words, reason-through-argumentation is a fundamental tenet to achieving truth. “A primary function of speech in this tradition is to express one’s ideas and thoughts as clearly, logically, and persuasively as possible, so the speaker can be fully recognized for his or her individuality in influencing others.”[32] Indeed, as a result of their philosophical beginnings, the spoken word in the West is used for discernment, while in the East, it is used towards unity.

Conclusion

When Nishi first rejected 理學 in attempts to further distinguish the Western term of philosophy from Confucian roots, it’s unclear if he knew that in opting for 哲學, he still rooted the term in an Eastern basis with its direct translation of 天道人道. In this paper, we have examined the difference in the logos and 道 as a basis for Western and Eastern thought. What we discovered is the significant structural similarity which language is built from in both concepts’ establishment of their respective philosophies. Their essences—logos as a language of distinction and 道 as a language of unity—have manifested themselves in the cultural linguistic tradition of both societies: argumentation and debate in the West, harmony and peace in the East. With this background, we can finally give an answer to the 但/只 dichotomy introduced by Derrida[33] at the beginning of this paper: is it 中国没有哲学，只有思想, or 中国没有哲学，但有思想？ From our findings, it is clear that China does not have philosophy—at least, not in the Western conception—but it absolutely has a cohesive system of configurable thinking that allows nature to be revealed through experience.

In revealing the essential characteristics of both logos and Dao, we showed how their relations to cosmogenesis provided both origin and the conception of language itself. This paper started by realizing the difficulty of comparing two metaphysical concepts: Heraclitus explains logos by saying it “is what it is;” Lao Zi himself all but concedes the same sentiment in stating 道可道，非常道，名可名，非常名. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name.” Eerily similar to Heraclitus’s words, Zhuang Zi said, “It is based in itself, rooted in itself,”[34] another definition-by-lack-of-definition. Therefore, we can conclude that while Dao and Logos are conceptually divergent, their similarities are striking and give compelling reasons for their inter-translatability which we must resist. Dao and Logos both define origins for entire philosophical systems, and those philosophical systems bely and pervade entire cultures. Both have their first definitions defined almost by a lack of definition. And both came to define a civilization and society’s attitudes towards speech, experience, and inquiry for millennia to come.

Nowadays, in modern Chinese, logos is no longer translated as the 道 mentioned in the Biblical translation. Instead, it is simply given a phonetic translation 逻各斯 (luó gè sī), a direct pronunciation of the word with unrelated Chinese characters. Equally, 道 is now referred to as a phonetic Dao rather than the “Way.” These basic translations may seem like they are capitulating effort to untranslatable concepts, but instead, it may be that they represent terms we never cease translating[35]—continually defining and redefining them into Eastern and Western houses.