This research examines fundamental differences between the thought of the Chinese and the thought of the Greeks. The research will discuss the structure of Chinese and Greek discourse as well as ways in which the respective worldviews of the cultures overlap, converge, and diverge.
Much of what is different between Chinese and Greek thought begins with the medium of expression in each culture: language. Making use of what she terms "contrastive rhetoric," Matalene (789), identifies different systems of logic contained in Chinese and Greek (Western) language. Because of conventions established in ancient Greece, in the West, linguistic practice in Western languages such as English is governed by specific rules and conventions that determine correct expression or writing. Matalene cites the view that rhetorical standards "are expressions of Western culture" (789), where writers "subscribe to Aristotle's [logical] dictum, 'State your case and prove it,' and we expect to be provided with premises and conclusions connected by inductive or deductive reasoning" (790). In the West, arguments are meant to be "cohesive, coherent, and explicitly unified" (Matalene 790).
Chinese language and philosophy are as logically constructed and expressed, but the "hierarchy of culture, language, and rhetoric" (Matalene 790) is logical differently in China than the West. The Western alphabet and the raft of what are referred to as Indo-European languages (e.g., by Cowgill and Jasanoff) are governed by a set number of letters memorized, then used and reused pursuant to specific rules or conventions to make meanings. The Chinese alphabet is not properly so called but an ideogram collection of "thousands of different characters" (Matalene 791). For a Chinese to be literate, he or she must memorize a large set of nonrepetitive characters, which implies an obligation to memorize "the culture itself" (792).
The Western linguistic structure that originated...