Chad Hansen's Chinese Philosophy Pages

You-Wu (Being-nonbeing)

You behaves roughly like an existential quantifier in Classical Chinese and wu like its negation. So "You X" says simply that X exists and "Wu X" denies it. This use, however, is grammatically most elegantly treated as an extension of their use as two-place predicates (transitive verbs). "S you/wu X" says that S has/lacks X. This analysis neatly generates the straightforward existential sentence because pre-verbal terms (e.g., topic or subject) are optional even in assertions. Where the context signaled the topic or subject is S, "You X" could be thought of as "With regard to S, there is X." Alternately, in the "pure" case, one might think of "you X" as "the world (universe of discourse) has X."

The you-wu pair feature in the question of whether or not Chinese philosophy has a concept of being—and what it is. A related question concerns rules for interpreting Western philosophy into Chinese. Into what Chinese concept should we translate "being?" The two main rivals are you-wu and shi-fei. (See SHI-FEI for related discussion.) We will approach the question from the reverse angle, "should we use the word 'being' in translating or interpreting Chinese philosophy. Angus Graham suggests that we should avoid 'being' and 'essence' on the grounds that the Western concept is the abstract object linked to the verb "to be (or its translations in Indo-European languages)."

Graham's analysis drew on Aristotle's response to Parmenides doctrine that forbade saying anything about being other than "it is." Parmenides was committed to metaphysical monism, the doctrine that there is only permanent, all embracing being with no distinctions, properties or change. He treated being and identity as the same thing because he confused two distinct meanings of ‘to be’: existence and predication. On the one hand, 'is' has the meaning of "exists." "What is, simply is and cannot not be." On the other hand, 'is' links a thing to its predicates or properties. If we focus merely on the verb and the principle "what is-not cannot become what is" then it will seem to entail that "what is-not old cannot become old." He concludes that things cannot change. Similar arguments supposedly motivated Parmenides conclusion that there could be no motion.

Aristotle's categories distinguished a number of different senses of 'being' which underlay the different ways we can predicate things of a subject (what it can be said to be). One of these is what came to be known as the essence or essential predication. Graham seemed to conclude that we should avoid either term in discussing Chinese philosophy. This indeed gives us reason to to worry that Aristotle's rich concept of "being" (including all the categories) would not coincide exactly with either you/wu or shi/fei. However, Aristotle's doctrine is similarly difficult for modern Western students. For most of us, the concept of being coincides roughly to existence, not predication. It does not, therefore, appear to be misleading to translate the you-wu pair as being and non-being. (Of course, whether doing so in a translation of Aristotle will help or hinder intelligibility is a distinct issue.)

By an interesting coincidence, an argument by the Neo-Daoist, Guo Xiang, almost paraphrases Parmenides—Wu is simply wu and cannot become you. The contrast is immediate: "You, though it goes through endless transformation, never becomes wu." Where Parmenides moved inexorably to permanence, Guo Xiang did not see change as any kind of philosophical problem. Things change, but they do not cease to exist. What the grammar of Chinese explains is not the absence of the concept of being, but the absence of a problem of permanence and change.