(4) How would you teach me to tie a knot? Show or tell?
Today i heard a lot of talk about the differences between eastern and western thinking. There is this notion that easterners and westerners (as a generalization) have problems understanding each other because we have two completely different ways of htinking. Watts says that
"[in some ways] the chinese written language has a slight advantage over our own, and is perhaps symptomatic of a different way of thinking. it is still linear, still a series of abstractions taken in one at a time. But its written signs are a little closer to life than spelled words because they are essentially pictures, and, as one chinese proverb puts it, "One showing is worth a thousand sayings" (9)
He goes on to say
"The child has to be taught not only what words are to stand for what things, but also the way in which our culture has tacitly agreed to divide things from each other. [...] How arbitrary such conventions may be can be seen from the question "what happens to my fist (noun object) when i open my hand?" The object miraculously vanishes because an action was disguised by a part of speech usually assigned to a thing! In english the difference between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs- so that one who thinks in chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities. " (5)
He is trying to say that explaining "Zen" in eastern culture is hard to do, because the two sides have two different ways of thinking. But i don't really think this is the case. Maybe we have a different way of expressing our thoughts, but everyone has thoughts that they can't put into words they know.
I think i have heard somewhere that the Inuit people have something like 15 different words for snow. SNOW. And yet who has felt completely inadequate expressing certain things in english? Smell for example. There are barely ANY words taht describe smell. You always have to say "this smells LIKE ____". Or even love. When you are in love, you KNOW that it is something much deeper than the phrase "I love you" could ever hope to cover. It's like... a mixture between respect and admire and adore and enjoy and maybe even worship a little bit, i don't know. But "love" is just NOT ENOUGH.
So i guess i can see how the english language can be insufficient. But at the same time, it's not just english. There are a bunch of swedish words that simply don't exist in the english, but it is the same the other way around.
In that respect then, i guess i have to question Watts. Sure chinese and english people say things differently, but how differently do we actually THINK? I don't think it's a question of being incapable of thinking like each other, but more of a problem of explaining HOW we are thinking in a way that can be understood and copied. It's not an understanding barrier, but a barrier of language.
But in some respects, could the language you speak affect the WAY you think? Say there was a language where you could define perfectly everys single emotion you had. Don't you think the people who spoke that language would tend to talk about emotion a lot more? You could tell someone how you felt about them in a way where you are never saying something you don't mean. Relationships could be more honest.
So maybe the chinese language having a greater fluidity between parts of speech TAUGHT them to think in a particular way as a RESULT of their having better ways to distinguish things from each other.
On the completely other side of the spectrum, MAYBE language is brought on by how you think.
Are people from different places really inclined to think in a completely different way? Do people think differently BECAUSE of their language? Or is language formed out of necessity? Is it impossible to fully understand someone you don't share a culture/language with?
Also, i wonder. If you were born and raised in a way where you never came into contact with language of any kind, would your thinking be "better"? We would be able to feel all those emotions without the bias of having words we can define them with? Would our emotional range be wider? or narrower? Would lack of a language KEEP us from feeling certain things because we would never wonder about them because we had never heard of them before?
Citing is engrained in my system now. Sorry.
In response to: The Way of Zen, Alan Watts (Chapter 1)
Not MLA format, but you can figure it out.