龚鹏程x迈耶｜跨学科的手稿和文本文化研究

龚鹏程对话海外学者第一百零二期：在后现代情境中，被技术统治的人类社会，只有强化交谈、重建沟通伦理，才能获得文化新生的力量。这不是谁的理论，而是每个人都应实践的活动。龚鹏程先生遊走世界，并曾主持过“世界汉学研究中心”。我们会陆续推出“龚鹏程对话海外学者”系列文章，请他对话一些学界有意义的灵魂。范围不局限于汉学，会涉及多种学科。以期深山长谷之水，四面而出。

德克·迈耶教授（Professor Dirk Meyer）

牛津大学中国哲学研究教授，牛津大学手稿和文本文化中心主任。

龚鹏程教授：您好。在文本生产的物质方面，牛津大学手稿和文本文化中心主要研究成果，可介绍一下吗？

德克·迈耶教授：龚教授，感谢您的问题。我们中心的关注点是将不同的前现代手稿文化带入彼此的对话中，并就我们所面临的问题在各学科间形成一种共同的学术语言。我们的学科经常受到狭隘方法的影响，造成了小小的学术孤岛，而不是相互学习。我们中心试图解决这个问题。

在西方学术界，中国领域在关注相邻学科以及我们可以从他们那里学到什么方面做得不错。但经过几十年对古代手稿的研究，我们的领域现在已经获得了专业知识，我认为值得与他人分享。

这样一来，中心也是一个平台，它把中国的经验带到关于古代思想生产的全球讨论中。西方学术界喜欢把古典地中海的经验看作是一种默认。我们以跨学科的重点，打断了这种霸权主义的话语。

在我关于中国哲学的工作中，我探讨了中国早期思想生产中的论证策略以及社会物质条件和思想的相互作用。我研究了文本的物质条件与它们被生产、传播和（转化）形成的物理媒介之间的关系，我将产生意义的策略概念化，这些策略超越了符号的词汇层面，被编码在结构、布局和功能中。通过研究媒体变化对思维系统化的影响，我进一步参与了哲学话语、手稿和文本文化以及哲学过渡时期的体裁和论证构建。

正是在这样的背景下，为了扩展我在中国哲学方面的研究，探索不同时间和空间的哲学事业的相似之处和差异，我建立了“跨学科的手稿和文本文化中心”并担任该中心的主任。该中心由亚洲和中东研究、古典学、中世纪文化、英语、哲学和互联网研究的同事组成，以跨学科的方式推进对知识的物质条件的研究。

Thank you for your question. The concern of the Centre is to bring different pre-modern manuscript cultures into a conversation with one another and to develop a common academic language across the disciplines about the issues we are facing. Our disciplines often suffer from a parochial approach which creates little academic silos rather than learning from one another. The Centre seeks to address this.

Within the academic West, the Chinese field is doing alright in terms of looking at neighbouring disciplines and what we can learn from them. But after decades of working with ancient manuscripts, our field has now gained expertise which I believe is worth sharing with others. In this way, the Centre is also a platform which brings the Chinese experience to a global discussion on thought production in antiquity. The academic West likes to see the classical Mediterranean experience as a default. With its interdisciplinary focus, the Centre interrupts such a hegemonic discourse.

In my work on Chinese philosophy, I explore argumentative strategies in early Chinese thought production and the interplay of socio-material conditions and ideas. I examine the material conditions of texts in relation to the physical media through which they are produced, transmitted, and (trans-)formed, and I conceptualise strategies which produce meaning beyond the lexical level of signification as encoded in structure, layout, and function. By studying the impact of media change on the systematisation of thinking, I further engage with genre and argument construction in philosophical discourse, manuscript and text cultures, and transition periods in philosophy.

It is in this context—to extend my research in Chinese Philosophy and explore parallels, and differences, in philosophical enterprise across time and space—that I established the interdisciplinary Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, for which I also serve as Director. The Centre comprises colleagues in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Classics, Medieval Cultures, English, Philosophy, and Internet Studies to further research on the material conditions of knowledge in cross-disciplinary ways.

龚鹏程教授：物质条件和思想的相互作用，中国早期竹简、木牍、绢帛，印度贝叶方面有什么例子？

德克·迈耶教授：在中国，公元前一千年的后半段，文本和思想的数量空前增加。由于成熟的手稿文化中的文字在直接的权力中心之外变得越来越普遍，它使更广泛意义上的社区中对比鲜明的子群体能够将政治挑战转化为社会政治和哲学思想的新表述。置身于一个不同行为者都能获得书面记录的环境中，使他们有能力阐明立场并重新阐述传统，因此，最终产生了具有新意义的论点。

有两个发展很突出。它们不是孤立的，而是辩证地联系在一起的，一个影响着另一个。

首先，在战国时期，社会面临着一种生存上的不安，这使得东周天下体系内的某些子群体对社会秩序提出质疑。这促使他们扩大自己的行动范围。通过对这种挑战的回应，他们在哲学上和政治上都成为了行动者。

同时，这些新的行动者在一个新的文本环境中工作，因为社会看到书面文本在实际流通中的空前增加。在这种更好的信息流通环境中，有关群体越来越能够看到文本，比较文本，并融合文本，以进行新的阐述和发展不同的思想。

在这种鸡生蛋、蛋生鸡的情况下，两种条件富有成效地结合在一起，以至于它们呈现出一个断裂期，新的东西就会出现。

但是，公元前一千年的后半段，特别是战国时期，在中国哲学思想形成的历史上并不是一个独立的时刻。尽管如此，可以说它预示着后来思想系统化的发展，它将以不同程度的强度重复战国时期相关社区的经验。

在社会物质变革的推动下，带来了新的社会政治和哲学挑战以及答案，其他"断裂期 "包括我们可以称之为 "文书时代"（约公元400-800年）的机械复制文本的生产线；"黎明的现代"（约公元1200-1800年）的印刷机和大目录；或者 "数字时代"，在互联网的背景下重新解释文本。

显然，这样的断裂期并非中国所特有，而是发生在不同社会的不同时期，在全球文学社会中产生了共鸣，无论是中国、欧洲还是其他地方。因此，中国只是一个案例研究，以实现跨学科的对话，在文本形势增厚的社会物质背景下讨论多种哲学。

In China, the second half of the first millennium BC saw an unprecedented increase of texts and ideas. As writing in maturing manuscript cultures was becoming more common beyond the immediate centres of power, it enabled contrasting sub-groups of a wider meaning community to translate political challenge into new articulations of sociopolitical and philosophical thinking. Being placed in a milieu in which the different actors had access to written records empowered them to articulate positions and rearticulate traditions, and so, ultimate, to produce arguments of new significance. Two developments stand out. They are not isolated but related dialectically such that one conditions the other. Firstly, at the time of the Warring States period, society faced an existential unsettling that made certain sub-groups of the meaning community of the Eastern Zhōu oecumene question the order of society. This propelled them to expand their scope of action. Through their response to such challenges, they became actors, philosophically and politically. At the same time, these new actors worked within a novel text environment, as society saw the unprecedented increase of written texts in physical circulation. Within this setting of better flows of information, the groups in question were increasingly able to see texts, compare texts, and fuse texts to make new articulations and develop different ideas. In this chicken-or-egg scenario where the two conditions come together productively, such that they present a period of rupture, something new comes to the fore.

But the second half of the first millennium BC, in particular the Warring States period, is not a stand-alone moment in the history of the formation of philosophical ideas in China. Nonetheless, it is fair to say it anticipated later developments in the systematisation of ideas that would repeat, with different degrees of intensity, the experience of the relevant communities of the Warring States. Facilitated by socio-material change that brings about new socio-political and philosophical challenges, and answers, other ‘rupture periods’ include what we might want to call the ‘Clerical Period’ (c. AD 400–800) with its production lines of mechanical copying of texts; the ‘Dawning Modernities’ (c. AD 1200–1800) with the printing presses and the great catalogues; or the ‘Digital Era’, which reinterpreted text in the context of the internet. Obviously, such periods of rupture are not specific to China but occurred at different times in different societies, resonating across global literary societies, whether in China, Europe, or elsewhere. China is therefore only a case study to enable cross-disciplinary dialogue for discussions of multiple philosophies in the context of the socio-material setting of a thickening text situation.

龚鹏程教授：手稿、口传之间，既有交叉、传承、互补、等关系，也有矛盾和冲突，例如您研究的《尚书》，就有口传本和文字本之争；也形成“今文”“古文”之争和真伪之争，吵了两千年。您们对这样的问题，有什么看法？

德克·迈耶教授：我们这个领域的口述与写作的辩论，有时可能相当尖锐，问题在于它倾向于用二元对立的方式工作。而古代的思想生产肯定遵循一种混合模式：写作参与口述模式，反之亦然。

说到《诗经》，音模承载着诗歌的歌词。音模从语音上定义了《诗经》的诗歌。但正如"模子 "一词所暗示的那样，在战国时期，它们也可以作为容器，在一定程度上填充相关社区认为合适的、具有语义可塑性的内容。如果所选字形的声音不违反它被放入的规定模具，作家或评论家就可以在一定程度上自由地应用一个群体对诗歌的理解。

最后，回到《尚书》传统和您关于的"真实性 "问题，体裁的模式也使我能够克服这个分歧。今天，《尚书》中只存在现代文字章节的旧文字版本，因此，与Michael Nylan一样，我建议谈论汉代《尚书》（针对现代文字文本）和公元四世纪早期的 《伪古文尚书》。

然而，无论我们认为是古文字还是现代文字，这两种文本都在不断地被改造和改写。《伪古文尚书》文本可能是档案工作的结果，现代文字的汉代《尚书》则是体裁划分下的产物。这些类型中的每一种对我们来说都有巨大的信息量。

作为思想史家，它们告诉我们有关群体如何与古代材料互动并从中产生新的论点。但它们都没有给我们提供一个“准确”的画面，比如说，周公做了什么或没有做什么。

The problem with the orality-literacy debate of our field, which can be quite shrill at times, is that it tends to work with binary pairs while thought production in antiquity quite certainly followed a mixed mode: writing engaged modes of orality, and vice versa.

Speaking of the Shī, sound moulds carry a song’s words. The sounds moulds define the individual songs of the Shī phonetically. But as the term ‘mould’ suggests, during the Warring States period they also served as containers that could be filled, to an extent, with semantically malleable content as deemed appropriate by the community in question. If the sound of the chosen graph did not violate the prescriptive mould into which it was placed, the writer or commentator was at some liberty to apply a group’s reading of the song.

Finally, coming back to the Shū traditions and your question of ‘authenticity’, the model of the genre also enables me to overcome this divide. Today there only exist old script versions of modern script chapters in the Shàngshū, and so, with Michael Nylan, I suggest speaking of ‘Hàn-era’ Shū (for the modern script texts) and ‘pseudo-Kǒng’ Shū of the early fourth century AD. However, whether we think of the old- or modern script texts, both types were continuously remodelled and rewritten. The pseudo-Kǒng texts of the old tradition are probably the result of archival work, the modern script Hàn-era texts were the products of genre expectations. Each of these types are hugely informative to us. As historians of thought, they teach us how the communities in question engaged with ancient material and produced from this a new argument. But neither of them gives us an ‘accurate’ picture of what the Duke of Zhōu, for instance, did or did not do.

龚鹏程教授：您们对近代新发现文书手稿的研究情况，尚祈见告。

德克·迈耶教授：多年来，我一直在探讨：在中国的话语中，什么东西确切地构成了哲学论证，以及它是如何运作的问题。

我从不同的角度、带着不同的关注点来做这件事，而每一个项目都会加深我对什么是好的论证的理解。

我深信论证的问题必须参照意义的物质性来解决，这个概念有两层含义：一层是指一个社会的社会智力动态，另一层是指文本在加厚的手稿文化中的实际可用性。

在我的第一本书《竹上哲学》中，我试图从概念上理解什么是中国早期的书面哲学论证，以及它如何在交流环境中发挥作用。为此，我选择了公元前300年左右的手稿文本，所以是在任何帝国干预发生之前。

这是必要的，因为我想在对古代的任何重新概念化发生之前获得战国思想活动的情况，就像在早期帝国时期一样，所以选在中国的书面遗产被改写之前。一旦我们看清了手稿文本中的情况，我们就可以更有信心地重新审视已接受的典籍。

以论证为基础的文本，以一种连续的方式发展一个点，这样的讨论通过在一个更大的意义网络中把它们连接起来而超越了单个的构件。

与此相反，在依赖语境的文本中，各个构件各自呈现出一个"更 "孤立的问题。不同的构件通常不会以一种连续的方式相互连接。在依赖语境的文本中，这对构件的信息内容没有影响。

但在以论证为基础的文本中则不同，在不同的文本配置中，文本单元的信息内容会发生相应的变化。因此，这种微观层面的观察对我们如何理解文本的宏观结论有影响。

对于我们的思想评价来说，《老子》中哪些单元在前，哪些在后并不重要。每个单元都提出了一个相当"孤立 "的关注，因此可以被视为相对独立的文本。在方法论上，我们甚至可以选择随机分析不同的单元。但对于以论证为基础的文本来说，情况就不同了。以基于论证的文本 "忠信之道"为例。这个文本的宏观结构反映了它的微观结构，因此决定了我们必须如何理解文本中使用的各种术语，包括忠实和可信：对于文本的思想交流来说，哪个构件被放在哪里是非常重要的。

在下一个更高的层次上，在构件之上，我们经常看到更大的文本集群，在文本传播的早期阶段可以作为文本独立流通。这些集群可以被识别为更广泛的文集中的章节，也可以被识别为单个文本中的段落。

作为意义单位，它们提供的信息因其直接的语境而不同。《诗经》中的"康王之诰"文本就是一个例子。它只有两个构件长度。在公元四世纪的《伪古文尚书》中，它与 "顾命"连读，成为后者的一个组成部分。在汉代现代字体的《尚书》中，它被视为一个独立的文本，与 "顾命"分开。如果 "康王之诰"作为一个独立的实体单独阅读，或者与前面的文本（"顾命"）合并阅读，其意义就不同了。

因此，无论是传播的还是挖掘，基于论据与上下文的概念对于获得一个文本的细微阅读是必要的。

Over the years I approached the question of what precisely constitutes a philosophical argument in Chinese discourse, and how it works. I did this from a variety of angles and with a variety of concerns in mind, and with each project I would deepen my understanding of what constitutes a good argument. I am convinced the question of an argument must be addressed with reference to the materiality of meaning, a concept which has two layers: one refers to the socio-intellectual dynamics of a society, the other to the physical availability of texts in thickening manuscript cultures. In my first book, Philosophy on Bamboo, I sought to conceptualise what constitutes a written philosophical argument in early China and how it works in a communicative setting. For this I chose manuscript texts interred around 300 BC, and so before any imperial intervention took place. This was necessary because I wanted to gain a picture of Warring States thought activities before any reconceptualisation of antiquity happened, as it did during the early empires, and so before China’s written heritage was rewritten. Once we see what is going on in the manuscript texts can we revisit the received canon with greater confidence.

Argument-based texts develop a point in a continuous way, such that the discussion extends beyond the individual building blocks by connecting them in a larger web of meaning. In contrast, in context-dependent texts the individual building blocks each present a ‘more’ isolated concern. The different building blocks are typically not connected to one another in a continuous way. In context-dependent texts this has no bearing on the information content of the building blocks. But this is different in argument-based texts, where in differently arranged text-configurations the information-content of the text unit changes accordingly. This micro-level observation therefore has implication on the macro-level conclusions of how we understand the text.

It does not matter for our evaluation of thought which units come first or last in the Lǎozǐ. Each unit presents a rather‘isolated’ concern and may therefore be considered as relatively independent texts. Methodologically we may even choose to analyse the different units at random. But for argument-based texts this is different. Take for instance the argument-based text “Zhōng xìn zhī dào”. The text’s macro-structure mirrors its micro-structure and thus determines how we must understand the various terms used in the text, including zhōng (fidelity) and xìn (trustworthiness): it matters a great deal which building block is placed where for the communication of the ideas of the text.

At the next higher level, above the building block, we often see larger text clusters that can circulate independently as texts at earlier stages of text transmission. These clusters may be identified as chapters in broader collections or as sections in an individual text. As units of meaning, the information they provide differs according to their immediate contexts. The text “Kāng Wáng zhī gào” (Proclamation of King Kang) of the Shàngshū is a case in point. It is just two building blocks long. In the pseudo-Kǒng old script recension of the Shàngshū (Venerated documents) of the fourth century AD, it was read conjointly with “Gù mìng” (Testamentary charge), thus forming an organic subsection of the latter. In the Hàn-era modern script recension of the Shàngshū it was taken as an independent text and separate from “Gù mìng”. The meaning of “Kāng Wáng zhī gào” differs if it was read as a separate entity on its own or merged and read conjointly with the preceding text (“Gù mìng”).

The concept of argument-based versus context-dependent is therefore necessary to obtain a nuanced reading of a text, transmitted or excavated.

龚鹏程，1956年生于台北，台湾师范大学博士，当代著名学者和思想家。著作已出版一百五十多本。

办有大学、出版社、杂志社、书院等，并规划城市建设、主题园区等多处。讲学于世界各地。并在北京、上海、杭州、台北、巴黎、日本、澳门等地举办过书法展。现为中国孔子博物馆名誉馆长、台湾国立东华大学终身荣誉教授、美国龚鹏程基金会主席。