从“口耳相传”到“著之竹帛”
作者简介:景海峰,深圳大学人文学院教授(广东深圳 518060)
摘要: 儒家经典以“六经”为根本,这些典籍的产生与成型经历了一个漫长的历史过程。早期的经典基本上是以口头的方式集结与流行的,到了西汉,始有整体性的书写转换,从“口耳相传”到“著之竹帛”,在儒家经典传衍史上是一次巨大的变革。文字书写的出现将口语表达做了抽离化的处理,产生了提升与变形,在理解的复杂性上便远远超出了原有的表意。因为去情景化的缘故,文字书写为后续的理解带来了更多的可能性和歧义性,也打开了无限的释义空间。书写对于口语而言,不只是具体的内容得以记录,而且扩展了记忆的历史,使得片段的、不连贯的记忆变成了可以叙事的统一体,一种有限的具体性便融入了普遍的世界关系之中。从口传到记录成文,再演变成为有系统体式的各类文章,这就为书写和阅读的诠释学间架奠定了基础。在此形式转换中,汇聚成篇的经典文本成为观念交互性展开的集散地,也是人们从历史经验来观照自我、汲取思想养分的重要源泉。
From “Teach by Word of Mouth” to “Written on Bamboo and Silk”
- Available Online:
2022-05-20
Abstract: Confucian classics are based on the “Six Classics”. The emergence and formation of these classics has gone through a long historical process. The early classics were basically assembled and popularized orally. In the Western Han Dynasty, there was an overall writing transformation, from “teach by word of mouth” to “written on bamboo and silk”, which was a great change in the history of Confucian classics. The emergence of writing has abstracted the spoken language and resulted in promotion and deformation, which goes far beyond the original meaning in terms of complexity of understanding. Because of de contextualization, writing brings more possibilities and ambiguities for subsequent understanding, and also opens up unlimited space for interpretation. For spoken language, writing not only records the specific content, but also expands the history of memory, making the fragmented and incoherent memory become a narrative unity, and a limited specificity is integrated into the universal world relations. The evolution from oral tradition to recorded texts and then to systematic texts has laid the foundation for the hermeneutic framework between writing and reading. In this formal transformation, the classical texts that have been gathered into books become a collection and distribution center for the interactive development of ideas, and an important source for people to observe themselves and draw ideas from historical experiences.