Phenomenology of Writing and Reading in the Context of the Occidental and Oriental Philosophy Paradigms

Abstract

Purpose. The article is devoted to the analysis of that how the writing system used in a culture can influence the way of thinking, metaphysics and epistemology that dominate in this culture. A comparative analysis is offered of how the existing system of writing (and reading) manifests itself in Occidental and Oriental paradigms of philosophizing; in particular, it’s considered how it goes in the Ancient paradigm (reading aloud in the conditions of a polis culture), Modern scientific paradigm (the influence of a large number of printed texts on the formation of scientific rationalism, the analysis is based on the theory of M. McLuhan), Chinese (correspondence between the organismism of the traditional Chinese worldview and the peculiarities of reading hieroglyphic texts), and also, as a special case, as it was presented in the Babylonian paradigm (the formation of its epistemological system of classifications based on cuneiform writing).

Results. The writing system used in Ancient and Modern scientific cultures is phonetic, the differences were in peculiarities of reading. Reading in antiquity, as well as later until modern time, was reading aloud. Accordingly, writing acted only as a "trace" of the voice, and the voice acted as the voice of the being itself, of the reality itself. Writing was secondary to the voice and, accordingly, did not provide for punctuation marks or spaces between words. The latter appear only in the Modern Age, that is, during the transition to the scientific paradigm based on the subject-object dichotomy, which actually equates voice and writing, and accordingly phonetic and ideographic writing methods. Chinese hieroglyphic writing combines elements of the first and the second, which gives rise to the possibility of different readings and, as a result, the specific meaning is determined by the general context of the text. The latter demonstrates a parallel to the organismic way of worldview of traditional Chinese culture. Finally, the Sumerian-Babylonian culture gave priority to written representations, respectively, things of the outside world were classified not by their properties, but by the nuances of cuneiform ideograms for their designation.