© March 2005; revised 25 June 2008 |
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Sidebar on the Chinese Character as a Philosophical Language
(for Gallery exhibit, “Richard Lovelace on Lely’s Talent for Psychological Portraiture, 1647”) Like Lovelace interpreting Lely’s psychological portraiture in terms of “the hieroglyphic characters of the Chinese,” Kircher appreciated how “the Chinese have so adapted the significance of many of their characters that an ingenious allusion is possible.” “The Chinese have innumerable ... characters of this type which are formed by putting together different characters and which they use with ingenuity for expressing complex thoughts,” wrote Kircher in his authoritative China Monumentis (1667), choosing for his first example the compound Chinese character for “to be afflicted.” The Chinese logogram (Lat. Afflictus) is formed with the determinatives for heart (Lat. Cor) and gate (Lat. Porta), thus equating “to be afflicted” with “the gate of the heart is closed.”
Kircher explains: “Character C signifies ‘to be afflicted’ and it is made from two characters B and A. B means heart and A means gate, which means ‘the gate of the heart (is) closed.’ A man in a state of affliction feels that all his breaths are concentrated within the gate of his heart, and so he feels fear, terror, and affliction.”
Most recently, it is the Chinese character for the verb “to listen” compounded from the determinatives for ears, eyes, undivided attention, and heart that has appealed to a group of U.S. artists & activists seeking new dialogic models of community and relationship. = to listen
< Chinese character for EYES < Chinese character for ATTENTION < Chinese character for OPEN HEART < Chinese character for EARS
LISTEN. Artwork for January page of the
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