The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece.
The manuscript is partly a historical exploration of early Chinese and Greek theories of metaphor, partly an epistemological reflection on comparative philosophy and literature and their methodologies, and partly a literary scholar’s critique of Cognitive Metaphor Theory. It argues that despite sporadic differences between their respective philosophical systems, early Chinese and Greek thinkers construed metaphorical expressions as based on a perceived likeness between two objects or phenomena, but also, crucially, as inducing a moment of conceptual confusion in the addressee. The latter explains why early metaphor theories are closely associated with discourses on misleading appearances, and why in Xunzi’s (d. 238 BC) theory of figurality, the corpse (which resembles but no longer is the living person) is the ultimate ‘metaphor of metaphor’.
It discusses critically relevant scholarship in the above-mentioned fields, contending that a methodology that allows the philosopher Xunzi to be read ‘against’ Plato’s Sophist and ‘with’ Aristotle’s Rhetoric not only exposes a thematics unnoticed in sinological scholarship on early rhetoric and philosophy; it also reveals an inverted correspondence between Plato’s critique of phantasmic representation and Aristotle’s insistence that a well-crafted metaphor defers the reader’s decoding of the intended meaning. Interlacing these thematic strands—and banking on twenty years of teaching these texts—the manuscript is the first of its kind.
It discusses critically relevant scholarship in the above-mentioned fields, contending that a methodology that allows the philosopher Xunzi to be read ‘against’ Plato’s Sophist and ‘with’ Aristotle’s Rhetoric not only exposes a thematics unnoticed in sinological scholarship on early rhetoric and philosophy; it also reveals an inverted correspondence between Plato’s critique of phantasmic representation and Aristotle’s insistence that a well-crafted metaphor defers the reader’s decoding of the intended meaning. Interlacing these thematic strands—and banking on twenty years of teaching these texts—the manuscript is the first of its kind.
Final report
1. Overview
My tenure allowed me to bring two book-length — and thematically and methodologically interrelated — studies to a conclusion: 1. ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology,” and 2. ”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece.” As indicated by the titles, both manuscripts are not only fundamentally comparative in nature, and investigate how and to what extent early Chinese and Greek ontologies and epistemologies relate to the linguistic and rhetorical topics of “correct naming” (‘orthotês tôn onomatôn’ and ‘zheng ming’) and figurative or metaphorical language (Plato’s ‘eikôn’ and Aristotle’s ‘metaphora’). They also argue that macro-level comparisons of early China and ancient Greece — typically postulating a rigid dualism of Western Metaphysics and Chinese Correlative Cosmology — are valid only as a first, primitive, and fumbling hypothesis in the pursuit of a more nuanced and fragmented ‘micro-level’ understanding of how the thinking about language and the constitution of the world (and the relation between the two) developed in Greece and China with sporadic inter-traditional overlaps but also with strong internal contradictions.
I give short synopses of the two works below (section two), highlighting what I consider their most important methodologies, arguments, and conclusions.
1.2 Networking and new project
The tenure also permitted me to develop old, well-established research networks (Academia Sinica in Taipei and the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University) and initiate new ones (the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University, the Sino-Hellenic Network at the University of Cambridge, and the Linguistics and Poetics Research Group at Oslo University). I presented the metaphor project (“The Phantasmatic Crypt”) at seminars in Taipei and in Tallinn.
A collateral outcome of the work on the two manuscripts is a new project on the metapoetics of the literary genres of ‘fu’ (or “epideictic rhapsody”) and ekphrasis and its origins in early Chinese and Greek poetics and language philosophies.
2. Synopses
2.1 ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology.”
The core question around which “Cratylus Sinensis” revolves is the following: Is naming described as an experience-based, hermeneutic, and quotidian activity in Plato’s “Cratylus” and in the text called “Deep Investigation of Names and Appellations” (“Shencha minghao”), ascribed to the Confucian policymaker and scholar Dong Zhongshu (ca. 198-107 B.C.)? In other words, is a “correct” name one which adequately conceptualizes its referent based on the name-maker’s experience of it, or must there be a ‘deeper,’ ‘physical’ or ‘meta-physical’ bond between the name and the thing, event or circumstance it refers to for the name to qualify as ‘orthês’ or ‘zheng’?
In keeping with the ‘sino-methodological’ inquiry described above, the manuscript further asks how the early Greek and Chinese discourses on naming and language differed from each other. Was the former predicated on a ‘metaphysical’ separation of sensory experience and abstract Form, and the latter on a notion of a ‘cosmos’ in which all things, actions, and phenomena interact and correlate? Or could a theory of naming (or, indeed, of ‘figurative language,’ ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’) be formulated outside and independently of the ‘larger,’ more overarching ontological assumptions of how reality is constituted that we find in Greece and China at the time when those texts were written?
A ‘neurotic’ close reading—defined as a mode of reading which appreciates (in both senses of the word) the logical and thematic inconsistencies in early philosophical texts, as well as the tensions between main argument (‘tenor’) and illustration (‘vehicle’)—tends to collapse rigid dualisms of the above kind, indicating instead that Greek and Chinese texts of the Axial Age are often thematically similar but with obvious differences in configuration and emphasis.
On the thematic level, I thus argue that in the “Cratylus” ‘eidos’ is not used in a metaphysical sense, denoting a suprasensual Form, but is in all likelihood related to the Platonic concepts of ‘doxa’ and ‘paradeigma,’ referring to a temporary assumption or ‘working definition’ about the character of a thing or event, and is thereby subject to reinterpretation (just like the ‘onomata’ themselves, as per Socrates). Conversely, the early Chinese concept of ‘correlative category’ (‘lei’) is habitually taken to represent the antithesis of the metaphysical concept of ‘eidos’ (as we find it in, for instance, Republic 10 597a): things of the same correlative category spontaneously react (‘ying’) to each other; thus early Chinese philosophy, ontology, and epistemology supposedly derive from an all-pervasive interest in how the things of the world interact and influence each other, in contrast to the ontology and epistemology of Western Metaphysics, which (it is assumed) derives from the inability of the human sense organs to perceive correctly the world, and which analyzes worldly events in terms of cause-and-effect and not (with a Jungian term) synchronicity. I am skeptical towards those dualisms, and instead argue that ‘eidos’ and ‘lei’ are closer than is usually admitted; thus, in Xunzi’s theory of correct naming (ca. 250 BCE), ‘lei’ is what predates the human experience of the world and guarantees that the objects and events that make up the world, and our experiences of it, are stable enough to be correctly understood by the senses and subsequently correctly named.
I hope hereby to have demonstrated that the early Chinese ‘cosmological’ discourse to some degree and in some aspects is compatible with the way in which the early Plato conceives the world, and although such sino-Platonic convergences occur only piecemeal and haphazardly—as here, in the different philosophical topographies of Socrates’s “correctness of names” and Xunzi’s ‘ontology’ of ‘lei’—this affinity appears also in early Chinese and Greek theories of language and of naming. Like the Socrates of the Cratylus, Dong Zhongshu’s preoccupation in the “Naming and Appellations” chapter is foremost with correct conceptualization and only secondarily, if indeed at all, with naming as a correlative or metaphysical activity.
2.2 ”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece.”
Could Aristotle's concept of linguistic “transfer”—’metaphora’—be applied in a relevant way to early Chinese theories about the function of language? Or is it, as the prevailing sinological expertise claims, that the Western concept of metaphor is based on completely different assumptions about man's place in the world than those that existed in ancient China? That the ancient Chinese lacked the Western metaphysical division between the sensual and the supernatural, and instead postulated a world in which the Ten Thousand Things are all interconnected and spontaneously influence each other, according to the worldview that sinology has dubbed ”correlative cosmology”? That the ancient Chinese did not perceive a statement such as “Ainsi, j'ai aimé un porc” (Rimbaud) as a description of an unappetizing person in terms of the animal he is said to resemble, but rather saw the connection between pigs and humans as an objective fact, independent of and preceding language or thought? That, in Heidegger's words, “the metaphorical is only found within metaphysics”?
“The Phantasmatic Crypt” questions this simplified description of China as cosmological and metonymic and the West as metaphysical and metaphorical. Through neurotically meticulous readings of Chinese and Greek texts from the Axial Age, it seeks to provoke a reaction between Greek texts on conceptualization and metaphor and the ideas about conceptualization and ritualism found in ancient Chinese writings—while at the same time creating a new methodology for comparative philosophy and literary studies.
By allowing Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian to be read and interact with the “Zuozhuan,” ”Mencius,” ”Xunzi,” and ”Master Lü's Chronicle” (from the fourth and third centuries BC), a macro-level interpretive practice is replaced by a micro-level one, thereby demonstrating that theories of language, rhetoric, and metaphor are independent of the worldview—Greek metaphysics or Chinese correlative cosmology—that dominated the era in which they were formulated.
A concrete example of a “neurotic” methodology (cf. Greek ’neuron’: “fiber, nerve, strength”) at the micro level is the project’s investigation of the role of the example in early Chinese and Greek texts. Plato illustrates his thesis on ‘eidos’ (‘suprasensual Form’) with examples that, paradoxically, do not distinguish between ‘eidos’ and ‘ta anthrôpina’ (‘everyday human experience’), but instead claim that a correct understanding of reality can be achieved through everyday and rational “weighing and measuring” (Republic 10). In a similar (but reverse) way, the canonical formulation of a correlative cosmology (in “Master Lü's Chronicle”) is paradoxically an illustration of a more comprehensive argument about causality, and of how certain actions and events are followed by certain lawful but, logically speaking, entirely explainable consequences. While the examples typify a synchronic thinking according to which event B is the correlative response to, but not the result of, event A, the tenor of the argument is thus concerned with the causality of worldly events. Methodologically speaking, this tension between argument and example — between tenor and vehicle — is arguably systemic and itself a possible topic for comparative studies in the rhetoric of philosophy.
This rhetorical-logical conflict between the main argument and the illustration—and between 'eidos'/correlative cosmology and ’ta anthrôpina’—is a starting point for a discussion of how early Chinese and Greek philosophy are united by this rhetorical paradox, but also of how certain common philosophical themes, such as the dualism of appearance and reality, in early Chinese linguistic-philosophical texts give rise to a discussion that is strikingly reminiscent of Aristotle's distinction between ’metaphora’ and ’onoma kurion’ (words used literally and non-figuratively). Comparative philosophy and poetics, I argue, can only be carried out in this asymmetrical way, revealing sporadic thematic and rhetorical coincidences.
The book demonstrates that although early Chinese philosophy lacked an overarching concept such as Aristotle's 'metaphora', there is a fragmentary, non-systematic theory of “the metaphorical” that in some places resembles Aristotle's rational theory of metaphor as an expression of an experienced “similarity” (’homoion’) between, for example, man and pig, but which in other places also corresponds to a surprising degree to Aristotle's lesser-known speculations about the metaphor as an intentional deception.
The finished manuscript largely follows the synopsis I presented in my application, but the criticism of “the Conceptual Metaphor Theory” has been significantly curtailed and can now be found in chapter 13 of “The Origins of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics” (2024).
3. Publications/manuscripts
3.1 ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology” (ca. 60 000 words, excluding indexes and bibliography).
Peer-reviewed (five readers) and accepted for publication in September 2025 in the Sino-Platonic Papers monograph series, published by the University of Pennsylvania and edited by Victor Mair (https://www.sino-platonic.org).
3.2
”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece (ca. 75 000 words, excluding indexes and bibliography). Submitted to SUNY Press in August 2025.
My tenure allowed me to bring two book-length — and thematically and methodologically interrelated — studies to a conclusion: 1. ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology,” and 2. ”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece.” As indicated by the titles, both manuscripts are not only fundamentally comparative in nature, and investigate how and to what extent early Chinese and Greek ontologies and epistemologies relate to the linguistic and rhetorical topics of “correct naming” (‘orthotês tôn onomatôn’ and ‘zheng ming’) and figurative or metaphorical language (Plato’s ‘eikôn’ and Aristotle’s ‘metaphora’). They also argue that macro-level comparisons of early China and ancient Greece — typically postulating a rigid dualism of Western Metaphysics and Chinese Correlative Cosmology — are valid only as a first, primitive, and fumbling hypothesis in the pursuit of a more nuanced and fragmented ‘micro-level’ understanding of how the thinking about language and the constitution of the world (and the relation between the two) developed in Greece and China with sporadic inter-traditional overlaps but also with strong internal contradictions.
I give short synopses of the two works below (section two), highlighting what I consider their most important methodologies, arguments, and conclusions.
1.2 Networking and new project
The tenure also permitted me to develop old, well-established research networks (Academia Sinica in Taipei and the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University) and initiate new ones (the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University, the Sino-Hellenic Network at the University of Cambridge, and the Linguistics and Poetics Research Group at Oslo University). I presented the metaphor project (“The Phantasmatic Crypt”) at seminars in Taipei and in Tallinn.
A collateral outcome of the work on the two manuscripts is a new project on the metapoetics of the literary genres of ‘fu’ (or “epideictic rhapsody”) and ekphrasis and its origins in early Chinese and Greek poetics and language philosophies.
2. Synopses
2.1 ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology.”
The core question around which “Cratylus Sinensis” revolves is the following: Is naming described as an experience-based, hermeneutic, and quotidian activity in Plato’s “Cratylus” and in the text called “Deep Investigation of Names and Appellations” (“Shencha minghao”), ascribed to the Confucian policymaker and scholar Dong Zhongshu (ca. 198-107 B.C.)? In other words, is a “correct” name one which adequately conceptualizes its referent based on the name-maker’s experience of it, or must there be a ‘deeper,’ ‘physical’ or ‘meta-physical’ bond between the name and the thing, event or circumstance it refers to for the name to qualify as ‘orthês’ or ‘zheng’?
In keeping with the ‘sino-methodological’ inquiry described above, the manuscript further asks how the early Greek and Chinese discourses on naming and language differed from each other. Was the former predicated on a ‘metaphysical’ separation of sensory experience and abstract Form, and the latter on a notion of a ‘cosmos’ in which all things, actions, and phenomena interact and correlate? Or could a theory of naming (or, indeed, of ‘figurative language,’ ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’) be formulated outside and independently of the ‘larger,’ more overarching ontological assumptions of how reality is constituted that we find in Greece and China at the time when those texts were written?
A ‘neurotic’ close reading—defined as a mode of reading which appreciates (in both senses of the word) the logical and thematic inconsistencies in early philosophical texts, as well as the tensions between main argument (‘tenor’) and illustration (‘vehicle’)—tends to collapse rigid dualisms of the above kind, indicating instead that Greek and Chinese texts of the Axial Age are often thematically similar but with obvious differences in configuration and emphasis.
On the thematic level, I thus argue that in the “Cratylus” ‘eidos’ is not used in a metaphysical sense, denoting a suprasensual Form, but is in all likelihood related to the Platonic concepts of ‘doxa’ and ‘paradeigma,’ referring to a temporary assumption or ‘working definition’ about the character of a thing or event, and is thereby subject to reinterpretation (just like the ‘onomata’ themselves, as per Socrates). Conversely, the early Chinese concept of ‘correlative category’ (‘lei’) is habitually taken to represent the antithesis of the metaphysical concept of ‘eidos’ (as we find it in, for instance, Republic 10 597a): things of the same correlative category spontaneously react (‘ying’) to each other; thus early Chinese philosophy, ontology, and epistemology supposedly derive from an all-pervasive interest in how the things of the world interact and influence each other, in contrast to the ontology and epistemology of Western Metaphysics, which (it is assumed) derives from the inability of the human sense organs to perceive correctly the world, and which analyzes worldly events in terms of cause-and-effect and not (with a Jungian term) synchronicity. I am skeptical towards those dualisms, and instead argue that ‘eidos’ and ‘lei’ are closer than is usually admitted; thus, in Xunzi’s theory of correct naming (ca. 250 BCE), ‘lei’ is what predates the human experience of the world and guarantees that the objects and events that make up the world, and our experiences of it, are stable enough to be correctly understood by the senses and subsequently correctly named.
I hope hereby to have demonstrated that the early Chinese ‘cosmological’ discourse to some degree and in some aspects is compatible with the way in which the early Plato conceives the world, and although such sino-Platonic convergences occur only piecemeal and haphazardly—as here, in the different philosophical topographies of Socrates’s “correctness of names” and Xunzi’s ‘ontology’ of ‘lei’—this affinity appears also in early Chinese and Greek theories of language and of naming. Like the Socrates of the Cratylus, Dong Zhongshu’s preoccupation in the “Naming and Appellations” chapter is foremost with correct conceptualization and only secondarily, if indeed at all, with naming as a correlative or metaphysical activity.
2.2 ”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece.”
Could Aristotle's concept of linguistic “transfer”—’metaphora’—be applied in a relevant way to early Chinese theories about the function of language? Or is it, as the prevailing sinological expertise claims, that the Western concept of metaphor is based on completely different assumptions about man's place in the world than those that existed in ancient China? That the ancient Chinese lacked the Western metaphysical division between the sensual and the supernatural, and instead postulated a world in which the Ten Thousand Things are all interconnected and spontaneously influence each other, according to the worldview that sinology has dubbed ”correlative cosmology”? That the ancient Chinese did not perceive a statement such as “Ainsi, j'ai aimé un porc” (Rimbaud) as a description of an unappetizing person in terms of the animal he is said to resemble, but rather saw the connection between pigs and humans as an objective fact, independent of and preceding language or thought? That, in Heidegger's words, “the metaphorical is only found within metaphysics”?
“The Phantasmatic Crypt” questions this simplified description of China as cosmological and metonymic and the West as metaphysical and metaphorical. Through neurotically meticulous readings of Chinese and Greek texts from the Axial Age, it seeks to provoke a reaction between Greek texts on conceptualization and metaphor and the ideas about conceptualization and ritualism found in ancient Chinese writings—while at the same time creating a new methodology for comparative philosophy and literary studies.
By allowing Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian to be read and interact with the “Zuozhuan,” ”Mencius,” ”Xunzi,” and ”Master Lü's Chronicle” (from the fourth and third centuries BC), a macro-level interpretive practice is replaced by a micro-level one, thereby demonstrating that theories of language, rhetoric, and metaphor are independent of the worldview—Greek metaphysics or Chinese correlative cosmology—that dominated the era in which they were formulated.
A concrete example of a “neurotic” methodology (cf. Greek ’neuron’: “fiber, nerve, strength”) at the micro level is the project’s investigation of the role of the example in early Chinese and Greek texts. Plato illustrates his thesis on ‘eidos’ (‘suprasensual Form’) with examples that, paradoxically, do not distinguish between ‘eidos’ and ‘ta anthrôpina’ (‘everyday human experience’), but instead claim that a correct understanding of reality can be achieved through everyday and rational “weighing and measuring” (Republic 10). In a similar (but reverse) way, the canonical formulation of a correlative cosmology (in “Master Lü's Chronicle”) is paradoxically an illustration of a more comprehensive argument about causality, and of how certain actions and events are followed by certain lawful but, logically speaking, entirely explainable consequences. While the examples typify a synchronic thinking according to which event B is the correlative response to, but not the result of, event A, the tenor of the argument is thus concerned with the causality of worldly events. Methodologically speaking, this tension between argument and example — between tenor and vehicle — is arguably systemic and itself a possible topic for comparative studies in the rhetoric of philosophy.
This rhetorical-logical conflict between the main argument and the illustration—and between 'eidos'/correlative cosmology and ’ta anthrôpina’—is a starting point for a discussion of how early Chinese and Greek philosophy are united by this rhetorical paradox, but also of how certain common philosophical themes, such as the dualism of appearance and reality, in early Chinese linguistic-philosophical texts give rise to a discussion that is strikingly reminiscent of Aristotle's distinction between ’metaphora’ and ’onoma kurion’ (words used literally and non-figuratively). Comparative philosophy and poetics, I argue, can only be carried out in this asymmetrical way, revealing sporadic thematic and rhetorical coincidences.
The book demonstrates that although early Chinese philosophy lacked an overarching concept such as Aristotle's 'metaphora', there is a fragmentary, non-systematic theory of “the metaphorical” that in some places resembles Aristotle's rational theory of metaphor as an expression of an experienced “similarity” (’homoion’) between, for example, man and pig, but which in other places also corresponds to a surprising degree to Aristotle's lesser-known speculations about the metaphor as an intentional deception.
The finished manuscript largely follows the synopsis I presented in my application, but the criticism of “the Conceptual Metaphor Theory” has been significantly curtailed and can now be found in chapter 13 of “The Origins of Chinese Literary Hermeneutics” (2024).
3. Publications/manuscripts
3.1 ”Cratylus Sinensis — Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology” (ca. 60 000 words, excluding indexes and bibliography).
Peer-reviewed (five readers) and accepted for publication in September 2025 in the Sino-Platonic Papers monograph series, published by the University of Pennsylvania and edited by Victor Mair (https://www.sino-platonic.org).
3.2
”The Phantasmatic Crypt: Figuring the Metaphorical in Early China and Ancient Greece (ca. 75 000 words, excluding indexes and bibliography). Submitted to SUNY Press in August 2025.