マックス・ヴェーバーにおける中国の統語論的に合理的な言語と「視覚的」な直観的文字

Abstract

Chinese script was one of the important issues in Weber's “Confucianism and Taoism,” but this has been neglected in studies of his sociology. He emphasized the character of the Chinese script formally, but did not elaborate on this point. He looked on the Chinese script as “anschaulich”. This German adjective means ‘visual’ or ‘intuitive’. He claimed that he “merely reproduced what Sinologists such as W. Grube had said about Chinese language and script”. This paper shows that Weber went beyond reproduction of what Sinologists had said, interpreting their statements in terms of his own theories about such concepts as “rational”. He referred to the “rational qualities of the Chinese tongue's structure.” But he took the concept “anschaulich” from Grube's theory. Weber contrasted what he saw as the syntactically rational Chinese language with the “anschaulich” script.