De l'idéographie divinatoire à Confucius et Zhuang Zi

Résumé En

Unlike Western thought, tending to the analytic and valuing personal reflection, Chinese thought is profoundly characterized by holism and impersonality. May these characteristics be determined by the language in which the thought is shaped and, more particularly, by the written language which in the West is conveyed in an analytical, alphabetic script and in China in an ideography of a holistic nature? Chinese ideography has its origins in scapulomantic divination whose extraordinary technical achievements coincide with the birth of this ideography at the beginning of the Yin epoch. One may think that it was the production of standardized divinatory graphs expressing various degrees of bad or good fortune that led to the empirical discovery of semanticity. A selective collection of documents produced in this original divination ideography served as the basis for the Confucian canon. Confucianism thus guarded against innovative, personal creations, always speculating on this canonical basis in a globalizing cosmological manner. Zhuang zi, who broke away from Confucianism, demystified Chinese ideography, stripping it of any divinatory transcendentalism while making it, on the other hand, a marvellous instrument of literary creation. However, he remained influenced by this ideography, as is seen in the impersonal form of his writing and the holistic polarization of his thought.