Shared Questions, Divergent Paths, Complementary Possibilities: Writing Forms and the Two Transcendence Paths in Chinese and Western Philosophy

Human civilization shares two fundamental philosophical questions: the concern with **Being** (What is truly real and reliable?) and the pursuit of **Origin/Arche** (Where do the world and the self come from?). Chinese and Western philosophy have responded to these questions in radically different ways. In the West, the core of "metaphysics" is precisely what Engels summarized as "the relationship between thought and being" — the question of the reality of Being itself and whether thought can grasp Being — making Being an inescapable, fundamental anxiety. In China, Being does not become a "problem" because the semiotic experience of Chinese characters daily reaffirms that "meaning resides in the texture of the sign"; instead, the Origin (Dao / the Absolute / Taiji / Thusness) becomes the focal question, and because the pathway of Being (the Dao that can be spoken) remains unobstructed, the Origin can be affirmatively reached. This paper argues that the root of this divergence lies in the fact that two writing systems, over the longue durée, materialized fundamentally different semiotic experiences. Alphabetic writing underwent a **"double stripping"** — the visual connection between the written form and the image of things was systematically severed, rendering the sign an "opaque container" in which meaning does not reside. Consequently, Being became an inescapable question: reality at the level of actuality is untrustworthy, and the correspondence between thought and Being can never be definitively verified. When Derrida revealed that even the voice depends on deferral, the desire for "presence" was proven impossible — Western philosophy reached the logical endpoint of **negative transcendence**. Chinese characters took a different path: the semantic radical system and the associative-compound structure preserved the connection between the written sign and imagistic thinking. The sign provides an "entry point" into meaning; Being is pre-reflectively confirmed in daily reading and writing; "seeking Dao in utensils" becomes an intuitively viable path; and "getting the meaning and forgetting the words" becomes the completion of **affirmative transcendence** — not a despair of language, but a release after trusting and using it. On this foundation, this paper further argues that the consequences of the "double stripping" are not singularly negative. The same emptying operation — the sign is no longer a "likeness" of things — produced, in philosophy, the uncloseable question of Being, while in mathematics and science, it liberated the sign into the freedom of **pure formal operation**: from Greek lettered geometry to Arabic algebra to the symbolic revolution of early modern Europe, formal abstraction took precisely the cognitive precondition that "signs carry no imagistic information." Because Chinese characters preserved the form–meaning connection, European-style pure symbolic operation was always an upstream struggle — not impossible (Liu Hui's "empty words" and Mohist logic are both evidence of this), but requiring extra effort — yet the Chinese character tradition also opened up other paths of formalization that exploited two-dimensional spatial resources (such as the tianyuan method). The fundamental difference between Eastern and Western philosophy lies not in whether they ask the questions of Being and Origin, but in this: an initial divergence in philosophical direction — triggered by multiple factors — was **locked in and amplified** by the structural conditions of the writing system, causing these two questions to develop, over the longue durée, into different types of transcendence — affirmative and negative. This paper concludes with historical materialism: the two writing forms are rooted in the materialization of two structures of communication — internal and external. Writing form itself does not "manufacture" the direction of philosophical questioning — Parmenides' decision and the Mingjia's challenge each had ori