On the Role of Chinese Linguistic Structure and Chinese Philosophy as a Methodology for Philosophy

Ever since Descartes established the cogito as the point of certainty, Western philosophy has faced a fundamental question: Can reason, in the course of knowing the world, also know itself? By tracing the history of this problem from Kant, through German Idealism and phenomenology, to analytic philosophy, this paper reveals a persistent “theoretical self-reference” dilemma underlying this inquiry—every attempt to grasp the indeterminable by means of concepts has repeatedly fallen into the self-referential cycle of “explaining concepts with concepts.” This paper argues that the root of this dilemma lies not in the oversights of individual philosophers but in the intrinsic limitations of the ground of the Indo-European “language of things”: centered on the morphological root, it naturally tends to transform everything thought—including the knower—into a static, nameable object, thereby leading to an objectifying split and idling when self-reference occurs. As a contrast, this paper proposes that Chinese is a “language of events,” characterized by phonetic integration, the non-duality of subject and object, and the co-embodiment of noun and verb, and is thus inherently endowed with reflexivity. On this basis, the paper distills two interrelated cognitive methodologies: “structural argumentation” and “reflexive illumination.” Structural argumentation allows the bidirectional tensional structure of things to manifest itself by delineating cognitive topography; reflexive illumination allows cognitive activity to become aware of its own operation within that operation, so that the knower is also included in the cognitive picture. Using this methodological framework as a thread, the paper sequentially unfolds the analysis of the cognitive structure of yin-yang, the operation of “transforming consciousness into wisdom” in Yogācāra Buddhism, and the “mind is principle” proposition in Neo-Confucianism, demonstrating that knowing and being share the same incomplete structure and that “mind is principle” is precisely the philosophical expression of this isomorphism—knowing is being, isomorphic in the human being. Finally, by applying the above methodology, the paper directly addresses the fundamental dilemma in Western philosophy of “having nowhere to place the human being,” offers a philosophical reading of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and elucidates the contemporary significance of this methodology in dimensions such as East-West civilizational dialogue, the relationship between science and theology, and the future of artificial intelligence. The ultimate aim of this paper is not to establish an alternative theoretical system but to return philosophy to its original meaning of “love of wisdom”: within the tension between wisdom and love, the human being is never closed off within any completed model.