花在中西文化中的隐喻意义

本文是一篇有着文化人类学色彩的比较文化论文。首先 ,它从两个英语单词anthology和florilegium出发 ,提出了一个问题 ,即为什么在中西文化中花往往成为“精华”的隐喻。其次 ,它运用大量来自于宗教典籍、哲学、人类学、民俗学、医学、文学和语言学著作的材料 ,以论证在古代中西民族的思维中曾经存在着一条认知链 ,即花 =(红色 ) =血 =生命 (灵魂 ) =精华。最后 ,它指出上述五项等式中项之间的任何一次顺序位移 ,基本上都依赖于原逻辑的一条本质规律 ,即假同一律

The Metaphoric Meaning of Flowers in Chinese and Western Culture

This is a thesis on comparative culture from the angle of cultural anthropology. First, in light of the two English words anthology and florilegium, it brings up the issue why the flower is prone to become a metaphor for essence in Chinese and Western culture. Second, with a lot of material from religious, philosophical, anthropological, folklore, medical, literary and linguistic works, it demonstrates that in the mind of ancient Chinese and Western people, there was a cognition chain: FLOWER=(RED)=BLOOD=LIFE(SOUL)=ESSENCE. Finally, it points out that any ordinal shift between terms in the above five term equality basically accords with "the law of pseudo identity" essential to prelogic.