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| Text Travel and Ethical Choice: Germination, Representation and Reading of Brain Text |
| Duan Guozhong |
| College of International Studies, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou225000, China |
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Abstract Brain text, the core concept in ethical literary criticism, is closely related to cognitive ethics, writing ethics and reading ethics throughout its travel from germination to representation and to reading. Brain text is germinated through the interaction between sense organs, the thing and the thinking: sensual data of the thing collected by sense organs are developed by the thinking into cognition, which is further formulated into brain concepts. Brain concepts are then integrated into brain text, which is further developed into forms of representation guided by ethics of writing. Reading of the representing text is also fundamentally an ethical choice undertaken by the reader and it carries potential impacts on the brain text of another individual or a community as a whole, leading to changes in collective perceptions of the thing and ethical values. Therefore, the germination, representation and reading of brain text is a cyclical process of the formation and transformation of ethical awareness. Brain text is constructed on the basis of brain concepts, and in the germination of brain concept, the foremost questions are: Is human brain capable of accessing the thing in itself? How can human brain produce knowledge of the thing, and in what ways are brain concepts formulated? etc. Based on hypotheses concerning the ontological and cognitive relationship between the subject and the thing, brain concept germination may fall into empiricist, idealist, rationalist, and affective categories, and, there are basically two interactive manners between the subject and the thing contributing to brain concepts: the external sensed by man and man affected by the external, the subject in the former active and in the latter passive. Brain concept includes both imagery and abstract concept, the former derived from sensual data of concrete things, while the latter resulted from processing metaphysical concept. Brain concepts are integrated into brain text according to the psychological mechanism of condensation and displacement, cultural supervision, and aesthetic and ethical principles, etc. Brain text is stored within private brains and is in need of media, such as language, writing symbols, images, and electronic signals for representation and communication. However, the writer’s brain text is exposed to changes due to the fact that brain text is privately created while the language for representation is essentially collective. The representation of brain text is also a re-creative process with narratives driven by ethical choices and cultural regulations. What’s more, language is no transparent tool ready for representing the writer’s brain text, and it functions metaphorically when referring to things external to language, giving rise to the ethics of writing: the writer undertakes the mission to covey ethical values embedded in the original brain text through literary creations, but language fails the writer to a certain extent due to its inability to refer to the real things. A literary text is necessarily open to multiple interpretations of its ethical value, which is both a challenge to the writer and an opportunity for the reader to free himself from the authoritative judgement of the ethical values solely by the writer. Therefore, the text’s openness allows the reader to stand equal to the writer himself, as well as to other readers, contributing to a joint effort between the writer and his readers in an endeavor to approach the external real and ethical values. Therefore, the germination, representation and reading of brain text is a process of ethical choices in which all participants, including the writer, the reader, the community or even the human beings as a whole, are involved in constructing and reconstructing private and collective brain texts, along with ethical values and principles encoded in the brain texts.
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Received: 17 May 2024
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2024, Vol. 54 
