Summary Of Arrival By Nathan Vedal

In the article, “Aliens, Neo-Confucians, and the Power of Language”, the author, Nathan Vedal, utilizes the film “Arrival” to introduce the controversial idea proposed by the Neo-Confucian scholars of the Ming Dynasty who were attempting to transcribe Confucian teachings from before 5th century B.C.E. This idea consists of the belief that decoding an unfamiliar writing system can teach new ways of seeing the world. Although I do not necessarily believe in this idea, I find the study itself interesting as I have recently learned about the Confucian religion. According to the article, Neo-Confucian scholars of the Ming Dynasty thought that by transcribing the Confucian teachings from before the 5th century B.C.E. one could see the world from the writers’ point of view. One particularly prominent scholar by the name of Wei Jiao preached a particular approach to this belief that gained quite a strong following. According to the article he once said that, “the ancient script apprehended before me that which is common in my mind with everyone else’s”; which is to say that by analyzing the composition of the ancient characters from the ancient
In one of his examples, he declared that when looking at the character that stood for the word obtain, one could see it as a combination of either the character for “hand” and the character for “to see” or the character for “hand” and