Disciplines in Translation: From Chinese Philosophy to Chinese What?

Abstract

This paper argues that not just texts, but also disciplines need new translations. Since the sixteenth century texts such as the Confucian Analects have been considered ‘Chinese philosophy’, an approximation that under the pressure of China’s modernisation and the emergence of analytic philosophy has increasingly forced these texts, which the Chinese have traditionally considered a genre of ‘Masters Literature’, into a shape dictated by contemporary notions of European and American philosophy. Illustrating its case by discussing Mencius’s notion of ‘human nature’, the paper argues that the ‘Masters Texts’ should be ‘translated’ into the new disciplinary context of a comparative intellectual history that includes non‐western thought traditions and provides more fruitful models of analysing the symbiosis of intellectual concerns with rhetorical strategies. Ultimately, such a new ‘translation’ of Chinese ‘Masters Literature’ will hopefully lead western philosophers to rethink their disciplinary framework, in particular the age‐old antagonism of the philosophical against the rhetorical/literary that is foreign to the Chinese tradition.

¹ I would like to thank David Damrosch, Wai‐yee Li, Michael Puett, and the two anonymous referees for their generous suggestions, which have considerably improved this paper.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank David Damrosch, Wai‐yee Li, Michael Puett, and the two anonymous referees for their generous suggestions, which have considerably improved this paper.

² Cicero. De oratore III.60–61. May and Wisse 2001: 241 f.

³ For a fascinating history of the more than four hundred centuries of ‘translation history’ of Confucianism between West and East, see Jensen (1997).

⁴ Many western proponents of ‘Chinese philosophy’ harbour deep resentment against their neglect by western philosophers. See Lin et al. 1995:

In this way, the Eurocentric and chauvinistic character of most modern Western philosophy has been reinforced […] The philosophical dimensions of Chinese thought, or lack thereof, should be an open‐ended question, subject to discussion […]; instead, the question has simply been begged against the Chinese. (747)

⁵ For an overview of the arguments and relevant scholarship, see Defoort 2001.

⁶ Scharfstein 1998: 55. Ram Adhar Mall even seems to believe in the possibility of a universal philosophy when he talks about interculturality: ‘[I]n the field of purely formal disciplines, it stands for the internationalism of scientific and formal categories’ (Mall 2000: 5). The mélange of the concept of ‘interculturality’ with an untrammeled conviction that the humanities should participate in their own ‘scientification’ stands out as a quite impossible amalgam of two fins‐de‐siècle, the most recent and the end of the nineteenth century.

⁷ See A. C. Graham’s work on the Mohist canons, and Lisa Raphals’ case for the importance of ‘metic,’ that is practical episteme in the Chinese tradition.

⁸ A delightful polemical contrasting of the comparative spirit in anthropology with the lack of it in history is Detienne (2000).

⁹ Note the negative declarations of intent in studies such as Cohen and O’Connor (2004), the scope of which is even narrowly limited to Europe. ‘What are the disadvantages of comparative history? That comparison takes longer, offers more room for mistakes, may be poorly received by specialists in the field: all are … uncontentious. However, even beyond these perils, lurk others’ (xvi).

¹⁰ Donald Kelley has made this point nicely:

Both philosophers and intellectual historians take ‘ideas’ as their common currency, but they look at the question in wholly different ways. For philosophers […] ideas are in some sense mental phEnomena that are adequately represented and communicated in the philosopher’s oral or written discourse and argument. For historians, however, ideas are in the first place social and cultural constructions, and the product of a complex process of inference, judgment, and criticism on the part of the scholar. The history of ideas has long been situated in the midst of this semantic confusion … (Kelley 2002: 105 f)

¹¹ Both Chartier (1998) and, more explicitly, LaCapra (1983) are good examples.

¹² Especially commanding is Zhang Cangshou 1996.

¹³ Eno (2002: 189). Zhang Cangshou unfortunately does not explore Mencius’s discursive structure but discusses its more properly ‘literary’ features such as its colloquial simplicity, its trenchant brevity in argument, its inquisitive unveiling of opponents’ self‐contradictions etc. (Zhang 1996: 25–40).

¹⁴ Mencius 5A/4. For the standard translation, see Lau 1978: 142

¹⁵ This anxiety surfaces also in what Michael Puett has described as Mencius’s resistance to vocabulary of active constructing that would threaten the organic unfolding from the inner to the outer. See Puett (2001: 58).