Imagined Civilizations: China, the West, and Their First Encounter

3. From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds

Chapter 3 From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds BY ADOPTING certain naive presuppositions, studies of the asserted problems encountered in translations between languages have often reached dramatic conclusions about the fundamental differences between civilizations. These presuppositions are naive in the sense that they circumvent many of the questions that should properly confront historical inquiry, adopting instead simple formulas. For example, on what level of social organization should historical explanation concentrate—what are the significant units of society in analyses of historical change? Instead of determining the complex networks of alliances that dynamically constitute groupings within societies, these studies consider the boundaries already given—drawn along lines of languages, or, more often, systems of languages that mark the purported divides between civilizations. What are the fracture lines in societies underlying antagonisms and conflict? Instead of analyzing complicated divisions along the dimensions of class, gender, status, allegiances, or competing schools of thought, all such differences are collapsed into a unity predetermined by the sharing of a single language (the same, that is, once all historical, regional, educational, and status differences are effaced). What kinds of relationships should historical analysis elucidate? With civilizations as the given units of analysis, such studies are typically content with assertions of similarities and differences. What, then, is the relationship between thought and society? Instead of historicizing the role of ideologies, self-fashioned identities, and performative utterances in the formation of social groupings, individuals are instead reduced to representatives or bearers of entire civilizations. How does one understand thought through the transcriptions preserved in historical documents? Instead of explaining the dissemination of copies, commentaries, and interpretations of texts in their cultural context, such studies fix an original against which the correspondence of the translation can be compared. And what is the relationship between thought and language? Too often, such studies implicitly presuppose a correspondence between words and concepts. After such a series of simplifying reductions have been adopted, the conventional conclusions about civilizations are an almost inevitable result. 51 52 3 From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds Rather than critiquing in a general fashion the paradoxes that inhere in claims made about civilizations in studies of translations, this chapter will illustrate these paradoxes through the analysis of specific claims. To accomplish this, I have chosen the two most important studies that have used incommensurability to analyze the translations by the Jesuit missionaries and their collaborators in seventeenth-century China. I first outline the claims, presented in these two studies, of linguistic and conceptual incommensurability between China and the West, claims that are based on the asserted difficulties of translating the copula (the verb “to be” used to connect subject and predicate) and the concept of existence. I then turn to the theories of incommensurability that underwrite these studies, along with several related philosophical theories: Emile Benveniste ’s analysis of the copula “to be,” Jacques Derrida’s critique of Benveniste, Willard Van Orman Quine’s arguments on the indeterminacy of translations, and Donald Davidson’s criticisms of assertions of conceptual schemes. Finally, as an alternative to incommensurability, I present an analysis of the translations in cultural context. China, the West, and the Incommensurability That Divides As we saw in the preceding chapter, throughout much of the twentieth century an anthropomorphized “China” and “the West” were imagined to be two central actors in historical drama. In this context, studies of the “first encounter” of these two great civilizations acquired a particular urgency. Interpretive approaches have often been limited to two alternative models—conflict, opposition, and misunderstanding, or synthesis, accommodation, and dialogue.1 But in the 1980s, relativism—again formulated within the context of an assumed plausibility of a divide separating China and the West—became yet another important approach.2 Theories of linguistic and conceptual incommensurability often 1 Important studies include Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984); Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh, eds., East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988); John D. Young, East-West Synthesis: Matteo Ricci and Confucianism (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1980); idem, Confucianism and Christianity: The First Encounter (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1983); David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977); idem, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985). For important criticisms of the received historiography, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions...