Trying to Be on Both Sides of the Mirror at Once: I. A. Richards, Multiple Definition, and Comparative Method

Why I dislike holding to one point is that it injures the tao (the way or principle). It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others.

—Mencius¹

"A university of China is a good place in which to realize what the oncoming world situation will entail."² This somewhat enigmatic and prophetic remark was made in the 1960s by I. A. Richards, who is well known as a pioneer of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. What is less widely known is his interest in problems of translation and cross-cultural interpretation. Richards first visited China in 1927, staying at Tsing Hua University. Then, in 1929, he went back to take up a one-year visiting professorship at Tsing Hua. In 1930, Richards held a series of meetings with scholars of Yenching University to discuss the writings of Mencius and began writing Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition, a book he published in 1932.³

Mencius on the Mind encapsulates many of the deepest and most fundamental concerns of Richards's thinking and writing. George Watson even thinks that Mencius on the Mind is Richards's "best book," while his works in English criticism have not stood the test of time.⁴ This essay aims to engage Richards's main concerns and arguments in this unduly neglected work, to show the important pioneering contributions that Richards has made to the philosophy and methodology of intercultural and comparative studies, and to argue for the central value and relevance of many of Richards's ideas and perspectives, especially those in Mencius on the Mind, to our contemporary thinking on intercultural interpretation and translatability. This essay will resituate Richards's Mencius on the Mind in the discourse of contemporary theory as an important precursor of hermeneutical, poststructuralist, and pragmatist ways of thinking in order to recuperate the work of Richards for current discussion in translation theory, cross-cultural comparison, theories of reading and hermeneutics, and theories of culture and cognition. In particular, I will delineate Richards's attempt to sketch out a philosophy of intercultural interpretation and understanding as part of the general philosophy of rhetoric, "as a study of misunderstanding and its remedies"⁵ by way of "multiple definition."

In Mencius on the Mind, Richards was interested in interpretation as a problem of translation and translation as a problem of interpretation. He was not primarily interested in presenting what Mencius really thought but in "the opportunity of considering modes of meaning carried to their revealing limits" and "in the information about thinking which we may extract by comparison between [Mencius] and others" (Richards, Mencius, xiii/8). The problem that worried Richards most was, "Can we, in attempting to understand and translate a work which belongs to a very different tradition from our own, do more than read our own conceptions into it? Can we make it more than a mirror of our minds, or are we inevitably in this undertaking trying to be on both sides of the looking-glass at once?" (86/84). Years later, Richards used the same metaphor for an essay, "Mencius Through the Looking Glass": "The odd title of this essay comes from T. S. Eliot. When I was working in Peking at Mencius on the Mind about 1930, he wrote to me (referring probably to his own early Sanskrit studies) that reading in a remote text is like trying to be on both sides of a mirror at once. A vivid and a suitably bewildering image. To ask how exact it may be would be to raise the prime question 'What is understanding?' anew" (Richards, So Much Nearer, 202). For Richards, to be on both sides of the mirror at once probably meant to be in the position to reach toward the impossible ideal of the "degree zero" of what is presupposed to be the unabstracted matter of order and thinking.

It is difficult to imagine that there might be a neutral language of interpretation free of cultural presuppositions. Any translation is bound to be filtered through the...