(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 2)
Many people have heard at least vaguely of what physicists call Bohr’s Complementarity Principle, but so far hardly anybody has heard of Haft’s Incommensurability Principle. If the great Danish physicist’s principle implies that a phenomenon may have, may even require, two apparently incompatible explanations, my own hitherto unsung contribution simply states that Chinese words do not in any realistic sense ‘mean’ the same thing as their supposedly ‘correct’ translations into English. The whole Chinese conceptual world is organized so differently to our own; the background of assumptions, emotional associations and conditioned social implications of the words – the ‘setting’ or ‘discourse’ in which the words operate – is so fantastically unlike our own, that it can never be assumed a supposedly ‘same’ word means the ‘same’ thing. Nor, on the other hand, does it ‘mean’ something different in our terms. What it ‘means’ cannot be fitted into the framework of ‘our terms’ at all. It is a meaning which, for us, does not exist.
Hundreds of words could be adduced to support what I am saying, but surely the most important is that most central of all words in Western culture and life...the pronoun ‘I.’ (Undoubtedly if I were turning this around and starting with a Chinese example, most people would expect me to mention first the verb ‘eat’...) In Chinese culture and life, this oh-so-tiny-looking word does not ‘do’ anything like the same crucial and life-determining things it ‘does’ in the West. Nor has it ever.
I need to keep these Scrapbook Scraps short, so I will not now immediately go on to write a whole book on this. Actually, it has already been done, many times. I have not yet compiled my list of Underground Must-Reads in Sinology, but when I do, one of the authors near the top of it will be Chad Hansen. In an article titled ‘Philosophy of Mind in China
Well, if the ‘subject’ is not in ‘the mind’ at all, let alone in MY individual mind...if my ‘meaning’ has nothing to do with ‘psychology’...and if my ‘experience’ is not ‘subjective’ at all...then in what sense does the word ‘I’ still mean ‘I’?
What we are looking at here is a perfect case of Incommensurability.
An aside at this point: is it mere coincidence that in English, ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same? (Answer: yes, it is the merest coincidence. Only a poet would think it is deeply meaningful.)
Chad Hansen’s article is still out there:
