http://chineseinput.net/에서 pinyin(병음)방식으로 중국어를 변환할 수 있습니다.
변환된 중국어를 복사하여 사용하시면 됩니다.
THE QUANDARY OF TRANSLATING NEO-CONFUCIAN THOUGHT : KILLING A TRADITION FOR LACK OF WORDS
MICHAEL C. KALTON 계명대학교 한국학연구원 2008 Acta Koreana Vol.11 No.1
Translation is a means to remove a linguistic barrier and enable communication. But that way of understanding the problem is too simple, for the notion that the barrier to be overcome is a matter of unfamiliar language assumes that words carry meaning independently from their larger social/cultural context. The interesting challenge of the translator is to bridge not only a language barrier but also the temporal and cultural gap between the milieu of the source and the milieu the reader. Standing with one foot in each milieu, the translator is aware of assumptions, understandings, and expectations that belong to one but not the other. In the case of philosophy, this is often the major point of interest: adventurous readers come to texts from distant times and places hoping to discover something new, a challenge to the world of their accustomed thinking. But to really “hear” something new most often demands sufficient linkage to the familiar; absent such linkage, the material translated simply sounds bizarre, and the translation has in fact failed. And even worse, traditions themselves die and become museum pieces when they fail to “translate.” I will argue that the two most central concepts in Neo-Confucian discourse, i (li) and ki (chi), generally translated as “principle” and “material force,” represent a rather extreme example of this problem. A close analysis of the difficulties that emerge in this case will also serve as a sketch of the general terrain that renders the translation of Neo-Confucian thought difficult. In philosophy the paradoxical reality is that at precisely the points where there may be the most to learn the barriers to com-munication are often the highest.
MICHAEL C. KALTON 계명대학교 한국학연구원 2010 Acta Koreana Vol.13 No.2
This article investigates two levels of society. The first is the contemporary, contingent, de facto condition of society, as evident especially in the American version of free-market capitalism. The second is a deeper structural condition that is both real (because that is the nature of the structure) and unreal because the contingent state of reality may reflect it poorly. This two-fold approach is inspired by the Neo-Confucian handling of this systemic tension between contingent conditions and deep structure in terms of a “physical nature,” and an “original nature.” I find the model a rich source of insight for considering virtually any level of living systems, including the entire social-environ-mental system. Thus I frame this paper as an inquiry into the Original Nature of Contemporary Society. In the end my objective is similar to the heritage of thought surrounding the “original nature”: to clarify what is distorted and the sources of the distortion, and to consider strategies of rectification. In contemporary terms, this is a Neo-Confucian reflection on the systemic tensions at the core of the contemporary sustainability crisis and on directions towards their remedy.