The 24th World Congress of Philosophy (WCP) ended with 8,000 participants, 1,000 conferences, and 5,000 reports. Around the theme of « Learning to be Human », the congress opened up dialogues from the West to the East, from science to humanity, from tradition to modernity, from individual to group, from spirit to nature. Such cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges are worth being called as: 

- The opportunity of thousand years , the entanglement of hundred years, the collision of ten days!

Concerning the communication from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges to interpersonal ones, the most basic issue is « expressibility ». There are many reports about this topic at congress. Here I present two reports to give a glimpse about this issue : 1 , Expressibility, Dialogue, Translatability: Chinese Whispers and Philosophical Translation; 2, Can an Appeal to Spirituality Bridge Cultural and Religious Gaps?

1, Expressibility, Dialogue, Translatability: Chinese Whispers and Philosophical Translation

This is a report of Symposia session“Expression, Dialogue, Translatability”, and the speaker Michael Beaney is a professor of philosophy at King's College, University of London, UK.

First, Beaney raised up the necessity for clarity of expression : If an idea is worth thinking, then it is worth saying clearly; and if it is said clearly, then it will crystallize thinking in others.

How can one make his ideas clear? He used "crystallization" as a metaphor: our mind is like a liquid in which all sorts of ideas and thoughts float around in an inchoate or semi-choate form, requiring the right seeds to crystallize them into something more choate.  What ‘true wit’does is provide the seed for this crystalizing process, and this represents one way in which ‘clarity’ is achieved.

He said, The medium of our ideas and thoughts is language, so the liquid is a particular language. True wit crystallizes the thoughts of those who speak the same language. So how do we crystallize thinking in people who speak other languages? The answer, of course, is through translation. 

He translated the opening sentence of his report by using Google Translate into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, then translated it back to English, from the initial sentence « If an idea is worth thinking, then it is worth saying clearly; and if it is said clearly, then it will crystallize thinking in others »  to the final sentence « If an idea is doubtful, then it is worth mentioning that, when it is clear, you will understand the ideas of others. »  This suggests that a key difficulty is the translation of the metaphorical use of ‘crystallize’, and one might expect that metaphorical uses of terms are particularly hard to translate. 

Then he used a game called « Chinese whispers » (In France it is called ‘téléphone arabe’, in Germany ‘stille Post’, and in Italy ‘passaparola’) to show that just how easy it is for messages to get distorted in transmission – or to become lost in translation. 

He gave also an example to show the difficulty to translate the opening sentence of « Dao De Jing » (or Laozi): 

－道 可 道 非 常 道。名 可 名 非 常 名。

He said, Whatever the best translation, however, what we have in the opening lines of the « Dao De Jing » is a thought that seems to run counter to the thought formulated at the beginning of this paper. We might bring this out by offering the following variation: 

A thought that can be crystallized is not a constant thought; a formulation that can be formulated is not a constant formulation. 

He said, We began with a thought that is characteristic of analytic philosophy – that there is a way of saying something clearly, which can crystallize thinking in others. But on the Daoist view, any formulation of a thought, and not least a supposedly canonical formulation, is suspect: it will never adequately capture the thought. The problem of expressibility may be common to both analytic philosophy and Daoism, suggesting a prime site for constructive dialogue, then, but the two traditions seem to be too fundamentally opposed for fruitful engagement with one another. 

He believed that the key to reconciling the two positions lies in the Confucian principle that is expressed at the opening sentence of The Analects : you have only learnt something if you can teach or practise it. What could be more satisfying than this? （学而时习之，不亦乐乎）

He final concluded : But this is not incompatible with there being a more or less favoured or canonical formulation, which occupies centre-stage in a network of alternative formulations, condensing and crystallizing the thinking involved in offering and considering these formulations, in all their degrees of accuracy and pertinence. Paradoxically, the more alternative formulations you consider, the more a single one might be judged as best capturing it – just as the more translations you consider of a given passage, as I hope we have seen, helps you to converge on the most appropriate translation. 

Michael Beaney analyzes the “clarity” and loss of clarity of expression and expression processes (such as translation). He believes that “our thoughts are like liquids, in which all ideas and thoughts are in an early or semi-mature The state is flowing everywhere, which requires the addition of suitable seeds to crystallize, making the idea more mature. 'Real wisdom' is to provide seed for the crystallization process, which is a way to achieve 'clearness'." This is a very new formulation, which concerns the "true wisdom" problem in the requirement of clear "expression" , but what he calls "crystal" and "seed" is just a metaphor, does not have a clear connotation.

2, Can an Appeal to Spirituality Bridge Cultural and Religious Gaps?

This is a report of Plenary session“Spirituality”, and the speaker Hans Julius Schneider is a professor of philosophy at University of Potsdam, Germany.

Schneider interpreted his theme : how can we understand the concept of spirituality in such a way that it helps in bridging gaps between religions and cultures? 

He analysed two positions from theoretical view : ethnocentrism and relativism.

He said, Ethnocentrism is the view that it is only my own religion (or, more broadly speaking, my own culture) that tells me what the world is like, what a good human life should be and what expressions like ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ mean. Some versions of this view even claim that only my own religion should properly be signified by this term.

In contradistinction, relativism is a position that is aware of the imperialist, the violent side of ethnocentrism, and, more generally, is aware of the dangers of refusing to consider as potentially valuable perspectives that are different from one’s own. Relativism, therefore, can be said to aim at overcoming the negative sides of clinging to one’s early conceptions. It urges to respect other cultures by tentatively stepping back from one’s own convictions, by taking serious the dangers of prejudices, i.e. of the limitations we have without being aware of them.

He further analyzed, But it is worthwhile noting that it (ethnocentrism) might have developed from an idea that has a grain of truth in it. It is this: The first apprehensions of what the world is like and what a good life should be grow from the experiences we have of our closest social environment at a very early age. These experiences are closely connected to our early emotional life and to the first steps of developing an identity. 

He said, as the dubious position of ethnocentrism may have grown out of an idea that has a positive side, so the philosophically more respectable position of relativism can develop a negative side. This happens when it is understood as including the claim that it is impossible to seriously discuss the merits and faults of different views of human life as they are articulated in different religions. Then tolerance can easily become indifference.

He said, both the imperialistic version of ethnocentrism and the indifference version of relativism are misguided. In this evaluation I am following an argument developed by Charles Taylor in his discussion about a “language of perspicuous contrast”. He shares the common critique of ethnocentrism, but, as a defender of a ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘understanding’ approach in the field of social studies, he also criticizes relativism because (as he rightly says) this position cannot even adequately state what the topics are that are treated in the articulations of a culture we do not understand.

He further argued that in the philosophy of language of the later Wittgenstein will strengthen Taylor’s position, namely, that also in religious studies an understanding approach is necessary as well as possible.  HIs chosen example is an important change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, namely, a change in his attitude to pictorial ways of speaking. 

He said, in his Lecture Wittgenstein claimed that there is something we cannot do with the help of language, namely, to express something higher. If this were so, this fact would strengthen relativism because it puts spiritual contents out of our critical reach.

When we now look at his later work as documented in the Philosophical Investigations we find that Wittgenstein has changed his mind on these points. Now he has something quite different to say about the workings of pictorial language and the limits of what language can do:

The great difficulty here is not to present the matter as if there were something one couldn’t do. As if there really were an object, from which I extract a description, which I am not in a position to show anyone. – And the best that I can propose is that we yield to the temptation to use this picture, but then investigate what the application of the picture looks like. (PI § 374)

So the next step for Wittgenstein is not to look for an object, but to “investigate what the application of the picture looks like”.  And this means, according to the definitions given above: In our human attempts of articulating the spiritual dimension of life quite different pictorial articulations might fulfill similar existential functions.

Hans-Julius Schneider believes that “the imperialistic version of ethnocentrism and the indifference version of relativism”are obstacles to the mutual expression of different cultures or religions, and the "spirit" above different cultures and religions can become the commonality of expression. As language cannot express “something higher” as Wittgenstein said, Wittgenstein later turned to " pictorial   language", but this view has been related to more difficult problems of nonverbal expression.

3, A Preliminary interpretation of the two reports: the levels of Expressibility and the « Big image has no form » of Chinese thought

Both reports involve the researches on some aspects of forms, contents, methods and processes of the “expression », but the different perspectives of the expression always interact with or restrict each other, and it seems impossible to sort out this kind of self-winding in the sense of pure concept, so their researches are actually seeking a transcendence over the forms, contents, methods and processes of the  “Expression”. This requires the transcendence to the problem  itself of  “expression », however, this transcendence perhaps is the very insurmountable difficulty to the western philosophy, though these kinds of researches seem to be heuristic，in fact, it is very difficult to make substantial breakthrough in this field. 

We believe, “the problem of expression” should be put in the background of the research on culture, but the instrumental rationality of the west philosophy can never transcend the essence of itself, so, going back to its very self is always an eternal cultural pursuit, the various explorations over the “problem of expression” manifest the historical persistence of this process.   

The 24 WCP provides a grand stage for us to express and performance, various academic discussions also provide an opportunity for us to retrospect our cultural and philosophical ideology.

The traditional Chinese philosophy is consistent with the peculiarity of Chinese culture, what lies behind the principe of “Big image has no form” is the clear hierarchical idea, which is beyond all the reach of western philosophy though it may have traversed all its capability. The traditional Chinese philosophy after systematizing itself clearly and explicitly by absorbing the nutritious achievement of western philosophy can bring the deepest insights into the modern western philosophy over its most obscure problems.

The traditional Chinese philosophy should launch an in-depth modern dialogue conversation with modern western philosophy, this is a long way to go. Perhaps it is of special significance for China to host this WCP .  

Reference：

1，Michael Beaney，Expressibility, Dialogue, Translatability: Chinese Whispers and Philosophical Translation

（表达、对话、可译性 — 传话游戏和哲学翻译，译者：周一帆）

2，Hans-Julius Schneider，Can an Appeal to Spirituality Bridge Cultural and Religious Gaps?（文化与宗教之间的沟壑可以借助灵性来连通吗?）