Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
And there are few external sources of the same age and type and provenance to use for comparison. We don't have a lot of 3,000 year-old divination manuals hanging around to look at. So scholars trying to resolve disputed passages have very little evidence to work with when trying to decide which meaning of many possible meanings is intended. Maybe they all were - divination thrives on ambiguity.
Chuckles! Speaking of papers and essays, there's also an essay by Shaughnessy in EC 20 (1995) named "The Origin of an Yijing Line Statement" where he poses a few interesting theories. In the first page there is a lighthearted comment about the "Why don't the professors..."I think Luis posted this link a while back, but Kidder Smith's little essay on "The Difficulty of the Yijing" is a nice summary of the scholarly problems of working with the Yi. Someone asked, Why don't the professors like to write about the Yi? Well, here's your answer:
# www.tc.umn.edu/~cmedst/gmap/uploaded/The%20Difficulty%20of%20the%20Yijing.pdf
Very worthy of consideration, indeed, and a very good question to ask ourselves when discussing translations, IMO. Translators will not ever be able to completely detach themselves from their own contemporary cultural background and their personal understanding of reality. They can approach it with the goal of empathizing with the time they are studying but, again, that involves much more than mere command of the language.Recently, when discussing the problem of context in translating the Yi (or even simply understanding what it is saying), it has become more common to talk about the context of the translator. That is, where is the translator coming from? What ideas and opinions does the translator have that affects his translation? What is the historical and cultural context of the translation?
These questions are resolvable and enlightening, whereas similar questions about the Yi itself are not. At least not yet. But if the Chinese keep digging, who knows?
At first, I was shocked and dismayed, but then I began to wonder if perhaps the professor was right. Does the Yi have any philosophical content or value?
Luis, I don't want to highjack your thread, but one of its themes seems to be the prevailing attitude of our established institutions of higher learning toward the Yi. I found the following webpage a year or so ago, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I am quite sure Manyul Im, who is a rigorously-trained and impeccably-credentialed professor of Asian philosophy, represents the opinion of a large minority, if not the majority, of his kind in the United States. Take a look:
http://manyulim.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/the-yijing-i-chings-philosophical-value/
From Manyul Im's blog said:Let me say something more about it. I don’t think there is tradition-independence of philosophical thought; *philosophy is Western* in an important sense. “The philosophical” is a Western concept in origin. What counts as a philosophical way of thinking is largely constrained by how the concept has been understood and continues to be re-understood in Western thought. I’m pretty sure that there is no non-Western concept that maps accurately onto it. It doesn’t follow from that that such thinking does not occur in the non-West. But it’s important for Philosophy 101 students to understand how the concept of philosophy originates in Greece and develops over time into the present. To that extent, any intro to philosophy has to include, I think, some reasonable subset of Western philosophical works that are pivotal in the history of the concept of philosophy: some sampling of Plato’s dialogues, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, Kant’s Prolegomena, Hegel’s Phenomenology, maybe Quine’s Two Dogmas or Naturalizing Epistemology, and I’m sure I’m leaving off someone’s favorite here.
So..., I wouldn't feel shock or dismay from his conclusions. OTOH, if "philosophy" related constructs were to be attached to the core Zhouyi text, my personal opinion would be that it is some sort of a "philosophical prompting aphorism matrix." (does that makes sense in English? ) If we think about the Yijing as a canonized classic, and all the exegesis piled upon it, we can clearly extract and visualize the matrix that seeded it. That some believe the seed isn't the tree is OK with me. However, no one can deny were the tree came from...At first, I was shocked and dismayed, but then I began to wonder if perhaps the professor was right. Does the Yi have any philosophical content or value? Obviously, I refer to the Zhouyi portion only. It would be hard to argue, even for Manyul Im, that the Dazhuan was devoid of philosophical matter.
But something that everybody wants to overlook is the relationship between philosophy and psychology, in the way our attitudes shape our perceptions, and how we philosophize best when we first understand our (often cowardly) motives for doing so. I think the Zhouyi authors had a great handle on this field of study and in fact I would credit them with writing the first psychology text as well as an ethical philosophy.
6. main part of alloy: the main metal component in an alloy
When you do something like this, as crazy as it sounds, it teaches you something about what divination really is and why the Yi has lasted for so long. I really recommend it. Try thinking about how you would improve the Yi. You'll be surprised where it takes you.
We barely know how to talk about what we are doing, our language is so saturated with the habit of rational analysis. But we know we are doing something more than making fools of ourselves, deceiving and deluding and excusing ourselves. I would like some of our smart people to talk and think about this in a serious way.
Most likely they are concerned about loss of income...I would like to hear what professional thinkers think about what is going on here. I would like some of the experts who are paid to ponder to take a look at something besides the usual, thread-bare philosophical and psychological issues of modernism. So far I have mainly been disappointed in this hope.
But still ... I can't seem to find a bridge between rational, scientific, critical, analytical thinking and the world of felt experience, intuition, non-rational understanding. I can't seem to resolve this science/religion thing, of which divination is a footnote. I can't even figure out the meaning of life.
Anyway, I was hoping the smart people would pay attention at some point. This divination business isn't rocket science, so why can't we figure it out? Maybe we could figure it out if it was rocket science?
Luis:...Translators will not ever be able to completely detach themselves from their own contemporary cultural background and their personal understanding of reality ...
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).