Yan Fu’s Translation of the Concept of Liberty in "On Liberty"

• In Event: Navigating Language and Power: Insights into Translation in Political Theory

Abstract

In this paper, I address two concerns arising from comparing non-western intellectual traditions with the western tradition. The first revolves around the search for conceptual equivalents in non-western traditions, such as “Was there a proto-concept of liberty in East Asian thought?” This pursuit is grounded in another concern, a normative one, regarding how we may evaluate non-western traditions in the absence of certain concepts, as in, “Does that mean that the East Asian tradition is illiberal?” I argue that these concerns arise from erroneous assumptions about language and ontology, drawing implications from the philosophy of language of Wittgenstein and Quine along with a case analysis of Yan Fu’s translation of the concept of liberty.

Scholars have observed that several concepts transmitted from the western world to East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent significant transformations in meaning. The concept of liberty serves as a prominent example: it was first imported to East Asia through the translation of classical liberal texts such as J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. Although Mill’s concept of liberty emphasizes the protection of the individual from both society and the state, East Asian thinkers, upon adopting this concept, largely assimilated its individualistic dimension into a nationalist concern for protecting their peoples from imperialistic encroachment. Yan Fu’s translation of Mill’s On Liberty, titled Quanji guanxi lun in Chinese, similarly exhibits this idiosyncrasy. Mill’s assertion of a private realm that should not be infringed upon is transformed into a call for achieving the wealth and strength of the Chinese nation. As a result, past researchers often concluded that the distinctive interpretation of the concept of liberty by Yan Fu and other East Asian translators was a misinterpretation.

Existing works on translation, however, have raised questions about the boundary between faithful translation and mistranslation. While readers may assume that a literal translation—thus as faithful as possible—would be desirable, some theorists have disagreed. Walter Benjamin, for example, argues that the ‘deviations’ from what might be ‘faithful translation’ disclose more of the meaning of a text. In any case, Yan Fu encountered a fundamental problem that made literal translation impossible, namely the absence of equivalent words in Chinese lexicography. It was not only the concept of liberty that the Chinese language did not (precisely) have; additional terms indispensable to the classical liberal tradition—such as individual, society, and right—were all absent. In his translations, consequently, Yan Fu establishes new ways of associating existing words and concepts to make room for the new concepts to obtain their meanings and for the discourses of classical liberalism to operate. His ‘free’ translation, therefore, was not merely a misinterpretation; it was an intentional maneuver of existing ideas to suggest newly imported ways of theorizing politics.

The philosophy of language explored by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations and Quine in Word and Object offers important insights into Yan Fu’s translation. Specifically, they illustrate how concepts, ideas, and even truths may be parochial to a particular language community. Wittgenstein’s notion of the ‘language game’ rejects the idealist notion of language and of a singular, universal way of verbalizing a phenomenon. Quine introduces the concept of ‘indeterminacy of translation,’ arguing that there exist multiple ways to translate a sentence, which can be incompatible with one another. Together, what Wittgenstein and Quine suggest is that each language resides in a world that may or may not have the same objects that call for reference. A language may have developed within a particular intellectual tradition to describe a phenomenon with certain concepts and certain ways to associate the concepts to form ways of theorizing politics, but all these would simply be parochial to its community. Another language community might have developed entirely different ways to theorize the same phenomenon. Expecting an equivalence of concepts between different languages, and intellectual traditions embodied in them, is an erroneous assumption.

Furthermore, Quine’s concept of the indeterminacy of translation provides crucial insights into why and how Yan Fu chose to create a new word to translate the concept of liberty instead of adopting one proposed by Japanese translators. The concept of liberty represented a novel idea requiring a new word to encapsulate it. Yan Fu sought to resolve the issue by introducing a new word, thereby creating room for the ideas of classical liberalism to be introduced, discussed, and transmitted. As my paper explains, the collectivist associations of that word were not a mistake but Yan Fu’s intentional maneuver to persuade people of the necessity of individual liberty.

Author

• Hyemin Park, University of Wisconsin, Madison