“Being”在日本哲学语境中的翻译及其对汉语哲学的启发

The Translations of “Being” in the Japanese Philosophical Circle and Their Inspirations for Chinese-Speaking Philosophers

众所周知,"being"具有系词、同一性与"存在"等多种含义,而从这些含义引申出来的哲学争论,在西方哲学史中一直扮演了非常重要的角色。由于中西语言之间的巨大差异,如何尽量准确地翻译这个词,也导致了汉语哲学界的相关争鸣。然而,虽然近代以来中国的现代哲学词汇的构成多有日译之痕迹,汉语哲学界却鲜有对于日语哲学界对于"being"的日译实践的自觉讨论,这就使得我们对于此类问题的研究一直缺失了日语向度的学术参考。详细而言,虽然在井上哲次郎的时代,"being"并没有被翻译为"存在",但将"being"翻译为"存在"的做法,却在日后慢慢成为日本翻译界的标准操作。而根据和辻哲郎的观点,将"being"翻译为"存在"乃是不合适的,因为"存在"无法承担对主词进行临时性本质指派的功用,而这个功用对于西文中的"being"乃是非常重要的。在《伦理学》中,和辻哲郎本人主张对"存在"的东方语源意义进行深挖,以便开拓出一种与海德格尔的"基础存在论"旨趣有异的空间伦理学,而与此同时,他也没有特别纠结于如何日译"being"这个问题。而在《日本语与哲学问题》中,和辻哲郎则转而思考如何在悬置汉字文化之中心位置的前提下,从日语的假名表达方式中寻求翻译"being"。他最后找到的与"being"对应的概括性日语词汇乃是"あり",即"ある"之古体,而"ある"的变体"がある"与"である"则勉强可以对应西语中"being"中的不同变体。但即使如此,"ある"与"being"之间的对应关系依然是非常不严格的,因为有一部分与"being"有关的日语表达并不能被归到"ある"之下,而一部分与"ある"相关的日语表达式也很难在与"being"有关的西语表达式之中找到对应者。而与日语相比,汉语中甚至连一个像"ある"那样能够勉强覆盖"being"中大多数含义的字或词也没有(而王路先生主张用"是"来翻译"being"的做法,其实也是有问题的),因此,今天汉语翻译者必须自创新词来翻译"being"。譬如,"是存"就可以是一个备选的翻译方案。

It is widely known that the term "being" bears multiple functions like working as a copula, as a symbol for identity and as an intransitive verb which means "existence." It is also widely known that philosophical discussions derived from "being" have long been occupied the central stage of the philosophical arena in the western tradition. However, due to the huge difference between western languages and Chinese, the issue on how to properly translate "being" into Chinese has also drawn a lot of attentions among Chinese-speaking philosophers. Nonetheless, despite the historical fact that the modern Chinese philosophical vocabulary was basically based on modern Japanese philosophical vocabulary, in China, there are no enough discussions on how Japanese scholars translated "being" into Japanese. The standard translation of "being" in Japan nowadays is sonzai, although this practice was not so normal in Tetsujirō Inoue’s era. However, Tetsurō Watsuji, one of the key members of the Kyoto School, argues that sonzai is not really equivalent to "being" in the sense that the former cannot function as a copula facilitating a speaker’s temporal attribution of an essence-encoding property to a subject. In his Ethics, Watsuji further argues that the spatiality-relevant connotation of sonzai is something missed in "being," and to probe into this connotation is precisely the starting-point for developing a spatiality-based version of ethics, which is different from Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. However, sonzai is still a Kanji-expression which was originally taken from Chinese, and in his Japanese Language and Philosophical Problems, Watsuji turns to probe into the Kana-based expressions,thereby he explores the possibility of finding a Japanese equivalent term for "being." The term that he found is "ari," which is the ancient form of "aru," the derived forms of which, like "dearu" and "gaaru," can barely be equivalent to varieties of "being." However, Chinese translators are not as lucky as Watsuji since it is simply hopeless to find an aru-like all-encompassing term in Chinese to correspond to "being," and more unluckily, the Chinese term "shi" is not as all-encompassing as what it is suggested by Lu Wang, who proposed to translate "being" as "shi." Hence, Chinese philosophical translators have no choice but create a new term to translate "being," and the candidate term proposed here is "shi-cun."