I was bugged during Week 7’s session on The Great Learning by the translation of the Chinese character 善 used by Melissa in her presentation. Melissa translated the term to ‘goodness’, which a quick google search reveals, is quite a commonplace translation for the word, at least in the context of Confucian studies. For the most part it holds up with my decidedly mediocre grasp of Mandarin, but I found things awkward when we were posed the question of whether we thought humans had an innate goodness inside of us.
Owing to the predominantly neo-liberal leaning perspectives I grew up with, my first instinct was to reject this premise of innate goodness as absurd. But this was a fundamental axiom of Confucian ideology – which still has scores of followers today, so I knew it couldn’t be so easily dismantled. And I realized it could be better reconciled with an alternative translation for 善, which I personally preferred, as compassion. Asking if humans were innately compassionate seemed more open-ended, and was something western perspectives would be able to make more sense of, with our understandings of human beings as social creatures.
Yet I would have to agree that goodness makes a more broadly adequate translation for 善. 善 does carry the implication of universality, as something expected of everyone, and an integral aspect of what it means to be human.
But it wouldn’t, in this case, have enabled the core premise it represents to be communicated to western audiences in a manner which would be easily digestible. I think this highlights a unique challenge likely to arise in most cross-cultural inquiries, posed by the ever-pervasive language barrier. Which begs the question, can we ever do other cultures justice in studies which merely peer into them from our foreign perspectives?
