《外国语言文学研究系列丛书·推而行之：<中庸>英译研究》：
In the introduction to the translation of the Zhongyong, Ames and Hall blame the failure of conveying genuine Chinese philosophical insights to Western readers on the irresponsible employment of “the default vocabulary of both demotic and philosophical discourse in the West”. They think Western languages are substance-oriented and suitable to describe and interpret a world of discrete objects. but the languages are “ill-disposed to describe and interpret a world, such as that of the Chinese, that is primarily characterized by continuity. process, and becoming.”For example, in the sentence “The wax is white”, the “wax” is the subject of the sentence, remaining fixed regardless of how the predicates are substituted, and the reality the structure of this language reflects is that the “wax” remains an unchanging, discrete object; but to Chinese language, the subject is inseparable from and consistent with the predicates, not a thing possessing an essential character and some inessentiaL affiliated attributes but a thing as the changing attributes, an event or happening. To put it another way, it is not that there is wax which is white but that at the moment there is the white wax which may be melted and disappear at another moment. Here persists the process-relational world view of ancient Chinese. It is impossible to use the language of substance to express this Chinese world view and equally impossible for a Western audience to experience and leam the world view if it is represented in substantive language. Thanks to the recent developments in Western philosophy, especially those of the alternative process tradition, the vocabularies of process and change have been foregrounded and prove to be fit for the articulation of Chinese sensibilities. Ames and Hall borrow the vocabularies and modify them to form what they call “the language of focus and field”. This language,already a key issue in some part of the trilogy, is premised on the basis of “contextualization”instead of the time-honored “representation” in the West. That is. the Chinese world this language presumes is one of process and change, “a phenomenal world of continuity, becoming, and transitoriness”, in which things as “states of becoming” or “happenings” are fit to be contextualized rather than disjunctively represented. In such a world, a particular thing is focal in that it both constitutes and is constituted by the field which consists of many other interconnected,changing things. There is no One behind the many, no absolute Context policing the contexts; the world is the “ten thousand things” becoming and perishing, and an open-ended affair construable from any number of the distinctive perspectives of the foci. As a case in point. the concept of li(礼). Ames and Hall suggest, does not have a definite conceptual meaning.The evocation of a sense focused out of the range of associations depends on the perspective: li are plural when seen as the many consummatory events of the day and singular when seen as the continuous unfolding of one's improved personhood in meaningful actions.
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