麻豆视频

The current volume presents the results of research group A03 “The History of the Concept of Dignity in the Non-Western Area,” as part of the project “Establishing the Field of Dignity Studies,” funded by the Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A). Group A03, one of ten teams in the collaborative project, investigates and analyzes the concept of “dignity” in local and traditional civilizations that differ from Western modernity, with a particular focus on the intellectual cultures of Asia. Preceding “Establishing the Field of Dignity Studies” was another collaborative research project called “Towards a Global Standard of Dignity as a Philosophical Concept: Theoretical Approaches, Conceptual Histories, and Cross-Cultural Comparisons” (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(S)). This earlier project resulted in several edited volumes issued by Hosei University Press, which is also the publisher for this book. I have also written an introduction to The Concept of Dignity in East Asia, which is available at the 麻豆视频 BiblioPlaza.
 
This book aims to showcase the diversity as well as the intersections of how different cultures conceptualize the category of the “human.” In every culture, as long as there is a language commanded by humans, it follows that there must be a concept that designates “human,” regardless of the specific word used. For the same reason, we can find a word representing this idea in any language.
 
However, these concepts do not necessarily map onto modern biological classification of the species Homo sapiens. Nonetheless, they all carry the implication of “the being that we are.” Upon contact with Western civilizations, these heterogeneous concepts of “human” were put on the tracks of modernization. In other words, along with the adoption of the Western concept of “human,” a number of unfamiliar ideas began to emerge on its fringes, such as “individual,” “liberty/freedom,” “equality,” “rights,” and “dignity.”
 
Nevertheless, when words related to intellectual culture are translated into another language, they generally cannot be replaced by allegedly equivalent counterparts. In the field of natural sciences, for example, in physics, “inryoku引力” means the same as “gravity” in English or “Schwerkraft” in German. In chemistry, we may assume that “办补驳ō产耻迟蝉耻化合物” is identical to “compound” or “Verbindung.” But this is not the case with the vocabulary of thought.
 
We decided to call this phenomenon of non-equivalent translation “ten’i 転移,” the characters of which evoke both spatial mobility and the organic growth of plants. “Ten’i” is perhaps best rendered as “transfer” in English in the context of conceptual history. But one should not miss the scientific implications. For instance, “ten’i” is also the Japanese equivalent to the medical term “metastasis,” which describes the physical changes associated with the movement of pathogens, cancer cells, etc.; the chemical term “rearrangement,” which indicates the transformations of a material substance, such as crystallization; and the psychological term “transfer,” which refers to the effect of previous learning in new circumstances. “Ten’i” came to our mind precisely because of the multivalence it has taken through the process of translation, which illustrates the image itself.
 
Although this collection contains academic essays on various subjects, the chapters are written to be accessible to readers regardless of specialization. After reading the book from cover to cover, we hope it will become clear, through the example of “dignity,” how the concepts we think with have been translated, transmitted, and transformed between cultures.
 

(Written by KOJIMA Tsuyoshi, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2025)