Out of the blue, I found myself thinking about Heidegger’s two concepts: ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. The Chinese translations are hard to convey. “Shangshou” does a decent job of expressing the idea, but it seems to point more to the user’s state; when we say “shangshou zhuangtai” (“being in a ready-to-use state”), we are more inclined to think it refers to someone’s skillful state. We say that someone has gotten the hang of something, rather than saying that something is ready-to-hand for someone. Of course, a ready-to-hand state implies a coordinated state between human beings and things, or even, one might say, a state in which subject and object have not yet bifurcated; but in the end, this concept primarily refers to the state of the thing. Also, taken literally, “shangshou” seems to mean that the thing is already in hand, yet what Heidegger emphasizes is precisely that the thing is not yet in hand, but only in a state of being able to be brought to hand at any moment. A more exact translation might be “at hand” in the sense of being not yet in hand, but something you can grab and use whenever needed. The translation of “present-at-hand” is also rather problematic. Heidegger is indeed emphasizing presentness here, but “in hand” makes it sound rather ambiguous; if it is understood as being close at hand, within reach, then it actually becomes just the meaning of ready-to-hand. And if one drops the “in hand” and simply says “present,” the meaning is about the same, yet Heidegger is still, after all, stressing the sense of the “hand.”
I am considering using “ying shou” and “zai wo” to “translate” these two terms—of course not in the strict sense of scholarly translation, but in the sense of substituting them through an intuitive grasp. First, “ying shou” suggests a relation of “responding in resonance”: the “ying” implies that it is not already present and on the scene, but that it answers the call and is available for use at any time. “Zai wo,” by contrast, loses the relation of resonance and instead indicates a state of having already been possessed. Heidegger’s brilliance lies in showing that the state of being present-at-hand or already possessed is not a more original truth. Heidegger points out that a thing being readily usable and a thing being firmly held are different matters; this is not only to say that what is tightly clutched in the hand is not something one can use with ease, but precisely that because it is so tightly held, it cannot be used with ease. “Truth in hand” and “using truth” are also two different things. Sayings like “it is language that speaks, not people who speak language,” or “truth possesses us, rather than our possessing truth,” are all similar formulations. The pursuit of truth lies in being able to let things “answer” us, not in letting things be occupied by us.
December 23, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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