ABSTRACT
Against Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of langage game and Thomas Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability, this paper argues for a minimum degree of common intelligibility, translatability and therefore communicability among different language games and realms of meaning. Having proposed the method of strangification and taking Chinese landscape discourse as an example, I’ll show that common intelligibility or lei in classical Chinese culture, offers a basis for the translatability between image (landscape painting) and text (philosophical essay on landscape painting) and serves also as the principle of classical Chinese poetry and art in general. I’ll argue that, without common intelligibility on which we can put together and compare different language games, it is impossible to discern the difference between different languages and thereby appreciate the true originality and uniqueness of each language. Among all different language games, there should be similarities and common intelligibility; while even with common intelligibility, there still should be unique originality, each with its own difference. Based on this contrasting situation, we are able to appropriate language and conduct strangification, by which we go beyond ourselves to many others in the process of construction of a meaningful life.
