Heidegger in the Museum. A Proposal

At Milan there is the small Museum of Art and Science where you can find a department about imitatons. If you like to buy antique furniture to make your home more stylish, go to this museum first and have a look at how new things can be made to look old and precious in very little time. You will understand that somebody can throw a brand-new wooden chair into a bin full of wood worms and, when he takes it out after a few days, he will have in his hands a very antique looking piece of furniture that he will sell for a lot of money.

That is how Heidegger works. He takes words, breaks them into pieces and forms new ones that seem very antique, very authentic, very similar to the most elementary, close-to-earth thinking of our farmer ancestors. They are not. They are artificial constructions that sound rather violent to the ear of a native German speaker.  

Take “das Umhafte” (“aroundness”). This word does not exist in any variety of German. Heidegger just chose the prefix “um” that derives from Greek “amphi”, and usually means “around” or indicates a partially circular movement. Then he stuck it to “-hafte”, a suffix which usually is attached to nouns or to verbs. “-haft” originally (say, in the 8^th century) meant “imprisoned in”, like in “sündhaft” (“sinful”), today we could translate it more or less with “in the manner of”, like in “beispielhaft” (“exemplary”) or with ‘with”, as in “schadhaft” (“damaged”). So, we can read “das Umhafte” as “what is in the manner of being around”. The translator* chose “aroundness” which sounds good: at least the suffix is attached to a preposition, not to a prefix, and even if you do not like it, you can be sure that  it is more acceptable than “das Umhafte”. That is how translations of philosophical texts work. They normalize strangeness. With Heidegger, that may be a good thing.

When leaving Germany you sometimes meet philosophers who with gleaming eyes proudly confess their admiration for Heidegger. Between Germans, it is improbable something like that will happen. As Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt stated, a native German speaker cannot read Heidegger without feeling the violence of his words, without perceiving that this man was close to the Nazis, not by chance, but by temper.

But when Heidegger creates strange compounds, like “das Zuhandensein” or “Dingvorhandenheit”, when he uses arcaic words like “Zeug” (“gear” or “stuff”) or “Haufen” (“crowd” or “mob”), or when he talks about what is “eigentlich” (“authentic”), a nice translation will not hesitate in normalizing his language, will use “what is at hand”, “objective presence of things”, will propose “useful things” (for “Zeug”) and “mass” (for “Haufen”) and turn his “eigentlich” – his dearest adjective, Adorno wrote a whole essay about its abuse – into a plain “true”. In that way, Heidegger in translation does not seem to be what he is. He simply seems to be a modern thinker who worries about our lives.

Then again the reader may stumble. Try: "By de-distancing as a kind of being of Da-sein with regard to its being-in-the-world, we do not understand anything like remoteness (nearness) or even being at a distance." (p. 97) What does that mean? Why should we understand "de-distancing" as "remoteness"? Because it is German, and because Heidegger is a playful thinker.

The German “Entfernung” usually means “distance”. But it may also mean “elimination”/ “putting s.th. in distance”. This is due to the fact that the word is composed. The prefix “ent”, related to Latin “anti-“ generally indicates the subtraction of something. Thus, “away with s.th.”, but if  “fern” means ‘far”, the real meaning of the whole word could be “put away being far”, i.e. “subtract distance”. That is Heidegger’s idea. He thinks, “Entfernung” should properly mean “elimination of distance”, and that explains the translator’s choice of “de-distancing”. So Heidegger disapproves of the common use: "putting away something”, he says, “is only a definite, factical mode". Heidegger is convinced he knows the real, the “true” one. He is getting there by splitting up the words and re-compounding them.

 By manipulating language he produces reflections in and about words that seem to be authentic. Heidegger’s proper place would be in some imitation department.

*Heidegger: Time and Being, transl. by Joan Stambaugh New York (State University of New York Press) 1996

Translation as Creation. Hegel in Italy

Going from Germany to Italy, at first sight, may seem like a return to a lost paradise. While the land that gave birth to Kant and Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche has been eliminating philosophy, step by step, since 1810 – first from school (the last year of Gymnasium now has 2 optional hours) and then from university – the nation of opera lirica and sexy comedy insists on teaching Philosophy to every kid who attends their ‘better’ High School, the Liceo. Five hours a week, as one of the main subjects.

That means that, at Italian universities, you may mention Kant or Aristotle or Leibniz and between 50 and 90% of your students will immediately know what you are talking about. Try naming Leibniz in German universities: 70% of students will get anxious, not knowing why you are talking about biscuits. Maybe this is modernization. Surely it has a price. German sociologists discuss endlessly about whether they can really really know reality and physicists reflect about the existence of causality as if not only Kant, no: not even Plato had ever existed. Between virtual worlds and globalization and Mother Earth everybody now, in Germany as in the Anglo-Saxon world, is thinking at the level of the Presocratics. People are simply wasting a lot of time by ignoring what others have thought in the last three thousand years. So, when Italian politicians today want to abolish their Philosophy teaching at school as utterly outdated, they will probably eliminate what is best about Italy: culture. Great Italians, I mean the ones who write and invent and translate and do research at the southern border of Europe did, as adolescents, five hours of Ancient Greek, five of Latin, five of Philosophy a week for three entire years. That's why they do it better.

You might object that Philosophy can not be taught. And talking about thruth and beauty five hours a week may seem like a great bore to the majority of students? True. But what Italian professori teach is not exactly Philosophy, it is History of Philosophy, presented in enormous text books, giant compilations of human thought. Students read excerpts, extracts, study resumes, short syntheses, formulae. Lucky are the authors with clear and handy concepts: thesis – antithesis – synthesis! Übermensch! Exploitation! Unlucky are the others who, like Kierkegaard, are trying to escape this kind of thinking in keywords. He finds himself strangled in a three step scheme that ends in religion and that he will never escape. Nobody will really read his books, not even professional thinkers: their work is to renew the known, not to rise up against it. That's why Italian editions of philosophers often contain only parts of the original text and nobody seems to care. Why read the whole thing when you already know from your textbook what the author says? Mondadori's “Aut aut” (Enten eller) without any note gives only the last chapter of the Danish book, Rousseau's Émile in most cases will be reduced from a 600 page brick to a 200 page leaflet. And the translations may be unreadable. Publishers know nobody cares. They let graduate students translate from any language they pretend to know under one condition: they have to do it for free. Then an aspiring professor will write a more or less brilliant introduction where he explains what the author wanted to say. That's how they give birth to monumental volumes like “Bompiani classici”. Obviously, Italian Philosophy is a thing of its own. It moves by repetition and explanation of formulas. Even if they are free of any invention, they will survive if they sound good.

Take the Hegel’s criticism of the traditional way of treating History of Philosophy. In Italian, he criticises: “A history conceived like a nursery rhyme of different opinions becomes an idle curiosity” (“Una storia, concepita in tal modo come una filastrocca di opinioni diverse, diventa curiosità oziosa”). Sounds great, implying that this way of writing History of Philosophy would be apt to sedating small, tired children. Obviously, this citation is ideal for short and memorable summaries. If you google “Hegel storia filosofia filastrocca” you will get 7970 results (15/08/2015). That is less than you will get with moving questions like “Kant gay?” (286000), but it is quite a lot – given that the formulation we find repeated nearly 8000 times (text books, presentations, conferences) is freely, though ingenuously, invented by the Italian translator. In the original German text Hegel writes about “This History, as a pointless narration of many different opinions” (“Diese Geschichte, so als eine Hererzählung von vielerlei Meinungen”). That is the creative power of a tradition of thought I propose to call Manualism. Usually its scholars will only recount others’ thoughts, but at times they create new, astonishing expressions, good for being repeated and for keeping alive what somehow still survives in the neighborhood of Philosophy.

Seemingly true/ wahrscheinlich: translating "The Critique of Pure Reason"

Whoever reads Kant's essay “What is Enlightenment?” will recognize the Prussian Philosopher's writing as being clear and logical. 
The first paragraph of his work starts with a definition: “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage.” Then the author immediately explains the two elements of this sentence that might have seemed surprising to the reader: “Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance.” Nothing is left in the shadows of ambiguity here. Everyday and legal terms are drawn into light. What else should we expect from a representative of Enlightenment? Not cloudiness in terms, certainly.
When it comes to one of Kant's masterpieces, “The Critique of Pure Reason”, on the other hand, the reader of the English translation will encounter some very obscure passages and few “enlightening” sentences.

“We termed dialectic in general a logic of appearance” (transl. Meiklejohn). Now Kant tries to explain: “This does not signify a doctrine of probability”. The reader will raise his eyebrow: why should the “logic of appearance” be a “doctrine of probability”? What is the connection between “appearance” and “probability”? Why does Kant pass from the first to the latter? What is he talking about? And he continues with badly connected statements: “Still less must phenomenon and appearance be held to be identical.” Why not? These are just two foreign words … “For truth or illusory appearance does not reside in the object” – first he talked about “appearance”, now he is discussing only a part of it, “illusory appearance”. Kant, a cheat?

At this point, we may follow sagacious advice: If it sounds strange, take a look at another translation. Indeed, in the Cambridge edition (by Guyers and Wood) the first sentence of the paragraph is: “Above we have called dialectic in general a logic of illusion.” That is, a logic of false appearance, not of appearance in general. “That does not mean that it is a doctrine of probability”. Again: where does “probability” come from? Why talk about the more or less probable when you are discussing illusions? Just imagine taking the microphone at the next conference and announcing: “Kant says illusion is not a question of probability!” This, as far as we may foresee the responses of conference audiences, might be considered somewhat surprisingly unsurprising. So, why should Kant have written this? Has he?

The answer is no. It's just the translation. Not this translation in particular, nor another one, but any translation from German. Kant writes: “Wir haben oben die Dialektik überhaupt eine Logik des Scheins genannt.” “Schein” may be appearance and false appearance (illusion) as well, though in German we do not use the word of Latin origin, but a Germanic stem.

“Schein” is a nominalisation of the verb “scheinen”, to seem – indeed it is the same as the English verb “to shine”, i.e. to give light by its own force. “Schein” is what we see because, that's the metaphor, something (who knows what?) is emitting light. Now, Kant in the second sentence takes up the word “Schein”.

“Das bedeutet nicht, sie sei eine Lehre der Wahrscheinlichkeit”. “Wahrscheinlich”, that's true, by every dictionary will be translated as “probable”, but literally this compound word means “seeming true” and the noun “Wahrscheinlichkeit” literally signifies “true-seemingness” or something equally strange. Kant is proceeding here with compounds of the word he introduced: the “seeming” is not what we call “true-seeming”, he declares. Kant only aims at eliminating terms that, being related with the one introduced earlier, may 
confound the question.

And “phenomenon” and “appearance”? Greek against Latin culture? No, in German it is nothing but “Erscheinung” and “Schein” that, according to Kant, should be distinguished. In other words: A second variation of “Schein” is to be excluded. “Erscheinen”, with the prefix “er” is something that happens in time; like in “eröffnen” (the new opening of a shop) and in “erwürgen” (pass from life to death by being choked), “er” usually indicates a discrete, a radical change. So, “erscheinen” indeed translates “to appear”: something that seems to be, and that, up to this moment, did not (seem to be).

The whole Kantian procedure of introductory word field processing  is incomprehensible in English. Kant is in fact trying to clarify German words. The German language at Kant's times still must have felt somewhat insecure. The first book on philosophy in German had appeared only about sixty years earlier (Wolff: Deutsche Metaphysik, 1719) with a register of translations of the newly coined German terms into Latin. German, about 1780, still lacked all the stability a philosopher needed. But in order to gain a useful vocabulary, Kant, as well as, later on, Hegel, did not trust terms taken from the ancient world; instead, as with “appearance” (they easily could have created “Apparenz”), they started from everyday German words and tried to draw them into light. That's why philosophical German is so close to average German language use.

Kant, as Goethe, was not only a great writer in German language, but also its creator.

Write, that I may see Thee! – What translators do

Thought is movement. Out of nothing it comes, at the full stop it is arrested – at least for a moment. In German, sentences may fall down like heavy drops,
self–contained universes, introduced by a conjunction and ending with a
participle or an infinitive, like the beginning of the introduction to Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason”:

Ob die Bearbeitung der Erkenntnisse, die zum Vernunftgeschäfte gehören,
den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft gehe oder nicht, das läßt sich bald
aus dem Erfolg beurteilen.

Whether the treatment of that portion of our knowledge which lies within
the province of pure reason advances with that undeviating certainty
which characterizes the progress of science, we shall be at no loss to
determine.

Other sentences may follow the first one. The movement goes on, again interrupted by other stops, by hesitations and suspensions: semicolons, commas, colons, dashes, ellipses. Thought is punctuated movement.

Guided by punctuation, thought may even trail off, as is typical for impressionist writers like Peter Altenberg. In order to make this fading visible, we use ellipses (“...”) or – like Altenberg – three dashes: “She is occupied, occupied by the works of nature and her mysteries – – –“. But not always can three dashes be read as signs of a thought that may fly elsewhere. Some philosophical writers use their own system for punctuation, that means: they have their own rhythm.

1

Hamann, “Magus of the North”, uses single, double and triple dashes.
He sometimes ends his paragraphs with the latter.

den ersten Menschen bewog unter dem gelehnten Balg eine anschauende
Erkenntnis vergangener und künftiger Begebenheiten auf die Nachwelt
fortzupflanzen – – –

That means, he is changing theme. It is not to be intended as an
invitation to float away in dreams, as the English translation (Blackwell) suggests:

This moved primal man to hand on to posterity beneath this borrowed skin
an intuitive knowledge of past and future events …

The rhythm of this thinker is fast and hard, not poetic and dreamy. What
else should we expect from a writer who starts:

Not a lyre! Nor a painter’s brush! A winnowing-fan for my Muse, to clear
the threshing-floor of holy literature!  
 
How is a philosopher of this dramatical type supposed to go on? In smoothly floating periods? Like the following? 

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race; even as the garden is
older than the ploughed field, painting than script; as song is more
ancient than declamation; parables older than reasoning; barter than
trade. A deep sleep was the repose of our farthest ancestors; and their
movement a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of
deep thought or wonder; – and would open their mouths to utter winged
sentences.

In German, it sounds like a butcher's knife on the marble board:

Poesie ist die Muttersprache des menschlichen Geschlechts; wie der Gartenbau, älter als der Acker: Malerey, – als Schrift: Gesang, – als Deklamation: Gleichnisse, – als Schlüsse: Tausch, – als Handel. Ein tieferer Schlaf war die Ruhe unserer Urahnen; und ihre Bewegung, ein
taumelnder Tanz. Sieben Tage im Stillschweigen des Nachsinns oder Erstaunens saßen sie; – – und thaten ihren Mund auf – zu geflügelten Sprüchen.
 
A series of colons, as if each term were explained by the next one, forming a chain. Four m-dashes that interrupt the flow in order to announce four surprises: every single part of this long period goes against common sense. Not caring about grammar rules, at the end the author's double dash evidences the length of the “seven days” of silence. In translation, only one, shy, dash appears, substituting Hamann's double one. Why?

Translators normalize their texts. The author feels he is a genius, and he expresses himself accordingly. Translators do not, and even if they did, no editor would believe them. Never trust translation. There is no thought without its proper punctuation.

2

Wittgenstein, though staying in England, continued to write in German,
Only in his mother tongue he felt secure to move in a hazardous manner:

Ich werde auch das Ganze: der Sprache und der Tätigkeiten, mit denen sie verwoben ist, das »Sprachspiel« nennen.

The colon betwen noun and genitive apposition: “the whole: of language and of the activities” would certainly not meet with approval from any teacher. Wittgenstein by this colon expresses a hesitation, he announces the new thought he is going to set into being, and he tells us he doesn't care about proper style. Wittgenstein here is not modest. No philosopher really is, not Kant, not Kierkegaard, let alone Hegel. 

The English translator dismantles Wittgenstein's attack against the rules of proper writing, translating the colon as well:

I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the 'language-game'.
 
Translators write nice texts. It's not their fault. Their editors ask them to do so. But, in a certain way, what they write is not philosophy. The movement of thought has its own rhythm, its own punctuation.

Pure thought, moving up and down?

By reading young Marx' and Engels' “German Ideology” – a work they never published, seemingly because Marx didn't want to draw the attention of the public to a half forgotten author named Max Stirner, extensively treated in the essay – the reader clearly sees two groups of people emerging: “German philosophers” on the one hand, “we” on the other. The “we” here may indicate the authors, Marx and Engels, or an entire movement that promotes a new way of thinking.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.¹

Ideas and worlds change, but we still feel comfortable down here. Thoughts remain linked to subjects, at least in English: it's we who think, “we ascend”. When reading the German text in original, we might see ourselves posted into a different universe where there are no subjects.

Ganz im Gegensatz zur deutschen Philosophie, welche vom Himmel auf die Erde herabsteigt, wird hier von der Erde zum Himmel gestiegen. D.h., es wird nicht ausgegangen von dem, was die Menschen sagen, sich einbilden, sich vorstellen, auch nicht von den gesagten, gedachten, eingebildeten, vorgestellten Menschen, um davon aus bei den leibhaftigen Menschen anzukommen; es wird von den wirklich tätigen Menschen ausgegangen und aus ihrem wirklichen Lebensprozeß auch die Entwicklung der ideologischen Reflexe und Echos dieses Lebensprozesses dargestellt.

“Here it is risen from earth to heaven”: Pure thought is moving up and down. In German, we don't need a real subject in passive phrases. “Hier wird gestiegen”, alternatively “Es wird hier gestiegen”, with “es” being only a placeholder: no real subject is indicated here. Thought doesn't seem the product of individuals; it is floating around. That may appear strange, since Marx and Engels are not exactly known for ghost-like visions of thoughts and ideas. But why then do these materialists use a grammatical form that abstracts from the thinking individuals?

First, their choice may be due to author's politeness, as Weinrich² states. They elegantly avoid indicating themselves. Second, by not naming the real subjects, Marx and Engels create a firm opposition to “German philosophy”, as they are not going to attach just another member to the chain of philosophical authors who, each one pretending to give the true and new thought, remain mere philosophers, producers of ideas linked to names, like brands.

Marx and Engels are not presenting themselves as the creators of just another philosophy. The authors want to underline the objectivity of their thought, and this is, as we see by the image they give by using impersonal passive, apt to mystification. Their language announces the entire historical movement of Marxism. This is lost in the English translation.

The Italian versions are even worse. Not only do they have to transform the passive (since intransitive verbs in Italian cannot be turned into passive voices), they have to do it with the impersonal pronoun “si” which is identical to the reflexive pronoun. In that way, stylistically they ignore the opposition between Marx' thought and “Philosophy”, and also lose the differentiation between the subjects the theory is talking about and the theory itself.

Esattamente all’opposto di quanto accade nella filosofia tedesca, che discende dal cielo sulla terra, qui si sale dalla terra al cielo. Cioè non si parte da ciò che gli uomini dicono, si immaginano, si rappresentano, né da ciò che si dice, si pensa, si immagina, si rappresenta che siano, per arrivare da qui agli uomini vivi; ma si parte dagli uomini realmente operanti e sulla base del processo reale della loro vita si spiega anche lo sviluppo dei riflessi e degli echi ideologici di questo processo di vita.³

If you want to understand it, read it in German. 

 

1https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a1

2Harald Weinrich: Textgrammatik der deutschen Sprache, 4th rev. edition Hildesheim – Zürich – New York (Olms) 2007, pp. 179-181.

3 https://www.marxists.org/italiano/marx-engels/1846/ideologia/capitolo_II.html. There is no appreciable difference between this version and the more recent Bompiani edition.

Hegel's “Phenomenology”: The Beauty of it

On the Web we can find at least two different translations of Hegel's Phenomenology, one published by marxists.org, the other by Professor Terry Pinkard.¹ How to choose between them?

The Marxist version begins:

In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries.

A plain sentence. The writer introduces a declaration of what he believes to be “inappropriate” and “misleading”. But why does he use so many words? Why this totally superfluous “written by his predecessors or his contemporaries” at the end? Was Hegel redundant? No, he simply put it the other way round, and the translator didn't respect the text. It is, as Pinkard translates:

In the preface to a philosophical work, it is customary for the author to give an explanation – namely, an explanation of his purpose in writing the book, his motivations behind it, and the relations it bears to other previous or contemporary treatments of the same topics – but for a philosophical work, this seems not only superfluous but in light of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and counterproductive.

The judgement “inappropriate” arrives at the end, after a very long parenthesis that had two functions: to create suspense and to make clear the pedantry and ridiculousness of the other position. The “Phenomenology” is theater.

Pinkard is trying to do justice to Hegel's text. Add to this the mistakes in the “Marxist” translation: “substantiell” as “psychical” and its title: “Philosophy of Mind”'; it's true that “Geist” may be both, spirit and mind. But how to explain the book's closing verses “Out of the chalice of this realm of spirits / Foams forth to him his infinity” if we eliminate the ambiguity of “Geist” as spirit/ghost?

Anyway, it's not with a good translation that you get really near to Hegel. The young philosopher is still under the influence of Hölderlin, the poet, and Schelling, the elegant writer. The “Phenomenology”, at times, is poetry.

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter”.

Hegel is talking about blossoms, about flowers. In German the whole sentence sounds:

“Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte

sagen, dass jene von dieser widerlegt wird”.

You should read it aloud in order to get the sound*. And lyrically Hegel continues. You wouldn't have guessed reading Pinkard's translation:

“Likewise, by virtue of the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom’s truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself.”

Why “existence”? It's not “Existenz”, derived from Latin, but “Dasein”, Being:

linked to a Germanic root, more elementary. What about “a false being of the plant”? Why “by virtue of”? In German, it's “through” (just listen: “durch”/ “Frucht”, “ur” and “ru”):

“ebenso wird durch die Frucht die Blüte für ein falsches Dasein der Pflanze erklärt, und als ihre Wahrheit tritt jene an die Stelle von dieser”.

Hegel's text avoids all elegant expressions and nearly all words with Latin origin. As the translator Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt remarked, every single word in the preface of the “Phenomenology” can be understood by a child of six. It's elementary, and being it is part of Hegel's thesis. So, when we read in Pinkard's translation a word like “cognizance”, we immediately know this must be wrong. “Erkenntnis” is simply “knowledge”. Just trust Hegel: he would never use an ugly or even just 'technical' expression. This is the beauty of his dramatical narration of the story of our spirit.

*Sound

The noun “Knospe” starts with the consonant “k”, pronounced in the back of the throat, and ends with a p on your lips: it is perfectly imitating the process of growth and explosion of a flower. “Blüte” is remarkable because of the long “ü” – remember German is usually preferring low profile vowels like “e”, “Hervorbrechen” is concentrating in one word the breaking through of the blossom, while in English you have the sad subordinate clause “when .. breaking through”.

Marxist: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm Terry Pinkard: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21288399/Phenomenology%20translation%20English%20German.pdf. I do not intent to criticize the great work Prof. Pinkard has done. I only want to evidence the difficulty of translating philosophical texts.

Happy days. Lukàcs's “Theory of Novel”1

“Happy are those ages” – no, we are not reading an old hippy's song about lost paradises. This is not a scene of smiling Lotus-eaters. It's just a wrong translation of an expression that we may find in a text called “Theory of Novel”: “selig”, blessed. It doesn't mean people then were happier than we are. But they were blessed. And we are not.

“Selig sind die Zeiten”, Lukàcs wrote, “Blessed are the ages”, and we might remember: “Blessed are”, beati sunt, Jesus. And also the Italian translator, choosing a more elegant “Beati i tempi...”, proves he didn't understand. Because in German it would have been possible to eliminate the verb “sind”. The first words recall Jesus Christ's Mount Sermon because the author of this “Theory of the Novel” wanted it to do so. He is presenting himself as a preacher.

The “blessed ages”, Lukàcs is telling us, are gone. But why does he consider them “blessed”? For them, “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths”, we read in the English translation. Interesting? Just an assertion of an ancient way of thinking: somewhere in the sky, men thought, our destinies are written. This may have been reassuring, but why should we cry about the loss of this idea that good or bad, everything is written? In German, the author's explanation sounds different: he talks about ages “für die der Sternenhimmel die Landkarte der gangbaren und zu gehenden Wege ist”. This is not only an assertion, it's beautiful. “Sternenhimmel” ends in “Himmel” (with a front vowel and a bilabial consonant), which for Germans is both the sky full of stars and heaven (maybe “starlit sky” would have been somewhat nearer to the original). “zu gehende und gangbare Wege” is presenting a minimal paradigmatic variation of the verb “gehen” (to walk), something typical for modern poetry, and means “paths to walk on and walkable”: “ways that we have to walk and can walk on”. These paths are “illuminated by the light of the stars”, the translator writes, but originally the paths are “erhellt” by the light of the stars: Lukàcs is not talking about street illumination by gas or by electricity, he does not use “beleuchten”, but something like “lightened”. The man writing is a poet.

Both a preacher and a poet, Lukàcs is writing a book with the title “Theory of Novel”. Mixing science and art, he inserts himself in the Romantic tradition, writing what in German we call an “Essay” (not to be confused with the anglosaxon one). This is a writing tradition born in Germany with early Romanticism, when passing limits between genres and knowledge fields was programmatic.² Probably as a reaction against the heavy academic style of German professors at the time, the essay was very popular around 1900 amongst intellectuals in the German speaking world. It's so common that Robert Musil defines a whole way of living as essayism, as a life without ultimate ideological and material safeties. Musil defines: the essay as “the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought”. That is, the essay is expression of something considered “inner life”, and it's linked to thought. What does this mean?

Adorno, in writing an essay about the essay, and adopting views that had been elaborated earlier by young Lukàcs, tries to explain. An essay, Adorno notes, takes its leave on a cultural object (e. g. not jungle trees, but rather poems on trees), it does not start with principles and definitions and does not proceed systematically. It uses words from common language. It has to be both beautiful and true, hence it rejects the division of art and science.

Inner expression and thought, an essay cannot be simply true or false. It has to be profound, profoundly true (similar to what washing powders do nowadays, as Roland Barthes pointed out), and there is no way of discussion about profoundness. “Der Essay ist unerwiderbar” (“an Essay is not answerable”) , a famous essayist wrote, and that means it doesn't give way to rational discussions. It wouldn't make any sense writing about “The Theory of Novel”: “Lukàcs is wrong. The stars lightened also paths people could not take.”

In giving the title “Theory” to this book, Lukàcs is cheating. This is not a theory, it's something else, a long essay, as personal and as true as any literary text may be. In the English translation, you wouldn't have guessed.

1In English: Georg Lukàcs: Theory of the Novel (transl. Anna Bostock) London (The Merlin Press) 1971, repr. 1988. Online: https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/georg-lukacs-the-theory-of-the-novel.pdf (15/4/2015).

2Some say it's a genuine Hungarian tradition. See: Reinhard Laube: Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus : Historismus als wissenssoziologischer Perspektivismus, Gòttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2004.

Basics

Being elementary

In English, the main auxiliary verbs (i. e. excluding modal verbs) are to be, to have, to do. In German, these become sein (to be), haben (to have) and werden (to become). This is only a small difference and so is the second one. The English to have, seen as full verb, seems to be weaker than the German haben. We say Ich habe ein Auto while in English we tend to add another verb: I have got a car. Two small differences?  They completely change the way philosophers write. English thinkers do not dispose of the same possibilities to be "down to earth" as Germans.

The first movement of Hegels Logik, in German, includes Sein, Nichts and Werden. Culminating in a very elementary, substantivated auxiliar verb: werden, the German original sounds much more evident than the English translation: Being, nothing and becoming – through being and nothing, only something elementary can arise, and to become doesn't seem to be nearly as elementary as werden.

Ernst Blochs starts his famous Tübingen Introduction to Philosophy with the sentences: “Ich bin. Aber ich habe mich nicht. Darum werden wir erst.” Three basic, auxiliar verbs maybe let the readers ignore the Philosopher's game: he passes from I to us without any explanation (he is Marxian). The three sentences read as an example of elementary grammar: sein, haben, werden. Consequently they give an impression of evidence which is only justified by German language. As an English translation we find: “I am. But I do not possess myself. That is why we are only coming to be.” The reader may reflect about this thought, but he will not agree immediatly.

German Philosophy gains part of its evidence and force by using particularities of German language; it does, in a certain sense, not exist outside its language.