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.