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.