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