Freitag, 2. Dezember 2016

Weber: “Soziologie soll heißen” – “Sociology is”? Translating speech acts 
Translating a text from one language to the other may be more difficult than you would expect. It is not only about words and meanings and sentences and texts. We also have to consider the pragmatic aspect of language. By talking and writing we always do something, and the difficulty arises from the fact that every language has different ways of acting by words. If you want to buy a sausage, in southern Germany you might say: “Ich kriege eine Wurst!” (I get a sausage). In the Northern part of the country, with this kind of order, this would be considered quite rude and you might get an irritated answer. There you should try: “Ich hätte gerne ..” (I would like to have). In the Netherlands and in France the same thing is usually expressed with “I take a sausage, if you'd like to (give one to me)”. Such differences in everyday formulas are easily overcome. We just learn them by heart. But with philosophical or other theoretical texts, things are more complicated. When thinkers write or say something, they are acting too.
Take the traditional English translation of Max Weber´s definition of sociology in “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” (Economy and Society):
“Sociology [...] is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences“.
Sounds easy. With the verb “to be” this is an assertive statement. But in German it sounds different:
“Soziologie [...] soll heißen: eine Wissenschaft, welche soziales Handeln deutend verstehen und dadurch in seinem Ablauf und seinen Wirkungen ursächlich erklären will“.
Why “soll heißen”? The German verb “sollen” is a modal verb; it defines the way a second, infinite verb is to be understood. This “sollen” indicates that the action of the verb is an order from somebody, a command deriving from the sphere of intersubjectivity: someone is saying so - your mother or humanity or God (in the latter cases, “sollen” indicates a moral dictate. Think of the Ten Commandments in the Bible: “Thou shalt not...”.
A proper translation of Weber´s definition could be “Sociology shall mean” in the moral sense. It is a kind of moral self obligation, or better: a declarative statement. The point is: for declarative statements you need a kind of authority, be that God or mother. Providing himself with the necessary authority is what Weber does in the Introductory notes. There he criticizes other authors as unclear (Gottl), as ambiguous and morally untrustworthy (Stammler and Simmel) – unlike himself, of course - and he refers to his own works on the topic.
What Weber is doing here is founding a new Sociology and doing so by his own right, as a righteous man and writer. That is the pragmatic sense of “Soziologie soll heißen”. 

Keine Kommentare:

Kommentar veröffentlichen