German for Philosophers: Chapter 17: Prefaces, introductions

German for philosophers, Chapter 17:

Anfänge / Beginnings

"The steeds that bear me carried me as far as ever my heart
Desired, since they brought me and set me on the renowned
Way of the goddess"

Someone is showing up, he starts speaking, and after a short time the listeners understand: this is a philosopher. How is this happening? Why do they listen? 


The philosopher is, so the definitions we usually get, talking about very general questions: about being, the good, about present, future and past as such ... but why? Will he be telling something the others do not know? Because he has followed, as Parmenides states, "the ways of the goddess"? 

We remember Pythagoras behind his drape mumbling the truth.  Why does it seem plausible that he is sitting behind, we are sitting in front of the cloth, and only he knows the truth? There is, as the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini has illustrated, a threshold between the supposed-to-be philosopher and us, the listeners. How does he create this distance between him and us?

The philosopher has to trigger in his listeners what Coleridge called the suspension of disbelief.

This can partially be done by position: a university teacher, a messenger of institutionalized knowledge, the one who passed many exams and selections, is supposed to be the one who knows. But philosophical knowledge is of a special kind. One might even question the right of university  professors to talk about truth... 

It has to be explained where the philosophical text comes from. That is what, after the titles on the cover,  prefaces do. Philosophically, though, these texts are supposed to treat the particular, the circumstances, everything irrelevant to the philosophical text in itself. What Genette described as paratexts, are impossible and necessary additions to the work of a philosopher. A brief look at writings of Wolff, Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Husserl seems to be interesting at that regard, at least to me.

Thesis: The difference between a novel and a philosophical work is that the latter needs a preface.

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.