Wittgenstein's Urbild

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein talks about Urbilder:

5.522
Das Eigentümliche der Allgemeinheitsbezeichnung ist erstens, dass sie auf ein logisches Urbild hinweist, und zweitens, dass sie Konstante hervorhebt.


The English translation of Urbild, according to both Ogden and Pears, should be "prototype". Max Black proposes "proto-picture", and even this might be misleading.

Ur corresponds to "proto" only if we call the jungle "protoforest" (Urwald), our origin "proto-origin" (Ursprung) and our first (or last) principle "protoprinciple" (Urprinzip). We would rather not. The prefix Ur- sometimes indicates something arcaic (Urzeit) and sometimes something very basic (Urgrund) – the English "prototype", however, is usually applied to cars instead: it is something that still has to be revised and improved.

Kant uses Urbild in order to translate the Platonic "idea". Which, looking back at the Tractatus, could be interesting indeed.

Achim Seiffarth

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Let us sketch a picture ... Wittgenstein and Plato?

2.0212 Es wäre dann unmöglich, ein Bild der Welt (wahr oder falsch) zu entwerfen.

2.0212 OGD It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).

2.0212 P/M In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false).

"To sketch any picture” probably sounds better in English. But however we may translate 2.0212, we would not stop wondering about why this is supposed to be an interesting sentence. In other words: Why should we try to sketch a picture of the world, as a whole? and what could an assertion like “This picture is false” mean?

Maybe by considering the German mother tongue of our philosopher, we could better understand what he means?

The German idiomatic expression “sich ein Bild machen von etwas” is usually translated as “to get an idea of something”. Ideas can be true or false. Images cannot. Would the following be a proper translation then?

2.0212 It would then be impossible to get an idea of the world (true or false)

No, this is not the proper translation. Wittgenstein would never have used the word “idea”, so heavily burdened by philosophical tradition. “To get an idea of the world”. Of the whole world! It is an ambition that could easily be seen as the heredity of a very traditional way of thinking. But maybe it really is? Just try it out. Translate “idea” every time Wittgenstein talks about “Bild” and – if this works, see him getting quite near to Plato.  

What is the case?

Keep quiet. Do not talk about anything beyond the field of facts, that is what young Wittgenstein seems to propose to the readers of his “Tractatus logico philosophicus”.

But how does this hard-liner make assertions about what we may make assertions about? A difficult question, of course. In order to find an answer, it could be worth your while to have a look at how Wittgenstein works. The first three sentences all start with “Die Welt ist …”.  In different assertions, Wittgenstein tries to explain what he wants to talk about. Nothing less than “the world”. In the second and the third sentence he makes a connection between “world” and “facts”. But in the first one?

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Before young Wittgenstein wrote this, he probably considered a series of alternatives, like

(1) Die Welt ist alles, was ist.

or

(2) Die Welt ist alles, was es gibt.

But with the first one the philosopher would have ended up in the middle of eternal philosophical debates about “the being”. The second one would have been metaphysically unfathomable, as Heidegger discovered later on, because the impersonal subject Es could have aroused the question: “Who or what is es?” and because of the verb geben, to give. So how could he possibly express what he wanted to say?

In the next sentence, Wittgenstein uses the word “Tatsachen”, facts. But here, in the beginning? He could have started with:

Die Welt, das sind die Tatsachen.

But he does not. He chooses a metaphor:

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

correctly translated as “The world is all that is the case”. Both in German and in English this is a metaphor deriving from Latin. “Was der Fall ist” is “what the dice says”, more precisely: “when it has fallen”.

The expression in German is kindred with the word “Zufall”, chance. In English it 

derives from French “cas”, but today you probably do not hear the connection between"case" and "chance". Only in “casual” it seems to have survived. What you can not hear in the translation is the antimetaphysical, or, if you like, existentialist, tendency in Wittgensteins words. Just remember Stirner's: we are "mit allem Andern bunt durcheinander herumgewürfelt”: "We are tossed about (like dices) with everything else".  

The world is what is there, Wittgenstein says, and it is there by chance: we just find it and may wonder about it, but we cannot identify a sense or a rule in its being there. 

In other words: the English translation “The world is what is the case” is both right and wrong. It may make you think of law or medical cases, rather than of chance. By reading the first sentence in English, you may find it strange, but you will not find the key to its proper understanding.

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

Translation as Creation. Hegel in Italy

Going from Germany to Italy, at first sight, may seem like a return to a lost paradise. While the land that gave birth to Kant and Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche has been eliminating philosophy, step by step, since 1810 – first from school (the last year of Gymnasium now has 2 optional hours) and then from university – the nation of opera lirica and sexy comedy insists on teaching Philosophy to every kid who attends their ‘better’ High School, the Liceo. Five hours a week, as one of the main subjects.

That means that, at Italian universities, you may mention Kant or Aristotle or Leibniz and between 50 and 90% of your students will immediately know what you are talking about. Try naming Leibniz in German universities: 70% of students will get anxious, not knowing why you are talking about biscuits. Maybe this is modernization. Surely it has a price. German sociologists discuss endlessly about whether they can really really know reality and physicists reflect about the existence of causality as if not only Kant, no: not even Plato had ever existed. Between virtual worlds and globalization and Mother Earth everybody now, in Germany as in the Anglo-Saxon world, is thinking at the level of the Presocratics. People are simply wasting a lot of time by ignoring what others have thought in the last three thousand years. So, when Italian politicians today want to abolish their Philosophy teaching at school as utterly outdated, they will probably eliminate what is best about Italy: culture. Great Italians, I mean the ones who write and invent and translate and do research at the southern border of Europe did, as adolescents, five hours of Ancient Greek, five of Latin, five of Philosophy a week for three entire years. That's why they do it better.

You might object that Philosophy can not be taught. And talking about thruth and beauty five hours a week may seem like a great bore to the majority of students? True. But what Italian professori teach is not exactly Philosophy, it is History of Philosophy, presented in enormous text books, giant compilations of human thought. Students read excerpts, extracts, study resumes, short syntheses, formulae. Lucky are the authors with clear and handy concepts: thesis – antithesis – synthesis! Übermensch! Exploitation! Unlucky are the others who, like Kierkegaard, are trying to escape this kind of thinking in keywords. He finds himself strangled in a three step scheme that ends in religion and that he will never escape. Nobody will really read his books, not even professional thinkers: their work is to renew the known, not to rise up against it. That's why Italian editions of philosophers often contain only parts of the original text and nobody seems to care. Why read the whole thing when you already know from your textbook what the author says? Mondadori's “Aut aut” (Enten eller) without any note gives only the last chapter of the Danish book, Rousseau's Émile in most cases will be reduced from a 600 page brick to a 200 page leaflet. And the translations may be unreadable. Publishers know nobody cares. They let graduate students translate from any language they pretend to know under one condition: they have to do it for free. Then an aspiring professor will write a more or less brilliant introduction where he explains what the author wanted to say. That's how they give birth to monumental volumes like “Bompiani classici”. Obviously, Italian Philosophy is a thing of its own. It moves by repetition and explanation of formulas. Even if they are free of any invention, they will survive if they sound good.

Take the Hegel’s criticism of the traditional way of treating History of Philosophy. In Italian, he criticises: “A history conceived like a nursery rhyme of different opinions becomes an idle curiosity” (“Una storia, concepita in tal modo come una filastrocca di opinioni diverse, diventa curiosità oziosa”). Sounds great, implying that this way of writing History of Philosophy would be apt to sedating small, tired children. Obviously, this citation is ideal for short and memorable summaries. If you google “Hegel storia filosofia filastrocca” you will get 7970 results (15/08/2015). That is less than you will get with moving questions like “Kant gay?” (286000), but it is quite a lot – given that the formulation we find repeated nearly 8000 times (text books, presentations, conferences) is freely, though ingenuously, invented by the Italian translator. In the original German text Hegel writes about “This History, as a pointless narration of many different opinions” (“Diese Geschichte, so als eine Hererzählung von vielerlei Meinungen”). That is the creative power of a tradition of thought I propose to call Manualism. Usually its scholars will only recount others’ thoughts, but at times they create new, astonishing expressions, good for being repeated and for keeping alive what somehow still survives in the neighborhood of Philosophy.

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.