Allegorical Tractatus

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes use of several terms he takes from classical philosophy: not only “Welt”, but also “Substanz” (which is, as he says, independent from the world!). It may seem he is only playing with high brow concepts of the Geistesgeschichte. In this way also his thoughts about God or “a god” could be read. But maybe the contrary is true.

Just have a look at:

4.012 Offenbar ist, dass wir einen Satz von der Form „aRb“ als Bild empfinden. Hier ist das Zeichen offenbar ein Gleichnis des Bezeichneten.

“Gleichnis” is a word that in German usually only Christ would use – or whoever thinks to speak for him. Jesus, young Christians learn, “spricht in Gleichnissen” – He speaks in parables, He allegorizes, His heirs pontificate. To talk in parables, we may add, is not to be considered the clearest of all possible manners of expressing yourself.

To translate it as “likeness”, as Pears and Ogden do, may give a wrong idea.

Ogden: “Here the sign is obviously a likeness of the signified.”

Well, “obviously”, offensichtlich, but offenbar: here this must mean “apparently”. There is nothing obvious in what Wittgenstein says. For Christians, in addition, this offenbar is linked to the Offenbarung, revelation.

Why not translate as follows:

"It is apparent (“obvious” in the sense of revealed!) that we sense a sentence of the form “aRb” as a picture. Here the sign apparently is a parable (allegory) of the signified."

What if the Tractatus said: all our signifying and indicating “facts” is very mysterious? Something near religion?

The Unding

5.5421 Dies zeigt auch, dass die Seele—das Subjekt etc.—wie sie in der heutigen oberflächlichen Psychologie aufgefasst wird, ein Unding ist.

This strange being, the Unding, is translated as… well, our logicians see the negation inside (literally Unding is a Nonthing) and extricate it:

Ogden: This shows that there is no such thing as the soul

Pears: This shows too that there is no such thing as the soul

At least Pears does not forget the auch (too). But both translators ignore that, in German, Das ist ein Unding! is just an idiomatic expression. Unding here means an "absurd thing". It may be a law, a rule, an order: it is judged as being against nature, against morals, against reason. And yes, according to the Grimms, Unding may also mean "ghost", "monster", "phantom". As it seems, Wittgenstein is getting polemic here.

For our purposes it would be sufficient to translate Unding as "absurdity".

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

Die Sprache Max Webers

Eine soziologische Untersuchung

http://www.tectum-verlag.de/die-sprache-max-webers.html

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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