Pure thought, moving up and down?

By reading young Marx' and Engels' “German Ideology” – a work they never published, seemingly because Marx didn't want to draw the attention of the public to a half forgotten author named Max Stirner, extensively treated in the essay – the reader clearly sees two groups of people emerging: “German philosophers” on the one hand, “we” on the other. The “we” here may indicate the authors, Marx and Engels, or an entire movement that promotes a new way of thinking.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.¹

Ideas and worlds change, but we still feel comfortable down here. Thoughts remain linked to subjects, at least in English: it's we who think, “we ascend”. When reading the German text in original, we might see ourselves posted into a different universe where there are no subjects.

Ganz im Gegensatz zur deutschen Philosophie, welche vom Himmel auf die Erde herabsteigt, wird hier von der Erde zum Himmel gestiegen. D.h., es wird nicht ausgegangen von dem, was die Menschen sagen, sich einbilden, sich vorstellen, auch nicht von den gesagten, gedachten, eingebildeten, vorgestellten Menschen, um davon aus bei den leibhaftigen Menschen anzukommen; es wird von den wirklich tätigen Menschen ausgegangen und aus ihrem wirklichen Lebensprozeß auch die Entwicklung der ideologischen Reflexe und Echos dieses Lebensprozesses dargestellt.

“Here it is risen from earth to heaven”: Pure thought is moving up and down. In German, we don't need a real subject in passive phrases. “Hier wird gestiegen”, alternatively “Es wird hier gestiegen”, with “es” being only a placeholder: no real subject is indicated here. Thought doesn't seem the product of individuals; it is floating around. That may appear strange, since Marx and Engels are not exactly known for ghost-like visions of thoughts and ideas. But why then do these materialists use a grammatical form that abstracts from the thinking individuals?

First, their choice may be due to author's politeness, as Weinrich² states. They elegantly avoid indicating themselves. Second, by not naming the real subjects, Marx and Engels create a firm opposition to “German philosophy”, as they are not going to attach just another member to the chain of philosophical authors who, each one pretending to give the true and new thought, remain mere philosophers, producers of ideas linked to names, like brands.

Marx and Engels are not presenting themselves as the creators of just another philosophy. The authors want to underline the objectivity of their thought, and this is, as we see by the image they give by using impersonal passive, apt to mystification. Their language announces the entire historical movement of Marxism. This is lost in the English translation.

The Italian versions are even worse. Not only do they have to transform the passive (since intransitive verbs in Italian cannot be turned into passive voices), they have to do it with the impersonal pronoun “si” which is identical to the reflexive pronoun. In that way, stylistically they ignore the opposition between Marx' thought and “Philosophy”, and also lose the differentiation between the subjects the theory is talking about and the theory itself.

Esattamente all’opposto di quanto accade nella filosofia tedesca, che discende dal cielo sulla terra, qui si sale dalla terra al cielo. Cioè non si parte da ciò che gli uomini dicono, si immaginano, si rappresentano, né da ciò che si dice, si pensa, si immagina, si rappresenta che siano, per arrivare da qui agli uomini vivi; ma si parte dagli uomini realmente operanti e sulla base del processo reale della loro vita si spiega anche lo sviluppo dei riflessi e degli echi ideologici di questo processo di vita.³

If you want to understand it, read it in German. 

 

1https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a1

2Harald Weinrich: Textgrammatik der deutschen Sprache, 4th rev. edition Hildesheim – Zürich – New York (Olms) 2007, pp. 179-181.

3 https://www.marxists.org/italiano/marx-engels/1846/ideologia/capitolo_II.html. There is no appreciable difference between this version and the more recent Bompiani edition.

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.

Happy days. Lukàcs's “Theory of Novel”1

“Happy are those ages” – no, we are not reading an old hippy's song about lost paradises. This is not a scene of smiling Lotus-eaters. It's just a wrong translation of an expression that we may find in a text called “Theory of Novel”: “selig”, blessed. It doesn't mean people then were happier than we are. But they were blessed. And we are not.

“Selig sind die Zeiten”, Lukàcs wrote, “Blessed are the ages”, and we might remember: “Blessed are”, beati sunt, Jesus. And also the Italian translator, choosing a more elegant “Beati i tempi...”, proves he didn't understand. Because in German it would have been possible to eliminate the verb “sind”. The first words recall Jesus Christ's Mount Sermon because the author of this “Theory of the Novel” wanted it to do so. He is presenting himself as a preacher.

The “blessed ages”, Lukàcs is telling us, are gone. But why does he consider them “blessed”? For them, “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths”, we read in the English translation. Interesting? Just an assertion of an ancient way of thinking: somewhere in the sky, men thought, our destinies are written. This may have been reassuring, but why should we cry about the loss of this idea that good or bad, everything is written? In German, the author's explanation sounds different: he talks about ages “für die der Sternenhimmel die Landkarte der gangbaren und zu gehenden Wege ist”. This is not only an assertion, it's beautiful. “Sternenhimmel” ends in “Himmel” (with a front vowel and a bilabial consonant), which for Germans is both the sky full of stars and heaven (maybe “starlit sky” would have been somewhat nearer to the original). “zu gehende und gangbare Wege” is presenting a minimal paradigmatic variation of the verb “gehen” (to walk), something typical for modern poetry, and means “paths to walk on and walkable”: “ways that we have to walk and can walk on”. These paths are “illuminated by the light of the stars”, the translator writes, but originally the paths are “erhellt” by the light of the stars: Lukàcs is not talking about street illumination by gas or by electricity, he does not use “beleuchten”, but something like “lightened”. The man writing is a poet.

Both a preacher and a poet, Lukàcs is writing a book with the title “Theory of Novel”. Mixing science and art, he inserts himself in the Romantic tradition, writing what in German we call an “Essay” (not to be confused with the anglosaxon one). This is a writing tradition born in Germany with early Romanticism, when passing limits between genres and knowledge fields was programmatic.² Probably as a reaction against the heavy academic style of German professors at the time, the essay was very popular around 1900 amongst intellectuals in the German speaking world. It's so common that Robert Musil defines a whole way of living as essayism, as a life without ultimate ideological and material safeties. Musil defines: the essay as “the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought”. That is, the essay is expression of something considered “inner life”, and it's linked to thought. What does this mean?

Adorno, in writing an essay about the essay, and adopting views that had been elaborated earlier by young Lukàcs, tries to explain. An essay, Adorno notes, takes its leave on a cultural object (e. g. not jungle trees, but rather poems on trees), it does not start with principles and definitions and does not proceed systematically. It uses words from common language. It has to be both beautiful and true, hence it rejects the division of art and science.

Inner expression and thought, an essay cannot be simply true or false. It has to be profound, profoundly true (similar to what washing powders do nowadays, as Roland Barthes pointed out), and there is no way of discussion about profoundness. “Der Essay ist unerwiderbar” (“an Essay is not answerable”) , a famous essayist wrote, and that means it doesn't give way to rational discussions. It wouldn't make any sense writing about “The Theory of Novel”: “Lukàcs is wrong. The stars lightened also paths people could not take.”

In giving the title “Theory” to this book, Lukàcs is cheating. This is not a theory, it's something else, a long essay, as personal and as true as any literary text may be. In the English translation, you wouldn't have guessed.

1In English: Georg Lukàcs: Theory of the Novel (transl. Anna Bostock) London (The Merlin Press) 1971, repr. 1988. Online: https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/georg-lukacs-the-theory-of-the-novel.pdf (15/4/2015).

2Some say it's a genuine Hungarian tradition. See: Reinhard Laube: Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus : Historismus als wissenssoziologischer Perspektivismus, Gòttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2004.

Basics

Being elementary

In English, the main auxiliary verbs (i. e. excluding modal verbs) are to be, to have, to do. In German, these become sein (to be), haben (to have) and werden (to become). This is only a small difference and so is the second one. The English to have, seen as full verb, seems to be weaker than the German haben. We say Ich habe ein Auto while in English we tend to add another verb: I have got a car. Two small differences?  They completely change the way philosophers write. English thinkers do not dispose of the same possibilities to be "down to earth" as Germans.

The first movement of Hegels Logik, in German, includes Sein, Nichts and Werden. Culminating in a very elementary, substantivated auxiliar verb: werden, the German original sounds much more evident than the English translation: Being, nothing and becoming – through being and nothing, only something elementary can arise, and to become doesn't seem to be nearly as elementary as werden.

Ernst Blochs starts his famous Tübingen Introduction to Philosophy with the sentences: “Ich bin. Aber ich habe mich nicht. Darum werden wir erst.” Three basic, auxiliar verbs maybe let the readers ignore the Philosopher's game: he passes from I to us without any explanation (he is Marxian). The three sentences read as an example of elementary grammar: sein, haben, werden. Consequently they give an impression of evidence which is only justified by German language. As an English translation we find: “I am. But I do not possess myself. That is why we are only coming to be.” The reader may reflect about this thought, but he will not agree immediatly.

German Philosophy gains part of its evidence and force by using particularities of German language; it does, in a certain sense, not exist outside its language.

Tra me e me: il Für sich nella “Logica” di Hegel

Il pensiero procede inarrestabile. I concetti emergono, sie ergeben sich, ed ecco il Fürsichsein: “Il concetto generale dell'essere per sé ci si è reso manifesto” (p. 162). Ma è giusta la parola? Hegel, a quanto pare, non si è inventato la parola, bensì l'ha trovata in giro: appunto Fürsichsein. Occorre mettere alla prova questo nome, dice.

“L'importante sarebbe soltanto dimostrare che a quel concetto corrisponde la rappresentazione, che noi colleghiamo all'espressione essere per sé”. Quello che va dimostrato qui è che un elemento del linguaggio comune abbia una base concettuale, ossia un suo diritto d'esistere. Ma che cosa significa il Fürsichsein comunemente? In italiano poco o niente.

Il für sich, secondo il dizionario dei fratelli Grimm, sarebbe nato come il contrario di hinter sich: corrispondente al vor sich oggi potremmo sentirlo in espressioni come ich ging so vor mich hin = “stavo camminando davanti a me”, cioè senza guardare dietro (né a destra né a sinistra), meditando. Forse da lì deriva il significato del Fürsichsein di oggi? Il Duden dà il nome come sinonimo di Alleinsein, ovvero essere/stare da soli. In tante espressioni è utilizzato il für sich: er steht da ganz für sich (= “sta lì tutto solo”) oppure da kann ich endlich für mich sein (= “là posso stare finalmente solo / in pace”). È ovvio come da questo “stare per sé”, nella solitudine in cui non si contempla altro che se stessi, sorga la riflessione, l'autocoscienza. “Diciamo infatti che qualcosa è per sé, in quanto esso toglie l'esser altro, la sua relazione e la sua comunanza con altro” (p. 162) scrive Hegel collegando il suo pensiero ad un'espressione comune del tedesco parlato, mentre in italiano il ragionamento resta incomprensibile: l'“essere per sé” qui non è altro che un termine tecnico, vagamente metaforico.

L'entusiasmo del filosofo per la propria lingua non si ferma qui. Nella nota seguente il pensatore esalta una seconda caratteristica del tedesco. Per chiedere “Che cos'è/che tipo di cosa è qualcosa?” in tedesco si formula (all'incirca) “quale una cosa è questo?” was für ein Ding ist das?. Ciò evidenzierebbe “il momento della riflessione-in-sé”, scrive il filosofo e sarebbe “di origine idealistica”, ovvero esprimerebbe la verità che una cosa (o un uomo) non è tale per un'altra (altro), ma per se stessa (stesso). Arturo Moni, il traduttore della Laterza taglia (p. 165): "All'inizio di questa nota l'A. faceva una osservazione intorno a una particolare locuzione tedesca (...) Non essendo cotesta locuzione di alcun uso per gl' italiani che ignorano il tedesco, ho creduto di poterla sopprimere." Bene. Chissà se il resto è d' “uso per gl'italiani che ignorano il tedesco”.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Logica, trad. da Arturo Moni e rev. da Claudia Cesa, Bari (Laterza) 1981, vol. I.

Hegel poeta

Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, dass jene von dieser widerlegt wird; 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.

Knospe – Blüte e Frucht – Blüte: solo di superficie si tratta di un parallelismo con ripetizione. Ci troviamo di fronte a un chiasmo: prima (la gemma) – dopo (il fiore), dopo (il frutto) – prima (il fiore). Stabile nel cambiamento, in questo oscillare, si dà l'immagine del tutto.

Ma questo chiasmo non è l'unico motivo per cui questa frase ci fa effetto. Guardando anche le vocali – il tedesco mediamente non ne è ricchissimo – nella prima parte emergono: o – e – i – e – o, più precisamente: ɔ – ə – ɪ – e – oː, un gioco di simmetria finta. Seguono ö e due forme di i: ɪ, iː. Infine nel punto più drammatico della frase u – u – ü nella vicinanza die Frucht die Blüte si ode il cambiamento non solo con l'opposizione u/ü. Anche durch die Frucht nasconde un effetto sonoro: ur/ru, variazione minima. Di fronte a questa serie di mezzi per indicare cambiamenti la fila di a nella scelta di parole per descrivere il processo cognitivo, quello limitato del Verstand, per intenderci, produce l'impressione di stabilità: falsches Dasein der Pflanze – Wahrheit.

Il traduttore nel seguente caso probabilmente non sarebbe d'accordo con tale interpretazione della frase hegeliana come poetica: sceglie senza tanti riguardi il gergo burocratico (“subentrare”) e giornalistico (“per così dire”) e ripete senza motivo le parole “frutto” e “fiore”.

“La gemma scompare quando sboccia il fiore, e si potrebbe dire che ne viene confutata; allo stesso modo, quando sorge il frutto, il fiore viene, per così dire, denunciata come una falsa esistenza della pianta, e il frutto subentra al posto del fiore come sua verità”. 

Der Geist geht in sich

Ricordo mio padre, seduto accanto a me, arrivare finalmente alla chiusura della sua predica: “Du solltest einmal in dich gehen!” Cioè? “Dovresti riflettere”, in italiano. “Riflettere” si dice anche nachdenken, in sich gehen invece è una metafora composta: il primo elemento è quello del “contenitore io” (ne parla Georges Lakoff in Metaphors we live by), mentre il secondo è “camminare” (gehen). Du solltest in dich gehen: “Dovresti entrare (a piedi) in te”. Per restare nell'immagine: c'è un interno dell'io. Questo dentro è buio, pieno di oggetti non immediatamente identificabili: motivi, pensieri, retropensieri, secondi motivi, desideri … che solo a colui che cautamente si addentra in questo spazio riveleranno la loro natura. In sich gehen: si tratta di un ripiegarsi in se stessi con lo scopo di esplorare un io non trasparente. È un'idea squisitamente pietista: Selbsterforschung.

Quando si cammina in sé, bisogna stare attenti che c'è tanto buio là dentro. L'utilizzo quotidiano dell' in sich gehen è presente in Hegel, quando scrive dello spirito: “in seinem Insichgehen ist er in der Nacht seines Selbstbewusstseins versunken”. Ma come dirlo in italiano? Vincenzo Cicero propone: “Nella sua introiezione, lo spirito è immerso nella notte della sua autocoscienza” (1063). Introiezione?

Viviamo in tempi tristi in cui per farsi comprendere si parla di proiezioni e di complessi, di introiezione e di rimozioni, cioè si utilizzano termini psicologici o psicoanalitici come se spiegassero qualcosa di rilevante. Cicero ad esempio traduce con “rimuovere” il tedesco aufheben. L'idea in sé è buona perché attinente al significato del tollere hegeliano: sia di cancellare sia di conservare, ma come termine specialistico qui forse non è fuori luogo? Dove si fonda tutta la scienza possibile non c'entra la psicologia. Comunque con la proposta di “introiezione” per in sich gehen si va in definitiva oltre il limite. Il cauto camminare dell'autoindagine sarebbe una -iezione? No.

Altre proposte? Enrico de Negri sceglie un verbo tutto suo: “Nel suo insearsi lo spirito è calato nella notte della sua autocoscienza” (304). Che dire? Il verbo “insearsi” non esiste, almeno il Devoto-Oli non lo registra. C'è da dubitare che “inseare” a qualcuno di quattordici anni possa risultare un verbo molto vivo che stimoli l'immaginifico. Non è in sich gehen, “insearsi”. È tanto strano e rende distante la filosofia tedesca. Forse è questa l'unica via percorribile quando si traduce Hegel in italiano.

G. W. F. Hegel: Fenomenologia dello spirito, trad. Enrico de Negri, Firenze (La nuova Italia) 1973.