A Note or rather a Question Mark. Kierkegaard

The book title from 1844 could have been Romantic: “Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy”. But the English translation is misleading. The Dane is taking up the term so very dear to Schlegel and Novalis, but he does so in an ironic way: Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophi, “Philosophical crumbs”. Not fragments, rather pieces of them. That means: being ironic with who is ironic.

This may be considered strange, because Kierkegaard does never refer to the more philosophical writings of our German Romantiker, not to their Fragmente. At least in his doctoral thesis he only writes about Schlegel's Lucinde... not about philosophy, but about literature. 

Jean Paul Richter and incontinence

Jean Paul Richter always writes too much. The texts he publishes are a continuous overflow of images, sensations, ideas. This may be a reason why Jean Paul, very popular until about 1810, was nearly forgotten in Germany after his death in 1825. Not so in the rest of Europe.

Jean Paul deeply influenced Italian modernist Carlo Dossi, whom Italians do not care about, and the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, of whom Danes think he were a theologist. You do not need to be translated in order to be misunderstood.

Both the Dane and the Italian read Jean Paul, an author hard to understand for a native speaker, in German. Probably these men did not study our language at a German cultural institute.

Nowadays studying German beyond the Bratwurst and Heidi Klums seems to be unzumutbar. That is the reason we have translations even of Jean Paul´s most particular work, the Vorschule der Ästhetik. In English this “preschool” becomes a “school”. I understand, you want to avoid indirect routes. But what if this being indirect was part of Jean Paul´s game? Who cares! Here Jean Paul talks about aesthetics, that is philosophy, a field where only the contents counts. But the publishers add two new elements to the title. “Jean Paul Richter´s School of Aesthetics”, okay, like XY´s tomato soup, and “Horn of Oberon”. The modest “preschool of aesthetics”, transformed into “Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter´s School of Aesthetics”. Find the difference. Or, rather imagine the consequences: “What are you reading?” – “Horn of ...”. 

But in the translation of the text, normalization rules. This is Jean Paul without Jean Paul. 

Unless he writes plain sentences, everything moves smoothly.

Der Verstand und die Objekten-Welt kennen nur Endlichkeit.

"The understanding and the object-world know only finitude”. Ja. 

Hier finden wir nur jenen unendlichen Kontrast zwischen den Ideen (der Vernunft) und der ganzen Endlichkeit selber.

"In the romantic we find only the infinite contrast between the ideas (or reason) and all finitude itself”.

Clearer for the reader, not hurting anybody, “in the romantic” instead of “here”.

Now, Jean Paul soars into the air: 

Wie aber, wenn man eben diese Endlichkeit als subjektiven Kontrast jetzo der Idee (Unendlichkeit) als objektivem unterschöbe und liehe und statt des Erhabenen als eines angewandten Unendlichen jetzo ein auf das Unendliche angewandte Endliche, also bloß Unendlichkeit des Kontrastes gebäre, d.h. eine negative? Dann hätten wir den Humor oder das romantische Komische.

"But suppose just this finitude were imputed as subjective contrast to the idea as objective contrast, and instead of the sublime as an applied infinity, now produced a finitude applied to the infinite, and thus simply infinity of contrast, that is a negative infinity. Then we should have humour or the romantic comic”.

Well, the rhetorical question is transformed. Fine. But what happened to the verbs unterschöbe und liehe? “were imputed”? Jemandem etwas unterschieben (simple infinitive instead of the hypothetical form used by Jean Paul), for example a murder, means “to pin a murder on somebody”. This is not a simple imputation. We could call it irony, but only in the German version.

carpe diem

"Google translate" works with databases. The quality of the translation depends on the dimension and the kind of the databases used. In Italian, for example, these seem to be quite small. Film titles may interfere with the translation. If you try attimo all alone, you will correctly get "moment", but fuggente ("fleeing") google produces "poets society".  At this point, attimo should be "dead". Attimo fuggente being the Italian title of the American film. 

The same thing does occur with the complete title Paradiso amaro ("The Descendants"), but, unfortunately, not with its parts. For the sake of poetry and mutual misunderstanding, this would have been marvellous. 

It is not the strangeness of word combination (attimo fuggente or mosto selvatico are both uncommon) that determines this differences, but the literate nature of the word fuggente. It usually is part of a translation from Latin. If somebody had not attended a Liceo (a school definitely harder then the German Gymnasium), he will rather not use it.

Just be aware of this inclination towards certain cultural standards.

Reflecting about yourself? Try with Rilke

There have been quite a lot of those who our universities nowadays present in courses as “Great thinkers II” who have produced beautiful writings, at least sentences the reader will remember because of their strange sound. Try young Hegel or Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, try young Adorno or Heidegger. There you will find an unusual attention to the choice of words and to the composition of the whole.

Philosophers take a certain distance to our everyday language, without entering the fenced fields of academic language (Peer reviewed!). They write in their own way. They necessarily do so. “Our language is full of traps” (Max Stirner). The more you believe to speak straight forward, the more you are risking to fall: not to get out of the limits of everyday understanding.

Some of these thought traps have been analyzed by Lakoff and Johnson. In order to express our pure thoughts, we use metaphors, we relate to images. An example: When we talk about ourselves as intelligent beings, as minds, we often use the metaphor of the container. Something is outside but then: “something comes into my mind”. Or viceversa, a common trap for philosophers at work, something (very precious?) is inside, but: “I cannot put my ideas into words”.

If we want to avoid these traps, we need to fight our common tendency of using prefabricated images. Poets often do this, and philosophers have good reasons for joining them. Get poetic, hesitate with each single word. And, read poems. The world and you, both may be rewritten.

Consider a poem from the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke:

Am Rande der Nacht

Meine Stube und diese Weite, / wach über nachbetendem Land, – 
ist Eines. Ich bin eine Saite, / über rauschende breite
Resonanzen gespannt.

Die Dinge sind Geigenleiber / von murrendem Dunkel voll;

In English this is translated:

“On the edge of the night
My room and this vastness, / awake over parroting land, – 
are one. I am a string, / strung over rustling wide
resonances.
The things are violin bodies, / full of grumbling dark”

Yes, the one speaking here presents himself as a string, a chord, and things (not “the outside world”, as there is no “inside”) as violins which wait for the string to move: things desire to be sung. But seemingly there is already some noise around. “The land” the poem says, is “parroting”. “Parroting” what? In German, we read “nachbetendem Land”. It is true, that if you look up the word “nachbeten” (“-ndem” are just endings for present participle and Dative) with one of the internet dictionaries that rule our word (I have tried the first five ones I have found) you get “to repeat”, “to parrot” and even “to regurgitate”. Try to use these translations in this poem: none of them makes sense here.

There are still other means of language exploration. Without knowing anything about German grammar, you could avoid dictionaries and move directly to Google translator. As a translation of “nachbetendem”, there we get “worship”. Obviously, “over worship land” is not an acceptable translation of a poetic text. But the idea is there. At least, we get no parroting, no noise. We get something strange. We might suppose the poet has chosen the word nachbetendem carefully. A poet does not use language, as psychologists use to say, in order to express himself. He is working within language, maybe struggling in order to avoid the traps.

If you know some German, maybe you could try to split the word 

nachbetendem up: nach, beten and the Grammar ending -ndem. Nach gives “after”, beten “pray”, and the Grammar ending is done with “ing”. Construct “after-praying”, and that is what the poem in German says. At night, the land would be after-praying because, for example, the original prayer has been spoken during the day, or maybe the poet refers to earlier music produced by him, the chord. And then he starts singing again.

Nachbeten, originally meant as repeating a prayer, in today's German has become a synonym of “repeat without understanding”. Our Internet dictionaries stick to the most recent, the most common usage. If you stick to them, you will not understand what poets, and philosophers have done when they struggled with language. And struggle it is.

https://sites.google.com/site/rilkefiles/home/am-rande-der-nacht---on-the-edge-of-the-night

About the poem: Peter Fuchs: System als Metapher, Weierswil: Velbrück 2001. 

Hölderlin? Read it with Google translator

Hölderlin was both a poet and a philosopher as well as Schelling's and Hegel's best 
friend during their College days. And if there is a perceivable difference between Hegel's 
"Phenomenology" (1807) and his later “Logic” (1812/1816), this may be partially due to 
the lasting influence of the greater poet who, in the meantime, had been declared crazy 
and closed away in a famous tower at Tübingen that you can (and should) still visit today.

Hölderlin, though half forgotten for decades, was an inspirational writer for man
philosophers in the late 19th (Nietzsche) and the 20th century. 
Heidegger pretended to be his true reader.

Hölderlin's so-called river poems may be understood philosophically as the representation
of a philosophy of history and of beauty. The poem “Der Ister” has been interpreted by the
philosopher from the Black Forest in a famous essay. 

For a reader who does not know the German language, it might be difficult to 
understand the greatness of Hölderlin's works. Translators tend to normalize the 
language into which they translate.
This happens not only with philosophical texts (usually translated by newly 
graduated students afraid of writing "strange things”), but with poetry as well. “The Ister” 
is a good example of this inclination. 

You could try yourself! With a dictionary and a grammar book at hand, you could probably 
understand the opening verse on your own: “Jetzt komme, Feuer!” 

Yes, komme is the imperative of kommen, to come. The narrator is talking to the fire. 
Whether he means the sun (dawn) or Greek divinity or both, is not clear. If we take a look at 
an important translation in English, we read instead: “Now is the time for fire!” obviously, 
the strangeness of talking directly to the fire – or a God! – has been eliminated. In this 
English version, someone is shouting out, we don't know to whom.
The second and the third verse in this translation are instead condensed in one: “Begierig 
sind wir, / Zu schauen den Tag” becomes “Impatient for the daylight”. At this point it may not
seem too strange if we tried to make Google Translator do the job. For the first three verses 
we get: “Now come, fire! / We are eager, / To look the day”. Much better. 

Going on with this Internet experiment, for the next verses we obtain: “And if the test / Has
gone through the knees, / One can feel the forest cries“. Does it sound weird? Yes, but it does 
so in German as well: “Und wenn die Prüfung / Ist durch die Knie gegangen, / Mag einer 
spüren das Waldgeschrei.” Doubt will arise at the word “test”, which is out of place stylistically. 
We could try an Internet dictionary for the translation of “Prüfung”. Among others, this will 
give “trial” (from God, for example). “And if the trial / has gone through the knees”: we could
imagine something horrible that weakens our knees, that makes them tremble. And that is 
exactly what the poet's German words evoke. The published translation instead gives: “We’re
on our knees”. Again, this sounds reasonable, but it's not what the poem says. 
The authors go on: “It’s then, in that silence, / We hear the woods’ strange call”. No. In the 
German original, nobody talked about silence. And the Waldgeschrei are just cries from the
(or of the) forest. If we imagine sunrise, the poet is probably talking about the noises the 
animals make in the woods early in the morning. He certainly does not say “strange”, though 
he does indeed use a strange word, as if the woods were shouting or crying. 
Translators transform. These ones do it in a harmful way. By additions like “in that silence”
the translators transform poetry into prose, and with “strange” they seemingly want to explain
how the poem is written. So reflective prose, rather than poetry, is what we get. Try Google 
Translator. When you notice something strange, use an extra dictionary. 
Never trust translators. 

(Two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” Translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover
http://jacketmagazine.com/27/hold-trans-2.html or http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-ister/comments/)

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”. 

Zweckrational?

In our wonderful German language, we may spontaneously form compounds of all kinds. We may walk around traumverloren or, for philosophers, even better: gedankenverloren. For the English translation you must choose between “absentmindedly” (but absent where? In dreams or in thoughts?) or “lost in dreams”, “lost in thoughts”.

Our actions may be zweckrational, as Weber believed: "rational regarding a purpose", you will have to translate. The noun, then, would be Zweckrationalität: rationality of purpose. Some suggest “instrumental rationality” – but this would presuppose critical thoughts expressed by Lukàcs and the Franfurt School after Weber's death: it's a bad translation.

In Weber's eyes, or words, this rationality of purpose was the dominating kind of rationality in today's Western world. He thought even the omnipresent bureaucracy could be described as zweckrational. Today we don't believe this to be true. To be zweckrational you need to be able to choose freely between the means you can employ in order to achieve your purpose. Once you have a bureaucratic organization with its directorates and departments and offices, you cannot do this; rather, you have to choose between the options provided by your organization. Well, it took us 40 years before Niklas Luhmann pointed out Weber's faulty re-use of a word applying to the behavior of individuals for organizations.

Maybe in English this would not have happened? Is Zweckrationalität “rationality of purpose” - or "of purposes”? One or many? Would this expression - ambiguous and cumbersome - have become the central metaphor of certain sociological and philosophical schools for describing modern society? In any case, we could be considered sprachverloren.