Cologne, 6 August 1996
Paul Murphy, Tom Blancato and Joel Beck all pounced on my remark about German
being given to thinking, English apparently not so sehr because of its glibness.
The bemusedness on their part triggers in turn some on mine, especially Joel
Beck's introduction "Your posts are generally highly enlightening..."
Seems like I've put my foot in it, thinking out loud. The thing that separates
me from the "Baroque theologians of language" is that I am not German, nor are
my forebears German, and I only learned German as an adult. So I should be free
of suspicions of being Chauvinist. Nor am I enamoured of the Graecophilia rife
in German Romanticism and other currents up to the rise of Nazism celebrating a
direct link between Aryan Teutonism and classical Greece.
What I say about German being given to thinking cannot really be substantiated
because it is based on very personal experiences with the language on the
background of being a native speaker of English (a language I love, to be sure,
especially its richness). Nevertheless, I will try.
Funnily enough, there is something about the purity of German (now I hear Paul
Murphy laughing about words like "Windschutzscheibenwischer" for windscreen
wiper). But this very agglutinate character of the language has some decisive
advantages for thinking. German has relatively simple building blocks that are
put together in various ways, so that it maintains a certain transparency which
allows the roots to be seen and 'felt' at a glance. This makes it at the same
time a pretty ugly language. It's hard to be elegant in German, I find. What
could be elegant about a "Luftpostleichtbrief" (aerogram), for example? Because
the building blocks of German can be pushed around easily, it's also easy in
thinking to make up new combinations (e.g. Werstandskräfte: 'the powers of
standing as a who'!) without it looking like or being experienced as a heap of
neologisms that go 'too far'. There is a kind of liberty to twist the language
and even to be led on by the combinatorial possibilities of the building blocks
themselves.
Greek also has this potential for ugliness: e.g. "ontos on" 'the being that is
beingly', "ousia" formed by the substantiation of the present participle of the
verb 'to be', thus: 'beingness', "energeia" - 'in-work-ness'; "entelecheia" -
'in-end-having-ness'; "to ti en einai" - 'the what-it-was-being'. Who among you
is brave enough to use such words in your texts? You (native English speakers)
all write so elegantly...
An example of philosophizing in German: the analysis of vorstellendes Denken
(which is pretty untranslatable into English to start with: 'imaginative
thinking', 'subject-ive thinking', 'thinking that places before') proceeds from
a simple everyday German sentence: "Ich stelle mir etwas vor." - "I imagine
something." "Stellen" however means 'place'. The verb "vorstellen" here is also
reflexive: mir. "I place something in front of me." This simple everyday
sentence in German already provides the clue to how to think through what the
thinking of the subject is: a placing before oneself of something. English does
not provide any such inherent help. And any feeling for 'acceptable', 'good' or
'elegant' English prohibits the play with such contortions. Whereas in German it
is completely natural (in a philosophical context): one is not doing any
violence to an already 'ugly' language. It is as if the language itself thinks,
calls to thinking, offers itself to thinking, drawing the thinker in the play of
its possibilities.
This play of possibilities in English has an entirely different character: in
English you end up with James Joyce, i.e. incomparable pieces of literature.
Heidegger's entire thinking is grouped around certain German verbs 'stehen' and
'stellen' ('stand' and 'place'), especially the latter. There are literally
hundreds of combinations possible with these basic verbs and the simplicity
facilitates thinking in maintaining clarity about what is going on in a
text/line of thought.
The thinking of the Gestell (set-up, enframing) would be impossible in English
since the whole line of thinking hinges on collocations of "stellen" that cannot
be carried through in English.
In English, the roots (Latin, Greek, Germanic, what-have-you) do not speak of
themselves. You have to do several steps of etymological archaeology to unearth
the roots, which is very important when using a word in a context of thinking.
So English offers limitless possibilities of nuanced expression but doesn't
really 'think in itself', i.e. offer itself to thinking.
This becomes apparent in English translations of Heidegger. The editors of such
translations enforce certain standards of acceptable English which may be quite
bad thinking (cf. my ongoing campaign against "staendiges Anwesen" being
rendered as "constant presence" - and this is only one, albeit an important,
example). English resists ugliness. How often have you read the word "whatness"
in English philosophical texts? I wager very seldom. Instead you would read
something like "quidditas", "essence", "essentia". But in German "Wassein" is
completely acceptable in a philosophical text, not exotic at all.
This is what I implied with the reference to the glibness of English. It is a
wonderful language for being elegant and light and easy and witty, a wonderful
language for expression of the subject. An incomparable language for the essay.
But it is hard to work with this language in the underworld, arduously smithing
a new language of thinking.
I presume I have now put my foot in it even further. As I say, my championing of
German as a language for thinking is based on personal experience, having
written philosophically extensively in both English and German. For thinking in
English it seems to me important to be brave enough to write an ugly English, to
pull words apart to their roots and to reassemble them in line with what calls
for thinking.
Gute Nacht
Michael
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