Some few comments on Paul M, Tom B., Joel B. and Michael Eldred,
my mother tongue is Spanish. I studied Philosophy (as a Jesuit priest
student) several years in (Chile and) Argentina and I live since 25 years in
Germany (where I made my Ph D in Philosophy at Univ. of Duesseldorf on the
concept of information, and my Teaching Qualification/Habilitation on
Hermeutics and Information (based on ideas from Heidegger, M. Boss and
Hannah Arendt). Of course it is now easier for me to think
(philosophically) in German than in Spanish but my basic contacts with
Heidegger were mediated through Spanish. Spanish is very near to Latin and I
love Latin as a philosophical language because of its simplicity. I would
compare Latin with English in this regard. I like following these discussion
on Heidegger in English because it is in some way refreshing, like
discovering another Heidegger (not only the topics but also the language),
sometimes it is like Coca Cola Light, it is not the real stuff (Heidegger
Light)! This is also something I learned when I translated Gianni Vattimo
(one of Italy"s postmodern thinkers, who studied with Gadamer and translated
also Heidegger into Italian, he teaches Hermeneutics in Turin) "The End of
Modernity". Vattimo is also an expert on Nietzsche. So it was a pleasure to
rediscover Nietzsche and Heidegger in Italian and to re-translate them into
German. Vattimo ' en-lightened' them (well: do you understand what I mean?
can I say this in English? I mean, he made them more light, less heavy, and
therefore he brought something like an Enlightment... on them) May be we
should discuss the question of languages like talking about more or less
appropriate instruments (nothing to do with nationality, chauvinism etc.
also in my case: no arian blood, ' just' Italian, french-bask, spanish). I
learned the possibilities of German (and Greek) as I was studying with the
Jesuits and I was fascinated by Karl Rahner... But I was also fascinated by
the souplesse of French. I feel at home in Italian and in French (and now,
of course, in German), but not in English. This has may be something to do
with moods (Stimmungen) and with Being... But I enjoy the concisness (is
this the right word?) of English and the way you talk to each other (very
often and direct...). Building blocks in German is indeed, as Michael Eldred
remarks, a wonderful possibility for philosophical thinking. But we should
not forget, that Hegel trans-lated most of his thinking from Latin into
German (this is probably why his style is awful!), Leibniz wrote in French
(French was t h e philosophical language in the 17th century) and also
translated from Latin (see also his School, particularly Wolff). English is
now the lingua franca for intellectuals and scientists. There are no neutral
media. When we think and write in English we are talking the language of
Wordsworth, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Yeats, and McDonalds! Kant read Hume and
Locke and he criticized the ' high' style... But I think there is finally no
possibility of separating language from thought and we are always, as Rahner
would say, Hoerer des Wortes. But words are always incarnate and we have no
possibility of forgetting them when we are thinking without loosing
something, namely the medium... This is the weak side of neutral arguments
such as Kant (who said, no one would made bookkeeping in verse!) or, for
instance, Popper (who is, in another way, very pathetic about simplicity and
easiness etc. give the impression, he has t h e right philosophical style,
in English!, and thinkers such as Hegel or Heidegger are just mystifications
of language etc.). Well, there are different kind of purism, isn' t it?
Philosophy is not a question of intellectual bookkeeping and it is not, as
in the case of metaphysics, a question of ' high' or prophetic style - it is
in-between, a ridge walk or a tight-rope walk (is there any difference
between this two words in English? I found them in my German-English
Dictionary, in German I would say: Philosophieren ist eine Gratwanderung
zwischen Schaermerei und Buchhaltung des Geistes
Cheers
Rafael
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