Lost in translation

 Peter Gordon’s excellent book (Continental Divide) on the 1929 Davos encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger is an insightful and historically informed account of the complex interplay of issues that were brought to the table. The central hinge or fold of Gordon’s book is the full translation of and commentary to the encounter itself, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which was transcribed by students of both Cassirer and Heidegger (Otto Bollnow for Heidegger, and Joachim Ritter for Cassirer). A central fold of the encounter itself occurs, I would argue, when the Dutch linguist Hendrik J. Pos intervenes into the discussion and suggests that what separates Cassirer from Heidegger is that, as Pos puts it, “Both men speak a completely different language,” and moreover there are several terms in each of these distinct languages that he doubts can be translated into the other’s language. For Heidegger, he nominates the terms “Dasein, Being, the ontic,” and for Cassirer “the functional in spirit and the transformation of primordial space into one another.” (CD 189)

Heidegger’s response to Pos’s claims brings to light a number of interesting points about the nature of philosophical problems and the role of philosophical discussions and disputations in addressing such problems. I’ll just highlight some of the implications of these points as they relate to the analytic-continental divide (working off some of the nice points made in Jon's post).

1. For Heidegger, the problem of the meaning of Being (Seinsfrage) is not simply one problem among others that can be resolved through a proper clarification and/or translation of terms. The capacity to formulate terms at all – Dasein, Being, the ontic, etc. – already presupposes a stance with respect to the meaning of Being. The role of such terms is for Heidegger only properly understood relative to the Seinsfrage that serves as the terminus a quo for philosophy itself, and it is the “terminus a quo,” Heidegger argues, which is “my central problematic, the one I develop.” (CD 191)
2. Cassirer, by contrast, argues that we begin with certain conceptual formations and then proceed to a greater and greater embrace of details through ever broader and more encompassing conceptual formations. These expanding formations are made possible by the nonsubjective pure symbolic form, or what Cassirer will identify as the common "perspective of language itself," (CD 204) that allows for the possibility of resolving philosophical disputes. Cassirer thus lays greater stress on the terminus ad quem than the terminus a quo.
3. There is much more that can be said, and Heidegger and Cassirer do say much more, but as an aside I’d like to state the difference between Heidegger and Cassirer in the following Kuhnian terms: for Heidegger to address philosophical problems is always to take up a revolutionary task and its pronouncements for that reason resist translation into the terms of an established language (or paradigm to continue the Kuhnian line); for Cassirer philosophical problems are the bread and butter of normal science. Philosophical progress is attained when philosophers work together and seek to resolve disputes and problems.
4. If one accepts this Kuhnian distinction as drawing a difference in kind between normal science and revolutionary periods, then we can understand the work of continental philosophers as a series of oracular pronouncements which are at bottom revolutionary and hence cannot be translated into a common, everyday language. The subsequent task of the acolytes is to attempt a translation of the philosopher's terms into a more easily digestible format--an effort that is forever incomplete due to the revolutionary nature of the discourse. The acolytes thus serve a counter-revolutionary function.
5. Cassirer’s “normal science,” by contrast, is much more in line with the work of analytic philosophers, where rather than focusing on the task of translating oracular statements of a central figure, analytic philosophers instead work on shared problems, and through their cooperative efforts to address these problems as well as resolve disputes and other problems that arise along the way, they are able to gain a modicum of progress.
6. This all too common stereotype of how analytic and continental philosophers operate is wrong. Perhaps it follows from the seductive simplicity of the Kuhnian distinction between revolutionary and normal science (a distinction that is paralleled in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics when he draws the contrast between the extraordinary task of philosophy’s questioning of the meaning of Being and the ordinary questioning regarding beings).
7. Where does this view go wrong? I would argue that it is wrong to think of a philosophical problem as either always being capable of being fully expressed within a shared language (e.g., Cassirer’s nonsubjective "perspective of language itself," or set-theoretic language) or as that which is lost in translation and remains unexpressed, untranslated, and untranslatable within or between the “languages” (to recall Pos). On the latter view, philosophers develop the terms and concepts they use in their effort to address a philosophical problem, and yet this problem forever eludes being adequately expressed and translated. It is at this either/or where the wrong turn is taken.
8. A philosophical problem, rather, involves a both/and in that it always has two immanent tendencies. On the one hand there is the tendency of a philosophical problem to undo established efforts and concepts, and thus when a problem comes to be reformulated or further explicated, for example, it can transform established practices along with how the problem itself is conceived. Think of David Lewis’s modal realism as part of his effort to address problems in semantics and the incredulous stares he no doubt received when he first proposed it (see this post)—stares that are due, one can only assume, to the fact that it was difficult to translate his formulations into established terms and approaches. This is the revolutionary tendency of philosophical problems. At the same time, philosophical problems also have a tendency to settle into an equilibrium state with accepted positions and claims neatly staked out, and these positions, in turn, can be further clarified, supported, and expounded upon. This is the normal science tendency of philosophical problems. Heidegger and Cassirer were both sensitive to the dual tendencies of philosophical problems (which will have to wait for another post), but this is the case, I would wager, for most philosophers who work within both analytic and continental traditions.

I’ve gone on too long with this post as it is, but it should be noted that both Heidegger and Cassirer resisted Pos’s claim that what ultimately separated them was that they each spoke a different philosophical language. Such resistance makes sense given Heidegger and Cassirer’s awareness of the complex nature of philosophical problems.