[lit-ideas] Re: Reading Heidegger
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- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 18:33:20 +0100
One of the best things that I have read about Heidegger's 'obscurity' is the
following:
"Then again, there is the matter of Heidegger's famous 'obscurity', which would
seem to require that special comment be made upon him. A great deal of this
'obscurity' is a matter of translation, and disappears when Heidegger is read
in German. To be sure, his German is at times a very highly individualized
vehicle of expression: Heidegger does coin his own terms when he has to, and
usually these are coinings that stick very close to the etymological roots of
German. Heidegger thinks very much within the matrix of the German language,
and his expressions hugs the particularity of this language to its bosom. All
of this makes for difficulty in translation . . . . [I]f we compare Heidegger
with two classical German philosophers, like Kant or Hegel, his sentences are
remarkably compact and incisive, his expression notably terse. Very often, in
reading Hegel, we get the feeling . . . that the philosopher is deliberately
willing to be obscure. One never gets this impression from Heidegger: he is
struggling to communicate, and his command of his own means of communication is
powerful and impressive. The difficulty comes, rather, from the obscurity of
the matter with which Heidegger is grappling.
"That there are obscure matters at all in our experience is a contention that
rubs against the prejudice of some positivistic philosophers that whatever
cannot be said clearly and distinctly cannot be said at all and the effort to
say it can only result in 'meaningless' verbalism. Every philosopher, in this
view, ought to be able to express himself with the simple-minded clarity of,
say, Bertrand Russell. and if the philosopher does not do this, it is a clear
sign of intellectual incompetence. All this, of course, is oversimplified
psychologizing. A philosopher may be quite capable of mastering one or the
other of the clear and distinct dialects of philosophy and bouncing the ball of
dialectic deftly back and forth across the net; but he may be drawn by other
subject matters into following a quite different path in philosophy. From the
point of view of a philosopher like Heidegger there are parts of our experience
that ordinary language finds itself hard put to express, if it can express
these matters at all; indeed, this ordinary language seems to have been formed
out a kind of conspiracy to cover over or forget these parts of experience
altogether."
- William Barrett in his introduction to the 'Phenomenology and Existentialism'
section of William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, eds., _Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century: An Anthology_, (New York: Random House, 1962); Vol. 3, pp.
152-3.
I can attest to Barrett's claims about reading Heidegger 'in the original', and
indeed would go farther than he does. I do not claim that one cannot come to
some understanding of Heidegger's thought, or critique his views in interesting
and insightful ways, without reading him in German. But I will say
categorically and unequivocally: if you have not read Heidegger in German, you
have not read Heidegger.
- Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
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