More on Texts and Translations

A regular reader responds to  On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages: 

 

Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in---are there serious problems with some works?--- but the problem of working with translations becomes even more acute with classical texts like Cicero and Aristotle. Often the texts are in bad shape with extensive lacunae and obvious ancient editioral tampering. Restorations rely on ancient paraphrases in languages like Arabic or Syriac. Or the restorations are pure conjectures (the 19th century German scholars were very quick to restore).

 

All of this is concealed in a typical English translation. The Greekless young scholar thinks he is reading Aristotle, but perhaps only 80-90% of his text is well established. Crucial passages often turn out to be corrupt in big or small ways. The scholar who wishes to be able to say "Aristotle said..." instead of "W.D. Ross' translation says..." needs to be familiar with his text at the level of the so-called critical or variorum edition, where (hopefully) all the textual problems are owned up to and the scholar can make his own informed judgment about what the best text is.

 

 For this reason, college reading editions like the Loeb texts are not good enough, because they are not critical texts. Some editors do a better job than others in noting problems, but the Loeb Greek or Latin is once again often a heavily restored text. You need to work with the Teubners or the OCT's or special critical editions by individual scholars.

 

The truly dedicated scholar should in fact go one step further back and consult the MSS themselves. Often no one has taken a good critical look at the MSS in the years since some German did the original MSS work in the 19th century. The Germans made mistakes! And they restored and otherwise edited. The MS is not the same in many ways as their transcription. With the new optical technology, it is time and overtime for scholars to revisit the MSS and recover better texts. Where some competent scholar has just done this work, perhaps new MSS work is unnecessary, but where the critical text is 100+ years old, it is not reasonable to trust it.

 

If you are a young philosopher or classicist and reading this story does not excite and challenge you, if you are too unmotivated to master a language and its texts, then for God's sake don't pretend to be doing scholarship in the history of philosophy with a bunch of translations at hand. I'm preaching to the converted, right?

The author is surely right with regard to the difficulties of being a responsible scholar of the Graeco-Roman texts. Knowing the classical languages is not enough; text-critical questions loom as well.  But I would say he is exaggerating when it comes to the difficulties of understanding Kant from a translation like that of Norman Kemp Smith.  But much depends on what one's purpose is.  There is a huge difference between a scholar of philosophical texts and a philosopher, between an historian-exegete who occupies himself with the writings and thoughts of others and a philosopher who devotes himself to the world and its riddles.   I would maintain the following theses. (T1) Philosophy is not the history of philosophy; to call a mere historian of philosophical ideas a philosopher is a misuse of terms; (T2) Only a genuine philosopher can write illuminatingly on a past philosopher: unless one is a philosopher oneself, one who has thought hard and long and independently about the problems of philosophy, one is unlikely to say much that is illuminating about a past master. 

 

If you agree with the spirit of these two theses, and if your aim is to pursue philosophy itself as opposed to historical scholarship, then I recommend that you not spend an inordinate amount of time on foreign languages and the texts of the great philosophers.  You will never become a philosopher that way.  Spend time on them, by all means!  Learn what they have to teach and realize that one does not philosophize out of an historical vacuum.  But if your scholarship blocks your own creativity and hinders your independence of mind, then what's the use of it?

 

An anecdote may help convey my meaning.  It must have been in the early '80s.  A paper of mine on haecceities had been accepted for reading at a regular colloquium session of the A. P. A., Eastern Division.  The paper focused on Alvin Plantinga's theory of haecceity properties.  Although I had a good job, I was looking for something better and I had also secured an interview with Penn State at that same APA convention.  The late Joseph J. Kockelmans was one of the members of the Penn State philosophy department who interviewed me.  When he heard that the paper I was to read dealt with haecceities, he asked whether I would be discussing Duns Scotus.  I of course explained that there would be no time for that since I had twenty minutes and my paper dealt with ideas of Plantinga.  Kockelman's question displayed the typical bias of the Historical/Continental type of  scholar.  Such a person cannot understand how one might directly engage a contemporary question without dragging in the opinions of long dead thinkers.  They cannot understand how one could think for oneself, or how philosophy could be anything other than its history or the genuflecting befote texts or the worshipping at the shrine of Heidegger, say.

 

And then there was a colleague I once had.  He was a Leibniz man.  Interested as I am in metaphysics, I once brought up the Identity of Indiscernibles with him.  I asked him whether he accepted it.  His reply was of the form: in one place Leibniz says this, and in another place he says that, and according to commentator X . . . " But what do YOU think of the principle, Dan?"  Well, in the Discourse on Metaphysics Leibniz takes the view that . . . .  And so it went.  He was a scholar of philosophy, but no philosopher.

 

Examples are easily multiplied.