Kant for Kids (Notes on a Survivor)

Posted on June 4, 2013 by

Tracing the reception of Kant’s phrase “selbstverschudeten Unmündigkeit” (“self-incurred immaturity” is the current consensus on how to translate it), I stumbled on one of those things that reminds us about the books, and the worlds, we have lost:Teutonia Title Page

This peculiar book, swept up into Google’s scanners during their sweep through the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, is a survivor from a vanished world: a world in which a title like Teutonia could be attached, without irony or aggression, to a book that was edited by two Jewish pedagogues and intended for the education of “German boys and girls” .

Assembled by the rabbi, translator, and writer  Gotthold Salomon (1784-1862) and the teacher and writer Maimon Fraenkel (1788-1848), it consisted, as announced on its title page, of selections of passages from the works of the “most excellent” German writers. The short extracts are organized topically and the table of contents gives a hint of the ambitions of the collection:

  1. God. Providence.
  2. The Knowledge of the World and of Man
  3. The Destiny of Man
  4. Religion
  5. Freedom
  6. Virtue. Vice.
  7. Death. Immortality.
  8. Belief and Hope
  9. Reason and Truth
  10. Nature and Art
  11. Beauty. Taste.
  12. Love. Marriage.
  13. Friendship
  14. Women (Weibliches Geschlecht)
  15. Fortune and Misfortune
  16. Education and Culture
  17. Worldly Wisdom (Lebensweisheit)

The seventh item in the section dealing with  “Reason and Truth” assembles a few passages from Kant, the last of which consists of the entire first paragraph of Kant’s essay on the question “What is enlightenment?”

Teutonia

Here, then, is one of the places where boys and girls from Jewish families, immersing themselves in what their families regarded as the culture to which they belonged, would have encountered Kant’s words.

It’s hard to look at things like this without thinking about all that was to follow. It’s also hard to look at the frontispiece of the collection without thinking about what history does to relics like this.

Teutonia Front

Adorno famously wrote that Mahler turned “cliché” into “event.” Looking at this frontispiece I couldn’t help thinking about the way in which history turns kitsch into monuments.

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Translating Kant on Enlightenment: Two Nineteenth-Century Translations

Posted on June 2, 2013 by

As sketched last week, my plan had been to consider nine different translations of Kant’s essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and see how the translation of the crucial terms in essay’s opening sentence changed over the last two centuries. There was, however, a rather large gap between the first translation on my list (John Richardon, 1798-1799) and the second (Carl Friedrich, 1949). Since this gap spans the period that interests me the most, it occurred to me that I should try to fill it by looking beyond complete translations of Kant’s essay and seeing how the first sentence was translated when it was quoted in books written between 1800 and 1949.

This would simple enough to do: assuming that anyone who goes to the trouble of quoting the opening sentence of Kant’s essay will probably, at some point in their discussion, also quote Horace’s motto Sapere Aude!, I figured it would be enough to go to Google Books and search for books appearing during this period that contained the phrase “sapere aude” along with the word “Kant.” The results were not quite what I expected:  there turned out to be fewer works quoting Kant’s essay than suspected. This might be (1) testimony to the relative neglect of Kant’s essay during the nineteenth century or (2) the result of failings in my search strategy (e.g., people cited the opening sentence but typically didn’t cite the Horace quote) or (3) simply an artifact of peculiarities in Google’s scanning or metadata. But, on a happier note, I did turn up a translation of Kant’s essay that I’d forgotten about, along with one summary of the opening paragraph that is extensive enough to merit its inclusion on my list of translations.

The Revised List

Here, then, is my revised list, which incorporates two new translations (see items 2 and 3) of the first sentence (as before, if you know of any other examples, please let me know). I will discuss other partial translations and summaries in subsequent posts:

  1. Enlightening is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
  2. A man is enlightened when he emerges from a state of self-imposed pupilage. Sarah Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (New York: Appleton, 1841)
  3. “Free Thought,” says Kant, “is the advance of man beyond the state of voluntary immaturity.” Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant translated under the author’s supervision by J. Frederick Smith (London: MacMillan & Co. 1890)
  4. Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Carl Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant, (New York: Modern Library, 1949)
  5. Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
  6. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. H. B. Nisbet in H. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
  7. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Ted Humphrey in Kant,Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983)
  8. Enlightenment is our release from our self-imposed dependence. Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson, in Kant, Foundations of Ethics (Millis MA: Agora Publications 1995)
  9. Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
  10. Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his state of self-incurred minority. Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  11. Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity. David Colclasure and Pauline Kleingeld, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Yale 2006)

So, I suppose we should get acquainted with our two new entries.

Sarah Austin’s Fragments

Somewhere in my earlier research I’d come across Austin’s translation and, indeed, thought that I’d written about it somewhere or other. But a search of my computer turned up nothing, so let me make amends immediately: Austin’s translation is just as significant as Richardson’s and every bit as strange. I’ll have more to say about her rendering of Unmündigkeit as “pupilage” in a later post (it seems to have influenced a few later commentators), but for now it will be enough to talk about the woman herself.

475px-Sarah-austin

Sarah Austin

As the Wikipedia (which draws on the entries on her in the Dictionary of National Biography and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article on her) informs us, she was one of the Norwich Taylors (Norwich turns out, as my brilliant colleague Arianne Chernock has shown, to have been a rather lively place, with a significant role in the history of women’s rights). Sarah Austin (1793-1867) was the youngest child of John Taylor, yarn maker, Unitarian, and contributor to the Norwich Cabinet, a radical political journal. She was one of six children and her family was closely connected to such important figures as Henry Crabb Robinson (who played a significant role in acquainting the English with German literature) and the jurist James Mackintosh (the author of Vindiciæ Gallicæ, one of the more important responses to Burke’s Reflections). Sarah seems to have been exceptionally well-educated in languages (she is said to have been “conversant in Latin, French, German and Italian”) and went on to marry the jurist and philosopher John Austin (1790-1859). They settled in Westminster and their circle of friends included John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.

There is much here that needs to be digested, but for now it may suffice to say that it is possible that Austin’s translation was the most important source for what a number of significant British thinkers knew about German literature in general and Kant’s discussion of the Enlightenment in particular (is there anybody doing any work on her?). It would be good to know more than I do about the publishing history of Richardson’s Kant collection and Austin’s collection of German texts (perhaps a quick visit to WorldCat would tell us something?), but it’s possible that it was hers was the translation of Kant’s essay that was being read for much of the nineteenth century.

J. Frederick Smith’s translation of Pfleiderer’s Development of Theology

The other example that I’ve added to the list is J. Frederick Smith’s translation of Otto Pfleiderer’s Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant (1890), a text that I hadn’t seen before. It might be worth reproducing the entire paragraph where Pfleiderer quotes Kant:

“Free Thought,” says Kant, “is the advance of man beyond the state of voluntary immaturity. By immaturity is meant, inability to use his own understanding except under the guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary when the cause of it is not want of intelligence, but of resolution and courage to use it without another’s guidance Sapere aude! Dare to use thy own understanding! is therefore the motto of Free Thought.”

What we have here is a translation of the entirety of the opening paragraph of Kant’s article that follows neither of the previous translations and, as should be immediately apparent, has a novel way of translating the word “Aufklärung.”

Here’s what the Rev. James Wood had to say about Pfleiderer in the Nuthall Encyclopedia (1907) — which appears to be the Wikipedia’s source:

a philosophical theologian, born in Würtemberg, professor at Jena, and afterwards at Berlin; has written on religion, the philosophy of it and sundry developments of it, in an able manner, as well as lectured on it in Edinburgh in connection with the Gifford trust, on which occasion he was bold enough to overstep the limits respected by previous lecturers between natural and revealed religion, to the inclusion of the latter within his range.

Beyond this, I know nothing about Pfleiderer, but quite a bit of his work seems to have been translated during the nineteenth century (which probably has something to do with his having given a Gifford lecture), including an 1899 article in the American Journal of Theology. It also discusses the passage from Kant.

At the end of the last century Kant called his age the age of enlightenment, in the sense that men then began to pass from their self-imposed tutelage and resolved to use their own reason: “Sapere aude!” Dare to use your own mind!” This “motto of the age of enlightenment” has come to be the program for all the movements of our century in science, morality, law and politics.1

The translator of the article in the AJT is uncredited, but the handling of Aufklärung as “age of enlightenment” differs markedly from the way it is treated by J. Frederick Smith in his translation of The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant. Smith had also been the translator of Pfleiderer’s 1885 Hibbert Lectures, so the claim that the translation of his 1890 book was done “under the supervision of” Pfleiderer may be worth taken more seriously than I was inclined to. Google serves up lots of J. Frederick Smiths, not all of them translators and, as far as I can tell, WorldCat doesn’t have a specific field of searching the names of translators (yet more evidence of the scandalous disregard in which the practitioners of this essential and demanding art are held). So, there’s not a lot more to say about him.

Except (if I may steal a trick from Steve Jobs), there’s one more thing.

Footnote Confessions

Both Austin and Smith inserted footnotes at the start of their translations in which they reflect on the peculiarities of the German word Aufklärung. These humble footnotes are, at least for the work that I’m trying to do, priceless: they provide us with the best evidence we have of the problems translators are having in making one language mesh with another. As a rule, good translators avoid doing this: if a translation is running properly, there’s no need to remind the reader of how many compromises are necessary in order to create the illusion that languages go into each other without any friction. From the little I’ve read of her work, Austin strikes me as an accomplished translator (I should stress that I’m not) and Smith, if we are to believe the title page, had that rarest of resources: an author who is willing to help. It’s significant, then, they found it necessary to explain their problems in finding an adequate English translation of Aufklärung.

Let’s work backwards. Here’s what Smith (perhaps aided by Pfleiderer) had to say about Aufklärung:

Any translation of this terminus technicus may mislead. From Kant’s authoritative definition of the thing, it appears that our English “Free-thinking” substantially represents it.

There is much here to ponder but, for now, it may be enough to note three points:

  1. To characterize Aufklärung as a terminus technicus suggests that this is a word that has ceased to be something with which English readers need trouble themselves: it’s not a part of everyday discourse, it’s not something that is in wide usage, it’s not even a controversial term. It’s the argot of a particular craft, in this case, theology.
  2. Thanks to Kant, who has provided the “authoritative definition of the thing,” we are no longer misled by what the term means: there’s an English equivalent available.
  3. The English equivalent is a term that reaches back into the early eighteenth century: “Free-thinking” (thank you, Anthony Collins!).

A half century earlier, Austin was considerably less at ease with what she found herself forced to do:

It is impossible, without greater deviation from the original than I feel myself justified in making, to avoid the use of this very awkward word, which is the exact translation of Aufklärung. A more significant title would be, “A plea for the liberty of philosophizing.”

What for Smith would become a terminus technicus that could easily be translated with an English term coined at the start of the eighteenth century was, for Austin, a “very awkward word.” Why “awkward”? Perhaps because, in her circle, the convention — which James Hutchison Stirling turned into something approaching a conviction — was to leave the German term untranslated? In any case, though the word was awkward, she found a solution.

Richardson began his translation of the sentence: “Enlightening is man’s emergence….” Austin shifted from the active to the passive voice and moved the collective to the singular: “A man is enlightened when ….” At the risk of making too much of her footnote, it seems as if she was not particularly pleased with this solution.  I think she was right to displeased.

For Kant Aufklärung was a process in which individuals were engaged;  in Austin’s translation it would seem that Kant was concerned with describing a state at which individuals have arrived:  that of having attained “enlightenment.”  This may help to explain why she found it necessary to translate Ausgang as “emerges” rather than “departure” or “exit” (her rendering of Unmündigkeit as “pupilage” may follow from this, but I’ll get to that in a subsequent post). Would it be too much to suggest that her handling of the opening sentence — indeed, her choice of how to translate the opening word of the sentence — forces her into a set of moves from which it will be hard for her translation to recover?

Having translated what she took to be an awkward term rather awkwardly, her footnote explained that to do anything else would require liberties with the text that she was unwilling to take. And then she offered a title that does a rather good job of suggesting what Kant was offering: “A plea for the liberty of philosophizing.”  Her footnote partly compensates for what she has done in her translation of the opening sentence and also reminds the reader of an even earlier thinker who was engaged in the same activity in which she takes Kant to have been engaged.  Where Smith sent his readers back to  Collins, Austin sent them back to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

  1. Otto Pfleiderer, “Religionless Morality,” The American Journal of Theology, Volume 3:2 (1899). ↩
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Wieseltier on the Barricades

Posted on May 30, 2013 by

As an aspiring curmudgeon (and damn, it takes a lot of effort), I’d like to like Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement address — I mean, it’s really cranky and curmudgeony.  But there are some things that even a would-be curmudgeon can’t pull off.

I’d have remained blissfully ignorant of the advice that Mr. Wieseltier was giving to the graduates of Brandeis were it not for the fact that an historian whose work I respect had kind things to say about the following lines:

If Proust was a neuroscientist, then you have no urgent need of neuroscience, because you have Proust. If Jane Austen was a game theorist, then you have no reason to defect to game theory, because you have Austen.

I’m not inclined to be kind.  It strikes me that this just doesn’t make sense:  were Proust a neuroscientist, then it would seem that admirers of Proust should  be interested in learning more about neuroscience.  The same goes for the business about  Jane Austen:  were she, in fact, engaged in game theory (everybody please note the conditionals here, OK?) and if her work seems appealing, then it might be worth reading a few other game theorists.  (Let us pause for a moment to note how effortlessly Wieseltier slips the verb “defects”  into the second sentence,  as if to suggest that intellectual interests were like political commitments from which one dare not stray:  for him, as for the younger Bush, one is with us or against us).  Sometime around 1700 Europeans discovered that, rather than reading one book (e.g.,  the Good one), over and over again, there was something to be gained by reading a lot of them.  This suggests that though the addressees of Wieseltier’s philippic may “have” their Proust, there’s nothing to stop them from acquiring a few other books as well.  Or from spending some time in a lab.

Much of the heavy lifting in Wieseltier’s address (not that there’s a lot of heavy lifting here:  after all, it’s a commencement address) rests with his juxtaposition of  “science” and “scientism.”  In brief:  science is “a blessing” because it knows its place, while scientism is “a curse” because it doesn’t.  To clarify: scientism “gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions” and, of course, we know which are which because we’re humanists and, hence, can speak with confidence about everything’s and everybody’s place.

Reading the speech reminded me why I’ve come to find a certain breed of literary humanists increasingly creepy: in their world Western civilization is always under siege and the barbarians — armed with gadgets that glow in the dark — are never far from the gates.  Since I’ve been known to advise my students that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take notes on computers (even, horror of horrors, in lectures)  and  (heaven forbid) have actually found the Google Ngram viewer to be moderately useful in making sense of how various nineteenth-century “humanists” attacked the Enlightenment, I know on which side of the gate I belong.  This, I suppose, makes me a scientist: after all, I know my place.

Finally there’s this:

Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness — and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.

I suppose I should be impressed that these two sentences manage to give a shout out to Max Horkheimer (“instrumental reason”!), to praise the ancients (always a smart move), to let us know what the “proper subjects” of our thought ought to be (John Wilkes prided himself on having  “no small vices,” and we, it seems, should take pride in having “no small thoughts”), and to dismiss “modern American philosophy” (would it be impolite to ask the speaker just which modern American philosophers he has in mind or —  better still —  request that he name five “modern American philosophers”?).

But I’m not impressed, just depressed.  If this is what passes for a defense of the humanities, things are even worse than I thought.  But maybe there’s some comfort in that:  it means that I’m making some progress with this curmudgeon thing.

Humanists of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your iPads!

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The Words We Have Lost: Translating Kant on Enlightenment

Posted on May 28, 2013 by

KantBMWhat might have been the most famous words ever written about the Enlightenment go like this: “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.”  The problem, however, is that the author of these words — Immanuel Kant (of course!) — wasn’t trying to answer a question about a period in history (i.e., “what is the Enlightenment?”) but was instead trying to clarify what was involved in the process or activity known as Aufklärung. This has become a particular hobby horse of mine. It strikes me that, the moment we start to think that Kant was engaged in an effort to define what “the Enlightenment” was all about, we lose track of what was going on in 1784 and what happened over the course of the next couple of centuries.

For Kant and his contemporaries, “enlightenment” denoted a set of projects and practices. By 1784 there was considerable confusion as to what counted and what didn’t count as a contribution to the “enlightenment of the citizenry.” Hence the question that Kant, along with many others, was attempting to answer in the flood of articles on the question that filled German periods over the next few years. To assume that these articles were an attempt to capture central features of a particular historical period prevents us from understanding just how confused people might have been around 1784 about what was and what wasn’t “enlightenment” and how long it took for these confusions to be replaced by a new set of confusions: disputes about what the historical period now known as “the Enlightenment” was all about. I think these two sets of confusions are related, but I’d like to keep them separate, if only to prevent yet more confusion. In looking at what Kant and his contemporaries were doing, I think it is essential that we realize that it is not the job of historians to resolve other peoples’ confusions — this is what philosophers do, when they’re not helping flies out of fly bottles. There’s nothing wrong with this (though I’d prefer that the flies stay in the fly bottles), but even those who are concerned with trying to resolve past confusions need to get clear on just what it was that earlier thinkers were confused about.

Putting Kant into English

It was in this spirit that, a couple of decades ago, I edited a collection of translations of a few of the German discussions of the question “What is enlightenment?” along with some later discussions of the controversy from the 1780s and subsequent attempts to answer Kant’s question. There were, after all, a lot of responses to the question besides Kant’s and it seemed to me that some of them — notably Moses Mendelssohn’s — were interesting in their own right. Others were useful in clarifying what seemed to be at stake in the debate and helped to understand Kant’s particular concerns (e.g., I think it helps to know that a fair amount of ink was being spilled at this point about issues involving the freedom of the press). My one regret is that I didn’t include the two essays from the Berlinische Monatsschift that prompted the question to what which Mendelssohn and Kant responded: Johann Erich Biester’s article questioning whether clergy were required at wedding ceremonies and Johann Friedrich Zöllner’s response to Biester, which included the famous footnote that launched the discussion. At the time when I was putting the collection together it wasn’t clear (at least to me) just how important and interesting disputes about the concept of marriage were about to become.

As part of the project, I decided to try my hand at translating Kant’s answer. Here’s how I handled the opening sentence: “Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” I didn’t spend much time looking at other modern translations, but I did consult John Richardson’s translation in his edition of Kant’s Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99). My hope was to get a sense of how Kant sounded to eighteenth-century English readers and to try to keep some of that in my own translation. But it became clear, from the very first word, that this wasn’t going to be possible.  Richardson’s English was too foreign from ours: “Enlightening is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.”

In the years since I did my translation, my admiration for Richardson’s has continued to grow. In retrospect, his rendering Aufklärung as “Enlightening” was a masterstroke. “Mental illumination” was the convention for translating the word that was adopted at the German Museum, the magnificent but ill-fated journal that translated a remarkable number of eighteenth-century German texts into English. “Mental illumination” is serviceable, but clumsy. “Enlightening,” on the other hand, perfectly tracks the way in which Kant was using Aufklärung and the oddness of using this word in this particular place — which kept me from doing something similar — now strikes me as just what we need: it makes it clear that we are dealing with a discussion of an activity, not a period. “Nonage” also works perfectly as a translation for Unmündigkeit and, as I mentioned in my Preface to the volume, it was a word that I would very much have liked to have had available to me.  But using “nonage” today would have been even odder than using “enlightening.”

The closeness of Richardson’s English to Kant’s German serves as a reminder that the vocabulary of the German enlightenment was not entirely foreign to translators like Richardson. According to Kant’s disciple Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, Richardson had studied Kant’s work during a stint at the university of Halle and two of his letters to Kant, written while he was living in Altenburg have survived.1 A few weeks ago it occurred to me that it might be mildly enlightening to slap together a blog post that would look at some of the ways in which the opening lines of Kant’s essay has been translated and see what might be said about them. I figured that, using Google’s Ngram Viewer, I could track the history of the various words that translators used and, perhaps, draw some enlightenment from this exercise. Rather quickly, though, what I was doing became too big (and too time-consuming) for a single post. So what follows will be the first of a series that moves, word by word (well, not every word) through the opening line of Kant’s response and explores the choices that different translators have made and what their choices might illuminate about the words, and the world, we have lost (think of it as my equivalent of making every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, except that it won’t take too long and will be much healthier).

Rounding up the Suspects

Let’s begin by collecting a few of the more readily available translations (please let me know if there are others that I’ve missed, which might be worth discussing):

  1. Enlightening is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.
    John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
  2. Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.
    Carl Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant, (New York: Modern Library, 1949)
  3. Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.
    Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
  4. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
    H. B. Nisbet in H. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
  5. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
    Ted Humphrey in Kant,Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983)
  6. Enlightenment is our release from our self-imposed dependence.
    Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson, in Kant, Foundations of Ethics (Millis MA: Agora Publications 1995)
  7. Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.
    Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
  8. Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his state of self-incurred minority.
    Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  9. Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity.
    David Colclasure and Pauline Kleingeld, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Yale 2006)

There are two places where everyone departs from Richardson’s choices: everyone translates Aufklärung as “Enlightenment” rather than “Enlightening” and everyone except for Lewis White Beck uses “immaturity” for Unmündigkeit. In contrast to his use of “tutelage” for Unmündigkeit (which is not the worst of choices), Beck’s decision to translate the important adjective selbstverschuldeten — which does a lot of work in Kant’s argument — as “self-incurred” seems to have caught on, though a few alternatives have been tried: Friedich attempts “self-caused”, while Humphrey and Rauch and Anderson use “self-imposed.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, the greatest variation involves what to do with Ausgang. Richardson’s use of “emergence” was followed by Humphrey and Gregor. I’m alone in opting for “exit,” and I still like it: it retains the rhythm of Kant’s opening (a three syllable noun followed by a two syllable noun) and, “Enlightenment” and “exit” parallel Aufklärung and Ausgang in starting with the same letter (small stuff, I know, but translation is nothing but an accumulation of small things, and I liked how it worked — besides it was how Michel Foucault’s translated Ausgang in his discussion of the essay). Two of the translations adopt “release,” which doesn’t work at all (what’s needed here is a word that implies an action on the part of the agent that is attaining enlightenment and “release” is much too passive). Friedrich used “leaving,” which is unobjectionable, I suppose, while Colclasure and Kleingeld use “emancipation,” which has many of the same problems as “release.”

And then there’s Menschen, which is probably the choice that has been most influenced by contemporary patterns of usage: up until 1983, everyone used “man’s,” then things became more complicated. Rauch and Anderson tried to avoid the issue of gender specificity by using “our,” which has nothing to recommend it, as far as I can see. Gregor, along with Colclasure and Kleingeld went for “the human beings.” And I, unrepentantly, used “mankind,” since anything else struck me as anachronistic (I made amends by following it with the neuter possessive “its”): there is every reason for us to avoid gender specific language when speaking of the species as a whole, but no reason at all to pretend that this was something that Kant or other male eighteenth-century writers would have done (like historians, translators are not in the business of getting flies out of fly bottles).

So, here we are: nine English translations and five German words. I hope to have something up about Aufklärung (including some tasty Ngrams) later this week.

  1. See Arnulf Zweig’s biographical note on Richardson in his translation of Kant’s Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and the discussions in Stephen Palmquist, Four Neglected Essays by Immanuel Kant (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1994) and Guisippe Micheli’s introduction to the reprint edition of Richardson’s translation, Essays and Treatises (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1993). ↩
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Poetry After Auschwitz – What Adorno Didn’t Say

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

At the beginning of April, while participating in the defense of an elegant and insightful dissertation on Osip Mandelstam, I stumbled over one of those statements that Adorno never said, but which lots of people think he did: namely, that is was “impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz.”  When my turn came to offer a few comments on the dissertation, I pointed out that what Adorno had said was that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, not that it was impossible. And then I went on to note that, in any case, he later took it back, conceding that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.” What I didn’t say (mainly because I hadn’t really thought about it) was why he would retract a statement that he never made in the first place.

It’s probably easier to understand why Adorno is almost always misquoted (a collection of his various statements on Auschwitz and poetry is available on HerbertMarcuse.org)  than it is to understand why he made matters worse by behaving as if he’d written what he hadn’t.  It’s just easier to assume that Adorno said that it was “impossible” to write poetry after Auschwitz. It’s one of those things that we assume Adorno must have said because it spares us the difficulty of wrestling with what he actually said. The fact that it is possible to poetry after Auschwitz can be confirmed by pointing to all the poetry that has been written since Auschwitz. The barbarity of continuing to write poetry after Auschwitz requires a discussion of what counts as barbarism — which would force us to ask uncomfortable questions about how we go about distinguishing barbarism from culture.

The widely misquoted statement about poetry after Auschwitz comes at the close of “Culture Critique and Society,” the opening essay (originally written in 1949) in Prisms (a collection of essays published in 1955). The German reads:

Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frisst auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. Der absoluten Verdinglichung, die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte und die ihn heute gänzlich aufzusaugen sich anschickt, ist der kritische Geist nicht gewachsen, solange er bei sich bleibt in selbstgenügsamer Kontemplation.

Samuel Weber’s English translation — which is keenly aware that German sentences work differently than English ones and takes time to breathe — is scrupulously faithful to Adorno’s text, albeit at the price of leaving a sentence that almost begs to be quoted out of context, a reminder that (for translators as for everyone else) no good deed goes unpunished:

Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

To belabor the obvious: “Cultural Criticism and Society” is about the practice of cultural criticism, not poetry. Its fear is that criticism now runs the risk of integration into the culture industry, where it serves as a sort of upscale advertising for cultural wares. The production of cultural goods that have status of things — which, according to Adorno, is not necessarily a bad thing (see his discussion of Beethoven’s final string quartet in the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment) — has now reached the point where everything, including spirit itself, is turning into a thing (which, to make things perfectly clear, is a bad thing). Therefore, critics should recognize what they’re up against, avoid playing the role of smug guides to the cultural goodies, and try to make sense of the difficulties that the poets are having (even — and, perhaps, especially — in those cases when the poets aren’t all that aware of it). This means that they need to talk about the society in which this poetry is being written.

Adorno retracted the statement that he never actually made at the start of Part III (“Meditations on Metaphysics”) of that Book Nobody Reads Anymore: Negative Dialektik. Here’s the German:

Das perennierende Leiden hat soviel Recht auf Ausdruck wie der Gemarterte zu brüllen; darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben. Nicht falsch aber ist die minder kulturelle Frage, ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse, ob vollends es dürfe, wer zufällig entrann und rechtens hätte umgebracht werden müssen. Sein Weiterleben bedarf schon der Kälte, des Grundprinzips der bürgerliche Subjektivität, ohne das Auschwitz nicht möglich gewesen wäre: drastiche Schuld des Verschonten.

Here’s what E. B. Ashton came up with:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt put on him who was spared.

There is much to criticize in this translation, particularly the intrusive and overly chummy “you,” which robs the passage of what is most immediately at issue. It is not primarily a question about whether you, the reader, can go on living after Auschwitz, but rather one about the status of those who escaped by chance: for example, Theodor Adorno. There is one final sentence in this monstrously long paragraph that drives this point home:

Zur Vergeltung suchen ihn Träume heim wie der, dass er gar nicht mehr lebte, sondern 1944 vergast worden wäre, und seine ganze Existenz danach lediglich in der Einbildung führte, Emanation des irren Wunches eines vor zwanzig Jahre Umgebrachten.

Here’s Ashton’s translation (which, mercifully, drops the “you”):

By way of atonment he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

The target here is no longer the culture critics who, consciously or unconsciously, render services to the culture industry, but instead their critic, who had escaped.

Thanks to the publication of Adorno’s dream notebook, we know what sorts of things he was dreaming about during the years that were granted to him as a result of the lucky accident of not having been detained on one of his trips from England to Germany during the first years of his exile. At the end of March 1944 he recorded the following:

In an arena, under my command, a large number of Nazis were to be executed. They were to be beheaded. There was a hitch for some reason or other. To simplify matters it was decided to smash the skulls of each of the delinquents individually with a pickaxe. I was then informed that the victims were overwhelmed by an indescribable terror at the prospect of this uncertain and excruciating form of execution. I was myself so disgusted by this atrocity that I awoke feeling physically sick.1

Here we have a dream from an accidental escapee that manifestly lacks that “coldness” that, if we are to believe Negative Dialektik, made both Auschwitz and the afterlife of those who accidentally survived it possible. At night, Adorno would seem to be confirming the lesson that he had learned from Max Horkheimer’s account of the genesis of “bourgeois subjectivity”: it achievement comes at a terrible price.

Back in Germany, Adorno atoned for his survival by dreaming that he had not survived and that his life had been the hallucination of one who had been slaughtered in 1944.  But, in 1944, having found safety in Los Angeles, he found himself revolted by a dream in which he found himself exacting an atonement of a different sort. Could that same lapse of bourgeois coldness that allowed him to sympathize with the sufferings of the monsters who haunted his dreams (a sympathy that nurtured, if only in his dreams, a sense that he was not himself a monster) have explained why he might be willing to make amends for a statement that he never made?

  1. Adorno Dream Notes, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) 26. ↩
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Revisiting the “Enlightenment Project,” Inspired by Anthony Pagden and Armed with Some Ngrams

Posted on May 15, 2013 by

I turned in the last of my grades for the semester at the start of the week and was reminded, once again, that if April is the cruelest month, May — at least for academics — must be the kindest: a vast prospect for research, reading, and writing opens. September, for the moment anyway, remains little more than a distant threat. Conveniently enough, one of the books that I’m looking forward to reading turned up in my mailbox at the end of last week: Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters.

A passing comment near the start of the book deals with one of my hobby-horses:

The now much-quoted, and much-abused phrase ‘the Enlightenment project’ was probably coined some thirty years ago by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (about whom I will have more to say later). It was not meant to be complimentary.1

Back in 2000, I ranted a bit in an article in Political Theory entitled “What Enlightenment Project?” (the title was supposed to be snarky, but that doesn’t always come off in print and “Enlightenment Project? WTF?” hadn’t occurred to me). Drawing on Albert O. Hirschman’s typology of reactionary forms of rhetoric (Jeremy Adelman’s recent biography of the great man is high up on my summer reading list), I examined some of the mischief associated with the term. Yet, when the time came to figure out what to put in the field that WordPress provides for briefly describing the focus of a blog, I found myself employing a variant of the phrase. My alibi was that I figured I could discuss treatments of the Enlightenment as a “continuing project” without actually committing myself to the view that this way of talking makes much sense. Pagden’s brief discussion of this “much-quoted, and much-abused phrase” provides a chance to revisit the phrase and see what sense I can make of it.

This post will focus on Pagden’s account of the genesis of the phrase (other posts, on related issues, will likely follow — after all, it’s summer and time to ruminate). Pagden makes three claims, which I’d like to a bit more closely: the first has to do with the novelty of the phrase “the Enlightenment project,” the second has to do with its alleged originator, and the third with the evaluation that the term implies. In what follows, I’ll be lending support to the first of these claims but questioning the other two.

The Ascent of the “Enlightenment Project”

The suggestion that the phrase “the Enlightenment project” was coined “some thirty years ago” is one of those claims that cries out for an Ngram:

EPSmoothed

What we have here would seem to confirm Pagden’s account: around 1980, the phrase “Enlightenment project” began its ascent, with “Enlightenment Project” following in its wake. The latter may be capturing an emerging practice of treating both parts of the bigram as proper nouns, but may also be tracking the appearance of the phrase in the titles of book sections and articles. Either way, it would seem to capture the extent to which the phrase is turning into a term of art.

The results look a bit messier if smoothing is turned off, but the same general picture emerges. There is, however, one intriguing difference:

EPUnsmoothed

While smoothed version makes it appear as if the ascent of “Enlightenment project” began in 1980, what we see in the unsmoothed version is a small hiccup in 1980, with the steady rise commencing in 1982, the year after the appearance of MacIntyre’s book. This fits better with Pagden’s claim about MacIntyre’s role, but it opens the question of how the phrase was the being used prior to the publication of After Virtue. A search for occurrences of the phrase limited to 1980 turns up five examples:

  1. “The development of a universal, mathematically formulated science and its emergence as the model for all science and knowledge represents a culmination of the Enlightenment’s project.” David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas (1980) p. 161.
  2. “John Wilkins, another Enlightenment project-director, who sought to fly to the moon, and who commissioned wings to be made for that purpose …” John L. Mahoney, The Enlightenment and English literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, with Selected Modern Critical Essays(1980), p. 110
  3. “Yet this loss of substance does not justify Goudzwaard’s outright negation of the entire Enlightenment project — toward human rights, toward democracy and toward science and technology” and “I argue against Goudzwaard that Christians must not stand against the Enlightenment project.” Gregory Brown, “Faith in Progress or Christian Faith,”The Ecumenist: A Journal for Promoting Christian Unity 19:3 (March-April 1981) 43-48 p. 45 & 48.
  4. “Despite Maurice’s sympathy with the Enlightenment project of self-appropriation and self-possession, nevertheless he contended that the exaltation of the autonomous self-defining subject in the critical tradition was an abstraction as distorting and alienating as the older metaphysics had been.” Charles Davis, Community and Critique in Nineteenth-Century Theology (1980) p. 59
  5. (No text snippet provided), Koun Yamada, Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans (1980)

Small though this list may be, it remind us of at least two things. First, some of these examples take some pains to specify just which Enlightenment project the author has in mind. For Held, the “Enlightenment project” involves the “development of a universal, mathematically formulated science,” in the first of the examples from Brown, Goudzwaard (a Dutch theologian)2 is said to reject an “Enlightenment project” that was directed “toward human rights, toward democracy and toward science and technology,” and, according to Davis, Maurice (about whom, I have been able to learn nothing) is sympathetic towards an Enlightenment project that has to do with “self-appropriation and self-possession.”

As a crude way of tracking what, if any, differences there might be in usages of an “Enlightenment project” that is not further specified and one that is specified in the ways that our examples suggest, we can compare two NGrams: one for “Enlightenment project” and the other for “Enlightenment project of.” Here are the results (the smoothing is turned off):

EProjectOf

Were all the instances of “Enlightenment project” simply the start of a phrase that continued “Enlightenment project of,” the two lines would overlap. Obviously they don’t. But caution is advised in interpreting what we are seeing here:

  1. As always appears to be the case with the things I want to investigate, these are really puny numbers (I guess I should be doing what Google wants and constructing an Ngram that compares Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Frankenstein). This might be reason enough to not to put much stock in any of these results.
  2. Not all instances of what we might call the “specified Enlightenment project” take the form of “Enlightenment project of” (e.g., only example #4 above would be captured by the Ngram for “Enlightenment project of.” As a result, it is likely that there are more invocations of “specified Enlightenment projects” than our Ngram is showing.
  3. Further, as example #3 illustrates, an author may initially specify what specific “Enlightenment project” is being discussed but then go on, for the remainder of the text, to employ the phrase “Enlightenment project” without a modifier. This, like the undersampling of “specified Enlightenment projects” noted in #2 would tend to reduce distance between the two lines.

Nevertheless, we may be on to something here. I can’t think of a good reason why the undercounting of “specified” uses of “Enlightenment project” should vary over time, but what we are seeing on the Ngram is a trend towards using “Enlightenment project” without spelling out just what it involves (though, once again, reservation #1 may still trump all other considerations). If this holds up, it would mean though invocations of the “Enlightenment project” increase, a specification of what it might involves are failing to keep pace.

The second thing that our five examples (four examples, if we leave Yamada out of the discussion) from 1981 suggests is that the phrase “Enlightenment project” is being used in at least three different disciplinary contexts: the first comes from a book on the Frankfurt School, the second is an editor’s note to one of the poems included in an anthology of literary texts from the eighteenth century,3 the third and fourth come from discussions in theology. While MacIntyre’s subsequent discussion of the “Enlightenment project” would be quite important for the context inhabited by the third and fourth examples, his work would appear to be rather alien to the tradition invoked in David Held’s study (true, MacIntyre wrote a book on Marcuse, but he made it clear that he didn’t think much of him). All of this is enough to wonder whether Pagden may have overlooked another possible candidate for “originator” of the term.

The Project of Enlightenment as the Project of Modernity

In 1997, the Swedish historian Sven-Eric Liedman offered the following account of the origins of the phrase “Enlightenment project.” It differs markedly from Pagden’s.

it was the German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas who, in 1980, first talked about ‘the Enlightenment Project’ and maintained that it had not lost its vitality and value.4

Liedman was alluding to the speech given by Habermas in September 1980 when he was awarded the Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt. The section of the speech that carried the title Die Projekt der Aufklärung began as follows:

The project of modernity as it was formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic. But at the same time it also results in releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social relations⁠.5

So here we have another account of the “Enlightenment project” and Habermas’s use of the phrase, unlike MacIntyre’s, could hardly be read as “not meant to be complimentary.”

There are two peculiarities that should be noted at the outset:

  1. While the section carries the title Projekt der Aufklärung, the “project” that concerns Habermas in the speech itself is the one that the philosophes allegedly initiated: namely, “the project of modernity.”
  2. The German Projekt der Aufklärung presents its translators with the dilemma of whether or not to employ the definite article: the two existing translations opt for “Project of Enlightenment,” but they could also, with equal justification, have used “Project of the Enlightenment.” Or they could have reproduced the ambiguity by going with “The Enlightenment Project.”

So, it’s time for another Ngram, this one comparing the German and English terms:

GermEng

What’s clear from the Ngram is that the German literature is discussing the “Projekt der Aufklärung” slightly earlier than Anglophone publications are invoking the “Enlightenment project” and the German discussions go on to invoke it much more frequently, peaking around 1997 (which, lest we forget, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment). I suspect the falling off of instances of “Projekt der Aufklärung” after that date tells us more about purchasing patterns in American libraries than it does about German usage.

What this doesn’t prove, however, is that all of those German discussions of the “Projekt der Aufklärung” are devoted to Habermas’s enlightenment project: since German academics are more likely to read English books than Anglophone academics are likely to read German ones, it stands to reason that a fair number of those discussions of the “Projekt der Aufklärung” will be dealing with MacIntyre. Nevertheless, as the example from David Held’s 1981 study suggests, readers interested in Habermas were already picking up the habit of invoking something called “the Enlightenment project” before the publication of After Virtue. (I should be able to provide first-hand testimony on this since David and I were both in the PhD program in Political Science at MIT in the 1970s, but I have no recollection of when I first heard the words “Enlightenment project.” I do, however, recall when I first heard the word “deconstruction,” but that’s a story for another day.)

This suggests that we might want to modify Pagden’s account of the origins of the phrase “Enlightenment project” and suggest that, while it did indeed come into fashion right about the time when he claimed it did,

  1. The credit (or blame) for the invention and popularization of the term would seem to belong to both Alasdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas.
  2. While, for MacIntyre, it may appear as if the term “was not meant to be complimentary” (there may be more I want to say about this, though), for Habermas it clearly was.

What this suggests is that sometime around 1981 we begin to see the beginning of a dispute over what “the Enlightenment project” involved and whether or not it was a good thing. This alternative account has its appeal: among other things, it makes 1981 look rather like 1784, when any number of people were arguing about what “enlightenment” was and wondering whether it was always a good thing. Perhaps this explains why, around this time, I thought it might make sense to start looking at the German debate on the question “What is Enlightenment?”

  1. Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters, (New York, Random House, 2013) 16. ↩
  2. There is a bibliography of his works in English here. ↩
  3. A copy of the book is making its way to me through interlibrary borrowing. ↩
  4. Sven-Eric Liedman, “The Crucial Role of Ethics in Different Types of Enlightenment (Condorcet and Kant),” in The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, ed. Sven-Eric Liedman, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities 58 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 45-58, p. 45. ↩
  5. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge [England]: Polity Press, 1996), 44-46. For an earlier translation, see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, New German Critique, no. 22 (January 1, 1981): 8-9 ↩
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How Isaiah Berlin Revised the “Two Concepts” (A Concluding Philological Postscript)

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

Having finished my three posts on the exchange of letters between Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, I’m ready to reward myself by rolling around in the some of the nGram catnip that I’ve been accumulating. But there’s one bit of unfinished business: a discussion of the differences between the 1958 edition of Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” and the version that was reprinted, eleven years later, as the third of his Four Essays on Liberty. While, at first glance, this would seem to be a rather tedious topic, it wound up being a good deal more interesting than I’d initially suspected. It has implications both for appreciating some of the challenges that “Two Concepts of Liberty” appears to have posed to its first readers and for understanding how Berlin understood what he was doing in this influential, if sometimes perplexing, essay.

The Two Versions of the Two Concepts

When I began the series of posts on Popper and Berlin I wasn’t at all concerned with the differences between the 1958 and the 1969 versions. Indeed, it didn’t occur to me that there were any. I worked from the 1958 text because — as I explained in my the first post — it’s the one I’ve owned for as long as I’ve been interested in political theory and it was the version Popper cited — by page number — in his letter (the fact that it is smaller and lighter than the Four Essays also had its appeal). But when I teach the essay, I use the 1969 version and several years ago I scanned that version so I could keep it on my iPad and refer to it in class. When I started to work on these posts, it occurred to me that, rather than transcribe the material that I wanted to quote, it would be easier to extract the text from my scan of the 1969 version and then paste it into the word processor I use when writing these posts. But I quickly began to notice that there were differences between what I’d copied and what I was seeing on the page in front of me.

I explain this in order to make it clear that I have not made an exhaustive investigation of the differences between the two versions. Some of the changes that I noticed are simply alternative ways of making the same point. For example, on p. 23 of the 1958 text, Berlin writes,

Cephalus, whom Plato reports as saying that old age alone has liberated him from the passion of love — the yoke of a cruel master — is reporting an experience as real as that of liberation from a human tyrant or slave owner.

In the 1969 version (p. 138) “Cephalus” is replaced by “Sophocles,” a distinction without a difference since Cephalus — that tedious blowhard and, on this occasion, name-dropper — is recounting something that Sophocles allegedly told him. But a few of the others had implications for the discussion between Berlin and Popper, which was what led me to them in the first place.

Since the “Two Concepts” lecture is generally regarded as Berlin’s most important work, it might be useful for someone to draw up a list of the differences between the two editions (perhaps the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library might be interested in making such a thing available). But that is not even close to what I am offering here.

I will limit myself to noting three changes.

Conceptual Change: Historical, not Logical

The first change involves the insertion of a few words into a passage that appears at the second paragraph of the Section II of the lecture, the section in which Berlin begins his discussion of the concept of “positive freedom.” The paragraph in question (p. 16 of the 1958 version, pp. 131-132 of the 1969 version) prepares for the long preview of Berlin’s argument that follows in the next paragraph. The paragraph goes as follows (I’ve set the new material in boldface):

The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other — no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the something. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions not always by logically reputable steps until in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other

These alterations are small, but by no means trivial. The passage, as originally formulated, began by granting that the “logical distance” between two concepts and closed by observing that the “development” of these two concepts pushes them in diverging directions. Berlin’s later additions clarify what kind of “development” he is proposing to trace — a historical development — and stress that the process driving these concepts apart is governed by something other than logic.

Berlin made a similar modification at the close of the third paragraph from the end of Section V (“The Temple of Sarasto”). Again, the new material is in boldface:

In this way the rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible, from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of an élite of Platonic guardians. (p. 37, 1959; p. 152).

Again, the change drives home the point that the transformation Berlin is attempting to trace represents something quite different from the working out of the logical implications of a proposition.

In the introduction to Four Essays on Liberty Berlin explained,

While I have not altered the text in any radical fashion, I have made a number of changes intended to clarify some of the central points which have been misunderstood by critics and reviewers.1

The particular misunderstanding that Berlin would seem to be remedying with these changes is clear enough: they remind the reader that the transformation Berlin is tracing is historical, rather than a logical. What is somewhat less clear is why Berlin would have thought that this point needed emphasizing or which of his “critics and reviewers” might have misunderstood him in this way.

It may be relevant that, within five months of the delivery of the lecture, Berlin found it necessary to remind at least one critic of this point. The critic was Karl Popper. In his letter to Popper of March 16, 1959 explained,

The whole of my lecture, in a sense, is an attempt at a brief study or prolegomenon to the study — of the way in which innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas (’know thyself’ or sapere aude or the man who is free although he is a slave, in prison etc.) tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.2

The parenthetical interjection “not inevitably!” — like his additions to the 1969 version of “Two Concepts” — emphasizes that the transformation of the concept of “positive liberty” into something monstrous was neither logical nor inevitable.

Popper’s suggestion that it was possible to conceive of “a very different and very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it” might have been motivation enough for Berlin to insist on this point in his response to Popper. The force of Popper’s critique was that it was (logically) possible to conceive a way of framing a concept of positive liberty that did not have the authoritarian implications that Berlin associated with the notion. Berlin’s response would seem to be aimed at reminding Popper that “Two Concepts” is not concerned with logical possibilities but rather with the “associations” that concepts have “accumulated” over the course of their historical development.

By the time that Berlin came to write the introduction to Four Essays on Liberty it would have been obvious to him that Popper was not the only reader who had read “Two Concepts” as an analysis of the differing implications of the concept of liberty, as opposed to an attempt to trace the diverging historical trajectory of two ways of talking about liberty. Two years before the publication of the Four Essays, the American political theorist Gerald MacCallum challenged Berlin’s notion that “we may usefully distinguish between two kinds or concepts of political and social freedom” and argued that

Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format “x is (is not) free from (to do, not do, become, not become) z,” x ranges over agents, y ranges over such “preventing conditions” as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.3

MacCallum was aware that “disputes about the nature of freedom are certainly historically best understood as a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom.” But the point of his “triadic” conception of liberty was to clarify the ways in which the contestants in these historical struggles were engaged in modifying the content of the variables in a concept of liberty that remained, when properly analyzed, the same.

Berlin limited his response to MacCallum to a footnote that dissented from MacCallum’s suggestion and insisted,

A man struggling against his chains or a people against enslavement need not consciously aim at any definite further state. A man need not know how he will use his freedom; the just wants to remove the yoke. So do classes and nations.4

Berlin’s rejoinder is not without its shortcomings. It is easy enough to conceive of an individual who simply wants to be free from some burden, but does not go on to specify what he or she wants to do as an alternative (this is the strategy adopted by Melville’s Bartleby). It is, however, more difficult to conceive of political movements that simply want to be freed from some form of oppression but do not specify what they want to do or to be (e.g., they might explain that they wish to become “a self-governing people”). But the question, at least for Berlin, is an historical one, rather than a conceptual one and the possibility that, somewhere in the past, we can find movements that, like Bartleby, simply refuse to do something without specifying what it is that alternatives they would prefer, cannot be ruled out. We can analyze political statements using MacCallum’s triadic concept to our heart’s content, but what is ultimately at stake is the question of whether actual political and social movements have articulated their positions in the way that MacCallum’s matrix would suggest or whether they have tended “(not inevitably!)” to move to one of the two diverging conceptions of liberty whose history Berlin purports to be tracing.

The weakness that plagues Berlin’s account lies in the absence of anything resembling the historical account that the modifications made in the text of the “Two Concepts” suggests is needed. As I suggested in my previous post, we now know that he had attempted such a conceptual history in the Flexner lectures. But, he was unable to shape it into a form that he found satisfactory. And since very little of the historical narrative that he was trying to work out in the Flexner lectures made it into the “Two Concepts,” readers and critics might have been forgiven for thinking that Berlin was presenting a conceptual analysis, rather than a history of concepts: hence the need to set them straight.

Monists, All the Way Down

There is one last revision that I want to note before ending this postscript. It comes at the end of the final paragraph of Section V, which summarizes how a commitment to the idea that (1) “all men have one purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction, (2) “that the ends of all ration beings most of necessity fit into a single universal harmonious pattern, (3), “that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational,” and (4) “finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free” tends to lead “to despotism, albeit by the best or the wisest — to Sarastro’s temple in the Magic Flute — but still despotism, which turns out to be identical with freedom ….” In the version in Four Essays, the final sentence is modified with a deletion and an addition:

Can it be that Hume is right and Socrates and the creators of the central Western tradition in ethics and politics who followed him have been mistaken, for more than two millennia, that virtue is not knowledge, nor freedom identical with either? that despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of the basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?

Popper’s letter had begun with a critique of this passage, noting that he considered himself a “rationalist” but had never accepted any of these principles and that he was “far from convinced that Socrates would have accepted your four basic assumptions, although I agree that Hume would have rejected them.” It would seem (at least as I read these changes) that Berlin’s modifications close the door on Popper’s attempt to persuade Berlin that there might be a way of salvaging both an alternative conception of positive liberty and a version of rationalism that was immune to the slide into despotism that Berlin sought to trace. Berlin eliminated the one point on which he and Popper (momentarily) agreed (namely, that Hume would reject these principles) and reinforced the notion that the entire tradition, beginning with Socrates, was wedded to what Berlin would come to call “monism.”

And, with this, my discussion of these exchanges between Berlin and Popper comes to a close.

cantip-action

Into the (nGram) Catnip

  1. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. ix-x. ↩
  2. Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960 Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009) p. 681 ↩
  3. Gerald C. MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312-313. ↩
  4. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty p. xliii. ↩
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