The Language of Traditions: Multilingualism in Arendt’s Thinking
Max Klein
The polis — if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration — gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages. In other words, men’s life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made ‘products.’ the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable.
(Arendt 1958: 197 f.)
The Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works considers the multilingualism of Arendt‘s thought in a theoretically sophisticated way. Her texts, often self-translated from English into German, are distinct works and in some sense independent from one another. This is obvious in view of the theoretically untenable idea of a ‘mechanical’ translation that preserves identity. Reinhart Koselleck’s project of ‘conceptual history’ draws attention to the historical foundation of all concepts, revealing their social and political index, so that the respective meaning of the concrete pragmatics results solely from the historical contextualization. How do you translate the German word “Bürger,” for example, when it has changed from the 18th to the 21st century due to comprehensive socio-historical transformations and has woven the traces of its temporal and spatial situatedness into its meaning? “Thus the homonymous word ‘Bürger’ is meaningless unless the term ‘Bürger’ is examined in its conceptual transformation: from the (city) Bürger around 1700 to the (state) Bürger around 1800 to the Bürger (=non-proletarian) around 1900 […]” (Koselleck 2022: 116). In Arendt’s case, this general translation barrier is even more pronounced. Arendt’s “own thought moved back and forth between German and American English, both in the sense that she often translated her own work from different expressive potentials in English and German and the different historical audiences they addressed […]” (Hahn / McFarland / Wild 2019: 11). In some cases, the texts differ massively in terms of both length and linguistic design, as shown in this essay, so that the thesis is put forward that Arendt was aware of the failure of a translation. The fact that Arendt saw language as more than just a technique for transmitting information is clear from her frequent references to ancient Greek and Latin. In order to recall for the present, for example, that the political always refers back to the polis, a complete lifeworld is invoked in the medium of language. Arendt turns this untranslatability into an intellectual program by making with the change of the audience also a philosophical change of tradition in the medium of language. Combining Koselleck’s insight into the history of concepts with Arendt’s multilingual textual strategy opens up an interpretative approach that seems appropriate to Arendt‘s thinking: different historical experiences are inscribed in the linguistic body of her texts and, in this respect, different traditions of thought are evoked.
The comparison of the account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration included in Vita activa and Human Condition bears impressive witness to this. The German text is quoted at the beginning and a brief interpretation of the conceptual structure is offered:
Dort [in der Grabrede des Perikles; M.K.] heißt es, daß die Polis denen, die Land und Meer zum Schauplatz ihrer Kühnheit gemacht haben, garantiert, daß sie nicht vergeblich gelebt und gehandelt haben, daß sie weder eines Homers noch anderer seiner Kunst bedürften, sondern ohne alle Hilfe ‚unvergängliche Denkmäler‘ hinterlassen werden von dem, was sie im Guten und Bösen an Erinnerungswürdigem vollbrachten; die Polis wird dafür sorgen, daß das Erstaunen der Mitwelt in der Nachwelt nicht erstirbt, daß also die Nachwelt, zwar nicht für die sterblichen Menschen selbst, aber für das, was an ihnen wert war, unsterblich zu werden, eine Mitwelt bleibt.
(Arendt 2019: 258)
Looking at this passage, one notices the prominent use of “Welt” composites. The concept of the ‘Welt’ occupies a systematic position in Arendt’s thought and is internally differentiated by the composites used. Arendt explicitly speaks of “Mitwelt” and “Nachwelt;” elsewhere in Vita activa she also uses the concept of the “Dingwelt,” which is at least hinted at in the quoted passage by the “unvergängliche Denkmäler” (“everlasting remembrance”). While the “Dingwelt” refers to material cultural products that give orientation and contour to reality, the “Mitwelt” is a normative order that exists between people which provides a space of values and cultural self-evidence. The “Nachwelt” in the German quote refers to an intertemporality theorem that, politically speaking, makes disobedience possible through the renegotiation of “Dingwelt” and the “Mitwelt” across generations. The above-mentioned “Denkmäler” exemplifies this relationship. On the one hand, they are part of the “Dingwelt” due to their tangibility; on the other hand, their significance as an expression of cultural memory is only revealed through the telling of stories that belong to the “Mitwelt.” The “Nachwelt” is a ‘hinge’ of mediation, which calls upon the potentiality to rebel against what has been handed down (Klein 2023).
The English version of the text fails to provide an equivalent ‘static’ analytical framework:
The polis — if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration — gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages. In other words, men’s life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made ‘products,’ the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable.
(Arendt 1958: 197 f.)
Unlike in the German text, no English equivalent is used for ‘Welt’ (‘world’). The “Welt” disappears from the linguistic surface and the text takes on more of a narrative than a systematic character. In the German quote, Arendt uses the word “Welt” four times. She speaks twice each of “Mitwelt” and “Nachwelt.” In the English quote, this clarity is replaced by words that carry less philosophical-historical ‘baggage.’ She speaks of “men‘s life together” instead of “Mitwelt,” the concept of “Nachwelt” is replaced by the mention of “imperishable.” Instead of obviously meaningful words, which also sound artificial in German, everyday words are used in English. By dispensing with these connections through the linguistic composition, the English text takes on a far more ‘fluid,’ even dynamic character. Looking back to Koselleck’s concept of ‘conceptual history,’ this difference in composition seems to reveal a deeper-rooted difference in tradition.
Arendt’s texts are not merely a form of neutrally description, but a kind of human action, so that both texts can be reflected on against the background of the theory of activity from Vita activa / Human Condition. I propose to examine the implied distinction between dynamics and statics of the German and English text in the context of Arendt’s difference between ‘working’ and ‘acting.’ While Arendt ascribes working the meaning of creating things that are permanently available to people, that give orientation to the world, action focuses on the dynamic of making a beginning in the world. Action thus differs from working in that it is capable of breaking with all continuity and questioning necessities. For the two quotations above, such a parallelism of language and activity would mean that the German text proceeds in a pattern of continuity through the static nature of its surface, while in the English text Arendt claims to make a new beginning in language, analogous to action. In this way, Arendt’s new biographical beginning in the USA becomes linguistically evident. Her thinking breaks out of systematic thinking and, with a more dynamic language in English, sets a philosophical as well as biographical beginning. I propose to see in this textual distinction a partial departure from the European tradition of political thought. Similar to Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology, Arendt also accuses the tradition of European thought in modernity of losing the self-evidence of action; the philosophy of modernity degenerates into a project of the homo faber, who views everything in terms of subjugation and categorically ignores his own political involvement. This thinking proceeds in the mode of production alone, which is philosophical in system designs and results in political alienation. Arendt does not seem to have completely detached herself from this tradition in the German text. So, is the new beginning in the USA also a break with European tradition, which is already apparent on the linguistic surface of the texts? In any case, a theoretical approach of this kind opens up an interdisciplinary access that mediates between history, literature, philosophy and political theory.
About the Author:
Max Klein is a lecturer at the Chair of Political Theory at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center and finishing his dissertation project in History of Political Thought on property rights in the genealogy of democratic rule of law. His interdisciplinary research and teaching interests focus on critical legal theory, property theory and the History of Political Thought, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th century. Most recently, he published in the German Political Science Quarterly on the expropriation debate in the Weimar Republic. The current research project follows on from a study he published on the analytical value of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the world and aims to demonstrate the capacity of her work for contemporary political and legal challenges in the context of climate change.
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah (2019): Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben, 20nd ed., München: Piper.
Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Human Condition. Introduction by Margaret Canovan, 2nd ed., Chicago UP.
Hahn, Barbara / McFarland, James / Wild, Thomas (2019): Hannah Arendt — Complete Works, Critical Edition in Digital and Print, in: Arendt Studies, Vol. 3, 9–14.
Klein, Max (2023): Politik der Nachwelt. Überlegungen zur intertemporalen Dimension politischer Entscheidungen in Anschluss an Hannah Arendt, in: Marcus Llanque / Katja Sarkowsky (ed.), Die Politik der Toten. Figuren und Funktionen der Toten in Literatur und Politischer Theorie, Bielefeld: transcript, 63–90.
Koselleck, Reinhart (2022): Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit, 12nd ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
