The Future of Phenomenology. Towards a Philosophy of Translation Inspired by a Phenomenological Hermeneutics

Domenico Jervolino


   Within the methodological perspective where I place myself, there is no gift of the phenomenon except in the gift of language, nor any gift of language outside the plurality of, or better said, the diversity of languages. The diversity of languages constitutes the presuppositions of the work of translation. Language, languages, translation therefore enter into the very heart of the constitution of sense.
    The word “gift” – in its most general meaning, taken from ordinary language – is suitable to be used in at least three meanings in our discourse: the first with respect to phenomena or, if you prefer, to life; secondly with respect to language, where phenomena manifest themselves as capable of being said; and thirdly with respect to the plurality of languages, where language itself becomes real.
    Language is a gift because we find ourselves alive, open to the appearance of the world. It is a gift because phenomena appear capable of being said, in that they are already said and can be expressed in a different way. It is a gift because they appear in their capacity to be said in many languages we can understand; they show themselves in their possibility, even in their effectiveness, which we can only very partially achieve, starting from our own language, which was given to us for free.
    I believe we can talk of a ‘gift’ in all three of these cases, just as we can say that life is a gift. This note can be further specified and deepened – it implies in all forms, even in the most ordinary use of the term, the notions of gratuity, of passivity, of receptivity.
    If the giving of phenomena can never disregard language, this does not mean one should close oneself to the characteristics and peculiarity of every language; it means realising that language expresses and that all languages, even if different, have the power to translate one into the other. This is therefore not a pure phenomenology but a hermeneutical phenomenology, a linguistic phenomenology that interprets the gift and the giving. These three forms of giving – life, language and languages – refer one to the other and sustain themselves reciprocally.
    It is important to stress that the third form presupposes and clarifies the former two: the gift of life (which is the essential openness to the world as phenomena, as it appears) and the gift of language as a logos, thanks to which we are living beings with the capacity of speech. In the gift of the mother tongue these two aspects (to have a world and to have the ability of describing it) converge, but our being within a world which is common to all speaking beings is also implicit, thanks to the fact that every different ‘tongue’ belongs to the universe of language and thanks to the translatability, in principle, of all languages.
    Here are topics regarding the linguistic and anthropological problem of translation within the context of an open philosophical debate: language as an inescapable characteristic of the finite and bodily condition of man, the constitution of sense in the phenomenon-language relationship, the tension between universality and finitude that comes out of this constitutive duality of what is human, and, finally, translation as a moment in which it is possible to dissipate that tension and as a paradigm of the different forms of interaction and communication among people.
    In this way, translation becomes a privileged moment of a reconstruction of the plural unity of human discourse that opens the way to an ethics of hospitality and of conviviality. The gift of language and of languages becomes a paradigm of gratuity that corrects the contemporary obsession towards the general commodification of lifeworlds and it gives a glimpse of a possible foundation for the social bond, in a perspective of solidarity and of solicitude for people.
    The modern paradigm of politics, grounded on the idea that the monopolistic use of strength concentrated in the hands of the sovereign, could generate the collective advantage of peace, security and social order, must today be called into question. It seems unable to fulfill the needs of humanity in the age of globalization.
    The challenge, instead, is to think of a nonviolent ground for the social bond. Following Ricoeur’s Parcours de la reconnaissance,(1) the idea of linking the great Hegelian theme of the struggle for recognition of subjects to that of the economy of the gift seems to me to be potentially seminal. The struggle among subjects does not necessarily fall under the sign of an irreducible aggressiveness; from the conflict a reciprocal recognition can arise.
    This Hegelian theme is well-known (it is the famous theme of the dialectic of master and slave). The master needs the slave and depends on him to satisfy his need, so that at the end there is no difference between the two consciousnesses.
The search for identity and recognition is inescapable, but the conflict between subjectivities is not the last word. Reciprocal recognition can be sought somewhere else, in the gift. In fact, as the extensive literature of anthropological studies has made evident, starting with Marcel Mauss, in primitive societies the gift and its return generate a complex net of social relationships. Why must the gift be returned? The anthropologists’ answer is that the gift symbolizes a magic power that has to be circulated. This is an insufficient answer that would condemn discourse on the gift to remain in the sphere of pre-modernity. What must be sought, instead, is a non-magical sense of the gift, which is neither more nor less than reciprocal recognition. I give a gift because I give something of myself and I expect to be recognized by the one I give my gift to. The gift is still a symbol, but not in a magical sense, rather it is a symbol of a humanity that is expressed in the other and myself, in our reciprocal relationship.
    Then, we could also say that what constitutes the social bond is the gift of languages that allows us to become part of the human consortium in the twofold form of the gift of the mother tongue and the reciprocal gift of languages (these two forms are strangers each to the other) that becomes real through translation, thanks to the practice of linguistic hospitality.
    It is an original gift, in that it is given for free, before any social contract, the moment we enter into human existence: it is evident that to establish a contract we need to understand each other. We are here talking of something that comes first in a transcendental sense, as an a priori condition of possibility. This coming first an equal dignity – in principle – of all human beings, giving foundation to the possibility that speech can oppose violence and dominion.
    This original gift is given to us in the form of a mother tongue. The mother tongue is the place where consciousness is born; it is no mere set of instrumental signs. In the mother tongue words embody reality itself; through it the world is born into our conscience. Nevertheless, we cannot stop here. The relationship between consciousness and language, the same metaphor of language as a verbal body of thought used by Husserl and the French existential phenomenology of language allows us to go deeper.
    In fact, we are and we are not our body, we conform to our mother tongue, but at the same time it has its own relative autonomy. Language is placed between the world and us, with everything that this implies, i.e. to say and not to say, the possibility of equivocation and deception, a world of implicit or hidden meanings that need to be reactivated and rediscovered. This ambiguity of language, which has its roots in our mother tongue, makes it possible for us who are born to the world thanks to it, to also take stand back from it. We always can and have to distance ourselves. Our consciousness of the world, and of ourselves, is not only a given but has to be re-conquered. There is a space here, I think, for the work of interpretation but also for an ethic of answering to the gift we have received.
    The mother tongue, which is my verbal body, does not shut me in. Rather, it opens me to other languages, to humanity and to history.
    On the basis of the considerations I have presented, I think we can affirm that translation helps us to reconsider the phenomenological method.
    The three fundamental theses of phenomenology are:(2)


    These three theses, as presented above, are listed in the order of their discovery. If we read them in the opposite order, they follow the order of their founding.
    My hypothesis is that all three of these theses can be clarified when we test them against the diversity of languages and against translation.
    Let us start from the third one, reduction. If we consider that every language is like a world, then to reduce or distance ourselves from a language, methodologically neutralizing it, is exactly what happens when one deals with a foreign language (and with every other language considered as a language of otherness). When reduction is meant in this way, is loses its potential as a fantastic and impossible operation of exiting the world. It becomes possible and necessary to reach that particular level which enables the understanding among different people. It thus becomes possible to reach that transcendental humanity that is the basis of people speaking a language in which they were born to consciousness, but we also are able to understand other human beings speaking different languages.
    This has clear influence on the conception of the subject that is always embodied in a world through the mediation of a language; but all the particular worlds eventually belong to a common world and our subjectivity exists in the communion with all the real and possible subjects, recognized in their essential and peculiar identity.
    The subject of a hermeneutical phenomenology is never an isolated ego but is the self, as a contingent, finite, bodily being that coincides with our concrete condition of suffering and acting human beings. We are required to realize ourselves in the praxis of a whole life, in the reciprocity of the intersubjective relationship, and to find a place in the world and in history. Then, the essential core of our life and our search for an identity in which our struggle and desire to live are expressed, which Ricoeur calls the “original affirmation,” must undergo an enormous and never final process of translation and translations, of all sorts, which is tantamount to the telling of our own stories, with the infinite web of our actions and passions, with the work of mourning and memory that such a work requires, with its always renewed challenges and the joy that it can bestow on us.
    Finally, meaning is neither the will to say, belonging to a subject without relationships, nor the access to a world of separate essences. It is, on the contrary, the space opened by translation in order to compare and let our perspectives on the world be communicated.
    In this way a phenomenological hermeneutics of translation can help us to realize that humanity, just like language, exists only in the plural mode.


Notes

(1) Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, Stock, Paris 2004, pp. 221-355.
(2) Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations, Seuil, Paris 1969, pp. 242-257 (English trans., Northwestern U. P., Evanston 1974, pp. 246-263).