4. Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangInteTran

4.1 Philosophy of Language: Language, Thought, Meaning

Already in the mid-1760s—for example, in On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764) and the Fragments (1767–8)—Herder began advancing three fundamental theses in this area:

• Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language—i.e., one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. (This thesis is already prominent in On Diligence and in the Fragments. To his credit, Herder normally refrains from advancing a more extreme, but philosophically untenable, version of the thesis, favored by some of his successors, that simply identifies thought with language, or with inner language.)
• Meanings or concepts are—not the sorts of things, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them, e.g., the referents involved (Augustine), Platonic forms, or subjective mental ideas à la Locke or Hume, but instead—usages of words. (This thesis is already prominent in the Fragments. Herder also develops important arguments for it.)
• Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that holds that sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but that there is also a converse dependence and that we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions from the empirical ones—so that all of our concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one way or another. (For this thesis, see esp. Treatise on the Origin, On the Cognition and Sensation, and the Metacritique.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean

4.2 Theory of Interpretation (Hermeneutics)

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A principle of generic interpretation. In addition to the nature of a work’s meanings, interpretation must also identify the nature of its genre (i.e., roughly, a certain set of general purposes and rules that it aspires to realize and conform to). As in the case of meanings, genres vary from age to age, culture to culture, and even individual to individual, and the interpreter therefore faces, and needs to resist, constant temptations falsely to assimilate a work’s genre to others with which he happens to be more familiar (for example, Shakespearean “tragedy” to Sophoclean “tragedy”, or vice versa). (This principle is already prominent in the Critical Forests from 1769, but finds its classic statement in the essay Shakespeare from 1773.)

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Herder proposes (prominently in This Too a Philosophy of History, for instance) that the way to bridge radical mental difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, “feeling one’s way in”.
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It has at least five components, which are quite various in nature but consistent with each other and all quite sensible and deep:

• (1) First of all, the metaphor implies (once again) that the interpreter typically faces a radical difference, a gulf, between his own mentality and that of the interpreted subject, making interpretation a difficult, laborious task (it implies that there is an “in” there that the interpreter must carefully and laboriously “feel his way into”).
• (2) The metaphor also implies more specifically (This Too a Philosophy of History shows) that the “feeling one’s way in” should include thorough research not only into a text’s use of language but also into its whole geographical, historical, and social context.
• (3) It also implies a claim—based on Herder’s quasi-empiricist theory of concepts—that in order to understand an interpreted subject’s language the interpreter must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his (perceptual and affective) sensations.
• (4) It also implies (This Too a Philosophy of History again shows) that hostility in an interpreter toward the people whom he interprets will generally distort his interpretation, and should therefore be avoided. (Herder, though, is equally opposed to excessive identification with them for the same reason.)
• (5) Finally, it also implies that the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that it had for a text’s original author and audience when they understood the text in light of such factors (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition).

Herder also insists (for example, in the Critical Forests) on a principle of holism in interpretation. This principle rests on several motives, including the following:

• (1) Parts of a text taken in isolation are typically ambiguous in various ways (in relation to background linguistic possibilities). In order to resolve such ambiguities, an interpreter needs the guidance provided by surrounding text.
• (2) That problem arises once a range of possible linguistic meanings is established for a piece of text. But in the case of a text that is separated from the interpreter by radical mental difference, knowledge of such a range itself presents a problem. How is he to pin down the range of possible meanings, i.e., possible usages, for a word? This requires a collation of the word’s actual uses and an inference from these to the rules that govern them, i.e., to their usages, a collation that in turn requires looking to remoter contexts in which the same word occurs (other parts of the text, other works in the author’s corpus, works by his contemporaries, etc.), or in short: holism.
• (3) Authors typically write a work as a whole, conveying ideas not only in its particular parts but also through the way in which these fit together to make up a whole. Consequently, readings that fail to interpret the work as a whole will miss essential aspects of its meaning—both the ideas in question themselves and meanings of the particular parts on which they shed important light.

Such holism in interpretation (like the holism of taking into account a whole geographical, historical, and social context) may seem to lead to a certain circularity: in order to interpret the part one needs to take into account the whole, but equally, in order to grasp the whole one needs to understand its parts. Herder agrees about this, but he considers the circularity involved benign. Specifically, he recommends interpreting parts in a provisional way in light of a general knowledge of the language in order thereby to generate a provisional interpretation of the whole, then applying this provisional interpretation of the whole in order to refine the interpretation of each of the parts, and so on, back and forth, indefinitely (see again the Critical Forests). This might seem like a mere pseudo-solution, but it is not: the key insight on which it implicitly rests is that understanding is not an all-or-nothing matter but instead something that comes in degrees.

In On Thomas Abbt’s Writings, On the Cognition and Sensation, and elsewhere Herder makes one of his most important and influential innovations: interpretation must supplement its focus on word-usage with attention to the author’s psychology. Herder implies several reasons for this (some of which would subsequently be developed more explicitly and elaborately by successors such as Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel):

• (1) As was already mentioned, he embraces a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that entails that in order to understand an author’s concepts an interpreter must imaginatively recapture the author’s relevant sensations.
• (2) As Quentin Skinner has recently emphasized, understanding the linguistic meaning of an utterance or text is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for understanding the utterance/text tout court; in addition, one needs to discover what might nowadays be called the author’s illocutionary intentions. For example, I meet a stranger by a frozen lake who tells me, “The ice is thin over there”; I understand his linguistic meaning perfectly; but is he simply informing me?, warning me?, threatening me?, joking? …
• (3) Skinner himself tends to imply that one can determine linguistic meanings prior to establishing authorial intentions. That may sometimes be so (e.g., in the example just given). But is it generally so? Herder implies not. And this seems right, because the linguistic meaning of a formula is often ambiguous (in terms of the background linguistic possibilities), and in order to identify the relevant meaning one must turn, not only to larger bodies of text (as was already mentioned), but also to hypotheses, largely derived from them, concerning the author’s intentions (e.g., concerning the subject-matter that he intends to treat). This is a further reason why interpreters need to invoke psychology.
• (4) As was already mentioned, Herder implies that an author often conveys ideas in his work, not explicitly in its parts, but rather via these and the way in which they are put together to form a textual whole. It is necessary for the interpreter to capture these ideas, both for their own sake and in order thereby to resolve ambiguities at the level of the parts.
• (5) Herder also implies that the second half of his doctrine of radical mental difference—individual variations in mode of thought even within a single period and culture—generates a need for psychological interpretation. Why does any special need arise here? Part of the answer seems to be that when an interpreter is dealing with a concept that is distinctive of a particular author rather than common to a whole period/culture, he typically faces a problem of relative paucity and lack of contextual variety in the actual uses of the word that are available as empirical evidence from which to infer the rule for use, or usage, constitutive of its meaning. Hence he needs extra help—and the author’s general psychology may provide this. (Points (2) and (5) would subsequently be elaborated by Schleiermacher, point (4) by Schlegel.)

In the same works Herder also indicates that interpretation, especially in its psychological aspect, requires the interpreter to use “divination”. This is another principle that is liable to sound disturbingly touchy-feely at first hearing—in particular, it can sound as though Herder means some sort of prophetic process endowed with a religious basis and perhaps even infallibility. However, what he really has in mind here is instead, quite differently and far more sensibly, a process of hypothesis, based on the meager empirical evidence that is available, but also going well beyond it, and therefore vulnerable to subsequent falsification, and abandonment or revision if falsified. (Etymologically, the French word “deviner”, to guess/conjecture is relevant here.)

Herder also implies an additional important point concerning the general nature of interpretation: After him, the question would be explicitly raised whether interpretation is a science or an art. Herder does not himself explicitly raise or address this question. But his strong inclination would clearly be to say that interpretation is like rather than unlike natural science; see, e.g., already On Thomas Abbt’s Writings. He has several reasons for thinking so:

• (1) He assumes (as indeed did virtually everyone at this period) that the meaning of an author’s text is as much an objective matter as the subjects investigated by the natural scientist.
• (2) The difficulty of interpretation that results from radical mental difference, and the consequent need for a methodologically sophisticated and painstaking approach to interpretation in many cases, make for further points of similarity between interpretation and natural science.
• (3) The essential role of “divination”, qua hypothesis, in interpretation constitutes yet a further point of similarity between interpretation and natural science. Moreover,
• (4) even the subject-matter of interpretation is not, in Herder’s view, sharply different from that dealt with by natural science: the latter investigates observable physical processes in nature in order to determine the forces that underlie and produce them, but, similarly, interpretation investigates observable human verbal (and non-verbal) physical behavior in order to determine the forces that underlie and produce it (Herder explicitly identifying mental conditions, such as conceptual understanding, as “forces”).

Finally, Herder also has a set of sophisticated and attractive reasons why accurate interpretation of the sort that he aims at is important. These include

• (1) the intrinsic interest of the ideas of historical and cultural Others thereby discovered,
• (2) the cosmopolitan respect that striving to understand them accurately both evinces and encourages,
• (3) the possibility of thereby discovering ideas different from our own which we can incorporate into our own perspective in order to improve it in various ways (e.g., ideas concerning morals or art), and
• (4) the possibility of thereby enhancing not only our understanding but also our self-understanding, namely, by coming to see in the light of comparisons what is distinctive of our own perspective and what not, and by coming to see how it has developed historically out of earlier perspectives.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#TheoInte

4.2 Theory of Interpretation (Hermeneutics)

Another key means that Herder adopts is to complement the goal of semantic faithfulness with that of faithfulness to the musical form of a work (e.g., meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance). As might be expected, his motives for doing this are partly extra-semantic: in particular, aesthetic fidelity, and fidelity to the exact expression of feelings that is effected by means of a literary work’s musical features. But they are also in part semantic: in his view, musical form and semantic content are strictly inseparable, so that fully realizing even the goal of semantic faithfulness in fact requires that a translation also be faithful to the work’s musical form. Why does he believe that musical form and semantic content are inseparable in this way? He has two main reasons: First, musical forms often carry their own meanings (think, for example, of the humorous and bawdy connotations of the meter/rhyme-scheme of a limerick). Second, as was recently mentioned, Herder believes that musical form is essential to an exact expression of feelings; but, as we saw earlier, he also thinks that feelings are internal to meanings (this is part of the force of his quasi-empiricism in the philosophy of language); so reproducing a work’s musical form in translation turns out to be essential even for accurately conveying the meanings of its words and sentences in translation.

In addition to being necessary in order to achieve translation’s traditional fundamental goal of exactly reproducing meaning (as well as aesthetic fidelity and fidelity in the expression of feelings) as fully as possible, the more “accommodating” sort of translation that has been described is also necessary, in Herder’s view, in order to achieve certain further important goals. One of these lies in a potential that translation has for enriching the target language (both conceptually and in musical forms). Herder argues convincingly that whereas “lax” translation forgoes this opportunity, “accommodating” translation capitalizes on it.

Another of these further goals lies in both expressing and cultivating in a translation’s readers a cosmopolitan respect for the Other—something that requires that the translation reproduce the Other’s meanings and musical forms as accurately as possible.

Herder holds that the preferred “accommodating” sort of translation demands that the translator be in a sense a “creative genius”, i.e., skilled and creative enough to satisfy the heavy demands that this sort of translation imposes on him, in particular, skilled and creative enough to invent the new conceptual and musical forms in the target language that it requires.

Despite his commitment to the central importance of this sort of translation (largely, as we have seen, due to its necessity for achieving translation’s traditional fundamental goal of faithfully reproducing meaning), Herder is also in the end quite liberal about the forms that translation—or interlinguistic transfer more generally, including, for example, what he sometimes distinguishes from “translation [Übersetzung]” proper as “imitation [Nachbildung]” or “rejuvenation [Verjüngung]”—can legitimately take. He allows that its possible forms are quite various, and that which one is most appropriate in a particular case will largely depend on the author or genre in question and on the translator’s (or transferer’s) purposes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#TheoTran