Abstract
We recount the process by which Plessner’s Levels was rendered into English, noting special difficulties of the task. We then discuss particular words and word groupings, the adequate translation of which required special care. Finally, we consider an example of the kind of collaborative procedure employed and the difficulties faced along the way.
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Notes
Before the forthcoming translation, Anglophone readers of the text had appeal only to a rough English translation produced by the cultural anthropologist Scott Davis, which he widely and generously shared through personal correspondence.
Plessner may have conflated von Koenigswald with his collaborator Franz Weidenreich. For a detailed account of the fossil discoveries, see Boaz and Ciochon (2004).
We include reference to the German section numbers here even though the English translation includes only section headings, per Fordham University Press’s style policy.
Prior to this phase of the process, several scholars read and gave feedback on the First and Second Prefaces as well as Chapter 7 (which Hyatt translated first in the process of finding a publisher): Jasper van Buuren, Austin Harrington, and Hans-Peter Krüger. Nils F. Schott, translator of Plessner’s Macht und menschliche Natur (published as Political Anthropology by Northwestern University Press, 2018) also provided input on early terminology questions.
Husserl uses the terms Anschauung and Intuition somewhat differently from both Kant and Plessner, a matter that cannot be discussed in detail here.
We were aided in coming to the following conclusions by Hans-Peter Krüger. Of course, we bear all responsibility for any errors in our formulation of the interpretation here.
Fisher quotes the following passage from Plessner's early work as signifying the break between reason-philosophy and life-philosophy (Vernunft- zur Lebensphilosophie): "der Mensch [ist] nicht mehr eine Angelegenheit des Systems, sondern das System eine Angelegenheit des Menschen geworden" [the human is no longer a matter of the system, but the system is rather a matter of the human]" (Plessner 1918/2003: 308; cited in Fisher 2016: 82). Or, as expressed in the Levels itself: “Life does not consist in its knowledge of itself, but it becomes completed in this knowledge. This subject-objectivity, however, does not become realized in a speculatively devised system—not even if it is a system, like Hegel’s, that understands history as the condition of the possibility of the realization of this subject-objectivity. It is realized only insofar as it has itself historically or experiences itself. Intellectual, cultural, and political history become the medium of self-knowledge; thus rather than a thought-up system, experience executes the constantly changing self-conception of the human and his interpretation of life. The task of philosophy consists in comprehending this process of understanding itself and thereby rendering objective life’s consciousness of itself.” (Plessner 1928/1975: 22).
Again, we thank Hans-Peter Krüger for his guidance here, and bear all responsibility for any mistakes in our interpretation.
The original may be found at Plessner (1928/1975: 82).
“It is from this perspective that Scheler’s actual achievement—his discovery of the cognitive import of emotional acts, his emphasis on the specific apriority of the emotional…”; “…the fact that a certain mature perceptual consciousness intuitively grasps, ‘means’ things (hallucinated or real) as substance-property structures.”
Quotations from Expert #4 are Hyatt’s translations of the expert’s original German comments.
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Hyatt, M., Honenberger, P. Translating Plessner’s Levels. Hum Stud 42, 13–30 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9480-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9480-x