Martin Heidegger was bold enough to claim that one could only philosophize in German or Greek. He also believed that his own language and that of Plato were related. Viktor Farías, his one-time student from Chile, is said to have asked Heidegger whether his work Being and Time could be translated into Spanish at all. Later, in his own book Heidegger and Nazism, Farías exposed the philosopher’s involvement in that ominous chapter of German history. Today, scarcely anyone would be so naive as to say that it was only possible to philosophize in German or ancient Greek.
Before that period of excess, German had for more than a century been an important medium for those who wanted to become involved in the work of the philosophers, namely, in reading important texts and discussing their content. It was Christian Thomasius who, at the University of Halle in 1694, changed from Latin, the language common at the time for academic lectures, to German. But it was only with Immanuel Kant that German became recognized in countries near and far as a language which corresponded, as it were, to the dignity of philosophy. I need not comment on the next stages: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but also Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Max Weber, and finally, the above-mentioned Heidegger. Their major texts contributed towards the German language becoming familiar to philosophers all over the world, but also towards the delusion that one should philosophize in German.
Adorno, by contrast, writes with reference to this Kantian beginning, that the latter’s thinking was centred in the concept of autonomy, the self-consciousness of the responsible rational individual, and not in those blind dependencies, one of which is the unreflected foremost power of the nation. According to Kant, universal rationality is only substantiated in the individual. Unfortunately, that unreflected power of the nation also dominates in the reflection on language. And in keeping with this Kantian tradition of enlightenment, which Adorno underscored, no one language has a special priority over the other. There is no such thing as one language being privileged for the business of philosophy. Everything can be said in every language. Something said in Japanese can easily be rendered in German. After all the misuse of the German language by philosophers, this knowledge is salutary.
But it is as well to be careful: however legitimate this view may be, linguistic universalism is difficult to assert if it ignores the intrinsic value of living with just one language and quickly turns into another excess, a false universalism. For over the course of the centuries, every national philosophical tradition has developed a distinctive linguistic coloration, one could say style, attitude or usage, that is also expressed at the language level. One may speak here of philosophical dialects, whereby there is no standard pronunciation, unlike in language teaching. Dialect is manifest not only in individual turns of phrase, but also in modes of arguing. It is the rhetorical shaping that gives arguments their incisiveness and plausibility. An argumentation is only intelligible in a context. One such context is a tradition of debate, and this is articulated in a national language. But anyone who thinks that diverse styles can be lumped together and that therefore English can and must become the language of philosophers, underestimates the resilience of a dialect, at least in philosophy. Today, we philosophers must avoid two excesses, the power of the national to which Adorno referred, but also false universalism. After all, the works of the philosophers need a feedback in the national public domain, and ultimately this national public domain lives with the national language, irrespective of all the impulses it receives from outside. And only with that national language can the German-speaking philosophers play their part “in the international concert” (Habermas). What did Adorno say? Universal rationality is substantiated only in the individual.//
