Michael N. Forster
Autor de Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit
Sobre El Autor
Michael Forster is Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Center for Philosophy at Bonn University.
Obras de Michael N. Forster
Obras relacionadas
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1957-12-09
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
UK - Educación
- Princeton University (Ph.D., Philosophy)
Oxford University (B.A., P.P.E.) - Ocupaciones
- Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy
- Organizaciones
- University of Chicago
- Premios y honores
- Humboldt Professorship, international prize for research from the Humboldt Foundation
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 10
- También por
- 2
- Miembros
- 165
- Popularidad
- #128,476
- Valoración
- 3.7
- Reseñas
- 2
- ISBNs
- 28
But Herder, man, I trust the guy. I like his heart and I think if he woke up today he’d be on the right side (when he was done screaming). He exhorts us to “expel the filth of the Seine” and it is a counterhegemonic riposte, not the ethnonationalism certain latter-day unsavouries have taken it to be; and I admire him for doing it, for speaking out. He wrote piles, and changed over time, and in ways that always saw him engaging and developing and never getting crazy conservative. But I think it’s the young Sturm-und-Drang Herder that I like best, not the older (I imagine the whole 19th century in Germany as a kind of dusty Prussian military academy schoolroom) and the one where all the best ideas came out: not only the famous “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” where he ballsily cuts the Gordian knot of language origin theory by saying we speak because we’re human, FULL FUCKING STOP, and then uses the airspace freed up to say many interesting things about the ways different languages express and shape the Geister of peoples, different strokes for different Volks, not only not only that, but also the larger body of his work, which Forster shows quite conclusively (I’d say) involves a much more radical, progressive, cosmopolitan sense of difference than the treatise does. And like, if you haven’t noticed we need a cosmopolitan theory of difference—one, that is, that falls neither into hypocritical leftish neurosis about respecting-difference-while-promoting-Western-values, nor rightish psychosis, of either the everyone’s-a-yankees-fan-at-heart or the Nazi tribal horror variety—then you haven’t been reading much.
Herder gives us radical alienness and a way of valuing it—both unalloyed positives in my book (as in, we only need to focus so hard on finding common ground if we’re too shitty to live with difference, which is much more interesting). His basis is threefold: 1) he does not admit the existence of transcendent meaning; 2) language in his vision does not evolve toward and cannot be wrangled into a single state, that is, it is irreducibly multiple; and 3) languages, to him, are therefore incommensurable. Each of these points in turn depends on what Forster argues carefully and compellingly is the unifying thesis of all Herder’s work: that thought is bounded by meanings, which are at once constituted by word-usages (with no external reference such as “ideas”) and reliant on sense-perceptions, and are thus radically different between cultures, historical eras, and also individuals, as expressed most richly in works of artistic (especially literary) genius. Herder’s linguistics is thus best seen as a special case of his investigation of differences in worldviews, of which his anthropology, hermeneutics, philosophy of history, and translation theory each make up a part and through which they inform each other. This makes him, in himself, a virtual secret history of our best attempts to theorize cultural difference in a respectful way. Then to top it off he does things like translate folksongs of the world so we can learn all about and love each other. He’s ace.
Almost forgot to mention that this book—“after” Herder—also considers Hamann (who has often been seen as Herder’s irrationalist mentor but who Forster considers a cranky poseur—it’s plausible, but I won’t accept it till I’ve checked out his whole book written from the perspective of the letter H myself—and Schleiermacher, who’s a historical doyen of sorts in translation theory but who Forster shows is in major debt to Herder too. That is all fine (the essay on Herder, Schleiermacher and “foreignizing” translation, bending words to try to convey the language world of the original author and expanding your reader’s own language world at the same time, is maybe the best one here), but it does make for a deal of repetition (all the same points about Herder get made in the other guys’ sections); also Forster plays favourites too baldly for a guy whose favourite philosopher’s buzzword was “empathy,” and maybe should have left Hamann alone rather than be so grudging. But small criticisms; strong effort.… (más)