четверг, 9 апреля 2015 г.

M. Heidegger "Introduction to Metaphysics" From "Translators' introduction" by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt

.... Because Heidegger places such a great emphasis on the importance of language for the question of Being and its history, the attentive reader should learn enough Heidegger's philosophical terminology to form a judgment concerning the best way to render Heidegger's key words in English. Because we have endeavored to maintain a high degree of terminological consistency in our translation, we hope this version of the Introduction to Metaphysics will aid this process of reflection. To assist the reader further, especially the reader who comes to Heidegger for the first time with this book, we offer here the brief discussion of important words in Heidegger's philosophical vocabulary, restricting ourselves to the most difficult and characteristic terms, used by Heidegger in this work. We also recommend a study of the more comprehensive glossary accompanying this translation. The reader must understand that what follow here are sketches, not definitions, and and that only closer study through an engaged process of familiarization can develop the fuller meaning of these words. There are no solutions to genuine problems of translation, only temporarily satisfactory placeholders for what thoughtful readers should themselves take up as a question about language.  

Das Seiende:  beings; what is; that which is.  Heidegger's  expression das Seiende is broad enough to refer to any entity, physical or otherwise, with which we may have dealings, whether real, illusory, or imagined. One helpful passage in this text suggest the range of things that may count as beings, including vehicles, mountains, insects, the Japanese, and Bach's fugues.  Das Seiende (or the equivalent Seiendes ) also often refers to beings in general and as a whole, as in the opening question of the book, "Why are there beings [ Seiendes ] at all instead of nothing?" It should be noted that the German expression, unlike the English "beings", is not plural, and is translated most literally as "what is" or "that which is". Occasionally, Heidegger refers to something as seiend, and we have translated this word as "in being". This is meant as a verbal adjective and does not mean located inside a being or thing. Finally, Seiendheit means "beingness", that which characterizes beings as beings, in general. For Heidegger, much of the history of philosophy has focused on this beingness rather than inquiring into the happening of Being itself.

Das Sein: For Heidegger, Being is not any thing. It is not a being at all. Introduction to Metaphysics often gives the impression that Being is the same as beingness. However, Heidegger's ultimate question is how it is that beings in their beingness become available to us in the first place, or how we come to understand what it means to be. The question of of Being, in this sense, inquires into the happening, the event, in which all beings in their beingness become accessible and understandable to us as beings. Being is thus essentially verbal and temporal. Literally translated, das Sein would be "the to be", but this would be far too clumsy a rendering. Among Heidegger scholars there is considerable controversy on how best to translate  das Sein into English. Many prefer the lowercase "being" in order to fend off the impression that Heidegger  means some Supreme Being standing above or holding up all other beings; das Sein must not be mistaken for a subject deserving the substantiation that capitalization can imply in English. (In German, all nouns are capitalized, so there is no such implication.) Still, in our judgement, to render das Sein as "being" risks confusion, especially with "beings" as the translation for das Seiende , and so we resort to the capitalized term.

Dasein: A word left untranslated in almost all renderings of Heidegger's work, Dasein denotes that being for whom Being itself is at issue, for whom Being is in question. For the most part, in Heidegger, this being is us, the human being, although Dasein is not equivalent to human beings; Heidegger insists that Dasein is not an anthropological, psychological, or biological concept. We can think of Dasein as a condition into which human beings enter, either individually or collectively, at a historical juncture when Being becomes an issue for them; in this sense, Heidegger often speaks in this text of "historical Dasein", "our Dasein", or "the Dasein of a people". In everyday German, the word Dasein is used just as we use the word "existence"; readers may always substitute "existence" for "Dasein" in order to get a sense of how Heidegger's statements would have sounded to his original audience. But Heidegger consistently sees the Latin term existentia as misleading and superficial, so it is preferable to interpret Dasein in terms of its root meaning. This root meaning is usually rendered in English as "Being there", but when Heidegger hyphenate  Da-sein, we have employed the equally valid translation "Being-here". Dasein is the being who inhabits a Here, a sphere of meaning within which beings can reveal themselves as meaningful, as significant.  

Das Nichts: Nothing. As the first sentence of Introduction to Metaphysics indicates, the question of "nothing" will be recurrent theme of this work. For Heidegger, there is a deep connection between das Nichts and das Sein, and once again, the reader must beware of taking the capitalized Nothing as substantive thing. Neither Being nor Nothing is a being for Heidegger. We have resorted to capitalization again to avoid confusion between Heidegger's use of das Nichts, which as Nothing is the counterpart to das Sein, Being, and his use of Nichts or nichts, without the article, which generally means "nothing" as employed in more ordinary language.

Gewalt: violence. Gewalt belongs to a family of words used in this work that present considerable difficulties for translation. In ordinary German, Gewalt can mean violence in the sense of arbitrary and willful force employed by the institutions of the state. We have decided to translate this word uniformly as "violence", in part for the sake of consistency, but also because Heidegger seems to want to underline the radically transformative work of the Gewalt-tat and the Gewalt-tatiger - the act of violence and the doer of violence - without minimizing the danger and even the terror of such work. Still, the reader should keep in mind the ambiguous meaning of Gewalt in German.

Walten; das Walten: hold sway; the sway. Related to Gewalt are the words walten (a verb) and das Walten ( a verbal noun). In ordinary German, walten means to prevail, to reign, to govern, to dominate.  Heidegger interprets the Greek word phusis, which is usually translated as "nature", as a Greek name for Being itself - that is, the "emergent-abiding Walten" of beings as such. We believe the expression"the sway" suggests this powerful upsurge of the presence of beings. That Heidegger seeks to interpret phusis as this "sway" is an undertaking to which the reader must lend special attention.

Grund: ground; reason; foundation. Like its English cognate, "ground", the German Grund  can mean both the earth beneath our feet and the reason upon which we establish a position. As such, ein Grund can be a foundation, and it is opposed to ein Abgrund, an abyss. We translate Grund and related words in a variety of ways, as indicated here, because no single English word can adequately capture its range of meaning.

Der Mensch: humanity; human beings; humans; the human being; the human. In German, Mensch means human being, irrespective of gender, and so, with a very few exceptions, we have sought to preserve this gender neutrality, especially because Heidegger discusses all human beings as Dasein.

Volk: a people; the people.  The German word Volk has troubled history. In official Nazi ideology, the Volk is the race, the bearer of a specific historical destiny, both biological and spiritual. But in ordinary German, Volk has no necessary connection with race. It can mean a people or a nation, or "the people" as the basis for sovereignty (as in the American "We the people"), although Volk usually does not mean "people" in the informal sense of "folks around here". Heidegger uses the word Volk in Being and Time, and there it is best translated as "community".  But in the 1930s, especially during his involvement with the Nazi regime, Heidegger discusses the Volk in a manner that clearly endeavors to come to grips, for better of worse, with the politics of his time.........

M. Heidegger "Introduction to Metaphysics"
 Мартин Хайдеггер "Введение в метафизику"

























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