As a young undergraduate, I had the good fortune not to humiliate myself by bringing a copy of Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad to our very first humanities seminar. In a time long before Emily Wilson had become the Homeric translator du jour, the only translations of the Iliad that any respectable aspiring intellectual would dare to be seen with were those of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald. Praised for its accuracy, Lattimore’s appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in mirroring the ancient Greek as closely as possible. Praised for its style, Fitzgerald’s translation appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in manifesting the lyrical beauty and poetic vivacity of Homer.
The logic was fairly simple: A good translation consisted in overcoming the unsophisticated English language in order to bring the reader into an encounter with the original Greek text as much as possible, whereas a bad translation consisted in tying itself to the conventions and inadequacies of English in order to obscure the original text and the reader’s ability to interpret it for herself. Since the Fagles translation appealed to those for whom a good translation consisted in readability and ease of understanding, with minor concern for Homer’s dactylic hexameter, it was a decidedly bad translation.
To what extent did this logic—and splendid hubris of youth—rightly grasp the nature of translation? Is translation the art of mirroring another language as closely as possible in style and substance? Is it the art of overcoming the distortive poverties of one language in order to meet with the original richness of another?
Such questions bear not only on translations of literature but perhaps even more decisively on translations of great works of philosophy. One thinker who wrestled directly with that challenge was the German-Jewish philosopher Edith Stein (1891–1942). In the introduction to Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to Ascend to the Meaning of Being, Stein tackled the question of linguistic translation precisely in order to address one of the major barriers facing methodological “translation” in modern philosophy.
Born in Breslau, Germany (now Poland), into a Jewish family, Stein eventually converted to Catholicism—although she would never claim that she had ceased to be Jewish by doing so—and later took vows as a Discalced Carmelite nun under the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Well before either, though, she set out to become a philosopher, arriving in Göttingen in 1913 to study under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Originally a psychology student of William Stern at the University of Breslau from 1911 to 1913, Stein had found herself increasingly frustrated by the amorphous terminology, incoherent methods, and complete lack of foundational self-understanding of the “infant” field.11xEdith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, trans. Josephine Koeppel, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1985), 221–222. Amid her studies, she kept noticing references to Husserl. Reading the second volume of his Logical Investigations, which she acquired from a friend, she remarked that Husserl “was the philosopher of our age.”22xIbid., 219. Husserl’s Logical Investigationsproposed that the mind does not create truth but finds it. Logical Investigations was, in Stein’s view, “epoch-making” because “it turned attention away from [the Cartesian emphasis on] the ‘subject’ and toward ‘things’ themselves” so that “perception again appeared as reception, deriving its laws from objects not, as criticism has it, from determination which imposes its laws on the objects.”33xIbid., 250, emphasis added.
Quickly becoming one of Husserl’s most brilliant students, Stein never hesitated to question the master. The semester Stein arrived at Göttingen, Husserl published the first of his three-volume series Ideas, a systematization of the phenomenological method he set out in Logical Investigations. Stein soon expressed concerns about certain sections of the newer work, particularly those that seemed to indicate the phenomenological method might be turning away from the things themselves and falling back into a kind of idealism. The phenomenological method, according to Stein’s take on Husserl, “reduces” or excludes from its investigation anything and everything “that is in any way ‘doubtful,’” for the purpose of gaining insight into the essence of things.44xEdith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 3. It suspends the entire world of experience (Erfahrung), or what Husserl called the “natural attitude.” (Erfahrung is the common word for “experience” in German.) Insight into the essence of things is then achieved through investigating “my experience [Erleben] of the thing…together with its correlate, the full ‘phenomenon of the thing,’” because the fact of my experience (Erleben) is not doubtful and thereby not subject to “reduction” or exclusion.55xIbid., 4. The German word Erleben also means “experience,” but it is a more recent invention and carries the connotation of living “in” or “through” experience. Husserl called this “infinite field of pure investigation” the phenomenological attitude.66xIbid. But within Ideas, Stein found that certain of Husserl’s procedures admitted unnecessary doubt or skepticism that did not lead back to the things but distorted the phenomena given in experience.
Stein wrote her dissertation under Husserl on the problem of empathy: the problem, that is, of how one somehow appears to have access to the experience (Erfahrung) of someone else experiencing living (Erleben), what in common speech we might call someone’s interior life.77xIbid., 1. The problem of empathy has foundational implications for the phenomenological method, since it reveals a “point of contact” between experience in the phenomenological attitude (Erleben) and experience in the natural attitude (Erfahrung) through the intersubjective relation of human persons. Following the defense of her dissertation, in 1916, Stein worked as Husserl’s private assistant for nearly two years. During this time, Stein arrived at the insight that Husserl’s writings on time-consciousness opened up the possibility for a new phenomenological starting point that could bridge the divide between mind and world through the very being of the human person. Although Stein hoped for Husserl’s approval of this insight, it became a point on which the two ultimately diverged philosophically. Husserl found the I to be pure, that is, empty or contentless, while Stein found the I to be a person filled with a unique, irreducible, and intersubjective meaning.
Stein had an ongoing conversion experience in the wake of the death of her mentor and Husserl’s right-hand, Adolf Reinach. Reinach completed his habilitation under Husserl in 1909, earning the title of Privatdozent, which enabled him to lecture at the university. Reinach enlisted in the army at the breakout of the First World War and was killed in action in the winter of 1917, at Flanders. In early 1918, Stein assisted Reinach’s widow, Anna, with compiling and editing his writings. Stein hesitated to help for “fear of entering their home empty of Reinach’s presence and expecting to find Anna as a grieving widow rather than the formerly happy wife.”88xEdith Stein, Edith Stein: Selected Writings, ed. Marian Maskulak, CPS (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2016), 16. To Stein’s complete shock, upon entering the Reinach’s home, she found “that Anna’s deep sorrow had been transfigured by her strong faith in the power of Christ’s cross.”99xIbid. As Stein recalls, “‘This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine strength that it inspires in those who bear it. For the first time, I saw before my very eyes the Church, born of Christ’s redemptive suffering, victorious over the sting of death.’”1010xIbid.; c.f. Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, OCD, Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2005), 59–60, 246, n12. Her encounter with Anna Reinach confirmed her philosophical intuitions that the human person, not the pure I, is the proper starting point for an objective inquiry and that empathy, intersubjective feeling into, is the key to mediating between experience as Erleben and experience as Erfahrung.
By 1920, Stein was deciding whether to become a Lutheran or a Catholic.1111xStein, Life in a Jewish Family, 420. While visiting her friend Hedwig Conrad Martius in the summer of 1921, Stein “chose, at random, The Book of Her Life, by St. Teresa of Jesus [St. Teresa of Ávila],” and in St. Teresa “found the answer she had sought.”1212xIbid. Stein was received into the Catholic Church in 1922 and began to study Christian philosophy and mysticism. But since, as she later wrote, “her mind was no tabula rasa” but had rather “been marked by a definite stamp that she could not ignore,” she eventually sought to “come to terms with these two philosophical worlds that met within herself.” The result was Finite and Eternal Being, her magnum opus.1313xAll quotations from here to the end are from Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to Ascend to the Meaning of Being, trans. Walter Redmond (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2024). Stein attempted to publish that work in the late 1930s but was repeatedly thwarted by Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. It would be published only in 1950, eight years after she was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and forty-eight years before Pope John Paul II canonized her as a saint.
As Stein explained in the introduction to her book, modern philosophy had split from theology and the concerns of ontology, transforming the question of being into a matter of epistemology: how we know what we know. That split was somewhat difficult to name because one camp was typically termed “modern philosophy” and the other was considered the outmoded “lifeless” philosophy still taught in Catholic schools—even though in Stein’s own time, albeit with some controversy, the latter came to be identified with the philosophia perennis and termed “Christian philosophy.” During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both camps returned to ontology, modern philosophy through what Stein described as “the philosophy of essence (the phenomenology of Husserl and Scheler), soon followed by Heidegger’s philosophy of existence and, at the opposite pole, by Hedwig Conrad Martius’s theory of being.” Christian philosophy returned to ontology and the question of being a few decades earlier, in response to Pope Leo XIII’s call, in Aeterni Patris, to revitalize the study of St. Thomas. Even though both camps turned to ontology around the same time, profound linguistic barriers stood between them, further reinforcing and exacerbating their methodological differences.
Since the two camps were still “speaking different languages,” while often using precisely the same words, Stein proposed “to find a language in which they [can] understand each other.” We, as moderns, “are living in a tower of Babel,” she observed. What Husserl meant by essence or act is not what Aquinas meant by essence or act, and yet, at the same time, they use the same words for good reasons. There are notable family resemblances and consistent internal logics to each philosophical province of meaning. “Linguistic confusion” has become the cross those attempting to philosophize in modernity have been forced to bear, Stein argued, because “we can scarcely use one word without fearing that someone will take it to mean something quite different from what we intend.”
The very terms that were first developed to provide clarity, however, now “come burdened with a complicated history.” For instance, “substance” or “essence”—from Plato to Aristotle to Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas to Descartes to Leibniz to Hume to Kant—carries so much baggage that what object or phenomenon (if any!) to which each one is referring is not immediately clear. This kind of terminological sedimentation creates confusion and leads to esoteric jargon and babel in modern thinking.
Because of this, a translator who seeks to render, for instance, Greek philosophical terms into another language might reasonably want to dispense with any Latin or Latinized terminology in order to create a new vocabulary that more closely captures the Greek. Joe Sachs’s 1999 translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics exemplifies such an endeavor. Sachs chose to translate the Greek term οὐσία as “thinghood” rather than “essence,” from Cicero’s translation of the Greek as essentia, or “substance,” which in turn came from Augustine’s translation of the Greek as substantia.
Similarly, albeit with key differences, Stein tells us how in her own time, “for some years now,” attempts have been made in Germany “to create a proper—German—language for philosophy.” The idea being, in the example Stein gave, that since medieval ontology was typically read in the original Latin, translating the Latin terms into another language that is both more philosophical and unfettered by the same historically burdened terminology appeared to some philosophers to be a legitimate way out of this linguistic confusion. While it is reasonable for scholars to strive to develop translations that will not be an immediate source of confusion and will not exacerbate the problem of historically burdened language, Stein nonetheless noted that “these attempts” to create a proper language for philosophy that overcomes the poverties of languages like Latin in order to achieve a good translation “reveal the pitfalls in this sort of translation” project.
Stein emphasized that “anyone who has tried to translate a foreign language knows how much he cannot translate…and anyone who has thought about what language as such is, and what languages are, knows it cannot be otherwise.” Now Stein’s claim here is not that language is simply untranslatable because of how much there is that one cannot translate. In fact, she makes a point to also say that “we can, however, do much more in this regard than what translators are so often content with.” Rather Stein’s point is that those who seek to “start over” or “begin anew” often philosophically misunderstand that the fact of not being able to fully translate everything reveals the nature of translation and the deeper meaning of language itself.
According to Stein, “languages grow from the spirit [Geist] of the people who speak them” and are a reflection of a community’s living “and the way they talk about their life.” Each and every language “can but mirror the variety and uniqueness of the people speaking them.” Stein contrasted ancient Greek and Latin, noting how “the Greeks were a philosophical people and created a philosophical language,” whereas the Romans “had to do their utmost to wrest from their language what it was missing,” since the Romans were an exacting people and created an exact language. This is the precise reason why Seneca had so much difficulty determining an appropriate translation of “τὸ ὄν (the be-ing [das Seiende]).” Writing to a friend, he remarked, “‘You will condemn our Roman limitations more than ever when you learn that there is a one-syllable word that I cannot translate’” because “‘I must use a verb for a noun.’”
According to Stein, the clear limitations of Latin did not make the language inadequate for the purposes of philosophy. On the contrary, she contended that “the scanty vocabulary of Latin is not just its poverty; it is also its strength,” and this strength is why “it is impossible to dispense with Latin terms entirely.” “The several meanings of a Latin word are not arbitrary; they are ordered, connected in meaning,” and form a concise and coherent thread of possible significations. The difference between Greek and Latin is not that one is philosophical and the other is unphilosophical but rather that, philosophically speaking, “Greek, with its freedom and ease of expression, is the language of living thought in motion.” By contrast, Latin, with “its strict syntax and terse austerity, is best at formulating sharply defined summary findings.” According to Stein, Greek and Latin are fit for different philosophical tasks when conceptualizing a phenomenon or bringing an object into linguistic givenness. Latin synthesizes, distills, and summarizes, whereas Greek manifests the living present. Latin is the fruit of reflective clarity, whereas Greek is the fruit of reflecting and experiencing clearly in the first place.
For Stein, language is the mature fruit of the spirit of a people achieved through their communal creativity and the values they collectively realize. What it means for a language to be a work of culture and to reflect the character or personality of its people is that specific languages, in both their form and content, reflect the values and arrays of meaning grasped by a people. The supposed poverty of Latin having the one-word “act [actus]” for “what is conveyed by the Greek words ἐνέργεια [energeia; effectiveness, actuality], ἔργον [ergon; work, working] and ἐντελεχεία [entelecheia; completion-of-being]” denotes the objective connections among these terms and how their arrays of meaning coincide. In the specific case of actus and the triplet of Greek instantiations, we find that ἔργον as the actualization of a possibility (e.g., thinking) when understood not as an effect but as an ἐνέργεια or activity of being (e.g., a thinker’s thinking) coincides with ἐντελεχεία as that which “has reached its goal in actual being” (e.g., the prime mover as thought thinking itself). Stein argued that “if we simply did away with this Latin ‘terminology,’ we would lose the very units-of-meaning that alert us to the objective connections, to the order of be-ings.” In other words, language grows from a people. To eradicate a language or the terminology of a language is to renounce “the mature fruits of the intellectual labor of centuries;” it is to renounce “the product of the spirit of a people called upon in its unique character—as is the spirit of every people—to make a unique contribution to all humankind.”
Each language is a unique possession, and through its unique character, as a reflection of its unique people, each language contributes to grasping “units-of-meaning” and realizing values that contribute to humanity. Each language’s distinct way of grasping meaning and realizing values is why translators find that not everything can be translated from one language to another. For this reason, even the most “unphilosophical” of languages, such as Latin and English, cannot be philosophically overlooked. Nor can the most philosophical of languages, such as Greek and German, be considered exhaustive or complete. The sharply defined summary findings of Latin, as in the case of actus, bring precision and clarity to the Greek, and the motive living thought of Greek, as in the case of ἐνέργεια, ἔργον, and ἐντελεχεία, vivifies and enriches the Latin.
Translation is not merely mirroring the style and substance of one language with those of another. Nor is it merely the act of overcoming the poverties of one language in order to meet with the richness of another. Translation, for Stein, is the art of cultural and communal encounter among peoples. It is a point of departure for unity among peoples and a fusion of horizons. A good translation, therefore, alerts us to objective connections in reality and serves as a source for more fully realizing values and finding units-of-meaning whereby knowledge of being and beings can be corrected, expanded, and deepened. A bad translation obscures, distorts, or occludes these objective connections from the side of either language or both languages.
From her foundational understanding of what language is and in what linguistic differences and linguistic confusion consist, only briefly outlined here, Stein developed a theory of and procedure for translating well. She set out the groundwork and procedure not only for linguistic translation but for methodological translation as well. Stein recommended that when translating among Latin, Greek, and German, “We should look for German expressions that work best but retain the solid groundwork of scholastic language by allowing it to show through, by taking it as our guide, and by referring back to it wherever there is a danger of missing the point or seeing but a single facet.”
Since Latin philosophical terms are, however, often “modeled after Greek,” if we hope to fully grasp what the Latin terms mean, “we must go back to their Greek background” in order to “help us track the various senses of a Latin term and find suitable German words for it.” This integrative and reflective procedure is necessary for philosophical understanding and developing a good translation because if, “for example, someone versed in modern philosophy, for whom ‘act’ means a freely elicited mental act,” applied this precise singular meaning to the Latin term actus in “the works of the scholastics,” or used it to render the various Greek words and meanings that fall under the one Latin term, he “would fall into the most dreadful misunderstanding.”
Although Stein focused on Latin, Greek, and German, other languages could be analyzed and compared in this way. When translating into one’s own language from others, especially ones with a more summative character such as Latin, one should strive to articulate its summative precision in both diction and style choices, even if it will likely require several words to translate such a language. Similarly, when translating an exacting or summative language, one should investigate this language’s relationship to others and the precise manner in which it has synthesized and distilled words, concepts, and ideas from other languages. Likewise, when translating a language of living thought, one should investigate the language’s relationship to the phenomenon it claims to grasp and articulate.
The task of Finite and Eternal Being is translational: Stein sought to fuse medieval ontology with phenomenology, bringing insights from both approaches to philosophy into a higher unity. She started “from scholastic patterns of thought,” presented “first in their scholastic dressing,” since the scholastic patterns of thought, like the Latin language in which they are written, were sharply defined summary findings. She then inquired into the origin of these scholastic ideas about the meaning of being by investigating both their historical origins as well as their objective origins by way of experience, since the objective origins are what stand closest to us and what we can investigate through our living. To investigate the objective origins of scholasticism’s sharply defined summary findings by way of experience turns out to offer two routes leading to the same summit: phenomenology by way of Erleben and metaphysics by way of Erfahrung. Both forms of experience, while different, are nonetheless experience, and in their own ways are each legitimate methodological starting points for an objective philosophical inquiry. Both lead to the fullness of being and an intelligible encounter with reality that, while never exhausted, can ever be translated anew, enabling the human community to unfold at greater depths and become more attuned to meaning and values that inhere in reality.