A Year with Heidegger

On Translating Plato’s Doctrine of Truth

I have recently finished reading Martin Heidegger’s Einleitung in die Philosophie. In the concluding text I read, a lecture on academic study delivered in Freiburg in the summer of 1929, Plato’s allegory of the cave appeared once again.

It was especially the thought of paideia — formation as a turning of the whole human being — that made me stop.

I had encountered this turning before.

Not only as a reader.

In 2000, Forlaget Epos in Sandefjord published my Norwegian translation of Heidegger’s Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit — Platons sannhetslære. The German text forms part of Wegmarken, volume 9 of the Gesamtausgabe. The Norwegian edition was published with the written consent of Hermann Heidegger. The edition itself identifies the German original, the first Norwegian publication in 2000, and me as the Norwegian translator.

The translation took me approximately a year.

Looking back on it now, I think this was my real encounter with Martin Heidegger.

I had, of course, read Heidegger before. One can read a philosopher, study the concepts, follow the argument, and try to understand where the text is leading. But translation is different. One cannot simply pass over a difficult sentence and assume that one has more or less understood what it means. Sooner or later, one must choose a word.

And the moment one chooses the word, one has already interpreted.

Three Languages

The task was more complicated than translating German into Norwegian.

Heidegger’s text is itself an interpretation of Plato’s Greek text. The German exposition therefore repeatedly returns to Greek words and expressions. I had to work simultaneously with Plato’s ancient Greek text, Heidegger’s German interpretation, and the language the text was to acquire in Norwegian.

Three languages met on the same page.

A German word could appear straightforward until I examined which Greek term Heidegger was trying to bring into view through it. The Greek term could, in turn, open meanings that could not simply be reproduced in Norwegian.

A clear example is aletheia — ἀλήθεια.

The word is usually translated as truth. Heidegger returns to the relation between concealment and unconcealment and tries to think truth as Unverborgenheit — the unconcealed, that which has been brought out of hiddenness. In my translation, this became a recurring problem: How could the Norwegian language preserve Heidegger’s point without making the text more alien than necessary?

Many of the footnotes arose from precisely such places.

They were not comments added externally after the fact. They were traces of places where the languages did not coincide.

Page after page, the Greek stands alongside the German interpretation and my Norwegian text. The Norwegian edition shows, for example, how I tried in the notes to explain Heidegger’s use of das Seiende and das Unverborgene, and why ἀληθές could not simply be rendered as “the true.”

During the work, I received help from Egil A. Wyller. He knew Plato and the Greek philosophical tradition in a way that made it possible to test my solutions against the original text. I did not want merely to reproduce what I thought Heidegger meant. The translation also had to stand in a defensible relation to the Greek text Heidegger himself was interpreting.

That made the work slow.

But the slowness gradually became part of the understanding.

One discovers that philosophical concepts cannot simply be moved from one language to another. A word may be linguistically correct and still lose something of the world to which it belongs.

Translation becomes interpretation.

Turning

The allegory of the cave is well known. Human beings sit bound in a cave, looking at shadows on the wall in front of them. They know nothing else and therefore take the shadows for reality. One of them is released and forced to turn around.

It is easy to tell the story as a simple movement from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from untruth to truth.

But when one works slowly with the text, the movement becomes less simple.

The released prisoner does not immediately welcome the light. He is blinded by it. Seeing is painful. What was previously familiar may at first appear more secure than what is new. Heidegger’s interpretation therefore emphasizes the transitions: the eyes must slowly become accustomed both to light and to darkness.

It was this turning that gradually came to interest me most.

Plato uses periagōgē, a turning or conversion. Heidegger links it to paideia, formation. In the text, paideia is not described as filling an empty soul with knowledge, but as a reorientation of the whole human being. Genuine formation “transforms” the self and leads it toward a different way of standing in relation to what shows itself.

That is something quite different from the idea of education as the transmission of knowledge.

One can learn a great deal without the gaze itself changing.

Perhaps one can even complete an academic education without anything fundamental ever having turned.

Translation as Resistance

I experienced something of this in the work of translation as well, though of course in a much more modest sense.

The text resisted.

I could sit for a long time with a single sentence. At first, I would try to find a Norwegian expression corresponding to the German. Then I would discover that the problem was not really linguistic. I had not understood the matter well enough.

I then had to return to Heidegger’s formulation, move on to Plato’s text and the Greek term, and then try again in Norwegian.

It was not only the words that had to be tested. My own first understanding had to be tested as well.

In this way, translation became a hermeneutic experience in a very literal sense. The work moved between part and whole, between languages, between a provisional understanding and a new reading. The sentence could look almost unchanged when I returned to it, but the question I brought to it was not necessarily the same.

The Unsaid in What Is Said

Heidegger opens Plato’s Doctrine of Truth with a thought that I now read differently from the way I did then. Scientific knowledge can be formulated in propositions, he writes, but a thinker’s “teaching” is of another kind: the unsaid in what is said can open itself to us in such a way that it concerns us personally.

I recognize this from the work of translation.

A translator of course works with the words that are actually there. But precisely because each word must be chosen anew, one is constantly confronted with what the words are trying to carry.

Why does Heidegger use this particular word?

What is he trying to make visible?

What happens if I choose this Norwegian word rather than another?

What disappears?

What appears?

Gradually, translation becomes less a matter of transporting sentences from one language to another and more a matter of dwelling with meaning.

I do not think I formulated this so clearly while I was doing the work around the turn of the millennium. I worked. I looked up words, compared texts, rewrote passages, and asked Wyller when I was uncertain about the Greek.

Slowly, the Norwegian text took shape.

Only later have I understood how much the manner of working itself mattered.

Back to the Cave

It is easy to remember the ascent and forget that the allegory of the cave does not end in the sunlight.

The liberated prisoner returns.

This, too, is a transition. Eyes accustomed to the light see poorly in the darkness. The others laugh at the one who returns. His new way of seeing does not immediately make him better able to move within the world he has left behind. Heidegger emphasizes that the allegory of the cave is precisely about a sequence of movements: out of the cave, toward the light, and back into the cave again.

This part of the story later became important to me as a teacher.

When I taught beginning social work students, social work as a multiparadigmatic scientific discipline was a central topic. The students were to encounter different theories of the human being, different philosophies of science, and different forms of knowledge. Natural-scientific, social-scientific, humanistic, and normative perspectives could all lay claim to relevance.

I used Platons sannhetslære in this teaching.

The allegory of the cave became an image of the idea that education does not merely consist in adding new knowledge to old. Encountering a different understanding of the human being may also mean that one’s own way of seeing is challenged. What one has taken for granted may have to be examined again.

It was precisely here that I encountered resistance.

Colleagues criticized me for bringing philosophy into scientific education. Philosophy and science, they argued, ought to be kept apart. The image used was simple and clear: they were like oil and water.

Incompatible.

I took the criticism seriously, because there is an important distinction here. A philosophical text cannot replace empirical research. Heidegger cannot be used as evidence of how people actually behave, and Plato cannot settle an empirical research question.

But that was never the intention.

The question I was trying to open for the students was another one: What understanding of the human being is already present in our theories and methods? What happens when two theories see the same person differently? And what is required of a future social worker when he or she discovers that the first way of understanding a situation is not necessarily the only possible one?

For me, such questions belonged in the education precisely because social work was multiparadigmatic.

In retrospect, I also see the conflict with my colleagues differently. Perhaps they were right in one respect: philosophy and science are different activities.

But difference is not the same as incompatibility.

Science can investigate the world methodically. Philosophy can ask what we have already presupposed when the investigation begins.

Perhaps that was also why Plato’s cave belonged in the classroom. It did not tell the students what they should think.

It asked them where they were looking from.

An Encounter

I have called this an encounter with Martin Heidegger.

That is, of course, a strange formulation.

Heidegger died in 1976. I never met him.

And yet there are encounters that do not require two people to be in the same room.

For approximately a year, I sat with his words in front of me. I followed them back to Plato’s Greek text and then tried to carry them over into my own language. Sometimes I followed Heidegger without great difficulty. At other times, the text stopped me and forced me to examine what I had actually understood.

Perhaps this is how philosophical texts continue to live. Not primarily because we repeat what the philosopher has already said, but because the text creates new questions in the one who reads.

I spent a year translating Platons sannhetslære.

More than a quarter of a century later, I encounter the allegory of the cave again in Heidegger. I now see more clearly that the work of translation did not merely result in a Norwegian book.

It also became a way of learning how to read.

I translated a text.

But the text also did something to the person who translated it.

Perhaps this is something of what Plato tried to grasp with the word paideia: formation as a turning of the whole human being. In Heidegger’s interpretation, this turning and the question of truth belong inseparably together.

A turning.

Not only of the gaze.

But of the one who sees.

References

Heidegger, M. (1976). Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit [Plato’s doctrine of truth]. In F.-W. von Herrmann (Ed.), Wegmarken (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9, pp. 203–238). Vittorio Klostermann.

Heidegger, M. (1996). Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introduction to philosophy] (O. Saame & I. Saame-Speidel, Eds.). Vittorio Klostermann. (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 27)

Heidegger, M. (2000). Platons sannhetslære [Plato’s doctrine of truth] (K. T. Pettersen, Trans.). Forlaget Epos. (Original work published 1976)

Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.; C. D. C. Reeve, Rev.). Hackett Publishing Company.