Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy: a Transformative, Socio-Narrative Approach to A.V. Miller’s Cold-War Retranslations. David Charlston. Abingdon; NY: Routledge. 2020. Reviewed by Stephen Cowley.
This book will interest students of the reception of Hegelian thought in the English-speaking world. It includes an account of the life of Arnold Miller (1899-1991), a leading translator of Hegel into English in the late 20th century and an analysis of some key translations, in which Charlston attempts to relate Miller’s ideological commitments to his choices of texts and words in his translations. Charlston argues that Miller separates the Phenomenology of Spirit stylistically from the mature system of the Encyclopaedia and Berlin lectures. The author thinks that Miller’s mature attitudes to gender, cold-war politics and religion played into his work as a translator. Miller saw more in Hegel than had been drawn out by the British Idealists (40) and wrote that reason was “the place where, Hegel says, God reveals himself to man” (41).
The book appears in a series devoted to issues of translation and Charlston is himself an experienced translator. His book thus features a theoretical backdrop of literature on the theory of translation that ranges from philosophical considerations about meaning to issues of socio-cultural impact, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and the practice of editorial “reframing”. He notes the influence on Miller of E.V. Rieu, who translated The Four Gospels for Penguin (36). The book includes the obituary of Miller by his daughter Mary Lettington, originally published in the Hegel Society of Great Britain (HSGB) Bulletin (1991). None of Miller’s own brief writings are included, which is unfortunate given their scarcity. Charlston has set up a website avmiller.co.uk to facilitate further discussions.
The works Miller translated are Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812-16, 1969), Philosophy of Nature (1830, 1970), Philosophy of Mind (1830, 1971), Phenomenology of Spirit (1807, 1977), Philosophical Propaedeutic (1809-11, 1986) and Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1833, 1986). The Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind completed the Oxford translation of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. Charlston says that “complex political motives and far-reaching cultural consequences are associated with the late twentieth-century Hegel revival in which the publication of Miller’s translations played a key role.” (6) He argues that these translations “cannot be taken as purely philosophical. They combine literary, scientific, religious and spiritual aspirations with a “euphemisation” or selective erasure of the political.” (54) He identifies “decolonisation, women’s rights and trade union activism” (37) as examples of such political issues. Let us then consider firstly Charlston's account of Miller’s life and then his investigations into Miller's translations.
Arnold Vincent Miller (1899-1991)
Miller was born in 1899 to a Baptist family and lived in London. Charlston notes that "his studious attitude possibly relates to his strict, Calvinistic family background." (116) Miller learned German and French at school and was called up to serve in the First World War, where he was taken prisoner and served as a medical orderly in an operating theatre. After the war, he travelled to Vienna with a Quaker mission to distribute food, at which time he had communist sympathies. He returned to London and through discussions of theosophy and politics learned about Whiteway colony in the Cotswolds, founded by social idealists associated with a church in Croydon. Through this, he met the early feminist Nellie Shaw and her partner the Czech Hegelian philosopher, Francis Sedlák (1873-1935), author of Pure Thought and the Riddle of the Universe (1921), to whom Miller dedicated his translation of Science of Logic. Sedlák had also translated this work, but had burned his manuscript when he couldn’t find a publisher (xiv). Miller contributed to Shaw’s biography of Sedlák, A Czech Philosopher on the Cotswolds (1940).
 |
| Nellie Shaw's memoir of Whiteway (1935). |
Miller married Frances Reeve in 1933, with whom he had two daughters, and worked for the civil service as a translator until the 1960s. It would have been interesting to have known more about his work for the civil service, which could easily have led to philosophical contacts, but Charlston is silent on this. Even the Civil Service Yearbook would have given basic information. One imagines he might have appreciated Hegel’s high view of civil servants as the “universal class”. He and his family joined the Church of England in 1946 and he took an active part in services and the Men’s Society. Charlston characterises his views as socially conservative from around this time. Charlston likens his views to those of G.R.G. Mure’s essay “The Organic State” (1949). This was a late contribution to the contest of ideas initiated by the critique of British Idealist Bernard Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) in L.T. Hobhouse’s Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918). Charlston notes in passing Miller’s interest in Jung’s psychology (49, 112).
In his retirement, Miller completed his six translations of Hegel. He gave a talk to the Hegel Society of Great Britain that was oriented to theosophy. He attended several HSGB conferences and travelled to Canada to meet the Hegel translation group in Toronto that included H.S. Harris, George di Giovanni and Jim Devin. Miller published essays on “Rudolf Steiner and Hegel” (1972), “Absolute Knowing and the Destiny of the Individual” (1983), “On Translating Hegel” (1983) – these last two both in The Owl of Minerva – and “Defending Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature” (1993). He left behind other unpublished papers and correspondence which Charlston has consulted, notably that with Owen Barfield, the interpreter of the “anthroposophist” Rudolf Steiner.
Miller as Translator
The main translations in terms of impact are the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Charlston notes that the Science of Logic had already been translated into English by Johnson and Struthers (1929), two students of British Idealist J.M. McTaggart of Cambridge University (146-47, 181, n17). Miller had begun re-translating it, perhaps shortly after the war, through dissatisfaction with the previous version which he thought gave “a most inadequate and misleading account of this fundamental work” (13). According to Charlston, Miller “worked with the German text alongside the English translation and certainly consulted other works.” (64) His revised translation came out in 1969. My experience with the Miller translation was one of disappointment. I found that it suffered from a lack of engagement with the theories of meaning developed by analytic philosophers. As a result, it failed to produce sentences that matched the criteria of meaningful utterance that I had come to expect as a philosophy student. The use of non-words, such as “sublate” and “diremption”, for which a dictionary was no help, and the use of such expressions as “negative positing” (for negative setzen) and “Notion” (Begriff) perplexed me. Charlston goes some way to explain how this happened. In seeking to move away from the British Idealist tradition, Miller removed Johnson and Struthers’ capitalisation of terms they took to represent logical categories on the basis of McTaggart. Hence the stability offered by these defined terms was missing. Miller stressed the scientific character of the text by a uniform translation of the ambiguous key term aufheben (sublate, remove, supersede), with little regard for context. In the Phenomenology on the other hand, he used over 40 paraphrases for the same term. Miller restored much of Hegel’s italicisation of words. In place of commentary or much-needed clarification, he referred readers to G.R.G. Mure’s Introduction to Hegel (1940). Mure objected to the “intoxication of Carlylese” (170) in Hegel translations.
The Phenomenology of Spirit had already been translated into English by Scottish philosophy professor James Black Baillie (1910, revised 1931), on the basis of Georg Lasson’s 1907 German edition. Charlston has examined the publisher’s correspondence files and analysed Miller’s revised text. He concludes that Miller regarded the Phenomenology as an early work to be treated separately from the system and thus less strictly in terms of its vocabulary. This, he notes, contrasts with the more recent translation of Pinkard, who strives for consistency in his translation (222, n14). Miller’s translation choices reflect his view of Hegel as a religious thinker and Miller’s distance from Marxist interpretations of his social thought. Charlston substantiates his view by examination of two sub-sections of the text: Lordship and Bondage (Phenomenology 4A) and The Ethical World (Ibid. 6A).
In his discussion of Lordship and Bondage, Charlston notes that Baillie’s use of the religious terms Lord (der Herr) and bondsman may relate to Lasson’s reference of the terms back to Luther’s Bible and hence to the language of the King James Bible (“I am the Lord your God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Exodus 20.2). Charlston concludes that Miller’s adoption of Baillie’s terms “supports the de-politicising, conservative emphasis of the Cold-War Hegel revival” (198). This is plausible, at least in comparison with the “master/slave” reading of Kojève and Hyppolite in France. I have found that Miller also brings out, even exaggerates, the religious overtones of the imagery in the following section on unhappy consciousness. The interpretation of chapter four of the Phenomenology is still contested and the presence of both political and religious overtones can be identified in the text. Hence, the choice of terminology, unless it is actively misleading, is only a matter of emphasis. Charlston does not address the feudal interpretation proposed by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory (2014).
Charlston’s examination of the Antigone section draws on the work of Kimberly Hutchings (2003). He cites Hegel’s description of women as introducing family intrigue and an admiration of youth into the public sphere where authority is exercised by elderly men (Phen, para 475). The text is ambiguous as to whether this refers to the women of a Greek polis or to women as such. One might think of Lady Macbeth as a modern example, as the play, translated by Schiller, is referenced in the text. Charlston comments that “the various translations subtly influence the level of universality at which Hegel’s account is read.” (215) Miller took over Baillie’s restructuring of the text, but toned down some of his rhetorical flourishes. I did not find his examples persuasive, e.g. the use of “womankind” for Weiblichkeit, in place of the more modern “femininity”, or Miller’s capitalisation of “Family”. Hegel addressed the nature of the modern family in the Philosophy of Right, so his mature view of the roles of men and women in the family unit should be looked for there.
Conclusions
Charlston appears at times to be beholden to a kind of Greenham Common view of politics as an everlasting righteous struggle against hierarchy. Nonetheless, he not only solves some mysteries about Arnold Miller, but sharpens our sense of what is at stake for Hegel-readers in the choices of his translators. He indicates through his analysis that the process of absorbing Hegel’s thought into the substance of Anglophone culture has stalled and might still challenge much modern thinking about the family, politics, philosophy and religion. He has not exhausted his subject matter and there would be scope for a further study that looked at a wider range of languages, translators (e.g. T.M Knox and more modern figures) and Hegelian texts.
References
Cole, Andrew. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: UP, 2014.
Hutchings, Kimberly. Hegel and Feminist Philosophy. Cambridge: UP, 2003.
Rashed, Ruth Abou. Review of Charlston D. Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy. Verifiche XLIX, 2020, 366-72.
Rieu, E.V. The Four Gospels. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952
No comments:
Post a Comment