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Translator’s Introduction
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Translator’s Introduction The Closed Commercial State is not one of Fichte’s most elusive or enigmatic writings. Yet it presents special difficulties to the translator. The most fundamental of these involve the tension between the different discursive levels and linguistic registers through which the text operates. This tension is already evident in the organization of the work as a whole: whereas the first book presents an abstract theory of ideal economic relations, the second book considers the “history of the present” and the third offers a concrete proposal for political action. Fichte, in a novel fashion, attempts to bring philosophy and material reality, the language of German idealism and the very worldly science of economics, into a commerce. The argument of the Closed Commercial State insists on closure and boundaries. Yet Fichte’s rhetoric often seems to be doing the very opposite. This presents a challenge to the translator, who must do justice to the very different expectations and conventions governing the translation of these different registers. Whereas English often forces us to choose between “earthy” Germanic words and a more abstract vocabulary of Latinate derivation , German, whose rich philosophical vocabulary is mostly cobbled together from rather ordinary root words, is extremely adept at moving between these different registers. Most modern readers would probably reject Fichte’s own extravagant claims regarding German’s “originality” and the superiority of “original languages” as media for philosophical thought.1 Yet it is still worth noting that for Fichte, the linguistic difference between “original” and other languages suggests the difference between the open and the closed commercial state. The closed commercial state is not only a political construct, but the hermeneutic construction of a state in which the meaning of economic activity , rather than being imperiled by the hyperbolic inflation and deflation to which world currency gives rise, would be conserved by sealing off reference within a hermetically closed whole. Seen in this way, translating the Closed Commercial State into English is a somewhat paradoxical undertaking—like trying to realize the value of national currency in world currency. xiii xiv Translator’s Introduction Rigorous philosophical translations, especially of German, are with good reason expected to make at least a valiant attempt at preserving not only the apparent reference of a term, but its resonances and associations within both the source language as a whole and the dialects and idiolects represented by the text in question, the philosopher’s other writings, and contemporaneous discourse. No one could be happy translating Heidegger’s Gestell as “rack,” though it is not unimportant to know that Gestell also has this very everyday sense. Economics, in contrast, was, or at least has become, a technocratic discipline with a vocabulary that claims precision in its reference. A philosopher might spend hours pondering the Latin roots of interest. For an economist considering the relation between unemployment and inflation, this is itself of little interest, and a translator who, translating a conventional economic text, felt the need to remind the reader that interest comes from a Latin word literally meaning “being‑among,” that a commodity was not only commodious but contained a due measure within itself, and that capital had itself inherited a rich metaphysical endowment, would probably be treated with a shrug. And if someone translated “interest ” as “among‑being,” “commodity” as “the duly‑measured” and “capital” as “head‑part,” he would be justly regarded as out of his mind. Fichte’s Closed Commercial State, however, is neither fish nor fowl. Or rather, it is a fish whose scales are on the way to becoming wings—or a bird returning to the sea. Sometimes this does not create problems. Forgetting that Anweisung appeared in the title of another work by Fichte, where it roughly means “instruction,” and also forgetting that it is related to a word meaning “to show” or “to point” and resonates with the German word for wisdom, we can happily translate it as “bill of exchange” in the sixth chapter of the third book.2 The context in which it appears mutes these other senses and associations. But often things become more difficult. Berechnung must be translated as “calculation” to capture the ostensive meaning of the text, but it is also involved in an elaborate play of concepts, on which much of the meaning of the text depends. Not only is the closed commercial state one in which everyone can count on everyone else, and every activity counts on every other activity, but calculation, for Fichte, becomes...