Identity,  Personhood,  The Self,  Translations and Transcriptions

Hegel on free will and property, as told through translation notes

May 29, 2020 /
An example of why it’s important to know the grammatical gender of your nouns and adjectives in Spanish, as well as the importance of context for translation, sponsored by GWF Hegel and Darío Sztajnszrajber

La libertad se juega en la propiedad…El espíritu libre alcanza el desarrollo de su libertad en la medida en que se apropia / sea propia de la naturaleza.

Hegel, according to Sztajnszrajber

Free will comes into play with property…The free spirit practices its free will to the extent that it appropriates / belongs to nature.

My translation of the above
end at 1:37:28

Introduction

If you’re listening to that sentence, depending on which of the transcriptions I’ve italicized is correct, Hegel could be saying very different things about free will and what one does with it, or what it might do on its own. I might be committing philosophy blasphemy by doing this, but I’m going to avoid defining the spirit. Hegel does not himself seem to have been clear on what he thought it was, which, frankly, is quite alright. It’s a complicated topic that a lot of people have varied, mutually irreconcilable perspectives on. Just know that, for Hegel, the spirit is related to his approach to what is a person—in some sense, an individual human—and the self. If you’re wondering what you are, that inner monologue and/or whatever you feel constitutes yourself, Hegel’s answer would either be “a (absolute) spirit, my good fellow!” or would at least heavily invoke his concept of spirit. For our purposes of properly transcribing and translating the clip above, it means something like “a person,” “the mind,” or “the self.” It is what differentiates humans from things and humans from each other—it’s what makes you you!

The fact that I was not very familiar with Hegel’s work when I began this essay probably explains how I could even realize that this equivocation in transcription is possible. I’ve tried to remove translation of the sentence a bit from Hegel’s greater work. There are important ways in which my oversimplifying some of the explanations of the translations has yielded false statements about what Hegel said. I’ve written it this way because my point is not to explain Hegel’s work nor get caught up in philosophical problems—at least not thoroughly. Instead, I wanted to explore how the equivocation in transcription was possible and touch on just enough of Hegel’s work to get a decent if imperfect transcription and translation of the clip. What I realized when checking my work was that Hegel and the philosophical movement he was a part of reimagine the world we inhabit to such an extent that just about all words have different definitions for him than they do to us, and likewise was the case for people in his own time, i.e., they would have had a tough time understanding him. I will briefly discuss that in a moment. What this causes for us is that translating his work entails not just the usual philological issues of translating someone from another culture and another time, but the issue of rebuilding the theoretical structures he created, e.g. his system of logic, and it is not my point here to delve very deep into any of that, though avoiding it entirely will be impossible—like anyone seeking an ideal, I won’t totally succeed but the pursuit can still be fruitful.

Part of why translating Hegel is notoriously difficult is he created a lexicon in German, by which I mean he often uses German words according to his personal and often abnormal senses of them. Thus, for a German to first determine a ballpark of what Hegel means by a particular word is a task in itself; to then properly translate that is quite another thing. My point is just that both Darío and I are relying on translations of Hegel that must have been very difficult to execute, often take a controversial position on which word a given word should translate to, not to mention the impossibility in general of 100% faithful translation (which is why I encourage language learners to prioritize operation in the target language over being able to translate it. Unfortunately, I am incapable of such operation in German.) After reading translations of Hegel and then interpretations of them, I have to say that I have my doubts about whether anyone nowadays understands what he was on about, since interpretations seem to add an incredible amount to the text itself, i.e., much that Hegel seems not to have actually said (according to translations). At least some cases of unfaithful interpretation seem to be politically motivated; Hegelian philosophy can inspire or explain things from the French Revolution, to Marxism, to modern day conservatism.

If for a moment I can highlight something that is surreal to me and contribute to the discussion about what some linguists are trying to get to the bottom of (and definitely not to brag), I can promise you that I made all of the translations herein in real time as I listened to the lecture from the clip above. While I have since looked into Hegel’s work and confirmed my translations, it is incredible to me how I have had to correct none of my translation thereof. I would defer to Chompsky on how on Earth I managed to do this; it would have to do with a sense and faculty I’ve developed whereby I can make very good snap interpretations of philosophical and Spanish sentences, by a method of years and hours and hours of mental hypothesis testing within the two subjects. Contemporary language theorists argue against Chomsky’s hypothesis-testing model. Also, somewhat baffling to me, they call it “language acquisition device (LAD),” which does not appear in Chompsky’s 1965 book they reference and the citation for which appears at the bottom of this page. However, their counterargument appeals to the hypothesis testing LAD’s impossibility for children, since children do not have access to many of the kinds of utterances hypothesis testing would require for learning certain parts of language children seem to comprehend pretty well. My reply would be that I started learning Spanish as a teenager, so the child argument is irrelevant, and I can remember consciously testing hypotheses in the way Chomsky describes on pages 24-26 of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965).

Whatever the case, by the end we will have solved the riddle of which of the italicized transcriptions is correct, considered whether “practices” and “free will” are a sufficient translations, along with having learned a bit about Hegel’s free will as it relates to his view on property rights¹.

What would Hegel’s free will look like if “sea propia de = belongs to” were the correct transcription?

If the spoken words I’ve transcribed are “sea propia,” then Hegel asserts that the spirit practices its will to the extent that it (the will) is or becomes part of nature, whereas “propia de la naturaleza” would translate to “belongs to nature².” (This is nature in the metaphysical or scientific sense, not in the sense of flora and fauna).

This would be a somewhat buddhist view of free will and the spirit. For a spirit to be free would be its giving up its free will, instead being free to the extent that it does not choose or decide anything, leaving its direction up to nature or the world. In other words, the spirit would be free inasmuch as nature were to control it, sans input from the individual spirit. Seeking freedom would be seeking to expunge the will from the spirit, to give it to nature. To say that that is buddhist without qualification is a bit unsophisticated; buddhism appeals to nirvana—nir meaning “without” and vana meaning “breath” as in “vane”—giving up breath, will, or control, exhaling, in order to get it back, e.g. after inhaling again, in a constant fluctuation between feelings of control and powerlessness, whereas here freedom is simply the spirit’s giving up control of itself to nature. Jesus’s taking the wheel, so to speak. No moments of the spirit’s control of its will would be freedom.

While the preceding view would be a viable and interesting view of freedom and free will, it is certainly NOT what Hegel is saying, which we will know after reviewing the following translation.

Is “se apropia = appropriates” the correct translation?

If the italicized is “se apropia,” then Hegel asserts that the spirit practices its free will to the extent that it appropriates³ (takes possession of or makes use of) nature. Not only, based on our western worldviews whereby we try to dominate nature, does it intuitively seem that that is probably what Hegel means, that is clearly what he is saying based on his literature. The relevant idea is an esoteric one from his Abstract Right, which is more or less Hegel’s writings about what a person is (Hegel 67) and why the primary function of legal institutions is to safeguard persons’ rights (Hegel xiv). This, to me as a student of the human rights movement, is of crucial importance4. But I digress, my point here is to properly translate the aforementioned sentence. So back to it: part of Hegel’s Abstract Right demarcates the right to property. Persons, says Hegel, have a right to property because persons practice free will by, at least partially, appropriating nature. Whereas owning or controlling property is a way of appropriating nature and persons have rights to practice free will, persons have a right to property. Therefore, we know that the italicized passage of my transcription is se apropia because, here, to appropriate nature is to control it, which is one of the ways Hegel believes the spirit exercises free will.

Now, I would love to go into why this, according to Hegel’s dialectic, entails that people will, throughout history, perform a back and forth of trying to dominate one another and take each other as property, and seems to predict the death of religion in favor of science, but those are discussions for another time.

The importance of understanding gendered adjectives & “practices” vs. “development”

To boot, let me squeeze in the bit about the importance of gendered adjectives. This is to boot, not the main point, because we’ve determined that “sea propia” is a less justified translation. It is therein that (grammatical) gender plays a huge role in meaning. OK. If the proper transcription were sea propia, then the referent of the adjective would be the will because it would be the last feminine noun before the feminine adjective. On the other hand, if the proper transcription were sea propio—which is clearly wrong because you can hear that that includes a phoneme that the speaker does not say—the referent would be the last masculine noun before the masculine adjective, which would be the development (of the will). In the former case, the entire will would pertain to nature while, in the latter case, only the development of the will would pertain to nature. The divergence in meaning would be the following.

If free will’s development belonged to nature, but the practice or other aspects of the free will still pertained to the spirit, it would be the case that one could freely practice free will but the free will’s constitution would change according to whatever nature were to do to the will. The development of the will would not include any input from the spirit, but the spirit would still confer input to practice of the free will.

On the other hand, if the entire free will belonged to nature, then whatever we believe free will to be, the free will would have to be out of our control in the same way that, say, our heartbeats or the law of gravity or the proliferation of kudzu are—not necessarily immovable or inoperable, but as untamable as the rest of nature. This free will is hard to imagine, but is something like saying that we have minds but no control over them. I am not very familiar with Sam Harris but it seems like he sustains something like that. It would not be meaningless to say we have minds, nor to distinguish them from other natural or worldly things, but this would still be an uncommon view in the West. It is also clearly not Hegel’s view, since he believes that spirits practice free will to the extent that they appropriate nature.

Another weird feature of such a translation is that the direct translation of desarrollo becomes the correct one. I.e., instead of the “practice” of the will, which I said above, the “development” of the will becomes correct. This is because “ser propio de” is a much more abstract verb than “apropiarse de.” When X appropriates Y, we know a little more about the relation between X and Y than we do if one or the other of X and Y simply belongs to or is a property of one or the other. Thus, we have more context and can infer a particular verb from that context. If that verb is not a direct translation, we have to consider whether an indirect translation is better than a direct one. On the other hand, when translating abstractly or without sufficient context, we must either avoid risky inference by leaving translations direct or seek more context.

As we will see when discussing the translation of “libertad,” as things currently stand, practice seems to fit better than develop. While Hegel does indeed say development often in Abstract Right, it’s not clear from a cursory glance why that is, since his discussion of free will seems to refer to many actions not obviously related to development in the sense of “making more robust or sophisticated”—rather, he seems to refer to instances of exercising, using, or practicing free will. (Hegel 45 book / 97 pdf).

A caveat to the practice/development conundrum is that it seems we are all describing free will synchronically and Hegel thought of instances of freedom as additions to the history of a diachronic free will. It is quite out of my scope here to discuss whether diachrony or synchrony more appropriately describe free will, though I will say that “development” makes sense if diachrony is the way to go, e.g., such that free will is a faculty or virtue that we can change or train, rather than a condition of the spirit or its arrangement with respect to the world. If the will is so diachronic, then exercising it is not possible without adding instances of free will to the spirit’s repertoire, so that “develop” would be a better translation.

Hegel does not seem to be totally clear on whether he thought will should be considered diachronically or synchronically. He talks about “form” (which seems like synchrony) vs. “content” (which seems like diachrony). Likewise, his “immediacy” seems to relate to synchrony, especially since here he uses the term “indeterminate,” a temporal term, to describe the will, rather than independent or causal terms, which he usually uses (Hegel 46, first paragraph). If the will is indeterminate, then perhaps it is in constant flux, such that ascriptions of freedom depend on its history rather than its current state, which would either be unknowable or unfixable. Time throws a wrench in most philosophy, though, so the confusion here isn’t a problem for Hegel relative to other philosophers, and we don’t really need to resolve any of the temporal problems for this translation—no one really understands time and that lack of clarity should therefore remain in any translation about it.

A little ditty on predication

It may come as no surprise that, since sea propia and se apropia sound similar and are in Spanish, their meanings are likely related. Words that sound similar in Spanish are often related in meaning because spelling rules in Spanish make a whole lotta damn sense, so that homophonous words are likely spelled similarly—it’s almost impossible for a Spanish word to sound like another without being spelled the same and therefore having a similar meaning. This is not universally true but is for the vast majority of words. (While in English, two words’ sounding similar is almost totally irrelevant to the proximity of their meanings. E.g., “you’re mean” vs. “the mean of the distribution,” vs. “gratia means grace in latin.” While you can trace English words’ roots in a way that shows how their meanings were related, they’re certainly not very related now. Further, accents aside, each Castilian letter corresponds to one phoneme, whereas a given English letter may often refer to two, depending on spelling—consider the long and short ‘e’.)

What is the relation between the meaning of sea propia and se apropia? As we have reviewed, in the first translation, nature controls the will of the spirit. In the second translation, the will of the spirit controls nature. Therefore, ser propio de and apropiarse de are converse relational. I.e, when X sea propia de Y, X is predicated of Y, whereas when X se apropia de Y, Y is predicated of X. This is an instance in which syntax and semantics converge. Were the verb and adjective of different root words, not only would the predicate relation, or the syntax, be just as converse as it is, the definitions would likewise diverge—i.e., the semantics would diverge. In this case, the definitions are nearly identical, pertaining to property and control, but the difference in meaning comes from a reversal in syntax of the particular type I have described above, the reversal in predication, i.e. what is controlling what.

Why have I translated “libertad” as “free will” and not “freedom?”

Hegel discusses free will more often than freedom alone in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991), where this discussion of property arises. Thus, if we are discussing “libertad” as it relates to property rights in Hegel’s terms, then we should try to leave the discussion in his own terms, which included free will more often than freedom.

The editor’s note at the beginning of Elements of the Philosophy of Right further evidences translating freedom as free will. The editor asserts that, by “freedom,” Hegel refers to actions that spirits actually take, not sets of possibilities. In common parlance, free will implies action more than does freedom (not that common parlance is correct). Thus, in today’s words, when Hegel says freedom—which, again, he does not say as often as free will anyway—its definition is closer to what we would call free will or freely performed action; when we discuss free will, we usually talk about decisions and actions that we take. To be clear, when Hegel uses freedom in that way, he is referring to actual actions, not a condition, whereas we might commonly refer to a condition when we say freedom. We say things like “I am free to dance naked in my own home,” meaning I am of the condition of being able to do that. On the other hand, Hegel would first see someone do something and refer to that something as freedom (or not)—i.e. predicating freedom of the action, not the person. For instance, if someone made pancakes and Hegel considered it an instance of that person, as a spirit, appropriating nature (e.g., that same dude’s making the flour and water and eggs his own and recognizing it as such while cooking it), he would refer to the action of pancake making as freedom or an instance of it (and could say that spirit is practicing its free will).

Even so, I have not replaced all instances of “freedom” with “free will,” not in the transcription and not throughout the essay. This is because freedom and free will are inextricable, because I don’t take a stance on whether Hegel’s view of freedom is correct, and I want to be able to provoke some idea generation. If I were to avoid using the word freedom, much of the essay would be awkward and alienating, preventing us from getting even an initial grasp of what the clip is really about.

Conclusion

So we have determined which transcription is correct and found the translation at least plausible. In doing so, we have touched on some topics that deserve further development. Perhaps the most relevant: could we better translate the clip through a more technical or precise understanding of Hegel? What would it be? Perhaps we would have to explore the “absolute spirit, as described in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Does his work seem to explain well the world we live in as we see it? Also related: What are persons? What is property? Would Hegel’s view of property satisfy our standards of intellectual property? Do we prefer positive or negative liberty? What is justice? What phenomena seem to be better described by diachrony and which by synchrony? What kind of problems does time entail for describing any of these things? I may or may not work through some of those topics in the future.

Notes

  1. Hegel is nonetheless worth your time for his complexity. Read Hegel and Nietzsche, and you may never need another text to understand human political psychology and perhaps therefore politics in general. I believe they are in the ballpark of jointly sufficient and independently unnecessary for such an understanding. E.g., Machiavelli may be very useful as well but you don’t need him if you have Hegel and Nietzsche. And I don’t always agree with them—in other essays on this blog I have argued against nihilism—but, still, they often describe very well how history proceeds and how people think.
  2. “…is a property of nature” is likely not correct because it would be hard to imagine each spirit’s free will being a particular property of nature, in the sense of a characteristic. Imagine a set of nature’s properties; it would be pretty weird to think that “free will of Steve Johnson” or “free will of Karen McNaulty” were properties alongside “greenness” or “atomicness” or “logicalness.”
  3. “2. To take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission” (https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=appropriate). Note: not always without permission, or even related to it.
  4. To me, “person” means “being deserving of ‘human’ rights.” (“Human” might be a misnomer.) Violating a human right is necessarily unjust. Therefore, determining what are persons and what are not is crucial for justice. Are all animals persons? Perhaps just some animals are, like pigs or porpoises? Perhaps none are. And justice is necessarily good, injustice, necessarily bad. (It has come to my attention through a recent Portal episode that human rights may be going out of vogue due to their absoluteness; we as a society disagree so often about what constitutes a right that we want to think that rights aren’t universal, inalienable, or otherwise aren’t what we conceive them to be. Perhaps “rights” should be culturally relative, but “human rights” should not. Human rights are precisely those rights which ought not change according to culture; for instance, one such human right might be the right not to experience genocide. Certainly, we can all agree on that, and it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t anyway because genocide would still be wrong. Disagree? I’d love to hear your argument for the permissibility of genocide. Similarly, there are some very basic rights that we should consider human rights. The right to not be prevented nor obstructed from accessing potable water is another. One’s right to a life without his experiencing torture. These rights are very few and sacred; I think people’s extension of human rights to things that aren’t clearly basic is why so many others think human rights are controvertible or expendable in the first place.)

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