The point is / my point is :: La cuestión es / mi cuestión es
I have often said “mi punto es” in Spanish and people seem to understand, even those unfamiliar with English. Still, as we were driving down the rather uncongested M-30 towards either (if my memory serves me well) Fuente del Berro or Goya in downtown Madrid for a lunch and sobremesa, and discussing the then recent retirada of the American military from Afghanistan (I will discuss that more in a moment), my partner and her father said that the expression “mi punto es” is not really used. They insisted that they understood what I meant by it and that I should continue but I made a point to stop and discuss the expression, which I usually don’t do in order maintain the flow of conversation and avoid burdening the conversation by my mere identity. But I had said “mi punto es” so many times in my life at that point that I had to stop and ask. What did Castilian Spanish speakers from Spain say when clarifying their rambling (as I was doing) or summarizing a brief argument, perhaps to make sure that their similarly contestable assertions were not confounded for the thesis? They had no answer and we didn’t come up with one after brainstorming, so I did continue to argue that the retirada was justified because we should never have been meddling in Afghan affairs, had made little if any progress in 20 years, lost a lot of lives of our loved ones (my uncle had sustained only minor injury, thank God, after an IED purple hearted one of his colleagues), and had always known that exiting would be messy; no one had a good argument to the effect that leaving Afghanistan later would bring more good or justice to the world; counterarguments, which in the Spanish media were that women’s rights were at stake among those women who stood to be conquered by the extremists poised to take over the country, were decent arguments but insufficient evidence that leaving was a net loss rather than gain, especially considering that the U.S. military does not intervene in any myriad systems of human rights abuses across the world. I will not go much further, for example, the research that says that each extremist killed by the U.S. creates, on average, 7 more. My point is this:
José Luis Villacañas de Berlanga, a prominent if not the most prominent living Spanish philosoher, uses “mi cuestión es” in the context I described above. In his book, The History of Contemporary Philosophy, he abbreviates an argument and focuses it on his thesis among other somewhat contentious propositions about Wilhelm Dilthey’s psychology (Dilthey was one of the early philosophical psychologists and may have been one of the first to use the term) as a basis for his particular species of transcendentalism by saying “la cuestión es que Dilthey pretende analizar esa categoría de subjetividad finita como un estudio que debe ser transcendental respecto a la comprensión histórica*” (126). Note that he is not asking a question and I can tell you that he does not ask a question about that anywhere in the book (cited below). Rather, he is doing one of the three things I’ve asserted that “my point is” does in English; among a flurry of assertions, he is clarifying which is his thesis. Question resolved.
* Here is the translation of that sentence, which I did not attach to the sentence itself because that would have begged the question in my argument:
“The point is that Dilthey tries to analyze this category of finite subjectivity as a discipline that should be transcendental with respect to historical understanding.”
Translator’s notes: ‘historical understanding’ is a technical term of Dilthey’s; it does not mean simply what it looks like. “Finite subjectivity” must be Villacañas’s interpretation of Dilthey and Hegel’s work (knowing Villacañas, it is probably justified by historical evidence but I don’t know enough German to say for myself). It is not a term that appears exactly in Paul Redding’s (with contributions from Allen W. Wood) overview of Hegel’s work. Both are experts in Kant and German Idealism. However, ‘finite’ and ‘subjectivity’ surround discussion of the subjective spirit (another technical term), the mind, and the individual person or self. Selfhood, the mind, the spirit, or personal identity are still vanguard philosophy and therefore no good singular term has taken hold of discussions thereabouts; I might have translated “subjetividad finita” to any number those terms but left it in Vallacañas’s words since there is no common agreement on what is the thing at hand.
Citations:
Villacañas de Berlanga, J.L. Madrid, Historia de la filosofía contemporánea, Version 2, Akal, 2001.
