National languages, the universality of the human spirit and a path to coexistence

It is in language that the decisive battles for humanity are fought. Much as MacIntyre put it, feeling like someone, feeling free, undoubtedly amounts to knowing how to express oneself, to knowing how to tell one’s own story. When we lack the words, our identity falters; it is merely a numerical identity, and we are not free. Speaking out is perhaps the most important act of freedom. Through action and discourse, as Hannah Arendt said, people reveal who they are – their identity. Hence the urgent need to nurture our words, by creating spaces (such as schools) where this is possible. But where are the words with which we tell our stories to be found? They are to be found in the human cultural world that people have built and into which we were born. It is no coincidence that language has, for as long as we can remember, represented the most immediate identifying feature of every culture. Linguistic diversity and cultural diversity are mutually interdependent. But the diversity of individuals is also linked to language. Every individual speaks the same language in an unmistakable and, in some respects, unique way. In this sense, plurality truly is the law of the land, even if, on this point, not everyone thinks the same way. Herder, to give one example, was convinced that it was God himself who willed the plurality of languages to adorn the world with a plurality of colours. Yet Fichte, for his part, already invokes this plurality to assert the primacy of the German language and culture over all others. Rather than serving as a reason for the irreconcilable openness of all languages to one another, the plurality of languages becomes a reason to assert closure, untranslatability, and the primacy of the German language over all others: a linguistic nationalism that is perhaps the most significant example of that sacralisation of one’s own language in which, as I have had occasion to emphasise on several occasions in this newspaper, the true sin of Babel lies.

It is Wilhelm von Humboldt who frames the issue correctly. He never loses sight of the link between the ‘particularity’ of different languages and the ‘universality’ of the human spirit embodied in each of them. There is no trace of linguistic nationalism in his thinking. Indeed, for Humboldt, the plurality – or rather, the diversity – of languages is the inescapable form through which the universality of the human spirit is expressed in an extraordinary interplay between identity and difference, which, rather than ‘smoothing over’ the latter, exalts it on a par with one’s own identity. In his view, the diversity of languages is analogous to the diversity found amongst individuals. It is only through the experience of diversity and otherness that the individual and the various languages become increasingly self-aware. The other language (other, but not entirely other) becomes the means to a better understanding of one’s own (one’s own, but not entirely one’s own), within a polarity: that between the universal and the individual, whose terms are always connected but never completely overlapping, as if the one—the universal—could express itself fully in the other—the individual. To put it another way, no national language can claim to express the whole of humanity or language in its universality. Hence the structural openness of every language to the other, combined, however, with a sort of compulsion for every language and every culture to remain true to itself, and thus with a potential for conflict and untranslatability.

As Antoine Berman has shown, there is a kind of ethnocentric temptation in every culture. However, it does not manifest itself in the same way across all cultures. Some cultures are more open than others; they have become more accustomed to the ability to take a step back from themselves – a process which I consider fundamental to truly engaging in dialogue with the other. In short, it is a matter of learning from the other without renouncing oneself and without any certainty that everything the other says is translatable into our own language. In the relationship between different languages and cultures, one must always take into account areas – some larger, some smaller – of untranslatability and potential conflict; the risk of misunderstanding and error is ever-present, just as it is, incidentally, even with those who speak our own language. But this does not mean that translation is impossible; rather, it means that all languages can be enriched by the new and the unexpected that arise each time from a genuine encounter with the other. What drives us forward in our attempts at understanding is the well-founded certainty that we are dealing with a human being who is human in the same way that I am, belonging to my own species, and therefore, however foreign, never an expression of absolute otherness, absolutely untranslatable.

As I said at the start, we need to nurture our words, our language. It is the only way we have of living decently with ourselves and with others.