Yet Schleiermacher’s public sphere manifests the contradiction that characterized the concept from its emergence in eighteenth-century aesthetics. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl puts it, “although in principle the capacity to form an accurate opinion is considered present in everyone, in practice it is limited to the educated” (Hohendahl 1982:51). So in Schleiermacher: although the work of foreignizing translation on the German language is seen as creating a national culture free of French political domination, this public space is open explicitly for “the talent of the orator,” a literary elite.
Because this is a strongly nationalist elite, it employs foreignizing translation in a remarkable project of German cultural imperialism, through which the linguistic community “destined” for global domination achieves it. Here nationalism is equivalent to universalism:
An inner necessity, in which a peculiar calling of our people expresses itself clearly enough, has driven us to translating en masse; we cannot go back and we must go on. […] And coincidentally our nation may be destined, because of its respect for {110} what is foreign and its mediating nature, to carry all the treasures of foreign arts and scholarship, together with its own, in its language, to unite them into a great historical whole, so to speak, which would be preserved in the centre and heart of Europe, so that with the help of our language, whatever beauty the most different times have brought forth can be enjoyed by all people, as purely and perfectly as is possible for a foreigner. This appears indeed to be the real historical aim of translation in general, as we are used to it now.
Thus, readers of the canon of world literature would experience the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts, but only as a difference that is Eurocentric, mediated by a German bourgeois elite. Ultimately, it would seem that foreignizing translation does not so much introduce the foreign into German culture as use the foreign to confirm and develop a sameness, a process of fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural narcissism, which is endowed, moreover, with historical necessity. This method of translation “makes sense and is of value only to a nation that has the definite inclination to appropriate what is foreign” (ibid.:80).
The ideological ensemble in Schleiermacher’s cultural politics precipitates contradictory permutations (elite literature/national culture, bourgeois minority/“Germany,” foreignizing/Germanizing), so we should not be surprised to find him speaking for and against foreign imports in German culture—in that same turbulent year, 1813. His bourgeois nationalism shapes both his advocacy of “many-sided contacts with the foreign” in the translation lecture and his xenophobic condescension in the patriotic sermon: “Every nation, my dear friends, which has developed a particular, or clearly defined height is degraded also by receiving into it a foreign element” (Schleiermacher 1890:73–74). This assumes, contrary to the lecture, that German culture has already attained a significant level of development, presumably in classical and romantic literature, which must be protected from foreign contamination and imposed universally, through a specifically German foreignization of world literature. Schleiermacher’s translation theory intervenes in “die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung,” a phrase that may seem restricted nationally in Lefevere’s English, “the whole evolution of a culture” (Lefevere 1977:81), but is shown to have worldwide application in Berman’s French: “le processus global de la formation de l’esprit” {111} (Berman 1985:333). And only Berman discloses the idealist metaphysics at work in the German text by choosing “esprit” for “Geist.”
Schleiermacher’s theory is shaky ground on which to build a translation ethics to combat ethnocentrism: his lecture does not recognize any contradiction in asserting that “our nation” is distinguished by “respect for what is foreign” while envisioning the geopolitical domination of a German bourgeois cultural elite. It also does not recognize antinomies in its thinking about language and human subjectivity which are likewise determined by a bourgeois nationalism. Schleiermacher evinces an extraordinarily clear sense of the constitutive properties of language, those that make representation always an appropriative activity, never transparent or merely adequate to its object, active in the construction of subjectivity by establishing forms for consciousness. The “proper field” of the translator, Schleiermacher states, consists of
those mental products of scholarship and art in which the free idiosyncratic combinatory powers of the author and the spirit of the language which is the repository of a system of observations and shades of moods are everything, in which the object no longer dominates in any way, but is dominated by thoughts and emotions, in which, indeed, the object has become object only through speech and is present only in conjunction with speech.
At the same time, however, Schleiermacher’s concept of “free idiosyncratic combinatory powers” signals a move toward an autonomous subject whose “thoughts and emotions” transcend linguistic determinations. “On the one hand,” Schleiermacher asserts, every man is in the power of the language he speaks, and all his thinking is a product thereof. […] Yet on the other hand every freely thinking, mentally self-employed human being shapes his own language. […] Therefore each free and higher speech needs to be understood twice, once out of the spirit of the language of whose elements it is composed, as a living representation bound and defined by that spirit and conceived out of it in the speaker, and once out of the speaker’s emotions, as his action, as produced and explicable only out of his own being. (ibid.:71) {112} The “spirit of the language” determines every speech act, is binding on every subject, but part of that action nevertheless answers only to an individual “being.” At one point, the priority of language over subject is tellingly reversed, with the author becoming the sole origin of the “spirit”: the readers of a foreignizing translation are said to “understand” when they “perceive the spirit of the language which was the author’s own and [are] able to see his peculiar way of thinking and feeling” (ibid.:72). As Berman points out, Schleiermacher’s lecture manifests the late eighteenth-century shift from representation to expression as the conceptual paradigm for language, and hence subject displaces object as the basis of interpretation (Berman 1984:233). Schleiermacher’s thinking about language is informed by romantic expressive theory, grounded in the concept of free, unified consciousness that characterizes bourgeois individualism.
As his exposition proceeds, it turns to metaphor and illustration, defining the “spirit of the language” in ethnic terms, yet without abandoning the transcendental subject:
We understand the spoken word as an act of the speaker only when we feel at the same time where and how the power of language has taken hold of him, where in its current the lightning of thought has uncoiled, snake-like, where and how the roving imagination has been held firm in its forms. We understand the spoken word as a product of language and as an expression of its spirit only when we feel that only a Greek, for instance, could think and speak in that way, that only this particular language could operate in a human mind this way, and when we feel at the same time that only this man could think and speak in the Greek fashion in this way, that only he could seize and shape the language in this manner, that only his living possession of the riches of language reveals itself like this, an alert sense for measure and euphony which belongs to him alone, a power of thinking and shaping which is peculiarly his.