Analogies for Understanding: Seeing and Translating

  

I often use the Platonic analogy of seeing, used by Weil, Murdoch, and Gaita. "Seeing" can suggest a kind of immediacy or finality that does not fit my own experience very well.

    My child self saw the cruelty. I think Plato and the contemporary thinkers who take to his work focus on seeing because they are all trying to resist a picture of morality as primarily a matter of inference, choice, or rule-following. The seeing analogy allows them to say that the moral problem is not that we know the truth and fail to act on it. The moral problem is that we fail to see the truth in the first place. That is the common thread.

    For Plato, the soul can literally be blind like the prisoners in the cave. The problem is that they mistake shadows for reality, not weakness of will. Similarly, in the Republic, the unjust person fails more to understand what is truly good for him that reject the good. Thus for Plato moral education becomes a kind of turning of the soul toward reality. The image is visual –the eye of the soul. Plato likes sight because sight suggests disclosure.

Reality is there. The question is whether one sees it.

    For Iris Murdoch, the chief obstacle is not ignorance but the ego. The fat, relentless ego constantly bends reality toward itself. Thus moral improvement consists less in choosing correctly than in learning to attend correctly. Her example is the mother-in-law, M, who initially sees her daughter-in-law as vulgar, common, and tiresome. Nothing external changes. The daughter-in-law remains the same. What changes is M's attention. Gradually she sees the girl as spontaneous, fresh, and genuine. Murdoch describes this as a change in vision. The reality was always there. The obstacle was the ego.

     Gaita's emphasis is slightly different. He often wants to defend the idea that moral reality itself can be perceived, a matter of a true seeing as, seeing the people in the psychiatric hospital as intelligible objects of love, for example. When someone sees a child merely as an exemplar one can have more of, or a dog merely as a specimen, or a person suffering from insanity as better off having never been born, Gaita thinks something real is hidden from view, that a form of “meaning-blindness” is in play. Thus he sometimes speaks of seeing the humanity of another, the preciousness of a life, or the significance of suffering. The language of vision helps him avoid both subjectivism and reductionism. 

    I feel the force of this seeing analogy and often use it myself. But I am also attracted to the analogy of translation. My use of the analogy of translation was originally inspired by Roman Jakobson's distinction between different forms of translation. Jakobson argued that translation is not limited to rendering a text from one language into another. He distinguished intralingual translation, in which meaning is re-expressed within the same language – I tell my students if they can’t put an argument or even a phrase in their own words, they don’t understand it; interlingual translation, translation proper between languages, which involves not only semantic meanings but style, register, context, and more; and intersemiotic translation, in which meaning is rendered from one system of signs into another, such as from a novel into a film. Nietzsche even thought of the brain turning electrical impulses into sight as a kind of translation. Or I have heard that musical is the translation of spiritual movements into sound. What struck me about this account is the idea that understanding itself often involves translation. We are constantly seeking new expressions that do justice to what was originally given. Certain experiences – wonder before the life of the pond, horror at the treatment of the frog, grief, beauty, or love – may disclose aspects of reality before we possess the concepts to articulate them, i.e., are translations of reality into experience. The work of philosophy is then also a form of translation: an attempt to render those disclosures into language, concepts, stories, and ways of life that remain faithful to the original experience. No translation is perfect, and the original always exceeds any particular rendering. Yet some translations are deeper, richer, and more illuminating than others. Philosophy, on this view, is not primarily the construction of theories but the ongoing effort to translate experience into understanding.

    Consider again my frog experience. If one uses the language of "seeing," I seem left with a puzzle. Why did it take fifty years of reflection, Plato, Lewis, Murdoch, Gaita, Cordner, Weil, and countless other experiences to help me understand what was seen? The language of translation handles this more naturally. The child’s experience is a disclosure. The work of philosophy is then to find a way to translate this experience into language, concepts, and understanding without betraying it. That is what I tried to do.

     The translation analogy has another advantage. Seeing appears to insinuate that reality is simply given. Translation highlights the distance between experience and articulation. There is interpretation involved. A translator is constrained by the ‘original.’ He cannot say whatever he likes. The original text pushes back. But there is no perfect mechanical rendering. You search for words, for the right emotional key, you revise, you try to deepen. Doing this you hopefully discover aspects of the original that you had not previously noticed. How many times have I discovered depths of meaning I had not noticed before even in poems I knew well for many years. And that reminds me of my attempts to understand my frog memory, to translate it into the language of thought. Certain experiences disclose reality. Thinking is the ongoing attempt to translate those disclosures into increasingly adequate language. I have tried to understand grief, remorse, love, and more. The experiences are not themselves arguments and are not self-interpreting. They do possess an authority that philosophy must respect. The task is to find words that do justice to them.

     There is also something in the translation analogy that preserves being fallible better than "seeing." When people say "I see that this is true," discussion often ends. When translators compare translations, discussion begins. One translation may be deeper, richer, more faithful, more illuminating, without ever exhausting the original. No translation is the last word. That is like Cordner’s "deepening one's sense" rather than replacing appearance with theory. Murdoch and Gaita are right that reality is first seen or disclosed through attention, love, wonder, grief, and moral responsiveness. But what follows is not the possession of a finished vision – they would agree with that. What follows is a lifelong work of understanding, deepening, which the translation analogy expresses better than the seeing analogy.

    The child sees. The adult translates. The philosopher critically compares translations. The poet offers another translation in a different key. The painter perhaps another. The saint yet another. None simply “constructs” the reality. All attempt to render it faithfully in different idioms. It avoids the danger that sometimes accompanies the language of "vision", namely, the idea that one has achieved a final and complete grasp. Translation acknowledges both disclosure and humility. Something has genuinely been revealed, yet the work of understanding it is never complete. 

     Why not just understanding (Verstehen)? Understanding is a broader and more traditional philosophical term. The disadvantage is that it can conceal the process by which understanding is achieved. Translation highlights several features that understanding alone does not.

     First, fidelity to something independent of oneself. A translator does not create the text. The original constrains him. That is important for my sense of realism. If you say you are trying to understand the experience, that can still sound somewhat internal to you. If you say you are trying to translate the experience, the image is that there is something there that demands fidelity. The experience becomes analogous to a text.

     Second, there is a plurality of translations. This may be the biggest advantage. "Understanding" often implies a single destination. Translation implies that some translations are better, some are worse, none are perfect,

several may capture different aspects of the original. The original is bigger than our minds. When I think of Plato, Murdoch, Gaita, Weil, Berry, Lewis, Cordner, and all the other thinkers that help me think, I do not think of them as competitors offering mutually exclusive theories. They are different attempts to articulate realities that exceed any one formulation, different musical keys, different accents, different translations of the world of experience into the language of thought. Translation captures that better than understanding.

     Third, there is the movement from experience to language. Cordner speaks of disclosure. I want to think about experiences like grief, remorse, beauty, wonder, the frog, the pond, etc. The problem is always how do I put them into words. That is the problem of translation. Understanding need not involve language.

     Forth, humility is essential. The translator assumes that the original is richer than his rendering. That attitude is central to my conception of philosophy. I am not interested in constructing a system that finally explains grief, beauty, dignity, or love. I am just trying to do as much justice to them as I can, with the help of some other great thinkers. Translation carries that attitude naturally.

     Every analogy has limits. There is something that understanding captures better. When I understand a poem, I do not merely translate it. I become transformed by it – as in “Ode to Immortality.” The poem enters my life. The translator analogy can sometimes leave the self too external to what is being translated. Cordner's "deepening of oneself" points beyond translation. The person is changed. The translator is not merely rendering a text; he is being formed by it. So I wonder whether the relation is something like this: reality is disclosed in experience (or distorted); understanding is the process by which we grow into what has been disclosed; translation is the attempt to articulate that understanding faithfully. Or the child sees; the man grows into what was seen; thinking translates that growth into concepts and language. That is why I would not replace understanding with translation. I would place translation inside understanding.

    But translation contributes something important: namely,  the ideas of fidelity, plurality of renderings, linguistic articulation, and humility before a reality that always exceeds our formulations. Which brings me back to the frog by the pond. The experience is more like the original text. Fifty years later, I am still working on the translation. Not because the original was unclear, but because it was richer than any single rendering. That seems to me a very fruitful analogy. 

. . . 

   Finally, how can an analogy communicate truth at all? Isn’t just a placeholder for a proper scientific account? And if there is no scientific account possible, in the strict sense, isn’t it just booga-booga, as an old philosophy professor of my, Henry Schankula (great teacher), used to refer to nonsense? 

  I base this on W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many, a great book of metaphysics, and Thomist metaphysics in particular. A theme Clarke's metaphysics is the distinction between metaphor and analogy. Both involve comparisons, but they function differently and possess different cognitive value. A metaphor suggests a similarity between two different things. When we say that "time is a river" or that someone has "a heart of stone," we do not mean these statements literally. Rather, the metaphor invites us to notice a likeness. It is imaginative, evocative, and exploratory. It points beyond itself toward a possible insight. Yet a metaphor, taken by itself, does not necessarily tell us whether the similarity corresponds to anything real in the structure of things.

     Analogy, by contrast, expresses a real similarity grounded in reality itself. It does not deny difference, but neither does it reduce everything to difference. For Clarke, following Aquinas, reality is neither completely uniform nor completely fragmented. The same patterns appear at different levels of being. Thus when we speak of bodily sight and intellectual insight, we are not merely making a poetic comparison. There is a genuine structural similarity between them. In both cases something becomes present to a knower; in both cases there are degrees of clarity and obscurity; in both cases attention matters; in both cases one may be blind or see more deeply. The analogy is therefore cognitive rather than merely decorative. It allows us to understand one reality through another because there is a real affinity between them.

     This understanding of analogy is important because Clarke believes that some of the most important realities cannot be adequately grasped through the kind of concepts employed by the natural sciences. Scientific explanation seeks precision, quantification, and univocal concepts. Such concepts mean exactly the same thing wherever they are applied. This approach is successful in the study of physical phenomena. But when we ask about realities such as being, personhood, friendship, beauty, love, understanding, or moral insight, the scientific method reveals only their physical conditions rather than their full truth. Neuroscience tells us what occurs in the brain when we understand something, but it does not tell us what understanding itself is. Evolutionary theory may explain why certain forms of attachment arose, but it does not thereby illuminate the nature of friendship or love. Scientific descriptions answer questions about mechanisms and causes. They do not answer questions about meaning or essence.

     Analogy enters precisely at this point. It allows us to approach realities that exceed the reach of univocal definition without abandoning rationality. To understand understanding through the analogy of sight, or moral growth through the analogy of maturation, is not to replace knowledge with poetry. It is to recognize that reality itself possesses structures that can be grasped only through similarities that unite diverse forms of being. For Clarke, analogy is therefore not a second-best substitute for strict scientific explanation. It is one of the principal means by which finite minds gain access to truths that are richer than any single definition can capture.

    This has implications for moral and philosophical reflection. Suppose a child experiences wonder before the life of a pond or horror at an act of cruelty. A scientific account may describe the psychological and neurological processes involved. Such an account may be true as far as it goes. Yet it does not necessarily make sense of what was disclosed in the experience. To make sense of that disclosure, one may need analogies such as seeing, attention, participation, reverence, or even translation. These analogies do not merely embellish the experience. They attempt to articulate its intelligibility. They are rational efforts to render into language aspects of reality that would otherwise remain obscure.

    For Clarke, then, analogy is intimately connected with truth. Truth is not exhausted by what can be measured, quantified, or expressed in univocal concepts. Some truths become accessible only through analogical understanding because the realities to which they correspond are themselves internally rich and diverse. Analogy neither abandons realism nor reduces reality to subjective interpretation. Rather, it is a way of remaining faithful to a reality that exceeds the limits of strict scientific description. The task of philosophy is not to replace such realities with theories but to make them intelligible through increasingly adequate analogies, always recognizing that the reality itself remains richer than any formulation we can provide.

   When I began this reflection, I thought of seeing and translation more as metaphors. But now I think they are genuine analogies in the sense explained above. Like translation, understanding involves fidelity to something independent of oneself, the possibility of more or less adequate renderings, the inexhaustibility of the original, and the deepening of insight through successive attempts at articulation. Clarke would ask whether those similarities are merely suggestive or whether they point to a real structure in human knowing. I say the latter.