Taste & Translation

I have a new essay on Arendt and Michael Denneny in the Hedgehog Review: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/lessons-of-babel/articles/translation-and-taste

& pasted below…

Translation and Taste: Matters of Judgment

Translation suggests that there are many ways of being good—but no sure method. A sentence in a foreign language can be translated successfully into our own by a number of different English sentences, none of which will replicate the original’s literal meaning, play of sound, or range of connotations. The number and variety of possible “good” translations, and the impossibility of making any singular perfect translation, may make us suspicious about ever placing a definite article “the” in front of “good.” Translation can be the beginning of a moral education by which we are awakened to the undeniable reality of goodness (there really is something good in good translations) and to the strangely multiple, perhaps irreconcilably diverse, forms in which goodness appears.

Although informed both by logic and the illogical codes inherited from history (such as the grammars of the languages concerned), translation is characterized by a degree of freedom—and uncertainty—for which these codes cannot provide sufficient orientation. Its success can never be secured in advance. It is, rather, similar to a set of activities such as assembling an outfit, decorating a room, or planning a party. These are operations that can go (embarrassingly and expensively!) awry, and, when they succeed, seem to have pulled off a uniquely fitting and somehow surprising match between social expectations and the personal character of the doer.

Such operations, in other words, require taste. Taste mediates apparent contradictions. It names an individual’s capacity (you might have great taste in wine) and also an object’s quality (“This wine has a great taste”). It can seem to refer to an objective, even transcendent and superior source of value, as if the good taste of a taster or thing tasted were either self-evident, or an avatar of an invisible but no less undeniable “the good.” But we also use taste to mean something like a mere whim. I might excuse myself from giving my (low) opinion of your favorite novel by saying it’s just not to my taste (de gustibus non disputandum est). And, between these two extremes, taste also can be construed as something like the family resemblance among a community of fellow enjoyers (people with, for example, the “same taste” in movies).

Perhaps because of this variety of meanings, and perhaps because we are most self-conscious about exercising it in what are often considered little pleasures not worth taking intellectually seriously, taste does not have grandeur of significance associated with judgment, another name for the aesthetic faculty exercised in the absence of reliable logical rules or authoritative cultural norms. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), particularly in the last two decades of her career, judgment referred to a mental activity distinct from what she called thinking on the one hand and willing on the other. In a series of lectures given in 1970, she argued, through a reading of Immanuel Kant’s own theory of judgment, that the way in which people talk to each other about aesthetic matters, for which there are neither preestablished authorities nor logically valid rules, reveals the basis of political and ethical activity (which likewise take place in an—often concealed—normative void).

Especially in our contemporary era, she argued, when we can neither rely on a generally binding cultural inheritance for orientation nor hope that the rationalizing methods of science can liberate us from the confusions of human decision, we must attend with new clarity to what judgment, most visibly at work in our deliberations regarding aesthetic choices, shows us about the real but pluriform and incompletely conceptualizable character of goodness. We know that it is possible, in the absence of authoritative voices or logical rules, to make good or bad choices and to convince others to make them with us—yet how, and on what grounds, we do this seems mysterious, if not absurd. We too often allow the mental attention that might elucidate these processes of decision and suasion to be distracted away and thereby melt into our unreflective following of public opinion composed of propaganda, glib chatter, and cliché.

While much of her work attacked these attitudes in the most catastrophic terms possible, linking them to the rise of totalitarianism and genocide, Arendt also focused, increasingly in her later years, on the way that judgment, so determinative of our collective political and individual moral fates, is also crucial in our everyday conversations and practices in regard to art, literature, and the enjoyments of culture. She seems to have decided that we can best improve our understanding of judgment by tracking its operations in the sphere of aesthetic discourse and decision-making, where the stakes seem less dire.

Arendt died shortly after writing only the first page, with two epigraphs, of what was to have been her book “Judging,” the intended third volume of her series The Life of the Mind (1978). Its initial two volumes, respectively titled Thinking and Willing, prepare the terrain for an account of judgment by distinguishing it from these two other sorts of mental activity, which Arendt suggested had been overly valued by ancient and modern philosophy. Thinking (celebrated by classical philosophers as “contemplation”) is an isolating and estranging activity that suspends an individual’s participation in the world around her. Willing, which has in modern times often been valorized by radical thinkers, is irrational, violent, and driven to impose itself on the world.

Judgment, in contrast to both, arises amid exchanges of opinion among interlocutors—it is worldly but not activist, nonlogical but not unreasonable. How exactly Arendt conceived of judgment has become, in recent years, the subject of a large and growing scholarly literature. Amid the decline of public confidence in science as a source of authoritative orientation for political and personal decision-making, and the further erosion of any national moral consensus, it is unsurprising that thinkers today should turn, as Arendt did, to judgment as a faculty that operates precisely in such uncertain situations.

It is surprising, though, that little attention has been paid to Michael Denneny, Arendt’s undergraduate and then doctoral student at the University of Chicago, who from 1968 to 1973 worked under her supervision on a dissertation on “taste.” Denneny is known to scholars of Arendt for a 1979 essay that provides one of the first, and still best, explications of her concept of judgment. He is known to history otherwise for his career as a pioneering publisher of gay fiction in New York, which he began after leaving Chicago and his unfinished dissertation. The three extant chapters of the latter (held in Denneny’s papers at Brown University), along with Denneny’s correspondence with Arendt, notes from her lectures, and other materials, offer thus far unexamined sources for understanding a crucial moment in her thought—and, more importantly, for understanding the phenomena at which her thought aimed.

Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.

Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. Writing in non-systematic modes of aphorism, fiction, dialogue, and essay, the thinkers grouped by Denneny around the problematic of taste, including Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713), modeled the kind of mental activity he, and Arendt, took to be capable of avoiding the unworldly isolation of “thinking” or the violent certitudes of “willing.”

If everything from the selection of furniture to the choice of company depends on our evaluative talk about pleasures rather than on universally valid, demonstrable rules, then the education of talk and pleasure must be a central task. It will have to be accomplished through the use of examples. Exemplary individuals, by exercising their taste, become models for others. Accordingly, Denneny showed, the main line of early-modern European aesthetic thinking ran through a multitude of now-forgotten books in which characters engage in conversations that show the reader how tasteful people discriminate among objects of pleasure and cultivate themselves.

While the era is often misremembered as the moment when “neoclassical” or “neo-Aristotelian” rules were imposed by critics on, for example, the French theater, Denneny was remarkably attentive to the ways early-modern thinkers instead used classical Greek and Latin writings as a repertory of (good and bad) models on which to practice aesthetic taste. Among such thinkers, one of the more important to Denneny was the Jesuit grammarian Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702), of whom he remarked “his name is today virtually unknown.” Bouhours is perhaps most notable historically for bringing into circulation the notion that matters of taste, chief among them friendship, are motivated by a je ne sais quoi (“I know not what”), something objective yet indefinable in the object of taste (or the potential friend) that pleases the beholder.

Although the term is still widely used today, we rarely consider that it implies a specific understanding of aesthetics. As Denneny put it, the je ne sais quoi is “unknowable,” but its “unknowability is of a distinct kind,” quite unlike that of the Kantian thing-in-itself or other matters about which modern thinkers have enjoined us to believe that it is not possible to make properly philosophical claims.

The notion that what pleases us about the people and things we enjoy is a je ne sais quoi specific to each particular person or thing (and to our own relationship with it), which eludes either categorization or complete description, might seem to be a hand-waving refusal to ground our choices rationally (that is, to index them to a system of rules that hold for all other rational beings). Our decisions about who to befriend, or what to eat, wear, etc., if thus reduced to apparently empty statements about our idiosyncratic and inexplicable pleasures, would be matters of pure whim and contingency about which it would not be possible for people to be “right” or “wrong.”

Denneny insisted, however, that Bouhours and other French aesthetic thinkers of his era were not giving up on the idea that pleasure and the choices it inspires have some relation to reason. Their reasons are simply of a different order from those of the rationality of logical rules operating among exhaustively defined concepts. We can, after all, be pleased with the wrong things and the wrong people—we can have bad taste. And we can have, if we learn how, good taste.

Learning how to have good taste, Bouhours held, means learning to translate, not least because good taste is acquired by looking at ancient Greek and Latin authors whom, in order to discuss with our contemporaries, we must bring over into our own languages. In La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687), the title of which might be freely translated How to Think Better About Books, Bouhours modeled aesthetic education by following, over the course of four dialogues, conversations between two friends, Eudoxe and Philanthe. Both are highly educated, knowing multiple modern languages and literatures (French, Italian, Spanish), and versed in the Greek and Roman classics. But they often disagree about which books and authors should be preferred. Eudoxe likes a sober, restrained style; Philanthe, the energetic and overflowing. Much of their conversation consists of one bringing the other’s attention to what he considers a particularly tasteful line from a cherished author, and his friend responding that what is good in that line (its concision, daring, imagination, etc., as the case may be) can be found in a similar but superior line from another writer. Often the texts cited are from different languages, and so the friends’ talk involves both much literal translation (for the benefit of the perhaps less polyglot reader) and “translation” in a metaphorical sense, wherein a thought can be said to be “translated” into various forms of expression.

The first—and one of the most extensive—cases examined by the two friends is a question of literal translation, as they debate the merits of a recent French version of the Roman poet Lucan’s Pharsalia. They are particularly concerned about the proper handling of the poem’s most famous line: “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni” (“the winning side pleased the gods, but the losing side pleased Cato”). In Latin, and in a pagan cultural context, this line, they aver, evinces an admirable nobility of spirit, by which Cato, the voice of old Roman virtue, affirms that his judgment is independent of the contingencies of fortune; he will not admire the winning side if the winners are, as he judges them, wicked.

To thus insist that some abstraction called History does not decide right and wrong, that justice is not whatever the powerful declare it to be, and that one’s own judgment remains inviolably free despite the disasters of politics is indeed so inspiring that it rings out from a rather forgotten, and on a long-running historical consensus quite bad, epic poem. In fact, this line was one of the two epigraphs Arendt chose for her book “Judging.” (Denneny’s 1979 essay on her theory of judgment offers a fascinating interpretation of this choice.) But, the two friends Eudoxe and Philanthe worry about how this sentiment could be properly expressed in French, and in a Christian context, where it might sound dangerously like Cato is defying God. They discuss, for some pages, how the French translator failed in this respect, and consider how translation must balance fidelity to the original language with fidelity to the sentiments the author meant to inspire.

Translation is necessarily an exercise in what we usually call tact: the taking into consideration of how a statement is likely to make someone, in a given context, feel. Like taste, tact is a word originally having to do with a bodily sensation that has come to refer to a domain of uncertain pleasures, fraught choices, and attention to others, reminding us how aesthetics is also a summons to ethical life.

As Eudoxe and Philanthe continue their conversation, they demonstrate a particular concern with what we call clichés (which also, of course, were a preoccupation of Arendt’s linking of aesthetic to ethical and political concerns, as in her famous notion of the “banality of evil”), and how translation might be their remedy. For example, Eudoxe directs his friend to the famous passage of Augustine’s Confessions in which the saint laments the death of his own friend whom he had loved as “half my soul” (what a lovely passage for one friend to read to another!). Augustine, Eudoxe observes, was not coining a phrase. Horace had already written of Virgil that he had been “half his soul,” and the experience behind the phrase is indeed universal to human love. Augustine had, however, wonderfully “refined” and “enriched” the borrowed language and commonplace feeling, making them newly vivid for the reader.

For Bouhours’s interlocutors, it seems, we avoid clichés—the unthinking and tasteless repetitions of statements to which we experience no existentially valid connection—by “translating” them into fresh terms so that their truth can be evocatively applied to our own case. Just as we need translation to prevent Cato’s noble thoughts from shocking rather than ennobling unprepared Christian readers, so, too, do we need translation to keep the perennial wisdom born of universal experience and handed down to us in the literary canon from benumbing rather than emboldening us.

Bouhours’s two conversationalists use the exchange of judgments about translations to improve each other’s (and thus the reader’s) taste in literature, which Denneny and Arendt held to model, in its reliance on admiration for exemplars in the absence of authoritative rules, the way we might acquire (if ever) ethical and political wisdom. The French Jesuit also implied that translation, in teaching us to compare different contexts and consider how our words can be adapted to our audiences, is itself an ethical act. It is even a political one, allowing us to hold together disparate eras and ideologies through tactful, tasteful acts of cultural translation.

These are not the primary concerns of literary translators today, who are more likely to be suspicious of such strategies of accommodation, and who opt instead to confront audiences with the original text’s difficulties. But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the aesthetic thinking of the early-modern period as irrelevant to our own concerns, and misremember it as having been preoccupied either with arbitrary rules or uncritical adoration of “the Ancients.” Bouhours and his contemporaries were, in fact, the first of “we moderns.” As Denneny argued, they developed a novel (and perhaps inadequate) vocabulary to make sense of an important part of human experience that was in danger of becoming incomprehensible. With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, he observed, reality was coming to be divided between, on the one hand, a domain of objective facts explicable in terms of universally valid laws expressible in mathematical terms, and, on the other hand, domains of contingency or unknowability about which nothing rational can be said.

The faculty of taste, and the range of phenomena in which it can be found to operate, Denneny argued, revealed to early-modern thinkers a “fundamentally different kind of reality” from the reality sundered into rational science and subjective nonsense. This different reality is the one in which we still spend much of our lives, whenever we have to invoke what we sometimes call common sense to make decisions that we feel we can get right or wrong, without having rules in reference to which rightness and wrongness are defined.

What might be particular about modernity is not so much that these sorts of decisions are more salient to us than they were to our premodern ancestors but that we have a diminished capacity and altered vocabulary for describing the specific areas of reality in which such choices are made. “Common sense” strikes us—and fairly enough, since this is usually how we encounter the term—as a meaningless noise made by clueless souls unable to provide reasons in support of their prejudices.

In Denneny’s account, however, matters of taste—that is, the domain of activities in which we might have to appeal to the existence of a je ne sais quoi as the concrete but confusing basis of our pleasure—are not trivialized by saying of them that “I don’t know what” is going on. Rather, the popularization of je ne sais quoi through Bouhours’s writing shows, Denneny explains, that he “seriously accepted his experiences of the realities he classified under the rubric” and wanted to defend them from being interpreted as meaningless, contingent, purely subjective phenomena about which rational discourse is impossible. Bouhours attempted, moreover, to show in his writings what kind of discourse is fitting for matters of taste: dialogues in which interlocutors seek, through the elaboration, evaluation, and comparison of examples, to excite and refine each other’s appreciation for different sorts of excellence. Translation is one of the most visible portions of the “kind of reality” where judgment and taste apply, and where neither logic nor tradition can provide answers (nor their apparent collapse provide liberation). It is also one of the most important practices by which we learn how to flourish—in the multiple odd ways that flourishing might take—while we continue to live here.