Qualitative Freedom

Claus Dierksmeier Qualitative Freedom - Autonomy in Cosmopolitan Responsibility Translated by Richard Fincham Qualitative Freedom - Autonomy in Cosmopolitan Responsibility Claus Dierksmeier Qualitative Freedom - Autonomy in Cosmopolitan Responsibility Claus Dierksmeier Institute of Political Science University of Tübingen Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Translated by Richard Fincham American University in Cairo New Cairo, Egypt Published in German by Published by Transcript Qualitative Freiheit – Selbstbestimmung in weltbürgerlicher Verantwortung, 2016. ISBN 978-3-030-04722-1 ISBN 978-3-030-04723-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04723-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964905 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Note on Translation I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to translate Professor Claus Dierksmeier’s monograph, Qualitative Freiheit: Selbstbestimmung in weltbürgerli- cher Verantwortung (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016) from the original German into American English. The tremendous breadth and depth of this work nonetheless presented some unusual challenges for the translator, both because of the manner in which, for large parts of it, the author connects a quite technical discussion of the intricacies of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century German philosophy with a more contemporary discourse on globalization ethics and also because of its inter- disciplinary nature – the discussion seamlessly gliding back and forth between top- ics within metaphysics, ethics, political theory, and economics. In translating such a work, it soon became apparent that it was neither possible nor desirable to employ the kind of consistency in the translation of technical terms that one might expect from, say, the translation of a treatise by a long-since-departed eighteenth-century philosopher or an academic journal article by a contemporary economist. These challenges have, however, been circumvented by the fact that our author took a very active role in the translation process. The initial drafts of this translation were thoroughly reviewed and amended by Professor Dierksmeier, while that subsequent iteration was further reviewed and amended by the translator. Professor Dierksmeier’s (American) wife, Laura, also thoroughly reviewed the manuscript, so as to convert some of the native inflections of the (English) translator into terms and expressions more familiar to an American readership. The final version of this translation thus emerged as the result of a “dialectical process” and is one in which all involved are now confident that all technical terminology, either for which there is no direct – natural – English equivalent or which could – potentially – prove ambiguous (hence admitting of mistranslation), has upon each specific occasion of its use and in accor- dance with its particular context been translated with the best possible English- language term to convey the author’s meaning and intension. In translating the discussions of the work of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte constituting the first quarter of this study, I was fortunate enough to have at my disposal for consultation authoritative translations of the works of all of these authors. The publication in the same year as the German-language version of this v vi Note on Translation monograph of the Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy volume within The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant series meant that it was possible for all quotations from Kant to follow these highly regarded Cambridge Edition translations. These editions translate Kant with a rigorous terminological consistency and an emphasis on literalness. As previously discussed, I do not consider these to be desirable virtues in translating Professor Dierksmeier himself when he is speaking in his own voice. But since these editions both aim to recreate – as far as is possible – for the English-language reader the experience of reading Kant in the original and are now employed within the vast majority of English-language Kant scholarship, I decided to ensure that all of the quotations from Kant conform with those in the Cambridge Edition translations. The English translations of Fichte’s works have (so far) not enjoyed the same uniform format, and a good many of his works (especially those composed after 1800) have yet to be translated into English. Nonetheless – in the vast majority of cases – where good-quality recent translations already exist, those translations have similarly been employed here. Mostly, that has meant quoting from Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000) – but Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993) and J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800) (Routledge, 2010) have also been quoted from where appropriate. In spite of the guidance that the aforementioned works could provide, however, probably the greatest challenge facing this translation was the translation of the German Recht, the multifarious compound nouns including this term, and the adjec- tives derived from it, such as, e.g., rechtlich and rechtmäßig. Whereas “ein Recht auf” and the plural “Rechte” quite evidently correspond to the English “a right to” and “rights,” respectively, there is no English term that naturally and unambigu- ously corresponds to “das Recht” in quite the same way. One possibility would of course be to translate “das Recht” as “law,” just as the term Naturrecht would seem most obviously translated as “natural law” and the adjective widerrechtlich most adequately translated as “unlawful.” Nonetheless, translators of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy almost invariably reject this solution, fear- ing its capacity to obscure the conceptual connection between “das Recht” and “die Rechte,” as well as due to concern about the ambiguous instances of the term Recht (where it is not clear whether the former or the latter sense is intended) within the writings of their long-since-departed authors. Accordingly, a consensus seems to have arisen among such translators that “das Recht” is most adequately translated simply as “right.” And indeed, this is the approach taken within the Cambridge Edition translations of Kant’s Rechtslehre, the translations of Fichte’s Grundlage des Naturrechts and Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (as is of course apparent from their respective titles, Foundations of Natural Right and Elements of the Philosophy of Right), and the translation of K. C. F. Krause’s Das Urbild der Menschheit – which remains to this day the only one of Krause’s works to have ever been published in English translation. The price that is paid for consistency and lack of ambiguity, however, is that this solution can, at times, lead to phrases and expressions which sound unduly abstract and unnatural in English (and, indeed, this is something that readers may possibly perceive as they read through some of the Note on Translation vii quotations from Kant and Fichte within this volume). Whereas this may well be a price worth paying when translating long-departed authors who we are hardly able to ask about the precise meaning of any potentially ambiguous expression they employ, it soon became clear that using the same approach to translating those pas- sages in which Professor Dierksmeier speaks within his own voice to show what Kant and Fichte are able to offer contemporary discussions within political theory and economics would produce an English-language discourse sounding intolerably artificial and unnatural. This problem was, however, fortunately obviated by the fact that Professor Dierksmeier is very much still alive and, as such, he could

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