Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
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7 8 <strong>Interpretation</strong><br />
ple, Tocqueville “reopens the question that our dogmatic passion declared to<br />
have been settled in advance. How can we deny the name ‘philosopher’ to the<br />
liberal sociologist who leads us out of the social cave?” (120).<br />
The third set of essays show Tocqueville at work in his literary<br />
<strong>and</strong> scholarly craft. Historian James T. Schleifer uses Eduardo Nolla’s critical<br />
edition of the Democracy to show how Tocqueville made the book “take shape”<br />
(121). In this exercise Schleifer notices something often lost upon the new<br />
reader of Tocqueville, overwhelmed with the details. Tocqueville “thought<br />
deductively, even syllogistically”; the facts support real arguments, <strong>and</strong> never<br />
get thrown about (122). Such logical rigor underlies the success of<br />
Tocquevillian comparativism, <strong>and</strong> helps him to reject (as his notes show him<br />
doing) easy comparisons between modern <strong>and</strong> ancient conditions. At the same<br />
time, Tocqueville emerges clearly as a non-historicist in his rejection of historical<br />
relativism. The desire for the arts <strong>and</strong> sciences, the love of honor, the family,<br />
the rule of law, the love of liberty, religiosity: the entirely new world of democracy<br />
will not extinguish these perennial human characteristics <strong>and</strong> practices<br />
but will instead channel them “in new ways” (135).<br />
Prolific translator Arthur Goldhammer describes Tocqueville’s<br />
literary style as supporting the substance of his thought inasmuch as in<br />
both he opposes both the Enlightenment philosophes <strong>and</strong> their Romanticist<br />
rivals. Neither the transparent prose of the Encyclopedists nor the lush <strong>and</strong><br />
overgrown rhetoric of his uncle Chateaubri<strong>and</strong> would do, for his purposes.<br />
He wants to influence his contemporaries, <strong>and</strong>, knowing that many<br />
of them will be impatient of any hint of pedantry, he does not wish<br />
to burden his prose with exegesis. Often he merely alludes. To the<br />
wise, a word is enough… A certain delicacy is required in dealing<br />
with such a text lest subtle references—hints contained in a lexical<br />
wisp of syntactic murmur—be obscured. (141)<br />
This leads Goldhammer to an extended <strong>and</strong> exceedingly subtle critique of what<br />
he describes as the Straussian mode of translation, which he regards as leadenly<br />
literalist.“Slavish imitation, being mechanical, saps the work’s soul” (151). This<br />
reader, for one, rather prefers a fair degree of slavishness in translators, inasmuch<br />
as fidelity to a text, being accurate, saves the work’s soul—from the<br />
translator. The real solution of course is to learn French, read Tocqueville, then<br />
consult the translations.<br />
French literature scholar Laurence Guellec discusses the<br />
Recollections, Tocqueville’s memoir of the revolution of 1848 <strong>and</strong> the short-