Haunted by Language

Multilinguality seems to be one of the fundamental conditions of philosophizing on a global scale. But — which language does philosophy speak? The respective mother tongue, a transitional or translational language, any of the world’s lingua francas or an universal language not bound to a specific grammar and context? And in which language can philosophy speak about its own language(s)? In how far is it possible for philosophy to liberate itself from linguistic constraints? 

In historical retrospect, philosophy in many “Axial Age” traditions is frequently bound to the language of a specific ethnic group and its position of power: Greek in Europe, Chinese in East Asia, Sanskrit in India etc. This established a hierarchy in which certain languages are assumed to have privileged access to truth. Philosophical translation in classical sense, therefore, is vertical: it implies a loss of meaning, or at best, an actualization of what has been lost. This hierarchy of languages reifies the epistemological gap between the inside and the outside, the native speaker (‘the civilized’) and the foreigner (‘the barbarians’). 

This asymmetry in and through language has been emphasized throughout modernity: Colonial contexts reinforced pre-existing linguistic hierarchies or reshaped them towards colonial languages, exacerbating the entanglement between thought and language. This enduring interconnection of power and language of philosophy appears as an immense burden upon the idea of a truly global mode of philosophizing — like ghosts of the past, still haunting the house we are thinking in.