Introduction

Summary

The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being. Every response binds up the Thou in the world of It. That is the melancholy of man, and his greatness. For that is how knowledge comes about, a work is achieved, and image and symbol made, in the midst of living beings.

—Martin Buber

The difference between languages is not between sounds and signs, but between ways of looking at the world in themselves. This is the ground and the ultimate purpose of all our investigation of language. The totality of what can be known, as our field of intellectual enquiry, lies between all languages, and independent of any particular language, in the middle. We can only approach this purely objective domain by means of our faculty of knowledge and imagination; that is to say, subjectively.

—Wilhelm von Humboldt

In this book I aim to do two things: first, to provide a modern introduction to the linguistic and cultural thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), a key figure of the German enlightenment and one of the founders of modern linguistics; and second, to show the relevance of Humboldt’s thought to dialogue between cultures and especially between faiths. I want to show that Humboldt’s philosophy of language, especially his idea of “translation,” is relevant to much more than “language.” It can offer us a way beyond one of the most intractable problems and sterile conflicts of our contemporary world: the perceived incompatibility between the affirmation of cultural and religious identities and the equally insistent demand for a renewal of the universal project of enlightenment.

Whether or not it is ultimately coherent, this intellectual conflict has been brought to a head by the continuing perception in the West that what Samuel Huntington (1996) called The Clash of Civilizations is the key issue in global politics.3 For Huntington, the real global divide is no longer between competing political ideologies but between “civilizations,” usually larger than nation states, with religious and cultural traditions that differ radically from each other. Huntington argued that such formations—which he might equally well have called “cultures”4— have become more and not less important with the increasing diffusion of technological civilization across the globe.