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PART I
Conceptualizing Dignity
through Practice
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ONE
Enacting Human Dignity
Clemens Sedmak
One of the more curious incidents in the history of translation is W. H. Auden’s “translation” of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings from Swedish to English. Auden knew no Swedish and had a collaborator, Leif Sjöberg, provide a literal translation, which he worked into a text with his own “freer” version of the book. He had done the same with Goethe’s Italienische Reise in collaboration with Elizabeth Mayer. In both cases he merged “translating” with “editing,” expressing his concerns, for instance, that “as an editor, Goethe did not do a very good job.”1 Obviously, getting rid of some passages in Goethe’s source text (elements that Auden deemed “repetitious,” “unintelligible,” or even “verbose rubbish”)2 carries the risk of provoking the suspicion of unfaithfulness. Those concerns were explicitly raised with reference to Auden’s translation of Hammarskjöld’s original Swedish text. In this case, however, the linguistic situation was even more challenging since Auden, whose German was reasonably good, admitted openly: “It is no secret that I do not know a single word of Swedish.”3 Nobody could blame a person wondering about the feasibility of such a “translation project.” The Times Literary Supplement featured a critical article in 1999, and the New York Times reported on a major dispute about the accuracy of the translation in May 2005.4 Auden worked with “literal raw material” that he “refined” following his own preferences and moral desires. He saw his translation projects very much as redemptive projects, redeeming texts from flaws; in his understanding, “every text reaches toward a pre-Babelian unity and oneness; in order to get there it must rid itself of all elements reminiscent of the Fall.”5
In an attempt to reconstruct the epistemological aspects of Auden’s methodology of translation we are able to identify two main elements: (A) he had strong beliefs (1) about his own linguistic capacities, (2) about the flaws of texts, (3) about the moral justifiability (or even moral necessity) to work on identifiable textual deficits, (4) about the possibility to engage in “redemptive linguistic labor” working with an almost unknown source language, and (B) he appointed a “linguistic ambassador” who could serve as a “bridge person” between the source and the target language, but primarily as a representative of the source language: Elizabeth Mayer (1884–1970) was a German-born American translator who came to the United States only after the Nazis had come to power; Leif Sjöberg (1925–2000) was a noted Swedish literary scholar who taught in the United States for many years.
Strong beliefs about the ethics of linguistics and collaboration with a linguistic ambassador enabled Auden to bridge a gap between a known and an unknown or less known language—with all the risks and epistemic vulnerabilities involved. One can see the plausibility of supporting Auden’s case for hermeneutics in more general terms since the art of understanding has been presented (by Gadamer, for instance) as an exercise in translating (moving from a familiar to a less familiar context). In order to make sense of a text, a work of art, or anything for that matter, the interpretation process requires bridges to avoid “painfully untraveled roads.”
TRANSLATING PRINCIPLES AND CONCEPTS INTO PRACTICES
Human dignity has been placed at the center of many development endeavors; many agencies are committed, at least in official statements, to respecting human dignity, the dignity of the human person. This may pose certain challenges, such as the development of general programs versus [those addressing] the uniqueness of the human person, efficiency versus slowness in the personal appropriation of changes, and social change and the creation of new entry points for humiliation (for example, introducing levels of computer literacy may create new mechanisms of social exclusion, and new medical cultures may offer new ways of objectifying the human person). The challenge is quite often one and the same: how to translate a concept or principle (like “human dignity”) into practices or even programs.
Auden’s example may also be relevant to this question on a more subtle level: development work, with its in-built bias toward elitism (so clearly described by Robert Chambers in his numerous publications), is creating a discourse on human dignity owned by privileged people with decreased levels of vulnerability. But it is especially people with increased levels of vulnerability—that is, those with high risks and fragile mechanisms to cope with these risks—who have a lot to say about what constitutes a dignified life, what threatens human dignity, and what nourishes a sense of self-respect.
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder of Mary’s Meals, which aims to provide chronically hungry children with one meal every school day, was inspired by the words of Edward, a boy from Malawi; Magnus had met a lady called Emma while providing famine relief in Malawi. She was dying of AIDS on the floor of her hut, surrounded by her young children. Magnus asked her eldest son, Edward, what he hoped for in life. The simple reply: “I want to have enough food to eat and to go to school one day.”6 This is a clear and concise definition of the very idea of a “dignified life,” a life corresponding to the demands of human dignity, as expressed in the Vatican Council II document Gaudium et spes: “There is a growing awareness of the exalted dignity proper to the human person. . . . and his rights and duties are universal and inviolable. Therefore, there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter . . . the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect.”7 The vision “Every child deserves an education and enough to eat” is a translation of “human dignity,” and this vision is translated into practices and programs such as having school feeding programs owned and run by community volunteers; establishing school feeding committees made up of parents, teachers, and volunteers; and using locally produced food wherever possible.
Auden’s project was the translation of a text from one language into another; this was a challenge for Leif Sjöberg and Elizabeth Mayer, too, since translations are done “after Babel.” Translating concepts from one language to another poses its own challenges (such as the irreducible moment of intranslatability and transmission loss), but translating concepts into practices is an even more puzzling undertaking; development work faces this challenge in a daily as well as on a programmatic basis. How does “human dignity” translate into practices “on the ground”?
We can identify with Auden’s challenge of translating from a less familiar context of language into a more familiar context of practical ethics. This practice is sometimes called “applied ethics,” suggesting that theoretical insights into moral questions (or, for that matter, “principles” and “rules”) can be “folded into” (“translated into”) practical contexts. According to this image, any set of principles or rules is carried over into a setting of human agency. This image creates the impression that a general principle as a stable normative unit can be “unfrozen” in a particular context and “translated” into specific practices. We may be tempted to think that a stable and firm principle such as human dignity can be translated into practices in a simple process that takes the principle from one place to another. In the United Kingdom Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton founded Save the Children in 1919 based on Jebb’s knowledge of the plight of children on the continent. This first charity specifically established for nondomicile children, and the first to be founded by women, set out to respond to the challenges to human dignity identified in Gaudium et spes 26. But there was no simple procedure for translating human dignity into practices. The organization had to deal with complex logistical and legal questions as well as the difference between working with adults and working with children. There is no simple way to “translate” human dignity.
Translating is a creative act; it is not simply an exercise in “unfreezing,” “removing,” or “displacing,” and linguistic principles of translation cannot be applied in transferring matter, such as boulders. In March 2012, a 340-ton boulder had to be transported from a quarry in Riverside County to the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, where it would be used as the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s environmental sculpture Levitated Mass. The sculpture had been worked out and designed according to experiential knowledge. We know, for instance, that Heizer’s 1968 sketch of a gigantic boulder seemingly hanging in midair (Levitated Mass) would take forty-two years to become a reality. The search to find the right rock was seemingly endless, and the first attempt to transport the 340-ton boulder to its destination was a failure. There was nothing wrong with the actual rock itself, but we could argue that the artist’s quest for quarried “rock” or “a rock” was directed by a particular mode of perception; he was looking not for “rock” but for a suitable medium for his sculpture. Accordingly, one could argue that it was not a boulder but the essence of an art project that had to be transported 105 miles to Los Angeles.
There seems to have been much more epistemic agency involved (including concern-based imagination, experiential knowledge, appropriate planning, or structured perception) than the simple “selection of a rock” reading of the situation could suggest. A general ethical principle such as “Do not torture a human being” needs a proper definition of key terms and explications of the implications—both of which are to be found in the 1987 UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The same can be said about general ethical principles as spelled out in the Ten Commandments (which have evoked many a casuistic investigation) or the Hippocratic oath with, for example, its obligation of anyone having recited the oath to help the sick according to their ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing (which is constantly being fiercely debated in the context of cosmetic surgery and advanced medical machinery); these general principles require substantial epistemic labor, including experiential knowledge and a structured perception. One cannot take the concept of human dignity and “apply” it in the same way one would take ointment and apply it to a wound.
General principles have histories, and in this sense each has a “memory”: general principles are based on particular experiences in the field of human praxis; at the same time, these principles change the perception of a particular concept. The story about “the stable universal” and “the dynamic particular,” well known from the history of Christian mission, with its negotiation of “constants in context” and the question of faithfulness to the gospel and respect for local cultures at the same time, is much more complicated than a clear-cut distinction between “the universal principle” and “the particular situation” is able to capture. The encounter with universal principles takes place within a particular context; the place to encounter a concept with a universal claim such as human dignity or a principle such as the absolute prohibition of torture is communicative and reflective practice. Furthermore, a general principle or concept serves as an ordering mechanism that organizes the description of a situation (not unlike Kant’s concept of intellect with regard to sense data).
The ethical principle “Respect the dignity of the human person!” is based on particular experiences, especially the experience of the denial of human dignity, and this principle also operates like an ordering lens that can organize local data in a particular way and set new standards to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. Kathleen Galvin and Les Todres have identified the concept of human dignity and its role in shaping human perception as the centrally important reason for human existence:
It opens up a lived perception of a deep common humanity in which we participate in both vulnerability as well as honourable kinship. The philosophical grounding of this perception has a very practical normative possibility in that it points to the meaningful source of the ability to care, to respect, and to grant autonomy and beneficence to others. In other words, it provides the possibility of a living basic intuition or perception that is deeper, that “gives juice” or lived authenticity to respectful caring behaviours which could otherwise easily become instrumental without such perceptual-intuitive sustenance.8
“Translating” ethical principles is not like transferring an oversized rock from A to B, especially if A was “abstract territory” and B “concrete territory.” There are differences between semantics and pragmatics, for sure, but not to the extent that a landscape can be easily and neatly divided into pragmatic “concepts” and “practices,” “principles,” and “examples.” We could further envisage Michael Heizer’s 340-ton boulder being moved from the Los Angeles museum to a museum in San Francisco, but they would still be comparable types of contexts that could “meet” and “interact.” Translating universal ethical claims such as the absolute prohibition of torture into particular contexts can also lead to processes of mutual interaction, processes that have been described in terms of “reflective equilibrium.” The term suggests a “dialogue,” wi...
