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English language (monolingual) [PRO] Social Sciences - Philosophy / Jaspers' anthropology
English term or phrase:complexity-challenging one-sided concepts
There is an inner cleavage in man’s innermost condition. Jaspers (as many others philosophers in the twentieth century) subscribes to an anthropology of disunion. Disunion does not amount merely to internal conflicts, in a strict psychoanalytical sense; rather, it is the ubiquitous presence of non-coincidence and eccentricity. Human existence constantly escapes any coinciding with an essence. This is the signature of the human condition: its perennial duality, otherness-haunting selfhood, complexity-challenging one-sided concepts, antithesis-troubling, so that we are condemned to perpetual self-becoming.
Should't it be the other way round, i.e complexity challenging one-sided concepts? Or don't I get it right? (same for otherness-haunting selfhood)
I agree with you, I always try to give a congruent meaning to my translation, even if I have to "force" the source. As for the compound phrases, I'm afraid I have to make periphrases in Italian...
That's obviously the best thing to do in this situation. If you don't get an answer, I would personally be inclined to translate it so that it means what we think it logically ought to mean, rather than what it seems to be saying. In any case, I don't know whether you can emulate these rather Germanic compound noun phrases in Italian.
I've already asked the (future) pubblisher (of the Italian traslation I'm doing), who asked the Italian authors, but didn't get any material, so I guess there is not an Italian version. I've written Stanghellini an e-mail last week, if he answers I'll ask him this, too.
I agree with your reading of the passage. That's what makes the particular phrase even more mind-boggling. As I've said, it's a bit all too complicated, in the negative sense. Does the writer know what he wants to show and prove? All seems to be true here, and the opposite as well.
But the drift of this passage is in the other direction, towards multiplicity and complexity, not simplicity and one-sidedness, which is why this bit seems to contradict the rest. These phrases express the disunion of the human self, its tendency precisely not to be simple and unitary. That is why I agree with Danila that it would be more reasonable if it read "one-sided-concepts-challenging complexity", in other words, complexity that challenges one-sided concepts, just as "otherness-haunting selfhood" must mean selfhood that haunts otherness.
I'm also a bit bothered by "antithesis-troubling". In what way does the human psyche "trouble antitheses"? Or does it mean "troubling [i.e. disturbing] antitheses"?
I think, simply because it is followed by 'one-sided concepts', 'complexity-challenging' is perfectly logical: one tries to simplify ideas that are too complex and so outside one's grasp; we are prone to simplifying them, thus we challenge complexity and use one-sided concepts (examples galore in history, especially used by demagogue 'leaders'). Even if it's not a quote, it sounds correct to me. I don't see 'otherness-haunting' as a contradiction: seeking simplification we can still try to simplify reality, in our own ways. That may be our way of 'self-becoming'. Though it all sounds a complicated notion all along.
this is actually not a quote, but it could be somehow taken from the book cited some lines before (Jaspers - Man in the modern age - Die geistige Situation der Zeit).
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