Philosophizing in Many Languages: Translation, Proto-Philosophy, and Middle Voice Agency

Linguistic Plurality and Decolonization

A central theme of the talk was the insistence that philosophy is inherently a multilingual endeavor, not the monopoly of a single privileged language. Elberfeld opened by reaffirming that philosophers often fail to acknowledge the plurality of languages but that such a plurality is necessary for philosophy. He argued that no language holds a special monopoly on philosophizing:

There is no primitive language, and there is no superior language… Heidegger says you can only philosophize in ancient Greek and German – but this is pure nonsense. — Rolf Elberfeld

He noted that Heidegger’s own claim about Greek and German reflected a narrow but pervasive mindset in philosophy that he was trying to challenge. Anke Graness strongly agreed with Elberfeld’s pluralistic approach but emphasized its political and decolonial significance.

I share your approach, arguing that it offers a different way to perceive the world, but I try to connect it to political issues… it is important for the liberation of African societies from the epistemic framework of colonialism. — Anke Graness

Drawing on thinkers like Kwasi Wiredu and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, she stressed that doing philosophy in indigenous languages can be an act of intellectual emancipation. Colonial languages (such as English, French, German) have long shaped African education and thought; reclaiming local languages in philosophical discourse is part of dismantling Eurocentric epistemologies. Graness cautioned against any form of “othering” or exoticizing non-European philosophies. Instead, she highlighted that languages are living, changing, and deeply interwoven with social and historical realities. For example, she noted contemporary debates about gender-inclusive language in German and the creolization of languages in post-colonial contexts. All these examples show that language evolution is tied to social change. “Language is also something we are negotiating about… languages are influencing each other,” she said, underlining that no language, European, African, or otherwise, is static or sealed off from history.

Monika Rohmer added that African languages face similar issues and opportunities. She reminded the group that the push to “come back to indigenous languages is a very important topic in African philosophy as an act of decolonization,” with the aim of recovering meanings that have been distorted or lost under colonial impositions. Both Rohmer and Graness stressed that philosophizing in African languages is not about isolating those languages as “others,” but about re-centering them as legitimate mediums for abstract thought and problem-solving within their own contexts. In Graness’ words, it is about “finding African solutions for African problems” by using conceptual resources of African languages and worldviews. This socio-political dimension was an important framework for the ensuing discussion in the sense that linguistic plurality in philosophy is not just a theoretical preference, but a commitment to intellectual justice and diversity.

Elberfeld welcomed these interventions and acknowledged that his own focus had been on making the philosophical case for plurality. He noted there is a controversy in the philosophy of language to justify why multiple languages matter philosophically. The contributions of Graness and Rohmer showed that, in addition to the internal philosophical arguments, there are broader cultural and political stakes in affirming many languages. Every language can be seen as a potential carrier of rigorous philosophical insight, each in its own manner. This set the stage for more fine-grained discussions about how different languages shape thought.

Grammatical Structures and Conceptual Worlds

Moving from the general principle of linguistic plurality, the discussion delved into specific differences between languages and how they might influence conceptual thinking. Participants compared grammatical features—such as gender, definiteness, and syntax—and reflected on whether these features shape philosophical ideas or worldviews.

One concrete example was provided by Abbed Kanoor, who drew on his background in Persian. “There is no specification of gender in Persian, for example,” he explained. “Even the third-person pronoun is neutral. You always have to clarify by context if you are talking about a woman or a man.” This absence of grammatical gender in Persian contrasts with languages like Arabic (a Semitic language) or French and German (Indo-European languages), which do mark gender. He added that Persian even uses Arabic loanwords in its own way—for instance, Persian adopted the Arabic article al– but still does not inflect words for gender.

This led Yoko Arisaka to pose a broader question about conceptual impacts of such grammatical differences. She asked whether learning a language with gender and definite articles introduced new ways of thinking: “Your mother tongue is Persian. When you learn French or German, does it change anything conceptually for you to suddenly have to mark definiteness or gender?”

Kanoor responded that indeed, adjusting to a language like French was challenging at first. The need to choose the definite articles le or la or to think of objects as masculine or feminine was initially foreign to a Persian speaker. Of course there is adaptation over time, but the learning process made him aware of how different languages partition reality differently. Arisaka agreed and pointed out that by contrast, in German not only pronouns, but nouns for inanimate things carry gender (der Mond is masculine, die Sonne feminine, etc.). Such features might subtly influence how speakers perceive connections or assign qualities. Elberfeld added that one must be careful not to assume that concepts translate neatly between languages: seemingly universal ideas like “culture” or “nature” can be untranslatable or strange in another tongue.

To illustrate this, Elberfeld gave an example from semantics: European languages have a broad abstract term “culture” (and related terms like interculturality, transculturality), which are taken for granted in Western discourse. “Yet if you go to East Asian languages, you cannot even translate this very well,” he observed. Japanese, for instance, lacks a natural equivalent for “interculturality” – there are possible equivalents such as 通文化 or 異文化, but they appear much more artificial and are not as well established as in Western discourse. Conversely, languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have a rich conceptual field around qi (氣) – a kind of vital energy connected to the breath that is diffused throughout the world, but can also be cultivated through embodied practices – which has no straightforward equivalent in European languages. “You can describe the world in terms of qi,” Elberfeld noted, whereas European philosophies might use the framework of “culture” or “cultivation” for similar discussions. This comparison of word fields shows how languages create different emphases: concepts that are central in one language may be peripheral or absent in another.

Leon Krings built on this point by discussing how some languages tend to turn processes into essences through nominalization. He remarked that in some languages, there is an “inclination of words to be substantivized.” This can lead to reifying fluid processes into static entities, which in turn shapes metaphysics. Krings suggested that some structural habits (like nominalization) are widespread across languages of a certain language family, though to varying degrees. He also cautioned that all languages have limitations and tendencies; none is a perfectly transparent vessel of thought.

Proto-Philosophy and the Question of Agency

One of the more theoretical exchanges revolved around what Elberfeld termed “proto-philosophy.” By this, he referred to the implicit conceptual background and habitual orientations in any given language and culture that precede formal conceptualization. These are the “seeds” or pre-philosophical patterns of thought that every speaker inherits. The notion sparked debate connected to the controversy about ethnophilosophy: How does proto-philosophy become philosophy proper? Who has the agency to articulate it? And is calling something “proto-philosophy” empowering or patronizing?

Sool Park noted that every culture stores up insights, concepts, ways of living – often in proverbs, linguistic habits, stories – which might later be distilled into explicit philosophy. This process of reflective abstraction, he noted, involves grammaticalization and generalization of the assumptions laid down in that specific language. In other words, when proto-philosophy turns into philosophy, the fluid wisdom of a lifeworld gets pinned down in general concepts and grammar – a necessary but problematic process.

Park immediately raised a critical concern: if this formalization is done from the outside, it can become an act of intellectual colonization. “You just explicated the problem of a grammatical realization from outside as a colonizing act,” he said, cautioning that it “should, in a way, be left to the speakers of the language themselves.” In the context of African philosophy, for example, Western anthropologists once collected African folk wisdom and labeled it “primitive thought” or “ethnophilosophy,” often denying African thinkers their own agency to theorize it. Park’s point was that who gets to do the generalization is crucial – ideally, a culture should articulate its own proto-philosophy into philosophy, rather than having outsiders impose an interpretation.

However, Park also acknowledged a paradox: even when a community articulates its worldview on its own terms, a certain violence of abstraction occurs. “There is still violence going on if you do that yourself,” he observed. To illustrate, he evoked the historical example of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China: “When Qin Shi Huang united China for the first time, what did he do? He united the language and the script – but also burned thousands of books.” In effect, forging a unified philosophical language (a lingua franca or standardized canon) often entails erasing or suppressing diversity. “We have 7000 languages,” Park continued, “so we have 7000 different processes of [conceptual] violence.” In this sense, philosophy is always to some extent a “violent” act of putting things together that aren’t truly homogeneous – it simplifies reality. Whenever we coin a concept or systematize ideas, we force a messy continuum into neat categories. This applies within a single language (standardizing dialects, defining terms) and even more so when translating between languages or conceptual schemes.

Elberfeld responded to Park’s provocative analysis with a nuanced agreement. “I would say language itself is violent to reality,” he remarked, “because it’s structuring reality… you cannot express all the subtlety of perception because there are only these words, you use them, and then some things become invisible – reality becomes flat.” He cited Nietzsche’s idea that every word is like a prism that distorts as much as it reveals. For Elberfeld, this inherent violence of language is a general condition – every act of naming and categorizing simplifies the flux of reality. However, he took Park’s point that philosophy, which often increases abstraction, must be especially self-aware of this tendency. The goal, he suggested, is not to abandon language, which would be impossible, but to keep language flexible and dynamic: “You can reflect in language, and then try to make language more dynamic, and not fix it.” In other words, philosophers should resist the urge to treat any given terminology or conceptual schema as final, and knowing multiple languages could be one way to unfix concepts.

Elberfeld clarified what he intended by introducing the term proto-philosophy. “I try to bring in this word [proto-philosophy], because we are born into a language – or into two or three languages – and a language provides a specific way of seeing and acting,” he explained. For example, if a language has built-in honorifics to respect elders, speakers develop a habitual stance of respect; if one’s language downplays hierarchical distinctions, one might chafe at formality. These dispositions become embedded “in our bodies… it always enters your body somehow,” Elberfeld said, especially through daily linguistic practice. In essence, proto-philosophy is the background ethos and ontology carried in a language before we start philosophizing explicitly. It “works in the background,” as Elberfeld put it, and shapes how people experience the world. Elberfeld then made an essential affirmative point:

We just now reflected on proto-philosophies and how we act in them, and when we do so, we can somehow change it a little bit… This was my main point. We are not locked in. We are not fixed by this proto-philosophy. But it always has a tendency to imply, ‘Oh, it is this way, you should do it this way and not the other way.’ And so we have to negotiate, if we know different languages, which way we should follow. A proto-philosophy is not fixed to only one cultural expression.
— Rolf Elberfeld

This statement was a key takeaway of the discussion. Elberfeld acknowledged that each of us begins with a proto-philosophical orientation, which implies “this is the way things are.” Yet, by learning other languages or encountering other worldviews, we gain freedom to negotiate and modify those inherited orientations. A linguistic culture’s proto-philosophy is not a prison; ideas can migrate and be reworked in new settings.

The question of agency naturally arose: if proto-philosophy is largely collective and unconscious, what about the individual philosophers’ agency? Does emphasizing communal language-worlds risk denying creative thinkers their role – a classic critique of the concept of “ethnophilosophy” in African thought? Elberfeld addressed it directly:

This is the ethno-philosophical question… the fundamental problem. But in language, it’s really interesting, because we are using language together, and we are all together the agents of language. There is not only one person who is the agent. It’s a mutual process, a purely Middle-Voice phenomenon. The individual and the community are always related; you cannot separate them.
— Rolf Elberfeld

In invoking the middle voice, Elberfeld was drawing on a grammatical category: in some languages, verbs have a middle voice where the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ is blurred. He suggested that speaking and thinking occur neither in total unison (collective) nor in total isolation (individual) – rather, individuals and communities co-create language and meaning in tandem.

Elberfeld went on to quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, the 19th-century linguist-philosopher, who also saw language as at once an individual and a collective activity. A lone genius does not invent a philosophy ex nihilo; they work on inherited linguistic material. Conversely, a language or culture is not a monolith that thinks for you; individuals can push and pull on the boundaries of language, as seen when new pronouns or terms are proposed and adopted by a community.

Leon Krings noted that some languages even attribute agency to non-human entities in their structure, for example, treating inanimate things as agentive, which yields different worldviews. He mentioned the word qi (氣) in Chinese or ki in Japanese discussed earlier as one form of expression of non-human agency in the midst of the human lifeworld itself. The implication was that languages differ in where they locate agency (in gods, in nature, in individuals, in things, etc.), and this too forms part of their proto-philosophy.

This theme set the stage for concrete examples of how philosophical ideas do transform and migrate across languages.

Translation as Philosophical Practice: Resonance, Transformation, and Conceptual Renewal

Perhaps the most illuminating part of the talk was when Elberfeld and others shared examples of philosophical translation across languages, both historical and contemporary, showing how ideas gain new life in another linguistic context. Elberfeld introduced what he called a “resonance theory of languages and philosophies.” Based on his long-term research, he observed that certain languages and philosophical traditions can resonate with each other in unexpected ways, enabling ideas to travel and even thrive more in a new language than in their original one.

His prime example was the transmission of Buddhist philosophy from Sanskrit to Chinese. Sanskrit grammar, with its complex system of inflections and abstract noun forms, had to be mapped onto a Chinese grammatical framework that lacked those features. Despite these challenges, the early translators of Buddhist sutras into Chinese succeeded – and in the process, Chinese developed new linguistic resources. For instance, Chinese had to mark certain newly introduced abstract terms as noun-like (something it did not always do previously) in order to express Buddhist concepts. Over time, a kind of “Buddhist Chinese” emerged: a specialized language adapted and expanded to accommodate the philosophical ideas. Elberfeld noted that this was not a one-way imposition; it was a mutual transformation. The Chinese language changed through new vocabulary and new syntactic patterns, but conversely, the Buddhist thought itself also changed in the Chinese context. In fact, Buddhism flourished in China, Korea, and Japan, developing into new schools like Zen/Chan – while it nearly died out in India. This led Elberfeld to a striking claim: “I became aware that Buddhist thought fits more to the structure of Chinese than to that of Sanskrit … Buddhism gained a totally new life in East Asia.” In other words, certain ideas may find a more congenial home in a foreign language, due to resonance between the language’s character and the philosophy’s needs.

From this case, Elberfeld generalized: “There seem to be resonances between a specific structure of language and a specific form of philosophy.” We should not assume that if an idea was born in one language it will remain best expressed there. In fact, the discussion suggested the opposite: when an idea moves into a new language, it can bring unforeseen possibilities. Elberfeld even applied this insight to modern Western philosophy itself. He provocatively suggested that the works of Martin Heidegger – a philosopher who infamously stated that philosophy is only truly possible in Greek and German – might actually “get a totally new life in East Asian languages.” “Nowadays, I think Heidegger is mainly read in East Asian languages,” Elberfeld observed, noting that scholars in Japan, China, and Korea have taken deep interest in Heidegger’s works. Because Heidegger struggled against the limits of European grammar (he coined neologisms and twisted German syntax to express his ideas), East Asian languages might in some ways handle his concepts more fluidly. It is an ironic twist: a thinker who championed Greek and German could be rejuvenated through Japanese or Chinese translations. “Maybe in 100 years, we will see Heidegger have gained a totally new meaning in East Asian languages, and in German we will have forgotten about him,” Elberfeld conjectured with a smile.

Leon Krings added that Heidegger himself, despite his Eurocentric statements, was dialoguing with Asian thought: “He tried to obscure his Asian influences,” Krings remarked, alluding to evidence that Heidegger was aware of Taoist and Zen ideas but downplayed them. This only reinforces the idea that cross-cultural fertilization is always at work, even if not acknowledged. Elberfeld cited Jacques Derrida’s theory of translation – the idea that every translation is effectively a rewriting that produces a new text and new meanings. Far from being a secondary, derivative activity, translation is deeply philosophical and creative: “It’s not that the same concept is transferred into another language. It assumes a new life, a new space of resonance in the translated text,” Elberfeld emphasized.

He shared a fascinating personal anecdote: when he translated the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō into German, Japanese colleagues told him: “Ah, now I can understand Nishida much better, because you defined all the subjects in the sentences.” In Japanese, subjects are often dropped, making Nishida’s prose ambiguous; the German translation, by forcing the grammar to specify subjects, inadvertently clarified some arguments.

Monika Rohmer connected these insights back to African languages. She imagined, for example, translating canonical European philosophers into a language like Yorùbá. “If you translate, for example, a text into Yorùbá, you will discover interesting things, like we can find words for Nietzsche’s ideas, but maybe not for Kant’s… Nietzsche we can bring into Yorùbá in a really easy way… Kant is maybe not so easy.” This thought experiment suggested that some philosophies (perhaps Nietzsche’s more poetic, aphoristic style) might resonate with Yoruba concepts, whereas Kant’s highly technical vocabulary might prove challenging or need creative new coinages. Rohmer’s point was that translation into African languages could open up new “spaces of resonance”, just as happened with Sanskrit to Chinese. In doing so, it might highlight which aspects of a philosophy are universal and which were merely language-specific quirks. It also gives African languages the chance to expand and innovate to express complex ideas, much as Chinese did with Buddhism.