Karl Jaspers - William A. Earle (1955)

566 William A. Earle an Karl Jaspers
Typoskript; DLA, A: Jaspers, auf Briefpapier der Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
August 25,1955
Dear Professor Jaspers:
I hope the Noonday Press has sent you copies of the translation I made of your Ver-
nunft und Existenz.1297 If not, they will be along shortly. The publication date is set for
sometime I believe in September. But I did want to explain a number of matters that
arose in the course of translating. First of all came the matter of the German »Exis-
tenz«. Two possibilities offered themselves, one being the English »existence« which
most certainly would have been read to mean what you call »Dasein«; and the other
being simply to retain the German, letting your own context and explanations serve
to clarify its meaning. I chose, for better or worse, the latter course. In addition, I gave
a brief explanation of it in my introductory note.1298 »Dasein« came out as »empirical
existence«, which is certainly not its exact meaning, but then there is no exact rende-
ring of it short of a paraphrase. To translate it literally as »being-there«, as some have
done, makes exactly no English sense at all.
Next, I took the liberty of adding an introduction.12" This was designed simply to
forestall certain misinterpretations of your work, which it would be subject to in the
light of current philosophic movements over here. It is not a »critical« introduction,
since I feit it would have been wholly inappropriate of me to do anything but try to
»present« your work.
As for the dust-jacket, I hope you can understand my embarrassment when I saw
it. To put it mildly, I regarded it as in the poorest possible taste to put my name in such
large letters and in such a conspicuous position. Not, of course, that anyone will be
fooled as to who the author is. But I’m afraid that it is the product of modern book
design, where the designer is more concerned with the optical balance of his letters
than with the significance of what they are saying. It’s particularly ludicrous since
your name is, naturally, very well known over here, whereas mine means nothing at
all. But I did wish to assure you that I would never have permitted it if I had seen it be-
töre manufacture. Aside from that, I think the Noonday Press did a rather nice job on
it all. You will also notice that the sub-headings for the chapters have been distributed
throughout the text over what I assumed were their appropriate paragraphs. This was