What are Metalanguages for? On Interdisciplinarity, Literary Translation and the Role of the Humanities

metalanguages -that is, those that are about other languages- have some interesting properties: in the effort to create second-order languages -such as bridge languages between two mother tongues or between two disciplines- the way in which particular languages approach the world, and their particular materiality and historicity, is foregrounded. This point of view helps us understand the inherent difficulties in both interdisciplinary cooperation and literary translation. An important aspect of work in the humanities is the creation of metalanguages in the context of what Heidgger calls "disclosing", that is, the constituting of the world according to a certain ontology -which carries a certain ethical weight, in that it profoundly impacts the way of life of a community that discloses in this or that manner-. If the role of the humanities towards human languages is understood, their role and educational importance becomes clear, the humanities facilitate dialogue between disciplines, and between worldviews, and they empower individuals and communities to articulate new ways of disclosing, new ways of answering the age-old philosophical question: how are we to live?