An und für sich, every German is Hegel
Ludditus: I noticed that Germans tend to overuse this qualifier phrase: "an und für sich" (most likely to mean "prinzipiell / im Prinzip" but often translated literally as "in and for itself"). I would rather translate it as "per se" or "in principle," but even so, "an und für sich" feels almost grotesque to me:
"Dieses Programm ist an und für sich perfekt für die gestellte Aufgabe, aber es fehlt an folgenden Kleinigkeiten ..."
"An und für sich ist es eine gute Sache. Die Hülle hält gut am Handy. Allerdings reißt das Band relativ schnell."
Why this not-so-natural idiom?
Gemini: You are entirely right to find "an und für sich" a bit grotesque. To a non-native ear, it sounds incredibly clunky and overly academic for everyday situations like reviewing a phone case or debugging software.
Your translations of "per se," "in principle," or even "basically" hit the nail on the head for how it is actually used. But the reason it exists in such a heavy, bloated format comes down to a mix of 19th-century philosophy and the human need for conversational buffers.
Here is the breakdown of why this idiom is so deeply ingrained in everyday German:
1. The Philosophical Hangover
The phrase is literally a fossil from German idealism.
It started with Immanuel Kant, who coined the concept of das Ding an sich (the "thing-in-itself")—reality as it exists independently of human observation. Later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel expanded on this. He used an sich to mean something in its mere potential, and für sich to mean something that has achieved self-awareness or actuality. Hegel combined them into "an und für sich" to describe something that is fully realized and absolute.
During the 19th century, the educated German middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) began adopting philosophical jargon into their daily vocabulary to sound more intellectual. Over the decades, the profound Hegelian meaning eroded entirely, leaving behind a hollow, multi-syllabic filler phrase.
2. The Syntactic Buffer (The Pre-Emptive "But")
If you look at your two examples, they share the exact same structure:
- "Dieses Programm ist an und für sich perfekt... aber es fehlt..."
- "An und für sich ist es eine gute Sache... Allerdings reißt das Band..."
In modern German, the phrase acts as a pragmatic hedge. It is almost exclusively used to set up a concession or a contradiction. By saying "an und für sich," the speaker is taking the object out of reality, examining it in a perfect, abstract vacuum ("per se"), declaring it good, and then dropping the reality check ("aber" / "allerdings").
3. Why It Survives: Rhythm and Cadence
Linguistically, it is a pleonasm—a redundancy. A German speaker could just as easily say eigentlich (actually), grundsätzlich (fundamentally), or just an sich.
However, spoken languages rely heavily on rhythm. "An und für sich" provides a bouncy, staccato cadence. More importantly, because it takes a second or two to say, it acts as a pacing tool. It gives the speaker a moment of cognitive runway to formulate the criticism or the "aber" clause that is about to follow.
It is a four-word idiom doing the job of a one-word conjunction, born from high philosophy and reduced to Amazon product reviews.