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As noted as far back as 2016, I've been ruminating for years about how to render certain key terms of Aristotle's philosophy from ancient Greek into English. To date, the only outcome has been a glossary that I update regularly as I add more definitions and polish the existing ones. Recently I lighted upon a constructive way to put some of these renderings to the test: by translating a brief Aristotelian work whose title is usually presented as On Virtues and Vices.
Although most scholars consider this work to be spurious - at best written by an Aristotelian but not by Aristotle himself - in 2013 Peter L.P. Simpson published a paper making a plausible case that the work was a kind of handout used during Aristotle's lecture courses, since it matches the description of something cited in the Eudemian Ethics. Duly encouraged, I decided to attempt a translation, which I ended up titling On Thrivings and Failings of Character.
The process was interesting and beneficial, at least for me - similar in some ways to running a unit test in computer programming. Just as writing is a form of thinking, so also is translating. If we envision a big field containing a whole lot of meaning, no one word can cover the entire field; that's one reason why in English we have so many synonyms. Things get even more interesting as you think through the overlapping ways that a word in ancient Greek covers part of the ground while a word in modern English covers some but not all of the very same ground. (And that's even leaving aside trying to honor the style and feeling of the original, as I've essayed when translating poems by the likes of Sappho and Horace, with varying levels of success.)
A notorious example is the ancient Greek word sōphrosunē / σωφροσύνη, which was sort of a catch-all concept in classical philosophy and culture, with meanings as diverse as moderation, temperance, self-control, self-knowledge, soundness of mind, balance, reasonableness, wisdom, prudence, virtue, even chastity. Classicist Helen North wrote a whole book about this one word! (For the record, I've settled on rendering σωφροσύνη as 'moderation'.)
Another factor I keep firmly in mind is the great cultural chasm between classical Athens and modern America. Although people often say that ancient Greece was the fountainhead of democracy and Western culture, it's also true that "the past is a foreign country", as David Lowenthal put it. For us, words like 'virtue' and 'soul' are weighted down with Christian theology, and we don't even use words like 'vice' and 'evil' anymore because that would be too judgmental. Thus my creativity with thrivings and failings instead of virtues and vices.
Translating this short piece (it's less than 2000 words in English) helped me work out some bugs in my glossary and better understand Aristotle's viewpoint, so I might try my hand at passages that include key concepts I didn't hit this time around, from works of Aristotle's like the Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and his early and mostly lost dialogue Protrepticus. If I do so, I'll definitely report on the results.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While continuing my travels in the land of Aristotle (specifically, entering passages from his Metaphysics into my digital commonplace book), I chanced recently upon the shoreline of the vast ocean of theology. Knowing that I would quickly drown if I ventured too far from shore, I merely picked up a few seashells, waded in up to my knees, and enjoyed the view of the endless depths. Even though these are mostly uncharted waters for me (despite a few related posts almost twenty years ago), I'll give a short report on my excursion.
Medieval theology produced a large number of arguments for the existence of god. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Maimonides, and others applied their great minds to the task. After first assuming an individual divinity, they attempted to prove its being.
Yet if we undergo a kind of religious inversion, we can adopt a very different perspective: first we accept being and then we try to understand its divine aspects. This is not pantheism or even panentheism, but a two-fold amazement at the fact of existence and the fact that we have awareness of it.
Aristotle scholar Aryeh Kosman spelled out this inversion in his book The Activity of Being:
Instead of imagining ourselves discovering what is divine and then coming to see it as the principle of being - of ousia - think instead of coming to see that which is the principle of being as, just because it is the principle of being, divine.... Instead of imagining a cardinal feature of god as awareness, think instead of coming to see the principle of the awareness that we have of the world - of the consciousness that we know as nous - as for that very reason divine.
Here we can glimpse a radically naturalistic standpoint on the divine. There's a passage in the Metaphysics that points in this direction:
If the divine being is always in this condition that we sometimes are, that is to be wondered at; and if it is in it to a greater degree than we are, that is to be wondered at still more. (1072b24-26)
What Aristotle seems to be doing here is extrapolating from our human moments of highest awareness - of theoria - to the life of a being that could enjoy such awareness not as an occasional "peak experience" but as an endless, continuous activity. Then he concludes: wow, that would be a god if anything could be!
Another way to think about it was identified by Hannah Arendt in her book The Life of the Mind: the god of the philosophers is not Zeus (or Yahweh or Allah or Shiva or even Zarathustra), but Being itself. This new god launches a revolution in which myth is replaced by reason, theology by ontology, religion by philosophy.
Yet fomenting revolution is a dangerous business. Recall that Socrates was condemned to death on two counts: corrupting the youth and inventing a new god. The latter is usually interpreted as referring to the inner voice - or daimonion - that warned Socrates away from doing the wrong thing, but perhaps the unknown god that spoke to him was this new god of the philosophers.
It's something to wonder about, for sure...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Both Ted Gioia and Ross Barkan (among others) have observed cultural stirrings that indicate we might be moving away from rationalism, in ways similar to the sea change from Enlightenment to Romanticism around 1800. Count me intrigued.
Back when I started working on Internet technologies in the mid-90s, there was great hope that they would be a force for human liberation (re-read John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace if you need a reminder of those utopian visions). It hasn't worked out that way. Over the last five years of my technology career, I saw the degrading effects of big tech up close while working on anti-tracking mitigations and pro-privacy protections at Mozilla. And that was even before the emergence of LLMs, which threaten to not only violate your privacy but also turn your mind into mush.
Yet the Internet is far from the only causal factor at work here.
For one, the reign of technocratic experts is over — COVID-19 put the final nail in that coffin when public health officials around the world quickly turned their backs on the previous scientific consensus that society-wide lockdowns were ineffective.
For another, the institutionalization of the avant-garde has run its course. When the early modernists exposed the bankruptcy of much late-Romantic artistic production, their wild experiments with form and content made sense (although I'd argue that there might have been more constructive ways to move forward). But at this point the shock troops have commanded the cultural heights for a hundred years, with little to show for it. How many modernist and post-modernist composers, writers, visual artists, and architects will be fondly remembered 100 or 500 years from now? Very few, I'd wager.
At the root of this failure was a misguided progressivism - of the aesthetic, not political, variety. No one has put this better than Glenn Gould:
We have never really become equipped to adjudicate music per se. Our sense of history is captive of an analytical method which seeks out isolated moments of stylistic upheaval — pivot points of idiomatic evolution — and our value judgments are largely based upon the degree to which we can assure ourselves that a particular artist participated in or, better yet, anticipated the nearest upheaval. Confusing evolution with accomplishment, we become blind to those values not explicit in an analogy with stylistic metamorphosis. ~ The Glenn Gould Reader, p. 342.
All this speculation about a return to Romanticism exposes an expectation that here we are at yet another moment of stylistic upheaval. However, the fracturing and mixing brought about by the Internet and a more global culture might militate against a thoroughgoing turn in any one direction. Nowadays, anyone can choose which way of life or artistic subculture to follow; many observers bemoan the resulting echo chambers, especially politically, but it's unlikely that we'll put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
That said, there are hopeful signs of a humanistic awakening, from a renewed emphasis on deep reading outside the universities to tech-industry parents encouraging their children to pursue careers in the arts. Moreover, hyper-rationalist movements like Effective Altruism and transhumanism, though never broadly appealing in the first place, have lost their luster. Even philosophy as a way of life is making a comeback.
On the other side of the ledger, secular humanists are still fighting the last war, algorithms rule the world, profound craft knowledge was lost across all the arts during the modernist interlude, and many people these days have never acquired the habits of in-person friendship and community.
We have a long way to go before classical, human-centered ideals of life and art hold sway again. Indeed, more than a return to Romanticism we might need a veritable Renaissance. The evident exhaustion of the modernist project gives me hope that new beginnings are possible. All we can do is try!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In an essay some weeks ago at Persuasion magazine entitled "Don't Just Let Radicals Dictate Your Opinions", professor of philosophy Matt Lutz listed three intellectual foundations for a more vibrant center-left political presence in America: "liberalism is the first principle"; "inequalities are problems to be solved"; and "absolutes are unwise".
The first and third of these strike me as pretty reasonable, but the second one set me to thinking about the enormous range of inequalities in human society. Lutz mentions only inequalities in wealth, status, and opportunity, but there's so much more: inequalities in power, talents, intelligence, strength, health, education, location, looks, personality traits, upbringing, family, friendships, personal networks, life experiences, and dozens more factors that can influence one's happiness or misery, flourishing or languishing, good fortune or bad fortune.
It's unclear how as a society we'd address some of these inequalities, or even whether we should. Consider a simple example: my dentist has higher status and in all likelihood greater wealth than the hygienists who work for her. Yet there are good reasons for this state of affairs: as both a doctor and a small business owner, she has received more years of training, taken on more risk, accepted more professional responsibilities and their attendant worries, etc.
The resulting inequalities in wealth and status are "entrenched" (as Lutz puts it) and are familiar from diverse fields of endeavor: doctors rise above nurses and orderlies, chefs rise above waiters and busboys, general contractors rise above framers and drywallers, conductors rise above tympanists and second violinists, and so on.
However, because apparently most Americans aren't worked up about the fact their dentist has greater status and wealth than their dental hygienist, "entrenchment" doesn't seem to be the most relevant consideration. Thus when thinking about which differences require societal attention, we might do better to look into undeserved inequalities. Yet talents, intelligence, personality traits, family, location, and other traits are undeserved, too - and few people other than the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls can imagine trying to solve for all of those by placing everyone back into the "original position". A more productive approach, and one more consistent with the American tradition, might be to solve for inherently unjust inequalities, especially inequalities of opportunity (e.g., all young people should have access to decent schools). It's here where folks on the center-left could offer a platform with broad appeal.
A further consideration is this: a second-order effect of trying to make society more perfect is that inevitably the experts who are tasked with solving these problems will accrue more power, higher status, and greater wealth. As humanity discovered in the 20th century, removing some inequalities will create others - or as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm, "some are more equal than others", a phenomenon which Milovan Djilas analyzed in his book The New Class.
Even further, I wonder if the more personal or less significant inequalities are perhaps not problems to be solved but differences to be celebrated (e.g., isn't it wonderful that some people have more athletic or musical or scientific talent than others?). I also wonder whether the less tractable inequalities might be things that reformers will have to put off solving until we attain some more perfect state of society in the future (maybe the far future, or maybe never - for how could we even start to correct inequalities in things like friendships and personality traits?).
A different (I don't say opposing) perspective, consistent with what Thomas Sowell calls "the constrained vision" and what older thinkers called the tragic sense of life, is that human society cannot be perfected and that it's a fool's errand to seek such perfection. On this view, which seems to undergird much of the center-right, many of the inequalities we encounter are not problems to be solved but realities to be accepted or even tragedies to be lamented.
As always, the truth - if indeed, working together, we can come closer to it over time - likely lies somewhere in the middle.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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A friend of mine once said that good and evil live parallel lives. It's hard to deny that there are and always have been extremely bad people in the world - dictators, secret policemen, drug lords, gang leaders, terrorists, assassins, sex traffickers, and the like; yet one could be fortunate enough go through life without directly running up against such twisted specimens of humanity, even if one knows they exist out there somewhere.
I'll make a bold claim: in the long run, beautiful actions and creations triumph over evil. There have been bad, evil, degenerate people since time immemorial, but the great sifting process of passing time winnows all but a few of them (and then only in generalities) from humanity's common memory. By contrast, we still retain keen awareness and concentrated appreciation of the cave paintings, epic poems, sculptures, architectural constructions, works of wisdom, and great sages from civilizations thousands of years before our time.
It's worth our while to ponder why this is so. Fundamentally, I suggest it's because goodness is what Aristotle called energeia: a positive principle of activity in accordance with capacities that constitute and support life itself. The opposite of this positive principle is a corruption, degradation, privation, or falling away from that positive activity; it's purely negative but doesn't represent an independent principle of its own; evil isn't some Manichean super-reality, but entirely parasitic upon what's good.
We see sadly stark evidence of this in Russia's war on Ukraine: Vladimir Putin and his minions can only kill and destroy, not nurture and build. Although it's no consolation to the victims of Putin's atrocities, this too shall pass. Five hundred years from now he will be a mere footnote to history, whereas the creations and insights of artists and thinkers like Bach, Shakespeare, Homer, and Confucius will live on.
All we can do is act and create as beautifully, humanely, and justly as we can in life. That might not always seem like enough, but cumulatively it makes all the difference.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
By no means do I have "the solution" for what ails the American body politic - as always, there are many causes (and many competing solutions) for our current predicament. And to be clear, I speak not about the day-to-day ins and outs of what's happening in the District of Columbia - who can keep track of it all? - but about longer-term trends. One of those trends is the ever-increasing centralization of governance at the national level.
As I understand it from my readings in American history, the Framers had great admiration for small republics ancient and modern (Athens, Rome, Florence, Venice, Switzerland, etc.) and wished to emulate their success. It was James Madison who had the insight to forge a republic on a larger scale than any previous state except perhaps the Roman Republic. Yet it's pretty clear that things aren't working out quite as the Framers planned.
Part of the challenge is that it's hard to scale the state. The best-governed countries in the world are all relatively small. If we take lack of corruption as a rough proxy for quality of governance, the best-governed countries are as follows:
For purposes of comparison, the population of those countries ranges from about the size of Vermont to about the size of Michigan. Of course, good government depends on many factors other than the size of the population (culture, laws, historical precedent, institutions, etc.), but size isn't nothing, either. Would an Anglosphere country such as New Zealand be as well governed if instead of having 5.5 million people it had 340 million people like the USA? I doubt it.
Another factor underlying the quality of governance is simple competence. More specifically, as countless corporate conglomerates have discovered, it's difficult to do many things well. The Constitution defined a short list of national matters to be handled by the national government, with everything else to be handled by states, counties, towns, cities, and other localities closer to the people. The short list did not include housing, education, energy, transportation, labor relations, and a whole host of other things that partisans fight over these days at the national level. Moreover, many of those now-national functions are also duplicated at the state level, leading to further inefficiencies.
Could it be that engaging in these activities only at the state (or more local level) might lead to better governance across the board in polities more on the scale of the independent nations listed above? It certainly seems like a direction to pursue, especially since that's how the American system was set up to operate in the first place.
But I'm just one powerless person without any influence over national, state, or local affairs, so who am I to prescribe political remedies?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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