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In 323 BCE, Aristotle was charged by the Athenians with the capital offense of impiety (the same charge that led to their execution of Socrates 76 years earlier) - although modern scholars think that Aristotle's ties to Alexander the Great played a large role, since Aristotle was suspected of being a foreign agent for Macedonian interests and was fair game after Alexander's death earlier that year. To prevent the Athenians from "sinning twice against philosophy", as he put it, Aristotle fled to Chalkis, where a year later he died of natural causes at the age of 62.
Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yesterday I learned, via a mention at The Hinternet, that an ancient philosophy scholar named Svetlana Mesyats has been put under house arrest by Vladimir Putin's goons for alleged financial irregularities related to a years-long effort to translate the works of Aristotle into Russian. As her former colleague Elizaveta Shcherbakovba explains, not only are the charges trumped up, but the real reason for targeting Mesyats is that Russian authoritarians like Aleksandr Dugin harbor a hatred of Aristotle because he was "the founder of the Western theory of democracy" - even going so far as to label the Institute of Philosophy, where Mesyats has worked for many years, as "the last refuge of scoundrels, traitors, foreign agents, defectors, Russophobes, and extremists."
Much as the Asharite school of Islamic theology felt threatened by (and ultimately went on to snuff out) the open inquiry of the Aristotelian-leaning Mutazilite school a thousand years ago, so also today atavistic authoritarians such as Putin and Dugin feel threatened by the very possibility of a translation of Aristotle's works into Russian. Apparently ~2400 years after his death Aristotle is still the ultimate foreign agent, and scholars of great integrity like Svetlana Mesyats are paying the price for their apostasy.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Some things stick in your mind. I recall a comment that a friend made fifteen or twenty years ago to the effect that after your spouse dies you shouldn't make any major changes for at least twelve months. Why he said that I don't know, but in my experience so far the comment doesn't ring true, at least not for me.
Talking with another friend over lunch today, I reflected on the strangeness of adjusting to my new life without Elisa. My personal identity and my day-to-day life have been so intertwined with Elisa's presence for over thirty years that the scale of the adjustment is enormous. Inevitably, I find, my very identity is changing in ways that can be hard to fathom.
As one example, Elisa was fairly cautious and analytical about spending money or changing our investments. I'm pretty much that way, too, but I can also be decisive. Over the last year or so I've become comfortable with a modified investment strategy that weights more heavily toward stocks, and over the last few weeks I've been putting that strategy into effect (in fact I've gotten rid of long-term bonds entirely, contrary to the Permanent Portfolio approach I discovered and implemented about ten years ago). More radically, after a series of conversations with a good friend of mine I got interested in buying a rental property, and last week I closed on a small home about five minutes from my house, which I plan to rent out initially to one of my best friends. I doubt that I would have done these things in concert with Elisa, at least not without a few years of careful planning and discussion, but on my own I've made these changes quite quickly. And there are other examples, too - I've bought a few musical instruments, donated two old vehicles to benefit our local jazz radio station, made contributions to some new charities, etc.
In a way I feel somewhat guilty about all this, as if I'm betraying Elisa and the shared life we built together. Intellectually I realize that I'm simply exploring new paths and starting to find a more independent identity, but emotionally it doesn't always feel right. Although change is inevitable, I feel the need to honor continuity, too. It can be rather confusing at times...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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There is something garish about our garrulous society. Everything can be talked about, and everything is. No experience is so private, so personal, so serious, or so sacred that it cannot be endlessly dissected, vivisected, violated, and exposed. This strikes me as a distinctly ugly and unseemly way to live. Better and more beautiful was the attitude of the ancients, well described by Pierre Hadot on page 174 of his Selected Writings:
Generally speaking, from the fact that the ancients spoke little, or at least with great sobriety, about certain experiences that we moderns describe with such emphasis and abundance, we must not conclude that they did not live these experiences, or that they experienced them only in a vague and imperfect manner. On the contrary, it is this half-silence which betrays the importance that such experiences had for them. There was in ancient culture a tendency to remain silent about what was essential.
Someone will quote Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." Yet there is a vast distance between his "cannot" and the "should not" of the ancients.
Talk cheapens.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Every morning since May 9th I've established a routine of waking up by 5:30am, feeding the dog, having a snack of skyr and homemade granola, and then sitting down to translate Aristotle for at least an hour and a half, accompanied by a mug of jasmine pearl tea and contemplative music from the likes of Bach and Palestrina. It's almost a sort of meditation, especially at that early hour when the world is so quiet.
Translating is hard work. On a typical morning I translate a mere fifteen or twenty lines of Aristotle's knotty Greek, weighing each word and phrase in an effort to bring out, to the best of my abilities, the sense of the original. Later in the day, if I don't have too many other commitments, I will add a second translation session in the afternoon; those are good days, although every day I make progress. So far I've translated about 15% of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics.
In parallel with this translation work, I continue to perform background reading in ancient Greek history, religion, and philosophy so that I can write a proper "prelude" to Aristotle's "fugue". While doing so today, I discovered that in his introduction to The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot Matthew Sharpe quotes as follows from Hadot's 1960 essay "Jeux de langage et philosophie" (apparently a somewhat Wittgensteinian reflection on language games and philosophy):
We can thus never completely understand a philosophy expressed in a foreign language, above all because it belongs to a linguistic system which is extremely different from our own. Yet, at the same time, it reveals to us a vision of the universe which is absolutely different from our own and which serves to complete our own perspective. This is why the translator must do violence to his own language in order to introduce the distinct traits of the other language into it.
Allow me to share a few thoughts.
First, in my experience the difference is not merely linguistic, but encompasses a vast canvas of culture, history, art, literature, religion, lifeways, political economy, and never-quite-stated assumptions that everyone who used the language took for granted. Gaining even a surface familiarity with all of that is the task of a lifetime, and I cannot claim to have done it even for the ancient Greeks.
As to doing violence, I try to avoid too much of that because I am, shall I say, a moderate, peaceful person (e.g., I've pulled back from translating ἀρετή as "thriving" and instead I'm now rendering it as "excellence"). Sometimes it's not so much a matter of introducing Greek traits into English as of finding ways to express in natural-sounding English what I take to be the thoughts behind the Greek; indeed, this is more difficult than producing Hellenized English or the sort of linguistic contortions that Martin Heidegger indulged in. It's a truism that a perfect translation is a virtual impossibility, like the Stoic sage who comes along only once every 500 years. Although there is truth in the truism, that doesn't mean one shouldn't make the attempt, and some translations are better than others along many dimensions (accuracy, readability, naturalness in the destination language, etc.).
The other day my best friend complimented me on my translations as well as on the extended "recastings" I've attempted in the "preludes" that have resulted from my encounters with the likes of Nietzsche, Thoreau, and Epicurus. I do think I have something of a knack for this, in part because I strive to get inside the thinker's head by deeply absorbing the spirit of their worldview over the course of years. Much time and attention is required for this kind of intellectual and spiritual osmosis, but I feel it's worth the effort.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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My friend Adrian Lory and I have scheduled our next Psy-Phi Dialogue for tomorrow at 8:30am PDT / 11:30am EDT / 15:30 UTC on Substack Live. To add some variety, this time around Adrian will be running the show. In appreciation for Adrian's assiduous attention to all things awe-inspiring and amazing, all topics will begin with the letter "A" and might include Aristotle, autism, art and aesthetics, awareness and attention, AI, areas of life, and any "aha moments" that arise as we amble along. ;-)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Over the last few months - exactly how many is foggy because lots of things are that way for me these days - I've been slowly re-reading the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I was about halfway up this particular mountain (pun intended) when I realized that I really should have been taking notes on the ascent, as per my usual process of working through authors I'd like to encounter and write books about. Thus I've gone back down to the trailhead and I'm reading again from the beginning, but this time with pen in hand.
Montaigne's qualities as a writer, thinker, and human being have continued to grow on me over the years - especially his limpid style, his sparkling intelligence, his wry sense of humor, his casually worn erudition, his love of wisdom, his lack of dogmatism, and his dedication to learning from his experience of life. Reading and re-reading the Essays is like going on a long, fascinating journey with the most insightful and delightful of conversationalists: the moment you return home, you're ready to start out all over again!
This time through I'm focusing primarily on Montaigne's dedication to what I call the private, the personal, the practical, the passionate, and the particular. I am wondering how he resisted the philosopher's siren call of the public, the general, the abstract, the detached, and the universal - all the while avoiding the self-absorption that is all too common among those who've inherited the essay form he invented. There are some secrets here to good writing, good thinking, and good living, which I aim to discover with a little help from my ancient friend Michel de Montaigne.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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