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Well, it took me about 8 hours over the course of a few days to translate the first page of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. Because there are 60 pages in the EE, as it's affectionately known (including the three "common books" shared with the Nicomachean Ethics), at this rate it should take me about 500 hours to complete the translation. That's not as long as I expected, and I'll probably gain speed as I make progress up the mountain because here at the start I'm thinking carefully about how I'll render certain words and phrases.
For example, on the very first page we find the following phrase: φιλοσοφίαν μόνον θεωρητικήν. Translators usually render that as something like "purely theoretical philosophy" but to my mind that kind of thing doesn't capture the likely thought behind the Greek words (we can't check all this with Aristotle, so we have to make informed inferences). In the fourth century BCE, philosophy was a new thing in the world and referred to "the love and practice of sagacity"; furthermore, the word θεωρία didn't mean "theory" in our sense (any more than ἐνέργεια meant "energy" or φαντασία meant "fantasy"), but I think instead meant something like "attention". Thus rather loquaciously I've provisionally rendered the phrase as "that passionate practice of sagacity which is devoted to attention alone"; this provides a fitting contrast with the fact that the EE focuses on that passionate practice of sagacity which is devoted to living beautifully and finding fulfillment. I freely grant that in this case I've used quite a few English words to unpack three Greek words, but (a) Greek is a terse language, especially in Aristotle's hands and (b) I'm working hard to make Aristotle's meaning truly understandable for modern readers.
By the way, when I say "page" I mean two columns of the Greek text as edited by August Immanuel Bekker in the 1830s. Although naturally I am closely referencing the most up-to-date scholarship on the Greek text, if you ask me the Bekker version is a thing of beauty.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Yesterday morning I wrapped up a 48-hour writing sprint in which, after several weeks of concentrated research and reflection, I composed chapter four (on love and friendship) of my forthcoming book on Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment. As if that weren't enough, this morning I began work in earnest on my translation of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. At the same time that dear friends of mine are striding boldly into humanity's agentic future, I am taking an inward turn, cultivating my own contemplative counterculture, and delving ever more deeply into a thinker who lived almost 2500 years ago, using only my own mind, a few shelves of physical books, and for the translation pencil, paper, a large Greek dictionary, and a small statue of Aristotle (gifted by a friend), with whom I can confer when I hit an impasse.
You might wonder: why in the world am I climbing this mountain?
I could say "because it's there", but that'd be a lazy non-answer. Kant is there too, but I'm not writing a book about his ethical philosophy or translating his Critique of Practical Reason.
I freely admit that, ever since I had a crisis of faith at the age of nine, I've been somewhat obsessed with becoming an ever wiser person. Over the years, that obsession has manifested itself as a yearning to thoroughly encounter and learn from a few great thinkers who strike me as especially sagacious about the human condition and human potential. Some of those thinkers are not really accessible to me because I don't know the language in which they wrote (e.g., Lao Tzu). Some thinkers whom other people consider to be great don't resonate with me for one reason or another (e.g., Augustine, Sartre). Some thinkers intrigue me but don't spark enough passion to justify a full encounter (e.g., Spinoza). Some thinkers are aligned with many of my own ideas but, I feel, lack the kind of surpassing profundity that is required for true sagacity (e.g., Eric Hoffer, Abraham Maslow). And so on. But if I were to create a Venn diagram of alignment, accessibility, profundity, and perhaps a few other properties, one thinker would land right in the middle: Aristotle.
That's not to say Aristotle got everything right (whatever that might mean) or that I agree with him about everything (after all, agreement is overrated). It is to say that, to me, his writings have endlessly repaid the admittedly significant investment I've made in reading them (and now translating one of his thornier works from Greek into English); in particular, I've found that reflecting on his insights and applying his methods of thinking in my own life have been immensely generative of whatever wisdom and sagacity I've been able to attain.
So here I am, still climbing Mount Aristotle. As I approach the summit, the trail grows fainter, the terrain grows steeper, and the air grows thinner. Thus I expect that the last two chapters of my book will emerge more slowly (perhaps much more slowly) than the first four. The writing itself is straightforward because words come easily to me once I figure out what I want to say, but the process of research and reflection is intense.
Wish me luck, flatlander! ;-)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Despite renewed commitments, local involvements, visits and calls with folks who care about me, and other sources of solace, lately I have been taking an inward turn. Although as previously mentioned I don't like to talk about myself much, after twenty-five years of blogging and the loss of my dear Elisa three months ago I am finding it helpful at times to use this weblog as something more like a diary, so I'll attempt to describe what's going on in my head and my heart.
The outward signs are clear enough: I've been ignoring news of the wider world even more than usual, immersing myself in the eternities (e.g., going deep into the writing of my Aristotle book), listening to highly contemplative music (Bach's Art of the Fugue, Palestrina's Canticum Canticorum, John Dowland's lute music, Gabriel Fauré's piano music), and therapeutically pouring my emotions into playing guitar (specifically a beautiful old Martin D-28 that I recently purchased from a friend).
The inward signs are more subtle. Maybe the recent rainy (and tonight snowy) weather has seeped into my soul, but I have this vague bodily sense that things are off. My feelings are closer to the surface. It's been harder to maintain my emotional equilibrium. Sadness often comes unbidden in moments of quiet. The noisy world is too much with me and I strive to avoid it. As difficult thoughts and feelings occupy my mind, the best I can do is simply sit with them. I'm not solving problems or working through impasses in any obvious way, just being.
I suppose these experiences represent yet another variety of grieving that will manifest itself, perhaps along with many others, during what I foresee will be a long process of coming to understand and adjust to Elisa's passing. In the meantime I'm working to cultivate, to the extent I can, a stance of profound patience.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Thursday morning at our usual time of 8:30am PDT / 11:30am EDT / 15:30 UTC, Adrian Lory and I will hold dialogue #4 in our series of live conversations about psychology and philosophy. We conferred briefly today and decided on a few possible topics: philosophical perspectives on happiness (or at least my perspective, informed by the book I'm writing about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment), Adrian's recent reflections on the nature of art (a topic I've been pondering of late as well), and the deep connections between art, myth, and religion. One thing is for sure: you can't say we shy away from the eternities! :-)
See you then!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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From reading my weblog, you might get the impression that I'm just another ivory-tower intellectual, philosophe, and artiste. It's true I started out that way after earning a degree in philosophy and ancient Greek, but over the course of my 30-year career in business and technology I learned quite a bit about the practicalities of life and slowly acquired traits and abilities that continue to stand me in good stead today, such as communication, negotiation, and public speaking.
Case in point: my current service to the community as president of my neighborhood association. Over the last few months I've been working diligently with folks in this corner of Douglas County, Colorado to oppose a dense, urban-style housing development being pushed forward nearby by mega-builder KB Home. Lest you immediately cry "NIMBYism!", I assure you that there is plenty of building going on around here, which the county's master plan channels to areas already slated for dense development; the difference this time is that the builder attempted to inject a pocket of urban housing into an area which the master plan has reserved for rural living. This is creeping urbanization: if the citizens want to modify the designation of protected areas they have a public process for doing so through modifications to the next version of the master plan, but one-off amendment proposals from developers ain't it.
Thankfully, because of a coordinated community response in my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods, at last night's well-attended public meeting the county's Planning Commission voted to deny KB Home's request to amend the master plan. I doubt we've heard the end of attempts to develop the parcels in question and similar properties here in Douglas County, but this victory gives the community some breathing room to collaborate with the county and the nearby town of Parker in a more measured manner as we navigate the inevitable tradeoffs between preservation and development. Personally I expect to be right in the thick of those conversations.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
In my classical guitar studies of late I've been learning a Bach prelude and fugue (BWV 999 and 1000, although so far I have only the prelude in my fingers). This has inspired me to think about tweaking my lifelong philosophy project of writing half a dozen books on the art of living well, as I've done several times before since first articulating it about twelve years ago.
All four of the books I've written so far in this series are short - perhaps too short. They are, as it were, my own somewhat improvisatory preludes to the large fugues produced by the great thinkers I've been encountering over the years.
Thus I've been thinking: what if I were to append each of my preludes with a fugue when producing (as I hope to do) new, high-quality editions of the books I've published so far? I already have the original materials on hand for a few of these, and I've been thinking about translating or arranging some of the other fugues. Here's what that might look like, in reverse chronological order...
First, Nietzsche (1844-1900). My book Songs of Zarathustra contains 72 poems riffing off aphorisms sprinkled throughout the works that Nietzsche published during his lifetime. The fugue would consist of my own translations of the hundred-odd aphorisms I cite in the poems. It's true that my German is rusty, but I think I could just barely pull this off.
Second, Thoreau (1817-1862). This one is easy, because the fugue already exists in Seasons of Thoreau, a companion to my book The Upland Farm containing relevant passages I selected from Thoreau's journal and published writings.
Third, Montaigne (1533-1592). Although Montaigne is a recent addition to my lifelong philosophy project, lately I've been warming to the idea of writing a long, rambling essay entitled "Apology for Michel de Montaigne" in which I would defend his personalist approach to soulcraft. The challenge here is producing a fugue of perhaps a dozen of his essays, since I don't know French; I'd likely need to use existing translations in the public domain.
Fourth, Epicurus (341-270 BCE). The prelude is my book Letters on Happiness and the fugue is already about half-done, since I've translated his Letter to Menoikeus, his Principal Doctrines, the collection of aphorisms known as the Vatican Sayings, and selected fragments from his lost works. I've been meaning to translate more of his fragments, some of testimonia from Greek and Latin authors, the ancient biography written by Diogenes Laertius, and perhaps his letters to Herodotus, to Pythocles, and to his mother.
Fifth, Pyrrho (ca. 360–270 BCE). Nothing is written or translated here except the first ~350 lines of my projected epic poem Gods Among Men. The fugue would probably consist of my own translations from ancient Greek of selections from Sextus Empicirus, Diogenes Laertius, and Eusebius. I might even throw in some passages from Montaigne's "Apology for Raymond Sebond" because what he says there about Pyrrho strikes me as extremely insightful.
Sixth, Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Over the last two months I've written the first half of my book Complete Thyself and I'll soon write chapter four of the projected six. My current idea is that the fugue would be my own translation of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, supplemented with passages from his other works (such as On Thrivings and Failings of Character). I'd skip the Nicomachean Ethics because the world already has enough translations of that one; besides, I think the Joe Sachs translation is excellent even though I disagree with him on the rendering of some key terms.
(Astute readers will notice that I'm leaving out The Tao of Roark, my little book about Ayn Rand's philosophy of life. That's because what I wrote is very much intertwined with Rand's novel The Fountainhead, which is more of a symphony than a fugue; I'd like each fugue to be 2-4 times as long as my own prelude, but in this case the ratio would be more like 10:1. Plus there are copyright issues.)
Sometimes I wonder why I've set myself up for such a massive undertaking, but it helps to give focus and direction to my intellectual endeavors and I find the results deeply fulfilling...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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