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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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Several people I respect have suggested to me that I read some of the many books authored by Byung-Chul Han (best known for The Burnout Society), so I bought a few that intrigued me and started with Vita Contemplativa since it appeared relevant to the writing of my book on Aristotle.
Well, I'm sorry, but I find myself compelled to go on a bit of a rant. Although much of the book's substance interested me, something quite specific about Han's approach really got under my skin. Chapter 3 ("From Acting to Being") is an adoring paean to unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger, quoting liberally from a wide variety of his books, essays, and journals. Chapter 5 ("The Pathos of Action") is a no-holds-barred takedown of persecuted Jewess Hannah Arendt, focusing almost exclusively on her book The Human Condition and studiously ignoring her book The Life of the Mind (having read them both, I'd assert that the latter is rather germane to an analysis of the contemplative life). The fact that Arendt was a student of Heidegger's and had an affair with him before the Nazis took power only adds a twist to the story, as does the fact that several times Arendt barely avoided being shipped off to the concentration camps before eventually escaping from Vichy France to America. (And Han has the gall to say that the French Revolution was vastly superior to the American Revolution; surely "liberté, égalité, fraternité" rang much more hollow in Arendt's ears than "the pursuit of happiness" as she was literally being pursued by the secret police!) Then, at the end of Chapter 3, Han lovingly quotes from Heidegger's reflections on a self-effacing Frenchwoman named Marcelle Mathieu whose hospitality Heidegger enjoyed at her home in Provence. The good little woman - so different from the brainy Arendt - listened silently, meekly, subserviently as Heidegger and various friends of hers engaged in spirited conversation. Han and Heidegger praise Mathieu for engaging in "an ethics of timidity" (!), even to the point of celebrating the fact that when some years later she was to visit Heidegger in Freiburg she came to his door and couldn't bring herself to ring the bell, presumably for fear of imposing on the great man himself (who you can be sure wasn't engaging in an ethics of timidity when he threw his mentor Edmund Husserl under the bus and took over the rectorship of the University of Freiburg under the Nazis). Yet Han writes all this without even a hint of irony or self-consciousness!
Although I have been forcibly exposing myself to Heidegger (right now I'm reading his lectures on Book VI of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics), emotionally and intellectually it's difficult for me to get around the fact that he was such an unethical philosopher. The thick layer of misogyny on top of the authoritarian cake only makes it that much more unappetizing.
Rant over, I return to the much more positive and pleasant task of translating Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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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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