When Distinctions Damage (and when they do some good)

It is impossible, then, that 'being a man' should mean precisely 'not being a man', if 'man' not only signifies something about one subject but also has one significance. ....

In the context of Aristotle's traditional logic, this is a remarkably precise statement of the law of excluded middle, P ∨ ¬P.
      --an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on the Law of the Excluded Middle

In these statements [that Aristotle has written in his various treatises,] the superior valuation of man over woman is explicitly stated. However, it is also present in the theory of contraries and in other aspects of Aristotle’s thought about sex identity. Aristotle stands out from his predecessors in that he gave a complete rationale for his theory of sex polarity. He developed reasons and arguments for the philosophically significant differentiation of the sexes and for the superiority of man over woman. Therefore, he is correctly identified as the founder of the sex polarity position. . . . [H]e also laid the groundwork for another theory of sex identity in his philosophy of definition.
      --an excerpt from Sister Prudence Allen's book, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 Bc-Ad 1250

This is a tough post for me to write, for some personal reasons.  It may be a difficult post for you to read, because I may not be very clear.  It's about language, and the ways we use it.  I'm trying to represent fairly what we bloggers say and how we come across when saying what we say.  How that may damage, or how it may do some good.  (If I've misrepresented anything you've said, then I'm sorry.  Readers should find links back to the contexts from which I've lifted a few quotes of fellow bloggers.)

Well, here goes.

Aristotle is alive around the blogosphere. At least the sort of logic he used to denigrate women and others is alive and well. It's almost as if bloggers making distinctions the way Aristotle did are afraid.  It seems they're afraid that if they don't differentiate sharply then they will not be able to have any sort of discernment or judgment at all.

But the real distinction, the good one we'd do well to make, is this one:

the differentiation between 

(1) our own human language that is often good and sloppy and imprecise and sometimes playful and is embodied and yet still allows us to see difference and even to celebrate all kinds of differences

and 

(2) Aristotle's logic that would separate the Other from oneself, logic that invariably and inherently puts oneself above that Other in some sort of hierarchical Nature, logic that would damage the Other or must view her already as naturally damaged.

Here are 3 examples:

example 1 

In his post "Spoken style correction: the iPeeve™," Mark Liberman does some good by allowing himself to be "inspired by Erin Gloria Ryan" in her confessions of using the filler like in her speech.  But Mark also really does some good by actually distinguishing Erin's more limited conclusions from his own.  He can, for example, question what she only presumes:  "whether vernacular like is genuinely female-associated," and then he can ask "the broader question of whether there's a female speech style characterized by features that weaken assertions."

However, then Mark sets himself above Erin by differentiating in a way that could damage his blog readers' perceptions of the way she speaks.  He suggests that her "incessant repetition of a low-information-content filler is annoying to listeners and should be avoided."  Yes, I know he goes on to generalize beyond Erin's own confession to say - like a logical prescriptivist would - that absolutely all of the following "should be avoided":  "like" or "literally" or "you know" or just plain "uh."  See how this prescription differentiates?  How it sets one sort of English speaker above the others.  Mark starts to sound like the logical prescriptivist Aristotle, who insisted that ambiguities "should be avoided" or else they'll make a lousy speaker.  What's really not so good is that Mark can't even follow his own prescription for the language that not good speakers "should" avoid.  In the very blogpost where he says fillers should be avoided, Mark himself fails to avoid using a filler.  He writes the filler "well"; he writes it and doesn't avoid it.  He writes the filler "well" as if he's talking:  "What am I talking about?," he asks in writing.  Then he says, pausing with his filler:  "Well, ..."  In kind reply to my comment pointing this out, Mark further differentiates the Nature of things; he says in red font:  "Sentence-initial well is what's generally called a "discourse marker" — it wouldn't become a "verbal tic" unless it was over-used."  Notice, it's NOT a "filler" or "verbal tic" when four differentiations can be made:  (a) "well" is "sentence-initial"; (b) someone writes a wikipedia article and calls "well" a "discourse marker"; and (c) until and unless "well" is "over-used" like "Ms. Ryan's" like is so overused; and (d) until and unless the speaker or writer like "Ms. Ryan" confesses to having "her (self-)conscious reaction" to using "well," a reaction, by the way, "[that] is ... quite negative."  And so notice, differentiate, how differently Mark uses his language from how Erin uses hers.

In summary, Mark makes some good distinctions after being inspired by Erin's blogpost.  Then he continues on to do some damage by differentiating the various differences between proper speech, in the way he uses it, and NOT proper speech that "should be avoided," in the way that she uses it.

example 2

In her post, "Sunday Superlatives: 6/26/2011," Rachel Held Evans does some good by differentiating some of the best blogposts she's read, on the one hand, from some bad blogposts, on the otherhand.  For example, Rachel sees how "spot-on" Jamie the Very Worst Missionary is with her post, “Human, Like Jesus,” (in which Jamie differentiates between people who tend to run down being human, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, people who tend more to go with the Jesus kind of humanity, i.e., "our humanity that compels us to treat others with kindness and respect").  Likewise, Rachel sees the "best argument" in Daniel Kirk's post, “Gay Marriage in New York” (in which Daniel differentiates between the state being in the marriage business, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the church NOT being in this business).  Furthermore, Rachel sees as "most provocative" Caryn Rivadeneira's post, “What Christians Can Respect About Slutwalks” (in which Caryn differentiates, on the one hand, the "horrific" thing that a male police officer in Toronto said from the more honorable protests by slutwalkers, on the other hand).  And then Rachel even does good by differentiating the bad:  Rachel calls "Most Un-Cool (...and not in a good way)" Karen Swallow's post “An Open Letter to Donald Miller” (since Karen differentiates how Donald Miller and how she Karen would make a list of qualities in a fianc(é)e in some Christianly way, on the one hand, and how Donald's actual fiancée has so differently made her list, on the other hand, in a not so Christianly way, i.e., in a way that "doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for God to bring a partner who can meet needs we don’t even know we have, needs God knows more intimately than we or our spouses can ever know").

However, then Rachel seems to talk about Karen by differentiating in a way that could damage Karen's blog readers' perceptions of the way she speaks.  Rachel says of Karen's blogpost:  "Unsolicited marriage advice from a complete strange in the form of 'open letter' = not cool."  And we all wonder if we can easily differentiate Rachel's unsolicited statement here about Karen's unsolicited one.  Who is above the other?  Who can call somebody's blogpost "cool" or "not cool" if the one is differentiating herself from the other but does the very same sort of differentiating as the other?  It's sort of confusing.  But the subtleties here are what can damage the Other.

And so let's look at what the ostensibly "cooler" (as if in a "good" way) bloggers do as "Christians" differentiated from the Others.  Daniel, for example, writes:  "It’s difficult for Christians to imagine a world where we are truly in the minority and subject to the power of people with alternative religious convictions."  And he adds, "As Christians, we need to learn how to hold our own religious views while seeking liberty and justice for all–not just those who happen to believe as we do."  And his clear differentiations are between "Christians we" vs. Others "truly in the minority" who cannot "believe as we do" because they're NOT Christians maybe gays - as if these are mutually exclusive categories with the middle excluded.  Isn't it damaging to find yourself without a real category, if you are Christian and gay or are Christian and some other minority or are Christian and yet still not necessarily sharing all the beliefs like Daniel's Christians do?  Similarly, Caryn says:  "While we can debate the method of SlutWalks, Christians should agree on their purpose. Christians should be leading the marches against violence toward women."  Can one not be a Christian and a feminist and also a SlutWalker?  Or is the only thing "Christians" can share with "their" debatable feminist method "their [SlutWalk] purpose"?  Can we all see how this sort of us NOT them differentiation doesn't allow people to be who they are or who they're becoming, as if one category of religious person is above the Others they're trying to "love" or at least somehow to agree with?  Doesn't the absolute differentiation damage?

example 3

Now let me point the finger at me.   I'll keep it short, but you'll have links if you want it long.   At this blogpost, I commented about two of my fellow bloggers in disagreement:  "I’m thinking that there are already two clear disagreements to note and that our seeing these differences clearly shouldn’t hurt anybody."  I was really hoping to do some good in differentiating, at least not to do damage.

However, it's clear there's been damage done late in a related conversation at a related blogpost here.  One of the conversants quotes me and says:  "Well, I don’t know about the 'not hurting' part. Of course it hurts. But ... "  Oops!  Suddenly I find myself perhaps doing not good but damage by using logic that separates instead of human language that appreciates difference.

Do you see the difference?  Can we appreciate differences in Others as we all talk, and change, and grow up a bit?  These are some of my questions this week as I listen in on and participate in blog talk and differentiations.

To Use Hitler's Deutsche, Aristotle's ἑλληνίζειν

Den gewaltigsten Gegensatz zum Arier bildet der Jude.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew.

So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will if the Almighty Creator: by resisting the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..

Denn ein rassereines Volk, das sich seines Blutes bewußt ist, wird vom Juden niemals unterjocht werden können. Er wird auf dieser Welt ewig nur der Herr von Bastarden sein.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards alone

--Adolf Hitler

τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ πεπηρωμένον·
The female is, in fact, as it were, a mutilated male.


Hence it is manifest that all the persons mentioned have a moral virtue of their own, and that the temperance (sophrosyne [σωφροσύνη]) of a woman (gunaikos [γυναικὸς]) and that of a man  (andros [ἀνδρός]) are not the same, nor their courage and justice, as Socrates thought, but the one is the courage of command, and the other that of subordination, and the case is similar with the other virtues.

--Aristotle

Why would anyone want to use Aristotle's words or Hitler's?  What if you're a Jewish woman?

My wife, who works in words as a professional writer, recently shared with me the ways some women, in fact, have well appropriated not only Aristotle's words but also his advice about how to use them persuasively.  Look here:

Aristotle’s Ancient Guide to Compelling Copy

and here:

What Aristotle Taught Us About Web Content Development

My spouse was actually endorsing what Amy Harrison and Elise Redlin-Cook were doing with Aristotle's language, with his conception of rhetoric, as clarity and as persuasiveness.

This isn't to say that she doesn't understand the evil of Aristotle's words, his straightforward ugliness towards females, towards women, towards any other, any barbarian.  No.  In fact, my life partner actually gave my dissertation on the awful phallo-logo-centricity of Aristotle's τὸ ἑλληνίζειν an apt, 2-word nickname.  She named the academic project of mine:  Aristotle Exposed.  She and many understand it's not just that Aristotle used his words, his sexist and racist logic, to put down females and to denigrate non-Greeks un-like him. 

It's also the way Aristotle used language.  His logic left no room for womanly or for barbarian ways of using language.  He taught his elite Greek male-only students to avoid ambiguities, to scoff at hyperbole, to ridicule parable, to work only in what's "Natural" and never in anything else (such as the speakeristic, poetic, the lyrical, the dialectical, the supernatural).  He didn't teach his boys in his AkaDemy (his school for the People) to listen.

So let's listen.  Listen again to Sister Prudence Allen and then to rhetoric scholar Krista Ratcliffe listening to Aristotle:

In these statements the superior valuation of man over woman is explicitly stated [by Aristotle]. However, it is also present in the theory of contraries and in other aspects of Aristotle’s thoughts about sex identity. Aristotle stands out from his predecessors in that he a complete rationale for his theory of sex polarity. He developed reasons and arguments for the philosophically significant differentiation of the sexes and for the superiority of man over woman. Therefore, he is correctly identified [by historians] as the founder of the sex polarity position…. [H]e also laid the groundwork for another theory of sex identity in his philosophy of definition.

--Allen

Aristotle’s Rhetoric assures students who study his rhetorical theory that they will learn not only how to produce enthymemes but also how to analyze them, and in a culture whose texts were primarily oral, such analysis implies listening. But Aristotle’s theory never delves into how to listen. Moreover, his production/ reception linkage is more complicated than his assurance allows.

Aristotle’s treatise of rhetoric was gender blind.

[Likewise, his treatise of politics is one in which w]omen, slaves and children were relegated to the category of ‘earthly possession’ for which men bargained. To redefine women’s position, feminist theories of rhetoric must critique this concept of language to determine if, and how, it can be made more inclusive. For how we assume language functions, more than anything else, determines how we read and write the cultural as well as the textual.

--Ratcliffe

Listen again.  Allen helps us recall how Aristotle lays a groundwork with language, the groundwork for thinking of males as superior to females.  Now, of course, Aristotle was not the first man to do this.  But, as Ratcliffe also rightly observes, Aristotle's teachings on rhetoric and on politics functioned as categorical and categorizing language that somehow [if wrongly and incongruently] appealed to Nature.

So we come back to Hitler.  Why Hitler?  Well, he's also sexist and racist by how he uses language.  Does that mean we shouldn't use his language?  No, but it means we'd do well to know exactly how he used it.  We would do well to remember that he would not use our language, that he would not want language to be used so liberally, so freely.

My eldest daughter just gave me Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.  Toward the end of the edition she gave me, Frankl tells this story about language and making meanings by it:

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?"  In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, "How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?"  She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.

To be fair to this American woman, Frankl was quite aware of just how awful, how sexist and how racist, the propaganda of Hitler really was.  Frankl experienced the effects.  Hitler's German is worse than just a kitchen knife.  It was a two-edged sword.  It was a gangster's switchblade, a guerilla's machete, a sadist's scalpel.  It was an IED, a terrorist's home-made bomb, an improvised explosive device.  It was Aristotle's Greek all over again, extreme racism and sexism in the guise of moderate rationality and by appeals to nature.  It was boxing up the Other in tight categories and putting oneself above as the default, unmarked Natural superior. 

Our question today (in these last few days of this Women's History Month) doesn't need to be whether we can use Adolf Hitler's Deutsche or Aristotle's ἑλληνίζειν.  We can.  And we can also do more.  We can use language inclusively, creatively, extremely.  We can listen to that preacher in the church down the street who exclaims that the Bible and Nature conspire against women to keep them silent.  We can eavesdrop on the husband who tells his wife that she is his helpmeet, his complement, his to-be-submissive God-given object, for "the Bible tells me so."  We can overhear the mostly-male politicians and the rule of law again and again justifying why males will have to continue to make more than women in the workplace.  We can ponder, sleeplessly if we must, how it is that young girls must still fear and must still have to work so hard at protecting themselves from being raped, fondled, abused, objectivized by men.  There is much more we can do.

Re-presenting Genesis: through a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic misogynist's eyes

"Well, he is a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic misogynist," says his second wife who is Jewish as was his first wife. And in answer to the question of whether Robert Crumb is in denial about having a foot fetish, she sets the record straight:

Legs and ass are No 1. He does not like fat women. He likes muscular, powerful women, physically and psychically!! He has strong footwear preferences but I would not consider him a foot fetishist.

She's been representing R.Crumb for some time now in relation to women, Jewish women, and muscular, powerful Jewish women.  On the cover of her "graphic memoir," Need More Love, she pictures herself as his type of covergirl:

And she appears with him, strong, on the poster of the documentary film about him:

But do you think that Aline Ricky Goldsmith Kominsky-Crumb can call Robert Crumb's graphic art sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynistic?  If she were to review his Genesis, would she say anything about his women and Jew denigrating illustrations of the first book of the Bible?  Could she?  Of course she could.

So why can't John Hobbins, who's praised David Peterson's review of R. Crumb's Genesis as "judicious"?  And why isn't Peterson's so-called judiciousness a recognition of Genesis through the eyes of a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic misogynist?  Here's why:

Hobbins quotes himself as having said:

The loathing Crumb inspires in a few, the accolades he receives from others, cast shadows and light on his most recent work . . . Crumb is a satirist. Satirists offend. Satirists offend by exaggerating truth.

Then he links to Peterson's review that offers:

To characterize Crumb’s tome as a graphic novel would be apt for another reason. Genesis is, indeed, a graphic book. In his drawings, Crumb does not hesitate to depict human bodies, violence, and sexual behavior in a graphic fashion, hence the aforementioned warning to minors. So, for example, the depiction of Lot and his daughters (Gen 19) or Judah and Tamar (Gen 34) leaves little to the imagination. Blood flies when Cain kills Abel. Some readers will, no doubt, complain about the overt depiction of sexual activity and violence.

What I think is fascinating is how Hobbins and Peterson and a whole host of other men love to focus on Crumb's art while, in contrast, his wife, an artist, loves to focus on Crumb himself in his art and in his life and as her art.  She doesn't just appreciate him for the satire or the way he offends or exaggerates.  She doesn't consider his truth so exaggerated or offensive so it seems.  She doesn't classify Crumb's representations of women and Jews as entirely different from Crumb the man, and goy.  She doesn't abstract his art from his self-loathing self.

In contrast, the sort of male abstracting that Hobbins does is akin to what men do when complaining to their wives, "Come on honey, I look at Playboy for the high-class articles."  The separation and the valuing separately conveniently allow men to allow men to denigrate women and, in some cases, certain races of women.  Now, I'm not accusing Hobbins of being blatant about this sort of Aristotelian categorization.  He's not necessarily in denial if he denies it.  He may have other intentions for praising Crumb's art as high satire apart from his blatant sexism and his expressed racism.  Nonetheless, it is convenient not to mention who Crumb is or at the very least who he has been or at the very very least who those being denigrated by Crumb recognize that he is.

Maybe some day, I'll write a review of Crumb's Genesis here at this blog.  He certainly includes some very interesting statements in the illustrated work on the text of Genesis and the sources of the stories therein.  Until then, and right now then, let me just link back to a few posts that have pointed out the abstracting reviews of R Crumb's Genesis by various men in the biblioblogosphere:  here, here, and here.

Translating Genesis 1:1: Aristotle or the Big Bang?

Dr. Hugh Henry and Mr. Daniel J. Dyke, respectively a retired physicist and a professor of Old Testament, have taken on Rashi, Robert Young, and several other Bible translators. In fact, the two have taken on (what they say is) Aristotle's view of the universe and the resultant (liberal, unscientific, outdated) translation methods of the Bible.

Their essay "Translating Genesis 1:1: Aristotle or the Big Bang?" is posted as a two parter here and here.

They're claiming that "it is intellectually satisfying that modern science now affirms the traditional translation of Genesis 1:1."  They're saying that "the rationale for Rashi’s own retranslation is discredited Aristotelian physics—not the opinions of his rabbinic predecessors."  They're asserting that Robert "Young followed Rashi in his translation of Genesis 1:1" and speculating that "he may have been seeking to make his Young’s Literal Translation consistent with [then] contemporary science."

In contrast, Henry and Dyke like this sort of "traditional" translation as more scientific:

¹In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 ²And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
 ³And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Young's Literal, which Henry and Dyke don't quote, goes like this:

 ¹In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth --
 ²the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness [is] on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters,
 ³and God saith, `Let light be;' and light is.

But Henry and Dyke do give the following two translations and critique them:

• “When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen 1:1–3, NJPS).
• “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:1–2, NRSV).

The most troubling thing about what Henry and Dyke do is to miscredit Aristotle for Rashi's and Young's and the NJPS and NRSV translation teams' translations.

In other words, Henry and Dyke don't refer readers to Aristotle's Cosmos, Physics, or Metaphysics, in which he clearly outlines his cosmology against, for example, Hesiod's.  Neither do Henry and Dyke discuss Hesiod's Theogony, which forms the backdrop of much of what the Greeks and the Jewish Septuagint translators worked with and against.

Moreover, Henry and Dyke quote Rashi some, but they hardly know how he so carefully works through Genesis, not following Aristotle (if working against Aristotle's sort misogyny and gynophobia -- see Suzanne's post here linking to Maggie Anton's post on "Rashi's "feminist" commentary on Genesis 1" which is followed by notes on "Rashi's "feminist" commentary on Genesis 3").

I only have a bit more time to say a couple of more things.  Then, I'd welcome anyone else's comments.

First, we'd do well to read Hesiod's Theogony when reading Moses's Genesis.  The Septuagint translation (which Henry and Dyke praise ironically) seems very aware of the old Greek text.  Second, Robert Alter, who by no means is following either Aristotle or Rashi (or Robert Young for that matter), produces a translation of the Hebrew that sounds very much like the non-traditional ones that Henry and Dyke are trying to disparage as neo-Aristotelian.  So take a look at some of that, in light of Henry and Dykes sweeping and erroneous logic and conclusions.  And then, we can avoid the sort of Aristotelian binary that Henry and Dykes propose with either "Aristotle or the Big Bang."

Here's Hesiod, then the LXX, then Alter:

First of all chaos [Chaos, Χάος] came into existence, thereafter however / Broad-bosomed earth [Gai', Γαῖ'] took form, the forever immovable seat of  / All of the deathless gods who inhabit the heights of Olympus, / And murky Tartarus, tucked in a cleft of extensively travelled / Earth [Gai', Γαῖ'], also Eros [Ἔρος], most beautiful god among all the immortals, / Loosening limbs, dominating the hearts and the minds and the well-laid / Plans both of all the immortals and all of susceptible mankind.
      --Hesiod, Theogony 116-22 (translated by Daryl Hine)

In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth [Gen, Γῆν].  Yet the earth [Gen, Γῆν] was invisible [a-oratos, ἀ-όρατος] and unformed [a-kataskeuastos, ἀ-κατασκεύαστος], and darkness was over the abyss [ἀβύσσου], and a divine wind [pneuma theou, πνεῦμα θεοῦ] was being carried along over the water.  And God said [eipen ho theos, εἶπεν ὁ θεός], "Let light come into being [Genetheto, Γενηθήτω]," And light came into being.
      --Moses, Genesis 1:1-3, translated by unnamed Jewish translators from his Hebrew into their Hellene (further translated into English by Robert J. V. Hiebert, NETS)

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said "Let there be light." And there was light.
      --Moses, Bereishit (בְּרֵאשִׁית, "in the beginning") Genesis 1:1-3, (translated by Robert Alter)

Now, what do you think?

translation: trading polymorphia for neither myopia nor hyperopia

I almost started this post with 3 long epigraphs.  But then, you see, the title is already strange enough.  So let me explain first, then give you 3 long quotations, and finally share some good translation examples.  

First, the explanation:

I want to go back to Joel Hoffman's warning:  "Translators who focus myopically on the words risk missing the forest and seeing only trees."  And then I want to move forward with this encouragement:  "Translators can both enjoy the forest and also share its trees of polymorphic leaves and colors, textures and shapes, rustles and smells." 

So now the 3 long quotations followed by good translation examples:

1.

Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another.... This kind of linguistic decision is simply a measure of foreignness, an acknowledgment of the fact that languages are not sciences of one another, you cannot match them item for item. But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one.... "The brutality of fact" is [painter Francis] Bacon's own phrase for what he is after in a painting. He is a representational painter. His subjects are people, birds, dogs, grass, sand, water, himself and what he wants to capture of these subjects is (he says) their "reality" or (once he used the term) "essence" or (often) "the facts." By "facts" he doesn't mean to make a copy of the subject as a photograph would, but rather to create a sensible form that will translate directly to your nervous system the same sensation as the subject. He wants to paint the sensation of a jet of water, that very jar on the nerves. 

--Anne Carson, "The Question of Translation"

2.

If we were to deny a possible choice of focus change from static, to dynamic, to relational views (particle, wave, field) we could never change our attention from doing something to being something.... Relevance in human language requires simultaneous—or oscillating—attention to both physical form and mental meaning.... In a phrase such as goals are important to a good government, the physical form includes the sounds and the clausal structure, but the referential meaning refers to the structure of government itself, with its values and purposes. Similarly, the noun goals, in spite of its abstract referential meaning and implied specific detailed purposes, also has the physical component (its form) of the sounds when it is said aloud, or else—if it is at the moment only a thought in somebody's mind—its formal molecular or neurological structure buried someplace, somehow, in the brain.

--Kenneth Pike, Talk, Thought, and Thing

3.

The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false.... It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation.... Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it.... The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

--Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons

If you skimmed over the above 3 long quotations, that's okay.  You probably noticed in some of the detail on your fly-by reading that all three writers chose particular details and certain words to say something similar.  Of course, I'm the one calling them similar.  Their trees are my forest, our forest together.  And I almost entitled my forest of a post something rather polymorphic like:  "translation: trading language about women and wombs for the language of women and of wombs."  But then we'd all have to pay too much attention to the tiny prepositions, right?  And you are getting where we're going now, aren't you?  It's not just a particular language, such as our contemporary English or their dead Greek, that has its users struggling over whether there's the risk of mere myopia or of mixing trees in the forest.  But it's also the very act of translation itself that is a struggle.

I'm granting Joel Hoffman the fact that "most translations" of "the Greek phrase en gastri" result from their translator "realizing that even though the Greek words for 'in' and 'womb' appear in the original, the English words 'in' and 'womb' have no place in the translation."  But "realizing" for me has a different meaning than it does for Hoffman.  The realizing is the making of a reality in which wordplay has no place in translation.  And by wordplay I mean not only playfulness of the words and performance by the writer and translator with the words but also hermeneutic "play" or interpretive wiggle room.   I do agree with Hoffman that most translators, even the incredible Richmond Lattimore (who's translation I give as the updated end of this earlier post), "realize" that "To try to form a sentence [in English] with 'in' and 'womb' would be overly myopic, focusing too closely on the [original Greek] words and not on how they work together."

The last post, therefore, was to try to begin to show that there's something in Aristotle's word view (a dimorphic, binary logic) that has changed the way Greek readers and English translators after him approach language.  And this approach is very different from the way Nancy Mairs says women approach language and the way Kenneth Pike says linguists would do well to approach language and the way Anne Carson says translators might render language.

Aristotle's separational approach to language -- especially when focused on bodies sexed female -- is highly suspect.  His mental meaning in language (i.e., his referential meaning) divides women from men, as Carson explains.  Furthermore, his physical form for that language (i.e., even the sounds) subdivides from normal men all mutations called females and, what he calls, kinaidoi (or "catamites") -- as Carson also explains.

Of course, I'm not saying Hoffman is advocating Aristotle's blatant sexism.  But I am wanting us to look carefully, polymorphically, at what Aristotle's done with respect to a gender-bifurcated phrase such as ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα.

I'm suggesting that we might have more care with dividing translation into  

either the merely myopic (which Hoffman calls a "translation trap" with it's near-sighted focus on form)

or what might be it's binary opposite (which Hoffman says is the way the translator must "get this right" by "focusing" in a hyperopic, big-picture relevance-theory way, on the central message to be communicated, on the sole and main meaning of the combined words, "on how they work together").

I'm calling for a translation with wordplay.  And it's a translation that allows words to play structurally and referentially in the guest language and also in the host language.

(Wouldn't it be nice, for example, to have an English translation of the Greek Odyssey in which we, the readers in translation, are not stuck with the monocular Cyclops, who -- in Homer's language -- cannot get the double-meaning pun when the hero tells his name?  The sounds "Ὀ - δυσσεύς" work together to refer to the character, Ulysses or Odysseus. But what if our translation also considered the soundS, as the individual treeS of the one referential forest; and what if those English sounds also meant οὔ τις, "no one"?  Wouldn't the one-eyed monster -- or Πολύ-Φημος, Poly-PHemus -- be shown for what he is, so Plenty-Famous?  So... wouldn't it be nice if a translator could get out of the either / or binary of the myopic translation trap vs. the hyperopic intended relevance?  How about some binoculars?  How about suspecting that looking at the forest but not the trees might lessen the forest in some way?)

Here then are good translation examples:

The first set below is by Willis Barnstone.  The second set I'll introduce in a moment.  Barnstone's translations here are from his Greek Lyric Poetry and his Restored New Testament (coincidentally his very first and his very most recently-published works).  What I'd like you to notice is how the Greek has wordplay and how Barnstone's translation has it.  I've provided the line breaks to foreground the intertextual, interlational wordplay as much as possible.  Do notice that the translation does not seek to match every form for every form.  Nor does the translation try to recreate in English simply the referential meaning (as a hyperopic matching) without so much regard to form.  Rather, Barnstone is attempting to "Let [the Greek author] say everything he wanted to say" in Barnstone's English (form, function, fullness, and fun).   It appears that the Greek writers wanted γαστρὶ to be a physical location of a body; and it appears that the locations and directions specified by some of their other embodied forms do matter.  Likewise, Barnstone's English not only allows both writers playfulness but also grants us their readers hermenuetic wiggle room.  You don't even have to "know" Greek fully to see some of it.  And neither the Greek nor the English is exactly "anything goes" that so many fear.  Instead it's what Pike (quoting Nelson Goodman) calls "radical relativism under rigorous restraints."  Here goes:

καὶ πεσεῖν δρήστην ἐπ᾽ ἀσκὸν κἀπὶ γαστρὶ
γαστέρα προσβαλεῖν
μηροὺς τε μηροῖσ᾽ . . .

And to fall upon your heaving belly,
and thrust your groin into her groin,
your thighs between her thighs.

--Archilochus 72 D. 119 W.

Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γέννησις οὕτως ἦν.
Μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ Μαρίας τῷ Ἰωσήφ,
πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτούς,
εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα
ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.

The birth of Yeshua the Mashiah happened this way.
Miryam his mother was engaged to Yosef,
yet before they came together
she discovered a child in her womb,
placed there by the holy spirit.

--Matthew 1:18

The second set of translations is by various English translators of the same text.  The text is called the The Popol Vuh and is in Quiché language of Guatemala.  The reason I've chosen this text is that it is infamously sexist but it's original language uses a very generic (i.e., not male or female or neuter gendered) locative word for what we might refer to as "conception" or "womb."  This same word, in the text, is used for God and for nature, for men and for women.  And the reason I've chosen this set of translations is because they each use English in various ways to render the Quiché.

The context of the phrase in focus is this:  There's a maiden who, by the spit of a man, becomes pregnant.  Her father calls her out before the male Lords, the elders of the village, who must decide whether to kill her for her fornication.  The Quiché phrase that we might transliterate "ral chupan" is one that means (quite literaly) "child inside."  You'll see the English versions with more context.

So here goes:

   ral chupan 

Thus her return again maiden
To her home.
Many instructions
Were said to her.
Straightaway therefore were created
  Her children in her womb
  By the mere saliva.
This therefore their creation
Hunahpu,
Xbalanque. 
(a "literal" translation and transliteration by Allen J. Christenson)

After all of the above talking, the maiden returned directly to her home, having immediately
conceived the sons in her belly by virtue of the spittle only. And thus Hunahpú and Xbalanqué
were begotten.
(a recreated, mediated translation "into English by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Griswold Morley from Adrián Recino's translation from Quiché into Spanish)

In the same way, by the time the maiden returned to her home, she had been given many instructions.  Right away, something was generated in her belly, from the saliva alone, and this was the generation of Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
(a "definitive" translation by Dennis Tedlock)

Now, I'm out of time.  But if you are still here and have a few moments, what do you see and hear?  How much wordplay is in the Quiché and how, likewise, open (or not) are the different translations of this phrase in this "'Book of the Community,' 'Book of Counsel,' or more literally ...  'Book of the Mat'"?  What difference do these translations make?

Aristotle and translation

To know Aristotle well, one takes the time to read his works (and even those works attributed to him) in Greek, his Greek. It's quite a body of work.

Most people who read Aristotle's body of written work read it mainly or only in translation. This is ironic and, for a number of reasons, problematic. It's ironic because Aristotle never intended for what he wrote to be translated from his elite Greek written for himself and for his educated-class, pure-Greek, male-only students into any bar-bar-ic mother tongue. If there was any translation to be done, it was to be a rendering of the lesser writings of foreigners into Hellene (as was done in Alexandria, the name-sake city of Aristotle's student Alexander the Great, as commissioned by a lackey king who called on Jews there to translate their holy scriptures from bar-bar-ian Hebrew into Greek for the elite students of Greek city states who would govern the empire).

There's more irony and then the problems also because the first translations of Aristotle's work were constructed most logically by the principles of Aristotle's logic. The first translations were from Aristotle's Greek into Arabic and into Latin by post-Greek world conquerors of a different sort, who were nonetheless similar to Aristotle and Alexander in their intentions to establish a global lingua franca. They were also similar in their allegiance to logic.  Aristotle's separational logic was the perfect method for their intentions of dominance. Logic divides and conquers, categorizes into us versus them, with "us" ultimately above "them." And translation can do this, logical translation, even translation from Aristotle's logical Greek into one's ultimately more-dominant language.

There's no surprise that people of Arab families, who found Aristotle's texts, used such appropriations of Aristotle's logic not only for their translation but also for advanced developments in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and even religion. That some contemporary Mohammedians despise translation - and even murder the translators - of the Koran today is no surprise, given the legacy of appropriated separational logic. There's no surprise that the Romans, setting up their empire in various hierarchical ranks, were strict about who could speak in public (women could not) and how the men were to speak and write (in imperial Latin). There's little surprise that the British, establishing the global Great Britain, would explicitly refer to the Greek imperial project as proposed by Aristotle and Alexander. For example, the first extant English translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is addressed in its “Preface” to the Monarch of England by the translator “H. C.” who, in 1685, suggests that Aristotle’s logical intentions with the treatise are global domination and that the intentions of his British King, James II and VII, might be as well:

The Emulation of the Englifh Verfion to approach as near as might be to the Greek Original, and to follow the Authors Example, embolden’d this Addrefs to your Honour. For they were not the Pedantic Rudiments of Rhetoric, which Ariftotle offer’d to one that had been his Royal Pupil, . . . Alexander. (“Epistle Dedicatory”)

Alexander, of course, is Alexander the Great, whom Aristotle tutored. Likely, the world dominator had studied Aristotle’s accounts of the global conquerors Darius and Xerxes in the Rhetoric (Book II, Chapter 20, 1393a – 1393b); translator H. C. certainly seems to have taken note of this possibility. The strong implication is of an elitism in the text (both in Aristotle’s original Greek and in H. C.’s English) that instructs the powerful on means to acquire nations so that there can be educational and colonial conquest. One common denominator between the Greek empire achieved by Alexander and the Great British empire of James II and VII is the learning of lessons from Aristotle and his Rhetoric. Even if H. C. has exaggerated the history of Aristotle’s influence on Alexander, the translator is inviting his own ruler to read the Rhetoric as if it teaches one, logically, to dominate the globe.

In the note by the English translator, H. C., we begin to see some of the problems of "translation." First, the dominance and pervasiveness of logic comes through even in his notion of translation. The nod to the "original" as if it means one and only one meaning is clear. In other words, what Aristotle's original Greek text says is what that original Hellene text by its author means. The author has one and only one intention. And the translator, likewise, has one and only one intention: the author's original and singular intention. Second, there's a problem because Aristotle's Rhetoric, which H. C. is translating, is not exactly a work on "logic" or even a work of "logic." Aristotle himself is unable to sustain logic in this work, although his first sentence of the treatise uses a separational formula of logic but turns out to be much less definitional and much more metaphorical. Third, there's a problem because how English translator H. C. gets at the presumed singular meaning of Aristotle is different from how Arabic and Latin translators got at it.

What's funny today in English translation of Aristotle's body of works is related to this third problem. When philosophers read Aristotle's works and translate them into contemporary English, then the lens of philosophy dominates. When rhetoricians read Aristotle's works and translate them into contemporary English, then their lens of rhetorical studies dominates. When literary critics read Aristotle's works and translate them into contemporary English, then the lens of literary criticism dominates. When classicists read Aristotle, then their translational lens dominates. And so forth.

When I started reading Aristotle's Greek texts, I came at them initially through the lens of translation, ironically. In other words, my Greek lens was not only Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Sappho, Gorgias, and the author of Dissoi Logoi (all of whom Aristotle and his logic disparaged), but also the Septuagint, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, the writer of "Hebrews," and Peter (all barbarians who came after Aristotle). These later works are largely works of translation from Hebrew and from Hebrew Aramaic. How very different the lens! How very different the notion of translation by these Jews! How non-logical (not necessarily illogical - if I can give a nod to Joel M. Hoffman for saying in a recent post "neither is it irrational — it is non-rational")! How very rhetorical in ways that Aristotle originally and logically despised rhetoric! How womanly in ways that Aristotle originally and logically despised fe-males! How accessible and bar-bar-ic in ways that Aristotle originally and logically despised the common and the lesser, non-Greek mother tongues!

But it may take another post or two to begin to illustrate just how different the concept and practice of translation that is seen in and by translators who have written the Bible of the Jews.  I'm talking specifically about the Septuagint translators and the writers of the New Testament who translated into Greek to write what Christians appropriate now as their Bible.  How very different the understanding and practice of translation by these early Jewish translators; how very different their understanding and practice from the Aristotelian understanding and practice of translation by Christian Bible translators today, whether these contemporary Bible translators employ the science of "linguistics" or push the dominance of "theology."

St. Paul and Aristotle: more influences

This post is continued from another.  I began considering with you how Paul often gets paired with Aristotle.

There are a few personal comparisons to make first.  For example, both followed their own ideals on marriage.  Aristotle wrote that the ideal age to get married for a man was 37, and for his wife, 18; -- and Aristotle was 37 when he took 18-year-old Pythias to be his wife.  Paul wrote that he was single; -- and Paul advised his students to be single also, saying that singleness was a gift from God.  Both men wrote that baldness in a man is natural and good or at least his hair should be realitively short; -- and both, we speculate, were bald or kept their hair short.

Then there are comparisons to make in their thinking.  Both men were suspicious of Greek philosophies that could not account for and encompass Nature, life-long systematic Learning, and God.  Both men appealed to themselves as examples of Natural men, as Learners (or disciples or apprentices with their own students), and as Experts on eternal and heavenly affairs.

Paul, like Aristotle, appeals to Nature when writing about Politics and Ethics and Economics (and by the latter I also mean something like Household Rule, or Oikos Nomos).  Naturally, the order is government over citizens, master over slaves, husband over wives, fathers over children.

For Aristotle, there was the study of Nature (φυσική or physike or "physics"), the apprehension of pure and precise systems (μαθηματική or mathematike or "math"), and the study of divine logic (θεολογική or theologike or "theology").  As far as I can tell, Aristotle coined those last two words:  mathemat-ike and theolog-ike or "lesson-ista" and "god-statement-ista."  In The Metaphysics Aristotle classes the three concepts together, naturally and systematically and logically, as the three sub-categories of φιλοσοφίαι θεωρητικαί or phosophiai theoretikai or "philosophy's theory."

The most interesting thing to note here is that Aristotle is not only concerned about being pure and precise but he is also concerned with sounding pure and precise.  To sound technical, Aristotle coins words using the suffix, -ική.  Curiously, it's a grammatically feminine ending that in some contexts disparages females.   I've played with translation into English so that φυσική or physike is rendered Nature-ista or Nature-istic.  And μαθηματική or mathematike is translated Lesson-ista or Lesson-istics.  And θεολογική or theologike sounds, in English, like God-Statement-istics or God-Statement-ista.

As we all know (or maybe you don't yet), Paul is the only writer of anything in the canonized New Testament who uses this suffix.  In fact, it seems that Jews translating the Holy Hebrew Torah and the other scriptures in Alexandria, Egypt avoided the suffix like another plague.  It was something of Aristotle that he'd learned from Plato; and, worse, it was something that Aristotle had taught Alexander the Great.  The translators (the Septuagint translators) only slipped a couple of times and used the -ICKY suffix when translating something about -ική women.

Before we get to which word Paul used exactly, which word with the suffix -ική, let me say a little something about the context in which he used the word.  He was writing to Jews and Greeks in Rome.  This is the letter we call "Romans."  What is fascinating is that Paul does not tell the women and wives in Rome to submit to their husbands; he does not tell them in this letter that they must not teach men or that they must learn quietly from their husbands at home; and he gives the women in Rome no instruction to stay silent in the Assembly.  Why not?  Well, why?  In Rome, such things were already strictly regulated by law and by custom.  Paul did not need to enforce the rule of men over women in home, in church, or in instruction.  The Roman government had outdone Aristotle (and Paul) in letting males rule naturally.  The other fascinating thing to note is that Paul does not address the Romans.  Rather, he appeals to the Jews and their scriptures.  And he appeals to the Greeks.  But he calls the Romans by Aristotle's term of disparagement:  he calls the Latin, Italian men of Rome "Barbarians."  (For some discussion of this, see my blogger friend Bob MacDonald's post Paul's Cantus Firmus
and my comment there).

Now, what's the -ική word Paul uses?  And don't you think the Greeks in Rome reading got it?  This is Aristotle's word, his very method.  The word is λογική or logike or Statement-ista or Statement-istics.  Paul is using it in the accusative case (which simply means it's in the grammatical form of a direct object).  But by it, he's modifying the word λατρείαν or latreian, which earlier Jews in Alexandria, Egypt had used to translate עֲבֹדָה (or `abodah) in "Exodus 12:25."  The Greek and Hebrew words mean something like religious "service."  The Greek word is not used much in the New Testament.  And Aristotle's word (i.e., "logic") is never used elsewhere nor is any other Greek Aristotle-like word with the special technical female-sounding suffix.  Paul is appealing to the Jews and Greeks in Rome about their "service" to God.  He's saying their service is as logical as Aristotle's formal logic.


Let give the whole sentence again (but this time with my translating it):   

Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς ἀδελφοί διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν ἁγίαν εὐάρεστον τῷ θεῷ τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν. Καὶ μὴ συσχηματίζεσθαι [OR συσχηματίζεσθε] τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ, ἀλλὰ μεταμορφοῦσθαι [OR μεταμορφοῦσθε] τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοὸς [ὑμῶν] εἰς τὸ δοκιμάζειν ὑμᾶς τί τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ εὐάρεστον καὶ τέλειον.

I'm beside you, calling you, sisters, brothers - through the deep compassion of God - to present your bodies, a sacrifice, alive, holy, blessed pleasures on God, your service of logical statementistics as with Aristotle.  And that doesn't mean to go together with the schema of this age; rather it means to re-form yourselves by mental newness from above into your opinions which are the good wishes of God and are blessed pleasures and finished to maturity.

Now I've run out of time for today again.  So let me just say this again:

Paul's approaches to men (vs women), to logic (vs rhetoric and dialectic and such), and to elitist centricism (vs feminisms and pluralisms and multiculuralisms) seem suspiciously like Aristotle's phallogocentrism.  Where I'm going with all of this, if time allows some other day, is this:  Paul's encounters with a Jew named Joshua and his apprentices began to unravel much of the Aristotelian(-like) system.  That was quite a carnival (or two).

St. Paul and Carnivals

Paul often gets paired with Aristotle, and below you'll find a bit more on Paul.  But first a quick review of Aristotle so as to consider the pairing of the two.  In a previous post, we ran through some questions about Aristotle's upbringing and motivations.  In this post, we want to look at his system for apprehending his world.  Then, we'll come back as quickly as we can to Paul.

If you read the extant texts of the entire corpus of what Aristotle wrote (which I chose to do for a dissertation), then you get his pure and precise categories.  Scholars such as Sara J. Newman are good to point out how sometimes the categories are inconsistent and are would-be "pure and precise categories."  But I'm talking about what Aristotle, the author himself, intended.  He intended practical things by his precise and pure categories.  He intended separations, mapping Nature into its hierarchy.  He intended a system of separations, into binaries, into a taxonomy of this but not that.  It's not just feminist scholars who recognize that Aristotle's pure and precise intention was phallologocentrism.  It is nevertheless mostly feminist scholars who see that the singular intention of Aristotle is yet his theme with three variations.  Clarice Lispector calls his intended theme, or phallogocentrism, that “system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity.” And now we get technical as we look at three various aspects of the system:

One variation on the phallogocentric theme was masculinism.  Aristotle was quite intentional when he wrote of τά φαλλικά [ta phallika].  Most English translators have merely transliterated that the "phallic," but Aristotle purely and precisely meant "what's blatantly penis-esque" and used the word to write about the shape and the penetrating force of the rule by males in the Greek city states.

Another variation on the phallogocentric theme was the use of language to map nature. Aristotle was definitely intentional when he wrote of λογική [logike].  Most English translators have simply put English letters together for the Greek sounds to come up with "logic."  But Aristotle coined this word from λόγος [logos], a huge and overdetermined concept for knowing.  Logos in it's simplest sense meant "statement"; but Aristotle tightened up the word a bit with the suffix -ική so that his neologism became λογ-ική [log-ike] or, to translate, "statement-ista."  Aristotle intended this new logic to be the pure and precise method of stacking statements together from premise to premise to forced conclusion, syllogistically or by means of a syllogism [or ὁ συλλογισμός].  (This method of logic, for Aristotle, trumped the method of dialektike of his teachers.  Dialektike is the method that Plato had his own teacher Socrates using, a question-asking method of drawing truth and selecting and electing knowledge out of the one being asked.  It's a method perhaps developed by a kept-woman, a non-Greek kept-woman named Aspasia, who taught dialektike to men such as Socrates.  Plato writes glowingly of Aspasia, and Socrates praises her, but Aristotle who mentions many women never says a thing about her.  Of course, Aristotle, in The Metaphysics, uses logike to explain that dialektike is a less pure and a less precise method than his superior method of logike.  Moreover, to begin The Rhetoric, Aristotle writes that rhetorike is an antistrophos of dialektike -- the two counterpart methods of knowing both inferior to his logike.)

Thirdly, Aristotle was intentional when writing of κέντρον [kentron].  This has come down to us in partially-transliterated English translation as something like "centrality."  What Aristotle meant by the word was a "central pricking point"; his teacher Plato had used it for that part of the circle-drawing compass that sticks into the papyrus or the clay.  The elite Athenians, such as Solon, in Aristotle's Athenian Constitution got the point.  What Aristotle intended for his Greek students in the all-boy Aka-Demy was to have Greece, Athens centrally, to be the center of the world.  His student Alexander the Great got the point.  But Aristotle never intended his elite system to be ours in any way.

So now we can think about Paul.  If you read the entire extant corpus of what Paul wrote (which I was forced to do as a child), then you might start thinking about Aristotle.

As compared to Aristotle, Paul had a much better family upbringing on the one hand, and a much less pure upbringing on the other hand.  Aristotle lost his mother when he was very young and had to be raised by an uncle; his mother was from a elite family and may have left his father, a physician in the Macedonian king's court, with more than enough means for the teenager Aristotle to join Plato's famous Academy in Athens.  Paul writes of his own history to a group of Greek Jews and Jewish Greeks in Philippi, Macedonia, where Aristotle grew up.  Paul was also of a pure-breed family.  A Hebrew of Hebrews, he boasts and goes on about his clan of Benjamin and his penis circumcision that marked him as the Jewish Abraham's and /or Israel's great great great (you get the idea) grand-son.  He also had some elite education:  Paul was an excellent Torah student of the Separatists, also known as the purist Pharisees, the holiest פרושים [perushim].

What makes Paul a bit different from Aristotle is how impure he was.  Paul was not only a Jew but he was also a citizen of Rome.  Furthermore, not only did he speak Aramaic but he also was facile with Latin and Greek.  He was adept in his understanding of the holy Hebrew Law and other Scripture; and he knew the Hellene translation well, as well.  Paul could use Greek like a Greek, whether that was engaging Greeks in Greek rhetoric in Athens or sending Greek native speakers in their native Greek city states letters.  He could navigate between cultures, being all things to all for persuasive winning purposes, and he could mold culture by what he said and what he wrote.  He was able to bring Jews and Greeks together (i.e., one half-Greek Jewish boy named Timo-Theos "honorer of god(s)" he was able to make more pure by having his penis circumcised).  He would write of the advantages of the Jew first, and would write of the appropriation of Jewishness by the Greeks.    

Now I've run out of time for today.  But let me just say this.  Paul's approaches to men (vs women), to logic (vs rhetoric and dialectic and such), and to elitist centricism (vs feminisms and pluralisms and multiculuralisms) seem suspiciously like Aristotle's phallogocentrism.  Where I'm going with all of this, if time allows some other day, is this:  Paul's encounters with a Jew named Joshua and his apprentices began to unravel much of the Aristotelian(-like) system.  That was quite a carnival (or two).

Aristotle and Carnivals

I've often wondered about little Aristotle, an orphan with a strong father (Nichomachus, after whom Aristotle named his one and only son).  Aristotle studied under Plato, and said things about how teachers are more important than parents (by which he meant male tutors are more influential than fathers).  Why did Aristotle choose to research in Lesbos?  Why didn't he name any treatise, not just a major work like Nichomachean Ethics, after his one and only daughter?  Why did his separational method, that he named logic, see females in nature - because so clearly and logically separate from males - as so much lower than their counterparts?

How did he come to love such pigeonholing?  How did he come to despise the dialectic method of his teacher, the poetry of Sappho (Plato's tenth muse), the parables of Aesop and of the Libyan so naturally bar-bar-ic and black and born like a slave, the thought of meta-noia as a threat to meta-physics, the threat of the supernatural to Nature?

Wouldn't he have hated how well Maya Angelou knows him?  How my blogger friend Sue so recognizes his influence on her?  How feminist philosophers and women rhetoricians and egalitarian bible scholars understand and appropriate his methods for their purposes as they, in their bodies in his Nature, also do so much more than he was willing by his separational logic to do?

But wouldn't he have loved the pigeonholing of the carnivals of blogging?  Don't they so conveniently categorize if they celebrate?  Wouldn't he have scoffed at the barbarism while saying See the deformities in this classed category?

So here are some carnivals of bloggers by classification.  Won't you know your Aristotle?  And yet won't you know more?

Feminist Carnival #2 is up 

The Fourth Carnival of Feminist Parenting is now up at Mothers For Women’s Lib  

Fifth Carnival of Feminists is up! 

 Carnival Against Sexual Violence 75 

Christian Carnival CCXCVI

Biblical Studies Carnival (where this blog, interestingly is mentioned)

and

Biblioblog Top 50 – September 2009 (where many more, yes many many more women are included!  Thanks to April DeConick's call!  strangely, this blog now is off the charts - and Aristotle would be amused).

 

 

 

Aristotle on Rape

This week, I learn that another of my friends has been raped. And, in a horrible coincidence, on the very same day, I learn that the "Top keywords driving traffic to speakeristic.blogspot.com from search engines" are "Aristotle on Rape." I wish I could say I am more surprised by the former.

The former makes me wonder about the long long painful silences outside of anonymous meetings - grieving, again. The latter makes me want to stop blogging entirely - hoping that men and women won't come to a blog when they can hear and interpret Aristotle for themselves.

The latter comes to my attention after reading Dr. Jim West's post on Alexa ratings. I wasn't surprised to learn that many of you find this blog, "Aristotle's Feminist Subject," from the top search words "aristotle logic essays." (In fact, some time ago, I wrote a series of long posts on "logic," and once many of you found a short post I'd composed comparing Aristotle's logic with Alice Walker's womanist essaying: "Aristotle's logic vs. Alice Walker's womanism" in which you and I considered "What does this mean for your writing?." And, indeed, some of you have come across a few posts I've labeled with the word "rape.")

But "Aristotle on Rape"? You've never read anything on that here. "Aristotle on Rape" is a dissertation. It's what translators like John Gillies get in 1823 when rendering the Greek of the Rhetoric into English this way:

"Again, If Theseus did not commit wrong in the rape of Helen, neither did Paris: if the sons of escaped punishment for carrying off the daughters of Leucippus, so neither ought the elopement with Helen to be prosecuted with vengeance."

It's what translator Ernest Barker, who really likes Aristotle and his Politics, finds he must write commentary on in 1962 when translating Aristotle's words in the treatise. Researcher Michael Davis explains:

[At the end of Book 5 of the Politics, one reads] Aristotle's long and detailed list of tyrants and their outrages, mostly sexual. We are given examples of rape, pederasty, insincere pederasty, pederasty in which the beloved is insulted by being asked playfully why he is not yet with child, wife-stealing, and castration, to name a few. So [ostensibly] uncharacteristic of Aristotle is this lurid account that one translator, Sir Ernest Barker, for the only time in his entire edition, relegates an undisputed portion of the text of the Politics to a footnote. His reasons are worth relating. The translator has omitted these passages in the text.

They are matters of scandal, or at best curiosities of history such as Aristotle with his encyclopedic habit loved to collect, rather than [Aristotle's own] matters of politics and theory.

Now, it is to be taken as a certain sign that something interesting is going on when an Oxbridge don's sense of propriety is offended. What is most peculiar about Aristotle's account of revolution is the connection he tacitly makes between sex and violence. Sexual outrages seem to be the paradigm for that hybris which

although having many parts, each of them is the cause of anger, and being angry, most men ordinarily attack for the sake of revenge and not preeminence. [Aristotle, Politics] (1311a33-36).

(Davis, "Erôs and Physics," The Politics of Philosophy: a Commentary on Aristotle's Politics, pages 90-91.)

What is staggering is how Aristotle's logic goes unnoticed. How surprised rational men like Barker and Davis can be by Aristotle's justifications for men raping women.

One only needs to start at the beginning of Aristotle's Politics to get more than hints. Aristotle is justifying his own elite Greek male dominant City State, "which is the highest of all... at the highest good." This is not just the ideal; it is the real, the status quo of Nature.

Here he explains how it must be, and how good it is:

For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest. Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say,

"It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians; "

as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says,

"First house and wife and an ox for the plough, "

for the ox is the poor man's slave. The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants....

And Aristotle goes on teaching the boys in his Aca-Demy:

Again, the same holds good between man and the other animals: tame animals are superior in their nature to wild animals, yet for all the former it is advantageous to be ruled by man, since this gives them security. Again, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal (and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming) these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority 1254b.20is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason, by apprehending it, but to feelings. And also the usefulness of slaves diverges little from that of animals; bodily service for the necessities of life is forthcoming from both, from slaves and from domestic animals alike.

Are we following what he writes (albeit through translation into our bar-bar-ic English)?

they say that it is monstrous if the person powerful enough to use force, and superior in power, is to have the victim of his force as his slave and subject; and even among the learned some hold this view, though others hold the other. But the reason of this dispute and what makes the theories overlap is the fact that in a certain manner virtue when it obtains resources has in fact very great power to use force, and the stronger party always possesses superiority in something that is good, so that it is thought that force cannot be devoid of goodness, but that the dispute is merely about the justice of the matter (for it is due to the one party holding that the justification of authority is good-will, while the other identifies justice with the mere rule of the stronger); because obviously if these theories be separated apart, the other theories have no force or plausibility at all, implying that the superior in goodness has no claim to rule and be master....

For a man's acts can no longer be noble if he does not excel as greatly as a man excels a woman or a father his children or a master his slaves, so that one who transgresses cannot afterwards achieve anything sufficient to rectify the lapse from virtue that he had already committed; because for equals the noble and just consists in their taking turns, since this is equal and alike, but for those that are equal to have an unequal share and those that are alike an unlike share is contrary to nature, and nothing contrary to nature is noble. Hence in case there is another person who is our superior in virtue and in practical capacity for the highest functions, him it is noble to follow and him it is just to obey

Lest it's lost in translation, that "very great power to use force" is that Greek man's ability to rape: βιάζεσθαι δύναται.

Aristotle on the Golden Rule

Aristotle on the Golden Rule: A (Mere) Preface

Two Aristotelian problems have occurred this week. Alas, convenient natural categories are getting blurred again despite the work of academicians and politicians.

First, some Bible bloggers are arguing this week about whether "the historical" Jesus really taught the Golden Rule. For instance, Mark Goodacre (also a New Testament scholar) is questioning the parroted answer of Loren Rosson III to the somewhat rhetorical question of John Meier, that question (you remember) which was once asked and definitively answered so long ago by the votes of the majority of scholars of the "Jesus" Seminar. Just look at all that black and grey ink for the words Jesus didn't say. But Meir, you see, is not content to sell just three volumes of his scholarship; so he's added another: A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume 4: Law and Love. Lest you missed it, or failed to imagine it, or were distracted by Love, their univocal answer (Goodacre's doubts aside) is: "No." "Christianity's founder" did not "champion" the "secular wisdom" called the Golden Rule."

Second, there's this: This week President Obama apparently did not get the memo; he certainly did not read the biblioblogger dispute. When he wrote his own memo to his Nation yesterday, he came off sounding like he thought the Golden Rule is religious (not secular) and, as such, has something to contribute annually and perennially to the Day of Prayer: ". . . we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth." And that memo-to-remember is inserted right in the middle of another fat debate or two or three this week: (you know) - the debates over how to keep separate church and state and Law and Love and executive prayer and Executive propriety (when the rest of the secular government gets stood up and is left all alone, right out in public with their voices cocked up towards the skies, with television camera crews from Fox News and CNN News and so forth making ready for youtube).

These are threats of a perhaps-real historical rabbi teaching something secular. OR of certain Christian writings (albeit with an academically-doubtful founder) harking back maybe to something Jewish. These are risks of mixing absolute categories - and of bringing together very distinct domains of dominance - that may cause some of us even to want to change the natures we were born with!

It reminds us of that lovable literary scholar who turned from solid atheism to intellectual theism to a path towards life-bending concessions of something radically different altogether. He also turned from serious literature to popular apologetics (and, thankfully, vowed never intentionally to mix the two, leaving his readers to do that job for him). Yes, I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis and of his little afterthought of an "Appendix" to The Abolition of Man. Yes, you remember it too, don't you? It's what he called, "Illustrations of the Tao," which, I think, too many Christians have appropriated in the pages as some aristotelian natural law if not that platonic ideal found also within the words of "The Word of God," which is also known as "The Bible." (Fair enough - that appendix was no afterthought of the author. And Lewis really was the evangelist of Mere Christianity, wasn't he?)

But Lewis was also thoroughly anti-modernist well before the French post-philosophers posted anything along those lines; and he says (to introduce the Appendix) that he is "not a professional historian," and he adds, "I am not trying to prove its [the Tao's] validity by the argument [of historical artifacts]. . . ," and he goes on to claim that "biology and anthropology" won't support some universal construct of a meta-narrative absolute Law. Which is why his first illustrations of rules found around the world and through the histories of it run right into Love.

He notes (8 illustrated LAWs - 8 and not 7; 8 and not 10 Commandments, nor 2 in 1), the first being:

"I. THE LAW OF GENERAL BENEFICENCE"

And he lists "Ancient Egyptian" and "Ancient Jewish" and "Old Norse" and "Hindu" and "Babylonian" and "Ancient Chinese" and "Roman" and "British" and "Christian" quotations from religious and from secular texts. What a mix. What a motley mix.

In his appendix, Lewis seems to have forgotten that he quoted Aristotle in Chapter One, where he quoted him right out of the Nichomachean Ethics. And here's the thing: the evangelical Christians I know who've read Lewis's little book - and who have liked it - have also likened it to "The Bible." They have likely done so because of Aristotle. It's not so much that they really have Lewis's appreciation for the Ethics (and Lewis seems to stomach Aristotle's ethics because he finds Aristotle's ostensibly natural "ought to" to be just a surfaced outcropping of the much deeper, less visible morality of Plato's ideal. Hence, Lewis says he doesn't have to "argue" or "prove" the Tao as Aristotle would, because Plato spared thinkers of that problem). The Christians who I know who have liked Lewis's book rather like the game of logic, which they play very seriously. Absolute premises can lead to absolutely rigid conclusions. Therefore: Categories are inherently natural and cannot (therefore: "should not") be mixed.

What hardly anybody notices and talks about out loud is that Lewis's "illustrations" of the "Tao" start (and end) with The Golden Rule. (Keep your eye on and your ear to The End.)

The mix of secular and religious historical quotations that Lewis cites (several from various groups and cultures of histories) is a mix of a Law, which is a mix of Law with Love. We rarely laugh at the irony, "Thou shalt love . . . ," but we "ought to" laugh. And we ought to laugh "involuntarily," - just the way we do when we've had just a bit too much to drink at a party and our best friend more-than-whispers that inside joke (within earshot of everyone else). We know, right then, while still sober, that categories have been mixed. Helplessly mixed.

(There now can be no Berlin wall erected between the "Greco-Roman world, going back as far as Herodotus and the sophists" and "Jesus" and "the historical" Jesus.)

And is there really a logical "reason" that the last illustration in Lewis' mixed up set comes from "Matt. vii. 12.": "Do to men what you wish men to do to you."?

Aristotle would say there is a reason. He'd join that argument to keep Jesus out of it. He'd repeat some of what he said in his secular Politics too. But he wouldn't be talking to you, or to me. Not if you're a woman, or any kind of bar-bar-ian. His Ethics were written for his son, Nicomachus, and for his father, Nicomachus, and for the elite boys in his Academy who might just some day conquer the world, logically and so forth. (Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics were not written for his mother. Nor were they for his wife who only bore him a daughter, nor for that daughter who is a female which is a mutant male according to his logic, nor for his concubine who bore him his Nicomachus, nor for any of his slaves.)

At the risk of breaching such natural categories, however, wouldn't you like to know how Aristotle writes the Golden Rule? If you've peeked by translation at his Ethics alone, then you know how Aristotle was concerned about three categories of "love." (I'm not just talking about how separate he must keep notions such as "agape," and "phileo," and "eros." He gets enough mere help from C.S. Lewis and Christian Bible scholars on that). When we have more time together, let's look and eavesdrop.

Aristotle's Dreams

When Alan Lightman wrote Einstein's Dreams, he was writing as an artist not as a scientist, he says. It's fiction. But he's getting into something miraculous, something deeply connected to the nature of the science of the scientist: the dreams of Einstein without which (the reader begins to believe) there could have been Einstein's waking thoughts - all part and parcel of Einstein's coming to believe in his theory, of relativity. Now, that's some science.

Elsewhere, I've noted how Lightman must concede that the translation of his novel, into say Japanese, must be as much art as it is science and, therefore, must be as much science as it is art - if it is to be any good at all, relatively speaking.

Aristotle understood Lightman's concession. So Aristotle was not fond of translation of his original, scientific Greek texts into some bar-bar-ic (and therefore lesser) mother tongue. It would necessarily be too womanly, too rhetorical. Because it was not good Greek, it would certainly have ambiguity, contradiction, emotion, evasiveness, fluidity and flux, hyperbole, hyperphysics (that is, the "supernatural" and the "miraculous" and such), metaphor, motion, parable, paradox, poetics, subjectivity, vagueness, and wetness. It would fall by the wayside of the author's intent.

Aristotle would not at all have liked, for example, that J. I. Beare presumes in En-Glish to represent what he writes in Hellene, on dreams. And, if you are a dreamy illusive female reading, then that's even worse: "So much at least is plain on all these points, viz. that the faculty by which, in waking hours, we are subject to illusion when affected by disease, is identical with that which produces illusory effects in sleep." For the dreamy, especially those presuming to prophesy miraculously by dreams, are as atrabilious as the readers of "the poems of Philaegides, e.g. the Aphrodite." One must note, likewise, that "Persons, too, who have fallen into a deep trance, and have come to be regarded as dead, say many things while in this condition." Reality, nature, and logic, in contrast, are all fixed. (Following the author, then, J. I. Beare wants his translation fixed to the nature of the original text.) Reality, nature, and logic (and Mr. Beare's very awake translation) are absolutely fixed (we notice in our barbaric readings) to Aristotle's advantage.

When Aristotle wrote about the reality of the rule in the household, he used logic. When Aristotle criticized Plato's and Socrates dialectic, he used logic. When Aristotle defined rhetoric (as a counterpart to dialectic), he again used logic. When Aristotle went to Lesbos to research animals, animal sleep, animals having dreams, animal sex, and animals having sex - he used logic. (And I just have to throw this in: he was fascinated that the Lesbians, those living in Mythilene in particular, would praise the poet "Sappho, though she was a woman" - and he says so in the Rhetoric). Women change, and wet females change too much. Males, especially the Greek boys of Aristotle's Academy, therefore in contrast are rather fixed in their nature.

But I imagine Aristotle dreaming nonetheless, and remembering his own subjective dream upon waking. Here he is observing objectively but then falling, falling asleep as he looks at the fixed cocoon of a caterpillar. He ripped up this page from The History of Animals, but Christian hippie rocker Larry Norman sang it anyway (as a mere bonus track, on the album "So Long Ago the Garden," called "Butterfly"):

Saw you underneath the leaf,
And that's when I decided to be a thief
I said, "Honey, you're a pretty cocoon,
I just know you're gonna come out soon.

You're a butterfly,
Yes I know, and I love you,
pretty butterfly,
won't you let it show?
pretty butterfly,
won't you come out just for me?
Yeah.

You're a butterfly
You're beautiful
But you did not know it.
You're a butterfly
You're beautiful
But you did not show it.

You needed warmth.
You needed love.
You needed Nature
to give you a shove.

If you wanna start livin'
Then you've gotta start tryin'
Spread your wings
And fill the sky.

You're a butterfly,
Yes I know,
pretty butterfly,
you gotta let it show,
pretty butterfly,
won't you come out just for me?
Yeah.
won't you come out just for me?

Now look at you
(and Norman & his boys
play a bit without words
here).

You're a butterfly,
Yes I know,
pretty butterfly,
But it's time to go
pretty butterfly,
Yeah
it's time for me
to set you free.

....
One more thing,
before you go
(It's something
I never let anyone know):

I am so lonely
so confused

But I never will forget the day
I dreamed today
and passed along your way

. . .
Saw you underneath the leaf,
And that's when I decided to be a thief
I said, "Honey, you're a pretty cocoon,
I just know you're gonna come out soon.
You're a butterfly
and I love you
pretty butterfly
but it's time to go
pretty butterfly
Yeah
It's time for me to set you free.

(bye bye
baby).