Aristotle on Love

Aristotle on the Golden Rule:
Eavesdropping on (Male-Logical-Ethnocentric Ethical) Love

In a post yesterday, we said far too much about us and, therefore, hardly anything about Aristotle. (We were so amused by our own categories of history and fiction, religion and secularism, politics and prayer, and law and love - that we ran out of attention to the father of our logic and how we think it must derive his ethics for us. Yes, I'm talking about how we tend to co-opt a method of knowing in order, for example, to rob Jesus of the Golden Rule as if that's our moral obligation. "But we're only being objective," we protest, "merely investigating the nature of what's really real." We hardly think about why Aristotle hated Heraclitus and why Einstein loved Heisenberg and why Toni Morrison's blind, wise woman, who is "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and . . . alone in a small house outside of town," will, without forgoing much at all, kindly point out the fact that the "systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.") So today let's get right to Aristotle on Love.

Let's let Aristotle speak for himself, shall we? Translator Harris Rackham does. (But aren't we amused that Jeffrey M. Perl and his friends suggest that Aristotle and his translators need anything more than logic? Perl and his pals recognize nuance, complexity, and un-forgone mid-wifery properties: "It takes a rhetorician more ingenious than Aristotle to refigure 'a lover of war' as an isolated pawn — though, as Harris Rackham demonstrates, a translator can devise a sort of logic: 'For one by nature unsocial is also a "lover of war" . . . inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts.'" Yes, I know, I'm suggesting we're not so much going to listen to Aristotle's original authorial intent as much as we are going to listen with our own. And yet Krista Ratcliffe suggested this long ago: our recovering Rhetorical Listening from its banishment by Aristotle so as to authorize eavesdroppers). When Aristotle says one thing, Rackham gets it as that very same (dynamically equivalent) thing (and the Greek reader, especially the one of racial and sexual and academic privilege should not make an error). When the author writes, the invisible translator renders precisely. First a glossary, then Aristotle:

φιλίας [philías] = "friendship"
φιλήσεις [philēsis] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "friendship"
ἀντιφίλησις [anti-phílēsis] = "reciprocal affection"

φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = "friend"
φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = (person) "loved"

φιλεῖται [phileĩtai] = (to be) "loved"
φιλητοῖς [philētoĩs] = "loveable"
φιλοῦσιν [philoũsin] = (to) "love"
φιλοῦσι [philoũsi] = (to) "form attachments"

ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to) "enjoy"
ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to be) "fond of"
ἀγαπᾷ [agapã] = (to) "care for"

ἐρωτικοὶ [érōtikoì] = "to fall in love"
ἐρωτικῆς [érōtikēs] = "love"

ἀλλήλους ... καθ’ αὑτοὺς
[allēlous ... kath' aűtoùs]
= "each other in themselves"

Now listen:

Now these qualities differ in kind; hence the affection [φιλήσεις] or friendship [φιλίαι] they occasion may differ in kind also. There are accordingly three kinds of friendship [φιλίας], corresponding in number to the three lovable [φιλητοῖς] qualities; since a reciprocal affection [ἀντιφίλησις], known to either party, can be based on each of the three, and when men love each other [φιλοῦντες ἀλλήλους], they wish each other well in respect of the quality which is the ground of their friendship [φιλοῦσιν]. So that there is a different species of will-wishing in each case.

Thus friends whose affection [φιλοῦντες] is based on utility do not love each other in themselves [ἀλλήλους οὐ καθ’ αὑτοὺς φιλοῦσιν], but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other [ἀλλήλων].

And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy [ἀγαπῶσι] the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us.

Hence in a friendship [φιλοῦντες] based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved [φιλούμενός], but as useful or agreeable. And therefore these friendships [φιλίαι] are based on an accident, since the friend [φιλούμενος] is not loved [φιλεῖται] for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be.

There's more in the Nichomachean Ethics:

And the tastes of youth change quickly. Also the young are prone to fall in love [ἐρωτικοὶ], as love [ἐρωτικῆς] is chiefly guided by emotion, and grounded on pleasure; hence they form attachments [φιλοῦσι] quickly and give them up quickly, often changing before the day is out.

The young do desire to pass their time in their friend's [φιλίαν] company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship [φιλίαν]. The perfect form of friendship [φιλία] is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends [φίλοις] wish each alike the other's good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends [φίλοι] for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship [φιλία] of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.—

And there's the distinctive distinguishing of love based on science - far separate from that of the poets and pseudo scientists like Heraclitus and Heisenburg - who know nothing of logic or objectivity:

Some try to find a more profound and scientific explanation of the nature of affection. Euripides writes that ‘Earth yearneth for the rain’ when dried up, ‘And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.’ Heracleitus says, ‘Opposition unites,’ and ‘The fairest harmony springs from difference,’ and ‘'Tis strife that makes the world go on.’ Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that ‘Like seeks after like.’

Dismissing then these scientific speculations as not germane to our present enquiry, let us investigate the human aspect of the matter, and examine the questions that relate to man's character and emotions: for instance, whether all men are capable of friendship [φιλία], or bad men cannot be friends [φίλους]; and whether there is only one sort of friendship [ἓν εἶδος τῆς φιλίας] or several [πλείω]. Those who hold that all friendship [...] is of the same kind [οἰόμενοι] because friendship [...] admits of degree, are relying on an insufficient proof, for things of different kinds also can differ [τὰ ἕτερα] in degree. But this has been discussed before.

Perhaps the answer to these questions will appear if we ascertain what sort of things arouse liking or love. It seems that not everything is loved [οὐ πᾶν φιλεῖσθαι], but only what is lovable [τὸ φιλητόν], and that this is either what is good, or pleasant, or useful. But useful may be taken to mean productive of some good or of pleasure, so that the class of things lovable [ὥστε φιλητὰ] as ends is reduced to the good and the pleasant.

But before we leave there's that hint at a Corinthian love, that Christian one, of that man named Paul, who begins to stretch in an other way Aristotle's more objective "agape" love (before he tells the women to be silent in the church and to ask their husbands at home). Says Aristotle, in his Ethics, logically avoiding hyperbole and other extremes:

The man who exceeds these limits cares [ἀγαπᾷ] more for such pleasures than they are worth. Not so the temperate man; he only cares for them as right principle enjoins. . . . Men who have inherited a fortune are reputed to be more liberal than those who have made one, since they have never known what it is to want; moreover everybody is specially fond of [ἀγαπῶσι] a thing that is his own creation: parents and poets show this. But it is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is not good either at getting money or at keeping it, while he is profuse in spending it and values wealth not for its own sake but as a means of giving.

That brings us back to Jesus, to the Golden Rule, to the various translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John of the conversations and questions. They are not so logical, so predictable, so categorical. They listen, with their own intent, as they listen to Moses, and to God. Have we answered all of our questions about Love, and the Law? Do we know its shape definitively (as if Greek male elite ethically)?

Would we recognize that "The love of God and for God resides in a gap"? Why are we listening to silenced women, like Julia Kristeva with her Tales of Love and their erotic, apagetic, philetic ambiguities? Like Jane's attention to ... Maggi Dawn and Jeanette Winterson and Simone preaching ... Bits and pieces, fragments, gaps, inbetween.

Who is my "neighbor"? and what must that mean?, asks Suzanne.

If we keep up this nonsense, we'll never listen to Aristotle only and only to his original designs on the Golden Rule.

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).

Aristotle Teaches Einstein

Hal got me to go with her to the public library again last night. With a Joan Didion novel and another by Joyce Carol Oates in her hands, she passed me trying to balance Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams in my own hands while leafing through Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. "Dad, I'm going to get some non-fiction too," she told me and ended up also with two books on mental illness, one on dianectics, one on the "science" of dreams, and a college-level introduction to psychology by "Dr. Joseph G. Johnson." Whew!

Now she'd inspired me to check out from the physics section Lightman's book Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe.

I've heard and read from Lightman about how (he thinks) science writing is different from artistic writing. Doesn't that sound a little like Aristotle, who must keep such categories separate? And I've read Lightman's incredible fiction before and have discussed with him its translation into over thirty different languages. "Do you want the translators of your novels to write in the target language like scientists, Dr. Lightman, or like artists," I asked him. He then incredibly, bravely, shows that he has gone beyond Aristotle and his aristotelian logic: "The translators must be both artists and scientists."

So back to our books. I skim this morning through my daughter's intro to psychology textbook, in which Dr. Johnson begins with a history of the science. Aristotle appears early and directly influences the thinking of Thomas Aquinas and then of Rene Descartes on the mind and soul. I look now at Lightman's science book on the history of cosmology ("In memory of Rabbi James Wax of Memphis who always thought about the big picture"). Aristotle figures early, of course, and directly influences Nicholas Copernicus and then Thomas Digges and then Isaac Newton; as you shall see below and infer by the title of this post, Aristotle also influences Einstein profoundly.

The chapter ends breathlessly (as I think about Lightman's persistent Aristotelian distinction between "science writer / artist writer") with these two sentences:

Whether Newton himself was more persuaded by this logical argument or by his religious beliefs, he ended up supporting the Aristotelian tradition of a cosmos without change. That tradition, unchallenged by Einstein, was not questioned until the late 1920s.
-(page 13, my emphasis)

Jesus S(L)aves

Jesus S(L)aves is a bad pun for a title to continue a series of posts. At the end, here, I'll link to the previous posts. But I'm trying to say a few things about how language and translation can foster slavery or can help to free slaves. I mean that both metaphorically and literally. (I mean no disrespect whatsoever to those who love Jesus. But "what's in a name," I'll ask here below.)

UPDATE: THE LOW-RES IMAGES WITH CARTOONSTOCK.COM ACROSS THE TOP HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM THIS BLOG. A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPANY OFFERED TO SELL THEM TO ME FOR A DISCOUNT. I APPRECIATE THE ARTISTS' WORK VERY MUCH BUT DECLINED THE OFFER SINCE THE COMPANY ALSO OFFERED TO LET YOU LOOK AT THE IMAGES VIA THE URLs BELOW THAT ARE LINKS TO THE CAPTIONS I'VE RETAINED.

cartoon caption: "'Slave Market. Buy One, Set One Free!' Apparently it's some sort of humanitarian special offer."

Sexism goes hand in hand with racism and race-based slavery. In the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, sexism and slavery hardly give way to egalitarianism or to abolitionism (until the bibles are read richly with various "second meanings" and not just The logical intention of some presumed singular author--such as God, who is male or neutered like the Wizard of Oz). And, in the United Kingdom and the USA, slavery (up through the 19th century) and sexism have been quite compatible (with Western-culture defenders of race separations and of female subjugations often arguing from the Bible). And in ancient Greece and ancient Rome (through the collapse of their empires), slavery and sexism are, together, the status quo.

Why? Well. Likely, it's the force of masculinist logic.

Aristotle not only gives his stamp of approval to slavery and to sexism (by owning people and by silencing women) but he also develops slavery and sexism out of his phallic logic of ethnocentrism, his purist logic. By logic, Aristotle perpetuates (1) misogyny and gynophobia; perpetuates (2) suspicion of rhetoric and hate of punning; and, of course, perpetuates (3) the denigration of the impure and lesser races as natural-born slaves out of his deep fear of darker-skinned peoples.

The fairly simple game of logic is this: define by the binary; classify by the hierarchy. The straight and rigid syllogistic process starts with the cold, objective, obvious "given" of nature, and moves, orderly through the sequenced premised statements, to the invariable conclusion. Aristotle, by logic, excludes the middle: there must be either the right answer, or what is NOT right (i.e., therefore "wrong"). Whatever is NOT the conclusion is ILLogical. Whatever is of "nature" (i.e. "physics") is supreme--the facts of nature always derive everything that must come "after nature" (i.e., "metaphysics"). Logic is all very thought through; it's very rationale; it can be taught in an undergraduate course in the UK and in the USA. I know, I took such a course. I learned logic under the very same professor who taught my father logic years before.

By his logic, Aristotle concludes:
that females are botched males, and that some humans are natural born slaves;
that logic itself is better hierarchically than poetry and rhetoric and parable and hyperbole and the super-natural and dialectic; and
that his elite Athenian Greek language is the central language for the world.

By logic, it is not extreme, then, for Aristotle's student Alexander the Great to conquer the world. (Aristotle's students are only males and only of the Greek race and only of the elite class). In fact, world domination by educated Greek men is logical. It is not extreme, by logic, to call for the major texts of the world to be brought to Alexandria to be translated into Greek.

cartoon caption: "Dog / Cat Dictionary. Not too difficult, says the one dog to the other, trying to find 1:1 correlations between pictured cat words : pictured dog words"

Translators today use Aristotle's logic, especially translators of the Bible who want its ostensibly-singular meaning to be pure.

So when someone like Mike Sangrey at the Better Bibles Blog concedes that the biblical texts are polysemous, he says something like this: "So, yes, the original pun adds significantly to the understanding of the text." But his logical conclusion is this: "it is better to understand the meaning of the text" or, in other words, "In any case, the fact of a pun in the original doesn’t mean we have to come up with a pun in English. The goal is to bring over the meaning from the original and into the English." What Sangrey means by "meaning" is that the text has one and only one (main) intention. And to translate is to map (in "dynamic equivalence") that singular meaning from Greek (or Hebrew) into English. In the event of a pun, which Aristotle also detests, Sangrey concludes that the goal of the translator is still singular. Hierarchically, the one and only certain meaning of the text (as the translator puts it in the "target" language) is "better" than reproducing a pun (in that "target" language). Before any of us protests "How fun is that?," we may want to recognize that Bible translation by Aristotle's logic is pretty serious business.

Ironically, human language and what we do with it is not like logic. For the ancient Greeks, human language practice is λόγος (or “logos”); in contrast, Aristotle names his observational procedure λογική (or “logic”). Logos is a pun with many meanings. Logic, in contrast, forces one reasonable meaning, the only meaning allowed.

Ironically, the texts of the authors of the Hebrew bible and the Greek-written bible is written in human language, not in logic. Ironically, as Willis Barnstone recognizes, "Much of the Old and most of the New Testament is disguised translation, and so the Bible passes uniformly as a sacred original."

Ironically, linguists who are bible translators resort to Aristotle's logic rather than to the kind of logos practices of the first translators of the bible. The first translators were the Jews who were forced to translate their scriptures from Hebrew into Greek by conqueror Alexander's lackey Egyptian king in Alexandria. The later translators were the Jews who used Greek to write the letters and prophecies and histories called the "new testament." These translators of the bible texts used logos principles in defiance of Aristotle's logic.

Ironically, linguists who use Aristotle's logic read the text univocally. Wayne Leman of the Better Bibles Blog has said, "I don't think that Paul wrote ambiguously. I am suggesting that we today do not always understand what Paul meant by what he wrote. (Lack of clarity is technically different from ambiguity.)" And Leman has said to me (I just can't find the quotation now) that he thinks it doesn't matter what translation methods were used by the first Jewish translators of the Hebrew scriptures. Dynamic equivalence the preferred logic today, assuming the original text has its meaning and the target the equivalent meaning.

(To be clear, neither Sangrey nor Leman is either sexist or pro-slavery! All I'm saying is they, like Aristotle, reduce logos to logic; and they reduce pun to one, and translation to "the equivalence" of the one meaning.)

Since Leman brings up Paul, I think it's fair to look at just how ambiguous Paul could be.

But first, let me say how different Jesus is from Aristotle. Jesus is the one his student John calls the "logos" (not the "logic"); and Jesus uses methods of ambiguous puns, dangerous extremes (hyperbole), of subjective comparisons (parable, or fable), of the supernatural (and not just nature and meta-nature), of graceful poetry (not always prose), of rhetoric (as in his preaching and teaching), and of dialectic (which sounds a lot like Socrates and Aspasia, a woman). Since I mention a woman, Jesus was womanly and treated females with the utmost respect (not just in contrast to the Jewish and Greek and Roman men around him). Jesus also confused the categories of "teacher" and "learner" and "friend," and "master" and "slave," and Paul says he actually became a slave. Before we look at Paul more, I should say that Barnstone thinks that the logical translation of the English "Jesus" is actually a Christian-racist move. To make him "Jesus" and not (ambiguously) "Joshua" (or "Yeshua"), and to make his mother "Mary" and not (ambiguously) "Mariam," is to rob them of their Jewish identities. The common Jewish names tended to have meaning(s). Saul, for instance, connotes the first failed king whose name means, roughly, "prayed for." But Paul, in Greek, also means something like "small," or little.

Paul, some say, makes a big deal out of this. Paul changes Jewish sects from the "Pharisees" (or Barnstone says from the "Prushim") to the learners of "Yeshua," and this seems a lot more lowly and less kingly, hence the name change from Saul to Paul.

Now a couple of other bibliobloggers have called one little text by Paul particularly radical. It was his subtle-antislavery text. Unfortunately, Christians in the UK and in the USA who read it translated logically and unambiguously also fail to read it in all it's fullness.

Here's how David Ker describes the text of punchy puns by Paul:

We talked a bit about Paul’s teaching on men, especially the idea of the pater-familias who ruled his house in New Testament times with a heavy hand. The little book of Philemon seems pretty dull to us today, but it must have been dynamite in Colossae. It would be hard to imagine a master taking back a runaway slave without punishment and even being asked to call him brother.

Here's how Ben Witherington III, getting into rhetoric a bit, describes Paul's text:

C. Beyond the Basics—Cultural Scripts and Ancient Persuasion The psychological dynamics of any given culture are not only unique and particular, they are often difficult to assess. For example, what is considered humorous in one culture may well seem offensive in another, and likewise what is considered persuasive in one culture may seem unconvincing in another. It’s not just a matter of trotting out ironclad rules of universal logic. The issue is culture specific. I say this now because a fair bit of the rhetoric of the NT, will seem manipulative to us in our post-modern situation. It will look like emotive arm twisting, as we shall see when we examine in some detail Paul’s tour de force argument in Philemon.

If the text is "dynamite" and is "not just a matter of trotting out ironclad rules of universal logic" but is exhibit A for a "fair bit of the rhetoric" and "emotive arm twisting," then the logical translation fails to show that. Paul is small. Philemon is the affectionate loving one who owns a slave. The runaway slave is Onesimus, who's name is a pun on "useful." "Useful" is a pun on what we have come to know as the word "Christ" or "Christian" or "little Christ." The belly ache for Paul is love for other people. And there's so much more to get here that logic does not get.

Paul's Greek is punny and liberating literally. Some time back, I tried to show some of that too, in literary English also. By logic in the USA, there's something different from the pun. By logic, there's slavery, even in the "translation" of the "new testament" and the "old testament." By logic, there's "separate but equal" between former slaves and their owners.

So what I'm trying to show now, through this series of posts, and lots of words, is how puns mirror good translation, and good translation mirrors feminist rhetorical discourse.

A Lesson One Sunday

"Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly
. . . . since woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women,

Aristotle maintains.

Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess,
but for the woman sophrosyne means
obedience and consists in
submitting herself to the control of others."
--Anne Carson, a few years after age 11,
writing Men in the Off Hours

". . . My education, I have to admit, has been gappy.
The basic rules of male-female relations
were imparted atmospherically in our family.

no direct speech allowed.
I remember one Sunday I was sitting in the backseat of the car.
Father in front.

We were waiting in the driveway for mother,
who came around the corner of the house
and got into the passenger side of the car

dressed in a yellow Chanel suit and black high heels.
Father glanced sideways at her.
Showing a good bit of leg today Mother, he said

in a voice which I (age eleven) thought odd.
I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say.
Her answer would clear this up.

But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.
Later that summer I put this laugh together with another laugh
I overheard as I was going upstairs. . . "

--Anne Carson,
writing a poem called "Thou" within "The Glass Essay"
and publishing it five years earlier,
in Glass, Irony, and God

The Logic of Female Pollution

As the anthropologists say, “Every touch is a modified blow.” The difficulty presented by any instance of contact is that of violating a fixed boundary, transgressing a closed category where one does not belong. The ancient Greeks seem to have been even more sensitive than we [in the present day Western world] are to such transgressions and to the crucial importance of boundaries, both personal and extra personal, as guarantors of human order. Their society developed a complex cultural apparatus, including such rituals as supplication, hospitality, and gift-exchange, which historians and anthropologists are only recently coming to understand as mechanisms for defining and securing the boundaries of everything in the habitable world. Civilization is a function of boundaries.

In such a society, individuals who are regarded as especially lacking in control of their own boundaries, or as possessing special talents and opportunities for confounding the boundaries of others, evoke fear and controlling action from the rest of society. Women are so regarded by men in ancient Greek society, along with suppliants, strangers, guests, and other intruders. But the threat which women pose is not only greater in degree than that presented by other transgressors of boundaries; it is different in kind. “Let a man not clean his skin in water that a woman has washed in. For a hard penalty follows on that for a long time,” Hesiod advises (Op. 753-55). When we focus on Greek attitudes to and treatment of the female, we see anxiety about boundaries from a particular perspective—that of hygiene, physical and moral. Considerations of pollution, which do not noticeably predominate in other ruses of contact like gift-exchange or supplication, assert themselves when the crises of contact involve erotic relations between male and female. . . .

First, let us consider the logic of female pollution. . . .

We might note also that the so-called Pythagorean Table of Oppositions, cited by Aristotle, aligns “boundary” or “limit” on the same side as “masculine”: over against “the unbounded” and “feminine” on the other side

--Ann Carson, Men in the Off Hours, pages 130-33

feminist Bible translation: not "anything goes" but a lot more personal

Suzanne McCarthy has announced a series of posts on the translation of a Hebrew Psalm. She’s looking at a variety of issues, some of which I’ve found include the question of ambiguity. Ambiguity is something modernists and masculinists tend not to favor in language, especially when it comes to Bible translation. But, in this post, I am going to make a big deal out of ambiguity for better (Bible) translation. For a feminist translation, ambiguity is huge. Ambiguity actually and ironically helps the best translators disambiguate to make meanings clear, to make the text more “wholly” and personally meaningful. And, below, I want to explain that and then illustrate it with a feminist translation of a Greek language passage my pastor had us read for the Easter Sunday sermon. It’s just a snippet of a narrative: Luke 24:8-12.
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Let’s make six things clear initially. First, McCarthy is not necessarily making the arguments I am. In fact, she states very cogently in a comment on her first post in her series that she “cannot perceive what relevance gender might have to this post”; I’d raised the issue that a particular Hebrew word is ambiguous in multiple ways, even with respect to grammatical gender. (In an update here, I note that McCarthy suggests ambiguity needs to be "resolved" in or by translation, especially of the Christian scriptures.)
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Second, I’m not trying to invent ambiguity where it does not exist, but I will agree with Richard Rhodes that I find much more ambiguity in language than he feels is necessary or is necessarily there. Ambiguity, I must say, has its limits; even though we users of language enjoy what Nelson Goodman calls “radical relativism,” there are what Nelson Goodman says are “rigid restraints”
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Third, then, the radical relativism of language, including ambiguity, is related to several things Kenneth L. Pike observes about language. [Pike’s a teacher of mine who’s profoundly influenced my thinking about these things. Pike is as much interested in the nature of language as he is how we human beings look at—i.e., theorize—and talk about—i.e., know—language. The first SIL staff member and Wycliffe Bible Translator to earn a Ph.D., Pike began with some very radical ideas; his acclaimed dissertation “A Reconstruction of Phonetic Theory,” completed in 1942, foreshadowed postmodern methods as it emphasized the need for reworking rigid, traditional and modern ways of viewing language. With one of his favorite books—Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior—Pike commenced emphasizing “a wholistic view.” In a later introductory book—the book Linguistic Concepts, which he had some of us his students read for a seminar on this “wholistic view” —Pike starts with the following one-sentence paragraph: “In this volume person (and relation between persons) is given theoretical priority above formalism, above pure mathematics, above idealized abstractions” (page xi).] Language, Pike says, is N-Dimensional with respect (a) to hierarchy of features; (b) to salient context and unity of features; and (c) to “fusion, merging, gradients, change, growth, education, and indeterminancies” (xi). Persons may and do determine whether to view language as (a) field, (b) particle, or (c) wave. Persons are above logic. One person can learn another person’s language, not in spite of ambiguity and not just by formal logic, but because of such ambiguity and because we all are above such logic. Persons make language ambiguous, and radically so.
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Fourth, I think confusing (1) ambiguity with (2) postmodernism or with (3) feminism or with (4) gender difference is not helpful. Aristotle can be of help to us here; for he does not want confusion of categories (and absolutely, in language, he does not want ambiguity; and he does name ambiguity as a category of language to avoid). And yet, I can’t agree more with Cheryl Glenn who puzzles over the male-only histories of western rhetoric; Glenn, who reads the masculinist and modernist accounts of rhetoric’s history says that, helpfully, “[p]ostmodernism influences our resistant readings of the paternal narrative, particularly since it demands our awareness of situatedness, our angle (in my case [i.e., in Glenn’s case], reading as a feminist, as a woman)” (page 5 of Rhetoric Retold). Glenn, “as a feminist, as a woman,” and as a postmodernist, employs “three methodologies” which she calls “three angles”: “historiography (which informs the entire enterprise of feminist remappings); feminism (which specifically works to situate female rhetorical figures); and gender studies (which refigure gender as a category for historiographical analysis)” (page 4). Here we begin to see some methodology overlap. We might call it methodological ambiguity. For Glenn, ambiguity, postmodernism, feminism, and gender studies all “do” different things; and nonetheless they still all do similar sorts of things. For me, Glenn and Pike do similar things, even though Pike resists some rather non-Pikean forms of “postmodernism” and even though he never called himself a “feminist.” For that matter, Glenn and Carolyn Custis James do similar things. The former situates the predominately male history of classical rhetoric from the perspective of women; the latter rewrites the predominately male history in the Bible from the perspective of women. Nonetheless, Custis James is not an academician using postmodernism, feminism, or gender studies per se. What is common for Pike, Glenn, and Custis James is this: language is ambiguous because of persons. Feminism as methodology set is also ambiguous because it speaks to feminism also as the aim or goal to be achieved by the method. Hence, Glenn can situate herself postmodernly “as a feminist, as a woman”; likewise, I can situate myself personally “as a feminist, as a man.” McCarthy, Pike, and Custis James might rather situate themselves as linguists and Christians and historians (who may or may not admit to doing the kinds of things I want to follow Glenn in doing, as a feminist). The personal, and the ambiguities created by persons, allow us to tease out and to embrace the differences as long as, feministically, our epistemology works out the self evident truths that all men and women are created equal. (Aristotle insists on formal logic that would dictate to us no ambiguity; his end is to confirm by objective observation what is nature—including the nature of males over females and of logic over subjective rhetoric and of an original Greek text over any translation into a barbarian mother tongue.)
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Fifth, when I call what I’m doing “feminist translating,” I am emphasizing as much the methodologies as I am what the methodologies produce. I am not, for example, wanting to go “Beyond the Personal,” not wanting to go beyond the methods of feminisms, which is what Joy S. Ritchie and Gesa E. Kirsch want to do when one of their students turns to Christianity and when they conclude, therefore, that her move is now necessarily opposed to feminism, which their ultimate goal (but no longer their method) in “Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.” In addition, I am not wanting to use a methodology that is not also part and parcel of the aim of the method. This, for instance, is what Ann Nyland is wanting to do by using ambiguity in language combined with the applied “Relevance Theory” of Bible translator Ernst-August Gutt for her goal: a Study New Testament for Lesbians, Gays, Bi, and Transgender. Nyland may rightly challenge whether the “word arsenokoites in 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10” in English should be “homosexual”; nonetheless, she turns to Gutt and even to E. D. Hirsch for methodology to say that “[t]he reader’s context determines how a certain passage will be understood.” What Gutt does (and Hirsch and Nyland with him) is to resort to a reader’s-context method of masculinist logic. Such logic (i.e., “this context but NOT that one”) may find ambiguity determined. Such logic is not—and I will emphasize this emphatically here—such logic is not a methodology that is lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender. (Generally, the Nyland translation gets favorable reviews by bloggers at BBB; it seems “accurate” in the places spot checked.) Nyland uses Gutt’s “relevance theory” for her method (to achieve her lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender translation) which is a method that is not Pike’s tagmemics nor is any of Glenn’s three angles either. Feminist translating uses both a personal methodology and also (by those angles) works the personal aim of valuing females as equally as males are valued; a feminist translation valorizes the personal connections that a person using language makes, regardless of and with regard to gender especially.
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Sixth, when I call what I’m doing “feminist translating,” I am calling attention to what male-dominant logic in translation neglects methodologically and teleologically.
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In Luke 24:8-12, there is attention given to women that does come across in the history. But in the Greek language that Luke uses there is more ambiguity than traditional English translators attend to because they tend to use masculinist logic. Masculinist logic wants to abstract the meaning to the text; masculinist logic wants to pretend objectivity (i.e., to say there’s no theological agenda even if there’s an attempt to say the a priori commitment to “plenary inspiration” theory of Christian scriptures is not a theological agenda); masculinist logic wants to be over subjective person; and masculinist logic wants to eliminate ambiguity when it drives some inclusive goal, such as Nyland’s NT fo LGBTs. As a consequence, traditional English translations can ignore the importance of women and their rhetoric. Sometimes, this is an unwitting consequence. Most Bible translators will very explicitly and publicly express their commitment to the value of women. And Bible translations born out of masculinist logic do not hide the fact that Luke gives historical attention to women.
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So what difference does a feminist translation make? Well, let’s look. First we’ll look at the King James Version; the Revised Standard Version; and the Nyland. Then we’ll check the texts of Luke. Finally we’ll examine feminist translating. (My formatting of the texts is for purposes of comparisons and contrasts).
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KJV
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And they remembered his words,

And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.

It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

And their words seemed to them as idle tales,

and they believed them not.

Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre;

and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves,

and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

RSV

And they remembered his words,
and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
Now it was Mary Mag'dalene and Jo-an'na and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles;

but these words seemed to them an idle tale,

and they did not believe them.
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Nyland

Then they remembered what he’d said.

They returned from the tomb and reported all this to the Eleven and to all the others.

And it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and their companions who told this to the apostles,

but they didn’t believe them,

because they thought their words were a lot of nonsense.

However, Peter got up and ran to the tomb.

He bent over to peep in and saw the strips of linen lying by themselves,

and he went off wondering what on earth had happened.
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Luke
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καὶ ἐμνήσθησαν τῶν ῥημάτων αὐτοῦ
καὶ ὑποστρέψασαι ἀπὸ τοῦ μνημείου ἀπήγγειλαν ταῦτα πάντα τοῖς ἕνδεκα καὶ πᾶσιν τοῖς λοιποῖς
(ἦσαν δὲ ἡ Μαγδαληνὴ Μαρία καὶ Ἰωάννα καὶ Μαρία ἡ Ἰακώβου καὶ αἱ λοιπαὶ σὺν αὐταῖς ἔλεγον πρὸς τοὺς ἀποστόλους ταῦτα)

καὶ ἐφάνησαν ἐνώπιον αὐτῶν ὡσεὶ λῆρος τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα
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καὶ ἠπίστουν αὐταῖς
(ὁ δὲ Πέτρος ἀναστὰς ἔδραμεν ἐπὶ τὸ μνημεῖον
καὶ παρακύψας βλέπει τὰ ὀθόνια μόνα
καὶ ἀπῆλθεν πρὸς ἑαυτὸν θαυμάζων τὸ γεγονός)
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Feminist Translating
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The women remembered the sayings he’d spoken.
They returned from the memorial grave announcing every bit of this to the eleven men and to the other men.
(There were Miyam from Magdala and Johanna and Jacob’s Miryam and the other women with them, stating this to the men he’d sent out.)
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They appeared in front of the men as if this were a bunch of silly sayings.
The men disbelieved the women.
(There was “Rock” standing up; he ran to the memorial grave;
bending over, he looked at the linen cloth only;
he left, amazed at what was birthed.)
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Commentary:

As mentioned, the blip of history that Luke provides here does not obscure women (in his Greek or in any translation above). Women are the first on the scene at Jesus’s tomb; they’re the first to remember what he said (because they listen to the angels jogging their memories); the women are the first believers; the first apostles (i.e., the male apostles’ apostles); and the first disciples to follow Jesus’s kinds of rhetorics (i.e., parable that requires personal reflection; hyperbole that appears silly; and miracle that can make radical changes for and in a body). We might say Jesus’s rhetorics are feminisms. Luke and the translations are not masculinist with respect to these facts of history.
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What Luke and the feminist translation do show (in contrast to KJV, RSV, and Nyland) are the following. The Greek gendered pronouns and verbs and played-on phrases (i.e., τοῖς λοιποῖς vs. αἱ λοιπαὶ) highlight whether the referents in English are females or males. There’s a bit of play also in the first action of the women (i.e., ἐμνήσθησαν or remembering) and the place they turn from (i.e. μνημείος or tomb for memorial). The main lines of action and the parenthetical comments are marked (i.e., in Greek by καὶ plus aorist verb for mainline action, by δὲ plus proper noun subject for parethetical comment; in English by “The [wo]men” or “They” for mainline action, and by the parentheses plus the existential there for parenthetical comment). What’s more, the initial main line for both resulting paragraphs is punctuated by a repeated clause object (i.e., τῶν ῥημάτων and τὰ ῥήματα); but even the repeated ταῦτα (i.e. “this”) following τὰ ῥήματα does not make clear whether the men think they are λῆρος because women are presenting them or because they were that way when Jesus first said them—there’s vagueness (not helpful ambiguity) in this bit of language. In addition, since the Greek proper names are common Hebrew names or peculiar Aramaic nicknames, the English tries to signal these personal connections (both to the people in Luke’s history here and to his later readers) with common Old Testament counterparts (in translation) or with scare quotes. (In showing the Hebrew senses of proper nouns, I’m following Willis Barnstone). Joshua (aka Jesus) had sent the men out to announce his kingdom, but they are hiding away when the women are sent to them; hence, “sent out” seems more personal and more to the point than a non-translation transliteration “apostle”. Finally, the final word here has a generative meaning in Greek that means something to those of us who are parents, or who have parents, especially mothers; hence, in English it’s “what was birthed”.

(Oh, one more little thing that Luke plays with, from verse 7 just before the lines noted above: He has angels reminding the women of the sayings of Joshua--i.e., Jesus--and ends with the one in which Joshua says this
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τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ὅτι δεῖ παραδοθῆναι εἰς χεῖρας ἀνθρώπων ἁμαρτωλῶν καὶ σταυρωθῆναι καὶ τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἀναστῆναι
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Of course, that last word is the one Luke picks up when he describes what “Rock”--i.e., Peter--does when he hears the women repeating the sayings of Joshua. “Rock,” like Joshua from the dead, stands up. That Joshua and the women can have such an effect is no small thing. Matthew hints at this power, and so does the feminist translation.)