[lbo-talk] Re: Derrida Was No Aristotle

[Jon Johanning]

On Oct 30, 2004, at 10:51 AM, Chris Doss wrote:

> This was what I was saying. The violence Aristotle
> does to Greek is considerable. "Entelechia" is a case
> in point -- "holding-in-the-goal." That just ain't
> Greek. Like I said before, it's very close to what
> Heidegger does with German. A good translation should
> capture that IMHO. Otherwise it's like translating
> Finnegans Wake and making it fit the rules of grammar.

Well, new interpretations of philosophical classics are always welcome; 
theses making Aristotle into an Athenian Heidegger or Wittgenstein 
deserve to be worked out in some detail. We may be on the trail of an 
amazing new take on the Stagyrite. :-)

However, until a convincing argument along these lines is forthcoming, 
I tend to stick with the consensus view of the fellow. The accepted 
line on him for quite a while has been that his substance/accident 
approach is just an application of the Indo-European subject-predicate 
grammar; if so, he was conforming to the conventional way of thought of 
this time, rather than challenging it in a fashion that would become 
popular more than 2000 years later.

As for "entelecheia," I don't see it as particularly violating of the 
rules of classical Greek, or more outrageous than what other poets, 
dramatists, etc., were doing at the time. Don't you think they were as 
capable of coining new words as we are, or as people speaking any 
language at any time have been? Aristotle certainly invented 
terminology of his own, but that doesn't mean that he intended this 
terminology to have a Wittgensteinian thrust.

Remember that "philosophy" as we know it was a new enterprise at the 
time, so there was even more need,  if anything, to invent terminology 
than there has been in later ages. A favorite maneuver of Plato's, 
which he may or may not have gotten from Socrates, was using the neuter 
definite article and a neuter adjective -- "to agathon," which many 
translators convert directly into the English "the Good," with the 
capital G used to suggest the function of Plato's coinage (though one 
can argue about whether that is an effective way of translating Plato, 
and other translators have gone in different directions). The 
pre-Socratics had lots of other terminological tricks, some of which 
are rather obscure to us, given the fragmentary texts that have 
survived.

To a great extent, philosophers always coin their own vocabulary, 
straining to express their new insights. Think of what Hegel did with 
"aufheben," and what a host of 20th-century analytical philosophers did 
in applying technical logical terms. C. S. Peirce and A. N. Whitehead 
are other examples that come to mind.

My point is just that, if you want to produce a translation of 
Aristotle in modern English that will be as understandable to your 
readers as possible, you would do well to eschew expressions like "the 
this." If you feel it necessary, coin some new English terms, a la 
Peirce and Whitehead. (For example, many translators of Aristotle 
simply borrowed his "entelecheia," fabricating the new English word 
"entelechy." And it is standard practice among Aristotle translators to 
do the same with terms that the Scholastic translators of Aristotle 
into Latin used, such as "substance" and "accident" -- where "accident" 
does not mean getting hit by a chariot!) But always try to make them 
reasonably understandable to your readers, if you want to have more 
than a handful of readers, that is.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
__________________________________________________
It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have 
suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an 
inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we 
didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” 
is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a 
language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the 
fact that the word is used so much.
       — Richard Rorty