Alpha 3-7: Lost and Found in Translation

These sections delve into the kinds of causes (aitia) or principles (archai) there are. Key concerns, since in Alpha, Aristotle indicates that this science seeks precisely this knowledge.

Aristotle's "review of the literature," his survey of previous views concerning causation, is helpful as always. It's mind-boggling that what we know of some of these philosophers, we know from him. (Poor Hippo, of whom Aristotle says only that "one would not consider him worthy of being included... because of the shallowness [paltriness] of his thought." Ouch!)

I've become quite conscious of some serious translation slippage with this reading. The historian-of-relatively-recent-American-English-speakers' ideas in me is inclined to slog through the Metaphysics in Greek, the better to get Aristotle's original meaning. But even with considerably better Greek than mine is at the moment, that quest for "original meaning" is doomed.

One major point of this reading is to get a handle on where things shifted in translation, where Aristotle's writings τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, "the stuff after the physics" or maybe "the stuff that goes beyond the physics," became Aristotle's Metaphysics, which is something altogether else. This change occurred at the hands of editors, translators and commentators who thought and wrote variously in Aristotle's Greek, in later Greek, Latin, Arabic, German, French, English and in many other tongues. Among them were non-Greek pagans, Muslims, Christians (Medieval and Modern), Enlightenment scientistic thinkers, and twentieth century scientific naturalists. Throw in a few Wicca and Cylons, for all I know.... the point is that they could each deposit a distinctive interpretive layer on "Aristotle's original meaning." The end result is whatever we, today, can think about concepts such as "substance" and "essence" and "cause."

So, some terminology/etymology stuff.

"Cause" is apparently Cicero's translation for Aristotle's aition, which in Greek meant the answer or response to a question (Randall 123-24). In "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger makes much hay of this slippage: he argues that the so-called "Four Causes" are not meant to give accounts of how something came to be in our accustomed sense. Rather, they give an account of what is "responsible" for a thing.

"Essence" is a later accretion altogether. It often translates the mysterious phrase "to ti en einai," literally something like "what it (this thing) is/was being." As Randall notes,

no single term corresponding to the Latin essentia, "essence," occurs in Aristotle. Aristotle used at least a half a dozen terms which can all be translated, in some contexts, as "essence." What complicates the matter is that they can all be translated in certain other contexts as definitely not meaning "essence." Ousia is the most troublesome and misleading of these ambiguous terms. (Randall 121 n.18)

"Substance," of course, is our translation for ousia.

My head hurts.

John Herman Randall, Jr. on Aristotle

Robb brought a very helpful additional secondary source to my attention--John Herman Randall, Jr., Aristotle (Columbia University Press, 1962). Randall was a prominent pragmatist, a local boy born in Grand Rapids in 1899 who studied with John Dewey at Columbia. Randall spent his entire career there.

Chapter 6: "The Ultimate Distinctions" is especially helpful to me. Maybe because he's a pragmatist, or because he's a naturalist, or because he's reflecting Dewey's attitude toward metaphysics (and Dewey was especially influenced by Aristotle, as I seem to remember Ralph Sleeper emphasizing), I find Randall's explanation of the Metaphysics especially helpful. Two points in particular stand out.

First, what Aristotle meant by substance, ousia, is most decidedly not what the great Moderns meant by it.

It is significant that when Descartes asked, "What is substance?" he was asking for what persists unchanged throughout change, what is in change that does not itself change. And in Locke and Kant, in fact, throughout modern philosophy, "substance" has been taken as the unchanging, the permanent in change, whether Locke's "I know not what," or Kant's "permanent in relation to phenomena." But for Aristotle, who since he gave the technical meaning to the term ousia rendered into Latin as substantia ought to know, ousia or substantia is defined precisely as that which undergoes change in change, what is at the end of any process different from what it was at the outset. (Randall, 112)

Now, this is an interpretation, and one that I am sure plenty of people will and have protested. No doubt the protests will be even stronger given my note about Randall's own pragmatist philosophical commitments. But his work on Aristotle is especially interesting to me because A) I happen to share a lot of those commitments, and b) it sheds a lot of light on pragmatist metaphysics more generally, especially as a reaction against the Moderns.

Second, Randall emphasizes Aristotle's commitment to the inexhaustible "thisness" of things. Now, Randall had the benefit of writing in the wake of phenomenology; Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger taught his generation of philosophers how to attend to things as opposed to language about things. Randall's Aristotle also knows the difference:

existing things, ousiai, are clearly more than their definitions alone, they are more than what they can be truly said to be. Such concrete things can never be exhausted by what we can say about them. We can never exhaustively "define" any particular individual ousia, we can never say everything that is true about it. (Randall 121)

That last point is one that Charles S. Peirce emphasizes again and again; it's the need to always recognize the irreducible, unique haecceity of things, which moors philosophy to actuality. Without it, we get speculative systems that are fantastically satisfying, but misleading.

Go Randall.