When it's still Greek to me

Currently I'm back in the classroom teaching an honors section of a course in the history of Greek philosophy. It's an all-day affair once a week for eight weeks with presumptively the best and the brightest of our community college's students. After retiring a few years back and teaching only online, it has been a chance to see if I can break with the lecture style I used before and engage my students more directly. The goal I've been setting is not just to learn some details about the great figures of the past but to try to get into what it means to ask a philosophical question.

In some way this has been a return to my own Jesuit past. Fifty years ago I was working on a master's thesis about one of the men to head Plato's Academy toward the very end of its history several centuries into the Christian era. At the time I thought it would make an interesting analysis to see how this writer, a man named Proclus, talked about the world in which he lived. Specifically, how as a pagan did he respond to the challenge of Christian orthodoxy? To do this, I tried to get hold of copies of everything he wrote, most of which had never been translated from Greek. With my faithful Liddell & Scott lexicon I skimmed through text after text before arriving at the realization that the man, writing in the same Attic Greek as Plato, absolutely ignored what had happened to the world around him. It was as though he and his intended readers, faithful to the old gods, could live in an encapsulated society that the Christians now left alone.

Today I cannot any longer claim much ability to sightread Greek philosophy in Greek, yet something I learned long ago was that conventional English translations of the old philosophers could often be misleading and fr that reason I prefer to look back at the Greek itself when I can. A couple of examples came up with a text that I was reproducing for my students. This was from Xenophon's treatise on what he called "economics," purportedly a discussion in which Socrates analyzes what it takes for good household management. The section, which offers fascinating glimpses into Greek life, involved the training of a wife, and most of it is the report of someone Socrates describes as an exemplary "gentleman." Now that English term chosen by the translator is redolent of British life in the Victorian era (think Jane Austen) but somehow I wondered just how well it fit the Greek picture. Since I was using the online Perseus texts from Tufts University, I was able to go back to the transliterated Greek and find that the term was kalokagathos, literally "beautiful and good." Ah, maybe we could use the term "one of the beautiful people" and so update the image to fit in with our own celebrity culture.

Another term in the text that at first perplexed me was "illiberal arts." Going to the Greek I found that the term referred to the type of activity of those craftsmen who had to work with their hands, especially at a forge. Aha, we were talking about the activity expected of slaves rather than free citizens. I remembered the thesis of sociologist Alvin Gouldner's Enter Plato that the fact of slavery explained the reason Greek philosophers, who as free citizens would not engage in "illiberal" arts, did not think of doing experiments to test their ideas about how nature worked.

Ah, the perils of translation. Since many terms, like the common words filling up column after column in the large Liddell & Scott I have on my bookshelf (logos, for example, takes up nearly three pages of dense type), can have multiple connotations depending on context, I began to appreciate the intentions of those who first translated most of the old Greek texts into English. "Gentleman" and "illiberal arts" were understandable examples of how scholars who did know the Greek mind tried to use words that might begin to approximate what was present in their own culture. Our trouble today is that, likely as not, the Victorian mindset is alien in itself, so using it to get at a Greek mindset is not always that helpful.

I run into this rather often in my other courses, especially when I am dealing with classic texts from Asian thought. I am coming more in my old age to appreciate the fact that, much as I resented it at the time, as a young Jesuit I spent a couple of years concentrating on Latin and Greek in a pattern that still echoed the goals of Renaissance education. I may not have fully seen the importance of being able to read Plato in the original Greek or Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin, but whenever I pick up a translation of either I often find myself cringing. I understand how translators are doing their best, but I also see how readily the reader lacking a background in the classics can be misled.