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On the Other Hand On the other other hand Retranslating Aristotle on law S. M. Wexler Chapter I Retranslating Aristotle Right now, Aristotle’s Greek is normally translated into smooth, sophisticated, elaborate English sentences. The purpose of translating in this way is to make the meaning of what Aristotle says clear to an educated English-speaking audience. This is very important, of course; indeed, it seems like the cardinal purpose of translation. But Aristotle did not write in a smooth, sophisticated, elaborate Greek. On the contrary, Aristotle wrote in a Greek that scholars say is terrible. For centuries, scholars even said Aristotle wrote as he did specifically to conceal his meaning. Aristotle was not trying to hide his meaning, but when we read his writings, we must bear in mind that they were not written for an English audience, a modern audience, or for that matter, any audience at all. For the most part, Aristotle’s works are notes, written in his own shorthand Greek, primarily for himself. Aristotle’s father was a doctor. He trained Aristotle as a boy to keep notes of what he was working on. This was what doctors did back then; they kept private notes. Aristotle retained the habit of keeping private notes through the whole of his life. At one period, when he was with Plato at the Academy, Aristotle wrote for an audience and published his work. Except for fragments, we do not have any of that work. What we call “The Works of Aristotle,” are the unpublished notes Aristotle kept toward the end of his life about the many different questions he was asking himself, the many different things he was wondering about. These notes do not contain any of the complicated technical terms found in modern logic, mathematics or science and they do not use the elaborate philosophical terminology that has been developed in the years since Aristotle wrote. They are much less sophisticated than the translations make them out to be. 2 We are all indebted to the translations. Even very skillful readers of Greek cannot read Aristotle’s works without a translation. But the translations distort Aristotle’s voice in an effort to make what he says coherent and intelligible – to make him accessible and attractive to a sophisticated modern audience. Aristotle was very smart, but what he says in the writings we have is not the least bit sophisticated. He does not speak clearly in his works; one might almost think of him as mumbling to himself. This book presents retranslations of some of the things Aristotle says about law. These are part of a different way of reading everything Aristotle says. These retranslations – which might almost be called “detranslations” – are an attempt to make clear how unsophisticated Aristotle’s writings are. The works of Aristotle are one-off, hand-made antiques. This book is an attempt to strip off some of the paint that modern translation puts on what Aristotle says. To translate Aristotle in a way that meets our needs for sophistication adds something to his work, but it takes something away as well. Here is an example of a translation from Aristotle’s Topics: The consideration of similarity is useful both for inductive arguments and for hypothetical reasoning and also for the assignment of definitions. For inductive reasoning it is useful because we maintain that it is by induction of particulars on the basis of similarity that we infer the universal; for it is not easy to employ if we do not know the points of similarity.1 If you know logic, you can understand what Aristotle is saying, but Aristotle did not know logic. He invented it. Aristotle had no understanding of what we have come to call “inductive reasoning.” The Greek words that have been translated as “inductive reasoning” mean “in-brought words.” The Latin for “bring” is duco and it is from in duco that we get “inductive.” The history of the English language may force us to translate Aristotle into Latin and then into English, but the word “inductive” carries 2000 years of commentary on Aristotle and logic. To speak of “inductive” anything – “proof,” “logic,” “arguments,” “reasoning” – is to speak with a kind of logical sophistication that Aristotle did not have. Aristotle is not talking about “inductive logic.” He is talking about people bringing in examples to talk about and what he says is that we can only learn from examples if the examples have something in common. 1 E.S. Forster, (Harvard, 1960), I. xviii, 108b 7-13. C:\Documents and Settings\koh\Desktop\on the other hand.doc 3 This book is not a translation of Aristotle. It contains new “retranslations” of many passages in Aristotle’s works. I compare the retranslations with standard translations, first to show what is involved in translation (and retranslation) and second because detranslating the translations adds something to our understanding of what Aristotle says about law. This, in turn, may provide us with some new ideas about law. Some new ideas about law I have learned two new things about law by reading Aristotle the way I do. First I have learned that there are many justices. Aristotle says this straight out in Ethics and he uses the plural “justices” (or “justnesses”) to say it. that there are justices many ... clear ὅτι μὲν οὖν εἰσι δικαιούναι πλείους ... δῆλον2 “Justices”, δικαιοσύαι, dee kay (as in kayak) owe sue´ nigh, with the accent on sue, is a plural. Aristotle uses this plural once and only once, when he says “there are many justices”. Mostly, Aristotle uses the singular, δικαιοσύνη, dee kay owe sue´ neigh. The plural “justices” is an extremely unusual word in Greek. It stands out like a red flag but instead of translating it with the plural “justices”, the translators, insisting that in English, justice cannot be plural, translate Aristotle as saying, “there are many kinds of justice”. The Loeb translation presents the quoted passage this way: Thus it is clear that there are more kinds of Justice than one …3 The Oxford translation presents it this way: It is clear, then, that there is more than one kind of justice … .”4 2 Ethics, V. ii, 1130b 6-7. 3 H. Rackham, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Harvard, 1926, 1999) p. 252. 4 D. Ross, Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, 1925, 1998) Revised by J.L. Ackrill and J.O Urmson. C:\Documents and Settings\koh\Desktop\on the other hand.doc 4 The Penguin translation has: We may now take it as proved that there is more than one kind of justice …5 All three translations say justice is a single thing. It can come in different kinds, but it itself is singular and unitary. Aristotle does not say there is one thing called “justice” that comes in many different kinds. He says “there are many justices”. Each of them is consistent with itself, but inconsistent with the others, except for one, which is inconsistent with all the others because it is not consistent with itself. In summary, when we say “just”, on the one hand we mean “”equal”, on the other hand, we mean “in accordance with law”. When justice is equality, on the one hand, “equal”means “the same”, on the other hand, it means with relevant differences taken into account”. These are four different justices. Two of them are opposites of each other in one dimension and two are opposites in another dimension, but on the other other hand, they are all four the same. They are all internally consistent and there is yet another justice that is the opposite of all four in a different dimension. This justice is not internally consistent. It is unsystematic. The idea that there is an unsystematic justice was new to me. There is a sense in which I should have known this because I was aware that Equity – at least in its inception – was not systematic, but I had never made the connection: equity=fairness=justice. Retranslating Aristotle the way I do has taught me this equation. In this book I examine what Aristotle says about the terms “equity” and “justice” and explain why “equity” is a bad name for the justice that is not systematic. Retranslating Aristotle has also shown me something about natural law, the idea that there is something outside of law to which law must conform if it is going to be law. Over the course of this book, we will see that on the one hand, Aristotle is a natural lawyer, on the other hand, he is not. We will also see that when Aristotle says law has a “nature,” on the one hand, he says its nature has a deep moral component, on the other hand, he says it has no moral component at all. It is simply how things are. We will 5 J.A.K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle, (Penguin, 1953) C:\Documents and Settings\koh\Desktop\on the other hand.doc 5 see finally, that when Aristotle says the nature of law has a moral component, on the one hand, he says the nature of law is good, on the other hand, he says the nature of law is bad. For me, it was a new observation that the nature of law could be bad. In the Western tradition, those who call themselves or would be called “natural lawyers” always say the nature of law is good and I had sort of assumed that that was what a natural lawyer had to say. Once I saw that the nature of law could be bad, I realized that in China, Confucius is a natural lawyer who says the nature of law is bad.
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