Liberty Through Grammar... Epictetus' Handbook Expanded.

Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1.

Oxford Frontispiece ca. 1715

In our perambulations through Epictetus’ Handbook or Manual, which is formally called the Enchiridion, we must remember that it is actually a compilation of his Stoic ethical witticisms and otherwise pithy sayings, which was done by Arrian, a mid-second century AD disciple of Epictetus (AD 55-135). The great virtue of Epictetus as philosopher, of course, is that he did not conceive of philosophy as a discipline for abstract thought and theory, but advanced rather the common Stoic idea that philosophy is the art of living well, and not just some handy-dandy knack for thinking and discoursing on abstruse stuff in order to bamboozle the bewildered and otherwise bedazzled audience.

So the Handbook is not a simple summary of Epictetus’ Discourses. Rather, it is one of the earliest self-help manuals of Western philosophy, which Epictetus cleverly styled for increasingly short attention spans by avoiding long and sustained philosophical arguments full of metaphysics, logic, and other such nasty tools of reasonable thinking and correct thought.

            There are several internet versions of the Handbook, free to all for the downloading. The version hosted by The Internet Classics Archive was translated by Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), who, as everyone probably does not know, was an English poet, classicist, writer, translator, and a member of the Bluestocking Circle, a Society founded in the 1750s, which, according to the Wiki-battalions, was “an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century [that] emphasized education and mutual co-operation.” From the same source we learn that Ms. Carter ‘rendered’ into English, which is the old way of saying ‘translated’, texts from the French, from Italian, and from ancient Greek. Our source continues that Ms. Carter’s “position in the pantheon of 18th-century women writers was, however, secured by her translation in 1758 of All the Works of Epictetus, Which are Now Extant, the first English translation of all known works by the Greek stoic philosopher. This work made her name and fortune, securing her a spectacular £1000 in subscription money.”

            In addition to her various translations, Ms. Carter’s rendering of Epictetus’s Handbook has the virtue of being in the public domain at present, which means that it is therefore free for the taking for anyone who, like The Internet Classics Archive, has a mind to publish the text. To her credit, however, free does not mean poorly done; for the Carter rendering is a fairly faithful reflection of Epictetus’ original language; it shows that the author had some notions about the variety of elements that are part and parcel of Stoic philosophy; and she had at least some rudimentary, albeit to our modern ears somewhat time-worn, sense of the English language, which one can certainly accept with grateful heart from a writer departed, lo these two+ centuries.

            A second internet version of the Handbook can be found at Guthenberg.org., which offers, to date, “52,125 free eBooks to download.” There is no doubt that the Project Guthenberg is in general a wonderful public service. Unfortunately, the translation of the Handbook on offer at Gutenberg.org is a bane to any ilk or brand of the English language, thanks to its wooden-indian level of sensitivity concerning speech forms, and it is anathema to the spirit of Stoic philosophy because of the translator’s complete and blithering obliviousness of Stoic psychology. The text was rendered by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a Harvard College graduate, American Unitarian minister, author, Civil War abolitionist, and soldier. But while I say ‘rendered’, I have my doubts as to whether Higginson actually rendered anything, but suspect that, notwithstanding his expensive education, he simply hashed up, made an opaque muddle of, and served up again for our dubious edification Ms. Carter’s more famous translation, which had been published roughly 100 years before. That said, instead of allowing this American edition to descend into well-deserved obscurity, The Liberal Arts Press (NY) picked up the Higginson text in public domain and published it in 1948. It was subsequently picked up (2014) by Project Guthenberg.

Now on to our task at hand. We are still in the introductory paragraphs of the Handbook, and Epictetus’ thinking hinges on our recollection of Stoic Big Idea Number One, that, as he says in the opening sentence, “There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control.”

2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1

         Me÷mnhso, o¢ti ojre÷xewß e˙paggeli÷a e˙pituci÷a, ou∞ ojre÷ghØ, 2 e˙kkli÷sewß e˙paggeli÷a to\ mh\ peripesei√n e˙kei÷nwˆ, o§ e˙kkli÷netai, kai« 3 oJ me«n <e˙n> ojre÷xei aÓpotugca¿nwn aÓtuch/ß, oJ de« <e˙n> e˙kkli÷sei 4 peripi÷ptwn dustuch/ß. a·n me«n ou™n mo/na e˙kkli÷nhØß ta» para» 5 fu/sin tw◊n e˙pi« soi÷, oujdeni÷, w—n e˙kkli÷neiß, peripeshvø: no/son d’ a·n (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) e˙kkli÷nhØß h£ qa¿naton h£ peni÷an, dustuch/seiß.

TRANSLATION (Aiken): You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire is in fact to obtain [something], which is to say that you actually grasp the thing you are striving after; (2) and that the promise implicit in avoidance or in your refusal to pursue, is not to embrace that thing you are deliberately trying to avoid. [You must keep in mind], as well, (3) that the one who is caught up in desire is miserable when he fails to obtain the thing sought after, and that the one caught up in avoiding pursuit, if he does not refuse to embrace, (4) is doubly miserable. So if you embrace a philosophy of avoidance only with respect to those things that you can control, (5) then you will embrace nothing at all, because you have chosen to avoid them. (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) But if you ‘fail to avoid’ suffering, or death or poverty, [which you inevitably must!] then you will be doubly miserable.

Ms. Carter: Remember that following desire promises the attainment of that of which you are desirous; and aversion promises the avoiding that to which you are averse. However, he who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched. If, then, you confine your aversion to those objects only which are contrary to the natural use of your faculties, which you have in your own control, you will never incur anything to which you are averse. But if you are averse to sickness, or death, or poverty, you will be wretched.

There are many interesting grammatical tidbits in this section of Epictetus’ Handbook that invite our attention. The first of these is the almost list-like enumeration of imperatives, or the command form of verbs, as if to remind us, from teacher’s mouth to student’s ear, that there are indeed certain things the Stoic philosopher must do in order to live a liberated life. There is the imperative to Remember: “You,” says Epictetus, “must continue to keep in mind…” This is an intellectual exercise distinctly different from simply ‘remembering’, just as ‘I have to remember to turn off the lights’ (punctual, in the sense of one-off) is a remarkably different mental activity from ‘keeping active in the front of your mind’ (ongoing action) that, for example, every day your children need to be picked up after school or that you must always tell your wife how beautiful she is today (memneso - Me÷mnhso; §1, L.1). Then there are the imperatives to “avoid or decline” (aron - a°ron; §2, L.2); to “abolish” (anele - a‡nele, §2, L.4); to actively replace the ‘thing’ that you used to abolish incorrectly with the thing you ought to abolish in its place – “[abolish] instead” (metathes - meta¿qeß, §2, L.2); and finally, there is the imperative to the budding Stoic philosopher to “be prepared to furnish” (crw, §2, L.7) the activity of getting started and then moving forward in stopping all the tomfoolery about avoiding certain types of things that are generally unavoidable. All the negatives in the passage are, I admit, a little overwhelming.

A second juicy language item is the very interesting use of parallel word families, because Epictetus playfully uses one noun or verb to illuminate meanings in another. In Greek, for example, the root idea of tuki (tuch) hovers around the notion of chance or luck; hence, kali tixi means ‘Good Luck’ in modern Greek. So here in our late Stoic text we have a dance, as it were, between various forms that each derive from this tuki-root, but which cast shadows on each other by their differences in nuance. First, there is the idea of being successful in obtaining the desired object, which is as if to say that we go beyond (epi-) the point where luck would normally land us (epi-tuki, e˙pituci÷a, §1, L.1); this is closely followed and informed by a-tuki (aÓtuch/ß, §1, L.3), because not having any luck in obtaining the desired item makes us miserable (a-tuki, or not having luck); then we are given another variation on the theme, which is to say an augmentation on the theme of being miserable, by dis-tuki (dustuch/ß, §1, L.4 and §2, L.1), which is to say that we are really, really miserable if we screw up big time on obtaining the desired effect; and this is followed up finally by its verb variation in §2, L.1 (aÓtucei√n)-‘you will necessarily be miserable’ (a-tuki).

            Another nifty word-play in this section of the Handbook is the parallelism that highlights the chemistry between ‘airo’ (a°ron) in §2, L.1 and ‘an-aireo’ (a‡nele) in §2, L.4, both of which derive from the root verbal idea of airo or aireo, whose fundamental sense is one of taking up, raising, or lifting up. You actually have to get down to the 4^th entry among the dictionary meanings and usages to get to the sense of ‘to lift and take away, to remove’ for airo, which usage is then blamed on Aeschylus (5^th century BC) and on the NT (1^st century AD). I suppose we may now also include Epictetus in this minority cadre of linguistic recalcitrants. As for ‘an-aireo’ in §2, L.4, its sense of ‘to make away with’, ‘to destroy, to abolish or annul’, is blamed on Homer and Herodotus, which is great company to be in, albeit only Homer among them makes it into Dante’s great circle of Hell reserved for virtuous pagans, among whom notable others are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If there is any divine justice, though, we might be able to take some comfort in the notion that Herodotus will not be hidden away in any other outer Erebos for his only slightly ‘ex-centric’ usage of ‘an-aireo’. When all is said and done, then, the ‘airo’ / ‘an-aireo’ parallelism in this section allows us to render our text: “Put away, therefore…” in the sense of, get rid of or have the waiter just take away this silly strategy of doing [X], and instead, “Completely abolish [Y]!”  

There is a final morsel of grammatical interest in this text, which comes in the form of parallel infinitives (the ‘to’ form of the verb) in §2, L.6, ‘orman’ and ‘aph-orman’ (oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n), both of which hang on the strong verb in the context, xrao (crw), although this verb very coyly shows up only afterwards, in L. 7. This particular parallelism also cradles a word-play deriving from the root, ‘ormao’, which means ‘to start chasing [something]’ or to ‘set off after [something]’. Epictetus wants us to understand that each one of us must make an effort by bringing something to the philosophical table in this game of living liberated lives, which is that we must be prepared [xraw] to undertake two activities: 1) to begin making a start (orman) on our journey, and 2) to move forward (aph-orman) away from where our journey started.

            There are also a couple of verbal niceties in these sections that are worth our attention and scrutiny. The first, of course, is the very first imperative memneso (Me÷mnhso; §1, L.1), which is in the perfect tense. Standard Greek grammars remind us that verbs in the perfect tense carry the idea that the progress of an action has been completed in past time and that the results of that action are ongoing—such as, I started chewing gum, (and I am still chewing gum to this day). This perfect imperative of the idea ‘to remember’, then, is that we knew or learned something in past time, and that we still today are keeping what we learned in mind. Hence our interest in rendering Epictetus’ phrase, not with Ms. Carter’s foreshortened “Remember that…,” but rather with the more sustained idea: “You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire…”

            Our second imperative in the text is aron (a°ron; §2, L.2), which I render by, you must “avoid or decline.” The tense of this imperative is called an aorist, which means that the past action, no matter how long it may have taken to accomplish in real time, stands now as accomplished. Ms. Carter renders this verbal idea as, “Remove…”; but this simple preterit fails to capture the full sense of aron as a past time, completed action; so we translate it instead as, “You must have put away from you, therefore, once and for all…”

            The last little nugget of interest is from §2, L.4, which Ms. Carter translates with: “But, for the present, totally suppress desire…”  So rendered, the reader is left to understand from this text that, at least for the nonce, he must “totally suppress desire,” in the hope, one might suppose, that one day he will perhaps be allowed to give full reign to his wild lusts and cravings. Mh ge÷noito (me genoito - Hell, no!), as the Apostle Paul was wont to bellow (thundering it out some 14 times in the NT)! The issue, which is staring us right in the face of course, is how to translate the prepositional phrase, epi tou parontos (e˙pi« touv paro/ntoß). Ms. Carter’s rendering is grammatically possible, but it shows a lack of any Stoic insight or intuition, because Epictetus does not want us to do anything for the nonce! In the Stoic philosophical life, we do everything for keeps, always, every single day! So, coupled together with our two tandem aorist imperatives, airo (a°ron) in §2, L.1, and an-aireo (a‡nele) in §2, L.4, this prepositional phrase has the philosophical sense of First, or Now, or At Present, “actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else.”

             The moral of the story, of course, is that you should avoid doing the kind of things that ensnare your desires and thereby enslave your soul, and instead, you should do everything within your power not to become the servant to your desires. For on this path lies liberty.

a°ron ou™n 2 th\n e¶kklisin aÓpo\ pa¿ntwn tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n kai« meta¿qeß e˙pi« 3 ta» para» fu/sin tw◊n e˙f’ hJmi√n. th\n o¡rexin de« pantelw◊ß e˙pi« 4 touv paro/ntoß a‡nele: a‡n te ga»r ojre÷ghØ tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n 5 tinoß, aÓtucei√n aÓna¿gkh tw◊n te e˙f’ hJmi√n, o¢swn ojre÷gesqai kalo\n 6 a‡n, oujde«n oujde÷pw soi pa¿resti. mo/nwˆ de« tw◊ø oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n 7 crw◊, kou/fwß me÷ntoi kai« meq’ uJpexaire÷sewß kai« aÓneime÷nwß. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1)]

TRANSLATION (Aiken): You must have put away from you, therefore, (2) once and for all, the strategy of avoidance of things that are not within our power, and abolish instead (3) those things that are within our power. (4) First, actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else. For if you reach out for something not within our power, (5) you will necessarily be miserable BOTH with respect to those things, AND with respect to the good of everything else. And all you have to do is to be prepared [xraw] to begin making a start and to move forward (7); yet with a light heart, and with reserve, and whole-heartedly.

Ms. Carter: Remove aversion, then, from all things that are not in our control, and transfer it to things contrary to the nature of what is in our control. But, for the present, totally suppress desire: for, if you desire any of the things which are not in your own control, you must necessarily be disappointed; and of those which are, and which it would be laudable to desire, nothing is yet in your possession. Use only the appropriate actions of pursuit and avoidance; and even these lightly, and with gentleness and reservation.

Full translation of section 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1of Epictetus’ Enchiridion (Aiken 2016):

            You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire is in fact to obtain [something], which is to say that you actually grasp the thing you are striving after; (2) and that the promise implicit in avoidance or in your refusal to pursue, is not to embrace that thing you are deliberately trying to avoid. [You must keep in mind], as well, (3) that the one who is caught up in desire is miserable when he fails to obtain the thing sought after, and that the one caught up in avoiding pursuit, if he does not refuse to embrace, (4) is doubly miserable. So if you embrace a philosophy of avoidance only with respect to those things that you can control, (5) then you will embrace nothing at all, because you have chosen to avoid them. (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) But if you ‘fail to avoid’ suffering, or death or poverty, [which you inevitably must!] then you will be doubly miserable.

You must have put away from you, therefore, (2) once and for all, the strategy of avoidance of things that are not within our power, and abolish instead (3) those things that are within our power. (4) First, actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else. For if you reach out for something not within our power, (5) you will necessarily be miserable BOTH with respect to those things, AND with respect to the good of everything else. And all you have to do is to be prepared [xraw] to begin making a start and to move forward (7); yet with a light heart, and with reserve, and whole-heartedly.

The Greek text for hellenophiles.

2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1

         Me÷mnhso, o¢ti ojre÷xewß e˙paggeli÷a e˙pituci÷a, ou∞ ojre÷ghØ, 2 e˙kkli÷sewß e˙paggeli÷a to\ mh\ peripesei√n e˙kei÷nwˆ, o§ e˙kkli÷netai, kai« 3 oJ me«n <e˙n> ojre÷xei aÓpotugca¿nwn aÓtuch/ß, oJ de« <e˙n> e˙kkli÷sei 4 peripi÷ptwn dustuch/ß. a·n me«n ou™n mo/na e˙kkli÷nhØß ta» para» 5 fu/sin tw◊n e˙pi« soi÷, oujdeni÷, w—n e˙kkli÷neiß, peripeshvø: no/son d’ a·n

2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1

e˙kkli÷nhØß h£ qa¿naton h£ peni÷an, dustuch/seiß. a°ron ou™n  2 th\n e¶kklisin aÓpo\ pa¿ntwn tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n kai« meta¿qeß e˙pi« 3 ta» para» fu/sin tw◊n e˙f’ hJmi√n. th\n o¡rexin de« pantelw◊ß e˙pi« 4 touv paro/ntoß a‡nele: a‡n te ga»r ojre÷ghØ tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n 5 tinoß, aÓtucei√n aÓna¿gkh tw◊n te e˙f’ hJmi√n, o¢swn ojre÷gesqai kalo\n 6 a‡n, oujde«n oujde÷pw soi pa¿resti. mo/nwˆ de« tw◊ø oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n 7 crw◊, kou/fwß me÷ntoi kai« meq’ uJpexaire÷sewß kai« aÓneime÷nwß. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1)]

A Mid-April Musing on Teaching Machiavelli in Undergraduate Liberal Arts Universities

I stopped teaching Machiavelli's (1469–1527) The Prince in my Humanities courses a certain number of years ago. The Prince is traditionally included in all Humanities curricula and academic readers, just as it has been included in the collection of Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 23) since the inception of that series in 1952. The problem? For the most part, Machiavelli's The Prince is presented in Humanities and Political Theory readers literally and uncritically, as representative of a proto-form of realpolitik. It should not surprise us, then, when this text is taught in our university classrooms, that it is simply presented at face value. But this is, precisely, the problem! Because the true 'face' of Machiavelli's The Prince is hidden; and when we teachers present the 'mask' as the true face, we are essentially handing our students a textbook study of fascism and the fascist attitude uncritically, as representative of the human 'way of things'. And they will of course, in turn, 'go out and do likewise.' 

     And yet The Prince simply cannot be a true, face-value 'political' treatise; because when it is interpreted in this common and naive way, it goes against the entire tenor of Machiavelli's life and all of his other writings. Therefore, any reading of The Prince requires from all its interpreters, both the student reader and the teacher of this text, much more real knowledge of Machiavelli's thought world, and therefore much more complexity and nuance. After all, why should teachers of Humanities continue to teach a fascist text in the context of Western universities, unless of course we are interested in teaching fascism to our students?! Unless, that is, we have been interpreting Machiavelli too simplistically... too lazily... Incorrectly. And yet already as early as the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784), relying in turn on the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in the History of Philosophy section of his famous Encyclopedia,  indicated for us a truer and more meaningful interpretive tradition, providing posterity with the interpretative clue for rightly understanding this 'hidden' text. Now, go and do likewise.

MACHIAVELISME, (Hist. de la Philos.) [Histoire de la philosophie] Diderot2

MACHIAVELISME, s. m. (Hist. de la Philos.) espece de politique détestable qu'on peut rendre en deux mots, par l'art de tyranniser, dont Machiavel le florentin a répandu les principes dans ses ouvrages.
      Machiavel fut un homme d'un génie profond & d'une érudition très - variée. Il sut les langues anciennes & modernes. Il posséda l'histoire. Il s'occupa de la morale & de la politique. Il ne négligea pas les lettres. Il écrivit quelques comédies qui ne sont pas sans mérite. On prétend qu'il apprit à regner à César Borgia. Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que la puissance despotique de la maison des Médicis lui fut odieuse, & que cette haine, qu'il étoit si bien dans ses principes de dissimuler, l'exposa à de longues & cruelles persécutions. On le soupçonna d'être entré dans la conjuration de Soderini. Il fut pris & mis en prison; mais le courage avec lequel il resista aux tourmens de la question qu'il subit, lui sauva la vie. Les Médicis qui ne purent le perdre dans cette occasion, le protégerent, & l'engagerent par leurs bienfaits à écrire l'histoire. Il le fit; l'expérience du passé ne le rendit pas plus circonspect. Il trempa encore dans le projet que quelques citoyens formerent d'assassiner le cardinal Jules de Médicis, qui fut dans la suite élevé au souverain pontificat sous le nom de Clément VII. On ne put lui opposer que les éloges continuels qu'il avoit fait de Brutus & Cassius. S'il n'y en avoit pas assez pour le condamner à mort, il y en avoit autant & plus qu'il n'en falloit pour le châtier par la perte de ses pensions: ce qui lui arriva. Ce nouvel échec le précipita dans la misere, qu'il supporta pendant quelque tems. Il mourut à l'âge de 48 ans, l'an 1527, d'un médicament qu'il s'administra lui même comme un préservatif contre la maladie. Il laissa un fils appellé Luc Machiavel. Ses derniers discours, s'il est permis d'y ajoûter foi, furent de la derniere impiété. Il disoit qu'il aimoit mieux être dans l'enfer avec Socrate, Alcibiade, César, Pompée, & les autres grands hommes de l'antiquité, que dans le ciel avec les fondateurs du christianisme.
     Nous avons de lui huit livres de l'histoire de Florence, sept livres de l'art de la guerre, quatre de la répuplique, trois de discours sur Tite - Live, la vie de Castruccio, deux comédies, & les traités du prince & du sénateur.
      Il y a peu d'ouvrages qui ait fait autant de bruit que le traité du prince: c'est - là qu'il enseigne aux souverains à fouler aux piés la religion, les regles de la justice, la sainteté des pacts & tout ce qu'il y a de sacré, lorsque l'intérêt l'exigera. On pourroit intituler le quinzieme & le vingt - cinquieme chapitres, des circonstances où il convient au prince d'être un scélérat.
      Comment expliquer qu'un des plus ardens défenseurs de la monarchie soit devenu tout - à - coup un infâme apologiste de la tyrannie? le voici. Au reste, je n'expose ici mon sentiment que comme une idée qui n'est pas tout - à - fait destituée de vraissemblance. Lorsque Machiavel écrivit son traité du prince, c'est comme s'il eût dit à ses concitoyens, lisez bien cet ouvrage. Si vous acceptez jamais un maître, il sera tel que je vous le peins: voilà la bête féroce à laquelle vous vous abandonnerez. Ainsi ce fut la faute de ses contemporains, s'ils méconnurent son but: ils prirent une satyre pour un éloge. Bacon le chancelier ne s'y est pas trompé, lui, lorsqu'il a dit: cet homme n'apprend rien aux tyrans. ils ne savent que trop bien ce qu'ils ont à faire, mais il instruit les peuples de ce qu'ils ont à redouter. Est quod gratias agamus Machiavello & hujus modi scriptoribus, qui apertè & indissimulanter proferunt quod homines facere soleant, non quod debeant. Quoi qu'il en soit, on ne peut guère douter qu'au moins Machiavel n'ait pressenti que tôt ou tard il s'éleveroit un cri général contre son ouvrage, & que ses adversaires ne réussiroient jamais à démontrer que son prince n'étoit pas une image fidele de la plûpart de ceux qui ont commandé aux hommes avec le plus d'éclat.
      J'ai oui dire qu'un philosophe interrogé par un grand prince sur une réfutation qu'il venoit de publier du machiavelisme, lui avoit répondu: « sire, je pense que la premiere leçon que Machiavel eût donné à son disciple, c'eût été de réfuter son ouvrage ».

Martin Heidegger: Post-Mortem, Post-Philosophy

Martin Heidegger is Lady Philosophy’s problem child—there is no doubt about it.

Imagine Boethius, who was a Roman senator, a consul, and all-around good-guy Stoic philosopher at large, but who had then been, from the height of his successes, thrown into prison for conspiracy against the Ostrogoth King, Theodoric, and then executed in 524 AD. This good man, who seemingly had forgotten all the life-lessons that are taught by Stoicism and by Plato, had in prison a consoling series of conversations with Lady Philosophy; and she was able to guide Boethius back again onto the path of right thinking and therefore of right living and dying. Boethius has therefore been for centuries the quintessential example of the life lived philosophically.

Now imagine Heidegger in a bitch session with Lady Philosophy. First it would be H saying: ‘Get away from me, because I don’t believe that Reasoned Thinking (a.k.a., rationalism) can help us live,’ and then him explaining in the inexplicable jargon of mumbo-jumbo: ‘In my Nazi vision of life a man only has meaning as a cog in the wheels of the German state; but I am special because I am the Führer’s philosopher, so please leave me alone—you have nothing to teach me.’ Unlike Boethius, Heidegger was never plagued by ethical thinking, and he was uninterested in being a teacher of the philosophical life.

Phrontisterion readily understands philosophy that is conceived of as a vehicle to help us to negotiate with awareness and personal dignity the all-too-often surprising vicissitudes of life, which is why Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy has continued to remain at the top of philosophy’s all-time best-seller list. And very rightly so. However, what should be the take-home Kerygma of a conception of philosophy that is not truly interested in life at all, but only in the enslavement of the many?

The following is Phrontisterion’s translation of a book review by Yann Diener, which appeared in the French weekly journal, Charlie Hebdo (No. 1228 / 3 February 2016); Diener reviews several books about Martin Heidegger that have recently been or are about to be published in French.

“Books [by Yann Diener]: Heidegger: his Life, his Work, his Führer.

Star philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger would have preferred that his bibliographical notice be limited to the narrative of his promenades in the Black Forest with his students. That did not happen: the historian Guillaume Payen has published [Perrin: January 2016] a solid biography that tells the story of the Master’s passage from Catholicism to Nazism.

Very well documented, Payen’s book will not end up as fodder for peoples’ magazines; rather, it shall permit one to read or reread Heidegger in his context. Payen, as historian, is contributing to the contextualizing work that the philosopher Emmanuel Faye as well as the linguist Francois Rastier have so desperately wished for (Charlie Hebdo, 16 & 23 December 2015). This biography is important because it is the first that shows the logic of young Heidegger’s journey, going from Catholicism to Nazism: first he wants to become a priest, but then he is seized by the desire to toss everything out the window, and he will begin to focus first on philosophy and then on national-socialism. Heidegger’s adepts have wanted to portray him as an inadvertent or opportunistic Nazi; but now we discover that he had a veritable passion for Hitler. When, in June 1933, his colleague Karl Jaspers asks him how a man as uninformed as Hitler can govern Germany, Heidegger gives him this stupefying response: “His educational upbringing does not matter; just look at his marvelous hands.” The ‘back-to-Being’ philosopher is counting on the Führer to provide for Germany, and so also for the whole world, the conditions for a philosophical revolution. (In his Reichstag speech of January 1939, Hitler even portrays himself as a prophet). Catholic until the age of 25, Heidegger will remain Nazi until his death. Nevertheless, his apologists continue to maintain that their hero was nothing more than an unfortunate assimilation into the Nazis worldview. This is an example of a thesis contradicted by the biography. The only choice the adepts shall have will be either to go into full-blown denial or to shift from their position of negation to a position of affirmation in order to claim/explain their unconditional love of their prophet.

Hypnotic language.

Translator of Kafka, of Freud or of Peter Handke, George-Arthur Goldschmidt has already shown an interest in the particularity of Heidegger-speak: his violence is contained in his hypnotizing prosody, which quickly fascinates his students. He uses the omnipresent ‘We,’ which helps to constitute [psychologically] a combat group. The texts that George-Arthur Goldschmidt has dedicated to this terrifying ‘newspeak’ are reedited in a book scheduled for publication at the end of January 2016. [NT: It is as of yet unpublished]. There is no doubt that the publication of this book shall permit us to get a clearer picture of how Heidegger’s words have slipped into the vocabulary of philosophy and how, unfortunately, they have also wormed their way into the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Anne-Lise Stern, Auschwitz survivor and psychoanalyst, used to spit on the ground when she had to pronounce the name of Heidegger, whose concepts have helped psychoanalysis to slide toward a sort of adaptive psychotherapy, whose focus is to normalize and to format the subject.

            When Heidegger used to begin his lecture on Aristotle, he would summarize the biography of the Greek philosopher by saying: “He was born, he lived, he died.” For Heidegger, we can say: he was born a Catholic, he lived as a Nazi, he is a dead Nazi.

1.     Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger. Catholicisme, révolution, nazisme (Perrin), January 2016.

2.     George-Arthur Goldschmidt. Heidegger contre la langue allemande, to be published at CNRS publishers.”

Further reading:

• François Rastier, Naufrage d’un prophète. Heidegger aujourd’hui, PUF, 2015.
• Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie : Autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935, Le Livre de Poche, réed. 2007.
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html
• http://www.worldcat.org/title/crisis-of-german-ideology-intellectual-origins-of-the-third-reich/oclc/253069
• http://next.liberation.fr/culture/2014/03/06/il-n-y-a-pas-d-affaire-heidegger_985029
• http://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/lessai-et-la-revue-du-jour-14-15/laffaire-heidegger-revue-critique
• https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/09/30/commentary-heideggers-black-notebooks
• http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/martin-heideggers-black-notebooks-reveal-the-depth-of-anti-semitism.html
• https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/what-heidegger-was-hiding
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html

A Matter of Life and Death

"Trompe-l'oeil Paintings" of Exceptional Quality at Patron's Tomb    

Pre-Scriptum: A former colleague, who is an art historian, asked Phrontisterion to help in translating a group of Greek inscriptions in the context of her research project on ancient Roman tombs and funerary frescos depicting garden scenes.

Dated at around the first century BC, the inscriptions were discovered in 1842, and excavated along with “frescoes of exceptional quality,” just south of Rome near the ancient Circus Maximus. The inscriptions were interpreted, catalogued, and published for the Musée National du Louvre in Les Inscriptions Grecques, interprétées par W. Fröhner (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, 1864/5).

To my knowledge there is still no other published translation specifically of the Patron inscriptions, other than the rather perfunctory renderings, in French, which were advanced in the 1860s by the Louvre curator, Fröhner (1834-1925). I have translated the funeral poems concerning Patron that are available, which are the Greek fragments 233, 234, and 235. Fröhner had originally suggested a reconstruction of several significantly corrupted passages, notably in fragment 233, but these have since been more meaningfully reconstructed by the editors of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG: University of California Irvine, USA). The following Greek electronic text is from the TLG.

Such is the reconstructed glimpse over the netherworld’s fading threshold, which history permits us, into what was once the life and death of Patron the doctor.

Engraving of Patron's Tomb (Secchi, Roma, 1843)

A Matter of Life and Death. At the emplacement of his tomb near the Palatine Hill, which is one of the most ancient parts of the Eternal City, the story of Patron’s life and death was found etched in stone, rendered in Greek heroic verse.

Patron’s tomb dates from approximately the time of Augustus Cesar, ca. 18 BC (vide Bagnani in Fröhner), and is situated at the Porta Capena, which is the southern gateway in Rome’s Servian Wall, opening out onto the Via Appia. The Servian Wall had the formidable reputation of being capable of repelling the elephant-equipped armies of the great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, who, in today’s geography, would have been a Tunisian, an even more remote son of ancient Phoenicia. That said, the Wall never had the opportunity to live up to its daunting reputation—apparently, and certainly notwithstanding his efforts to the contrary, the Punic general and his armies only ever got to within 5 km of Rome.

The stone inscriptions of Patron’s life and death are composed in ancient Greek. The curiosity here, of course, is that a non-specialist like this Phrontisterion philosopher would not necessarily have expected to find Greek language funeral inscriptions in Rome. 

The Inscription Blocks from Patron's Tomb

But, then, that is part of the intrigue in this story; because this detail reveals to us something about this immigrant medical doctor, Patron: according to one fragment in the inscriptions, which are composed in Doric, as opposed to Attic Greek, Patron says that his native land was Lycia, which is today found in southwestern Turkey on a finger of land pointing to, and including the island of Rhodes (light brown on the map below).

Scholars talk about the Dorians as a people, an ethnicity certainly familiar to students of art history for its columns—which are considered simpler than those of either the Ionians or the Corinthians, as well as for art of the Geometric period (ca. 950 BC).  But then again, scholars talk about many things and not everything is necessarily interesting or worthwhile. For example, there is a common albeit not unproblematic scholarly notion of a so-called Dorian “invasion” of the Peloponnesus, which should perhaps be more correctly called a migration of Dorian peoples, which is thought to have taken place sometime around 1150 BC.

Architectural Columns

The Doric or Dorian dialect of Ancient Greek, commonly known as western Greek, which was spread about Greece by the migration of the Dorian peoples, is fairly indigestible to a Hellenophile, like myself, who has been nurtured on the sweet milk of Attic and Koine Greek. In addition to being more or less the standard style of ancient Greek that one studies at school, Attic, or eastern Greek, is also the Greek dialect of Athens, spoken from ca. 500-300 BC. This is the Greek of the classical period of Athens, in which are embodied the works of the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedian Aristophanes, the historian Thucydides, and of course the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Historically speaking, Attic Greek would slowly evolve into the Koine or common Greek spoken during Hellenistic and Roman antiquity—this is the “superregional” or lingua franca Greek that was spoken from roughly 300 BC to 300 AD all across the Mediterranean basin, and which will also include the writings of the Christian New Testament.

In the briefest possible wiki-history version of the Greek dialects, according to those in the know “it” all boils down to Mycenaean or Late Bronze Age Greek (16^th-12^th centuries BC), which was reconstructed from the Linear B tablets after some first-class linguistic sleuthing by Ventris and Chadwick. The three forms of Greek that evolved from Mycenaean Greek are the Aeolic (Lesbos, western Asia Minor, Boeotian and Thessalian = northeastern Greece), the Doric (northwestern Greece), and the Ionic (western and southwestern Asia Minor). Attic Greek evolved as a subgroup of Ionian Greek.

Doric Greek, on the other hand, which is our present interest, is, historically speaking, an older dialect of Greek, and spoken provincially, which is to say primarily beyond the borders of Attica, which, as its name implies, occupies the Attic Peninsula including, of course, the great polis of Athens. Dating from ca. 800-100 BC, variations of Doric Greek “were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon.”

According to wiki-history, then, the scholarly consensus is that Doric Greek originated among ethnicities living in the mountains of northwestern Greece, which is supposed to be the traditional homeland of the Dorians, and from which Doric was spread to neighboring regions during the Dorian “invasion” and subsequent regional colonizations. Per the wiki-map below, the broader group of Doric dialects, which is indicated by all the various “brownish” regions, will include Doric proper, Northwest Greek, and Achaean Doric.

Important for historians of ideas is the contextualizing historical setting, which is that the two most important ethnicities in 5^th century Greece were the Dorians and the Ionians, who were also the two principal players in the Peloponnesian War—a total game-changer for the history of the city of Athens. Prima facie, the war in the Peloponnesus was waged between Athens and Sparta; but the Athenians and their allies in Sicily were ethnically Ionian, while the folks in Syracuse and the Spartans were ethnically Dorian. The war was fought serially, and it was therefore rather long in that it lasted from 431-404 BC, or for about 27 years; but it eventually brought about the decline of Athens per the prediction of Socrates just prior to his execution at the hands of the Athenians in 399 BC. It goes almost without saying, of course, that the Ionians of Attica, like their Dorian ancestral enemies in the Peloponnesus, had their own dialect of Greek, their own style of making a column, and are color-coded with a distinctive purple on the wiki-map below.

Spoken Greek According to Regions (Source: Wiki)

As we were saying, then, Patron was a medical doctor and ethnically Dorian, which means he spoke Doric Greek, if one may already begin to deduce his language from the language of his funeral inscriptions. One discovers additionally from the inscriptions that he originally hailed from Lycia, which is a whole wide world away from Rome, and that he died and was buried in a beautiful Roman tomb as an immigrant.

Lycia, which today would be Anatolia or the southwestern region of Turkey, was a Doric Greek speaking region of Asia Minor. It was subsumed into the Greek empire that was being constructed by Alexander the Great, and, after the defeat of the Persian King, Darius III, at the battle of Issus (southern Anatolia) in 331 BC, Lycia was totally Hellenized under the rule of the Macedonians. After 168 BC, when Lycia enjoyed official home rule within the context of the Lycian League, the region enjoyed some degree of autonomy under the protectorate of the Roman republic; however, Lycia was neither independent nor a sovereign region, but a self-governing region under republican principles. It also had the right, apparently for a time, to mint its own coins. In 43 AD emperor Claudius dissolved the Lycian League, and Lycia was again incorporated, with provincial status, into the Roman Empire. This would be about the time, historically, that Patron would have appeared on the scene.

            There have been some fine heroes in history and myth who claim Lycia as their homeland. Much of the early foundational history of the region is recounted in The Histories of Herodotus, having to do with the sons of Europa, Sarpedon (the grandfather of the Homeric one) and Minos; it was Minos who bested Sarpedon in vying for the throne in Crete, thus driving him away from Crete and into our narrative. In his flight, grandfather Sarpedon lands in Milyas, which is the ancient name for later Lycia.

Apparently Bellerophon, of Pegasus fame and monster-killer extraordinaire, credited with slaying Chimera, was also later king in Lycia. This story comes to us via Homer (Il. 6.155-203), being told by his grandson, Glaucus (Trojan ally), who, one remembers, meets the great Diomedes (Greek) on the battlefield (Bks. 2 & 6) and, instead of fighting as enemies, they actually exchange gifts of friendship because their grandfathers had been befriended. Diomedes got the best of the exchange, however, and notwithstanding the excellence of the gesture, Glaucus comes down to us as a somewhat tragic fool of the gods who would later be killed by Ajax.

One thing leading to another, though, the first Sarpedon, who fled Crete from his brother, ultimately yielded a second Sarpedon, through Laodamia (daughter of Bellerophon); this second hero was killed at Troy. This Sarpedon grandson is famous for having had a good grump at Hector, the Trojan general (Bk. 5), on the nature of heroism or lack thereof, and, additionally, for giving a wonderful speech on the honorable, heroic life (Bk. 12), as well as for living and dying an uncertain number of times—being a favorite of Zeus, the King of the Gods tried to keep him from dying at the hands of Diomedes, until Hera reminded her husband that gods did not have that right (Bk. 16), at which point Zeus backs off. So—spoiler alert, Sarpedon gets to really die; but the comedy gets played out, because Apollo recovers the body and has it delivered back to Lycia for funeral honors. All is well that ends well, in a Greek tragic, heroic kind of a way.

Now all of this chatting about heroes hither and yon in the pages of Lycian history necessarily brings us back full circle to the Roman funeral inscriptions of our good doctor, Patron, which are not “simply” composed in Doric Greek, but are in fact rendered in the heroic poetic form of the Greek epic.

According to common sources, scholarly opinion seems to be that Doric Greek is the “conventional dialect of choral lyric poetry”; but then I am not sure that this bit of information advances us much, because choral lyric poetry is not written in the epic form, which Patron’s inscriptions definitely are. There is equally scholarship suggesting that ‘epic praise’ will undergo historical transformation already in Classical Athens, shifting from its traditional expression through Homeric poetry/verse, and instead being replaced with the more democratically oriented funeral oration. The strength of this theory is grounded in the funeral oration of Pericles (Thucydides, History 2.41.4), who, speaking over the Athenian dead, says: “We need no Homer to sing our praise, nor anyone else who with his verses may delight for a moment…” Instead of relying on more traditional or customary rhetorical devices to demonstrate their ‘power through epic poetry’, as had the aristocratic Athens of antiquity, “Pericles assures the [5^th century] Athenians that their city has provided overwhelming demonstrations of its power, and especially in view of the dead they were there to honor. Such tangible proofs, he contends, are sufficient in and of themselves to ensure the glory of the city (http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/10/14/thucydides-rationalism-2005/, p. 11).”

The Greek epic tradition is, first and foremost, Homer. The most anodyne definition of the epic is, as every schoolboy learns, that it is a lengthy poem containing tales of journeys and deeds of derring-do; but this definition does not inform us as to why a 1^st century BC funeral inscription would be composed in epic verse, unless, of course, we give value to the metaphorical element of the deceased’s journey through life, and then the passage from life to death. This certainly seems a fitting hermeneutical entry into thinking about and interpreting the Patron inscriptions.

A second direction to go in considering the Patron inscriptions is not to consider necessarily the content of the inscriptions for epic material, but rather for their metrical form. Standard epic verse, which is traditionally composed in hexameter metrical lines, is also certainly apparent in the Patron inscriptions (vide Fröhner, 294).

Finally, there is a consideration of the actual vocabulary used in the inscriptions, which is in fact and in deed denotationally dominated by Doric epic elements. This seems consistent with general usage in antiquity, for, according to one site, “All later Greek poetry relied on Epic practice to a greater or lesser degree. This included vocabulary, a choice of alternates for noun declension and verb conjugation, turns of phrase and even particular quirks of syntax.” This description of “epic practice” is certainly fitting considering all the Doric language elements, apparent both in noun/adjective declensions as well as the verb conjugations, with which the Patron inscriptions are replete to overflowing.

The Patron inscriptions (circa 18 BC).

TOMB OF PATRON

(233.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)

Πάτρω]ν [εἰμί]· πατρὶς Λυ[κίων μ’] ἐλοχεύσατο γαῖα. (1)

  Ῥώμ]α δ’ ἐν τιμαῖς πρά[γματά μου δέχ]εται.

Ὦ] μάκαρ, [ἐς φάος] ἀελίου πάλιν [οὔ μ’ ἀπο]πέμπεις,

  εὐπά[τριδ’ ἀλλ’ ἐφορᾷς τηλό]θι θαπτόμενον.

233. I am Patron; and the fatherland that bore me, Lycia. /

And valor among honors can be expected through my accomplishments. /

You are blessed, [Lycia] who do not send me off again back to the light of the sun, /

But rather, from afar you oversee funeral rites celebrated to honor one of noble family born.  

233.bis. Commentary: Our native lands send us forth into the light of the sun, and observe from a distance as we are given again to the shadows. The valor of our accomplishments between sun and shadow is ours to win, but it does not belong to us alone; our honors are also those of our native soil. The individual is always surrounded by a crowd of witnesses.

233.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 295). Je suis Patron, …… est mon pays natal ; maintenant l’Hadès m’a reçu, moi qui fus si bienveillant pendant mon administration. Heureux Hadès ! tu ne me renvoies plus à la lumière du soleil, car j’ai appartenu à une noble famille, moi qui suis enterré ici.

(234.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)

Εἰς τὸν αὐτόν. (n)

Οὐ βάτοι, οὐ τρίβολοι τὸν ἐμὸν τάφον ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν @1 (1)

  οὐδ’ ὀλολυγαία νυκτερὶς ἀμπέταται·

ἀλλά με πᾶν δένδρος χαρίεν περὶ ῥίσκον ἀνέρπει

  κυκλόθεν εὐκάρποις κλωσὶν ἀγαλλόμενον.

Ποτᾶται δὲ πέριξ λιγυρὴ μινυρίστρι’ ἀηδὼν (5)

  καὶ τέττιξ γλυκεροῖς χείλεσι λιρὰ χέων,

καὶ σοφὰ τραυλίζουσα χελιδονὶς, ἥ τε λιγύπνους

  ἀκρὶς ἀπὸ στήθο[υς ἡδὺ χέουσα μέλος].

Πάτρων ὅσσα βροτοῖσιν ἐράσμια πάντ’ ἐτέλεσσα

  ὄφρα καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδᾳ τερπνὸν ἔχοιμι τόπον· (10)

τἆλλα δὲ πάνθ’ ἃ λέλοιπα καὶ ἐν νεότητι κατέκτην

  ᾤχετο πλὴν ἃ πρὶν ζῶν ἀπεκαρπισάμην.

234. Neither brambles nor burdocks hold court around my tomb, / (1)

Nor does any shrilling bat turn overhead; /

But rather every tree gracefully spreads upwards, twisting in a circle all about my vault, /

Which is made glorious from all sides by their branches heavy laden with fruit. /

And flitting around and about is a clear-voiced warbler, a songstress, / (5)

And a cicada boldly holding forth from between sweet lips, /

And a clever swallow quietly intoning, or even a cricket’s shrill chirping, /

When a pleasant song is pouring forth from her breast. /

[I], Patron, achieved all sorts of lovely things among mortal men /

In order that I should also have a delightful place as well in Hades; / (10)

But, also, I have left behind all those things I used to seek after in my youth; /

It is all gone, save that fruit which I harvested before, while alive.

234.bis. Commentary: Patron’s tomb is not a place of decay and abandon, but is surrounded by the beautiful, the pleasant, and the fruitful. This is obviously also true of Patron’s life, which was a ‘place’ of fruitful and pleasant plantings and sowing. The goodness that Patron sowed during his life spent among men, is the only abiding fruit that Patron gets to leave behind.

234.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 294). Ni ronces ni épines n’entourent mon tombeau ; nulle chauve-souris aux cris perçants ne tournoie au-dessus ; mais toutes sortes de charmants arbustes, les branches ornées de beaux fruits, poussent autour de mon cercueil et on y voit voltiger le rossignol aux mélodies retentissantes et la cigale à la voix douce et harmonieuse, et l’hirondelle aux doctes gazouillements, et la sauterelle aux cris sonores, qui, du fond de sa poitrine, répand ses jolies chansons. (Moi) Patron, j’ai rendu aux hommes beaucoup de bons services pour avoir aux enfers une place agréable. De tous les biens que j’ai quittés et que je possédais dans ma jeunesse, il ne me reste rien, si ce n’est (le souvenir) des jouissances que j’ai goûtées durant ma vie.

(235.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)

Πατὴρ Πάτρων μὲν, Ἀπποληΐα δ’ ἐγώ· (1)

τεκνῶ δὲ δισσὰ τέκνα, πατέρα δ’ εὖ λέγω.

235. My father is Patron, and I am Appoleia;

I have brought two children into the world, and I commend [eulogize] my father.

235.bis. Commentary: The children, and the children’s’ children, are the fruit of a parent’s planting, but a harvest for the future.

235.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 295). Mon père est Patron, moi je suis Appuleja. J’ai eu deux enfants et je bénis mon père.