 | Aristotle’s PHYSICS, translated by Joe Sachs. Rutgers University Press, 1994, 260 + xi. Include Introduction, Commentary, Glossary and Index.
Aristotle was Ayn Rand’s favorite philosopher and it is a pity that she had to read him through Latinized spectacles, rather than in an English translation that tries to be as true to Aristotle’s Greek as is possible. Since Aristotle was Greek, why put up with translations like “substance,” “essence,” “actuality,” when “thinghood,” “what-it-is-for-something-to-be” and “being at work” are closer to the way Aristotle wrote. I was amazed at how quickly I came to prefer Sachs to all my other Aristotle translators. And his way with words allows one, or at least me, to see the Greek words kind of floating right behind the English.
But if translation thing doesn’t light your fire, let me say a few words about Sachs’ introductory essay. Sachs’ 30 page Introduction is worth the price of the book itself. (And before I forget, let me mention that he appends Commentaries after each section on a particular topic, e.g., after the section on Time, Book IV, chapters 10-14.)
Sachs does not want us to read Aristotle with the smugness that comes from living after the great scientific revolutions of the 17th century and believing that we have all the answers. “When Hobbes laughed at Aristotle, he was certain he knew what a BODY is. Today all bets are off.” (11)
After detailing many of the problems and outright contradictions of modern physics, Sachs suggests that “Perhaps it would be worthwhile to suspend, at least for a while, our notions of what can be and what it is for something to be, to try out some other way of looking.” (17) Whether this is right or wrong is debatable, but it does throw one’s attitude to reading the PHYSICS into an entirely different mode. One now approaches the PHYSICS as a book from which we can actually learn something. This is the standard approach at St. John’s College in Annapolis where Sachs has been a tutor in the Great Book Program for over 30 years. The authors of the Great Books are the teachers and one should approach them as learners. (Kant included!)
So what we get is a non-mathematical physics which is not only “more diverse than the world described by mathematical physics,” but one in which we have to get used to a “correspondingly richer vocabulary in order to read the PHYSICS.” (17-18)
Sachs has much more to say about the different worlds views implicit (and explicit) in Aristotle’s and modern physics, but I’ll leave those additional discoveries for the interested reader. I want to move on to Sachs description of the shape of the inquiry that takes place in the PHYSICS. In a word (and Chris Sciabarra ought to love this) it is dialectical. What that means is Aristotle gives preliminary definitions, if at all, in Book I, but these definitions do not represent his final thoughts on the subject. Sachs instances “change.” Although we are told in Book I what change is, the concept is still being “chewed” in the last four books of the PHYSICS. So, a casual or careless reader might think that Aristotle is contradicting himself given what he says in different Books, but what he is actually doing is developing and deepening the original notion until we wind up with something very different from that with which we began, albeit related. (Think of Hegel’s notion of ‘aufheben’ here.)
I do have one minor complaint—the Greek Pagination. In most texts, the Greek pages and sections are listed in the right and left hand columns on every page. They are done that way in the other three books by Aristotle that Sachs has translated, to wit; METAPHYSICS, ON THE SOUL, and the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS. But for some inexplicable reason, in the PHYSICS they are blended into the text itself. And I mean “blended.” Trying to find, say, 205a30, is a real bitch. The ‘30” is by itself on p. 86 and the ‘205a’ is on p. 85. No excuse for this.
Nevertheless, Sachs gives one the opportunity of reading Aristotle with news eyes. Sachs makes you understand why Aristotle was Rand's favorite philosopher. See for yourself.
Fred Seddon
|
Aristotle's PHYSICS by Aristotle
