Meditation on Fantasy and Imagination

Meditation on Fantasy and Imagination

 

         C. S. Lewis has had at least as great of an influence on my thinking as any other writer. A couple of places I cannot go with Lewis, theologically. His views on women and marriage will seem quaint. But these things are on the margin and do not diminish just how much he has taught me and my appreciation of what a wonderful writer he is. The Abolition of Man, The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, Miracles, Three Ways of Writing for Children, The Weight of Glory, and the short Meditation from a Toolshed – all wonderful, essential. His more scholarly writings on literature, especially Milton and Spencer, wonderful. I have just re-read his autobiographical discussion of how he became – kicking and fighting– a Christian: Surprised by Joy. I could read this book over and over. Here I want to reflect on an important theme of that book: the distinction Lewis makes between (Freudian) fantasy and imagination. This essential distinction Lewis shares with another great influence on me – Iris Murdoch. I will restrict myself to Lewis’ thought, however. Here are some key passages from Lewis: 

It will be clear that at this time – at the age of six, seven, and eight – I was living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else…. But imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions. It may mean the world of reverie, daydream, wish-fulfilling fantasy. Of that I knew more than enough. I often pictured myself cutting a fine figure. But I must insist that this was a totally different activity from the invention of Animal-Land (Lewis’ imaginary world). Animal-Land was not (in that sense) a fantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was its creator not a candidate for admission to it. Invention is essentially different from reverie; if some fail to recognize the difference that is because they have not themselves experienced both. Anyone who has will understand me. In my daydreams I was training myself to be a fool; in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.

 

Applying this distinction to reading different kinds of literature, literature based on fantasy as opposed to imagination – as does Murdoch – Lewis makes the distinction even more sharply – I must quote at length: 

Let us...lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a ‘Boy’s book’ or a ‘Girl’s book,’ as distinct from a ‘Children’s book’. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairyland. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery of the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration. The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? – really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story. (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in On Stories – And Other Essays on Literature, 37-38.)

 

Both Lewis and Murdoch find this distinction essential for thinking and judging literature: literature based on fantasy – sentimental literature – is at best an escape from one’s troubles; at worst, it feeds the narcissistic potential of our personality and cuts us off from truth.

        I understand the distinction as the boundary between the ‘empirical’ and the ‘noumenal’ ego, to use Kantian language; or the psyche (e.g. as Freud and Plato before him understood it) and the soul. The psyche is largely a system of egocentric energy and fantasy, fed by an evolutionary past and, powerfully, by socialization. The soul – which includes our intellect and ‘heart’ and all higher spiritual powers, including the imagination – is that potential that in a limited, perspectival way, experiences love (and gives it), goodness, beauty, and truth. The family and social matrix forces a separation between the psyche and the soul during the course of our childhood. How and why is a problem beyond my power. The Christian idea of original sin is just as good as anything science can offer. I suppose the inheritance of evolution and history work against any unity. The combination of pure love, virtue, wisdom, community, historical roots, and justice every child needs seems beyond us as a species. Some families, burdened by economic necessity, oppression, or fortune cannot lovingly attend to their children. Some parents, themselves damaged as children, pass that damage further onto their children. Failures of love and bonding activated the psyche; pure love together with the rootedness and bonding love activate the soul. (I make no metaphysical assumptions about the substance or destiny of the soul. I am using it in an everyday sense, as when we translate a line of Homer as “a man loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.”)

         In capitalist-consumerist-modernist-technological society, the dissolving of community and family produces narcissistic and otherwise damaged personalities as if off the assembly line. Children absolutely depend on their parents for all their needs. Parent, themselves narcissistically needy, use their children to satisfy their own narcissistic needs; ignore them when these needs require it – or resentfully attend to them. The children sense this, and withdraw into a psychic castle to protect their vulnerable egos. They never experience the kind of love that reassures them: they are “good, very good”; it is wonderful that they exist, that they have come into the world. And the world? They are thrown into schools, where, radically insecure, they often confront a kind of “war of all against all,” albeit a sublimated one. Lacking the security that they are worthy of a pure love, they compensate by striving to increase their social market value – in my case, through sports and appearance. But it is a game they cannot win. Always there is someone whose social value implies: you are of lesser worth; you are in the end not lovable. The child loses awareness of that deeper worth that only pure love and nurture can implant.

Fantasy is a necessary defense mechanism allowing us to live with this, though not the only one. (Submerging yourself in a more powerful collective identity, as in sentimental-romantic nationalism, is another.) Daydreams compensate for our lack by imagining us having whatever attributes place one high up on the scale of social value – and thus often make us a worthy object of sexual love by some elevated peer. A typical adolescent fantasy of mine (I cringe to tell it) was to imagine I was much taller and more powerfully built, making me a dominating basketball player. My girl would watch my fantasy-self dominate the game. Well, I am in good company. Lewis relates part of his experience: 

At boarding school] There was a great decline in my imaginative life…. My reading was now mainly rubbish…. I read twaddling school stories in The Captain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, mere wish fulfillment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of the hero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he may like pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.

As Lewis wrote: that kind of fantasy is “training to be a fool.” The more you lack, the more insecure you are, the more powerful the hold fantasy will gain over you. Obviously, much art fuels this ego-program. I myself have never been able to write fiction because as soon as I do I find fantasy takes over the story I wanted to tell.

Imagination (in Lewis’ and Murdoch’s sense) allows an escape from this alienation, allows you to get in touch with the soul. The longing mentioned by Lewis expresses the longing of the forgotten soul to emerge from its subconscious prison into the light of consciousness and the world. Lewis connects it with the experience of joy – in a very special sense. I have always firmly believed that joy is utterly different from happiness, and that somehow joy flows from the sublime soul (sublime because buried beneath the socially constructed ego) whereas happiness (very fleeting) comes from the ego. Lewis describes it like this: 

…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

 

It is the greatest blessing of my life that I understand this because I have experienced exactly the longing Lewis refers to here. For me, for example, the fall season; reading The Lord of the Rings; my books; at times, the Catholic liturgy; formerly the Christmas season, and still the Easter season; my children as babies as periodically still – all this has evoked Joy in me. In Joy you leave the unrelenting ego behind. Something deeper is touched – the soul. The contact comes from some place, idea, thing, or person. You reach out to a reality that is not only an end-in-itself but like a portal to another world, or rather came “trailing clouds of glory” from that other world. I don’t think this commits me to a dualism: the fallen world and the divine realm, for example. I might also explain it as a removing of the ego-blinders such that this world and this life is for a moment revealed in its full glory. You are able to see, not “through a mirror, darkly”, but truly. In this seeing, you become aware that you are a living soul – precisely because you are not focusing on yourself.

       Joy is sublime. By sublime I mean something precise, learned and adapted from Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976). His account illuminates the psyche-soul relation I have been exploring through the distinction between fantasy and imagination. Joy is a sublime experience of transcendence. Whether transcendent to the everyday psyche or the material world – or both – is beside the point now. In our everyday, happy-and-pleasure-pursing, pain-and-unpleasantness-avoiding self we experience the world and everything in it – from trees and the sun to our children – from the perspective of this interpreted self. So, for instance, the first stage: I go out for a fall walk, take in the trees, the sky, the vegetation, the homes, and so on.

Of course, I could sentimentalize these things; transform them in my mind into a kitschy greeting card, for example – and experience some self-gratifying feelings. That is just one aspect of the fantasizing psyche and no escape from it. The longing (Sehnsucht) that is Joy is no longing to be in a kitsch painting. Rather, in the second stage of the sublime experience, your normal categories of ‘autumn’ break down. You – your empirical ego or socially constructed self – is not part of the longing at all. You, or what you ordinarily imagine yourself to be, have left the stage; Joy has replaced you. It’s like you can – as Moses looking into the Promised Land – almost visualize how autumn would be in Heaven or in a Platonic Idea. It is a difficult thing for me to understand. Not the actual fall day or moment in time holding a newborn baby – wonderful though they be – but the longing for joy occasioned by such events goes beyond what occasioned them. It is as if what occasioned them, their full being, breaks through that fantasizing ego and opens the door for the soul to apprehend this being. Now a fall day or a newborn baby may be, as Lewis puts it, an image or reflection of divine reality, or the divine spirit that infuses our being. In Lewis’ own words: 

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. “Reflect” is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image. 

This is the completion of the third stage of the sublime. The everyday experience – say of the fall day – was ruptured by joy in the second stage, and now when you experience other fall days, even though not in the grip of joyful longing, you see them as something very different – as images or reflections (symbols) for some reality that transcends ordinary ego consciousness. The memory of the original experience becomes part of the longing. Simply put, you see the world differently. The fall day activated your spiritual consciousness that emanates from another part of your being, your soul. The only necessary dualism that I insist on is the world as seen through the lens of the constructed self, its clichés and fantasies; and the world as seen through joy and longing – in which imagination plays a powerful role. From the perspective of the latter, the former seems a form of blindness.

      The sublime experience that reveals the living soul is not yet religion. As Lewis wrote, 

In me, at any rate, it contained no element either of belief or of ethics; however far pursued, it would never have made me either wiser or better. 

This reflects Lewis’ commitment to Christianity – a commitment to the belief that only direct contact with Christ can make a person wiser or better than pagan virtue. I don’t quite agree with Lewis here, and the difference is theological and philosophical. Only in fear and trembling do I disagree with Lewis, and fear he may be right and I wrong. I agree that the experience of Joy is probably a necessary condition for religious experience, agree with him that Joy is not yet religion. Still an absolute difference in attitude toward life and the world does exist between those locked in their distorting egos and those who, however much dominated by ego consciousness in their daily lives, have had the breakout experience of Joy.

   In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people have been chained from birth and can only see images on the screen of the cave wall, images produced by cliché and media in the service of the powers that be. They take this to be reality. This is the state of the constructed psyche. Joy is one way to break these chains. It gets you to the top of the cave where the sun cancels the darkness of psyche and reveals the bright world to a soul. This is an absolute difference. A life spent in the cave of ego, from the point of view of the soul who at least knows light exists, is not worth living. Indeed, it is a form of Hell. Once in the sun, you may discover God, you may discover that God’s love infuses the Creation, and much more. Perhaps from that higher spiritual imagination, the sunlight we may see in joy seems as pale a thing as the life of the cave seemed to the soul that the sunlight first awakened. I don’t know. I am sure that the worst thing – Hell – is for the cave (social power and ego) to imprison the soul, and thus never know or even want to know the world as it really is, the world that can awaken a soul into existence.

    One of the tragic, frustrating aspect of making this distinction is that only those who have experienced the escape from the damaged or narcissistic ego that is Joy will be able to believe it. This, moreover, has little to do with merit. Joy is a free grace, but those whom failures of love and community have badly damaged by may not be able to experience it, through no fault of their own. Still, from their perspective, all Joy will be sentimental delusion, which is in reality a corruption of joy. If the damaged, self-protecting narcissistic ego is all, then any apparent escape from must necessarily be an act for others or self-deceit for the purpose of elevating the insecure ego at the expense of other egos. There is little or nothing to be done about this.

    The distinction between fantasy and imagination – and the two parts of our inner lives that each comes from – is key not only for thinking about art but religion. As long as ego consciousness keeps us down, God can only originate in our fantasy. The whole world and heaven can be little more than our own projection, socially constructed at that perspective largely is. The ego consciousness creates its own God, one that makes them feel good, removes their insecurities, places them above others, and above all makes no demands of them. I fear that much liberalism as well as fundamentalism in religion have their sources in ego consciousness. Many people have rightly insisted that the absoluteness of goodness and the demands of a clear conscience place one in touch with something deeper than the superficial self. It is clear to me that imagination does the same.

         

           

Afterthought

All religious people and most thinking people up till the modern period beginning in the 17^th century believed that the anti-thesis of goodness, the definition of the Satanic, was what we call today “autonomy.” As Milton’s Satan precisely puts it: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” Thus what is real and good doesn’t come from Being, from Creation, but from our wills – as informed exclusively by an ego consciousness that walls out any contact with reality and love. Satan knew what he rejected. His will was completely autonomous. Our ego-driven wills, just as busy walling out reality and love, just as busy building “a hell in heaven’s despite,” to quote another poet (Blake), don’t know any better, having been damaged in childhood and throughout our lives by failures of love and community, and subject to a powerful ideological and medial conditioning. You may as well expect someone who knows nothing but soap operas to respond to Shakespeare. It is possible! But only by a difficult rebellion.

     I would end with a quote from Schiller’s well-known poem “Ode to Joy”

 

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

Was der Mode Schwert geteilt;

Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder,

Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

 

Thy enchantments bind together,

What did custom stern divide,

Beggars becomes princes’ brothers,

Where thy gentle wings abide.

  

Kreeft and Hume's Critique of the Syllogism

 

Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic (2004) is more than a textbook on classical, Aristotelian logic. It is also a philosophy of what is called “critical thinking,” in the parlance of our times. As a former teacher’s assistant instructor of introductory logic, I love the book. But I have some questions and perhaps some criticisms of the philosophy part, which has been valuable to stimulate further thinking on the issues raised there. Here I want to reflect on what he writes about Hume’s critique of the syllogism and its connection to the problem of induction. 

. . . 

A syllogism is to argument what an atom is to matter: a fundamental unit whose properties are indispensable for understanding the whole, but which by itself cannot explain the richness of the larger structures built from it. What is a syllogism and what does it have to do with ordinary reasoning? Consider the following argument: 

Many parents lie to their children because they tell them that Santa Claus brings the presents. 

Or you could express it like this: 

Many parents tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents. Therefore, the parents are lying to their children. 

So like every argument, there is a premise and a conclusion. 

         Premise:

Many parents tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents.

 

         Conclusion:

Therefore, the parents are lying to their children.

To think well about this argument, you would have to inquire as to whether the terms were clear (parents, children, Santa, lying, bringing presents) and, if so, whether the premise was true: that is, you can only think about whether the premise is true if its truth doesn’t depend on what different people may mean by the terms. Here, I am just focused on logic.

   And focusing on logic, you can perhaps see that, just like that, the conclusion can’t follow because the premise says nothing about lying at all, so you can make a deduction about lying from that premise alone. And the premise contains a term, Santa Claus, that is not in the conclusion. Thus there is an implicit premise containing lying, one that connects lying with Santa Claus. 

1)   Many parents tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents. 

2)   Anyone who tells a child that Santa Claus brings the presents is lying to that child. [implicit premise] 

3)   Therefore, many parents lie to their children.

 

This is now a syllogism. I want to further analyze it before coming to Hume’s criticism so as it bring out the force of that criticism. There is often a tension between English grammar and logical grammar that need not confuse you. In English grammar the predicate is the entire verb phrase: 

          …tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents 

Logical grammar only cares about what predicate is being attributed to the subject, what general set of things the subject belongs to. So we might rewrite the sentence as: 

{Many parents} are {people who tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents}.

 Now the subject term is still parents, but the predicate term is people who tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents. Logically, the statement asserts that parents and caregivers belong to the set (or class) of people who tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents.

    So rewriting the entire argument, including the implicit premise, in logical form (classical), and adding the logical quantifier (only three: all, no or some) you get:

 

1)   Some {parents} are {people who tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents}. 

2)   All {people who tell a child that Santa Claus brings the presents} are {people who lie to their children}. [implicit premise] 

3)   Some {parents} are {people who lie to their children}.

 

That is the logical grammar or the original argument, one possible way of describing the logical grammar, namely, according to Aristotelian logic. I will keep coming back to this example. 

. . . 

  Hume's criticism of the syllogism is that it cannot teach us anything new. Consider the classic example: 

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

 Hume's argument is that the conclusion is just contained in the premises. If "Socrates" is already included under "all men," then nothing genuinely new has been discovered. Deduction merely unfolds what was already there implicitly. So if the conclusion contains more than the premises, the argument is invalid. But if the conclusion contains no more than the premises, then the argument is useless because it tells us nothing we did not already know. The syllogism is either invalid or trivial.

    Applied to the example above, Hume would say the conclusion is already contained in the premises. If you already know that some parents belong to the class "Santa-tellers," and all Santa-tellers belong to the class "people who lie to their children," then you have not learned anything fundamentally new by concluding that some parents lie to their children. The syllogism merely rearranges what you already accepted. 

. . . 

   Kreeft argues that Hume equivocates on the phrase "already known." The conclusion is contained in the premises implicitly, but not explicitly. That difference is everything. He uses a number of analogies. A sculptor "contains" the statue in the marble, but the statue still has to be carved out. Likewise, a syllogism makes explicit what was previously only implicit. Another analogy is that of unpacking luggage. You already possess everything inside the suitcase, yet opening it genuinely increases your usable knowledge. Nothing has been added, but something has been revealed.

    His deeper point is that Hume assumes that knowledge is like collecting more and more isolated facts. The Aristotelian instead sees knowledge as primarily understanding relations. What does that mean?

    Compare Hume and Aristotle. Suppose someone accepts the premises: 

Some parents tell their children that Santa Claus brings the presents.

Everyone who tells a child that Santa Claus brings the presents lies to the child.

 For Hume, then you already know that some parents lie to their children. The conclusion is simply hidden inside the premises like a folded piece of paper. The syllogism merely unfolds it. Knowledge, on this picture, is essentially possession of information.

   The Aristotelian view is different. Suppose a parent says: "I never lie to my children." Then, after some discussion, he also admits: "Yes, I tell them Santa brings the presents." The syllogism forces him to ask about the relation between these two beliefs. He may never have seen that relation before. The syllogism shows that the following three judgments cannot all stand together: 

1. I tell my children Santa brings the presents.
2. Anyone who tells children Santa brings the presents lies to them.
3. I never lie to my children.

 The intellectual gain is not a new isolated fact. It is an understanding of how these judgments fit, or fail to fit, together.

    For Aristotle, science/knowledge/understanding (epistēmē) is not a collection of propositions expressing states of affairs. It is seeing why things belong together. The example syllogism does not merely state that "Some parents lie." It reveals a conceptual structure. If telling children that Santa brings the presents is true and belongs under lying, then some parents must also belong under people who lie to their children. The syllogism makes that relationship visible.

    Imagine someone who owns three pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but has never fitted them together. For Hume they already possessed the fourth piece because it was implicit in the pieces. For Aristotle, what they lacked was not another piece but seeing how the pieces fit together. That, in my opinion, is genuine understanding. 

. . .

    I think my example may point beyond Kreeft. Suppose someone rejects the second premise. The issue is what counts as a lie, or does this particular kind of case constitute lying. So the syllogism has performed a philosophical service by identifying the exact conceptual relation that is in dispute, allowing us to locate the fault line. The disagreement is about whether telling children fictional stories as true stands in the relation of species to genus with lying. That is also an increase in understanding.

    Kreeft wrote that knowledge consisted in understanding relations. If he means by that that knowing/understanding is a seeing of the conceptual and logical relations among terms and propositions, then that makes sense to me. Whether or not anyone changes their mind about the Santa question, the syllogism identifies exactly which relation must be examined: the relation between telling children that Santa brings the presents and lying. Once that relation is made explicit, the real philosophical discussion can begin. The syllogism has not settled the debate, but it has revealed its logical structure. It makes the architecture of a disagreement visible. That is more than saying it "unpacks" what was already implicit.

. . .

The problem raised by this argument is conceptual, not logical. The syllogism itself cannot settle the question. Everything depends on how we understand lie. If one person’s understanding of the concept is intentionally asserting what one believes false in order to create a false belief, then the premise is prima facie true. If another understands lying in a richer moral sense involving betrayal of trust, then prima facie the Santa stories are not lies. The syllogism remains valid either way as long as the same definition is used in both premises, but you get different statements depending on the meaning attributed to lying. We have to settle the question of whether the Santa stories are real lies. 

Translations as Analogies and Wilson's "complicated man"

 

Many apparent paradoxes about translation arise from the mistaken assumption that a translation must either be identical to the original or entirely different from it. There is a well-known (in translation circles at least) Italian saying: Traduttore, traditore – to translate is to betray. A translation betrays the original because it is not identical to the original. If this is the standard, then translation is impossible. In a lecture on her approach to translation, Emily Wilson uses the ship of Theseus to illustrate this paradox about identity through change. The story comes from ancient Greece and is reported most famously by Plutarch in his Life of Theseus. After Theseus returned from Crete, the Athenians supposedly preserved his ship as a memorial. Over the years, as planks decayed, they were replaced one by one. Eventually every original plank had been replaced. This led philosophers to ask: Is it still the same ship? Nothing in a translation of the Odyssey is left from the original and yet it is still referred to as Homer’s Odyssey. But that a translation has nothing in common with the original can’t be right either. Words are equivocal when the same word has two completely different meanings: a bank to deposit money in vs. the bank of a river to picnic on. None of the translations of the Odyssey that I have read are “equivocations” of the original.  The paradox vanished once identity is replaced by analogy. 

. . .

 Translation is a form of analogy, preserving meaningful similarities while accepting unavoidable differences. I would illustrate the concept of analogy by the analogical meaning of words like good. A good knife is sharp; a good argumentative paper is well-written, well-structured, well-argued; a good teacher is someone who knows their stuff, knows how to communicate it, and inspires love for the subject. Good means something importantly different in each of the three uses. But the word is not equivocal; there is a core similarity, something like a thing being good when it fulfills its purpose and is what it should be. Different but in the essential aspect the same. This illustrates analogical meaning. 

   There is also analogical comparison, one thing being understood through comparison with another. To exemplify the logic: Is there a stronger or weaker analogy between analogy between sex worker and massage therapist? Both take money to perform a bodily service – to that extent the analogy is strong. More moderately, both may be self-employed or have a boss. Both may involve emotional response to some degree. More similarities and I could go on. Is the analogy thus strong? That is disputed. The most obvious difference is that the one involves sex, the other doesn’t. Is that of major significance? That depends on how you understand sex. For most of us it is something intimate, private, deeply connected to our subjectivity. It comes with mutual attraction. It comes with obligations like caring about any physical or emotional consequences. Etc. Thus it is not a possible commodity. Thus the analogy is weak. But if it is intelligible that sex means nothing more than a message to someone else, if that is possible (which I strongly doubt), then the analogy would be strong. The disagreement involves deeper conceptual, moral, and worldview differences as well as different people with different life histories. So it is a complex matter. 

. . . 

   These different examples share a common structure. In both cases understanding depends upon recognizing similarities within differences. The term "good" applies analogically to different kinds of things because each exhibits excellence appropriate to its nature. Likewise, an analogy such as "a sex worker is like a massage therapist" highlights certain shared features while (arguably) highlighting essential differences. In neither case are we dealing with strict identity or complete unrelatedness. Analogical thinking occupies the middle ground between the two, and in this, I just will assert here, it shows the structure of reality. 

     Translation has the same structure, being neither identical to the original nor unrelated to it. As an analogy, it preserves certain features – deemed essential – while neglecting others deemed accidental or, more painfully, less essential. The question is therefore not whether a translation is the same as the original, but whether it preserves the similarities that matter most, the most essential ones. Which is a question of interpretation. Which is why the translation has to be steeped in the original, its language and world. Has to have “wisdom” in this sense. 

. . . 

    An amazing amount of attention has been devoted to Emily Wilson’s  translation of the first line, which I will compare to Richmond Lattimore’s. The Greek adjective polytropos – a rare Greek word that many now know due to this attention – encompasses a range of meanings that no single English word can fully capture: resourceful, versatile, cunning, adaptable, wandering, and difficult to define. Perhaps also it can refer to being tossed around by fate. The word is built on tropos ("turn"), and the poem presents Odysseus as someone who is also turned about by external forces.

   Thus Wilson argues that the word prepares the reader to expect twists and turns (i.e. complexity) from the story that follows: a complicated protagonist in a complicated world. Her "Tell me about a complicated man" loses the literal imagery of many turnings or many ways. But it preserves what she takes to be the essential aspect of Odysseus himself, in addition to his fate: his, well, complexity. The phrase communicates to a modern reader that this is not a straightforward Hollywood hero but a character marked by contradictions, ambiguities, and multiple dimensions. Odysseus is brave and deceptive, loyal and unfaithful, noble and ruthless, and in this respect "complicated" captures something genuinely important about him. Would Homer’s audience have experienced these tensions as tensions? I feel like they might have, but who knows? 

    The cost, however, is that the word loses some of the associations with wandering, turning, and practical resourcefulness that are present in the Greek (these are indicated in other parts of the translation). It also introduces a modern psychological connotation that is not contained in polytropos itself. Here indeed a lot is asked of the reader, namely, to bracket out these modern associations.

   Wilson's choice was also not purely semantic, as I heard her explain in a lecture. She set herself the task of producing a fast-moving six-beat line that would provide modern readers with an experience analogous to the forward momentum of Homer's verse. (This is what I like best about her translation.) Her problem was not simply finding the closest dictionary equivalent of polytropos but finding a word that worked within a larger poetic structure of rhythm, pace, and readability. Indeed, translation choices must satisfy multiple demands simultaneously. Trade-offs are involved. A translator may sacrifice some lexical precision to preserve meter, narrative energy, or emotional impact. Once such constraints are taken into account, Wilson's choice appears less like a simple reinterpretation of a Greek word and more like a judgment about how best to preserve the overall effect of the poem. One can argue about it. One can prefer another solution. It is arguable. It is not an obvious mistake made in the service of ideology in spite of what the culture warriors are preaching about it.  

          Different translators make different judgments about which aspects of this complex meaning are most important to preserve.  Richmond Lattimore's translation, "Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways," attempts to preserve the semantic structure of the Greek as closely as possible. His phrase preserves the sense of multiplicity contained in poly- and hints at the wandering and many-sided character of Odysseus. It has a nice alliteration and rhythm. At the same time, it remains deliberately open-ended. The reader is not told exactly what kind of "many ways" are meant. Are they journeys, strategies, disguises, or traits of character? The ambiguity remains, much as it arguably does in the Greek. The advantage of Lattimore's choice is its fidelity to the range of the original term. Its disadvantage is that many contemporary readers may find the phrase somewhat obscure or merely decorative. 

    I like it. It might be my preferred solution of the four translations I know but that is perhaps because I can fill in the vagueness of the term with my reading of the poem. The risk Wilson takes is giving a more concrete but narrower interpretation of the word. But there is no right or wrong answer as there is in doing a math sum. It is a question of making difficult judgments.

      The difference between these translations comes down to whether the solutions are stronger or weaker analogies to the original. The strength of an analogy depends upon judgments about what is most essential and what is more accidental in the realities being compared. The question is not whether Wilson's phrase is identical to polytropos – an impossible standard – but whether the similarities she emphasizes are more essential than the features she leaves behind. That is the only question, and it is a damn complex question (too complex for the simple-minded culture-war mentality). Translation controversies do often function as philosophical and literary-critical debates in disguise, sometimes heated, exposing competing assumptions about history, morality, politics, textual interpretation, and human nature. That is what makes it so interesting, minus the unfortunate attempt of culture warriors to high-jack it. one of the great things about reading great works is that you can leave all that behind you. What a tragedy would it be if one could not read a translation of The Odyssey without being dragged into a culture war that is almost wholly located in Plato's shadowy cave, i.e., is itself a form of ideology (false consciousness). (True, this false consciousness is a distortion of deeper problems that reasonable people of good will can see differently, just as reasonable people of good will can see the Wilson choice of "complicated" differently.)      

    The real question is not which translation is literally the same as Homer, but which aspects of Homer each translation succeeds in carrying across and which aspects it inevitably leaves behind. You have to read both to know the answer. I love all the translations I know: Fitzgerald and Lattimore from old, more recently Wilson and Mendelsohn. All interesting variations on a fascinating theme. All together give you a more complete picture of the original, like different perspectives of a sculpture will give you a better idea of the sculpture as a whole.

   A Homer scholar who has spent most of their lives with Greek can notice things that I cannot. But that does not mean that I am incapable of appreciating Homer or forming intelligent judgments about translations. We can notice readability, tone, rhythm, emotional force, and whether a translation helps us see aspects of the work we had previously overlooked. And my Greek is good enough to compare some passages and see whether choices are plausible and defensible. But it is not good enough to adjudicate every scholarly controversy. For that I would be inclined to defer to someone like my former professor Robert Rabel, who is steeped in Homer. 

   Sometimes I feel it is like listening to a Bernstein and a von Karajan performance of a Beethoven symphony. You have to be steeped in classical music to be able to follow a critical discussion of the differences – I couldn’t. You know both performances sound a bit different and perhaps you know which sounds better to you. But both can be enjoyed. The analogy is imperfect, since translators alter the words whereas conductors perform the same score, but it captures an important truth: appreciation does not require mastery, and disagreement among experts does not prevent ordinary readers from enjoying, debating, and learning from different interpretations. 

The Translator and the Philosophical Thinker

 

I have been thinking a lot about different translations of the Odyssey recently, and also about the act of translating in general, whether from one language (ancient Greek) into another or from the word into moving pictures (as in the Nolan film). And in thinking about the fitting relationship between the translator and the original, I am again reminded of the relationship of someone trying to understand (interpret) reality philosophically. Right away it seems clear to me that the first virtue is humility and respect before the original – whether it be reality (Creation=reality as respected) or the original text. The idea of stewardship forces itself on me (as thought by Berry) rather than creation. The 'original sin' is projecting what has its source in ego-consciousness, including ego-uplifting ideologies, onto reality/the original. I want to try to make sense of that thought.

. . .

 The basic thought seems to be that both the philosopher and the translator begin with something that is already there. Neither creates – “constructs” the primary object, although “constructing” or “creating” a simulacrum or idol of the primary object is a human possibility and is indeed more common that the opposite. The philosopher encounters reality; the translator encounters a text. Their first task is not construction but attention.

     Simone Weil's notion of attention (the French word as she uses it) and Iris Murdoch's related idea of "unselfing" refer to something far deeper than ordinary concentration or mental effort, as the English word means. Attention is a disciplined openness to reality in which the ego temporarily relinquishes its habitual tendency to interpret everything in terms of its own desires, fears, ambitions, and preoccupations. It is not an act of mastery but of receptivity. For Weil, genuine knowledge begins when we cease trying to force reality into the shape of our expectations and instead allow it to disclose itself on its own terms. Murdoch similarly argues that moral and intellectual error often arise from the "fat relentless ego" that projects its fantasies onto the world, while virtue consists in learning to see what is actually there. Attention is therefore a form of loving regard, a patient, just, and truthful looking that acknowledges the independent reality of the other, whether another person, a work of art, a text, or the world itself. It does not eliminate interpretation but purifies it by making interpretation answerable to something beyond the self. In this sense, attention is both an epistemic and a moral virtue: it is the condition under which reality can correct us, surprise us, and gradually draw us beyond the confines of our own subjectivity. Attention, in other words, is the refusal to place the self at the center of reality. It is a movement from possession to participation, from projection to perception, from the closed circle of consciousness toward a reality that always exceeds it. For Weil and Murdoch, truth achieved by a purification of vision. We see more truly to the extent that we become less imprisoned within ourselves.

     From this arises humility. Humility is the recognition that one is not the center, source, or measure of reality. The attentive person discovers limits: the text exceeds me, the land exceeds me, the other person exceeds me, Being exceeds me. Humility is therefore the appropriate response to the recognition of otherness and transcendence.

     From humility follows stewardship. If the land, the text, or the world possesses a reality and value not derived from my desires, then my relation to it cannot be one of ownership in the absolute sense. I become a caretaker rather than a master. Stewardship is humility translated into practice. (Compare to modernism, for example, to Locke, for whom land in its natural state has relatively little value. It becomes valuable when human beings mix their labor with it, cultivate it, improve it, fence it, drain it, plant it, and make it productive. Nature provides the raw material; human effort creates most of the value. We force nature to serve our needs – an attitude that is the origin of the current ecological crises.)

      So I turn again to Wendell Berry, from whom I learned the importance of the idea of stewardship. He argues that modern industrial society treats the land as an object to be manipulated according to abstract economic calculations. The farmer ceases to know the particular field, creek, soil, and community. In Weil's terms, he ceases to attend. Once attention disappears, humility disappears as well, because the land is no longer encountered as something with its own nature and limits. It becomes merely a resource. Stewardship gives way to exploitation. For Berry, the good farmer is first of all a good observer. He knows the contours of a field, the habits of water, the character of a soil, the history of a place. This is already a form of attention. Such knowledge produces respect, because one learns that the land cannot be successfully treated as infinitely malleable. The attentive farmer therefore becomes a steward rather than a conqueror. Attention reveals the reality of the other. Humility accepts that reality. Stewardship acts in accordance with it. Or to put it differently, attention is the experience-understanding that something has a being of its own. Humility is the acknowledgment that this being does not derive from oneself. Stewardship is the practical discipline of caring for that being in a manner appropriate to its nature.

     This is also why the biblical notion of stewardship is deeper than mere land management. A manager can still think in terms of control and efficiency. A steward serves something entrusted to him. The steward recognizes that the vineyard, the flock, or the land ultimately belongs to another. The concept therefore already contains humility. Seen this way, Weil, Murdoch, Berry, and the biblical tradition are all pushing against the same modern temptation: the transformation of the world into an extension of the will. The fundamental alternative is not between action and passivity but between care and control. Attention is the mode of perception proper to care; stewardship is the mode of action proper to care; and humility is the disposition that makes both possible.

       In my translator analogy, the pattern is the same. Attention means listening carefully (reading carefully) to the original text, just as one would listen attentively to one’s children or friends as a precondition for understanding them. Humility consists in recognizing that the text has meanings that exceed one's preconceptions. And stewardship involves producing a translation that serves the original rather than using the original to serve oneself. The same structure can be extended to philosophy, to the land, to other persons, and ultimately to Being itself. The underlying movement is always from projection and mastery toward receptivity and faithful participation. 

. . . 

  The primary virtue of both philosophical thinker and the translator then is humility before what is given. The philosopher does not create reality but seeks to understand it. The translator does not create the original text but seeks to render it faithfully in another language. In both cases, the task is one of stewardship rather than ownership. The translator is entrusted with a text; the philosopher is entrusted with the world.

      The characteristic temptation of both philosopher and translator (and farmer) is to substitute what originates in the self for what originates in the object. Instead of listening, one projects. Instead of receiving, one imposes. Reality is made to conform to a theory, and the text is made to conform to an ideology. What appears as interpretation becomes a disguised form of self-expression, whereas truth is the conformity of intellect to reality (adaequatio intellectus et rei), involves conserving rather than mastery.

    Of course, translation and philosophy are creative acts, in a sense, but they are forms of disciplined creativity. Their freedom is bounded by fidelity. The translator creates a new text in service of an original text; the philosopher develops concepts in service of reality. Error begins when service gives way to mastery and the interpreter starts treating the text or the world as raw material for the expression of the self. The translator and philosopher are active participants, but their activity is answerable to something that precedes them.

     In this respect, Tolkien's idea of "sub-creation" comes to mind. And indeed, the inevitability and productivity of interpretation, how it fits in with humility and stewardship. If reality is creation and the text is an already existing work, then the philosopher and translator are neither passive copyists nor sovereign creators. They are sub-creators. Their activity is genuine and productive, but it remains dependent upon and accountable to something prior. Tolkien writes in “On Fairy-Stories” that human beings make because they are made in the image of a Maker. Human creativity is therefore not rival to creation but participates in it. Applied to translation and philosophy, this means that humility does not require the suppression of creativity. Rather, creativity flourishes most fully when it acknowledges its dependence on what precedes it. The translator creates a new text, but in response to an original text. The philosopher develops concepts and interpretations, but in response to reality. Both are acts of sub-creation rather than self-creation.

    This also helps with the question of interpretation. There is no "view from nowhere." We never encounter reality or a text without language, tradition, interests, and historical situatedness. Interpretation is therefore inevitable, made inevitable by the radically finite, conditioned mind engaging with that which transcends it. But this does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid or that the object disappears. Indeed, interpretation is not a barrier between the mind and reality but the medium through which reality becomes intelligible. The question is not whether we interpret but whether our interpretations remain answerable to what is being interpreted. Which is where humility enters. Humility is not the fantasy of becoming a perfectly transparent medium. It is the willingness to allow the object to correct us.

     This line of thought, not original to me, implies a correction of our critical vocabulary. The contrasts are not between interpretation and literal reproduction, between creativity and fidelity, but between the distorted and the faithful, the self-enclosed and the responsive interpretation, self-expression masquerading as interpretation verses sub-creative interpretation. Mastery verses stewardship. A translator who mechanically reproduces words without interpretation has failed just as surely as a translator who rewrites Homer into a vehicle for contemporary political commitments. Likewise, a philosopher who merely repeats inherited formulas has failed just as surely as one who remakes reality in the image of a favorite theory.

    Tolkien's idea allows us to say that the highest form of creativity is not self-assertion but participation. The translator and philosopher do not create ex nihilo. They participate in a reality or a text that exceeds them, bringing forth meanings that were genuinely there but not yet fully realized in this particular language, culture, or historical moment. The interpreter is neither a mirror nor a master; he or she ought to be faithful participant in an ongoing act of disclosure.

 . . . 

   I suppose the crucial move, the one that will be questioned, is the analogy BEING:TEXT.  Most people – not all – would readily grant that a text can exceed a reader and that a translator ought to approach it with humility. The more controversial claim is that Being itself stands in an analogous relation to the knower: i.e., that reality is not merely a collection of neutral facts as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (“the world is what is the case”) but something that can be read, interpreted, disclosed, and misunderstood.

    Of course, the analogy is common in the tradition to which I feel I belong. Augustine perhaps came up with the image of the Book of Nature. Aquinas's postulated that creatures are intelligible because they participate in divine reason. Galileo thought the universe is written in the language of mathematics and Newton thought he was thinking God’s thoughts after him. Berry writes as though the reality of a place makes demands upon our attention analogous to those placed by a text. But many modern thinkers would object, believing that a text has an author and therefore an intended meaning. Reality is not a text because reality has no author and therefore no meaning to be discovered. A text is already an interpretation; reality is merely what is there. In other words, the analogy works naturally within a broadly theistic, classical, or hermeneutic framework, but less naturally within a naturalistic one.

    Of course, to speak of an analogy here means that I am not saying that reality is literally a book. What the analogy says is that both texts and reality confront us as something that exceeds our interpretations and places constraints upon them. The force of the analogy lies not in authorship but in otherness. A translator discovers that the text resists certain readings. Likewise, the philosopher discovers that reality resists certain descriptions. In both cases, understanding is a dialogue between interpreter and interpreted rather than an act of unilateral construction. Being is text-like because it possesses intelligibility that precedes and exceeds our interpretations. And our relation to Being resembles our relation to a text insofar as both require interpretation, humility, and openness to correction.

     The analogy is almost forced on me and other by experience in a similar sense that the concept of God can be forced on one. [In his later work, and perhaps even more in the recollections of those who knew him, Wittgenstein believed that certain concepts are not presented as conclusions of proofs but as ways of seeing that become difficult to avoid once one attends to experience properly. It is not a matter of proving x but that x is what makes sense of experience]. It makes sense of experience, reflected on phenomenologically. I am not arguing that reality is like a text; therefore, we should interpret it as one. I am arguing that careful reflection on our experience of understanding, misunderstanding, discovery, surprise, correction, and disclosure leads us to a text-like conception of reality. We observe that there is a difference between looking at something and merely projecting onto it. Again and again we discover that reality exceeds our categories, resists our projections, surprises our expectations, and rewards patient attention with deeper disclosure. The language of interpretation, reading, and understanding therefore appears not as a metaphor imposed upon reality but as an attempt to describe faithfully our encounter with it. That structure is equally recognizable in moral life, in science, in philosophy, in art, and in translation. What first suggests the analogy is resistance.

     Once that distinction is granted, reality has already acquired at least one of the crucial features of a text: it can answer back. It can prove us wrong. A text resists me; it is not infinitely malleable. Analogously, reality resists me; it is not infinitely malleable. Another person resists me; they are not simply an extension of my consciousness. This resistance is precisely what ego-consciousness finds inconvenient and what attention learns to welcome as it can reveal more than we initially saw.

     And that is the hinge of my whole argument: the possibility of attention presupposes that there is something there to attend to which is not simply a projection of the self. If that claim fails, then both philosophy and translation collapse into competing acts of self-expression, i.e., subjectivism, solipsism.