Customer Reviews

Aristotle's Metaphysics

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First I will discuss the positives of Mr. Sachs's translation. The question of whether someone should or should not read the Metaphysics is self-evident.

The edition is aesthetically fabulous. Green Lion Press always crafts superlative texts (cf. their editions of Euclid and Apollonius) and the Metaphysics is no exception. Margins are generous, the cover is sturdy, and the pages are both sewn and glued. If one takes even the smallest care with it, the book will last many years.

The translation is likewise competitive with every other essentially literal translation available, though not their superior. Sachs replaces Latinate cognates such as "substance", "actuality", and "potentiality" with terms like "thinghood", "being-at-work-staying-itself", and "potency". Make use of his glossary and your lexicon to figure out "ousia", "energeia", and "dunamis". After this work to make sense of Aristotle's technical terms, this translation will serve you well.

The downside to Mr. Sachs' translation is this: it is not really superior to any other essentially literal translation available: Hippocrates Apostle's and W.D. Ross' translations serve admirably. I do not share Mr. Sachs' contention that the Latin translations of Aristotle have obscured his meaning; rather, I contend Aristotle's work contains difficult technical vocabulary, and how one translates this vocabulary can never be "immediately comprehended" as Mr. Sachs asserts. One must struggle, then, directly with "substance" or "thinghood"; indirectly, with "ousia".

I've not read Sachs's translation of the Metaphysics, though I did work through his version of the Physics during a summer at St. John's College (where he teaches). His Metaphysics was circulating as a xerox copy at the college bookstore; I'm glad to see it in print.

Anyone unfortunate enough (as I am) to read Aristotle in English rather than ancient Greek, can benefit from Sachs's translations, though it remains worthwhile to have something like the classic Oxford translation alongside, to compare their senses of the Greek text. Sachs's object is to recover what Aristotle may've been up to, by avoiding the Latinate terminology that haunts Aristotle studies and trying to find more "authentic" meanings for the Greek words. Whatever his ultimate success or failure, it's wonderful to have such a fresh approach to the translation of Aristotle available.

Without knowing Greek and the subtle shades of meaning and relationships among words that such knowledge reveals, understanding the depth of Aristotle's Metaphysics is nearly impossible - unless you have Joe Sachs' translation. Through other translators, Aristotle seems to be playing an archaic game of semantics, and so would seem difficult to take seriously as providing us a viable philosophical system. The reviewer below criticizes Sachs for departing from the usual practice of using Latin cognates to translate key words, as if those cognates are more intelligible than Sachs's non-standard English. To a certain extent, this is true - the usual "actuality" for Aristotle's "entelecheia" is a more intelligible word in English than Sachs's "being-at-work-staying-itself". "Actuality" sounds straightforward, while Sachs's phrase makes us scratch our heads and ponder the meaning. Such pondering, however, is the point. After Sachs has made you ponder, do you suspect that you might understand a bit more about what Aristotle was up to than if you just ran across "actuality" without giving it a second thought? If someone told you that Aristotle simply meant "actuality" and then you found out that the Greek word contained everything expressed in "being-at-work-staying-itself", wouldn't you feel like like the previous translator pulled the wool over your eyes? I'll gladly accept more awkward English as the price for grasping the richness of Aristotle's vocabulary. The one other highly useful translation is Montgomery Furth's for its faithfulness to Aristotle's sentence structure, though it contains only part of the Metaphysics and uses the latin-derived vocabulary.

Apart from the translation, Sachs's notes provide unique insights quite unlike any I've seen from the usual big names who specialize in ancient philosophy, and will provide immense help to the student and open a new horizon of understanding for the seasoned reader. In fact, the notes and introduction alone would make this translation worth buying. Perhaps this is partly explained by the fact that Sachs seems to take Aristotle more seriously, and to read him more sympathetically, than most any other contemporary English commentator.

I cannot recommend Sachs's effort highly enough - and the same goes for his translations of other works by Plato and Aristotle.

I preface this with one caveat: I am not a Greek scholar. I have, however, read this book, in toto, in this translation. I have also read, though not in its entirety, another translation. Joe Sachs, positively a very intelligent scholar of these texts, has tried to put it into what he considers to be true to the Greek. Again, I am not a scholar of the Greek language, but I think that Sachs goes 'overboard,' if you will, in presenting to us, the laypeople, a translation beyond what is really necessary to get the job done. By that, I mean that a traditional translation is more than adequate, so long as you don't try to get at the Thomistic textual analysis at first go-round, or so I'm told. There are several chapters (keeping in mind, this is Aristotle's Metaphysics we're talking about) where I had trouble discerning pages at a time, reading and re-reading just for an objective account of what Aristotle was saying, or trying to say through Dr. Sachs. The Metaphysics should be read; that is not the question. The question is whether this is the translation for you. I, for one, will say that it is not. Not because of uncanny foresight, but due to the difficult readability of such a complex exposition on reality, being, and, in the concluding chapters of course, God. So, I give this version 3 stars: as a text in itself, it is good; it is not a wonderfully understandable translation, however. I hope that this verbose review has been beneficial for you.

This translation of Aristotle from the Greek directly into modern English makes use of the scholarship surrounding the efforts which have been most successful with Heidegger.

`Thus, the way I understand *to ti en einai* departs from, but is rooted in, Owen's understanding of it. The same is true of my rendering *ousia* as "thinghood," when it is used in a general sense, and as "an independent thing" when it is used of singulars. I have heard two sorts or criticism of my use of the word thinghood in Aristotle's PHYSICS. The one sort, that it occasions laughter or embarrassment, is a general instance of Heidegger's observation in WHAT IS A THING? that philosophy is that at which thoughtless people laugh. Let the laughter or embarrassment subside, and then judge the meaning carried by the word, both on its own and in its context, on its merits. The other sort of criticism regrets the fact that thinghood is not as closely related to being as *ousia* is to *to on.* . . .' (p. xxxvii).

"Lassie is an *ousia,* and the *ousia* of Lassie is dog." (p. xxxviii).

Intellectuals need to pay attention to the concepts that are used in their own fields, if nowhere else, and Aristotle was close to the peak of ancient Greek intellectual attainment.

"Aristotle invents a second word, being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia), converging with it in meaning, to sharpen and clarify his use of being-at-work, and he gives an array of examples in which we are meant to `see at a glance by means of analogy,' what it means (1048a 39)." (p. xxxix).

In the beginning of this book, ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS, Translated by Joe Sachs, there is a Greek Glossary with 49 words or phrases on three pages, followed by an English Glossary of 43 words or phrases on eleven pages. "This is a slightly revised version of the glossary that appears with the translation of the PHYSICS, based upon those passages in which Aristotle explains and clarifies his own usage. Bekker page numbers from 184 to 267 refer to the PHYSICS; those from 980 to 1093 are in the METAPHYSICS." (p. xlix).

Chapters are short, especially in Book V (Book Delta), which Joe Sachs calls "Things Meant in More than One Way." This has usually been considered "a dictionary, but Aristotle himself, at the beginnings of Books VII and X, says that it is about the various ways things are meant. The point is not to define words but to collect and organize the distinct senses of important words meant in more than one way. These ambiguities are not verbal but inherent in things, and Aristotle steadfastly preserves them." (p. 77, n. 1).

I am not particularly fond of this book. If undergraduate college courses are meant to provide students with general outlook on likely events, and graduate schools at major universities are intended to select those students who want to qualify for cutting edge work in a highly specialized professional discipline, the works of Aristotle seem to be the high point of a Greek attempt to create an upper level above anything that had previously been considered possible. Alexander the Great, as a student of Aristotle, might be faulted for aspiring to far more than what could be useful, just as Heidegger seemed to be pushing for a German spirit that was sure to damn the rest of the world to misery when he assumed a place in the leadership of a German university backing Hitler and the Nazi party.

I did not find Aristotle's approach to religion in Book VI to be inspiring, though it does seem to be intellectual. "But if there is anything that is everlasting and motionless and separate, . . .

"And while it is necessary that all causes be everlasting, these are so most of all, since they are responsible for what appears to us of the divine. Therefore there would be three sorts of contemplative philosophy, the mathematical, the natural, and the theological; for it is not hard to see that if the divine is present anywhere, it is present in a nature of this kind, and that the most honorable study must be about the most honorable class of things. The contemplative studies, then, are more worthy of choice than are the other kinds of knowledge, and this one is more worthy of choice than are the other contemplative studies." (pp. 110-111).

This is a nice priority for an established church to maintain its dignity, but it is far more ancient than modern. It is not clear how infinite his "triangle containing two right angles" (p. 112) is supposed to be. Even his attempts to tiptoe around the major stereotypes of ancient bookworms seem limp. "For instance, it is neither always nor for the most part that someone pale has a refined education, but since it sometimes happens, it will be incidental (or if not, everything would be by necessity)." (p. 113).

The Index only mentions three pages in Aristotle's text for Socrates, though Aristotle often uses his name as an example: "And since Socrates exerted himself about ethical matters and not at all about the whole of nature," (p. 14) and "so that whether Socrates is or is not, one might become like Socrates, and it is obvious that it would be the same even if Socrates were everlasting." (p. 23). Two generations of seeking lessons from Socrates, ignoring whatever meaning the hemlock had, took place before we find Aristotle finally admitting "For there are two things one might justly credit Socrates with, arguments by example and universal definition," (p. 260). A real philosopher ought to do better than that.