You Know What I Mean, Right?
11 Aug, 2024
I won't dispute the fact that I initially felt burdened with what I percieved to be the expectations of everyone who had ever known me, at least digitally. It should be a no-brainer that my first actual post be about the peculiarities of the Azuchi-Momoyama period, or maybe even Nagoya Castle, since currently that seems like a perfect intersection of interest.
So naturally, I want to talk about language. I've been doing my usual 'dabbling' in linguistics as of late. I can't pinpoint where my interest in it stemmed exactly. Maybe it came from mediating so many conflicts? The most distinct catalyst to me would probably be during my fall semester in 2023, where my English Composition professor assigned us 'Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics'. (Yes you can read the whole thing free right there. It isn't terrible in terms of content but the prose is what hurts the most.) Now obviously we were required to write and reflect on the various values we learned from Aristotle's brilliant super ultra dead mind, but because I am famously cooperative, I liked to debate the professor.
I couldn't win. It was pretty much a battle of values from the start, and I'm not very good at being persuasive. As I reflected on why my professor couldn't grasp the fact that Aristotle might be wrong, I started to doubt myself. Was my moral compass out of whack? Was I messed up for thinking that doing good things to feel good about yourself wasn't an issue? Should I start sleeping before 3AM and teach myself French?
Then I got 8 hours of sleep and was normal again.
I still couldn't understand this lady though. So perhaps a change of perspective was in order. It was then I realized that we were reading the same words, sure, but we were also seeing completely different implied meaning. To my professor, Aristotle was a friend, someone who was naturally moderate. They were familiar enough that he could write something like whatever the hell the 'Right Reason' is, and she would simply assume that he had miraculously accounted for every edge case.
It's like when your friend makes a badly worded post and you know them well enough that you're like yeah, of course this makes sense, and you don't even think to correct them and suddenly 4 hours later it's turned into a whole thing where they've accidentally somehow talked themselves into a situation where they look like they're condoning the brutal and inefficient tax system before the The Japanese Land Tax Reform of 1873. (I was not condoning that, for the record, I was just kind of wondering what would have happened if private property ownership hadn't been implemented and capitalism didn't happen. I swear I support farmers rights. Or at least the idea of them, because it seems like this didn't go too well. We all hate when farmers are turned into tennants on the land they farm, right?)
To my withering brain, Aristotle seemed full of himself (though I enjoyed when he would make a point to refute or insult contrary ideas/philosophers. love a little philosophical beef.) Just. Entirely unspecific? Exactly what helpful conclusion was I meant to draw from:
"Thus much is plain, that the mean state is in all things praiseworthy, and that practically we must deflect sometimes towards excess sometimes towards defect, because this will be the easiest method of hitting on the mean, that is, on what is right." (Aristotle, Book 2, Chapter VIII)
Now before you get up all in my face like: "Squid, he's wayyyy more specific in Book 2, please be serious", I completely disagree, because even though he outlines what the preferable extremes are (later on, not in Book 2 though), what an 'extreme' is is still, entirely subjective to the reader. Aristotle's exhorting is fundamentally useless to someone who lacks the ability to judge themselves objectively. Which happens to be a lot of people.
Tangent aside, I also recalled that this was a translated text. There's a particularly long note from the translator that precedes the actual books I highly recommend reading, not only because it kind of summarizes things in laymans terms, but also because it acts as a proof that what you are about to read is an interpretation of a text, and not the text itself. There's layers to this. This cemented two things for me:
- I would never study philosophy in an academic setting
- This wasn't about Aristotle's ideas at all, was it?
See, me and my professor were functioning at two completely different orders of processing. Aristotle uses very specific terminology, terminology that he defines rather tediously, just so that he can have you read a sentence and understand it exactly the way he wants. My professor is a qualified professional because she can read all of this and understand the precise pragmatics of it. I am an amateur analyst because I read all of that and could only see those words in the context they were used in my own life. I lacked perspective. I couldn't switch over to Aristotle-brain. I don't think I ever tried, actually.
It's so much more than 'giving people benefit of the doubt.' (I mean, who am I to take such a condescending stance on Aristotle?) It's about understanding how Aristotle, my professor, my family, my friend who felt the need to have an opinion on land tax reforms from the Meiji Era, and everyone else communicated, and by consequence, understanding how they saw the world. I started paying more attention to the exact words my family would use and the implied context that threaded through all of our exchanges. Then I was able to understand the source of so many of our conflicts too. It was like some weird super power I had unlocked. I became a lot less reactionary, which made my experience on social media more tranquil. I won't say I'm immune to being incensed by the occasional 'bad take' though.
Man, linguistics is cool. I think I'll study it.
If you read all of that, here's what I think Aristotle's fursona would look like.
It turns out, he was somewhat of a cephalopod expert.