I am not a public man
2 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the sixth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
In the previous article in this series I discussed some of the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica. In this article I will continue in the same vein by discussing another example of how certain mistranslations obscure our understanding of Aristotle.
My focus in this article is on the terms public and political. Whereas the previous article focused on a Greek term (politeia) that has no Latin cognate, the opposite is the case here; there is no Greek cognate for the Latin publicus. So when Benjamin Jowett translates Socrates’ famous statement οὐκ εἰμὶ τῶν πολιτικῶν (Gorgias, 473e) as “I am not a public man,” we know something fishy is going on.
W.R.M. Lamb’s translation is not much better: “I am not one of your statesmen.” In both cases, the English translation obscures the deep conceptual resonances of Socrates’ remark. For the word which Jowett renders “public man” and which Lamb renders “statesman” is πολιτικῶν (politikón), which is of course directly related to polis and politeia. A far more obvious translation of Socrates’ statement would therefore be “I am not a politician.”
Politikón is a notoriously difficult word to translate, as the entry in the famous intermediate Liddell-Scott dictionary of Ancient Greek (widely known as Middle Liddell) makes clear:
The difficulty arises because the word is so intimately bound up with a specifically Athenian concept of the polis, as explicated in various ways by Plato and Aristotle. It is, like Cicero’s concept of res publica, not something that admits of a simple dictionary definition, but comprises a whole philosophy, a Weltanschauung. But it is precisely this connection which most English translations of Plato’s Gorgias tend to obscure, and which is much more clearly brought out by translating Socrates’ remark in Gorgias [473e] as “I am not a politician.”
The English mistranslations compound the error by obscuring the important connection between this remark by Socrates near the beginning of Gorgias and his later remark, near the end of the dialogue (Gorgias, 521d):
οἶμαι μετ᾽ ὀλίγων Ἀθηναίων, ἵνα μὴ εἴπω μόνος, ἐπιχειρεῖν τῇ ὡς ἀληθῶς πολιτικῇ τέχνῃ καὶ πράττειν τὰ πολιτικὰ μόνος τῶν νῦν
Lamb renders this as follows:
I think I am one of few, not to say the only one, in Athens who attempts the true art of statesmanship, and the only man of the present time who manages affairs of state.
A much more literal translation would be something like this:
I am with a few Athenians today, so as not to say alone, one who practises the true art of politics and one who alone practises politics.
In other words, whereas Socrates had said, near the beginning of the dialogue, that he was not a politician, Socrates now says he is one — perhaps indeed the only person in Athens who still practises the true art of politics [alithós politikí téchni, ἀληθῶς πολιτικῇ τέχνῃ ] and who alone practices politics [práttein tá politiká mónos, πράττειν τὰ πολιτικὰ μόνος].
This is, of course, only an apparent contradiction. When Socrates at first denies that he is a politician, he is using the term politikón in the sense that it had by this point in Athenian history come to be used by the majority of citizens, which is similar to the way in which the English word politician is used today. It is, at best, morally neutral, and more often carries negative connotations, suggesting an image of someone who is interested above all in gaining power at any cost.
When Socrates later claims that he is perhaps the only real politician in Athens — the only one who still practises the true art of politics — he is gesturing towards an older sense of the term — one in which a politician is, by definition, someone who is concerned above all for the good of the whole polis, and who engages in a sincere quest to discover what the best public policies are by debating, dialectically and publicly (i.e. in the agora) with his peers, the other free and equal citizens of Athens. It is this kind of politician who no longer exists, with the notable exception of Socrates, and this kind of politics that is all but dead outside of philosophy — thanks largely to the pernicious influence of the Sophists. It is this kind of politics that Aristotle attempts to describe — anachronistically — in his book on the topic.
The Latin distinction between public (publicus) and private (privatus) actually captures an important dimension of the old Athenian idea, in which politics is the highest form of human action, and can only occur in the agora, the town square, where free and equal citizens meet to debate and vote, in contrast with the domestic realm of the household, the oikos. The oikos is precisely where people are deprived of (deprived has the same etymology as private) the conditions for becoming fully human — the privation (privatio) that is, of the necessary conditions for fulfilling their nature as political animals, according to Aristotle’s definition of man as πολιτικὸν ὁ ἄνθρωπος ζῷον (politikón o ánthropos zóo) in his Politics [1253α].
However, these resonances, which are immanent in the Latin terms publicus and privatus, are largely absent from the modern English terms public and private, which have come to acquire very different connotations — some of which point in exactly the opposite direction to those of publicus and privatus. This inversion is not a mere question of semantics; it goes to the heart of the modern condition, the one which Hannah Arendt described so perceptively in her magnum opus, The Human Condition, which Freud identified as the source of so much psychopathology, and for which only Lacanian psychoanalysis offers any real hope of coming to terms with.
For the next article in this series, click here.
