Translatorsâ Note
Like Pierre Hadot, Juliusz DomaÅskiâs work on philosophy as a way of life (manière de vivre, mode/genre de vie) uses relatively few technical terms that could present special difficulties for translators. That said, French was not DomaÅskiâs first language, as he acknowledges, and occasional sentences in the text do pose unusual challenges to render in clear, flowing English. There are in addition two terminological issues that we faced, and which are worth flagging to readers here.
The first is the notion of a ârealized ethicsâ [éthique réalisée], which DomaÅski identifies as a âscience of conduct not only theoretical, but âpracticed.ââ [p. 9] The importance of the term to DomaÅski is clear: âin the later periods of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophy,â he asserts, ârealized ethics [lâéthique réalisée] was explicitly considered to be the most important philosophical discipline.â [p. 10] DomaÅski will even speak of the ethic âauthentically realized [éthique authentiquement réalisée] by the philosopher,â which, he argues, was âcalled into question, if not totally deniedâ in patristic Christian appropriation of ancient philosophy [p. 19]
As other usages in the text confirm, this term is clearly the product of rendering the verb réaliser, âto realise,â into an adjectival form. So, DomaÅski tells us that, for the late ancient pagan commentators who sought to systematize the classic philosophical texts, âthe science of true being is the lowest level of the system, while the ethics realized upon it [lâéthique réalisée en est], by contrast, is the highestâ [p. 10], and also that, long before them, even Aristotle, the preeminent exponent of theoria as the highest form of life, âwas well aware of the fact that the ethics realized by the philosopher [lâéthique réalisée par le philosophe] constituted an indispensable component for the authenticity and integrity of philosophy.â [p. 12]
Of further note here is the evidently closely related notion of a âpracticed ethicsâ [éthique pratiquée]. Characterizing the culture of 13th century scholasticism, DomaÅski writes:
There is a reciprocal interpenetration of theological and philosophical elements, a penetration accompanied however by the formal separationâmore radical than everâof one part of philosophy, reduced to its theoretical content, from faith, which contains from now on in itself also what we have defined as a practiced ethics. [p. 41]
Later in the same discussion, DomaÅski claims that with that separation of philosophy and faith, âan active morality, a practiced ethics, all this belongs to another order [than what comes to fall under the philosophical heading of ethics].â [p. 42] However, that this notion is, if not identical in meaning with ârealized ethics,â then in closest relation to the term, is established, where he describes a ârealized ethicsâ exactly as a âscience of conduct not only theoretical, but âpracticedâ [pratiquée], incarnated as it were in the behavior of the philosopher, an art of living exercised by [philosophers] themselves.â [p. 9]
The term ârealized ethicsâ in any case may strike readers as relatively unusual in English. It is unusual in French, too. We could find no less unusual ways of translating lâéthique réalisée; and its very strangeness should draw the readerâs attention to the distinctiveness of DomaÅskiâs idea. He is talking of an ethics which is more than the content of a theoretical discipline. It is the content of a way of life students may lead, which illuminates as much as is illuminated by theoretical discourse. We might say that this corresponds to what Hadot called âlived ethicsâ in contrast to a discourse about ethics. Such a ârealized ethicsâ is less a topic to be covered within a philosophical system or syllabus (along with metaphysics, epistemology, and so forth) than a transformation of the experience of its students, insofar as their theoretical learning attains living sense in the ways they feel, desire, think and act in the world. We venture to suggest that DomaÅski would have us see the distinction between a (merely) theoretical or âtheoreticizedâ ethics and a ârealized ethicsâ as a radical reversal of the general post-Kantian distinction between âpureâ and âappliedâ science. From this point of view, the science of âpure practical reason,â along with other modern attempts to render a wholly procedural ethics, appears drastically incomplete.
The second technical term needing discussion is DomaÅskiâs use of the adjective, scientiste. In English, we have the words âscientisticâ and âscientific.â A similar distinction can be made in French between scientiste and scientifique. âScientistic,â from the noun, âscientism,â describesâand typically deprecatesâa particular stance regarding the epistemic superiority of scientific inquiry. According to scientism, science is the one valid way to gain knowledge (if not certainty!), and with knowledge, progress. The knowledge claims of others forms of human inquiry and expression are spurious, because they are not properly or at all âscientific.â The charge typically laid against scientism is that it relies on a distorted and reductive view of the sciences, a view that confuses distinctions between deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning, and consequently ignores the plurality, not to mention the fallibility, of scientific methods. According to this criticism, scientistic thinking should be contrasted with actual scientific inquiry, meaning the methods (along with the leaps, detours and dead-ends) taken by scientists working within their various fields.
Today, âscientismâ evokes a dated, peculiarly obtuse, late modern attitude of celebrating the extraordinary successes of the physical and life sciences in the 18th through 20th centuries, while scorning other cultural pursuits, including philosophy, for their supposed failure to progress. However, it is possible to characterize at least some thinkers of earlier eras as sharing a âscientisticâ stance, too, albeit in a broader sense that included philosophy and even to some extent theology within its purview. So, DomaÅskiâs choice of scientiste, for example, when describing what we translate as âthis general scientistic tendency [tendance scientiste] which is proper to all scholasticismâ [p. 32], resonates against his choice not to use the possible alternative, scientifique. We think DomaÅski means here to characterize scholasticism in general as always a little obtuse to living possibilities which other forms of inquiry, that donât readily conform to the scholastic methods, may make available and active.
Nevertheless, there are occurrences of scientiste in the text when we felt less than sure that DomaÅski meant to criticize the scholastics of the European Middle Ages so strongly, as âscientisticâ in their overall conception of theological or philosophical activity. It seemed quite plausible in those cases that he only intended to highlight specific scientific methodologies which developed in the examination of particular questions. In the end, while we register these doubts here, we decided always to use âscientisticâ to translate the adjectival use of scientiste in DomaÅskiâs text. âScientisticâ scholasticism would always at least claim to be just âscientificâ in its methods, although the undue narrowness of its conception of what counts as scientific would predispose it toward failure to recognize the kind of rigorous exercises involved in cultivating a realized ethics. Thus, it seemed fair to us to remind readers consistently of DomaÅskiâs sensitivity to the potential bias of this scholastic tendency. This decision also affected our choice on several occasions to render savant as âscientific scholar.â
Evidently related to this interpretation is DomaÅskiâs use of a word we have translated as âtheoreticizationâ [théorisation], with the adjectival form, âtheoreticist.â DomaÅski does not use a parallel French adjectival form, but the sense of the word closely parallels that of scientiste as it is used in the text. Its key occurrence describes Alcuinâs contribution to the scholastic conception of philosophy. Christianizing Boethius, Alcuin identifies Lady Philosophy with âJudeo-Christian Divine Wisdom,â rather than philosophy as practiced among the ancient schools. Alcuin reflects often on the moral value of, we might say, âpre-Christianâ philosophy, marking it as an initial, even if indispensable, stage on the way to contemplation of the âJudeo-Christian divine wisdom.â Yet, at the same time, Alcuin assigns philosophy to the curricular domain of the artes liberales. Thereby, we gain a glimpse, DomaÅski writes, of the âfuture scholastic theoreticizationâ of philosophy, a glimpse of philosophy reconceived strictly as training in formal practices of reasoning. The content of philosophical discourse, then, is not so much theorized from life, but âtheoreticized,â that is to say, removed to a space of reasons utterly remote from the vocation to a life lived well. In any case, both these words should be understood to contrast with the âpracticistâ orientation of DomaÅskiâs ârealized ethics.â
There are other occasions when DomaÅski uses phrases or formulations in French which seem especially significant, but which have in our view no one or simple English equivalents. In these instances, we give the phrases in the original in brackets immediately after our translations. A further small note concerns DomaÅskiâs French translations of classical Greek and Latin texts in the main text. We follow his translations of these texts, rather than using established English translations of the same loci, unless otherwise noted. Where DomaÅski quotes short passages in Latin in the body of the text, we have given English translations in the main text, with the Latin appearing in footnotes below.
Where DomaÅski quotes Latin sources at lengthâhis extensive footnotes include over 9000 words of Latinâwe decided early on that these quotations would need to be given a translation into modern English. However, rather than eliminate the Latin originals from the text, we have deposited them in a set of parallel footnotes marked in Roman numerals. For the work of translating the medieval Latin in many of the more esoteric texts which DomaÅski adduces, we acknowledge with gratitude the exceptional work of Krzysztof Bekieszczuk. Where Greek texts are concerned, we follow DomaÅski and use Greek characters at those points in the original French text where he used them. We also follow the original on those occasions throughout the text where he uses Latinate characters to transcribe the Greek, as for instance the word meletê.
A final note concerns translations from ancient Greek texts in several of DomaÅskiâs explanatory footnotes. We have followed DomaÅskiâs own translations from the Greek unless specifically marked.
La Philosophie, Theorie our Manière de Vivre? is a little book, but it is also a book of careful, creative, concentrated thinking. It has been a privilege to collaborate in attempting a translation that bears these same qualities.