The other day I found myself for a brief moment in BMV books at Yonge and Eglinton. There I found a wonderful copy of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It seems that in looking earlier I had only found the Penguin edition, which is on acid paper and is always falling apart in second hand stores. This translation is by Richard Hope; the frontpiece is a sketch of the flowing branches of a tree emanating from its trunk, appropriately.
Now, I’ve always wanted to read this book. I tried once in undergrad, with not much success, I think I had found a bad translation from the library. I find it almost a disgrace that a graduate from a relatively well known university, with a strong degree in philosophy and a high GPA could get out of dozen’s of philosophy classes without having to have read one page of the Metaphysics.
Want to understand Aquinas? Other Scholastics? Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fiche, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Derrida? Nothing until you have read Aristotle. I had signed up for the Aristotle class, hoping that we would slough through the book–but no, we read, again, the Nicomachean Ethics. Which is not to say that it isn’t a good book, but I had studied it three times earlier.
How did a student get through a degree in philosophy without reading one of the two foundational texts in Western philosophy (the other being Plato’s Republic)? Easy: because it is hard, and the university doesn’t challenge students any more, but wants to give them the best possible change of graduating with a B average. It is a disgrace, and it has nothing to do with media and the twilight of the book, but of the way students are coddled.
So I am already through books Alpha, Beta and Gamma. And despite all its talk about the centrality of reason and the possibility of finding the good and the true, it is an excellent book. Aristotle anticipates skeptical critique, even those of the post-moderns. It all comes down to one position: either you believe A does not equal not-A, that a proposition is either true or false, or you believe nothing, and you can therefore advocate nothing.
I am writing a lot in the book, partially from discovering H. J. Jackson’s book Marginalia. A friend of mine took a class with Jackson on Coleridge, and I had read the volume of Coleridge’s Marginalia which was edited by Jackson. I would like to use her book as a source for my studies into reading and writing, why the two are closely interconnected, and why creation–writing–necessarily flows reading. The two are not disconnected, which calls all our ideas of copyright and derivative works into question.
From the beginning of writing, and from the beginning of a child’s development, books are written in. It is not a one way glass between the writer and the reader, but it is essentially interactive. The reader is working as she reads. It will be particularly interesting to see how this continues through to the digital medium (Wark’s Gamer Theory might show us something about that).