In a time that is beyond unsettling and strange, I have found some comfort in returning to contemplate what a liberal arts education is or was, and how it interacted with elements in American culture which were horribly flawed with systemic racism. Such an education, when it worked, offered a way out of lying, self-delusion, and social delusion. For me, a liberal arts education above all meant engaging with ancient Greek and Roman writers.
While the label "classics" is unquestionably, unfashionably elitist and redolent of a great deal of European and American imperialism, it points out the way these ancient writers set a template for understanding tragedy, grief, and loss. These writers seem to read us as much as we read them: the warnings they suggest about how a life, world, and culture can fall apart is more pertinent with each passing month.
In these past several disastrous and tragic months, I was enlivened to read Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. La lingua geniale in the original Italian: "ingenious" is not an incorrect translation, but neither is it sufficient: ingenious suggests superficially clever rather than boldly inventive. The language provides undeniable evidence that ancient Greeks thought in a precise and different manner than how we might imagine them to have thought. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" —especially when the past is so remote and long ago.
I wish to turn to this theme of the utter strangeness of ancient Greek in some longer elegy for the liberal arts and the role the might have or could have played in American culture in the past two centuries. The two elements of aspect and mood in the ancient Greek language carry this water: these elements of verbs structure a different world of thinking through that channel, that language.
In English, the nouns do a great deal of the work of making sense transparent from writer to reader. In Greek, the verbs do the work. Aspect encodes a way of thinking about verbs and actions that go to the heart of Greek sense-making. Because most later languages so lack verbal aspect, it is impossible to describe without using too many words.
Begin with English. English verbs are locked into the iron frame of time: past, present, and future. What the person who acts intends by the action is either beside the point or rendered through adverbs or some other locution. Maybe the action is a layered past —before such-and-so happened, this-and-that had already happened (a past perfect), or some kind of ordering of future affairs: when that-and-this will happen, such-and-so will already have happened (a future perfect). In any case, the verbal periphrastic combinations establish an intricate temporal order.
Greek verbs live with but the haziest notion of this iron law of past, present, and future. A present aspect is durative: it's happening right now and maybe into an infinite future. (Marcolongo's example, "I'm calling you," καλέω) The aorist aspect (a-orist means indefinite or without bounds; an ὁριστής is a boundary-maker, with the α-negative or privative) is momentary, taken as such (and not necessarily in the past!) (Marcolongo's example: an idea of calling you, "I'll call you," έκάλεσα with no reference to when in present or future.) The perfective aspect is a completed action that stands completed with no going back on it. (Marcolongo's example: κέκληκα, I called you --and you never called back, lost the note by the phone, or are ignoring me). These aspects do not function as temporal "when" signals, but as "how" performative signals that take time, or are not yet in time or stand-or-fall on the facts. Ancient Greek retains aspect of verbs from the fabled proto-Indo-European language (that maybe never was), as does Serbo-Croatian, Hawaiian, and in some was African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
In modern languages, aspect and time become conflated: when it happened is taken to mean how it happened. Many Greek verbs have three distinct stems that are conjugated in different aspects: their suffix-like endings indicate 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and singular or plural (or dual, another topic entirely). "I look and I am looking," όράω is a present durative action: still looking. What grammarians call the "future" ὄψομαι is really much more an indefinite intention: I'll look when I get around to it, I intend to look. The Greeks were not much interested in characterizing the future: it simply had to be experienced, like the will of the gods. The aorist εἷδον is I look, once, and that was enough, because: now the perfect: I am in the state of having seen, which is; I know οἴδα, and finally ὤφθην, I looked and it's a matter of record: it's known that I looked. That all these verb parts are stitched together by grammarians and lexicographers does not mean that ordinary ancient Greeks thought them related: they simply used them as the wished to make themselves clear.
Dividing how an action occurs from when it occurs is obvious only to a modern speaker of a few languages (Serbo-Croatian; Hawaiian). A bit closer to most Americans, the aspectual distinctions in African American Vernacular English, which sometimes obscure tense (time), can be the habitual, perfective, or resultant: "he do be eating," "he have bin ate," "he have done ate" (properly "dən ate"). Those may not tie the past or present action of eating to a time-frame, but indicate how it happens, or happens, or what is the result of it happening. This comparison begins to get at the power of aspect: how it happened.
To their credit, authors of high school or college grammars of ancient Greek, such those by as Herbert Weir Smyth, James Hadley & F. D. Allen, or H.L. Crosby & J.N. Schaeffer, completely fail to mention aspect, which seems to have come into the study of ancient Greek from comparative study of Slavic languages; the first OED entry for grammatical aspect dates to 1853. Joseph Dongell's much more recent Elementary New Testament Greek (2014) incorporates an unavoidably confusing discussion of aspect as internal (inside the event, "I am washing the car"), external (suspended above & viewing the action as a simple singular event: "Today we wash the car," as a flat description), and perfect: once-and-done "I'm happy to say I have washed the car". Dongell then muddies the water a bit with discussion of a perspective chosen by the speaker and not property of an action itself. His example is Jesus' resurrection, always a loaded topic (best stay away from it). When he notes that verbal aspect doesn't tell us very much about how to picture an event in reality, he appeals to the developing idea of a "fuller picture" of a verb called Aktionsart, a "type of action" distinguishing elements of activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state. Aktionsart picks apart categories on a grid of perception to get at a "fuller picture" a verb does, and has little practical consequence. Aspect is the contrary: by distinguishing how an action occurs: how a verb "walks" (as it were), Greeks could pick apart sense from nonsense. Plato wields aspect very carefully (see Timeaus 37e—38c: please don't complain that Timeaus isn't or wasn't by Plato)(See also two entries by Seumas Macdonald here and here.)
This recondite aspective element of verbs combines with a second perspective on ancient Greek verbs: mood. The subjunctive mood in modern English is nearly disappearing, but most of us can still remember the subjective, distinguishing "was he a fool?" from "were he fool." In the first, he was or wasn't a fool, or perhaps we can disagree about that; but the second points to the real possibility that he isn't or wasn't but could be, might be, or might have been. "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship," Ricky admonishes Elsa in Casablanca. (English also has the infinitive mood, to do something, and the imperative mood, do something! but they don't matter so much here.)
But ancient Greek adds a third mood: optative, the mood of desire. The optative depends on the slight shift in the speaker's desire and the conditions that might allow it. Marcolongo's examples are clear: "I want to sail/intend to sail" (indicative: my boat is docked, I'm ready); "I would like to sail; I might go sailing" (subjective: My boat is docked but the winds are foul); "I would like to sail/I might go sailing" (optative: My boat is docked; I don't know how to sail; I'll have to learn how and then I really want to), finally back to: "I would like to sail/I would have liked to sail" (but I don't have a boat; I live in Kansas; it's a lost cause--indicative again).
What separates those moods? Possibility, the speaker's projection of desire, and perception of herself as strong enough, brave enough, even decisive enough. That volitional optative is completely dependent upon her sense of responsibility and resolve to turn words into action.
Both desire and regret (negative in the optative) might not draw a line between possibility and impossibility, the desire that it might come true versus the historic indicative which indicates that it never will come true. If the odds are ever in your favor, as they say in Hunger Games, it could be optative (or merely subjective: they'll change, you know); if the odds are that you're going to die, the indicative. Between the poles of real and unreal is a whole force field of human desire, likelihood, or impossibility. That's where the optative supplements the subjective—but was utterly lost as Greek spread in the Alexandrian world. Hence in the New Testament, the only real optative is μὴ γένοιτο: may it not be! which the Authorized Version plumped up as:" God forbid!" The optative became a sort of second-string, bench-team subjective.
There are uses of the optative mood: volitional ("I want to write"); potential ("I could write") and oblique ("He said that I would write"), but enough already. When Odysseus says "Would that I were young and my strength firm," his fervent and binding desire is so strong that he uses the optative for the tenacity of his intention to return to Ithaka and reclaim his ancestral seat, even though it is (or seems) impossible. (Odyssey 14:70-71)
Back to our perilous present in which many wait in dread for violence they believe will ensue after the 2020 election. The liberal arts spoke to a nation that had been divided by war, failed to liberate and reconstruct, and stood by while robber barons plundered the wealth of many in the first Gilded Age. Liberal education, nevertheless, offered a way out of predatory capitalism and cultural enslavement to a renewed sense of purpose, even with its blind spots, that resulted in the achievements of the Progressive era and laid the foundations for the New Deal. The means of this education were a steady focus on language, on truth and its expression, on desire, on the aspect of how things come to be, choosing to hope in the optative in the face of impossibility.
That education was an heir of those who wrote an English language that we have lost the ability to speak accurately. Its speakers picked apart truth and desire because they mattered more than market indices and predictions of future profit. The care with which the far more remote ancient Greeks thought, about how things happen and how they desired them to happen contrasts oddly with their rather simplistic and one-dimensional view of the future. (Greek future verbs are almost an afterthought.) With the (controversial) advent of writing, they picked apart these elements in texts that lack punctuation and diacritics. Their flow of thought depended on particle and enclitics, those little bits of words that signaled the flow of thinking and of speech. Liberal arts educations --there was more than one model--flourished in an America culture that prized language and its use: the Lyceum circuits, Milton, the Bible, even Emerson. That care with language was a direct ally of intensive study of Latin and ancient Greek literatures.
I am working out more thoughts about these topics, using other concepts as well: what I have written is only a workshop model, a sketch, and maybe a bad one. The foundation of the liberal arts, the careful usage and analysis of expressive language, was foundational and now almost extinct outside of few precincts of wealthy institutions. Whether such an education can ever return is another subject.