Translation question ("swine's meat before men")

[Timothy D. Sergay]

Dear colleagues,

    I think the key to the figure "swine's meat" is the archaic English 
sense of "meat": "food of any kind" (New Oxford American English 
Dictionary). The philosophic topic is the derivation of virtue, that is, the 
tracing of our knowledge of the good to its proper roots, specifically, the 
question of whether those roots lie in some metaphysical realm or in the 
realm of natural and common human experience. Butler argues strongly for the 
latter. As for Butler's figure in its context, I believe the rhetoric of 
"casting swine's meat before men" would parse logically as follows: it is a 
satirical reversal of the Gospel figure "to cast pearls before swine" that 
operates by redistributing the attributes "worthy" and "unworthy" between 
two elements: (1) the thing cast (i.e., offered) and (2) the party BEFORE 
whom (1) is cast (i.e., the party TO whom [1] is offered). Pigs, or more 
precisely, the category "swinish," functions as a metaphor for 
"unworthiness" in both cases. In the Gospel, element 1, pearls, something of 
great worth, is cast before swine (unworthy recipients); in Butler's figure, 
element 1, "swine's meat," is something unworthy of men (worthy recipients): 
it is "meat fit for swine". If you cast "swine's meat before men," you offer 
men something unworthy of them, unfit for human consumption. In Butler, 
then, element 1, the thing offered, is ethical theories that seek to derive 
virtue from something other than "man's experience concerning his own 
well-being," namely, "a lineage, deduced as it were by spiritual heralds, 
from some stock with which she [virtue] has nothing to do." In other words, 
there is no doctrine of ethics more wretchedly unfit to offer to human 
beings than that which seeks to derive virtue from metaphysical sources, 
i.e., sources other than human experience of natural comfort and advantage. 
(In ethics, I believe Butler's preferred line of thinking derives from 
Plato, if not further back: what is good ultimately contributes to human 
wellbeing, vice is in essence its own punishment, as in the hangover.) The 
true, sufficient and only source of virtue is, again, "man's experience 
concerning his own well-being." Prosecuting any other view of ethics, i.e., 
any metaphysical accounting for its origins, is akin to offering decent 
human beings meat fit only for swine.

    The whole passage of "Way of All Flesh" is available here:
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/drama/TheWayofAllFlesh/chap19.html.

    I would expect the Russian treatment of the sequence before the comma to 
go something like "нет худшего метания свинского корма перед человеками, чем 
то, что тщится льстить добродетели, будто ее недостойны ее жe собстсвенные 
истоки, но ей необходима родословная..." ("net khudshego metaniia svinskogo 
korma pered chelovekami, chem to, chto tshchitsia l'stit' dobrodeteli, budto 
ee nedostoiny ee zhe sobstvennye istoki, no ei neobkhodima 
rodoslovnaia...").

Best wishes to all,

Tim Sergay 

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