H. P. Grice and G. J. Warnock on 'visum'

visum -- VISUM – IMAGINATUM, imago, imaginatio, φαντασία, imagination, fancy, appearing Fr. imagination, image, (re)presentation, G. Phantasie, Einbildungskraft. The standard translation of the Greek φαντασία by “imagination” raises more problems than it solves, if only because it resorts to a calque of Imperial Latin imaginatio, which was unknown to Cicero, for whom an imago was still chiefly a portrait (De finibus, V.1.3). The modern translation of phantasia by “representation,” which is increasingly accepted, is certainly preferable because it does not refer to a notion, the imagination, which for us designates something quite different from what the Greeks might have meant by phantasia, but it does not make room for what is at the heart of phantasia: appearing. PHANTASIA 773 this in French as sans image, Bodéüs better as sans représentation—are marks of phantasia’s reliability: therefore we can only be astonished by any interpretation tending to reduce phantasia to what governs internal visual images alone in the absence of any object, images (phantasmata) that are supposed, moreover, to be usually false (so that phantasmata is then rendered by “illusions,” whence our modern “phantasm”). In any event, this interpretation absolutely contradicts the Aristotelian definition of phantasia as “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of sense” [ὑπὸ τῆς αἰσθήσεως τῆς ϰατ’ ἐνέϱγειαν] (De anima, III.3.429a.1–2). If we stress this etymology and the connection between phantasia and phainesthai, we are not directed first of all to visual, “pictorial” mental images but rather to what has to do with apparition, with becoming apparent, with the presentation of an external entity thus brought to light, indeed, with the simple presentation of real things—which may very well be things heard rather than seen. . If Hobbes was very aware of the difficulties of moving from Greek to Latin, the Romans themselves had to experience them directly. Republican Latin, practiced by the author to whom we owe many of our translations of Greek notions, namely Cicero, had only three terms that could be used to render phantasia: (1) imago, which designated primarily a portrait, but could also refer to mental images, such as those used in mnemonic techniques; (2) imitor, which meant mainly to imitate in the attempt to reproduce an image, and which “translated” the Greek verb eikazô [εἰϰάζω], which meant “to make a portrait, to represent by means of a drawing or painting,” whence “to resemble”; (3) imaginosus, “subject to hallucinations.” We can now understand the difficulties Cicero encountered in translating the Greek word phantasia. On the one hand, probably to emphasize that the Stoics’ phantasia referred to the representation that “is engraved, struck, and impressed on the basis of an existing object in conformity with that object in such a way that it would not be produced if the object did not exist” (De legibus, VII.50), he resorted to the Latin word visum (Academica, I.40), which is usually translated by “representation,” but which signifies primarily “the thing seen.” But on the other hand, he also used visio and imago to render the Epicureans’ eidôlon (De divinatione, II.120; I. Phantasia, Apparition, and Representation The translation difficulties reflect the no less great difficulties involved in determining what the Greeks might have meant by phantasia: they have to do both with the polysemy of the Greek term, which is connected with the development of the Greek language itself, and with the complex and varied usage that Greek philosophers made of it. Let us explain at the outset that if phantasia must be related to phainô [φαίνω], “to make appear in the light” (phôs [φῶς]—and still more, to the middle-voice verb phainomai [φαίνομαι], “to come into the light, to appear”—it is also related to phantazomai [φαντάζομαι], “to become visible, to appear, show itself ” (phantazô [φαντάζω], “to make visible, present to the eye or to the mind” it does not exist in the active mood before the Hellenistic period and does not acquire the sense of “to imagine” until the first or second century CE, when, for example, it appears in the author of the Treatise on the Sublime [Pseudo-Longinus] and in Alexander of Aphrodisias. We see immediately that the term originally had very little to do with our modern “imagination,” whether reproductive or creative, and probably still less with Malebranche’s folle du logis (madwoman in the house) or with Pascal’s maîtresse d’erreur et de fausseté (mistress of error and falsity). Moreover, didn’t Herodotus use the verb phantazomai to mean simply “show itself ” (Histories, IV.124, where he says that the Persians no longer saw the Scyths because they had disappeared—aphanisthentôn [ἀφανισθέντων]—and no longer showed themselves—ouk eti ephantazonto [οὐϰ έτι ἐφαντάζοντο])? Thus we can understand Aristotle’s famous statement: “As sight [ὄψις] is the most highly developed sense, the name phantasia has been formed from phaos [φάος], because it is not possible to see [ἰδεῖν] without light” (De anima, III.3.429a.2–4; trans. J. A. Smith in Basic Works of Aristotle 9). The Stoics, adopting the same etymology, added the following: “phantasia gets its name from the word ‘light’ [φῶς],” and in fact just as light allows us to see both itself and what it envelops, phantasia allows us to see both itself and what has produced it” (Aetius, IV.12–15; Sextus Empiricus, M., VIII.162). The view peculiar to the Stoics (phantasia is index sui), and the fact that, according to Aristotle (De anima, III.7.431a.16–17; 8, 432a.9–10), “the soul never thinks without an image” (phantasma [φάντασμα])—Barbotin renders 1 Hobbes and the difficulties of moving from Latin to Greek Thus we are a priori very far from any idea of a representation in the absence of an object and still further from any assimilation of phantasia to Hobbes’s “decaying sense” (in the Latin version, sensio deficiens, sive phantasma dilutum et evanidum) (Leviathan, I.2). Whatever we moderns may owe to this conception and whatever we may think of this possible comparison, we have to note that Hobbes saw clearly that imaginatio very imperfectly translated as phantasia: For after the object is removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image [imaginem] of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call imagination [imaginatio] from the image made in seeing, and apply the same, though improperly to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it fancy [phantasia], which signifies appearance and is as proper to one sense as to another. [The Latin words between brackets are those used by Hobbes himself in the Latin version of the book, De Cive, 1641.) (Leviathan, I, 2) internal, silent dialogue with itself (Theatetus, 189e–190a; Philebus, 38b–40b), Plato distinguishes between the pure phenomenon of thought, which he characterizes as doxa, and thought that presents itself to the mind through the intermediary of sensation (aisthêsis [αἴσθησις]). It is this second form of thought, a mixture of opinion and sensation, that he chooses to call phantasia or to designate by phainetai (Diès translates it in French as j’imagine, but literally it means “it appears”), emphasizing that inevitably it will sometimes be false (Sophist, 2633e–246b). . While it is true that in Plato and Aristotle what appears through phantasia may be subject to doubt, phantasia cannot be reduced to this aspect. This is evident in the Stoics, but it is also the case in Aristotle, for whom the spectrum of the phantasmata ranges from the true ones, which are necessary for thinking, to the false or illusory ones, such as appear in dreams, hallucinations, and all situations in which the conditions of perception are difficult, by way of the phantasmata at work in local movement, in which the role of phantasia is to make the object in question appear to be desirable so that one moves toward it. Ultimately, what radically separates Aristotle from Plato with regard to the reliability of phantasia is the former’s express desire to distinguish it clearly from judgment: just because the sun appears (phanetai [φαίνεται]) to me to have a one-foot diameter does not mean that I will believe that it is smaller than the Earth we live on (De anima, III.3.428a–24b.10). Thus Aristotle regularly connects phantasia with the impersonal phainetai, “it appears,” explaining that these terms have to be understood in their literal and not their derived (“metaphorical” in Aristotle’s vocabulary) senses. Phainetai could in fact be used in Greek to signify anything that “appears,” whether it appears by virtue of phantasia (the literal sense, according to Aristotle) or by virtue of something else, like sensation or thought (derived senses, according to Aristotle). In other words, just as we can say “it appears” to signify what emerges from an argument, or simply to mean “it seems,” the same goes for Greek, with phainetai (and it is interesting that Aristotle himself does not fail to do so, as in De anima, III.10.433a.9, where phanetai introduces the conclusion of an argument that appeals precisely to phantasia). It is in this sense that we must understand this statement: “If then imagination [phantasia] is that in virtue of which an image [phantasma] arises for us, excluding metaphorical uses of the term” (De anima, III.3.428a.1–2), only what appears by virtue of phantasia deserves to be called phantasma, and not, as for Plato or in ordinary language, everything that appears or seems to be by virtue of sensation, opinion, or thought. III. Appear to, Appear as “Thus it appears” that if phantasia refers first of all to what appears, whether what appears is true or false (despite their redistribution of terms, the Stoics were hardly innovative from this point of view), we cannot identify it with our modern “imagination,” a notion that has in addition the disadvantage of emphasizing an activity on the part of the subject, whereas in Greek it is rather a matter of receiving. De finibus, I.21), that is, the simulacrum, to borrow Lucretius’s Latin (see IMAGE and SPECIES), which is the replica of the bodies emanating from themselves and producing in us an “image” (phantasia, which here takes on a strong sense close to phantasma, because this term, which presents a further difficulty, not only designates a faculty but can also designate what results from that faculty). It is not until Imperial Latin, then, that we find imaginor and its derivatives, beginning with imaginatio. Imaginor and imaginatio, however, render the late meanings of phantazô and phantasia. This is shown by the following statement by Quintilian (first century CE), casually made in the course of a discussion of the ways of eliciting emotion: The Greeks call [phantasia] [φαντασία] (we could well call it visio) the faculty of representing to ourselves the images of absent things, to the point that we have the impression that we are seeing them with our own eyes and holding them in front of us [per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesantur animo ut eas cernere oculisac praesentes habere videamur]. (Institutio oratoria, VI.2. 29) Quintilian still proposes to translate phantasia by visio, but the definition he gives it is already far more “modern”: it seems to be modeled, even in the appeal to emotion, on the definition given in the Treatise on the Sublime (XV), when Pseudo-Longinus emphasizes that in his age (probably the first century CE), the term phantasia is used regarding passages in which writers, orators, and poets, acting out of enthusiasm and passion, seem to have seen so vividly what they are describing that they succeed in bringing it before the eyes of their audiences. Thus imaginatio, which also does not at first refer to our modern conception of the imagination, can translate phantasia, but, strictly speaking, this translation is relevant only for a few late occurrences of phantasia. Later still, William of Moerbecke seems to have realized this in his translatio vetus of Aristotle’s De anima, since he does not hesitate to decline phantasia and phantasma in Latin, as if they were untranslatables, a usage followed by Thomas Aquinas in his commentary, which nonetheless sometimes uses imaginatio as well (In Aristotelis librum de anima, 644–45, where we see the marvelous usage phantasiantur in the context of a discussion of the seeming prudence of ants and bees). However, a century earlier phantasia was essentially pejorative and designated something that was related to apparitions, phantoms—which could also be designated in Greek by phantasma because of its relationship to phasma [φάσμα], “vision, specter, phantom” (see, for example, Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, v. 710, for phantasma; Agamemnon, v. 274, for phasma). II. Appearing and Appearance Although—or because, as it would probably be more correct to say—phantasia refers first of all to that which appears, it is nonetheless true that it can also refer to a mental image that is very likely to be false, or to pure appearance. It was Plato who gave this turn to the notion, to which it cannot, however, be reduced. Trying to understand thought, dianoia [διάνοια], as the mind’s -- “Appear” is undoubtedly the key word that allows us to define more precisely what the Greeks understood by phantasia (provided, that is, that it is not identified with appearance taken in a pejorative sense, with mere semblance). In fact, though it is not necessary to appeal to Wittgenstein’s “seeing as,” since Plato already provided us with the means, we must understand phantasia, no matter which phantasma it should cause to appear, as a structure with a twofold complement governing the fact that something, whatever it is, appears to X or to Y as this or that. . Jean-Louis Labarrière “Representation” is better, but it has in turn the disadvantage of stressing what presents itself “again,” which may, of course, be the case but is not necessarily the case. Whence the way of writing it in several languages: “(re)presentation.” But this is hardly satisfying, since what it is most important to preserve is the connection with phainomai and phantazomai, while at the same time finding a family of terms from the same root to translate phantasma, phantaston, and phantastikon, and to refer both to mental images (pictorial or not) and to simple apparitions, to dream-images and hallucinations and other phantoms or shades—the least of the paradoxes certainly not being that a term derived from the word “light” can also signify “shade.” 2 Plato’s ambiguity, Aristotle’s precision, and the Stoics’ redefinitions v. SUBLIME Three texts that echo each other allow us to gauge more accurately the oscillations in the philosophical use of a single family of words and the difficulty of translating them. Plato writes the following: SOCRATES: If a man sees objects that come into his view from a distance [πόϱϱωθεν] and indistinctly, would you agree that he commonly wants to decide [ϰϱίνειν] about what he sees? PROTARCHUS: I should. SOCRATES: Then the next step will be that he puts a question to himself. PROTARCHUS: What question? SOCRATES: “What is that object which catches my eye [φανταζόμενον] there beside the rock under a tree?” Don’t you think that is what he would say to himself, if he had caught sight of some appearance [φαντασθέντα] of the sort? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And then he would answer his own question and say, if he got it right, “It is a man.” (Philebus, 38c–d; trans. R. Hackforth in Collected Dialogues of Plato) Aristotle writes this: [E]ven in ordinary speech, we do not, when sense functions precisely with regard to its object [οὐδὲ λέγομεν], say [ἐνεϱγῶμεν ἀϰϱιϐῶς πεϱὶ τὸ αἰσθητόν] that we imagine it to be a man [ὅτι φαίνεται τοῦτο ἡμῖν ἄνθϱωπος], but rather when there is some failure of accuracy in its exercise. (De anima, 428a.10–12; trans. J. A. Smith in Basic Works of Aristotle) Regarding Stoicism, we read, [Chrysippus said that we have to distinguish phantasia, phantaston, phantastikon, and phantasma]. The phantaston [usually translated by “object represented”] is what produces phantasia [the “representation”]. The phantastikon [usually translated by “imagination” or “imaginary”] is an empty movement, an affection that occurs in the mind without any phanataston having given rise to it. The phantasma [“imaginary object”] is that to which we are drawn in this empty movement of the phantastikon. (Aetius, Placita philosophorum, IV.12.1–5) The situation described by Plato clearly refers to what appears to X or Y as this or that, in the presence of the object. As a result, the conditions of perception govern the veracity or reliability of what appears to us, and it is therefore misleading, to say the least, to translate phainetai in French by j’imagine, as Diès did in his translation of the Sophist, 264a. Similarly, when Aristotle, preparing to criticize Plato’s definition of phantasia as a mixture of sensation and opinion, virtually quotes the Philebus in seeking to distinguish phantasia from sensation, the French translator Barbotin senses the necessity of rendering phainetai by paraît in his rendering of Aristotle’s De anima, but he nonetheless thinks he has to add l’image, which spoils everything. The sentence put between quotation marks in Aristotle’s text—an obvious allusion to the passage in the Philebus quoted earlier—should be rendered in French not as “cela nous paraît être l’image d’un homme,” as Barbotin has it, but rather as something like “cela nous paraît être un homme,” because it is the object itself that appears to be this or that, and the better the conditions of perception, the better the apparition will be. Finally, the Stoics undertook a redistribution of terms by separating the phantasma from phantasia and making it responsible for everything that produces illusions. But by a strange reversal of the situation, we can nonetheless conclude that this act bore a new conception of the imagination as creative, to which Pseudo-Longinus and Philostratus testify: Orestes’s visions, which the Stoics always associated with the phantasmata of the phantastikon (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII.170, 244, 249; VIII.63, 67), were to become the very model of literary creation, Euripides having seen the Furies and succeeded in making us see what he had “imagined” [ἐφαντάσθη] (On the Sublime, XV.2). REFS.: Plato. Philebus. Translation by R. Hackforth: Philebus in Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. . Le Sophiste. Translated into French by Auguste Diès. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1925. The reappearance of “phantasm” on the basis of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis As used by translators of Freud, “phantasm” is supposed to render the German Phantasie, that is, the idea of the products of the imagination through which the ego tries to escape the grasp of reality (such as daydreams) and that are often closely related to the unconscious. This term (along with its adjective phantasmatic), which reappeared in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, is now widely used in ordinary language. Despite the fact that in medical French fantasme was occasionally used as early as 1836 in the sense of visual hallucination, and that in the 1906 edition of the Nouveau Larousse illustré it is soberly defined as a “chimera that is formed in the mind,” in 1926 it is still absent from the eighth edition of the RT: Dictionnaire général de la langue française. Resurfacing in French psychoanalytic literature over the course of the first third of the twentieth century, fantasme reconnected with the persistence in everyday popular speech of the Latin phantasma, a late transcription of the Greek word given the same spelling, which signified an image presented to the mind by an extraordinary phenomenon and that remained linked with phantasia, a term that initially designated the mental operation accompanying such an image, and only later “shade” or “phantom.” Phantasma established itself in Imperial Latin in the form of fantauma, from the Ionian Greek phantagma and the Massalian Greek phantôma. This fantauma from what is now southern France is found again in the twelfthcentury French fantosme, with the meaning of “vision of a person from the other world” or “phantom,” and then “illusion” and “daydream.” In Romance languages, the Italian and Spanish fantasma very clearly retains this twofold meaning, first of specter and then of mental image, whereas in French the two medieval terms fantosme and fantasie long continued to designate an extraordinary vision (fantosme) and the power of imagination (fantasie). These last two terms are found in German in the form of Phantom (in English “phantom,” and by extension, “deceptive image, illusion”) and Phantasie (the word “imagination”). The pride of place that Freud gives to Phantasie led the first French psychoanalysts to translate the term by a word new to French, or newly rehabilitated in French usage: fantasme. However, Phantasie designates less the power of imagining (Einbildungskraft) than the imaginary world and the whole of its contents, the creative activity of dreams, images, and visions to which the mind lends itself and that are expressed by the verb fantasieren (substantialized in the form of das Fantasieren). So that as Laplanche and Pontalis note in their Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis, the French fantasme “does not correspond exactly to the German [die Phantasie], in that it has a more restricted extension; fantasme refers to a specific imaginary production, not to the world of fantasy or imaginative activity in general” (trans. D. Nicolson Smith). Nonetheless, although it was psychoanalysis that actually established the term fantasme in French—but by assigning it a more restricted meaning than German Phantasie—the corresponding concept has spread within the discipline to multiple levels or modalities (for instance: primal fantasy, fantasme originaire, fantasme de séduction, conscious and unconscious phantasm, the “family romance,” and so forth)—whether they come from Freud, Jung, Lacan, or Melanie Klein. But today the use of fantasme has moved far beyond the field of psychoanalysis, in which it was born in the early twentieth century. It remains that in French, and especially in English, “fantasm” or “fantasy” are sometimes written “phantasm” or “phantasy,” the school of Melanie Klein seeing in this—inappropriately, it seems—a way of distinguishing the unconscious phantasm (phantasy) from the conscious phantasm (fantasy). Independently of this interpretation, the British publishers of the Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works, who generally opted for phantasy, justified, in these somewhat awkward terms, the distinction between the two spellings: Phantasy is adopted here on the basis of a discussion in the Oxford English Dictionary, which comes to this conclusion: “In modern usage, the terms fantasy and phantasy, despite their phonic identity and their etymology, tend to be apprehended as being distinct, the predominant sense of the former being “caprice, whim, fantastic behavior,” whereas [the predominant sense of ] the latter is “imagination or hallucinatory representation.” Consequently, phantasy will be understood here with the technical meaning of a phenomenon concerning the psyche. But fantasy may also be used in certain appropriate occurrences. (Standard Edition, 1:24) Thus the difference from their French colleagues (for whom phantasme and fantasme have the same meaning), and also from their Italian colleagues (who use fantasia or fantasma) and Spanish colleagues (fantasía and fantasma), Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysts seem to insist on establishing a real distinction between fantasy and phantasy, the latter term being seen as closer, by its spelling, to the German Phantasie and indicating, in their view, a specific dependence, in relation to Freudian vocabulary, on the concept that is supposed to correspond to it. Charles Baladier REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited by John Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis. Translated by D. Nicolson Smith. New York: Norton, 1974. First published in France in 1967. REFS.: Armisen, Mireille. “La notion d’imagination chez les Anciens.” Pallas 15/16 (1979–80): 11–51 / 3–37. Aristotle. De anima. Translation by J. A. Smith: “On the Soul.” In Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Birondo, Noell. “Aristotle on Illusory Perception: Phantasia without Phantasmata Source.” Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001): 57–71. Blumenthal, H.J. “Neoplatonic Interpretations of Aristotle on ‘Phantasia.’” Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977): 242–57. Bundy, Murray Wright. The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927. Castoriadis, Cornelius. “The Discovery of the Imagination.” Constellations 1, no. 2 (1994): 183–213. Cocking, John M. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas. London: Routledge, 1991. Fattori, Marta, and Massimo Bianchi, eds. Phantasia~Imaginatio, Rome: Ateneo, 1988. Flory, Dan. “Stoic Psychology, Classical Rhetoric, and Theories of Imagination in Western Philosophy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 29, no. 2 (1996): 147–67. PHRONÊSIS 777 Heil, John F., Jr. “Aristotle’s Objection to Plato’s ‘Appearance’: De anima 428a24–b9.” Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003): 319–35. Imbert, Claude. “Théorie de la représentation et doctrine logique dans le stoïcisme ancien.” In Les Stoïciens et leur logique, edited by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Vrin, 1978. Labarrière, Jean-Louis. “De la ‘nature phantastique’ des animaux chez les Stoïciens.” In Passions and Perceptions, edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Martha Nussbaum, 225–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . “Des deux introductions de la phantasia dans le De anima, III, 3.” Kairos 9 (1977): 141–68. . “Jamais l’âme ne pense sans phantasme.” In Aristote et la notion de nature, edited by P.-M. Morel, 149–179. Bordeaux, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997. Labarrière, Jean-Louis, ed. “Aristote —Sur l’imagination.” Les Études philosophiques 1 (1977). Lycos, Kemon. “Aristotle and Plato on ‘Appearing.’” Mind 73 (1964): 496–514. Manieri, Alessandra. L’Immagine poetica nella teoria degli antichi. Pisa, It.: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998. Modrak, Deborah K. W. “Φαντασία Reconsidered.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 68 (1968): 47–69. Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Role of Phantasia in Aristotle’s Explanation of Action.” In Aristotle’s “De motu animalium.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. 221–69. Osborne, Catherine. “Aristotle on the Fantastic Abilities of Animals in De Anima 3.3.” In vol. 19 of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, edited by David Sedley, 253–85. New York: Oxford University Press. Schofield, Malcolm. “Aristotle on the Imagination.” In Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, edited by G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen, 99–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “Image et Apparence dans la théorie platonicienne de la Mimêsis.” Journal de Psychologie 2 (1975). Reprinted as “Naissance d’images.” In Religions, histoires, raisons. Paris: Maspero, 1979. 105–37. Watson, Gerard. Phantasia in Classical Thought. Galway, Ire.: Galway University Press, 1988. Wedin, Michael V. Mind and Imagination in Aristotle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. that is, obvious and constraining events, such as natural phenomena, that are sometimes remarkable and for which we have to account (apodounai ta phainomena [ἀποδοῦναι τὰ φαινόμενα] [Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ 1073a36–37]). The well-founded phenomenon has to be distinguished from the imaginary phenomenon, and it is legitimate to speak of the “reality of phenomena” (Leibniz, De modo distinguendi phaenomena ab imaginariis). Phänomen/Erscheinung Unlike German, French has only a single term; as a result, it is difficult to render in French the subtle difference that may exist between Phänomen and Erscheinung, unless we resort to the term apparition for the latter (Leibniz still writes phaenomena sive apparitiones) or create the improbable term parence (jargon used by a few translators of Heidegger). In Kant, for whom everything that is the object of a possible experience is a phenomenon, the latter is opposed to the noumenon, but also to the thing in itself (Ding an sich) and, like Erscheinung, to Schein (deceptive appearance, illusion). Phénomène, Conscience, Phénoménologie In French, the technical term phénomène designates everything that appears to consciousness. In this sense, phenomena are to be described first, without seeking laws, causes, or hidden principles. It is in accord with this meaning of the term that Descartes wrote in the Principles of Philosophy (III.4), “I shall give a brief description of the phenomena whose causes I claim to seek.” Phenomenology (Ger. Phänomenologie, introduced by Lambert; see LIGHT, Box 1), especially Husserlian phenomenology, constructs a lexicon that makes it possible to reconfigure the relationship between phenomenon and consciousness.