H. P. Grice reads Cicero

Cicero reorganizes the vocabulary of the passions around their motivity and their tumult, in contrast with the immobility of reason. He does this through a translation and the commentaries that accompany it. This translation is discussed at length in Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Reflection on the best way to interpret Greek pathos and to psychology and ethics seems to him to be dominated by the paradigm of the body, of medicine, and hence of illness. But although this model works well as regards the perturbation that concerns him most, pain, it does not lend itself to the expression of the concept of affectivity in general. Morbus is not a good term because pathos is not a good idea— philosophically speaking. Why? Because for Cicero the history of the mind goes back to Plato and even further, to Pythagoras. First Pythagoras and then Plato had analyzed the structure of the psuchê [ψυχή] into two parts, one the basis of a distinctive characteristic, movement. Whereas one part is tranquil and constant, calm and placid, the other part is full of motus turbidi, movements and maelstroms, such as rage or desire (ibid., 4.4.10). It was this very precise concept of mobility, unrest, and inconstancy that was to resurface in the Latin word. Cicero took advantage of his role as a creative translator, as a fabricator of neologisms and importer of Greek notions, to refresh the philosophical memory that had faded in the Greek vocabulary. In Latin, a new language, we find on the surface of the word the originary signified that theory had always identified as essential in affective life: the idea of perturbation. In the Latin language, a work in progress that translators were shaping by the choices they made, words were to be, in sum, more appropriate, more adequate to notions. If it is a question of naming a motus turbidus, because that is the pertinent definition, then it must be called perturbatio. Through the decisions it requires, the act of translating offers an opportunity to find the correct word, to improve the fit between word and concept. Reformulating in another language makes it possible to bring out a forgotten or underestimated meaning and thus to amend an incoherent usage. Cicero seems to reproach the Greeks, from Pythagoras to Zeno, for not having preferred to pathos a word like tarachê [ταραχή] (alarm; see Lysias 6.35), for example, just as he has chosen perturbatio rather than morbus. It seems to him, in fact, that ancient ethics always thought “emotion” when it used the word “passion.” In the commentaries accompanying his lexical choices, we can discern his criticism of Stoicism: whereas he rejects the obsessional nosography of the classification of the pathê, he notes their tumultuous nature. However—and translation comes in here—the kinetic metaphor should have priority over the medical metaphor. Cicero observes that all the Stoics, and notably Chrysippus, tried very hard to compare the illnesses of the mind with those of the body. Let us instead examine more closely what the thing itself contains (ea quae rem continent pertractemus), he suggests. What has to be understood is the fact that perturbation is always in movement: intellegatur igitur perturbationem in motu esse semper (ibid., 4.10.24). Perpetual movement is thus the “thing” (res) whose essence the word perturbatio expresses. Moreover, Zeno had already defined a perturbation as a “commotion” (commotio) contrary to reason (ibid., 4.6.1). In doing so, he situated himself in the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition that identifies wisdom with peace of mind (ibid., 4.4.10). However, the Greeks, including Zeno, called this perturbatio—which they defined (wrongly) as a commotio—a pathos. A worn-out language failed to render adequately an essential idea. Another language was now able to rediscover excites us, terrifies us. We are affected by a cause, in the sense that we are invested by it, that it can put us in this or that disposition (afficere). Therein consists the failure of our will, of that perfect mastery, of that total freedom of choice that Adam and Eve perverted long ago. Now our will has gone off track (perversa voluntas). By allowing ourselves to be invaded by a pleasure or a pain, we are saying yes to something that we should reject. But we say yes because our will is now split, divided, and can take the wrong turn. Passion—that is, the finitude that makes us human—resides in this possibility of error, of this inflection of the will that allows itself to be influenced, carried away, convinced.