Thesaurus griceianum -- in twenty volumes, vol. xv.

INTENTUM. INTENTION INTENTION ARABIC ma’nā [المعنى[ ma’qūl [معقول[ FRENCH intention GERMAN Intention, übersinnliches Erkenntnisbild, Vorstellung der Vernunft, Begriff GREEK noêma [νόημα] ITALIAN intenzione LATIN intentio v. CONCEPT, CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, EPOCHÊ, ERLEBEN, FORM, IMAGE, LOGOS, OBJECT, PHÉNOMÈNE, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SOUL, UNIVERSALS, WILL “Intention” is a doubly polysemic term. As well as the equivocation that exists in French or Italian between the accepted meaning of the term—that of intention as in “to intend to” or as in “moral intention”—and the psycho-phenomenological meaning (which does not exist in German, where the first meaning is expressed as Absicht), the term presents, in this second, psycho-phenomenological register, a radical ambiguity, and is deeply divided between divergent philosophical paradigms. Indeed, the semantic field of “intention” covers a series of distinct phenomena, whose progressive coordination in the history of philosophy partly explains how saturated the modern notion of intentionality has become, torn as it is between the Husserlian phenomenological model, and that of the philosophy of mind. Thus, as Hilary Putnam has shown, the term “intentionality” has, in actual usage, widely diverse senses, namely, (1) for words, sentences, and other representations to have a meaning; (2) for representations to be able to designate (that is, to be true for) an actually existing thing, or, when there are several things, to designate each one of these; (3) for representations to be able to apply to something that does not exist; and (4) for a “state of mind” to be able to apply to a “state of affairs” (Putnam, Representation and Reality, 1). We will attempt to show here how the same word has come to mean, in German and thereafter in the other languages of philosophy, “the intentionality of linguistic expressions [die Intentionalität von sprachlichen Äußerungen],” the intentionality of acts of the mind or of thought (die Intentionalität von Denktaten), or that of acts of perception (die Intentionalität von Wahrnehmungen). I. Intention and Meaning The relation between intention and meaning, or sense, is attested in several theses in Edmund Husserl’s Ideen, especially when he defines the “fundamental element of intentionality” by equating the “intentional object [Objekt]” with “objective sense or meaning,” and posits that “to have a meaning, to aim at some meaning,” is the fundamental character of all consciousness, which as a consequence is not only lived experience, but a lived experience that has a “noetic” meaning (“Sinn zu haben, bzw. etwas ‘im Sinne zu haben’ ist der Grundcharakter alles Bewußtseins, das darum nicht nur überhaupt Erlebnis, sondern sinnhabendes, ‘noetisches’ ist,” Ideen 1, §90, p. 185 [206], trans. Kersten). In fact, the distortions or gaps that Putnam points out are in part due to the fact that the Husserlian intentional lived experience is assigned two aspects, a “noetic” aspect and a “noematic” aspect; the latter includes precisely the sense “separated out from this Bakker, Paul J.J.M, and Johannes M.M.H. Thijssen, eds. Mind, Cognition and Representation: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Blumenthal, H. J. Soul and Intellect: Studies in Plotinus and Later Neoplatonism. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1993. Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Endress, Gerhard, and Jan Aertsen, with Klaus Braun, eds. Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition: Sources, Constitution, and Reception of the Philosophy of Ibn Rushd (1126–1198): Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium Averroicum, Cologne, 1996. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1999. al-Fārābī. “De Intellectu et Intellecto.” Edited and translated by Étienne Gilson. “Les sources gréco-arabes de l’Augustinisme avicennisant.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 4 (1929–1930): 108–41. Rpt. Paris: Vrin, 1981. . “On the Intellect.” In Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources. Edited and translated by Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman, 68–78. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007. Giele, Maurice, Fernand Van Steenberghen, and Bernard Bazán, eds. Trois commentaires anonymes sur le Traité de l’âme d’Aristote. Philosophes médiévaux. Vol. 11. Louvain, Belg.: Publications universitaires, 1971. Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London: Warburg Institute, 2000. Jolivet, Jean, ed. and trans. L’intellect selon Kindī. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1971. Kelly, Brendan R. “On the Nature of the Human Intellect in Aristotle’s De anima: An Investigation into the Controversy Surrounding Thomas Aquinas’ De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1995. Libera, Alain de. Albert le Grand et la philosophie. Paris, Vrin, 1990. . “Existe-t-il une noétique avveroïste? Note sur la réception latine d’Averroès au XIIIe siècle.” In Averroismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, edited by F. Niewöhner and L. Sturlese, 51–80. Zurich: Spur, 1994. . L’unité de l’intellect: Commentaire du De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas de Thomas d’Aquin. Paris: Vrin, 2004. Libera, Alain de, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, and Alain Galonnier, eds. Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet. Paris: Vrin, 1997. McCarthy, R., trans. “Al-Kindi’s Treatise on the Intellect.” Islamic Studies 3 (1964): 119–49. McInerny, Ralph M. Aquinas against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. Perler, Dominik, ed. Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001. Schroeder, Frederic M., and Robert B. Todd, eds. and trans. Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect: The “De intellectu” Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle “De Anima” 3.4–8. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990. Siger de Brabant. Quaestiones in tertium De anima. De anima intellectiva. De aeternitate mundi: Édition critique. Edited by Bernardo Bazán. Louvain, Belg.: Publications universitaires, 1972. Translation and introduction by Cyril Vollert, Lottie H. Kendzierski, and Paul M. Byrne: On the Eternity of the World (De aeternitate mundi). Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1964. “Siger of Brabant on the Intellective Soul.” In Medieval philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, edited by Gyula Klima, with Fritz Allhoff and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Thomas Aquinas. The Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle’s Treatise on the soul. Translated by R. A. Kocourek. St. Paul, MN: College of St. Thomas, 1946. . On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists [De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas]. Translated and with introduction by Beatrice H. Zedler. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1968. Translation, introduction, Refs.:, and notes by Alain de Libera: L’unité de l’intellect contre les averroïstes: Suivi des textes contre Averroès antérieurs à 1270. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. INTENTION 501 lived experience, insofar as it casts its look appropriately.” The “sense” in question is not, however, “significance” or “meaning” as it is commonly understood, but concerns existence and nonexistence. The “situation” that, according to Husserl, defines “sense” is the fact that “the non-existence (or the conviction of nonexistence) of the objectivated or thought of Object pure and simple pertaining to the objectivation in question (and therefore to any particular intentive mental process whatever) cannot steal its something objectivated as objectivated, that therefore the distinction between both must be made” (Ideen 1, §90, p. 185 [206], trans. Kersten). The fact that “sense” is indifferent to the existence or nonexistence of the object is therefore the salient phenomenon indicated by the word “sense” in the analysis of intentionality. Husserl says, in this regard, that “the Scholastic distinction between the mental [mentalem], intentional or immanental Object on the one hand, and the actual [wirklichem] Object on the other hand,” refers to the distinction between the object and the existence of the object. Yet he radically contests the assimilation of the intentional object to an immanental object in the sense of an object “actually present in phenomenological purity” (Ideen 1, §90, p. 186 [206], trans. Kersten): sense is not a real component of lived experience, like hulê [ὕλη] (that is, for example, the data of sensation, Empfindungsdaten, and what is more, “not every really inherent moment in the concrete unity of an intentive mental process itself has the fundamental characteristic, intentionality,” Ideen 2, §36, trans. Kersten). Nor is it a psychic reality, or even a portrait or a sign. To attribute a “copy function” to intentional lived experience would lead to an “infinite regress”: “A second immanental tree, or even an ‘internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to an absurdity” (ibid.). Husserlian “sense” is thus not to be understood as simply borrowing the notion of “immanent object,” but as a “correlate belonging to the essence of phenomenologically reduced perception [das zum Wesen phänomenologisch reduzierten Wahrnehmungen gehörige Korrelat]” (Ideen 1, §90, p. 187 [209], trans. Kersten). Insofar as it is limited to the vague notion of representation, the connection Putnam makes between intentionality and nonexistence does not fully capture the Husserlian notion of “sense” (nor, a fortiori, that of a “complete noema” distinguished from a “core of meaning”). Nonetheless, the sense of “intention” or “intentionality” is marked by a series of oscillations that Putnam’s taxonomy translates very well. II. Intention and Intentionality The conception of intentionality that has for a long time been predominant in French-language literature comes principally from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. According to this conception, (a) “without exception, every conscious process is, in itself, consciousness of such and such, regardless of what the rightful actuality-status of this objective such-and-such may be, and regardless of the circumstance that I, as standing in the transcendental attitude, abstain from acceptance of this object as well as from all my other natural acceptances” (Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns); and (b) every state of consciousness “aims at” something, and carries within itself, as that which is “aimed at” (as the object of an intention), its “respective cogitatum”—what Husserl summarizes as follows in the famous formula of §14 of the Second Meditation: Wobei das Wort Intentionalität dann nichts anderes als diese allgemeine Grundeigenschaft des Bewußtseins, Bewußtsein von etwas zu sein, als cogito sein cogitatum in sich zu tragen, bedeutet. The word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be conscious of something; as a cogito, to bear within itself its cogitatum. (Cartesian Meditations, §14, ed. Ströcker, 35; trans. Cairns) (N.B.: It is worth pointing out how closely this resembles the formulas introducing the cogito in §14, ed. Ströcker, 34: “Der Transzendentale Titel ego cogito muß also um ein Glied erweitert werden: Jedes cogito, jedes Bewußtseinserlebnis meint irgend etwas und trägt in dieser Weise der Gemeinten in sich selbst sein jeweiliges cogitatum, und jedes tut das in seiner Weise.”) Several francophone and anglophone interpreters tend nowadays to forget, however, the “fundamental property” of consciousness, “to be conscious of something,” for Husserl refers neither to “a relation between some psychological occurrence—called a mental process—and another real factual existence [realen Dasein]—called an object,” nor to “a psychological connection taking place in Objective [objektiven] actuality between the one and the other,” but rather to “mental processes purely with respect to their essence,” that is to say, to “pure essences and that which is ‘a priori’ included in the essences with unconditional necessity” (“Vielmehr ist von Erlebnissen rein ihrem Wesen nach, bzw. von reinen Wesen die Rede und von dem, was in den Wesen, ‘a priori,’ in unbedingter Notwendigkeit beschlossen ist”: Ideen 1, §34, p. 64 [74], trans. Kersten). Intentionality is not a connection between a physical fact and a psychic fact. When we are caught in the contemporary, postWittgensteinian opposition between “empiricism” and “intentionalism,” we tend to forget that we often invoke intentionality over and against a conception of mental acts that states that no mental act can have an extra-mental entity as its content. So “intentionalism” consists in maintaining the “intentionality of the mind,” which means that our acts orient us toward things outside ourselves. This is, however, a weak (even trivial) characterization of phenomenological intentionality, which does not greatly value the Husserlian distinction between a “thing pure and simple” (Sache) and a “complete intentional object [Objekt]” (Ideen 1, §34, pp. 66–67, trans. Kersten). Similarly, the discussions generated by the behaviorist proposition according to which we can and must eliminate all intentional entities (the “mentalist expressions” of natural language) gives “intentional” a meaning that is so reduced or so metaphorical that we might wonder whether “intention” here had anything whatsoever to do with phenomenology. Even more complex debates have developed beyond the field of basic Husserlian studies, particularly in anglophone philosophy. One example of this is the discussion between Wilfrid Sellars and Roderick Chisholm on the relationship between thoughts and the 502 INTENTION the sense that a resemblance is one way of extending towards the thing which it resembles. And it is in this sense that the light emitted is the “intention” or the [intentional] “species” of the source of a light. A. Intentio as actus voluntatis: Intention and attention The ethical meaning of intentio, the first one that is historically attested, is closely related to the contemporary meaning of voluntary intention. However, since St. Augustine, the dimension of active orientation immanent to the notion of intentio has been presented as a characteristic not only of the will, but also, by extension, of any cognitive process. Understood in this sense, intentio becomes synonymous with attention. The proximity of intention to attention is well known to phenomenologists. Husserl gives a unified discussion of this (from the noetic and noematic point view) in his analysis of “mutations” or “attentional modifications,” when he attempts to describe, for the “complete noema,” the variations of the correlative appearance of the noetic modifications (Ideen 1, §92, pp. 189–190, trans. Kersten). He stresses, moreover, that nicht einmal des Wesenzusammenhang zwischen Aufmerksamkeit und Intentionalität—diese fundamentale Tatsache, daß Aufmerksamkeit überhaupt nichts anderes ist also eine Grundart intentionaler Modifikationen—ist meines Wissens früher je hervorgehoben worden. not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality—this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications—has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before. (Ideen 1, §92, p. 192 [215] n. 1, trans. Kersten) The couple “intention”/“attention” (which corresponds also to the English “directedness”) was attested, in exemplary fashion, in St. Augustine’s analysis of visual sensation: Itemque illa animi intentio, quae in ea re quam videmus tenet sensum, atque utrumque coniungit, non tantum ab ea re visibili natura differt: quandoquidem iste animus, illud corpus est: sed ab ipso quoque sensui atque visione: quoniam solius animi est haec intentio. Further also, that attention of the mind which keeps the sense in that thing which we see, and connects both, not only differs from that visible thing in its nature; in that the one is mind, and the other body; but also from the sense and the vision itself: since this attention is the act of the mind alone. (De Trinitate, 11.2.2, ed. Haddan and Knight) Intentio and attendere, “to pay attention to,” “to intend” (German Aufmerksamkeit), are often combined. This is true of Abelard, in his theory of abstraction as selective attention (which prefigures the theories of John Stuart Mill and of William Hamilton): Dum in homine hoc solum quod ad humanitatis naturam attinet intelligere nitimur, utpote animal rationale semantic properties of language. Sellars states that “thoughts as intentional entities are derived from the semantic properties of language,” which means that “intentionality resides in the metalinguistic utterances that express the semantic properties of an object language” (the so-called weak irreducibility thesis), whereas Chisholm maintains, on the contrary, that “the semantic properties of language, and thus the metalinguistic utterances that express them, are derived from the properties of thoughts, which are the fundamental support of intentionality” (the so-called strong irreducibility thesis; cf. Cayla, Routes et déroutes de l’intentionnalité). III. Intention and Intentio As fragmented as it might at first appear, the plurality of meanings of “intention” can be seen as relatively coherent if it is considered as the continuation, or as another version, of the original polysemy of the Latin intentio. Indeed, in this term we find not only the effects wrought by successive translations, but also the shadow cast over the modern philosophical lexicon by the different stages of the genesis of the medieval notion. Certain contemporary debates about intentionality might, then, appear to some extent to rearticulate—by simplifying or complicating them—problems that were tackled in the Middle Ages within a more unitary framework. The Scholastic Latin intentio presents an extraordinarily rich array of meanings. The term can in fact be translated as (1) attention (German Aufmerksamkeit); (2) aim, objective, purpose (German Anstrebung, Absicht, Vorhaben); (3) relationship, rapport (synonym habitudo, German Beziehung, cf. Thomas Aquinas, In Sent. I, d. 25, qu. 1.3c); (4) meaning, in the sense of a speaker’s intention to mean something (intentio loquentis, intentio proferentis); (5) image, copy, resemblance, similarity (synonym similitudo, German Ähnlichkeit, Abbild); (6) representation, notion, concept (synonyms conceptio intelligibilis, ratio, conceptus, repraesentatio, German übersinnliches Erkenntnisbild, Vorstellung der Vernunft, Begriff); (7) intelligible form (synonym species); or (8) extra-mental resemblance. The polysemy of intentio is mentioned by Duns Scotus (Reportata Parisiensa 2, d. 13, art. un., trans. McCarthy, 39; Ordinatio, trans. McCarthy, 26), who reduces it to four primary meanings: Notandum est quod hoc nomen “intentio” est equivocum. Uno modo dicitur actus voluntatis “intentio.” Alio modo: ratio formalis in re, sicut intentio rei a qua accipitir genus differt ab intentione a qua accipitur differentia. Tertio modo dicitur conceptus. Quarto modo, dicitur ratio tendendi in obiectum, sicut similitudo dicitur ratio tendendi in illus cuius est. Et isto modo dicitur lumen “intentio” vel “species” lucis. We have to note that the noun “intention” is equivocal. The first meaning of “intention” is an act of will. A second is: a formal reason present in a thing, in the sense that in a thing, the intention from which the generic type is derived is different from the intention from which the (specific) difference is derived. A third meaning of “intention” refers to a concept. And a fourth meaning [of intention] refers to the way in which one reaches out or extends towards an object, in INTENTION 503 “1. imaginatio corporis que in memoria est, 2. informatio, cum ad eam convertitur acies cogitantis, 3. intentio voluntatis utrumque coniungens” [De Trinitate, 15.3.5, pp. 430–33]). B. Intentio as form (ratio formalis in re) Intentio can often mean “form.” This form has nothing to do with the “form of the body perceived,” as described in St. Augustine’s theory of vision, but is rather the Aristotelian idea of form. This is to be understood as both the form and the definition (or the definitional form) realized in extra-mental things, according to one of the characteristic ambiguities of the term logos [λόγοϛ]. (On the distinction between the two meanings of logos—logos-definition and logos-form—see Cassin, Aristote et le logos, 107–10, as well as 257–93, in particular 260–63.) As ratio formalis in re (Scotus, “a formal reason present in a thing”), intentio thus refers to what Alexander of Aphrodisias called the logos koinos [λόγοϛ ϰοινόϛ], both a common notion (logos-formula) and a common form (logos-form), or, if one prefers, the “common definition” and “common nature” fully present in each thing, and equally, which is to say entirely, predicated of all things that are fully what they are by virtue of this common notion and form. The use of the word intentio as ratio formalis in re continues, then, the idiosyncrasy of Alexander’s vocabulary. When, for example, he states that “the definition of man” (“a bipedal terrestrial animal”) is common because it applies to “all” men, and is “fully in each one,” he substitutes the definition itself for the “common quality named in this definition,” thereby combining an expression and what it refers to. This understanding of intentio is the one determining what Lloyd calls, with respect to Alexander, the “conventional picture of forms as universals in re” (cf. Lloyd, Form and Universal, 51), a thesis based on a “confusion of the universal with the form.” C. Intentio as conceptus (concept) “Concept” is one of the most frequently attested meanings of intentio. It is very clear in the following description by Thomas Aquinas of the process of conceptualization, which includes all of the implied terms: Intellectus per speciem rei formatus intellegendo format in seipso quandam intentionem rei intellectae, quae est ratio ipsius, quam significat definitio. Formed from a species [form] of a thing, whenever the intellect conceives, it forms within itself an intention of the thing conceived, this intention being the notion of the thing as signified by its definition [or: “by the term ‘definition’ (when applied to that notion)”]. (Summa contra Gentiles 1, q. 53) Intentio is thus obviously linked to conceptio, conceptus, and ratio, without ever being exactly synonymous with them. In the above passage from the Summa contra Gentiles, intention appears as the content of a notion (= ratio), expressed/signified by its definition. But not all texts define it so decisively. In many discussions, intentio and conceptus are considered to be equivalent. In others, intentiones replaces the awkward expression passiones animae, which constitutes the top of the semiotic triangle of De interpretatione (see SIGN). In this case, it is the tripartite mortale, circumscriptis scilicet omnibus aliis que ad substantiam humanitatis non attinent, profecto multa se per imaginationem nolenti animo obiiciunt que omnino ab intentione abiecimus. Adeo ut . . ., dum aliquid tamquam incorporeum per intellectum attendo, sensum usu tamquam corporeum imaginari cogor. While we try only to conceive in man that which concerns the nature of his humanity—that is, as a mortal, rational animal—, after having eliminated everything else that does not concern the substance of humanity, many things that we had completely rejected from our purview become ob-jects of the mind through the imagination. While I attend to a thing as incorporeal in an act of intellection, I am forced through the use of my senses to imagine it as corporeal. (Abelard, De intellectibus §19) The ad-tension (the “tension-toward” or “tendingtoward”) or the attention in the expression “directedness toward” is thus the first meaning of intentio in the field of cognition, whether this “tending-toward” is provoked by the thing itself (that is, the ob-ject present), or whether it is spontaneous (that is, as the aim of a distant or absent term). The etymology of intentio as tendere in aliud suggests a limited distinction between attention, and aim or purpose strictly speaking (lexicalized in German as Aufmerksamkeit, and Absicht, Anstrebung, and Vorhaben). It is in the first sense that Thomas Aquinas writes that attention is the “condition required for the activity of any cognitive faculty” (“ad actum cuiuslibet cognoscitivae potentiae requiritur intentio,” De veritate, quarto 13.3c). In the second sense, he stresses that intentio refers to the activity of the faculty of thought insofar as it “directs what it apprehends to the knowledge of something else, or to some operation [id, quod apprehendit, ordinat ad aliquid aliud cognoscendum vel operandum]” (Summa theologiae 1, q. 79, a. 10 ad 3m). As Duns Scotus writes, however, precisely insofar as intendere means “in aliud tendere,” and if it is true that every cognitive power is said to aim or extend toward an object, solely by virtue of the fact that an object is objected with respect to this power: to this degree and under these circumstances, intendere is to be understood more precisely as that which is voluntarily oriented toward an object, whether it is absent or present (Reportata Parisiensa 2, d. 38, q. 1). Voluntary attention is thus a fundamental and inextricable aspect of intentio. This sense is undoubtedly inherited from St. Augustine, for whom it played a central role in his theory of perception and memory. He used this sense of intentio almost identically in both his tripartite corporeal vision (that is, [a] the form the body perceived, [b] the image that is formed of it in the intention of the person discerning it, and [c] the attention of the will that joins these two together) and his description of the operation of memory (which also has a tripartite structure: [1] the imaginary vestige that remains in one’s memory; [2] the impression of this vestige in the mind’s intention, when one recalls it; and [3] the attention of the will that, once again, joins the two together. The original Latin is as follows: “[a] forma corporis, [b] conformatio que fit in cernentis aspectu, [c] intentio voluntatis utrumque coniungens” [De Trinitate, 14.3.5, pp. 354–56], and 504 INTENTION and lumen, which paradoxically recalls one of the oldest meanings of the concept: the fruit (proles) of conception in the literal sense of the term. It is indeed this register that underlies the use of intentio when the example of light is discussed: the source of light “engenders” luminosity. “Lux,” writes Scotus, “gignat lumen tamquam propriam speciem sensibilem sui” (Ordinatio 2.13, trans. McCarthy, 276). This vocabulary, which one could readily term “Augustinian,” is even more pronounced among theorists of optics or perspectiva, particularly when they discuss the theme of the “multiplication of species.” One of the founding fathers of the theory, Robert Grosseteste, writes literally that the generic term lux has to be broken down into light that engenders (generans) or gives birth (gignens), and light that is engendered (generata) or given birth to (gignata): “The light that is in the sun engenders from its substance the light that is in the air [lux quae est in sole gignit ex sua substantia lumen in aere]” (Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum analyticorum libros 1.17, ed. Rossi, 244–45). This engendering relation, which preserves both the alterity and a certain essential unity between what engenders and what is engendered, undoubtedly explains why one can discuss, on the shoulders of a further play on the word “species,” the theme of the propagation of light, and then the theme of the perception of colors, and beyond that of perception itself, by resorting to the language of propagation, and of the multiplication of natural species. Matthieu of Aquasparta explains in these terms that “every corporeal or spiritual form, real or intentional, has an engendering and self-disseminating force, either actually, as in the case of forms subjected to generation and corruption, or intentionally” (Quaestiones disputate de gratia, q. 8, ed. Doucet, 214). As surprising as it might seem, intentio is thus both a rival of conceptus, coming from another network and another interlinguistic field (Arabo-Latin, as we shall see, and no longer Greco-Latin), and an equivalent of conceptus, as far as the semantic aspect of generation and conception is concerned. Duns Scotus, who was among the first to articulate an authentic theory of intentionality as an orientation toward an object, also played a major role in naturalizing intentionality. He was well aware that intentio understood as conceptus derived from Arabic theories of optics, and that as similitudo or species, lumen that is multiplied according to three different types of ray (rectus, fractus, reflexus) denotes the “sensible species of lux, immediately engendered by it.” But he consciously used this perspectivisit theory to explain that the formal reason of a given intellection, the species genita (engendered form), which is nothing other than that of the imago gignentis (the image of what engenders it), requires a “real presence” of the object to the cognitive power, that is, a “sufficient proximity to enable engendering” of the said species by the object itself, an engendering that places the present object “sub ratione cognoscibilis vel repraesentati,” in short, makes it knowable or representable (Ordinatio 1.3.3.1, ed. Balić, 6:232). Briefly, then: the word intentio serves here to express the process by means of which objects directly engender their image in the intellect. A movement whose directionality is exactly opposite that of an orientation toward the object troubles any understanding of intentio as “ratio tendendi in obiectum.” nature of the phônai [φωναί]—that is, as “vocal sounds,” as noêmata [νοήματα] (noemata or concepts), and as onta [ὄντα] (beings, also called “things,” ta pragmata [τὰ πϱάγματα])—inherited from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Categories that, when superimposed on the triangle “vocal sounds, affects or passions of the soul, and things,” explains the appearance in this context of intentio as noema, or concept. Intentiones in the sense of noêmata is thus part of a history that goes back a long way, with the earliest attested reference perhaps the distinction mentioned by Clement of Alexandria (Stromates, 8.8.23.1, ed. Stählin, 3:94.5–12) between onomata [ὀνόματα] (names), noêmata (concepts, whose names are symbols), and hupokeimena [ὑποϰείμενα] (“actual substrata, of which concepts are the impressions made within us”; cf. on this point Pépin, “Clément d’Alexandrie,” in particular 271–79). D. Intentio as ratio tendendi in obiectum, the angle of the aim or intention The fourth sense of intentio, which at first glance is close to what Franz Brentano calls “die Richtung auf ein Objekt” (the orientation toward an object), is in fact the most enigmatic. In some ways, it is bound up with the third sense, if ratio tendendi refers to what serves as a formal principle in the act of intention by which a cognitive power is oriented toward its object (“illud per quod tamquam per principium formale in obiectum tendit sensus”). In this case, ratio tendendi indeed refers to a conceptual similitudo that constitutes the angle of the aim or intention. But the analysis becomes complicated when Duns Scotus includes in this fourth sense a resemblance that is both extra-mental and nonconceptual, stating that “ipso modo dicitur lumen ‘intentio’ vel ‘specio’ lucis” (It is in this sense that the light emitted [or luminosity] is said to be the “intention” or the “species” of the source of the light). There is something quite puzzling about this thesis. First, it assumes that we can treat luminosity (lumen) as a conceptum produced by an extra-mental thing (lux), independent of any activity or act of the intellect. Yet this statement corresponds to a precise theory of intentionality that stipulates that “every concept is [the concept] of a first intention which [the concept] is naturally producible immediately by the thing itself, without any operation or act of the intellect” (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 1.23, ed. Balić, 5:360: “omnis conceptus est intentionis primae qui natus est fieri immediate a re, sine opere vel actu intellectus negociantis”). Here, the term intentio is used to express an intuition that would be directly opposed to that of modern “intentionalism,” insofar as it suggests that objects themselves engender the concepts that represent them to the mind (a thesis that is compatible with the statement by which the noêmata are the impressions made within us by the hupokeimena [ὑποϰείμενα]). This intuition is also in contrast to the theory one assumes to be standard, according to which all intentions, in the sense of concepts, are produced by the intellect, or are the species formed by the intellect, and are existing within the intellect. The example Duns Scotus gives is not, however, a neutral one. The classical distinction in the medieval theory of light between lumen, as the light emitted or radiating in a transparent or diaphanous milieu, and lux, as the source of light, assumes that there is an engendering relation between lux INTENTION 505 as immanent to the psychic. Gegenständlichkeit is, however, an expression that is as equivocal as Intentionalität. One might also assume that Brentano is using it in the same sense as Bernard Bolzano when, in discussing the influence of “things that make no claim to existence [Dinge, die keinen Anspruch auf Wirklichkeit machen],” he wonders about the Gegenständlichkeit (objective existence) of the concept “which we quite rightly associate with the word infinite.” “The next question to be asked,” Bolzano writes, “is that concerning its objective existence—that is, whether there exist objects to which it can be applied, whether there exist sets which we may judge to be infinite in the sense here” (cf. Bolzano, Paradoxien des Unendlichen, §13, p. 13, trans. Prejonsky, 84). “In-existence,” which has nothing to do with nonexistence (German Nicht-Existenz), denotes a type of presentification that has to do with inherence, in the sense of “being present,” “existing in,” “residing in” (German Innewohnen): in all psychic phenomena, there is an object. In this sense, intentionality expresses the fact that, as Aristotle writes in De anima (8.431b30–432a1), “it is not the stone itself that is in the soul, but the form of the stone” (“ou gar ho lithos en têi psuchêi, alla to eidos [οὐ γὰϱ ὁ λίθοϛ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ, ἀλλὰ τὸ εἶδοϛ]”). To speak about intentionality here amounts to saying that the mode of presence of a stone in the soul is intentional and not real, that the extra-mental thing is not “really” but only “intentionally” inherent in the soul. This lexical choice has a history, and its reasons. The notion of “intentional being” must not be confused with that of esse obiectivum or “objective.” The mention of the “direction toward an object” nonetheless places emphasis on a dimension of mental in-existence—that is, the orientation or direction toward an object—that has caused many problems for readers of Brentano. According to Putnam, Brentano, in contrast to Husserl, did not maintain that “the intentionality of the mental provided a way of understanding how mind and world are related and how it is that in acts of consciousness we come to be directed to an object” (cf. Putnam, Representation and Reality, 88); rather, he merely wished to indicate that “mental phenomena were characterized by being directed toward contents” (ibid.). Whether or not Putnam’s interpretation is well founded, it remains the case that the “tending toward an object” suggested by the currently accepted Latin etymology of the verb intendere (tendere in) was very early on considered as a characteristic aspect of the kind of mental presentation envisaged by Aristotle in De anima (8.431b30–432a1). Radulphus Brito defines intentionality on the basis of this “tending toward”: intentio is “that by which an intellect tends toward a thing [tendit in rem]” (Pinborg, “Radulphus Brito’s Sophism,” 141 n. 49). In medieval texts, the directionality of intentio competes explicitly with the very notion of a mental content. In fact, the same term refers both to the movement by which the intellect is directed toward an object or apprehends a mental content, and to the intrapsychic mode of presentation of this same object and content. This overlap is not without consequences for the status of intentionality in modern philosophy. The nature of this polysemy is fundamentally linked to the history of its translations. Indeed, the word intentio only appears in its different usages, at the end of the twelfth century, in the Arabo-Latin translations of Aristotle and of the Peripatetic corpus as a translation of This tension is only relieved once the perspectivist theory of intentio is rejected as an epistemological model, and as a framework for a theory of perception based on a direct gnoseological realism—that is, once intentionality no longer functions as a characteristic or a mode of being of similitudo or species engendered by an object, independent of any perceiving subject. We are now able to trace this decision back to Pierre d’Auriole, who opened up the space for a new reflection on the phenomenality of appearing. Indeed, it was against the idea that once could admit every extra-mental intentional existence that Pierre d’Auriole established his theory, reducing the intentional being of lumen to a real being, and reformulating the notion of intentional being in terms of apparent or phenomenal being (esse apparens), with intentional being reserved, in the strictest sense, for the mode of being of color in a rainbow. Esse intentionale became, on this basis, a synonym of esse obiectivum or fictitium sive apparens (“objective or fictive or apparent being,” that is, phenomenal), and was contrasted to “esse reale et fixum in rerum naturae absque omni apprehensione” (real being remaining stable in natural reality outside of any perception). Anything accorded intentional being could not exist outside of perception: it is merely a conceptus objectivus (objective concept), or, to put it more accurately, an apparitio objectiva (objective phenomenon: Scriptum, 1.23, ed. Pinborg, 133–34). IV. The Geneses of Intentionality A. In-existence It was Brentano, consciously borrowing from the Scholastics, who introduced the term “intentionality” (Intentionalität) into the vocabulary of psychology. This initiative was directly responsible for the adoption of the term and the concept in intentional psychology and phenomenology. Brentanian intentionality is supposed to define the specificity of mental phenomena, by a kind of relation that is named, rather unfortunately, “intentional in-existence”: Jedes psychisches Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker der Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl wir nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen is), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. (Brentano, Psychologie- vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1:124–25 ; trans. Rancurello et al., 88) One might wonder about the translation of “die immanente Gegenständlichkeit” by “an immanent objectivity.” The definite article (die) could suggest that it is rather a question of “immanent objective existence,” of the opening of the object 506 INTENTION man,” intentio hominis—in other words, “the definitional formulation characterizing the concept of man,” that is, “rational, mortal, bipedal animal”). . B. Intentio as an optical term If intentio is often a synonym both for a concept and for the thing conceived, the notion itself of presentation / presentification / intentional presence covers several other lexical networks. A first set is linked to the technical vocabulary of optics, and to the dissemination of the theories and the work of Alhazen, for whom intentio was the name of the form affecting the apparatus of sight, and then by extension its mode of being in the physical medium of transmission: one speaks, in this sense, of the esse intentionale of the thing in medio. This is the sense in which the Latin translation of the Averroës Magnum commentarium on Aristotle’s De anima discusses the “spiritual being” of the extra-mental things affecting sight: in the medium of transmission, the res has an esse spirituale, not an esse materiale. The equivalence between spirtuale and intentionale is a characteristic of the Latin lexicon of Averroës (cf. Averroës, Magnum commentarium in De anima 2, comm. 97, ed. the Arabic ma‘na [المعنى .[Its ambiguity is at its origin, the same as that of the term it translates. The word ma’na [المعنى [ corresponds to the Greek logos [λόγοϛ], noêma [νόημα], dianoia [διάνοια], ennoia [ἔννοια], theôrêma [θεώϱημα], and pragma [πϱᾶγμα], among others (Endress, “Du grec au latin à travers l’arabe,” 151–57). The Arabo-Latin intentio has just as many meanings, since it is equivalent to at least three kinds of term: (a) a thought, concept, idea, notion; (b) a signification (in which we find the dimension of the English “to mean,” or the French vouloir dire); and (c) an entity. That the same term refers at the same time to a mental act, a content, a cognitive state, and an object is clearly apparent in the fact that, from the thirteenth century on, intentio has equally meant either the concept of a thing, or the thing itself as it is conceived, or both at once. So the notion of “relational intention” is thus from the outset, in the Middle Ages, programmatically inscribed within the idea of an originary shared belonging of intentio rei and res intenta. In the same register, there is a further ambiguity in the pair logos-ma‘na [المعنى ,[which progressively colors the term intentio with the double nuances of “form” (as in the expression “the intention of a thing,” intentio rei—that is, the “form of a thing”) and “formulation” (as in the expression “the intention of 1 Intentio and ma’nā [المعنى[ The Arabic ma’nan (with the article: al-ma’nā [المعنى ([means what is on one’s mind, what one is referring to, what one means (German meinen—no etymological link to English “mean”; French vouloir dire) by a word, or a notion. The Arabic root ‘NY [ى ن ع [indeed means “to aim.” Ninth-century translations chose the word to translate several meanings of the Greek logos [λόγοϛ]. So in Aristotle’s treatise De anima, we read that sensation is affected by color, or flavor, or sound, not insofar as each of these is said, but to the extent that it is such and such a quality, and “according to logos” (2.12, 424a24, trans. Barnes). Commentators have sought to define more precisely the status of this being which affects sensations in this way. Themistius (Paraphrase of De anima, ed. Heinze, p. 78, 3.10.13) also uses logos [λόγοϛ]. The Arabic translates the term in Themistius’s paraphrase of Aristotle as ma’nā [المعنى) [1.7.11, trans. Lyons), as it does for Aristotle’s original (Averroës, Magnum commentarium in De anima, §121, ed. Crawford; cf. Bos, Aristotle’s De anima Translated into Hebrew, 107.658). Avicenna uses the term in a number of different senses (cf. RT: Goichon, Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sînâ, §469, pp. 253–55), including one meaning, very close to our own, that was close to the lekton [λεϰτόν] of the Stoics (Avicenna’s De anima, 287). In the twelfth century, the word was translated from the Arabic of Avicenna and Averroës by the Latin word intentio. Likewise, Jewish translators from the Ibn Tibbo (or Ibn Tibbon) family translated it as ‘inyan this popularized translations Latin]. עִנְיָן] meaning, which thus has little in common with our “intention,” in the sense of “to intend to do something.” It is in this sense that we talk of “intentional species” (Roger Marston was the first to use the term) as what our perceptive organs receive, stripping concrete things of their matter to retain only their form. Avicenna defined the object of logic as being “the second intellected concepts [ma’ani (معانى [(which are based on the first intellected concepts, [and which are based on them] from the point of view of [the fact of their having] the quality of [being] that by which we attain the unknown from the known, not from the point of view of the fact of their being intellected: they have an intellectual existence that depends on absolutely no matter, or that depends on noncorporeal matter (Shifa’: Métaphysique, 1.2, 10.17–11.2). The Scholastics followed him by distinguishing intentio prima and intentio secunda (starting with Godefroid de Fontaines), and this usage became so common that it enabled François Rabelais to joke: “comedere secunda intentiones” (to eat second intentions: Pantagruel 1.7), that is to say, pure abstractions ( below). This mode of existence in the intellect alone was sometimes called intentionalitas (Pierre d’Auriole, Étienne de Rieti), and the phenomenological usage of “intentionality,” borrowed by Husserl from Brentano, is the most recent part of this history. Rémi Brague REFS.: Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Bollingen series, 71.1–2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Averroës. Magnum commentarium in De anima. Edited by F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Avicenna. Al-Shifa’: La Métaphysique. Edited by G. C. Anawati. Cairo, Egypt: Organisation générale des imprimeries gouvernementales, 1960. . Avicenna’s De anima. Edited by F. Rahman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Bos, Gerrit. Aristotle’s De anima Translated into Hebrew by Zerahyah b. Isaac b. Shealtiel Hen. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1994. Themistius. Paraphrase of De anima. 4th ed. Edited by R. Heinze. In RT: CAG, 5-3. Translation by Robert B. Todd: On Aristotle On the Soul. London: Duckworth, 1996. Arabic translation by M. C. Lyons: An Arabic Translation of Themistius’s Commentary on Aristoteles, De anima. Oxford: Cassirer, 1973. INTENTION 507 d’Auvergne, “the intellect has two ways of being oriented towards things [supra res ipsas intellectus duplicem habet motum].” A first movement orients it directly or immediately toward things themselves. Through this movement, it obtains knowledge of the nature of the things on which it imposes a name. This “nature” is the quiddity of a thing, and the name imposed is a name of first intention (“man,” “animal,” “Socrates”), because it signifies “the concept of the intellect that is first oriented toward the thing itself [in rem ipsam primo intellectus intendentis].” The second movement is the one whereby the intellect is oriented toward a thing that is “already apprehended,” in order to attach to it the “conditions” of consideration upon which depends the attribution of a second-intention name, or “universal name.” Starting out from the same premises, the Modists developed an actual theory of intentions. The modista Radulphus Brito (Raoul le Breton) defined intentio as “that by which the intellect is oriented towards a thing [tendit in rem].” He articulated the contemporary distinctions (those of Simon of Faversham or Pierre d’Auvergne) into an actual combined system where we find both the Aristotelian and Thomist topos of the “three operations of the intellect” (apprehension, judgment, reasoning) and the Modist semantic theory of paronyms. He was thus able to bring into play a single distinction between the abstract and the concrete at the three levels of operation, allowing him to conflate the trivial opposition between the intention and the thing. At the level of the first operation (the apprehension of a reality according to its own particular mode of being), Brito made the distinction between a first abstract intention, or “knowledge of the thing” (cognitio rei), and a first concrete intention, or “the thing as it is known” (res sic cognita). He thus returned to the theme of paronymy (the abstract/ concrete relation), which had provided his predecessors with the general framework for the intelligibility needed to elucidate the status of second intentions. For Brito, however, the correspondence between the paronymic meaning and the semantic status of intentions could be generalized into an actual theory of intentional objectness, since he maintained that every kind of knowledge “names its object” in the same way that “abstract accidents name their subject,” which is to say, concretely: “Et ita semper cognitio denominant suum obiectum, sicut accidentia abstracta denominant suum subiectum” (cf. Pinborg, “Radulph Brito’s Sophism,” 141). From this basis, an entire taxonomy was established, encompassing prima intentio in concreto (joining together res intenta, “the thing intended,” and prima intentio in abstracta, “first abstract intention”), intentio secunda in abstracta, and intentio secunda in concreto, these last two assigned once again to the second and then the third operations of the intellect. This ponderous architecture was brutally shaken up by the Nominalists, particularly William of Ockham, who reconfigured the theory of impositions and the theory of intentions into an entirely different doctrine. Taking into account what was for him a cardinal difference separating words in spoken and written languages from the concepts and terms of the language of the mind, William of Ockham redefined the relationship between “impositions” and “intentions.” . Crawford, 277.28–30): “Color habet duplex esse, scilicet esse in corpore colorato [et hoc est esse corporale] et esse in diaffono [et hoc est esse spirituale],” which Albertus Magnus translated as, “In matter, form has material being, in the diaphanous, on the contrary, color does not have a material being, but a spiritual being” (Albertus Magnus, De intellectu et intelligibili, 1.3.1). C. Intentio as the form of the inner senses A second lexical network is provided by the terminology particular to the Avicenna latinus, which uses the word intentio to refer to a representation whose origin is nonsensible, formed in the inner senses, and associated with a sensible apprehension effected by the outer senses. In this network, intentio refers in its literal sense to the vis aestimationis or estimative faculty, the role of which is to apprehend “unsensed intentions residing in singular sensibles.” Understood in this way, “intentions” are what the inner senses perceive of a sensible reality without the “intermediary of the outer senses.” The “unsensed intentions of the sensibles” are thus contrasted with the “forms of the sensibles” that are at first perceived by the outer senses, and only subsequently by the inner senses (and because of them). A characteristic example of an “intention” in this sense is the property or character of “dangerousness” of a wolf, which a sheep perceives in a nonsensible way, and which causes it to run away at the sight of a wolf, that is, when its “form” is presented to its outer senses ( here, and SENSUS COMMUNIS). In Averroës, the opposition between intention and image acquires a new, almost “iconic” aspect. Indeed, for him, an image only “depicts” certain external characterisitics of a real object, or certain of its particular or common sensible properties (color, “‘form” in the sense of “figure,” etc.), but it does not “represent” them. Intentio, by contrast, represents certain elements of the “individual this” that are not given in an image, and that correspond to what this individual is insofar as it is “this individual.” To speak of the iconic aspect of intentio thus means that intentio alone makes present a given individual as the individual he or she is, whereas an image only presents a set of sensible characteristics. For Averroës, it is a specialized faculty, the cogitative faculty, that is capable of separating out intentio (ma‘nā al-khayāl [الخيال معنى [from the image (al-khayāl [الخيال.([ . The distinction Porphyry makes between first imposition (prôtê thesis [πϱώτη θέσιϛ]) and second imposition (deutera thesis [δευτέϱα θέσιϛ]) of names is partly what forms the basis for the medieval analysis of intentiones as first intentions and second intentions. According to Porphyry, names are first applied (“first imposition”) to sensibles, and only subsequently to intelligibles, considered as things that are “anterior in themselves” (that is, naturally), but posterior in the order of perception (Porphyry, In Categoria Aristotelis, ed. Busse, 90.20ff. and 91.20–27). Being perceived first (i.e., before the “commons”), sensibles or individuals are the first objects of signification (ibid., 91.6–12). Intelligibles are thereby the object of a “secondary” linguistic imposition. In the Middle Ages, the distinction between the two types of imposition was used as a tool for differentiating between the ways in which thought is oriented toward an object. For Pierre 508 INTENTION 2 “Cogitative” and its Greek, Arabic, and Latin equivalents In the vocabulary of medieval philosophical psychology, the distinction between nous [νοῦϛ], to noêtikon [τὸ νοητιϰόν], and to dianoêtikon [τὸ διανοητιϰόν] (literally “intellect,” “intellective or noetic faculty,” and “dianoetic faculty”) was usually reduced to an opposition between the Arabic or Latin equivalents of nous and to dianoêtikon. This reduction corresponds to the fact, noted by Bodéüs (Aristotle, Catégories, ed. Bodéüs, 146 n. 6), that De anima does not strictly delineate between the faculty called to dianoêtikon in 413b13, 414b18, or 431a14, and the faculty is elsewhere referred to as to noêtikon. The French translations of the Greek, which range from faculté discursive (discursive faculty: Tricot) to réflexion (reflection: Bodéüs), show that for them, the basic opposition was between dianoia [διάνοια]— so-called discursive thought—and noêsis [νόησιϛ]—so-called intuitive thought. This same division commands how the field was organized in medieval times, when it was structured around the pair vis cogitativa and intellectus. In the tradition of Arabic Peripateticism, to dianoêtikon appears at the center of a three-term system, corresponding to the so-called passible or material “faculties of perception”: the imaginative, the cogitative, and the rememorative. These terms need to be clarified, however. In Avicenna, for whom there are five inner senses (see SENSUS COMMUNIS), the cogitative refers to the same faculty as the imaginative. It is the third inner sense, the vis cogitativa (al-quwwat almufakkira [المفكرة القوة ([ ّ in man, or imaginativa in animals, whose function is to divide and compose the images retained by the imagination, the second of the inner senses. In Averroës, on the other hand, for whom the division of the inner senses is tripartite, the cogitative assumes part of the functions that Avicenna reserves for the estimative: perceiving intentions (). In his commentary on De sensu et sensato, Averroës describes as follows the functioning of the three faculties relating to the “inner senses”: “The sense perceives the extra-mental thing, then the formative faculty [i.e., the imaginative faculty] forms [an image] of it; then the distinctive faculty [i.e., the cogitative faculty] distinguishes the intention of this form from its description; then the retensive faculty receives what the distinctive faculty has distinguished” (cf. Black, “Memory, Individuals, and the Past,” 168–69). In the Latin translation of Averroës’s Magnum commentarium on Aristotle’s De anima, these three faculties are designated using the triad (virtus) imaginativa-cogitativa-rememorativa—three faculties whose function is to “make present the form of the thing imagined in the absence of the corresponding sensation.” The five faculties distinguished by Avicenna—(a) common sense (banṭāsiā [بنطاسيا) ,([b) imagination, (c) imaginative (for animals) or cogitative (for man), (d) estimative, (e) memory—are thus reconfigured by Averroës: (1) imaginativa = (a), (b); (2) cogitativa = (c), (d); (3) rememorativa = (e). In fact, the particular role of the “cogitative” faculty endowed with a “rational character” consists of either (1) depositing or registering in memory the “intention” of the imagined form taken with the individual, which serves as the substrate of that form, or (2) distinguishing memory from this individual substrate in the “imaginative” (al-mutakhayyila [لةّالمتخي ([or “formative” (al-muṣawwira [المصورة ([ ّ faculty and in the “imagination.” The cogitative is thus in a median position relative to these two other faculties: in relation to imagination, because of its abstractive activity, which works with images; and in relation to memory, because of its activity of depositing, which consists of transmitting abstract individual intentions to a receptacle (a faculty of the mind conceived as the “receiving faculty” or instance). It is from this deposit, receptacle, or store that one draws the “imagined intentions” necessary for the noetic process of abstraction: the cooperation among the faculties of the inner sense enables the “presentation of the image of a sensible thing” upon which the activity of the “virtus rationalis abstracta” is exerted. This activity, as the agent intellect, “extracts a universal intention” and then, as the material intellect, “receives” it and “apprehends” it (or “comprehends” or “thinks” it). For Averroës, the distinction between “cogitative faculty” and “intellect” (cf. Magnum commentarium in De anima 2.29, ed. Crawford, 172.25–173.32, in relation to 414b18: “Deinde dixit: Et in aliis distinguens et intellectus. Idest, et ponamus etiam pro manifesto quod virtus cogitativa et intellectus existunt in aliis modis animalium que non sunt homines”) is misinterpreted in the Galenic tradition. It is also misinterpreted by all those who attribute to Aristotle a doctrine of the intellect as a “faculty existing in a body.” In the Scholastic tradition, “cogitative” generally retains this meaning. Certain authors, however, stress the aspect of “individual abstraction.” If the cogitative does not produce universal concepts, it at least presents or delivers the individual form of a thing insofar as it is such-and-such a “thing” (for example, a “man” or a “line”). This individual “form” is not reduced to the collection of particular or common accidents that characterize each individual as an “individual” (this man, this line). Ipsa [= virtus cogitativa] cognoscit intentiones, id est formas individuales omnium decem praedicamentorum, ut formam individualem huius hominis, secundum quod hic homo, et hanc lineam et huiusmodi plura ita quod non tantum cognoscit accidentia sensibilia communia et propria, sed intentionem non sensatam, et exspoliat eam ab eis, quae fuerunt ei coniuncta de sensibilibus communibus et propriis. It is this [virtus cogitativa] which knows intentions, that is, the individual forms of what falls into one of the ten categories, like the individual form of this man inasmuch as he is this man, or like this line and many other things of this same kind, such that it does not only know the common and particular sensible accidents, but also the nonsensible intention, which it extracts and separates out from the common and particular sensibles that are connected to it. (Jean de Jandun, Super libros Aristotelis De anima, 214) REFS.: Aristotle. Catégories. Edited by R. Bodéüs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002. Averroës. Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima: A Critical Edition of the Arabic Text. Edited, translated, with introduction and notes by Alfred L. Ivry. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002. Translation by F. Stuart Crawford: Magnum commentarium in De anima. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Black, Deborah L. “Memory, Individuals, and the Past in Averroes’s Psychology.” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 5 (1996): 161–87. Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Elamrani-Jamal, Abdelali. “Averroès: La doctrine de l’intellect matériel dans le Commentaire moyen au De anima d’Aristote. Présentation et traduction, suivie d’un lexique-index du chapitre 3, livre III: De la faculté rationnelle.” In Langages et Philosophie, Hommage à Jean Jolivet, edited by A. de Libera, A. Elamrani-Jamal, and A. Gallonnier. Études de Philosophie Médiévale 84 (1997): 281–307. Jandun, Jean de. Super libros Aristotelis De anima. Venice, 1587. Reprinted Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966. INTENTION 509 with a strictly empiricist (or, as one might say, “inscriptionist”) reading of the passio animae, attributing to Aristotle a reduction of concepts to simple impressions or inscriptions (or resemblances) of things “in” the soul. Because intentionality is here understood as an orientation of the intellect toward the object, the explanation of thought as the impression of a species in the soul by the thing itself—a causal model that poses the problem of how one passes from a sensible impression to an intelligible concept, and makes it necessary to distinguish between two types of species: a species that is “imprinted in the senses” (species impressa) and a species that is “expressed in thought” (species expressa)—gives way to the description of the process by which a cognitive power is actively oriented toward an object, where its act terminates. In Aristotelian terms, there is thus a shift in the problematics of the theory of intentionality. It is no longer a matter of explaining what action exterior things exert on the soul through the intermediary of sensible species, but rather of describing the way in which the intellect, understood as a power of apprehension (potentia apprehensiva), This complex classification—which allows us to foreground a metalinguistic aspect by identifying the possibility of a reciprocal application at the two levels of mental language and conventional language (since a second-imposition name can be applied to a mental concept, and a second-intention name can be applied to a conventional sign)—is, if we forget the “particularist” ontological thesis that supports the whole thesis, one of the three pillars of the doctrine of universals. V. Intentionality as an Anti-Aristotelian Theory A. Action of things or of the intellect? The medieval theory of intentionality, even if it is based on a rereading of De anima 3.8, 431b30–432a1, is to some extent anti-Aristotelian. To be more exact, it opposes the naturalist dimension of the notion of psychic impression elaborated by commentators on the basis of the opening lines of De interpretatione. Indeed, the principal function of the idea of an intentional presence of the thing to the intellect is to break 3 Intentions and imposition according to William of Ockham William of Ockham calls categorematic signs “first-imposition names,” that is, oral or written words that conventionally signify individual extra-mental things. He calls the natural conceptual signs of the individual things to which they are subordinate “first intentions”; the categorematic oral or written words conventionally signifying other conventional signs he refers to as “secondimposition names”; and the mental categorematic conceptual signs that signify naturally other mental signs he calls “second intentions.” This general grid proves to be remarkably complex in its concrete applications. The expression “second-imposition name” can be understood, in fact, in two ways. (1a) In the broad sense, any name that signifies conventionally instituted sounds as conventionally instituted sounds is a second-imposition name, that is, insofar as it signifies, whether or not it is applicable to the intentions of the soul (which are natural signs). This is the case for expressions such as “noun,” “pronoun,” “conjunction,” “verb,” “case,” “number,” “mood,” “tense,” and so on, “understood in the way a grammarian uses them,” that is, “to signify the parts of speech while they signify” (nouns that are predicable of vocal sounds both when they do not signify and when they do signify are thus not second-imposition names). (1b) In the strict sense, any name that signifies conventionally instituted signs without being able to be applied to the intentions of the soul (which are natural signs) is a second-imposition name. This is the case for expressions such as “conjugation” or “figure,” which cannot signify an intention of the soul (and this is the only reason to exclude them from second-imposition names in the strict sense), since there are no distinctions of conjugations or of figures for “mental” verbs. First-imposition names are all names that are neither names in the sense of (1a) nor names in the sense of (1b). However, the expression “first-imposition name” can be understood in two ways. (2a) In the broad sense, everything that is not a second-imposition name is a first-imposition name: in this sense, syncategorematic terms are first-imposition names. (2b) In the strict sense, only categorematic names that are not second-imposition names are first-imposition names. First-imposition names in the strict sense of (2b) are themselves of two sorts, that is, certain among them (3a) are second-intention names, others (3b) are first-intention names. Second-intention names are those which are “precisely” imposed in order to signify both intentions of the soul that are natural signs, and other signs that are instituted conventionally (or however such signs are characterized). There is thus (3a1) a broad sense and (3a2) a strict sense of the expression “secondimposition names.” In the broad sense (3a1), a second-intention name is a name that signifies intentions of the soul (which are natural signs), and that can also signify or not “conventionally instituted signs, only when they are signs,” that is, second-imposition names in the sense (1a). In the sense (3a1), a secondintention name can also be at the same time a second-imposition name. This is the case for names used in relation to what are called “universals.” The names “genus,” “species,” and so on, like the names “universal” and “predicable,” are second-intention names because they signify “nothing other” than intentions of the soul (which are natural signs), or arbitrarily instituted signs. In the strict sense (3a2), a second-intention name is a name that only signifies intentions of the soul (which are natural signs). In the sense (3a2), “no secondintention name is a second-imposition name.” First-imposition names are all other names, that is, all those that signify things that are neither signs, nor what characterizes these signs. But here again, we can distinguish between (3b1) names that signify “precisely” things that are not signs intended to substitute for other things, and (3b2) names that simultaneously signify such things and signify signs, such as the names “thing,” “being,” “something” (aliquid), and so on, that is, what the Scholastics termed “transcendentals.” There are thus signs that signify both conventional signs and mental signs: these are second-imposition names in the broad sense (1a), which are either oral words or written words, and second-intention names in the broad sense (3a1), which are concepts. There are also names that are both first imposition and second intention: first imposition, because they do not signify a conventional sign; but second intention, because they signify a mental concept: the case par excellence is the oral word “concept.” 510 INTENTION a real object, functioning as a cause of perception: in many cases, on the contrary, it is a substitutive, purely “terminative and representative” object that is the principle of the cognitive act—for example, a memorial species (if it is a question of a “thought of absent objects”)—and that “presents itself in place of the external thing,” when “this thing is not itself the object of an aim or intention” (Olieu, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 74, ed. Jensen, 3:113). A representation, an image, a species, or a “presential object” (praesentialis) thus provides a substitutive presence, which “is the object of an aim or intention, and terminates it,” whenever there is no object (really) present. The distinction between a terminative object and a causal object gives a more interesting range of meaning to intentionality understood as orientation toward an object. C. “Intention”/ “in-tension”/ “pro-tention” If the triad “in,tention”-“pro,tention”-“re,tention” has enjoyed a particular fortune in the phenomenological analysis of the intimate consciousness of time, the intentional structure of thought itself was presented in the Middle Ages in terms of “pro-tention.” The vocabulary of “tending” (in/pro) immanent to intentionality was established more permanently in the fourteenth century. During this time, it combined with the vocabulary of “aiming” expressed with and around St. Augustine’s and Boethius’s notion of the “highest pointing of the mind” (acies mentis; see ARGUTEZZA). For medieval philosophers, to say that the “intentional power,” the vis inventiva of a cognitive faculty (potentia cognitiva), “tends toward an object [in obiectum intendit]” was to say that it “extends toward it within itself [intra se protenditur]” and that, “in this pro-tention” itself, “it points toward that which is ob-jected” (“et protendendo acuitur quod est acute ad aliquod sibi obiectum intenta”). “Acuity” does not refer, then, to a circumstantial modality of thought that is subject to variation: it is a constitutive trait of its intentionality. Intention, as an “actual aim” (aspectus actualis), is fundamentally pro-tentive. It is a movement of tending toward, of opening out or unfolding, by which a cognitive faculty “is sharpened” and “points” in the direction of the object (Olieu, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, ed. Jensen, 3:64). Alain de Libera REFS.: Augustine. De Trinitate. Edited by A. W. Haddan and K. Knight. Translated by Arthur West Haddan. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 3, edited by Philip Schaff. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. Auriole, Pierre d’. Scriptum. In “Radulphus Brito on Universals,” edited by Jan Pinborg. Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age Grec et Latin 35 (1980): 133–37 [edition of part of the Scriptum, d. 23, on the basis of MS BAV, Vat. Lat. 329]. Averroës. Magnum commentarium in De anima. Edited by F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Banchetti-Robino, Marina Paola. “Ibn Sina and Husserl on Intention and Intentionality.” Philosophy East and West 54 (2004): 71–82. Biard, Joël. “Intention and Presence: The Notion of Presentialitas in the Fourteenth Century.” Translated by Oli Sinivaara. In Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, and Pauliina Remes, 123–40. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2007. . “Intention et signification chez Guillaume d’Ockham: La critique de l’être intentionnel.” In Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet, edited by moves to act (perficitur) and ends (terminatur) as an apprehension “of something” (see SENSE, Box 1). Duns Scotus gives the theory its canonical formulation when he posits that “in an apprehensive power, the motor principle does not have to be the proper object of this power from the angle where it is a motor, but the object from the angle where it terminates the given power,” that is to say, its endpoint, its pole of actualization, its “ending”—which is tantamount to saying that “cognitive power does not so much have to receive the species of an object [recipere speciem obiecti], as to be oriented by its activity toward it [tendere per actum suum in obiectum].” B. Intention, representation, and aim The Brentanian thesis of “intentional in-existence,” which defines psychic phenomena by the fact that they “contain an object within them intentionally,” goes hand in hand with a second thesis, equally popular, that affirms that every mental act is either a representation (Vorstellung) or “based on a representation” (this is the case, for example, with judgments and affections). For the school of thought around Brentano, then, the question of intentionality develops spontaneously out of the notion of representation, which is understood as essentially “oriented” toward an object (Gegenstand). The notion of intentional object is therefore explored from the point of view of representation, against the background of a distinction between the ob-ject itself, the ob-stant or Gegenstand (“the object taken independent of thought” or the object “as it stands before” thought, and is “that toward which representation is directed”; Twardowski, Zur Lehre von Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, 4), and the “immanent object” (immanentes Objekt) or “content” (Inhalt) of representation, which alone deserves the name of “intentional object,” literally speaking. Now, however, the case of “representations without objects” (gegenstandslose Vorstellungen), following the terminology previously introduced by Bolzano, will stand in need of redefinition. It is not enough to say that every representation has a content, but that each representation does not for all that have its corresponding ob-ject. It is false, from the point of view of terminological rigor, to talk about “inobjective” representations. According to Twardowski, there are no representations “which would not represent something as an object” (ibid., 25), or representations “to which would correspond no object.” There are, however, a number of representations “for which an object does not exist” (ibid., 29). Even if these comments fall far short of the “broadening of the sphere of the object even beyond being and non-being” (which only Alexius Meinong’s “theory of objects” will provide), the idea of “representations for which an object does not exist” exposes one of the fundamental problematics conveyed by the notion of intentionality (see RES). The medieval theory of objectual intention (aspectus) is, in this sense, part of the proto-history of the gegenstandslose Vorstellungen (representations without objects). According to this theory, particularly elaborated by Pierre-Jean Olieu (Olivi) around 1280, every cognitive act (sensible or intelligible) requires an aspectus “having as its actual term an object” or, more literally, “ending in actuality on an object [super obiectum actualiter terminatus].” This does not mean that the principle of the cognitive act must in all cases be INTUITION 511 Normore, Calvin. “Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources.” In Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Amélie Orksenberg Rorty, 223–41. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Olieu, Pierre-Jean [Peter John Olivi]. Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum. 3 vols. Edited by B. Jensen. Florence: Quaracchi, 1922–26. Panaccio, Claude. Ockham on Concepts. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2004. Pasnau, Robert. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pépin, Jean. “Clément d’Alexandrie, les Catégories d’Aristote et le fragment 60 d’Héraclite.” In Concept et Catégories dans la pensée antique, edited by P. Aubenque, 271–84. Paris: Vrin, 1980. Perler, Dominik, ed. Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001. Pinborg, Jan. “Radulphus Brito’s Sophism on Second Intentions.” Vivarium 13 (1975): 119–52. Pini, Giorgio. Categories and Logic in Duns Scotus: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Categories in the Late Thirteenth Century. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2002. Porphyry. In Categoria Aristotelis. Edited by Adolf Busse. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1887. Putnam, Hilary. Representation and Reality. New ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Richardson, R. “Brentano on Intentional Inexistence and the Distinction between Mental and Physical Phenomena.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 64 (1982): 250–82. Searle, John R. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Sorabji, Richard. “From Aristotle to Brentano: The Development of the Concept of Intentionality.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 9, suppl. (1991): 227–59. Tachau, Katherine. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics (1250–1345). Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1988. Twardowski, Kazimierz. Zur Lehre von Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen. Vienna: Hölder, 1894. Translation by Reinhardt Grossmann: On the Content and Object of Presentations. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1977. Alain de Libera, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, and Alain Galonnier, 201–20. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Black, Deborah L. “Mental Existence in Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna.” Medieval Studies 61 (1999): 45–79. Bolzano, Bernard. Paradoxien des Unendlichen. Edited by B. Van Rootselaar. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1975. Translation by F. R. Prejonsky: Paradoxes of the Infinite. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950. Boulnois, Olivier. Être et représentation: Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot, XIIIe–XIVe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Brentano, Franz Clemens. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Edited by Oskar Kraus. 2 vols. Hamburg: Meiner, 1974. First published in 1874. Translation by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister: Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Oscar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. New introduction by Peter Simons. London: Routledge, 1995. Cassin, Barbara. Aristote et le logos: Contes de phenomenology ordinaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Cayla, Fabien. Routes et déroutes de l’intentionnalité. Combas, Fr.: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991. Chisholm, Roderick M. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Chisholm, Roderick M., and Wilfrid Sellars. “Intentionality and the Mental: Chisholm-Sellars Correspondence on Intentionality.” In Intentionality, Mind and Language, edited by Ausonio Marras, 214–48. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Clark, Elizabeth A. Clement’s Use of Aristotle: The Aristotelian Contribution to Clement of Alexandria’s Refutation of Gnosticism. New York: Mellen, 1977. Clement of Alexandria. Stromates. Edited by Otto Stählin. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1939. Denery, D. G. “The Appearance of Reality: Peter Aureol and the Experience of Perceptual Error.” Franciscan Studies 55 (1998): 27–52. Duns Scotus. Opera omnia: Ordinatio. Prologus, vol. 1. Edited by Karl Balić. Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1950. Endress, G. “Du grec au latin à travers l’arabe: La langue créatrice d’idées dans la terminologie philosophique.” In Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse, 151–57. Textes et études du Moyen Âge 8. Louvain, Belg.: Fédération internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1997. Grosseteste, Robert. Commentarius in Posteriorum analyticorum libros. Edited by Pietro Rossi. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1981. Hamesse, Jacqueline., ed. Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen: L’influence de la Latinita. Textes et études du Moyen Âge 8. Louvain, Belg.: Fédération internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1997. Hickerson, Ryan. The History of Intentionality: Theories of Consciousness from Brentano to Husserl. London: Continuum, 2007. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Dorion Cairns: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. . Ideen. Edited by Karl Schuhmann. In Husserliana: Gesammelte werke III:1 and III:2. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1983. Lambertini, Roberto. “La teoria delle intentiones da Gentile da Cingoli a Matteo da Gubbio: Fonti e linee di tendenza.” In L’insegnamento della logica a Bologna nel XIV secolo, edited by D. Buzzetti, M. Ferriani, and A. Tabarroni, 277–351. Bologna, It.: Istituto per la storia dell’università, 1992. Lloyd, Antony C. Form and Universal in Aristotle. Liverpool, Eng.: Francis Cairns, 1980. Matthew of Aquasparta. Quaestiones disputate de gratia. Edited by Victorin Doucet. Florence: Quaracchi, 1935. McCarthy, Edward R. “Medieval Light Theory and Optics and Duns Scotus’ Treatment of Light in D. 13 of Book II of His Commentary on the Sentences.” Ph.D. dissertation. City University of New York, 1976. Münch, Dieter. Intention und Zeichen: Untersuchungen zu Franz Brentano und zu Edmund Husserls Frühwerk. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993. INTUITION v. BEAUTY, BILD, COMPARISON, IMAGINATION, INSTANT, INTENTION, MEMORY, MERKMAL, SIGN “Intuition” comes from the Latin intuitio, which in Chalcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus refers to an image reflected in a mirror. The term is derived from the verb intueri, which means “to see,” “to look upon” (tueri means “to see” and “to look over,” “to protect”), with a connotation of intensity—attentively, fixedly, admiringly, immediately, and all at once—and applies as much to sight in the literal sense, that of the eyes of the body, as to metaphorical sight, through the eyes of the soul. Intuition is thus a direct vision of something given that presents itself immediately as real and true. In modern philosophy, the term brings together a Cartesian source (what is clear and evident) and a Kantian source (the objectivity of the object). I. Intuition and the Evident A. Intuition, sensation, intellect The first network is that of sensible intuition, which is connected to the immediacy of perception and thus to its truth (see PERCEPTION, Box 3; SENSE, I.A and Box 1; cf. TO SENSE, TRUTH). The second is connected to intelligible 512 INTUITION II. Intuition and the Object of Intuition A. The various usages of Anschauung The Kantian revolution split the history of the different usages of Anschauung (and of “intuition”) in two, insofar as it set up in opposition to the intellectual intuition (we already find intuitio intellectualis in Nicholas of Cusa) inherited from noêsis, which is contrasted with the empirical and the sensible world, the paradoxical concept of a sensible intuition (sinnliche Anschauung) that is nonetheless susceptible of being “pure” and that constitutes the foundation of the given of phenomena or of the diversity of experience. For Kant, the former is deeply illusory, and the latter forms a system with the concept (Begriff) and constitutes the field of representation. (On the singularity of Kant’s vocabulary, see BEGRIFF and CONCEPT, ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, SEIN: cf. OMNITUDO REALITATIS.) Kant’s revolution is correlative with the broadening of the meaning of “aesthetics” to cover the general science of sensibility (see AESTHETICS; cf. GEFÜHL, SENSE). In French, comprendre and penser correspond to some extent to the activity of Begriff, but the language lacks a technical term for anschauen and so has coined the verb intuitionner (see BEGRIFF, GEMÜT, Box 1, and GERMAN). Since Kant, transcendental idealism has explored the possibility of separating out the pure intuition of the sensible, but without reference to a noumenal “thing in itself,” so conferring upon it the meaning of a constitutive activity (see TATSACHE). Conversely, the epistemology of quantum physics has explored a problem of visualization that is not connected to a sensible given, but instead to the theoretical possibility of representation (see ANSCHAULICHKEIT and the particularly significant evolution of the meaning of this term). B. The “given” Intuition implies a certain mode of access to an object. Its character of being immediately obvious culminates in the problematic of the given and of the “donation without a donor” (see ES GIBT, HÁ, and more generally, IL Y A). Contemporary philosophy has been divided between a devalorization of intuition in favor of praxis in the Marxist tradition (see PRAXIS) and the reconstitution of a doctrine of the intuition of essences on the far side of the Kantian critique of the intelligible world, in Husserl and some of the phenomenological tradition, with the thematics of Wesenschau or Wesenanschauung (see GEGENSTAND). III. Intuition and Intuitionism Intuitionism can be understood in several ways, all of which refer to a valorization of the immediacy of a type of knowledge. On its usage in moral philosophy, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon world, see FAIR and compare MORAL SENSE, UTILITY, WERT. On its usage in the epistemology of mathematics, and more generally in the field of analytical philosophy, where “intuitionism” (Poincaré, Brouwer) is opposed to “formalism” and “logicism,” see EPISTEMOLOGY and PRINCIPLE, and compare ANSCHAULICHKEIT. intuition, which has to do with ideas (see IDEA). The English and French intuition covers a wide range of terms denoting, even before Plato, this kind of instantaneous intellection; it is frequently used to translate the Greek nous [νоῦς], “mind,” or noêsis [νόησις], “thought,” and even noêma [νόημα], “object of thought,” whenever they are being contrasted with more discursive procedures, such as dianoia [διάνоια], but it is equally often used to translate epibolê [ἐπιϐоλή] (from epiballô [ἐπιϐάλλω], “to throw onto,” from which we get the standard meanings of “imposition,” “apposition,” “superimposition,” “an imposed tax,” “project”), a terminology that, from Epicurus to Plotinus and beyond, refers to the direct application of the mind. The various Latin translations are just as complex: intellectus is one of the translations of nous (but only one, since nous is also translated as sensus; see SENSE), and yet it is not translated into French by intuition, but rather by intellect or entendement (understanding); and we find the Latin intuitus in the philosophical texts of the European classical age, in Descartes, for example (the Scholastics had coined notitia or cognitio intuitiva, which were taken up by Spinoza and Leibniz). (On this cluster of terms linked to the names of the faculties, see INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING; cf. CONCEPT, REASON.) B. Intuition and the relation to the divine “Intuition,” via nous and intellectus, is one of the ways of characterizing God (see INTELLECTUS, TERM, Box 2; cf. GOD, LOGOS). The theological importance of intuition relates to the problem of “beatific vision” or “transparency,” which was later on transposed in the metaphysics of Malebranche as a question of the “vision in God”; intuition is also both closely connected and opposed to the thematics of truth as “light” or “suddenly seeing clearly” (see LIGHT, SVET, TRUTH; cf. OIKONOMIA). C. Intuition and subjectivity Apperception, properly speaking, which is connected to the consciousness that a subject has of itself, constitutes a particular case of intuition (see COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ERLEBEN, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, SELF, SENSE, SOUL, SUBJECT, TATSACHE (and below, §III); cf. ACT, CERTITUDE, DASEIN). A constituting relation-to-self opens out on to the singularity of the individual (see GENIUS, INGENIUM, PERSON). Intuition is characterized in this context by an intelligent, but always spontaneous or sudden behavior, perhaps even a prephilosophical one, based in a certain analogy of noêsis with “flair” (see UNDERSTANDING, Box 1); it can be understood in terms of the connotations of ḥads [الحدس [in Avicenna’s Arabic (see INGENIUM, Box 1), and it is found in the opposition English speakers make between semantic intuition and pragmatic insight (the “sight” that illuminates or clarifies a difficulty). More generally, the position of the subject determines a Weltanschauung, an “intuition of the world,” whose meaning ranges from the cosmological to the romantic, and even ideological (see WELTANSCHAUUNG). ISTINA 513 ISTINA [ISTINA [истина] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH truth FRENCH vérité GREEK alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] [אֱמֶת] emet ’HEBREW LATIN veritas v. TRUTH, and DASEIN, MIR, POSTUPOK, PRAVDA, REALITY, RUSSIAN, SOBORNOST’, SVOBODA, TO BE, WORLD The Russian word istina [истина], unlike its French translation vérité, has a primarily ontological sense: it means: “what is, what truly exists.” The epistemological sense of “a statement conforming to reality, a true judgment,” is secondary and derived in relation to this ontological sense. The logical sense of “veracity” is, moreover, translated by a different Russian noun, istinnost’ [истинность], so that istina and istinnost’ are translated into English using the same word, “truth.” In Russian philosophy there is a fundamental opposition between istina as true existence and istina as true judgment. Considered separately from its epistemological meaning, the term istina can then be understood in two contrasting ways. In the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, it has an objective and impersonal character: istina is the objective self-identity of reality; but for the existentialists, istina takes on a dynamic meaning: “what is” is nothing other than the identity of the act and the event. I. Istina: Truth as the Reality and Self-Identity of Being The modern Russian word istina [истина], like the Slavonic istina, corresponds to the Greek alêtheia. It comes from the Slavonic ist, istov, “true,” “real” (RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 144; Preobazhenskij, Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 1:275–76). Dictionaries propose three versions of the etymology of ist: according to the oldest thesis this term is derived from the Indo-European es- (to be); according to another it is formed from the prefix iz- and from the form sto- (“that which is upright,” “which is upright”), as in the Latin ex-sistere, ex-stare; finally, according to Vasmer, the most likely version links ist and istina to the pronominal form is-to (“the same”), analogous to the Latin iste. Ist means “the same” in modern Bugarian, like the Slovenian îsti, and the Serbian and Croatian ïstî (Vasmer, Ètimologičeskij slovar’, 144). Pavel Florensky, in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, undertakes a comparative study of the notion of truth among the Slavs, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews. For him the Greek alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] has a gnoseological meaning of “that which resists forgetting,” while the Latin veritas has a primarily cultural and juridical sense (it is “the real state of the thing judged”), and the Hebrew ’emet [תֶמֱא” [comes from the history of the holy word, from theocracy” (’emet meaning “faithful word,” “reliable promise”). Florensky writes the following about the Russian word: Our Russian word for “truth,” istina, is linguistically close to the verb “to be”: istina—estina. Istina in Russian has thus come to mean, by itself, the notion of absolute reality: istina is what is (sušče [сущее]), what truly exists (podlinno suščestvujuščee [подлинно существующее]), to ontôs on or ho ontôs on; as opposed to what is illusory, apparent, not real, impermanent. The Russian language marks the ontological aspect of this idea in the word istina. Istina thus means an absolute self-identity, or being equal to oneself, absolute exactness and authenticity (podlinnost’ [подлинность]). (Florensky, Pillar and Ground) The term sušče (in Greek, to ontôs on [τὸ ὄντως ὄν]) has been translated into French as ce qui est (what is) or l’être (being) (Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 195), as existant concret (concrete existent) (Berdyayev, Essai de métaphysique eschatologique, for example, 111), and more rarely, as étant (being) (Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 196). If in French étant is opposed to existant, in Russian suščestvujuščee (that which exists) and sušče are considered as synonyms, as are bytie [бытие] (being) and suščestvovanie [существование] (existence); their opposition normally requires a reference to the French existence or the German Existenz. So by situating istina within this ontological field, Florensky is relating it to the identity of being in itself. It is this ontological concept of truth that has often led Russian philosophers to stress the fundamental opposition between truth as authentic being (bytie) and truth as true judgment. Nicolas Berdyayev acknowledges this: Russians do not accept that truth (istina) can be discovered by purely intellectual means, by reasoning. They do not accept that truth (istina) is merely judgment. And no theory of knowledge, no methodology is evidently capable of shaking this pre-rational conviction of the Russians, namely that apprehending what is, can only be given in terms of the complete life of the mind [esprit], the fullness of life. (Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 81–82) Istina, understood then as being and the identity of the real, is not accessible to the purely logical or intellectual subject but is always related to the act of a person, to a choice one makes. II. Istina and the Supra-personal Subject (Solovyov) There are, however, two ways of conceiving of the relation to istina. The first, in Vladimir Solovyov, associates the objectivity of being (istina as ousia, substance and quiddity) with going beyond subjectivity. In reaction to this, the second one, that of the Russian existentialists, interprets istina as energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], an act or exercise rooted in the person. In his Teoretičeskaja filosofija (Theoretical philosophy), Solovyov makes a distinction between the truth of an isolated fact, or a formally universal logical truth, and truth properly speaking, that is, truth as bezuslovno-suščee [безусловно-сущее] (what exists absolutely). Bezuslovno-suščee is a noun made up of the substantivized participle corresponding to the Greek to on [τὸ ὄν] (being), and the adverb bezuslovo (unconditionally), analogous to the Greek anupothetôs [ἀνυποθέτως]. Truth in this latter sense constitutes the (possibly inaccessible) object of the risky enterprise that is philosophy. Although philosophy is a personal matter, it requires going beyond the limits of a particular existence. Solovyov writes: True philosophy begins when the empirical subject rises up through supra-personal inspiration to the realm of truth (istina). For even if one cannot define in advance 514 ISTINA demon or Saint Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, it cannot be recognized by “all.” Unlike istina, which necessarily applies to “all” (istina as judgment), istina as “what is” is one particular and personal truth, “what truly exists for an empirical person, when this person is alone with him or herself”: It is only when we are alone with ourselves, under the impenetrable veil of the mystery of individual being, of an empirical personality (ličnost’), that we sometimes decide to renounce these real or illusory rights, these prerogatives that we enjoy by virtue of our participation in a world that is common to all. It is then that the final, or near-final truths (istiny) suddenly burn brightly before our eyes. (Ibid., 335) Unspeakable, incommunicable, these ultimate truths die by being expressed in the words and structures of language that attempt to transform them into rational, necessary, comprehensible, and obvious judgments “for ever and for all.” B. Nicolas Berdyayev: Istina, communion (soobščenie), and creative freedom (svoboda) Berdyayev also opposes truth as judgment and truth as existence: I am the way, the truth (istina) and the life. What does this phrase mean? It means that truth (istina) is not intellectual or exclusively gnoseological in character, but that it has to be understood comprehensively: it is existential. (Berdyayev, Truth and Revelation, 21) However for Berdyayev, unlike Shestov, existential istina is a matter not of the individual, but of intersubjectivity: “Truth is communitarian (istina kommjunotarna [истина коммюнотарна]); in other words, it assumes contact (soobščenie [сообщение] and fraternity between men” (ibid., p. 24). The best translation of soobščenie in French is communion; indeed, Berdyayev often uses two words, soobščenie and the transliteration of the French word “communion,” as synonyms (Berdyayev, Ja i mir objektov, 165). Communion is the fruit of love (ljubov’ [любовь]) and of friendship (družba [дружба]). The adjective kommjunotarnyj, often used as a secular equivalent of sobornyj [соборный] (catholic, universal), is also borrowed from the French. That which is communitarian, as opposed to collective, is based on the freedom (svoboda [свобода]) of each person. The idea of “original freedom” as a source of creation, whether divine or human, is central to Berdyayev’s metaphysics, which are developed out of Jakob Böhme’s doctrine of Ungrund. This freedom, svoboda, gives an absolute character to human subjectivity. But human creation always implies a departure from self, an elimination of self, and is only realized in the communion with others. Reality as an “objective given (ob’ektivnaja dannost’ [объективная данность]” that is imposed from “outside (izvne [извне])” the person (ličnost’) is at the opposite extreme of creative human existence. Berdyayev sees it as the source of slavery and of the submission of man: “It is completely wrong what truth (istina) is, one must at least say what it is not. It is not in the realm of the separate and isolated self. (Solovyov, Teoretičeskaja filosofija, 213) In short, truth, namely “what truly exists,” is objective. This is why it is only revealed to the “mind” (esprit), that is, to the supra-personal or properly philosophical (dux [дух], “mind”) subject, insofar as it is distinguished from the empirical (duša [душа], “soul”) and the logical (um [ум], “intellect”) subject. For Solovyov, a classical thinker of the nineteenth century in the tradition of Hegel and of rationalism, istina is thus the self-identify of the supra-personal objective world; it is revealed to the mind that thinks itself. III. Istina and Existentialism In contrast to Solovyov’s objectivism, we find three distinct interpretations of istina in Russian existentialism: the term forms part of an individualist problematics with Shestov, a creationist problematics with Berdyayev, and an ethical problematics with Bakhtin. A. Lev Shestov: Istina and the singularity of a person (ličnost ) In the fourth chapter of Athens and Jerusalem (1951), Shestov contrasts truth (istina) to truths (istiny [истины], the plural of truth): In searching for the origins of being, metaphysics has not been able to find universal and necessary truth (istina), whereas in studying what comes from these origins, the positive sciences have discovered a number of “truths” (istiny). Does this not mean that the “truths” (istiny) of the positive sciences are false truths (istiny ložnye [истины ложные]), or at least fleeting truths, which last no more than an instant? (Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, 334) “Universal and necessary truth,” like Solovyov’s “logical truth,” is revealed to the “logical subject,” designated by the pronoun vse [все] (“all,” often in quotation marks), analogous to the German man (one). The fact that philosophy has been incapable of reaching this “universal and necessary truth” is far from being an objection against metaphysics. On the contrary, “metaphysics does not want to, and must not, give us truths (istiny) that are compulsory for all” (ibid.), since they would then merely lead to “constraining truths,” likes those that the positive sciences offer us. In order to discover authentic truth, metaphysics has precisely to give up the “sword of necessity,” that is, its claims to a valid universal truth. However, if the logical subject in Shestov and Solovyov is incapable of discovering authentic truth, from an existential point of view, Solovyov’s supra-personal subject does not exist. On the contrary, “the truth (istina) is revealed to an empirical person (ličnost’ [личность]), and only to an empirical person” (ibid., 336). Contrasting the empirical person to the vse [все] (all), Shestov compares the empirical/transcendental distinction with that of living/dead: “Someone who is alive, what this school of thought calls an empirical person, was the main obstacle for Solovyov” (ibid.). Istina thus acquires an existential character: like, for example, Socrates’s ISTINA 515 So istina retains its epistemological meaning, “what is, from the objective or scientific point of view,” but it is relieved of its ontological meaning: it can no longer refer to “what truly exists,” nor to what French translators have sometimes rendered (for example, Berdyayev) as vérité philosophique (philosophical truth) (Khomiakov, 7). For Bakhtin metaphysics (for which he uses the expression prima philosophia, or doctrine of “being as being”) has to go beyond the limits of the theoretical world: “It is only from within the actually performed act (postupok), which is once-occurrent, integral, and unitary in its answerability, that we can find an approach to unitary and once-occurrent Being in its concrete actuality. A first philosophy can orient itself only with respect to that actually performed act (postupok)” (ibid., 28). “What truly exists” is not istina, but postupok, an act invested with pravda. The world of “what is,” within which postupok takes place, is the beingevent (bytie-sobytie). With this term Bakhtin introduces an etymological metaphor: sobytie means “event,” but literally so-bytie signifies “co-being,” “co-existence,” that is, a shared world. Bytie-sobytie, analogous to the German Mitwelt, is the antonym of the world of theoretical istina: it implies authentic existence and participation. . Since istina, like pravda, is normally translated as “truth,” the precise meaning of these two terms is thereby lost. This is why, in contexts where istina is set in opposition to pravda, the least incorrect solution is to explain the first term in terms of “philosophical truth,” or “theoretical truth,” or even “abstract truth,” which marks a clear distinction with pravda, whose meaning is “truth in justice” (see, for example, Berdyayev, Khomiakov, 7). Whereas istina expresses the authenticity of “what is,” pravda emphasizes the fact that the thing has the character of being right or just. Andriy Vasylchenko REFS.: Bakhtin, Mikhail. “K filosofii postupka.” Filosofija i sociologija nauki i texniki. Moscow: Nauka, 1986. Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov: Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Berdyayev, Nicolas. Alekseĭ Stepanovich Khomiakov. Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Vodoleĭ, 1996. First published in 1912. Translation by V. and J.-C. Marcadé, with E. Sebald: Khomiakov. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1988. . Istina i otkrovenie: prolegomeny k kritike otkroveniia. St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo in-ta, 1996. Translation by R. M. French: Truth and Revelation. London: Bles, 1953. . Ja i mir objektov. Paris: YMCA, 1934. Translation by Irène Vildé-Lot: Cinq méditations sur l’existence: Solitude, société et communauté. Paris: Aubier, 1936. . Opyt ėskhatologicheskoĭ metafiziki: tvorchestvo i ob’ektivatsiia. Paris: YMCA, 1947. Essai de métaphysique eschatologique. Paris: Aubier, 1946. Translation by R. M. French: The Beginning and the End. New York: Harper, 1952. Florensky, Pavel. Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: opyt pravoslavnoĭ teoditsei v dvenadtsati pis’makh. Moscow: Lepta, 2002. First published in 1914. Translation and annotation by Boris Jakim: The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Introduction by Richard F. Gustafson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Shestov, Lev. Afiny i Ierusalim. Paris: YMCA, 1951. Translation and introduction by Bernard Martin: Athens and Jerusalem. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966. Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich. “Foundations of Theoretical Philosophy.” Translated by Vlada Tolley and James P. Scanlan. In Russian Philosophy, edited by James M. Edie et al., 99–134. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. . Sobranie sochinenij. St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911–14. to attribute a purely theoretical meaning to truth (istina), and to only see it as a kind of intellectual submission of the knowing subject to a reality which is given to it from the outside” (Truth and Revelation, 22–23). Istina, as “what truly exists,” has nothing in common with given reality; but this reality can be transformed or transfigured by the creative energy of the original freedom present in the creative act. It is in this sense, then, that we should understand the following sentence: “Truth (istina) is not a reality, nor a corollary of the real: it is the very sense of the real, its Logos, its supreme quality and value” (ibid., p. 22). Istina, which is thus dynamic in nature, is “what truly exists in reality: subjectivation, the transfiguration of the real.” Truth as transfiguration ultimately has a theological and eschatological meaning: it leads, through communion and the creative act of a person, to the “definitive victory” over our “fallen state of objectivation” (Berdyayev, Essai de métaphysique eschatologique, p. 63), or in other words, toward the end of being (bytie). C. Mikhail Bakhtin: Istina and pravda Bakhtin, for his part, contrasts logical istina not to ontological istina, but to pravda [правда] (truth in justice), a term that translates the Greek dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη], but understood within an entirely different set of oppositions, such that it is usually translated into French, for want of anything better, as vérité (truth). This opposition needs to be read in the context of Bakhtin’s critique of the “abstraction” of scientific philosophy, as presented in his theory entitled Toward a Philosophy of the Act (written at the start of the 1920s and never completed). For him, the theoretical world with its “abstract truth (otvlečënnaja istina [отвлечённая истина]),” is incapable of containing postupok [поступок] (an ethical act). Contrasting “theoretical abstraction” to what he termed “participating thought,” one that considers the being “inside the act (postupok),” he proposed an original version of existentialism: ethical existentialism. His “subject” is no longer the knowing subject, but the acting subject. Pravda does not exclude theoretical istina. On the contrary, it assumes and completes it through a personal responsibility: “The entire infinite context of possible human theoretical knowledge—science—must become something answerably known [uznanie]. This does not in the least diminish and distort the autonomous truth (istina) of theoretical knowledge, but, on the contrary, completes it to the point where it becomes compellingly valid truth-justice (pravda).” (Toward a Philosophy, 49) The absolute nature of istina is preserved, since a responsible action does not imply any relativity: When considered from our standpoint, the autonomy of truth (istina), its purity and self-determination from the standpoint of method are completely preserved. It is precisely on the condition that it is pure that truth can participate answerably in Being-as-event (bytie-sobytie [бытие событие]); life-as-event does not need a truth that is relative from within itself (otnositel’naja istina [относительная истина]). The validity of truth (istina) is sufficient unto itself, absolute, and eternal, and an answerable act or deed of cognition takes into account this peculiarity of it; that is what constitutes its essence. (Ibid., 9–10) 516 ITALIAN acquired and retained a distinctive set of features of its own, and possesses a personal repertory of recurring themes, and of references to a particular expressive and conceptual register. From a broad historical perspective, and taking into account the limits imposed by its irreducible complexity, the Italian language has been characterized by a constant and predominant civil vocation. By “civil” I mean a philosophy that is not immediately tied to the sphere of the state, nor to that of religion, nor to that of interiority. In fact, ever since its humanist and Renaissance origins, its privileged interlocutors have not been the specialists, clerics, or students attending university, but a wider public, a civil society one has sought to orient, to influence, to mold. The first circle of interlocutors was made up of compatriots, fallen heirs of a great past, citizens of a community that in the beginning was simply a linguistic community, politically divided into a plurality of fragile religious states and, from a spiritual point of view, conditioned by a Catholic church that was too powerful (Italian philosophy has consequently developed a number of supplementary functions in the face of weak political institutions, and a certain contentiousness in the face of the massive presence of the Catholic church). The second circle—with the emphasis here on “universalist” traits—is made up of all people. The most representative Italian philosophers, then, have not closed themselves off in narrow local circles, any more than they have devoted themselves to questions having to do with a particular logical, metaphysical, or theological sublime, as was the case in other nations—England, Germany, and Spain—where the weight of Scholastic or academic philosophy was felt for a much longer time, precisely because the caesura that humanism and the Renaissance represented was not so strong in these countries. These Italian ITALIAN A Philosophy for Nonphilosophers Too v. ART, ATTUALITÀ, BEAUTY, CIVILTÀ, EUROPE, FRENCH, GOÛT, LEGGIADRIA, MÊTIS, PRAXIS, SPREZZATURA, VIRTÙ The public of nonphilosophers are privileged interlocutors of Italian philosophers, who consider all humans not only as animals endowed with reason, but also as animals who nurture desires and formulate projects. What characterizes Italian philosophy, and what is reflected in its network of concepts, the styles of its research, and its language, is—to quote Machiavelli—the fact that it does not simply search for logical truth, but rather “the effective truth of the thing” in all its complexity. The fundamental terms of the Italian philosophical lexicon are common to the European tradition: where they are distinctive is in the expressive quality each singular author brings to them. The margin of untranslatability of these terms is thus not because of the “spirit of the language” but of the particular poetic or artistic “stamp” of the individual writers who create or reinterpret them. They are born of language that is cultivated but not specialized, clear but not technical, intuitive but not mystical: language in which the greatest mathematical rigor exists alongside the most intense pathos. In this sense, its register is characterized by an interweaving of reason and imagination, of concept and metaphor. I. A Civil Philosophy In the West, philosophy is for the most part transnational. If one were, as a hypothetical experiment, to trace contour lines and isobars to connect theories belonging to the same genre, but dispersed across different geographical areas, one would plainly see that these would lead us to draw maps whose borders do not coincide at all with those of existing states or national languages. Despite this, it is undeniable that Italian philosophy—like other philosophies—has 1 Podnogotnaja, truth, and the practice of the question There is a synonym of istina that is also translated as “truth”: this is the term podnogotnaja [подноготная], which refers to “a truth hidden by someone, circumstances or details carefully concealed.” It is encountered in situations where there is a question of “throwing light on” an affair, of trying to “uncover” the truth, for example, in a trial: it is an adjectival noun formed from the group of words podnogotnaja istina. Originally, podnogot-naja referred to a sort of torture, or an interrogation, as when pointed objects are thrust “under the fingernails”—pod nogti [под ногти], or in the singular pod nogot [под ноготь] (cf. RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar russkogo jazyka, 352). Similarly, the term podlinnyi [подлинный] (authentic) is etymologically linked to the ancient practice that consists, in a trial (pravëž [правёж]), of beating a suspect with a “long stick (podlinnik [подлинник])” to force him to tell the truth (RT: Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, 2:186). The Russian term isolates a part of the meaning of the Greek alêtheia [ἀλήθεια], which also comes from a judicial trial. Alêtheia, which etymologically means “unveiling,” “dis-covering,” was uncovered quite normally during a trial through the use of torture (basanizein [βασανίζειν]) on slaves called to testify, who were freed in this way from allegiance to their masters. But alêtheia as “un-veiling” embraces all of the senses of truth, from authenticity to justness; and the Greek system of justice opens out onto judgment and the faculty of discriminating (krisis [ϰϱίσις], krinein [ϰϱίνειν]). Conceived as alêtheia, the truth extends its semantic orbit to the questioning of philosophy itself, as attested by the way in which Plato calls as a witness the verses by Parmenides in order for them to confess under torture that the false presupposes the existence of non-being (The Sophist, 237a–237b; Eng. ed. N. White (Hackett), 25): “‘Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.’ So we have his testimony to this. And our own way of speaking itself would make the point especially obvious if we examined it a little (basanistheis [βασανισθείς]).” ITALIAN 517 philosophers took as their object of investigation questions that implicated virtually all of the population (the “nonphilosophers,” as Benedetto Croce called them), knowing full well that they were dealing with animals who not only were endowed with reason but who also nurtured desires and formulated projects, animals whose thoughts, acts, and expectations were not bound by already established forms of argumentation, or even by defined—rigorously, of course— methods and languages, but shaped in an abstract and general way. II. “The Effective Truth of the Thing” Italian philosophy has consequently been at its best in its attempts to find solutions to problems where the relations between the universal and the particular are at stake, where logic comes up against empiricism. These problems (and the vocabulary to express them) are born of the overlapping of social relations and the variables that have mixed with them. This has produced an individual conscience divided between an awareness of the limits imposed by reality and the projection of desires, between tradition and innovation, between the opacity of historical experience and its transcription in images and concepts, between the powerlessness of moral laws and the implacable nature of the world, between thought and lived experience. Whence the many—often successful—attempts to carve out spaces of rationality in territories that seem deprived of it, to give meaning to forms of knowledge and practices that often appear to be dominated by the imponderable nature of power, taste, and chance: political philosophy, the theory of history, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy (these all being fields, moreover, where the weight of subjectivity and of individuality prove to be decisive). It is important to emphasize that in rejecting the predominant philosophical perspectives, it is not a matter of “weakening” claims to the intelligibility of the real, but on the contrary of the effort to highlight spaces that were all too often hastily abandoned (and left to lie fallow) by a reason that had identified itself excessively with the sometimes triumphant paradigms of the physical sciences and of mathematics, to the extent that it modeled itself on them. Italian philosophers are consequently philosophers more of “impure reason,” who take into account the conditioning, the imperfections, and the possibilities of the world, than philosophers of pure reason and of abstraction. In other words, they tend toward the concrete, in the etymological sense of the Latin concretus, the past participle of the verb concrescere, which refers precisely to what grows by aggregation, in a dense and bushy way (corresponding to the English “thick,” as opposed to “thin,” in the terms first introduced several decades ago by Bernard Williams, in relation to a moral discourse that is irreducible to formulas and precepts). Although these philosophies are not interested in the knowledge of the absolute, of the immutable, or of norms that have no exception, they certainly do not abandon the search for truth, and are absolutely not given over to skepticism and relativism. On the contrary, the great tradition of Italian philosophy has never given up hope of the existence of a truth, or of the possibility of attaining it. This has been true since the time of Dante, who expresses it as follows: Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia (I now see well : we cannot satisfy nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra our mind unless it is enlightened by di fuor dal qual nessun verso si spazia. the truth beyond whose boundary no truth lies. Posasi in esso come fera in lustra Mind, reaching that truth, rests within it a tosto che giunto l’ha : e giunger pòllo, a beast within its lair; mind can attain se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra. that truth—if not, all our desires were vain.) (Paradiso, IV.124–29, in La divina commedia, ed. A. Lanza; trans. A. Mandelbaum in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri) What characterizes Italian philosophy, and what is reflected in its network of concepts, the styles of its research, and its language, is—to quote Machiavelli—the fact that it does not simply search for logical truth, but rather the “verità effettuale della cosa” (effective truth of the thing), which often contradicts what appears in the first instance, and proves, without this being its cause, to be lacking an intrinsic rationality juxta propria principia (according to its own principles). But this truth is not reached through simple reasoning. That is, Italian philosophy has always maintained the tension between epistêmê and praxis, between the knowledge of what cannot be other than what it is, and the knowledge of what can be different to what it is, between the a priori and the a posteriori—not in order to stay midstream, but to cross from one bank to the other. Although this philosophy distinguishes between the two terms, the world of thought seeks never to lose contact completely with the world of life, in the same way that it seeks not to isolate the public sphere from the private sphere. Despite the importance of the Catholic church and widespread religious practices, or perhaps because of these, a philosophy of interiority, of the dramatic or intimate dialogue with oneself, like the one that developed in France, from Pascal to Maine de Biran, or in Denmark with Kierkegaard, has essentially been absent in Italy. This is not only because of the externalizing tendency and the theatricality of the Roman Catholic rite, or the mental blocks caused by the fear of the Inquisition and the “tribunals of conscience” of the Counter-Reformation, but also because of the highly hierarchized institutionalization of the relations between the faithful and God. Unlike Lutheranism or Calvinism, Roman Catholicism is the guardian of a juridical culture, formalized over the centuries, which meticulously and knowingly regulates the behavior of the faithful. In the Italian philosophical tradition, one can consequently see, in opposition to the Protestant belief according to which sola fides justificat (faith alone justifies), the traces of the “religion by good works,” of the existence in the world, that are proper to Catholicism—in other words, what is not shown to be effective has no value. The fundamental terms of the Italian philosophical lexicon (which we will see adopted by a constellation of authors such as Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, Vico, Leopardi, Croce, and Gramsci) are generally those common to the European tradition, which has its deepest roots in the trinity “Athens, 518 ITALIAN of clauses that are shorter than the German written by Luther from Latin, but more articulated than the short, dry sentences in English. As a result, the turns of phrase and the punctuation sometimes have to be reworked to match the rhythms of the language into which Italian is translated. The constant reference, whether implicit or explicit, to the universe defined by the idea of an effective reality proves to be fundamental from a conceptual point of view. It is, of course, close to the Aristotelian tradition of auto to pragma, of which the Sache selbst (the fundamental matter for thought, the thing itself, the matter itself) and the Wirklichkeit (reality) are what, in Hegelian terms, we would mark as the goal or the end point. However, the Italian version of this concept implies something concrete which distances it from other philosophical cultures (for that matter, the young Hegel developed the meaning of Wirklichkeit from Machiavelli, whom he studied in order to write his uncompleted work, The German Constitution). . III. Volgare and Poetic Logic In its use of the volgare (vulgar), Italian philosophical vocabulary does not make a clean break with the scholarly language by definition, with Latin, since the relationship of the latter to the former is seen as a direct one. Latin remains, in its exemplary and “classical” simplicity, the skeleton beneath the flesh of Italian, which is linked to the spoken language Rome, Jerusalem.” Where these terms are distinctive is in the expressive quality that each singular author brings to them. In other words, the untranslatability of these terms is not the fruit of the “spirit of the language,” but derives rather from the particular poetic or artistic “stamp” of the individual writers who create or reinterpret them (and this pertains as much to their lexicon as to their syntax). Conversely, the apparent ease with which they can be translated is not because they have their source, as is the case for English, in everyday language, but rather because they are born of a language that is cultivated, but not specialized; clear, but not technical; intuitive, but not mystical—a language that, to paraphrase the title of a well-known work by Jean Starobinski, tends rather toward transparency than toward obstacles (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 1971). This is why one needs, more than in other cultures, to know the intellectual history of Italy to understand the terms well. The degree of abstraction of concepts, or more precisely their comprehensibility, is typically higher in Italian than in English (which is lexically far richer, with four or five times the number of words—around seven hundred and fifty thousand words, as opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand) and not as high as in German, such that Italian concepts have to “cover” connotations that, in other languages, are distributed among several subconcepts. The syntax, in addition, does not present any particular irregularities or traps: it is generally less complex, and constructed 1 Machiavelli: Verità effettuale della cosa and knowledge of detail Machiavelli himself might serve as the primary example, in the field of politics: the understanding of the verità effettuale della cosa (effective truth of the thing) is implied by the knowledge of particular things in their specificity. This does not exclude, but on the contrary presupposes, a movement of knowledge toward the universal: this also implies the overcoming (and not the abandonment) of the confused and distorting vision of the imagination and of opinion, as much as that (transparent and well articulated depending on the genre) of norms and laws that are governed by reason, without relying on the experience of concrete situations. In a chapter of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius entitled “That though Men deceive themselves in Generalities, in Particulars they judge truly,” Machiavelli analyzes the situation in Florence after the Medici were banished from there in 1494. In the absence of a constituted government, and because of the daily worsening of the political situation, many people tended at that time to attribute responsibility for this to the ambition of the seignory. But as soon as one of them in turn managed to occupy a position of high public office, his ideas regarding the real situation of the city came closer and closer to the reality, and he abandoned both the opinions that circulated among his friends, as well as the precepts and abstract rules by which he had to begin his apprenticeship of public affairs: From time to time it happened that one or another of those who used this language rose to be of the chief magistracy, and so soon as he obtained this advancement, and saw things nearer, became aware whence the disorders I have spoken of really came, the dangers attending them, and the difficulty in dealing with them; and recognizing that they were the growth of the times, and not occasioned by particular men, suddenly altered his views and conduct; a nearer knowledge of facts freeing him from the false impressions he had been led into on a general view of affairs. But those who had heard him speak as a private citizen, when they saw him remain inactive after he was made a magistrate, believed that this arose not from his having obtained any better knowledge of things, but from his having been cajoled or corrupted by the great. (trans. Ninian Thompson, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, 1:47) Whence Machiavelli’s explicit intention to remain attached to reality, without following the drifting movement of his imagination and his desires: But, it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. (trans. W. K. Marriott, The Prince, chap. 15) ITALIAN 519 the vulgar language was helped by the fact that Italian, at least from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, was recognized as a language of culture (a language, it is true, that was generally carried along more by melodrama, theater, and literature, than by philosophy). . Whereas German philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger considered their eminently speculative language as the most appropriate to express philosophical thought, it never crossed the minds of Italian philosophers to make such a claim for their own language. Neither did they intentionally seek a specific technical vocabulary, relating to the philosophical koinê coming out of the European tradition. Italian philosophy aimed instead for the expressive power of concepts and of argumentation: its ideal was closer to that of music, in which the greatest mathematical rigor exists alongside the most intense pathos. As Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) observed of Galileo (Zibaldone, ed. Solmi, 2:285), he was guided by “the association of precision with of different regions. The fundamental categories of the classical and medieval philosophical tradition (res, natura, causa, substantia, ratio, conscientia [thing, nature, cause, substance, reason, conscience]) are not seen to require any particular interpretative effort. Unlike German (where a philosophical term is added to that of ordinary language—for example, there is Differenz and Unterschied [difference])—the concepts used in philosophy in Italy are the same as those used in ordinary language. In order to enrich their meaning, or acquire a greater determination, they only have to go through the “thickness” of reasoning and exempla [examples], and travel from the convent cells and university classrooms to the public squares and offices of the most cultivated citizens, and in the process, they are retranslated into spoken language. Bilingualism (Latin/Italian) in philosophy was very early on limited to scholars of other nations or, as was the case with Giambattista Vico, to the inaugural theses read out in an academic context (e.g., his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1708 and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda of 1710). The widespread practice of using 2 The “illustrious vulgar tongue”: A language for philosophy Conscious of the fact that many people had not had any philosophical training, and convinced that “all men want to know” and were thus seeking philosophical knowledge, Dante made a plan to organize a philosophical banquet that the greatest possible number of people could attend. Not only was the Convivio (around 1304) conceived as a sort of summary of philosophical knowledge for the illiterate (the non litterati), but also it contained an explicit reflection on the transmission of knowledge, and consequently, on philosophical language. Although Dante was certainly not the first to write philosophy in the vulgar tongue, he was the person who articulated most clearly the problem of the relation between language and philosophy, and worked out all of its consequences, thereby transforming both the mode of expression and the content of philosophy. The Divine Comedy (1307–20) realized fully the ideal of such a philosophico-moral pedagogy addressed to all, and dedicated to a vast reform of the social and political world “for the good of the world which lives badly” (in pro del mondo che mal vive). Dante’s treatise De vulgari eloquentia (On vernacular eloquence), written around the same time as the Convivio, attempts to lay the theoretical foundation of a new use of the vulgar. Drawing on an analysis of the different modes of expression, the “vulgar tongue” (locutio vulgaris) and the “secondary tongue” (locutio secundaria, grammatica) (of which the first is natural, common to all, corruptible and variable, and the second artificial, reserved for the literate, eternal and invariable with regard to place and time), and following a historicobiblical itinerary going from the unity of the Adamic idiom to the infinite division of idioms after Babel, Dante postulates the need for an “illustrious vulgar tongue” that would avoid the disadvantages of the two spoken languages, while retaining their essential qualities (see LANGUAGE). This illustrious vulgar tongue, which he says should be common to all Italian city-states without belonging to any of them, is comparable to the first elements of each genre, which become their measure: The noblest signs which characterize the actions of Italians do not belong to any city state of Italy and are common to all of them; and we can put among them the vulgar tongue we banished earlier, and which breathes its perfume in each city without staying in any of them. Yet it may breathe its perfume more intensely in one city state than in another, just as the simplest of perfumes who is God breathes His perfume in men more than in beasts, in animals more than in plants, in plants more than in minerals, and in minerals more than in fire, in fire more than in the earth. (trans. S. Botterill, De vulgari eloquentia, I, chap. 16) This vulgar tongue that the poet-philosopher sought—a few examples of which he recognized in several inspired contemporaries—would make it possible for the existing local vulgar tongues to be measured, evaluated, and compared. The aim of Dante’s uncompleted work was to establish the rules, as much from a grammatical as poetic or rhetorical point of view, of this vulgar tongue, which could lay claim to the universalism of Latin without having its rigidity, and to the expressiveness of the vulgar without the irregularities of fragmentation. By writing his “sacred poem,” Dante simultaneously produced a model and an exemplum. The language and the form of the Divine Comedy were the means he gave himself to create a new philosophy for a new audience: the secular public. Ruedi Imbach Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The unfinished Latin text was composed ca. 1302–5 and published in Vicenza, Italy, as early as 1529. 520 ITALIAN himself and, transforming himself in them, he becomes these very things. (trans. L. Pompa, The First New Science [translation modified]) We are indebted to Vico for the discovery that the internal logic of events is not only revealed through reason but also through the imagination, which obeys laws that are in fact more constricting and more demanding than the laws of reason. And this involves a legacy from the past that we cannot suppress. In the ingens sylva (the great forest), where he locates the primitive relations that humans have between themselves and with nature, promiscuity reigns. Marriages do not exist, because the considered and solemn choice of a woman with whom to have one’s own children has not yet happened. Mating between bestioni (wild animals) is thus a matter of force and chance; dead bodies putrefy with no tombs; conflicts are resolved by force, or by cunning. The historical period that follows, however, equally obeys poetic logic—though it is now the birth of a civic order that this logic imposes. The monogamous family and religion appear, and with them, humanity leaves behind its state of savagery. The gentes majores (those who claim to be able to interpret the visible order in the skies contemplated from the clearings in the forest []) feel the need to impose from on high laws reflecting a similar order onto those who are living in anarchy. The political imagination of the gentes majores—which draws upon myths and supernatural powers, on fears and hopes—is thus at the origin of a fictional order, but in which men believe, thanks to the power of the imagination (fingunt simul creduntque). It regulates and gives meaning to the moments that mark the solemn emergence of a life that will from that point on be lived together: it establishes tombs for the dead, the celebration of marriage, the worship of gods. If human history has a meaning, it is not because it derives from a rational logical that is internal to events, but because an order has been imposed on these events that has come forth from the imagination, and that is little by little rationalized through myths, rites, juridical concepts, and moral obligations, all of which appear subsequently. In an effort to express the genesis of the reason that is deployed within imagination, the linear language of the Latin works by Vico becomes, in The New Science, complex and overloaded; from a syntactical point of view, parenthetical comments and digressions proliferate. But it is always powerfully expressive. . IV. “Ultraphilosophy” It was Giacomo Leopardi, however, who really attempted to establish a lasting alliance between philosophy and reason, reason and imagination, clarity and distinctness of concepts and indetermination. He challenged their reciprocal isolation to show how they were complementary in their antagonism. For Leopardi, only someone who is at the same time a philosopher and a poet can understand reality. If he does not want to be only “half a philosopher,” a thinker in effect has a duty to experience passions and illusions: Anyone who does not have, or has never had, any imagination or feelings, anyone who is unaware of the elegance.” In this sense, its register is characterized by an interweaving of reason and imagination, of concept and metaphor. Or rather, in Vico’s terms, by marrying together the logic of reason and what he refers to in the Scienza Nuova as “poetic logic.” Because it is a question of understanding the logic of transformations, of finding a meaning to the continual becoming of things, of confronting this mutazione (mutation) so often mentioned by Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century as the essence of things and the source of delettazione (delectation) rather than of sadness and melancholy (see his Spaccio della bestia trionfante), the language of Italian philosophy tries to be incisive and enlightening in a familiar mode. It works far better in the form of a dialogue (from Alberti to Galileo and Leopardi), or in statements that are rich in figurative expressions created by the imagination, than in the dry form of a systematic treatise or a metaphysical meditation. But as with Bruno, there is always some order in the swirl of mutations, and at their heart any changes take place around a fixed pivot: Time takes away everything and gives everything: all things change, nothing is annihilated; one alone is immutable, one alone is eternal and can remain eternally one and the same. With this philosophy, my spirit takes on another dimension, and my intellect is magnified. (Candelaio, vol. 1; trans. G. Moliterno, Candlebearer) The fact that there is no hierarchy in the infinite universe, and as a consequence there are no absolute center and periphery, is also reflected in the syntax: given that every element of the sentence, even the commas, could become the center of the discourse, Bruno rejected—as Yves Hersant, one of his French translators, has observed—hierarchical constructions based on subordinate clauses, and his reasoning was almost always expressed using coordinated clauses (which are typically a series of relative clauses). In addition, he mixed together, following the whims of his imagination, the three styles (low, middle, high) of the Aristotelian tradition, and introduced trivial language. The vulgar and the sublime, reason and “heroic fury,” logic and the imagination, could thus exist alongside one another and fuse together. And it was precisely this “poetic logic” of the imagination that Vico called for to show the roots of the “pure mind,” which humans attain when they are at the highest point of the development of a civilization. Through the idea of a poetic logic, Vico takes myths, religion, passions, and art out of the sterile space of the irrational and shows that they have a specific and fecund legitimacy, a logic to be exact, with rules that, while not coinciding with those of the “mind opened out” (mente dispiegata), illuminate the meaning of what we achieve without intending to, or unreflectively: So that while rational metaphysics teaches us that homo intelligendo fit omnia, this imaginative metaphysics [metafisica fantastica] show that homo non intelligendo fit omnia; and perhaps there is more truth in the second statement than in the first, for man, when he understands, opens up his mind and apprehends things, but when he does not understand, he does things from ITALIAN 521 philosophy occupies the space of the real, and poetry that of the imagination, which is complementary, and each recognizes the demands of the other. Because of this, the philosopher has to take into account not only truth (this is his principal aim) but also illusions, which are essential ingredients of human nature, and which intervene to a great degree in the existence of individuals. And it is not enough to recognize them as such, and then put them aside, since they have “very strong roots” so that even if one cuts them down and understands their vanity, “they grow back again.” However, human “noble nature,” as we read in Leopardi’s poem La Ginestra (vv. 111–17), is heroically opposed to illusions and it sacrifices no part of truth, but has, on the contrary, the courage to confront these illusions (“The noble nature is the one / who dares to lift his mortal eyes / to confront our common destiny / and, with honest words / that subtract nothing from the truth, / admits the pain that is our destiny, / and our poor and feeble state” [Leopardi, Canti, trans. J. Galassi]). Since it recognizes the power of illusions, philosophy consequently must, according to Leopardi, be bound to the experience of the senses, and remain close to the effective truth of the thing. This is different from what happens in the context of German culture, which, in fusing together poetry and philosophy, ends up producing hybrid philosophical possibilities of enthusiasm, of heroism, of vivid and great illusions, of strong and varied passions, anyone who does not know the vast system of beauty, who does not read or feel, or has never read or felt, the poets, cannot by any means be a great, true and perfect philosopher it is absolutely indispensable that a man such as this be a sovereign and perfect poet. Not in order to reason like a poet, but to examine like the coldest and most calculating rationalist [ragionatore] what only the most ardent poet can know. Reason needs the imagination and the illusions it destroys; the true needs the false, substance needs appearance, the most perfect insensibility needs the most vivid sensibility, ice needs fire, patience needs impatience, powerlessness needs sovereign power, the smallest needs the largest, geometry and algebra need poetry, etc. (Zibaldone [4 October 1821]) Leopardi is here stating a more general tendency of Italian philosophy, already present most explicitly in Vico: the determination to break down the walls separating reason from imagination, and philosophy from poetry, without, however, being responsible for confusing these roles. Each, in effect, feeds off the other, while remaining firmly in its place: 3 Illuminismo v. LIGHT Illuminismo has nothing in common with what in French is referred to as illuminisme, whether one is talking about the doctrine of certain mystics such as Swedenborg or Böhme, or in psychiatry, “a pathological exaltation accompanied by visions of supernatural phenomena” (Le Petit Robert). But illuminismo, the Italian Enlightenment, is also distinct from the French Lumières, the English Enlightenment, and the German Aufklärung in its determination not to lose sight of the psychic faculties and the social conditions out of which reason emerges. Although Vico did not, strictly speaking, belong to the Enlightenment movement, we already find in him, well before Heidegger, the idea that a “clearing” has a philosophical importance, as a place where light and shadow, order and disorder meet, as well as the site of emergence of rationality and poetic fantasy. Indeed, for Vico, the first men contrasted the disorder of their existence in the ingens sylva—the great forest of their origins—with the order of the sky, to which their imagination attributes a name: So a few giants, who had to be the strongest of them, and who were spread out in the woods at the tops of the mountains, where the fiercest beasts have their lairs, terrified and astonished by the great effect of which they did not know the cause, raised their eyes and noticed the sky. Then they imagined that the sky was an immense living body which, seeing it thus, they called Jupiter, the first god of the so-called gentes majores, who by the flash of lightning, and the rumble of thunder, wanted to tell them something. (trans. L. Pompa, The First New Science, Book 1 [translation modified]) In this way, the “opened mind” has an origin, which it is impossible to abstract, and a consistency that is continually limited by historical givens, which one cannot deduce rationally (the “certain” and the “blind labyrinth of man’s heart”). This “opened mind” is threatened by a return to the stages he had gone through previously, by virtue of which it can happen that those who have attained a high level of civilization “turn cities into forests, and forests into men’s lairs” (ibid.). A shadow of new barbarism is thus projected onto the cleared space of civilization. The figures of the Italian Enlightenment— in its two main centers, Naples and Milan— retain a close contact with civil society and practical life. The explicit refusal of metaphysics and of abstraction is exemplified by Antonio Genovesi (1712–69), the first person in Europe to be appointed to a chair in political economy (in 1754), and whose thought focused on the interwoven interests and aspirations of humankind, and on the struggle against privilege. The Enlightenment philosophy of Lombardy was more oriented toward law; it also found expression in the dynamic review Il caffè (1764–66), and its major representatives were Pietro Verri (1728–97) and Cesare Beccaria (1738–94). The Enlightenment project for them, on the one hand, developed in the direction of a modernization of society, facilitating the individual search for happiness, and, on the other, aimed at making the correctional system more humane through the abolition of torture, by humanizing punishment, and by making judgments more clear-cut and quicker. The light of a human reason (and no longer that of Providence) that tried hard to become more just, thus struggled to break through the darkness of social life. 522 ITALIAN and cannot be deduced—which contrasts with any idea of innateness: The destruction of innate ideas destroys the principle of goodness, of beauty, of absolute perfection, as well as their opposites, that is, of a perfection which would be founded on reason, a superior form to the existence of the subjects which contain it, and thus eternal, immutable, necessary, primordial, existing before such subjects, and independently of them. (Zibaldone [17 July 1821]) It thus becomes absurd to speak of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, of order and disorder, as absolutes. Indeed, once innate ideas have been eliminated, There is no other reason possible why things should be absolutely and necessarily such and such a way—some good, others bad—independently of each will, each event, each fact. The only reason that is for all, in reality, resides in these facts, and consequently this reason is always and only ever relative. So nothing is good, true, bad, ugly, false, except relatively; and the conventional relationships between things is also relative, and this, if we can put it this way, is absolutely so. (Zibaldone [17 July 1821]) In the metaphysical tradition, what is bad, false, or ugly has an eminently negative connotation: they are deprived, respectively, of what is good, true, and beautiful. Leopardi roots out the very assumptions of such a conception. Demonstrating that what is bad is not an accidental, voluntary, human disruption of a divine or natural order that would, if it were not for this, be perfect, he dismisses both the substantialist conception of the plenitude of being, and the thesis of the existence of a kosmos, that is, a harmonious and divine structure (synonymous with both beauty and order). The pillars of the architectonics of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which have been present almost continuously from Plato through to Leibniz, thus collapse. The principle of an independent (absolutus) order at the root of all things, a source—moral, logical, or aesthetic—of justification of the world and of human actions—this principle now ceases to exist: For no one thing is absolutely necessary: that is, there is no absolute reason preventing it from not being, or from not being such and such a way, etc. This is tantamount to saying that there is not, or there has never been, a first and universal principle of things, or that if it exists, or has existed, we cannot in any way know it, since we do not and cannot have the slightest evidence to judge things prior to things, and to know them beyond pure, real facts. There is no doubt that if we destroy the pre-existing Platonic forms of things, we destroy God. (Zibaldone) The Summum malum falls along with the Summum bonum, Satan falls along with God. Men and their histories remain consequently alone in a cosmos that knows nothing of them, and that conceals no finality for them. poems, chimerical constructions that reach their apogee, Leopardi writes, in the self-celebration of Germany: Che non provan sistemi et congetture E teorie dell’alemanna gente ? Per lor, non tanto nelle cose oscure L’un dì tutto sappiam, l’altro niente, Ma nelle chiare ancor dubbi e paure E caligin si crea continuamente: Pur manifesto si conosce in tutto. Che di seme tedesco il mondo è frutto. (Is there something that the systems and conjectures And theories of the German people do not prove? For them, they are not so many obscure things So that one day we know everything, the next nothing. But they are clear things that are endlessly clouded by fog And continual doubts and fears are born; All in all, we see manifestly That the world is the fruit of a Germanic seed.) (Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, l.17; trans. G. Caserta, The War of the Mice and the Crabs, 6) Yet the Germans (whose philosophical culture Leopardi did not know well) have no reason for self-celebration: The German men of letters’ lack of a social life, and their ceaseless life of study and isolation in their offices not only divorces their thoughts from men (and from the opinions of others), but also from things. This is why their theories, their systems, their philosophies are for the most part poems of reason, whatever the genre they examine: politics, literature, metaphysics, morality, and even physics, etc. Indeed, the English (such as Bacon, Newton, Locke), the French (such as Rousseau and Cabanis), and even some Italians (Galileo, Filangieri, etc.) have made great, true and concrete, discoveries about nature and the theory of man, of governments, and so on, but the Germans have made none. (Zibaldone [30 August 1822]) Leopardi attempts to complete and go beyond rationalism and the Enlightenment, which the cultures of his “superb and foolish” century have blocked. He seeks to do this by elaborating an “ultraphilosophy” that is closely linked with poetry, and that is able to offer an exact assessment of the nature of man as a desiring being, but a being also incapable of realizing the infinity of its desire, and of attaining a lasting pleasure. Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, one might say that “ultraphilosophy” is nothing but the continuation of philosophy through other means, namely, those of poetry—means which, once they are known and used, ought nevertheless not trouble or overly excite “very cold reason.” Philosophy should use the indeterminate beauty of poetry to reject any conception of form as pure, fixed, rigid, and innate form (Platonic in its origin, but taken up by Christianity, and identified with God). Since all knowledge comes from the senses, and is fueled by the imagination and by reason, beginning with a ceaseless working on the materials that are transmitted to them, humans affirm that all things are given ITALIAN 523 I despise philosophy that is nasty, presumptuous and dilettante: presumptuous when it discusses difficult things as if they were not difficult, and dilettante with respect to sacred things. By contrast, I very much like the nonphilosopher, who does not get upset and remains indifferent to philosophical arguments, distinctions, and dialectics, who possesses truth by stating it in a few simple principles, and in clear sentences, which are a reliable guide for his judgment and action: the man of good sense and of wisdom. (“Il non-filosofo,” in Frammenti di etica) This man is, precisely, the philosopher’s son, because “good sense is in fact nothing other than the legacy of previous philosophies, which have been continually enriched by their capacity to welcome the clear results of the new kind of philosophizing. This is not a gift of nature, but the fruit of history, a product distilled by the historical labor of thought; and since he welcomes the results, and only the results, unconcerned by how they were obtained, he welcomes them without debate or subtle arguments, and without any doctrinal methods” (ibid.). For Gramsci, this concern—allied to more political intentions—to build this narrow, treacherous bridge between the philosophical high-mindedness of the elite and the spontaneous philosophy of nonphilosophers, between reason and common sense, is almost obsessive: It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers,” by defining the limits and characteristics of the “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. “common sense” and “good sense”; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which surface collectively under the name of “folklore.” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith) The only difference between the philosophy of philosophers and that of nonphilosophers comes from the level of critical awareness and of active conceptual elaboration that each manifests or claims. Whence, the following rhetorical question: [I]s it better to “think,” without having a critical awareness, in a disjointed and episodic way? In other words, is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e. by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world (and this can be one’s village or province; it can have its origins in the parish and the “intellectual activity” of the local priest or V. Historicism and the Nonphilosopher Italian historicism (from Croce to Gramsci) has contested Jacobin abstractions, which Leopardi had already denounced, by highlighting the obstacles, the blocks, and the specificity—or rather the concrete nature—of each historical situation and the consequent necessity of making reality the measure of thought. Leopardi was inspired more by Vincenzo Cuoco’s Saggio sulla rivoluzione napoletana (Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799) than by Marx. That is, he reflected more on failed revolutions and the lessons to be drawn from sudden defeats, than on radical innovations and on preparing for new insurrections. Italian historicism is characterized precisely by the encounter between history and utopia: a history energized, structured, innervated by a utopian goal (that of emancipation) and a utopia held in check and weighed down, forced to take into account certain obligations and the limits of what was possible, the obstacles that lay in the way, and how one navigated one’s way through them. In the ethical and political, but also aesthetic domains, the attachment to the real, to the effective truth of the thing, the fidelity to the world and the ability to communicate, are once again valued, by Croce, for example, in opposition to empty interiority and its claims. Beauty, consequently, is nothing other than the effective expression in a singular and unique work of art, of an intuition that would otherwise remain indeterminate and without content in our feelings and in our mind, and of which we are fully conscious only because someone was able to express it. Indeed, beauty is, for Croce, when he writes his Aesthetic, “a successful expression, or better, simply expression, since when expression is not successful it is not an expression” (trans. Colin Lyas, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General). The proof afforded by reality, together with its communicability, shatters the prejudice hidden within the belief that the confused interiority of intention is enough to create a work of art: One sometimes hears people say they have many great thoughts in their mind, but they cannot manage to express them. In truth, if they had them, they would have transformed them into fine, ringing words, and thus expressed them. If, when they express them, these thoughts seem to evaporate, or appear to be rare and poor, it is because they did not exist, or because they were rare or poor. (Ibid.) Like those who nurture illusions about the value of their own wealth, who are then harshly contradicted by mathematics, we usually tend to overestimate the intensity of our intuitive gifts. Expression—that damned-if-you-do, damnedif-you-don’t trap-that-is-also-a-bridge that Croce builds for us here—shows us our limits and, at the same time, makes us more aware of the fact that a painter “is a painter because he sees what others only feel, or glimpse, but do not see” (ibid.). For Croce, the love of the concrete goes as far as a defense of “nonphilosophy,” which he declares as philosophy’s legitimate son, and which disseminates a culture, and contributes to the layering of philosophical ideas in the unreflective form of good sense: 524 ITALIAN and nonspecialists alike, and on the other, to show that behind general and abstract formulae lie hidden unexpected situations, but ones that have their own logic, which we understand by respecting the specificity of the object. Thus, through his crystalline prose, Galileo constantly puts himself in these dialogues in the position of an interlocutor, Simplicio, designed to represent in exemplary fashion the way of thinking that was dominant at the time in the scientific community, the one that drew on the well-established authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Galileo sought to refute this authority by means of “experiments undertaken and demonstrations that were certain,” but certainly not to ignore it. On the contrary, he kept it as a constant point of reference, and as an indicator of a common sense that had to be raised patiently to the level of a new scientific knowledge. As a representative of the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1604 by Federico Cesi, Galileo’s ideal was precisely to have the eye of a lynx in searching for the truth where it was the most difficult to reach, and where appearances could often be deceptive. In his research, Galileo advocates starting out from simple elements that, when combined together, offer the meaning of what is more complex: I have a little book, shorter than Aristotle’s or Ovid’s, which contains every science and does not demand lengthy study: it is the alphabet; anyone able to assemble vowels and consonants in an ordered way will find in it a source of the truest answers to all questions, and will draw from it teachings of all the sciences and all the arts; this is exactly the way in which a painter, with the different plain colors next to one another on his palette, knows how, in mixing a little bit of one to another, and even adding a little bit of a third, to represent men, plants, buildings, birds, fish, in short, to imitate all visible objects; and yet on his palette there are no eyes, feathers, scales, leaves or stones. (trans. S. Drake, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) This is the route by which abstractions are incarnated in reality, that is, the letters of the alphabet transformed into terms that have meaning, colors into eyes and feathers, numbers and geometrical figures into physical beings. But Galileo also ventured down an opposing path. According to this latter method, he proceeded by excarnation, as Yves Bonnefoy would say, in order to extract the general rules of the living flesh of particular cases, knowing full well that this could then lead to dead ends. This is why he wrote in praise of the progressive discovery of reality, in its specific and distinct traits, a discovery that has to go beyond false analogies in order to privilege the faculty of discrimination and that also has to sometimes conclude with a declaration of provisional ignorance. This is well illustrated by the parable of the “man gifted by nature with a perceptive mind and an extraordinary curiosity” (Galileo, “Il Saggiatore: The Assayer,” in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. trans. S. Drake and C. D. O’Malley), who at first confuses the song of a bird with the sound of a bird whistle, and ageing patriarch whose wisdom is law, or in the little old woman who has inherited the lore of the witches or the minor intellectual soured by his own stupidity and inability to act)? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality? (Ibid.) . The almost neorealist value of concrete lived experience, of the link between determinate historical and economic situations, is also central to Italian historicism in general, including after Croce and Gramsci. It is manifest in the recognition of rights and of the implacable nature of time itself, and by the refusal to take refuge in the corrupt shelter of consciousness, in the comforting but sterile isolation of private space, or to seek a way to escape into glorious but illusory utopias that promise immediate regeneration. According to historians, we should accentuate the link between philosophy and the effective history of men, or the “real roots of ideal choices,” since philosophy consists of “recovering the humanity of thought, of rekindling the humanity of thought, the human flesh without which these thoughts would not be in the world” (E. Garin, La filosofia come sapere storico). Each philosophy thus relies on the fact that men change, as do the intellectual tools used to understand reality. The historian of philosophy from now on discovers “in place and instead of philosophy understood as the autonomous development of a self-sufficient knowledge, a plurality of fields of investigation, of positions, of visions, in relation to which the unity of the act of philosophizing is conceived as a certain level of critical awareness, or at the very most, as the need to unify the different fields of research” (V. Verra, La filosofia dal’45 ad oggi). Once again, in historicism, philosophy is conceived as being itself directed toward the concrete, and aims ultimately to become the point of liaison between what is experienced and what is thought. VI. Mechanê and Machines When we again consider, from the point of view of the sciences, the basic characteristics of Italian philosophy, whether translatable or untranslatable, we note the fundamental contribution made by Italy, from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo, from Volta to Pacinotti, from Marconi to Fermi. Oddly, we might also observe that there has never been any indigenous reflection on the philosophy of science or on logic—if we exclude Galileo himself and the figures (who for a long time remained rather isolated) of Peano, Vailati, and Enriques. As a consequence, no technical or specialized language has been disseminated, and in general it has recently been imported from the AngloSaxon world. However, Galileo is an excellent example of the particular attitude of the Italian tradition that seeks, on the one hand, to position itself from the point of view of nonphilosophers ITALIAN 525 came from their vibration” (ibid.), he kills it by dissecting it, so that “he removed both its voice and its life he reached from this such a point of mistrust vis-à-vis his own knowledge, that if anyone asked him how sounds are made, he replied honestly that he knew a few ways, but felt certain that there could be a hundred other unknown and undreamed of” (ibid.). then slowly begins to distinguish this latter sound from the music played by a stringed instrument, and from the sound made by rubbing a finger around the edge of a glass, or by the buzzing of the wings of a fly. Finally, when he tries to understand where the shrill sound of a cicada comes from, “having pulled off the front of its chest and seeing below it a few hard but fine cartilages, and thinking that the chirping 4 Storicismo v. HISTORY Although Italian historicism owes its origins in part to the German Historismus of a Ranke or a Dilthey, it quickly acquired its own set of features and its originality, especially with Croce and Gramsci. It is based on the thesis of the absolute historicity and immanence of every human life and expression. History is the product of the objectification and the determinate incorporation of our actions in this unique and incredible world, or rather of the fact that the actions of everyone are inevitably caught up in the great deluge of collective events. Whence the rejection of all teleological thinking, the respect for the implacable nature of facts, and the emphasis on individual responsibility. This position, however, does not imply the acceptance of the ineluctable necessity of the course of history. On the contrary, individuals question the past and thus bring it alive and make it present, pressured by needs that are endlessly renewed and manifest, spurred on by the desire to eliminate the obscurities and phantasms that interfere with action, and to escape servitude and the weight of the past. It is thanks to reflection and philosophy— which is a metodologia della storiografia, “methodology of historiography” (“historiography” signifying here, as Croce explains, historia rerum gestarum or “historical account of the past,” that is, not events but their interpretation in history books), the knowledge of this “concrete universal” present in each event—that we succeed in understanding the meaning of what has been. The historical investigations of historians—and those that each of us undertakes to reconstruct the meaning of our behavior and our past—ease the route to freedom, which is understood as an awareness of necessity and a knowledge of the real possibilities of action. Historicism consequently excludes both the passive acceptance of events as well as the desire to go beyond the determining factor and limits of the real without confronting them. By converting the past into knowledge, and by understanding everything that stirs dimly within us and within the world, we are ready to realize who we are, we become creators of history. Only that which is objectified, and which enters into a relation with the activity of others, leaving behind some sign, has any permanent value—and not the feeble attempts, nor the boasts, nor the paralyses of the will that destroy our minds, nor the endless chatter. The life of the mind consists precisely in this realization of the movement of the whole in the works of the individual, which are merely functions that are subordinate to this totality. For Croce they become immortal, in a secular sense, and only have value if they consciously accept being the construction materials of a history that is unfolding above their heads, beyond their intentions, and in which they nonetheless believe: [N]o sooner is each one of our acts completed than it is separated from us and lives an immortal life, and we ourselves (who are merely the process of our acts) are immortals, because we have lived and are still living. (“Religione e serenità,” Frammenti di etica, 23) In this one, unique world we maybe suffer, but this world alone contains the objects of our desire, of our passion, of our interest, and of our knowledge. We would not, in fact, want any other, for example, the one promised by religions: we are inextricably tied to this immanence (this is the meaning of the expression storicismo assoluto [absolute historicism]). We have to immerse ourselves courageously in it, accept the risk, the possibility of suffering, of disappointments, and of sadness: [I]s it worth living when we are forced to take our pulse at every moment, and to surround ourselves with useless remedies, avoiding the slightest draft because we are afraid of falling ill? Is it worth loving, when we are constantly thinking about and accommodating love’s hygiene, measuring its doses, taking it in moderation, trying from time to time to abstain from it in order to get better at abstinence, out of a fear of the overwhelming shocks and heartbreaks in the future? (“Amore per le cose,” in Frammenti di etica, 19) What the Gramscian conception of history aims to do, for its part, is to provide an appropriate theoretical framework for confronting a determinate historical situation of struggle and transition, which is marked by numerous imbalances and tensions, and in which bridgeheads and delays coexist alongside one another. Such a history should in Italy, for example, play a mediating role between the industrial North and the agricultural South, between the high culture of bourgeois tradition and the superstitions or the folklore of the subaltern classes, between philosophy and myth, between the development of productive forces—understood even in the context of a Taylorist system—and the obstacles that come from outmoded or archaic relations of production. By the effort brought about to eliminate the divisions between dominant and dominated, history should be transformed on the basis of a project of collective emancipation, and not contemplated and admired like some unfathomable mystery, rendered cruel by its incomprehensible and eternal essence. Historicism is so radical and immanent that what today is true in this precise situation of historical constraint could well become false, and what is false could, at least to some extent, become true: We might even go as far as stating that, while the entire system of the philosophy of praxis could become obsolete in a unified world, many idealist conceptions, or at least certain aspects of these, which are utopian during the period of necessity, could become “truths” after this has passed, etc. (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith) 526 ITALIAN the same elements of the wooden structure that at first resisted and bore the weight and the strains of the materials that rested on them, could then break because of the change in scale. Consequently, the unchanging nature of properties belonging to geometrical figures does not always apply in physics: “Now, since mechanics has its foundation in geometry, where mere size cuts no figure, I do not see that the properties of circles, triangles, cylinders, cones and other solid figures will change with their size” (ibid.). The case of Galileo, who wondered why abstract mathematical reason could not have the effects on reality that we might intuitively assume it would have, did not lead to the surrender of rationality in its confrontations with aconceptual practices, but on the contrary, to the birth of a new form of knowledge, as is the (exemplary) case with modern mechanics. In order to grasp the innovative nature of Galileo’s propositions in this domain, we need to measure the distance with respect to the long tradition that began in ancient Greece, and continued up until his time. The term mekhanê originally meant “ruse,” “deception,” “artifice,” and it had already appeared in the Iliad (VIII.177) in this sense of the term. It was only later that it referred to machines in general (in a sense that is close to the connotations of the “appropriate use of an instrument” and of “theatrical machine,” from which the expression theos epi mekanêi (deus ex machina) is derived, and in particular to simple machines—levers, pulleys, wedges for cutting, inclined planes, screws, and then to war machines, and to automatons. Mechanics, the knowledge concerned with machines, was thus born with this distinctive trait: it was assigned to the construction of artificial entities, of traps fabricated against nature in order to capture its energy and to channel it to the advantage of humans, and according to their whims. But why do machines have a semantic legacy having to do with ruse and deception? We do not understand, for example, how a lever can lift enormous weights with the minimum of effort, nor how a cutting wedge manages to split stones or gigantic tree trunks. The Quaestiones mechanichae, for a long time attributed to Aristotle, provide a testimony to this astonishment when they state clearly that “many marvelous things, whose cause is unknown, happen according to the order of nature, while others happen against this order, produced by technê for men’s benefit” (847a). When nature is contrary to our own usefulness, we succeed in mastering it by means of artifice (mechanê). In this way, technique allows us to conquer nature in circumstances where it would otherwise conquer us. On this strange (atopos) genre, the treatise again adds that “these are things by which the least triumphs over the greatest,” as in the case of the lever, precisely, which enables great weights to be lifted with little effort. The mechanical arts, because they belong to the realm of the ruse and of that which is “against nature,” are not part of physics, which concerns what belongs to the order of nature. What is more, for the Greeks only mathematics and astronomy are sciences in the true sense of the term, in that they are not concerned with things that can be other than what they are, and that therefore do not have the character of being necessary—this is the case of those things linked to praxis (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5.1140a and VI.6.1140b). These sciences thus enjoy the privileges of In this sense, the logic of discovery for Galileo was open to what was new, and was not yet reducible to the compact unity of a theory: I do not want our poem to be restricted to unity to the point where we can no longer give free rein to circumstantial episodes: all they need is to have some link to what we are saying; it is as if we had gathered to tell stories, and I said allow me to say the one that comes to my mind after hearing yours. (trans. S. Drake, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) The famous statement about the world being written in mathematical characters does not allow us to deduce from these a priori forms any similarly certain knowledge regarding physical space. Let us look at this text again: Philosophy is written in this immense book which is always open before our eyes, I mean the Universe, but we cannot understand it if we do no apply ourselves to understanding first of all its language, and to knowing the characters with which it is written. It is written in a mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it would be humanly impossible to understand a single word. Without these, we would just be wandering vainly in a dark labyrinth. (“Il Saggiatore: The Assayer,” in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, trans. S. Drake and C. D. O’Malley) Galileo was well aware that there is a clear difference between mathematical models and physical reality, even though this reality could and had to be read, ultimately, using these very instruments. The engineers, artisans, and workers at the arsenal in Venice, when they built their ships, for example, learned that there was no correspondence between scale models and real models, between abstract theory and the practice dictated by lived experience. Indeed when Salviati, at the beginning of the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, recommends that philosophers and theoreticians of nature go to visit the world of those who know how to build machines, he is certainly not arguing in favor of practice over theory: “The constant activity which you Venetians display in your famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics; for in this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must be some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations, have become highly expert and clever in explanation” (trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences). As the character Sagredo observes, the fact that in the construction of ships, scale models are not equivalent to real models implies that “in speaking of these and other similar machines one cannot argue from the small to the large, because many devices which succeed on a small scale do not work on a large scale” (ibid.). So geometry is not applicable sic et simpliciter (purely and simply) to physical reality. When one goes from a small-scale model of a ship to the real ship, ITALIAN 527 deceived in trying to apply machines to many operations impossible by their nature, with the result that they have remained in error while others have likewise been defrauded of the hope conceived from their promises. These deceptions appear to me to have their principal cause in the belief which these craftsmen have, and continue to hold, in being able to raise very great weights with a small force, as if with their machines they could cheat nature, whose instinct—nay, whose most firm constitution—is that no resistance may be overcome by a force that is not more powerful than it. How false such a belief is, I hope to make most evident with true and rigorous demonstrations that we shall have as we go along. (trans. S. Drake, On Mechanics, 147) From this perspective, it is precisely machines—which will after Galileo be built according to fully rational criteria and calculations, going beyond the “approximate” empirical system, in the sense in which Alexandre Koyré understands it (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe)—that take away from slavery its advantages of efficiency and low cost, and enable it to be virtually abolished. The force of human labor, in the form of a pure expenditure of energy, is no longer indispensable, whereas—and this is one of Galileo’s other great intuitions—machines will henceforth substitute for the lack of intelligence of natural forces, and of animals that expend energy. By means of “artifices and inventions,” they will be capable of saving people their energy and money, by transferring to inanimate and animate nature the burden of providing the energy that had previously been oriented toward the “desired effect.” What is important here, as often in the whole of the Italian tradition, is the idea of a conscious control over partially spontaneous processes (natural or historical). We sometimes intervene in these latter forces by directing them toward the future on the basis of present mutations, following the principle stated in chapter 2 of Machiavelli’s Il Principe: “sempre una mutazione lascia l’addentellato per la edificazione dell’altra” (for any change always leaves a toothing-stone for further building” [trans. Q. Skinner and R. Price, The Prince, 6]). Remi Bodei REFS.: Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso, Book 3 of La divina commedia. In La Commedia: Nuovo testo critico secondo i più antichi manoscritti fiorentini, edited by A. Lanza. Anzia, It.: De Rubeis, 1995. Translation by Allen Mandelbaum and Barry Moser: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri : Paradiso, a Verse Translation. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986. Bacon, Francis. Wisdom of the Ancients. Introduction by Henry Morley. London: Cassell, 1905. First published ca. 1609 in Latin. Bruno, Giordano. Candelaio. In vol. 1 of Opere italiane. 2 vols. Edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia. Torino: UTET, 2002. Candelaio was first published in 1582. Translation by Gino Moliterno: Candlebearer: A Comedy by Bruno of Nola Academician of No Academy. Edited by G. Moliterno. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1999. . Spaccio della bestia trionfante. In vol. 2 of Opere italiane, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia. 2 vols. Torino: UTET, 2002. Spaccio della bestia trionfante was first published in 1584. Translation by Arthur D. Imerti: The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Edited by A. D. Imerti. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. necessity and of a priori knowledge, since they are true independently of experience. In the vast debate on the relation between phusis and nomos, mechanics has been resolutely defined, since its mythical origins with Daedalus and Icarus, as antinature, whereas medicine, which appears, for example, in the treatises De arte (On Art) and De victu (On Diet) from the Hippocratic corpus, is presented instead as a science that supplements and imitates nature. With Galileo, we begin to realize that we command nature by obeying it, that it cannot simply be mistreated and that the main responsibility of mechanics is not to astonish us. In order to master nature, we have to serve it, yield to its laws and its injunctions, taking advantage of its knowledge. The concept of ruse, in the sense in which the weakest gets the better of the strongest, and where a man such as Ulysses deceives the obtuse Polyphemus that is nature, loses its pertinence. For Galileo, there is no longer any need to divert nature from its course, to torture it, to put it on the rack so as to force it to reveal its secrets, as Francis Bacon wanted to do, opposing not the ruse to the force of nature, but a counterviolence. Man, “vicar of the Most-High,” can and must, according to Bacon, exert violence upon nature, for the surest method when faced with matter, which, like Proteus undergoes continual metamorphoses, is to stop it, to block the process of its changes: “And that method of binding, torturing, or detaining, will prove the most effectual and expeditious, which makes use of manacles and fetters; that is, lays hold and works upon matter in the extremest degrees” (Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients). For Galileo, this kind of violence disappears, precisely because mechanics ceases to be against nature. The formula PxFxDxV indicates the conquest of rationality by means of product of four “things” that have to be considered in their reciprocal relations: “namely the burden that one wishes to transport from one place to another; the force which has to move it; the distance it has to be moved; and the time of the said movement, because it is used to determine the speed, since it is all the greater if the moving body, or the burden, travels a larger distance in the same time” (trans. S. Drake, On Mechanics, 23–24). If we examine the weight necessary to move a body from one place to another, the force necessary for this operation, the distance this body travels, and the time this movement takes (speed), we can clearly see that one parameter gains what another loses. So using a lesser force is compensated by a longer traction time, as in the case of the lever that lifts great weights with little effort. Galileo showed, by means of true and necessary demonstrations, that mechanics were disappointed when they wanted to use machines in a number of operations that are by nature impossible. We should not give in to the dream of catching nature out (or with its guard down, so to speak), of getting it to bend to our will: It has seemed well worthwhile to me, before we descend to the theory of mechanical instruments, to consider in general and to place before our eyes, as it were, just what the advantages are that are drawn from those instruments. This I have judged the more necessary to be done, the more I have seen (unless I am much mistaken) the general run of mechanicians 528 ITALIAN Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Edited By N. Gallo and C. Garboli. Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Translation and introduction by J. G. Nichols: The Canti: With a Selection of His Prose. Rev. ed. Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008. Translation by Jonathan Galassi: Canti. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. . Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia. Edited by F. Russo. Milan: Angeli, 1997. First published in 1842. Translation, with introduction and annotations, by Ernesto G. Caserta: The War of the Mice and the Crabs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1976. . Zibaldone di pensieri. In vols. 1–2 of Giacomo Leopardi’s Opere, edited by Sergio Solmi. Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1966. . Zibaldone di pensieri. 3 vols. Edited by R. Damiani. Milan: Mondadori, 1997. First published in 1898 in 7 volumes. Translation and introduction by Martha King and Daniela Bini: Zibaldone: A Selection. New York: Lang, 1992. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. Vol. 2 of Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, edited by Francesco Bausi. 2 vols. Rome: Salerno, 2001. Translation by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov: Discourses on Livy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Translation by Ninian Thompson: Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. London: K. Paul, Trench and Co., 1883. . Il Principe. Vol. 1, edited by Mario Martelli and Nicoletta Marcelli, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli. 2 vols. Rome: Salerno, 2006. First published in 1513. Translation by W. K. Marriott: The Prince. London: J. M. Dent, 1908. Translation by Tim Parks: The Prince. London: Penguin, 2009. Translation by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price: Machiavelli: The Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Verra, Valerio. La filosofia dal’ 45 a oggi. Torino: ERI, 1976. Vico, Giambattista. La Scienza Nuova. 2 vols. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Rome: Laterza, 1974. First published in 1744. Translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Translation by Leon Pompa: The First New Science. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Croce, Benedetto. Estetica comme scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Vol. 1 of Filosofia dello spirito. 2 vols. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1909–12. Translation by Colin Lyas: The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . “Frammenti di etica.” In Etica e politica. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1973. . Politics and Morals. Translated by Salvatore J. Castiglione. London: Allen and Unwin, 1946. Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican. Translated by Stillman Drake. Foreword by Albert Einstein. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. . Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. Introduction by Antonio Favaro. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1946. First published by Macmillan in 1914. . On Motion (De motu, 1590), and On Mechanics (Le meccaniche, 1600). Translated, with an introduction and notes, by I. E. Drabkin (De motu) and Stillman Drake (Le meccaniche). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960. . Opere. 20 vols. Edited by Antonio Favaro. Florence: Barbera, 1929–39. . “Il Saggiatore: The Assayer.” In The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. Translated by Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. Garin, Eugenio. La filosofia come sapere storico: Con un saggio autobiografico. Roma: Laterza, 1990. Translation by Giorgio Pinton: History of Italian Philosophy. Introduction by Leon Pompa. Edited by G. Pinton. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Gramsci, Antonio. “Appunti per una introduzione e un avviamento allo studio della filosofia e della storia della cultura.” In vol. 2 of Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana. 4 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. English translation: “Notes for an Introduction and an Approach to the Study of Philosophy in the History of Culture.” in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, edited by David Forgasc, 324–62. Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. New York: New York University Press, 2000. . Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The German Constitution. In G.W.F. Hegel: Political Writings. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 529 The concept thus has two dimensions: a theoretical dimension, the critique of a spatialized, undifferentiated, and indifferent conception of temporal “unfolding,” in which history becomes an infinite accumulation; and a practical and political dimension, interrupting this enumeration, blocking this avalanche (Thesis 17, Stillstellung, stillstellen [blockage, blocking, halting]) so as to bring about a knowing transformation of the present, which also transforms the image of the past. So even though Jetztzeit is close, in its brief and radiant temporality, to Augenblick (another frequent term in the “Theses” and which Benjamin translates as “instant”), the word no doubt borrows many of the characteristics of kairos: the ideas of a break, of something discontinuous, of a decisive and irreplaceable moment. Benjamin notes in the Arcades Project (N, 10, 2): “Definitions of the fundamental concepts of history: catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity.” The “time of the now” is precious and unique, and therefore fragile, but also sharp and decisive; it creates a new image of the past and establishes a new configuration between the present and the past. Because it enables one to act, to escape, to block the catastrophe—history as it is and as it continues to be—it is, in Benjamin’s theological vocabulary, “a model of messianic time” (Thesis 18), or it even contains “splinters of messianic time” (Er bergründet so einen Begriff der Gegenwart als der “Jetztzeit,” in welcher Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind) (“Theses,” App. A). It is because decisive and just political action, which happens within the time of the now, is urgent, acute, and extremely precarious, since it has to grasp the “right moment” in midflight, that it is comparable to a messianic redemption that no theology of history or any ideology of progress could guarantee. No temporal determinism can guarantee when Jetztzeit will come to pass either. One of the most difficult aspects of this concept is that it emphasizes the subjective dimension of choice and decision, the dimension precisely of being subjects of historical action, and at the same time it cannot be based on any arbitrary resolution because of the risk of thereby losing its radiant effectiveness. It also necessarily depends on a certain temporal objectivity, on a “historic trace,” a sign (index) that does not refer to a mechanical causality between past and present but to a sort of condensation when a forgotten, lost, perhaps repressed moment from the past can suddenly be deciphered and known by the present and in the present: what Benjamin calls “the Now of knowability [das Jetzt der Erkenntbarkeit]” (Arcades Project, N, 3, 1). In order to describe more precisely this convergence of subjective decision and the fabric of objective history, Benjamin will have recourse to different models, in particular the Proustian theory of involuntary memory, the Freudian dialectic between dream and unconscious images and the action of the waking consciousness, and the drifting openness to experience of the Surrealists. JETZTZEIT JETZTZEIT (GERMAN) ENGLISH at present, present time, the now time FRENCH à présent, temps actuel v. INSTANT, and HISTORY, MOMENT, STILL, TIME Although the lexical form of this word existed before Walter Benjamin marked it (it is found, notably in the work of the Romantic poet Jean Paul), Benjamin was the writer who made it into both a heuristic and a philosophico-practical concept. It is not easily translatable. Benjamin seemed to have wanted to emphasize the everyday meaning of “the now-time”: its nontechnical, nonscholarly use as a common noun modernized by doubling it up as jetzt (now, at present) and Zeit (time). Jetztzeit only appears in Walter Benjamin’s late writings, at the end of the 1930s: in his theses “On the Philosophy of History” (often simply referred to as the “Theses”) from 1940, in the notes relating to this text, and in the “Notebook N” of the Passagenwerk [Arcades Project], which was also devoted to “theoretical reflections on knowledge,” in particular critical reflections on the “theory of progress.” So it was in a situation of extreme personal and collective danger, and confronted by the imperious need to rethink a potential struggle against a triumphant fascism, that Benjamin attempted to formulate a concept that gives the “time of the now” (one possible literal translation of Jetztzeit) a decisive weight, instead of treating it as a vanishing instant, a sort of unrepresentable tipping point between the past (which has gone) and the future (which does not yet exist). This perilous situation and this necessary struggle are also two of the main aspects of this concept. Indeed, the Jetztzeit has to enable a construction of history opposed to the “homogenous and empty time” of traditional historiography, particularly that of historicism but also that of the “ideology of progress” denounced in the “Theses.” This critical construction proceeds by quite intense interruptions, breaks, and overlapping between the present and the past, accompanied by modernizing political actions: Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet. So war für Robespierre das antike Rom eine mit Jetztzeit geladene Vergangenheit, die er aus dem Kontinuum der Geschichte heraussprengte. (History is the object of a construction whose site is not empty, homogenous time, but time filled with “the now.” Thus for Robespierre, ancient Rome was a past laden with “the now,” which blasted out of the continuum of history.) (Thesis 14) J Why, then, did Benjamin not adopt, or even modify, the term kairos but instead coin the term Jetztzeit? Two hypotheses: first, in order to emphasize better the proximity of the concept to Jewish prophetic and messianic traditions (as opposed to Greek or Christian traditions); and second, to insist on the fact, in the very structure of the word, that only in the present can true historical knowledge and the time of just political action be united. Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin REFS.: Benjamin, Andrew, ed. Walter Benjamin and History. London: Continuum, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. “Anmerkungen” to “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.3: 1222–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Translation by Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland: “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History.’” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 401–11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. . “Das Passagen-Werk: Konvolut N (Erkenntnistheoretisches; Theorie des Fortschritts).” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 5.1: 1222–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin: “Convolute N (On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress).” In The Arcades Project, 456–88. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. . “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.2: 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Translation by Harry Zohn: “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Gandler, Stefan. Materialismus und Messianismus: zu Walter Benjamins Thesen Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008. Mosès, Stéphane. The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Piep, Karsten H. “‘A Tiger’s Leap Into the Past’: On the ‘Unhistorical,’ the ‘Historical,’ and the ‘Suprahistorical’ in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’” New German Review 20 (2004–5): 41–59. Steinberg, Michael P., ed. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Tiedemann, Rolf. “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History.’” In Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, edited by Gary Smith, 175–209. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. . “Jetztzeit.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. 4:648–49. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976. JUSTICE, JUDGMENT I. Justice and Equity “Justice” comes from the Latin justitia, itself derived from jus, which dictionaries translate either as “right” or “justice.” In French, as in Latin, justice refers both to the conformity to the law (droit; cf. Ger. Gerechtigkeit); the justice one dispenses (and which constitutes in modern times one of the three branches of state power, alongside the legislative and the executive); and the sense of equity, the spirit of justice, which is bound up with morality. See LEX, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, THEMIS, and FAIR, PRAVDA; and cf. ISTINA, POSTUPOK. On equity, refer more specifically to THEMIS, IV; cf. PHRONÊSIS, PIETAS. II. Justice and Judgment The judgment (Lat. judicium, from judico, judicare) that justice entails relates to a much broader sphere; it refers as much to the act of judging in the sense of “pronouncing a verdict,” as to that of judging in the sense of “forming an opinion of, appreciating, thinking”—and it also designates the “faculty” described by Kant (in the second part of the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason) as the “power to subsume within rules,” which is the source of the latter. The Greek krinein [ϰϱίνειν] does not come from the same root (krinein comes rather from *krin-ye/o, which means “to separate out, to sift”; we find *krin in the Latin cerno, and in the French critique, critère, crise [crisis] or discernement), but still contains the same breadth of meanings, which range between the judgment of a court and a logical, aesthetic, or moral judgment. On logical judgment, see BEGRIFF, CATEGORY, LOGOS, MERKMAL, PROPOSITION, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH; cf. IMPLICATION, INTENTION, PRINCIPLE. On aesthetic judgment, see AESTHETICS, GOÛT, STANDARD; see also PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION; cf. INGENIUM. v. ALLIANCE, MORALS, VIRTUE 530 JUSTICE 531 kêr: in Iliad 8.69ff., Zeus weighs two kêres on the scales, those of the Achaeans and those of the Trojans. This relation to death means that the word kêr is also used in the sense of “misfortune”—for example, in tragedy. B. Moira, Aisa: One’s lot and the thread of one’s life The term moira, used more frequently and more traditionally than kêr to indicate destiny, is inscribed within the semantic field of the “part or portion assigned,” the “lot” that is attached to a being from birth. Moira [μοῖϱα] derives from the verb meiromai [μείϱομαι], “to have one’s legitimate part,” which in the perfect heimartai [εἵμαϱται] or the pluperfect heimarto [εἵμαϱτο] means “is (was) marked by fate,” whence heimarmenê (moira) [εἱμαϱμένη (μοῖϱα)], “the part that is imparted.” In Iliad, 24.209–10, the mother of Hector weeps for the death of her son: “So almighty Destiny [Moira] spun with her thread [epenêse linôi (ἐπένησε λίνῳ)], from the moment I gave birth to him.” Moira is a spinner who spins around the newborn child the portion of life assigned to him. As we can see in this example, moira or Moira and Moirai are associated with death. In Homer, we come across the expression, tirelessly repeated: “Death and almighty moira [thanatos kai moira krataiê (θάνατοϛ ϰαὶ μοῖϱα ϰϱαταιή)]”; see, for example, Iliad, 5.83; 16.334). This semantic value of the notion of destiny in Greek is confirmed by the term aisa [αἶσα], which is a name for “destiny” in the sense of the “portion allocated,” the “lot” of one’s life, and which is related etymologically to a series of words such as aitios [αἴτιοϛ] and aitia [αἰτία], “cause,” which imply responsibility (Iliad, 20.127–28: “After that he will suffer what destiny [aisa] / spun with her thread for him at the moment of his birth, / when his mother brought him into the world”). Aisa and Moira are both personified as spinners, and are sometimes used synonymously (Odyssey, 5.113ff.). These terms emphasize the fact that the fundamental notion of destiny in Greek is linked to the idea that each person’s life is a part of a whole, just as moira is part of a land, or of a country, or of the honor due to a class of persons, and so on. It is a legitimate, singular part, connected to a subject. Along the line of destiny, every event produces a closure; the line itself, made up of a succession of closures, does not unfold as a “trace.” Above these events that affect the subject, that for that subject are hic et nunc, the dimensions of the ubique and the semper open up, which is to say the dimensions of the divine (Diano, Il concetto della storia, 252ff.). The subject, beneath the vault of this whole, of the divine, feels present there as a gift, offered and taken back by a mysterious force, by the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. . KÊR [ϰήϱ], MOIRA [μοῖϱα], AISA [αἶσα], HEIMARMENÊ [εἱμαϱμένη], ANAGKÊ [ἀνάγϰη], PEPRÔMENÊ [πεπϱωμένη], TUCHÊ [τύχη] (GREEK) ENGLISH fate, destiny FRENCH destin, fatalité, sort, lot, nécessité, fortune ITALIAN fortuna, fato, destino LATIN fatum, fortuna SPANISH destino v. DESTINY [SCHICKSAL], and CHANCE, DAIMÔN, DUTY, GOD, EREIGNIS, GLÜCK, LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA], LAW, MOMENT, OBLIGATION, PRESENT, THEMIS Greek uses a considerable number of distinct terms to refer to what the Romance languages generally call “destiny” (Fr. destin, Ital. and Sp. destino, from the Latin root destinare, “to determine, to stop”) or “fate” (fatalité, fato, derived from the Latin fatum, from fari, “to say”). These Greek terms convey more or less philosophically reinscribed or elaborated representations and images that are still operative today: death (kêr [ϰήϱ]); the portion assigned and the lot one draws (moira [μοῖϱα], heimarmenê [εἱμαϱμένη], aisa [αἶσα]); the thread and the knot (Klôthô, the Moirai or Fates themselves); the good or bad effects of fortune (tuchê [τύχη]); the bond and constraints of necessity (anagkê [ἀνάγϰη]). Each of these expressions attests in its own way to the formation of a relationship between the gods and men, and a relationship of man to himself. I. The First Paradigms of Destiny A. Kêr: The destiny of death In Greece, up until the end of the fifth century, destiny casts its formidable and irrepressible shadow over man. Whenever it manifests itself as kêr [ϰήϱ], it is literally the “destruction” that threatens human beings. The term is rich in content, as Pierre Chantraine points out (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. kêr), since it “involves at the same time notions of destiny, or death, and of personal demons.” In a famous scene in the Iliad, Zeus weighs the kêres of Achilles and of Hector (22.209ff.); we do not know whether the two kêres are personified or not. Both are described as the “kêres of painful death,” that is, the destiny of death that each of the heroes has as his double, or phantom, or personal demon. What is curious is that they have a weight, and they can be weighed. Zeus places the two kêres on the scales, and Hector’s kêr drops and falls into the house of Hades. Apollo abandons the hero, and his fate is sealed. In a play that has been lost, Psuchostasia, Aeschylus adapted this scene in the Iliad, but he replaced the kêres with the souls of Achilles and Memnon (RT: TGF, 88–89 N. = 374–77 Radt). Aeschylus clearly interpreted the kêres in the Iliad as psuchai, the sort of psychic doubles or phantoms that live on in Hades after the death of the individual (see SOUL, Box 3). In other cases, however, there is nothing personal about the K C. Fatum, destinare: Word and destination The semantic field of moira and aisa contrasts distinctly with that of fatum, “fate,” in Latin. Fatum, from the verb for, faris, fari, fatus sum, “to speak,” implies precisely the “word” pronounced by fate, or by the oracle: “At si ita fatum erit: nascetur Oedipus Laio” (But if it is according to the “word of fate”: “Oedipus will be born to Laius”: Cicero, De fato, 30). The etymology of fatum suggests connections to fabula (fable), fateor (I confess), fama (fame), and so on. Fatum has entered into several Romance languages (cf. Fr. fatal, Ital. fato, Eng. fate, etc.). The Romance languages have also drawn upon another, different semantic field to express the notion of destiny: that of the Latin destinare (from de and a verbal form linked to stare), “to determine, to stop, to assign or destine.” Latin itself does not form any words meaning “fate” out of destinare, but the Romance languages do: French destin (1160 CE), Italian destino (c. 1321), Spanish destino—and thence the English “destiny.” II. The Spinners A. From the “part” (moira) to “Moira” In Greek, the “portion” of one’s fate is assigned (peprôtai [πέπϱωται], from porô [πόϱω], “to give, to offer”) or determined by the gods; sometimes, it “comes upon” or “leaps onto” a human being (like a chance event), but more often it becomes the “thread” of each person’s fate. Greek therefore has recourse to the verb klôthein [ϰλώθειν], “to spin,” and invents the goddess Klôthô [Kλωθώ], the spinner, making her into a plural, Klôthes [Kλῶθεϛ ], the Spinners (Odyssey 7.197), or into one of the three Moirai, goddesses of fate, the two others being Lachesis (lachos [λάχοϛ], from lagchanô [λαγχάνω], which means the “lot,” as in drawing lots, for example), and Atropos, “the inflexible one,” “the one who cannot be turned 532 KÊR 1 The double epic and tragic motivation: Determinism and responsibility There is a strange contradiction in Homer between two orders of interpretation that are applied to individual fate. On the one hand, Homeric heroes embrace and assume control of their own deaths, thereby creating the conditions of their freedom; on the other hand, the Iliad entrusts to the gods the practical achieving of the hero’s death, whether his destiny is moira, aisa, or kêr. The gods, whether protective or antagonistic, intervene in human affairs via a complex mechanism: they act directly, but also through the Parcae, who weigh up and plan for Zeus (Dios boulê [∆ιὸϛ βουλή]) and thus embody the complicity between a god and a cursed fate (oloê moira [ὀλοὴ μοῖϱα]). This paradox has created problems of interpretation that are the source of endless debate. When a character such as Patroclus says, for example, that the gods bear a heavy responsibility for his fate of death, we can always trace his actions back to the moment when he makes a decision. Patroclus blames Zeus, Apollo, accursed fate, Euphorbus, and finally Hector for his death (Iliad, 16.844–50). In this hyperdetermination typical of the epos, we do not know which one to choose, but for Achilles there is no doubt about the matter: it is Hector he blames for Patroclus’s death, and Hector is the one on whom he will take his revenge. Patroclus could have avoided his death if he had followed Achilles’s advice (16.87–96) and not led his army against Ilion. The poet remarks on the gravity of this failure, and apostrophizes his hero, calling him “foolish” or “mad” (nêpios [νήπιοϛ]). He adds that Zeus excited his heart and his passion (thumon [θυμόν]). With this dual human and divine motivation, the poet expresses what we would now call the compatibility between determinism and responsibility (see, for example, Bok, Freedom and Responsibility, or Derrida, The Gift of Death) and presents in his own language the mystery of the fatal, fateful decision. Apollo himself, on four occasions, stops Patroclus and, repeating Achilles’s warning, tells him that it is not his destiny (aisa) to conquer Troy (Iliad, 16.698–709). But Patroclus, addressing Hector, who has just dealt him a mortal blow, refuses to acknowledge his own excessiveness, and prefers instead to produce a list of the agents who have caused his death: he places Hector at the end of this list, a minor agent whom he can thereby humiliate by depriving him of any glory. Homeric man is free and responsible, although he is represented as being in contact with divine forces: in the case of Patroclus, these forces do not deprive him of this freedom, contrary to what he says, but add nuance by underscoring the excessive nature of his decision. This fate is celebrated by the poet, who attributes glory (kleos [ϰλέοϛ]) to the hero who has chosen to die in the name of such glory, and erects a tomb to him in his immortal song. The questions that Homer treats are the stuff of tragedy: individual freedom despite fate and the will of the gods. But fate becomes more real and more brutal; the destructive will of the gods becomes more urgent, involving forces such as atê [ἄτη], “blindness and destruction” (Aeschylus, Persians, 1037); phthonos [φθόνοϛ], “the jealousy of the gods” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 904); anagkê [ἀνάγϰη], which often refers to a misfortune such as slavery (Aeschylus, Choephoeri, 75–78); or the Erinyes, avenging goddesses of family crimes (ibid., 283). The curse of the ancestors (ara [ἀϱά]: Sophocles, Electra, 111) is ineluctable. Prophecy is the text of fate. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, oracular statements are perceived not only as a form of anticipation, but also as divine will: Oedipus declares that he is the very person Apollo has predicted, the person who will kill his father and marry his mother. Yet human action goes beyond the circle of divine foresight: in blinding himself, Oedipus prevails over his misfortune and, in recognizing himself as a divine victim, acquires a heroic awareness of his destiny. What is more, the divine telos [τέλοϛ] is manifest in a series of circumstances constantly referred to as “chances” (tuchê [τύχη]): if necessity is helped by chance, is it not that bit less necessary? Chance and necessity cease to be opposed: their juxtaposition is one of the most puzzling innovations of Sophoclean drama. REFS.: Bok, Hilary. Freedom and Responsibility. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. “Donner la Mort.” In L’Éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Paris: Métailié Transitions, 1992. Published separately as Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée, 1999. Translation by David Wills: The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Pucci, Pietro. Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. KÊR 533 B. The Parcae The spinners become the preferred image in classical poetry, and find their way to Rome, where they acquire the name Parcae. The term comes from Parca (from the verb pario, “to procreate”) and referred to a goddess of birth who was identified with Moira (probably by a false etymology) and, in the plural, with the Moirai. The Parcae fulfill the same imaginary functions as in classical Greek poetry: they intervene at important moments in one’s life (Horace, Odes, 2.6.9: “Should angry Fate [Parcae] those wishes foil . . .”), and they control the length of one’s life (ibid., 2.3.13–16: You will enjoy your banquet “while life, and fortune, and the loom of the Three Sisters yield you grace [dum res et aetas et sororum fila trium patiuntur atra]”). As they move from Greece to Rome, the Moirai learn to sing and to write. Catullus (64.321) says that the Parcae “divino fuderunt carmine fata” (expressed oracular words [words of fate] with a divine song); fata, because of its connection to the verb fari (to speak), gains in semantic force and richness. Of the many examples, we might mention Ovid, who describes the Parcae spinning and singing an oracle in the Metamorphoses (8.452ff.). C. The book of fate In figurative representations, we often see the Moirai with a scroll (volumen) in one hand and a distaff in the other (cf. RT: LIMC, s.v. Moirai, 643 n. 33, 35, etc.). Although they do not write in the book of the father of the gods, the Moirai and the Parcae nonetheless do write. We read, for example, in a funerary text (RT: CLE, 2:1332.2): “vixi bene ut fata scripsere mihi” (I have lived well, as the fata had written for me): the Parcae, then, produced something in writing that prescribed one’s destiny and the quality of one’s life. In becoming something written, fate is no longer a part of life, even when symbolically represented by a thread, nor is it a ghostly double of man (kêr), but it is a stone tablet or a scroll that carries oracular signs. This implies that the whole within which the particular prescription takes shape is a text. The book of fate has become proverbial in the literature and imagination of Europe: Shakespeare, to cite him alone, mentions “the book of fate” (Henry IV, Part II, act 3, scene 1, v. 45). However, this vast imaginary and conceptual apparatus, and the incantatory force of these phantoms, never prevented the Greeks from seeing man as naked, responsible for his acts, fascinated and horrified by his own death (Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, 17–29). Philosophy creates its own mythology for the Moirai: in Plato (Republic, 617c), they are the daughters of Anagkê (Necessity), and they sit on thrones at the side of the celestial circles, singing with the Sirens: Lachesis the past, Klôthô the present, and Atropos the future. III. Tuchê, Attaining the Event The word for “chance, luck, fortune” in Greek is tuchê [τύχη]. This word is derived from the verb tugchanô [τυγχάνω] (in the aorist, etuchon [ἔτυχον]). Because tugchanô has two different connotations (“to attain or achieve, touch, succeed” and “to happen, to occur by chance”), the semantic field of tuchê swings back and forth between meanings: sometimes aside.” So the etymological meaning of moira as a “part” is lost, since in assigning to the Spinners the role of producing this “part,” the “part” symbolically becomes a thread made by a distaff, an image of human impermanence and vulnerability. Then, through a sort of personification or metonymy, this moira becomes the name not of the thread, but of the spinners who, while belying any etymological link to moira, will be called Moirai. The operation is a genuine poetic discovery (Dietrich, “The Spinning of Fate in Homer,” 88). This rhetorico-religious shift from moira (part) to Moira (Spinner) does not exclude the mythological connection of the Moirai with other figures. The Spinners have been compared to, among others, the Norns of the Norwegian epic, the AngloSaxon Metten(a), and the medieval German Gaschepfen, who are magical spinners who endow human beings with skill and talents at birth, even if they are not true goddesses or figures of fate. It seems that in Greece in ancient times, spinning was associated with magic: Homer perhaps worked syncretically to synthesize these popular beliefs and the image of the Moirai (Dietrich, “The Spinning of Fate in Homer,” 93ff.). Moira and the Moirai often preside over the death of a human being, with Aisa sometimes taking the place of Atropos. They are daughters of Night in Hesiod (Theogony, 211–20); they appear in funeral inscriptions; during worship, they are sometimes associated with the underworld deities Gê, Dêmêtêr, and Korê. Tragedy refers to them as “ancient goddesses” (palaigeneis [παλαιγενεῖϛ]: Aeschylus, Eumenides, 172; Sophocles, Antigone, 987); and the motif of the Moirai as spinners of fate remains popular in the religious imagination up until the time of the Romans (Eitrem, Paulys Real Encyclopädie, s.v., cols. 2479–93). By associating the Moirai with a thread that is spun and cut, with death and underworld deities, fate for the Greeks takes on melancholic nocturnal and funerary connotations. Already in Hesiod (Theogony, 900–906), however, an Olympian version is evolving that has the Moirai as daughters of Zeus and Themis (see THEMIS). Here the associations are all positive, since they are born in the same bed as the Horai—Eunomia, Justice, and Peace—and receive “the highest honor” from Zeus (pleistên timên [πλείστην τιμήν]). They are mentioned for the first time as a triad with their own names and specific function: bestowing good and evil upon men. This concept relates them to other deities sharing the same task: for example, the Muses (Odyssey, 8.63), and Zeus in particular (first in the Iliad, 14.527ff.). They spin threads, but they are not the only ones to do so, since Homer sometimes uses “to spin” (epiklôthô [ἐπιϰλώθω]) for the other gods when, either collectively (Odyssey, 1.17, 8.579, 11.139, 20.196; Iliad, 24.525) or individually (Odyssey, 4.208, 16.64), they make a decision or hand out portions of good fortune and misfortune to men. The Moirai seem to be the metaphorical model beings used to represent this action. Zeus and Apollo are referred to as Moiragetai [Mοιϱαγέται], a cultic title that defines them as “those who guide the Moirai” and thus preside over fate. Considered in this light, fate for the Greeks takes on a more positive complexion than in Homer, and is used in the end to signify the arc of a human life (Euripides, Bacchae, 99, etc.), marriage (Aristophanes, Birds, 1731–35, etc.), the decisive moments in life, and death. 534 KÊR a clearly secular connotation since, as Euripides says, “If there is tuchê, what then are the gods? And if the gods have any power, tuchê is nothing” (frag. 154.4–5, in Colinus, Nova fragmenta Euripidea). The Stoics will recall this principle, and they will offer instead the notion of heimarmenê (). Tuchê, understood as luck and chance, works in philosophical texts from Aristotle to Epicurus as a means of giving man, beyond the necessity that closes off one’s life, play enough to be free and to experience pleasure. . success, or good fortune; sometimes the purely accidental nature of things; sometimes unhappy fate. So tuchê is the aoristic “event” that happens, hic et nunc. In this respect, it is distinct from moira and from heimarmenê (moira) (from the perfect form heimartai), both of which imply a notion of continuity and of completion of an action—a predetermination constituted at the moment of the birth of a human being (see ASPECT). For ancient thought, moira as well as tuchê come from the gods, that is, from the powers of the polytheistic pantheon. But from the fifth century BCE on, tuchê is the name given to an accidental or contingent event. In this way, tuchê acquires 2 Tuchê and automaton in Aristotle v. ART, PRAXIS It is during his analysis of causes (aitiai [αἰτίαι]) in book 2 of his Physics that Aristotle elaborates the notion of tuchê by distinguishing it from that of automaton [αὐτόματον]. “Fortune” and “chance,” to use the standard translations, are both motor causes of what happens (hothen hê archê tês kinêseôs [ὅθεν ἡ ἀϱχὴ τῆϛ ϰινήσεωϛ], 7.198a3; cf. to kinêsan [τὸ ϰινῆσαν], as distinct from matter, hulê [ὕλη], form, eidos [εἶδοϛ], and finality, to hou heneka [τὸ οὗ ἕνεϰα], 7.198a22–24). However, they are not causes by themselves (kath’ hauto [ϰαθ’ αὑτό]), as is the quality of “being a builder” or “being an architect” that the builder/architect possesses with respect to the house to be built, but rather are causes by accident (kata sumbebêkôs [ϰατὰ συμϐεϐηϰώϛ]), as is the quality of “being a flute-player” that that builder/architect might well also possess. Their field of action is not the domain of “what always or most often happens” (the necessary and the universal, which are the domain of science), but that of the contingent, the accidental, which is tied to the infinite, indefinite, indeterminate nature (aoriston [ἀόϱιστον]) of an individual (apeira gar tôi heni sumbaiê [ἄπειϱα γὰϱ τῷ ἑνὶ συμϐαίη], 4.196a38ff., “for what can happen to an individual is limitless”). We can understand this as the way in which an accident can befall, sumb-baiê, a subject, or the way in which heterogeneous series, involving distinct unities, can happen to intersect—for example, the comings and goings of a debtor and of a lender (sunebê [συνέϐη], 196b35). This is why they can count “for nothing” in the face of causes by themselves (5.197a14). Nevertheless, we do notice them. This is because of a second characteristic that they possess: fortune and chance are applied only to “events that occur in view of something [ta heneka tou (τὰ ἕνεϰά του)],” or those which manifest some finality and could be fulfilled by thought and by nature (apo dianoias, apo phuseôs [ἀπὸ διανοίαϛ, ἀπὸ φύσεωϛ], 5.196b18–22). The event occurs, but “it does not originate in a cause that intended this event,” it only appears to have been intended (this is how I understand Aristotle’s hotan mê genêtai to heneka allou hekeinou heneka [ὅταν μὴ γένηται τὸ ἕνεϰα ἄλλου ἑϰείνου ἕνεϰα], 197b24, a difficult text that is often corrected). This is where the extent of the difference in scope between automaton and tuchê becomes clear. Automaton refers to any appearance of finality whatsoever; but we speak of tuchê only when the end lets itself be read in terms of a deliberate choice or decision (proairesis [πϱοαίϱεσιϛ]) that is characteristic of a praxis, of a practical agent. The examples speak for themselves: “The tripod fell over automatos: it is now upright to be used as a seat, whereas it did not fall over to be used as a seat” (197b16–18). But when the lender who is out for a walk happens upon his debtor “so he can collect his money [hoion heneka tou apolabein (οἷον ἕνεϰα τοῦ ἀπολαϐεῖν)]” (5.196b33), we refer to this as tuchê. In both cases, finality seems to be intrinsic, even though it is not in fact, and this is how automaton becomes etymologized as auto-matên [αὐτὸ-μάτην], literally, “by itself in vain,” of which tuchê is one kind: “This is what an automaton is, and it is so because of its name: each time that it occurs by itself in vain [hotan auto matên genêtai (ὅταν αὐτὸ μάτην γένηται)]” (6.197b29ff.). It is easy to see why the translation of automaton as “chance” was not particularly productive (the French word for chance, hasard, is borrowed from the Arabic al-zahar [هر َالز ,[ َ “throw of the dice,” via the Spanish azar; the DHLF [in RT] even explains that zahr [الزھر ,[ َ “flower,” referred to the flower on one of the faces of the die). Pierre Pellegrin chose to translate automaton into French as spontanéité (spontaneity), and tuchê as hasard (chance, 4.195b30): “We also say that le hasard [tuchê] and la spontanéité [automaton] are among the causes.” Henri Carteron has recently translated this into French as: “We also say that la fortune [tuchê] and le hasard [automaton] are causes,” but this new translation is very problematic. The paradigm of the game of chance is indeed directly opposed to the Aristotelian conception of tuchê: a throw of the dice or an accidental fall are certainly neither one nor the other the object of a rational choice. Indeed, the following statement by Aristotle would be incomprehensible if that were the case: “Nothing inanimate, nor even a beast or a small child, does anything that occurs by chance [ouden poiei apo tuchês (οὐδὲν ποιεῖ ἀπὸ τύχηϛ)], because they do not have the faculty of rational choice [hoti ouk echei proairesin (ὅτι οὐϰ ἔχει πϱοαίϱεσιν)]; no more than fortune or misfortune can befall them [oud’ eutuchia oud’ atuchia (οὐδ’ εὐτυχία οὐδ’ἀτυχἰα)], unless it is figuratively speaking” (6.197b7–9). It is all the more incomprehensible given that the Greek division of tuchê into eutuchia [εὐτυχία] and atuchia [ἀτυχία] is made inaudible by the difference between chance/fortune and misfortune. We can also appreciate the difference that is established between this systematic physics (the four causes) and ontology (accidentality and contingency), and the fate of the epic and tragic hero. Fortune becomes an object of epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη], not that it is calculated or measured (the mathematics of probability is still a long way off; see CHANCE), but because it is rigorously analyzed in terms of its “as if.” Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. The Physics. Translated by Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. KÊR 535 benevolence: good Tuchê, good Luck. The goddess Fortuna would be its Latin equivalent. . In the fourth century BCE, tuchê passed from scholarly texts, where it had become secularized, into more popular forms, and became the goddess Tuchê, with a propensity for 3 Fortuna in the Renaissance v. VIRTUE, VIRTÙ Understood in terms of its Latin root, and the entire Romance language tradition, as well as in terms of its retranslation of the Greek and Hellenist tradition, fortuna is an equivocal term that designates good or bad luck, or something opportune or accidental, and can mean at the same time chance, necessity, or fate, and Providence. It is a notion whose ambiguity was figured and personified as a near-deity, particularly during the period of humanism from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The term fortuna at that time did not signify fortune in the sense of tuchê (Aristotle, Physics, 5), or that which we cannot control (Cicero, Seneca). In Dante, it is still a fluid unity in which a number of contradictory themes are condensed, and refers analogically to divine providential intelligence as a protective power. The notion undergoes two important changes during the Renaissance: this was the period of its most powerful polymorphousness and greatest mobility, representing by analogy with the fine arts a “plastic compromise formulation” between the term’s different meanings, to borrow one of Ernst Cassirer’s expressions. It was also the period of its delegitimation: Fortuna fell from the status of a stellar goddess who was nearly omnipotent, to that of a wild animal full of furor that one had to learn to hunt and tame. The term in the end came close to designating either chance, devoid of all intention, or the necessity of nature, that is to say, essentially that with which human “freedom of action” is concerned. In Machiavelli, the term was considered in strict correlation to virtù, and covered the entire spectrum of its meanings, with the exception of that of Providence. This fluidity, which was close to disrupting its conceptual unity, was all the more necessary given that Fortuna pointed toward that which was outside our grasp, and took on the status—which Giordano Bruno would systematize—of an idea that we can only approach figuratively, precisely because what is at issue escapes all determinate form. Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less. (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 25, trans. Marriott) Machiavelli’s sentence asserts the equivalence between fortuna and virtù. It takes away from theoretical judgment the possibility of making a decision by neutralizing all decisive assessment; it forestalls any accusation of excessiveness, and serves as a prescription for action. Fortuna is the name of what escapes us at the very moment we need to contain it or hunt it down. In the same way, at the precise moment virtù frees itself from Fortune and chooses the path of force (which happens by calling out to fortune as kairos [ϰαιϱόϛ]; see MOMENT) according to a relation analogous to the masculine-feminine sexual relationship, fortuna reminds us of its presence and envelops virtù, since virtù itself is what happens to a subject. The term thereafter comes to name the paradox of the relation between chance, necessity, and freedom in a manner that remains mythical without being a mystification. The term has too often been considered in the sense of a mythological residue (Cassirer), or of a stillrepresentational prefiguration of the conceptual opposition between freedom and the order of the world. If Machiavelli abolished all trace of Providence from the notion, it was not in order to eradicate its necessarily obscure nature, but, in a powerful way, to retain it as a form of intelligibility. Gérald Sfez REFS.: Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Translated by William Walrond Jackson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1909. . The Divine Comedy. Translation and commentary by Charles S. Singleton. 2nd ed. 6 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. . The Latin Works. Translated by A. G. Ferrers Howell and Phillip H. Wicksteed. London: J. M. Dent, 1904. . Opere minori. Edited by Domenico De Robertis et al. 3 vols. Milan: Ricciardi, 1855. . Vita nuova. Translated with introduction by Mark Musa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Cassirer, Ernst. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. 5th ed. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977. Translation by Mario Domandi: The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Introduction by Mario Domandi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. Flanagan, Thomas. “The Concept of Fortuna in Machiavelli.” In The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, edited by Anthony Parel, 127–56. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Lefort, Claude. “Machiavelli: History, Politics, Discourse.” In The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, edited by David Carroll, 113–24. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. . Le travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1972. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Chief Works and Others. Translated by Allan Gilbert. 3 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965. . Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. Edited by Francesco Bausi. 2 vols. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 2.1–2. Rome: Salerno, 2001. Translation by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov: Discourses on Livy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. . Il Principe. Edited by Mario Martelli and Nicoletta Marcelli. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. 1. Rome: Salerno, 2006. Translation by Tim Parks: The Prince. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. Translation by W. K. Marriott: Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Mansfield, H. C. Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pocock, John Greville Agard. The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Procacci, Giuliano. Studi sulla fortuna del Machiavelli. Rome: Instituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1965. Tarlton, Charles D. “Fortuna and the Landscape of Action in Machiavelli’s Prince.” New Literary History 30 (1999): 737–55. Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor. “Machiavelli on History and Fortune.” Bucknell Review 8 (1959): 225–45. 536 KÊR Cassin, Barbara. Parménide: Sur la nature ou sur l’étant. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Colinus, Austin, ed. Nova fragmenta Euripidea. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Decharme, Paul. La critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs des origines au temps de Plutarque. Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1904. Reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1966. Diano, Carlo. Forma ed evento: Principii per una interpretazione del mondo greco. Venice, It.: Pozza, 1952. . Il concetto della storia nella filosofia dei Greci. Milan, It.: Marzorati, 1955. Dietrich, Bernard Clive. Death, Fate and the Gods: The Development of a Religious Idea in Greek Popular Belief and in Homer. London: Athlone, 1965. . “The Spinning of Fate in Homer.” Phoenix 16 (1962): 86–101. Eitrem, Samson. “Moira.” In Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 24 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1894–1963. Erkell, Harry. “Augustus, Felicitas, Fortuna: Lateinisches Wortstudien.” Diss., University of Göteborg, 1952. Feeney, Denis C. The Gods in Epic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Giannopoulou, Vasiliki. “Divine Agency and Tyche in Euripides’ Ion: Ambiguity and Shifting Perspectives.” Illinois Classical Studies 24–25 (2000): 257–71. Greene, William Chase. Moira, Fate, Good and Evil in Greek Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Gundel, Wilhelm. “Heimarmene.” In Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 24 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1894–1963. Guthrie, W.K.C. The Greeks and Their Gods. London: Methuen, 1950. Reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1985. . “The Religion and Mythology of the Greeks.” In Cambridge Ancient History, rev. ed., vol. 2, chap. 40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Krikos-Davis, Katerina. “Moira at Birth in Greek Tradition.” Folia Neohellenica 4 (1982): 106–34. Lesky, Albin. “Gods and Men.” In A History of Greek Literature, translated by James Willis and Cornelis de Heer, 65–73. New York: Crowell, 1966. . “Göttliche und menschliche Motivierung im homerischen Epos.” Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philos. Hist. Klasse 4 (Winter 1961): 1–52. Marks, Jim. Zeus in the Odyssey. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008. Mourelatos, Alexander P. D. “Constraint-Fate-Justice-Persuasion.” In The Route of Parmenides, 160–63. Rev. and exp. ed. Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides, 2008. Nilsson, Martin Persson. A History of Greek Religion. Translated by F. J. Fielden. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Onians, R. B. The Origin of the European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Plutarch. Moralia. Vol. 7. Translated by Lionel Pearson and F. H. Sandbach. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Pucci, Pietro. The Song of the Sirens. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Reydams-Schils, Gretchen. Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of the Timaeus. Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1999. Robinson, T. M. “Presocratic Theology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, edited by Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham, 485–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Roveri, Alessandro. “Tukhê in Polibio.” Convivio 24 (1956): 275–93. Schreckenberg, Heinz. Ananke: Untersuchungen sur Geschichte des Wortgebrauches. Zetemata, 36. Munich: Beck, 1964. Solomon, Robert C. “On Fate and Fatalism.” Philosophy East and West 53 (2003): 435–54. Strohm, Hans. Tyche: Zur Schicksalsauffassung bei Pindar und den frühgriechischen Dichtern. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1944. Van der Horst, Pieter Willem. “Fatum Tria Fata, Parca, Tres Parcae.” Mnemosyne 11 (1942): 217–27. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich Von. Der Glaube der Hellenen. 2 vols. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959. IV. Anagkê: The Bonds of Necessity The etymology of anagkê [ἀνάγϰη] is disputed, though the term possibly evokes the sense of “embracing” (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). Since Homer, the word has meant “constraint,” from which comes the sense of divine fate (Euripides, Phoenician Women, 1000). In Prometheus Bound (511–19), the Moirai and the Erinyes govern Anagkê; when the chorus asks who governs Necessity, Prometheus replies: “The three Moirai and the Erinyes with their unyielding memory”; he adds that Zeus himself would not be able to avoid their fate (tên peprômenên [τὴν πεπϱωμένην]). The word plays an important role in the Orphic writings, as attested by Euripides in Alcestis (963ff.): “I have found nothing stronger than Necessity [Anagkê], nor any remedy [against it] in the Thracian tablets, which the voice of Orpheus has written.” Through a Platonic invention, it becomes the mother of the Moirai (Republic, 617b–e). Anagkê plays a role in Parmenides’s system. Associated with moira and dikê [δίϰη] (justice, etymologically meaning “indication”; see THEMIS), anagkê ties beings in solid bonds. Barbara Cassin has shown how we can find its palimpsest in the immobility of Odysseus tied to the mast in the episode of the Sirens (Parménide, 55ff. and 151). Cassin also analyzes (151) the word and the concept of anagkê: the least-contested etymology connects the term with the curve of the arm (agkos [ἄγϰοϛ]), and the word is in fact constantly linked to circularity, to the turning back upon itself of telos, to limits, to bonds, to circles, and to the bands that, like the Styx, the Serpent, and the Ocean, encircle everything (see Onians, Origin of European Thought, pt. 3, chaps. 2 and 12; and Schreckenberg, Ananke). The constraint of destiny will become a universal theme: Dante speaks of “la forza del destino” (see the opera by Verdi); Shakespeare says: “All unavoided is the doom of destiny” (Richard III, act 4, scene 4, v. 218); and Milton has his Almighty say: “What I will is Fate” (Paradise Lost, 7.173). In all of these examples, however, the semantic field of destiny is no longer Greek, but Latin, coming from destinare or from fatum. . Pietro Pucci REFS.: Adkins, Arthur W. H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960. Alvis, John. Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. Berner, Franz. “Tekhne und Tukhe: Die Geschichte einer griechischen Antithese.” Diss., University of Vienna, 1954. Berry, Edmund Grindlay. “The History and Development of the Concept of Theia Moira and Theia Tychē down to and including Plato.” Diss., University of Chicago, 1940. Bianchi, Ugo. Dios aisa: Destino, uomini e divinità nell’epos, nelle teogonie e nel culto dei Greci. Rome: Signorelli, 1953. Busch, Gerda. “Untersuchungen zum Wesen der Tyche in den Tragödien des Euripides.” Diss., Heidelberg University, 1937. Brutscher, Cordula. “Cäsar und sein Glück.” Museum Helveticum 15 (1958): 75–83. KÊR 537 4 The heimarmenê of the Stoics, chain and providence v. BEGRIFF, Box 1, ELEUTHERIA, Box 2, IMPLICATION, LOGOS For the Stoics, everything happens according to fate. Fate is the rational organization of events that occur naturally (Diogenes Laertius, 7.149). No event is exempt: nothing happens without a cause. The Stoics deny that there is such a thing as fortune or luck. They choose necessity, heimarmenê, as a principle of the world, reviving at least etymologically the notion of the part of a whole, although the whole is no longer mysterious. Through a series of plays on words, of verbal allusions, and of literary references (particularly to Homer: see Long, “Stoic Readings of Homer”), Chrysippus and the Stoics broaden the scope and extent of the definitions of heimarmenê, which becomes heirmon [εἱϱμόν], “chain,” and logos [λόγοϛ], “speech” and “reason.” The oneness of a government of destiny is reciprocated with the oneness of the world itself, which is God. “God, Intellect, Destiny and Zeus are but one” (Diogenes Laertius, 7.135); “Common nature and the common reason of this nature are Destiny, Providence, and Zeus” (Plutarch, Contradictions of the Stoics, 34.1050b). Our sensations and our representations (phantasiai [φαντασίαι]) are our points of access in the whole network of Destiny, God, or Nature, which is an integrated chain of causes and effects, a total present, a code for the universe. Logical articulation is founded on the organization of the world itself, God or Nature, Providence, Destiny, which it reproduces in the order and the import of the utterances it joins together. Another word for heimarmenê in the sense of fate is peprômenê, assigning to every thing its limit, peras [πέϱαϛ], which is its determination, and therefore “finishing and ending” (Plutarch, Contradictions of the Stoics, 34.1056b). Cicero (De divinatione, 1.55.125) explains the term fatum (from fari, “to say,” fatum, “what has been said”—in Arabic, the word is mektoub, “what has been written”) as the Latin translation of heimarmenê: By “fate,” I mean what the Greeks call heimarmenê—an ordering and sequence of causes, since it is the connexion of cause to cause which out of itself produces anything. (fatum autem id appello, quod Graeci εἱμαϱμένην, id est ordinem seriemque causarum, cum causae causa nexa rem ex se gignat.) (Cicero, On Divination, 1.125–26 [RT: SVF 2.291], trans. in RT: The Hellenistic Philosophers, 337) In the words of Diogenes Laertius: Fate is defined as an endless chain of causation, whereby things are, or as the reason or formula by which the world goes on. (Zeno, in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.149, trans. Hicks, 235) The Stoics identify the greatest good, virtue and happiness, which they define as the fact of living in accordance with the events that happen naturally. Nonetheless, the Stoic theory of Fate is irreducible to the “argument of laziness” (if I am going to be cured of my illness, I will be cured, whether or not I call the doctor) and eradicates neither my action nor my freedom, which it appears to suppress: in the rational economy of the confatalia, or events linked together by fate, my illness is linked to the fact that I call the doctor. Human freedom does not reside so much in the choice of the content of our acts as in the active manner in which we embrace the events that happen to us naturally, and in which we thereby insert ourselves into the system of the world. Fate is irresistible. “The fates guide a docile will; they sweep away the one that resists [ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt]”—this is how Seneca (letter 107.11 in Letters to Lucilius) freely translates the lines by Cleanthus that are cited at the end of Epictetus’s Manual for Living. Our action can nevertheless become conjoined to fate, provided we know how to distinguish between simple facts and facts that are linked (simplicia versus copulata), between perfect and principal causes and auxiliary and adjacent causes (causae perfectae et principales versus adiuvantes et proximae): “As therefore,” he says, “he who pushes a cylinder gives it the beginning of its motion, but does not give it the power of rolling; so a sense impression when it strikes will, it is true, impress and as it were stamp its appearance on the mind, but assenting will be in our power, and, in the same way as was said in the case of the cylinder, it is pushed from outside but for the rest moves by its own force and nature.” (Cicero, De fato, 43, trans. Sharples, 87, 89) By assent (sugkatathesis [συγϰατάθεσιϛ]), which is in our power and which is not reduced to a passive acceptance, we have the power to participate actively in the network of Providence. The Leibnizian theory of freedom will return to this motif. Frédérique Ildefonse REFS.: Cicero. De fato. In Cicero, De fato and Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, edited with an introduction, translation, and commentary by R. W. Sharples. Warminster, Eng.: Aris and Philips, 1991. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. London: Heinemann, 1925. Long, Anthony A. “Stoic Readings of Homer.” In Homer’s Ancient Readers, edited by Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 538 KITSCH There are many disadvantages to translating the term in this way. The two attributes that are substituted for the semantic richness of Kitsch greatly reduce its complexity. By devaluing it from the outset, they take as a given what needs to be elucidated. So when Broch writes, “The essence of kitsch is the confusion of the ethical category with the aesthetic category. It is not concerned with ‘good,’ but with ‘attractive’ work; it is the pleasing effect that is most important,” the translation of Kitsch as tape-à-l’æil [garish art] is wholly inadequate, first of all because not everything that is “garish” has to do with aesthetics, and then because the second sentence would therefore merely state a banal tautology, namely that the only aim of “garish” art is to produce a “pleasing effect.” It is an entirely different matter if we retain the term Kitsch. What is more, other linguistic traditions had not hesitated to use the notion in its original language. Clement Greenberg, for example, published an article in 1939 entitled “Avant-garde and Kitsch” in which he returned to Broch’s idea that Kitsch borrows “tried and tested techniques,” uses “prefabricated signs which, in its hands, solidify into clichés” (11). The merit of Greenberg’s article is that he connects the appearance of Kitsch to that of another controversial phenomenon, the avant-garde, which also permanently destabilized established aesthetic values. Greenberg contrasts Kitsch with the avant-garde. The avant-garde alone seems capable of “continuing to change culture in the midst of ideological confusions and violence” (17): In the first place it is not a question of a choice between merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think—but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch imitates its effects. (Ibid., 13–15) . II. Taste, Effect, or Attitude? After the war Hannah Arendt reflected upon the mass culture that was developing and of which Kitsch remained one of the main components. She pointed to the structural links between the world of aesthetic taste and that of political opinions, which both require a certain persuasiveness. In more general terms culture and politics belong together “because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as how it is to look henceforth, and what kind of things are to appear in it” (Between Past and Future, 223). Understood from this perspective, Kitsch becomes all the more disturbing since, as Hermann Broch had noted, “one cannot work in any art without adding to the mixture a drop of effect” (Création littéraire, 361), that is, without adding some drop of Kitsch. It was no doubt for this very reason that Kitsch, an alarming corruption that could be found even in the most uncompromising works of art, was contested so vigorously. KITSCH (GERMAN) ENGLISH junk art, garish art, kitsch v. AESTHETICS, ART, BAROQUE, CLASSIC, CULTURE, GOÛT, NEUZEIT, PEOPLE, SUBLIME The word Kitsch is German in origin and had previously been translated into French as art de pacotille (junk art) or art tape-à-l’œil (garish art), but the original term has now become firmly established in all European languages. Used as an adjective, kitsch or kitschy (dis) qualifies cultural products intended for the masses and appreciated by them. As a noun the term designates a category of taste, certainly linked to an aesthetics, but even more so to an ethics whose political consequences are obvious. The subtitles of two works devoted to kitsch (Moles; Dorfles) indicate why some people find it attractive while others judge it severely: it is both an art of happiness and an expression of bad taste. I. A Question of the Public or of Artistic Value? The notion of Kitsch first appeared in the nineteenth century. It became the object of keen attention when mass society— helped by increased leisure time—had at its disposal a “culture for the masses” that, by its nature, seemed to threaten the very existence of authentic culture. Kitsch covers all different means of expression once they abandon rigor in order to cater to a wider public. The art of the chromos, pleasantly eye-catching photographs, the religious keepsakes collected by pilgrims, the souvenirs designed for tourists, but also the popular literature sold in railway stations, the comic theater of the boulevards, or the music that simply creates an ambiance: these are all examples of Kitsch. As a kind of debased popularization, it offers a decadent model that is all the more alluring for being so easily accessible. This is, at least, what its detractors say. Hermann Broch, one of the first critics to write seriously about Kitsch, sees it as a form of “radical evil” that destroys value systems, since its essence “is the confusion of the ethical category with the aesthetic category” (“Evil in the ValueSystem,” 33). In search of the pleasing effect, one that offers the most inexpensive seduction, kitsch art does not aim to be the product of good work but merely to be an attractive end product. This perverse method means that Kitsch uses tried and tested techniques and that it turns its back on creation in order to achieve a risk-free success in its effort to seduce. As Albert Kohn explains in an introductory note to his French translation of Broch’s 1955 book Dichtung und Erkennen: The German word Kitsch has no equivalent in French. It refers to all genres of objects in bad taste, of artistically pretentious junk, popularizing commonplace forms through their mass-production, but it also applies to literary, artistic or musical works which aim for easy effects (such as melodrama) and pomposity, and cultivate sentimentality or mindless conformity. For want of being able to use the German word, we have translated it depending on the context as “art de pacotille” [junk art] or “art tape-à-l’œil” [garish art]. In actual fact, these two meanings are often combined. (Broch, Création littéraire, 17) KITSCH 539 longer tell with such works whether Kitsch is simply amusing—there is a kitsch-man perhaps ready to be awakened in every lover of art—or whether it is both funny and critically insightful. Denys Riout REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 197–226. Introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin, 2006. . Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Broch, Hermann. Dichten und Erkennen: Essays 1. Edited and with introduction by Hannah Arendt. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 6. Zürich: Rhein, 1955. French translation by Albert Kohn: Création littéraire et connaissance, essais. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1985. . “Evil in the Value-System of Art.” In Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age: Six Essays. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by John Hargraves. New York: Counterpoint, 2002. . “Kitsch” (1933) and “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch” (1950). In Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles. New York: Universe Books, 1968. Dorfles, Gillo, with Vivienne Menkes, eds. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Universe Books, 1969. Giesz, Ludwig. “Kitsch-Man as Tourist.” In Kitsch, edited by Gillo Dorfles with Vivienne Menkes, 156–74. New York: Universe Books, 1969. . Phänomenologie des Kitsches. 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Munich: Fink, 1971. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” In Art and Culture, 3–21. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. First published in 1939. Gurstein, Rochelle. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch Revisited.” Raritan 22, no. 3 (2003): 136–58. Moles, Abraham A. Le kitsch: L’art du bonheur. Paris: Mame, 1971. Over the years the definition of Kitsch expanded and became more complex. When Broch returned to the subject in 1951, he stated that he was not talking “truly about art, but about a determinate attitude of life” (ibid., 311) deeply rooted within “kitsch-man.” Abraham Moles pursued this logic in his work on Kitsch: It is not a semantically explicit denotative phenomenon, it is an intuitive and subtle connotative phenomenon; it is one of the types of relationships that human beings have with things, a way of being rather than an object, or even a style. Of course, we often talk of “kitsch style,” but as one of the objectifiable supports of the kitsch attitude, and we can see this style becoming more formalized into an artistic period. (Moles, Le Kitsch, 7) Nevertheless, at a time when pop art was blurring the ordering of established values in the avant-garde world, a new form appeared that staked a claim to Kitsch, and this was “camp.” This American term is used to describe “something so outrageous or in such bad taste as to be considered amusing” (Webster’s New Ideal Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989). Since then, artists in Europe as well as in the United States have been exploiting both the first level—their works are crude, and the second level—they are doing this deliberately, joyously combining what is pleasing to the eye and what is revolting (for example, Jeff Koons). We can no 1 Avant-garde and Kitsch In his article “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939) Clement Greenberg writes: Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rearguard. True enough— simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys and wherefores. The precondition for Kitsch, a condition without which Kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness Kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from that tradition devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, and themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from the reservoir of accumulated experience. This is what is really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new “twists,” which are then watered down and served up as kitsch. (Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch) 541 twelfth century on, the word meant “speaking” or “speech,” sometimes with pejorative connotations (bavardage, “gossip”), with parole later taking on this sense. Langage in the sense of a “way of speaking particular to a people” would give way to langue, but would subsist as a “way of speaking particular to an individual or a group” (cf. “diplomatic language”). Its definition as an organized system of signs used to communicate would enable it to be extended to nonlinguistic systems (“the language of art, of colors”) (RT: DHLF). The English term “language” was borrowed from the Old French lenguage around 1280, in the sense of a “way of speaking,” then, of a “national language.” In 1765, Diderot, in the RT: Encyclopédie, criticized the common definition of langue as a “succession or accumulation of words and expressions” (cf. RT: Dictionnaire universel), saying that it in fact described a “vocabulary” rather than a “language,” a term that covered not only words and their meanings, but also all the figurative turns of phrase, the connotations of words, the way the language was constructed, and so on. Langue would need to be defined more precisely, as the “totality of the usages of the voice belonging to a nation,” insofar as one should consider “the expression and communication of thoughts, according to the most universal views of the mind, and the views most common to all men,” and not the particularities specific to a nation and the ways it speaks, for which the term idiome would be used, with parole referring to language in general (“La parole is a sort of painting of which thought is the original”). This division allowed for a distinction to be made between Grammaire générale (Standard Grammar) considered as a “science” concerned with the “immutable and general principles of the spoken and written word,” and “particular grammars” understood as “arts” that study the ways the practical usages of a language are applied to these general principles of spoken language (see Auroux, L’encyclopédie: “Grammaire” et “langue” au XVIIIe siècle). The distinction between langue and parole drawn in Ferdinand de Saussure’s RT: Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) allows one to distinguish the code from its use, the social from the individual, the essential from the accidental, and thereby enables the science of language to become a stable object, with langage referring to the faculty (see section B, below). The same epistemological necessity would lead Chomsky to distinguish between “competence” and “performance,” though we cannot superimpose these two conceptual pairs, especially since, if the Saussurean langue is envisaged as a “treasure trove,” a passive container full of isolated “signs,” Chomskean “competence” is in contrast a set of “rules” allowing one to generate an infinite set of possible combinations of a given language, from a universal and innate linguistic faculty. For other linguists, such as Antoine Culioli, langage does not fall outside of the field of LANGUAGE LANGUAGE CATALAN llengua, lenguatge, parla ENGLISH language, tongue, speech FRENCH langue, langage, parole GERMAN Sprache, Rede GREEK logos [λόγος], glôssa [γλῶσσα], idiôma [ἰδίωμα] ITALIAN lingua, linguaggio, favella, parlare LATIN eloquium, lingua, loquela, idioma, locutio, sermo, oratio PORTUGUESE língua, linguagem, falar ROMANIAN limba, limbaj, vorbire RUSSIAN jazyk [язьɪκ], reč’ [pеɥь] SPANISH lengua, lenguaje, favella, habla(r) v. DISCOURSE, LOGOS, MANIERA, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, TERM, TO TRANSLATE, WORD From the unity of logos to the multiplicity of Latin terms, by way of the overt binary (for example, the German Sprache/Rede), or ternary oppositions (for example, the French langue/langage/parole), history shows us that, when referring to relatively circumscribed realities (the speech organ, the faculty of speech, the means of expression particular to a group, the set of terms, the particularity of style, usage) or precise oppositions (individual/common, etc.), the same terms have sometimes been used with opposite meanings, and these shifts of meaning are clear and identifiable. The different theories of language have opted, within the multiplicity, even profusion, that each language offers, for a set of terms that in each case is quite limited. They have defined them in contrastive fashion in order to posit the oppositions they required, and in order thereby to specify the subject of the discipline. There is nothing, moreover, preventing a later theory that starts out with the same set of terms from giving different definitions of these terms. I. The Emergence of the Differentiation of Langue/Langage/Parole A. From language to the language sciences The first attested meaning of lingua, lingue (ca. 980) was an “organ situated in the mouth,” from the Latin lingua (which accounts for the metonymy of the French expression mauvaise langue, “malicious gossip,” from 1260 on, in the sense of “malicious words,” then of “malicious person”). The meaning of a “system of expression particular to a group” is attested at the same period, but more in the sense of “shared language,” except when the noun is qualified or determined in some way. The French word idiome (idiom), a gallicization of idiomat, borrowed from the Low Latin idioma, also had the meaning of a “language or way of speaking particular to a region,” and then much later of a “particularity of style.” Langage in French, first noted as lentguage (ca. 980), designated the properly human faculty of expressing oneself and communicating. But from the L linguistics, nor is it the concern of physiology, psychology, or even philosophy (cf. the “philosophy of language”), but it is precisely linguistics’ own ultimate object, insofar as it is apprehended on the basis of the diversity of langues (whence the plural expression in French, sciences du langage “sciences of language,” often preferred nowadays to linguistique, “linguistics,” to describe the discipline). B. The Saussurean pair langue/parole and its translations 1. Langue/parole The terminological pair langue/parole has become widely accepted on the basis of the importance Ferdinand de Saussure conferred on it. Indeed, in chapter 3 of the Course in General Linguistics we read: By distinguishing between the language itself [la langue] and speech [la parole], we distinguish at the same time: (1) what is social from what is individual, and (2) what is essential from what is ancillary and more or less accidental. The language itself is not a function of the speaker. It is the product passively registered by the individual. Speech, on the contrary, is an individual act of will and the intelligence, in which one must distinguish: (1) the combinations through which the speaker uses the code provided by the language in order to express his own thought, and (2) the psycho-physical mechanism which enables him to externalize these combinations. In fact, Saussure’s chapter is marked by a torrent of distinctions. Upstream, we find an initial split being made between langage and langue (langage has to be discarded because this term is too “heterogeneous”). But the presumed “homogeneity” of langue requires a new demarcation (or “separation”), one that distances it precisely from parole, to the extent that it produces two clearly opposable “linguistics,” in the same way the “social” is opposed to the “individual,” and even more so, the “essential” to the “accidental.” This distinction is reinforced by the term “subordination”—that is, of parole to langue—such that: It would be possible to keep the name linguistics for each of these two disciplines. We would then have a linguistics of speech. But it would be essential not to confuse the linguistics of speech with linguistics properly so called. The latter has linguistic structure as its sole object of study. It is obvious that we have now left the realm of methodology and are entering that of ontology, which raises a formidable problem. Should the lived experience of a language be the deciding factor here, or should it be the conceptual imposition of the theorist? Is the latter not setting him- or herself up as a supreme judge, who is in danger of forcing the summoned “object” to submit to his decisions as an interpreter and organizer? And a theorist consolidates her authority even more through the power of an undisputed conclusion—indeed, as history will go on to confirm, this distinction between langue and parole has for a long time now been accepted as an indisputable axiom of any linguistics worthy of the name. 2. Binary or ternary, depending on the language Saussure’s Course, however, manifests a certain reticence in this regard: [T]he distinctions established are not affected by the fact that certain ambiguous terms have no exact equivalents in other languages. Thus in German the word Sprache covers individual languages [langue] as well as language in general [langage], while Rede answers more or less to “speech” [parole], but also has the special sense of “discourse.” No word corresponds precisely to any of the notions we have tried to specify above. That is why all definitions based on words are vain. It is an error of method to proceed from words in order to give definitions of things. This is a strange statement for a linguist to make, even more so for one who is an avowed partisan of the “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign” (unless we hold the editors of the Course responsible on this point, and not Saussure himself). Whatever the case may be, if we turn our attention back to words, we have to admit that they do float around without any secure points of anchorage. This is confirmed by Eugen Coseriu who, while stating that this duality works in most languages, is forced to accept that it is displaced and complicated by a second distinction between two varieties of language, that is, those that have only a binary distinction, and those that present a ternary distinction. So we have: a. Binary type (langage-langue/parole) German English Russian Latin Sprache language/tongue jazyk [язьɥκ] lingua Rede speech reč’ [pеɥь] sermo/oratio b. Ternary type (essentially the Romance languages) French Italian Spanish Portuguese Romanian Catalan langage linguaggio lenguaje linguagem limbaj llenguatge langue lingua lengua língua limba llengua parole favella/ parlare habla(r) fala(r) vorbire parla The elements provided by Tullio de Mauro (critical edition of the Cours de linguistique générale), however, give a ternary structure also for Polish (jezyk / mowa / mowa jednostkowa) and for Magyar (nyelvezet/nyelv/beszéd), which relativizes the exclusive privilege accorded to Romance languages. What is more, he stresses the specific complexities of German, English, and Italian, and we can already see a blurring of terms in the table above (there are sometimes several words on the same line, and one could add govorenie [говорениe] to the Russian reč’). We can assume, therefore, that the premise of an orderly distribution (between languages, and within each language) has to be significantly qualified. So it is reasonable to formulate the hypothesis that if one looks hard enough, one will always find a way to expand or reduce the desired number of categories. The lists of categories thus end up confirming 542 LANGUAGE LANGUAGE 543 [I]t is just as correct to say that the human race only speaks one language as it is to say that every man possesses his own language. ([D]aß man ebenso richtig sagen kann, daß das ganze Menschengeschlecht nur Eine Sprahce, als daß jeder Mensch eine besondere besitzt.) (ibid.) The power of language does not allow itself to be distributed into moments (increasing or decreasing, widespread or restricted, essential or ancillary). The universal and the singular exist side by side, or to put it more precisely, they only appear in their reciprocal tension, or their productive interaction (a coordination without subordination). In the tradition that flows from Humboldt, then, coordination inevitably prevails, even at the expense of more or less happy or loose compromises, which accept the agreement of the reconciled dualities. This is true of the now classic pair modus/dictum (see DICTUM). Thus Charles Bally: An explicit sentence comprises two parts: one correlates to the process that constitutes representation (for example, rain, a cure); we will call this, following the example of logicians, the dictum. The other contains the key element of the sentence, namely, the expression of modality, correlative to the operation of the thinking subject. The logical and analytical expression of modality is a modal verb: both constitute the modus, which complements the dictum. Modality is the soul of the sentence, it is constituted essentially by the active operation of the speaking subject. the modus is the theme, and the dictum the substance of what is said in an explicit statement. The modus and the dictum complement one another. (Bally, Linguistique générale et linguistique française, §§28 and 32) This is equally true of the pair “type/token” (see PROPOSITION, Box 4). Here, for example, is C. S. Peirce: A common mode of estimating the amount of matter in a MS or printed book is to count the number of words. There will ordinarily be about twenty the’s on a page, and of course they count as twenty words. In another sense of the word “word”, however, there is but one word the in the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on a page or be heard in any voice, for the reason that it is not a Single thing or Single event. It does not exist; it only determines things that do exist. Such a definitely significant Form, I propose to term a Type. A Single event which happens once and whose identity is limited to that one happening or a Single object or thing which is in some single place at any one instant of time such as this or that word on a single line of a single page of a single copy of a book, I will venture to call a Token. (Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, §537) the theory of the “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign”: signifiers (signifiants) have no fixed meaning, and attempting to distribute them leads to their dispersion, which is consequently followed by a dispersion of signifieds (signifiés). Should the distinction between langue and parole be described, then, as “factitious,” in Descartes’s sense (factae; in Meditatio, 3a )? 3. The dynamics of oppositions We should begin by challenging the rather casual opposition between “factitious” and “innate” (or between “accidental” and “essential”). The concept presented to us in this terminological pair is precisely duality itself, that is, a dynamic relation with no separation or merging of the terms—or, even more radically, with no “subordination” of one term to the other. Such subordination remains the strongest temptation when the schematization of aspects of language is attempted, with the most perverse of effects (we have to put everything into one of the terms— langue—so as not to leave a merely insignificant residue in the other, at the expense of their mutual disqualification). We can find a clue if we go further upstream from Saussure, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is perhaps his hidden counterpart. The aspect of language that holds and stimulates his interest most keenly is the fact that it appears as both object and subject, in a paradoxical coincidence of opposites (or of terms judged as such by abstract understanding): Language is as much an object and independent as it is a subject and dependent. For nowhere does it have any permanent foundation, but it must always be produced anew in one’s thought, and consequently come down entirely on the side of the subject: but the characteristic property of the act of this production is to convert it immediately into an object; in so doing it involves at every moment the action of an individual, an action that is already linked in itself by all of its present and past operations. (Die Sprache ist gerade insofern Object und selbständig, also sie Subject und abhängig ist. Denn sie hat nirgends eine bleibende Stätte, sondern muß immer im Denken aufs neue erzeugt werden; es liegt aber in dem Act dieser Erzeugung sie gerade zum Object zu machen: sie erfährt auf diesem Wege jedesmal die ganze Erwirkung des Individuums, aber dieser Einwirkung ist schon in sich durch das, was sie wirkt und gewirkt hat, gebunder.) (Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie [Writings on the Philosophy of Language]) Humboldt was endlessly fascinated by this interweaving of opposite and complementary poles, and it led him in the end to a famous and obscure pair, which moreover he expressed in Greek: ergon/energeia. These, however, could be replaced with other terms, for example, Macht (the sheer power of the elements memorized) as opposed to Gewalt (the enthusiastic initiative of an individual). Humboldt’s investigation of this string of terminological couples led him finally to what is perhaps the most striking and provocative statement in his work: 544 LANGUAGE Saussurean duality proper, with its distinctions and its blind alleys, and the need for an order that does not sacrifice the complexity of the problem. This problem, once it has come to light, remains forever a source of torment, which from time to time generates illuminating conjectures. II. From the Oneness of Logos to the Complexity of the Medieval Semantic Field The difficulty of translating ancient texts into modern languages is dramatically illustrated by the terminological network that concerns us. On the one hand, we have the almost absolute oneness of logos in Greek, which by itself covers all the modern terms referring to the linguistic field, and even beyond, leaving just a small place for glôssa. In classical Latin, on the other hand, logos scatters into ten or more terms, whose meanings are more or less set. Medieval Latin inherits this diversity, with no real possibility of putting these terms into any order: indeed, it has to deal with a number of real legacies, via the transmission of texts, which come into conflict with specific and new terminological choices. These new choices are linked both to choices of translation in philosophical and religious texts (so, for example, it is lingua that appears in the Vulgate Latin as the expression used to talk about the confusio linguarum, but it is locutio that is retained for translating the famous passage from De anima, see section II.B.2, below), to theoretical choices in the elaboration of a particular doctrine (the opposition between lingua and idiomata in Roger Bacon), and to different uses of terms’ former connotations, notably with the aid of some celebrated etymologies (see the one for idioma). A. Glôssa/logos: Langue/langage, parole, and so forth In ancient Greek, logos [λόγος] was a catchall word covering everything: it referred to a particular language or tongue, language in general, speech, and more generally discourse, but also the faculty of thinking and of speaking, and more generally relation (see LOGOS)—everything, that is, except for the tongue as an organ, for which the term was glôssa [γλῶσσα] (in Aristotle’s biological treatises, for example). Glôssa, however, has the same kind of metonymic extension as langue in French: the tongue as an organ that is common to humans and animals (Homer, Iliad, 1.249, Odysseus, 1.332), and the tongue as an organ of speech (Hesiod, Works and Days, 707). So it can mean speaking as opposed to acting (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 813), or feeling or thinking (Euripides, Hippolytus, 612; Lucien, Pro lapsu inter salutendum [On a Mistake in Greeting], 18). Since Homer, the term glôssa has also referred to the tongue we speak—understood generically to designate all language when the language spoken is Greek, or restrictively, when it is a foreign or barbarian tongue that is being alluded to, as idiom (Iliad, 2.804, 4.438; Herodotus, 1.57). “To speak a language” can be rendered as glôssan nomizein [γλῶσσαν νομίζειν], to have it in practice (Herodotus, 1.142), or chrêsthai [χϱῆσθαι], to use it (4.109); and dialects are seen as “derivations” or “alterations” of a language, tropous paragôgeôn [τϱόπουςπαϱαγωγέων] (1.142.8) (see TO TRANSLATE, section I). In rhetoric and poetics, particularly in Aristotle, glôssai are archaic or dialectal terms (“signal words” for Hardy, “borrowed names” for Dupont-Roc and Lallot; see WORD, II.B.1), as opposed to the “word” properly speaking The same classic distinction informs Chomsky’s duality of “competence” and “performance,” which the author himself compares to the Saussurean pair: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic). To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one. We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). Only under the idealization set forth in the preceding paragraph is performance a direct reflection of competence. In actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. The distinction I am noting here is related to the langue-parole distinction of Saussure. (Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax) Chomsky’s distinction has the merit of being highly manipulable, and it is strengthened by its assumed close fidelity to its object. One might suspect, however, that this overly harmonious symmetry erases the interactive complexity of the problem that needs to be resolved. This is why, downstream from Saussure, one of the most interesting studies appears to be the one proposed by Ludwig Jäger, which Thomas Scheerer summarizes as follows: what we are dealing with is a chiasmic classification based on the four concepts “actual/virtual” and “individual/social.” So we have: 1. As far as the virtual (in absentia) is concerned, the distinction between, on one hand, an “individual” concept of a language (in the sense of subjective, internalized processes), corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “treasure trove,” “repository,” “memory,” and on the other hand, a social concept of language (in the sense of a social, semiological institution, whose value is intersubjective), corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “social crystallization,” “social secretion,” “social product.” 2. As far as the actual (in praesentia) is concerned, the distinction between, on one hand, an “individual” concept of speech (in the sense of subjective realizations of the possibilities given by the internalized and intersubjective potentials of language), and on the other hand, a “social” concept of speech (in the sense of an intersubjective—dialogical— production endowed with a new meaning, corresponding to the Saussurean concepts of “analogy” and of “parasemic creation”). The interesting aspect of this proposition is the concern to find a middle way, though not a reductive one, between the LANGUAGE 545 Idioma is used especially when one wishes to stress the difficulty of translating, whether it involves one of the three sacred languages or a vernacular language. There is a wide consensus about the synonymy between several of these terms: Pierre Hélie (ca. 1150) uses genus loquelae and genus linguae indiscriminately, before qualifying them as graeca, latina, etc.; Boethius of Dacia (ca. 1270) posits an equivalence between lingua and idioma (grammatica in una lingua vel in uno idiomate [the grammar of one language or tongue]”) but also posits the universality of grammar as a science, when he explains that “all languages are one single grammar [omnia idiomata sunt una grammatica]”; Peter Comestor (RT: PL, 198, col. 1623D) asserts an equivalence between loquela and idioma (“loquela tua id est idioma Galilaeae [and your speech of Galilee, that is to say]”) in his commentary on Matthew 26:73. Lingua also signifies, by extension, but more rarely, the community formed by those who speak the same language (cf. Revelation 13:7): so Raoul of Caen refers to Tancredo, celebrated by all people (populos) in all languages (linguas). 2. Language, speech (sermo, locutio, loquela) The meaning of “language” as the human ability to use vocal signs to communicate can be found in sermo, which thus translates logos—cf. the translation by Chalcidius of Plato’s Timaeus, 47c: “Propter hoc enim nobis datus est sermo ut praesto nobis fiant mutuae voluntatis indicia” (Language has been given to us so we have a way to conveniently indicate our wishes to others). We also find it in locutio, for example, in the answer given by Boethius of Dacia to the question of knowing whether “grammar” is possessed naturally by men (“utrum grammatica sit naturaliter ab homine habita”): men who have never heard a human word spoken (loquela) are still naturally able to speak (locutio vel grammatica). He makes reference to Psammetichus’s famous experiment, reported by Herodotus (for a more detailed history, see Launay, “Un roi, deux enfants et des chèvres,” which unfortunately cites only very few texts in the original): Si homines aliqui in deserto nutrirentur, ita quod numquam aliorum hominum loquelam audirent nec aliquam instructionem de modo loquendi acciperent, ipsi suos affectus naturaliter sibi mutuo exprimerent et eodem modo. Locutio enim est una de operibus naturalibus, cujus signum est, quod instrumentum, per quod fit locutio, natura in nobis ordinavit. (If men were raised in a desert such that they never heard a word spoken by other men, and received no instruction as to how to speak, they would still naturally express their feelings, and in the same way. Language is indeed one of the natural faculties, and the sign of this is that the instrument by which language is produced is given to us by nature.) (Herodotus, Histories) There is one universal modus loquendi (idem apud omnes, an expression that Aristotle applied to mental affects [pathêmata tês psuchês (πάθηματα τῆς ψυχῆς)]; see SIGN), here attributed to language, with the accidental differences explaining the diversity of languages (idiomata). (kurion [ϰύϱιον]), which can at times elevate the logos, and sometimes make it incomprehensible (Poetics, chaps. 21 and 22; in particular, 1458a 22–26). Finally, glôssai would later refer to the tongues of fire of the Pentecost. It is worth noting that in Greek glôssai and logoi, in the plural, do not usually or primarily refer to the same reality as in the singular (logos: thought-speech, etc.; logoi, propositions, definitions; glôssa: tongue as an organ, and one language as distinct from another; glôssai: archaisms or obscurities). Glôssa in the sense of “tongue” is distinct from the universality of the logos defining the humanity of humankind, in that it is linked to the differences between languages, and to human diversity. We tend therefore to reserve “language” (langage) for logos, and “tongue” (langue) for glôssa. In addition, we might be tempted to say that parole, in the Saussurean sense of an individual act, has no equivalent in ancient Greek, but this would be to forget that logos is first and foremost discursiveness, act, performance, and thus quite appropriate to designate a speech-act—but only insofar as it is a universally singular act defining the human (see SPEECH ACT). . B. The proliferation of terms for “language” in medieval Latin For classical Latin, . “Fiebat autem res non materno sermone, sed literis” (The conversation took place not in our mother tongue [materno sermone] but in Latin [literis]). This sentence from Guibert de Nogent’s (d. ca. 1125) autobiography, Monodiae, allows us to understand at the outset the complexity of this semantic field in medieval Latin. The notions collectively associated with the term “language” are at the confluence of ten or so words—elocutio, eloquium, famen, idioma, lingua, linguagium, locutio, loquela, sermo, verbum, vox—whose various meanings are generally wider than “language.” This semantic field was of little interest to medieval lexicologists: it did not give rise to any of those differential verses so highly valued by the masters, nor to any substantial dictionary entries. Of these words, we will focus our attention on the most commonly represented in the medieval corpus. 1. Idiom (eloquium, lingua, loquela, idioma, locutio, sermo) The terms in question share the meaning of “language of a group, idiom”: the four privileged words having this meaning are lingua (anglica, arabica, gallica, graeca, latina, romana, etc.), sermo (anglicus, hebraeus, latinus, maternus, sclavonicus), eloquium (arabicum, graecum, hebraeum, latinum), and idioma (arabicum, graecum, teutonicum), while it is rarer to find loquela (hebraica, latina, saxonica) and locutio (barbarica, latina). The specific sense of idioma, “distinctive character,” comes through in the expressions idioma linguae, idioma linguae graecae, hebraeae, teutonicae, and is retained after it acquires the more simplified meaning of “language,” even if Robert of Melun (d. 1167) speaks, for emphasis, of proprietas idiomatis hebraeae linguae. So too the distinction in Peter Comestor (d. 1178; RT: PL, 198, col. 1653B) between linguae and idiomata linguarum: the apostles get their message across not only because of their mastery of languages, but also because of the dialects that are derived from them. 546 LANGUAGE 1 Sprache/Rede, langue/parole? Heidegger as a reader of the Greeks Heidegger states, in §34 of Being and Time, in the course of an analysis of speech as existential: “The Greeks had no word for langue (Sprache), they understood this phenomenon ‘from the beginning’ as parole (Rede).” The difference established between Sprache and Rede is by no means self-evident, however— added to this initial difficulty is that of its translations into French, which vary considerably: translations either stress the opposition langue/parole, as in the version above by François Vezin, or, on the contrary, they join the terms together, as twin sisters opposed to Rede, as in the translation by Emmanuel Martineau: “The Greeks have no word for Sprache (parole, langue), they understood this phenomenon ‘from the very first’ in the sense of parler [act of speaking].” The distinction Sprache/Rede is a classic one in German, and we find it notably in Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], pt. 2, bk. 10): “Schreiben ist ein Mißbrauch der Sprache, still für sich lesen ein trauriges Surrogat der Rede” (Writing is a misuse of language, reading quietly to oneself is a sad substitute for live conversation). It is to the ancient tradition, still prevalent in the Middle Ages, of reading out loud that Goethe contrasts the stille für sich lesen = legere in silentio (Saint Augustine), tacite legere, or legere sibi (Saint Benedict). For Heidegger, however, the distinction between Sprache and Rede only takes on its full meaning after accounting for both (1) the interpretation of logos [λόγος] he proposes in the same text (§7) as apophantic, and (2) the existential structure of Mitsein (being-with). He is concerned with returning to the conditions of the ontological, and thus existential, possibility of speaking [la parole] as an ontological structure of Dasein. Rede still leaves open the possibility of Gerede (§35); of parlerie, “gossip” (Montaigne); of bavardage, “idle chatter” (Martineau’s translation); or of the on-dit, “hearsay” (F. Vezin’s translation). The opposition between Sprache and Rede is so indecisive that the following paragraph (§35) can say: “Die Rede ist Sprache” (La parole est langage parlé [Speech is spoken language], Vezin; or, Le parler est parole [Speaking is speech], Martineau). Other statements from the same period move in a similar direction and join together rather than oppose Sprache and Rede, as, for example, in the Gesamtausgabe (GA; vol. 27), where we read: The Greeks, like all peoples of Southern Europe, lived far more intensely within the realm of public speech and conversation [in der öffentlichen Sprache und Rede] than we are used to. For them, thinking is discussing openly and publicly. Books were of no interest, and even less so newspapers. For the Greeks, logos was not thought of independently from “dialogue” within a space we might call “rhetorical” (§29 of Being and Time describes Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of being-together”) and “political,” in the sense of the Aristotelian definition of the polis [πόλις], in the Nicomachean Ethics (2.7), defined as a “community of words and actions.” In short, Rede lends itself better than Sprache to underlining the existential character of speech, insofar as it is experienced in the exchange of spoken words. What Heidegger emphasizes in his own way is that “language” is not understood in an original, but rather, a derived mode when it is envisaged independently of what one is talking about, as well as of those “with whom” one is talking. In other words, the existential structures of being-in-the-world (In-der-Weltsein) and being-with (Mitsein) constitute the sole originary ground within which a langage, understood as “use of the language to express thoughts and feelings” (RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française), can be rooted. We need to add to this the fact that Heidegger, going against a long tradition, reads in the Peri hermeneias of Aristotle something entirely different from a mention of “sounds produced by the voice”—the Latin translation (ae quae sunt in voce) is in this case more faithful to the words of the Stagirite (see SIGN, Box 1). The decisive element in the voice, for Heidegger, is not its sonorousness, as in “vocal production”; rather, “the humanity of the voice is primary in relation to the fact that it can convey a message” (Fédier, Interprétations). In Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language), Heidegger expresses wonder at the fact that the Japanese have no word for Sprache and are not bound to the “brilliant history of sonority in the human adventure of language” (Hagège, L’homme de paroles), or in other words, to phonetics. This is what is expressed by koto ba (spoken word): “flower petals of the koto—the appropriation that controls all that for which responsibility must be assumed over what grows and blossoms into flowers”), which “names something other than the meaning conveyed by the names which come to us from metaphysics: γλῶσσα, lingua, langue and language” (GA, vol. 12). Pascal David REFS.: Fédier, François. Interprétations. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Figal, Günter. “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context: Dynamis Meta Logou.” Translated by Drew A. Hyland and Erik M. Vogt. In Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, edited by Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 83–92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Dichtung und Wahrheit. In vol. 22 of Gesamtausgabe. Munich: Boerner, 1973. Translation by Robert Heitner: From My Life. Edited by Jeffrey L. Sammons and Thomas P. Saine. 2 vols. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. Hagège, Claude. L’homme de paroles: Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Translation by Sharon L. Shelly: The Dialogic Species: A Linguistic Contribution to the Social Sciences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. In vol. 27 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996. . Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. . Sein und Zeit. French translation by E. Martineau: Être et temps. Paris: Authentica, 1985. . Sein und Zeit. French translation by F. Vezin: Être et temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. . Unterwegs zur Sprache. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In vol. 12 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by Peter D. Hertz: On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Weigelt, Charlotta. The Logic of Life: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of “Logos.” Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002. LANGUAGE 547 eloquium fluens, eloquium luculentissimum.” Both sermo and locutio are used to characterize verse and prose forms of expression: so one would say sermo metricus, sermo prosaicus, and Raban Maur, transposing a verse text into prose, claims he is translating not another language, but another mode of expression (vol. 5 [dated 814]): “interpres non alterius linguae sed alterius locutionis.” So it is particularly interesting to find lingua in this context, in the sense of “style,” “language”: Vulfin, the author of the Life of Saint Martin (ca. 800), contrasts an expert and erudite language (“diserti eruditique sermonis eloquium”) with the poverty of an arid style (“paupertas sterilis linguae”). In the twelfth century, Geoffroy of Saint Victor congratulates Saint Augustine on having used a refined language in expressing himself (“ad eloquentiam linguam das urbanam”). C. The mother tongue (lingua materna): From lost unity to multiplicity/diversity 1. Nos Latini The men and women of letters in the Middle Ages spoke Latin so much that they referred to themselves as “Latins” (nos Latini). Latin was felt as such a factor of identity or identification by clerics and scholars that any other language was a foreign language (lingua aliena), whether it was one of the erudite languages (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic), or a vernacular language. For this reason, one refers to words transferred or translated (translata) into Latin as foreign words, whether they had been assimilated or not, that is, whether they had taken on a Latin ending (nota), or not (peregrina). Latin, according to Gilles of Rome, was thus an invention of philosophers, who wanted to create for themselves their “own idiom” (proprium idioma) as a way of compensating for the Abbon de Saint-German discusses the power of speech in his commentary on Proverbs 18:21 (“mors et vita sunt in manibus linguae”) and explicitly breaks with the biblical metaphor on lingua, translating this expression as “id est in potestate loquele.” Lingua never in fact appears in this context in the sense of “language”; when it is present in association with locutio or loquela, it is always confined to the sense of “physical organ.” So it is said that the tongue (lingua) is the instrument of taste and of speech (gustum et locutionem, according to the Latin translation of De anima, 420b 5ff.; see WORD, III.B.1). These three terms—locutio, sermo, and loquela—are also used by extension to designate the human ability to pronounce language distinctly, a faculty of which mutes are deprived (in Bede, Aldheim, Thietmar, Peter the Venerable, and Pierre Riga, among others). Lingua, with its double meaning of a physical organ of articulating sounds and of a system of vocal signs, clearly cannot be used in this type of context without misinterpretation or ambivalence. 3. The language of an author, style (sermo, eloquium, locutio, lingua) The meaning of “a way of speaking, style, expression, language” is assumed by sermo, eloquium, but also lingua. So Remigius of Auxerre gives sermo as a synonym for facundia, while Hugh of Saint Victor puts it between vox and intellectus. We also find sermo vulgaris (in the sense of an informal language), while Giraud de Barri (Expugnatio Hibernica) states that he is renouncing his previous way of writing in favor of a “presentis idioma sermonis,” assimilated to a “novus modus eloquentiae.” In addition, the style, expression, or “language” of a writer is referred to as, for example, “sermo clarus, sermo nitidu, sermo exquisitus, sermo blandus; 2 Lingua and sermo in classical Latin Two words were used to mean “language” in classical Latin: lingua and sermo. Lingua, which originally applied to the organ of speech, referred to the linguistic material of a people, the communication tool everyone possessed because he or she belonged to such and such a community. Sermo, which originally applied to meeting and talking, to conversation, to discussion, to exchanging opinions, was used to refer to the perfected, mastered language: cum audisset Latronem declamentem, dixit: sua lingua disertus est; ingenium illi concessit, sermonem objecit. (after having heard Latronus orate: he speaks, he said, with an eloquent tongue: he agreed he had talent, he objected to his fine language.) (Seneca the Elder, Controversiarum, 2.12) There is, however, another opposition between these two terms, which we can at least speculate is present in Varro. The author of, among other texts, two works with similar titles, the De lingua latina and the De sermone latino, Varro apparently had a bipartite conception of the description of Latin (though it is difficult to assess, insofar as we only have one small part of De lingua latina, and just a few slight fragments of De sermone latino). If, as the most detailed analyses of the plan of De lingua latina show, this treatise was a study of language as meaning, it is tempting to think that De sermone latino was, by contrast, a study of the material aspects of language. The rare testimonies we do have of De sermone latino do not contradict this hypothesis: they deal with questions of spelling, of accent, of archaic forms, even of meter. Are the two types of opposition compatible? What they have in common is perhaps the fact that language in its most immediate manifestation (lingua) essentially aims at meaning, while language in the aspects that can be mastered (sermo) implies an awareness of its form. This hypothesis is, however, entirely conjectural. Marc Baratin REFS.: Baratin, Marc. La naissance de la syntaxe à Rome. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. The Elder Seneca Declamations. Translated by M. Winterbottom. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Varro, Marcus Terentius. On the Latin Language. Translated by Roland G. Kent. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938. 548 LANGUAGE omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus. Est es inde alia locutio secundaria nobis, quam Romani gramaticam vocaverunt. Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata; tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis, cum illa potius artificialis existat. (I call “vernacular language” that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third, because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.) (De vulgari eloquentia, 1.2–4) This passage poses many questions: Since Latin was in fact the mother tongue of the Romans, an argument Dante will return to precisely in order to legitimize the use of the vulgar tongue, why is Latin a grammatica, and more artificial (that is, the product of art) than the vulgar tongue for clerics in the Middle Ages? Moreover, the fact that he asserts here that the “vulgar” is the noblest tongue, whereas he said the opposite in the Convivio, 1.5.7–15, has led to extensive commentary, particularly when one needs to remember that the De vulgari was written in Latin and the Convivio in volgare (for a summary of these discussions, see V. Coletti, Dante-Alighieri). In the Convivio, three reasons are adduced in support of Latin’s superiority. The first of these is its “nobility”: Latin is perpetual and incorruptible, and this is what allows ancient writings still to be read today. Then, its “virtue”: anything that achieves what it sets out to do to the highest degree possible is considered virtuous, and Latin is the vehicle that best allows human thought to become manifest, while the vulgar is unable to convey certain things. And finally, its “beauty”: Latin is more harmonious than the vulgar, in that it is a product of art, and not of nature. Latin, or the grammatica, is in any case a human creation, thanks to its inventors (inventores grammatice facultatis), which is regulated (regulata) by a “common consensus” and is therefore impervious to any “individual arbitrary” intervention. This is why it is defined, recalling Bacon’s idea of a substantial unity, as “a certain identity of language which does not change according to time and place” (quaedam inalterabilis locutionis idemptitas diversis temporibus et locis; De vulgari, 1.9.11). We see, then, how ordinary and everyday variations of different individual ways of speaking (sermo) are unable to affect Latin, which remains the same through the ages, this being a necessary condition of the transmission of ancient knowledge. 2. The vulgaris locutio As far as the question of origins is concerned, God, says Dante, created a “certa forma locutionis”—Pézard translates deficiencies of the vulgar language (De regimine principium, 2.2.c.7). For some, the divide was clearly located between clerics and lay people: clerics had a language (ydioma) that was “the same for all” (idem apud omnes—the term ydioma, like modus loquendi earlier, indicating the specificity of, on the one hand, the social group, and on the other, of the human race), and that one learned at school, whereas lay people had languages made up of words whose meaning was established conventionally (ydiomata vocum impositarum ad placitum), and that one learned from one’s mother and family. Latin enabled one to return to the unity that was lost with Babel, and this unity was necessary for knowledge, whether profane or sacred. Even though Roger Bacon went as far as to say that he spoke Latin as his mother tongue (lingua materna), as he did English or French, the former would generally be set in opposition to the two latter. The mother tongue is, according to Bacon, devalued as a cultural language for the “Latins,” because he judges it unable to express particular kinds of knowledge, like logic. But it assumes a surprisingly far higher status for other peoples, when he says, for example, that they turn away from Christianity because it is not preached in their mother tongues, and is thus not able to persuade them convincingly (“quia persuasionem sinceram non recipiunt in lingua materna”; Opus Majus, vol. 3). For Bacon, a substantially unified lingua is diversified accidentally into different idiomata (for example, Greek splits into Attic Greek, Aeolian, Doric, Ionian); if Latin is the same “from the furthest reaches of Puglia to the outer limits of Spain,” each idiom has its own distinct traits (proprietas), which is precisely why it is called idioma, from idion (proper), from which the word idiota is derived, describing someone who is content with the properties of his idiom. Idios [ἴδιος], in Greek, is opposed to koinos [ϰοινός]: anything private is considered “idiot”; or to put it another way, idiom and the idiomatic are different from logos, in that the latter opens up human beings to the political (Aristotle, Politics, 1.1.1253a 1–18: see PROPERTY, and cf. LOGOS and POLIS). This proprietas, this genius that is proper to each idiom, and that includes not just its vocabulary but also its rhythmic and musical properties, makes any literal translation impossible. In certain passages the idiomata are seen as dialects, in relation to the mother tongue (and Thomas Aquinas refers in a similar way to locutiones), but elsewhere it is simply a matter of different usages, or ways of pronouncing the same language, with the identity of a language being guaranteed by a “substance” that precisely remains independent of its usages. For Dante, materna locutio, which he also calls vulgaris locutio, is opposed to Latin (still referred to as grammatica), precisely because materna locutio has been learned naturally, without rules, by imitating the nurse, whereas Latin has been learned “artificially,” that is, according to the rules of art (cf. Republic, 1.13). Because it is so difficult to learn, only a few acquire the knowledge of second/secondary means of expression (locutio secundaria), and these are only available to a few peoples, such as the Greeks (see ITALIAN, Box 2): [V]ulgarem locutionem [Italian: lingua volgare] appellamus eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine LANGUAGE 549 then proceeds, with the term idioma, to embody historical modes of expression “proper” to an individual or a community, passing from the Hebrew idiom of Adam to the first idioms after Babel. We enter after Babel into the realm of vulgar, attested and contemporary historical languages, which are diverse and imperfect, variable and dispersed, and which necessitate two different modes of return to unity. The first is a scholastic mode: unity is regained through the invention, to be determined by scholars, of one, stable language of knowledge, the grammatica, or Latin. The second is the “illustrious” mode, through the establishment of the volgare latium that Dante first of all promoted in De vulgari, and then acted out in the Commedia. The different linguistic terms are not to be seen as applying to disconnected realities but as manifesting different points of view about one identical reality: thus Latin is envisaged first of all as an example of a regulated mode of expression (locutio regulata); then as an idioma, as the proper language of the Romans; and finally as grammatica, an artificial invention that comes after the scattering of Latin into the vernacular. Naturally, this tripartite arrangement does not imply any equivalence among these three terms. The difficulty, which the divergent readings of Dante’s treatise illustrate remarkably well, is a methodological one: should we understand the vocabulary regarding “language” with reference to other terminological networks of the time, or give it a certain autonomy by weighing the value of each term within the text—or within his work as a whole? In the first case, which terminological networks would we make reference to, assuming we can even determine a coherence for each one: a theological, scriptural network? A Scholastic, philosophical network? A literary, grammatical, or rhetorical network? Such questions have to be considered by every interpreter and every translator, especially when one is dealing (as is the case with Bacon) with authors who are marginal or whose works fall outside conventional, established institutional circuits, and thus languages. What is at stake here is the very understanding of their project itself. To conclude, we have a constellation of three terms, to return to Saussure’s schema, in which one of the terms (langage) is charged with a negative role, a pure abstract generality that has to be excluded so as to allow for a free play between the two other terms (langue/parole). This play is open, complex, intense, and it works by continuous interaction, without any reduction or exclusion. We might describe this, then, as a complementarity, or even better, a polarity; a richly productive and powerful system, with multiple implications, and which has no need for explicit recollection to reproduce itself. Irène Rosier-Catach Barbara Cassin (II.A) Pierre Caussat (I.B) Anne Grondeux (I.A) REFS.: Abbon de Saint-German. 22 Predigten. Edited by U. Önnerfors. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985. Agamben, Giorgio. “Le lingue e i popoli.” In Mezzi senza fine: Note sulla politica. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Translation by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino: “The Language and the People.” In Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Dante’s phrase into French as “certaine forme de langage” (certain form of language); Coletti’s Italian version is “data forma di linguaggio” (given form of language); Imbach, again into French: “forme détérminée du langage” (determinate form of language)—at the same time that he created the first soul. “Form” here covers both the terms for things, the construction of these terms, and the pronunciation of these constructions (“Dico autem ‘formam’ et quantum ad rerum vocabula et quantum ad vocabulorum constructionem et quantam ad constructionis prolationem”). This original “certa forma locutionis” has been variously interpreted, either as the first language (Hebrew, which Dante also refers to as ydioma: “The Hebrew idiom was the one produced by the lips of the first speaker”; De vulgari, 6.6), or as a universal prelinguistic structure enabling the first languages to be generated, or as a type (form) of which concrete languages would have been species. If, according to De vulgari, this form of language was the one Adam used, in his Paradiso Dante says, on the contrary, that Adam spoke a language that died out before Babel (Paradiso, 26). This pre-Babelian form of language would have been used by “all languages of all speakers” (qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur) if there had been no Babel, the “tower of confusion,” whereas it was only preserved by the sons of Heber: “After the confusion, it remained with them alone, so that our Redeemer could use not the language of confusion, but the language of grace.” After Babel, humans had to invent languages, or rather ways of speaking (loquelae) as it pleased them (ad placitum) (De vulgari, 1.9.6). It is worth noting, however, that in other passages, Adam seemed already to be using a language invented ad placitum (Paradiso, 26), and that for other writers of the time, this same ad placitum characteristic of language happened not after Babel, but after the Fall, as a punishment for man’s original sin, and that deprived humans of the ability to use a language that would express naturally the quiddity of things (Henri de Gand). The many different interpretations of De vulgari depend ultimately on the way the different terms of the linguistic semantic field are interpreted. Contrary to the traditional approach (as defended, for instance, by P. V. Mengaldo), which simply attributes this variation in vocabulary to a mere “stylistic variation” on Dante’s part, thereby authorizing an analogous “stylistic variation” on the part of the translator, we think, along with M. Tavoni (“Ancora su De vulgari”), that Dante’s choice of vocabulary is deliberate and plays a crucial role in the treatise, a role that is, moreover, confirmed by its statistical distribution. It is impossible to ignore the fact that locutio dominates chapters 1–5, idioma chapters 6–9, and vulgare chapters 10–19; that lingua appears only in the narration of Babel, in the coded syntagmas (8.1: confusio linguarum, 6.6: lingua confusionis) referring back to those of the Vulgate (Genesis 10 and 11) and those of several exegetes; and that loquela in turn is present only in this episode, in order to designate human speech, which starts out unified and is subsequently divided into so many tasks. The first chapters thus seem to be intent on defining the different modes of expression or of speech (locutiones), both vulgar and artificial, proper to human expression—what is “proper” to human expression being to manifest one’s thoughts to another, according to the common definition (borrowed here) in Plato’s Timaeus. Dante 550 LAW Olender, Maurice. Les langues du paradis: Aryens et sémites, un couple providentiel. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Translation by Arthur Goldhammer: The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven. Rev. and augm. ed. New York: Other Press, 2002. Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Raoul of Caen (Gesta Tancredi). Gesta Tancredi in expeditione Hierosolymitana, auctore Rudolfo Cadomensi, ejus familiari. Vol. 3 of Recueil des historiens des croisades: Historiens occidentaux. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1866. Récanati, François. Direct Reference: From Language to Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. . La transparence et l’énonciation: Pour introduire à la pragmatique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979. Rosier-Catach, Irène. “Roger Bacon: Grammar.” In Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, 67–102. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1997. Sanders, Carol, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Saussure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 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Tübingen: Narr, 1995. Danesi, Marcel. “Latin vs. Romance in the Middle Ages: Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia Revisited.” In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 248–58. London: Routledge, 1991. Dante Alighieri. De vulgari eloquentia. Edited and translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . De vulgari eloquentia. Translated to Italian by V. Coletti. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. . Oeuvres complètes. Translated by A. Pézard. Paris: Gallimard / “La Pléiade,” 1965. Geoffroy of Saint Victor. “The Preconium Augustini of Godfrey of St. Victor.” Edited by Philippe Damon. Medieval Studies 22 (1960). Gilles of Rome. De regimine principium. Frankfurt: Minerva, 1968. Giraud de Barri. Expugnatio Hibernica. In vol. 5 of Opera, edited by J. F. Dimock. London: Longman, 1867. Guibert de Nogent. Monodiae. Edited by E.-R. Labande. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981. Herodotus. Histories. Translation by John M. Marincola and A. de Sélincourt. New York: Penguin, 1996. Holdcroft, David. Saussure: Signs, System, and Arbitrariness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hugh of Saint Victor. Hugonis de Sancto Victore Opera Propaedeutica. Edited by R. Baron. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie. Volume 3 of Werke in fünf Bänden. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979. Imbach, Ruedi. Dante, la philosophie et les laics. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996. Jäger, Ludwig. “F. de Saussures historisch-hermeneutische Idee der Sprache: Ein Plädoyer für die Rekonstruktion des Saussureschen Denkens in seiner authentischen Gestalt.” Linguistik und Dialektik 27 (1976): 210–44. Koerner, E.F.K. “Saussure and the French Linguistic Tradition: A Few Critical Comments.” In Memoriam Friedrich Diez: Akten des Kolloquiums zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Romanistik Trier, 2.–4. Okt. 1975, edited by Hans-Josef Niederehe and Harald Haarmann, 405–17. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1976. Launay, M. L. “Un roi, deux enfants et des chèvres: Le débat sur le langage naturel chez l’enfant aux XVIe siècle.” Studi Francesi 72 (1980): 401–14. Maur, Raban. Monumenta germaniae historica, epistulae (in Quart). Vol. 5, Epistolae Karolini aevi (III). 2 vols. Edited by E. Dümmler. Berlin: Weidmann, 1898–99. Mazzocco, Angelo. Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1993. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. “Un contributo all’interpretazione di De vulgari eloquentia I, i–ix.” Belfagor 5, no. 44 (1989): 539–58. Milner, Jean-Claude. L’amour de la langue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978. Translation by Ann Banfield: For the Love of Language. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990. LAW, RIGHT FRENCH loi, droit GERMAN Gesetz, Recht LATIN lex, jus SPANISH ley, derecho v. DROIT, LEX, and CIVIL RIGHTS, FAIR, LIBERAL, POLITICS, RIGHT, RULE OF LAW, STANDARD, THEMIS Most of the legal notions used in modern political philosophy come from a transcription in vernacular languages of terms originating in Roman law, and from its reception in medieval Europe. This transmission of Roman concepts was accompanied by a significant inflection of their meaning, but the translation conventions have nonetheless been stable enough that basic terms such as lex and jus have found equivalent terms in every language of continental Europe, and the distinction between loi and droit in French, for example (or Gesetz and Recht in German) has remained constant. The situation, however, is fundamentally different for the English language, in which, or in relation to which, translation problems have meant constant difficulties, both in the philosophical vocabulary LAW 551 These difficulties are quite well known and have generated a number of conventional translations, most of which are easy to understand and apply. Philosophie du droit, or Rechtsphilosophie, is normally translated as “philosophy of law,” even if it refuses to make law (ordinary or even constitutional) the primary source of right (but Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie is nonetheless sometimes translated as “philosophy of right” out of faithfulness to the German). A law enacted by a lawmaker authorized to rule on such questions becomes “statute law” (which already leads to several oddities: in order to explain the original meaning of article 6 of the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” [“Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”] of 1789, for example, we would have to say that in “French law,” “statute law” is the expression of the general will). The shortcoming of “statute law,” however, is that it suggests too clear a distinction between a legislative power and other authorities, which is not always relevant, either because one is referring to periods in the past when such a distinction did not always have the same importance that it has in the modern age, or because the legal-philosophical reasoning itself leads us to bracket it. This leads to a common and long-standing expedient that consists of reverting to the plural of the word, which almost always refers to the legislative, or nomothetic, dimension of the “law”: “the laws” will be one possible translation of la loi, of lex, or of nomos, and the title of Cicero’s De legibus (On the laws), just as much as Plato’s Nomoi (Laws), do not pose any particular problems of translation. These conventions are useful, but they do not overcome all the difficulties. As far as ancient notions are concerned, it is unfortunate that both the lex naturae of Cicero and the jus gentium of Roman law have to be translated as “law.” In the modern context, the dual meaning of “law” still poses several problems, as becomes apparent, for example, in reading Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. For Locke, the state of nature is not a state of lawlessness, because human beings are subjected to the “law of nature” (§6), which in French could be translated either as droit naturel (as Bernard Gilson does, in Locke, Deuxième traité du gouvernement civil) or as loi naturelle: only civil government, however, enables the birth of a “legislative power,” which in turn allows the “Commonwealth” to be governed by an “establish’d, settled, known, Law” (§124). The function of statute law, or “establish’d law,” will thus be to make “natural law” (droit naturel) sufficiently public for it to take on a force of obligation, and ignorance or partiality would deprive it of this force in the state of nature. But statute law cannot itself have any legitimate authority unless it conforms to the natural law instituted by God, which is thus imposed upon human lawmakers as a higher commandment (English translators and authors encounter similar difficulties when, for example, they need to distinguish between lex naturae and jus naturae, which leads them at times to use “right” as a translation of jus so that “law” can be a better equivalent of lex). These problems are ultimately encountered at every point in any translation into English or from English: the “history of law” will become “legal history,” and the “lawyers” in American cinema are both jurists and men of law, while being very different from Philippe the Fair’s légistes, the class of jurists charged with renewing Roman law in France and creating from it a uniform and centralized legal code. as well as in legal texts. In schematic terms, the problem takes the form of a double ambivalence. English distinguishes between “law” and “right,” with each corresponding to some of the aspects of loi (Gesestz) or droit (Recht), but the extension of the concepts is not the same. “Law” has a wider extension than loi, and even if “right” partly overlaps with the polysemy of jus or of droit, the use of the term “right,” in the singular and the plural, refers more often to the specific dimension of droit that the French would term droits subjectifs (subjective rights; that is, freedom, property, etc.) attached to individual or collective subjects. I. The Particularities of English Political Right(s) A. The legal vocabulary of English In the continental tradition, law (or la loi in French) is both a rule and a command given by an authority empowered to enact it; more specifically, la loi refers to a certain kind of norm, established by a particular power (legislative power), and regarded as higher than that of other sources of droit (regulations, jurisprudence, and so on), in accordance with criteria that can be material or formal. In this context, the basic problem is knowing what founds the higher authority of the law, and what can stem from its intrinsic characteristics (rationality, generality, publicness, and so forth), and from the identity of the founder of the law (the sovereign). The history of law is thus bound up with the parallel history of modern political rationalism and of state sovereignty. The dominant tendency today, particularly clear in France, is to qualify the reverence for the law, because of the threefold effect of the weakening of legislative power, the proliferation of legislative texts, and, above all, the progressive acceptance of the contrôle de constitutionnalité des lois (the constitutional review of laws; in other words, for the French Conseil constitutionnel, the “law as an expression of the general will” is only a law when it is in accordance with the Constitution, as it is interpreted by the Conseil). It is important to note, however, that this evolution is not in itself enough to transform the entire logic of the juridico-philosophical categories. It simply means that the characteristics previously attributed to the law as an “expression of the general will” are transferred to a certain type of law (the Constitution), enacted by a specific legislative power (the “constituent” power or lawmaker), while all of the difficulties associated with the modern doctrine of sovereignty simply take a different form (O. Beaud, La puissance de l’état). On the other hand, the extension of the concept of loi in French is limited at the outset by its relation to the concept of droit, which refers both to the legal order as a whole, and to the right of a subject, which may be defended in a court case; so whatever its position in the hierarchy of norms, la loi is only a source of le droit. In the English tradition, however, “law” refers to the legal order as a whole (like le droit, in other words), but it also retains some of the main connotations associated with la loi. Conversely, if “right” can sometimes also be understood in a general sense (if only because the adjective “right” means “just”), it more often has a far narrower sense, when used in the plural or singular, and in consequence it tends to be confused with “subjective” rights (R. Dworkin, Law’s Empire and Taking Rights Seriously). 552 LAW continuity, since the first rule in making laws is that of the “precedent” (stare decisis). Common law is thus a fundamental element of the Ancient Constitution, which was supposed to have governed the English since time immemorial (and whose prestige would make it possible for the 1688 Revolution to be presented as a restoration of an originary and more authoritative set of laws). The remarkable feat of English history is to have forged its path toward the rationalization of law on this traditional legitimacy. The centralization of judicial decisions allowed a homogenous order to emerge out of the different customs, and the primacy of the precedent encouraged legal security and the predictability of decisions, which constituted the basis of the development of modern society. The authority of the precedent was not always absolute; as the great jurist William Blackstone noted, “[T]he doctrine of the Law is the following: precedents and rules must be followed, unless they are clearly absurd or unjust,” which means that on the one hand, judgments must not depend on the opinions of judges but on the laws and customs of the country (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:69), and on the other hand, that the judge can and must reject “decisions that are contrary to reason (absurd), or to divine law (unjust)” (A. Tunc, “Coutume et ‘Common Law’,” 57). The major effect of this type of elaboration of law, from the point of view of political philosophy, is to have inhibited the full affirmation of the doctrine of sovereignty, which, by contrast, characterized the development of politics in France. While French theorists of the monarchy, such as Bodin, tended to make the sovereign the ultimate, if not sole, source of the law, the English based the authority of political power on an original “common law,” while at the same time giving their political community the means for their law to make “progress” toward modernity. This original mechanism explains the political differences between England—where the Crown was unable to appear as the vehicle for progress, and where the 1688 Revolution confirmed the power of the courts—and France, where the actions of successive parliaments had long discredited the idea of judicial power (A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution). It also had important philosophical consequences: it limited the rise of modern legislative rationalism based on the idea of a natural affinity between reason and the “law” made by the sovereign, which would by contrast become fully developed within the culture of the French Enlightenment. But we must also add that the primacy of common law is only one of the two main aspects of the English constitution: although it is based on the tradition of common law, the constitution also presumes “the sovereignty of Parliament” (or of the “King in Parliament”). This sovereignty needs to be understood in the strongest sense of the term: the sovereignty of Parliament is absolute in the sense that no rule of law can oppose an act or a statute of the English Parliament, if this act has been legitimately adopted (cf., for example, W. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:156–57, and Dicey, Introduction), and this will become established notably within the courts, where a statute has the power to repeal the rules of common law (Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:89) under certain formal conditions. Similarly, “rights” are essentially So when we go from Latin or modern continental languages to English, we encounter difficulties that flow from a particular legal institution, and that have lasted to this day, as any jurist knows who has ever tried to translate into English a notion such as the German Rechststaat (which the French état de droit captures perfectly), or to find a continental equivalent of the English “rule of law.” To clarify these difficulties, we will begin with a genealogical analysis of the particularities of the English legal lexicon, and then go on to examine the way in which the first modern philosophers adopted or, on the contrary, subverted this tradition, before looking finally at the later transformations of Englishlanguage philosophie du droit. B. The spirit of English law English history is part of the wider history of western Europe, shaped by the development of the modern nationstate, which subordinated political (royal) power to the rationality of law. In England, as in France, this process led on the one hand to the institutionalization of royal power, by distinguishing it from patrimonial or imperial control, and on the other to an increase in the predictability of law, by privileging a law common to the whole kingdom. Generally speaking, then, what is particular to England in this context can be presented in the following way: the courts of the kingdom (notably the Royal Court) played a major role in the unification of English law, producing a law that was both customary and based on case law, and that provided royal power with the centralized structure that was needed in order to govern, but without having to make the positive law decreed by the king the primary source of law. The history of English freedom runs parallel to that of the history of the acquisition by the “barons,” and then by all British subjects, of “rights” that are opposable to royal authority, and that form the substance of the different English declarations, from the Magna Carta (1215) to the Bill of Rights (1689). The conceptual system of English law appears at first to be a process of giving form to this singular historical experience, according to a logic that is both very old and extremely durable. In this regard, Frederick Maitland notes that the use among the great English jurists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (for instance, Glanvill and Bracton) of Roman terms is itself somewhat uncertain, and that they do not differentiate clearly between jus and lex (F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 1:175). The two senses of “law” refer to the duality of the common law of the courts, and the statute law imposed by the sovereign. Subjects can oppose their “rights” to the political power, but this power nonetheless exercises a legitimate authority over these subjects. So “law” refers to two concurrent conceptions of the formation of norm, with the English constitution ensuring they work together by an endlessly repeated miracle. “Common law” does not at first seem like a “judgemade law,” because it is supposed to be simply “revealed” by a judge, who in this sense is the “mouthpiece of the law.” This is what distinguishes it from statute law, which is “made” by an authority that is based on its own views concerning justice or the common good, and that requires no other justification than its political legitimacy. Common law is thus presented as a means of formalizing customs, whose long existence is a guarantee of their venerable nature, and it also favors LAW 553 the basis for understanding the powers and domains of the different political institutions. The prestige that common law enjoys has made it the foundation of what we might call the English political idiom—and this prestige flows in the first place from common law’s ability, over such a long period of time, to resolve in an original manner the main problems England has faced. Thanks to its law, this country with such a troubled history has been able to see itself as the product of a continuous and harmonious history, both profoundly different from that of other European monarchies and called upon ultimately to give lessons in freedom to other civilized nations. Indeed, in a now-classic work—The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law—J.G.A. Pocock showed how common law constituted the model from which the English elaborated the doctrine of the Ancient Constitution that was to become a point of reference in the seventeenth century for the adversaries of the Stuarts and thus contribute to the victory of a liberal interpretation of the English regime. By emphasizing the continuity of common law before and after the Norman conquest, the effects of this event were minimized, while limiting the rights imposed by force. By making common law the heart of English law, the authority of the empire, along with Roman civil law, was excluded, while the differences between the English monarchy (a “mixed regime”) and French absolutism were foregrounded. These ideas were to be more fully developed during the revolutionary period, when the adversaries of the Stuarts readily invoked the permanence of English law and the immemorial nature of the Ancient Constitution to challenge the idea that royal power would be the main source of law, or that this power could change the law in whatever way it wished. The fundamental premises of the apologists of common law are themselves based on principles that go back a long way. We can already find them, for example, in the work of John Fortescue, who in the fifteenth century distinguished very clearly between the absolute monarchy of the French, and the “limited” monarchy of the English, for whom the royal prerogative was limited by the courts, the main one being Parliament, which was considered to be primarily a court of justice. But it was above all in the seventeenth century that the classic doctrine of common law was formulated, notably around the ideas of Edward Coke, the rival of Sir Francis Bacon and of Matthew Hale (1609–76). . The classic conception of common law implies a certain interpretation of the English constitution, according to which all political or legal institutions must be subject to the law, that is, to the order of the common law, as it is interpreted by the judges of the main courts. Even during Coke’s time, though, this orthodoxy met with several objections, drawn from political and legal practice, or from new political doctrine. First of all, there were in fact several elements within the English institutions that appeared to contradict Coke’s vision: the Court of Chancery could temper common law through equity; Parliament could change it radically through statutes that replaced the previous law, and the royal prerogative seemed to give the monarch a certain independence with respect to the statutes subjective rights, which may have appeared within a custom before being integrated into common law or recognized by a statute, but which are as such opposable to political authority. This paradox of English public law comes from the absence of a written constitution. It originally derived from the primacy of the customary or semicustomary arrangements of the Ancient Constitution (whose spirit in this respect is the spirit of common law), but it also evolved into the affirmation of the full sovereignty of Parliament, the natural counterpart of the flexibility of the constitution. The difficulties are moreover magnified by the fact that modern “constitutionalism” (which implies the subordination of ordinary law to the constitution, through the control by the courts of the constitutionality of the laws) evolved in the wake of the American experience, and in a legal world dominated by English concepts. Nevertheless, a study of the development of the English-language philosophy of law would reveal a permanent opposition between two approaches, whose duality is an expression of the ambivalence of the English tradition. The predominant approach, which goes from Edward Coke to a writer such as Ronald Dworkin, could be seen as a progressive idealization of the experience of common law. However, the very fact that it is a “law,” combined with the particular logic of the modern conception of sovereignty, also explains the stubborn persistence of a positivistic current of thought trend that always tends to subvert the dominant vocabulary of English legal philosophy. This positivistic approach, defended by Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, survives in Austin and Hart. It should be said, however, that these two traditions have certainly communicated with each other, especially through the affirmation of the liberal concept of freedom as an absence of constraint, a conception that was largely adopted by the advocates of the approach that emerged out of common law, but certain elements of which come from Hobbes. In order to understand this development, while explaining the enduring legacy of untranslatable concepts that English law has transmitted to philosophy, we would do well to begin with common law and the debates to which it gave rise in English political thought. C. Common law In its strictest sense, the expression “common law” refers to the first of the three main traditional branches of English law, the other two being equity and statute law. Common law here means a law common to the different regions of the kingdom, a law that, before the courts, must always prevail over particular usage or customs, and that is the indissoluble basis of the authority of the king over all his subjects, while providing these subjects with the advantages of a single system of justice. Common law is first and foremost a customary, unwritten law (lex non scripta, as Blackstone puts it), whose authority is tied to its immemorial nature. It is also a scholarly law, whose fundamental rules prohibit any arbitrary modification, and the knowledge of which is acquired through a long and patient study of precedents. But common law is not only an original “legal system”: it is also the foundation of the English political regime, insofar as it provides 554 LAW D. The philosophical consequences of the doctrine of common law Beyond the English constitution, the doctrine of common law implies something akin to a general theory or a philosophy of law, which is a priori opposed to positivist theories (which recognize as law only “positive law,” that is, a law made by the sovereign, or someone authorized by the sovereign), without for all that having the same inflexibility as most theories of “natural law” because it is rooted within a legal tradition that valorizes the role of time and of history in the revelation of law. As one contemporary historian notes (G. L. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition), the authority of precedent and of custom does not necessarily imply that all common law goes back to furthest antiquity. What is crucial, however, is that one can affirm continuity between the past and the present. Usage and custom have imposed rules by showing that these rules were both acceptable, because they were consonant with the public spirit, and reasonable because they were in accordance with common reason. This affirmation linking historical continuity and “reasonableness” is not without some ambiguity. One could, along with Coke, draw from it a particularist conception of legal reason, which emphasizes the internal coherence of jurisprudence built up patiently through “cases” resolved by judges, or through the law “stated” by judges. As we will see, this aspect of the theory (which is obviously connected to the judicial “corporatism” of Coke, and to his defense of the “artificial reason” of the judge) has been the favorite target of the great modern critics of common law since Hobbes. It is no doubt for this reason that subsequent authors emphasize on the contrary the affinity between common law and natural justice, in order to show that common law includes within it a certain number of the general principles that not only conform to custom, but also translate rational needs linked to the very nature of law. These two conceptions of reason at work within the law have in common the fact that they are a priori opposed to positivist theses, which place positive law, made by a legislator and not revealed by a judge, at themselves. More generally, the traditional English conceptions were also confronted with the contemporary development of the doctrine of sovereignty, which had been familiar to French jurists since Bodin, but which was not entirely unheard of in England itself (where it would be reclaimed by the partisans of the reinforcement of royal power, but also by certain defenders of the Parliament). On this latter point, Coke, who was also a political actor, tended to reject the logic of sovereignty, which he saw as incompatible both with the logic of English law and with the rights acquired by the English since the Magna Carta. As for equity and the statutes, he presented them as complements of common law, revealed by the authorities constituted by common law itself. In this context, Parliament itself appears as a specific jurisdiction, made up of the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, whose supreme status authorizes it to change the law by proposing new statutes, by repealing previous statutes, and even by modifying the content of common law. So while he thereby reaffirmed the superiority of Parliament over the king (the king only being fully legitimate as a “King in Parliament”), Coke managed to reconcile the primacy of Parliament with the “Rule of Law,” and with his own antivoluntaristic conception of the making of laws. On the one hand, Parliament had the “power to abrogate, suspend, qualify, explain or make void [legislation that previous parliaments enacted], in the whole or in any part thereof, notwithstanding any words or restraint, prohibition or penalty [in previous legislation], for it is a maxim in the law of parliament, quod leges posteriores priores contrarias abrogate,” and this power is “so transcendent and absolute, as it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds” (Institutes of the Laws of England, vol. 4). On the other hand, Parliament was simply acting here as a judge, who invoked ancient statutes, that is, “law, this universal law that the English have claimed as their heritage” (ibid.; see also F. Lessay, “Common Law,” and J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History). . 1 Edward Coke (1552–1664) Edward Coke was at the same time a judge, a parliamentarian, and a legal theorist. Several times a Member of the House of Commons, of which he was Speaker in 1592–93, he was also the attorney general in 1593–94, then chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas (1606) and lord chief justice of England. As a parliamentarian, he was opposed to the absolutist tendencies of James I (for which he was imprisoned in 1621), and it was in this context that he was the author in 1628 of the Petition of Right, one of the basic documents of “English freedoms.” Coke is generally considered the greatest representative of the common law tradition, which he interpreted as being halfway between the traditional doctrines of limitation of power and the principles of modern liberalism. In the conception of law that Coke advocates, the authority and the knowledge of the judge are simultaneously minimized and magnified. On the one hand, the judge is indeed not a legislator and he does not “make” laws (judex est lex loquens); his function is to “state the law” (jus dicere). In a sense, even if the identity of the legislator is problematic here, common law is certainly a law, which is acknowledged by the judges whose authority it founds, and which expresses a higher rationality. On the other hand, we can know this law, and the reason that inspires it, only through the succession of different generations, and this knowledge calls for an “artifical reason” based on accumulated experience, and not only on reasoning. Law is thus a specialized knowledge, which is not to be confused with “natural reason” (nemo nascitur artifex), and judges are its privileged guardians. This is why they, and they alone, are in a position to reveal the always identical and always new meaning that common law assumes over time. LAW 555 of Nature (lex naturalis): whereas the right of nature “is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature,” a law of nature “is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (Leviathan, 1996). The object of this distinction is to show why people are necessarily led to “lay down the Right” they naturally have over all things in their natural condition, without also having to thereby contradict their nature. When they “lay down” their rights, they do not stop seeking to preserve nature and their life; however, taking account of the laws of nature that show us how to preserve ourselves in fact brings with it a radical change, since it marks the transition from freedom to obligation and obedience. Hobbes is aware of being an innovator when he so clearly distinguishes right and law, as in the following passage: For though they that speak of this subject use to confound jus and lex, right and law, yet they ought to be distinguished, because right consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear; whereas law determineth and bindeth to one of them: so that law and right differ as much as obligation and liberty, which in one and the same matter are inconsistent. (Leviathan) As has often been pointed out, this transformation of the relationship between right and law places Hobbes at the precise intersection of two fundamental trends in modern politics, which are on the one hand liberalism, and on the other the absolutism expressed by the theory of sovereignty. Hobbes was one of the fathers of liberalism because he prioritized subjective rights and freedom, conceived as the absence of constraint, in his analysis of the constitution of the political bond, which set him in opposition both to the classical tradition and to modern republicanism. But he was also one of the thinkers of the absolute state, because he claimed to show that individuals can attain their primary objective (the preservation of their life) only by transferring almost all of their rights to the sovereign, against whom no resistance is allowed, besides escape or exile. These two aspects of Hobbes’s thought are moreover linked, since the the forefront of the creation of law. This is why common law, whatever its ambiguities, appears as a privileged adversary of legal positivism, and why critics of this approach are often still led, even today, to repeat and rediscover the typical modes of reasoning of common law. Conversely, the traditional theory of the English constitution itself offered a foothold for a positivist interpretation, through the idea of the supremacy of Parliament—or of the “King in Parliament.” The argument made by Coke, who explained the power Parliament has to change the law by its statutes, and its power to modify these statutes indefinitely, as coming from the authority that it possesses in common law, can in fact quite easily be reversed. If there is an authority that is sufficiently powerful and legitimate to modify the rules of English law, it is difficult not to think that this authority is sovereign, and that its decisions are presumed to be more rational than those made by common judges, who are inspired by their “artificial reason.” In addition, if the Chancery Court has the power to correct the rules of common law, and if the king is not entirely subordinate to the statutes, then it does seem that the legal order has a number of holes in it, which common judges are not the only ones able to fill. This observation led certain authors, for different reasons, to develop a number of critiques of common law. These critiques, drawing on the royal prerogative or the sovereignty of Parliament or, even more profoundly, on the idea that some sovereign power is necessary if there is to be any law at all, have brought about a complete overhaul of the doctrine of law. A systematic examination of these discussions is beyond the scope of this entry. Referring readers to the works on this subject by F. Lessay, G. J. Postema, and J.G.A. Pocock , we will simply attempt to show briefly the influence of these critiques of common law on the development of English political philosophy and on the philosophy of contemporary law, where the vocabulary itself echoes these foundational debates. II. “Law” and “Right” According to Hobbes: Legal Positivism versus Common Law A. The foundational debate Chapter 14 of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) opens with a distinction between the Right of Nature (  jus naturale) and the Law 2 Equity In English law, “equity” refers to one of the three fundamental sources of law (along with common law and statute law): the Court of Chancery can judge “in equity” and thereby protect rights that have not been recognized by ordinary courts (which have to follow the common law rigorously). The English term “equity” sometimes designates the classical philosophical notion (Aristotle’s epieikeia [ἐπιείϰεια]), and at other times a particular right, originally produced by a distinct court. In A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, Hobbes plays cleverly on the two senses of the word in order to suggest the superiority of royal justice (against which there is no appeal, since it is directly inspired by natural reason) over the justice of ordinary judges, whose action has to be able to be tempered by the action of the courts of equity. REFS.: Raynaud, Philippe. “L’equalité dans la philosophie politique.” Égalité et équité: Antagonisme ou complémentarité. Edited by Thierry Lambert et al. Paris: Economica, 1999. Newman, Ralph A. Equity and Law: A Comparative Study. New York: Oceana Publications, 1961. 556 LAW Seeing therefore the introduction of propriety is an effect of Commonwealth, which can do nothing but by the person that represents it, it is the act only of the sovereign; and consisteth in the laws, which none can make that have not the sovereign power. And this they well knew of old, who called that Nomos (that is to say, distribution), which we call law; and defined justice by distributing to every man his own. (Leviathan) Significantly, this text is cited by Carl Schmitt, who sought to place Hobbes back into an imperial political tradition, foreign to both liberalism and “enlightened” absolutism (Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum). B. Hobbes and the tradition of common law: The subversion of the English legacy What are the consequences of this philosophy of right for the English legacy, and especially for the tradition of common law? The clearest text on this subject is without doubt the admirable Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, in which Hobbes stages the opposition between the tradition of Coke and the new “lawcentered” and rationalist philosophy. In this text, Hobbes clearly attributes to Coke the confusion between “law” and “right” (or between lex and jus), which he had denounced in the Leviathan. He also develops a powerful internal critique of the juridical tradition of common law, in order to show that the modern conception of sovereignty (attributed here to the king and not to Parliament) is the only one able to lend true coherence to the English legal system. To support his argument, he quotes Bracton (“the most authentic author of the common law”) on several occasions, to show that the king is fully sovereign in the temporal order. He adds that, since England’s break from Rome, the spiritual power also lies with the king, and he interprets the expression “King in Parliament” in a way that proscribes any dualism in the civil authorities. The main target of the Dialogue is obviously the power of judges under common law, which the dominant tradition claimed was based on the wisdom produced by the “artifical reason” acquired over the course of legal studies, and which Hobbes attacks in the name both of “natural reason” and of the authority of the legislator. On the one hand, there is no other reason than natural reason (Leviathan, 29), if it is true that “no man is born with the use of reason, yet all men may grow up to it as well as lawyers” (ibid., 38), and the knowledge of judges is no different from that which is used in other arts. On the other hand, the wisdom of judges is not in itself sufficient to give the force of law to their decisions, since “it is not wisdom, but Authority that makes a law” (ibid., 29). The laws of England were not made by law professionals, but “by the kings of England, consulting with the nobility and commons in parliament, of which not one of twenty was a learned lawyer” (ibid., 29). Borrowing an expression from the Leviathan, “auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem,” Hobbes makes it clear that he considers doctrines that valorize laws produced or revealed by English jurisconsults as sophisms of the same kind as those of Platonic philosophers, religious fanatics, or defenders of papism: the claim to make truth or absolute power of the sovereign and his laws goes hand in hand with a transformation of the status of the law, whose function is no longer to guide individuals toward virtue or the good life, but, more modestly, to create the conditions in which subjects will pursue their own ends in order to attain an essentially private, and no doubt worldly, happiness. The function of the absolutist state is to create the conditions of what Benjamin Constant will later call the “freedom of the Moderns” (in “De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes,” 1819). Apart from defending the authority of the State against sedition and unrest, of which the first English revolution was a good example, Hobbes’s work aimed at a complete transformation of politics, which took the form of a profound change of the status of political philosophy, and a radical subversion of the tradition of common law. Hobbes’s explicit project was to demonstrate the priority of the sovereign and the law in the definition of “right,” and this involved a certain devalorization of the role of the judge in favor of the lawmaker. No less remarkable, however, was that this devalorization was part of a larger effort to place the question of right and law within the proper domain of political philosophy. More than anything else, the political philosophy of the author of the Leviathan is primarily one of law and right, because it foregrounds the necessity of an impartial third party who is an outsider to the disputes between persons, and who can institute a legal bond between them, thanks to the capacity to impose decisions without contest. In this sense the sovereign, who determines the competence of the other authorities, is indeed a kind of supreme judge, whose function is first and foremost to ensure the reign of law. “The law” is simultaneously “law” and “right,” and the higher authorities are indissolubly “jurisdictional” and “legislative” (as were Parliament or the “King in Parliament” in the English tradition). This is what is demonstrated in the continual play between jus and lex that Hobbes engages in, and of which we find an admirable example in chapter 24 of Leviathan: “Of the Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth,” that is, the production and distribution of raw materials, as well as the status of the colonies created by a republic in foreign countries. In this chapter, Hobbes defends the thesis that the law and its guarantee depend on the prior protection and authorization of the sovereign, and to support his theory he invokes the authority of Cicero who, although he was known as a “passionate defender of freedom,” had to recognize (Pro caecina, XXV.70 and 73) that no property could be protected or even recognized without the authority of a “civil law” (Leviathan, chap. 24). Now, what Hobbes is translating here is clearly jus civile, a “right” rather than a “law,” whose relationship to the “law of nature” is somewhat different in Cicero to how the author of the Leviathan interprets it. Conversely, this inflection of the classical terminology of jus civile to a meaning more favorable to the sovereign authority of the supreme lawmaker is accompanied by a symmetrical transformation of the status of the law, which Hobbes supports very cleverly by referring to the etymology of the Greek nomos (law), so as to give “law” back the meaning that jus had in Roman law, that is, the function of attributing to everyone what he or she is due (suum cuique tribuere), and of thereby guaranteeing justice (justitia) in these distributions: LAW 557 a “Hobbesian” logic at work in all the thinkers who want to break with the legacy of common law lawyers, or who want to highlight the similarities between the English system and other forms of the modern state. Conversely, the conceptual schemas of common law reemerge spontaneously in all those who, for different reasons, want to limit the claims of the sovereign and the legislator in order to reaffirm historical rights, or to give the judge a privileged role in the protection of these “rights.” This can be seen in the examples of Bentham and Hart, on the one hand, and of Hume, Burke, and Dworkin on the other. A. Legal positivism in England Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is without a doubt the main heir to Hobbes in England, even if his political opinions are clearly a long way from monarchic absolutism. Utilitarian anthropology is a continuation of the fundamental ideas of Hobbes, through the work of Helvetius and Holbach, and above all, Bentham, who shares the same critical perspective on the English tradition as the author of Leviathan. For Bentham, as for Hobbes, the objective is to rationalize English law by reducing the influence of judges in favor of the political authorities. Here again, this planned rationalization takes the form of an affirmation of the rights of natural reason against the judicial culture, by giving priority to the law understood as a commandment, and by a fundamental transformation of the principles of legitimation of the rules and usages of common law. Bentham’s attitude is thus similar, mutatis mutandis, to that of Hobbes, as is shown by the way in which he interprets the authority of custom, or the rule of stare decisis. For traditional lawyers, the historical continuity of custom in itself had authority, whereas for Bentham, custom only truly becomes law when it is legalized, that is to say, sanctioned by the so-called lawgiver: the reasoning is the same as the one that, in Hobbes’s Dialogue, founded the authority of the English courts on the authorization of the sovereign. Custom and the rule of the precedent have, in addition, a genuine advantage from a utilitarian point of view, which is that they guarantee, thanks to the continuity of law, the security that the citizen is looking for in the legal order. But for Bentham, this entails consequences that are the opposite of those drawn by traditional lawyers. For them, the continuity of custom created a presumption of rationality and of legality, but the judge, who would reason on the basis of the principles incorporated in common law, could sometimes break with precedents when it seemed that these precedents would lead to an “unreasonable” decision, which explains how the judge, without “making” a law (since he only “reveals” it), could play an innovative role (for example, Blackstone, Commentaries, 1.69–71). For Bentham, however, the judge could not reject a precedent without becoming a legislator, and without thereby creating retrospective laws, which would endanger the security of citizens (Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, 194–97 and 207–10). But the conflict between the letter of the law and the decisions of judges could also be seen as a symptom of the imperfection of the traditional English system, where the inflexibility of the rule of precedent increased the risk of the arbitrariness of judges, which led Bentham to propose a complete reform of English law, in which law-making and wisdom the source of the law is nothing other than the mask worn by all those attempting to usurp supreme power. In addition, as the Dialogue argues elsewhere, the reasoning of the philosopher appears in the eyes of the lawyer as the product of a privilege unduly conferred on statute law against common law, whereas the philosopher by contrast claims to “speak generally of law” (29) when he discusses the role of the kings of England in making English laws. The Hobbesian reconstruction of the theory of law thus concludes by prioritizing legislation over any other source of law, and by strongly affirming the sovereignty of the king; the other constituent parts of Parliament are, for Hobbes, merely useful accessories without being in any way indispensable to the adoption of laws. This does not mean, however, that Hobbes abandons the entire former tradition, nor that he refuses judges any role in making laws, since his strategy always consists in starting from an internal critique of the contradictions of tradition in order to show that his own proposals are more likely to achieve the objectives that tradition claimed to be pursuing. First of all, as was noted earlier, the primacy of the legislator itself comes from its ability to state law, and to ensure its reign, by transcending the violent disputes that persist in the state of nature: Hobbes’s sovereign (who is for him the king) remains in some ways a judge, just as the English Parliament was in the traditional theories of common law lawyers, and his action is therefore still related to the two senses of law (Dialogue, 46: “Since therefore the King is sole legislator, I think it also reason he should be sole supreme judge”). Hobbes also adapts the equivalence of reason and the common law to his own ends, even if he ironically reverses its meaning: where Coke’s disciples would say that common law was “artificial” reason itself, Hobbes will say that natural reason was the true common law. As for the role of judges, it was certainly severely reduced, but not entirely denied. Hobbes grants the common law judge a certain normative power, which comes from the fact that the sovereign had affirmed from the outset that, “in the absence of any law to the contrary,” customary rules, or those based on cases, would have the force of law (in the same way that “civil law,” that is, Roman law, could be incorporated into English law, if the king so desired). Moreover, the judge is not necessarily more passive than in the traditional doctrine. In the Dialogue, the philosopher goes as far as to acknowledge, against his interlocutor, that the judge can without risk reject the letter of the law, as long as he does not reject its meaning and the intention of the legislator (30). And in Leviathan, Hobbes notes that the judge can complete civil law by the law of nature when positive law does not fully authorize a reasonable decision, even if he also has to refer, in the most difficult cases, to the higher authority of the legislator (chap. 26). III. Two Philosophical Traditions The greatness of Hobbes comes from that fact that he was the first to grasp what it was in the common law legacy that prevented the modern state from becoming fully developed, at the same time as he understood admirably the indissolubly emancipatory, rationalist, and absolutist nature of the “modern” conception of sovereignty. This is why, in the subsequent history of English-language thought, one finds 558 LAW state and society, which have allowed English thought and the “continental” trends to be brought closer together: Hobbes sometimes appears as a successor to Bodin, and Bentham as a reader of Holbach and Helvetius. Conversely, the schemas that have emerged out of common law are very much alive in authors who are sensitive to the particular role of the judge, whose importance is obvious in the democratic politics and the constitutional law of our times. Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Austin, John. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. London, 1832. Beaud, Olivier. La puissance de l’état. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. First published in 1765–69. Carrive, Paulette. “Hobbes et les juristes de la Common Law.” Pp. 149–71 in Thomas Hobbes: De la métaphysique à la politique. Edited by Martin Bertman and Michel Malherbe. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Cormack, Bradin. A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Dicey, Albert Venn. Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Reprint of 8th ed. [1915]. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982. Dworkin, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1986. . Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Edlin, Douglas E. Common Law Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gough, John Wiedofft. Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955. Hart, Herbert Lionel Adelphus. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Hobbes, Thomas. A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Edited and with an introduction by Joseph Cropsey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. . Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. First published in 1651. Lessay, Frank. “Common Law,” in P. Raynaud et S. Rials (éd), Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, PUF, 1996. Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. 3rd ed. Edited, revised, and with an introduction by J. W. Gough. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. First published in 1690. Pocock, John Greville Agard. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. . Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. . Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pollock, Frederick, and Frederic William Maitland. The History of English Law. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. First published in 1895. Postema, Gerald L. Bentham and the Common Law Tradition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Raynaud, Philippe. “Juge.” In RT: Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Saccone, Giuseppe Mario. “The Ambiguous Relation between Hobbes’ Rhetorical Appeal to English History and His Deductive Method in a Dialogue.” History of European Ideas 24 (1998): 1–17. Schmitt, Carl. “Nehmen/Teilen/Weiden.” Pp. 489–504 in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954: Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre. Berlin: Duncker and Humbolt, 1958. Translation by G. L. Ulmen: “Appropriation/ Distribution/ Production: An Attempt to Determine from Nomos the Basic Questions of Every Social and Economic Order.” Pp. 324–35 in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum. New York: Telos Press, 2003. Tunc, André. “Coutume et ‘common law.’” Droits 3 (1986): 51–61. adjudication are each regulated by the principles of utility, in ways that borrow both from the Hobbesian tradition and, paradoxically, from certain elements of the common law tradition (c.f. ibid., 339–464). The same problems will also be addressed by the great English theoreticians of legal positivism such as John Austin (1790–1859) and especially Herbert L. A. Hart (1907–92), whose work has notably paved the way for a “positivist” interpretation of the fundamental elements of English law. In contrast to the classical doctrine whereby the judge only “revealed” the law, common law now appears as a “judge-made law,” in which the judge could be led to institute new rules when the existing law does not allow a case to be resolved. B. The legacy of common law The main philosophical legacy of the traditional English lawyers is to be found in authors such as David Hume or Edmund Burke. These authors’ interpretations of politics can be seen as philosophical transpositions of the models of common law, as is shown by their use of English history, their emphasis on the limits of individual reason, and their search for an “artificial reason” that would be irreducible to the simple application of “metaphysical” rules based on “natural reason” (Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, 81–143, and Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, 202–32). Alongside this tradition—which we might call “conservative”—it is also worth noting the very evident presence of modes of thought based on common law in an author such as Dworkin, whose critique of Hart’s positivism is clearly in the service of the great “liberal” causes of our time. Indeed, in Dworkin’s view, law cannot be reduced to rules, since it also contains a set of principles that underlie the legal system while expressing a common morality. These are the principles that judges use when they seem to reject precedent or, more generally, when they appear to “create” law, as the “liberal” judges on the Supreme Court of the United States do, and this reasoning is very similar to Blackstone’s. In the same way, Dworkin’s emphasis on the “continuity” of law above and beyond the “apparent” reversals of case-based law, or even his thesis that every difficult case has only one right response (which assumes that bad decisions can only be “errors”), quite clearly echo the ideas of the great English lawyers. And this work, which is entirely dedicated to the defense of modernity, also reminds us that the success of common law was due to its capacity to present the most radical innovations as the consequences of faithful adherence to tradition. So there is, in English-language philosophy of law, something irreducible to the other modern trends, which comes from the way it incorporated within philosophy the schemas of reasoning that emerge directly out of the legal tradition of common law. It is almost as if the English experience and the English language carried with them a particular vision of law, irreducible both to positivism and to the most dogmatic versions of natural law. But this tradition is itself shot through by constant internal tensions and has been the object, beginning with Hobbes, of radical critiques based on a projected rationalization of the LEGGIADRIA 559 LEGGIADRIA (ITALIAN) ENGLISH grace, beauty FRENCH grâce, beauté, élégance, légèreté GERMAN Geschicklichkeit v. GRACE, and ART, BAROQUE, BEAUTY, DISEGNO, MIMÊSIS, SPREZZATURA Leggiadria, a now obsolete term referring to an affected elegance, comes from the Latin levitus and from Provençal. During the Italian Renaissance leggiadria came to express an almost natural grace that was in no way divine but anchored in worldly reality, situated at the point of equilibrium in a tension between the natural and the artificial. It found cognates in other Romance languages (cf. the Spanish ligereza and ligero, with the additional sense of “inconstant” or “unfaithful”), and would also be translated as grâce, “grace,” grazie, élégance, beauté, “beauty.” Toward the end of the sixteenth century, however, during the time of the Counter-Reformation, and when Italy lost its autonomy, the meaning of the term shifted: leggiadria came to mean instead a beauty in which the artificial prevailed over the natural, and thus became one of the most important qualities of the courtier in treatises on how to comport oneself. Leggiadria would thereafter refer to the ability to create a social circle at a distance from actual political conflicts, and was presented as a feigned spontaneity whose most appropriate expression was sprezzatura (an affected casualness), as in Il Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) by Baldassare Castiglione (1528), which was widely read in the courts of Europe. In this new sense, it could be translated as gaillardise (highspiritedness) and Geschicklichkeit (artfulness, skillfulness; formed from Geschick). I. The Education of Nature? The term leggiadria had its origins and was used most frequently in love poetry. It referred to feminine beauty, or to the elegance of animals that one could in principle train, since leggiadria had to do, in fact, with educating nature—to the point of making what was acquired appear as natural. This nuance of meaning is found throughout poetry written in vulgar language, from Dante to the Baroque poets. In Poliziano, for example, leggiadria is the very particular grace of a doe and of a loved woman, who are both characterized by a spontaneous but precious elegance: Ira dal volto suo trista s’arretra, e poco, avanti a lei, Superbia basta: ogni dolce virtù l’è in compagnia. Beltà la mostra a dito e Leggiadria. (The fateful anger leaves his face, and Vanity resists a little more when he is before her; every sweet virtue accompanies him. Beauty points to her, and so does Leggiadria.) (Le Stanze, I.45; The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. D. Quint) In the fifteenth century, the term expressed a rather vague oscillation between the natural and the artificial. In the sixteenth century, with the demand for systematizing and classifying literary genres as political systems, a number of treatises on love or poetics were keen to distinguish between beauty, grace, and leggiadria. The most striking example is the dialogue entitled Il Celso. Della bellezza delle donne. Here, Agnolo Firenzuola, in drawing up a taxonomy of terms used to describe beauty, uses a false etymology in making leggiadria derive not from lightness but from law (legge): La leggiadria non è altro, come vogliono alcuni, e secondo che mostra la forza del vocabolo, che un’osservanza d’una tacita legge, fata e promulgata dalla natura a voi donne, nel muovere, portare e adoperare così tutta la persona insieme, come le membra particolari, con grazia, con modestia, con misura, con garbo, in guisa che nessun movimento, nessuna azione sia senza regola, senza modo, senza misura o senza disegno. (As many people would have it, and as the very force of the word suggests, leggiadria is nothing but the observance of a tacit law, which is created and promulgated by you women, so that you can move, carry, and compose your whole body, as well as all the individual parts of your body, with grace, modesty, measure, and discretion, so that no movement is unregulated, nor without manners, measure or design.) (Il Celso, Discourse I) So leggiadria continued to refer to a more than graceful beauty, but it began to lose its lightness, so to speak: it needed to have rules, measure, and disegno. The balance between the natural and the artificial thus seemed to tip toward the artificial, or at the very least, toward the construction of a consistent and well-planned order. It was no coincidence that this requirement was particularly marked in the nascent genre of treatises on art, where the principle of the imitation of nature began to compete with the idea of something constructed according to the intentions of the author, and thanks to his artistic skill. Opinions were thus divided, with the emphasis sometimes on the natural, and at other times on the artificial, but humanists seemed to go more in the direction of the latter. The balance between the natural and the artificial found in earlier uses of leggiadria was still retained in Cosimo Bartoli’s 1550 Italian translation of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria: wherever the humanist has used the Latin term venustas (“from the goddess Venus,” hence the aesthetic quality bound with the pleasure derived from the observation of bodily beauty, and most famously translated into English by Henry Wotton, in the seventeenth century, as “delight”) to refer to a certain order obtained by supplementing the inadequacies of nature itself, the translator chose the word leggiadria. Leggiadria conferred on beauty both its principle of order and harmony, and the power to complete the plans that nature had not been able to complete: La bellezza è un certo consenso, e concordantia delle parti, in qual si voglia cosa che dette parti si ritrovino, la qual concordantia si sia avuta talmente con certo determinato numero, finimento, e collocatione, qualmente la leggiadria ciò è, il principale intento della natura ne ricercava. (Beauty is a certain correspondence and harmony between parts, whatever the thing they are part of, this harmony being obtained by a determined measure, by an order, and an arrangement, in other words, leggiadria, which is the principal aim of nature.) (Alberti, L’Architettura; It. trans. by C. Bartoli, VI.2) 560 LEGGIADRIA transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque period: the break with the Renaissance involved a taste for shapes, colors, and spiral forms supplanting the taste for contours, design, and lightness. In the eighteenth century, leggiadria was thus completely overshadowed by the distinction between grace and beauty in neoclassical artists such as Antonio Canova, Leopoldo Cicognara, and Ugo Foscolo: for them, art aspired to be almost godlike, and consequently could not be considered worldly. Schiller’s aesthetics, in which grace was a matter of beauty in movement, seemed to borrow certain aspects of leggiadria—though in fact his notion of grace was intended as a basis for the synthesis between nature and suprasensible freedom. Leggiadria, though, makes no claims at all to transcend the real. Anchored in worldly reality, it suspends certain of the world’s rules in order to create parallel words, caught within a fragile equilibrium between the artificial and the natural, and not in order to bring about the intervention of divine grace. Like Guido Cavalcanti, who in Boccaccio escapes from being chased by leaping “with great lightness” and landing on the other side of the Orto San Michele, leggiadria does not deny the necessity of the real, but merely looks for the supporting points from where it can perform an elegant, light leap, a saving little nothing. Italo Calvino adapts Boccaccio’s story in his Lezioni americane (1988) when he recommends lightness to writers of the next millennium, as one of the major yet forgotten touchstones of Western literature, heir to the humanism of the Renaissance. Fosca Mariani-Zini REFS.: Alberti, Leon Battista. De re ædificatoria. Florence: Niccolò di Lorenzo Alamani, 1485. Translation by Cosimo Bartoli: L’Architettura. Florence, Torrentino, 1550. Translation by Giovanni Orlandi: L’architettura / De re aedificatoria. 2 vols. Edited by G. Orlandi. Introduction and notes by Paolo Portoghesi. Milan: Polifilo, 1966. Translation by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor: On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. .On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of “De pictura” and “De statua.” Edited and translated, with introduction and notes, by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Castiglione, Baldassare. Il cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori. Edited by Bruno Maier. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1955. First published in 1528. Translation by Charles S. Singleton: The Book of the Courtier. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New York: Norton, 2002. Della Casa, Giovanni. Il Galateo. In Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del comportamento. Edited by Arnaldo Di Benedetto. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1970. First published in 1558. Translation by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett: Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on Manners. Introduction and notes by K. Eisenbichler and K. R. Bartlett. 3rd rev. ed. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1994. Translation by Jean de Tournes: Le Galatée. Lyon, 1598; revised as Galatée ou Des manières by Alain Pons. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1988. Firenzuola, Agnolo. Celso. “Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne.” In Opere. Firenze: Sansoni, 1971. Translation by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray: On the Beauty of Women. Edited by K. Eisenbichler and J. Murray. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Poliziano, Angelo. Stanze per la giostra, Orfeo, Rime: Con un’ appendice di prose volgari. Novaro, It.: Istituto Geografico de Agostino, 1969. . The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. Translated by David Quint. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85. First published in 1586. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. London, 1912–15; reissued New York: AMS Press, 1976. But if, in Bartoli’s translation, nature remains the main point of reference, in the same year Vasari clearly characterized the beauty of leggiadria as being, above all, free from any measure: according to him, it exceeds nature and the rules of proportional harmony. Its champions were thus Raphael, Parmigianino, and Pierino del Vaga; those who condemned it were Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, that is, the painters who were the most closely attuned to the “natural” universe. II. The New Morality and the Virtue of Grace The shift in leggiadria’s meaning toward the sense of “artificial” and even of “artifact” occurred more explicitly in the use of leggiadria in manuals for deportment from the second half of the sixteenth century. With Italy’s loss of its autonomy, and the Counter-Reformation, a new morality of behavior was evolving within the courts: men of letters elaborated a rhetoric based on the carefully managed distance between one’s inner-self and how one displayed oneself in public. Leggiadria therefore acquired a meaning close to that of sprezzatura, as illustrated by Baldassare Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (1528), which consisted of dissimulating the efforts of art behind an appearance of nonchalance. This morality would find its theoretical justification much later in Torquato Accetto’s La Dissimulazione onesta (1641); for him, disguising spontaneity and one’s own opinions was a means of survival. In many treatises during the Counter-Reformation, leggiadria in effect became what characterized the space between the private and the public, the innate and the acquired, sincerity and lying, which was also the realm of social savoir-faire, of the carefully negotiated distance where the particular sociability of leggiadria reigned, namely, in conversation. In his Galateo (1558), Giovanni della Casa thus placed leggiadria in the register of good manners. It was always at the heart of the activity of communicare e usare, or developing a relationship whereby two men became less of a stranger or enemy to one another. But it was also defined as attending to the imperfections of one’s own body: without the elegance of a carefully lookedafter body, beauty and goodness become divorced from each other. Jean de Tournes (1598) translated into French the definition of leggiadria that figures in the Galateo: L’élégance [leggiadria] n’est en quelque sorte rien d’autre qu’une certaine lumière qui se dégage de la convenance des choses qui sont bien composées et bien divisées les unes avec les autres et toutes ensemble: sans cette mesure, le bien n’est pas le beau, ni la beauté plaisante. (Elegance [leggiadria] is in many ways nothing but a certain light which is given off by the perfection of things which are well arranged and well divided between one another, and as a whole: without this meaure, the good is not beautiful, and beauty is not agreeable.) (Della Casa, Il Galateo; Fr. trans. J. de Tournes) This was the sense in which leggiadria was translated and adapted in high society in the courts of Europe. However, its popularity was short-lived: Heinrich Wölflin (Renaissance und Barok, 1888) saw the disappearance of the world of leggiadria (die graziöse Leichtigkeit) as one of the major elements of the LEIB 561 LEIB / KÖRPER / FLEISCH (GERMAN) ENGLISH lived-body/body/flesh FRENCH chair/corps GREEK sôma [σῶμα] / sarx [σάϱξ] [ּבָׂשָר] bāsār HEBREW ITALIAN carne/corpo LATIN corpus/caro SPANISH carne/cuerpo v. FLESH, SOUL, and ANIMAL, CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, GESCHLECHT, LIFE/LEBEN, LOGOS, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, QUALE, SUBJECT Leib has two meanings, which depend on its privileged correlative term: when paired with Seele (soul), it corresponds to the currently accepted sense of the body as the home of sensory experience and fits into the common opposition of soul/body. Understood in terms of its relation to its close neighbor, Körper, its meaning is inflected and revitalized through its etymological connection to Leben (life). Leben means the vital, fluid, living, and dynamic side of corporeity, whereas Körper refers to the structural aspect of the body, that is, its static dimension. One is thus tempted to translate Leib (1) as “flesh” (chair in French, carne in Italian and Spanish), in order to emphasize this aspect of vital fluidity, and Körper as “body,” when the two terms are being used together, especially in a Husserlian context; (2) as “body” whenever it is Seele that structures the meaning, in more classical contexts. But the problem one runs up against is the retranslation of chair—a key term in Merleau-Ponty—in the Germanic languages, where there is a more specific term: Fleisch (German), and flesh (English), which are usually translated into French as viande (meat). (Spanish and Italian present no such difficulty.) In addition, chair carries with it theological connotations, which leads one to question the way in which the concept took root in a Greco-Latin, or even Hebrew, context. Indeed, both Greek and Latin have two terms that one could comfortably retain as bi-univocal in translating chair/corps or Leib/Körper, namely, caro/corpus and sarx/sôma. But just as the transition from German to French does not allow for a simple transposition of one pair to the other, one is also faced with shifts of meaning in Latin and in Greek, or at any rate, inflections linked to the underlying axiology of each term, in ways that are moreover quite distinct in philosophy and in theology. I. The Lexical and Etymological Dimensions In present-day German, Leib refers to the stomach or the breast, as, for example, in expressions such as Nichts im Leibe haben (to have an empty stomach) and gesegneten Leibes sein or die Mutterleib (to be pregnant). More broadly, Leib corresponds to anything having to do with the intimacy of the body at its most vital: harten Leib haben (to be constipated); or sensorial: am ganzen Leibe zittern (to tremble all over). Leib is also used in expressions that mention the soul (Seele) or the heart (Herz): kein Herz im Leibe haben (not to have a heart), mit Leib und Seele (wholeheartedly), and jemandem mit Leib und Seele ergeben sein (to be devoted body and soul to someone). This suggests a proximity between Leib and the realm of “sensing” or “feeling,” whether affective or sensorial. The etymology reveals a common root between Leib and leben on the one hand, and Leib and bleiben on the other, going back to Middle High German (lîp, genitive lîbes). In the first case, Leib conveys the idea of a vital flow, proper to all living beings, which animates an inert body. In the second, bleiben attests to the link between Leib and dwelling, residing, and the intimacy of a place. Leib is part of a specific Germanic context: lîp are those who have “stayed” (die Gebleibenen), who have not fallen on the battlefield, as opposed to wal, those who have fallen, that is, heaven’s chosen ones (die Ausgewählten), the heroes. The life/death polarization of the pair lîp/wal follows naturally (the living and the dead), even if it is not constitutive of the primary meaning. One can therefore find this shared sense between Leib and leben in many almost tautological idiomatic expressions: bei lebendigen Leibe verbrannt werden (to be burned alive), Leib und Leben einsetzen (to risk life and limb), das ist er, wie er leibt und lebt (that’s just like him). In short, the Leib aspect of the body is vital and alive: the inert aspect is the becoming-inert of Leiche or of Leichnam (“corpse” in English, cadavre in French), or the inertia of Körper, a solid, physical, and material body. So one speaks of “bodies” in the physical sciences, celestial bodies (Himmelskörper) in Aristotelian cosmology, and corpuscles (Körpchen) in quantum physics. Whenever Körper is used in a human context, it signifies an organic structure or a complexion (Körper-Anlage-Beschaffenheit), a stature or conformation (-bau), comportment or bearing (-haltung), and in any case, a static, functional, or quantifiable configuration (-gewicht, -größe, -kraft). . II. Leib and Its Entry into Philosophy This was twofold: first, in terms of Leib’s paired relation to Seele (soul), and second, in terms of its quasi-oppositional relation to Körper, and thus its correlation with Geist (spirit) (RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie). The ways in which Leib fits into a Kantian and post-Kantian context, within idealism more broadly, and then into its critical reassessment by Nietzsche, illustrate this pairing: here, Leib comes to be linked to subjectivity. Kant’s Opus postumum, for instance, makes Leib a formal a priori of the subject, and Fichte (Die Tatsachen des Bewußtseins) asserts that the materiality of the Leib is the absolute a priori of self-consciousness. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, however, insists on the fact that the body (Leib) is the expression of an individual, but that this expression is already mediated; it is a sign produced by the body, but the body is not at the origin of the sign. For Schopenhauer (Werke), the Leib represents an immediate object and expresses the will. Nietzsche describes it as a “great reason” and even sees it as the vital principle of theoretical reason (Also sprach Zarathustra). In short, Leib in the German nineteenth century was associated with transcendental subjectivity, or it was related to the individual, physiological, or instinctual subject. III. Crux phaenomenologica: The Disintegration of Leib as an Effect of the Diversity of Its Translations The psychology of the time, which Husserl inherited, also used the term Leib, but in the context of a psycho-physical parallelism (as in the work of Fechner, Wundt, and Avenarius), or more precisely, of the reciprocity of the psychic and the physical (Stumpf). Apart from these authors, Husserl borrowed from Theodor Lipps the notion of empathy as an immediate sharing of the feelings of others. Rejecting the 562 LEIB (leiblich/Leiblichkeit/Verleiblichung/körperlich/Körperlichkeit/ Verkörperung); the bi-univocal correspondence between Leib and Körper proves all the more uneasy, given that the Romance languages use a single term to refer to the everyday meaning and the theological meaning of incarnation, while German speaks, in the latter register, of Menschwerdung. In Husserl, the sphere of “ownness” refers to the first experience in which the lived experiences of consciousness are constituted and engendered: it has a genetic status as the original matrix of our corporeality. In French, the notion of chair (flesh) attempts to express the sensible locus that is irreducible to objective spatiality But is this use of the term chair appropriate to refer to the way Leib is inflected? MerleauPonty first privileges this term in Le visible et l’invisible (1964) in referring not to the body of others, but to the being of the world. To emphasize the carnal dimension of experience is to affirm the world’s sensing (of itself). Thus, the French chair captures better than the English “being” a certain unity of experience (there is a flesh of being), whereas one’s “own” body is individual. The Husserlian Leib also contains this unity of the experience that, without appearing, is concretized in the form of everyone’s body. This “non-appearing” or “non-apparent” (in-apparaissant) is not something that lies beyond. If chair does not appear, it is because we do not perceive it, we are not attentive to it— as happens with small perceptions in Leibniz. This emphasis on the labile, fluid, soft nature of chair, which downplays the structured-ness of the body, is unique to French, even though it takes as its point of reference the usual sense of the term (in French, the bones and la chair connected to blood are opposed to la viande [meat], or the soft substance of the body). Fleisch (German) and “flesh” (English) have this sense, and the German translators of Merleau-Ponty have, moreover, translated chair in this way, also using the word Leib. What is revealed here is the hypersensitive dimension of a human being (chair is what can be wounded, or can flourish), the intimate exchange between inside and outside, namely, the skin: only the skin can have la chair de poule (goose bumps; literally, chicken skin). What is more, whether we are talking analogical inference of Benno Erdmann, he conceived of empathy as the mediated (corporeal) manifestation of the lived experience of others. Leib thus acquired the meaning of “body as it is lived,” leading Anglo-Americans to opt for the expression “lived-body.” But this translation has the disadvantage of placing corporeality in a reflexive framework (my body, lived by myself), when phenomenology aimed to short-circuit the distinction between inside and outside. We come across similar difficulties with the French expression corps animé (animate body), which considers Leib from a psycho-physical point of view. We have the reverse of the same difficulty with the translations corps organique (organic body) or corps vivant (living body), which are relevant for worldly, anthropological phenomenology, but that each time incline Leib in the direction of biology. What are we to make, then, of the corps propre (one’s own body) that is a theme from Maine de Biran through to the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception, the “subject-body,” which is one’s own, as opposed to the “object-body,” which scientists deal with? This distinction would easily render Husserl’s distinction between Leib and Körper, but such a translation is almost tautological: in fact, a Leib is always “mine” (mein Leib), or “my own” (Eigenleib). Even with the expression fremder Leib, it is the other’s mode of a belonging to him- or herself that is in play. Likewise, whenever Husserl talks about Leibkörper (literally, body of flesh), or about körperlicher Leib or physischer Leib, or even Körperleib (Husserliana, no. 13; Husserliana, no. 15), he does so in order to free subjectivation from the objectbody (Körper). Although what is one’s own is just as much a component of Leib as what is quick or living, Leib cannot be reduced to this. When Husserl talks about Eigenleib, it is so as to specify Leib as one’s own, not to assimilate the one to the other. The translation of Leib by corps propre may confirm the links between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but it also opens the door to an improper linking of Leib with what is properly one’s life. The network of composite words we find in Husserl is supplemented by a series of derived terms 1 Lebenswelt and In-der-Welt-Sein: “Lifeworld” and “being in the world” v. DASEIN, MALAISE, WORLD The emphasis on Lebenswelt, or “lifeworld,” in the later writing of Husserl corresponds to an internal exigency of Husserlian phenomenology: yet it also seems to correspond to the impact of a return of the writings of the disciple (Heidegger) on those of his master (Husserl), in particular the notion elaborated in Being and Time of In-der-Welt-Sein. French translators have preferred to translate Heidegger’s expression as êtreau-monde (being-to-the-world) rather than être-dans-le monde (being-in-the-world) (Sartre). It is indeed best understood with reference to the German In-sein (être à [to be at/to]), where what is at issue is not so much the localization or placement of being-in-relation-to, as the delocalization, or even “removal” or moving (as in changing residence) (déménagement) in the Baudelairean sense: “It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one that I discuss incessantly with my soul.” “To be at/to” is also “to be exposed to,” and not being able not to be exposed to, so that the title of prose poem 48 in Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris captures perfectly both the centripetal and centrifugal tension of “being-in-the-world” (and in a language): “Anywhere out of the world.” Pascal David REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. LEIB 563 find in Matthew 26:41 (or Mk 14:38): the Spirit is filled with love, but the flesh is weak. In John 3:6, sarx and pneuma refer to two types of creation: “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” Sôma alone contains the possibility of a glorious self-transformation. Sôma alone can have an individuated and individuating status, while sarx is infra-individual: the asthenic flesh is thus contrasted with the force of the spirit. Yet this hypothesis (Husserl, Thing and Space) does not hold up, because (a) we are only dealing with one, asthenic, meaning of the flesh; and (b) the axiology of the spirit and of the flesh is supported by that of glory and sin. It is notable, however, that “the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14) has quite a different valence: the “flesh of life” in John is a redefinition of finitude as the possible power of individuation. The distinction is thus not between flesh and spirit (and also not between Paul and John), but between the flesh of sin and the flesh of glory and life (Cyril of Alexandria, Deux dialogues christologiques). B. The univocality of the philosophical context: Soma, psuchê, nous In the context of Plato and Aristotle, where sarx and pneuma do not form a conceptual framework, the distinction sôma/ psuchê [ψυχή], or “animate body”/“intellect” (nous [νοῦς]), is the one that prevails, and it is linked to a depreciation of the somatic that would continue through the modern era, up to and including Descartes. Phaedo (83d) and Gorgias (493a–b) describe sôma as a prison cell, a tomb (sôma = sêma [σῆμα]), whose sign is desire, and understand psuchê as a form of exile, its own executioner crucified on the body. Aristotle radicalizes what in Plato was not a duality—but rather the soul’s desire through the body, and the soul’s exile in the body—by an ontological break that universalizes pure divine thought (nous) and individualizes corporeal form: psuchê and sôma are thus correlates of each other, as “form” (morphê [μοϱφή]) and “matter” (hulê [ὕλη]), or “activity” and “passivity” (De anima, 430a 5). This duality reappears in Descartes in the distinction between the res extensa and the res cogitans (anima, mens, and cogitationes). In short, the body (sôma, corpus) is ontologically insubstantial and is kept at a distance, as passive matter. Heidegger was therefore able to think of corporeality as ontic substantiality, so the Platonic and Aristotelian filiation is not the one we should retain if we wish to see corporeality as something productive. C. The non-onto-theo-logical (Hebrew) dynamic of the flesh: Bāsār, rūah. , nèfèš To understand the theological ambivalence of sôma/sarx (or of corpus/carne, in Tertullian), and the positive meaning it can have, we might turn to another context: in the Hebrew scriptures, neither the body nor the flesh are valued negatively. The flesh (bāsār [רָשָׂב ,([ּas a human composite of body and soul, is even privileged as a concrete index of the spirit (nèfèš [שֶׁפֶנ .([A human being is an organic unity sometimes referred to as nèfèš, sometimes as bāsār, with rūaḥ [ רוּח [ ַ (breath, spirit of God, soul) linked to it. As the RT: Traduction oecuménique de la Bible testifies, roughly half of the occurrences of bāsār are translated as chair (flesh) (137 out of 270), indicating a consistent use of about a fruit or about the skin’s appearance, la chair harbors a network that is both mobile and firm, plastic and structured, endlessly reconfigured: the vitality of the body resides in its chair. Michel Henry can thus proclaim this carnal sense of Leib, which is a different name for what he calls “auto-affection.” And Didier Franck proposes, in his discussion of the analytic of la chair in Chair et corps, the idea of refusing to give this originary aspect any autonomous status, by articulating the invisible, or the inapparent, as that which constitutes visible appearing. So to translate Leib as chair brings out the tension between phenomenology and metaphysics, because of the originary non-appearing unity that the term conveys. This articulation that would become the horizon of Husserlian phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s thinking toward the end of his life, as well as Michel Henry’s perspective, are situated within this framework. This tension becomes problematic when the metaphysics inherent in la chair doubles as instinctual immanence and theological transcendence. As early as the twelfth century, chair had a strong theological resonance that is certainly present in the notion of the living body as a glorious body. In addition, chair also had an instinctual, even sexual connotation: to speak about a carnal union was to speak in more elegant terms of a sexual union. From the ambivalence of the living body as biological or theological, to the ambiguity of la chair as instinctual or spiritual, we remain caught within the duality of immanence and transcendence. IV. The Horizon of the Ancient World: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Roots How are we to arrive at rational grounds for choosing a translation of Leib when faced with such a swarm of different decisions taken over the years? It would seem appropriate to reflect on the Greco-Latin roots of the notion. In each case we have a pair (sarx/sôma [σάϱξ/σῶμα]; caro/corpus) that modern languages have transposed into “flesh”/“body,” chair/corps, or carne/cuerpo-corpo. But do the theological or philosophical contexts that the classical sources reveal mitigate the difficulties in translating Leib? A. The equivocality of the contexts of Paul and John: Sôma, sarx, pneuma In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul wavers between flesh (sarx) and body (sôma): after having distinguished between the different kinds of flesh in the animal world and then having differentiated the bodies in the cosmology of the ancients, he separates the psychic, animal body (destructible, despicable) from the spiritual, pneumatic body (glorious, powerful). Sôma is ambivalent, linked to sin, rejected or elevated to the glory of resurrection. Paul’s sôma has no quality of its own. Sarx, however, is defined in the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians as being opposed to the spirit (pneuma [πνεῦμα]), but it is not identified with the somatic body, since as something selfishly closed upon itself, the residue of a sin that is legalized within the law, and the source of death, its meaning is entirely negative (Rom 7:5–14; Gal 5:13– 16). Sarx is understood in terms of a morality of abstinence, which gives it a worldly and finite meaning. This meaning of “flesh” as a manifestation of human finitude is also one we 564 LEIB as in French (âme et corps), idiomatic expressions are available that make sense in everyday language. By working with two usages, one more technical, and the other more everyday, we bring into play a salutary contextualization. By maintaining a distinction between Leib and Körper in French, one can account for the difference between corporeal appearing and carnal appearing. It is then that the philosophical emerges: the aim of the German compound nouns is to indicate the interweaving that is the only way one can conceptualize unity in difference. Further, does this articulation (as corps and as chair, or between a technical and an everyday term) not correspond to the double meaning of Leib (linked to Seele/opposed to Körper), which signals Leib’s entry into philosophy? Natalie Depraz REFS.: Avenarius, Richard Heinrich Ludwig. Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses: Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. 3rd ed. Berlin: Guttentag, 1917. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. Deux dialogues christologiques. Translated by G. M. de Durand. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964. Translation of the second dialogue by John Anthony McGuckin: On the Unity of Christ. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. Dodd, James. Idealism and Corporeity: An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1997. Erdmann, Benno. Wissenschaftliche Hypothesen über Leib und Seele: Vorträge gehalten an der Handelshochschule zu Köln. Cologne: M. Dumont-Schauberg, 1908. Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Elemente der Psychophysik. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1907. Translation by Helmut E. Adler: Elements of Psychophysics. Edited by David H. Howes and Edwin G. Boring. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. . Religion of a Scientist: Selections from Gustav Th. Fechner. Edited and translated by Walter Lowrie. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Die Tatsachen des Bewußtseins. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Vol. 1 in Nachgelassene Werke. Bonn: Marcus, 1834. Franck, Didier. Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomelogie des Geistes. Edited by J. Hoffmeister. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1971. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Henry, Michel. C’est moi la vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Translation by Susan Emanuel: I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Hübner, Kurt. “Leib und Erfahrung in Kants Opus postumum.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 7, no. 2 (1953): 204–19. Husserl, Edmund. “Aus den Vorlesungen, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Wintersemester 1910/1911.” In Zur Phänomenlogie der Intersubjektivität, edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 13. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Ingo Farin and James G. Hart: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2006. . Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Dorion Cairns: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. . Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907. Edited by Ulrich Claesges. Husserliana, no. 16. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Richard Rojcewicz: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1997. . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Edited by Karl Schuhmann (vol. 1) and Marly Biemel (vol. 2). 2 vols. Husserliana, nos. 3.1 and 4. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977, 1952. Translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1931. this term, whereas corps (body) does not correspond to any unified conceptual register: it is designated by seventeen Hebrew terms, among them bāsār (28/270) and ḥayyah [הַיַח [ (2/3), out of a total of seventy-two occurrences. “Flesh,” on the other hand, corresponds to only five terms in Hebrew. Nowhere in the Judaic tradition is “flesh” reduced to the physical or organic body. Its spiritual dimension is even the basis from which a possible glorification of the body itself makes sense. Obviously, this dynamic sense of the flesh pulls it away from substantiality: with respect to this endorsement of the flesh, Christianity will then bear onward this non-onto-theological sense of the body to which the expression in John testifies: “the Word became flesh.” D. How to translate? We are dealing with four distinct conceptual fields. Christianity and phenomenology emphasize the ambivalence of the corporeal: sinful/glorious (sarx-caro/sôma-corpus, and Körper/Leib). The two other fields are unequivocal—either positive (Judaism) or negative (philosophy). In addition, there is no analogical or inverse relationship between one pair (sarx/sôma) and another (Körper/Leib), in which sarx would be to Körper what sôma would be to Leib, since sôma also has a negative sense and sarx a positive sense. In short, the pair sarx/soma (caro/corpus) is not on its own a discriminating difference. A further quality polarizes its relevance: the modal pair sin/glory. Sarx on its own is not evil, but the sin by which Paul qualifies it is, to such a point that this sin then comes to define sarx. On the other hand, following the Judaic meaning of “flesh,” John makes it the flesh of life, which refers, as in the Old Testament, to the complete person—body, soul, and mind. In this respect, one decisive historical point of reference is that of the German esotericists (Weigel, Oetinger, Baader), who make Leiblichkeit into a geistige Leiblichkeit, endowing the body-flesh with a spiritual life that Schelling would turn to his advantage, as the body-flesh that phenomenology would reactivate by relieving it of its substantial materiality, and by recasting it as a vital subjective dynamism. The pair Körper/Leib allows for an operative distinction because of the inertia/life or objective/subjective polarities that the Greek and Latin pairs do not offer and that Hebrew alone allows for through the expanded sense of bāsār. So it is the qualities of sôma-corpus (sin/glory) and of sarx/carne (death/life) that come to be analogous with the qualities of Leib/Körper (subjective lived experience / inert objectivity). We could say, then, that the Leib/Körper polarity is conceptualized without being terminological. In this respect, it is reasonable to follow Paul Ricœur’s appeal to the economy of meaning (body/flesh), and the use of a single term to cover the different concepts that Leib’s history and uses disclose. If we go along with this principle, we will opt for a minimalistic translation of Leib as “body”: we could also convey the phenomenological polarity by using the term “flesh,” given that Husserl uses Leib in a distinctive way, associating it with Körper, and articulating it with Seele. Distinct terms are thus legitimized according to their usage. Either Leib (flesh) works phenomenologically in liaison with Körper, or Leib (body) is associated with the psychic: in German (Leib und Seele), just LEX 565 Cid is asked “As-tu du coeur?’’ (Do you have the heart?). There is nothing specifically Semitic about this. In Aristotle, too, the “heart’’ (kardia [ϰαρδία]) is the end point of sensations, and the starting point of the movements of the organism (cf. RT: Index Aristotelicus, 365b 34–54). And in Egypt, from the Middle Empire on, a heart would be weighed postmortem, a procedure that was supposed to assess the moral worth of the dead person and thus to determine his fate in the afterlife. Attributing higher intellectual functions to the heart is something we find in Latin (cf. Cicero, Tusculanes, I, 9, 18), but this is not at all the case in Greek. The Bible talks about a wise and intelligent heart (Ps 90:2; Prv 15:14). In the Qur’ān, people who “have a strong heart’’ (’ūlū ’l-albāb [األلباب أولو [are those who are intelligent enough to decipher the signs of creation and to see in them traces of the presence of Allah (III, 190). The meaning of “the innermost core,” which allows one to speak of the “heart of something,” is discreetly present in the Bible, which mentions, for example, the “heart” of an oak tree (2 Sm 18:14); it develops in medieval Hebrew and takes on a laudatory meaning under the influence of the Arabic lubb [لب ,[ ّ which can refer to the pit of a fruit and also to what is most pure about a thing, its quintessence. Rémi Brague REFS.: Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Shlomo Pines. Introductory essay by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. . Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–35. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 15. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. . Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Zweiter Teil, 1921–28. Edited by Iso Kern. Husserliana, no. 14. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Kant, Immanuel. Opus postumum. 2 vols. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Vols. 21 and 22 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1936–38. Translation by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen: Opus postumum. Edited by Eckart Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lipps, Theodor. Ästhetik; Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. 2 vols. Leipzig: Voss, 1914–20. McGuckin, John Anthony. St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy; Its History, Theology, and Texts. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1994. Midgley, Mary. “The Soul’s Successors: Philosophy and the Body.” In Religion and the Body, edited by Sarah Coakley, 53–68. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach Zarathustra. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 4 of Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Translation by Adrian Del Caro: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Translation by Kathleen Blamey: Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Paul Deussen. 6 vols. Munich: Piper, 1911–13. Translation by T. Bailey Saunders et al.: The Works of Schopenhauer. Edited by Will Durant. Abridged ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928. . The World as Will and Presentation. Translated by Richard E. Aquila with David Carus. 2 vols. Longman Library. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008–10. Stumpf, Carl. Leib und Seele: Der Entwicklungsgedanke in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie; Zwei Reden. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Barth, 1903. Welton, Donn, ed. The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Wundt, Wilhelm Max. “Über psychische Kausalität.” In Zur Psychologie und Ethik: Zehn ausgewählte Abschnitte aus Wilhelm Wundt, edited by Julius A. Wentzel. Leipzig: Reclam, 1911. Translation by Charles Judd: “Psychical Causality and Its Laws.” In Outlines of Psychology, 352–72. 3rd rev. ed. Leipzig: Engelmann, 1907. (HEBREW] (לֵבָב] LËVAV], לֵב] LËV ARABIC qalb [القلب ,[fu’ād [الفواد [ ّ لب] lubb ], ٴ ENGLISH heart FRENCH coeur GREEK kardia [ϰαρδία] v. HEART, and CONSCIOUSNESS, ESSENCE, GEMÜT, GOGO, INGENIUM, INTELLECTUS, SAMOST’ SOUL, BOX 4, TO TI ÊN EINAI, TRUTH, UNDERSTANDING This word is common to Semitic languages. Its usage represents, as with many languages, a remarkable case of the metaphorical use of a part of the body, considered as central, in order to express the moral worth of an individual or the very essence of something. Arabic has specific words for the heart as an organ (qalb [القلب ,[and less commonly fu’ād [الفواد [לֵב] lëv Hebrew In ]). ٴ refers less to the organ than to the entire thorax (cf. 2 Sm 18:14ff.), with all of the entrails contained within the cavity that it forms. It is from the heart that the very source of life is said to spring (Prv 4:23; cf. 25:13). It is the seat of life force and the center of the psychic life in all its dimensions (cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I, 39). The heart is the source of perceptions (Dt 29:3), memory (Is 46:8 etc.; Jer 3:16, etc.), feelings, and desire—including courage (Ps 40:13), in the sense in which Rodrigue in Corneille’s Le LEX / JUS (LATIN) ENGLISH right, law FRENCH loi, droit GERMAN Recht GREEK nomos [νόμος] ITALIAN diritto SPANISH derecho v. LAW, TORAH, and CIVILTÀ, DROIT [THEMIS], DUTY, FAIR, MORALS, PIETAS, RELIGIO, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, RULE, SOLLEN The Greek nomos [νόμος], implying at the same time the notions of sharing, or division, of the law, of right, and of obligation (see THEMIS), has no corresponding term in modern languages. The exception is present-day Greek, in which two distinct lexical terms still designate the law and division (more precisely “law” and “department”: cf. RT: Mirambel, Petit dictionnaire français-grec, and RT: Pernot, Dictionnaire grec moderne–français)—and in which the root of the word nomos is declined as a series of terms referring to the law (so we have nomiki, the science of law [cf. RT: Kyriakides, Modern Greek-English Dictionary]; nomika, the study of law [cf. RT: Mirambel, ibid.]; nomikos, a lawyer [cf. RT: Mirambel, ibid., and RT: Pernot, ibid.]; and nomodidaskalos, a law professor [cf. RT: Alexandre et al., Dictionnaire français-grec]). The Romans, aware of the correspondence between lex and nomos, emphasized the fact that the Latin word referred to a free choice and not to an imposed division. Thus lex prefigures jus in that it expresses a political will linked to Roman 566 LEX RT: Holy Bible, New International Version). Neither should we forget the weight and name for money (nomisma [νόμισμα] in Greek, from nomos precisely, a point that Aristotle underlines in the Nicomachean Ethics, 5.8.1133a. 30ff.). This is why the balance, or set of scales, has become firmly established as an allegorical figure for human justice. It should come as no surprise that in ancient Roman law a transfer of property required the ritual presence of a bronze ingot and a set of scales (one acquired property per aes et libram, “with bronze and balance”) nor that, in light of the intermediary situation of the laws of the home, an obligation could be created simply by writing in the account book of the father of the family (known as expensilatio). The emergence of the “urbanistic” laws of the urbs and the “civic” laws of the civitas is thus identified with the addition of a metaphorical meaning to instruments that were first used to apprehend the physical world scientifically, then to organize space, and finally to build houses and design towns. In the city of the Republic, norma became a virtual form thanks to which man could make law out of the matter constituted by the society of animals already domesticated by the laws of the home. As for the forma, also derived from the Greek gnômôn, this referred to the mold, and especially the small mold, the formula, which gave a legal form to human relations: in classical Roman law, one could not bring about an action because one possessed a right, but one could have one’s right recognized because a lender had anticipated the small mold of the formula and had placed a legal claim relating to the dispute within it. There was thus a logical chain, but one that went from Greek to Latin, linking nomoi to normae, the norms of a civilization that agreed on its laws, and also, more generally, on what was beautiful, good, and just—these norms establishing within the city, through various sanctions (critique, ridicule, reprobation, banishment, and finally passing legal sentence), a system that frames society using squares and formulas. . The norma became a linguistic vampire. Although it referred solely to the normative world, that is, the world of human activity, it became in modern languages the happy rival of nomos. Nomos is, of course, present in terms such as “economy” and “autonomy,” as well as in a few neologisms in scientific jargon, but “anomaly” still seems almost a grammatical error when opposed to the formidable army of terms like “norms,” “normal,” “normality,” “normalization,” and so on. The linguistic failure of nomos—which conceals its conceptual permanence—could be explained by the political domination of the Greek world by a Roman civilization founded on the preeminence of law and which was determined that the wisdom of law (jurisprudentia) should prevail over every school of Greek philosophy. II. Lex Although jus and lex were unrelated to Greek vocabulary, the proximity of lex to nomos was not difficult for the Romans to perceive, and this was what allowed them to claim jus as something truly their own. In other words, what we call law always expressed, at a time when the Roman Empire referred to itself as the West, a normative system that constituted the imperialism. As for jus, it acquires its full meaning in its interaction with directum (the straight path, the correct way)—which through its popular usage produced, among other terms, “right,” droit, diritto, derecho, and Recht (considered unhesitatingly as translations of jus)—and with rex, the one who draws lines and angles and who thus determines what is inside and outside, allowing for the construction both of the architectural town and of the city as Republic: hence rex, the “sovereign,” the “king.” In the context of the Roman Empire’s military and political victory in Greece, we can see why the Greek nomos succumbed to the Latin norma (square), a linguistic phenomenon indicating a true Roman “squaring off” of ancient civilization. I. From Nomos to Norma The Greek nomos [νόμος] does not explicitly designate the law but rather the “portion assigned” (nemein [νέμειν], “to distribute”; see THEMIS) to something or someone, particularly in terms of its species or genus. So men, unlike animals, are assigned dikê [δίϰη], “justice,” and not violence (“So listen to justice [dikês], forget violence [biês (βίης)] forever: this is the law that the Cronid assigned [nomon dietaxe (νόμον διέταξε)] for men”; Hesiod, Works and Days, 275–76). There is no distinction between the nomoi that regulate the universe and the nomoi of the city: indeed, the normative process that makes a certain type of mammal into a political animal takes the form of a determining structure of authority in which man is domesticated by the home before being civilized by the city. It is a matter of being shaped by the laws (nomoi) of the home (oikos; see ECONOMY and OIKONOMIA). Submission to the “laws of the home” was for preChristian antiquity the first stage of managing living beings, whether human, animal, or vegetable. The oikos (the domus in Latin) domesticates living beings, with only humans able subsequently to undergo the selective process of insertion into the city (Baud, Le droit). On the essential function of the laws of the home, one only need recall that the confrontation between Creon and Antigone, the most famous passage in ancient literature on the opposition between divine laws and those of the city, concerns the laws of the home that are dominated by funerary worship, which is ultimately related to the law of Zeus (Sophocles, Antigone, lines 440–601). Linguistically, there is no relation between nomos, lex, and jus. The contact between Greek and Latin is indeed somewhat perverse, since the transition occurs by way of instruments of measure. In fact, the Greek gnômôn [γνῶμων] (which refers specifically to a sundial and a ruler) is the source of the Latin norma, a square, a term no doubt borrowed, via the Etruscan language, from the accusative of gnômôn (see RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v.). Nomos is what is attributed through an act of sharing or division and designates justice as first of all the justness of a measure. Measuring tools, designed to be used by a builder, are the true interface between justness and justice. What we find here in the Greco-Roman world is clearly expressed in the Bible: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin” (Lv 19:35–36; an ephah was “a dry measure having the capacity of about 3/5 of a bushel or about 22 liters,” and a hin was “a liquid measure having the capacity of about 1 gallon or about 3.8 liters”; LEX 567 English registers the first usages of “to civilize” in this sense in the last years of the sixteenth century. A. Inscribing lex The Greeks also respected “unwritten laws,” those agraphoi nomoi [ἄγϱαφοι νόμοι] that came down directly from a divine being and that were consonant with natural law, like those unprescribed laws of the family that Antigone obeys in disobeying Creon, and that, unlike written laws, could not foundation of civilization. Since Romans had agreed to refer to the art of “being together” as “civility” (civilitas) (Duclos, De la civilité), including being together within their civil law, the French elaborated, one after the other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the terms civiliser (to civilize) and civilisation (civilization) in order to refer, respectively, to a procedural act and to a legal situation: the fact of entering, and then of being within, a civil law (Starobinski, “Le mot civilisation”; see also CIVILTÀ). The romance languages followed suit, and 1 Gnômôn, metron, kanôn v. TRUTH, Box 2 A large number of nouns are derived from gignôsko [γιγνώσϰω], “to learn to know by dint of effort” and, in the aorist, “to recognize, discern, understand” (RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque), such as gnôsis [γνῶσις] (search, enquiry, knowledge, gnosis), gnômê [γνῶμη] (intelligence, judgment, decision, intention, maxim; the composite term suggnômê [συγγνώμη] signifies forgiveness; see PARDON), and gnôma [γνῶμα] (a sign of recognition). One of these terms, gnômôn [γνῶμων], as an adjective described someone who discerns, understands, and judges; as a noun, gnômôn refers to “that which regulates or rules.” It had many technical uses, whether it was a question of people, experts, inspectors (hoi gnômones [οἱ γνώμονες] are the guardians of the sacred olive trees; Lysias, Orations 7), or, especially, things or instruments that measured time and space: the needle on a sundial and the dial itself (Plutarch, Morals, 1006e; Herodotus, Histories, 2.109), a clepsydra or water clock (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 42b), the sharp edge of a forest (Apollodorus of Damascus, Poliorcetics, 149.4), and above all a carpenter’s square, which the Pythagoreans used to explain through representation how numbers are generated (a square [gnomon], that, as Aristotle emphasizes in the Categories, “surrounding a square, magnifies it without altering it” [15a 30]). It was the tool par excellence of astronomy, of geometry (the gnômôn in Euclid is the complementary parallelogram of another parallelogram or of a triangle), of arithmetics (the gnômôn is the odd factor of an even number, as 3 is in relation to 6), and the tool in ancient mathematics of the co-constitution of arithmetic and geometry. We switch with this single word from the most intellectual to the most concrete (the gnômônes are also the teeth by which one determines the age of a horse or a donkey; Xenophon, On Horsemanship, 3.1), from the operations of the mind to the instruments by which it is inscribed in the world. The same type of semantic extension is true of the canon and the measuring stick. Metron [μέτϱον], “measure,” from the same family as mêtis [μήτις] (“cunning”: see MÊTIS), refers equally to a measuring instrument (the surveyor’s stick [Iliad, 12.422]); the measures of wine and water [Iliad, 7.471]), the factor in a product (Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, 83–84), as well as to the quantity measured, space, or time (sea, youth), in particular a verse or meter (as distinct from melos [μέλος] and rhuthmos [ῥυθμός]; Plato, Gorgias, 502c, and Laws, 2.669d). Above all, as “measure” it means a just measure (after Hesiod, Works and Days, 694, it is linked to kairos [ϰαιϱός]; see MOMENT). Aristotle emphasizes, for example, that “there is a metron for the size of a city, as for everything else, animals, plants, organs” (Politics, 7.4.1326a, 35–37)—in this case the size being equal to the distance a voice will carry. Metron as a (just) measure and metriotês [μετϱιότης], “moderation,” are thus linked to meson [μέσον] and to mesotês [μεσότης], the (exact) middle, which are used to define virtue (arêtê [ἀϱητή]; see VIRTUE; cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1106b 24–28). From metric system to just measure then, mathematics and morality, via poetry and music, are intrinsically linked. But a more telling testimony than anything else of the impact in ancient times of the metron and the art of measuring (metrêtikê [μετϱητιϰή]; Plato, Protagoras, 356–357) is the celebrated phrase of Protagoras about man as measure and his violent reinterpretations: “man is the measure of all things [pantôn chrêmatôn metron estin anthrôpos (πάντων χϱημάτων μέτϱον ἐστὶν ἄνθϱωπος)], of those which are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not” (80 B1 DK = Sextus, Adversus mathematicos, 7.60; see RES, Box 1; cf. Cassin, L’effet sophistique, 228–31 and 261–63). For the Plato of the Laws, it is God who is the measure (4.716c), and for the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics, it is the spoudaios [σπουδαῖος], the good man, who is in himself kanôn [ϰάνων] and metron (5.11.1136a 32–33). With kanôn, we move this time from matter to operation. The kanôn is the stem of a reed or the stalk of a rush (kanna [ϰάννα]) and refers to any long and straight bar made of wood (the bars or handle of a shield, the keel or the centerboard of a boat, the stick of a distaff, the beam of a set of scales, the key of a flute, the posts of a bed), particularly the ruler and line of woodworkers and carpenters (Euripides, Trojans, 6; Plato, Philebus, 56b), from which we get rules, models, principles (Euripides, Hecuba, 602: “we know evil, when we have learned good as kanôn”). Bailly (RT: Dictionnaire grec-français) explains that in music, kanôn refers to a kind of tuning fork; in history, to the different ages; in grammar, to the rules and the model of verb declensions and conjugations: in short, from the canon of Polycletus to the classical catalogue of alexandrines, by way of the logic (to kanonikon [τὸ ϰανονιϰόν]) of the Epicureans, a canon always provides the rule. The word was borrowed by administrative Latin to designate a tax, and by the language of the church to refer to a rule, or a canon (RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). This set of terms, which explains why “no-one may enter if he is not a geometrician”—the words engraved above Plato’s Academy—attests to the close relationship in Greek between mathematics and morality. The Latin synergy between architecture and law constitutes one of the possible triumphs of this Greek relation. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Robin, Léon. La pensée grecque et les origines de l’esprit scientifique. Edited by P.-M. Schuhl and G. A. Rocca-Serra. Expanded ed. with complementary Refs.:. Paris: Albin Michel, 1973. First published in 1923. 568 LEX great as to temper the pride he felt when he contemplated a Roman culture based on law and that, sustaining as it did an empire which had conquered Greece, could claim that its science and wisdom in law, or jurisprudentia, was a match for Greek philosophy (Cicero, On the Orator, 1.34.195, and On the Republic, 1.22 and 2.15). This was why he wanted to draw a clear distinction between nomos and lex. For him, then, the Greek nomos was a process of distribution, whereas the Roman lex was a deliberate choice: And so they believe that law is intelligence, whose natural function it is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing. They think that this quality has derived its name in Greek from the idea of granting to every man his own [Graeco nomine nomon suum cuique tribuendo appelatam], and in our language it has been named for the idea of choosing [ego nostra a legendo]. For as they have attributed the idea of fairness to the word law, so we have given it that of selection [ut illi aequitatis sic nos delectus vim in lege ponimus], though both ideas properly belong to law. (Cicero, On the Laws, in Santangelo, “Law and Divination,” n. 15) Through its laws, Rome asserted itself as master of its destiny, an imperial destiny, which declared as one of its duties that of giving laws, leges datae, to the nations its conquered. The victorious general, or the governor appointed to administer the conquered territory, would generally give an engraved, public law, and the nations making up the empire were progressively identified by a lex, either original or given. Rome was sovereign judge of all other laws. So Justinian declared in 553, in Novella 146 of Corpus juris civilis that the Jews indulged in “senseless interpretations” of the Bible. Since it could not be linked to the “correct reason” of natural law, the Torah placed Jews outside the law. This is where we can locate the origin of Western anti-Semitism (Legendre, Les enfants du texte). This ancient trajectory of the word lex, which led to its inscription within the body of the emperor, while also inversely pointing to an ethnic identity, explains why, as it traversed the Middle Ages, it could on the one hand refer to any fragment of what the medieval university called the Body of Roman Law (Justinian’s Corpus juris civilis), and on the other hand could refer during the Frankish period to that which distinguished one people from another (the lex of the Salic Franks—the Lex Burgundionum, or Burgundian Laws—not to mention the lex of the different Gallo-Roman groups and thereafter written by the barbarian king, whose subjects they had become!). III. Jus Finally, why do we talk about “law” (droit) when we are dealing with what is “legal” (juridique)? This important lexical question resists attempts to obscure it. A. Of a so-called jus naturale A great deal has been written by lexicographers on the origins of jus, which is so intimately bound up with Roman cultures (RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique be usurped by any tyrant (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.1373b 4–15; cf. Hoffmann, “Le nomos, ‘Tyran des hommes’ ”) On the other hand, the Romans inscribed within the West the mystique of the founding text, even before it was reinforced by their own adherence to a “religion of the Book.” Although it originally referred to a religious law, lex retained only traces of this origin in a few rare phrases. Unlike jus, the lex of the Romans was essentially human, first of all because it required some human work to give it its lapidary form (in the broad sense of what is engraved in stone or bronze), and because later on the Romans conceived that it could be incarnated by one man, the emperor. Unlike custom (mos), which presupposed a tacit common understanding, lex was what had to be engraved and displayed in the town. Legem figere means “to engrave the law in bronze or stone and display it in the forum”; legem delere, perrumpere, perfringere is “to erase,” “get rid of,” or “break the law” (RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. lex). Lex thus functioned as a kind of hinge connecting the materiality of the town (urbs) to the immateriality of the city (civitas), thereby confirming the link between architecture and law suggested by norma. The most important lex for the Romans was the Law of the Twelve Tables, a written record from the fifth century BCE of the customs of a primitive and superstitious rural society, yet which Cicero presented as containing more wisdom than all of the schools of Athens (Cicero, On the Orator, 44). The Romans did claim to respect a natural law that could be discovered by “correct reason” (Cicero, On the Republic, 3), but they never missed an opportunity to point out that nothing was closer to correct reason than Roman law. With the Law of the Twelve Tables, the Romans went from engraving in stone to writing “within the heart.” Indeed, Romans in Cicero’s time learned the Law of the Twelve Tables as a rhyme (Cicero, On the Laws, 2.4), despite the fact that it had become an archaic text whose meaning was only understood, and even then imperfectly, by a small minority of scholars. Even though in the second century CE writers were still defending its wisdom (Gellius, Attic Nights, 30.1), the most important thing for the Romans was that the Law of the Twelve Tables was inscribed within the materiality of the town as well as in the legal truth of the city. Engraved on the walls of the town, then in the hearts of the Romans, the lex was finally marked upon the emperor’s body. Drawing the consequences from the fact that the emperor of the late Roman Empire had become the cornerstone of Roman law, and reappropriating a phrase that the Hellenistic monarchies had popularized (nomos empsuchos [νόμος ἔμψυχος]), Justinian’s compilation transmitted to the West the idea that the emperor (and, thereafter, the pope, the king, the state, etc.) was a “living law” (lex animata; Justinian, Corpus juris civilis, Novellae 105.2, §4), which medieval jurists completed by adding that he had “all the archives in his heart” (a recurring theme in the entire work of Pierre Legendre; see in particular L’empire de la vérité). B. Nomos and lex Cicero thematized the relationship between nomos and lex. Like all Romans, and like everyone in the ancient world, his admiration for Plato knew no bounds, but it was not so LEX 569 was handed over to the victim of that injury, was nothing other than the vestige of the archaic principle according to which any living body could be materially committed to another in a relationship of obligation. However, because they considered that humans were clearly distinct from other animals, Roman legal advisors agreed that the child of a slave should never be kept by a usufructuary, yet the latter was perfectly entitled, at the end of his contract, to return the cow or mare but to keep the calf or the colt (Terré, L’enfant de l’esclave). Justinian’s Institutes was a pedagogical work that moved from the general to the particular in order to arrive at the real object of the study: Roman civil law. This didactic operation starts out with the nomos common to men and animals, for which there is only the noun jus, since the ultimate objective is jus civile. So natural law (jus naturale) is retained, although to be more precise, it only appears in the introduction to the rubrics (bk. 1, title 2), announcing what are in a sense the real legal topics, which are then defined in the first paragraph with a gradation in their relevance: “[L]aw is divided into the law of the people (common to all men) and civil law (particular to a given city)” (jus autem civile vel gentium ita dividitur). As we can see, true law excludes the nomos of nature, translated as jus naturale, and only comprises two parts: the law of the people (comprising the most common contracts), and civil law, the real subject of the treatise, which can finally be achieved through the rhetorical operation of going from the general to the particular. Indeed, even though the Institutes concede that the laws of Solon and Dracon might have once been considered as the civil law of the Athenians, it goes without saying that, in the spirit of the work, the true civil law is that of the Romans. This is testimony to the often scornful condescension that Roman legal advisors showed, much as Cicero himself had done (On the Orator, 1.44.97), whenever they mentioned the law of other cities, but it is also a consequence of the fact that, since Caracalla’s edict of 212, all those living within the empire had become Roman citizens. “What we call law has nothing ‘natural’ about it,” writes Pierre Legendre, “any more that it constitutes an ‘objective’ phenomenon whose universal character is self-evident” (Sur la question dogmatique). Neither in Greek literature nor in Roman law do we find anything that is truly natural law. Whether it is a question of the unwritten laws (agraphoi nomoi) of the Greeks or of the jus naturale of the Romans, what we see is nothing more than a natural order guaranteed by a deity. Antigone appealed to Zeus’s law in opposing Creon, and the Christianized empire of Justinian’s time attributed “natural laws” to divine Providence, using a plural that reinforced the allegiance to the unwritten laws of the Greeks: “naturalia quidem jura divina quadam providentia constituta” (the laws of natureare established by divine providence; Justinian, Institutes, 1.2, §11). So quite logically, therefore, in 1140, the Decree of Gratian, the founding text of the new discipline of canon law (jus canonicum), opens with the following definition of natural law: “Natural law is what is contained in the Law [the Law of Moses: the Old Testament] and the Gospels” (Jus nature est, quod in Lege et in Evangelio continetur; Decree of Gratian, 1 d.a.c. 1). And following this same logic, Thomas Aquinas made natural law de la langue latine, s.v. jus; RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des insitutions indo-européennes, vol. 2, chap. 3: “Jus et serment à Rome”). The indisputable connection to an oath (jusjurandum) firmly designates a religious expression that has the force of a law and a sacred expression of commitment. The desacralization of jus occurred over a long period of time. This took the form initially of making within the law a separate public law (jus publicum) containing everything to do with “sacred things, the priesthood and the public offices” ( Justinian, Corpus juris civilis, Digest, 1.1.1, §2: “Publicum jus in sacris, in sacerdotibus, in magistratibus consistit”), and then by the medieval elaboration of canon law, which restricted public law to anything to do with public offices (Chevrier, “Remarques”). In addition, and quite understandably, imbuing jus with a religious meaning gave to the word, which expressed the law, an important political force. Linking the founding of a town to the existence of a city that had become an empire, Roman legal advisors created an indissoluble bond between jus and the political existence of Rome. Historians and Roman jurists transcribed the Ciceronian theory, according to which lex was at the origin of jus, into a patriotic register—thereby confirming our critical attitude when confronted by the bravura passages of the philosopher lawyer— and they have always emphasized the fact that the Law of the Twelve Tables was the sole “source of law,” the fons juris of Rome, and of this empire that made the West. The transition in Latin from nomos to norma established as a first principle that law, unlike justice, but like architecture, was necessarily man-made. This is why it is imperative to understand what Romans meant when they, before anyone else, talked about “natural law.” According to the author of Justinian’s Institutes (1.2), which was written in 533 to train future jurists of the empire, “natural law is that which she has taught all animals” (jus naturale est, quod natura omnia animalia docuit) and “a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea” (nam jus istud non humani generis proprium est, sed omnium animalium quae in coelo, quae in terra, quae in mari nascuntur; Institutes of Justinian, trans. modified—Ed.). As for what this jus naturale consists of, he only makes allusion to the union of male and female, to procreation, and to the education of the young. One essential text proves that we are dealing here not with what we would call law, but with what the Greeks referred to as the nomos that we have in common with animals: Demosthenes’s Against Aristogiton (Orations), in which he defined as a nomos of nature [τῆς φύσεως νόμος] the fact that humans love their parents just as much as animals do (25.65). So the jus naturale that Justinian’s Institutes discusses does not belong to the normative world in which what we call the law operates but rather to the sphere of the most elementary of human observations. For jus naturale to come into the sphere of law properly speaking, one would have to have granted animals the legal status of persons. It is true that the philosophers of pre-Socratic antiquity, especially within the Pythagorean school, reflected deeply on the way in which one could conceive of justice between humans and animals (see on this point the groundbreaking work of Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes), but law has never taken this into account. Noxal surrender, whereby an animal that had caused injury 570 LIBERAL Gellius, Aulus. Attic Nights. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Vols. 1–3. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. . Les nuits attiques, IV. Translated by Y. Julien. Paris. Les Belles Lettres, 1998. Gratian. Corpus juris cononici. Vol. 1, Decretum, edited by E. Friedberg. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druk–u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959. Hesiod. Works and Days. In The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Hoffmann, Geneviève. “Le nomos, ‘Tyran des hommes.’” Droit et Cultures 20 (1990): 19–30. Justinian I. Corpus juris civilis. Edited by T. Mommsen and P. Krueger. Berlin: Weidmann, 1886. . The Institutes of Justinian. Translated by J. B. Moyle. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913. . Justinian’s Institutes. Translated and with an introduction by Peter Birks and Grant McLeod. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Legendre, Pierre. L’empire de la vérité: Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels. Paris: Fayard, 1983. . Les enfants du texte: Étude sur la function parentale des états. Paris: Fayard, 1999. . Sur la question dogmatique en Occident: Aspects théoriques. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Santangelo, Federico. “Law and Divination in the Late Roman Republic.” In Law and Religion in the Roman Republic, edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, 31–56. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2012. Starobinski, Jean. “Le mot civilization.” In Le temps de la réflexion, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Terré, François. L’enfant de l’esclave: Génétique et droit. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. Xenophon. The Economist. In The Shorter Socratic Writings: “Apology of Socrates to the Jury,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Symposium,” translated and with interpretive essays by Robert C. Bartlett, with Thomas Pangle and Wayne Ambler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. the means by which men approached a divine law that was beyond their intellect (Strauss, Natural Right and History). B. Jus and directum So in antiquity and in the Middle Ages in the West, divine laws (lois divines) absorbed natural law (droit) because law, properly speaking, was considered to be man-made. It was a necessarily human product because it was made using a ruler and a square. This was why the Roman jus, which was in fact visibly present as the root of several words associated with the “juridical,” gave way to directum (RT: Du Cange, Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis, vol. 3, s.v. directum), from which were formed most of the terms in the West that refer to the law: diritto (Ital.), derecho (Sp.), diretto (Port.), droit (Fr.), Recht (Ger.), right (Eng.), and so on. Light is shed on the mystery if we take into consideration that the Digest, this monumental work that Justinian’s compilers devoted to legal doctrine, ends with a concluding title (50.17), the “Rules of Ancient Law” (“De regulis juris antiqui”), and if we understand that the king (rex) is what links regula to directum. Gnômôn and norma opened up and circumscribed the space of norms, within which the rex designated rules, and prepared the way for what we today call law (droit). Before being a king, the rex is first and foremost the one who draws straight lines (RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des insitutions indo-européennes, vol. 2, s.v. Rex), the one who makes a directum, that is, a straight line, using a regula or a ruler, the tool enabling one to rule (regere), that is, to “direct in a straight line,” and then to “be a director or a commander” (RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, entry rego). The rex Romulus ploughed the first straight furrow, from which the town (urbs) and the city (civitas, the place of civil law) were built. By distinguishing what was sacred from what was profane (at Rome there was a sacred inner space, the pomoerium, that one could not enter armed) and also by distinguishing what was Roman territory from what was not, the rex defined as well the extendable site of civil law within which the West was formed. Jean-Pierre Baud REFS.: Baud, Jean-Pierre. Le droit de vie et de mort: Archéologie de al bioéthique. Paris: Aubier, 2001. Caillemer, Exupère. “Nomoi.” In Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, edited by C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, vol. 4, fasc. 1. Paris: Hachette, 1908. Chevrier, Georges. “Remarques sur l’introduction et les vicissitudes de la distinction du ‘jus privatum’ et du ‘jus publicum; dans les œuvres des anciens juristes français.” In Archives de philosophie du droit, 5–77. Paris: Sirey, 1952. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. “On the Commonwealth” and “On the Laws.” Edited by James E. G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . Orations. Edited and translated by John T. Ramsey, G. Manuwald, and D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Demosthenes. Orations. Edited by A. T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. Duclos, Denis. De la civilité: Comment les sociétés apprivoisent la puissance. Paris: La Découverte, 1993. Fontenay, Élisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998. LIBERAL, LIBERALISM v. CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVIL SOCIETY, ECONOMY, LAW, LIBERTY, LIGHT, PEOPLE, POLITICS, POWER, STATE, WHIG The English term “liberalism” evokes a political and cultural tradition that has no real French equivalent, which makes the word difficult not so much to translate as to use correctly. There have, of course, been French liberals, but when all is said and done, they have been fairly distant from the English model, and ended up abandoning what constitutes its core feature, namely the individual. With its origins in the Glorious Revolution and in the work of John Locke, liberalism in the sense of an affirmation of the priority of individual liberties, and their protection against the abuses of the sovereign or the collectivity, represents a national cultural tradition that spread across the rest of Europe, and has found its fullest expression in the American Constitution. But it is not easy to grasp its meaning outside of this context. It refers to a set of attitudes and convictions rather than a doctrine whose contours are well defined. This can lead to complete misunderstandings: thus, liberal designates a progressive or social-democratic attitude in the United States, but in France the word signals an opposition to the welfare state. It seems perhaps more satisfactory to draw a distinction between the acceptance and the refusal of a certain modernity: “liberalism” would then designate an acceptance of market capitalism, of individualism, of permissive morals, and a refusal of nationalism and of the all-powerful state. Given the ideological and emotional charge of this language, we should perhaps content ourselves with LIBERAL 571 Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, and, more recently, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and John Rawls. Its most characteristic feature is the priority of individual freedom. In opposition to the ancient ideal of direct or participatory democracy, as exemplified by the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberalism would instead represent modernity, with the “freedom of the Moderns” or the protection of the private sphere of individuals against any abusive interference, and it would defend the sovereignty of the individual for reasons that were both epistemological and moral. The epistemic foundation of liberalism, inherited from Locke and then redefined by Mill and Kant, and later by Popper, can be located in the affirmation of an intrinsic relation between the values of truth and of individual freedom. The access to truth appeared to be essentially linked to the individual’s freedom of judgment and of inquiry, and to the absence of barriers inhibiting dialogue and discovery. The origin of this idea is to be found in Greek philosophy, in the Socratic ideal of the free man, of which liberalism is the direct descendant (certainly in Mill, at any rate). Far from being a society like any other, the liberal world will claim to establish an essential link to truth and reason. Its moral basis lies in the conception, inherited from Kant, of the person and of his or her inalienable rights, a conception that leads an author like Rawls to place justice and rights at the heart of liberalism: Each member of society is thought have an inviolability founded on justice or, as some say, on natural right, which even the welfare of every one else cannot override. Therefore, in a just society the basic liberties are taken for granted and the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. (A Theory of Justice) This priority of freedom leads to the defense of the theory that the power of the state and of government should be limited through the existence of a “Bill of Rights”; by establishing “checks and balances,” the best known of which is “judicial review”; by the separation of church and the state; and by the secularization of political power—even when there is an “established” religion in place, as in Great Britain. . It is only in recent times that liberalism has moved closer to democratic ideals. Indeed, liberalism traditionally mistrusted democracies, and was suspicious of the “despotism” of majorities, a mistrust that was articulated eloquently by Tocqueville. Since popular and electoral forms of democracy had shown themselves to be powerless in the face of the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, they were rejected in the twentieth century by liberalism as carrying within them the seeds of tyranny and of antiliberalism, as conveyed by the debatable notion of “popular sovereignty.” This gave rise to the conception of a liberal democracy, in which constitutionalism tempers the errant behavior of elected majorities. But the weak point of liberalism, in contrast to the Republican ideal, remains therefore its failure to leave room for political participation (the “liberty of the Ancients”). It can lead only to social atomism, since its individualism deprives it of any true doctrine of citizenship, or of political community. describing certain of its contemporary usages that translators need to be aware of, and between which they will have to choose. For the sake of convenience we will make a distinction between a liberal “philosophy”; the political positions that lay claim to this philosophy; economic liberalism; and finally, a rather vaguely defined social and cultural attitude particular to the Anglophone world and to northern Europe. The word “liberal,” identical in contemporary English and French, is derived from the Latin liberalis, which designates that which relates to a person who is free (in contrast to a slave), and his physical or moral qualities (“noble, gracious, honorable, beneficent, generous”), as exemplified by the “liberal arts”: see especially ART, II, BILDUNG, CIVILTÀ, CULTURE. The entry ELEUTHERIA has a discussion of the different paradigms used to think and express liberty, including the one derived from the French liberté (as opposed to “freedom”), from the root *leudh (to believe), which is a root common to the Greek eleutheria [ἐλευθερία], the Latin liberi (children), liberty, or liberal. On the network freedom-nobility-virtue, see BEAUTY, Box 1, VIRTÙ, Box 1; cf. LIBERTY. Politically, the term “liberal,” which originally referred to the virtue of liberality, has only come into usage fairly recently; what has been called liberal since the nineteenth century are those political movements that defend the legacy of the English and American revolutions, that is, limiting the powers of the state in the name of the rights of the individual. This limitation is by way of various institutional arrangements, such as representative government, and the separation of powers, and always presumes a clear distinction between the “state” and “civil society.” Liberalism in this sense rejects any integral political control of the economy, but does not rule out a certain redistribution of income. The French term libéral, which does not refer to the same tradition, cannot, of course, be superimposed on the English term: see below, and WHIG; see also CONSERVATIVE, and cf. CIVIL SOCIETY, LAW, POLITICS. I. The Origins of Liberalism As a complex cultural and political reality, liberalism seems to have a certain consistency at an intellectual level. But the myth of liberalism’s intellectual unity has been shattered, and we now talk instead of liberalisms. We can at least distinguish between two historical forms, the second of which is better known. The first liberalism was the “liberalism of diversity” (W. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism”), a legacy of the Protestant Reformation and the War of Religions, which took the form, particularly in Locke, of an appeal for tolerance with respect to the diversity of religious beliefs. It was based on a fear of civil war, whence the expression “liberalism of fear” (J. Shklar, Ordinary Vices), rather than on the idea of tolerance as a positive ideal. The second liberalism, “the liberalism of autonomy,” emerged out of the Enlightenment and out of Kant’s work. He justified tolerance in terms of an appeal to universal reason, as a factor that could ultimately unify humankind. So it would be wrong simply to equate liberalism with the Enlightenment. Beyond these distinctions, however, we can identify several constant features within liberal philosophy as it was championed, in different ways, by Kant, Humboldt, Benjamin Constant, John 572 LIBERAL most often fervent democrats who are very attached to the “formal liberties” (to certain of these, at any rate) that most of the “leftist” tendencies of the Old World do not really value. There is, moreover, a specifically American genealogy of radicalism, which aims to revive the democratic elements of the national tradition by harking back to figures such as Thomas Paine (during the Revolutionary era), or even the abolitionist Garrison: on closer examination, it becomes apparent that this radicalism owes a great deal to the “liberal” and puritanical roots of American democracy— hence, the quite accurate characterization of the American Revolution, by the historian Gordon S. Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution), as a “radical” revolution. In this context, we could justifiably see “liberals” as representing a moderate left. The following are, or were, all liberals: supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, lawyers who have defended the rights of women and of blacks, advocates of a security policy that is more preventive than punitive, or even all those who accepted the profound changes that have affected the American way of life since the 1960s. It goes without saying that, as is also the case with the original French distinction between right and left, the relational nature of these definitions means that the respective positions of the “liberals,” “conservatives,” and “radicals” on any specific problem can vary. Thus, for example, a certain activism on the part of the Supreme Court justices, which came across as conservative during the time when it blocked reforms deemed to be progressive, belongs now, on the contrary, to the shared “liberal” culture of the present age, marked by the historic role played by Chief Justice Earl Warren and his immediate successors (the fight against racial segregation, making abortion a constitutional right, and so forth); and conversely, most conservatives today II. Liberalism as a Political Reality: “Radicals,” “Conservatives,” and “Liberals” It is important to note, at the outset, that the term “liberalism” has only a relational meaning, as a function of the existence or absence of other political or social movements, in particular long-standing worker movements, and communist or socialist parties, which were established in the nineteenth century. In the exemplary case of the United States, where the three political families (conservatism, liberalism, radicalism) are different from those in Europe, and can only really be defined through their relations to each other, liberalism clearly occupies more or less the ground of the political left as it is understood in Europe. Conservatives or, more recently, neo-Conservatives, correspond roughly to the European right wing, but with nuances that have to do with particularities of American history. There is no place in the imaginative world of this history for the ancien régime: while religion, notably Protestantism, plays a central role, even though the Constitution has broken away from the idea on any established religion. So American conservatives very much favor security and tough penal politics (“law and order”); they distrust the welfare state, in the name of both individual property and individual responsibility; they are worried about the difficulties that the institution of the family is undergoing, or about the decline of churches, and some of them are even inclined to support the positions of the religious right on questions such as abortion, prayer in school, or the anti-Darwinian teaching of creationism. Radicals, in contrast to liberals, would correspond to the European extreme left, but their lack of a Jacobin tradition, and especially of any Leninist ideology, means they are 1 Checks, balances, and institutional restraints in the Anglo-Saxon world v. JUSTICE a. Checks and balances To the classic doctrine of the simple separation of powers (Montesquieu), the British constitutional practice has, since the eighteenth century, added the idea of the balance and control of powers by each other. The term “check” (untranslatable into French) refers to the capacity of control and prevention leading to an equilibrium, or to “balances.” In the American Constitution, this principle of checks and balances has given the president the power, among others, to block legislation and to nominate judges to the Supreme Court; the Senate can ratify treaties; and the House of Representatives can itself initiate the process of impeaching the president, etc. b. Judicial review “Judicial review” first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a typically American constitutional conception, and it has come to be part of most contemporary democratic regimes. Whenever there is a conflict between the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers, or between the regions (or states) and the central (or federal) power, or even between the citizens and the state, there is a higher moral authority (the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Council, etc.), which has the power to decide and to judge whether laws (or actions of the state, etc.) comply or not with the Constitution. c. Judicial activism / judicial restraint This concerns a fundamental dilemma of any constitutional philosophy, which could be expressed as follows: when should one accept the verdict of an election, and when should one intervene and defend what one believes to be the “principles” of the Constitution? Divided between activism (for example, at the time of the New Deal, which judges had condemned as anticonstitutional) and the duty to restraint with respect to legitimately elected powers, or of laws voted in Congress, magistrates in constitutional courts cannot lay claim to objectivity, and consider themselves as simple interpreters of the Constitution and of the fundamental laws. It is in this sense that one should understand the question of the “power of judges.” LIBERAL 573 since liberals there have been led more and more to efface the individual from their preoccupations, and to come round ultimately to republicanism and statism (L. Jaume, L’individu effacé). If French “radicals” could no doubt place themselves somewhere between their American homonyms and “liberals,” a further “leftism” (sinistrisme), to borrow René Rémond’s expression, pushed them more toward the right with the development of socialist, and then communist, political parties. It is clear in any case that, until quite recently, one had to be very cautious about transferring the American categories of “conservatism,” “radicalism,” and “liberalism” to discussions of French politics. Conservatism was weakened because many of its themes were taken over by the far-right party Action Française: the most liberal republicans, in the European sense of the term “liberal,” certainly formed an important trend during the Third Republic, but they had no successors within subsequent political movements (only a few politicians aligned themselves with their politics). III. Liberalism and the Market Would it clarify matters, then, to link liberalism to a conception of society in which the market and “civil society,” in Hegel’s sense, would be the true agents of social organization, thereby making the role of the state secondary? This approach is tempting, since if we make the role of the state definitive, we end up with a split between individualist liberals and interventionist and centralizing antiliberals, on both the left and the right, which would perhaps correspond better to present-day transformations in French democracy and society. The market has, indeed, been conceived by some authors, the most famous of whom is Friedrich von Hayek, as a political principle that limits power, and thus as the source of a greater freedom of choice for individuals. But this conception has led to further confusions, and for this reason in English the term “libertarianism” is preferred to “liberalism.” . On the other hand, for social-democratic liberals, best represented by the philosopher John Rawls—but the economist would say they are in favor of a certain “judicial restraint” (.c). The fact that liberalism is also a philosophical movement whose definition is itself an important matter of debate can complicate things even further, since politically conservative movements can be led to present themselves as liberal (see A. Bloom’s foreword to L. Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern). Moreover, one could legitimately think that the respective positions are always essentially situated within a broader context, which remains that of liberalism in the wider sense, which is to say, a politics inscribed within the constitutional framework of a representative government. The situation is obviously quite different in Europe, and particularly in France, where liberalism is historically the movement that has, one might say, consciously pursued the development of a “modern regime” based on the defense of individual freedoms and rights, while resisting the democratic excesses of the “tyranny of public opinion” and, above all, of socialism. Although it has its origins in England, it also had a number of very eminent representatives in France (Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville) and even in Germany (Wilhelm von Humboldt). Its golden age was in the nineteenth century, and it has appeared to be on the wane since then, with the progress of socialism, the establishment of worker and trade union traditions, and the rise of the postwar welfare state, all of which has led European liberalism to be more closely aligned with the conservative right. Margaret Thatcher’s new right in Great Britain appropriated the term “liberal” and gave it a new meaning in order to wage war on both the welfare state and the paternalism of traditional conservatives. She thus introduced so-called liberal deregulatory and monetarist economic policies, which did not prevent her from reinforcing and centralizing the state in a way that was totally opposed to the liberal conception of politics. Liberals everywhere came to occupy a rather vague middle ground, along with the more moderate tendencies of the Christian Democrats (liberal parties can act as bridge parties, as in Germany—or be prevented from doing so because of the electoral system, as in Great Britain). Within a broader context, the situation in France is rather unique, 2 Libertarianism Libertarianism represents the position that goes furthest in defending the minimal state, advocating a principle of nonintervention and of nonredistribution for the most disadvantaged, based on a theory of alternative justice—one of entitlements or freely acquired property rights (Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia), without a principle of justice (for instance, a principle that would affirmatively mandate equality of opportunity, or that would establish the principle that certain needs are basic, and their fulfillment equally so) that would act as a corrective of this initial distribution. A position such as this is inspired by the idea of the self-regulation of economic and social change, illustrated by the metaphor of the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith. It leans upon Vilfredo Pareto’s principle of “optimality,” that is, the existence of points of equilibrium in the market, and argues that the market by itself provides the criteria of justice: a distribution is optimal or just when there is one single individual whose position would be worsened if distribution were modified to compensate for the situation of the most disadvantaged. Freedom of exchange is thus sufficient to ensure its justice, with any intervention of the state being unjust because it limits individual freedoms. REFS.: Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974. Van Parius, Philippe, Qu’est-ce qu’une société juste? Paris: Seuil, 1991. 574 LIBERAL to the zivile Gesellschaft, that is, the “public forum” within which citizens of a democracy organize themselves, communicate, act together, cooperate, and develop their potential, without necessarily going through the structures of the state, or through a centralized bureaucracy. This is a culture for which the world of associations, far from being marginal, is at the heart of the full development of the individual, and of his or her peaceful relationships with others. This social dimension of liberalism is often overlooked by those who understand individual freedom solely in terms of its tension with an external authority, as the “freedom to say no.” This misunderstanding corresponds to a religious division within Europe, and the question can be clarified if we consider liberalism in light of Protestant values, in the sense in which an individual, according to these values, is conceived of as morally responsible for his choices, and as having no other judge for his acts than his own conscience. Permissiveness and individualism in liberalism are inseparable from what one could appropriately call an interiorized “moral code based on principles,” as opposed to a “moral code based on authority,” whereby the law is always external, and overshadows the agent. Depending on whether one admires or detests this tradition, whether one condemns it as permissive and as the source of social fragmentation and anomie, or whether one thinks of it as providing new sources of happiness and fulfillment, the term “liberalism” will be used with pejorative or positive connotations, and it is set in opposition either to totalitarianism and state violence or to the republic and social democracy, or even to “libertarianism” and the dangers of the anarchic development of the postmodern individual, as the American or Canadian “communitarians” emphasize. Catherine Audard Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Berlin, Isaiah. Liberty. Edited by Henry Hardy. With an essay on Berlin and his critics by Ian Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Constant, Benjamin. Principes de politique. In De la liberté des Modernes. Paris: Hachette, 1980. Principes de politique was first published in 1818. Galston, William. “Two Concepts of Liberalism.” Ethics 105 (April 1995). John Harsanyi would also be a good example—it should be possible to reconcile social justice and the respect for individual freedoms. The market cannot by itself be the source of a principle of justice or redistribution; in order to respect equal freedoms for all, such a principle needs to be the object of an agreement on the part of those who can hope to profit from it, as well as of those who would see their benefits diminish. Liberalism has no hesitation, then, in placing itself within the great tradition of the social contract in arguing that the principles of economic justice (Rawls’ second principle) are just if they can be the object of unanimous consent (that is, of a contract), and can be shown to benefit the most disadvantaged. Far from being subject to the laws of the market, contemporary liberalism justifies its limits in the name of social justice: A social ideal in turn is connected with a conception of society, a vision of the way in which the aims and purposes of social cooperation are to be understood. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice) What is common, however, to the different expressions of the vague concept of economic liberalism is, as Bernard Manin has clearly shown, the idea of an order that would not result from a central power, and that would even in a way come to take its place, in order to free individuals from oppression. If the market is well used, it would appear as a source of emancipation like other dimensions of civil society, whose field of action extends well beyond the satisfaction of economic needs. . IV. A Liberal Culture? The term “liberalism” ultimately describes a cultural tradition that emphasizes the autonomy of individuals, their spirit of enterprise, their capacity for self-government, without the need to refer to a central power, certainly at an economic level, but no less at a social level, in the tradition of eighteen-century civil society in the English sense. This liberal conception of civil society is not the same as the bürgerliche Gesellschaft execrated by Marx, but conforms more closely 3 Communitarianism v. COMMUNITY, GENDER An important critical movement in the United States and Canada has emerged to challenge classical liberalism: it is known as “communitarianism,” a term one could translate into French, though awkwardly, by the neologism communautarisme. This movement aims not to defend traditional communities per se, but to recognize the modern individual’s need for rootedness and identity. Just as the abstract and universalist philosophy of the Enlightenment was rejected by Hegel and by the political romanticism of Herder and Schleiermacher in the name of the value of traditions, community, Gemeinschaft, and a sense of history, so the contemporary communitarian critique of liberalism emphasizes the importance of individuals being rooted in communities, and of the concrete diversity of cultures, as well as of gender differences (feminist critiques). REFS.: Berten, André, ed. Libéraux et communautariens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Walzer, Michael. Pluralisme et démocratie. Paris: Esprit, 1997. . Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1984. LIBERTY 575 II. From Greek to Latin The main focus here, however, will be on two problems of translation from Greek to Latin, which allow for a better understanding of a certain number of particularities within the networks of modern languages. A. From the Greek eleutheria to the Latin libertas 1. How does one get from the regulated development that characterizes the Platonic eleutheria [ἐλευθερία] to libertas, conceived of as the freedom of the will, when the very notion of “will” has no direct equivalent in Greek? Two entries respond to this question: ELEUTHERIA, which discusses the translation of Greek meanings of “freedom” in the Latin of the Church Fathers and of Scholasticism; and WILL, which reconstructs the medieval history of the formation of a terminological equivalent to the Greek thelêsis [θέλησις]: voluntas as the freedom to agree to or to reject the content of a judgment, or to act rationally for the general good. The secularization of this notion of will leads to the modern, Cartesian notion that “[t]here is no one who does not feel and does not experience will and freedom as one and the same thing, or rather that there is no difference between what is voluntary and what is free” (Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, “Réponses aux troisièmes objections,” in Œuvres [AT], 7:191.I.10–14). 2. On the changes that the vocabulary of the will undergoes in contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, refer to WILL, Box 1; cf. CONSCIOUSNESS and SOUL. B. The translation of to autoexousion by liberum arbitrium 1. The Latin liberum arbitrium (free will) replaced the Greek notion of authority over oneself with that of an indifferent choice between opposites, and thus locates the entire concept of liberty in this indifference of choice. In other words, the two determinations of “freedom,” which, for us moderns, seem to be self-evident are as follows: a) the near synonymy of “free” and “voluntary,” which means that any form of freedom is fundamentally determined as freedom of (the) will; b) the fact that the proper locus of freedom is to be found in election, that is, in a choice between opposites, such that freedom itself can be understood as freedom of the will (cf. Thomas Aquinas: “The proper act of free will is choice. For we may say that we have a free will because we can take one thing while refusing another. And this is to choose.” Summa theologica, I, quarto 83, article 3, reply). 2. In this respect, the translation of the question of free will in turn leads to several decisive choices. In German, the term Willkür links from the start the matter of the freedom of the will to the autonomy of the will: The discussion of the Kantian problematic, which is inherited by our terminology, can be found in the entry WILLKÜR. In Russian, the semantic play between the two words for “freedom”—svoboda [свобода] and volja [воля]—offers a different coupling of the relationship between the infinite nature of the will and the affective naturalness of motives, Gautier, Claude. L’invention de la société civile. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Francs, 1993. Halévy, Élie. La formation du radicalisme philosophique [1901–4]. 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hayek, Friedrich A. von. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Translation by G. Blumberg: La route de la servitude. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Jaume, Lucien. L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Manent, Pierre. Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1987. . Les Libéraux. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1986. Manin, Bernard. Principes du gouvernement représentatif. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. First published in 1858. Pareto, Vilfredo. Manuel d’économie politique. Translated into French by A. Bonnet. Paris: Giard et Brière, 1909. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Renaut, Alain. L’ère de l’individu. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Rosanvallon, Pierre., Le libéralisme économique. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Shklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, general editors. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981. First published in 1776. Strauss, Leo. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern. New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992. LIBERTY I. Domains and Models 1. The polysemy of the word “liberty” is a source of considerable difficulty. The adjective “free” (Fr. libre) covers a spectrum of nuances: it can be a synonym for “spontaneous,” “unconstrained,” “uninhibited” (so a body, for example, can be in “free fall”; see FORCE), and also for “independent,” “autonomous,” even “autarchic”; it can have the more technical sense of “indeterminate” or “indifferent,” and so one might talk of a free choice that makes no difference either way, or of free will. One finds just as many nuances in most modern languages. 2. The question of liberty is a determining one for the constitution of subjectivity, and subsequently for psychology, even down to the word “subject” itself (in which one hears “subjection”); see SUBJECT and WILL, WILLKÜR; cf. CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, ES, I/ME/MYSELF, UNCONSCIOUS. 3. For the moral dimension of liberty, see PRAXIS; cf. DESTINY, DUTY, MORALS, OBLIGATION. 4. The sense of “liberty” informs the political and social domains from the outset, beginning with the difference between free individual and slave: see in particular LIBERAL and BILDUNG, Box 1; see also CIVIL SOCIETY, HERRSCHAFT, LAW, POLIS, POLITICS, POWER, WORK. Refer to ELEUTHERIA, I and Box 1 for the different clusters of meaning within the main linguistic networks: nature and growth; or culture and belonging to a group of friends; see also SVOBODA, one of the ways of saying “freedom” in Russian, which is formed from the Slavic possessive svoj [CBOЙ], analogous to suus. 576 LIE 3. On place in relation to space and physics, see FORCE, MOMENT, NATURE, TIME, WORLD. 4. On place conceived of as an originary place of one’s own, see HEIMAT, IL Y A, OIKEIÔSIS, PROPERTY, and SEHNSUCHT, Box 1, cf. MALAISE; see also DASEIN, LEIB, WELTANSCHAUUNG (WORLD, 5, 6); cf. PEOPLE/RACE/NATION and PRINCIPLE. v. SEIN while the term postupok [поступок] refers to a free act, insofar as it can take the form of a commitment: see POSTUPOK and SVOBODA. v. ACT, PEOPLE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD LIE The French word for “to lie,” mentir (derived from the Latin mentiri; the etymologies do not tell us much, including those related to Anglo-Saxon, English “lie,” German Lüge), means to say something false with the intention of deceiving. Lies thus refer to the articulation of the true and the real, the logical and the ontological, but they involve an ethical register. One can find under TRUTH (in particular TRUTH, IV; see also, for the Russian, ISTINA and PRAVDA) a discussion of the antonyms of truth, one of which is the lie. The main dividing line falls between languages and traditions that fail to distinguish between error and lie (the Greek pseudos [ψεῦδος] might be from the root *bhes-, “to breathe,” like psuchê [ψυχή], “the soul,” or phêmi [φημί], “to say”), and do not reflect the Latin, then Christian, differentiation between the two. I. Logic and Ontology Refer to FALSE for the articulation between these two registers. II. Ethics Lying is a discursive act (see SPEECH ACT; cf. ACT) that makes a willful use of something false. The problem of intention, good or bad, is central: are there “good lies”? Is there a “right to lie”? See INTENTION, WILLKÜR. Lies are in this sense connected to a will that is judged from the outset as condemnable (see GOOD/EVIL, MORALS, VALUE), unlike aesthetic illusion (which is not): see FICTION, and cf. APPEARANCE (particularly DESENGAÑO, LEGGIADRIA, MIMÊSIS). A “lie” brings into play the belief of the listener: see FAITH, GLAUBE; cf. CLAIM. The devil is the “liar” par excellence: see DEVIL. LIEU (FRENCH) The Latin locus, which means not only “place, location, site” but also “rank, situation,” translates the Greek topos [τόπος]. In French, the word for place, lieu, has come to be used in a range of technical senses, particularly medical (“sick region,” “genitalia”) and rhetorical (lieu commun, or commonplace). 1. In aesthetics, refer to IN SITU, which reappropriates an archeological term to mean the fundamental trait of a work of art conceived in terms of its site. On the ontological relationship between a work of art and its place, see in particular LIGHT, Box 2, and cf. IL Y A. 2. On the rhetorical topos, see COMMONPLACE; cf. ANALOGY, COMPARISON, IMAGE, MIMÊSIS, TROPE, and more broadly, DISCOURSE, LOGOS, SPEECH ACT. LIFE / LEBEN The French vie (life), deriving from the Latin vita, serves to designate existence, the type of life (a creature’s ways of living and means of existence), the life story, biography, or model for living. 1. In the German ERLEBEN, as distinguished from Leben, one finds a reflection on how to separate out natural life—the Greek zôê [ζωή], see ANIMAL—from the reflective life that enables human experience and existence— the Greek bios [βίος], in the sense of mode or “species of life,” and aiôn [αἰών], “the span of life.” In addition, see AIÔN, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, EXPERIENCE, LEIB, cf. OLAM. 2. For the relation to death, as tied to human consciousness, see also CONSCIOUSNESS, DESTINY, MALAISE. 3. On the relationship between the mode of life and the means of existence, see BERUF, ECONOMY, ENTREPRENEUR, OIKONOMIA, WISDOM. 4. On the relation of “life” (vie)to narrative, to models, and to history, see HISTORY, RÉCIT, VIRTÙ; cf. SPECIES. v. GESCHLECHT, GOD, HUMANITY, PATHOS LIGHT / ENLIGHTENMENT DANISH lys DUTCH licht FRENCH lumière, Lumières GERMAN Licht; Old High German, lio(t)ht; Aufklärung GREEK leukos [λευϰόϛ], phôs [φῶϛ] [הַשְׂכָּלָה] haśĕkālâ HEBREW ITALIAN luce, Lumi/illuminismo LATIN lux, lumen RUSSIAN svet [свет] SPANISH luz, Luces/Ilustración v. BILDUNG, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, IDEA, ITALIAN, MADNESS, MIR, REASON, SVET The Indo-European vocabulary for “light” refers to what is brilliant or resplendent, based on the idea of a free, clear space in the open air as opposed to a wooded and enclosed space. Closely related to sight, a bodily sense granted privilege in the Western tradition, “light” serves as a paradigm for knowledge and reason. The term’s use to describe the European movement known as the Enlightenment derives from Novalis, who employed it having in mind the new status of light in modern physics. LIGHT 577 In Latin, lumen, -inis (neut.; from *leuk-s-men > *louksmen > *lousmen > lumen) differs from lux, lucis (fem.) in that it must have originally referred to a means of lighting, a “light,” with the concrete sense that the suffix -men gave to the formation. Lux, write Ernout and Meillet (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine), is light “considered as an activity, an active and divine force, particularly as the ‘light of day’ . [L]ux is a more general term than lumen, and their uses do not overlap.” Under leukos, Chantraine (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) makes a connection to the Latin lucus, originally a “clearing,” literally laûkas, “field” (Old High German loh, “clearing”). Ernout and Meillet (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine) note under lucus, with reference to the lux group (cf. also the possible but contested etymology of the French word lucerne, “skylight”; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique du français), that “[t]his Indo-European word designated a free and clear space, as opposed to a wooded one—woods and covers being the main obstacles to man’s activity.” These connections between the bright space of a clearing and the clarity of light are not self-evident. The English “light” (Lat. lux) is more strictly distinguished from its homonym “light” (Lat. levis), which is related to the German leicht, lichten, Lichtung, than in Continental cognates. Heidegger’s thought can help us to think of lightness as a condition of light. . I. The Indo-European Vocabulary of Light The set of terms expressing “light” in the modern European languages comes from the Indo-European root *leuk-, which gives us the Greek leukos [λευϰόϛ], “a luminous, brilliant white,” and the Latin lucere, “to shine”; lustrare, “to illustrate”; and luna, “moon.” The Indo-European vocabulary of light shows a remarkable proximity between the Greek, Romance, and Germanic families, even if the Greek only happens to be represented by leukos and its derivations (but see also Box 1). . The adjective leukos [λευϰόϛ], like all those that in ancient Greek have to do with the vocabulary of color, refers less to whiteness itself than to its intensity, its brilliance. It describes marble, and “when the notion of brilliance is used it indeed seems to be related to hêlios [ἥλιοϛ], [sun] [(Iliad, 14.185) and in the expression λευϰὴ φωνή = λαμπϱὰ φωνή [leukê phônê = lampra phônê], ‘ringing voice’ in Aristotle (Topics, 106a)” (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). We might compare this to argos [ἀϱγόϛ] (from which the Latin argentum is derived), which is also used to describe the sheen of white (clay, the white of the eyes), expressed in this case as a rapid flash (lightning, horses, Ulysses’s dog) and from which the Greek name “Argonauts” is formed (cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. argos). 1 Phôs, phainô, phêmi (light, showing [oneself/itself], speaking): An ultra-phenomenological Greece v. ERSCHEINUNG, PHÉNOMÈNE, PROPOSITION Even though the term “phenomenology,” as Heidegger remarks, does not appear historically until the eighteenth century (in JohannHeinrich Lambert’s Neues Organon of 1764), it belongs to the Greek epoch. Phainomenon [φαινόμενον], the middle participle of phainô [φαίνω], “what appears, by itself, from itself,” and logos, “to say.” In paragraph 7 of Being and Time, Heidegger recalls that phainô comes from phôs [φῶϛ], “light.” But in truth, there is an even tighter etymological knot to be tied here. Chantraine (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) notes that phainô is formed from the Sanskrit root bha, which is semantically ambivalent, since it means both “to enlighten,” “to shine” (phainoi, phami), and “to explain,” “to speak” (phêmi [φημί], fari in Latin); in other words, “saying” and “shining” are already mutually interdependent; there is already a phenomenology in the phenomenon itself. Finally, phôs [φώϛ], the same word as “light” aside from the accent (acute instead of perispomenon), also refers to a man, a hero, a mortal and was a common term in Homer’s time. Its etymology is “obscure,” Chantraine tells us (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). Yet, “if the dental inflection is secondary, there is a formal identity between the Greek nominative and the Sanskrit bhas, light, brilliance, majesty.” “But,” he adds, “from the semantic point of view, the connection is not so easy to make.” Phenomenologically, it is, however, too good to be true: etymological evidence that joins together in the same dazzling term “light,” “phenomena,” and “man.” Greek man is then the one who sees, as a mortal, the light (that of the day of his birth, of the return, of death), what appears in the light, phenomena, and the person who enlightens them by expressing them. The play on words between allotrion phôs [ἀλλότϱιον φῶϛ], now a perispomenon, from fragment 14 of the poem by Parmenides (“light from elsewhere,” that is, the light that the moon has by borrowing it from the sun), and allotrion phôs [ἀλλότϱιον φῶϛ], with an oxytone accent, “the man from elsewhere,” “the stranger” of the Homeric poems (for example, Iliad, 5.214, or Odyssey, 16.102, 18. 219), and its fate in Empedocles (fr. 45; RT: DK), are sufficient to confirm that the etymology, whether Cratylean or not, was understood. The two words resonate within each other, as they do in Homer’s Parmenides, the epic poem on cosmology and philosophy. We have here the common matrix of perception in Greece, both classical and romantic, and the theme that interested Heidegger so keenly: truth—if it is a mutual interdependence of appearing and of saying in human Dasein, both openness and finitude—seems to be a copy of, and a meditation on, this etymology. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Parmenides. The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary. Edited by A.H. Coxon, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986. . Parménide: Sur la nature ou sur l’étant: La langue de l’étre. Edited, translated, and commentary by Barbara Cassin. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. 578 LIGHT this—but also: “See how this sounds, see how this feels, see how tasty this, see how hard it is.”) (Confessions, 10.35, 54) What is expressed here is the primacy of sight, illustrated and reinforced by a common means of expression; we might even say a “photological” tradition. The brightness of the sun, called leukos [λευϰόϛ] by Homer (see above), will become, in the famous allegory of the cave in Plato (Symposium, 7), the analog of light received from the Idea of the Good, as opposed to the darkness, which reigns in the cave. The light of the sun will remain in Descartes’s programmatic text the paradigm for knowledge: cum scientiae omnes nihil aliud sint quam humana sapientia, quae semper une et eadem manet, quantumvis differentibus subjectis applicata, nec mejorem ab illis distinctionem mutuatur, quam Solis lumen a rerum, quas illustrat, varietate ( just as all sciences are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and identical to itself, however different the subjects to which it is applied II. Light, Sight, and Idea In the vocabulary of Western thought, light enjoys an equally privileged position as the one that sight occupies among the five senses, to the point where sight serves as a common denominator of the other senses, as Saint Augustine noted: Ad oculos enim videre proprie pertinet. Utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus, cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus. Neque enim dicimus: audi quid rutilet, aut: olefac quam niteat, aut: gusta quam splendat, aut: palpa quam fulgeat: uideri enim dicuntur haec omnia. Dicimus autem non solum: uide quid luceat, quod soli oculi sentire possunt, sed etiam: uide quid sonet, uide quid oleat, uide quid sapiat, uide quam durum sit. (Vision belongs properly to the eyes. But we use this term even for the other senses when we apply them to knowing. Yes, we do not say: “Listen to how this shines,” nor: “Feel how this glows,” nor: “Taste how resplendent this is,” nor “Touch how bright this is.” It is “see” that we use, indeed, in all these cases. Not only do we say: “See how this shines”—and the eyes alone can perceive 2 Lichtung, “clearing,” “bright space,” “lightness” Contrary to appearances, the German Lichtung does not come from Licht, “light,” but from leicht (cf. Eng. “light”), which is from the verb lichten, “to lighten,” “clear,” “free.” So the Lichtung in question in section 28 of Being and Time (“To say that it is ‘illuminated’ [erleuchtet] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself”) in no way places Dasein within a “photological” tradition, nor does it take up again the Platonic metaphor of light. Returning in 1965 to these questions, in the text that would appear in 1984 as Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens, Heidegger states: The presence of what-is-present has as such no relation to light in the sense of brightness. But presence is referred to light [das Lichte] in the sense of the clearing [Lichtung]. What this word gives us to think about may be made clear by an example, assuming that we consider it sufficiently. A forest clearing is what it is, not because of brightness and light, which can shine within it during the day. At night, too, the clearing remains. The clearing means: At this place, the forest is passable. The lightening [Das Lichte] in the sense of brightness and the lightening of the clearing [Lichtung] are different not only regarding the matter, but regarding the word as well. To lighten [Lichten] means: to render free, to free up [freigeben], to let free. To lighten belongs to light [leicht]. To render something light [Leichtmachen], to lighten something means: to clear away obstacles to it, to bring it into the unobstructed, into the free [ins Freie]. To raise [lichten] the anchor says as much: to free it from the encompassing ocean floor and lift it into the free of water and air. Or again, in a seminar held jointly with Eugen Fink in 1966–67: Haben Lichtung und Licht überhaupt etwas miteinander zu tun? Offenbar nicht. Die Lichtung dürfen wir nicht vom Licht her, sondern müssen sie aus dem Griechischen heraus verstehen. Licht und Feuer können erst ihren Ort finden in der Lichtung. (Do clearing and light have anything to do with one another? Evidently not. We must not understand clearing from light, but we must understand it from the Greek. Light and fire can only find their place first in a clearing.) (“Seminar in Le Thor,” Gesamtausgabe) It is therefore a matter of going back from light to its nonvisual condition of possibility, which no longer has anything to do with the opposition of light and dark but precedes it as its a priori, as a “lightness of being” (as A. Schild’s translation into French of Heidegger’s expression in Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung has it: “légèreté de l’être”). The French translation of Lichtung as allégie (F. Fédier’s translation), unlike Lichtung’s translations into French as clairière (clearing) or éclaircie (bright space) or into Spanish as claridad and claro, frees the term from the register of light, in accordance with Heidegger’s indications. REFS.: Fédier, François. Regarder voir. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens. Edited by Hermann Heidegger. St. Gallen, Switz.: Erker, 1984. Translation by Richard Capobianco and Marie Göbel: “On the Question concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (Spring 2010): 213–23. Translation by A. Schild: L’affaire de la pensée. Mauvezin, Fr.: TransEurope-Repress, 1990. Heidegger, Martin, and Eugen Fink. Heraklit: Seminar Wintersemester 1966/1967. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986. Translation by Charles H. Seibert: Heraclitus Seminar, 1966/67. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979. Sallis, John. “Into the Clearing.” In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan. Chicago: Precedent, 1981. Sallis, John, and Kenneth Maly, eds. Heraclitean Fragments: A Companion Volume to the Heidegger/Fink Seminar on Heraclitus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980. LIGHT 579 Unterschied zwischen Hell und Dunkel, Licht und Finsternis besteht. (What is Aufklärung? Answer: this is what everyone knows who, having eyes to see, has learned by using them to recognize the difference between the bright and the dim, between light and darkness.) (my italics) Or again, in this statement by Lichtenberg: Man spricht viel von Aufklärung und wünscht mehr Licht. Mein Gott, was hilft aber alles Licht, wenn die Leute entweder keine Augen haben, oder die, die sie haben, vorsätzlich verschließen. (One talks a lot about Aufklärung, and one wishes for more light, but my God, what is the use of all the light you can wish for, if people either have no eyes to see, or if they do, close them on purpose.) (Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, 1:201) It is proper for the light of reason to cast itself everywhere and thus to reject prejudices and superstitions in respect of which the Aufklärung claims to be a liberation (Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? 1783). The light of enlightened reason against the darkness of obscurantism—indeed, in German, the counterconcept of Aufklärung is Schwärmerei, a tricky word designating excessive, sometimes infantile, perhaps misguided enthusiasm or adulation. . B. Critique of the Enlightenment and the reductive conception of light in modern physics Novalis, who was the author of Apologie der Schwärmerei (1788) and who thus of his contemporaries set himself apart from the Aufklärer, made a highly original link between the French, then German, movement of the Enlightenment and the new status of light being defined by modern physics as a mathematical science of nature. He thereby anticipated the critiques that Merleau-Ponty, in his Eye and Mind (chap. 3), would subsequently direct at Descartes’s Dioptrics: Das Licht war wegen seines mathematischen Gehorsams und seiner Frechheit ihr Liebling geworden. Sie freuten sich, daß es sich eher zerbrechen ließ, als daß es mit Farben gespielt hätte, und so benannten sie nach ihm ihr großes Geschäft, Aufklärung. (Light had become their favorite theme because of its obedience to mathematics, and because of its insolence. They rejoiced at seeing that it is refracted rather than being iridescent [playing with its colors], and it is from this that they gave the name Aufklärung to their great affair.) (“Die Christenheit oder Europa,” 1799) Descartes indeed stated in Discourse 1 of his Dioptrics (6:85, ll. 1–4) that “in the bodies we name colored, colors are nothing but the different ways in which these bodies receive it [light] and send it back to our eyes.” may be, and it receives no more diversity than the light of the sun from the variety of things its illuminates ) (Regulae ad directionem ingenii, 1; my italics) (On the sources of the “metaphor of a radiant sun to signify the universality of an omniscient understanding,” cf. Jean-Luc Marion, in Règles utiles et claires: “Should we conclude that the ‘solar’ relationship of understanding to its truths is transposed, with Descartes, from the divine to the human?”) It is not accidental that Descartes mentions the naturali rationis lumen (natural light of reason) at the end of the same Rule 1: a decisive shift occurs, in fact, from external light to the light of the human mind, as lumen naturale = ratio. This is the “light of reason” (Descartes), “the daylight of reason” (Boileau, Art poétique, 1.19), “the natural light of reason” (Leibniz, Théodicée, §120)—which is alone capable of lighting “someone who walks alone in the dark” (Descartes, Discours de la méthode). “Tremble in case the light of reason does not come,” Voltaire will say in the following century (RT: Dictionnaire philosophique, “Abbé”). III. The Aufklärung/“Enlightenment” A. The emergence of a terminus technicus Combined with the advent of modern rationalism, the determination of reason as lumen naturale would lead to the characterization of the eighteenth century as the “age of Enlightenment” (Sp. El siglo de las luces and Ilustración; Ital. Lumi/Illuminismo; Fr. Lumières; but Ger. Aufklärung, from the adj. klar; Lat. clarus; Eng. clear). The expression es klart auf (aufklaren, with no vocalic alternation) is used first of all to describe the weather brightening up, the sky clearing, through a borrowing of the German from Dutch sailors (cf. RT: Duden: Das Herkunftswörterbuch). This was the origin of the transitive verb aufklären, in the sense of the English “to enlighten” (an Aufklärer is not only someone with an enlightened mind or a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but also someone who “lights the way” in the military sense of reconnaissance), and leads to the formation in the eighteenth century of the term Aufklärung as a philosophical concept, terminus technicus. In 1784, Moses Mendelssohn still felt the term was a neologism. This is how he puts it in his essay “Ueber di Frage: Was heißt aufklären?”: Die Worte Aufklärung, Kultur, Bildung sind in unsrer Sprache noch neue Ankömmlinge. Sie gehören vor der Hand bloß sur Büchersprache. Der gemeine Haufe versteht sie kaum. (3) (The words “enlightenment,” “culture,” “education” are still newcomers to our language. At the present time they belong merely to the language of books. The common masses scarcely understand them.) The term Aufklärung, however, still retains a close semantic, even lexical, relation to “light,” as shown by the definition Wieland gives of it (“Sechs Fragen zur Aufklärung”): Was ist Aufklärung? Antwort: Das weiß jedermann, der vermittelst eines Paars sehender Augen erkennen gelernt hat, worin der 580 LIGHT here a witness to a Platonic, even Neoplatonic, or Plotinian understanding of light. He was not alone: Goethe exclaims, in a reply to Schopenhauer, “What are you saying! Light only exists when you see it? No! It is rather you who would not be there if light itself didn’t see you” (Gespräche, 2:245). Indeed, according to Plotinus, “What the soul must see is the light by which it is illuminated. For neither is the sun seen in another’s light. How is this achieved? Take everything away” (Ennead, 5.3, 17, 28). “What we must see is what enables us to see; it is light which is the source of our gaze” (Hadot, Plotin), and not only its object. This is what is “solar” (sonnenhaft) about the eye, as Goethe will say at the beginning of a celebrated quatrain: Wäre nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken? (If the eye were not sun-like, How could we perceive light?) (Zur Farbenlehre; translation modified) One of the other repercussions of this shift from external, solar light to the “enlightenment” of the human mind would be a singular reevaluation of the light that is not produced by Elsewhere (in a letter to Mersenne from December 1638, Correspondance, 2:469, ll. 1–2), Descartes would define light as a propulsion (poussement): “it is only this propulsion in a straight line which is called Light.” So Novalis constructed a genealogy of the project of the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, as well as of the name claimed for it, with reference to the history of the sciences, that is, by connecting this project to the new way in which modern physics was approaching the phenomenon of light. In French, the Enlightenment (Les Lumières) was also sometimes called la lumière (RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française, s.v. “lumière,” meaning 13), as is attested by this statement from Voltaire (letter to ¬Gallitzin, 14 August 1767, Correspondance), which is a counter-illustration to the genealogy proposed by Novalis: “It pleases me to see that an immense republic of cultivated minds is being formed in Europe: light is communicating from all sides [la lumière se communique de tous côtés]” (my italics). So in the eyes of Novalis, it was on the basis of a simplistic (and reductive) conception of light, an optical narrowing particular to modern physics, that the word and the idea of the Enlightenment were able to germinate and flourish. Going against the grain of the very project of modern science as a mathematical science of nature, Novalis remained 3 [ ַה ְשׂ ָכּ ָלה] Haśĕkālâ retranscribed sometimesַ ] ה ְשׂ ָכּ ָלה] ,Haśĕkālâ as Haskālā, comes from śēkel [כל ֶשׂ” ,[ ֵreason,” “intellect,” “discernment,” “culture.” Formed from a Hebrew root, this term is not strictly speaking a Hebrew translation of the German term Aufklärung nor of the English “Enlightenment,” even if it refers to a movement closely associated with the Enlightenment. “Even though it is inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, its roots, its particular character, and its development, are entirely Jewish” (RT: Dictionnaire du judaïsme). The name “Age of Enlightenment” would in Hebrew be almost blasphemous, if only because of verses 3–5 of bĕrē šīt (Genesis), where it falls not to man but to God to say of (and to) the light ( ôr [ורֹא” [light,” “sun,” “morning,” “brightness”) that it be—Septuagint: [Г ενηθήτω φῶϛ]; the Vulgate: “Fiat lux”; Luther (RT: Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers): “Es werde Licht”; RT: The Bible: Authorized King James Version: “Let there be light”; Le Maistre de Sacy: “Que la lumière soit faite.” The term “Haskalah,” which is foreign to biblical Hebrew, first appeared in Germany in the 1760s and referred to a social and cultural movement in Judaism in Central and Eastern Europe that grew from the middle of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. It expressed a more open attitude among Jews regarding their values and the way of life of their non-Jewish neighbors; the desire to emerge from the ghetto; and the rejection of what we might today call a withdrawal into ethnic identity. In place of these, Haskalah favored an emancipation, even assimilation, that opposed both orthodox Judaism and Hasidism. Its emblematic figure was Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the author—notably—of a German translation of the Torah, yet one that was printed in Hebrew characters. It was out of the Haskalah movement in Germany that a Wissenschaft des Judentums, or “science of Judaism,” was born and was according to Steinschneider able to develop alongside an agnostic, even atheistic, position. Steinschneider, as Gershom Scholem asserts, “did not hide the fact that in his eyes the function of the science of Judaism consisted in burying the phenomenon with dignity.” (Scholem had planned to write an article, which would in fact never appear, to be titled “Sebstmord des Judentums in der sogenannten Wissenschaft des Judentums” [The suicide of Judaism in what has been called the science of Judaism].) We should no doubt take into account, in this uncompromising judgment, Scholem’s own position on what came to be known as the Deutschjudentum, a Judeo-German symbiosis, of which Hermann Cohen would become the most celebrated representative. How, though, was the sometimes frenzied anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, sadly exemplified by Voltaire, compatible with a knowledge of Judaism and with a recognition of the status (social, political, and legal) of European Jews? This was one of the inherent tensions of the Haskalah—at the same time, it was a dissemination of Jewish culture, even if it was in a vernacular language other than Hebrew or Yiddish, and the sowing of the seeds of an ideology that would come to deny it, embalming it if necessary and placing it outside the realm of the properly scientific. How could a “religion of reason,” or a “religion considered within the limits of pure reason” (Kant), acknowledge the attested Revelation of Judaism, which we commonly refer to as Judeo-Christian? Cohen would attempt heroically to overcome this contradiction in his Religion der Vernunft aus der Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism). REFS.: Cohen, Hermann. Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Edited by Bruno Strauss. Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1988. Translation and introduction by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Introductory essay by Leo Strauss. New York: Ungar, 1972. Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Von Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen. Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994. Translation by Harry Zohn: From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. New York: Schocken, 1980. LOGOS 581 LOGOS [λόγος] (GREEK) ENGLISH discourse, language, speech, rationality, reason, reasoning, intelligence, foundation, principle, proportion, count, account, recount, thesis, tell, tale, tally, argument, explanation, statement, proposition, phrase, definition FRENCH discours, langage, langue, parole, rationalité, raison, intelligence, fondement, principe, motif, proportion, calcul, rapport, relation, récit, thèse, raisonnement, argument, explication, énoncé, proposition, phrase, définition, compte/conte GERMAN Zahl, Erzählung, cf. legen/liegen/lesen [ּדָבָר] dāvār HEBREW LATIN ratio/oratio, verbum v. DISCOURSE, REASON and GREEK, HOMONYM, LANGUAGE, MADNESS, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, RES, SENSE, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, WORD The Greek word logos [λόγος] has such a wide range of meanings and so many different usages that it is difficult to see it from the perspective of another language except as multivocal, and in any case it is impossible to translate it except by using a multiplicity of distinct words. This polysemy, sometimes analyzed as homonymy by grammarians, has usually been considered by modern commentators as a characteristic of Greek language and thought that relates, before all of the technical meanings, to the primordial meaning of the verb legein [λέγειν]: “to assemble,” “to gather,” “to choose.” What is untranslatable here, paradigmatically, is the unity beneath the idea of “gathering together,” a series of concepts and operations—mathematical, rational, discursive, linguistic—that, starting with Latin, are expressed by words that bear no relationship to one another. One authoritative way of indicating this lost unity is to see it as inscribed within a play on words that incorporates this relationship etymologically, or even simply at the level of signifiers, as in the Latin ratio/oratio (the first comes from reor, which, like one part of legein, means “to count” then “to think”; the second, which according to a popular etymology is derived from os, oris, the “mouth,” complements the first with the meaning of “speech”). In French the play is on compte/conte, which are both derived from computare but were certainly not distinguished from one another until the seventeenth century; in English there is an analogous play on “count”/“account”/“recount” and also on “tell”/“tale”/“tally”; in German, on Zahl/Erzählung and also on legen/liegen/lesen. The other way one could proceed, which is not an alternative, is to import the word into one’s own language: this culminates in the Heideggerian usage, which bears witness to philosophy’s debt to Greek. Finally, to get the full measure of the polysemy of logos in the course of the word’s history, we have to trace the connection between the first branching into ratio/oratio (or “reason”/“speech”) and the Logos in John’s Gospel, translated as Verbum, which refers back to the Hebrew dāvār [רָבָד ,[ּand which means both the word and the thing, in this case, Christ as the word made man. I. The History of the Language and Lexicography The multiplicity of meanings of logos [λόγος] poses for the language historian the question of knowing whether we are dealing with a phenomenon of polysemy properly speaking the human mind, or by reason: Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and the illuminism movement would still use light as a frame of reference but in a completely different way. Pascal David REFS.: Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Boileau, Nicolas. L’art poétique. Edited by Sylvain Menant. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Descartes, René. Correspondance. Vol. 2 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. . Dioptrics. In Discours de la méthode et essais, vol. 6 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. Translation by Paul J. Olscamp: Optics. In Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, edited by Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001. . Discours de la méthode. In Discours de la méthode et essais, vol. 6 of Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. Translation by Desmond M. Clarke: Discourse on Method and Related Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. See also translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross: Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, edited by David Weissman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. . Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence. Edited and translated by George Heffernan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Translation by Jean-Luc Marion: Régles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Edited by Otto Schönberger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994. Translation by John Oxenford: Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, edited by J. K. Moorhead. Introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Goethe, Johann W. von, and Johann Peter Eckermann. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens: 1823–1832. Vol. 2. Leipzig, 1836. . Zur Farbenlehre. 2 vols. Tübingen: J. G. Cottäschen, 1810. Translation by Charles Lock Eastlake: Theory of Colours. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Hadot, Pierre. Plotin ou la simplicité du regard. Paris: Plon, 1963. Translation by Michael Chase: Plotinus; or, The Simplicity of Vision. Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. Théodicée. In Œuvres de Leibniz, series 2, edited by M. A. Jacques. Paris: Charpentier, 1842. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Sudelbücher. In Sudelbücher I, vol. 1 of Schriften und Briefe, edited by Wolfgang Promies. Munich: Hanser, 1967. Mendelssohn, Moses. “Ueber die Frage: Was heißt aufklären?” In Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, edited by Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974. Translation by Daniel O. Dahlstrom: “On the Question: What Does ‘to Enlighten’ Mean?” In Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1964. Translation by Carleton Dallery: Eye and Mind. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. “Die Christenheit oder Europa.” In Vol. 3 of Schriften, edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz, 507–25. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967. Translation by John Dalton: Christianity, or, Europe. London: Chapman, 1844. Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Voltaire. Correspondance. Edited by Theodore Besterman. 13 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1977–87. . Select Letters of Voltaire. Translated and edited by Theodore Besterman. New York: Nelson, 1963. . Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of His Correspondence. Translated by S. G. Tallentyre. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004. Wieland, Christoph. “Sechs Fragen zur Aufklärung.” In Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, edited by Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974. 582 LOGOS of a diachronic differentiation in the original meaning of a single root λε/ογ-, thus as a phenomenon of polysemy. Where logos is concerned, a philological analysis of the occurrences in ancient Greek of the terms, both noun and verb forms, that are based on this root and comparison with the Latin leads us indeed to think that the fundamental sense of λε/ογ- is that of “collecting,” “gathering,” and “assembling” and that the use of the Greek verb legô [λέγω]—Latin, lego—in specific contexts is, for each of the languages, the source of differentiations that a priori are unforeseeable but that are in fact very real. In Latin, it seems plausible that a syntagma like legere oculis (to take in with a glance) as applied to the graphic signs of a text or the names of a list gives us the origin of the meaning of “to read,” which lego acquired in this language (the proliferation of meanings that begins with a single etymological root) or of homonymy (a formal convergence that is produced from several homophonic etymological roots). As always in such cases, the question generates different answers depending on whether one looks at it from a synchronic perspective (how did the language users experience things?) or a diachronic perspective (what do we learn from an etymological investigation?). . The unanimous view of modern etymologists is that what can appear from a synchronic point of view as a more or less accidental semantic convergence between homophonic roots (homonymy) must on the contrary be described as the effect 1 Compound words and derivations: One or two roots? In addition to the word λóγος itself, ancient Greek has more than two hundred compound nouns with -λογος/-λóγος as the second element. The sheer number, as well as the open-ended proliferation of this lexical group, suggest that the group itself is a good, if indirect, way of approaching an analysis of the term. From a semantic point of view, this set of terms can easily be divided into two groups: – In the first, -λογος refers to the notions of “gathering together,” so we have σύλλογος: “gathering,” “meeting,” assembly”; and λιθολóγος: “stonemason” (who puts stones together). – In the second, -λογος refers to the notion of “word,” “speech,” so we have διάλογος: “conversation,” “dialogue”; and μυθολóγος: “storyteller.” In both cases, -λογος is clearly related to the verbal root λεγ-, which is able to convey the two meanings identified in the compound nouns: so σύλλογος} is related to συλλέγειν, “to gather,” and διάλογος is related to διαλέγεσθαι, “to have a dialogue.” Faced with this lexical range, a speaker of Greek might feel that his language had two homophonic roots of the form λε/ογ-, one meaning “to gather”—hereafter referred to as λε/ογ-1; and the other, “to speak,” “to say”—hereafter referred to as λε/ογ-2. Morphologically, the compound words with the ending -λογος can be separated, according to the general rules of Greek, into two conceptual categories: a. those ending in -λογος, in which the unaccented λ can be interpreted as an action noun, for example, διάλογος, “conversation,” “dialogue” (λε/ογ -2); σύλλογος, “act of putting together,” “the result of this act” (λε/ογ-1); φιλóλογος, this word having a “possessive” sense: “someone who cherishes the λ,” “a lover of literature, a philologist” (λε/ογ-2); and b. those ending in -λóγος, in which the accented λ can be interpreted as an agent noun, with the compound X-λóγος meaning “(someone) who λέγει X”; for example, μυθολόγος, “(someone) who tells stories” (λε/ογ-2); and λιθολόγος, “(someone) who puts stones together” (λε/ογ-1). So it is the accent that allows us to determine that the “philologist” is a lover of language rather than someone who talks about love. As we can see, the two types (a) and (b) allow for the two meanings identified of the root λε/ογ-. Moreover, all of those compound terms that are used to designate an agent—all of group (b) in theory, and several of the representatives of group (a)—in turn quite naturally provide the basis of a verb derivation ending in -εῖν (-εῖσθαι) and of an abstract noun derivation ending in -ία, designating the activity of the agent; for example: – φιλόλογος → φιλολογεῖν, “to devote oneself to the study of literature” and φιλολογία, “the study of literature, philology” – μυθολόγος → μυθολογεῖν, “to tell stories” and μυθολογία, “(*the act of telling stories)”, whence “imaginary story” – λιθολόγος → λιθολογεῖν, “to build by putting stones together” and λιθολογία, “the activity of a stone-mason” The uniformity of the derivations produced in this series, which culminates in a relatively technical vocabulary often designating activities relating to professions of one kind or another, undoubtedly helps to give a semantic unity to this range of terms containing the root λε/ογ- and in which the initial opposition we envisaged between λε/ογ-1 and λε/ογ-2 is blurred. Alongside the series of terms—such as, on the one hand, ϰαϰολόγος (a malicious gossip [person]), ϰαϰολογεῖν (to speak ill of someone), ϰαϰολογία (malicious gossip [noun]) and ἀντίλογος (someone who contradicts), ἀντιλογεῖν (to contradict), ἀντιλογία (contradiction) (λε/ογ-2); and on the other hand, ποιολόγος (a haymaker), ποιολογεῖν (to make hay), ποιολογία (haymaking), βοτανηλόγος (a botanist), βοτανηλογεῖν (to collect plants), βοτανηλογία (plant collecting) (λε/ογ-1)—where the two semantic fields are quite distinct, it is likely that for the linguistic sensibility of Greek speakers of different periods, the semantic values associated with -λογεῖν/-λογία fluctuated more or less whenever the designated activity linked the notion of “collecting,” “assembling,” “recording” (λε/ογ-1) with the notion of “a discourse on ,” a theory of ” (λε/ογ2). This was manifestly, and tendentiously, the case for “scientific” activities, in which a learned person with specialist knowledge would give a more or less theorized discourse on the objects or facts he had collected. Could we not say that the occupation of the ἀστρολόγος, someone who tells us about the stars, is also to record them for us? Or that the ἐτυμολόγος, who shows us through a kind of second-level discourse the ways in which words “say the truth,” is not also a collector of etymons, and potentially, a compiler of ἐτυμολογιϰά (lists of etymologies)? And that the γενεαλόγος has to record previous generations before telling me my own ancestry? LOGOS 583 These historical data, now well established, enable us to consider from a more accurate perspective the somewhat flexible and ultimately uncertain polysemy manifest in the Greek words belonging to the semantic family of logos. One point is worth emphasizing. The Greek logos retains, from the basic meaning “to gather” of the root λε/ογ- and as an almost indelible connotation, the semantic feature of being syntagmatic. Of all the well-known semantic variations of logos—“conversation,” “speech,” “tale,” “discourse,” “proverb,” “language,” “counting,” “proportion,” “consideration,” “explanation,” “reasoning,” “reason,” “proposition,” “sentence” ()—there is barely a single one that does not contain the original sense of “putting together”: the constitution or consideration of a series, of a notionally complex set. As “counting” or “proportion,” logos is never an isolated “number”; as “tale,” “discourse,” “proverb,” “proposition,” or “sentence,” it is never (or only ever marginally) a “word,” and so on. One only has to consider the relative semantic poverty of another root related to “saying,” *Ϝεπ- (cf. epos [ἔπος], eipein [εἰπεῖν]), which is closely related to λεγ- in the auxiliary inflection of the verb legô, to understand how much the extraordinary richness of λε/ογ- owes to this “syntagmatic” dimension of its semantic field. Even if, as we know, etymology does not control indefinitely and absolutely the meaning that words can take on in the course of their history, it is important to keep in mind that the Greek logos is connected to a polysemic etymon in which the sememes “to gather” and “to say” are closely related. This has to be the starting point of any reflection on the history of logos as a philosophical term. . without, however, losing its original meaning. This polysemy was retained all the way through to the Romance languages, in which—to give the example of French—lire (read), relire (reread), élire (elect), dialecte (dialect), and collecte (collect) sit happily alongside one another. In Greek, the Homeric uses of legô—ostea legômen [ὀστέα λέγωμεν], “let us gather up the bones” (Iliad, 23.239); duôdeka lexato kourous [δυώδεϰα λέξατο ϰούϱους], “he chose/assembled/ counted twelve young men” (Iliad, 21.27); leg’ oneidea [λέγ’ ὀνείδεα], “reeled off / uttered curses” (Iliad, 2.222); and su de moi lege theskela erga [σὺ δέ μοι λέγε θέσϰελα ἔϱγα], “gather together for me/enumerate for me / recount to me / tell me your marvelous exploits” (Odyssey, 11.374)—allows us to see clearly how the already frequent use of this verb in Homer (meaning “to assemble”) and complemented by terms referring to linguistic entities (curses) or lending themselves to linguistic form (“accomplished exploits” → “things recounted”) could have led to its more specific designation as a spoken word: “gather together” → “put into a row” → “count (out)” / “enumerate” → “(re)count” → “say.” The compound Homeric verb katalegein [ϰαταλέγειν] (and later on its nominal derivations katalogos [ϰατάλογος], then katalogê [ϰαταλογή], “record,” “register,” “list,” “catalogue”) illustrates particularly well the flexibility and the contextual conditions in which the initial semantic value of the root λε/ογ- is modulated. An epic expression such as ἀλλ’ ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ ϰαὶ ἀτϱεϰέως ϰατάλεξον, “come now, tell me this, record / enumerate / recount calmly” (Iliad, 24.380 and 656; Odyssey, 1.169, etc.) is certainly a precious example of these “linguistic” contexts that, beginning with the prehistory of the Homeric text, have oriented the semantic evolution of the root λε/ογ. 2 How do dictionaries translate logos? Dictionaries, whether etymological or not, distinguish between two verbs: legô and *legô, étendre (RT: Bailly, Dictionnaire grec français), “lay” (RT: LSJ) [by contrast, ]. The LSJ then gives for the first a single entry, divided into three main meanings: 1. “pick up,” 2. “count, tell,” and 3. (with the future and aorist 2) “say, speak.” The Bailly dictionary, basing its definitions on the distribution of usual moods and tenses, lemmatizes two verbs formed from the same root *leg-, rassembler (to gather): the first means 1. “to gather,” 2. “to pick,” from which we get “to collect,” “to sort out,” “to count,” and only later, “to enumerate,” “to say one after the other”; the second straightaway means: 1. “to say,” in the sense of “to speak,” “to declare,” “to announce,” 2. “to say something,” “to speak reasonably,” 3. “to designate,” and 4. “to signify”—before giving a number of more technical meanings (“to praise,” “to recite,” “to read out loud,” “to organize,” “to speak like an orator,” “to move a vote,” etc., until 11. “to have someone say”). This series of dissonant meanings, entirely motivated by English dictionaries’ desire for simplicity, is a symptom of the modern difficulty of discursively binding together a rational trajectory with a wide range of verbal statements. In French, the adjective discursif denotes both a rigorously ordered series, as well as a digression (RT: Le nouveau petit Robert), while discursivité is only first attested in 1966 in Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (RT: DHLF, vol. 1). As for the noun logos, Bailly makes a distinction between two broad semantic fields, which become increasingly complex: A. parole (speech); B. raison (reason). The RT: LSJ, on the other hand, juxtaposes a series of entries: 1. “computation, reckoning”; 2. “relation, correspondence, proportion”; 3. “explanation”; 4. “inward debate of the soul”; 5. “continuous statement, narrative”; 6. “verbal expression or utterance”; 7. “a particular utterance, saying”; 8. “thing spoken of, subject matter.” It is noticeable that there is a transition from the mathematical (1–2), to the rational (recounting to the other and to oneself, 3–4), and then the linguistic (statement, utterance, or reference). In one case we start with speech and arrive, via reason, with its capacity to judge and evaluate, at the mathematical sense of “relation, proportion, analogy” (B.III.4 of Bailly, 4th and final sense in RT: Bonitz, Index aristotelicus); in the other, it is the mathematical that provides the starting point (RT: LSJ). The essential dissonance could thus be expressed as a double question: as the history of the language suggests (see above), was the mathematical sense primary, with relationality and proportionality serving as a paradigm, even a matrix, of a syntagmatic structure in general, in a line that ran from Pythagoras to Plato and then Neoplatonism? Or rather, from a structural perspective that is no doubt more Aristotelian (Bailly, Bonitz), is mathematical technique simply one application of the human logos? 584 LOGOS for” (logon didonai [λόγον δόδιναι]); logos, or discourse as argumentation, is opposed to muthos [μῦθος], or discourse as narration. The ploysemy of logos is thus placed under the yoke of correct or rigorous statement (orthos logos [ὀρθὸς λόγος]), or of reasoning, as the very medium of philosophy: “[W]hen we ask men questions, and if we ask questions in the right way, these questions say by themselves everything as it is. Now if knowledge and correct reasoning [orthos logos] were not present within them, they would not be able to do this” (Phaedo, 73a8). This is the turn that Socrates thematizes in Phaedo (99e), when he declares himself tired of the materialist examination of existing things and maintains that one has to “take refuge in reasoning [eis tous logous (εἰς τοὺς λόγους)] and, within this reasoning, examine the truth of beings” (M. Dixsaut’s French translation is “raisonnement,” which she describes as a cache-misère [respectable outer garment, or better: a fig-leaf; Platon: Phédon], but this is nevertheless preferable to “proposition” [Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedo]; idées [ideas] or notions [notions; Robin, Plato’s Œvres Complètes], or “definitions” [Bluck, Plato’s Phaedo]). Logos, as a rational statement, entails analysis: “grammatical” analysis before it was invented—inseparable from dialectical activity with respect to forms and the five basic genres—is linked in the Sophist to the logical analysis of truth. Logos is the “first combination” (hê protê sumplokê [ἡ πρώτη συμπλοϰή]; Sophist, 262c 5–6) made up of a noun and a verb and could be either true or false (263b): the meaning of logos as “statement” was therefore set at exactly the same time as the meaning of onoma as “name” (until then, onoma had meant, rather, a “word”) and the meaning of rhèma [ϋῆμα] as “verb.” Understood in this way, logos is perhaps the best way of designating definition itself: for the word or name “circle” (onoma [ὄνομα]), there is a corresponding logos made up of nouns and verbs: “something whose extremities are all at a perfectly equal distance from the center” (ex onomatôn kai rhêmaton [ἐξ ὀνομάτων ϰαὶ ῥημὰτων]; Letter 7, 342c). B. The network of meanings of logos in Aristotle In the philosophical “dictionary” that Aristotle proposes in Book Δ of his Metaphysics, there is no entry entitled logos that records and clarifies the uses of this word. Yet the word is caught within a multiplicity of networks that, even if they are primarily anchored in different places of his work, are used (without being thematized) within one and the same treatise. This is particularly true of De anima, and in analyzing these networks, we gain a better understanding of the extreme difficulty of a classic work such as this. Any interpretation of Aristotle is always faced with the the choice of two approaches to the networks in which a work’s key terms are embedded: either exploring the differences and revealing the gaps and conceptual shifts by using a multiplicity of heterogeneous translations (so Hamlyn, for example, states in the preface to his edition of De anima: “to prevent misunderstanding I have flagged all occurrences of the word by providing the translations with the subscript ‘L’ ”) or attempting to “make available the source which motivates the different ways of meaning” (Heidegger, Phänomenologische interpretationen) by reinventing the scope of the Greek language within the target language. A first network (De anima, 1 and 2), thematized in Book Ζ of the Metaphysics, links logos to eidos [εἶδος] (“form” as opposed II. The Polysemy of Logos Thematized and Used by the Greeks Themselves The history of Greek philosophy can be described as a series of reinterpretations of the meaning of logos against a background of a still-active polysemy. What we find is a shift from one doctrine or systematics to another through a strategy of refocusing. From the pre-Socratics and the Sophists to Plato, from Plato to Aristotle, from Aristotle to the Stoics, and so on, the polysemy of logos is reorganized each time around a different matrix of meaning. We offer here merely a few examples. A. From the power of speech (logos) to the correctness of the statement (logos) From the Sophists to Plato, the sense of “speech” is very clearly devalued in favor of that of “rational statement.” In his Gorgias, subtitled On Rhetoric, Plato shifts logos away from the field of discursiveness, which he assigns to rhetoric, and toward that of the rationality and correctness of statements, which he reserves for philosophy. The Sophist Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, a famous speech that had the effect of absolving her before the whole of Athens of any blame for the Trojan war, defined logos as “a great sovereign [dunastês megas (δυνάστης μέγας)] who, with the smallest and most inapparent of bodies, accomplished the most divine acts [theiotata erga apotelei (θειότατα ἔϱγα ἀποτελεῖ)]” (82B11 DK, §8). The power of logos-as-speech (discours), which is greater than that of force, is thus linked to its performative effectiveness. More than simply saying what is, in accordance with the movement of revealing and of representational adequacy proper to ontology, logos-as-speech enacts what it says, and in particular produces the polis (see POLIS), the city, as a continuous discursive exchange and creation of consensus, which characterizes that political animal endowed with logos that is man (see epideixis in SPEECH ACT, I). Socrates, in dialogue with Gorgias, begins with an apparently banal definition of rhetoric as the “art of speaking” (technê peri logous [τέχνη πεϱὶ λόγους]; 450c). However, when he examines rhetoric more closely, he refuses to call it an art, describing it instead as alogon pragma [ἄλογον πρᾶγμα] (465a), an expression that we are compelled to translate, following Alfred Croiset (in his 1974 translation into French of Gorgias and Meno), as a practice or a thing “devoid of reason”: that logoi-as-speech can redeem or recall the alogon-as-irrational is the mark of the Platonic operation that devalues and excludes from philosophy one meaning of logos in favor of another. Within this shift from one sense of logos to another a war is waged between philosophy and rhetoric, which constitutes one of the key points of access to the Greek world: “The most immoderate presumption of being able to do anything, as rhetors and stylists, runs through all antiquity in a way that is incomprehensible to us” (Nietzsche, “The History of Greek Eloquence”). The Platonic dialectic then reinvests each of the accepted senses of logos with new meaning. As the art of asking the right questions and giving the right answers to them, it is also the art of defending a thesis (logos), in which the musical sense of setting the tone, of finding the key or the dominant, is still resonant: it is the art of “reasoning” and “accounting LOGOS 585 But what is new has to do with the subject capable of legein, of making statements: not man, but aisthêsis itself, including that of the aloga, or “beasts,” legei. Sensation states what it senses by itself; sight says what it sees (white), but still it does not speak, it does not produce logos, that is, a grammatical statement, a predicative sentence (“Socrates is white”). So the perplexity remains as to which part of the soul it is that senses, and “one could not easily class it as alogon, nor as logon echon [λόγον ἔχον]” (De anima, 3.9.432a 15–17). This survey of the meanings of logos makes their disjunction, as well as their systematization, apparent: so a gap remains between the mathematical logos, which calculates sensation, and the logos proper to man, who makes statements, constructs arguments, and unites and persuades citizens. It is as if the Greek language contributed to confusing, and thus to foreclosing, a certain number of questions that Aristotle, “compelled by truth,” nevertheless persisted in asking. C. Logos and Stoic systematics The Stoics, unlike Aristotle, turned the polysemy of logos into a principle of their systematics. For them, logos thematically organized and unified the three parts of the philosophical logos: physics, ethics, and logic. Physical logos is the rational and immanent order of the world (kosmos [ϰόσμος]), which is fully determined by causal relations without exception. The Stoics made a distinction between two fundamental cosmological principles that reproduced the strict division between acting and suffering: between matter (hulê [ὕλη]), which is a pure indeterminate principle, the absolute capacity to undergo, and logos, which is the source of the determination of everything. They called this logos “god,” insofar as they considered it the demiurge, a driving force and formative power. Its physical name was “fire,” a legacy of the Heraclitean logos: so for Zeno, this god was “an artistically working fire, going on its way to create; which is equivalent to a fiery, creative, or fashioning breath” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers). In addition, each living being, each body, each individual in the physical world, contained logoi spermatikoi [λόγοι σπερματιϰοί], seminal reasons, from which he developed, each one representing the singular reason of the fatal law according to which he would develop, provided the conditions he encountered were favorable. Logos justified the Stoic identification of nature—common nature as nature proper, fate, providence, and Zeus: it was well known the world over that, in Plutarch’s words, “common nature and the common reason of this nature [ἡ ϰοινὴ φύσις ϰαὶ ὁ ϰοινὸς τῆς φύσεως λόγος] are Fate, Providence and Zeus” (Plutarch, Contradictions of the Stoics, 34.1050b. This identity was also a principle of Stoic ethics, a rational ethics that affirmed an identity between virtue, happiness, and the sovereign good. For Zeno, the end is a way of living in accordance with nature, itself identified as a way of living according to virtue, that is, a “way of living in accordance with the experience of the events which occur naturally.” The order of the events is nothing other than fate, which is logos (Plutarch, ibid.). In logic, logos was the faculty of reasoning that distinguishes men from animals. This is the faculty of giving to “matter”), to to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι] (quiddity, quintessence), and to entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια] (“act” as opposed to “power”), as well as to horos [ὁρος] (definition). So the soul is the logos of the body, as (for instance) ax-ness is the logos of the ax—and we should add that it is the logos of the soul to be logos of the body (see 412b 11–16). Logos, designating what gives form to a thing, thereby constitutes its definition: it is simultaneously “essence,” “finality,” “raison d’etre,” “definition,” and “account” (as the swarm of translations at 412b 10 testifies: “this is what the soul is,” that is, ousia hê kata ton logon [οὐσία ἡ ϰατά τὸν λόγον]: “a substance in the sense of form” [Barbotin]; “substance, that corresponding to the principle L” (De anima); “substance as that which corresponds to the account of a thing” [Durrant]; “the substance which corresponds to reason” [Bodéüs]; “the essence insofar as it is expressed” [cf. Heidegger, Questions II]). Being par excellence and the expressible par excellence, physics and metaphysics, are thus onto-logically bound together and open the Metaphysics out onto the Organon. A second network connects logos, “voice,” “discursiveness,” and “rationality” (De anima, 2.8 and 3.3) in several statements that make logos something proper to man. This network remits to two kinds of analysis: one is based in anatomy and physiology and specifies the type of linguistic articulation proper to the human logos (The History of Animals, 9.535a, 28–30, for example); the other, via the elaboration of expressiveness as articulated in the Peri hermeneias (4.16b 26: logos esti phônê sêmantikê [λόγος ἐστι φωνὴ σημαντιϰή], “a vocal sound that has a conventional meaning”) relates, by virtue of their connections to the right and the good and to living well, man conceived as an “animal endowed with logos” and man conceived as a “political animal” (Politics, 1.1.1253a 7–15). With the phantasia logistikê [φαντασία λογιστιϰή] (“representation”—though not aisthêtike [αἰσθητιϰή], “representation with the senses,” as is the case with animals—but “rational” [Barbotin, among others], “calculating” [Bodéüs], or better still, “discursive,” De anima, 3.10.433b 29–30), which conjoins imagination and persuasion, De anima brings together under the term logos domains that we would separate under the headings of, on the one hand, anatomy and physiology, and on the other, politics and ethics, but also rhetoric and poetics. The third, more specific, network in the De anima defines “sensation” as a logos, in the mathematical sense of “relation,” “proportion,” a ratio: sensation (aisethêsis [αἴσθησις]), the name for the actual coincidence between a sensory organ (aisthêtêrion [αἰσθητήριον]) and an object sensed (aisthêton [αἰσθητόν]), is nothing other than the calculation of an average between contrasting qualities—for example, white/black to make gray. This is why “an excess of objects sensed destroys the sensory organs: for if the movement is too strong for the organ, the logos [the relation] is broken, and this is sensation” (De anima, 2.12.424a 30–31; cf. 3.2.426a 27–b 8). But the fact that logos is frequently translated as “form” (Barbotin) or “reason” (Bodéüs) does not facilitate this understanding, or our understanding generally. The fourth network involves a semantic field that is barely distinct from the second network: at most it gives logos, when joined to phasis [φάσις] and apophasis [ἀπόφασις] (“affirmation” and “negation”), the specific meaning of “statement.” 586 LOGOS Plautus (300 BCE), that all of the uses attesting to the values of “reasoning,” “method,” and “explanation” developed. This was why, when Cicero and Lucretius translated and expounded Greek philosophical doctrines, ratio was available to them as a term that was able to convey a large number of the meanings of logos. A given meaning could be made clearer with another noun, which was not added to ratio but qualified it, in pairs such as ratio et consilium (the plan, intention), ratio et mens (intelligence, the faculty of reason), ratio et via (method). To convey the sense of “speech,” the term oratio, which is not etymologically related to ratio but is a remarkable homophone, allows us to hear the polysemy of logos, especially when it is paired with ratio. 1. The new coherence of Lucretius The uses of the term ratio in the poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius tended to reduce the polysemy of the term in order the reinforce the coherence of the Epicurean method and the didactic effectiveness of his exposition; this movement of reduction and unification of meaning is marked on the one hand by a recurrence of the reasons or providing causal relations or of accounting for (logon didonai) what we perceive by formulating our perceptive data, or of providing logical representations (phantasiai logikai [φαντασίαι λογιϰαί]) between them. In every case, what the faculty furnishes are human representations as distinct from animal representations; throughout, logikos indissociably means both rational and discursive. . III. From Greek to Latin A. Logos / ratio, oratio The Latin term ratio does not cover all the senses of logos: it has neither the meaning of “gathering” nor the meaning of “speech.” From the verb reor (“to count,” “to calculate,” and in popular usage “to think,” “to estimate,” “to judge”), and used less frequently than puto or opinor, the noun ratio did not produce many compound terms: ratiocinor is rare, and the adjective rationalis was not used before Seneca. It was out of the meanings of “counting” and “calculation,” which ratio has in common with logos, and from the time of 3 The polysemy of “logos” according to Greek grammarians A marginal scholium of a manuscript of the Technê grammatikê by Dionysius Thrax, the text below should be taken for what it is: a more or less careful (there are several redundancies) and byzantine compilation of notes of different sources and dates. It does not, therefore, call for the same kind of exegesis as a deliberately constructed text. We offer it here as a kind of “exhibit” in a trial to show the extent to which the polysemy of logos, described here as equivocal or as a homonym, had struck Greek grammarians. In this respect, the zealous manner in which our scholiast provided as long a list of meanings as possible, even at the cost of occasionally repeating himself, is in itself a noteworthy symptom: Logos is used in many different senses: it is an equivocal word that can signify many things. Logos can mean 1. the rational capacity (ἐνδιάθετος λογισμός) that makes us reasonable, thinking beings (λογιϰοί ϰαί διανοητιϰοί); 2. concern (φροντίς), cf. the expressions “it is not worthy of logos” or “I do not feel any logos about him”; 3. consideration (λογαριασμός), cf. “the commander feels logos for his lieutenants”; 4. justification (ἀπολογία), cf. “He gave a logos for that”; 5. the general (logos) [ὁ ϰαθόλου] that encompasses all parts of speech (μέρος λόγου); 6. definition (ὅρος), cf. “sentient living being,” as the answer to the question “give the logos for animal”; 7. the juxtaposition of words which express full meaning, that is syntactical logos, cf. “finish your logos [sentence]”; 8. (logos) of expenses, sometimes called logos of the bank; 9. the (logos [relation]) of geometry, cf. “there is the same logos between two cubits and four cubits, as between a half and one cubit”; 10.proportion (ἀναλογία), cf. “the logos of four to three is four thirds”; 11. a good reason (τὸ εὔλογον), cf. “he did not do that without a good logos,” meaning “with good reason” (εὐλόγως); 12. the conclusion that follows from premises [he then gives an example of a syllogism]; 13. the fact of being rationally endowed (λογιϰὴ ϰατασϰευή), when we say that men are endowed with logos, but not beings that are devoid of reason (ἄλογα); 14.potentiality (δύναμις), when we say that it is by virtue of a natural logos that animals have teeth and a beard, in other words, by virtue of natural and seminal potentialities; 15. the vocal form that is coextensive with thought (ἡ συμπαρεϰτεινομένη φωνὴ τῶ διανοήματι), cf. ἄπελθε [go away], which is a word (λέξις), insofar as it has a meaning and also a logos because of the sense of the thought content that completes it; 16.that which expresses self-sufficiency (ὅ δηλοῖ τὸ αὐτοτελές), cf. what one says when something is missing from a statement: “finish your logos”; 17. extension (logos), as a given type of completion, cf. “the logos of Demosthenes against Midias is beautiful”; 18.book (βιϐλίον), “lend me the book Against Androtion” [a speech by Demosthenes]; 19.the relation between sizes (σχέσις τῶν μεγεθῶν), when we say that one size has the same logos in relation to another size, as some other size has in relation to some other size; 20.subject (ὑπόθεσις) [i.e., the summary of the plot], cf. “I am now going to read out the logos of the play and its didascalic [comic fragment]”; 21. cause (αἰτία), cf. Plato [Gorgias, 465a]: “I do not call art an activity devoid of logos [ἄλογον πρᾶγμα]”; 22.God, par excellence (ϰατ’ ἐξοχὴν ὁ θεός), cf. Jn 1.1: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God”; in other words, “the son of God, in the beginning, was exactly the same and equal to his Father.” (Dionysius Thrax, Scholia in Dionysii Thracis artem grammaticam, in Grammatici Graeci, vol. 1, fasc. 3) LOGOS 587 ratio. Nonetheless, the understanding of invisible things, perceived dia logou [διὰ λόγου] (10.47, 10.59, 10.62), is not expressed by ratio, but by mens (6.77) or by injectus animi, the mind’s projection. Rational activity, when it covers any kind of perception, is thus directly related to the thinking and feeling subject, which no compound of ratio could express. 2. The nodal points of translation in Cicero The uses of ratio in the Ciceronian corpus reveal at least two “nodes” of translation, which stand out against the banalization of the term as a result of what we might call a diffuse Stoicism. We find an example of this banalization in the brief exposition of the physical doctrine of Anaxagoras (De natura deorum, 1.26): the ordering of the world produced by the nous (fr. A38 RT: DK), the diakosmêsis [διαϰόσμησις], is translated by a phrase in which the group of words vis ac ratio describes the rational process set in motion, as if the diachosmêsis of Anaxagoras were the unfolding of an immanent rationality, the one postulated by the Stoics (“Anaxagoras was the first to argue that the well-ordered organization of all things was a result of an infinite intelligence which had perfected their composition by proceeding rationally [omnium rerum discriptionem et modum mentis infinitae vi ac ratione dissignari]”). A first node occurs around the translation of logikê (technê) [λογιϰή (τέχνη)], “logic”: “in altera philosophiae parte, quae quaerendi ac disserendi quae logikê dicitur” (in the second part of philosophy, concerning the search for and exposition of arguments, which is called “logic”; De finibus, 1.22). We note here that ratio is not what technique is concerned with, but rather the method itself of quaerere and disserere: “logikên quam rationem disserendi voco” (De fato, 37). The sense of “gathering,” well attested for logos but not for ratio, is thus conveyed by the term disserere, “to connect words together, in the right order.” Ratio has to do more with the unfolding, with the method of the process, as is made clear by this definition of apodeixis [ἀπόδειξις], or demonstration, translated as argumenti conclusio (giving form to an argument): “ratio quae ex rebus perceptis ad id quod non percipiebatur adducit” (the method that leads from perceived things to what was not perceived; Academica, 2.26). According to another translation choice (which we find relates to the doctrine of Antiochus; Academica, 1.30–32), ratio is given a meaning that is closer to the sense of logos as “reason and discourse”: logic is defined as “philosophiae pars, quae erat in ratione et in disserendo” (the part of philosophy that concerns the methods of reasoning and its exposition), and the object of dialectics is said to be “oratio ratione conclusa,” discourse governed by the rules of argumentation. The homophonic play of words ratio/oratio allows us to resolve, from a point of view that is here clearly marked by Stoicism, the impossible translation of the object of logic. However, the occurrences of this nonetymological pair (but which must have been perceived as etymological, to judge by Cicero’s uses of the terms) help us to understand where the second difficulty lies. When ratio and oratio are used together, they emphasize a mythical kind of coherence: the origins of eloquence in De inventione (1.2) and of the social bond in De officiis (1.50), are explained by the ability to handle ratio and oratio, whether vera ratio, and on the other by a number of uses that cover several different Greek compound nouns that are based on logos: logismos [λογισμός], epilogismos [ἐπιλογισμός], phusiologia [φυσιολογία]. Vera ratio describes the Epicurean doctrine (see, e.g., On the Nature of Things, 1.498; 5.1117), whose truthfulness is proclaimed in opposition to the erroneous theories of Heraclitus (1.637) and of Anaxagoras (1.880). It is “just reasoning” that allows us to account for the movement of atoms (2.82; 2.229), and it is the advent of an explanation that will reveal a new aspect of the world: Now, pay attention to the true doctrine. An unheard of discovery will strike your ears. A new aspect of your universe will be revealed. (Nunc animum nobis adhibe veram ad rationem. Nam tibi vehementer nova res molitur ad auris. Accidere, et nova se species ostendere rerum.) (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 2.1023–1025) In these uses, ratio covers almost the only sense of logos that it does not have in Latin, that is, the sense of “speech”; it is the master’s speech, the revealed word, this logos that, at the end of the Letter to Herodotus (Diogenes Laertius, 10.83), refers to the synthesis of the main points of this doctrine, which can lend a certain force to anyone who has memorized it. On the other hand, ratio unifies several aspects of Epicurean natural science (phusiologia), whose objective is to “explain the causes of phenomena” (Diogenes Laertius, ibid., 10.78): ratio is thus often paired with causa (4.500, 6.1000), and sometimes replaces it (7.1090; the ratio of an epidemic). Ratio covers all natural laws (2.719) and, for this very reason, provides a general principle of explanation of nature: ratio is thus closely associated with natura in the expression natura haec rerum ratioque, which refers to the recent discovery by Epicurus of the system of nature and its explanation in Latin by Lucretius: Lastly, this recent discovery of the system of nature, and today, indeed, I am the very first able to translate it into the language of our fathers. (Denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus nunc, ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces.) (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 5.335–337) The importance of this use is indicated in the syntagma that appears as a refrain four times in the poem (1.148, 2.61, 3.93, 6.41), natura species ratioque, “the sight and explanation of nature,” or more precisely, “the explanation that accounts for phenomena” (naturae species, what nature makes manifest), but also “the explanation that proceeds by reasoning on the basis of phenomena.” These glosses, which are not translations, are intended to remind us that ratio refers here to logismos, the reasoning by which the lessons of nature are explained (Diogenes Laertius, 10.75), or to epilogismos, through which we understand the end of nature (10.133). Two fundamental aspects of this methodical reasoning are thus conveyed by the single term 588 LOGOS Testaments. In this perspective, it was first of all the Wisdom of the Old Testament (ḥokmah [הָמְכַח ,([translated as Sophia in the Septuagint), which prefigured the Logos of John: Paul (1 CE) was thus already calling the Son of God “wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). There are many points that Wisdom and Logos have in common that allowed for this assimilation: both are created by God (Prv 8:22; cf. Jn 1:4); both represent life (Wisdom declares “for he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord” [Prv 8:35]; cf. the Logos: “in him was life, and the life was the light of men” [Jn 1:4]); both preexist creation (“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” [Prv 8:22]); and both constitute the means of creation (Wisdom is the worker, technitis, who makes everything that is [Prv 7:21 and 8:6]; and Jn 1:3 says of Logos that “all things were made through him”). Wisdom is even presented as spoken “from the mouth of the Most High” (Eccl 24:3), and in that regard, it reconnects with the usual meaning of logos and its communicative function. Despite these convergences, John did not use Sophia, which is a translation of ḥokmah, to designate the Son of God but rather Logos, which is a translation of dāvār. Beside the difference in gender of the nouns (Sophia is a feminine term, unlike Logos, which is masculine and then appropriated as the Son of God), Logos covers a much greater semantic field than Wisdom, which is associated in Rabbinical tradition with the Torah, the written Law (cf. Eccl 24:23). Dāvār is, like Logos, the means of revelation (cf. Ex 3:14, where God reveals himself to men through his Word as the One and Only God), and above all, it is an active power. . 2. Logos: Verbum, sermo, ratio, or causa? a. Logos, verbum, and sermo In the Latin versions of the Bible, two concurrent translations for the logos of the prologue of Jn 1:1 are attested depending on the geographical region: in North Africa, sermo was used (cf. Cyprian, Ad Quirinum testimoniorum, 2.3: “In principio fuit Sermo et Sermo erat apud Deum et Deus erat Sermo”). In Europe, however, it was verbum that prevailed (Novatian, De Trinitate, 30). Whether the term that was kept to translate logos was verbum or sermo, Christ was the spoken word. But verbum was more suited than sermo, which had strong connotations of internal plurality, for the unity and uniqueness of the Son of God. So in his Tractatus in Johannis Evangelium (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 108.3), Augustine comments on the passage from John 17:17 in the following terms: “Your discourse [Sermo],” he says, “is truth.” What else did he say than “I am the truth”? For indeed, the Greek Gospel has logos, that which is also read there where it was said, “In the beginning was the Word [Verbum] and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And of course we know that the Word itself is the only-begotten Son of God, who “was made flesh and dwelt among us [Et utique Verbum ipsum novimus unigenitum Dei Filium quod caro factum est et habitavit in nobis].” And because of this [verbum] it could also be put here and in some codices has been put: “Your Word [Verbum] is truth,” as in some codices even there it was written “In the beginning was the Discourse [Sermo].” But in the Greek, in teaching or learning. This coherence is also the one that Stoic discourse aspires to, over and against moral suffering (Tusculanes, 4.60). But the dissociation between the two terms highlights their irreducible distinction, or the trap of the Stoic conception of language. When arguing against the Stoic Cato, Cicero states his disagreement at the level of words, oratio, while claiming to be in agreement with Cato about the main points of doctrine, the ratio: “Ratio enim nostra consentit, pugnat oratio” (we agree on doctrine, it is language which opposes us; De finibus, 3.10). Similarly, in Cicero’s translation of the Timaeus, the inadequacy of all language, other than by “resemblance,” to translate anything to do with gods and the creation of the universe (29c) is clearly marked thanks to the distinction between the ratio of the demiurgical god and the oratio that gives us its image—and yet both terms serve to translate logos. The uses of ratio in Seneca’s language are marked by an interpretation of the doctrine that limits man’s participation in the reason of the world: the animus of god is wholly ratio, that of man is possessed by error (Natural Questions, preface, 14). Man’s rationality is constitutive, and Seneca coins the adjective rationalis, which essentially covers the first manifestation of logos through the mastery of the spoken language: infans irrationalis, puber rationalis (the newborn infant is without reason [without speech], the child possesses reason; Epistles, 118.14). But if ratio is the imitatio naturae (ibid., 66.39), the conditions of this imitation are made more difficult by a general blindness that prevents us from perceiving the rational principles at work in nature and in the nature proper to man (ibid., 95). So the construction of the rational subject does not coincide with a progressive reinforcement of reason, but with a process of curing this blindness (ibid., 50). This interpretation, which systematically treats errors of judgment as an illness, privileges the vocabulary of care, and of the willingness or disposition to be cured (hence Seneca’s interest in bona mens and voluntas). B. From Logos to Verbum: The Gospel according to John 1. The Logos: Son of God, hokmah . (wisdom) or dāvār (the spoken word)? Logos appears seven times in the Gospel according to John in the New Testament (four times in the prologue to the fourth Gospel 1:1, 14; twice in John 1 1:1, 5:7; once in Rv 19:13). The term is translated canonically as “Word,” or Verbe in French, which is a calque of the Verbum of the Vulgate. John says that the Logos was “in the beginning” (John 1 1:1), even before the creation of the world, and it was through it that God created all things (1:3: “all things were made through him”). The Logos “was God” (1:1), as well as being a person distinct from God (1:2: “the Word was with God”). It is also called the “only Son” of God (1:14). What is specific to John’s Logos is that it “became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14): incarnation confers upon Logos the mission of communicating with men and of revelation to them, which is related to its current sense of “spoken word” in common Greek. We go from the organic nature of the logoi spermatikoi (seminal reasons) of the Stoics, a legacy of Aristotelian form, to the economy of persons and of filiation. The ancient exegetes (e.g., Origen, Saint Augustine) were convinced early on of the continuity between the two LOGOS 589 our people are already wont, through the artlessness of the translation, to say that Discourse [sermo] was in the beginning with God, though it would be more appropriate to consider Reason of older standing, seeing that God is [not] discursive [sermonalis] from the beginning but is rational [rationalis] even before the beginning, and because discourse itself, having its ground in reason, shows reason to be prior as being its substance. Yet even so it makes no difference. For although God had not yet uttered his Discourse [sermo], he always had it within himself along with and in his Reason [ratio], while he silently thought out and ordained with himself the things which he was shortly to say by the agency of Discourse: for while thinking out and ordaining them in company of his Reason, he converted into Discourse that which he was discussing in discourse. [Cum ratio enim sua cogitans atque disponens sermonem, eam efficiebat quam sermone tractabat]. (Tertulliani adversus Praxean, §5) In Augustine we find an analogous opposition between Verbum, as the creative Word of the Father, and Ratio, as the Reason immanent to God independently of all creation. But Augustine prefers verbum to sermo as a translation for logos, since the former term for him emphasizes, better than ratio, the notion of an effective Word, as we can see in the De diversis quaestionibus (Eighty-Three Different Questions, question 63): “In the beginning was the Word.” The Greek word logos signifies in Latin both “reason” [ratio] and “word” without any variation, both there and here, is logos. And so in truth, that is, in his Word, in his Only-Begotten, the Father sanctifies his own heirs and his coheirs [Sanctificat itaque Pater in veritate, id est in Verbo suo, in unigenito suo, suos heredes ejusque coheredes]. (Tractates on the Gospel of John) The association made at the end of this passage between Verbum and veritas (truth) is not coincidental. It points to a popular etymology, traditionally attributed to Varro and that Saint Augustine adopts when he links verbum (the word) either to verum (true) or to verum boare (to proclaim what is true) (De dialectica, 6). One can probably see here another factor explaining the translators’ choice of Verbum to translate the Logos of John. b. Logos and ratio Yet the church fathers would continue to question the possible translation of Logos by Ratio, which pointed to the divine Reason of the creative God. For Tertullian (verses 150–222), who possessed an African version of the Bible in which the translation of logos as sermo was preferred, logos does not correspond to the Latin verbum but instead to the combination of ratio (reason) and sermo (speech). Indeed, although it is true (Tertullian maintains) that thought precedes the spoken word, that reason (ratio) is the substance of this spoken word (sermo), ratio is nonetheless expressed in the form of an inner spoken word. This [reason] the Greeks call Logos, by which expression we also designate discourse [sermo]: and consequently 4 The ambiguity of the Hebrew dāvār [רָבָד ,[ּspoken word The Hebrew word dāvār [רָבָד [ּpresents an interesting ambiguity, since it means both “word” and “thing”—this last, first of all in the sense of “fact,” “event.” This Semitic substratum explains certain oddities of the early Gospels, such as the angel’s expression to Mary “no word [rhêma (ῥῆμα)] is impossible for God,” or the words of the shepherds at the Nativity: “let us go see this word which has happened” (Lk 1:37 and 2:15). The same ambiguity exists in Arabic, where amr [األمر [sometimes refers to the “matter at hand” (pl. umūr [أمور ,[sometimes to the command given (pl. awāmir [أوامر .([In French, chose (thing) is a doublet of cause (cause, reason, case): la chose (thing) is what is en cause (the case) in a legal debate, and the thing one is talking about (ce dont on cause). The words Ding in German and “thing” in English both recall the thing, which was the name for an assembly of people where certain “things” would be on the agenda. The ambiguity of the word makes sense in terms of the representation of creation as having issued forth from a divine command. This idea is found in the ancient Near East, perhaps as a result of the idea of thunder as a divine voice (cf. Sumerian ENEM = Akkadian awātum). It appears in the Bible: “By the word [dāvār] of the Lord the heavens were made” (Ps 33:6). It is implicit in the first story of creation at the beginning of Genesis. This creative word is hypostasized in Philo, who gives it the name logos. The term is used in John’s Gospel to designate the word in which all things were created and that became flesh. The Latin translates this as Verbum, which refers in theology to the second person of the Trinity before his incarnation as Jesus Christ. The emphatic usage of “word” to refer to the poetic word, sometimes with a capital letter, represents a secularization of the idea. A further representation comes to be grafted on to this meaning, whereby the word can magically act upon reality. To know the “answer to a mystery,” or mot (word) de l’énigme in French, enables one to change things by returning to their verbal source. Things are like frozen words, which one can free up. This idea is echoed, finally, in a quatrain by Eichendorff: “a poem [Lied] lies dormant in all things” (“Wünschelrute”), and in Proust: “[W]hat lay hidden behind the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a pretty phrase” (Swann’s Way, chap. 1). One of the most famous plays on words in Western literature is based on the ambiguity of dāvār [רָבָד .[ּIn the first Faust, Goethe has his hero retranslate the opening of the prologue to John’s Gospel: “in the beginning was logos.” He rejects Wort (word), then Sinn (meaning), then Kraft (power), to settle in the end on Tat (act) (vv. 1224–37). This choice seems arbitrary, unless we understand that Faust begins with an implicit retroversion of his text, which is attentive to its Semitic substratum. Rémi Brague REFS.: Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Translated by C.K.S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin. London: Chatto and Windus, 1981 590 LOGOS With Meister Eckhart, the theology of the Word become even more complex. He devoted paragraphs 4 to 51 of his Commentary on the Prologue of the Gospel of Saint John to an exegesis of the expression in principio erat Verbum. Following Augustine, he proposed the equivalence between Logos and Verbum et ratio (§4). For him, logos is the first cause of all things (§12: “causa prima omnis res ratio est, logos est, Verbum in principio” [the first Cause of all things is Reason, Logos, the Word in the Principle]). He emphasizes the intellective nature of the Word (§38: “Verbum, quod est ratio in intellectu est, intellegendo formatur, nihil praeter intellegere est” [the Word, which is reason is in the intellect, is formed by knowing, is nothing but knowing]). Man, as intellect, can find himself again in the Word and can be reborn to his true divine nature, while the Father creates his Son in the human soul. This use of logos in the language of theology to refer to the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, is strikingly original. John deflected the term by wresting it from its usual noetic domain and dwelling on the Incarnation. Thereafter followed a period when the notion of causality, which was essential to the Christian conceptualization of creation, was eclipsed. Then the Latin of the medieval theologians reinvested logos with the profane values of Greek philosophy (the Platonic idea and the Stoic cause). . IV. Vernacular Puns A. English: “Tell,” “tale,” “tally”; “count,” “account,” “recount” “Say,” the most common word in English to express “saying,” is not really polysemic and can only ever translate one of the meanings of legein. It competes with other families of words, in particular those around the verbs “tell” and “count,” which like legein, open out onto more complex usages that are at once arithmetical, discursive, and performative. (a) A first important and rather archaic meaning of “tell,” which is still present, was that of “counting” or “enumerating”—saying or “telling” out the numbers one by one (one, two, three, etc.), a first form of counting that also interested Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. We find this usage in Robinson Crusoe in the following: He could not tell twenty in English; but he numbered them by laying so many Stones on a Row, and pointing to me to tell them over. (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, chap. 15) This is what one does when one counts out coins, for example, or banknotes, and a “teller” in English is both someone who tells tales, as well as someone who counts money in a bank. (Automatic tellers dispense cash or tell customers the balance in their bank accounts.) The idea of counting is associated with the idea of saying (stating the numbers, one by one), and arithmetic is the ability to follow a series out loud, such as two, four, six. Conversely, the association of “tell” with “count” defines narration; hence, a “tale,” as derived from a primary form of counting, like a series with stages that can be enumerated and well defined: serialized tales are of this kind. [verbum]. However, in this verse the better translation is “word” [verbum], so that not only the relation to the Father is indicated, but also the efficacious power with respect to those things which are made by the Word [Sed hoc loco melius verbum interpretamur, ut significetur non solum ad Patrem respectus, sed ad illa etiam quae per Verbum facta sunt operativa potentia]. Reason, however, is correctly called reason even if nothing is made by it. In the Tractatus in Johannis Evangelium (1.10), Augustine considers this translation to be established, in spite of the potential ambiguity of the word verbum, which refers equally to the Word and to human spoken words. Rather than suggesting a better translation, the author is content to underline the difference between the Verbum of the Father and our human words (verba): “And whenever you hear: In the beginning was the Word [In principio erat Verbum], so that it does not make you think of something of little value—as you normally do when you hear talk of human words [cum verba humana soleres audire]—this is what you must think: the Word was God [Deus erat Verbum].” c. Logos and causa In the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena (810–877) also reflected on the notion of Logos in his Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature). In this text, he blends a number of Neoplatonic elements with his own Christology and argues that within the Word reside Ideas, that is, the first causes from which all things were created: The most primary reason of all things, which is simple and multiple, is God the Word. For it is called by the Greeks logos, that is, Word [verbum] or Reason [ratio] or Cause [causa] [Nam a Grecis logos vocatur, hoc est verbum vel ratio vel causa]. Therefore, that which is written in the Greek gospel, en archêi în ho logos, can be interpreted “In the beginning was the Word,” or: “In the beginning was the Reason,” or: “In the beginning was the Cause.” For nobody who makes any one of these statements will be deviating from the truth. For the only-begotten Son of God is both Word and Reason and Cause, Word because through Him God uttered the making of all things [verbum quidem quia per ipsum deus pater dixit fieri Omnia]—in fact He is the Utterance of the Father and His Saying and His Speech [immo etiam ipse est Patris dicere et dictio et sermo], as He Himself says in the gospel, “And the speech which I have addressed to you is not Mine but His that sent Me” [et sermo quem locutus sum vobis non est meus sed ipsius qui misit me]. Reason because He is the principal Exemplar of all things visible and invisible, and therefore is called by the Greeks idea, that is, species or form [ratio vero quoniam ipse est omnium visibilium et invisibilium principale exemplar ideoque a Grecis idea, id est species bel forma dicitur]—for in Him the Father beholds the making of all things He willed to be before they were made—; and Cause because the origins of all things subsist eternally and immutably in Him [causa quoque est quoniam occasiones omnium aeternaliter et incommutabiliter in ipso subsistunt]. (2.642b–642c) LOGOS 591 essay on A Winter’s Tale entitled “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses,” he shows how Shakespeare’s vocabulary is saturated with these double usages of “tell” and of “count,” “account,” “loss,” “gain,” “owe,” “debt,” “repay,” etc. We can see how rich the economic lexicon already is in Shakespeare’s language, but counting, or rather the impossibility of counting, takes on an added dimension, that of the inability to say, to express oneself, or to “tell.” Leontes in A Winter’s Tale is thus “unable to tell anything,” to know and to say what counts, and Cavell, returning to the dual sense of saying and knowing in “telling,” sees in this attitude an expression of skepticism itself—the impossibility of expression repeating the inability of counting, and of counting for others. This usage of the pair “tell”/“count” closely links “saying” to categorizing, as in the expression “to count as.” To “count something as” is to put it in a category or a semantic unit. Here again is Cavell: “how we determine what counts as instances of our concepts, this thing as a table, this other as a human. To speak is to say what counts” (In Quest of the Ordinary). To see a thing as this or that is to “count” it, in the literal sense, as one of these words (or concepts), or as one of those others. In This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), Cavell reads Kantian, but also Emersonian, categories as the means by which we count things, that is, count a given thing as falling under a given word, and thereby, he concludes, “recount our condition.” The term “recount” thus becomes untranslatable. (The French translation is forced to invent the verb ra-compter for “to recount”). The linguistic play surrounding “tell”/“count” would thus allow for a new definition of the categories (that is, of the application of concepts and words to the world) by the invention of a conception of logos that would at the same time, and indissolubly, be a narrating (recounting), a counting out of differences, and an accounting. So it is through the English language and its usages that the irreducibility of logos to a simple description of the world, or the irreducibility of description to statement, becomes apparent in very concrete ways. B. German: Legen, liegen, lesen The difficulty of translating legein and logos is a cornerstone of Heidegger’s reflection on Greece, on language, and on philosophy, and it prompts a complex linguistic play in German. One of the starting points of this reflection is Heraclitus’s fragment 50. . In discussing this fragment, Heidegger proposes retranslating logos and homologein by taking as a pivotal term the “literal” or “authentic” (eigentlich) meaning of legein. Wer möchte leugnen, dass in der Sprache der Griechen von früh an λέγειν reden, sagen, erzählen bedeutet? Allein es bedeutet gleich früh und noch ursprünglicher und deshalb immer schon und darum auch in der vorgenannten Bedeutung das, was unser gleichlautendes “legen” meint: nieder- und vorlegen. Darin waltet das Zusammenbringen, das lateinische legere als lesen im Sinne von einholen und zusammenbringen. Eigentlich bedeutet λέγειν das sich und anderes sammelnde Nieder- und Vor-legen. Medial gebraucht, meint λέγεσθαι: sich niederlegen in die Sammlung der Ruhe; λέχος ist das “Tell” is specifically oriented toward the effect or intention of the spoken word and has the dimension of a speech act: “telling” is always something other than describing or stating and does not refer, as “say” almost always does, to a statement. So rather than “say,” one will “tell a lie” or “tell the truth,” and “tell” adds to the simple idea of speaking, the fact of pointing out (to tell the time), of announcing or informing, correctly or not; of letting others know. “Tell” also means to narrate or relate, as in to “tell tales” (the two words being closely linked). “Tell” sometimes suggests, again going beyond a descriptive use of language, confession or revelation, as in “to disclose,” “to reveal” (cf. the expression “tell all”). Its usage also extends to cases where it is a matter of making distinctions, of showing discernment, as one speaks (tell friend from foe, tell right from wrong). So “telling” is distinct from the notion of stating and means “to make or see a difference” and “to have some criterion for” (“I can tell,” or “How can you tell it’s a goldfinch?” the example given by J. L. Austin in “Other Minds”). So we can identify two directions in the verb “tell”: that of narrating or recounting and that of enumerating or counting (cf. the verb “tally”). The usages of the verb “tell” suggest two dimensions of logos that go beyond the simple description of what is: the “telling,” the narrative saying, which is intended to have an effect on others (what Austin, in How to Do Things with Words, defined as the perlocutionary dimension of what is said); and the act of counting implied in any statement (which would be its illocutionary dimension). Whatever the case, it seems that the verb “to tell” and its usages highlight more than “to say” and more than its French equivalents, a performative dimension of spoken language that is inseparable from a conception of logos as performance. (b) This duality, to which the false French pair conter (to tell) / compter (to count) curiously enough corresponds, is to be found in the compound words based on “count” (recount, account). (Romance languages in general play on this pun: see, for instance, Cervantes, Don Quixote 1.28, where Dorotea refers to the sad account of her woes: “el cuento, que no le tiene, de mis desdichas” (the story [cuento], which is uncountable [que no tiene cuento], of my sorrows). “To recount” in the strict sense means “to count again,” but also “to narrate.” “Account” can be used not only in the sense of “counting” (money) but also in the sense of “giving an account of ” something or of “accounting for” (as in the Greek logon didonai, the “day of reckoning” is the last judgment). This is precisely how Locke uses the noun “account,” which is why in the French translation, Pierre Coste (Essai philosophique) alternatively uses compte (tally) and récit (tale). This, of course, then poses the problem of translating into French the expression “accountable” for one’s actions, where the French for “accountable” should be not, as Coste translates it, responsable (responsible), but rather comptable (countable) (as Étienne Balibar proposes in his version, in “Points-bilingues”). We can see here, then, how moral philosophy during this period of English philosophy is defined in economic terms. The pairs “count”/“account” and “tell”/“tally” thus articulate a remarkable link connecting counting, saying, and debt. Stanley Cavell identifies a Shakespearean source of this problematic that links the economic to the moral. In his 592 LOGOS Logos takes root by his raising the following question: “How does λέγειν, whose literal meaning is to lay out (legen), come to mean saying and speaking (sagen und reden)?” The answer concerns the being of language: To say is λέγειν. This sentence, if well thought, now sloughs off everything facile, trite, and vacuous. It names the inexhaustible mystery that the speaking of language comes to pass from the unconcealment of what is present [der Unverborgenheit des Anwesenden], and is determined according to the lying-before of what is present as the letting-lie-together-before [dem Vorliegen des Anwesenden als das beisammen-vorliegen-lassen]. (“Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]”) Logos, which is thus linked to the unveiling of alêtheia, is what allows the phenomenon to show itself as itself (apophainesthai; cf. Sein und Zeit, §7B). What would have come to pass had Heraclitus—and all the Greeks after him—thought the essence of language expressly as Λόγος, as the Laying that gathers! Nothing less than this: the Greeks would have thought the essence of language from the essence of Being [das Wesen der Sprache aus dem Wesen des Seins]—indeed, as this itself. For ὁ Λόγος is the name for the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]. Yet none of this came to pass. (“Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]”) Ruhelager; λόχος, ist der Hinterhalt, wo etwas hinterlegt und angelegt ist. (Who would want to deny that in the language of the Greeks from early on λέγειν means to talk, say, or tell? However, just as early and even more originally, and therefore already in the previously cited meaning, it means what our similarly sounding legen means: to lay down and lay before. In legen a “bringing together” prevails, the Latin legere understood as lesen, in the sense of collecting and bringing together. Λέγειν properly means the laying-down and laying-before which gathers itself and others. The middle voice, λέγεσθαι, means to lay oneself down in the gathering of rest; λέχος is the resting place; λόχος is a place of ambush where something is hidden, poised to attack.) (“Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]”) There are several comments one might make here. In the first place, with regard to the Greek. Heidegger makes no distinction (in contrast with the standard etymology given by Frisk [RT: Griechiches etymologisches Wörterbuch] and by Chantraine [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque]), between *λέγω, from the Indo-European root *legh- “to be lying down” (from which we get λέχος and λόχος, as well as legen, liegen, or the French lit) and λέγω, from *leg-, “to gather.” This fusion or confusion is an essential part of his argument. Here the onto-logical privileging of the Greek 5 Translating a pre-Socratic (Heraclitus, fragment 50) A “fragment” is surrounded by an aura of meaning and depends on an interpretation of the whole that is more wished for than guaranteed. This is true of the very famous fragment of Heraclitus: οὐϰ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀϰούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἕν πάντα εἶναι (Not after listening to me, but after listening to the account [logos], one does wisely in agreeing that all things are one.) (Heraclitus, Fragments) – A more rationalist interpretation understands logos in the sense of Sinn, “sense,” “reason,” and founds a preStoic cosmic physics, in which logos produces the unity of the world; this is how we might read the German translation by Diels Kranz (RT: DK): “Haben sie nicht mich, sondern den Sinn vernommen, so ist weise, dem Sinne gemäss zu sagen [to say according to the meaning], alles sei eins.” Dumont proposes, in French: “Si ce n’est pas moi, mais le Logos que vous avez écouté, il est sage de convenir qu’est l’Un-Tout” (If it is not me, but Logos that you listened to, it is wise to agree that One is All). – A more discursive interpretation, defended for example by J. Bollack and H. Wismann, emphasizes the difference between signifier and signified, between saying and what is said: “L’art est bien d’écouter, non moi, mais la raison, pour savoir dire en accord toute chose-une” (Art is indeed listening, not to me, but to reason, to know how to say in agreement all one-thing). The commentary does not “rationalize”; quite the opposite: “To allow the signifier to act, Heraclitus asks that we listen to what is being said, without being limited by the intention of the speaker” (ibid.). – An ontological interpretation, like the one Heidegger proposes, links logos to the unveiling of being: “Nicht mir, aber der Lesende Lege gehörig: Selbes liegen lassen: Geschickliches west (die lesende lege): Eines einend Alles [Belonging and lending an ear, not to me, but to the gathering Posing: leaving the Same laid out: something welldisposed spreads out its being (the gathering Posing): One uniting All]” (“Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50]”). REFS.: Bollack, Jean, and Heinz Wismann. Héraclite ou la séparation. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972. Dumont, Jean-Paul, ed. Les écoles présocratiques. Paris: Gallimard / Folio, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. “Logos [Heraklit, Fragment 50].” In Vorträge und Aufsätze, edited by FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, 211–34. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. Translation by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Logos (Heraclitus, fragment B 50).” In Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, 59–78. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975. Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by T. M. Robinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Maly, Kenneth, and Parvis Emad, eds. Heidegger on Heraclitus: A New Reading. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1986. LOGOS 593 Augustine, Saint. Eighty-Three Different Questions. Translated by David L. Mosher. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1982. . Tractates on the Gospel of John. Translated by John W. Rettig. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988–95. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. . “Other Minds.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 83–84. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Balibar, Étienne. “Points-bilingues.” In Identité et différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Bluck, R. S., trans. Plato’s Phaedo. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. Bray, G. “The Legal Concept of Ratio in Tertullian.” Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 94–116. Cassin, Barbara. Aristote et le logos: Contes de phénoménologie ordinaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. . L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. . “Who’s Afraid of the Sophists? Against Ethical Correctness.” Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Hypatia 15 (Fall 2000): 102–120. Cavell, Stanley. “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses.” In In Quest of the Ordinary, by Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. . This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989. Translation by S. Laugier: Une nouvelle Amérique encore inapprochable. Paris: Éditions de L’Éclat, 1991. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. Alfred Vacant, Eugène Mangenot, and Emile Amann. Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1923–50. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. London: Heinemann, 1925. Dixsaut, Monique, trans. Platon: Phédon. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. Ebbesen, Sten. Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Erigena, John Scotus. Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature), Book 3. Edited by I. P. Sheldon-Williams with the collaboration of Ludwig Bieler. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981. With Logos (and its capital letter), the Greeks “inhabited this being of language,” but they never thought it, not even Heraclitus, who made it appear “for the time of a lightning flash.” In German, the same fusion/confusion is repeated, now pertaining to legen and lesen: “To lay [legen] means to bring to lie [zum Liegen bringen]. Thus, to lay is at the same time to place one thing beside another [zusammenlegen], to lay them together. To lay [legen] is to gather [lesen]” (ibid.). The present day meaning of lesen in German, “to read” (like the Latin legere), is therefore only a variation of the lesen that gathers together, gathers up, and shelters (cf. Ährenlese, “gleaning”; Traubenlese, “grape harvest”; Lese, “crop,” “harvest”; Auslese, “selection”; Erlesen, “election”; Vorlese, “preselection”; etc.). Heidegger’s German articulates the being of saying and the being of holding forth as a laying out, exactly as the Greek does. . Barbara Cassin Clara Auvray-Assayas Frédérique Ildefonse Jean Lallot Sandra Laugier Sophie Roesch REFS.: Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. . On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Translated by W. S. Hett. Rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. 6 Vernunft ist Sprache, λόγος: The three senses of Wort If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. (Letter from Hamann to Herder, 8 August 1784, Heidegger, “Language”) The famous passage quoted by Heidegger, “Reason is language, λόγος,” in the essay “Language” is dated 8 August. Hamann addresses Herder by putting himself in the position of Job in his mire (Job 30:6ff.); he refers to Herder’s later Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, which he has just received, as a Lustgarden (garden of pleasures) and only feels directly concerned by book 4, on the divine origin of language and the role of religion in the life of mankind. “Vernunft ist Sprache, λόγος” refers to the entire conception of creation in its two aspects—nature and history—as the word of God, in accordance with his reading of Genesis. This clear “language” that God speaks is made obscure (finster) by the fall; this is why intelligence only comes at the end of time, with the angel of the apocalypse, who will reveal its meaning, and not with a human Clavis Scripturae (kritische Grübeley). Reason is in the abyss of language, which is itself the veiled speech of God, a divine proffering that is the model of all creation. Herder’s explanation is thus somewhat too short for Hamann; although it reintegrates reason with language, it does not see the divine word as being within language, whereas for Hamann the three are inseparable, and the logic of specialization that is particular to the modern world is unaware of this. To counter this logic of specialization (which Herder embodies, despite his critical stance toward it), Hamann suggests that we need to return to the three senses of logos, which are to be found also, he says, in the German Wort: reason (Vernunft), speech (Sprache), word (Logos). According to Hamann, this strategy could be put in terms of the rhetoric of Demosthenes, as actio, actio, and actio (adapting a passage in Cicero he was fond of, De oratore, 3.56.213; cf. Orator, 27.56). Through Luther’s translation of the Logos in John’s Gospel, Hamann sets out to rediscover the unity of reason and language, but especially their shared origin in the word of God. The reason of Modernity is absorbed in the divine word, Wort expressing simultaneously, in Protestant cultures, revelation and language. The defense of natural language is thus for Hamann a way to contain reason (Vernunft) and to subject it to the word. So for him, Wort is more a strategic reduction of Logos than an adequate translation, but it allows him to intervene in the three domains covered by this term. Denis Thouard REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. “Language.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, edited by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 594 LOGOS Gilson, Étienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1955. Grillmeier, Alois. Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche. Freiburg, Ger.: Herder, 1979. Translation by John Bowden: Christ in Christian Tradition. 2nd rev. ed. 2 vols. London: Mowbrays, 1975. Hackforth, R., trans. Plato’s Phaedo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Hawtrey, R.S.W. “‘Ratio’ in Lucretius.” Prudentia 33 (2001): 1–11. Heidegger, Martin. “Logos (Heraklit, Fragment 50).” In Vorträge und Aufsätze. 3rd ed., Pfulligen, Ger.: Neske, 1967. First published in 1954. Translation by David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Logos.” In Early Greek Thinking. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. . Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Edited by Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. Gesamtausgabe, vol 61. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz: Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. . “Vom Wesen und Begriff der PHYSIS. Aristoteles, Physik B, 1 (1939).” In Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, 239–302. 3rd ed. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Thomas Sheehan and William McNeill: “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 183–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Keener, Craig S. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. 2 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. Kertz, Karl G.S.J. “Meister Eckhart’s Teaching on the Birth of the Divine Word in the Soul.” Traditio 25 (1959): 327–63. Léon-Dufour, Xavier. Lecture de l’Évangile selon Jean. 4 vols. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988–96. Libera, Alain de, and Emilie Zum Brunn. Maître Eckhart: Métaphysique du verbe et théologie négative. Paris: Beauchesne, 1984. Locke, John. Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain, où l’on montre quelle est l’etendue de nos connoissances certaines, et la manière dont nous y parvenons. Translated by Pierre Coste. Amsterdam, 1700. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Nicolas, Christian. Utraque lingua: Le calque sémantique: Domaine gréco-latin. Louvain, Belg.: Peeters, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The History of Greek Eloquence.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent, 213. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ojeman, R. “Meanings of ‘Ratio’ in the De rerum natura.” Classical Bulletin 39 (1963): 53–59. O’Rourke Boyle, Marjorie. “Sermo, reopening the conversation on translating in Jn 1, 1.” Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 161–68. Plato. Œuvres complètes. Edited and translated by Leon Robin. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1940. . Plato [in twelve volumes]. Translated by H. N. Fowler et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–37. 7 Glossolalia: From the unity of the word to plurality of tongues “Glossolalia” is a technical expression referring to a variety of speech act whose name derives from the Greek term for speaking in tongues. Saint Paul may have been the first to define this linguistic practice. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he enjoins his addressees not to “speak into the air” (1 Cor 14:1–25). To “speak in tongues,” Paul suggests, is how to forget the meaning of one’s words. It is to abandon one’s tongue for “tongues” and “obscure expressions,” such that one becomes a “child in understanding” and a “barbarian that speaketh unto a barbarian.” In The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, Giorgio Agamben has commented that such speech consists not so much in the “pure uttering of inarticulate sounds” as in a “‘speaking in gloss,’ that is, in words whose meaning one does not know.” To hear such sounds is to know they mean something without knowing exactly what such a “something” might be; in other words, it is to discern an intention to signify that cannot be identified with any particular signification. Agamben notes that the traditional translations of the Greek text of Paul’s letter fail to capture the full radicalism of the linguistic “barbarism” that it clearly describes. Whereas the King James version, following the Vulgate, has “If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto he that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me,” a literal rendition would read otherwise on a single, decisive point: “If I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto he that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian in me [en hemoi].” “The text’s en hemoi,” Agamben writes, “can only signify ‘in me,’ and what Paul means is perfectly clear: if I utter words whose meaning I do not understand, he who speaks in me, the voice that utters them, the very principle of speech in me, will be something barbarous, something that does not know how to speak and that does not know what it says.” One might well conclude that to speak in tongues is therefore to speak without speaking. For glossolalia begins where the canonical determinations of language end: at the point at which speech is irrevocably loosened from both its significance and its subject, as one experiences, within oneself, “barbarian speech that one does not know.” It is an “unfruitful” state, in Paul’s words, since it is one in which language is sundered from its semantic and intentional ends, suspended, “in unknown tongues,” without the “profit” of a definite sense or purpose. But it is precisely this semantic sterility that also renders glossolalia stimulating for thought. What is speech loosened from its adherence to the rules of a particular language, from the will of an individual speaker, from the conventions of adult and native discourse? Giorgio Agamben may be the contemporary philosopher who has considered these questions with the greatest acuity, and he has suggested more than once that in such glossolalia one may discern a fundamental dimension of language all too seldom considered as such: communicability without content, or, more simply, “gesture.” Daniel Heller-Roazen REFS.: Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. . Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993. . Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. . Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. . Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. . Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. . The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. “Speaking in Tongues.” Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002): 92–115. LOVE 595 of a bipolarity ranging from sensuality to intellect: depending on the context, the period, or the author, the meaning moves, in each language, now toward one extreme, then toward the other. To determine which of these two poles we are referring to, we are often obliged to resort to several kinds of qualification that take into account especially the nature of the affect involved, its intensity, or its object (one can love God, one’s neighbor, one’s wife, one’s sexual partner, one’s child, a close friend, something one will never see again, a landscape, chocolate, staying home). Thus the differentiation will be made by means of epithets, complements, expressions of modality (e.g., with sensual desire, eroticism, libido, or inversely, with respect, tenderness, friendship, sympathy, charity). But the dichotomy can also manifest itself as an antithesis between two different semantic fields: in German, lieben (love) and mögen (like), or Liebe and Minne (a poetic type of love); in Italian, amare and voler bene a (which includes the idea of a strong desire); whereas in French, aimer means both “love” and “like” and thus sometimes has to be further specified (aimer d’amour, aimer bien). However, even this antithesis is not always maintained. Thus, although the disjunction between “love” and “like” works for the differentiation by affect (I love you, je vous aime / I like her, je l’aime bien), the same is not true when it is a matter of intensity: to the question “Do you like cabbage?” one may very well reply “I love it” (“J’adore ça!” French says, using the same verb as for God) or “I am fond of it.” A. Dichotomies based on the nature and modalities of the affect The bipolar character of the vocabulary of love is manifested especially through a series of pairs of opposites, the most common of which are those that distinguish between eroticized, sensual, or carnal love and romantic, tender, spiritual love, two affects whose interaction was analyzed by Freud; “concupiscent love” and deep affection for a friend (amour d’aimitiè), a classical distinction, especially since the time of Aristotle, Cicero, and Descartes; love as affectus and love as esteem, an opposition close to the one Malebranche establishes between “instinctual love” (amour d’instinct) and “rational love” (amour de raison); “pathological love” and “practical love,” which Kant radically opposes to each other. We can add the dichotomy proposed by Pierre Rousselot regarding medieval authors: “physical love,” which is governed by natural tendencies (phusis [φύσις]) that lead every being to seek its individual happiness, versus “ecstatic love,” violent, independent of natural appetites, foreign to any personal interest and to any selfish inclination. This distinction is related to the one, also concerning the love of God, on which Fénelon and quietism base themselves when they oppose “mercenary love” to a “pure love” that pushes contempt of self and disinterestedness to the point of showing itself to be indifferent to the “impossible supposition” of damnation itself. 1. Sensual love and romantic love Liebe, on the one hand, and amour, on the other, conjoin in their generic meaning the amor/libido bipolarity that the Latin substantives perfectly distinguish. But they do not proceed from the same source. When Freud opposes two Schindler, Alfred. Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinitätslehre. Tübingen: Mohr, 1965. Tertullian. Tertulliani adversus Praxean liber: Tertullian’s Treatise against Praxeas. Translated by Ernest Evans. London: SPCK, 1948. Weigelt, Charlotta. The Logic of Life: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of Logos. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002. Yon, Albert. Ratio et les mots de la famille de reor: Contribution à l’étude historique du vocabulaire latin. Paris: Champion, 1933. LOVE / LIKE CATALAN amistança FRENCH aimer, amour, amitié GERMAN lieben, mögen, Minne GREEK eran [ἀϱᾶν], agapan [ἀγαπᾶν], philein [φιλεῖν], erôs [ἔϱως], philia [φιλία], agapê [ἀγάπη] [ ַא ֲה ָבה] ahavāhָ ], ’א ֵהב] āhëv ’HEBREW ITALIAN amare, voler bene a, piacere a LATIN amare, diligere, amicitia, caritas SPANISH amar, amistad v. MORALS, NEIGHBOR, PATHOS, PLEASURE, SENSE, SOUL, VERGÜENZA, VIRTUE Our present-day languages deriving from Indo-European ones are connected mainly with two major etymological types: for Romance languages, the Latin verb amare, which may be based on amma (mother), and for the Germanic group (with lieben and “love”), a Sanskrit root that has sometimes been associasted with the Greek eros [ἔϱως], as well as with the Latin libido. But whatever the etymology may be, the various words all have a generic sense of equivalent extension, unless they are inserted into a system of opposition: the pair to “love” / “to like” in English; mögen/lieben in German. In French, aimer designates a whole spectrum of relationships and affects that ranges from sexuality and eroticism to more or less sublimated relationships between people, values, things, or behaviors (when one “loves” [aime], one can “make love,” “be in love,” “cherish,” “like,” etc.). The semantic indetermination that consequently characterizes these terms forces us to resort to complements or to circumlocutions that enable us to determine which kind of affect we are dealing with (in French, aimer d’amitié vs. aimer d’amour), and these complicate translation accordingly. This indetermination also leads to the reinvestment or invention of new words to specify a kind of love or object (in the New Testament, agapê [ἀγάπη], and its translation by caritas, the Germanic Minne, and in Catalan, Raymond Lully’s amistança). From this point of view, the first of modern languages is Latin, since it combines in amare what are in Greek two completely distinct poles: on the one hand, eran [ἐϱᾶν], aimer d’amour, “to (be in) love,” a disymmetric relation of inequality and dissimilarity (active/passive)—a Platonic word whose extension determines an erotics of philosophy; on the other hand, philein [φιλεῖν], aimer d’amitié, “cherish,” a relation of equality or commensurability and resemblance—an Aristotelian word that characterizes ethical and political bonds. I. The Bipolar Schema: In Modern Languages, “to Love” Means Everything The different affective modalities covered by the verb “to love” (or aimer, lieben, etc.) are located between the extremes 596 LOVE moderation and the most irrational passion, or whether it must necessarily be in accord with reason and knowledge. Some medieval theologians had already adopted the traditional idea, which began with Origen and Saint Augustine and continued to Leibniz and Malebranche and which sees true love as having to be based on an exact appraisal (aestimatio) or discernment (discretio) of the value of its object. This intellectualist program, which finds its application particularly in the case of “ordinate love” (“Ille autem iuste et sancte vivit qui rerum integer aestimator est; ipse est autem qui ordinatam dilectionem habet” [Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control]; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, bk. 1, chap. 28). This thesis is in contrast to the doctrinal orientation of Bernard of Clairvaux, the bard of love as affectus and as the impulse of the heart escaping not only all measure but also all rational control. However, his friend and disciple William of Saint-Thierry elaborated a theory of “love-intellection,” that is, a love regulated by knowledge. We find this idea, which was fairly widespread in the seventeenth century, in Descartes and especially in the works of Corneille. Descartes emphasizes, in fact, the importance of an intellectual appraisal of the value of the different objects of love. Thus he observes that love differs from other affections “by the esteem one has for what one loves, in comparison with oneself” (Passions of the Soul, §83) and that it is governed by “judgments that also lead the soul [âme] to join itself willingly with things that it considers good and to separate itself from those that it considers bad” (ibid., §79). With Spinoza, we find once again, in a more original form, the idea of the rationality of the order of love, notably with regard to amor Dei intellectualis, which is for him the crowning achievement of reason. This love goes beyond reason itself and beyond law. It represents the plenitude of knowledge that prevents the soul from getting lost in the fog of affectivity or passion, a torment that Romanticism later magnified under the name of Leidenschaft (an ambiguous composite derived from leiden, “to suffer”—the substantive Leiden designating the Passion of Christ), whereas affectivity itself, developing in it as legitimately as that other natural force constituted by the imagination, permits it to overcome pure intellectualism. . B. Dichotomies based on the object: The invention or reinvestment of other words To the various binary oppositions we have just mentioned as enabling us to clarify the meaning, obviously so ambiguous, of the word “love” (and amour, Liebe, or amore), one can add others that take into account not the nature or modalities of the affect, but rather the object loved or its specific qualities. For example, the following: love of God / love of one’s neighbor or oneself; filial love / love of country; earthly love / heavenly love (cf. Lucien’s work on Marguerite de Navarre published under this title); self-love (egocentric love; Aristotle calls it philautie, Hugo of St. Victor calls it amor privatus) / altruistic love (according to Gregory the Great); homosexual love / heterosexual love. But the invention of other words is made necessary precisely when the object cannot forms of love that are expressed, one by tender or romantic feelings, and the other by directly sexual tendencies, he has no trouble in discerning, beneath Liebe, the force of the libido, sexual desire, which organizes itself, invests itself, transfers itself, sublimates itself (see DRIVE). On the other hand, for Lacan, amour is radically opposed to desire. . 2. From love to tendresse and sentimentality In translating the opposition that Freud establishes between sinnliche Liebe and Zärtlichkeit, French translators render the latter term as tendresse (tenderness). Tendresse came into common use only in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, being limited to the sense that it currently has, amorous feeling, whereas amour was also applied to sexual or eroticized love. The vocabulary of tendresse came to replace that of friendship (amitié), which had had since the sixteenth century the strong sense of “love” (amour), following on the adjective tendre (tender)—which, like the Latin tener, expressed the idea of youth, freshness, or delicacy, in the sense in which one speaks of “tender years” (âge tendre). In the French classical period, tendre was even used as a masculine noun to designate the love relationship, in particular in Mlle. de Scudéry’s famous “Carte du Tendre” (Map of the Land of Tenderness). . 3. Bipolarities from the Middle Ages to Kant Christian authors of the Middle Ages base themselves partly on Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 8.2) and Cicero (De amicitia, §6) to oppose “concupiscent love” (amor conscupiscentiae) to “the love of friendship or good will” (amor amicitiae seu benevolentiae). The former, which ranges from the desire for the pleasures of the senses to the desire for divine benefits (which is related to what Kant was later to call amor complacentiae), consists in a selfish attraction to objects that provide us with delight or enjoyment and that we want to possess. The latter, whose definition is reminiscent of the Greek eunoia [εὔνοια], draws us toward a being whom we love for himself, whom we wish well, or whom we are happy to see possess this good. In his Passions of the Soul (§81), Descartes says that this “distinction” is traditional, but he thinks that “it concerns solely the effects of love” and that this does not imply a genuine duality in the essential definition of the latter, which is always, whatever its effects or objects might be, a mixture of concupiscence and good will. In the 1950s, in order to translate this distinction into contemporary language, some psychologists popularized the opposition between amour captatif and amour oblatif (“the desire to have and possess the object, to assimilate it and identify it with oneself,” as opposed to the “desire to give oneself and lose oneself in the love object, to identify with it”; Maggini, Lundgren, and Leuci, “Jealous Love”). The latteris characterized by an altruistic propensity to sacrifice oneself in which Jacques Lacan discerned a form of egocentric aggressivity. The resort to the bipolar schema was also established in the context of a question that remained acute throughout the history of conceptions of love, that is, the question of whether love is essentially a matter of sentiment and affectivity to the point of culminating in an absence of any LOVE 597 1 The Freudian and Lacanian dichotomies In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921), chap. 8, “Being in Love and Hypnosis” (“Verliebtheit und Hypnose”), Freud points out that the affective relationships that we designate by the term “love” (Liebe) represent such a vast “scale of possibilities” that the term is full of ambiguities: it can designate “the object-cathexis on the part of the sexual instincts with a view to directly sexual satisfaction , what is called common, sensual love,” as well as feelings of “affection” (Zärtlichkeit). At a certain stage of development, the latter are grafted onto the original libidinal current, inhibiting its drives toward sexual aims. In adolescence, the sensual current (sinnliche Strömung), which reappears with a certain intensity, enters into competition with “affectionate trends of feeling that persist” in such a way that the subject’s future destiny will be marked by the existence between these two currents of either a genuine schism or a sort of harmony. In the first case, “A man will show a sentimental enthusiasm for women whom he deeply respects but who do not excite him to sexual activities, and he will only be potent with other women whom he does not ‘love’ and thinks little of or even despises” (cf. “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” [“Über einen besonderen Typus der Objektwahl beim Manne,” 1910]). In the second case, a synthesis regarding the same erotic object is produced “between the unsensual, heavenly love and the sensual, earthly love,” so that “[t]he depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his purely sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection.” In his article of 1912 that was reprinted in Contributions to the Psychology of Love and called “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (“Über die Allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens”), Freud mentions the rift observable in some men between the current of sensuality and that of affection. He states that psychoanalysis should allow such men to arrive at “a completely normal attitude in love” harmoniously combining the two tendencies. In reference to the last of the stages of libidinal development (after the oral, sadistic-anal, and phallic stages), some of Freud’s disciples have theorized this as “genital love”—a notion that Jacques Lacan criticized, targeting those who, without regard for “the fundamentally narcissistic nature of all being in love (Verliebtheit) were able to so utterly deify the chimera of so-called ‘genital love’ as to attribute to it the power of ‘oblativity,’ a notion that gave rise to so many therapeutic mistakes” (Écrits). Perhaps it is because of such criticisms that the French often use the English term “genital love,” as if to remind themselves that this “illusion” seduced chiefly Anglo-Saxon psychology. Lacan adopted Freud’s distinction but inflected it in the form of a radical opposition between amour and désir, the former being rigorously defined as “ignorance” of the latter and as being nothing more than “what substitutes for the sexual relationship.” However, Freud maintained a link between the two, asserting that love is what enables the sexual appetite to revive after a certain period of non-desire following satisfaction, after what he calls “an interval free of desire.” In Lacan, the word amour is thus made unequivocal by the fact that it signifies nothing other than de-eroticized sentimentality. Thus he posits a difference in nature between love thus defined and what has been excluded from it: desire. For Freud, on the contrary, what is called “spiritual love” is merely erotic love metamorphosed, in the best of cases, by sublimation, a process that redirects the infantile libido toward nonsexual cultural goals. This radical Lacanian dichotomy is nonetheless tempered by the fact that for psychoanalysis, “love” designates not only the “choice of object” (Objektwahl) but also “transference love” (Übertragungsliebe), a phenomenon that is fundamental for the functioning of analytical procedures. It was after the failure of his treatment of his first hysterical patients that Freud theorized transference and, more precisely, transferential love as “resistance” to analysis. This love is transformed into an “indispensable requirement,” its manipulation allowing the analyst to make “the patient’s buried and forgotten love-emotions actual and manifest” (die verborgenen und vergessenen Liebesregungen)” (“The Dynamics of Transference” [“Zur Dynamik der Übertragung,” 1912]; see also “Postscript,” in Fragment of an Analysis [Dora]). We can thus say that Lacan qualifies, on this subject, his opposition between amour and désir. While on the one hand he defines love as nothing more than “ignorance” of desire and the sexual, on the other hand he posits that love itself, as the motive force of transference, is a necessary condition for the analytical process: “At the beginning of the analytical experience, let us recall, was love” (Le transfert). Thus, this same seminar of 1960–61 was devoted almost entirely to the question of love. A minute analysis of Plato’s Symposium provided Lacan with an opportunity to theorize the relations between amour and désir differently. From the myth of the birth of the daimon Erôs, as he is mentioned in Socrates’s and Diotima’s speeches (Symposium, 202a), Lacan takes the formula “Love is giving what one does not have” (Le transfert), declaring: “We can say that the dialectical definition of love, as it is developed by Diotima, rejoins what we have tried to define as the metonymic function in desire” (ibid.). REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. “Being in Love and Hypnosis.” Chapter 8 of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 111–16. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. . “The Dynamics of Transference.” In vol. 12 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 97–108. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. . Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989. . Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 3–112. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. . “Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I.” In Mass Psychology and Other Writings, translated by J. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2004. . “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” In “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” chap. 4 of Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by P. Rieff. New York: Touchstone, 1997. . “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” In vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 177–90. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. . “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men.” In vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 163–76. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. . “The Technique of Psycho-analysis.” In An Outline of Psycho-analysis, translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. Lacan, Jacques: Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by B. Fink: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. . Le transfert. Vol. 8 of Le séminaire (1960–61). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Translation by C. Gallagher: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan 8: Transference. London: Karnac Books, 2002. 598 LOVE hand, the love between Christian spouses, founded on a mutual fides, and on the other hand, “courtly love” (or fin’amor, “refined love,” or “pure love” in Occitan), which he assimilates to the adulterous, murderous passion felt by the troubadour or the hero (notably Tristan) with regard to the “lady of his thoughts.” However, the expression “courtly love” appeared in French only very lately, around 1880, in the work be confounded with any other, as for example, in the case of God or a person loved with an incommensurable love. 1. Conjugal fides and courtly love In his famous book Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont opts to harden the opposition that manifested itself in the twelfth century between two forms of love: on the one 2 Affectionate, affection, sentimental Starting from tendresse (tenderness) (or from the related forms tendreur and tendreté), which was initially understood literally— Vauvenargues still preferred the literal meaning, for example, regarding the “tenderness of meat”—the classical French language came, through the compassion inspired by the delicate or fragile nature of an object, to an attitude corresponding, in the subject, to a penchant henceforth designated by the word tendresse in the affective sense. In other languages this semantic shift took place on the basis either of the same Latin adjective tener (as in English with “tenderness,” in Italian with tenerezza, and in Spanish with ternura) or of another word that had as its primary meaning the idea of weakness or delicacy (like zart in German, from which Zärtlichkeit is derived). Nevertheless, Kant, precisely in referring to the fragility of the feeling of friendship (teneritas amicitiae) in his “Doctrine of Virtue” (The Metaphysics of Morals, pt. 2, §46), paradoxically brings us back to the literal, pre-seventeenth-century sense of the French word tendresse. He states that “[f]riendship is something so tender that if it is based on feelings [and not on principles and rules] it cannot for an instant be guaranteed against interruptions.” The semantic development of the French word tendresse can in fact be explained in two ways: either the object affected by tenderness in the pre-seventeenth-century sense of “weakness” inspires a sympathetic attention in others that is called upon to transform itself into a dynamics of love that will assume the name of tendresse in the affective sense; or such a passionate fire in the heart flaring up independently of any previous emotion is perceived as a typically feminine feeling, that is, one related to the sensitivity of the “weaker sex.” But in both cases, we are dealing with the register of weakness, of inclination, that is, of pathein [παθεῖν], or what Spinoza calls the animi pathema, and even of defectiveness, for example, when one is said to have weakness for a person, an expression that corresponds to prendre quelqu’un par son faible (to attack someone at his weak point) and that leads to the notions of attraction, the traps of seduction, and charms from which someone suffers. This avatar of the word tendresse is related to the modern meanings that were acquired at the same period by the noun sentiment and the epithet sentimental. The latter made its entrance, with the meaning it now has, through the 1769 translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. The translator explained the word this way: “It has not been possible to render the English word ‘sentimental’ in French by any expression that might correspond to it, and it has therefore been left in English. Perhaps in reading it will be found that it deserves to be made part of our language.” The adjective “sentimental” had only very recently appeared in English, in 1749, by derivation from “sentiment” (which had itself been borrowed from French in the fourteenth century), with its double meaning of opinion based on an evaluation that is more subjective than logical (according to the meaning that is found, for example, in David Hume’s work) and a disposition belonging to the register of the heart and affectivity (and sometimes given a pejorative connotation, particularly emphasized in what is called ressentiment). German has adopted the epithet sentimental and the noun Sentimentalität, which has the meaning of “sentimentality” when it is preceded by the adjective affektiert. REFS.: Sterne, Laurence. Le voyage sentimental. Translated by J. F. Frenais. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1769. 3 “Pathological love” and “practical love” in Kant The pair “pathological love” / “practical love” introduced by Kant at the beginning of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (RT: Ak., 6:399), illustrates once again the bipolarity of the notion of love and the necessity of resorting to epithets. Kant’s problem is the following: love seems to depend on sensibility alone, and as such it should be excluded from an ethics that posits that in principle an act has no moral value unless it is done out of duty. What then should we do with the duty of love expressed in the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lv 19: 18; cf. Mt 22:39)? Kant was forced to recognize in “The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue” (pt. 2 of the Groundwork) that “a duty to love makes no sense” (RT: Ak., 6:401–2). The solution to this problem involves a distinction opposing “practical” love, which can be the object of a duty insofar as it resides in the will, to a “pathological love” depending on sensibility. “The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue” makes use of a parallel distinction between “charity” (amor benevolentiae) and “kindness” (amor complacentiae). In each case the distinction seeks to bring the principles of Kant’s moral doctrine into conformity with the Scriptures: this attempt was given particular attention by the neo-Kantians, who in the early twentieth century reexamined the question of Kant’s Christianity (cf. Bauch, “Luther und Kant”). REFS.: Bauch, Bruno. “Luther und Kant.” Kant-Studien 4 (1900): 416–19, 455–56. LOVE 599 words in their own vernacular languages, usually by derivation from a common word in these vernaculars or from a Latin word. That is what happened, precisely with regard to “love,” in the work of the creator of philosophical and literary Catalan, Ramon Llull (ca. 1235–1315). . 3. Lexical investments and reinvestments in Christian Latin In fact, to translate the Hebrew ’āhëv, which is applied to the love of God, Christian authors initially adopted relatively new terms, either Greek ones like agapê (whereas agapan [ἀγαπᾶν] is older) rather than erôs or philia, or Latin ones such as caritas rather than amor. In Latin, they even invented dilectio, built on the older verb diligere. a. Caritas in the church fathers The notion of caritas was established by the first Christian authors writing in Latin when they had to translate the Bible into that language. At that time they were dependent on Greek—that of the books of the New Testament and the translation of the Bible made by Alexandrian Jews (the Septuagint). As we have seen, the translators of the Septuagint, who had had three verbs to render the Hebrew verb ’āhëv: eran [ἀϱᾶν] (erôs), philein [φιλεῖν] (philia), and agapan (agapê), showed a marked preference for the last, probably because, having classically a much less determinate meaning, it lent itself to a semantic innovation corresponding to the stronger and deeper meaning of the Hebrew’āhëv. As G. Kittel and Friedrich’s RT: Theologisches Wörterbuch notes in the article “agapê,” “the old word ’āhëv imbued the pale Greek word with its rich and yet precise meaning. The whole group of words in the family of agapan received a new meaning through the translation of the Old Testament.” of Gaston Paris, whereas, to designate such a form of love, German had long had the untranslatable noun die Minne. . 2. The New Testament between eros and agapê Sometimes the disparity with which human love is confronted when it has as its object not a peer or an inferior but God himself is considered impossible to render using oppositional terms taken from the common vocabulary. When the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren found himself in this situation, he compensated for this difficulty by appealing to the two Greek terms erôs [ἔϱως] and agapê [ἀγάπη]. But he considered them as far more than simple polarities of love; between them he saw an opposition that broadened “to the point of becoming a philosophical antithesis” that presented itself as an irreconcilable conflict between “two fundamental motives” (Agape and Eros). Nygren indicates what is at stake through an epigraph borrowed from the Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: “Although the German language is so poor that it has to use the single term ‘love’ [Liebe] in both cases, the two ideas [erôs and agapê] nonetheless have nothing in common.” Believing that he saw in the Greek conception of erôs both a synthesis of nonpossession and possession, on the one hand, and on the other hand a demonic intermediary that allowed the subject to move from the crude forms of desire to truth and immortality, Nygren thought Christianity had radically overthrown this monist conception of love by promoting, in opposition to the Platonic erôs, the agapê revealed by the New Testament writings of Paul and John. . The special problem posed for theologians and mystics by the human soul’s love for God also led them to invent specific 4 The Germanic Minne Although the erotic ideal advocated by the Provençal troubadours and the trouvères in northern France has only recently been given the name of “courtly love” (which amounts to defining such an original experience by the place where it developed: the seigneurial or royal courts—corteis—of the period), in the Middle Ages the German language already had a specific term, die Minne, to designate this form of love and more particularly what characterizes it in its essence. Moreover, down to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, we find it personified, in the same way as fin’amor in courtly literature, as the goddess of love (Liebesgôttin), as Lady Minne (Frau Minne). According to the usual etymology (Lat. memini, “remember,” and mens, “mind”), the noun Minne (like the verb minnen and the adjectives minnig and minniglich) emphasizes the presence of the beloved in the consciousness of the lover and the fact that this presence continues over time in the form of phantasm and memory. In short, Minne is love insofar as it occupies the lover’s mind and leads him to resort to poetry, for instance, to testify to his psychic experience. The latter corresponds to the experience medieval theologians described, in order to stigmatize it, as delectatio morosa, that is, the habit of dwelling with pleasure on thoughts of the absent beloved. It is illustrated still more clearly by the passion that the courtly poet cultivates for the “lady of his thoughts,” especially in the extreme situation of amour de loin. Thus, around this courtly adventure of fin’amor, the Germanic lexicon acquired the following components: der Minnesang (the poetry of the troubadours), das Minnelied (love song), der Minnedichter and der Minnesänger (troubadour), der Minnedienst (service to the lady), der Minnetrank (love philter). But the term Minne and the characteristics of Provençal “pure love” were also used by the thirteenth-century Flemish members of a lay sisterhood (the Béguines) in developing a theory of the love of God. For Hadewijch of Antwerp (d. ca. 1260), the love-experience designated by the expression Minnemystik included two phases. The first takes the form of an impetuous, passionate desire (aestus amoris; in Dutch, orewoet); this is the element of joy (ghebruken) in total union. The second is marked by an experience of ravishment and privation (ghebreken), of suffering and distress. However, this is more of an alternation; indeed, a coexistence of apparent contradictions corresponding to the antithetical feelings of joy and desolation in which courtly poetry saw the expression of the essential transcendence of love. 600 LOVE passion as well as that of disinterested affection) and diligere, and also two nouns, amor and caritas. Caritas, which we frequently find in Cicero and which later became an important term in the Christian Scriptures and in Christian theology, is In their turn, Christian authors writing in Latin had to wonder how to render the word agapê as used in the Septuagint and in the New Testament. At that time, Latin had two verbs meaning “to love”: amare (with the broad sense of amorous 5 The “true” Christian notion of love according to Nygren In his work Agape and Eros, Nygren maintains that even when it takes the form of “celestial love,” the primary characteristic of Orphic or Platonic erôs is “aspiration, lust, desire” and remains ineluctably faithful to its basic nature as man’s appetite for an object to be possessed, whereas the agapê celebrated in the New Testament is supposed to be essentially a gift of oneself, a totally disinterested descent, and for that reason a sacrifice of which God alone is capable. Moreover, Nygren seeks to identify the “transformations” to which, since the end of the Middle Ages, theology is supposed to have subjected the “true” Christian notion of love, which is agapê. It is supposed to have adulterated the latter by developing the theory of caritas ordinata, or “the order of love,” that is, the order of a love that has the property of necessarily conforming to the value of the object itself. In Nygren’s view, such a theory represents a “fatal synthesis” from which Luther was to seek to free theology and that amounts to including in agapê one of the essential elements of erôs, namely an interested desire motivated by the qualities that can be discerned in the love object. The Scholastic adage according to which a thing must be loved in proportion to its value (magis diligendum quia magis bonum) would thus take us back to the kind of love that is traditionally described as mercenary and that is in reality radically foreign to the New Testament conception of love. Nygren’s work, which had a wide impact, has a weak philological basis. Interpreters pointed out, in particular, that unlike the Hebrew language, which had only the verb ’āhëv [הב ֵא [ ָand the noun ’ahav āh [בה ָה ֲא [ ַ to designate all forms of love (sacred or profane, noble or impure, selfish or disinterested, etc.), the Greek of the Septuagint had several words to render the diversity of these forms, such as agapê, erôs, and philia. Even when the Hebrew text refers to sensual love, the Septuagint prefers erôs— a word that is, moreover, extremely rare in the Septuagint as a whole—the term agapê (which the Latin Vulgate renders as caritas). It is the word agapê that we find in the most erotic passages of the epithalamium of the Song of Songs. Thus lines 7–10 in chapter 7, which express a passionate desire for the physical possession of the beloved, begin with these words: “How fair and pleasant you are, O love [agapê], delectable maiden!” But if the term agapê has been thus used by the Greek Jews of Alexandria to designate forms of love other than spiritual love, and inversely, Christian authors have traditionally interpreted this biblical poem attributed to Solomon as an allegory of mystical love, that is no doubt because beneath the instability of the vocabulary, we can discern a certain semantic malleability and, more precisely, a certain legitimacy in passing from one kind of affect to another. Thus Nygren’s “systematic” dichotomy would be replaced, as Paul Ricoeur puts it (in Liebe und Gerechtigkeit), by a “process of metaphorization” by virtue of which, for example, erotic love, erôs, has the power to signify and express agapê, thus rendering the real analogy that connects distinct affects. REFS.: Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. London: SPCK, 1953. Ricoeur, Paul. Liebe und Gerechtigkeit = Amour et justice. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990. 6 Amistat and amistança Catalan words ending in -ança or -ància designate the action of the verb and are derived from it. Thus contemplança means the action of contemplating (contemplar). In the case of amistança, the verb amistansar is not attested before 1373. It has two meanings: “reconcile,” “make friends”; and “live in concubinage with.” Thus it is because a third term is required alongside amor and amistat, and not by derivation, that Ramon Llull created the word amistança. This term is never translated as “action of reconciling.” Whereas in common usage amistat acquires the sense of amorous friendship outside marriage (“women’s amistat is deceiving,” Llull, Blanquerna, chap. 27), amistança is reserved for loyal, pure, disinterested friendship between two persons (Ausiàs March, poem 92: “But the other love, amistança pura, / After death its great strength endures . . .”). Amistança (whose character is emphasized by the use of pura) is felt by the poet for a dead woman. For the poet, who never mentions God’s love or love for God, amistança pura constitutes the major elevated form of love. Amistança subsequently underwent the same development in meaning as did amistat: in the seventeenth century, the word could mean “concubinage.” For Llull, amor is reserved for God, along with the verb enamorarse, which frequently reinforces the verb amar. In his Llibre d’amic et amat (The Book of the Lover and the Beloved), he describes the amor of the amic; it is never a question of carnal amistat: “Blanquerna [the fictional author of the Llibre] wanted to make them [his hermit-readers] to love [enamorar] God.” Similarly: “The amic says to the amat: You who fill the sun with spendor, fill my heart with love.” In this context, amistat would have an unacceptable sexual connotation and amistança would be too human. The doublet amic/amat takes into account the intentionality of amor and the duality Ramon Llull considered constitutive of the love between man and God. Dominique de Courcelles REFS.: Llull, Ramon. Blanquerna. Translated from the Catalan with an introduction by E. A. Peers. London: Dedalus, 1988. First published in 1926. .The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. Edited by Kenneth Leech. Translated by E. A. Peers. London: Sheldon Press, 1978. LOVE 601 before the Fall—that is, without grace, a state that according to some writers corresponded to the state of pure nature. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century theological summas, the treatises dealing with the virtue of caritas gave particular attention to the notion of caritas ordinata, or amor discretus, that is, supernatural love’s property of conforming to the value of its object. This property derives from the diversity of the measure implied in the double commandment that demands that man love God “with all his heart” and his neighbor “as himself.” Thus the quantum of love that serves as a basis for these two movements of incommensurable love is the one that one must have for oneself, amor sui, which Aristotle calls philautia (Nicomachean Ethics, 9.8) and Hobbes calls “self-love” (Leviathan, chap. 15). This Scholastic notion seems to be the origin of a proverb that is usually used ironically and is translated in French as “Charité bien ordonnée commence par soi-même.” Other languages translate it more prosaically, omitting the dimension of ordo amoris. Thus in German, people say, “Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste,” and in English, “Charity begins at home.” b. From caritas to “charity” In addition to the specifically theological meaning of the love of God and neighbor, in the third century caritas acquired the meaning of “gift” or “alms.” In the tenth century it was gallicized in the form of caritet and then charité, which designated the theological virtue, particularly in its dimension of mercy and benevolence with regard to the poor and deprived. Thus this word was later adopted to designate congregations or associations (Brothers or Sisters of Charity, Ladies of Charity) that were especially attached to this form of religious devotion. Then the term was extended to the various manifestations of aid and assistance in social life (vente de charité, bureau de charité). The epithets charitable (sometimes used ironically) and caritatif derive from the word charité. Caritatif, which was relatively rare, came to be widely used in the twentieth century to refer to Catholic charitable movements, under the influence of the English “caritative,” which was originally part of the vocabulary of political economy. Thus while retaining, especially for moral theology, its meaning of supernatural virtue turned toward God and neighbor, “charity” assumed more and more the restricted meaning of mercy, humanity, and philanthropy, whereas in modern times, debates about the theological virtue itself, notably those in which Fénelon and quietism were involved, are recentered more specifically on the believer’s love of God, and more precisely on the question “in what sense it must be disinterested,” as Malebranche put it in the subtitle to his treatise De l’amour de Dieu (1697). The semantic evolution of the French word charité (like that of the Italian carità, the Spanish caridad, and the Portuguese caridade), in the sense of mercy as a feeling and benevolence as an act, is unknown in German. In German, the New Testament agapê (the supernatural love of God and neighbor) is rendered by Liebe (notably in 1 Cor 13:1–8, where the clause “If I have not agapê” is translated by Luther as “wenn ich hätte der Liebe nicht”) and charity toward one’s neighbor, in a literal way, by die Nächstenliebe, but when it is a matter of the feeling of mercy and generosity, by die Mildtätigkeit, and for charitable action, by die Hilfsbereitschaft or die Barmherzigkeit. derived from carus, which had the twofold meaning of what one “cherishes” and what is “of great price”—whence the proximity of the terms charité and cherté in French. Caritas adds to the meaning of amor that of esteem and respect, as we see, for example, in Seneca and especially in Cicero. For the latter, amor designates the affection two spouses or two brothers have for each other or that of parents for their children, but the use of caritas was considered preferable when speaking of the love one has for the gods, for the fatherland, for one’s parents, for superior men, or for humanity, notably in the expression caritas generis humani (De finibus, 5.23, 65). But the first Latin Christian authors adopted none of the words of this classical vocabulary to render the word agapê in the Septuagint and the New Testament. Thus in the first half of the third century, Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage limited themselves to transcribing the word as such, as was also done with other Hellenisms, like baptizein [βαπτίζειν] and charisma [χάϱισμα], that were permanently established. Nonetheless, in their commentaries on the Scriptures and in their theological writings, they tended to render the verb agapan by diligere and the substantive agapê by either dilectio (especially Tertullian), a word that had just appeared in the language of the Church, or by caritas (especially Cyprian). It was only later on, and mainly with Saint Jerome at the end of the fourth century, that the latter two terms entered into the translation of the Bible itself, but with a preference for caritas, which occurs 114 times as opposed to 24 times for dilectio. Thus, as Hélène Pétré points out, “the term which in everyday language served to designate the affections, and whose use Cicero had broadened in the expression caritas generis humani, expresses for Christians the highest virtue that contains both the love of God and love for humans.” It is notably by caritas that the Vulgate renders agapê in the famous Pauline hymn in 1 Corinthians (13:1–8): “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not caritas [King James: “have not love”], I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not caritas I gain nothing. Caritas never ends.” Nonetheless, Augustine, for instance, sometimes declares that the three terms amor, dilectio, and caritas are more or less equivalent. Among the church fathers, caritas designates the love man has for God and for his neighbor propter Deum, in conformity with the evangelical principle, as well as the love that is in God himself (Caritas summa or Caritas in Deo) and that is expressed particularly in the mutual relations among the three persons of God. In the Middle Ages, Peter Lombard (ca. 1100–60) maintained in his Sentences that caritas is a love so sublime that it can be conceived only as identical with the presence of God himself (and more precisely of the Holy Spirit) in the soul. At the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, most theologians rejected this theory (which was officially condemned by the Council of Vienna in 1311–12) and made caritas a habitus in the Aristotelian sense of the term, that is, a peculiarly human capacity for action and merit, like faith and hope, over which it has precedence as the “mother of all virtues.” These theologians thus came to distinguish this supernatural caritas from dilectio naturalis, or the love of God and one’s neighbor, of which the first spiritual creatures (Adam, Eve, and the angels) were capable 602 LOVE both the Epicurean thesis that friendship arises from need and weakness and the conflations of friendship with flattery (blanditia) characteristic of relationships with a tyrant, in which the absence of fides and caritas are manifest. It is, on the contrary, a question of guaranteeing the equality of exchange that alone can provide pleasure: “There is nothing more pleasant than performing duties for one another with devotion” (nihil vicissitudine studiorum officiorumque jucundius). It is on this basis that the sweetness of private relationships can flourish (suavitas-comitas-facilitas). B. Greek: The two poles of eran and philein Greek distinguishes very clearly between two ways of loving, eran and philein. Thus it has a verb, and a whole terminological complex, for each of these poles, which most modern languages now differentiate only by means of adjuncts. Eran is presented as a passion that comes from outside, like Cupid’s arrows, and is connected with desire (epithumia [ἐπιθυμία]), pleasure (hêdonê [ἡδονή]), and the enjoyment (charis [χάϱις]) of an object; it designates an essentially dissymmetrical relation between an erastes who feels love and makes it (he is the Corneillian amant or, rather, amoureux, because it is never taken for granted that his love is shared) and an eromenos who is its object (the “beloved”). Philein (“to love as a friend,” “to cherish,” and “to like to . . .”) is on the contrary an action or activity freely consented to and deployed from within an (ethical) character or a (political, social) position; it determines a relationship that is not always symmetrical but is in any case mutual and reciprocal, whether it is a matter of similarity, equality, or commensurability. That is how we can understand, in the first cosmogonies, difference as an originary power between erôs and philia or philotês [φιλότης], both of which are usually translated by “love.” Hesiod’s erôs “softens the sinews” (lusimelês [λυσιμελής]; Theogony, 121) and intervenes to pass from parthenogenesis to the embrace of Earth and Sky (137ff.); in Parmenides’s Poem (28B12 DK), erôs causes the elementary polarities to be deployed and dispersed. On the contrary, Empedocles’s philotês unites similars with similars, which Discord (neikos [νεῖϰος]) separates again (e.g., 28B22 DK). But the peculiarly philosophical use of these terms is determined by Plato, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other. Plato seeks to capture philein under eran and proposes erotics as the very model of philosophy; Aristotle makes eran a special and accidental case of philein and describes in terms of philia the whole of the relations constitutive of the human world. We are justified in supposing that modern languages are rather Platonic, since they combine everything under the pole of the erotic, hierarchizing objects and affects. . 1. Eran or dissymmetry: Plato’s philosophy as a generalized erotics Plato reveals the dissymmetry inherent in the erotic relationship connecting pederastry with Socratic dialectic and makes erôs a condition of philosophy. In Lysis, which is considered one of the dialogues of Plato’s youth, Socrates’s whole operation consists in treating erôs as if it meant philia or, to put it another way, in eroticizing philia (the subtitle of the dialogue is peri philias), so as to convince little Lysis that Finding it easier than other languages to do without periphrases, German translates “mutual love” by Gegenliebe. Max Scheler even proposed the neologisms miteinanderlieben for “to love in mutual contiguity” and Liebensgemeinschaft for “community of love”—a reality that was, according to him, introduced into history by Christianity. II. The Latin and Greek Vocabulary of Love A. Latin: Amare, amor, amicitia In Latin, as in modern languages, the uses of amare cover the whole spectrum of sexual, amorous, familial, and friendly relationships, so that the expression of a specific bond requires the adjunction of other terms. In Cicero’s language, the implementation of distinctions through juxtapositions and contrapositions of other terms involves precise stakes, since it is a matter of defining, on the one hand, amor in relation to the tradition of the Platonic theory of love and, on the other hand, amicitia as a notion constructed on the basis of Roman practices. But the distinction between the two substantives is a constructed effect that is all the more obvious because they derive from amare (De amicitia, 27.100) and because it is amor that gives amicitia its name. In his Tusculan Disputations (4:68–76), quoting numerous examples of amor in the poets, Cicero tries to show that amor is usually “borne by desire” (libidinosus) and that this desire leads to an illicit sexuality (stuprum) or even to madness (insania/furor); consequently, one cannot “accord authority to love [amori auctoritatem tribuere]” as Plato does or accept the Stoics’ definition, in which love is “the drive that moves us to make friendships on the basis of a vision of beauty” (conatum amicitiae faciendae ex pulchritudinis specie). Connoting amor in this way, Cicero refuses to accept the positive values of the Platonic theory of love, and he elaborates a notion of amicitia in which amor does not play a major role. In the dialogue De amicitia, he takes the various levels on which the bond of friendship was expressed in Rome as a basis for a definition of amicitia that includes, with numerous mediations, the Greek traditions, whose lexicon is in this case untranslatable. Friendship is a special relationship, the one that unites two great statesmen, Scipio and Laelius, which makes it possible to articulate the connections between political friendship and private friendship: the choice of the interlocutors allows Cicero to emphasize something to which the language itself testifies, namely the identity of the vocabulary of political relations and private relations. Amicitia is an active relationship that is expressed above all in benevolentia, the will to act for the good of the friend, and it is precisely benevolentia that enables us to distinguish the bond of family relationship (propinquitas) from friendship: “Whereas you may eliminate [goodwill] from [family] relationship, you cannot do so from friendship. Without it, family relationship still exists in name, friendship does not” (translation modified). This active goodwill gives the service rendered (prodesse) and pleasure (delectare) equal weight, and they mutually correct each other: the attraction to the other may then be expressed by amor and motus animi; it grows and is confirmed only through the exchange of services (beneficium) and lasting attachment (studium consuetudo). The association of pleasure with services rendered seeks to refute LOVE 603 they are not loved in return [antiphileistai (ἀντιφιλεῖσθαι)], often that they are even hated” (212b–c). The fact that from the point of view of the eromenos, philia is thus simply a more suitable or socialized lure for erôs is clear in Socrates’s recantation in the Phaedrus, where the seduced beloved sees himself in his lover as in a mirror: “he possesses that counterlove which is the image of love [eidôlon erôtos anterôta (εἴδωλον ἔϱωτος ἀντέϱωτα)], though he supposes it to be friendship rather than love, and calls it by that name [erôs]” (255d–e; cf. Symposium 182c, where the erôs of the erastes has as its complement the philia of the eromenos). This play between eran and philein is particularly difficult to render in French: the French translation of both philein and eran by aimer erases any trace of the Platonic operation, as if French had already registered it. But in the Socratic dialogues, if erôs can take on the traits of philia, that is because philia is he should submit to his lover without shame (222b). That is why one of the central questions concerns the difference between active and passive, “the person who loves” and “the person who is loved,” in a relationship of philia conceived on the model of that of erôs: “As soon as one man loves [philei (φιλεῖ)] another, which of the two becomes the friend [philos (φίλος)]—the lover of the one loved [ho philôn tou philomenou (ὁ φιλῶν τοῦ φιλουμένου)], or the loved of the lover [ho philoumenos tou philountos (ὁ φιλούμενος τοῦ φιλοῦντος)]?” (212b). The strategy consists in making “desire” (epithumia), erôs, and philia equivalent (221b–e) and in deducing the necessity of loving (eran) one’s lover under cover of the reciprocity inherent in philein, which is expressed by the creation of the verb antiphilein [ἀντιφιλεῖν], “love in return”: “Though [lovers] [hoi erastai (οἱ ἐϱασταί)] love [philountes (φιλοῦντες)] their darlings as dearly as possible, they often imagine that 7 An etymological romance: Amare, the maternal breast; eran, the male body; philein, the sociability of the bond Etymological and semantic disputes rage about whether fantasies and repression are to be compared or distinguished. Ernout and Meillet (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine) acknowledge the plausibility of the derivation of amare from amma, “mother,” which is closely related to amita, “aunt,” the father’s sister, and of course to mamma, “nurse,” “mother,” “breast.” On the other hand, eran, which also translates amare, tends to be on the side of the male. Chantraine (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) stands by an unknown etymology, rejecting, along with Benveniste (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes), the series of comparisons proposed by Onians (RT: Origins of European Thought, p. 177, n. 2; p. 202, n. 5; pp. 472–80) and instead connecting “damp desire” (pothos hugros [πόθος ὑγϱός]) and erôs with hersê [ἕϱση], “the dew” (like houreô, “urinate,” from the Sanskrit word for “rain,” varsa-) and dew with the male, arsên [ἄϱσην], which we find in the “sap” of “spring” (both designated by the Greek ear [ἕαϱ], or in “spring,” as in the Latin words for “man” (ver and vir). Whatever the word’s etymology may be, Onians suggests that the primary meaning of eraô, is “I pour out (liquid),” and in the middle voice, “I pour out myself.” Dictionaries try to avoid this lexical oddity by distinguishing two eraôs, one meaning “to love” and the other, used only in compounds, meaning “to pour” (for exeraô [ἐξεϱάω], “pour out,” “vomit”; Chantraine proposes a derivation from era [ἔαϱ], which is preserved in eraze [ἔϱαζε], “on earth”). In general, dictionaries that take this path do not succeed in maintaining a clear separation (thus according to RT: LSJ, suneraô [συνεϱάω] is a single verb with two meanings, “pour together” and “love jointly,” and not two distinct verbs as in Bailly’s RT: Dictionnaire grec-français). For Onians, the meaning of eran thus merges with that of leibô [λείϐω], “pour drop by drop” (in the middle voice, leibesthai [λείϐεσθαι], “to spread out,” “to liquefy”), which he compares with liptô [λίπτω], liptesthai [λίπτεσθαι], “desire” (with its “lipidic” family of fat, gluey, shining) to the point of identifying ho lips [ὁ λίψ], “rainy wind”; hê lips [ἡ λίψ], “the running, the drop or libation”; and lips [λίψ], “desire.” He then proposes a truly remarkable cluster combining liquid poured out (Gr. leibein, Lat. libare, “make a libation”), desire (Lat. lubet or libet, libido), love (Ger. lieben), and procreation and freedom (Liber, the Italic god of fertility; liberi, “children”; libertas, “liberty”), which he finds in the same form in the Saxon cluster froda, “foam”; Freyr and Freyja, the gods of love and fertility; and “free” and frei. This is probably an etymological fiction and is censured at every step by Chantraine and Benveniste, who distinguish, for example, between leibô and libare, liptô and libet/ lubet, “desire”; but their censure is also acrobatic, because to account for the “disturbing polysemy” of Latin libare, Benveniste has to retain from the ancient meaning of “pour a few drops” that of “take a very small part” (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2:209). For philein, we must begin from the adjective philos [φίλος], which enters into the construction of several hundred words in the Greek lexicon; and since, Benveniste writes (ibid., 1:353), the debate about its origin is ongoing, “it is more important to begin to see what it means.” Benveniste starts over from the fact, “peculiar to a single language, Greek,” that the adjective philos, which means “friend,” also has, apparently as early as Homer, the value of a possessive: “mine, thine, his, etc.” (philos huios [φίλος υἱός] means “his son,” philon êtor [φίλον ἦτοϱ], “my heart” [Iliad, 18.307]; phila heimata [φίλα εἷματα], “your clothes” [Iliad, 2.261]). Nevertheless, the possessive does not constitute the matrix of the word’s meaning. Benveniste finds the latter in the connection between philos and xenos [ξένος], in the “relationship of hospitality” through which a member of a community makes a foreigner his “guest”: this is a reciprocal obligation that may be given material form in the sumbolon [σύμϐολον] (a sign or token of recognition, for example, a broken ring, of which the partners have kept corresponding halves), which establishes a pact (philotês) that can be seen in the word philêma [φίλημα], “kiss.” To translate philein, Benveniste resorts to a neologism: hospiter (ibid., p. 341; for example, Illiad, 6.15: “C’était un homme riche, mais il était philos aux hommes; car il hospitait [phileesken (φιλέεσϰεν)] tout le monde, sa maison étant au bord de la route”). Rooted in the society’s oldest institutions, philos thus designates a type of human relationships: “All those who are bound to each other by reciprocal duties of aidôs [αἰδώς] (“respect,” see VERGÜENZA) are called philoi” (Benveniste, ibid., p. 341), since combatants who make a pact, including relatives, allies, servants, friends, and particularly those who live under the same roof (philoi)—that is, the wife, designated as philê when she is made to enter into her own home. In that very way the term acquires its affective value. 604 LOVE Books 8 and 9 of Nicomachean Ethics (cf. Eudemian Ethics, 7, and Rhetoric, 2.4) testify to the breadth of the notion of philia: it designates all the positive, mutual relationships between the self and others, in the home and in civil and political society, on the basis of the bond between self and self. “Friendship” is the customary translation, but it is obviously untenable because it cannot cover this whole set of meanings that includes, in particular, love for those of one’s own species (“philanthropy,” 1155a 20; the master even has philia for a slave, insofar as the slave is a man, 1161b 6), the bond between parents and children (affection, paternal, maternal love / filial piety), husband and wife (tenderness, conjugal love), companions (“camaraderie” or “love” among hetairoi [ἑταῖϱοι]), age groups (“benevolence” in the elderly, “respect” among the young), mutual-aid relationships (charity, hospitality), trade and business (esteem, confidence, fairness), specifically political relations that are vertical (rulers’ “consideration,” subjects’ “devotion”) and horizontal (“sociability,” “harmony”; thus homonoia [ὁμόνοια], “concord,” “consensus” of citizens, is “political friendship,” 1167b 2), and even the relationship between men and the gods (piety, indulgence). Thus it is, conversely, in Aristotelianism that philia becomes generic, and erôs becomes simply one of its species, based on the consideration of “pleasure” (di’ hêdonên [δι’ ἡδονήν]), 1156a 12), which is frequent among the young, just as friendships among older people are based on the “useful” (to chrêsimon [τὸ χϱήσιμον], 1156a 10). But both of these are only “accidents” of the third and essential kind of philia: “friendship” properly so called, which is based on virtue (true friends are kat’ aretên [ϰατ’ ἀϱετήν], “like in virtue,” 1159b 4). Only the last expresses the essence of friendship, because it is situated from the outset in an exchange, a stable and equal reciprocity: “Now equality and likeness are friendship [hê d’ isotês kai homoiotês philotês (ἡ δ’ ἰσότης ϰαὶ ὁμοιότης φιλότης)], and especially the likeness of those who are like in virtue” (1159b 2–4). Let us note also the peculiarity, which is consonant with philein, of the English expression “to like,” whose etymology includes the idea of “similar to,” in which affection and resemblance agree in the attraction of the same by the same. Whence the clear relationship between philia and democracy, “for where citizens are equal they have much in common” (1161b 10). But when inequality is evident, and the superiority of one party over the other is constitutive of the relationship (man/woman, dominant/dominated, etc.), then it is “proportion that equalizes the parties and preserves the friendship” (to analogon isazei kai sôizei tên philian [τὸ ἀνάλογον ἰσάζει ϰαὶ σῴζει τὴν φιλίαν]; 1163b 29f.); the inferior’s philia compensates by its intensity and constancy the merit of the superior, for example, by returning in honor what he receives in money: “even unequals can be friends; they can be equalized” (isazointo gar an [ἰσάζοιντο γὰϱ ἄν]; 1159b 2; cf. 7.15 and 16). This characteristic of commensurability enables us to understand why the institution of money (nomisma [νόμισμα], 1164a) depends on philia, and how, more generally, the passage to the symbolic makes it possible to acquit oneself of what is unacquittable with regard to relatives and with regard to the gods (e.g., 1163b 15–18). . never more than one of the possible kinds of the comprehensive class of erôs. In the Symposium, Diotima explains to Socrates that through synecdoche, a name that is in reality the name of the whole has been limited to a small part (the erotic erôs, that of the erastes, the lovers): “You see, what we’ve been doing is to give the name of Love [erôta (ἔϱωτα)] to what is only one single aspect of it [tou erôtos ti eidos (τοῦ ἔϱωτός τι εἶδος)]; we make just the same mistake, you know with a lot of other names” (205b); so that one does not talk about eran in relation to those who love money, gymnastics, or wisdom, but rather about philein: whence “philosophy” (205d). It is understandable that this is naturally followed by the demonstration of a perfect continuity between the desire for sensual beauty and the love of the beautiful that in itself is monoeides [μονοειδές], “a single idea,” a “unique form” (210b, 211e). The right path thus consists in “mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself— until at last he comes to know what beauty is” (211c). Although this exposition of the asceticism of pederastic erôs practiced by Socrates (212b) is delivered by a foreigner, a woman, and a Sophist (the subject is beauty and speech, not the Good), it continued to define Platonism, Platonic love, and its process of sublimation. All the more because this asceticism itself is contagious, taught de facto, since Alcibiades, who is loved so “Platonically” by Socrates that he ends up pursuing him as a lover, notes that the erastes is not the person people think he is: in these dialogues in which the person who is questioned starts answering (Plato often plays on the proximity of eromai [ἔϱομαι], “I question,” and erômai [ἐϱῶμαι], “I love”), Socratic irony consists in trading roles and making others who have been “bitten” by his philosophy (218a; 222b) fall in love with him. Thus erotic dissymmetry determines the practice of philosophy. 2. Philein: The equality of roles, equalization, and commensurability. Aristotle or an ethics and politics of friendship To give a sense of the difference between eran and philein, we can begin again from the compounds antiphilein and anteran [ἀντεϱᾶν]. There is nothing more misleading than a parallel, for anti- sometimes indicates reciprocity: antiphilein means “love in return,” “to return philia for philia,” which in Aristotle refers to the very definition of philos (“philos is the person who loves [ho philôn (ὁ φιλῶν)] and who is loved in return [kai antiphiloumenos (ϰαὶ ἀντιφιλούμενος)]”; Rhetoric, 2.4.1381a 1; Aristotle’s and Cicero’s uses [redamare, “love in return,” Laelius, 14.49] thus function as displacements of the Lysis and returns to common usage) and sometimes antagonism. Before Plato, anteran meant essentially “compete in love,” when the problematics of love was not deliberately inflected in terms of philia ; political office should be reserved for philosophers who do not seek power (see, e.g., Republic, 7.521b: “those who take office should not be lovers of rule [erastas tou archein (ἐϱαστὰς τοῦ ἄϱχειν)], otherwise there will be a contest with rival lovers [anterastai (ἀντεϱασταί)]”). Compare Calame (Poetics of Eros), where in the apocryphal dialogue Anterasti (The Rivals), the rivalry concerns the dignity of the object of love, wisdom, or gymnastics. LOVE 605 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Edited by M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Le Brun, Jacques. Le pur amour. De Platon à Lacan. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. Maggini, Carlo, Eva Lundgren, and Emanuela Leuci. “Jealous Love and Morbid Jealousy.” Acta Biomedica 77 (2006): 137–46. Mommaers, Paul, with E. Dutton. Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic. Louvain: Peeters, 2004. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Pétré, Hélène. Caritas. Étude sur le vocabulaire latin de la charité chrétienne. Louvain: Université Catholique, 1948. Plato. Lysis. Translated by J. Wright. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingon Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingon Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Symposium. Translated by Michael Joyce. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingon Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. Price, Anthony W. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Ricoeur, Paul. Liebe und Gerechtigkeit = Amour et justice. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990. Robin, Léon. La théorie platonicienne de l’amour. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. Translated by M. Belgion. New York: Pantheon, 1956. Rousselot, Pierre. The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages: A Historical Contribution. Translated by A. Vincelette. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2002. In view of the heterogeneity of the paradigms of erôs and philia, we can gauge the scope of the problems and transformations that their translation by a single word presupposes. Clara Auvray-Assayas Charles Baladier Philippe Būttgen Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by R. Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Augustine, Saint. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by J. F. Shaw. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009. First published in 1887. Calame, Claude: The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece. Translated by J. Lloyd. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De amicitia. Laelius: A Dialogue on Friendship. Translated by E. S. Schuckburgh. London: Macmillan, 1931. Daumas, Maurice: La tendresse amoureuse XVI–XVIIIème siècles. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1996. Diogenes Laertius. Vitae philosophorum. Edited by H. S. Long. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Translation by R. D. Hicks: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Febvre, Lucien. Amour sacré, amour profane. Autour de l’Heptaméron. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1944. Ferrari, Giovanni R. “Platonic Love.” In The Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by R. Kraut, 248–76. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hesiod. Theogony. Translated by Norman O. Brown. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953. 8 Aimance / “lovence” Aimance, in spite of its romantic sound (parallel to “romance”) and its association with ideas that trace back to amour courtois and the troubadours, is apparently a recent term. It was coined in 1927 by the French linguist and psychoanalyst Edouard Pichon, a figure who influenced Lacan. Aimance was interestingly picked up by the francophone Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, who used it as a general title for his poetic works. It is from Khatibi, a close friend, rather than from Pichon, that Jacques Derrida borrowed the term. He used it extensively in his Politiques de l’amitié (1994), and when the work was translated into English as The Politics of Friendship in 1997, the translator, George Collins, coined the neologism “lovence.” The reference to Pichon is interesting, however, because his intention was to provide an equivalent for Freud’s concept of libido that would avoid its overly sexualized connotations and point to a broader concept of object attraction, one that would not necessarily entail sexual satisfaction. Pichon’s move was symptomatic of a general “French” resistance to “German” psychoanalysis in the name of a more civilized culture of sentiments. This appeal to the tradition of amour courtois and the troubadours formed part of a larger trans-European conflict over definitions of desire and sublimation (which is evident in C. G. Jung’s critique of Freud’s “hypersexualism”). In a sense, what Derrida performs in Politics of Friendship through the deconstructive reading of a philosophical tradition ranging from Aristotle to Nietzsche is a complete displacement of this ill-formulated sex/amour debate. One of Derrida’s reasons for having recourse to a third term that is neither love nor friendship is to identify an indeterminate affect that circulates among modalities of love and friendship on a spectrum of sentiments that defy description or enumeration. Derrida’s use of aimance parallels, in this respect, Freud’s use of the category pulsion, with its neutralization of the active/passive opposition in desire. Aimance also fosters a phenomenology of the transference processes through which love, friendship, hostility, and rivalry are institutionally and sentimentally constituted and undone. This phenomenology of twoness (what Nietzsche in an extraordinary wordplay called Zweisamkeit, literally “loneliness-in-two”) significantly questions the rigid distinction between the public and private spheres, as well as conventional, gendered views that sustain the “double interdiction” against friendship with and among women in the philosophical tradition. Recent reclamations in English of the word “amity” (as in Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England), to signal forms of female friendship and affection that fall outside heteronormative and same-sex vocabularies of love and sexual relation, might well be considered a fair approximation of the French aimance. Étienne Balibar REFERENCES Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. First published in 1994. Khatibi, Abdelkebir. “L’aimance et l’invention d’un idiome.” In Œuvres. Vol. 2, Poésie de l’aimance. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pichon, Edouard. Développement psychique de l’enfant et de l’adolescent. Paris: Librairie de l’Académie de médecine, 1965. 607 whether it is legitimate or not). The minimal distinction between the two notions comes down to the following: Gewalt always refers to the idea of “free” control of something or of someone; consequently, the connotations of arbitrariness, of instrumentalization, or of reification belong logically to this semantic field. Macht, on the other hand, refers essentially (if not exclusively) to the vita activa, to using one’s will and establishing aims that one attempts to achieve. The connotations of Macht thus have more to do with autonomy and coherence of action, and its adequacy to the goals pursued, which implies that Macht inevitably requires legitimacy and recognition. II. From Potestas and Potentia to Macht and Gewalt: The Different Stages in the Critique of Domination The evolution of the semantic fields of these two terms, which have continually cut across one another, has had at least three clearly identifiable phases. The first has accompanied the formation of modern political forms of authority since the end of the Middle Ages, which have, with increasing concentration, placed the exercise of domination into the hands of the state apparatus. One effect of the reception of Roman law, and of conflicts between princes, imperial power, and papal authority, which appealed to divine omnipotence (Allmacht), has been to make the notions of potestas and of potentia increasingly abstract terms. This phase has ended with a distribution of “domination” among the state (which has been able to “monopolize the legitimate use of constraint” [M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 29]), civil society, the economy, and the remains of the different spiritual authorities. The second phase concerns the vast domain of the legitimization of power and the use of force. In the article on Gewalt in his dictionary, Grimm points out that the meaning of “a misuse of power was barely formulated” in the Middle Ages: this sense of the term arises with the convergence of a concentration of powers, the move toward secularization, and the rationalization of the conception of law. It was only then that the terms of power and of constraining force departed from their status as normative notions expressing the legitimate need to conserve a social and political order, whose essentially Christian foundations were never questioned. Gewalt and Macht thus became either descriptive notions (whose connotations remained relatively “neutral”), or states of things that, while they had no clear and explicit justification, nevertheless aroused the suspicion that they were potentially illegitimate. From the sixteenth century onward, political thought would continually reflect upon the opposition between right and force, just as, in parallel, moral thought would oppose the “power” of reason to the “violence” of passions. The term Gewalt was interpreted from the perspective of natural MACHT, GEWALT (GERMAN) ENGLISH might, power, violence v. POWER and DROIT, FORCE, HERRSCHAFT, JETZTZEIT, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VALUE When Luther comments on Romans 13 (“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities”), he writes that “one must not resist authority (Obrigkeit) by force (Gewalt), but only by confessing the truth” (Weimar Ausgabe, 11: 277). This interpretation underlines one of the connotations—rebellious force—that gradually, and especially toward the end of the Middle Ages, came to be added to the traditional meaning of Gewalt, which originally referred to the entire range of acts connected with the exercise of temporal power: administering, reigning, organizing (the root of the term goes back to the Latin valere). It is clear that the associated notions of potestas and of vis (force) are directly linked to this exercise of power, and because Gewalt implies the use of force, the meaning of the term moves easily, by extension, toward the idea of violence, that is, a rebellious, even revolutionary, force exerted against power (Macht). Gewalt and Macht thus share the idea of potestas, with Gewalt inflecting this idea toward vis and violentia, while Macht tends more toward potentia. I. An Uncertain Division: The Arbitrary and the Free Deployment of Force It is not so much the etymology of these terms or the tradition of their usage that suggest or anticipate the semantic value they assume in philosophical reflections but rather a terminological decision that establishes a division at the heart of their fields of connotation, whose borders are blurred. When Kant calls Macht a “power which is superior to great hindrances,” and Gewalt this same force “if it is also superior to the resistance of what is also endowed with Macht,” we can say on the one hand that Gewalt is understood as a modality of Macht, and on the other that these definitions transpose what is normally a political and legal linguistic usage into the domain of nature. This well-known quotation is the beginning of paragraph 28 of the “Analytic of the Sublime” where Kant talks of natural force (which should be expressed rather by the term Kraft, referring to physical force in general, see FORCE). He simply wants to emphasize that the force of nature can be understood as a power that, on certain occasions, is unleashed and turns violent. This violence is understood as an avatar of power that, as such (that is, as potentia), is synonymous with possibility (here the connection with “potentiality” is of importance) in the broad sense of the term. In contemporary usage Macht might be best understood in Max Weber’s definition of the term: “Any possibility, within a social relationship, of imposing one’s will, even in spite of a resistance, and regardless of what this possibility is based on” (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 28). Gewalt in turn refers first and foremost to the exercise of a constraint (and it matters little M justice, for example, as referring at the same time to the space of freedom belonging to each individual, the illegitimate intrusion of an individual into the private sphere of another individual, and the legitimate force that preserves this natural space of freedom. It is difficult to avoid noting how much Macht, in this semantic extension, can cut across each of the values attributed to Gewalt, with the one partial exception that the connotations of Macht are slightly less negative. The third phase, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the phase of contestation that came with the fact of power and force being concentrated in the hands of the apparatuses of the state and of domination. Revolutionary phenomena, modern wars, the analysis of the structure of society in terms of conflict and exploitation, the critique of law in the name of the ideological interests it served and whose “reality” it masked, all brought about a shift in the understanding of these two notions. They were no longer understood in the general context of law but became poles of social and political theories, whose objective was the critique of domination with a view to its redefinition, its control, or even its disappearance in history. At the same time these two terms were notions that became as much concepts of theoretical reflection as they were notions usurped for instrumentalized ends (revolutionary “violence” [Gewalt], for example, could be said to be “legitimate” from the perspective of an ideology of history judging the present in the name of a “scientifically” guaranteed future, based on a belief in the “power” [Macht] of the exploited classes). When Fichte develops the idea, in his 1796 work Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre, that the “law must be a power (Macht),” and when he asks what the nature of this power should be, such that it goes beyond the law of the will of each individual, from a contractual perspective directly inspired by Rousseau, he will use the term Übermacht, which immediately becomes a synonym for Übergewalt, in other words, a superior power, or the supreme force/power of the law. The “common will” of the contracting parties must have a “superior power in view of which the power of each individual is incommensurably restrained, so that this will can be preserved beyond itself and ensure it is maintained: this is the force of the state (Staatsgewalt)” (ibid., 153). The only distinction one can make in the use of these two terms is that Macht here appears as more abstract and general, whereas Gewalt is explicitly referred to the potestas executiva, since then the use of force is concretely required for the constraining force of the law to be effectively realized. In Hegel, as in Kant, the distinction between the two notions is thematized—“Force (Gewalt) is a manifestation of power (Macht), or it is power as exteriority” (Hegel, Logik, 2: 200). The Enzyklopädie (1830, §541) talks about Staatsgewalt in the same sense as Fichte and uses Gewalt to refer to the distribution of the power of the state into different powers (executive, legislative, judicial). When the Enzyklopädie discusses the state of nature (ibid., §502), however, Gewalt signifies less “force” than “freely disposing of something” (according to its first meaning): The law of nature—strictly so called—is for that reason the predominance of the strong (Stärke) and the reign of force (Gewalt), and a state of nature a state of violence (Gewalttätigkeit) and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and sacrificed is just the willfulness and violence of the state of nature (Gewalttätigkeit). (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. and with introduction by William Wallace, 1894). However, in his Philosophy of Right §95 (cf. also §93 add.), Hegel will use Gewalt to designate constraint (Zwang), that is, the use of brute force against a natural existence that is an agent, the bearer or the product of will (the existence of a man, or what he has produced or built). But Gewalt also serves here as a synonym for “possession” (Besitz), which is defined by the fact of disposing externally of something in whatever way one wishes. This first level of possession will be overcome to reach the level of property (Eigentum), which is no longer defined in terms of free disposition but also of the right which of course guarantees this free disposition (within certain limits) over and against the arbitrary power of another person. Marx will not depart radically from this distribution of connotations. His now celebrated expressions—“the proletariat must abolish political power when it is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They must themselves become a power (Gewalt) and, first and foremost, a revolutionary power” (“Moralisierende Kritik und kritisierende Moral,” 4: 338); “force (Gewalt) is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (Capital, I, §8, chap. 31)—do not essentially modify the meanings of the two terms, and the differences between them are more of degree and of modality than of nature. . III. Macht and Gewalt, “Power” and “Violence”: Arendt and Benjamin on the Functions of Violence There have been only two real and original departures from these meanings. The first of these is Walter Benjamin’s use of the term Gewalt, in the extreme extension of its sense, that is, the violence against all tradition, to which he is not afraid of adjoining the adjective “divine” (göttliche) violence. The second is to be found in the decisive opposition between power (Macht) and violence (Gewalt) that Hannah Arendt develops in the essay bearing this title (Macht und Gewalt). In his 1920 essay “Critique of Violence” (Selected Writings, vol. 1), Benjamin opposes the mythical, foundational, and conservative violence of law with divine, destructive, and purifying violence: “For only mythic violence (schaltende Gewalt), not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men. Once again all the external forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law. Divine violence may manifest itself in a true war exactly as it does in the crowd’s divine judgment on a criminal. But all mythic, lawmaking violence (verwaltende Gewalt), which we may call ‘executive,’ is 608 MACHT MACHT 609 or of institution, supported by a greater or lesser number of individual wills. “Power” (Macht, pouvoir) is thus both the condition of any sociopolitical order and a finality in itself, whereas “force” (Gewalt, or violence) only has aims that change each time. In addition, power has no need for justification, but only for legitimacy, whereas force is never legitimate. The use of force can in certain circumstances be justified in terms of an anticipation of what it could achieve; power, in contrast, derives its legitimacy instead from the past, from a tradition. At the same time revolutions are only the results of redistributions of power, and force itself cannot set them in motion (its function being instead to introduce reforms). When “revolutionary violence” (revolutionnäre Gewalt), however, brings about a transformation of reality, it only achieves one result: “the world has become more violent (gewalttätiger) than it was before” (Macht und Gewalt, 80). Power is normative, while force as violence is instrumental; power is not identifiable with domination, since it is lacking constraint, manipulation, and conflict. Neither is defined by its capacity to overcome resistance (it does not pertain, as in Max Weber, to a relation of order and obedience). To refer to a “power without violence” (gewaltlos) is a pleonasm. Violence can destroy power; but it is absolutely incapable of creating power” (ibid., 57). . Marc de Launay pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, ‘administrative’ violence that serves it. Divine violence (göttliche Gewalt), which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign’ (waltende) violence” (ibid., 252). This violence, whose conception is manifestly inspired by the ideas of Georges Sorel, is also said to be revolutionary; it is a “pure violence exerted on behalf of living beings against all life,” it is a “liberation from all law,” whereas mythical violence “imposes all at once both guilt and expiation.” A manifestation of divine violence can be found in the element of “educative power” that is “outside of all law.” In essence, the backdrop to this divine violence is a transposition of a conception derived from Jewish mysticism into terms that are Sorelian rather than Marxist (even though the idea of pure violence is very close to the Hegelian Marxist sense of Gewalt as negativity). This is Isaac Luria’s cabalistic notion of the “breaking of vases,” this catastrophe that is responsible both for the dispersion into the world of the sparks of evil and for the “exile” of God himself, the “divine contraction” whose consequence is creation itself. Divine violence is also manifested in the idea of the here and now (see JETZTZEIT), the potential sudden eruption of the messianic dimension at the heart of the mythical, and thus fallacious, continuity of time. Arendt, for her part, opposes the domain of “force,” that is, the domain of technology (production, and making the material means adequate to the ends), to that of “power,” 1 The “will to power” (“Wille zur Macht”) in Nietzsche This expression, “will to power,” first appears at the time Nietzsche was writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, thus in the final phase of this thinking. It is understood first of all as another, more precise way of referring to what is commonly called life. But in Zarathustra itself, the “will to power” is directly related to the evolution of cultures across time and history, as a way of establishing control over the whole of phenomenal reality. This expression returns at several points in 1885, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, and refers there to the furthest level that our own reflection can reach when it attempts to interpret reality (what Nietzsche designates as the “original text”). So the “will to power” is the highest level attained by our hypotheses, and it thus becomes identified with philosophy as the attempt to think the totality of what is. The “will to power” thus refers to the general dynamic of our instincts, from the most basic to the most refined drives, to the dynamic of the body, and even that of the inorganic world. But we must never forget that instincts constantly adjust themselves and evaluate circumstances with a view to satisfying themselves and that they necessarily enter into conflict with one another. There are thus only transient and fragile states of equilibrium between these different movements, and this is what we call the “self,” for example, or a “cause,” or “knowledge,” or “will.” Since Nietzsche on the one hand says that “will” (Wille) is an exoteric term, that it does not exist as such—there is only an instinctual dynamic that is absolutely inseparable from the dynamic of the mind—and since on the other hand what he declares as his most profound thought is that of the “eternal return” (ewige Wiederkunft, an expression we find in 1882, before the notion of the “will to power” makes its appearance), we are entitled to consider the “will to power” as the “mask” of the eternal return. Nietzsche explains in a posthumous fragment (7 [54], end 1886– spring 1887) that the “supreme will to power” is the fact of “impressing upon becoming the character of being that everything returns is the most extreme convergence between a world of becoming and a world of being.” In 1887 Nietzsche planned to write a book that would bear the title “Will to Power.” He worked on this plan during the course of the year in 1888, explaining that, on the one hand, the 372 fragments mentioned in relation to this plan were only to help him clarify his own thoughts, and that any publication of them was consequently prohibited (letter to P. Gast, February 1888), and on the other hand, that this same project from then on was to be called “Transvaluation of All Values” (letter to F. Overbeck, 13 February 1888). In September of that same year, Nietzsche abandoned the expression “will to power” as a designation of what he was about to publish, and the foreword to the Twilight of the Idols was completed on 30 September, identifying this date as year one of the “transvaluation of all values.” The different editions of the Will to Power that appeared after Nietzsche’s death were simply compilations of posthumous fragments, grouped more or less coherently according to the themes defined by the successive teams at the Weimar Archives (under the aegis of Nietzsche’s sister). 610 MACHT 2 “Forcing” (Forçage) “J’aimerais l’appeler un forçage, si scandaleusement autoritaire soit la connotation du mot” (I would prefer to call it [the psychoanalytic act, which ‘forces’ a particular sort of knowledge to appear] a forcing, however scandalously authoritarian the word may sound) (Conditions). So writes Alain Badiou, toward the end of his 1991 lecture “La vérité: forçage et innommable,” thus hesitating ever so slightly around the problem of conceptual nomination, the problem, that is, of the relation between the word (“la connotation du mot”) and the concept this word is to name (“j’aimerais l’appeler un forçage,” “call it a forcing”). Badiou’s scruple is to the point: defined in French as “l’action de forcer, de faire céder par force,” “the act of forcing, making something occur on account of, or making something bend to, a force,” forçage is thick with connotations of violation, sexual violence, unnaturalness, and impropriety. To the degree that word and concept are never in a simple relation of exteriority to one another and that concept-invention is therefore always an inventio in the rhetorical sense, working with the historicity of the term in question, Badiou’s well-founded scruple necessarily doubles as a provocation. After all, one might think of forçage, intuitively, as the very other of the idea of philosophy, a virtual synonym for the absence of reason; or, alternately, at a somewhat more advanced level of reflection, forçage might be understood as a figurative description of the philosophical malady par excellence, a kind of rapacious idealism that acknowledges no alterity, no gap between concept and object, forcing everything that stands in its path. The provocation is only heightened when one realizes that Badiou’s concept of forçage bears upon nothing less philosophically central than the relation of truth to knowledge. Assuming that the provocation is not an empty one, what kind of philosophical situation might demand such a paradoxical alignment of forçage with values such as truth and knowledge? To what exigency does a concept of forçage respond? The fact that Badiou adapts forçage from Paul Cohen’s mathematical technique of “forcing” does not lessen the paradoxicality of the concept or the urgency of the questions raised by its formulation. Similarly, other Englishlanguage usages such as “forcing bulbs” in horticulture or “forcing bids” in the game of bridge may give the term a technical inflection, but they do not fundamentally alter its connotation. (Indeed, given philosophy’s historical ambivalence to technê, these usages could hardly be said to prepare or anticipate a distinctly philosophical conceptualization of the term.) Without further delay, let us turn back to the text of Badiou’s lecture: forçage is “a matter of the point at which, although incomplete, a truth authorizes anticipations of knowledge, not statements about what is, but about what will have been if the truth reaches completion.” Already in this brief description, not quite yet even a proper definition, questions of time and decision are clustered, somewhat unexpectedly, with the problem of epistemology, the problem of knowledge. It is to this knot that the paradoxical concept of forçage corresponds. As is by now well known, a truth for Badiou is an event in the robust sense, which means that it, by definition, eludes knowledge; forçage bears, in turn, on the knowledge of truth, the consequences of truth for a knowledge to which it nonetheless necessarily remains heterogeneous. Because a truth cannot be known, it is undecidable and therefore subject to decision. Yet the theory of forçage is not as such a decisionism. It is, rather, a paradoxical epistemology of the future effects generated by groundless decisions—a meta-decisionism, perhaps. One decides on the basis of the future anterior—what will have been if the truth comes to completion, what will have been if the situation is altered to accommodate what was previously an anonymous multiple or subset. What this means, in practice, is the introduction of a new name into a situation, a name that corresponds to nothing in the current situation and therefore has no referential value in the present but instead “refers” to its “completed” existence in a “situation à-venir” (Being and Event). Two additional points must be made concerning the technical aspects of forçage. The first is that of the paradox of “authorized anticipations of knowledge” or of forçage as “method” (Conditions). For the modern (i.e., Cartesian) theory of knowledge is founded on the notion of intuitive (or sensible) evidence; “method” as such was conceptualized precisely as a guard against anticipation. The initiation, under the sign of forçage, of an epistemology of “authorized anticipation” is therefore remarkable to say the least. Second, and following from this point, the equivocal character of forçage in relation to various twentieth-century philosophies of time is worthy of interest. On one hand Badiou’s thought is premised on the non-self-identity and non-self-sufficiency of the historical present; and insofar as the event inaugurates a sequence, it might be said to “temporalize,” to bring about a particular acute sense of historicity. And yet, on the other hand, forçage effects a kind of telescoping of the future into the present, a telescoping that necessarily drains the future of its futurity; the negation of the historical present thus ultimately leads for Badiou not to a heightened sense of temporality, but to an affect of eternity. To round out this entry, several additional notes are in order. First, the equivocal relation throughout Badiou’s oeuvre between forçage and force as such is worthy of note, though there is not room for an extended treatment here. In Théorie du sujet (1980), for instance, Badiou mobilizes forçage alongside Hegel’s concept of Kraft from the Wissenschaft der Logik, using both to think the rupture dialectique between subject and structure. Kraft is theorized as the positing of externality, whereby the seemingly reactive subject, in understanding itself to posit the structure that seems to determine it, transforms structure into a moment of its own development (Théorie du sujet). Forçage approaches the same problematic from a different angle, juxtaposing the classical logic of implication (“p implies non-q”), which by definition cannot think rupture, with the logic of forçage, according to which “p forces non-q” is a contingent development from the absence of a constraint, a consequence of the fact, in other words, that nothing more powerful than p forces q (Ibid.). Thus Badiou can write the following, implicitly aligning force and forçage: “Between formal implication and forcing there lies all the ambivalence that the dialectic introduces in the old problem of determinism. The subject’s surrection is the effect of force within the place. This does not mean that the place implies it” (Ibid.). In L’être et l’événement, by contrast, the critique of political ontology leads to a rejection of the language of force, even as forçage becomes an ever more important theoretical construct. Badiou thus writes, in regard to Hobbes: “To suppose that the political convention results from the necessity of having to exit from a war of all against all, and to thus subordinate the event to the effects of force [subordonner l’événement aux effets de la force], is to submit its eventness to an extrinsic determination. Politics is a creation, local and fragile, of collective humanity, it is never the treatment of a vital necessity” (Begin and Event). Second, the concept of forçage has an interestingly ambiguous psychoanalytic background. Though Badiou cites Lacan in his lecture on forçage, he does not cite any of the instances in which Lacan in fact writes of forçage, referring instead to the theory of the “half-saying” [mi-dire] of truth elaborated in Seminar 17. Badiou does suggest, however, MADNESS 611 REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. Macht und Gewalt. Munich: Piper, 1970. Translation: On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. . Selected Writings. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996–2003. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre. In Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Edited by I. H. Fichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965. First published in 1845. Translation by Michael Baur: Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. Edited by Frederick Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hanssen, Beatrice. Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 2000. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 20. Hamburg: Meiner, 1992. First published in 1830. Translation by Steven A. Taubeneck: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, and Critical Writings. Edited by Ernst Behler. German Library. Vol. 24. New York: Continuum, 1990. . Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Edited by Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 14. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, forthcoming. Translation by T. M. Knok: Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Edited and with introduction by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. . Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die objektive Logik. Edited by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 21. Hamburg: Meiner, 1985. First published in 1832. Wissenschaft der Logik, Zweiter Band: Die subjektive Logik. Edited by Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, 1981. First published in 1816. Translation by A. V. Miller: Science of Logic. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. 3 vols. In Marx-Engels Werke. Vols. 23–25. Berlin: Dietz, 1963–1983. Translation: Capital. 3 vols. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works. Vols. 35–37. New York: International Publishers, 1996–98. . “Moralisierende Kritik und kritisierende Moral.” In Marx-Engels Werke. 4: 331–59. Berlin: Dietz, 1972. First published in 1847. Translation: “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works. 6: 312ff. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Siebeck, 1922. Translation by Ephraim Fischoff et al.: Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. MADNESS / INSANITY FRENCH folie, démence GERMAN Schwärmerei, Wahn; Unsinn, Verrücktheit GREEK mania [μανία], phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ], aphrosunê [ἀφϱοσύνη], paranoia [παϱάνοια] ITALIAN follia, pazzia; demenza LATIN furor, phrenesis; dementia, insania, insipientia v. DRIVE, GENIUS, LOGOS, MALAISE [MELANCHOLY], MEMORY, MORALS, PATHOS, PRUDENCE, REASON, SOUL, WISDOM The terminology of madness follows two distinct models in most languages. On the one hand, there is a positive model, which treats madness as a distinct entity subject to the highest valuations: thus Greek mania and, in another register, Latin furor, which indicate exceptional states. These persist in literary modernity in the ideas of inspiration, enthusiasm, and genius, as well as Schwärmerei, the extravagance in terms of which Immanuel Kant characterizes both the madness of Emanuel Swedenborg and that of dogmatic idealism. On the other hand, we also find a negative or privative model: madness and the insane are outside or past reason or even wisdom (aphrôn, insipiens, insania, dementia, from which come our terms“insanity,” “dementia,” “paranoia,” and others). Unreason in this sense is in danger of being run together with irrationality (the aphrôn [ἄφϱων] is the opposite of the phronimos [φϱόνιμοϛ], the morally sensible sage). Cicero, with the goal of personally overseeing the shift from Greek vocabulary to Latin, opens the latter up to the symmetry of the health of the body and that of the soul. The medieval terminology of the subject confers a sort of technical value, even in theological controversies, upon terms like insipiens and phreneticus. The many terms of antiquity, which were initially based on Greek mania [μανία], were retained in modern languages until the advent of modern psychiatry, at the end of the eighteenth century, though at the cost of semantic shifts and new linguistic choices owing in particular to translations and definitions of Cicero, the Stoics, and Augustine. that there may be a Freudian precedent to the concept in what he cites as “frayage,” a term rendered as “working-through” [Durcharbeiten] in the English translation of Badiou’s essay (Conditions, 206/138). “Frayage” is in fact the term Jacques Derrida uses, on the basis of the French idiom “se frayer un chemin,” to translate Freud’s Bahnung (pathbreaking, pioneering, forging), in his famous 1966 essay on “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (in L’écriture et la différence). Alan Bass in turn renders frayage/Bahnung as “breaching,” a term that captures the implicit violence of the concept far more effectively than the comparatively euphemistic “facilitation” favored in the Standard Edition. The reference to frayage (Bahnung) thus not only links forçage back to the discussions of “force and place” in Théorie du sujet but also points toward a comparison between Derridean différance and Badiouian forçage as distinct modes of “spacing” that find a common precedent in Freud’s Bahnung. Third, and finally, the question of a modernist aesthetics of forçage remains to be addressed. For Badiou writes in passing, in reference to Rimbaud and Mallarmé, of “un forçage de la langue par avènement d’une autre langue à la fois immanente et créée“ (the forcing of language by the advent of another language at once immanent and created) or again, this time in relation to Beckett, of “une invention dans la langue, un forçage poétique” (an invention in language, a poetic forcing) (Petit manuel d’inésthétique, Beckett, l’écriture et la scène). This conceptualization of forçage in fact resonates with the use made of the term by Lacan in Seminar 23, in which he writes, in reference to his own appropriation of knot-theory, of “the forcing of a new writing [le forçage d’une nouvelle écriture] and the forcing of a new kind of idea [et le forçage d’un nouveau type d’idée]” (Séminaire 23). Lacan, however, draws attention to what Badiou does not—the status of mathematical formalization as such, here grasped under the sign of forçage, as a formidable intervention in the aesthetics of philosophical writing. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz 612 MADNESS contrast between phrenitis and mania, no doubt we must place it in the second half of the second century BCE. Thus, since diagnosis follows definition, we could not confuse phrenitis— that is, insanity with fever, crocudismos [ϰϱοϰυδισμόϛ] (the gesture of ripping out strands of tissue or blades of straw) and carphologia [ϰαϱφολογία] (permanent and involuntary movements of hands and fingers)—and mania, insanity without fever. With regard to this text, Galen has the same problems of translation and understanding as we do. The determination and definition of illnesses like mania, phrenitis, or melancholy presuppose a certain number of complex cultural facts, including in particular: the constraint of the definition according to the model of philosophy and rhetoric; the definitive separation between illness of the body, reserved for doctors, and that of the soul, reserved for philosophers; the victory of soul-body dualism; and the triumph of the Stoic theory of passion as an illness of the soul (see PATHOS). Celsus attempted a new grouping. He classified under the notion or “genre” of insania the three major illness among which “madness” is essentially distributed, namely, phrenitis, melancholy (the fear and sadness attributed by Hippocratics to “black bile”), and mania. Why insania? We would be at a loss to give a semantic analysis, but a shift has occurred in any case from a positive entity, mania, to a privation, insanity, that authorizes and promotes the parallel between illness of the soul and illness of the body. The determinations of madness, or the ways of expressing it in the widest sense in Latin, are numerous. It seems indeed that this is Celsus’s choice. The semantic field of madness is henceforth determined by the history of medicine. B. Psychiatric frenzy and mania These problems are not restricted to Greco-Roman antiquity. This is not only because these texts were well known and scrutinized through the middle of the nineteenth century, and play a role in the foundation of psychiatry, but also because a certain number of problems were dealt with in antiquity in a way that was decisive for psychopathology, and for the very meaning of the word “mania.” When psychiatry was created (at the end of the eighteenth century), the question of terminology returned. Philippe Pinel writes then: “The happy influence exercised on medicine recently by the study of other sciences can no longer allow giving the general name of madness, which may have an indeterminate scope, to insanity” (Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique). There are in his writings, however, two concepts of madness. One, in his Nosographie philosophique, corresponds to the tradition; another one, wider and newer in its definition, creates problems of categorization with the first, in his Traité médico-philosophique (128–29). However, Pinel’s student Esquirol wrote, in 1816, an article entitled “On Madness.” In 1818, he wrote another, “On Mania,” in which he returns to the classic definition: “Mania is a chronic affection of the brain, usually without fever, characterized by perturbation and exaltation of the senses, mind, and will.” “I shall use,” Vincenzo Chiarugi had written, on the other hand, “the word insanity [pazzia] without having to adopt a term taken from a foreign language, thus avoiding the risk of confusion and misunderstanding” (Della pazzia in genere e in speczie, trans. Mora). I. Greek Mania and Its Modern Destiny: From Enthusiasm to Psychosis A. The mania of philosophers and the phrenitis of doctors Concerning mania [μανία], Boissier de Sauvages writes: “From the Greek mainomai, I am crazy, furious; in Latin, furor, insania; in French, folie & manie” (Nosologie, 7.389). The word is thus trapped in its equivalences in Latin and in French. We may consider it the most general, the most available, both in extension and in understanding (mainomai [μαίνομαι] answers to a Sanskrit root that means “to believe, to think,” from which we derive both menos [μένοϛ], “warrior spirit,” and mimnêskô [μιμνήσϰω], “I remember” (see MEMORY). Mania initially refers to what we tend to place under the vague word “madness,” and continues to do so in ordinary language. In Hippocrates, we may say that mania is only found as a symptom, as are all changes of êthos [ἦθοϛ], “character.” It does not yet exist as a concept of sickness. Plato describes four forms of divine madness (mania, Phaedrus 265b, and esp. 244–45). The first, inspired by Apollo, is mantic delirium, divination. The “moderns,” says Plato, are the ones who, lacking a sense of beauty, introduced a t to the word and called the art of divination mantikê [μαντιϰή] rather than manikê [μανιϰή]. The second form is “telestic” delirium, given by Dionysus, who “accomplishes” (teleô [τελέω]) in the sense that he initiates one into mysteries. The third is the delirium inspired by the Muses, namely poetic delirium. The fourth form, a gift of Aphrodite or Eros, is that which incites love, erôtikê mania [ἐϱωτιϰή μανία]. This text, which ancient medicine carefully recalls, is of primary importance for understanding this medicine’s definition of mania. Thus, Caelius Aurelian, a doctor in the fifth century CE (who is transposing a second-century doctor, Soranus of Ephesus, into Latin), writes: Plato, in the Phaedrus, declares that madness is twofold: one comes from a tension of the mind, having a cause or origin in the body, the other is divine or sent down, and is inspired by Apollo; now we call this divination. (Chronic Illnesses 1.5, ed. Bendz, 144) Continuing to cite the text of the Phaedrus in the Chronic Illnesses, Caelius is right to speak of the duality of madness. For whatever the number of distinctions Plato makes, alongside these “meaningful” madnesses, there is the sickness of madness. In fact, we may speak of a “double madness,” a good one (“the greatest gifts come by way of madness,” Plato, Phaedrus 244b) and a pathological madness. It is this duality that is put to the test in Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae. Something happened, however, that we could not better show than by citing Galen. When he reads in a Hippocratic constitution (Epidemics 3 = RT: Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 3:92) that “none of the frenetics had an attack of mania but instead of that they were prostrate,” he is perplexed. The conjunction of mania and phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ] is incomprehensible to him. Since Hippocrates cannot be wrong, Galen thinks we must give phrenitic a metaphorical sense. In truth, the Hippocratic text is a problem for him because a very important epistemological break had taken place, namely, the development of definitions of illnesses. As for the systematic MADNESS 613 indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely a disturbance. (Foucault, A History of Madness, 133) II. The Latin Terminology: Furor / Insania / Dementia A. Cicero as a translator of the Greeks The uses of Latin terminology for madness are marked by the influence of Stoicism, the distinctions and analyses of which are taken up in contexts that are not strictly Stoic. Thus Cicero: I shall follow the time-honoured distinction made first by Pythagoras and after him by Plato, who divide the soul into two parts: to the one they assign a share in reason, to the other none. Let this then be our starting point; let us nevertheless in depicting these disorders employ the definitions and subdivisions of the Stoics who, it appears to me, show remarkable penetration in dealing with this problem. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.11, trans. King, 339) A first attempt deals with the distinction of passions and illness, which the Greek groups under the general expression pathê: Finally, outside of any medical context, it is prudent to avoid translating mania by “mania,” since the English term is reserved for technical use; “madness,” which remains the most general and least technical term, is used instead. It is common to see translators, out of a desire to avoid repetition, go so far as to translate mania by “frenzy.” This is unfortunate, since in traditional nosography, mania is in fact opposed to “frenzy” (phrenitis). Translating mania by “delirium” should also be avoided, as since Pinel, we know that there are manias without delirium. Mania remains a technical term today, defined thus: “State of intellectual and psychomotor excitation, and exaltation of mood, with morbid euphoria, of periodic and cyclic evolution, entering the framework of manic-depressive psychosis” (RT: Postel, Dictionnaire de psychiatrie, s.v.). . We may note, furthermore, that traditional nosography found itself overlaid, from the end of the eighteenth century on, with a “scientific” nomenclature derived from the medicalization of madness, henceforth defined as “mental illness.” However, as Michel Foucault noted, between these two lexica of madness—that is, before the era of medicalization—an intermediate, purely descriptive terminology developed. A person was described as a “stubborn litigant,” a “big liar,” a “mean and quibbling” person, a “worried, despondent, and gruff mind”: There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree. What these formulae 1 Contemporary nosography The conceptions of “madness” that were developed in antiquity did not find a place in the nomenclatures established by contemporary psychiatry, in which, for example, we find words or expressions like aliénation mentale (P. Pinel, 1797; “insanity” in English), psychosis (E. Feuchtersleben, 1844), paranoia (C. Lasèque, 1852) or Verrücktheit in German (W. Griesinger, 1845, then E. Kraepelin), schizophrenia or dementia praecox (E. Bleuler, 1908), and phobia (1880). In this new nosography, the denotations of ancient terms like mania [μανία], phrenitis [φϱενῖτιϛ], and pathos [πάθοϛ] for the Greeks, or furor, insania, and perturbatio for the Romans (whose symptomatology generally went back to Hippocrates or Galen), often only retained from that point on a literary or popular usage. The modern and contemporary nosography of madness relies on a wide variety of neologisms borrowed from Greek, such as “phobia” (from phobos [φόϐοϛ], illness whose primary symptom is a paralyzing and irrepressible fear when faced with an object or situation that in reality presents no danger; psychoanalysis refers to this rather as “anxiety hysteria”), “manic-depressive psychosis” (from the beginning of the twentieth century, the third, after paranoia and schizophrenia, of the major current psychoses that is characterized by a disturbance of mood in which states of manic euphoria and fits of melancholy or depression alternate), “hysteria” (an eighteenth-century term; then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a collection of disorders that was initially believed to be related to eroticism originating in the uterus—from the Greek hustera [ὑστέϱα]— and that relate to unconscious conflicts manifested by bodily symptoms and in the form of symbolizations), “paranoia” (from paranoia [παϱάνοια], a kind of systematic delirium in which interpretation predominates and which does not include intellectual deterioration; Freud saw it as a defense against homosexuality). However, note that, alongside these various terms, psychiatry and psychoanalysis place emphasis on the idea of a schize or a defect in the personality of the subject, notably with regard to what is called “schizophrenia.” This last term, by which Bleuler replaces the expression dementia praecox used by Kraepelin, comes directly from the Greek verb schizô [σχίζω], which means “to separate, split, dissociate,” and which had already yielded “schism” in the sense of “separation.” Thus schizophrenia would be characterized by symptoms of mental dissociation, discordance of affects and frenzied activity that lead to a general withdrawal into oneself (autism) and a breaking off of contact with the external world. The same idea is found in the German noun Spaltung used by Freud, which French psychoanalysts translate by clivage, though often using it rather loosely, with the meaning of a dissociation of consciousness, or of the object, or of the ego—regarding this Freudian Ichspaltung, Lacan translates the expression as “refente du sujet” (Écrits, 842). REFS.: Bleuler, Eugen. Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. Berlin: Springer, 1916. Ey, Henri. Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study of Being Conscious and Becoming Conscious. Translated by J. H. Flodstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. . Études psychiatriques. 3 vols. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948–52. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by J. Khalfa. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kraepelin, Emil. Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. 9th ed. Leipzig: Kraepelin and Lange, 1927. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 614 MADNESS of fury of the great tragic heroes from the madness that the paradoxical definition of the Stoics attributes to the nonsages: this distinction does not exist in the verb mainesthai, which refers equally to the madness of Heracles, prophetic fury, and non-wisdom. The paradox “hoti pas aphrôn mainetai [ὅτι πᾶϛ ἄφϱων μαίνεται]” is translated “omnem stultum insanire” (Cicero, Stoic Paradoxes 27). The choice of the Latin stultus, which does not connote madness, to render the Greek aphrôn [ἄφϱων], whose most well-attested meaning is “demented/ crazy,” reinforces the effect of distinguishing them and expresses what is most characteristic of the Stoic doctrine of the passions: all passion comes from an error of judgment. However, the distinction drawn does not simply dispose of furor as an illness of “great natures”: Cicero refuses to attribute it to black bile, and presents it rather as a complete blindness that results from excess. In this way, he maintains the Stoic point of view by taking advantage of everything that, with regard to furor, connotes excess—from heroic fury to the self-dispossessions of erotic poetry—without appealing to a precise form of judgment. The term is also absent from the list of forms of anger that yields, in the Ciceronian translation, ira, excandescentia, odium, inimicitia, discordia (anger, irascibility, hate, enmity, resentment) (Tusculan Disputations 4.21). B. Furor and insania in the Stoics Cicero’s attempts at drawing distinctions are largely adopted by Seneca, who nevertheless takes advantage of them to explore the confusion of moral and physical causes of collective disorder: Between the insanity of people in general and the insanity which is subject to medical treatment, there is no difference, except that the latter is suffering from disease and the former from false opinions. In the one case, the symptoms of madness may be traced to illhealth; the other is the ill-health of the mind. (Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistolae morales 94.7, trans. Gummere, 3:21–23) However, furor and insania are used conjointly to refer to evils of body and mind, the evil of the individual in civilization: furor refers to a state of ingratitude that has become so general that it threatens the foundation of all social bonds (“Eo perductus est furor ut periculosissima res sit benificia in aliquem magna conferre,” ibid., 81.31–32), or the blindness comparable to that of the clown who, having lost his sight, believed that the house had gone dark (ibid., 50). It is the state of all who can no longer perceive that they are affected, since the organ of judgment is too sick: Seneca’s language exploits the symmetry between insania and insanitas more widely than Cicero does, to apply the Stoic paradox to a state of civilization: “We are mad, not only individually, but nationally [non privatim solum sed publice furimus]” (ibid., 95.30, trans. Gummere, 77). III. Scholastic Expressions for Unreason and Christian Faith as “Madness” A. The fol From the eleventh century on, under the influence of the Gregorian reform and of Cluny, all the different components of European society came to be integrated into what Terror, lusts, fits of anger—these belong, speaking generally, to the class of emotions which the Greeks term pathê [πάθη]: I might have called them “diseases,” and this would be a word-for-word rending: but it would not fit in with Latin usage. For pity, envy, exultation, joy, all these the Greeks term diseases, movements that is of the soul which are not obedient to reason; we on the other hand should, I think rightly, say that these same movements of an agitated soul are “disorders,” but not “diseases” in the ordinary way of speaking. (Ibid., 3.7, trans. King, 233) It is in the context of this general distinction that we must understand the etymological connection between insania (madness) and insanitas (ill health), on the basis of which Cicero develops the Stoic doctrine of passion/illness: “The word insania refers to a weakness and a sickness of the intelligence [mentis aegrotatio et morbus], that is, the ill health [insanitas] of a sick mind [animus aegrotus]” (ibid.). Thus the appeal to a play on etymology makes it possible to find a linguistic correlate of the symmetry between bodily and mental health, which is a philosophical construction. In this way, Cicero gives Latin a capacity that neither the general term pathê nor mania (which insania translates) has in Greek, at the expense of forcing Latin usage: whereas sanus may mean either healthy of body or healthy of mind, insanus only means “mentally ill / crazy.” Once this symmetry has been established, Cicero can interpret the only legal text from the classical period that refers to a person as a madman (furiosus), so that the oldest legal usage of the language coincides with the Stoic approach: furor is, just as much as insania, an imbalance of the mind, but it is such that it prevents one from fulfilling the obligations of life. I cannot readily give the origin of the Greek term mania: the meaning it actually implies is marked with better discrimination by us than by the Greeks, for we make a distinction between “unsoundness” of mind, which from its association with folly has a wider connotation, and “frenzy.” The Greeks wish to make the distinction but fall short of success in the term they employ: what we call frenzy they call melancholia, just as if the truth were that the mind is influenced by black bile only and not in many instances by the stronger power of wrath or fear or pain, in the sense in which we speak of the frenzy of Athamas, Alcmaeon, Ajax and Orestes. Whosoever is so afflicted is not allowed by the Twelve Tables to remain in control of his property; and consequently we find the text runs, not “if of unsound mind,” but “if he be frenzied.” For they thought that folly, though without steadiness, that is to say, soundness of mind, was nevertheless capable of charging itself with the performance of ordinary duties and the regular routine of the conduct of life: frenzy, however, they regarded as a blindness of the mind in all relations. (Ibid., 3.11, trans. King, 237–39) The distinction suggested on the authority of the Twelve Tables allows for a better account of what separates the state MADNESS 615 defends the constricting character of his argument relative to the Trinity by falling back on dialectic: “This hard to break triple-bond by which any frenetic destroyer of our faith finds himself firmly chained [unde phreneticus quivis fidei nostrae impugnator fortiter alligetur],” De Trinitate, 3.5). Yet the term phreneticus comes here not from a scriptural source, but from the tradition of Augustine, himself well aware of ancient medico-psychological terminology. The bishop of Hippo first recalls the clinical table (cf. Guimet, “Caritas ordinata et amor discretus,” 226–28). Phrenesis (from the Greek phrenitis) is a mental illness that engenders the loss of reason and that, for example, leads the subject to laugh when he should cry (Sermo 175, 2.2, RT: PL 38.945). It is sometimes accompanied by delirium, visions, and extravagant divinatory phenomena (De Genesi ad litteram, 12.17.35–36, RT: PL 34.468). It is indicated by disorders such as fever, abuse of wine, and insomnia, and leads to crises that become increasingly violent as death approaches (De quantitate animae, 22.38, RT: PL 32.1057, 40.1058; Ennaratio in Psalmum 58, RT: PL 36.696). In all of these symptoms, the “frenetic” is contrasted with the “lethargic,” who founders constantly in inertia and in sleep (Sermo 87, 11.14; RT: PL 38.538). Augustine then puts this classic schema to a moral and spiritual use. In his eyes, the two components of phrenesis, confusion and violence, are found in particular in the case of the Jews. It is under the influence of a virulent furor that they, refusing the salvation brought to them by Christ, made themselves executioners. And it is with respect to their blindness that the Messiah begs divine forgiveness for them: “They know not what they do.” Attributing this same pathological state to his other adversaries, the Donatists, Augustine suggests binding the phreneticus with constrictive arguments (Sermo 359, 8, RT: PL 39.1596), a remedy taken up by Richard of Saint Victor in attempting to restrain this lunatic by means of dialectic. Nevertheless, the phrenesis of late antiquity and the Middle Ages is paradoxically rehabilitated in the romantic period, continuing into surrealism, by so-called frenetic literature, which, especially with Charles Nodier (1781–1840), is presented as a deliberate intensification of sensuality, passion, imagination, revolt, and fantasizing. . IV. Kantian Schwärmerei and the Relation to Belief A. The “swarm of bees” Originally, the German noun Schwärmerei meant the agitation of bees, which move about without stopping; more precisely, on the one hand, it means the disorderly movements of each of the bees considered independently, and on the other hand, it means the compact flight of the swarm forming a group, equally uncontrollable. This double meaning made it possible to apply the term to religious beliefs that could be stigmatized as “wandering” and “sectarian.” Thus it was often used by Luther starting in the 1520s to denounce the “left wing” of the Reformation, which condemned the flesh in an exalted manner, interpreting the Gospel of John (6:63) in a fanatical sense: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” Schwärmerei connotes the exalted was called Christendom. Those who were excluded—Jews, Saracens, heretics—ran the risk of being accused of thinking or acting “differently.” Their deviance was then classified as a major defect of confusion or madness. In the vernacular, the “other” was called a sot (in Old French soz, sos, from the medieval Latin sottus, of unknown etymology), a maniac, a dervé, insane, fol. This last term, which would take up a prime position in the language of madness, comes from the Latin follis, which means “pouch of sealed leather, goatskin flask, balloon or bellows for fires.” Only in the Middle Ages does it take on a derisive second meaning, designating a stupid person or idiot. In their own academic disputes in Latin, theologians did not refrain from stigmatizing their adversaries as incapable of correct reasoning, stricken with stultitia, amentia, or furor. However, among the terms related to unreason or mental confusion that they exchanged in more or less insulting ways, there are two terms that assume, in the disputes, a properly technical sense: insipiens and phreneticus. The first is the Vulgate translation of the epithet aphrôn, found in the Septuagint in the incipit of Psalm 52 (53 today), which stigmatizes unbelief. This incipit, in effect, appears in Latin bibles in the following form: “Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus” (The fool said in his heart: There is no God). This is why medieval iconography illustrating madmen or madness takes as its frame the illuminations of the letter D, which is the initial letter of this verse of the psalm. B. The insipiens Unlike fol, insipiens is etymologically close to the idea of mental derangement, coming from sapio, “to have taste, discernment,” and from sapiens as a noun or adjective “sage,” referring to the non-sage—someone whose reason is faulty. It is translated into French as insensé, that is, someone whose statements are contrary to good sense and whose mind wanders (from sensus and, in the language of the Church, insensatus, an adjective that evokes absurdity, stupidity, idiocy, like “nonsense” in English). Yet, even though this same attitude of mind, this unreason, was also imputed to the Jews, guilty of not having recognized Jesus as the Messiah, it is Anselm of Canterbury who pronounces it of its most emblematic figure, the monk Gaunilo, for refusing to accept the proof of God’s existence offered by the author of the Monologion and the Proslogion. When Anselm attacks him, especially in chapters 2 and 4 of the latter, he never refers to Gaunilo by name—only, and often, as the insipiens. He asks in particular how this fool par excellence “could say in his heart what cannot be thought [quomodo insipiens dixit in corde suo, quod cogitari non potest].” What “cannot be thought” is that God does not exist, once one has in one’s mind the idea of a being such that it is impossible to conceive a greater one. It is necessary, indeed, that he exists both in thought and in reality (“et in intellectu et in re”). “Why then did the fool say in his heart: God is not, unless it is because he is stupid [stultus] and foolish [insipiens]?” (See SENSE.) C. The phreneticus Among the most violent attributions the authors of the Latin Middle Ages hurled at their opponents, we also find phreneticus. Thus, in the twelfth century, Richard of Saint-Victor 616 MADNESS seen, the extravagance of the speeches and practices of the seer do not give rise only to ridicule but also to conceptual elaboration, the link between extravagance, madness, and the belief in spirits gives Kant the opportunity to play with these different terms. Indeed, besides Schwärmerei, German has another term that comes from the life of insects to express the ideas that populate the heads of deranged individuals: Hirngespinst (in RT: Ak., 2:926). Spinnen means “to spin.” Hirngespinst, just as untranslatable as Schwärmerei (except perhaps by “chimera” or “fantasmagoria”), refers to having a spider in the brain, or, as is sometimes said more colloquially, “to have spiders in the belfry.” However, the images of bees and spiders are conjoined in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer in such a way that the reference to the extravagance of interaction with the spirits yields another term, Hirngespenst, by which Kant means the notion of a “ghost in the head.” The system of these different terms is what also transforms the sense of the word Wahn, which thenceforth means not so much illusion, understood as perception of an appearance, as madness—and this sense is maintained in the Critique of Pure Reason. The word Wahn is thus distinguished from all of those that Kant uses, from the Essay on Illness of the Head (1764) through Anthropology Considered from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), where he attempts to classify all the forms of mental derangement according to the faculties, perceptual or intellectual, that are affected. Besides the common forms of head and heart sickness, which range from stupidity (Blödsinn) to clownery (Narrheit), derangement (Verkehrtheit) is the inversion (Verrückung) of empirical notions. Delirium (Wahnsinn) is the disorder that strikes judgment at the point closest to this perceptual experience; dementia (Wahnwitz) is the upsetting of reason in its most universal judgments. Of course, the term Wahn is related to Wahnsinn, “delirium,” and in 1766 Kant writes that what interests him about Swedenborg is the disturbance of judgment at its closest resemblance to perceptual disorder, that is, the latter’s hallucinations. But Wahn gets its specific meaning from the philosophical discussion that links Swedenborg’s delirium to that of reason in the idealism represented by Leibniz. imagination that moves outside of accepted paths, the uninhibited stubbornness of beliefs, and sectarian behavior. It is truly an untranslatable term, since neither Latin, nor English, nor French has a term with any sort of link to the image of the swarm of bees, in which the evocation of the isolated adventure of a dreamer meets up, contradictorily, with that of the fanaticism of an uncontrollable group. In French, the term is translated as exaltation, fanatisme, or enthousiasme, depending on the case. In German military terminology, the image of the swarm is also invoked to refer to the activity of a scout who is detached from the group on a personal adventure, as well as the compact but uncoordinated movement of a group of soldiers. B. Kant: From Swedenborg’s hallucinations to Leibniz’s idealism The term Schwärmerei was used until the eighteenth century in theological controversies to refer to heretics, schismatics, and innovators who deviated and disturbed the equilibrium and calm of the Church. All of these uses involve insulting or stigmatizing labels rather than a clear concept. Kant transforms the polemical usage into a concept when, in 1766, in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Explained through Dreams of Metaphysics, he describes the thought of the visionary Swedenborg as deriving from Schwärmerei, contrasting it with Leibnizian idealism. In this work, Kant analyzes at length the system of beliefs and thoughts that, based on the idea of the unreality of death, allows the seer to communicate with the spirits from beyond, who speak to him in virtue of the ecstatic transformations of his senses. The sensory hallucinations are interpreted by Swedenborg as a message from angels and the Christ, which reveal to him the true order of things under the appearance of laws of nature. The content of the images in these visions, which dwell in him, is related by this “prophet of the other world” to the text of Genesis, of which Swedenborg claims to give the correct interpretation by arguing that his “internal being is open” and that he is therefore himself the oracle of the spirits. The terminology of Schwärmerei is thus related, in 1766, to that of ghosts and interaction with spirits. If, as we have just 2 The Pauline praise of madness The parable of the wise virgins and the mad virgins (Matthew 25:1–2) only invokes madness as a synonym of distraction, casualness, lack of foresight: “Five among them were mad and five prudent [pente de ex autôn êsan môrai kai pente phronimoi (πέντε δὲ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἦσαν μωϱαὶ ϰαὶ πέντε φϱόνιμοι)].” It is in Paul that the paradoxical situation in virtue of which Christian faith is a form of madness radically opposed to reason and common wisdom is described (1 Cor. 1:23–25): “We declare a Christ crucified, scandal for Jews and madness for pagans [ethnesin de môrian (ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωϱίαν)] for what is madness of God is wiser than men [hoti to môron tou theou sophôteron tôn anthrôpôn estin (ὅτι τὸ μωϱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ σοφώτεϱον τῶν ἀνθϱώπων ἐστίν)].” Paul adds (1 Cor. 3:18): “If someone among you thinks himself wise in the way of the world, let him become mad [môros genesthô (μωϱὸϛ γενέσθω)].” And later in the same epistle (4:10): “We are mad [êmeis môroi (ἡμεῖϛ μωϱοὶ)], we, because of Christ.” To express this idea of madness and scandal applied to devotion to the crucified Christ, Paul appeals to the term môria [μωϱία], which, present notably in Aeschylus and Plato, is related to the verb môrainô [μωϱαίνω], which means, in the transitive sense, first “to dull” or “to stultify” (cf. Matthew 5:13: “If the salt becomes bland [môranthê (μωϱανθῇ)] . . .”), then “to make mad.” Thus the adjective môros [μωϱόϛ] has the primary sense of “dulled” or “insipid,” and the secondary sense of “mad” or “insane.” Translated into the Vulgate as stultitia, môria comes in composition in Greek terminology with sophos [σοφόϛ] and phrôn [φϱῶν] to yield môro-sophos [μωϱό-σοφοϛ] and môrophrôn [μωϱό-φϱων], terms meaning equally “madly wise” and “wisely mad,” as though they were especially apt to express the Pauline paradox. MADNESS 617 and Flanders. By contrast, Erasmus made his Praise of Folly (1509) the tool of a reversal that made it possible to see two very different aspects of all human things, one seeming glorious despite being pathetic (such as the conceits of scholars and theologians), the other held to be extravagant and contemptible, but in reality filled with a noble prudence and genuine wisdom. Montaigne does the same in making wisdom of madness and madness of wisdom. At the start of the seventeenth century, Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a comic interrogation of the indefinite boundary between delirium and good sense, between enchantment and disillusionment (see DESENGAÑO). Fascinated by and basking in the feats of chivalry from old novels, the noble hidalgo of La Mancha leaves his village, wearing his armor, to make what he has read become real. In this way, though himself bewitched, he ends up bewitching the world and preserving truth through the lies of fiction. In its turn, rationalism, especially that of Descartes and Spinoza, aims to banish the insane from the order of reason and to deny their psychic states any positive reality, whereas the philosophes of the Enlightenment make their position more nuanced by interpreting insanity as a ruse of nature that is only harmful past certain limits. The latter view clears of all charges, for example, the “literary madmen” of Raymond Queneau and Andre Blavier, and those who have given approval to what is called “the art of the mentally ill,” inheritors of part of the positivity of Greek mania. However, the same attempt at understanding will underwrite the idea that madness can appear in anyone, even if its extravagance is not always perceptible. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, the symbolic softenings attributed to Pinel with regard to the treatment of madness paradoxically liberate a highly vengeful language opposing the so-called scientific approach to psychiatry that accompanied them. Visiting the “lunatics” in a hospital, Charles Nodier, in La fée aux miettes (1832), defines the “madman” as “a discarded or chosen creature like you or me, who lives by invention, fantasy, and love in the pure regions of the intelligence.” From romanticism to surrealism, with André Breton, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault, in relation to Gerard de Nerval, Comté de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Hölderlin, the claim “he is mad” is dropped in the face of the question, “Is he mad?” Thus, as Blanchot says about Hölderlin’s extreme and genuinely schizophrenic fits: Madness would be a word perpetually in disagreement with itself, and thoroughly interrogative, so that it calls into question its possibility, and thereby, the possibility of the language which would compose it, hence the questioning as well, insofar as it belongs to the game of language a language, as such, already gone mad. (Preface to Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, trans. Holland) Clara Auvray-Assayas Charles Baladier Monique David-Menard Jackie Pigeaud When Kant comments on Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, he insists on the fact that, more than the wild construction in itself, what Schwärmerei really consists in is consistent sensory hallucination, when it feeds the belief in the unreality of death and in the communication with spirits, and, last but not least, when it constructs a philosophy of nature as simple appearance, which enters into the minds of men through the conversations they have with spirits from the beyond. It is as an idealist theory of nature that Kant connects Schwärmerei to Leibniz’s thought. He makes the connection since, in 1766, Kant challenges rationalists to say in what the difference between the two systems of thought consists. However, the reformulation introduced in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason, when he gives a transcendental definition of the modality of our judgments, retains the imprint of this closeness established in 1766 between Schwärmerei and Leibniz’s thought. Kant distinguishes, in effect, that which “without being impossible in the sense of contradiction, cannot be counted among the things that are possible.” There are two forms of this impossibility in the transcendental sense: the Leibnizian intelligible world, and the fanatical world system of the Schwärmer. Further, in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant creates a composite word that unites once again the ecstatics and the dogmatists, against which the critique of reason will teach us to preserve ourselves. The critical response that he brings to bear on the problems of metaphysics will not be content, he says, with “the extravagant-dogmatic desires for knowledge” (“Zwar ist die Beantwortung jener Fragen gar nicht so aufgefallen, als dogmatischschwärmende Wissbegierde erwarten mochten,” in RT: Ak., 3:14). We may note that Kant uses Schwärmerei as a synonym for Fanatismus when he insists on the practical function of the extravagance that determines the will in these cases. This explains why, in the Critique of Practical Reason, the term “fanaticism” is most often used to refer to the insane illusion of moral and political reformers who wish to convince us that a good determined in its content is the absolute achieved. The formalism of morality according to Kant has the function of avoiding the madness of the will that is fanaticism. And we know that, in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment, usually translated as “Critique of the faculty of judgment”), Kant returns to the closeness of enthusiasm and fanaticism. It is this usage of the term Schwärmerei, and not its meaning as strictly related to critical and transcendental themes, that is taken up by all the authors, writers, philosophers, and poets of the romantic era in Germany. Its mild forms make it equivalent to whim, but a whim that cannot be uprooted, that develops into fantasies or all-pervasive beliefs. . V. The Right to Madness At the end of the Middle Ages, in a register similar to that of the Pauline dialectic between the madness and the wisdom of the Cross, several currents of thought attempted to give a positive view of madness using the same terms that had thus far been considered pejorative, or at least to mitigate their seriousness. The fifteenth century locked up the cargo of the insane in the strange “Ship of Fools” (Narrenschiff), which long wandered the rivers and canals of the Rhineland 618 MALAISE . “La réflexion de Celse sur la folie.” In La médecine de Celse: Aspects historiques, scientifiques et littéraires, 257–79. Saint-Étienne, Fr.: Publication de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, Centre Jean Palerne, 1994. Pinel, Philippe. Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou la Manie. 2nd ed. Paris: J. A. Brosson, 1809. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Seneca. Ad Lucilium epistolae morales. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. London: Heinemann, 1925. REFS.: Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury. Basic Writings. Translated by T. Williams. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007. Blanchot, Maurice. “La folie par excellence.” In K. Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh: Swedenborg et Hölderlin. Paris: Minuit, 1953. Translation by M. Holland: “Madness par excellence.” In The Blanchot Reader, edited by M. Holland, 110–28. London: Blackwell, 1995. Boissier de Sauvages, François. Nosologia methodica. Amsterdam, Neth.: Sumptibus Fratrum de Tournes, 1763. French translation by M. Gouvion: Nosologie méthodique, ou Distribution des maladies en classes, en genres et en espèces. Lyon, Fr., 1772. Brisson, Luc. “Du bon usage du dérèglement.” In Divination et rationalité, 230–48. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Chiarugi, Vincenzo. Della pazzia in genere e in specie: Trattato medico-analitico. Con una centuria di osservazioni. 3 vols. Florence: Carlieri, 1793–94. Reprinted Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1991. Translation by G. Mora: On Insanity and Its Classification. Introduction by G. Mora. Canton, MA: Science History Production, 1987. Cicero. Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. London: Heinemann, 1945. David-Ménard, Monique. La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg. Paris: Vrin, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” In L’écriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Translation by A. Bass: “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference, 36–76. London: Routledge, 2001. Esquirol, Jean Étienne. Des maladies mentales. Paris: Baillière, 1838. Translation by E. K. Hunt: Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. Introduction by R. de Saussure. New York: Hafner, 1965. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by J. Khalfa. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1988. Guimet, Fernand. “Caritas ordinata et amor discretus dans la théologie trinitaire de Richard de Saint-Victor.” Revue du Moyen-Âge (Aug.–Oct. 1948). Iogna-Prat, Dominique. Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’Islam, 1000–1150. Paris: Aubier, 1998. Jaspers, Karl. Strindberg et Van Gogh: Swedenborg et Hölderlin. Paris: Minuit, 1953. Laharie, Muriel. La folie au Moyen-Âge: XI–XIIIe siècles. Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1991. Pigeaud, Jackie. Folie et cures de la folie chez les médecins de l’antiquité gréco-romaine: La manie. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987. 3 Freudian Schwärmerei Curiously, we find the term Schwärmerei in Freud, in a very specific sense. It does not refer, in the writings of the founder of psychoanalysis, to any form of delirium, nor any belief, but to the stories that adolescents tell each other when they bestow a worshipful love upon someone of the same sex: oaths of fidelity, daily correspondence, declarations of the absolute. These whims or flames usually disappear as if by enchantment, says Freud in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three essays on the theory of sexuality [1905], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5), and in particular when love for someone of the opposite sex appears. However, there again, the paradox of the Schwärmerei is to be an uncontrollable belief despite its fragility, and to construct an imaginary world in which one is ecstatic. As a result, the term Schwärmerei is also used by Freud in two other cases. The first is in the exalted love of what is called “the young (female) homosexual” for a mature woman of low morals, to whom she attaches herself. The seriousness of the passion is shown when, meeting her father one day while she is walking with the woman of her thoughts, she throws herself off a bridge that overlooks a railway (“The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” [1920], in Standard Edition, 18:145–72). In another case, Freud describes as Schwärmerei the dedication of martyrs who do not feel pain when they suffer for their God (“Psychical [or Mental] Treatment” [1890], in Standard Edition, vol. 7). He insists there on the transition that takes place, in these experiences, between the perverse components of drives and the self-sacrifice that ensures belief (see “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14). REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. First published in 1905. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Translation by J. Strachey: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. . Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. London: Imago, 1940–52. Translation by J. Strachey: The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. MALAISE (FRENCH) v. GOOD/EVIL Malaise (the opposite of aise [ease] in French, from the Latin jacere [to throw], itself linked to the idea of dwelling, then to the idea of convenience and of pleasure), refers to a painful sensation, as much moral as physical, and in particular implies the more or less conscious, or more or less confused, perception of a dysfunction in the relationship between the soul and the body. The term malaise can cover a multitude of experiences of suffering, whether fleeting or chronic, slight or keen, that a person, but also a group, might undergo. An era, a language, a culture, or a nation can distinguish itself by naming, defining, or expressing its malaise, in literature as well as in philosophy. I. A Dysfunction between Soul and Body 1. On the relationship between soul and body, the networks of affect and passion, see in particular CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, GEFÜHL, GEMÜT, GOGO, LEIB, PASSION, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, PHANTASIA (and IMAGINATION), STIMMUNG, STRADANIE, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf., ANIMAL, LOVE, PLEASURE, SOUL, SUFFERING. MANIERA 619 2. The physiological location in which malaise is rooted varies with the organic cause to which one attributes the dysfunction: so it could be the bile, see MELANCHOLY; the spleen, see SPLEEN; or the throat, see ANXIETY. The degree of its possible medical diagnosis and treatment varies as well: see MELANCHOLY; cf. GENIUS, MADNESS, PATHOS. II. Sketch of a Typology of Different Kinds of Malaise A. Individual suffering, ontological suffering, national suffering Individual malaise can lead one to question one’s relationship to being, and one’s sense of belonging to the world; see ANXIETY, DOR, HEIMAT, Box 2, SAUDADE; cf. CARE, DASEIN, SORGE, SOUCI, and TRUTH, Box 8. It can also have a moral, religious, or social register, or bear witness to a whole era: see ACEDIA, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN. In more general terms, these affects form part of a national cultural register, with the word used to designate them functioning as a password, even when it is “imported,” like “spleen,” for example: see ACEDIA, DESENGAÑO, DOR, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN. B. Models and expressions A number of different temporal and spatial models are involved, one of the richest being the Greek nostalgia, always turning back to the past and seeking to return to the place of origin: see SEHNSUCHT, Box 1 and NOSTALGIA; cf. HEIMAT. But the future and the unknown beyond can be no less determining: see SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, cf. DESTINY. The expressions of malaise and of pain are also significantly different from one another, implying syntactically the whole (Lat., me dolet, “I am suffering”) or the part (Eng., “my foot aches”), and determining a relation to philosophy (angst, Sehnsucht), and/or to poetry (nostalgia, saudade, spleen), to literature (desengaño), or to silence (acedia): see all of these terms. v. PORTUGUESE, SVOBODA MANIERA(ITALIAN), MANNER, STYLE DUTCH manjer; handeling; wijze van doen FRENCH manière, faire, style GERMAN Manier; Stil ITALIAN maniera; stile v. AESTHETICS, ART, BAROQUE, CLASSIC, CONCETTO, DISEGNO, GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, ROMANTIC, TABLEAU The word maniera as it was used in different languages, and understood in its different senses, was at the heart of the language of art criticism from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. It refers to the personal nature of an artist’s work, to the taste of a whole school, and to the use of a formal language associated with a particular time and place (the Florentine manner, the Roman manner, the Flemish manner). When used with other adjectives (grand manner, strong or clashing manner) or with proper names (in the manner of Michaelangelo, of Carrache, of Raphael), it refers to the modes of expression chosen by artists. It can take on a negative connotation: a mannered artist is one who copies a manner, who neglects to imitate nature. This diversity of meanings led to a number of substitutes (in particular faire in French, Stil in German, “style” or “stile”in English, all with different nuances), and finally to the word being abandoned at the end of the eighteenth century. I. Maniera and the Origin of Art Theory It seems that the word maniera first appeared in Italian art literature. The first known occurrence is in the Libro dell’arte by Cennino Cennini, written at the end of the fourteenth century: “Always attach yourself to the best master and, following him everywhere, it would be unnatural for you not to take on his manner [sua maniera] and his style” (chap. 25). Maniera is here the characteristic hallmark of an artist, his signature style, but also the particular qualities that could, paradoxically, be acquired by others. For Raphael, in his letter to Pope Leo X (in Gli scritti) on the conservation of ancient monuments, the term can suggest the formal characteristics of a monument: “The monuments of our time are known for not having a maniera that is as beautiful as those of the time of the Emperors, or as deformed as those of the time of the Goths,” which he describes later on as “dreadful and worthless”; these Gothic buildings, he writes, are “senza maniera alcuna [without any manner].” It was, however, in Vasari’s Le vite that maniera became a key term in the language of art criticism. The different meanings and the frequency of its use made it one of the richest notions of Vasari’s text. Maniera referred to the particular character of a people (Egyptian maniera, Flemish maniera. . .), and to the different stages in the evolution of art history (maniera antica, maniera vecchia, maniera moderna). Each artist had his own maniera, comparable to writing, and it was also sometimes defined with the help of adjectives (“hard,” “dry,” “great”). Maniera was also something like an artistic recipe, used to express the nonrepresentable effects of nature: sculptors tried to find a maniera to represent horses. It was above all the hallmark of the greatest artists (with Michaelangelo the foremost among them) who knew how to surpass nature. It could, finally, be a form of infidelity to nature, a simple artistic practice. This meaning became more clearly developed in the seventeenth century, and the most famous expression of a critique of maniera is without doubt that of Bellori, in his introduction to the life of Annibale Carracci: Artists, abandoning the study of nature, have corrupted art with maniera, by which I mean a fantastic idea, based on practice and not on imitation. (Le vite, 31; Lives of the Modern Painters, trans. A. S. Wohl) An art that is too dependent on maniera is removed from nature, and must therefore be condemned. II. The Double Meaning of “Manner” in European Languages The adaptation of the word maniera was a determining factor in the transmission of the Italian conception of the work of art to the different countries in Europe. It is striking, then, that in Dutch art criticism, the term manier was used in combination with the term handeling, which had an equivalent MANIERA(ITALIAN), MANNER, STYLE DUTCH manjer; handeling; wijze van doen FRENCH manière, faire, style GERMAN Manier; Stil ITALIAN maniera; stile v. AESTHETICS, ART, BAROQUE, CLASSIC, CONCETTO, DISEGNO, GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, ROMANTIC, TABLEAU The word maniera as it was used in different languages, and understood in its different senses, was at the heart of the language of art criticism from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. It refers to the personal nature of an artist’s work, to the taste of a whole school, and to the use of a formal language associated with a particular time and place (the Florentine manner, the Roman manner, the Flemish manner). When used with other adjectives (grand manner, strong or clashing manner) or with proper names (in the manner of Michaelangelo, of Carrache, of Raphael), it refers to the 620 MANIERA each artist interpreted nature personally, and not the result of a scholarly apprenticeship. The negative meaning gradually prevailed, however. Within the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de Sculpture, manner was condemned in a lecture delivered in 1672 by Philippe de Champaigne, “Contre les copistes de manière” (Against artists who copy manner), which would be delivered five more times between 1672 and 1728. The topic would be taken up again in 1747 in a lecture by the comte de Caylus, “Sur la manière” (On manner), which would also be delivered four times over the next twenty years. While Champaigne restricted his condemnation to the lack of originality of the painters who appropriated the manner of others, Caylus defined manner as “a more or less happy failing . . ., a habit of always seeing in the same way . . ., a thing we put in place of nature to be approved, by means of an art that consists merely of its perfect imitation.” Painters who were renowned for having no manner would be deserving of the greatest praise. The lecture by Charles Antoine-Coypel on the “Parallèle entre l’éloquence et la poésie” (Parallel between eloquence and poetry) (1 February, 1749; published in 1751), though, was more in the tradition of Roger de Piles: Everyone knows that in talking about different kinds of writing we use the word “style,” which thus signifies figuratively the manner of composition or of writing. As painters each have their own manner of composing and writing with a paintbrush, they could use this word, just as orators do. But they simply call this large part of their art “manner.” So when I say that this painting is in the manner of Raphael, I put in the art lover’s mind an idea that is equivalent to what a man of letters would think if I said this speech is in the style of Cicero. Most dictionaries from the second half of the seventeenth century, which were often compilations, systematically presented these two meanings of the word “manner,” namely the way of doing things that characterized the works of a particular artist, and the artistic failing that consisted in “departing from what was true, and from nature.” They would generally distinguish between “having a manner” and “being mannered,” even though there was often no clear distinction between this latter expression, and “having a bad manner.” When “manner,” understood in the sense of “a way of doing,” was qualified by other adjectives (“strong and deeply felt,” “weak and effeminate,” “gracious,” and finally “gentle and proper”), it enabled a series of categories to be established into which one could place all of the greatest painters. As for the “great manner,” it was defined as a knowing exaggeration that created a distance from the baseness of the natural. This expression characterized paintings in which nothing is small, in which details are sacrificed for the idea, and it was, above all, the definition of a genre of painting. Artists themselves, however, remained critical and used the word “manner” in a predominantly negative sense. For the painter Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, “Manner is an improper assortment of exaggerated traits and of excessive forms” (Traité de peinture [Treatise on painting]). He goes on to explain, This definition states clearly enough that by manner we do not here mean the way of doing things, the style meaning. So Van Mander (1604) talked about the vaste stoute handeling (the assured and bold manner) of painting, like the vaste manier van Schilderen of Cornelis van Haarlem. The word manier could also refer to a comparative art criticism: Van Eyck painted his draperies, according to Van Mander, op de manier van Albertus Durerus (in the manner of Dürer). Samuel van Hoogstraten, in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole des Schiderkonst (Introduction to the high school of painting) (1678), uses different expressions incorporating the term— each with a slightly different meaning—within a span of two pages. He uses the word manier in a negative sense in talking about painters who adopt the habit of coloring “als of de dingen aen haere manier, en niet haere manier aen des aerd verbonden was” (as if things were dependent upon their manner, and not their manner dependent upon things). Yet the following chapter is entitled “Van der handeling of maniere van schilderen [Of handling or the manner of painting],” where maniere is spelled with an e at the end. In commenting on the word handeling, he talks about wijze van doen (way of doing), and the word manier in Holland indeed seemed to remain linked to the particular nature of the hand. In France, the word had different meanings, and was used in different ways depending on the authors. Abraham Bosse, in his study of the manner of the greatest painters, adjudged that “if the natural was well copied according to the rules,” there would not be so many different manners; but “because ignorance reigned for a period of time among the practitioners of this art, many of them as a result came to formulate manners that pleased their particular fancies” (Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de peinture [Sentiments on the distinction between different manners of painting], 1649, p. 142). Manner was both the characteristic hallmark of an artist and a proof of whim opposed to nature. For André Félibien, manner was “the habit painters adopted in the practice of all the aspects of painting, whether it be composition, or design, or use of color” (Des principes de l’architecture [Principles of architecture], 1676). As he goes on to explain, “Painters normally adopt a habit that is related to the masters they have learned from, and whom they have wished to imitate. So we recognize the manner of Michelangelo and of Raphael in their students.” Depending on which master or model a painter chose, the manner could be good or bad. As the result of this kind of training, manner was the equivalent of an “author’s style,” or the “writing of a person who frequently sends one letters” (ibid.). Roger de Piles borrows Félibien’s definition and inflects it: “What we call Manner is the habit painters have adopted, not only in how they use the paintbrush, but also in the three main aspects of Painting” (Conversations [1677], unpaginated first draft of a dictionary). He eliminates the reference to the acquisition of manner from the masters, and goes on to compare manner to the “style and the writing of a man from whom one has already received a letter,” whereas Félibien compares it to both. Although his formulation is close to Félibien’s, Piles gives a wider sense to his definition. Manner was both a characteristic of the “hand” of an artist (handling a paintbrush, writing) and a characteristic of his mind (style). “All kinds of manner are good when they represent Nature, and their difference comes only from the infinite number of ways in which Nature appears to our eyes” (ibid.). Manner was the way in which MANIERA 621 painting reveals to the connoisseur that the piece must be the work of a great master. (“De l’illusion dans la Peinture [On illusion in painting],” 1771) Faire, used in the sense in which Bosse and Piles use manière, was thus the subject of long, enthusiastic definition, which allowed Cochin to defend faire against the accusation that it described just a kind of mechanics. Even in poetry, he would say, faire is essential, and is what distinguishes Racine’s Phèdre from Pradon’s. Dictionaries, however, would mention the term only very briefly, and would refer to manière, thus demonstrating the other term’s relative failure. Watelet, in the RT: Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, considered it to apply to the “mechanism of the brush and the hand.” Dandré-Bardon, in his Traité de peinture, instead preferred beau-faire (fine technique). Watelet and Lévesque’s Encyclopédie méthodique: Beaux-Arts (1788–92) attests to the aesthetic revolution that was taking place around 1790. In the entry “Illusion,” Watelet reproduced in its entirety a lecture by Cochin in which the word faire is foregrounded. Lévesque, who was responsible for completing the dictionary after Watelet’s death (1786), asked the painter Robin for an article on “Beau-Faire” (which, under the same heading “Faire,” had followed the former entry by Watelet in Diderot’s Encyclopédie). Robin radically condemned the term: “It is not, however, that good technique [le bien-fait] or bad technique [le mal-fait] in art do not have their charm and their unpleasantness; but woe betide anyone who does not see them as the least worthy or most insignificant vice of a work of art!” The failure of the word faire is linked to the failure of an aesthetics that wanted to emphasize the technical qualities of painting. IV. The Emergence of the Notion of “Style” The notion of “style,” which would ultimately replace that of manner, emerged gradually in art theory. It was used above all comparatively, but from the seventeenth century, certain writers tried to give the word some of the meanings of maniera. Thus, for instance, this passage, cited approvingly in his notes by Nicholas Poussin, which he found in and borrowed from A. Mascardi’s treatise Dell’arte istorica (Rome, 1636): La maniera magnifica in quattro cose consiste: nella materia overa argumento, nel concetto, nella struttura, nello stile. Lo stile è una maniera particolare ed industria di dipingere e disegnare nata dal particolare genio di ciascuno nell’applicazione e nel uso dell’idee, il quale stile, maniera o gusto si tiene dalla parte della natura e dell’ingenio. (The magnificent manner consists of four things: the matter or argument, the idea, the structure, the style. Style is a particular manner or talent in painting and in drawing, which comes from the particular genius of each person in the application and use of the idea. This style, or manner, or taste, are on the side of nature and genius.) (Notes cited in Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni [1672], 480) that distinguishes one master from another master, for in this sense everyone has his own manner . . ., besides the shame of ignorance, nothing is more insulting to an artist than being called mannered. Manner understood in this sense was condemned less forcefully by the engraver and secretary of the Académie, Charles-Nicholas Cochin, than it was by Dandré-Bardon. In a lecture delivered in 1777 at the Académie of Rouen, Cochin took “manner” to mean not “the manner of painting or of drawing,” but everything that was at a remove from nature, every “convention learned or imagined that is not based on what is true, either because it comes from imitating the masters, or from our own mistakes” (Discours sur l’enseignement des beaux-arts). For him, manner was associated with the search for an ideal beauty that was superior to nature. But he was nevertheless keenly aware of the technical limits of painting, and considered that it “is very difficult, and almost impossible, not to be somewhat mannered in painting shadows” (ibid., 21). This assimilation of “manner” to convention led to the word entering ordinary language, as is illustrated by Diderot’s essay “On manner,” published in the Salon of 1767: It would seem, then, that manner, whether in social mores, or criticism, or the arts, is a vice of a civilized society. Every person who departs from the appropriate conventions of his state and of his nature, an elegant magistrate, a woman who despairs and swings her arms, a man who walks in an affected manner, are all false and mannered. (Les Salons, 3:335–39) III. The Search for a Substitute in French: Faire (Technique) This negative sense of manière prompted critics to look for an alternative term to describe an artist’s personal way of painting or of drawing. The word goût (taste) had been used since the sixteenth century as a synonym for manière, and dictionaries would systematically cross-reference the two terms. Expressions such as “painted with great taste” or “a picture that shows a great taste in painting,” “a taste like Raphael’s,” and so on, would continue to be found in many texts of art criticism. By the seventeenth century, however, the meaning of the word goût had become too broad for it to be able systematically to replace the word manière. Charles Nicholas Cochin attempted to substitute the noun faire for manière, and indeed refused to use manière to refer to the technical qualities of a painting, which in his view were the only ones that mattered: One of the greatest beauties of art is the singular effect of the sentiment that moves an artist while painting; it is this artistry in the work, this assuredness, this masterly ease, that often distinguishes beauty, that beauty which arouses admiration, from mediocrity, that always leaves us cold. It is that faire [technique] (as artists call it) that separates the original of a great master from a copy, no matter how well executed, and that characterizes so well the true talents of an artist, that the smallest, even most uninteresting detail of the 622 MANIERA What are all the manners, as they are called, of even the greatest masters, which are known to differ so much from one another, and all of them from nature, but so many strong proofs of their inviolable attachment to falsehood, converted into established truth in their own eyes, by self-opinion? (The Analysis of Beauty, [1753]) Joshua Reynolds reversed the terms, and used the term “manner” negatively: [T]hose peculiarities, or prominent parts, which at first force themselves upon view, and are the marks, or what is commonly called the manner, by which that individual artist is distinguished. A manner, therefore, being a defect, and every painter, however excellent, having a manner. (Discourses on Art, 6th Discourse [1774]) Reynolds introduced the term “style,” while he spelled “stile” and “style” in a somewhat unsystematic fashion. “Stile” could be the equivalent of “manner” in the sense of designating the ways in which a subject is expressed: “Stile in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed” (2nd Discourse [1769]), whereas “the style” would refer to the rhetorical category to which the work corresponds: “The Gusto grande of the Italians, the Beau idéal of the French and the ‘great style,’ ‘genius,’ and ‘taste’ among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing” (3rd Discourse [1770]). But the two meanings and the two spellings are also used interchangeably: “And yet the number is infinite of those who seem, if one may judge by their style, to have seen no other works but those of their master, or of some favourite whose manner is their first wish and their last” (6th Discourse [1774]). In the Encyclopédie méthodique, Lévesque devoted an entry of five-and-a-half columns to the word Style (as much as the two combined entries of Manière and Maniéré [Mannered]). His definition, which he acknowledged was essentially taken from the writings of Mengs and of Reynolds, was an attempt to synthesize the meaning of Stil in Winckelmann and Mengs, and the second sense of “style” in Reynolds: “The combination of all the elements that come together in the conception, the composition and the execution of a work of art make up what we call its style, and one might say that it constitutes the manner of being of this work” (Watelet and Lévesque, Encyclopédie méthodique, “Style”). So even though the word “style” had been used previously in art criticism, it was only through the detour of its translation that it became established within a critical metalanguage and replaced “manner,” at the expense, however, of a narrowing of its semantic field. “Style” quickly assumed all of the meanings that until then had been associated with “manner,” with the exception of the sense of practice pure and simple, which was seen as negative. It did not encompass the particular character of the hand of an artist, and subordinated painting to style as a means of expressing an idea. In the nineteenth century, however, the contradictory senses of “manner” reappeared in relation to the word Style, or the particular manner, is thus subordinate to the grand manner, and is inherent in a creative personality. Despite the confused nature of the language, Poussin and Mascardi are certainly trying to draw a distinction between two meanings of the word maniera: one that has to do with the particular character of an artist, and the other that is presented as a rhetorical category characterizing the painting. In France, the notion of style had been used as a comparative term by Félibien and Piles. Coypel’s lecture cited earlier (“Parallèle,” 1751) helped to determine the meaning of the word style as it applied to painting. Style was a reflection of content, and Coypel established the traditional distinction for painting among the heroic and sublime style (that of the frescoes of Michaelangelo and of Raphael in the Vatican), the simple style (landscapes and animals), and the tempered style (the historical paintings of Alabani or Maratta, subjects that were more graceful than impassioned). Style characterized as much the subject as the way in which it was handled. This parallel influenced dictionary definitions, which all noted that style was an inherent part of composition and execution. While the word indicated a reflection of the genre and the content as far as the composition was concerned, and a formal quality as far as the artistic execution was concerned, it was almost never used in isolation; it could be heroic, simple, tempered, and so on, or dry, polished, assured, harsh, and so forth. The term remained fairly marginal in France, however, and it was the translations of English and German texts that would help make “style” into one of the key notions of art theory. While Johann Georg Sulzer, in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (General theory of art), used Manier in a sense very close to the French and Italian meanings, the word Stil began to appear in Johann Joachim Winckelmann almost simultaneously, and in a much broader sense. Winckelmann in 1764 made reference to “dem verschiedene Stile der Völker, Zeiten und Künstler” (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums [History of the Art of Antiquity]), which his French translator J. Huber rendered in 1789 as “les différents styles et les différents caractères des peuples, des temps et des artistes” (the different styles and the different characters of the people, the times, and the artists).” Stil borrows certain of the connotations of “manner,” but eliminates the particular role of the artist. Styles are characteristic of peoples and times, like manners for Vasari. Winckelmann thus studied the Egyptian style, the Etruscan style, and identified four styles among the Greeks: Älter Stil, which could be translated as “ancient style” or “style of imitation”; hohe Stil or Stil der Grosse, sublime or grand style; schöne Stil, beautiful style; and finally Stil den heinlichen oder den platten, minor and vulgar style. “Style” for Winckelmann, and similarly for Anton Raphael Mengs, thus replaced “manner” as a means of talking about the formal characteristics of a civilization, while “manner” introduced a personal dimension. In England, there was a similar shift: the reflection on “manner” referred to connoisseurship, and the word was used in the senses Abraham Bosse gave to it. “Manner” still had a positive connotation in Jonathan Richardson, but a much more ambiguous one in William Hogarth: MATTER OF FACT 623 Piles, Roger de. Conversations sur la connaissance de la peinture et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. First published in 1677. Raphael. Gli scritti: Lettere, firme, sonetti, saggi tecnici e teorici. Edited by Ettore Camesasca, with Giovanni M. Piazza. Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by R. R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. First published ca. 1774. Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. Introduction by Elizabeth Cropper. 2nd ed. Vienna: IRSA, 1992. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann Reich, 1771–74. Van Mandel, Karel. Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by H. Miedema. Doornspijk, Neth.: Davaco, 1994. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85. First published in 1568. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. New York: AMS, 1976. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. First published in 1764. Translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave: History of the Art of Antiquity. Introduction by Alex Potts. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006. “style,” and brought into play at the same time the particular style of the artist, that of his time and his school, the mode of representation chosen, and the difference relative to a natural model. The nuances introduced by each artist in the use he made of this term make any single definition impossible, and leave translators no other solution but to adapt this catchall word to each of their respective languages so as to enrich their own treatises. Christian Michel REFS.: Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architettori moderni. Torino: G. Einaudi, 1976. First published in Rome, 1672. Translation by Alice Sedgwick Wohl: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bosse, Abraham. Le peintre converty aux précises et universelles règles de son art. Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de peinture, dessin et gravure . Edited by R.-A. Weigert. Paris: Hermann, 1964. First published in 1649. Brusati, Celeste. Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Caylus, Anne Claude de. “Sur la manière et les moyens de l’éviter.” In Vies d’artistes du XVIIIe siècle. Discours sur la peinture et la sculpture. Salons de 1751 et de 1753. Lettre à Lagrenée, edited, with introduction and notes, by André Fontaine. Paris: Laurens, 1910. Cennini, Cennino. Il libro dell’arte della pittura: Il manoscritto della Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, con integrazioni dal Codice riccardiano. Edited by Antonio P. Torresi. Ferrara, It.: Liberty House, 2004. Composed betwen 1400 and 1437; first published in 1821. Translation and notes by Christiana J. Herringham: The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini: A Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting. London: Allen and Unwin, 1899. Champaigne, Philippe de. “Contre les copistes de manière.” In Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle, edited by Alain Mérot, 224–28. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996. Cheney, Liana de Girolami. Readings in Italian Mannerism. Foreword by Craig Hugh Smyth. New York: Lang, 1997. Cochin, Charles-Nicolas. “De l’illusion dans la Peinture.” In vol. 2 of Œuvres diverses; ou, Recueil de quelques pièces concernant les arts. Paris, 1771. . Discours sur l’enseignement des beaux-arts prononcés à la séance publique de l’Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen. Paris: Cellot, 1779. Coypel, Charles-Antoine. “Parallèle entre l’éloquence et la poésie.” Mercure de France (May 1751): 9–38. Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François. Traité de peinture suivi d’un essai sur la sculpture. Paris, 1765. Diderot, Denis. “De la manière dans les arts du dessin.” In vol. 3 of Les Salons, edited by Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Essay first published in 1767. . Diderot on Art. 2 vols. Edited and translated by John Goodman. Introduction by Thomas Crow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Eck, Caroline van, James McAllister, and Renee van de Vall, eds. The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Félibien, André. Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres arts qui en dependent: Avec un dictionnaire des termes propres à chacun de ces arts. Paris, 1676. Franklin, David. Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Edited, with introduction and notes, by Ronald Paulson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. First published in 1753. Hoogstraten, Samuel van. Inleyding tot de hooge schoole des Schiderkonst. Rotterdam, 1678. French translation and commentary by Jan Blanc: Introduction à la haute école de l’art de peinture. Geneva: Droz, 2006. Mérot, Alain. French Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Caroline Beamish. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. MATTER OF FACT, FACT OF THE MATTER FRENCH fait, réalité v. FACT and BELIEF, ENGLISH, NATURE, PROPOSITION, REALITY, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, TATSACHE, THING, TO TRANSLATE, WORLD We will here be less interested in fact, than in the rather strange expression “matter of fact,” which is found in English philosophy, and notably in Hume. “Matter” means (a) “material substance, thing” and (b) “affair, subject,” and “matter of fact” thus in a sense replicates the word “fact.” We might mention a number of typical common expressions, such as “for that matter,” “a matter of time,” “what’s the matter with you?” but “matter” in its derived verbal form also indicates importance and implication: “no matter,” “it matters.” This specifically English double-meaning enables a number of clever plays on words, such as the title of Peter Geach’s book Logic Matters, or Bertrand Russell’s What Is Mind? No Matter? What Is Matter? Never Mind. It is an integral part of the semantics of the expression “matter of fact,” which both refers to factuality and posits it as necessary and essential. This duality is found in the (absolutely untranslatable) inverted form of the expression, as it is used by the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine: “fact of the matter,” which is a particularly forceful statement of factuality, while adding to this notion a physicalist dimension (the “fact of the matter” as a physical reality), but also, paradoxically, an ontological question. I. “Matters of Fact” “Matters of fact” (it is frequently in the plural in Hume) is normally translated into French as faits (facts), but also sometimes, with a surprising literalism, as choses de fait (factual things) (see the French translation of Book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature by G. Tanesse and M. David, 1912; the term was retained in a recent edition by Didier Deleule). This translation, in addition to demonstrating the paradoxical nature of the expression “matter of fact,” highlights the “hardness,” or at least the reality of a fact defined in this way. It does seem 624 MATTER OF FACT If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. (Ibid., 26) “That-clauses” of this kind have been subsequently explored by contemporary philosophers of language, notably Ramsey, Austin, Strawson, and Davidson, in order to challenge the idea that there are objective “facts” (see BELIEF, PROPOSITION) that are objects of belief, or of statements. So they explore expressions such as “true to the facts” and “unfair to facts,” as well as the question of what we say when we “say that” (see “On Saying That” in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation). What is at stake is knowing whether we can eliminate the notion of fact from the theory of language. II. The Expression “Fact of the Matter” In several well-known texts, Quine used the expression “fact of the matter,” as a rather puzzling inversion of Hume’s expression “matter of fact” (the reinvention of Humean naturalism being one of Quine’s goals, Hume is naturally one of Quine’s main philosophical points of reference). The expression, first used in a negative form (“no fact of the matter”), suggests that some questions have no reality or foundation. Quine expresses this idea in the context of his thesis concerning the indeterminacy of radical translation. The situation of radical translation is the case where we are dealing with a radically foreign language, with no dictionary or tradition of translation, nor any bilingual interpreter, and where a linguist has to compose a translation manual from his or her empirical observations of the verbal behavior of an indigenous people. According to Quine’s thesis, there are several possible, empirically equivalent, and incompatible translations of one and the same expression. It is meaningless to ask which is the correct translation, the correct reconstitution of the foreign language. In From a Logical Point of View, he summarizes his method using the expression ex pede Herculem: we can reconstitute the statue of Hercules from his foot, but there is nothing from which the language can be reconstructed, no “fact of the matter,” no (physical) reality that allows us to ask the question: In projecting Hercules from the foot we risk error, but we may derive comfort from the fact that there is something to be wrong about. In the case of the lexicon, pending some definition of synonymy, we have no statement of the problem; we have nothing for the lexicographer to be right or wrong about. (From a Logical Point of View, 63) Quine explains the meaning of the expression in the context of a polemical exchange with Chomsky by comparing the indeterminacy of translation to the underdetermination of theories by their data. Just as several theories can account for the same set of empirical data, several theories of language can account for the same verbal behavior. Linguistic theory, as part of science, is underdetermined by the data at first sight as if for Hume the expression “matter of fact” means an empirical fact, a state of affairs, which is part of reality: “This is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained” (Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1 §7, 19). “Fact” and “reality” sometimes appear to be synonymous: “If this be absurd in fact and reality, it must also be absurd in ideas” (ibid.). “Matters of fact” are thus questions that concern the existence of objects, and empirical reality: It is evident, that all reasonings from causes or effects terminate in conclusions, concerning matter of fact; that is, concerning the existence of objects or of their qualities. (Treatise of Human Nature, 1.3 §7, 94) We have to add that these “matters of fact” are objects of “belief.” They are “conceived” by us; we have an idea of them, but a particularly strong and lively idea. This liveliness defines belief, which “super-adds nothing to the idea”: It is certain we must have an idea of every matter of fact which we believe. When we are convinced of every matter of fact, we do nothing but conceive it. (Ibid., 1.3 §8, 101) These are the two aspects we also find in the famous definitions of Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a work in which Hume draws a distinction between “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas.” Facts, by contrast with relations of ideas, are not known by understanding alone: their opposite is always possible, and the certainty proper to them is different: All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter is still possibility. (Enquiry, 25) We might wonder first of all what Hume means in referring to the “contrary” of a fact when he has defined a fact as an empirical fact, and not as an idea, a belief, or a proposition (whose object is a fact). Here we encounter a peculiarity of “fact” that “encapsulates” a state of affairs and a proposition, a specific characteristic indicated by the English expression “that-clause”: a fact is expressed in the form “that p,” which refers both to a fact and to a proposition: That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. (Ibid., 25–26) “That the sun will not rise tomorrow” is an “intelligible” proposition, which can be affirmed, but also a fact (see SACHVERHALT). To believe a proposition is not to have a feeling of belief that would be attached to a given proposition, it is to “believe a fact,” directly so to speak, which is indicated by the construction “believe that.” MATTER OF FACT 625 notion is just a physical one, which would weaken Quine’s thesis. It is a naturalist notion (and here, very characteristically, the reference to Hume reappears): the notion of “fact of the matter” is intrinsic to scientific theory; this factuality is defined by our theory of the world, as a product of human nature. The “fact of the matter” is no longer a physical substratum (“a distribution of elementary physical states”) that is independent of language, but also turns out to be, by an effect of mise en abyme, part of our conceptual schema: “Factuality, like gravitation and electric charge, is internal to our theory of nature” (Theories and Things, 23). The notion “fact of the matter” is itself to be considered immanently. This is Quine’s conclusion in Theories and Things: “The intended notion of matter of fact is not transcendental or yet epistemological, not even a question of evidence; it is ontological, a question of reality, and to be taken naturalistically within our scientific theory of the world” (23). So the truly radical nature of his notion of “matter of fact” comes to the fore in Quine’s late texts: it refers not only to empirical evidence, like the Humean “matter of fact,” but also to a radical ontological indeterminacy. “What counts as a fact of the matter” is, as such, subjected to indeterminacy: “We can switch our own ontology too without doing violence to any evidence, but in so doing we switch from our elementary particles to some manner of proxies and thus reinterpret our standard of what counts as a fact of the matter” (Theories and Things, 23). Sandra Laugier REFS.: Davidson, Donald. “On Saying That.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 93–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Davidson, Donald, and Jaako Hintikka, eds. Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1969. Follesdal, Dagfinn. “Indeterminacy of Translation and Underdetermination of the Theory of Nature.” Dialectica 27 (1973): 289–301. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Edited by Stephen Buckle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1748. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Laugier-Rabaté, Sandra. L’anthropologie logique de Quine: L’apprentissage de l’obvie. Paris: Vrin, 1992. Pitcher, George, ed. Truth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Quine, W. V. O. “Facts of the Matter.” In Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, edited by Robert W. Shahan and Chris Swoyer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Also in American Philosophy from Edwards to Quine, edited by R. W. Shahan, 176–96. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. . From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. . “Indeterminacy of Translation Again.” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 5–10. . “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation.” Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 178–83. . “Replies.” In Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, edited by Donald Davidson and Jaako Hintikka, 292–352. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1969. . Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. . Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Strawson, Peter S. “Truth.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 24 (1950): 129–56. of indigenous verbal behavior. But this is not sufficient to account for the indeterminacy of translation, which is a banal epistemological problem, since, as Quine explains, the indeterminacy of translation is additional to this empirical undeetermination: Though linguistics is of course a part of the theory of nature, the indeterminacy of translation is not just inherited as a special case of the under-determination of our theory of nature. It is parallel but additional. (Reply to Chomsky, in Words and Objections, 303) This is where the “fact of the matter” comes into play, with respect to empirical data as well, or even in a “physicalist” context, where reality is defined solely by the natural sciences: “This is what I mean by saying that, where indeterminacy of translation applies, there is no real question of right choice; there is no fact of the matter even to within the acknowledged under-determination of a theory of nature” (ibid.). Translation has no “fact of the matter”; it translates “nothing.” When a linguist thinks he has discovered something, he is only projecting his own hypotheses, “catapulting” himself, as Quine puts it, into a native language using the categories of his own language: There is no telling how much of one’s success with analytical hypotheses is due to real kinship of outlook on the part of the natives and ourselves, and how much of it is due to linguistic ingenuity or lucky coincidence. I am not sure that it even makes sense to ask. (Word and Object, 77) There is no sense, or rather no reality (of “fact of the matter”) to the question, since the translator, to a large extent, “reads” his or her own language into the native language. The absence of “fact of the matter” repeats in a particularly radical form Quine’s critique of meaning: nothing is translated in translation, and no meanings or senses (see SENSE) of which the expressions in different languages would be the counterpart or the expression. The “fact of the matter,” as the redundant nature of the expression suggests, gestures toward a physicalist point of view, as Quine says in an article entitled “Facts of the Matter.” If the question of translation—knowing which manual of translation is the “correct” one—is deprived of the “fact of the matter,” it is because it has no physical relevance: My position was that either manual could be useful, but as to which was right and which wrong there was no fact of the matter. I speak as a physicalist in saying that there is no fact of the matter. I mean that both manuals are compatible with the fulfillment of just the same elementary physical states by space-time regions. (“Facts of the Matter,” in Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, 167) A real difference for “fact of the matter” would be a difference in the way elementary physical states are distributed. However, we should not deduce from this that the 626 MEDIA MEDIA / MEDIUM (of communication) I. The Magic of Words Here is Freud in 1890 on “Psychische Behandlung (Seelenbehandlung)” for a medical manual whose title, Die Gesundheit, needs no translation: Wir beginnen nun auch den “Zauber“ des Wortes zu verstehen. Worte sind ja die wichtigsten Vermittler für den Einfluß, den ein Mensch auf den anderen ausüben will; Worte sind gute Mittel, seelische Veränderungen bei dem hervorzurufen, an den sie gerichtet werden, und darum klingt es nicht länger rätselhaft, wenn behauptet wird, daß der Zauber des Wortes Krankheitserscheinungen beseitigen kann, zumal solche, die selbst in seelischen Zuständen begründet sind. (Gesammelte Werke, 5:301–2) The French edition of this text, translated and edited by Jean Laplanche, renders the paragraph: A présent, nous commençons également à comprendre la ‘magie’ du mot. Let mots sont bien les instruments les plus importants de l’influence qu’une personne cherche à exercer sur une autre; les mots sont de bons moyens pour provoquer des modifications psychiques chez celui à qui ils s’adressent, et c’est pourquoi il n’y a désormais plus rien d’énigmatique dans l’affirmation selon laquelle la magie du mot peut écarter des phénomènes morbides, en particulier ceux qui ont eux-mêmes leur fondement dans des états psychiques. (“Traitement psychique [traitement d’âme]”) Finally, here is Strachey’s translation in the Standard Edition: Now, too, we begin to understand the “magic” of words. Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed. So that there is no longer anything puzzling in the assertion that the magic of words can remove the symptoms of illness, and especially such as are themselves founded on mental states. (“Psychical [or Mental] Treatment”) Even after setting aside the problems of translation in general and of the Freud translation in particular, we are left to wonder over Strachey’s choice of the word “media” where Freud wrote Vermittler and the French translators opted for instrument—not because “media” works poorly, but because it works so well, perhaps better than the original. A Vermittler is a person who acts as a broker or intermediary; to suggest that words are the most important, Vermittler is to offer us a metaphor that evokes a person in a well-tailored suit working on commission. The French instrument presents still other challenges of interpretation, not metaphorical this time, but metonymic. The claim that words are instrumental in exercising influence is clear enough. But what about the claim that they are the “most important” instruments? Compared to what? The dictionary offers us such examples of the word instrument as “compasses” (un instrument de bord) and “tractors” (un instrument agricole) but nothing that would make a compelling alternative to “words,” which is what it would take for Freud’s argument to make sense. By contrast, the English word “medium” raises far fewer difficulties, and the ones it does raise are much more interesting. The RT: Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a medium is “any intervening substance or agency.” We understand right away that Freud is arguing that of the various substances or agencies through which men and women seek to intervene in one another’s lives—drugs, money, caresses, and so on—words are the most effective when it comes to producing beneficial changes in mental states. It would have been helpful if Freud had specified whether he meant spoken words or written words, or both, but that is a problem of argumentation rather than of language or translation. In short, the term makes it easier to understand Freud’s claim and then to have an argument about it. After centuries of untranslatability, “medium” has been welcomed into French and German and a number of other languages for precisely this reason. It allows authors to join an argument long dominated by Anglo-American philosophy, social science, and industry. II. A Wonderfully Perfect Kind of Sign-Functioning The Latin adjective medius has roots in the Sanskrit madhya and the Greek mesos, all three terms meaning something like “in the midst” or “in the middle.” One could be in the midst or middle of any number of things, some quite concrete—the distance from here to there—and others more abstract. Hence Quentin Skinner cites Cicero’s maxim in De officiis that “our highest duty must be to act in such a way that communes utilitates in medium afferre—in such a way that the ideal of the common good is placed at the heart of our common life.” This idea was taken up by Renaissance civic humanists, who held that classical virtues “ought to be in medio, in our midst; they ought indeed to be actively brought forth in medium, into the center of things” (Visions of Politics). “Medium” approaches a recognizably modern sense when, in addition to being a place where ideas or affects can be brought forth, it becomes a way of bringing them forth. One of the first appearances of this notion is in book 2 of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605), where Bacon takes up Aristotle’s claim that “words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words.” This may be true, he writes, “yet it is not of necessity that cogitations be expressed by the medium of words.” Bacon mentions the gestures of the deaf and dumb, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters. One could even say it with flowers: “Periander, being consulted with how to preserve a tyranny newly usurped, bid the messenger attend and report what he saw him do; and went into his garden and topped all the highest flowers, signifying, that it consisted in the cutting off and keeping low of the nobility and grandees” (in The Major Works). This argument may well have been influenced by Montaigne, who, in one especially beautiful passage in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580), reflected on the many forms of communication available to animals and men: “After all, lovers quarrel, make it up again, beg favors, give thanks, arrange secret meetings and say everything, with MEDIA 627 their eyes.” Not only eyes, but heads, eyebrows, shoulders, and hands communicate “with a variety and multiplicity rivalling the tongue.” Montaigne called these moyens de communication ( John Florio’s 1603 translation of the essay translates this as “meanes of entercommunication”). But there is a crucial difference between Montaigne and Bacon’s theories of media: Montaigne is concerned to show the many ways men and women can communicate with one another; Bacon wants to find the most effective ways. The introduction of “medium” into English-language theories of communication shifted the grounds of philosophical debate toward pragmatic matters. This shift was helped by the word’s associations with natural philosophy, which classified media according to how they assisted or resisted whatever passed through them (e.g., light, magnetism). “When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language,” James Madison writes in Federalist Paper no. 37 (1788), “his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.” Madison’s pun neatly captures this conflation of the two senses of medium in English; such a pun would not have been possible in French or German (the French translation of 1792, usually attributed to Trudaine de la Sablière, misses it entirely by describing His will as “obscurcie par le voile dont elle s’envelope”; a translation of 1902 by Gaston Jèze does much better with “le nébuleux moyen par lequel elle est communiquée”). As chemical and mechanical technologies for reproducing words and images proliferated in the nineteenth century, so too did the sense that these technologies were members of the same conceptual family: the family of media. Thus a treatise on libel from 1812: “Libel in writing may be effected by every mode of submitting to the eye a meaning through the medium of words; whether this be done by manual writing, or printing, or any other method” (George, A Treatise on the Offence of Libel). The formula “medium of words” evokes Bacon, but the emphasis is now on the “symbolical devices,” as the author calls them, rather than on the symbols themselves. The word “medium” could expand to include nearly anything that facilitated communication. In his 1864 account of the analytical engine, one of the first generalpurpose computers, Charles Babbage explains that it functioned through the “medium of properly-arranged sets of Jacquard cards” (Passages from the Life)—the punch cards engineered by Joseph-Marie Jacquard to operate his automatic looms. By the turn of the twentieth century, the concept had expanded yet again to include new electrical means of communication. (On electrification’s contribution to the unification of a concept of media, see Gitelman and Collins, “Medium Light.”) . This proliferation was such that Charles Sanders Peirce attempted to arrive at a formal definition in his 1906 essay “The Basis of Pragmatism in the Normative Sciences.” What do all these media have common? “A medium of communication is something, A, which being acted upon by something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, I, in a manner involving its determination by N, so that I shall thereby, through A and only through A, be acted upon by N.” He offered the example of a mosquito, which is acted upon by “zymotic disease,” which it in turn transmits to a new host animal in the form of a fever. It was an odd example, logically and biologically, and Peirce recognized its oddness. “The reason that this example is not perfect is that the active medium is in some measure of the nature of a vehicle, which differs from a medium of communication in acting upon the transported object, where, without further interposition of the vehicle, it acts upon, or is acted upon by, the object to which it is conveyed.” In other words, the mosquito did not simply transmit the zyme unchanged; it transformed the zyme into a fever. This logic of the parasite stood in contrast to a classically logocentric scenario: “After an ordinary conversation, a wonderfully perfect kind of sign-functioning, one knows what information or suggestion has been conveyed, but will be utterly unable to say in what words it was conveyed, and often will think it was conveyed in words, when in fact it was only conveyed in tones or facial expressions” (“The Basis of Pragmatism”). III. A Somewhat Cumbrous Title Samuel Weber has argued that the modern era is characterized by a theological stance that attributes to media “the function of creatio ex nihilo.” “The ‘singularization’ and simplification of the complex and plural notion of ‘the media’ would be a symptom of this theology” (Benjamin’s -abilities). He credits this sacralization to Hegel, whose notion of mediation (Vermittlung) elevates the process to world-historical importance. However, it was not only, or even mainly, speculative philosophy that gave us “the media” as an uncountable noun with innumerable powers. It was Anglo-American social science. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the recognition of a family resemblance between the various “implements of intercommunication” (to take another phrase of Peirce’s) meant that they could be compared and contrasted in profitable new ways (Weber, ibid.). “The medium gives a tone of its own to all the advertisements contained in it,” writes Walter Dill Scott, a student of Wilhelm Wundt, who was a professor of applied psychology at Northwestern University, in his Theory of Advertising of 1904. Scott made this remark in a section of his book entitled “Mediums,” but this form was soon obsolete. The plural would vacillate in grammatical number before settling into a singular that could be labeled as “mass,” “mainstream,” “new,” and so forth. Indeed, as late as the 1940s, it was still necessary to explain what one meant by “mass media.” Julian Huxley, presiding over the newly formed UNESCO in 1946, announced that “Unesco is expressly instructed to pursue its aims and objects by means of the media of mass communication—the somewhat cumbrous title (commonly abbreviated to ‘Mass Media’) proposed for agencies, such as the radio, the cinema, and the popular press, which are capable of mass dissemination of word or image” (the English text of Article I reads “means of mass communication”; the French text, “organes d’information des masses”). The term “mass media” found its niche in scholarly articles by such influential American midcentury thinkers as Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, and Paul Lazarsfeld. 628 MEDIA 1 Ordinateur/Computer/Numérique/Digital For the advocates of a purity of the French language jeopardized by the multiplication of imports from English, computer science and digital culture have represented an important battleground because of the Anglo-American preeminence that has marked them since their beginnings in the 1940s. In their perspective, the adoption of terms like ordinateur and informatique to designate computer and computer science appeared as clear victories. These words not only sounded French, they also conveyed a different take on what computing was about. More recently, however, the line of demarcation has become less evident because of the ambiguity that surrounds the definition of numérique versus digital. Ordinateur was proposed in 1955 by the Latin philologist and Sorbonne professor Jacques Perret, who had been asked by one of his former students to suggest French names for the new machines that IBM was about to commercialize in the country. Perret suggested ordinateur, which applied to the capacity of someone to arrange and organize. Ordinateur used to have strong religious connotations. According to the RT: Le Littré, the adjective had been applied to God bringing order to the world. It also designated the person in charge of ordaining a priest. But very few persons would be aware of this religious dimension, argued Perret, so that the name would essentially relate to the notions of ordering and accounting, just like the other French term, ordonnateur, which was used in the administration for officials with power to authorize expenditures. Ordinateur was from the start a success. It was even transposed in Spanish and Catalan as ordenador and ordinador. (It is however worth noting that most other Romance languages preferred to translate the word “computer”: calcolatore in Italian or calculator in Romanian.) This success coincided with a major evolution in the public perception of computers. Whereas the first machines had been generally envisaged as mere computing devices, the accent was shifting toward their capacity to order logical propositions, a capacity that seemed to announce the possibility of an artificial intelligence. Thus, despite its French particularism, ordinateur was in profound accordance with a worldwide transformation epitomized by the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In charge of every aspect of the mission to Jupiter staged in the film, the HAL 9000, the ship’s computer, was definitely more an ordinateur than a computing device. Informatique was another major success. Coined in 1962 by a former director of the computing center of the French company Bull, Philippe Dreyfus, from the contraction of information and automatique, the term was officially endorsed during a cabinet meeting by President Charles de Gaulle, who preferred it to ordinatique to name the science of information processing (see Mounier-Kuhn, L’informatique en France). Around the same time, the German Informatik, the English “informatics,” and the Italian informatica also appeared. But the French term has enjoyed a widespread use without equivalent in other countries. Since its adoption, first by the government, then by the French Academy, the term has evolved in two seemingly discrepant directions. On the one hand, it covers a much broader range of subjects and domains than was envisaged by its creator and early promoters. Beside computer science proper, it applies to information technology as well as to the entire computer industry. On the other hand, it retains a distinctive scientific flavor. In French, informatique seems to belong to the same disciplinary family as mathematics, thus putting the emphasis on the abstract dimension of computer science, on its logic and algorithmic content. It is worth noting that until recently, computer science was often associated with mathematics in the programs of study of French higher-education institutions. Such an association bore the mark of the long-standing approach of technology as an “application” of pure science, a conception epitomized by institutions such as the École Polytechnique. At this stage it would be tempting to contrast a French propensity toward abstraction when dealing with computer and digital subjects with a more concretely oriented English vocabulary. Browsing through the various official publications devoted to French alternatives to the use of English words and expressions (the feared anglicismes), such as the Vocabulaire des techniques de l’information et de la communication published in 2009 by the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie, the official committee for seeking such alternatives, seems to confirm such an opposition. The contrast between the French numérique and the English “digital” could easily pass for a typical instance of this divergent orientation. A closer examination reveals, however, a more confusing set of relations between the two terms, as if the full meaning of what is at stake in their contemporary use could be apprehended only by playing on the interwoven resonances that they evoke. This ambiguous relation might represent an incentive to question the opposition mentioned above between allegedly French and English approaches to computer and digital subjects. Numérique versus “digital”: both terms derive from a similar reference to numerals. The French term is directly related to nombre and numération, whereas the English comes from “digit.” Contrary to its French equivalent, “digit” refers to the concrete operation to count on one’s fingers: digitus means “finger” or “toe” in Latin. The term “digital” is thus well adapted to the most recent evolution of computer culture, namely, its more and more concrete, almost tactile, turn. Conceived initially as mere electronic calculators, then as logical machines that could possibly become intelligent in the future, computers have become emblematic of a new cultural condition giving priority to the individual and his/ her sensations and emotions. This evolution had been foreseen by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab—an institution devoted to the exploration of the new possibilities of interface between human and machine. In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Negroponte opposed the information age to the digital age about to unfold. According to him, whereas the former was all about anonymity, standardization, and mass consumption, the new cultural era would see the rise of individual experience and preferences. The French numérique definitely misses this individual and sensory dimension. But the full scope of what is at stake in the rise of digital culture is perhaps better understood by playing on the extended resources that a comparison between English and French offer. The lack of direct tactile connotation of culture numérique is partly compensated by the fact that the adjective “digital” is more clearly related to fingers in the French language. It applies among other things to fingerprints: empreintes digitales. With the new importance given to biometrics in emergent digital culture, this connection matters. It reveals that what is at stake today is not only individual experience but also identification by institutions and corporations. From numbers to fingers and back, it becomes then interesting to work constantly on the border between French and English, on a moving threshold marked by disconcerting exchanges and uncanny inversions of meaning. Antoine Picon REFS.: Mounier-Kuhn, Pierre-Eric. L’informatique en France de la seconde guerre mondiale au plan calcul: L’émergence d’une science. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1996. MELANCHOLY 629 But European philosophers resisted this tendency. Their attitude is summed up by Sartre in a fragment from his notebooks of 1947–48 entitled “The American Way: Technical Civilization, hence Generality”: “This is what mass media, best seller, book of the month, best record, Gallup, Oscar, etc., tend to do,” he wrote, leaving all the important words in English. “It is a matter of presenting to the isolated exemplar the image of the totality” (Notebooks for an Ethics). Back in Germany, Adorno also took his distance from a term that he had resorted to repeatedly while in exile. In “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” first delivered as a radio address in 1963, he argued that “the very word mass-media [Massenmedien], specially honed for the culture industry, already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master’s voice.” For Sartre, Adorno, and their contemporaries, “mass media” was less an untranslatable than an untouchable sullied by intellectual and institutional associations with American cultural imperialism. The entry in the current edition of the RT: Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française reflects this sense of its origins: “Média. n. m. XXe siècle. Abréviation de l’anglais des États-Unis mass media, de même sens.” This resistance was soon exhausted. In the late 1960s, the German publishers of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media settled on the weirdly operatic title Die magichen Kanäle. At the end of the century, a collection of McLuhan’s writings appeared under the title Medien Verstehen: Der McLuhanReader (1998). In France, in the 1990s, Régis Debray launched the excellent Cahiers de médiologie, devoting issues to themes like theatricality and bicycles; more recently he started a review entitled, simply, Médium. Cognates like “multimedia,” “remediation,” and “mediality” proliferate globally. This reflects less the dominance of English than the collective urgency of an intellectual project. “For the moment,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “it is less important to respond to the question of the meaning of Being than it is to pay attention to the fact of its exhibition. If ‘communication’ is for us, today, such an affair—in every sense of the word —if its theories are flourishing, if its technologies are being proliferated, if the ‘mediatization’ of the ‘media’ brings along with it an auto-communicational vertigo, if one plays around with the theme of the indistinctness between the ‘message’ and the ‘medium’ out of either a disenchanted or jubilant fascination, then it is because something is exposed or laid bare” (Being Singular Plural). Ben Kafka REFS.: Adorno, Theodor W. “Résumé über Kulturindustrie.” In Ohne Leitbild. Frankfurt: Suhrhampf Verlag, 1967. Translation by Anson G. Rabinbach: “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 12–19. Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, 1864. Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychische Behandlung (Seelenbehandlung).” In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. London: Imago Publishing, 1942. Translation by Jean Laplanche: “Traitement psychique (traitement d’âme).” In Résultats, idées, problèmes I. (1890–1920). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Translation by James Strachey: “Psychical (or Mental) Treatment.” In vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. George, John. A Treatise on the Offence of Libel, with a Disquisition on the Right, Benefits, and Proper Boundaries of Political Discussion. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1812. Reprinted in The Monthly Review 73 (January–April) 1814. Gitelman, Lisa, and Theresa M. Collins. “Medium Light: Revisiting Edisonian Modernity.” Critical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (July 2009): 1–14. Huxley, Julian. Unesco: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy. UNESCO Preparatory Commission, 1946. Links to these versions, along with Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, can be found at http://www.onlineunesco.org/UNESCO%20Constitution.html (accessed 1 Sept. 2009). Madison, James. Federalist Paper no. 37. In The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, edited by Terence Ball. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Translation by [Trudaine de la Sablière?]: Le Fédéraliste, ou Collection du quelques écrits en faveur de la constitution proposée aux États-Unis. Vol. 2. Paris: Chez Buisson, 1792. Translation by Gaston Jèze: Le Fédéraliste (commentaire de la constitution des États-Unis). Paris: V. Girard & E. Brière, 1902. Montaigne, Michel de. “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” In The Complete Essays, translated by Michael Andrew Screech. New York: Penguin, 1993. . The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne. Translated by John Florio. London: George, Routledge, 1886. First published in 1803. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Peirce, Charles S. “The Basis of Pragmatism in the Normative Sciences.” In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Scott, Walter Dill. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising. Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1904. Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics. Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. MELANCHOLY FRENCH mélancolie GERMAN Melancholie, Schwermut GREEK melagcholia [μελαγχολία] LATIN melancholia, furor v. ACEDIA, DESENGAÑO, DOR, ES, FEELING, GEMÜT, GENIUS, INGENIUM, I/ME/MYSELF, LEIB, MADNESS, MALAISE, PATHOS, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, SPLEEN, STIMMUNG Although we can date the origin of what we know as modern psychiatry back to the work of Philippe Pinel—whose MedicoPhilosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania (year IX, 1801) signaled both the autonomy of mental illness as a field of study separate from physiology and the application of new clinical and institutional practices to the treatment of patients—the study of mental illness, or of madness, as a discipline has a longer history that goes back to antiquity. The word “melancholy” at that time referred to a state of sadness and anxiety, without a fever, and most often accompanied by an obsession, or near delirium, this state being marked by an excess of black bile, which some authors considered to be the cause of the illness and others as a concomitant symptom. 630 MELANCHOLY psychiatry, whose origin can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century with the practice of “moral treatment,” via two paradoxical semiological forms, made up of contradictory traits, such as the signs of genius and of madness on the one hand, and the signs of what was permanent and accidental on the other. The dispositional characteristics of genius were thus manifestations of a humor that could just as easily lead to madness, as a result of a momentary disturbance of thymic equilibrium. Although European psychiatry is still relatively young, it does not for all that challenge the traditional historical sources from which it emerged, both medical and philosophical, however attentive it appears to be to international (for the most part originally American) systems of diagnosis. As testimony to this, we might take current debates, often inspired by psychoanalysis, about the meaning of the term “melancholy,” in other words, about the specific signs that guide its classification in the three main traditional nosographic groups (neuroses, psychoses, and perversions). Already in 1915, at the beginning of his article “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud wrote: “Melancholia [Melancholie], whose concept [Begriffsbestimmung] fluctuates even in descriptive psychiatry, takes on various clinical forms the grouping together of which into a single unity does not seem to be established with certainty; and some of these forms suggest somatic rather than psychogenic affections.” The study of the concept is further complicated if we take into account another tradition, in parallel with the medical history of the shifts in its uses and meanings, that is, the ethological tradition (ethos [ἔθος], “custom,” but which also designates a set of cultural characteristics; see MORALS), which is no doubt more literary, but which still has an influence on the psychiatric approach. This is the very tradition that Esquirol advised leaving to the moralists and poets, and which draws on the mythical resources particular to different groups. II. The Humoral Conception of Melancholy The word “melancholy,” as its etymology indicates, locates the affection it refers to within the Hippocratic theory of the four humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood), which persisted into the nineteenth century, even though interest in humoral theory waned in the second half of the seventeenth century as scholars and others switched their focus toward mental alienation, understood increasingly as a form of distraction or wandering. Indeed, around this time a number of works appeared which, imbued with the scholarship of the Renaissance, itself built upon Greek and Arabic sources, progressively made way for a more mentalist conception of obsession or idée fixe, the therapies for which took the form of purging and amusement or distraction (see CATHARSIS). So starting with the conception of a complex chemistry in which heating and fermentation were the main agents of transformation of natural elements, the Hippocratic description of temperament (one could be melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, or sanguine) understood as a combination (krasis [ϰϱᾶσις]) of the four humors (chumoi [χυμοί]), depending on how much of each of them was present in different organs, would be The word “melancholy,” then, comes originally from the Hippocratic theory of the humors (melas [μέλας]), “black”; cholê [χολή], “bile”), as well as from a chemical theory of fermentation and of vapors, and would continue to be understood more or less explicitly as such until the nineteenth century, even though “melancholy” tended by then to refer to a state of mental alienation that was increasingly distinct from physiology. By exploring the history of the term and the shifts in its meaning, we can thus identify four themes and points of reference to consider diachronically: the conception of humor, the symptom of obsession, lovesickness, and the nature of genius. The way in which we will discuss them will help us to differentiate between the major trends of English, German, and French psychiatry, and the typologies that they propose. One might have thought that the general application in psychiatry of the assessment scales of humor—in its psychological sense, close to the Greek thumos [θυμός], and its disorders (dusthumia [δυσθυμία])—would have attenuated the former denotations of the term “melancholy.” It seems, however, that modern approaches to melancholy—particularly as it is manifested in mourning, psychomotor slowing down, generalized negativism, or intellectual hyperlucidity—are on the contrary reviving the figures as they were used by writers in antiquity, in that they pertain more to actual psychological mechanisms than to simple semantic analogies. I. The Ambiguity of the Concept From the perspective of contemporary psychiatry, melancholy is something of a paradox, in that it has to take account both of the relativity of a nosology that has largely been superseded by our understanding of how complex affections are, and also of the uniformity of a semiology determined by the different scales of assessment of the symptoms (for the most part American) which European psychiatry is compelled to use as its points of reference. Nevertheless, melancholy still seems to elude any attempt at a definitive classification, as can be seen, for example, in the shift from DSM III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (1980) to DSM III-R (1987), and then DSM IV (1994), which sees a modification of the diagnostic signs of melancholy, as well as in the CIM (Classification internationale des maladies de l’OMS), known as the ICD in English, which practically eliminates it. The problem is not a new one, and Jean-Étienne Esquirol, in his work De la lypémanie ou mélancolie (On lypemania or melancholy) (1820), already wrote that “the word melancholy, widely used in ordinary language to express the habitual sadness of a few individuals, must be left to the moralists and poets, who do not have to be as rigorous as doctors with their expressions. This term can be retained and used to describe the temperament in which the hepatic system is predominant, and to refer to the disposition to obsessive ideas and sadness, while the word monomania expresses an abnormal state of physical or moral sensibility, with an unconscious and permanent delirium.” Esquirol adopted the word lypemania (lupê [λύπη], “sadness”) in place of “melancholy,” and used the latter term to refer on the one hand to a disposition of the temperament—a permanent state (hexis [ἕξις]), a predisposition (proclivitas)—and on the other, to the open manifestation of the illness, a punctual, accidental state (diathesis [διάθεσις]), the manifestation of the ill (nosos [νόσος], nosêma [νόσημα]). The interest of this ambiguity particular to “melancholy” as a term is expressed throughout the history of MELANCHOLY 631 keen to eliminate it from the nosology—but it does not originate with the Neo-Stoics (Hippocrates, Galen, and their followers). It was already present in Plato and Aristotle, who compared melancholy to the state of inebriation, and considered that the multiple forms of melancholy reproduced drunkenness’s different degrees of distraction. Plato writes in The Republic: “Then a precise definition of a tyrannical man is one who, either by birth or by habit or both, combines the characteristics of drunkenness, lust, and madness (melagcholikos [μελαγχολιϰός]).” And in the famous Problem XXX, Aristotle, or Pseudo-Aristotle, maintains that the word “melancholy,” following the variety of manifestations of inebriation according to the nature of the individuals, designates the excessive and incomprehensible changes they undergo whenever too great a quantity of black bile is acting upon them, or whenever some external occurrence stimulates it too aggressively: “In most people then black bile engendered from their daily nutriment does not change their character, but merely produces an atrabilious disease. But those who naturally possess an atrabilious temperament immediately develop diverse characters in accordance with their various temperaments.” III. “From Humor to Mood”: The Age of Quantitative Measure As a result of these successive shifts in the meaning, then, the word “melancholy” does not refer to a precise pathological entity, and in this respect, its overwhelmingly diverse and extensive semiology makes it impossible to establish a definitive and stable nosology. It suggests an “essentially polymorphous” temperament, to borrow J. Pigeaud’s expression from his commentary on Problem XXX, which possesses in their potential state “all the characteristics of all men.” The numerous attempts at a psychiatric classification of melancholy have accordingly relied on privileging some aspect or particular mechanism. This has meant isolating such aspects or mechanisms from the whole range of manifestations of the illness so as to make them a distinctive sign that corresponds to a system of classification, whose relevant criteria can then be shared in advance. But the experimental studies that were conducted with a view to achieving this aim did not confirm the hypothesis of differential biological reaction, so researchers then focused their efforts on somatic treatments, in particular, medication using antidepressants. These positive studies are part of an active attempt to establish the meaning of the word “melancholy,” retrospectively as it were, since it is according to how patients respond to the different treatments administered to them that researchers hope to confirm whether they can be classified as melancholic or depressive. In any case, we are forced to return to the need to determine international assessment criteria, one of whose manifest paradoxes is that they give renewed credibility to a humoral theory by trying to understand and measure melancholy according to a quantitative assessment scale. Given the inherently variable nature of the nosography of melancholy, we cannot but be skeptical a priori of the many ventures nowadays to isolate analytically the symptoms of the identified affection in order to then evaluate them using a comparative scale of measure. Furthermore, to proceed in integrated into an already more modern conception of a pathology centered on mental disorders, and in relation to which humor would only be one cause among several others. The first definition of melancholy is to be found in aphorism 23 of book 6 of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates: “If a fright or despondency (dusthumia [δυσθυμία]) lasts for a long time, it is a melancholic affection” (The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, Eng. trans. Francis Adams). And Galen, who resurrected humoral theory in the second century CE and can serve as a representative of Greco-Roman medicine, completed Hippocrates’s definition as follows: “Melancholy is a sickness that damages the mind (gnome [γνώμη]), with a feeling of malaise (dusthumia) and an aversion toward the things that are most cherished, without a fever. In some of those who are ill, an abundant and black bile also attacks the esophagus, so much so that they vomit and at the same time their mind is considerably affected” (Galen, Medical Definitions, 19 K 416). One could not express better than in this description of melancholy, which is both etiological and semiological, the reciprocal influence of the soul and the body, as if, in this case, temperament (krasis) suffered from an excess of black bile which, damaging the stomach (stomachos [στόμαχος]), affected the soul in its vital energy. Melancholy indeed suggests a mental pathology with a double cause, in humoral chemistry and in an organic dysfunction. But Galen’s definition does further work still. Although it is the excessive vapors of back bile that most often cloud the brain, the same result can be seen with the combustion of the other three humors, to such an extent that the term “melancholy” ends up referring not only to the harmful effects of black bile, but also to those of the other three humors when they are affected in the same way. So “melancholy” became a generic and representative term for madness, which comes from a complexion or temperament that, even though it remains natural, nonetheless predisposes an individual to this kind of distraction. It was for this very reason that other writers, and in particular Aretaeus of Cappadocia, extended the semiology of melancholy well beyond the simple effects of black bile, to include a more multiform disorder of the understanding. Cicero, who favored this extension of the term, went as far as to translate the melancholy of the Greeks using the term furor, thus reducing melancholy to a “deep anger” or to a “fury,” as J. Pigeaud explains in his seminal work La maladie de l’âme. In book 3 of his Tuscalanae, Cicero wrote: “The Greeks, indeed have no one word that will express it: what we call furor, they call μελαγχολία [melagcholia], as if the reason were affected only by a black bile, and not disturbed as often by a violent rage, or fear, or grief. Thus we say Athamas, Alcmæon, Ajax, and Orestes were raving [furere].” And according to R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Cicero’s intention was to “describe a convulsion of the soul which could not be gathered from the mere concept of ‘atrabiliousness’ ” (Saturn and Melancholy). This extension of the term “melancholy” still lies at the heart of the problematic in contemporary psychiatry, in the sense that some psychiatrists like to keep “melancholy” within the category of psychoses, whereas others prefer to consider it as a specific structure, and yet others still are 632 MELANCHOLY discourse the psychic mechanisms underlying the formation of the symptoms. Here again, the meaning of the word “melancholy” will be subject to many modifications and shifts, depending on the methodological approach adopted. So phenomenological psychiatry will refer to melancholy as an illness of endogeneity by emphasizing its generic nature, and psychoanalytically inspired psychiatry will describe it as a narcissistic illness and will consider the nosological question as secondary. If the former approach is still attached to the notion of humor, this time in the sense of the inner sentiment of the unfolding of a personal history (innere Lebensgeschichte), the latter approach is attached to the various figures of melancholy, understood as formal models of psychic function, some of which are already to be found in the annals of modern psychiatry, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. IV. The Clinical Tradition: The Age of the Great Classifications A. Endon, Stimmung, Schwermut Endogeneity, then, might provide a new interpretation of modern humor, as useful to positivist psychiatry (with the category of “endogenous depression”) as it is to phenomenological psychiatry, which attempts to account for the notion of melancholy itself. Hubertus Tellenbach, heir to the great German phenomenological psychiatric trend of the first half of the twentieth century (with, among others, E. Strauss, V. E. von Gebsattel, and L. Binswanger), proposed a definition of endogeneity accompanied by its substratum: the endon, which we should no doubt understand as a formal schema that is useful for the overall configuration of the notion. The term “endogenous” appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century (A. Mechler), and was often a synonym for “constitutional,” which did little to explain the nature of melancholy since other affections could also be related to it, in particular, psychoses and neuroses, which were said to have a “depressive basis.” The term concerned the “disorders of the humor,” or even the “vital feelings” in their stuporous or maniacal disturbances. This is where some located those affects whose anomalies derived from a primary organization of drives, and which were thus relatively independent from external events and psychological motivations. This simply indicates how vague the notion still was, and how it seemed to call out for a third etiological field alongside the somatic and the psychic. Indeed, Tellenbach’s definition of melancholy is more an overall description than an actual definition: it emphasizes the importance of vital rhythms, and the coherence of their combination, in other words, their historial aspect: By endogeny, then, we mean what emerges as the unity of the basic form in any life event [als Einheit der Grundgestalt in allem Lebensgeschehen]. The endon is by its origin the phusis, which opens out and remains within the phenomena of endogeny. (Melancholie) The word “melancholy” thereafter refers, in a phenomenological context, to an endokinesis, to a movement of the endon, or even a rupture with the endon, understood as a blockage of the basic manifestations of life (stupor, despondency, despair), a blockage that the individual endeavors this way one would have to envisage a nosographic category sufficiently broad to cover all of the apparently characteristic signs of melancholy according to their intensity. This was the category of depression, and the debate surrounding the distinction between melancholy and depression, far from disappearing, has grown even more complex as a result. It would also be worth looking more closely at diagnostic classifications, as well as the assessment scales of the intensity of the symptoms, in particular, those relating to the psychomotor disorder that is seen increasingly as an indication of melancholy. This is because they show, on the one hand, the mobility of the semiology of melancholy—and this is far from insignificant when it is sometimes assigned psychotic characteristics—and on the other hand, the interest there is in retaining the notion of humor (or mood, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition). Humor or mood in this sense is obviously different from the humoral theory of Hippocrates, and more closely resembles the Greek notion of thumos [θυμός], understood as the way in which one feels oneself, the self-perception of one’s own relationship to the world, a kind of psychic coenesthesia (see CONSCIOUSNESS, Box 1). Anglo-Saxon psychiatry is most explicit in this regard, and uses the word “mood” for this “coenesthetic” humor. We are now far removed from the physical register in which the humors operated, however; no longer would the word “moisture” be in any sense applicable to this “coenesthetic” humor, though “moisture” is indeed related to the liquid humor in the Hippocratic sense and, for someone like Ben Jonson, already referred metaphorically to the general character of a man when all of his humors flowed in the same direction: So in every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour. (Every Man Out of His Humour, I.1) In the same way, spleen would be considered as that vague and sad humor which, as in ancient times, comes from an accumulation of humor/moisture in the spleen, which was where black bile was to be found, according to many physicians (R. Blackmore, 1725). (See INGENIUM, Box 2, and SPLEEN.) While contemporary psychiatry attempts to assess the intensity of certain characteristic signs of humor, or mood, with a view to establishing a psychiatric nosography that is intended to be universal, it approaches melancholy in a number of different ways. These alternative approaches include, on the one hand, phenomenological psychiatry, with its notion of endogeneity, which goes back to clinical observation of the behavior of the patient, and the description he himself gives of his mood, and on the other hand, psychiatry inspired by psychoanalysis, which identifies within the patient’s MELANCHOLY 633 stable semiology of melancholy, and of putting it in a relevant classificatory category. B. Manic depression French psychiatrists before Kraepelin had included melancholy in the group of thymic psychoses broadly named “manic depressive” (or what Farlet in 1851 called folie circulaire [circular madness], and Baillarger in 1854 called folie à double forme [double-formed madness]). Kraepelin, however, distinguished it clearly from manic depression up until 1913, when he included it in the eighth edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, emphasizing the identity of the clinical symptoms of the two illnesses, even if the variations of mood in melancholy often remain very slight, to the point of being imperceptible. From that point on, manic depression constituted a disease in the same way that paranoia and schizophrenia did, and it encompassed all of the symptomatic variations of melancholy, of mania, and of the different combined states, as well as pure mono-symptomatic forms. The interest of such a classification as regards melancholy lay in what would henceforth appear to continue to distinguish it from other simple forms, that is, the integrity of ideation. From psychomotor inhibition to the state of stupor, from delirious ideas to confused states, three types of pure melancholy emerge, all characterized by an aggravation of what we might call a fullness of the idea, from the point of view of the mechanism; and by moral suffering and psychomotor inhibition, from the point of view of the classic syndrome. Kraepelin’s nosography remains a key reference point in the history of psychiatry, not just in Germany, but in Europe more generally, insofar as, according to a detailed semiology, all the simple forms of the illness are grouped under more general forms (so, for example, “pure melancholy” is under the form “manic depression” [maniacdepressive Psychose]), and thus retain their characteristics almost autonomously. For this reason, melancholy is still nowadays classed as manic depression or neurotic depression depending on the assessment of the disturbances of ideation, of the intensity of sadness and anxiety, as well as of the degree of psychomotor slowing, to use the modern expressions. The second half of the nineteenth century, and the start of the following century, witnessed an explosion of great German treatises in psychiatry, which were vast systems of classifications of mental illness that relied on the most detailed of semiological methods, drawn up during close clinical observation. The mechanisms of the different ideas, the very ones brought to light and favored by the organo-dynamist approach that would be developed in France, and even more so by psychoanalytically inspired psychiatry, could already be glimpsed as a number of metaphorical figures at work in these treatises. For melancholy, for example, one finds in the figures of the hole and of the cavity (T. Meynert, Freud), as well as the figure of the whirlwind and the spiral movement (H. Schüle, H. Emminghaus), characteristics of the loss of psychic investment, and of the flux of thought. After this, the psychosomatic or psychic mechanisms underlying the symptomatic manifestations would enter the definitions of mental affections at the expense of a semiology, whose endless reworkings made the establishment of a universal nosology extremely difficult. to prevent by a defensive behavior focused entirely on a respect for, and conformity to, an established order (Ordentlichkeit). If Tellenbach’s phenomenological approach to melancholy still reflects the relevance of German psychiatric thought, in spite of the pressure exerted by the obligation to apply international classificatory norms, it is because the humoral tradition has its roots not only in a clinical practice that attempts to analyze its manifestations, but also in a philosophical tradition that psychiatrists are not averse to exploiting in elaborating their theoretical models. Like psychiatrists from the English-speaking world, German psychiatrists use an original term to designate modern humor: Stimmung, whose meanings have an even wider resonance than the corresponding English term, “mood” or “humor” in the nonphysical sense. Stimmung comes from stimmen, to make one’s voice (Stimme) heard, to establish, to name (bestimmen, “to determine”), and to play an instrument in order to tune it. This latter meaning, when extended to humor, suggests the fact of putting oneself in a certain frame of mind (see STIMMUNG). The lexicon of the French translation of Tellenbach’s work retains the following composite nouns: Gestimmtsein (being-in-a-mood); Gestimmtheit (color of the mood); Verstimmung (change of mood); and Stimmbarkeit (suppleness, affective mobility). The richness of this vocabulary (beyond its application to melancholy, which makes melancholy not so much a morbid entity as a frame of mind, or even a typus, as Tellenbach puts it) echoes in this sense the great movements of German psychiatry from the end of the nineteenth century. This tradition, beyond the clinical and nosographic conception of someone like Kraepelin in particular, was still very much in line with the work of J. Herbaert: a dynamic of associations of ideas in which the antagonisms between representations were related analogically to intracortical antagonisms. As far as melancholy specifically was concerned, the German classification made a distinction between a simple melancholy (melancholia simplex) and a stuporous melancholy (melancholia errabunda, melancholia agitans sine active); relative to these two forms, there were then a melancholy without delirium; a precordial melancholy; a delirious melancholy, which was also still called religious; and a hallucinatory melancholy, which was still called hypochondriacal. W. Griesinger, for example, follows this classification of melancholy (Mental Illnesses, 1845), and places melancholy properly speaking (Melancholia), along with hypochondria, in the more general category of “states of mental depression. Melancholy (Schwermut).” This latter term, a synonym for despondency or depression (schwer, “heavy, weighty,” and Mut, “feelings, qualities, or states of mind”), conveys the main quality of humor, much as does the term “tristimania,” coined by the American B. Rush in 1812, or lypémanie (lypemania), coined by J.-É. Esquirol in France in 1820, or L. Delasiauve’s dépression (1860). From this perspective, and in order to distinguish Melancholia from simple Schwermut, R. Krafft-Ebing and H. Schüle would emphasize the accidental or nonaccidental nature of the etiological factor, as well as the presence or lack of anxiety. But it was E. Kraeplin who would foreground most explicitly the difficulty of establishing a 634 MELANCHOLY approach of the Greco-Latin tradition. This organo-psychic influence is still largely present not only among French psychiatrists, but also more widely across the Mediterranean, insofar as it determines two otherwise unrelated directions for research and treatment of melancholy: the neuro-pharmacological approach, and the psychodynamic approach, whose essentially psychoanalytic points of reference are still very much alive in France. Melancholy then comes to be discussed in terms of mechanisms, and in this it follows Freud, who drew this conclusion from V. Tausk’s lecture on melancholy on 30 December 1914: The essential criterion by which we must circumscribe the symptoms (which, in practice, never appear in their pure form) and the forms of illness is its mechanism. The observation of benign cases, offers, as Hitschmann mentioned, the only possibility of drawing up a chart of pure symptoms. If this is true, there is only one melancholy, which has the same mechanism, and which should be curable by psychoanalysis. Freud’s call for circumscribing and unifying the concept of melancholy was followed, however, in a less-than-unified way by psychoanalytically inspired psychiatrists. The result is a vast nosographic panorama within which melancholy shifts from being a manic-depressive psychosis to a major depression, and even a narcissistic illness (still described as an “illness of the ideal”). The 1914 formulation comes close to the category of “narcissistic neuroses” that Freud, in 1924, would distinguish from psychoses and neuroses, and of which for him melancholy was the paradigm: “We may provisionally assume that there must also be illnesses which are based on a conflict between the ego and the super-ego. Analysis gives us a right to suppose that melancholia is a typical example of this group; and we would set aside the name of ‘narcissistic psychoneuroses’ for disorders of that kind” (“Neurosis and Psychosis”; see ES). Psychiatric practice, while necessarily distinct from psychoanalytic practice in the sense that its primary aim is the medical objective of the disappearance of the symptom, through well-established therapeutic knowledge, nevertheless shares with psychoanalysis a recognition of those unconscious mechanisms identified by Freud, which it finds at the heart of the melancholic patient’s discourse. Three such mechanisms are commonly encountered in psychiatric literature. They attach respectively to the figure of mourning, understood as an impossible psychic resolution; to the figure of a generalized negativism, which results in a logical, hyper-formalized discourse; as well, finally, as to the figure of a narcissistic rift, whose consequences would manifest themselves through a devalorization of one’s self-image. C. The figures of melancholy: Lovesickness It is curious to note how similar contemporary figures of melancholy are to those that were already present in the history of the illness, from antiquity up through the seventeenth century, in the form of different kinds of melancholy, such as “divine melancholy” (Marsilio Ficino), “white melancholy or white bile” (Agrippa of Nettesheim), and even “amorous or erotic melancholy” (Jacques Ferrand and the authors of the various “Treatises on Lovesickness” of the seventeenth century). V. Melancholy as a Paradigm of Narcissistic Illness A. Melancholic discourse In spite of the delirious or confused appearance that certain forms of melancholy can take, the illness that corresponds to this name is said to be distinguished from manic depression in that it preserves the integrity of intellectual processes, even if the full weight of the obsession often causes a patient to sink into extreme pathological behaviors, such as total mutism or systematic negativism. German psychiatry and French psychiatry attach a similar importance to the discourse of the patient through the repetitive figures he presents, and which is said to translate the nature of the affections from which it derives. In 1891 G. Dumas, in his medical thesis Les états intellectuels dans la mélancolie [Intellectual states in melancholy], makes a distinction between an organic melancholy and an intellectual melancholy, depending on the whether the state prior to melancholy was affective or intellectual, and according to the possible variations of the causal order, conceived as follows: organic facts, mental productions, and confused perceptions of these facts, or melancholy. Melancholy is thus less a pathology than a psychic operation whose aim is to justify the organic or affective disorders of which the patient continues to be aware. Melancholy would not simply have an organic etiology—which neither the Germans nor the French were yet able to do without—but also a rational logic. This logic prompts the patient to translate his impressions of diminution and of weakness into a type of discourse and behavior, which then precisely becomes part of the definition of melancholy. “In all cases,” writes G. Dumas, “the affective effect, melancholy, appears to be merely the awareness of the movements made, the confused idea of the body. We are no longer in the presence of an ill-defined power succeeding an idea, and being expressed by physical organs; we are only ever dealing with intellectual states, ideas, images or sensations, and with physiological states.” W. Griesinger, to whom G. Dumas refers in his thesis, had already emphasized this impression of great coherence that emerges from melancholic discourse. For Griesinger, this is a testimony to the mind trying to understand cenesthetic states or apparently inexplicable movements of the body, and which, in order to do this, conceives of logical arguments that are more or less removed from the lived context, more or less artificial in relation to the still uninterpreted affective base. B. The mechanism of melancholy We find in Germany as well as in France, besides an interest in nosology, a continued and no less powerful interest in the study of the particular forms of discourse of the patients, insofar as these forms might reveal the underlying etiological mechanisms of the different types of affections. Alongside the descriptive semiological description of melancholy, then, a morphological definition explaining the illness is also elaborated, in both Germany and France, whose medical traditions are nonetheless distinctly different: German alienists remained attached to the theory of the association of ideas since J. Herbart, who attributed to representations a force of attraction and repulsion, and French alienists remained attached to the organo-psychic MELANCHOLY 635 Avicenna, and the whole Arabe family, call this illness Alhasch or Iliscus in their language: Arnaud of Villanova [de Villeneuve], Gordon, and their contemporaries call it heroic or lordly Love, either because the ancient heroes or half-gods were greatly affected by this ill, as the Poets recite in their fables, or because the great Lords and Ladies were more prone to this illness than the people, or finally, because Love dominates and masters the hearts of lovers. (Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour ou mélancolie érotique) Now, the term “heroic melancholy” no doubt comes from a semantic confusion of the Greek erôs (love) with herus, heroycus, or hereos (words whose meaning has long eluded lexicographers), if not even with the Greek hêrôs [ἥϱως] (hero), Arnaud de Villeneuve in the thirteenth century, in his Liber de parte operativa being the first to make this mistake, which was later adopted by Burton. Lovesick melancholia, the object of many specific treatises, is thus offered, from the point of view of mood or affect, as the model for a behavior characterized by a withdrawal of investment in the outside world, a turning in upon oneself, and a moral suffering fueled by feelings of self-deprecation and guilt. Mourning or separation merely provides melancholy with an opportunity to manifest itself; the illness is here understood as a constitutive mode of psychic structuration for some, and a physicchemical anomaly for others, which are present well before any precipitating event. The fact remains that, as the works on “lovesickness” show so clearly, melancholy is affirmed as an “illness of desire,” in the sense in which desire, attacked at its core, gives way as it collapses to a number of different expressive formulations, such as, for example, Seneca’s taedium vitae, close to boredom, or even nostalgia (see SEHNSUCHT), understood in the seventeenth century as an illness of exile, or homesickness ( J. Hofer, 1688). To classify melancholy as a specific category of psychiatric nosography seems, then, to be an impossible task, given the different epistemological contexts that govern such a classification on the one hand, and the variability of symptomatological descriptions that work against any precise semiology on the other. However, alongside these descriptions, phenomenological and psychoanalytical trends continue to inform a different kind of practice, which is based on an approach toward the illness that, for phenomenology, focuses on the nature of the patient’s temperament and on an awareness of his or her biographical history, and for psychoanalysis, focuses instead on unconscious mechanisms and psychic structuration. What is understood by melancholy is therefore understood in terms of the symptoms themselves which, first identified in antiquity, would nowadays be defined by a metaphorical displacement: mood and moral suffering, obsession and partial delirium, lovesickness and mourning, as well as the characteristic of genius, and the hyper-lucidity of a discourse reduced to a pathological authenticity. We might say that desire can no longer be sustained by narcissistic projection, for want of a sufficiently stable specular image, and that this originary failure points to a fundamental anomaly in the relationship to the other, the advent of which psychoanalytic metapsychology tries to reconstruct. Melancholy is a narcissistic If the ancients had already provided a good description of these different manifestations of melancholy, the Renaissance and the classical age established them as almost autonomous models. In this regard, “erotic melancholy” offers one of the most instructive examples, insofar as it provides the raw material for a number of specialized treatises written by doctors, as well as philosophers and theologians. We find many allusions in antiquity to the discomfort of the state of being in love (Hippocrates, Caelius Aurelianus, Rufus of Ephesus, Aretaeus of Cappadocia), either from erôs [ἔϱως], or from epithumia [ἐπιθυμία], passionate longing, lust, desire (the latter, provided that we understand the transcendental movement that epithumia leads to as the overcoming through love of simple covetousness or bodily desire). And it is indeed the state of being in love, and its crisis of passion, which causes unreliability of judgment, as well as languor and the stupor that accompanies it when the absence of the object is felt all too cruelly. Aretaeus of Cappadocia tells of one such case when he describes an adolescent boy who, having sunk into melancholy and been abandoned by his doctors, was cured by the love of a young girl: “But I think, he added, that he was in love from the beginning and that, having been disappointed in his advances on the young girl, he became languorous, which made him appear melancholic to his compatriots” (quoted in J. Pigeaud, De la mélancolie). This passion thus gave way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a particular category of melancholy: “erotic melancholy,” which was compared to a kind of “fury of love” or “amorous folly,” an expression that a doctor such as Jacques Ferrand translates using the word erôtomania [ἐϱωτομανία]. It could certainly be considered as an “illness of desire,” an expression that would not really be anachronistic since the author specifically makes desire an efficient cause of the malady: We therefore say that, according to this doctrine [the doctrine of Hippocrates], love or erotic passion is a kind of reverie, which is caused by an excessive desire to enjoy the loved object. Now, if this kind of reverie is without fever, and accompanied by ordinary fear and sadness, it is called melancholy. Res est solliciti plena timoris amor [Love is a thing that is filled with fear and worry]. (Ferrand, Traicte de l’essence et guerison de l’amour et de la mélancolie érotique) Ferrand, following his master du Laurens, classifies melancholy as a kind of hypochondria, attaching to it the symptoms of the latter, such as stomach upsets and disorders associated with the organs. While he claims that the heart is the seat of the cause of the illness, the liver the seat of love, and the genitalia the seat of combined causes, the symptoms are said to be in the brain, which is responsible for the general alteration of one’s mind and temperament. His contemporaries, in particular, A. de Laurens, J. Guibelet, T. Bright, and R. Burton, also respected this classification, and while none of their works was devoted to lovesick melancholy, they did discuss it in particular chapters. These authors, and especially Burton, talk in this regard of “heroic melancholy,” an expression that is also mentioned by Ferrand, who traces it back to Arabic writers: 636 MEMORY Nunberg, Herman. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society/Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, Volume 4 (1912–1918). New York: International Universities Press, 1918. Pigeaud, Jackie. De la mélancolie: Fragments de poétique et d’histoire. Paris: Dilecta, 2005. . La maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981. . Melancholia: Le malaise de l’individu. Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2008. Plato. The Republic. Translated and with an introduction by H.D.P. Lee. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1955. Radden, Jennifer. Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Simon, Jean Robert. Robert Burton (1577–1640) et l’Anatomie de la mélancolie. Paris: Didier, 1964. Starobinski, Jean. Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie, des origines à 1900. Basel, Switz.: Geigy, 1960. Tellenbach, Hubertus. Melancholie. 3rd ed. Berlin: Springer, 1961. Translation by Erling Eng: Melancholy: History of the Problem, Endogeneity, Typology, Pathogenesis, Clinical Considerations. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980. Vidal, Fernando. “Jean Starobinski: The History of Psychiatry as the Cultural History of Consciousness.” In Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, 135–54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. illness, an illness of desire and of truth, in the sense that, as Freud states, the melancholic subject has come so close to this truth that it falls ill as a result (Mourning and Melancholia, 1915). Beyond the seduction of an eminently protean philosophical and literary discourse, melancholy defies any attempt at reductive classification in the field of psychiatry. It is thus held captive by the Aristotelian kairos [ϰαιϱός], if we are willing to understand this kairos as the opportunity offered to the temperament to manifest itself as a structural effect. Marie-Claude Lambotte REFS.: Aristotle. “Problem 30:1.” In Problems. Translated by W. S. Hett and Harris Rackham. Rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953–57. . “Problems.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, Bollinger Series 71. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Binswanger, Ludwig. Melancholie und Manie: Phänomenologische Studien. Pfullingen, Ger.: Neske, 1960. . Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger. Translated by Jacob Needleman. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner et al.; introduction by J. B. Bamborough. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000. Comay, Rebecca. “The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism.” In Walter Benjamin and History, edited by Andrew Benjamin, 88–101. New York: Continuum, 2005. Dumas, Georges. Les états intellectuels dans la mélancolie. Paris, 1894. Esquirol, Jean-Étienne. “De la lypémanie ou mélancolie [Ch. 8].” In Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal. 2 vols. Paris, 1838. Translation by E. K. Hunt, with an introduction by Raymond de Saussure: “Lypemania or melancholia [Ch. 8].” In Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. New York: Hafner, 1965. First published in 1845. Ferrand, Jacques. De la maladie d’amour ou melancholie érotique. Paris, 1623. Translation, critical introduction, and notes by Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella: A Treatise on Lovesickness. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. “Trauer und Melancholie.” In Freud-Studienausgabe III: Psychologie des Unbewußten, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 183–212. 9th ed. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001. Translation by James Strachey: “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 14: 243–58. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. . “Neurosis and Psychosis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 19. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. Gowland, Angus. The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Jordan-Smith, Paul. Bibliographia Burtoniana: A Study of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy; with a Refs.: of Burton’s Writings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Kraepelin, Emil. Einführung in die psychiatrische Klinik: Zweiunddreissig Vorlesungen. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Barth, 1905. Translation and introduction by Thomas Johnstone: Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry. New York: Hafner, 1968. First published in 1904. Lambotte, Marie-Claude. Le discours mélancolique de la phénoménologie à la métapsychologie. Paris: Anthropos, 1993. . Esthétique de la mélancolie. Paris: Aubier, 1984. Lussier, Martin. “‘Mourning and Melancholia’: The Genesis of a Text and of a Concept.” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 81 (2000): 667–86. MEMORY / FORGETFULNESS FRENCH mémoire, oubli GERMAN Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Vergessen GREEK mnêmê [μνήμη], mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], memnêmai [μέμνημαι], lêthê [λήθη], lêsmosunê [λησμοσύνη] LATIN subvenire, menini, obliviscor v. CONSCIOUSNESS, DICHTUNG, HISTORY, IMAGE, MADNESS, MIMÊSIS, PARDON, PRESENT, SOUL, TIME, TO TRANSLATE, TRUTH, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG The specialized words denoting the faculty of mastering and actualizing the past, that is, memory-thought, split off from a group encompassing the activity of the mind in the broadest sense, and opening out onto many different associations, including warlike violence and delirium. The root men- covers everything to do with the mind in general, with men in menos [μένος] (force), and man in mania [μανία] (delirium), and for memory in Greek: mimnêskomai [μιμνήσϰομαι], mnêmê [μνήνη], mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], and in Latin: memini and memor, memoria. Memory has a double status: it can be referred to and invoked, or it can be experienced. There are different models for thinking memory. First and foremost of these is writing (Gr. graphê [γϱαφή]), with a trace that is left and then found again; imprinting (Gr. tupos [τύπος]); and a trail (Ger. Spur) that can be followed. We find, relatedly, the notion of a “treasure” trove, present in various models of thought (see the connotations of the Ger. Gedächtnis). When this memory-treasure is possessed, it lends itself to the progressive work of internalizing the world (see the Ger. Erinnerung), which is more dynamic than the different models of memory in the Romance languages. The close association of memory with gratitude is prefigured in the German language (Dank, “thanks,” alongside Gedanke, “thought”), and thought is concentrated into acknowledgment (reconnaissance), to the point where knowledge (connaissance) becomes nothing more than a fixation on history (Denken as Gedenken, commemoration). MEMORY 637 [μέϱμεϱος], “causing concern”). Ernout-Meillet’s RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine mentions that the expressive value one hears in memor has, according to him, become “attenuated.” It has had to go from a powerful energetic representation to the presence of a system of stabilized memory. But one can still think differently about the faculty of memory. The Greek language developed an independent group from mna-, another form of the same root, alongside men- (mimnêskomai [μιμνήσϰομαι], “to recall”; mnêmê [μνήμη], “memory”; mnêma [μνῆμα], “monument”; mnêmôn [μνήμων], “who remembers”). What happens is unusual. Memory staked out a terrain for itself within the order of spoken language, and it is hard not to connect this fact to the cultural importance of remembering the past, and to the formation of specialized castes who were guardians of a culture’s own language, a language that was inherent in its poetry. This is the key distinction: two core meanings radiate out in different ways, with physical battle on one side and verbal ability on the other, and the overlapping play of these two meanings can be seen clearly in early texts. B. Force and delirium: Menos, mania Homer shows that memory in action is put in the service of the social order. The soothsayer instructs the hero, who defends the town and the kingdom. The intrusion of unbridled passions reveals that the order is doubly threatened, whether this order is manifest at home or on the battlefield, by the raw nature that reigns within. Rules against the evasion of forgetting within, and against fleeing from the excess outside, are invoked in consequence. Rage is concentrated and deployed, as the uses of the verb memona [μέμονα] show in Homer’s Iliad: the hero, Hector, gives in to his passion, which remembers itself as if it had been the sole object of his will, and merges with his force (“Remember,” he says to the other Trojans, “your irresistible force [μνήσασθε] [ἀλϰῆς]”; 6.112). When the Trojans out of cowardice retreat in the face of war, they are embodied in the contrasting figure of Paris, and for a while the pleasures of lovemaking replace the heroic acts of war. Memory is associated with exhorting and actualizing social values, and forgetfulness with not respecting them. Helenos, the Trojans’ soothsayer, exhorts the two leaders, Hector and Aeneas, to stop the warriors from throwing themselves into the arms of their women, to the great delight of their enemies (6.80–82). He shows that their army is divided; it destroys itself, whereas nothing stops the champion of the Greeks. Diomedes rages like a second Achilles, and no one can measure up to his force (menos [μένος], which has been transformed into pure delirium; he is mad, mainetai [μαίνεται]). Achilles is the son of a goddess, but Diomedes is truly delirious (“all’ hode liên mainetai” [ἀλλ’ ὅδε λίην μαίνεται]; 6.100ff.); no ordinary force of war can oppose him (“oude tis hoi dunatai menos isopharizein” [οὐδέ τίς οἱ δύναται μένος ἰσοφαϱίζειν]; 6.101). C. The two forms of forgetfulness: Too much or not enough intensity Memory, as a creator of values, is implicitly defined in terms of a contradiction. Thought’s freedom disengages itself from, French clearly marks the duality between effective action and sudden, almost involuntary memory, by making a distinction between se rappeler (to recall) and se souvenir (to remember). Forgetting has a constant relation to memory, which is notforgetting, or a form of counter-forgetting, which then becomes a natural state, established through a selective effort of the mind. The English (forget) and the German (vergessen) suggest a kind of fluid power that carries away the traces of an experience, which is then out of reach. The effacement in the French word oubli (Low Lat. oblitare, “to erase, to efface”) conveys the idea of a more controlled relation: here, effacement is an object of analysis in itself; forgetting ceases to be the counterposition of a methodically selective process of remembering or recollecting, and in artistic creation, it characterizes the condition of a decisive transition to another order of meaning. I. Memory-Thought A. The Greek and Latin roots: “Memory” and “mental” Memory perhaps does not exist by itself, as a distinct intellectual faculty. The support it offers to man in his life is so central that it cannot be separated from the manifestations of thought in several of its forms. Thought represents to itself the choices it makes and endlessly recalls the paths and values it sets for itself. It becomes attached to what it knows, to what it knows it must not lose from sight, or to what one could not think, that is, what one could “forget.” Memory and warlike force are thus closely related in language, and converge as two forms of concentration. Where they diverge is when action splits into two and becomes, in the language of tales and songs, the object of an autonomous reminiscence. “I remember” is memini in Latin and memnêmai [μέμνημαι] in Greek, but historically these do not express the same thing. Both are perfect tenses, expressing a state, and are closely related through their linguistic genealogy. In Latin we find the same, rich root men- (all that is “mental”), denoting in a wider sense “the movements of the mind.” The corresponding words in Greek, menos [μένος], “force,” or the perfect tense memona [μέμονα], took on somewhat different meanings. In “to think forcefully,” the object and intensity of a commitment was retained, and as a result one could hear a passion in it, and above all the ardor of being in combat, a will which, when one has it, is irresistible. One would like to have it when one encounters it in the enemy, and one can never acquire it when the primary and spontaneous manifestation of the fundamental value of courage is lacking. The force that is thereby revealed lays claim to its superiority; it creates the social order of the heroic world, and of the world before it. The Latin words memor, “remembering,” and memoria, “memory”—which has become a catch-all term in several languages—are based on the supplemental intensifier of yet another root, but which is also attached to men-, and which we find in memini. It highlights no less forcefully how closely interconnected, outside of any specialized sense, the art of “remembering” and the contents of “thought” are (we have the related word in Sanskrit, smarati, “to think,” and in Greek, merimna [μέϱιμνα], “concern,” with the intensification in the adjective mermeros 638 MEMORY it, which is how he constitutes it. Forgetfulness opens the way for the opposite to happen, leading to loss, alienation, and disaster. II. The Making of the Past A. Making history and the war of memories Remembered values concern the life of the cities in their present, but there is another more autonomous form of memory, which integrates the past. It is represented in the epic by a character such as Nestor, who is old and who remembers. He is the indispensable witness, who is present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Actualizing the past relies on former conflicts and their political dénouements, which serve as models. The action itself verges on excess, and is in danger of being thereby weakened. Memory intervenes in the action, and is focused between these two poles. One of its forms consists of recalling the conditions of its incarnation. The other separates and distances itself from the action by imagining the form of the experiences of the past as if it were a matter first of all of knowing, and then acting. The creation of meaning implies the distance of a past and of remembered facts. But since the masses are incommensurable and in a sense immemorial, and thus “unmemorable” (amnêmoneutos [ἀμνημόνευτος], or unvordenklich in German), as impossible to grasp as the present that passes, small and large societies, states, and communities within states, all construct various horizons, which are all more or less mythical. Through memory they transform what is known, which had already been transformed. What is historical are not facts, which can often be embroidered, but the fact that a tradition was at a certain moment in time rearranged and reorganized, reordered in such a way that the guiding principles, even the finality, are intelligible to us. This is how we can grasp the importance of memory in the world of Greek culture. It takes the form of mastering a tradition, and of a particular mnemotechnic that is necessary because of the extent of the historical corpus, which increases when all of the different regional actualizations of that tradition are added to it. The stakes are extremely high. The struggles to preserve memory, of such immense importance in our times, are part of these traditions, within and between nations, which redefine their identities. Any event can be accepted, gaining a “right to memory,” or on the contrary be repressed, or challenged, because it is out of place, embarrassing, or burdensome. So while historical knowledge is progressing and attaining a previously unknown degree of precision, it still remains shot through with taboos and things left unsaid, amnesias by command, political constraints, and the need to hold on to mythical beliefs. The past is both unknowable and available, and this is what we might call the war of memories. B. Nietzsche: Becoming as ontology Faced with an investigative openness that encompassed all areas and ages of the modern world, which was exposed to their arbitrary nature and forced certain choices, and at a time when historicism was in the ascendant, Nietzsche described history in terms of corresponding periods of superior but remembers, the constraints of the social order. The two domains touch and overlap, and it is as if the struggle brings out an inherent tension within language. 1. A thought without limits Delirium in Greek, or mania [μανία], is always, in another form, “to think” (the same root men- with a zero vowel pattern): “the Greek mainesthai [μαίνεσθαι] is dissociated from the general notion and applies to a wild and furious passion” (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “mainomai” [μαίνομαι]). Delirium is freed from rage. Hector meets Diomedes, who is invincible. At the same time, the soothsayer urges him to go into the town so that he can implore the support of the protective goddess there. This is impossible, if not absurd, since Athena, as everyone knows, favors the Greeks. Helenos had a vision of disaster the moment Diomedes appeared, a vision of an absolute force. With a disregard for all principle, this force makes no pretense of commanding or ordering, and simply prepares for a crushing defeat. Pure delirium, mania, fills the heart of this warrior. No one can do a thing against his rage, which is potentially limitless. Language historians have focused on the way in which passion and madness come together in this text, as if the poet were highlighting their linguistic kinship. Homer’s verses here do reveal a certain excess (whether this is linguistically correct or inaccurate), related to what it means to put someone to death, outside of the social bounds that normally circumscribe the power to execute. Force is now helpless when faced with delirium since all the rules have been obliterated: the point of view that the text constructs leads to the discovery of a gaping hole, formed when collective memory is set aside. In its place we find the exorbitance of a form of thought that has no limits, and this becomes the basis on which memory is founded. Ulysses, in his visit to Achilles, presents in the same way Hector’s omnipotence as victor and conqueror, when he attempts to set fire to the Greek ships. Excess has a new master, and the gods give him free rein according to their will. They are playing with total annihilation, which will go in whatever direction they wish: “He leaves it up to Zeus and goes into a frightening delirium (mainetai ekpaglôs pisunos Du [μαίνεται ἐϰπάγλως πίσυνος Δύ]) . . .; the rage which possesses him sweeps everything away (kraterê de he lussa deduken [ϰϱατεϱὴ δέ ἑ λύσσα δέδυϰεν])” (Iliad, 9.237–39). The soothsayer’s vision is again overcome by the persuasion of Ulysses the orator. He goes immediately into a delirium. Nothing will now stop Hector, just as nothing stopped Diomedes; he is beside himself, in the grip of an acute fit of madness. 2. The perils of forgetfulness Forgetfulness (lêthê [λήθη]) can come, though not from an excess of intensity, but from a failure to hold on to thought. When he leaves the battle (in books 2 and 6) and returns to his mother, Hector does not want to drink the wine she offers him (6.258–62). “Do not break my limbs: I am afraid of forgetting force and combat” (mê m’ apoguiôsêis meneos, d’alkês te lathômai [μή μ’ ἀπογυιώσῃς μένεος, δ’ ἀλϰῆς τε λάθωμαι]); to forget is to lose. He does not want to lose his warrior-like force, and knows that he only has this force if he has a clear head, and in his heart, the force to think about MEMORY 639 frees itself from and leaves behind the stranglehold of the past, and responds to an expectation and desire to make the future (“der Blick in die Vergangenheit drängt zur Zukunft hin”). Nietzsche’s speculation is more realist: it considers the actualization of the forces in the course of a history that does not change and opens itself up to reincarnation. Memory is saved when its brilliance is recovered within this other messianism that he finds in the cyclical culminations of life. The remembered life of history is reaffirmed in the fulfillment of life (“Historie zum Zwecke des Lebens”), and individual moments are dissolved in the identity of a force. Memory then relates essentially, if not exclusively, to whatever force has been dominant; there is never anything inferior, and no projection into the future (see HISTORY). C. Poetic memory: Mnemosyne and Lesmosyne Memory is the mother of Muses, and Immortality is secondary. Remaking the past, conceived broadly as bringing together all human knowledge, was transformed in ancient societies when it was entrusted to specialists who brought the past alive through words and music. Memory became a professional activity, whose function was linked to feasts and celebration, and to a body of knowledge susceptible to invention, and to the reinventions of multiple horizons. The word mnêmê [μνήμη], which will assume so much importance, is absent from Homer, and only once does he use the word mnêmosunê [μνημοσύνη], which gave its name to Memory, mother of the nine Muses, according to Hesiod’s Theogony (l. 54). In a scene from the Iliad in which Hector, in his delirium (8.181), dreams of destroying the Greek ships, he again says that he has to keep the fire “in his memory” (mnêmosunê tis puros genesthô [μνημοσύνη τις πυϱὸς γενέσθω]). The two forms of delirium, the desire for death and poetic power, are joined together. The poet shows, at this crucial moment of an illusion, that he knew the word and uses it. He makes the delirious hero into a poet like himself, arranging reality in his ecstasy as he likes, and at the same time shows that he has chosen to make him speak in this way. Zeus, in the Theogony, makes love to Mnemosyne, and fathers the Muses over the course of nine nights, outside of the circle of the gods. When they are born, they find a home in a world apart, close to the summit of Olympus, where they share with the gods (while being separated from them) freedom from all cares, at an appropriate distance: this is the condition of song (vv. 53–67). The divine reproduces itself with the daughters of Memory; it re-creates itself within a zone of marvelous and unreal autonomy. The gods have access through voice to the joy that they feel from identifying themselves in this mirror, and men allow themselves, through the intervention of the Muses, to be transported far away; through them, they become part of the divine. Art makes them forget their misfortune, and through a temporary cessation of their cares, tears them away from the normal laws of an everyday temporality. A second Olympus is established next to the gods, a domain of forgetfulness. After all, the gods themselves are involved in the affairs of mankind, whether they control them or not. Forgetting as a way of repairing evil becomes, more absolutely, the condition of the conquest of another world, where in theory nothing is ever forgotten, nothing good, but also nothing evil. dominance. While some periods stood out, they were all essentially seen as concentrations of energy. For Nietzsche, knowledge is all the richer for restricting itself to what is essential, which is constantly reborn and returns in identical form in the immensity of becoming. The dialectical discussion of history and non-history in chapter 1 of the second part of Untimely Meditations (“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” [Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben]) only apparently defends forgetting (das Vergessen). Nietzsche articulates an aporia: man is condemned to escape the forgetfulness of childhood (die Vergessenheit), and destined to know his past, yet this past crushes him. All that counts are the strong concentrations in which life is manifest. Nietzsche broadens the frame of reference, starting with the personal, progressing to the historical, the anthropological, and then to the evolution of all societies. He talks deliberately and insistently about “the creative force of an individual, of a people, of a civilization” (die plastische Kraft eines Menschens, eines Volks, einer Kultur) in order to encompass a totality, when he is in fact thinking of the embodiment of these forces in the superior individual, the super-man. The speculative categories of ontology are for him transferred to the history of the triumphant man who abandons himself to becoming. The forces of dispersion and becoming in all its diversity are turned back against themselves, and they produce their own negation. Through an accumulation of vital forces, in an almost biological sense, becoming is pushed to the point where it can acquire the name of “being,” and paradoxically be immobilized at the moment of culmination. This is not so much a triumphant liberation from the weight that inhibits life, as a non-history. Nietzsche adapts, develops, and reinterprets the historian Niebuhr’s disenchanted conclusion on chance, where the eye of “the most powerful minds turned to the particular structure that commands their vision.” He invests in a supra-historical (überhistorisch) perspective, as a science of the past in its totality. For Nietzsche, a lucid analysis should enable us to recognize the conditions in which a particular force was able to become a dominant one within the arbitrary circumstances of history. One immediate consequence of this is that knowledge of the past (historical phenomena as an object of knowledge, Erkenntnisphänomen) is no longer the objective; if this were the case, it would be dead (“Ein historisches Phänomen, rein und vollständig erkannt und in ein Erkenntnisphänomen aufgelöst, ist für den, der es erkannt hat, todt”). Knowledge is living (blind power is not wasted “for someone who is alive” [für ihn, den lebenden]), only when it is applied to the content it is useful to know, for anyone who can use it to his advantage. Science is nothing by itself, it is destined for those in power, and past regimes serve the regimes of the future. Memory is rehabilitated as a site of reincarnation or resurrection (“in the wake of a powerful new current of life, of a culture which is becoming” [im Gefolge einer mächtigen neuen Lebenströmung einer werdenden Kultur]). By emphasizing the superior concentration of forces (“von einer höheren Kraft beherrscht”), Nietzsche thus eliminates the meaning of history, and moves in the direction of freedom and utopia, although it is true that his vision of what might replace it, since it is overly intellectual, is no less “supra.” It 640 MEMORY (The Swan) in Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) is an orchestration of the universal fecundity of exile and absence. Assimilation via the grandeur of failure, which is clearly situated within a Christian tradition, provides a new principle of unification. The modern poet confronts the immensity of literary tradition, and prefigures Mallarmé’s Le livre, as well as Paul Celan. In one of the most far-reaching explorations of the faculty of memory that has ever been undertaken, Baudelaire set out to make the widow, starting with Virgil’s Andromache, and then going farther back to Hector’s wife in Homer, a symbol of absence, welcomed and surpassed in the poetic pathos of a staged allegory. The mind has this power, and overcomes separation because it reconstitutes itself paradoxically in this separation: “je pense à vous,” “je ne vois qu’en esprit,” “je pense à mon grand cygne” (I think of you, I see only in my mind, I think of my great swan), then: “Je pense à la négresse” (I think of the negress): the movement extends to everything that has ever uprooted, exiled, excluded. This determinate absence retracing the fate of all that has not been, but which could or should have been, spreads its influence across every related language that is connected by similar exclusions. As it recalls in the midst of sorrow, the memory of memories is recomposed once again from one language to another (see MALAISE [MELANCHOLY, SPLEEN]). In response to the immense majesté (giant majesty) of the widow’s grieving we have the fecundity of a “memory,” which like the earth is already fertile, containing all that could ever have been said and written later on, as in various poetic projects of total synthesis: Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime: Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve! et puis à vous, Andromaque Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor! Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île, Aux captifs, aux vaincus!à bien d’autres encor! (Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings, Old neighborhoods, are allegorical for me, And my dear memories are heavier than stone. And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause: I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad, Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime, Gnawed by his endless longing! Then I think of you, Fallen Andromache And likewise in the forest of my exiled soul Old Memory sings out a full note of the horn! I think of sailors left forgotten on an isle, Of captives, the defeated many others more!) (The Flowers of Evil) From the word mnêmosunê, the poet creates in this same passage the antithetical word lêsmosunê [λησμοσύνη] (v. 55), the power of forgetfulness that is communicated. This is not an “intentional paradox” (as West says of v. 55 [Hesiod, Theogony]). Forgetting is not the absence of memory, nor its effacement, but more positively, a tearing one away from the avatars of an ordinary alienating existence. Initiating us into the history of the world drives evil out of this world. The word is created not as a negation, but as an analogy and as an active counterpart to memory, a complementary power, which is said to possess the art of driving away misfortune, as Helen’s drugs are able to do in volume 4 of the Odyssey. Lesmosyne provides a respite from sorrows and pains, and forgetfulness is her work of magic. This counter-term to memory is only attested once more that we know of in Greek literature, in the Antigone of Sophocles (v. 156), with the same allusion to an extraordinary overcoming of an ominous reality, the threat of nothingness. D. The fiction of total knowledge 1. Homer’s Muses The Muses know everything, and represent the abstraction of an all-powerful art. Totality in space and time, in the world or in history, is part of a limitless superhuman memory. When Homer asks for the help of the Muses, the daughters of Memory, he mentions a particularly precise knowledge, and above all a superlative distinction—“who was the first?” or “the best?”: see, for example, Iliad, 2.760ff.: “These were the leaders of the Danaans and their lords. But who was far the best among them, do you tell me, Muse—best of the warriors and of the horses that followed with the sons of Atreus?” (su moi ennepe, Mousa [σύ μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα]; Homer, Iliad). The information presupposes a choice; the Muses have the advantage of knowing everything, and the poet does not know it. The appeal is made to an absolute authority, and song renders even more problematic the knowledge to which poets lay claim. These invocations, through their forcefulness, confer the evidence of necessity upon the statement. It is flawless, without forgetfulness or simply true; the Greek of Homer’s time has an adjective that expresses what is “true” by saying “that which is not evasive” (alêthês [ἀληθής]), that is, small totalities, every time (see TRUTH). During the chariot race, old Phoenix is stationed at the finish line. He will be able to recall the race—in its entirety— and tell the truth (“hô memneôito dromou kai alêtheiên apoeipoi” [ὧ μεμνέῳτο δϱόμου ϰαὶ ἀληθείην ἀποείποι]; 23.361). It is not that he could hide the truth, but that he has to see everything to be able to make distinctions (this and not that), and indeed, the author analyzes the nature of his own speech by this means. He knows that the sum of knowledge that it implies is only a fiction or a construction, and thereby demonstrates the two aspects of absolute memory upon which it is itself based. It aspires to be whole, but the poet does not hide the fact that it is a fiction, pointing to its own limits and inadequacy. He knows that his art is an entirely artificial product, something made, precisely, through art. 2. Baudelaire’s Andromache: Suffering considered as a Muse In the age of modernity, the absolute power of memory as restitution is founded upon exclusion. Baudelaire’s “Le cygne” MEMORY 641 celebration. Its poetic means have transported it elsewhere, and forgetfulness is the line that is crossed by verbal transcendence, with art finding a way to create for itself another world. Forgetfulness is the primary condition of poetic creation. In the same way, Vergessen in German, in Celan’s poetry, is the very movement of words being uprooted, and deliberately becomes part of traditions of language in order to make them say something else. The distant separation from the world of the senses that forgetfulness represents is, then, a rejection of the language that evokes this world; it is a space of both transgression and freedom. All that has ever been said can be said again, and is saved from effacement by a system of references that is each time created anew. III. Models of Thought A. Writing One of the key questions in psychology and gnoseology is that of knowing how memory works. What do we retain, and why do we retain in such different ways, not primarily according to the history of each individual, but when we consider more generally the lesser or greater power of the faculty of memory itself? Plato, before Freud, chooses writing as the model. 1. Plato: Memory and knowledge All men are different and have their own unique mark. However, when Plato analyzes the error of this proposition, the model proves to be inadequate, and he literally makes signs fly. If inscription was originally engraved, it will subsequently become volatile. Plato first introduces the psychological or intellectual function of memory, without the recourse to anamnesis, in his Theaetetus dialogue, during the discussion of erroneous judgment. He admits “for the sake of argument” that the “ideas” or impressions formed in our minds leave an imprint on something, like a block of wax that we have within us, on which an impression (or ekmageion [ἐϰμαγεῖον]) is made. It is as if we were reproducing the sigil of a ring within our souls. So there is nothing to stop us having such representations, whether true or false, valid or invalid. Plato’s model includes a selection stage—forgetting occurs when the inscriptions are erased and lost (191d)—and an explanation of the inequality among men, which he says is due to the volume and quality of the impregnable mass we each possess (191c). He also makes the connection with cultural memory, which we would call collective memory, so we might describe it as the presence of Memory. It is indeed true that everything is written and discussed using memory, and Plato’s model is thus a necessary one (see EIDÔLON). What we still need to consider, however, is the case where an error is not a matter of correctly identifying an object, but of mistakenly making a false substitution in the order of knowledge available to us. The wax tablet no longer works as a model when we imagine the possibility of not representing something to ourselves that we in fact know very well. Knowledge eludes us if we consider that there is such a thing as a false opinion, and that “we are capable of not knowing what we know.” In the dialogue, Socrates introduces an important semantic distinction between having at one’s Majesty, although wholly objective, is already the product of an immemorial poetic tradition, and it is this in fact that the poet rediscovers, that he recollects and analyzes. The different levels of the Alexandrine verses transpose the triumph over immediate experience into the most mediated layers of literary culture, whose words the poet allows to resonate in the poem, such as the three syllables of “Helenus.” It is as if the most tragic separations were the source of all poetic creations, and conversely, that absence was only accessible via literature. The poet’s own exile (“dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile” [in the dim forest to which my soul withdraws]) connects him to all those who have ever been exiled. “Un vieux souvenir sonne” (An ancient memory sounds); there is only one, and when he has concluded this extended poetic exploration, he is as old as the world, recollecting every loss that has never been gathered in: “Je pense” (I think). By the end, it is everything and anything that the poet has fashioned into poetry because he has lost it. It is also a history of poetry, transformed by its Christian past. Suffering becomes a Muse, who knows everything, and the jubilant poet has a key that opens whatever he touches. 3. Mallarmé’s break with tradition: The freeing of forgetfulness With Mallarmé, the Orphic search for a truth hidden within language leads to a more marked break from previous poetic practices. The transition in his poetry from nothingness to a purer and more autonomous space of language means that he is concerned not only with the forgetfulness that the world has suffered through the ages, nor simply with the forgetfulness of the world as a condition of poetic creation, but with the forgetfulness of false forms of presence in the world, which are nevertheless celebrated poetically. Memory is displaced, and folds back upon itself. This difference in tone and light can be seen in one of his key sonnets, “Le vierge, le vivace ,” which is almost certainly a programmatic and defining statement of his art, and which makes forgetfulness a condition of poetic song. It is not poetry itself, which could equally well glorify the immediacy of life, as it has done ad infinitum in the past. There exists another language, whose precision is quite different, one that is transferred and refined through rejection and negation. The poetic élan and desire to overcome separation that we find previously are transported elsewhere, into something more absolute. These are still maintained in order to counter forgetfulness in memory, but memory now re-emerges on the other side of the nakedness of effacement, and performs a radical break with the world. Memory traces harden in this Orphic language as it becomes abstracted within a third space, and as it rises up out of this poetry that is stripped bare. The passage through negation was a necessary one. Poetry in the figure of a swan leaves behind it “ce lac dur que hante sous le givre / le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui” (Beneath the frost of a forgotten lake / Clear flights of glaciers not fled away; trans. John Holcombe). The world of life is thus divided, and also leaves behind the raw matter of frozen traces: “Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient” (In past magnificence of another day / The swan remembers). It remembers its lost glory as in a mirror: if it escapes, it is because it has resisted and not given in to incantation and 642 MEMORY inscriptions and different layers. As they are superimposed, there is a process of transcription (or of translation, Übersetzung), which is also a kind of rewriting (Umschrift), and Freud here also uses the word “transcription” (Überschrift). The scribe “transcribes.” According to the model sketched out in his letter, Freud suggests a transcription of the material that was retained in the first level, and made up of pure signs of perception. This transcription first takes place in a second layer, which is defined by the state of non-consciousness (Unbewußtsein), then in a third, which is characterized as “pre-consciousness” (Vorbewußtsein). This latter phase is dependent on representations of words, communicating with our official ego, and precedes the subsequent development of a “consciousness of thought” (Denkbewußtsein). The work of translation takes place at each moment of transition from one phase of life to another, and it occasionally goes wrong. The inhibitions that it runs up against explain the origin of neuroses. There are “residues” or “surviving” remainders. Freud’s terminology is innovative and bold. It suggests that something “survives” its previous stage (Überleben), and that these survivors are thereafter elements out of place. The different modes of writing enter into conflict, and normal development is arrested. Traumas can be understood as “fixations” in the strong sense of the term, hard obstacles that are the result of something that has not passed through or that did not work properly. Repression (Verdrängung) is in no sense the same as forgetfulness, but it is rather conceived as a resistance that redirects the “thrust” (Drang) of the drive, as if into a blind alley. It is through a kind of rereading, using the verbal representations acquired during the third stage prior to puberty, that one can go back and reactivate the unconscious. This return through memory is reparative, and can possibly bring about a recovery since the earlier repression may not have been firmly established at the following stage and can be eliminated. A partially intelligible memory opens up a path into the registers and archives of the unconscious, and enables a phased interpretation of the amnesia with the help of a memory. Dimly remembered perceptions, which are nevertheless conscious, force open the door leading to the essential mysteries of early childhood life (see DRIVE and VERNEINUNG). 3. Bergson: The traces of lived experience in involuntary memory In the chapter on “The Two Forms of Memory” Henri Bergson draws a distinction between, on one hand, a memory that eludes representation, as if it has been learned, and that is revealed to be a rationalist prejudice, an ideology inhibiting the perception of, on the other hand, another kind of memory, one that is “spontaneous” and “perfect from the outset.” As he says about this second sort of memory, “time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it” since it is a possession that is properly our own. Although time moves forward in its duration, it retains “in memory its place and date.” The terms Bergson uses here are important since what counts is “a memory” (souvenir) that must not become “foreign to our past life,” that is, alienated by everything else, by external influences. Ernst Cassirer, in the third volume of his Philosophie der symbolischen formen, reproached Bergson for not having disposal (“possessing,” kektêsthai [ϰεϰτῆσθαι]), and having concretely in one’s hand (echein [ἔχειν]), as we would hold a stylus (197b). What we need, more than an erasure or simple virtuality, is a wider effective presence, but a presence that is not actualized. Socrates is thus led, once he presents this deeper understanding of the complex reality of the dynamics of memory in the course of his reasoning, to propose another image. He imagines an enclosure, with a large variety of captive birds that would live in this aviary, whether in large swarms, or in small groups, or even on their own: each has been imagined to conform to the logical structures of thought. The owner tries to catch the one he needs, but does not always succeed. What he wants is there, but he cannot get it—“such that he does not catch and hold in his hands what he had possessed for a long time” (ha palai ekektêto [ἃ πάλαι ἐϰέϰτητο]; Theaetetus, 198d). If Homer, who knew this text well, says kear [ϰέαϱ] (or kêr [ϰῆϱ]) for “heart,” instead of kardia [ϰαϱδία], as Plato does, this is because he means “wax,” kêros [ϰηϱός], hiding it by means of the phonic association of poetry: we have to know how to interpret according to the Cratylus, and look for wax (kêros) in the word “heart” (kêr). Memory figured as wax is the “heart” of the soul (Theaetetus, 194c), and receptivity is thus defined and attributed to a fundamental technique, like that of the poets. It retains all impressions and ideas, imprinted as a seal is imprinted: the magic of an infinite number of seals is indeed a gift that memory, the mother of the Muses, has made to the human soul (191d). 2. Freud: Writing within the unconscious Freud’s great discoveries—infantile sexuality and repression, and the role of the memory attached to them—can be figured as a kind of writing, as Freud himself does. The history of the transmission of this writing resembles that of his texts, with the phases that precede it, and it follows the period of latency that separates us from the dramas of our inhibited early development. It is the impressions of this resistance and the wounds left behind that enable us to go backward in time, to decipher the “text,” and to correct deviations. The object of the kind of reconstructive memory (Gedächtnis) that the psychoanalytic cure attempts to perform exists as a form of writing. For Freud, a language has been primordially engraved in the body, at an age when the infant was merely responding to the urges of its drives and instincts. The infant bears the marks of this phase, like a sigil that has been imprinted, determining its history, or even culture, at a stage that is paradoxically the most vital and energetic of its existence. The deviations from accidents to this natural history set in place an equally primal negation, and they make the body into a text that can be read—or not read. Freud invokes the model of inscription from the outset, in the founding text of the famous letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896 (no. 52 = 112), written just as he makes his extraordinary discovery. Freud uses the term “writing down” (Niederschriften), as if there were within the different layers of the soul a scribe who recorded the perceptions or the accidents and impressions, and put them down on paper, so as to fix them precisely. The basic principle consisted of rigorously separating out consciousness from this memory (Gedächtnis), which was buried, and made up of successive MEMORY 643 B. Memory as a storehouse 1. German, between the actualization of the past and accumulation, Erinnerung and Gedächtnis There are two words in German with quite different values, Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, to which the French terms souvenir and mémoire only partially correspond. The first indicates an action, within the individual confines of a person’s inner self, as if actualizing one of a thousand possible memories. The second, closer to a cerebral capability than to the soul, calls to mind a casket and its treasures because of the suffix and the analogies one could make between Gedächtnis and a word such as Behältnis, a box. An object is enclosed and if one has a “good” memory, it is that much more safely preserved. This intensifier is formed from the root of the verb denken (to think), through an apophonic play on words. The basic tenses of denken are the preterite dachte, and the participle gedacht, which one could associate with the idea of a cover and a roof (Dach). The faculty of memory is in a sense multiplied in this shelter where everything that has been thought is gathered together. 2. Hegel: The concept and its associations For Hegel, memory becomes an integral part of the dynamics of the unfolding of Spirit. The dimension opened up by language with the word Erinnerung allows Hegel to situate memory, and to deepen the link that connects it to the successive structures of history. He understands it, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as a movement toward a superior, and more “inner” appearance, of substance when it is exposed to truth. The movement of interiorization becomes an internal memory, or Erinnerung. As substance acquires greater depth through this attention to the past, the science of memorized history is founded. Elsewhere, the progression of world history is presented as self-examination and self-discovery. Absolute spirit folding itself back upon its own foundation is translated by a turn of phrase borrowed from religious practice: insichgehen, “to enter into oneself.” Interiorization encompasses traditional self-examination and the entire dimension of self-reflection. 3. Poetic memory integrated into the philosophical system: Erinnerung and Andenken The Phenomenology integrates early Greek poetry into the evolution of self-consciousness. The pathos of the poet enables him to escape from domination by raw nature. This is an effect of developing one’s memory, mnêmosunê, in which a movement of reflexive thought becomes manifest, involving a reconsideration of one’s given state (Besinnung) and the acquisition of an internal reference. Interiority includes the interiorized memory (Erinnerung) of the immediacy of the previous stage, which is thus overcome. It was still deprived of freedom, and with writing, as well as music, the phase including the liberation of consciousness reaches a second level. The function of memory brings with it the painful rift of poetry. For Hölderlin, who experiences this rupture as a retreat of the gods of antiquity, his last hymns, entitled Memory (Andenken) or Mnemosyne, suggest the primordial role of the poet: it is his “fidelity” (Treue) that preserves. Poetry aspires to reconcile the alien with what is properly one’s own, all considered the intuition of time as a more global functional unity, which would include all of the different directions of our perception and our consciousness, future as well as past. Bergson’s dissociation of the horizon of memory from the horizon of expectation did not seem legitimate to Cassirer, but these are no doubt two equally valid points of view, and one does not necessarily have to absorb the other. Bergson wrote Matter and Memory at the same time Freud was making his discoveries. What is under debate in both cases is the identity and irreducible experiences of an individual person. Philosophy opens the way for a new form of “self” through the notion of involuntary memory, Proust’s reading of which produced a novelistic exploration that was unprecedented in its psychological depth. The fracturing of perspectives was fruitful, and almost fatal for the chosen domain of investigation (we might recall Epicurus, who was already attempting to construct intellectually a troublefree art of living, in his search for ataraxia [see GLÜCK and PLEASURE]). Knowledge of the past becomes a distinct act; it belongs to us, and is devoid of anxiety. We are ultimately indebted to Freud’s work for this principle. Bergson isolates spontaneous memory, as distinct from learned memory, which is part of learning the mechanisms that are indispensable to our role as social actors. He analyzes lived experience and discovers the succession of unitary and irreducible monads of which it is made up. The work of memory is not freely organized, but is preformed in the history of the subject, who provides the self with a multitude of “dates,” each one complex. The self tries to find its way among these, hoping to identify the things that count and that he has already retained. His memory will thus be made up of a multitude of memories, which are specifically limited to the experience of the person who lives with them. 4. Benjamin: Layer memory Walter Benjamin describes the value of Proust’s search in terms of its transcendental dimension. The self, in recollecting itself, discovers its being by recognizing the different stages of awareness of what it is doing. As a translator of Proust, Benjamin in a short text “Ausgraben und Erinnern” (Excavation and Memory) retranslates the work of uncovering. He compares it to an archeologist’s analysis of the layers of soil: “he will be like a man who digs” (wie ein Mann der gräbt). In doing so, he liberates images, which are the buried treasures of our past, provided the digger, or searcher, can indicate the place and the process of discovery: “being epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, recollection as true Erinnerung has to provide at the same time an image of the person remembering.” The act is illuminated in the silhouette of the digger. The image is elevated to the status of a symbol, and Benjamin breaks down into its constituent elements the German “synonym” for Denkbild (alongside Sinnbild; the title Denkbild, borrowed from a series of texts, groups together the disparate texts). By digging down into a word, we learn that what we remember is the image of the “thought” that penetrates this word. The word Denkbild has its tradition, and Herder, for example, wrote: “learn to understand these symbols [diese Denkbilder],” that is, those images in which thought is held fast (see BILD). 644 MEMORY poetic language, as able to come alive on its own through a particular effect of concentration. It is as if, reproducing itself by a breath, it were the creator of everything. The text encompasses a singular moment, marked by an exceptional happiness in which everything is sketched out and writes itself. There is nothing supernatural about the effect of this moment of grace, but as always with Celan, it charts a new path. The poem is composed in a process of self-understanding and self-discovery. A fist (poetry) closes on the emblematic device it is grasping, though these are only stones or pieces of gravel. Poetic speech is in the stones: DEN VERKIESELSTEN SPRUCH in der Faust, vergißt du, daß du vergißt, am Handgelenk scießen blinkend die Satzzeichen an durch die zum Kamm gespaltene Erde kommen die Pausen geritten dort, bei der Opferstaudede, wo das Gedächtnis entbrennt greift euch der Eine Hauch auf. (THE SILICIFIED SAYING in the fist, you forget that you forget, blinking, the punctuation marks crystallize at the wrist, through the earth cleft to the crest the pauses come riding, there, by the sacrifice-bush, where memory catches fire, the One Breath seizes you.) The “you” is the poet, and an “I” is addressing him. The hand of the “you” is holding the pen, and it is associated here with the reduction of writing and the rendering-rhythmical of nothingness. The blaze of memory itself is absorbed by the virtuality of a speaking that would conform to it entirely. The debris has been shaped. A piece of glass calls out and attracts punctuation marks, is given form and structure. The movement of concentration is sketched: the earth cracks open, and a ridge bursts forth. A moment of suspension thus rises up out from the verbal magma. It assumes a figure thanks to the pauses, and absence itself folds back on itself. The expectation of something taking a fixed form condenses the incandescence of memory, so it is no longer either the circumscribed object, or any faculty that is unfolding within language, but it is caught within an involuted movement and lets out a simple breath. This unique breath takes hold of the signs, and at the same time of the poet, who in this instance “forgets to forget,” as he usually does. The paradox is only an apparent one. The disconnectedness from the horizons that are set out suggests disappearance, followed by a return of everyday meanings. The dead, in their muteness, find a place where they can be “unforgotten” (unvergessen; see the poem “Still Life” [Stilleben]). Differentiation is the while acknowledging concrete differences, and under the threat of memory’s collapse. 4. Heidegger’s double interiorization The movement traced by Hegel is taken up again by Heidegger. In his Kant from 1929 (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik), Heidegger reinterprets the anamnesis of earlier visions of the soul in Plato in terms of fundamental ontology. He presents it now as a founding act of the human condition of being-there (Dasein): “It is indeed a question of remembering again, of anamnesis (wie der Erinnerung), as Plato says: but authentic ‘remembering’ (Erinnerung) must at all times interiorize the interiorized object.” This doubling of Hegelian interiority may seem surprising (“das Erinnerte verinnern”), but the word incorporates an analysis of the concept and moves beyond a tautology by a dimension opened up by the word, which divides the concept. What is “recalled” is not called by consciousness, but comes forth and imposes itself. The object is nothing other than the essential finitude of Dasein; it comes and takes hold of what opens itself to finitude. The movement is thus reversed, and the notable difference is that the interiorization is not properly speaking an interiorization of the self, as it was for Hegel. From a more theological perspective, welcoming the fundamental truth defines the authentic existence of the self. Memory will be a matter, then, of “letting [fundamental truth] more and more come to us,” in its innermost possibility, where innermost means constitutive or foundational. Memory is determined as a form of recollection. Erinnerung: no other word in any other language would allow one to think and translate this re-collection, and taking it one step further, interiority will be given to the truth itself that encompasses it. German culture based on Lutheranism ultimately focuses on this doubled reintegration of its primary movement. 5. Heidegger’s Hölderlin: Truth concentrated into Andenken and Verdankung, the words for memory After 1934, Heidegger locates “what thinking is” in the sphere of language. His argument unfolds notably in his meditations on and paraphrases of Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne,” which for him prefigures a source of poetic effusion that relates less to historically determinate memory than to a call emanating from thought itself. In Hölderlin’s poem we see a number of words merge together, like Andenken, or memory in the sense of a thought that is attached to an object (An-denken), or a concentrated accumulation, like Andacht des Andenken, where in addition to memory we have, with the apophony, religious fervor or contemplation or, by means of another vector, gratitude in the archaism Gedanc, in Dank and Verdankung: one could easily get lost or go under. It is no doubt as a reaction against Heidegger’s emphatic and expansive call for an original thinking, that Paul Celan, in his own semantic network, so clearly connected the word “thought,” Denken, to the constant memorability of historical truth, assigning to it another kind of origin by playing one “thought” off against another. The title of one of his poems, “Andenken,” refers to the most deliberately personal experience. C. Paul Celan: The breath of memory Poetry, like art, can be experimental. A short poem, from Breathturn, presents memory, inherent in the matter of all MEMORY 645 related more to “remembrance” than the act of memory is to the matter itself that is remembered. To forget is to not reach, or on the contrary to lose, and can also be an absolute tabula rasa. The etymology of the German word for forgetting, Vergessen, like the English “forget,” expresses failure or falling short. The search or pursuit has amounted to nothing, the prize has eluded us. In fact, the German ear, because of a phonic play of assonances, associates forgetting with a more widespread loss, by way of the verb meaning “to pour,” giessen (ich vergass, “I forgot”; ich vergoss, “I poured out”). It is the opposite of the horn of plenty, a current that sweeps us away. The French word oubli does not convey this same dynamism. The French verb oublier goes back to the popular Latin oblitare, present in all popular Gallo-Roman dialects, though alongside the more eloquent verb desmembrar used in the Southwest (Sp., archaically, said: desmemorar), based on memorare, to “unremember.” In classical Latin, oblivisci, along with the participle oblitus, is considered a metaphor borrowed from writing (see Bréal, then Ernout and Meillet). The word is related to oblinere, “to efface, wipe out,” and is also associated with levis, “smooth” (from the Gr. leios [λεῖος]), implying the absence of any roughness and difference, things being reduced to a white powder. French retains something of this perhaps in the idea of a flat vacuity, and Mallarmé connected the word oubli to aboli (abolished), which opens out onto nothingness. . B. Forgetfulness within memory Forgetfulness, with its power to tear one away from fullness of meaning, offers a means of perpetuating memory. Memory thinks, but only manages to do so through forgetting if instead of signifying loss, flight, or abandonment, memory allows us on the contrary to reconstitute a reference. We choose what counts. While in French one thinks about someone (pense à quelqu’un), or has a thought for someone (une pensée), in specific: the survivors from the work of selection are exempted from methodical forgetting, they are its raison d’être and its negation. The word “memory” comes alive, and is expressed in its condensation, it speaks to itself. IV. Forgetfulness as a Condition of Memory A. The words for forgetfulness and memory: Connotations of different languages Memory has a double status in modern languages. It is either invoked or experienced. How this duality is translated in each language is essential since it results from the fact that the past, whether lived or imagined, personal or collective, is both always there and absent. It is forgotten, or on the contrary comes to meet us and imposes itself, which is why there is a constant crossover between invocation and visitation. The range of associations relating to the ways one establishes a past or distant event, in one’s mind or body, covers a broad spectrum beyond the specialized words. In French, the abstract value of the intensifier rappeler (to remind; appeler intensément, to call intensely) appears very early on in the language, in the sense of “to bring to consciousness or memory.” It is the origin of the pronominal expression se rappeler (to recall; before 1673), which then begins to compete with se souvenir de (to remember), derived from the Latin subvenire, “to come to the aid of, to help,” then “to come to mind, to occur.” The impersonal expression il me souvient (I recollect) and the intransitive are older than the pronominal verb se souvenir (fourteenth century), which became established in parallel with se rappeler. In the one case, help comes by itself, it is experienced passively as a gift; the other conveys the idea of effort and the notion of success or of sovereignty, which is perhaps even magical. We can indeed remember the dead, and so enter into the unknown. “Calling” is also expressed in German as in Erinnerung rufen. French, though, emphasizes the act, or actualization, and does not directly link the verbal activity to the site itself of memory, nor to the faculty of memory, nor to a present knowledge. In English, for example, “to remember” is also 1 French, between thought and dream While other languages, such as English, German, Spanish, or Italian, only have one word for dream (Ger. Traum, Sp. sueño, Ital. sogno), French has two: on the one hand, songe (from the Lat. somnium), and on the other rêve, derived either from a form of the Latin rabies (rabies) or from the popular Latin for “vagabond,” exvagus, or according to others from a form of GalloRoman, exvagares, from exvadere, “to go out.” “Delirium” overlaps with “escape” in our imagination, unless one is in fact superimposed on the other. As well as the “interpretation of dreams (rêves),” French also has the expression “key to our dreams (songes),” and this singular duality has its own history. Songer, the verbal form, has a noble lineage. Its values can be situated in a context of quite wide semantic freedom. The word oscillates between the rigor of focused thought (songez-y bien, “pay close attention to this, think it over carefully”), and the vagueness of the imagination (à quoi songes-tu donc? “what are you dreaming about?”). The evolution of the language meant that it rather dominated the field, referring on the one hand to the rational operation of “thinking,” derived in Romance languages from the Latin intensive pensare, “to weigh,” which connects reflexive activity to evaluation and appreciation, not present in songer, and on the other hand, suggests the opposite world of dream experiences. The lexical unity became fractured and split off in two different directions. Penser gained the upper hand over songer, pushing songe into the realm of illusory appearance. Rêve, which was used to mean delirium or ecstatic extravagance, has only recently supplanted songe, without eliminating it entirely, however, such that when one is songeant, one is sometimes thinking, concentrating, or recalling, and sometimes one is dreaming, or letting oneself be carried away. 646 MEMORY as they are in English as well (“think” and “thank”). But they were originally, if thought was first of all formed by life returning back to its past, where it was expressed and described. Reflection developed within the autonomy of language which, turning upon itself, masters its own inventiveness. We can envisage not holding on to one meaning, as a deepening of our understanding of an event in its duration, as if it were a response, an echo, a replica. However, to be free of a (heavy) past—something life demands as time progresses: this responds to a very different, and contrary, objective. In this case, the present remains shaped by a choice, and imposes a certain way of doing things, a judgment, a practice, and a politics. See Boxes 2 and 3. Jean Bollack German the verb denken also means “to remember,” to the point where no distinction is made between the two verbs, as one does in more formal language with the prefix ge- in gedenken, which denotes the reverence of a solemn and ritual commemoration. Celan, who makes the extermination of the Jews the central focus of his poetry, uses one word for the other, thinking for remembering, and restricts its meaning, binding thought and memory together. This is a limit case, and perhaps an exemplary one. To think is to “enter forgetfulness”—as one enters a religion—in order to recall, to think about nothing but the object, which never moves away and which shapes the form of every content, whatever it may be, which is created by history. “Thoughts” (Gedanken) will thus be determined and structured from within by the power of verbal creation. French is unable to say this because thought and memory are not similarly bound together, nor linked to gratitude (Dank), 2 Erinnerung (recollection) and Gedächtnis (memory) in Hegel The German word Erinnerung (recollection) is based on the verb erinnern (to recollect)— literally, “to interiorize”—and signifies the internalizing act whereby one remembers some particular thing one knows or has encountered in the past. Gedächtnis (memory), on the other hand, derives from the verb denken (to think) and suggests a remembering capacity involving an abstract or generalizing element associated with thinking. The distinction between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung in Hegel’s philosophical system has been traced to Aristotle’s treatise De memoria et reminiscentia, which was posited as the source of the differentiation of two kinds or modes of memory in medieval philosophy from Augustine to Duns Scotus (see RT: Etymological Dictionary of Greek). Erinnerung is differentiated from Gedächtnis in the context of Hegel’s analysis of representation (Vorstellung) in the Encyclopedia of Science as the transition from perception or intuition (Anschauung) to thinking (Denken). Representation is divided into three stages with intellect progressing from Erinnerung (recollection) to Einbildungskraft (imagination) and Gedächtnis (memory). Here is the passage from paragraph 451 of the Encyclopedia: a. The first of these stages we call recollection (inwardization) in the peculiar meaning of the word according to which it consists in the involuntary calling up of a content that is already ours. Recollection forms the most abstract stage of intelligence operating with representations. Here the represented content is still the same as in intuition; in the latter it receives its verification, just as, conversely, the content of intuition verifies itself in my representation. We have, therefore, at this stage a content that is not only intuitively perceived in its immediacy, but is at the same time recollected, inwardized, posited as mine. As thus determined, the content is what we call image. b. The second stage in this sphere is imagination. Here there enters the opposition between my subjective or represented content, and the intuitively perceived content, of the object. Imagination fashions for itself a content peculiar to it by thinking the object, by bringing out what is universal in it, and giving it determinations that belong to the ego. In this way imagination ceases to be a merely formal recollection (inwardization) and becomes a recollection that affects the content, generalizes it, thus creating general representations or ideas. Since at this stage the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity is dominant, the unity here of these determinations cannot be an immediate unity as at the stage of mere recollection, but only a restored unity. The manner in which this restoration takes place is that the intuitively perceived external content is subjugated to the mentally represented content that has been raised to universality, is reduced to a sign of the latter content which is, however, thereby made objective, external, is imaged. c. Memory is the third stage of representation. Here, on the one hand, the sign is inwardized, taken up into intelligence; on the other hand, the latter is thereby given the form of something external and mechanical, and in this way a unity of subjectivity and objectivity is produced that forms the transition to thought as such. According to a traditional interpretation, the developmental, historical movement of Geist (spirit) in Hegel involves a flowing, cumulative process in which particular Erinnerungen are converted into the generality of Gedächtnis. This relation is still to be found in the interplay of recollection and memory in Bergson, according to which souvenir adds up to mémoire: “Il n’y a pas de conscience sans mémoire, pas de continuation d’un état sans l’addition, au sentiment présent, du souvenir des moments passés. En cela consiste la durée. La durée intérieure est la vie continue d’une mémoire qui prolonge le passé dans le présent” (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience). The same pattern can be discerned in the hermeneutic model of experience of Hans-Georg Gadamer, despite his critique of the synthesizing movement of Hegel’s dialectic. From the perspective of hermeneutic consciousness “the real” (das Wirkliche) or “real experience” (wirkliche Erfahrung) is handed down “out of the truth of recollecting” (aus der Wahrheit des Erinnerns). In an influential lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1980 and published later in the posthumous collection of essays entitled Aesthetic Ideology, Paul de Man proposed an interpretation of the relationship between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis in Hegel that challenged the traditional view. De Man approaches Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics and in particular the crucial distinction between symbol (Symbol) and sign (Zeichen) by way of the account of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis in the Encyclopedia. De Man starts with the following description of the interaction between thinking (Denken) and perception or intuition (Anschauung): “Thought MEMORY 647 subsumes the infinite singularity and individuation of the perceived world under ordering principles that lay claim to generality. The agent of this appropriation is language.” A corresponding movement is discerned by de Man on the level of representation in the transition from recollection to memory in the Encyclopedia. For de Man, in contrast to Bergson, there is memory only without recollection: “memory effaces remembrance (or recollection),” he argues, “just as the I effaces itself” by entering into or being appropriated by the generality of language. “The faculty that enables thought to exist,” de Man continues, “also makes its preservation impossible.” Thus, he concludes, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics are “double and duplicitous”: they represent the efforts of Gedächtnis and the order of the sign to preserve aesthetics by sweffacing the singularity of Erinnerung that is the basis of Hegel’s symbolic concept of art. Thus, the famous statement by Hegel—“art for us is a thing of the past”—could be translated on the basis of de Man’s interpretation as “Erinnerung for us is a matter of Gedächtnis.” On the occasion of de Man’s death in 1983, Jacques Derrida delivered a series of lectures later published as Mémoires for Paul de Man that were in part an extension of the reinterpretation of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis just sketched. Derrida is especially interested in elaborating an affirmative dimension to de Man’s critique of Hegel. “We are quite close here,” Derrida observes at one point, “to a thinking memory (Gedächtnis) whose movement carries an essential affirmation, a kind of engagement beyond negativity, that is to say, also beyond the bereaved interiority of introjection (Erinnerung): a thinking memory of fidelity, a reaffirmation of engagement.” Thought, Derrida writes, is not “bereaved interiorization; it thinks at boundaries, it thinks the boundary, the limit of interiority.” Thus, for Derrida, thinking affirms itself at the limit of Hegel’s distinction between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis. Kevin McLaughlin REFS.: Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Edited by Arnaud Bouaniche. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. Translation by F. L. Pogson: Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Bloch, David. Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Bormann, C. von. “Erinnerung.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2. Edited by Joachim Ritter. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1972. de Man, Paul. “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics.” In Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 91–104. Derrida, Jacques. Mémoires for Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava; translations edited by Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989. Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Mind (Part III of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). Translated by William Wallace, together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s 1845 edition, translated by A. V. Miller and with foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. 3 Erfahrung (German)—Experience (English) Experience (Erfahrung) which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source (Quelle) from which all storytellers have drawn. “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” Translated by the English word “experience,” Erfahrung derives from the verb fahren (signifying “to go” or “to travel”) and contains the sense of knowledge to which one has come through something like a journey. Erfahrung is thus rooted in the concept of a knowledge attained from observations made in the course of an event or an encounter. This knowledge is not limited to the person making the observations but rather includes those to whom it can be passed along and handed down as part of a tradition. The evidence of Erfahrung is communicable; it is knowledge that can be imparted and learned. “Learning” is another signification of Erfahrung in the sense both that one learns something from one’s own experience and that one can learn of something communicated by someone else, for example, through a letter or a newspaper: “durch einen Brief, durch die Zeitung etwas erfahren.” The adjective erfahren is applied to those who are skillful, expert, or practiced in a particular occupation, such as a skillful doctor (ein erfahrener Arzt) or an expert tradesman (ein erfahrener Fachmann). Unlike the obsolete signification of the English word “experience” or the sense carried still today by the French word expérience, Erfahrung does not include the scientific meaning of what we now call “experiment” (from the Lat. experiri and the Gr. empeiria both based on roots signifying “to try”). Nevertheless the path by which Erfahrung travels to become a crux in modern German philosophy in the work of Immanuel Kant passes by way of the experimental method developed in natural science during the early modern period. As with “experience,” the philosophical origins of Erfahrung are traced to the concept of empeiria in Aristotle, especially to his Metaphysics, where it is defined as the specifically human capacity or faculty produced by memory: “The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience” (980b). The product of memory, Aristotle specifies, experience is knowledge of the particular (what the Scholastics would later call cognitio singularium), rather than the general, which is the domain of art (981a). This definition of experience as the capacity for knowledge of the (continued) 648 MEMORY particular produced by memory in human beings is cited and recited throughout medieval and early modern philosophy from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Hobbes and Christian Wolff. The new scientific theory advanced by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century with its emphasis on experimentation reinterpreted the concept of experience in effect by reaching back to its etymological roots and insisting on the connection to “trying” and “trial.” Most importantly, Bacon argued that experience was not a faculty or capacity but rather a method and a process—not an ability but a way to come to knowledge. Bacon differentiated between experimentia vaga and experientia ordinata and asserted the superiority of regulated experiment over vague experience as the true path to knowledge. Bacon’s distinction in the word “experience,” more precisely in the Latin word experientia, of these two significations is suggested by the nineteenth-century English translation of the Novum Organum (1720) that remained a standard for more than a century: “And an astonishing thing it is to one who rightly considers the matter, that no mortal should have seriously applied himself to the opening and laying out of a road for the human understanding direct from the sense, by a course of experiment (experimentia) orderly conducted and well built up, but that all has been left either to the mist of tradition, or the whirl and eddy of argument, or the fluctuations and mazes of chance and of vague and ill-digested experience (experimentia).” The two senses discovered by Bacon in the single Latin word experientia that are translated into English in this passage as “experience” and “experiment” correspond in German to Erfahrung and Versuch. The Grimms’ dictionary (RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch) traces the emergence of Versuch in the sense of a scientific experiment to seventeenth-century natural science and cites Wolff’s allusion in the early eighteenth century to the distinction between gemeine Erfahrungen (ordinary experiences), on the one hand, and Versuche (experiments), on the other. The most important condition for the emergence of Erfahrung as a pivotal concept in modern German philosophy was the development of the empiricist theory of experience by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Locke and Hume returned to and reworked the Aristotelian sense of empeiria as a human faculty, rather than deriving from it a method of scientific trial in the manner of Bacon. Instead of being produced by memory, however, experience for the empiricists was the result of perception. The human capacity for experience, according to these theories of “understanding,” is a potentiality to be receptive to inner and outer impressions. The empiricists made the radical claim that receptivity was the source, not just of knowledge of the particular, but of all knowledge. Bacon had ordained that the experimental method was to begin with what he called experientia literata—emphasizing the indispensable work of the experimental scientist who writes down and archives the results that form the basis of his “interpretation of nature” (interpretatio naturae). At the hands of the empiricists nature writes itself down on human beings who become their own archive. Thus we come into the world, as Locke famously says, as a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” and nature inscribes itself on us as experience. The ground shifts in Kant’s project for a transcendental critical philosophy. With the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 Erfahrung breaks free of the empiricist context and takes up a position that inaugurates the speculative tradition in German thought and redefines the philosophical landscape of the West. Erfahrung for Kant is the result not of receptivity to sense impressions but of the ability to judge inner and outer objects that affect the mind. Transcendental critique is, in other words, concerned with experience as a possibility—with “our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.” Kant thus begins the exposition of Erfahrung in the first part of the first Critique with the deduction of space and time as elements in which the appearance of objects—of experience—becomes possible. Although it does not come from experience, the knowledge to which we come in transcendental critique is of experience, specifically, of the possibility of experience. Kant’s theory of Erfahrung is therefore not to be understood as simply turning away from empirical experience—it might be more accurately described as a translation of this experience into the Erfahrung of transcendental critique. Erfahrung in Kant was the key source of the revival of interest in his work during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the German context, for example, Hermann Cohen’s study of this topic, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (first published in 1871 and in a revised and expanded second edition in 1885), became a canonical work among the Neo-Kantians, in particular, those centered at the University of Marburg. At one point in his interpretation Cohen underlines the following sentence at the beginning of the introduction to the second edition of the first Critique as encapsulating Kant’s critique of British empiricism, and in particular of Hume: “But although all our cognition commences (anheben) with experience,” Kant writes, “yet it does not on that account all arise (entspringen) from experience.” The difference that the transcendental turn makes, Cohen observes, can be understood as the distinction between anheben (commencing or beginning) and entspringen (arising or springing from) in this assertion. The first part of this sentence acknowledges the skepticism of Hume’s insistence on experience as the ground of knowledge; but the second part makes room for the transcendental thesis that sense impressions do not represent the “final formal element of experience.” Erfahrung also includes a dimension—Cohen calls it an “extension” (Ergänzung) or a “complement” (Complement)—of a priori possibility. We can have knowledge of objects that we do not encounter in the space and time of a psychological process, Kant proposes, by “only what we ourselves lay into them” (nur was wir selbst in sie legen). Cohen glosses: “What kind of ground is it that we ourselves ground? It should be not a beginning but a springing from (Entspringen), but this springing from occurs indeed out of a spring (Quelle) that we ourselves dig. In ourselves lies the springing point (Springpunkt) of all knowing.” Among the most important philosophical developments in the twentieth century that derive from the return to Kant’s theory of Erfahrung is Walter Benjamin’s literary and social criticism. Although he was influenced, especially in his early work, by the writings of Cohen and his student, Ernst Cassirer, Benjamin was by no means an adherent of Neo-Kantianism, much less a mere follower. Cohen and his colleagues in Marburg believed that the “extension” that is the source of Erfahrung—its originary possibility—could be discovered and described scientifically through the application of the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime. Benjamin’s early essay, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” (1914–15) shows some signs of experimentation along these lines. Yet in another essay from this same early period, “On the Program for the Coming Philosophy” (1917), Benjamin harshly criticizes what he regards as the mechanically “empirical” concept of Erfahrung promulgated on the basis of Kant (indeed, he calls this concept “Kantian”). When the question of Erfahrung resurfaces in his writings of the 1930s, in particular, in his critical essays such as “Experience and Poverty” (1933), “The Storyteller” (1936), and “On Some Motifs in (continued) MEMORY 649 REFS.: Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck, 1992. Translation by Rodney Livingstone: Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Baer, Ulrich. “Landscape and Memory in the Work of Paul Celan: ‘To Learn the Language of the Place.’” In Semiotics, edited by C. W. Spinks and John Deely, 111–23. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. . Œuvres completes. Vol. 1. Edited by C. Pichois. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976. Benjamin, Walter. “Ausgraben und Erinnern.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by T. Rexroth, 4:400ff. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. . “Denkbilder.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by T. Rexroth, 2:305–438. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Translation by Rodney Livingstone et al.: “Ibizan Sequence” and “Thought Figures.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 553–737. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bergson, Henri. Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. First published in 1896. Translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer: Matter and Memory. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. First published in 1912. Bloch, David. Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen formen. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Vols. 1–3: Oxford: Cassirer, 1923; vol. 4: Berlin: Cassirer, 1931. Translation by Ralph Manheim: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Introduction by Charles W. Hendel. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–96. Celan, Paul. “Atemwende.” In vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke. 5 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. First published in 1967. Translation by Pierre Joris: Breathturn. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995. . “Stilleben.” In Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Translation by David Young: Marick Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1902. Edited by J. M. Masson. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986. . The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985. Baudelaire” (1939), Benjamin explicitly refers to Henri Bergson’s critique of Kant’s theory of Erfahrung, especially as it extends from Bergson’s early work translated as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889) to Matter and Memory (1896). Bergson’s critique in the former of Kant’s transcendental deduction of space and time in the first Critique becomes the basis of the concept of memory developed in the latter. What especially attracts Benjamin’s attention is that Bergson’s theory of memory offers an account of the dynamic communicability of experience. Bergsonian mémoire, Benjamin proposes, reveals that “Erfahrung is matter of tradition”—this, he goes on to explain, constitutes the “philosophical structure” of Erfahrung. At this point Benjamin draws on a Hegelian topos and distinguishes between, on the one hand, experience as Erfahrung, which is based on Gedächtnis (the German translation offered for Bergson’s mémoire), and, on the other, a kind of experience he calls Erlebnis (citing Wilhelm Dilthey), which is derived from Erinnerung (a word employed by Hegel to characterize an interiorizing form of subjective memory that has been translated into English as “recollection”). The specific connection between experience and memory in Benjamin’s theory of Erfahrung is articulated through his manipulation of these four terms for which English equivalents have proven elusive. If Benjamin’s theory of Erfahrung attempts to emancipate itself from the scientific concept of experience advanced by Cohen and the Neo-Kantians, on the one side, it also seeks to free itself from the antiscientific concept of experience proposed by Bergson, on the other. It is therefore important to take note of how Benjamin departs from the Bergsonian project of providing an account of experience, and in particular the experience of time (la durée) as it is truly lived. Unlike Bergson, whose critique of Kant argues that true experience occurs in a temporality fundamentally different and apart from spatial extension— indeed, Bergson sees spatialization as the hallmark of the inauthentic, mechanized time of science—Benjamin insists repeatedly on what he calls the “interpenetration” (Durchdringung) of time and space. According to a similar logic, Benjamin describes the experience of the “standardized, denatured existence” of the mechanical time against which Matter and Memory is directed itself as an Erfahrung and goes on to suggest that Bergson’s work communicates knowledge of an experience he avoids in the form of an image of what Benjamin calls “large-scale industrialism.” The communicability of this image derives, in other words, from what does not take place in the time and space of a cognitive experience. The knowledge communicated by this image springs, not from an object that appears within a psychological process of perception, but from what we ourselves—or perhaps, more specifically, Benjamin himself—lays into this source. This inserting of an “extension,” which Benjamin proceeds to characterize as a “synthetic” process in his comments on the interpenetration of involuntary and voluntary memory in the fiction of Marcel Proust, is the basis of an Erfahrung of which “only a poet can be the adequate subject.” In this sense Benjamin finds in the poetry of Baudelaire and in the novel of Proust, but also in the wanderings of the “historical materialist” in his late study of nineteenthcentury Paris the transcendental Erfahrung opened up by Kant. Kevin McLaughlin REFS.: Aristotle. Metaphysics. 2 vols. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Bacon, Francis. New Organon. In vol. 8 of The Works of Francis Bacon. Collected and edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1863. 59–350. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Program for the Coming Philosophy” and “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” In Selected Writings, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. . “Experience and Poverty.” In Selected Writings, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. . “The Storyteller” and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings, vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Cohen, Hermann. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd ed. Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1985. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989. Inwood, Michael. “Memory, Recollection and Imagination.” In A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Kambartel, Friedrich. “Erfahrung.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2. Edited by Joachim Ritter. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1971–2005. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 650 MENSCHHEIT 3.19.62), humanity is still envisaged from the Aristotelian perspective of the political nature of man as endowed with language. Yet the term also refers to a series of qualities and virtues, to the extent that we can see a convergence of the two meanings in the attempt to bring together rhetoric, philosophy, history, and law in a single educational program. Although Cicero confessed that he did not really know what man was, or what his essence might be (De finibus 5.33), and thus does not strictly speaking allow us to see his thinking as anticipating “humanism,” it would be possible to deduce from it, as Leonardo Bruni did in the fifteenth century, the notion of studia humanitatis. . The medieval Christian tradition emphasizes the opposition between humanitas and divinitas, and makes the first term a synonym for everything that has to do with finitude and imperfection, without putting into question the primary meaning of human nature. Molière can thus have his theatrical pedant, Métaphraste, say, “Si de parler le pouvoir m’est ôté, / Pour moi j’aime autant perdre l’humanité” (If the power of speech were taken from me / I would just as well lose my humanity: Le dépit amoureux, 2.8), in the same sense that Pascal, speaking of Christ, writes, “Sachant que nous sommes grossiers, il nous conduit ainsi à l’adoration de sa divinité présente en tous lieux par celle de son humanité présente en un lieu particulier” (Knowing how gross we are, he thus conducts us to the adoration of his divinity, present in all places, by that of his humanity, present in a particular place: Provincial Letters, letter 16). Furthermore, the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (RT) takes humanitas as its point of reference both for the entry Menschheit and for Menschlichkeit, but it is precisely this dependency on Latin that Fichte challenged in the fourth of his Addresses to the German Nation (1807), criticizing the use of the term Humanität. His reaction to the importation of a foreign term was based on the argument that the development of the particular language and thought of the German people had in reality nothing to do with imported terms that were grafted on artificially, especially if the languages from which these terms were borrowed could not compete with the German language in their originality. French was, according to him, too dependent upon Latin, whereas German was perfectly capable of thinking the notion of humanity by giving it its own expressions: Menschheit, Menschlichkeit, and Menschenfreundlichkeit (which subsumes the idea of kindness, benevolence to others, and philanthropy, in its literal etymological sense). This explicit argument barely disguised the subtext: Fichte was reacting against a French model imported through the Academy of Berlin, which proposed a universalist ideal of humanity, when it was Napoleon’s armies that undertook to impose this ideal, by refusing any German specificity. In addition, Humanität was too directly linked to a Roman Catholic semantic and cultural context, whose “universalism” was opposed head-on to the Lutheranism that founded the German language. It was all the more surprising that the Grimms’ dictionary, which dates from the first half of the nineteenth century and, as we saw, does refer to the Latin humanitas, does not record Humanität (RT: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch). Humanität, after all, was already present, sixteen years Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 3 of Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. “Andenken.” In Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996. 79–151. Translation and introduction by Keith Hoeller: “Remembrance.” In Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Amherst, MA: Humanity, 2000. 101–74. . Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Vol. 3 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991. Translation by Richard Taft: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th ed. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Hesiod. Theogony. Edited by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Homer. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray, revised by William F. Wyatt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “La vierge, le vivace . . .” In Œuvres completes. Vol. 1. Edited by B. Marchal. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen I–IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 1. Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by Walter Kaufmann: “The Birth of Tragedy.” In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House, 1967. . Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ricoeur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Translation by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer: Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Weinrich, Harald. Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: Beck, 2005. Translation by Steven Rendall: Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.