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

PACTUM, FOEDUS, TESTAMENTUM. It. patto English, pact, compact, contract, covenant. FOEDUS TESTAMENTUM HEBREW] (בְּ ִרית] BERĪT FRENCH alliance GERMAN Bund διαθήϰη v. ALLIANCE, and BERUF, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, EUROPE, GOD, LAW, PEOPLE, SOBORNOST  The word used in the Bible to designate the covenant, berīt, is certainly related to the Akkadian birītu, “bond.” Thus the underlying idea is probably the same as that underlying German Bund, from binden, “to bind.” On the other hand, the literal meaning of the usual expression for “conclude,” karat berīt [ריתְ ּ ִב רתַַכ ,[ּis “cut” (cf. Gr. horkia temnein [ὅϱϰια τέμνειν]), whence a semantic paradox: one binds by dividing. The expression no doubt comes from the sacrifice consecrating the covenant, as the Greek equivalent spondê [σπονδή] came from the libation that completed it, or the English expression “to strike a bargain” came from the gesture of shaking hands. People passed between the two halves of an animal, calling down on themselves the same fate in the event that they committed treachery (Gn 15:9, 17; Jer 34:18). A covenant is an oath connected with a curse (Gn 26:28; Dt 29:11). The idea first arises from a contract between humans, such as a soldier’s obligation to serve his leader (2 Kgs 11:4). At first, this contract is unequal: a superior imposes duties (Jgs 2:20; Ps 111:9). Later it becomes an agreement among equals (Gn 14:13), brothers (Am 1:9), friends (1 Sm 23:18), or spouses (Mal 2:14). The idea of a covenant may include, as it does in contemporary French, international treaties. Such treaties, beginning with the most ancient, between Egyptians and Hittites (1280 BCE), appeal to the gods as guarantors. In this way, every people that enters into a contract recognizes the power of the other’s gods and thus makes a kind of covenant with them as well (Ex 23:32). The novelty of Israel is the idea of a covenant between a people and its own god, a god who chose his people (Ex 19:5f.). The divine was a 6 [اجتهاد] Ijtihād The word comes from the verbal radical jhd meaning “to apply oneself to,” “to strive.” The corresponding substantive jihād, meaning primarily “effort” and “striving,” has also come to be used for “holy war.” Ijtihād is another derived substantive and is to be translated also as “effort” or “initiative,” but it means, above all, “effort of interpretation,” especially in jurisprudential matters. Thus the noun mujtahid (the person who performs ijtihād) designates a scholar who interprets the law in order to apply it or adapt it to new cases and circumstances. Beyond its technical meaning, the concept of ijtihād, especially for reformist modern thinkers, has come to signify the intellectual effort of the Muslim world to reconstruct the religious thought and the law in Islam in order to cope with the challenges of the changed times. In that sense ijtihād is the dialectical other of taqlīd, which is the blind adherence to and repetition of tradition (or what is constructed as such) simply because it is tradition. REFS.: Kurzman, Charles, ed. Liberal Islam: A Source Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mas’ud, Khalid. Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Ijtihad. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2003. Ramadan, Tariq. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Smock, David R. Ijtihad: Reinterpreting Islamic Principles for the Twenty-First Century. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2004. Officium, professio, vocatio. BERUF, profession, vocation, calling, métier, vocation ἔϱγον, πόνος, ϰλῆσις, תַ פְ קִ יד, v. VOCATION, and CLAIM, GLAUBE, GOD, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, SECULARIZATION, SOLLEN, STAND, STRADANIE, WORK Beruf became untranslatable relatively recently: it is associated with Max Weber and his 1904–5 study on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The problem concerns first the twofold meaning of the word, which oscillates between the secular (trade, profession) and the religious (vocation): whereas German hesitates, French is forced to choose. But Beruf has another, remarkable particularity: its untranslatable aspect does not have to do with the genius peculiar to a language, but to the decision made by a translator, Luther, and to a historical development, that of modern capitalism, whose whole novelty is, according to Weber, concentrated in it. 104 BERUF A second solution consists in coining a portmanteau word that indicates the difficulty: that is what Jean-Pierre Grossein does by using profession-vocation in the most recent French translation of The Protestant Ethic—after having justified this solution in his selection of Weber’s writings on the Sociologie des religions, arguing that “awkwardness” must be preferred to “insipidness” in cases where Beruf clearly denotes the “interweaving” of the two registers (“Glossaire raisonné”). Translator Isabelle Kalinowski emphasizes that this neologism “is more an explanation than a translation.” The choice to really translate, that is, to situate the word in the normal usages of the target language, led her to a third solution, using throughout the word métier, which has “the advantage of applying better to the very broad meaning that Weber gives to Beruf ”—unless, of course, the translator is obliged to leave Beruf in German. However, with métier one of the two nuances of Beruf disappears: the French word has no particular religious resonance. Kalinowski accepts this risk, and even sees in it a confirmation of the starting point of Weber’s analysis, namely, “the absence in Luther’s time of a term having the connotation of the word ‘vocation’ in Romance languages—and, we might add, in other languages as well” (italics in original). The most faithful French translation of Weber would thus be one that failed, precisely because it is a translation into a Romance language, to render the plurality of the meanings of Beruf. The polemic raging among translators thus opposes two philosophies of translation that are probably irreconcilable. As for the word itself, it would be false to say that Beruf spontaneously unites contraries, the sacred and the profane, and that it is in its nature to express something different from what other languages express. Weber very clearly refuses to take into account “any ethnical peculiarity of the languages concerned” or to see in the word “the product of a Germanic spirit” (cf. his refusal to invoke a “national character”). Weber’s starting point is in fact linguistic, but his reasons are located outside language: And if we trace the history of the word through the civilized languages, it appears that neither the predominantly Catholic peoples nor those of classical antiquity have possessed any expression of similar connotation for what we know as a calling (in the sense of a life-task, a definite field in which to work), while one has existed for all predominantly Protestant peoples. Beruf does not divide languages qua languages, but it reveals another division separating Protestant peoples from others, and from Catholic peoples in particular. In this sense, Beruf is a very special kind of untranslatable: “the idea is new, a product of the Reformation”—in short, it is a confessional untranslatable. How can Beruf lack an equivalent if it is not by virtue of a particular character of the language itself? The first thing to note is that Beruf was not initially an untranslatable term, but became one: thus we must assume a historical change. Second, this change takes the typical form of a decision, that of an author, Martin Luther, who according to Weber chose to understand the word in a new sense. Third, this authorial decision is more precisely a translator’s decision: for Weber, it was in translating the Bible that Luther created I. The Semantic Development of Beruf By devoting a section of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to “The Notion of Beruf in Luther,” Weber gave the philosophical and sociological vocabulary a new term, and at the same time discovered an untranslatable: the French at times also use the word Beruf, all the more willingly because for Weber it has the value of an emblem for the whole process of the emergence of modern capitalism. In itself, Beruf can be defined as a certain conception of work as “an absolute end in itself, a calling.” For Weber, the spirit of capitalism is concentrated in Beruf, as is shown by his definition (or at least his “provisional image”) of a “mentality that seeks, in a systematic, rational way, a legitimate profit through a vocation (Beruf).” This quest for profit was accompanied, in the modern period, by a “social ethic” bearing “a specific idea of vocation as duty (Berufspflicht)” that would confer a moral value on labor and on the vocation in which it is performed. In the French translations of the preceding quotations, the word Beruf is rendered by vocation and métier; the first translator, Jacques Chavy, used in the same passages the terms vocation, profession, and métier, profession. Here we see the difficulty of the term. In French not every métier is a vocation, whereas Beruf denotes two things at once: a regular, remunerated occupation, and a calling (the word Beruf comes from rufen, “to call”), the election that leads to this occupation and gives life its ultimate meaning. French translators of Weber can choose among three solutions. The first accepts the necessity of choosing, as Éric de Dampierre, who helped revise the first French translation, explains in a note: The translation of Beruf, “métier et vocation,” a key word for Weber in many regards (cf. Le savant et le politique), required that the semantic tension between its two poles be retained. We have rendered it by métier (or profession) in a religious context, and by vocation in an occupational context, in order to emphasize this tension that provides the foundation for the work’s thesis. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to assume that these two complementary meanings are present everywhere, in particular in a Biblical context, where doing so would amount to reintroducing an anachronism: in such cases, we have made do with besogne, an old Scriptural word that seemed to us the best suited to render the notion in its undifferentiated state. The principle of translation is thus a constant inversion: to render the foreignness of Beruf, the word métier, normally used in secular, occupational contexts, is used in religious ones, and the word vocation, which is normally used in religious contexts, is used in occupational ones. This solution is necessarily a makeshift one: the inversion is not carried out systematically, and cannot be, since it has to assume what is in question, namely, the division into the temporal and the spiritual, the occupational and the confessional. The peculiarity of German Beruf is that it attenuates this division, and expresses simultaneously what French has to distinguish or even oppose. It is thus dangerous to start from this distinction between the sacred and the profane to translate a term that challenges that distinction. BERUF 105 German Bibles also used a composite of rufen, ruffunge). The choice of Beruf to render ponos/ergon appears as a deviation of meaning that we are justified in assuming to be deliberate when we consider how much was invested theologically and doctrinally in this whole translation. Nevertheless, the question remains whether the conflation of occupation and divine vocation has a basis in the text of the Bible. Weber (French trans. K.) locates a passage in 1 Corinthians (7:20) that seems to move in this direction. This passage exhorts every Christian to “stay in that calling in which he was called” (en têi klêsei hêi eklêthê [ἐν τῇ ϰλήσει ᾗ ἐϰλήθη]). In the characteristic reduplication of klêsis/ eklêthê, we seem to find the two senses of Beruf, or at least klêsis seems likely to have a non-religious meaning. However, Weber notes that here the word is not strictly synonymous with ergon in Sirach (French trans. K.), and interprets it as a social status (Stand) rather than as a Beruf (in the sense, he explains, of a “delimited domain of activity”). There are, nonetheless, certain problems with Weber’s thesis. The first is intrinsic: for a speaker of modern German, Luther’s Beruf is almost as untranslatable as for a speaker of any other language. The two senses of the word seem to have diverged again after Luther: to avoid any ambiguity, the German editions of the Bible that revise Luther’s translation now render the Pauline klêsis by Berufung (vocation). Weber himself hesitated regarding the sense of Beruf in modern German. On several occasions he refers to the “current meaning” of the word (French trans. K), taking it for granted that the latter is “profane” (French trans. K.). Thus Beruf would signify no more than an occupation in a “neutral” sense (French trans. K.). However, it is striking that a few lines further on, in describing the development of the Latin opificium, Weber explains that the word was “morally neutral” and contrasts it with a text by Seneca (De beneficiis, 4.18), where it “becomes the equivalent of Beruf ” (French trans. K.). Weber’s hesitations show that the word’s nuances are still difficult to handle—even for a native speaker, if he lingers over it a moment and asks what it really means. They also show that Beruf’s semantic development continues—at least if Weber has correctly accounted for it. Here we encounter a second difficulty: we can ask whether the use of the term owes as much to Luther as Weber assumes. We should note first that Sirach, where Luther is supposed to have invented the modern meaning of Beruf, was not included in the canon of the Protestant Bible. Thus it is unlikely that this meaning would have had much influence had it not been spread by Luther’s original works as well. On this point, assessments may vary: there is indeed a doctrine of the Beruf in Luther’s political works, but one may wonder, reducing it to its real proportions, whether the importance accorded to it is not a retrospective illusion produced by reading Weber. II. The Doctrine of Beruf: A Retrospective Illusion? Luther’s 1523 treatise on political authority, Von weltlicher Oberkeit, formulates the idea that “everyone must attend to his Beruf and his work” (Denn eyn iglicher muss seins beruffens und wercks warten). But it does not go much further. Luther’s other political works elaborate instead a doctrine of conditions (Stände). The latter’s content corresponds to what Weber the modern concept of Beruf by modifying the earlier use of the word. Weber’s reasoning is set forth in particular in two long notes, veritable textual and linguistic surveys reviewing Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, English, and Romance languages. The old use of Beruf is defined as religious, equivalent to Berufung or Vokation: it corresponds to French vocation, and particularly to ecclesiastical vocation. For Weber, the current sense of the word is thus a “profane” sense, “purely secular”: in a remarkable way, Luther is supposed to have secularized the term. According to Weber, the pivotal text that marks the term’s transition to its modern use is found in Luther’s translation of a passage in Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), 11:20–21, which recommends: 20 Stand by your task, and attend to it, and grow old in your work. 21 Do not wonder at the works of a sinner, but trust in the Lord and keep at your toil; for it is easy in the sight of the Lord to enrich a poor man quickly and suddenly. The stakes involved in translation seem to multiply infinitely when we consider that the text of Sirach translated by Luther was composed in Hebrew, but transmitted in Greek (the book is, moreover, not part of the Jewish canon). The original Hebrew text was partially rediscovered only in 1896 and finally completed in Qumran, then in 1964: in Weber there are echoes of the first reconstitution (French trans. K.). The Greek translates the first occurrence of the Hebrew tapĕqîd [ידִ קְ פַ ת—[rendered here as “task,” designating an established occupation—by diathêkê [διαθήϰη]; “work” (v. 20a) renders ergon [ἔϱγον], and “toil” (v. 21a) ponos [πόνος]. It is the last two words that Luther (who knew only the Greek text) translated by Beruf: en tôi ergôi sou palaiôthêti [ἐν τῷ ἔϱγῳ σοῦ παλαιώθητι] becomes beharre in deinem Beruf, and emmene toi ponôi sou [ἔμμενε τῷ πόνῳ σοῦ] becomes bleibe in deinem Beruf (on the other hand, in v. 20a, diathêkê is oddly rendered by Gottes Wort, the Word of God; cf. Die deutsche Bibel). Earlier German translations had never resorted to Beruf, limiting themselves to a literal translation of ergon by Werk, “work” (the Vulgate translates this word by opus). Luther was also the first to conflate the work and the effort that produces it, ergon and ponos, in a single term: the verse thus begins to turn around this Beruf that the translation repeats twice and elevates to the dignity of a biblical concept. In itself, however, Luther’s new translation of Sirach does not make Beruf an untranslatable. We must add that he uses the term to translate another word, which is also Greek, but this time it is not a Hebrew word translated into Greek because it is drawn from the Epistles of Paul. The word in question is klêsis [ϰλῆσις], which a French Bible such as the Jerusalem Bible translates by appel (call) (1 Cor 1:26; Eph 1:18; 4:1–4) or by vocation (Heb 3:1), while the Vulgate makes systematic use of vocatio. Thus Luther assimilates into Beruf not only ergon and ponos but also klêsis: according to Weber, this is the source of the word’s twofold meaning of “occupation” and “vocation.” Luther’s translation decision appears still more remarkable if we follow not the order of the books of the Bible but the chronology of his translation. Luther began by translating the New Testament in 1522; his complete version of the Bible dates from 1534. When he translated Sirach, he had thus already used Beruf in its traditional sense (earlier 106 BERUF On the other hand, so far as doctrine is concerned, Weber recognizes Luther’s “economic traditionalism” (French trans. K.), and locates—as did Troeltsch later—modernity in the Puritan sects, the first to establish the “secular asceticism” he considered characteristic of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (see French trans. K., where this asceticism is contrasted with Luther’s “acceptance” of “the fate that God has irremediably determined for everyone”). No doubt we must also take into account the contribution made by Luther’s disciples, who may have provided the theoretical mediation that the new use of Beruf in translation needed. In any case, Weber remains prudent in examining the Augsburg Confession (see Kalinowski’s note in her French translation; she does not see the modern sense of Beruf clearly emerging in this text). Here we are close to the core of the problem, which has to do with the partition between the temporal and the spiritual. Luther’s decision to bring Beruf into his translation of Sirach is open to completely contradictory interpretations depending on the position taken with regard to the problem of secularization: did Luther secularize the word by using it to translate ergon and ponos, or did he instead give “everyday temporal work” a “religious meaning” (French trans. K.) far removed from the “disenchantment of the world”? Weber’s hesitations concerning the modern meaning of Beruf (neutral or ethical?) show that the difficulty has not been resolved—if it ever can be: on the contrary, everything suggests that the secularization thesis is connected with the hermeneutic postulate. We might just as well maintain that the translation of ponos/ergon by Beruf could hardly be more religious. In the history of German translations of the Bible, Beruf here replaces Werk. This terminological substitution has a theological motivation that Weber, surprisingly, does not mention: even in an Old Testament text, Luther took care to avoid Werk, which referred immediately to the execrated doctrine of salvation by works. The sola fides doctrine of justification (justification by faith alone), whose connection with the concept of Beruf (see French trans. K.) Weber mentions only further on, thus played a role in the translation in a way disproportionate to the relatively small doctrinal importance of the verse. Beruf is a theologically overdetermined translation, and it is probably this overdetermination that explains the other translational twist (also ignored by Weber) that led Luther to render by a single term the two distinct Greek words ergon and ponos: taken out of its traditional use, Beruf had the advantage of drawing attention away from both works and the effort (ponos) that performs them, that is, from both the adverse theology and the psychology on which it was based. Moreover, Weber was the first to emphasize that the “import” of his analysis of Luther’s Beruf was at best “problematic.” He thus abandoned the attempt to establish a direct connection between Luther’s attitude toward temporal activity and the emergence of capitalism (French trans. K.). Similarly, it is impossible to explain an untranslatable term like Beruf as a decision made at a certain point by a translator when this decision seems not to have had a special impact, at least before Weber. It would be more accurate to say that Weber is the sole inventor of Beruf, or that the latter is a Weberian and not a Lutheran untranslatable. To be sure, explaining a term by reference to an individual decision, even if it is a translatorial says about Beruf and about Luther’s sacralization of temporal activity, notably through his refusal to confer a superior value on monastic ways of life: for Luther, God is just as present in the kitchen as in the convent—if not more (see, e.g., Predigten des Jahres 1534). Nonetheless, the word Beruf is not given special treatment: in particular, it never appears alone, but always in association with Stände (see the commentary on Psalm 118, Das schöne Confitemini, and the treatise Vom ehelichen Leben, which shows that among the Stände we must count not only occupations but also marriage). The idea that there is a Lutheran doctrine of the Beruf (Gustaf Wingren) is thus more selected from the texts than actually developed in them: it is not that the resulting interpretation is false, but it would take a long investigation into the history of ideas to determine how exegetes finally came to regard the notion of Beruf as a central category in Luther’s thought. In this investigation, we would have first to determine how Weber himself was persuaded of the importance of the word and idea of Beruf for Luther. The suspicion that Luther has been read retrospectively on the basis of Weber is illustrated by a passage in the chapter on Luther and Calvin in the History of Political Philosophy edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. This passage is entitled “Politics as Vocation,” but seems in fact to deal with the doctrine of social status. A note added by the French translator recalls, however, the author’s main concern at the same time that it returns to the problem of translation: The English word “vocation,” like the French vocation, is a poor translation of the German Beruf, and signifies an occupation insofar as one is called to it, the activity that one performs (the text speaks here of the “vocation” of the father or husband). The author is implicitly referring to Max Weber’s text on “Politik als Beruf.” Many things are in fact left implicit here (except perhaps the title itself, “Politics as Vocation,” a literal translation of Weber’s book Politik als Beruf). American political science is perhaps alone in giving Luther’s politics the place it deserves, and its representatives who emigrated from Europe, from Hannah Arendt to Leo Strauss, played some role in that, but because of the constant debate that they carried on with Weber, they probably knew Luther only through the categories of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This retrograde movement came in addition to the one carried out by Weber himself, who found his own questions anticipated in Luther—questions of science and politics as Beruf, which, as Catherine Colliot-Théllène points out in her translation of Wissenschaft als Beruf and Politik als Beruf, deal with the “mission” of the scientist and the politician and refer to something quite different from the Protestant sublimation of everyday occupations. However, that does not mean that we are dealing here with a false problem, as is shown by the difficulties Weber encountered in handling the word. The problem of Beruf could probably appear only in the question that Weber asks: to what degree, and in what respects, are we still Protestants? Regarding Luther, the Protestant Ethic offers a contrasting analysis. So far as translation is concerned, Luther’s posterity is strongly emphasized: the English Puritans used “calling,” modeled on the rufen (call) of Beruf to denote a simple occupation—but the word had difficulty establishing itself as a translation of klêsis in English Bibles (French trans. K.). IMAGINATUM Imago SPECIES BILD 107 BILD (GERMAN) FRENCH image, tableau, figure, visage ԑἴδωλον דְמוּת, צֶלֶם, v. IMAGE [EIDÔLON], and ANALOGY, BILDUNG, DICHTUNG, DOXA, IMAGINATION, MIMÊSIS, OIKONOMIA, REPRÉSENTATION, SPECIES, TABLEAU The vocabulary derived from Bild (image) is particularly rich in German: not because there is, as in Greek, a differentiated plurality of terms to designate an image from different points of view, but because there is an especially complex set of words that are modeled on Bild and systematically related to it: Urbild (paradigm/archetype) and Abbild (copy), Gleichbild (“copy,” as well, but emphasizing resemblance more than fabrication), Nachbild (“ectype,” “copy,” emphasizing its secondary, imitated status), Bildung (education, culture), Einbildungskraft (imagination), and so on. The development of this system is representative of a large part of the history of German philosophy. The starting point for thought about the image (Bild) was provided by the biblical verse that says God created man “in his own image” (Gn 1:27). Meister Eckhart’s speculation that the image and its model are identical was based on this biblical text and left its mark on later philosophies. In each case, Bild had to be entirely rethought, indeed retranslated, depending on whether it was associated with its model (whence the Urbild/Abbild opposition) or with the faculty that produces the image (Einbildungskraft), and on the way in which the force and function of this faculty was conceived, as reproductive or truly productive. In the course of interpretations of Kant from Fichte to Heidegger, the way in which Bild was conceived came to concentrate the major opposition between the understanding and sensibility, and thus the conception of the subject, between spontaneity and receptivity. I. The Avatars of the Biblical Verse The beginning of Genesis raises the question of the fundamental determination of the human being created in the image and likeness of the creator in the context of the biblical prohibition on images (cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §10). Thus in Luther’s translation, Bild (Gottes) corresponds to the Hebrew ṣèlèm [םֶלֶצ ,[the Greek eidôlon [ԑἴδωλον], and the Latin imago. The New Testament says that Christ is eichôn tou theou tou aoratou [ԑἰχὼν τοῦ θԑοῦ του ἀοϱάτου] (“the image of the invisible God,” Col 1:15), and the Vulgate says that he is imago Dei invisibilis. Luther renders this as “das Ebenbilde des unsichtbaren Gottes.” Luther’s translation is more precise than that of the Vulgate; Bild leaves open the possibility of a dissemblance (the dissimilitudo mentioned by Saint Augustine [Confessions, book 7, chap. 10] and later by Saint Bernard [De diversis, sermon 42.2]), whereas Ebenbild is so to speak on the same footing with its original, a “perfect image” that is not susceptible to degenerating from “the vivacity of the original” (Bossuet). This translation variant shows in an exemplary way the problem raised by the relationship between the image and its model, Bild and Urbild; in German, the issue was framed by Meister Eckhart, two centuries before Luther. decision, does not necessarily make it less enigmatic: that is the case when Beruf is explained solely by Luther’s initiative. But the solution ceases to be inaccessible when the study of translatorial decisions is connected with that of their reception: Beruf probably came from a question peculiar to Weber, who transformed a translatorial fact into a genuine concept, and in doing so brought out the real difficulty. Untranslatables do not always arise where we expect them—in this case, they arise at the intersection of the philosophical, the religious, the political, and the social. REFS.: Grossein, Jean-Pierre. “Peut-on lire en français L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme?” Archives européennes de sociologie 40 (1999): 125–57. . “À propos d’une nouvelle traduction de L’Éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalism.” Revue française de sociologie 43 (2003): 653–71. Luther, Martin. Das Schöne Confitemini an der Zahl des 118, Psalms. In Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hereafter WA), vol. 31/I, 68–182. Weimar: Böhlaus Nacht, 1906–61. . Ecclésiastique, in Die deutsche Bibel. . Predigten des Jahres 1534. In WA, vol. 37, 480, 1.2–8. . Vom ehelichen Leben. In WA, vol. 10/II, 275–305. . Von weltlicher Oberkeit, wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei. In WA, vol. 11, 229–81. . Works of Martin Luther. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1943. Strauss, Leo, and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of Political Philosophy. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963. Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. Edited by K. Lichtblau and J. Weiss. Bodenheim: Athenäum Hain Hanstein, 1993. . Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1988. . L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme. French translation by I. Kalinowski. Flammarion, 2000. . L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme. French translation by J. Chavy. Plon, 1964; repr. 1990. . L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme. French translation by J.-P. Grosseain. Gallimard / La Pléiade, 2003. . Max Weber: Political Writings. Edited by P. Lassman and R. Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. . Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by S. Kalberg. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002. . The Sociology of Religion. Introduction by T. Parsons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. . Wissenschaft als Beruf. Translated by Catherine Colliot-Théllenè. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. . Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917–1919), Politik als Beruf (1919-1922) Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. Edited by M. Reiner Lepsius, W. J. Mommsen, W. Schluchter, and J. Winckelmann. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1992. Wingren, Gustaf. Luther on Vocation. Translated by Carl C. Rasmussen. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957. BIEN-ÊTRE This term is generally used to translate the English term “welfare,” but differs from “well-being” as the objective form differs from the subjective. See CARE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, UTILITY (cf. UTILE). On the welfare state, its German translation as Wohlfahrtsstaat, and the connotations of its French translation as état providence, see GLÜCK, IV; cf. HAPPINESS. v. CIVIL SOCIETY, GOOD/EVIL, PLEASURE, POLITICS, STATE, VALUE 108 BILD language by mysticism (cf. Grimm, Duden, Kluge), so that it has the meaning of “leaving an imprint on the mind,” on the model of terms such as Einblick (vision), Eindruck (impression), Einfall (incidence, idea that occurs to one), and Einleuchten (illumination). In this case, the prefix ein- indicates a movement of internalization toward the “living source” constituted, according to Meister Eckhart, by “the image of God in the depths of the soul” (daz gotes bilde in der sêle grunde), whereas Kant understands it in the sense of a unification. Einbildung has in fact been “one of the fundamental terms of Germanic thought since Paracelus and Böhme, and even since the great mystics of the Rhineland” (Marquet, Liberté et existence). In the “Transcendental Deduction” in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (A, 120), Kant writes: “Die Einbildungskraft soll das Mannigfaltige der Anschauung in ein Bild bringen.” Kemp-Smith renders this as “imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image,” but it might better be translated as “the imagination has to form a picture of the manifold of intuition.” Jean Beaufret has even interpreted this sentence to mean that imagination “organizes into a single picture the manifold provided by intuition,” having emphasized that “the literal meaning of Bild is ‘picture’ much more than ‘image’ ” (“Kant et la notion de Darstellung”). The “single picture” (Bild) in question is none other than the manifold as it presents itself, not as a jumble of sense impressions, but with the more attractive appearance of a universe—as a kosmos [ͷόσμος] rather than a chaos [χάος]. Kant thus conceives Einbildungskraft, a German translation of the Latin vis imaginationis, on the basis of Bild, a picture that is single because unified; but he also conceives it, inversely, as a unifying and synthesizing power of “uni-formation.” To qualify the synthesis of the manifold of sense intuition, which is possible and necessary a priori, Kant resorts to the expression “figurative (figürlich) synthesis,” giving the Latin equivalent, synthesis speciosa, in which II. Abbild, Urbild: Meister Eckhart or the Life of the Image The term Bild underwent a rich theological and mystical development from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius. The originality of Eckhart’s doctrine of the bilde (Lat. imago) has notably to do, on the one hand, with its conception of “being-an-image” (das Bildsein) as a relationship of perfect assimilation (imago est similis) between the image (Abbild) and that of which it is an image (Urbild), so that being-an-image is boldly declared to be the whole of the image, which lacks nothing of that of which it is the image: the image is less relative to a model (Urbild) than it is the living relationship to this model, which is in turn nothing other than the relationship to the image that constitutes it as a model. On the other hand, Eckhart’s doctrine is characterized by his dynamic conception of the image: “Imago proprie est emanatio simplex, formalis, transfusiva totius essentiae purae nudae” (Strictly speaking, the image is a simple, typical emanation transfused with the whole essence pure and unadorned), a kind of internal gushing forth and boiling. Eckhart’s image is never at rest, but constantly seething, because it is life. Wackernagel has noted the “prodigious enrichment undergone by the motif of the image through its conversion from Latin into Eckhart’s native language,” and also the semantic gap between bilden and entbilden (a term that remained extremely rare: Suso, Tauler, Angelus Silesius): “Between a bilde taken sometimes as an image and sometimes as an anti-image, the prefix ent- can indicate both difference and its contrary, that is, assimilation” (“Imagine denudari”). With Kant, the term Bild embarks upon a philosophical career that is no less rich, if only because of the profusion of terms that it elicited. III. Bild, Einbildung: Kant from the Imaged to the Imaging Kant clearly understands Bild on the basis of the verb einbilden, which seems to have been introduced into the German 1 The image in Hebrew ( sèlèm . [םֶלֶצ ,[děmût [מוּתְד([ The passage in Genesis where it is said that man is made in the image of God is a monologue in which God, addressing himself in the plural, says, “Let us make man in our image, as our likeness” (1:26). The verse presents several difficulties: a. to whom is this plural addressed? The church fathers saw in it a foreshadowing of the Trinity; the Jews and modern exegetes see in it the chorus of angels; b. why these two different words, each preceded by a preposition with a different nuance? An almost identical binary formulation, in which the prepositions are inverted, expresses the resemblance between the father and the child (Gn 5:3); c. what does this resemblance consist of? Is it a physical property, like standing upright? Is it reason? Is it freedom? A poetic formula justifies the inviolability of the person: “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” (Gn 9:6); d. the verse is followed immediately by the reminder of sexual difference: “So God created man in his image (běs�alěmēnû [נוֵּ מְ לַצְ ב ;([ּin the image of God created him; male and female created he them” (Gn 1:27). What relation is there between the two affirmations? As for the words for “image,” the first comes from a root meaning “to carve” and in the first place designates a sculpted figure, above all for use in a cult—what the prophets call an “idol” once the cult has come to concentrate only on the Temple of Jerusalem. The root of the second means “to be similar,” and the word itself designates in the first place a copy, a reproduction. Furthermore, the first preposition, of which the chief sense is “in,” supposes a stable possession; the second, which in the first place means “like,” suggests the status of the image is itself metaphorical. Christian theology distinguishes between the image, which partakes of the nature of man and thus cannot be lost, and the resemblance. Sin disturbed the second, and the economy of salvation must permit its recuperation. The idea is present with the Greek and Latin fathers (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.16.2; Saint Augustine, Of the Trinity, 14.4.6) before it passes into the Middle Ages (e.g., Saint Bernard, On the Song of Songs, 82.7–8). Maimonides explicates the two terms with the principal aim of removing all temptation to make God into a corporeal being (Guide for the Perplexed, 1.1). Rémi Brague BILD 109 absolute ego’s self-positing; by projecting itself in an image, the ego gives itself a sort of mirror in which its free productivity is reflected. Thus Fichte has deliberately accentuated and radicalized the thetic character of the synthesis peculiar to the productive imagination, extending the transcendental schematism and its Schweben (floating in suspension) that shapes in advance the contours of the thing that the intuition is preparing to take in (Kant) or to capture as part of its sphere of influence (Fichte). When I perceive a house, Kant says, “I draw as it were the outline of the house” (Critique of Pure Reason, B, 162), the imagination thus understood being a constitutive ingredient of perception: “This floating (Schweben) itself designates imagination by its product; it produces the latter, as it were, in this movement and through this movement itself” (Fichtes Werke, vol. 1, Grundlage der gesamten Wissensschaftslehre). The Fichtean Bild is thus less feigned than freely fashioned in accord with the self-deployment of the absolute ego. Einbildungskraft, which Fichte still sometimes calls Einbildungsvermögen (shaping power) can thus be defined as “das bildende Vermögen des Ich” (Fichtes Werke, vol. 9, Nachgelassenes zur theoretischen Philosophie), a “formative power of the ego.” Moreover, according to Fichte it would be better termed Bildungskraft; here Fichte is pursuing the Kantian enterprise of reappropriating for philosophy a term bequeathed to the German language by the mysticism of the Rhineland. It was left to other great figures of German idealism, notably Hölderlin and Schelling, to exploit the speculative and poetic resources of Einbildungskraft understood as productive imagination, even if Fichte’s philosophy is—still more than that of Schelling, with which it is often associated in this respect—the philosophical apotheosis of Bild. This phenomenon is probably related to Fichte’s concern to anchor in ordinary language the results of his apparently very esoteric research. He is no doubt the philosopher in whose work we find the most occurrences of the term Bild. But “the image, the correct translation of Bild, does not express this inner power that makes Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science) and consequently the self, a being that ‘creates itself’ ” (Philonenko, L’Œuvre de Fichte). V. Bild, Gleichbild: Schelling or the Image as Power Ascribed in turn to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, the text Franz Rosenzweig titled The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism (ca. 1796) seeks to justify the idea of a “sensible religion” made possible, nolens volens, by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which makes the beautiful the symbol of morality (§59). By maintaining that “the philosopher must have just as much aesthetic power as the poet” (der Philosoph muss eben so viel ästhetische Kraft besitzen, als der Dichter), the author of this text, as a reader of Schiller, seems to have grasped the essence of the Kantian analyses by making this “aesthetic power,” which is the imagination as Einbildungskraft, the poetizing or productive (dichtend) source of philosophizing activity, for all that Kant had made the imagination the secret, common root of understanding and sensibility. Schelling did not fail to emphasize Einbildungskraft, “so well-named in German,” which he interprets, in §22 of his Philosophy of Art (Philosophie der Kunst), as “signifying literally species echoes one of the Latin equivalents of Bild. Because it is “figurative,” the synthesis speciosa is thus ipso facto bildlich (Heidegger), which means that it refers to the figuring or rather the configuring power of Einbildungskraft. On this “very beautiful Latin expression that Kant uses, however, only once in the Critique,” see Longuenesse (Kant et le pouvoir de juger), who refers to a passage in Kant’s 1770 Inaugural Dissertation in which space and time are described as formae seu species essential to the constitution of our minds (§4). It is a “very beautiful expression” notably in that the Latin terms forma and species always associate the idea of beauty (esp. hermosura, Ital. formosità) with that of form and aspect—so that we see here already an anticipation of the Critique of Judgment. If imagination (Gr. phantasia, Ger. Phantasie), defined classically in accord with an Aristotelian tradition as reproductive imagination (De anima, 3.3), is taken up again by Schulmetaphysik (e.g., in Wolff, Psychologia empirica, §92, and Baumgarten, Psychologia empirica), for his part, Kant distinguishes, notably in §28 of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht), a reproductive imagination that belongs to the domain of psychology, and a productive imagination that belongs to the domain of transcendental philosophy, an exhibitio derivativa and an exhibitio originaria. The reproductive imagination is still called in German zurückrufend (re-calling), and the productive imagination dichtend (poetic or creative). Insofar as imago (image) is etymologically related to the verb imitari (imitate), “imagination” is a not very satisfactory translation of Einbildungskraft when the latter, conceived as productive, is seen as an originary configuring power in the service of the understanding, or even, according to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, as constituting its essence. The question of Bild comes up again in the chapter on the schematism, where Kant feels the need to distinguish Bild from schema (Schema; A, 140–B, 179), thus emphasizing a contrario their proximity to each other. The schema, one of the four figures (with the example, the symbol, and the construction) of Darstellung, exhibitio, is defined as “the representation [Vorstellung] of a universal process of the imagination [Einbildungskraft] in providing an image [Bild] for a concept.” This acceptation provided a springboard for Fichte. IV. Bild, Bildung: Fichte or the Projection of the Ego in Image Fichte builds on the thetic character of the synthesis of the transcendental imagination, conceiving Bild on the basis of bilden, the image on the basis of imaging, positing “the image as such” as a “free product of the ego,” of a projecting, imaging ego: the image is not a makeshift reflection of the thing that has reached the ego, but a projection (Reflex) of the ego producing itself in an image in the course of its free activity. In other words, the sole original to which the image can appeal is the ego. Fichte thus associates the imaginary activity of the ego-projecting-itself-in-an-image (Bild) with its formation (Bildung) understood as an autonomous genesis: “In the act of producing an image, the ego is entirely free” (Grundriss des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre). Fichte thus understands Bild on the basis of bilden, the formed on the basis of forming, and not the other way around. The Bild is the result of the production at work in the 110 BILD could have been so misunderstood and disfigured by his immediate posterity that this question has to be examined all over again from the opposite direction. We will limit ourselves here to emphasizing that Heidegger’s reading of Kant, like his reading of Hölderlin, accentuates the idea of an essential finitude of the human being, who is a “king of finitude” (Hölderlin, hymn “To Freedom”), whereas German idealism emphasized the unconditional nature of the ego of transcendental apperception as Selbstbewusstsein, or “self-consciousness.” The Bild itself thus became the stake in conflicting interpretations that sometimes inscribed it within a spontaneity Kant reserved for the understanding, and sometimes sought to maintain the equal balance of spontaneity and receptivity, of logic and aesthetics. Instead of stressing the thetic character of the Kantian synthesis (Fichte and Schelling), Heidegger underlines the essential part played, in every knowing, by sensibility understood not as passivity but as receptivity. Referring to Kant’s comment cited earlier, Heidegger remarks that The term Bild is to be taken here truly at the source, as when we say, looking on a landscape, “What a beautiful view!” [Bild] (Anblick), or again, in the presence of a gloomy group, “What a sad sight!” [Bild] (Anblick). Kantbuch, §19 In a way that is strictly the inverse of the formation of Fichte’s (or even Schelling’s) Bild, here the Bild presents itself and offers us a presence that is not the result of our imagination or created by the power of the imagination. The narrowness of the Bild/Anblick relationship Heidegger establishes will allow a bold reversal (§20): One says of a landscape that it is a view (picture), species [“Anblick (Bild),” species], as if it were looking at us [“gleich als blicke sie uns an”]. The Bild is in a way “de-subjugated.” Here we see that the question of the Bild, with its abundant vocabulary, constitutes a major issue in what opposes Kant’s immediate posterity, that is, German idealism, to the phenomenological interpretation of the transcendental schematism in an unexpected revival of the impulse provided by Husserl. Pascal David REFS.: Beaufret, Jean. “Kant et la notion de Darstellung.” In Dialogue avec Heidegger, II, Philosophie moderne, 77–109. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, 1797–1800. Edited and translated by D. Breazeale. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. . Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99). Edited and translated by D. Breazeale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. . Grundriss des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre. In Fichtes Werke, vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyer, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. Die Frage nach dem Ding. In GA, vol. 41. Translation by W. B. Barton Jr. and V. Deutsch: What is a Thing. Chicago: Regnery, 1968. . Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. In GA, vol. 3. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975–. Translation by R. Taft: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. the power of making uniform” (die Kraft der Ineinsbildung). This uniformizing or esemplasie (Coleridge), a term created on the basis of the Greek eis en plattein [ԑἰς ἕν πλάττԑιν], characterizes the fusion of the finite and the infinite (cf. Tilliette, Schelling), or again, Hineinbildung (another of Schelling’s neologisms), that is, the mutual interpenetration of the ideal and the real (distinguished from reel to match the ideal and come closer to the Latin res, realitas). A crossroads for Schelling’s meditations up to 1815, the term Bild also has a Platonic resonance that is linked in particular with the interpretation of the Timaeus, in the opposition between Urbild (archetype) or Vorbild (paradigm) and Nachbild (ectype). Two characteristics constitute the Bild: not being the object itself, and being “just like” it, as is explained in Lesson XI of the l’Historisch-kritische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie (Critical-Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology): “Das Bild is nicht der Gegenstand selbst, und doch völlig wie der Gegenstand selbst” (The image is not the object itself, and yet it is wholly like the object itself). Nonetheless, in mythology Schelling recognized the presence, if not of the “divine Self ” in person, the “image of the true God” (das Bild des wahren Gottes), or at least his Gleichbild or “replica,” as an anticipation, and almost by proxy, so that it is to the term Bild that Schelling resorts here to connect revelation and mythology. Like Ebenbild (which we have already encountered in Luther’s translation of Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians 1:15), Gleichbild is almost an oxymoron, or at least the expression of a unity that is conflicted and accepted as such, designating the element of revelation in a mythology that is not yet revelation. VI. Bild, Anblick: Heidegger or the Image Looking at Us We have examined what Kant’s immediate successors said about the question of the transcendental imagination. In a sense, however, nothing was said, at least according to an important note in Heidegger’s book on Kant (Kantbuch, §27): The explicit characterization of the power of imagination as a basic faculty [Grundvermögen] must have driven home the meaning of this faculty to Kant’s contemporaries. Thus Fichte and Schelling, and in his own way, Jacobi as well, attributed an essential role to the power of imagination. Whether in this way the power of imagination as seen by Kant was recognized, adhered to, and even interpreted in a more original way, cannot be discussed here. The following interpretation of the transcendental power of imagination grows out of another way of questioning and moves, so to speak, in the opposite direction from that of German Idealism. Such a declaration shows us first of all that the “stone thrown into the pond” of Marburg Neo-Kantianism represented by Heidegger’s Kantbuch is nonetheless engaging, secretly but no less “athletically” in a debate with all the interpretations of Kant since 1781, and notably the one that the history of ideas has retained under the name of “German idealism” (Hölderlin being quickly excepted), to the point of characterizing Kant’s work as “an unconquered fortress behind the new battlefront.” Thus it remains to ask in what way “the essence of Einbildungskraft as Kant understood it” BILDUNG 111 I. The Question of Holism By “culture” we can mean, depending on the context or period, a certain amount of knowledge in the domains of history, literature, art, music, and language that distinguishes a person who possesses it from one who does not, and serves as a sign of recognition among members of a group. The German definition of Bildung implies, on the other hand, an actualization of human perfectibility. In this sense, it is not reducible to any definite content. If Humboldt praises the Greeks and advocates imitating them, it is especially in order to posit as a paradigm a principle of self-determination and self-regulation that he perceives as central to Greek culture. In many respects, the Greek reference is interchangeable. Far from being an accumulation of objective knowledge, the theory of Bildung, as Humboldt defines it, is constructed on the basis of the observation of a gap between the multiplication of fields of partial knowledge and the moral progress of humanity. The point is to take over the positive sciences in order to subject them to the Rousseauian imperative of moral progress. Reducing external reality to imaginary representations produced by Einbildungskraft, art constitutes a way of extending Bildung that contributes to the self-determination that places the subject of Bildung at the center of the perceived world. It reduces the indefinite multiplicity of phenomena to a small number of symbolic elements referring to the infinite. This self-fashioning of autonomous individuality is nonetheless fully realizable only through the mediation of language, which, better than art, provides a symbolic relationship to the world and enables the subject to appropriate it. But through language we pass from human individuality to the singularity of the group in which a relationship to the world can be expressed. At the same time that it expresses the individual’s aspiration to the universal, Bildung marks a difference because the modes of appropriation and expression of the world through language are not identical. We have often been struck by the theological dimensions of a theory that makes of the human being involved in the dynamism of Bildung a veritable monad. In this respect, we can only approve of the idea that Bildung is the expression of a holistic dimension of German culture, whereas in his Sociology of Religions Max Weber speaks of an Einsheitskultur (homogeneous culture), and in his book on Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Historicism and its Problems) Ernst Troeltsch aspires to a Kultursynthese (cultural synthesis). To develop a theory of Bildung is to postulate a coincidence of the singular with the universal in a dynamics that is history envisaged from a German point of view. The degree of generality attained by a term that can then be associated with the totality of the elements of an intellectual tradition arouses distrust. Bildung is less a pernicious ideologeme than an empty place in discourse, a coincidentia oppositorum whose postulated existence makes it possible to engage in discourses on the singularity of the subject and the coherence of the group. It is certainly in this function of touchstone or interstitial glue between conceptual sets that the term Bildung is most untranslatable. It would in fact be rather absurd to claim that a word designating the acquisition of theoretical or practical knowledge can be translated only if it does not assume an identifying function. The idea of a co-extensiveness of language and . Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Translation by Joan Stambaugh: Being and Time. Rev. ed. Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2010. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp. London: Macmillan, 2003. . Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. Translated by William Jeckoff. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. Libera, Alain de. “La théologie de l’image . . .” In La mystique rhénane. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984. Longuenesse, Beatrice. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. Marquet, Jean-François. Liberté et existence. Étude sur la formation de la philosophie de Schelling. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1973. Oltmanns, Käte. Meister Eckhart. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1935. Philonenko, Alexis. L’Œuvre de Fichte. Paris: Vrin, 1984. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Translated by Mason Richey et al. Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2008. . Philosophie der Kunst. In Schellings Werke, vol. 5. Edited by O. Weiss. Leipzig: Eckhardt, 1907. . Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Translated by V. C. Hayes. Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1995. Schönborn (von), Christoph. L’Icône du Christ: fondements théologiques. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986. First published in 1976. . God’s Human Face: The Christ-icon. Translated by L. Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. Tilliette, X. Schelling. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1992. Wackernagel, Wolfgang. “Imagine denudari.” In Éthique de l’image et métaphysique de l’abstraction chez Maître Eckhart. Paris: Vrin, 1991. cultura BILDUNG, KULTUR, ZIVILISATION (GERMAN) FRENCH culture, position, éducation, formation, libération des préjugés, raffinement des moeurs, civilisation παίδԑια v. CULTURE, and AUFHEBEN, BEHAVIOR, BILD, CIVILTÀ, CONCETTO, IMAGE, IMAGINATION, LIGHT, MORALS, PERFECTIBILITY, PEOPLE, PLASTICITY, PRAXIS, STRUCTURE Designating alternatively physical beauty, intellectual cultivation, the divine imprint on the human mind, the integration of the individual into society, and the constantly emphasized parallelism between Greek culture and German culture, the term Bildung is certainly one of those words whose translation seems the most aleatory. The difficulty also has to do with the persistence of secondary meanings that are not eliminated by the choice of a primary meaning but are always conveyed in the background. Moreover, there is a tension between the term Bildung and the term Kultur that develops starting in the Enlightenment and designates the progress of mores thanks to civilization and then gradually comes to refer to the organic coherence of a social group. The terms Bildung, Kultur, and Zivilisation thus define each other in a variable relationship, but Bildung remains the word most difficult to transpose. Between the universality of the nation or of knowledge and immediate singularity, in the German context Bildung represents the element of particularity, which explains why it is usually anchored in the two privileged domains of language and art. This particularity of Bildung can have an identity-related dimension only by postulating its difference. The German notion of Bildung includes precisely an element of programmed incommunicability with regard to anyone who tries to approach the term from the outside. 112 BILDUNG its meaning. Thus Bildungsanstalt (educational institution) refers to the most intellectual sense of the term, whereas the concept of Bildungstrieb (formative drive; see DRIVE), borrowed from the anthropologist and anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, designates nature’s aptitude for causing forms to emerge. Whereas the classical dictionaries of the German language reveal a great wealth of meanings for the term Bildung, they are much more circumspect about Kultur and Zivilisation. Adelung defines Cultur (culture), whose roots he recognizes in both French and the agricultural vocabulary, as a purification of the mental and physical strengths of a person or a people, so that Cultur can signify both a liberation from prejudices (Enlightenment, Aufklärung; see LIGHT) and refinement of manners. The term Zivilisation is unknown to Adelung, but he defines “civil” as bürgerlich, characteristic of the citizen, and notes that civilisieren, borrowed from French civiliser, signifies “give good manners.” Heinsius adopts these definitions and notes the term civilisation in the sense of improvement of manners, derived from the Latin civilitas, civilis. The term civilisation, in its oldest stratum, refers to the political organization of the city. From this survey we can conclude that the great lexicographical investigations that are chronologically close to German idealism do not give the terms Kultur and Zivilisation a historical or ethnological sense, but simply designate a process of the purification of manners from the point of view of the Enlightenment. Thus these two terms appear in the Hegelian lexicon, and even then rarely, with a processual value. B. Aufklärung and culture In Über die Frage: Was heisst aufklären? (1784), Moses Mendelssohn complains that the words Aufklärung, Kultur, and Bildung are newcomers in the German language. They belong only to the language of books and the common man does not understand them. Mendelssohn’s complaint allows us to note a semantic equivalence or extreme proximity among three terms that moreover belong largely to scholarly language. From Kant’s point of view, the determining term is not Bildung but Kultur. Starting out from a rude, uncultivated state, humans arrive, thanks to the development of their dispositions, at culture (“aus der Rohigkeit zur Kultur”), at the organization of their lives in accord with their goals and with the deployment of their own strengths. Humans elaborate culture in society (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose [Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht], chap. 4). From this point of view, culture is also a duty to oneself and to others. In fact, the transition to culture does not result from a continuous evolution, but is produced instead by a tension, humans being, according to Kant, both social and opposed to sociability, inclined to confine themselves to individual behaviors. Culture, more a process than a result, arises from the effort to discipline the tendencies to reject sociability. However, dissensions are not in principle contrary to culture, and may even serve as its motive force. Culture does violence to nature, but at the same time it develops nature’s virtualities. Humans’ goal is indeed to develop their natural strengths, “der Anbau-cultura—seiner Naturkräfte” (Metaphysics of Morals [Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797), and human understanding, of a necessary mediation of language in the symbolic appropriation of the world, is not absent from the linguistic thought of eighteenth-century France, whether we think of Condorcet or his posterity among the members of the Société des Idéologues frequented by Humboldt during his stay in Paris and his turn toward linguistics. To a certain extent, the term Bildung is thus invested with an arbitrary will to untranslatability. To define the term Bildung as an index of a holism peculiar to German culture is thus to accept uncritically a form of intellectual self-perception and the marked-out paths that it implies for anyone who wishes to explore it only from the inside. Whether one thinks the notion of Bildung can or cannot be translated ultimately depends only on the arbitrary choice of an intellectual position inside or outside the discourse that it structures. II. From the Image of God to Human Development A. Lexical stages Friedrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary (RT: An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language) explains that the term Bildung (bildunga in Old High German), which derives from Bild, “image,” signified at first creation, fabrication, the fact of giving form. The transition to the idea of intellectual training and then to education is supposed to have proceeded from the language of mysticism, in which înbilden designates the acquisition of a figurative representation, establishing a de facto relationship between Bildung and Einbildung (imagination). The mysticism of the late Middle Ages, like Pietism, maintained that God imprinted his image (sich einbildet) on humans. In his 1793 dictionary, Johann Christoph Adelung attributes to the term Bild three main meanings: that of the form of a thing, that of the representation of a thing, and finally that of a person or thing considered from the point of view of its apparent form (a man can be designated by the term Mannsbild). According to Adelung, the verb bilden signifies giving form to something, but also reproducing a thing’s form (a meaning that subsists residually in the concept of bildende Künste, “plastic arts,” “arts of reproduction”; see ART). The noun Bildung is thus supposed to designate both the action of giving a form and the form itself, notably the form of the human face. Theodor Heinsius’s dictionary (1818) lists these two meanings and adds that of a cultivated person’s state, as well as that of the ability of the mind to recompose, in a whole that did not previously exist, the singular representations transmitted by the imagination (Einbildungskraft). In their dictionary (1860), the Grimm brothers observe that the term Bildung is characteristic of the German language, and that it is not found, or found only in forms derived from German, in other Germanic languages. The term is supposed to have designated an image, imago, and then, more broadly, a form (Gestalt). It is still in this sense that Winckelmann himself knew the term when he wrote that over time, scientific advances taught Etruscan and Greek artists to free themselves from primitive fixed and rigid forms. And, speaking of the Laocoon, Lessing explains that it had “a form [Bildung] which inspired pity because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time.” The Grimm brothers also note the meaning of cultus animi, humanitatis, which they attribute notably to Goethe (see MENSCHHEIT). The numerous compounds into which the word Bildung enters can help explain BILDUNG 113 The education [Bildung] and improvement [Fortbildung] of a nation are nothing other than the work of destiny: the result of countless causes that converge, so to speak the result of the whole element in which they live. Reasoning and understanding alone cannot in any case be the sole vehicles of this education of humanity that Herder calls for in the context of the Enlightenment. The heart, blood, warmth, life are all elements that are involved in the education of humanity and cannot be reduced to a rational mechanism. In its double meaning of a process of acquisition and a terminal state, culture (Kultur) remains in Herder the distinctive trait of a people and even suggests the possibility of outlining hierarchies among peoples. In Herder, the term Bildung is applied to humanity and to the nation, but also to language, the vehicle of culture. While he likes to talk about the formation of language (Bildung einer Sprache), this is naturally in the trivial sense of the term. In order for a language to take form it must go through a certain number of phases that historians of the language can reconstruct and scan. But here Bildung also signifies that the language is enriching itself, that it is accomplishing a process of improvement, ennobling itself: Our language is in a phase of formation (Bildung)—and the expression “formation (Bildung) of the language” is almost a motto that is today on almost everyone’s lips: writers, art critics, translators, scientists. Each of them wants to form (bilden) it in his own way: and one is often opposed to the other. What should we do if everyone is allowed to form (bilden) it: shall I then be authorized to ask what “form” (bilden) means? What is a language without formation (ungebildete Sprache)? And what revolutions have other languages undergone before they appeared formed (ausgebildet)? This questioning is followed by a series of historical considerations on the best ways of enriching the language among which translation, notably the translation of ancient authors who are distant from German in their mode of expression, plays a central role. III. Formation or Self-Making A. Self-Making The essential dimension that the term Bildung acquires around 1800 is that of reflexivity. The development that Bildung implies is not only the acquisition of competences with a view to improvement, but corresponds to a process of the self-fashioning of the individual who becomes what he was at the outset, who reconciles himself with his essence. This use of the word is found notably in Hegel, who devotes long passages to Bildung in the fourth part of the Phenomenology of Mind (Phänomenologie des Geistes), the one entitled “Spirit”: The means, then, whereby the individual gets objective validity and concrete actuality here is the formative process of Culture [Bildung]. The estrangement [Entfremdung] on the part of spirit from its natural existence is here the individual’s true and original nature, his very substance. This individuality moulds itself [bildet sich] by culture to what it inherently is, and only these natural strengths are not limited to intellectual and spiritual strengths, but also include physical strengths. The development of culture culminates in a constitution defined in accord with the concepts of human rights, in an overall refinement of the manners and the intellectual qualities, not of the individual, but of civil society. Thus culture’s vocation is to find its full realization in politics. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798) Kant uses the terms kultivieren, zivilisieren, and moralisieren almost as synonyms. Culture includes education and upbringing and finally obtains a certain aptitude. The term Zivilisierung is said to ¬emphasize culture, insofar as culture inclines people to enter into the social whole (Über Pädagogik). According to the distinctions made in Kant’s posthumously published writings, morality represents a third stage in the progress of humanity toward perfection, following culture and civilization. The relative absence of the term Bildung in Kant’s work is revelatory of an approach that is comprehensive, collective, and political, without any mystical or organicist dimension. C. Bildung and humanity The notion of Bildung becomes central once again in the language of Herder, who stresses movement and becoming in relation to any fixed situation. In his work, Bildung acquires a status that allows it to include the reference both to the biological and organic development of forms and to intellectual education and the refinement of manners. The tension between Kant and Herder is projected in the semantic opposition that leads one of them to prefer to speak of Kultur and the other to speak of Bildung. Furthermore, Bildung applies less to the individual than to humanity as a whole. As a result, it tends to coincide purely and simply with history, a history that would not be solely a history of ideas, but also one of behaviors, feelings, and sense impressions, which is already suggested by the title Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Another Philosophy of History for the Cultivation of Humanity, 1774). Bildung is determined first of all by external conditions and tendencies, by appetites based on the imitation of a model. What were these tendencies? What could they be? The most natural, the strongest, the simplest! For every century, the eternal foundation of the education of men [Menschenbildung]: wisdom rather than science, the fear of God rather than wisdom, love among children and spouses instead of elegance and extravagances, order of life, domination over a house in conformity with God’s order, the primitive image [das Urbild] of every order and every civil organization—in all that the simplest and deepest enjoyment of humanity, how could that have been, not conceived [erbildet], but even developed [angebildet], perfected [fortgebildet], except by that eternal power of the model [Vorbild] and of a series of models [Vorbilde] around us? This eternal model that is the source of all Bildung has a pronounced theological dimension. While Bildung is a kind of education, it cannot be limited to an intellectual education transmitted by books and libraries: 114 BILDUNG designating solely a process of education, whether it is a matter of intellectual or moral education. The highest form in the hierarchy of forms, the one that would best represent Bildung, the forming or shaping with theological roots, would be precisely, in an ever-latent reversal, the absence of form. We encounter this sense of the term Bildung notably in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, and particularly in his 1799 novel, Lucinde. Carried away by a love without object in the chaos of his inner life, the hero, Julius, feeling that he is destined to be an artist, discovers how far behind he still is in Bildung (“dass er noch so weit zurück sei in der Bildung”). But the decision to educate himself (bildete sich) leads him to forget his century and take his models among the heroes of the past or to project himself into the future, in short, to emancipate himself from temporal determinations. Bildung is almost as indeterminate as the state it allows us to leave behind. Schlegel even develops a theory of Bildung whose highest degree would be passivity, the abandonment of forms, and the acceptance of idleness. Women are supposed to attain spontaneously this state of openness to the indefinite. Men, on the other hand, should seek to achieve it. “That is why in women’s love there are no degrees or stages of Bildung.” The indefinite dimension of Bildung, its openness to a vague infinity and its reversal into a victory over the tyranny of forms, is not peculiar to Romanticism. Paul Natorp, in a very nationalist work entitled Die Seele des Deutschen (The German Soul, 1918), emphasized the fact that Goethe, beyond his philosophical, aesthetic, and literary qualities, acted as a Lebensbildner (shaper of life). After him, “the term Bildung should never have been understood in a superficial sense, because for him, and for anyone who remained faithful to his spirit, it meant nothing less than the organization of the whole of life into a living masterpiece.” Bildung is supposed to be the act of giving life and in that way moving beyond forms. Natorp appeals to the model of Goethe’s Prometheus: “I am here and give form to men in accord with my image, to a race that resembles me.” Understood in this way, Bildung becomes a kind of organic duty to express a German idea that cannot be limited to the individual but includes the collectivity. C. Bildung and philology Despite its numerous extensions, Bildung corresponds to a specific kind of education: the study of antiquity and especially Greek philology. There is a very clear reason for this. The Greeks had an all-encompassing cultural system, paideia [παίδԑια], whose paradigmatic value in turn permitted the construction of national cultural systems in Europe: “The original Greek creation of culture (Kultur) as a system of paideia and pure forms that served as its organ produced the effect of an illumination on the peoples of the world” (Jaeger, Humanistische Reden und Vorträge). Transposing the Greek paradigm to German reality required a special familiarity with the ancient Greek language and the texts that transmitted it. Bildung became primarily a philological activity. Even before Friedrich August Wolf made in clear in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (Prolegomena to Homer, 1795) that understanding the Iliad and the Odyssey required an understanding of how they were transmitted by doing so is it then something per se and possessed of concrete existence. The extent of its culture [Bildung] is the measure of its reality and its power. We can see how difficult it is to express otherwise than by convention the whole of the semantic field covered by the term Bildung in its Hegelian acceptation. Individual selffashioning is at the same time a transition from substance to a reality that makes it alien to consciousness. The process in which individuality cultivates itself is, therefore, ipso facto, the development of individuality qua universal objective being; that is to say, it is the development of the actual world. This world, although it has come into being by means of individuality, is in the eyes of self-consciousness something that is directly and primarily estranged. In other words, Bildung is a process that both produces and alienates individuality. In order to accede to Bildung, individuality distances itself from its Self. A splitting takes place, and the language of this splitting is the perfect language of the world of culture. The overthrow and mutual alienation of reality (Wirklichkeit) and of thought define “pure culture” (reine Bildung). “The spiritual condition of self-estrangement exists in the sphere of culture as a fact.” In the play of the formation of individuality in a process of self-fashioning on the one hand, and of alienation, the estrangement from that same individuality, on the other, thought acquires a content and Bildung ceases to be a pure virtuality. The notion of Bildung is important in Fichte’s political writings, notably in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), where the education that modifies not only the individual’s heritage but his nature itself becomes a kind of glue unifying the people. Bildung is no longer a specific education but a “general culture” (allgemeine Bildung). Schelling shares with Hegel a comprehensive conception of Bildung and in his Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (On University Studies) (1808) he explains that “to attain absolute form, the spirit must test itself in all domains, that is the universal law of all free education (Bildung).” Nonetheless, in Schelling the term has a much weightier meaning in a passage in his treatise on the essence of human freedom (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände [1809]) that illuminates the movement from the Grund or initial obscurity to division. According to Schelling, this movement can take place only through a “veritable in-formation (Ein-Bildung), things in development being informed (hineingebildet) in nature or more precisely by an awakening, the understanding highlighting the unity or Idea concealed in the separation from the Grund.” When Hegel was writing the Phenomenology of Mind, Bildung still conveyed a mystical meaning inherited from the representation of a form breathed into matter. But this process is henceforth situated strictly within the framework of a self-constituting subjectivity. B. The indefinite In many of the contexts in which it is used, Bildung includes an element of indetermination that makes it unsuitable for BILDUNG 115 1 Paideia, cultura, Bildung: Nature and culture v. IMAGE, LOGOS, RELIGIO, VIRTÙ, WORLD A fragment of Democritus quoted, via Aristotle, by Stobaeus, sums up the importance of paideia and its aura: “Paideia is the world [kosmos [ϰόσμος]; Diels-Kranz suggests Schmuck (ornament)] of those for whom this goes well (tois eutuchousin [τοῖς ἐυτυχοῦσιν]), and the refuge of those for whom it goes badly (atuchousin de kataphugion [ἀτυχοῦσιν δὲ ϰαταφύγιον])” (68 B 180 DK). The word paideia, which designates both “youth” and “education, culture,” derives from pais [παῖς], “child”; not the child as his mother gives birth to him, teknon [τέϰνον] (from tiktô [τίϰτω]), engender, and as he is brought up (trephô [τϱέφω]), feed, cause to grow), like any animal at all, but the human offspring whose body and mind have to be shaped, whence a common phrase, notably in Plato, paideia kai trophê [παίδεια ϰαὶ τϱοφή] (Phaedo, 107d, e.g., translated by L. Robin as “formation morale et régime de vie”, and “culture et goûts” by M. Dixsaut. Paideia is understood in its proximity to paidia [παιδιά], “play”: thus Plato’s Laws call for legislation “on paideia and paidia relative to the Muses” (2.656c). Paideia is opposed to apaideusia [ἀπαιδευσία], the ignorance of the badly educated, as is shown, for example, by the myth of the cave, which opens like this: “Next, said I, compare our nature in respect of education and its lack to such an experience as this” (Republic, 7.514a 1–2). Or again: “By education, then, I mean goodness in the form in which it is first acquired by a child” (tên paragignomenên prôton paisin aretên [τὴν παϱαγιγνομένην πϱῶτον παισὶν ἀϱετήν]) (Laws, 2.653b 1–2). From Socratic dialectic to the austerities of the laws, everything in Plato is thus persuasive and pedagogical, oriented toward the standard of virtue that would be taught by the philosopher-king and conveyed through institutions. Everything in Plato, but also everything in Aristotle, for whom paideia is a way of fulfilling the definition of man as an animal endowed with logos [λόγος]. No one, neither the child, nor, of course, women, nor even slaves, achieves this without paideia: each one is in his own way not only a living being, like an ox, but a living being endowed with enough logos to acquire more (“Wherefore they are mistaken who forbid us to converse with slaves and say that we should employ command only, for slaves stand even more in need of admonition than children”; Politics, 1260b 5–7; cf. Cassin, Aristote). No one has logos from the outset, totally and once and for all, because logos constitutes for us nature’s goal (Politics, 7.13.1334b 15): to lead toward logos by logos is the very essence of paideia (Cassin, Aristote). In other words, man’s nature is his culture. The breadth of paideia ranges from politics—it is the logos that makes man a “more political” animal than others (Politics, 1.1253a 7–10)—to ontology—it is evidence of apaideusia (lack of education) to demand that everything be demonstrated (Metaphysics, 4.4.1006a 6; cf. 3.1005b 3–4), and, in the case of the principle of noncontradiction, we are then “no better than a vegetable” (Metaphysics 4.4.1006a 14–15). As Hannah Arendt emphasizes, it is a matter of our mode of relation to the things of the world (Between Past and Future). To characterize Greek culture in its relationship to the art that is often confused with it, Arendt cites the statement Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles in his funeral oration for the latter: “We love beauty within the limits of political judgment, and we philosophize without the barbarous vice of softness” (philokaloumen te gar met’ euteleias kai philosophoumen aneu malakias [φιλοϰαλοῦμέν τε γὰϱ μετ’ εὐτελείας ϰαὶ φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλαϰίας]) (Thucydides, 2.40; Arendt, Between Past and Future; cf. Cassin, L’Effet sophistique). In opposition to the over-refinement of the barbarians, the political and practical standard of paideia defines the Greeks’ relation to beauty and wisdom. In relation to the barbarians, and then to the Romans, we see that the logos constituted par excellence by the Greek language can become the depository of paideia (see GREEK), and that in the Hellenistic schools, culture was presented in the form of mimêsis rhêtorichê [μίμησις ῥητοϱιχή], “literary culture,” meaning the appropriation of great authors and of creative imitation, but of culture and no longer of nature (Cassin, L’Effet sophistique ). We also see why it is Greek paideia and not Roman cultura that functions as a model in German Bildung. Cultura derives from colere, “to inhabit, cultivate, practice, maintain,” from the root *kwel-, like pelomai [πέλομαι], “to turn around,” which we find again in “circle,” and the verb designates both humans’ relation to the gods—they cultivate them, make them the object of a cult—and that of the gods to humans—they live with them, protect and cherish them (cf. A. Ernout and A. Meillet). Literally and first of all, cultura is agricultura, “the culture of the earth”: the mind is like a field that cannot produce unless it is suitably cultivated and “philosophy is the culture of the mind” (cultura autem animi philosophia est; Cicero, Tusculan Orations, 2.13). Arendt notes emphatically: “It was in the midst of a primarily agricultural people that the concept of culture first appeared, and the artistic connotations which might have been connected with this culture concerned the incomparably close relationship of the Latin people to nature, the creation of the famous Italian landscape” (Between Past and Future). It is precisely here that we see one of the fundamental differences between the Greeks, who conceived cultivating the earth as a Promethean act, almost a rape, and the Romans, who fashioned nature into a habitable place: “The reason why there is no Greek equivalent of the Roman concept of culture resides in the predominance of the arts of fabrication in Greek civilization. Whereas the Romans tended to see even art as a kind of agriculture, as the culture of nature, the Greeks tended to see even agriculture as an element of fabrication, as one of the ingenious and skilful technical artifices through which humans, who are more frightening than anything else that exists, domesticate and dominate nature.” Bildung is located on the side of technê [τεχνή], art, of artifice and fabrication, and not on the side of natura. Werner Jaeger never ceased to emphasize its relation to plastic activity, the plassein [πλάσσειν] through which the sculptor models his creation: “The term culture (Bildung) should be reserved for this kind of education (Art der Erziehung) alone, the one for which Plato uses the material metaphor of the character that is fashioned (als bildlicher Ausdruck für das erzieherische Tun). The German word Tun indicates very clearly the nature of Greek education in the Platonic sense: it suggests just as much the artist’s plastic composition (das künstlerische Formende, Plastische) as the guiding model which is always present to the mind of the artist (dem Bildner innerlich vorschwebende normative Bild), the idea or typos” (Paideia; see ART and PLASTICITY). And what is thus shaped by the legislator is “the living man”: “Other nations have created gods, kings, spirits: only the Greeks have shaped men” (cf. this phrase which we will not try to translate: “Ausbildung, Durchbildung, Vorbildung, Fortbildung, nicht Bildung,” Jaeger, Humanistische Reden und Vorträge). Thus it is through humanism and not culture that Bildung, which considers humans as works of art, inherits the very action of paideia. Barbara Cassin (continued) 116 BILDUNG education and Ausbildung as practical training. We can show, Humboldt writes in Über das Studium des Altertums (On the Study of Antiquity), that the attention given to physical and intellectual culture (Bildung) was very great in Greece and was guided principally by ideas of beauty, and that “a strong tendency among the Greeks to educate [auszubilden] man both in his greatest diversity and in his greatest possible unity is undeniable.” The parallel between the fragmentation of Greece and the fragmentation of Germany being obvious in Humboldt’s writing, Bildung appears as a form of constructive tension between identity and plurality. The Bildung of German Hellenist philologists from Wolf to Wilamowitz by way of Philipp August Boeckh, Gottfried Hermann, Otfried Müller, Hermann Usener, and others is also a way the individual participates in the collective. D. The individual and the collective The term Bildungsroman, generally translated as “novel of education,” was introduced into critical terminology by Wilhelm Dilthey, who makes use of it in his Leben Schleiermachers (Life of Schleiermacher, 1870) to characterize the novels of German classicism. A novel about a young man’s coming to awareness of himself and at the same time finding his place in the social world, the Bildungsroman, which is often also called the Entwicklungsroman, “novel of development,” or Erziehungsroman, “novel of character development,” combines Rousseauist roots (the German reception of Émile, ou de l’éducation, 1762) with Pietist roots (Karl-Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser, 1785). This twofold background corresponds to the structural ambiguity of the notion of Bildung as both the education of the social individual and an internal education independent of any context. A subset of the Bildungsroman genre is the Künstlerroman (novel about an artist), in which the hero’s discovery of the world of art enables him to succeed in his exploration of both an inner space and a social life. The main example of the Bildungsroman is provided by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and more particularly by the first volume, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96). For Goethe and his hero, the notion of Bildung implies a shaping of singular existence by the acceptance of outside influences, family relationships, art and especially the theater, Pietistic religious trends, and certain social milieus, especially the nobility. The hero himself explains what he means by Bildung: “Let me tell you: ever during the intellectual history of Greece, Wilhelm von Humboldt had told him that in his opinion there was, alongside the particular forms of intellectual learning, another that federated humans’ various modes of expression and gave them their unity. This education (Ausbildung) is increasingly losing its importance and achieved its highest degree among the Greeks. It can be better promoted, it seems to me, only by studying great and remarkable men from this point of view, or to put it in a word, by studying the Greeks. Letter from Humboldt to Wolf, 1 December 1792 In his Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft (1807), Wolf pointed out a radical difference between the ancient peoples of the Orient on the one hand, and the Greeks and Romans on the other: One of the most important differences is that the former scarcely rose, or only by a few degrees, above the kind of culture (Bildung) that is called politeness (Policirung) or civilization (Civilisation), in contrast to superior intellectual culture (Geisteskultur) properly so called. The germ of a dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation is already present here. By an obvious paradox, in Wolf’s work the term Kultur often designates the education of the mind, whereas Bildung designates the social condition attained. The conceptual divisions do not exactly coincide with the semantic divisions. To create a new German culture, to gather together what had been dispersed, to restore a unity comparable to that of the model of paideia, Germans had to study Greek. Bildung became a kind of substitute for a centralized state at the same time as a humanistic improvement of the individual. This simultaneously educational and political function of Bildung was in fact of a very different nature depending on whether the Greek paradigm was invoked to construct a German culture around 1800 or to magnify the German Empire and its subjects’ conformism during the Wilhelmine period. It is chiefly Humboldt who can be considered the theoretician of Bildung as a transfer of the Greek paradigm to Germany. Moreover, we find in Humboldt a competing use of the terms Bildung, Ausbildung, and Kultur that challenges the frequently alleged opposition between Bildung as intellectual REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press, 1961; rev. ed., 1968. 197–226. Aristotle. Politics. In Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon and translated by B. Jowett. New York: Vintage, 2001. Cassin, Barbara. L’Effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1995. . Aristote et le logos. Contes de la phénoménologie ordinaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, chaps. 2 and 3. Jaeger, Werner. Humanistische Reden und Vorträge. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1960. . Paideia. Die Formung der Griechischen Menschen. Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1934. Translation by G. Highet: Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945–. Plato. Laws. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, translated by A. E. Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1961. . Phaedo. Translated by M. Dixsaut. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. . Phaedo. Translated by L. Robin. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1926. . Republic. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, translated by P. Shorey. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1961. Waterfield, Robin, ed. The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (continued) BILDUNG 117 of its subjective, individual, reflexive dimension and make it a form of property or symbolic capital. In the second half of the nineteenth century the idea of technical, professionalized, socially pertinent training was established, and led to a previously almost imperceptible opposition between general education, culture, Bildung and specialized training, even technical training, Ausbildung, Fachausbildung. The German state, drawing its legitimacy from its pedagogical functions— a new type of legitimacy that obviously inspired the French Third Republic, traumatized by the defeat at Sedan—sought to make ever-broader groups participate in the integrative system of Bildung. Social Democratic movements fit perfectly into this dynamics, which led to the notion of Volksbildung (popular education) and the multiplication of Volksbildungsvereine (popular education associations). By becoming institutionalized and transforming itself into social glue, Bildung lost its individualistic dimension and espoused social strategies. It no longer provided the unity of a culture. In the second of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), Nietzsche deplores the fact that historicism has substituted Gebildetheit (erudite culture), the prerogative of the philistine (Bildungsphilister, a term that appears around 1860), for Bildung. According to Nietzsche, Germans, in the grip of historical studies, were losing their human dimension and becoming “creations of historical culture, wholly structure, image, form without demonstrable content and, unhappily, ill-designed form and, what is more, uniform.” In fact, for Nietzsche there is no longer any true Bildung but only a historical knowledge of its components. People limit themselves to ideas of Bildung (Bildungsgedanken) or to the feeling of Bildung (Bildungsgefühl) in order to avoid making a decision about Bildung (Bildungsentschluss). Far from recognizing culture in contemporary Germany, Nietzsche was persuaded that the Greeks (whom, like Humboldt, he regarded as the criterion in this area) would call Germans “walking encyclopedias.” To designate authentic Bildung, the Bildung that has disappeared, and in particular that of Greece, Nietzsche liked to use the term Kultur, emphasizing a living unity, the “unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” B. Culture and organicism Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term “culture” ceased to designate a future and expressed instead an entity, a state of national communities. Jakob Burckhardt understood Kultur as referring to “the totality of the intellectual developments that take place spontaneously and without aspiring to universality or monopoly” (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien). Processuality is not completely lacking, but it is a process that takes place within the unity of an organism. In relation to the simply totalizing tendencies of holism, organicism implies a quasi-biological functionality. Culture is thus “the process of millions of persons through whom the naïve action determined by their race is transformed into a conscious aptitude.” Cultures are born, flourish, and die, and this organic life of cultures is governed by “superior, inaccessible laws of life.” For Burckhardt, culture represents the critical authority of civil society as opposed to the state and religion. It includes the fine arts, to be sure, but also livestock-raising, agriculture, maritime shipping, since I was a boy, my wish and intention has been to educate myself completely as I am.” According to Goethe, German bourgeoisie were able to acquire practical training, to develop some of their abilities with a view to being socially useful, and even to acquire a general intellectual education. However, he considers this education inferior to the one he thinks was previously reserved for the nobility, an education of the person taken as a whole, without any amputation. The influence of a complete, unamputated personality can be obtained through a new form of aristocracy whose acquisition depends notably on artistic education. It is easy to show that the various phases of the acquisition of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister correspond to the phases through which German culture passed in the eighteenth century, thus making the individual development of Wilhelm’s personality an allegory of the education of the German people itself. Another notable characteristic of Goethe’s conception of Bildung has to do with the role accorded to action. Whereas the complete education of the personality, analogous to the education of the people as a whole, transcends the acquisition of separate abilities, it must, when it is once acquired, reconnect with practical activity. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1821, 1829), a sequel to the first novel, justifies this return to the practical, as if the notion of Bildung, in the simple context of Goethe’s work, were already evolving and included within itself the necessity of a theoretical reformulation. “In any case, society now forces us to have a general education; therefore we do not need to worry about it anymore, it is the particular that we have to appropriate.” Let us note that in his poem Hermann und Dorothea Goethe uses the term Bildung in an archaic sense of harmonious physical constitution, at the same time that in Wilhelm Meister he is developing the theory of Bildung as intellectual education. IV. Resisting Organicism A. Bildungsbürgertum The French occupation of Germany during the Revolutionary Wars and especially during the Napoleonic Wars was a sort of incubation period during which the concept of Bildung acquired its central place in Germany’s philosophical selfimage. This French period of German history is characterized by a radical reduction of spatial fragmentation and the emergence of the idea of a German state that would be the heir to the Enlightenment, that is, of a pedagogical state. Whereas in old Germany intellectual education was one of the duties of certain social groups, virtually the prerogative of corporate organizations after 1800, and more precisely after the foundation of the Humboldt University in Berlin (1810), it became the distinctive insignia of servants of the state, of a state that was initially virtual or partial but after 1871 included most of the Germanic world. Bildung, a reference point that was clearly less important in Alemannic Switzerland and Austria than in Germany proper, was the condition of membership in the universality of the state, just like property. Real property or military office that was not accompanied by cultural capital, that was not legitimized by Bildung, even became suspect. Educating a new kind of citizen or subject, the Bildungsbürger (roughly, middle-class intellectual) tended to deprive Bildung 118 BILDUNG a constraint exercised on drives: “This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization [der entscheidende kulturelle Schritt]. The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization [Kulturgut].” Cosmopolitan, universalist, marked by the spirit of the Enlightenment, democratic in its essence, Zivilisation includes on the other hand a threat of decomposition for the national entities that it transcends or federates. The notion of Kulturkampf (culture war), which designated the politics of the Prussian Protestant Bismarck with regard to Catholic groups, well expresses the menace that weighs on culture and obliges us to defend it. This defense does not shrink from using radical means, and in the belligerent language used during the First World War, Thomas Mann himself did not hesitate to champion a defense of the idea of culture, including the brutal forms its affirmation might take. In any case Germany, better rooted in nature, was supposed to be resistant to civilization conceived as primarily intellectual. In its exacerbated form, the opposition between culture and civilization reflects the ancient German mistrust with regard to a universality inherited from the Enlightenment that was supposed to conceal a French desire for hegemony. We can understand why the French political vocabulary at the beginning of the twentieth century appealed to the notion of civilization in reaction to the German instrumentalization of the dichotomy. This semantic opposition, which arose from Franco-German distrust, became a structuring factor in ethnological studies that could be scientific only by studying concrete societies rooted in their particularity, and thus cultures, but without seeking to see to what extent these cultures drew on the universal reservoir of possible human behaviors, and thus on a human civilization. When Freud uses the term Kultur, he does not do so to appeal to its radically organicist and nationalist dimension, but rather to challenge the pertinence of the opposition itself. Norbert Elias seeks to outline the sociogenesis of this opposition. While he does not hesitate to use the term “civilization,” he does so on the one hand to account for an investigation that is international or at least extends to the whole of the West—he even discusses a national feeling on the part of the West. On the other hand, civilization, which he connects with the “civilities” of court society, includes forms of concrete life that the history of mentalities has taken as its favorite object of study: The French and English concept of civilization can refer to political or economic, religious or technical, moral or social facts. The German concept of Kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic, and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic, and social facts, on the other. The French and English concept of civilization can refer to accomplishments, but it refers equally to the attitudes or “behavior” of people, irrespective of whether or not they have accomplished anything. In the German concept of Kultur, by contrast, the reference to “behavior,” to the value which a person has by virtue of his mere existence and conduct, without any accomplishment at all, is very minor. Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation commerce, and crafts; all these elements enter into various combinations in the notion of culture. The diversity of the internal programming of culture allows us to distinguish major historical periods and to speak of cultures in the plural. The sense of the term in Burckhardt is very close to that used by ethnologists. While Burckhardt thinks that “the miracle of language” is at the origin of culture as a federating bond, we must remember that language is also what Franz Boas—who was trained in Germany before leaving for the United States—made central to ethnological investigations and methods. In Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1923), the concept of culture becomes an operative concept for the historian. To understand Western culture, he wrote, “we must first know what culture is, how it is related to visible history, to life, to the mind, to nature, to the spirit, in what forms it manifests itself and to what extent these forms—peoples, languages, and periods, battles and ideas, the arts and works of art, the sciences, the law, great men and great events—are symbols and can be interpreted as such.” Culture corresponds to a network of symbolic forms, to their concentration around a people and even a race—a term that in Spengler’s terminology is not too far from that of “culture.” Peoples are spiritual entities (Seelische Einheiten) based on symbols, but Spengler draws a distinction between primitive peoples, such as the sea people during the Mycenaean period, who do not have a strong coherence, and peoples of culture (Kulturvölker), who are much more precisely determined. After the moment of culture, peoples sank into the era of fellahs, the condition of Egypt during the Roman period. Moreover, to primitive cultures Spengler opposes great cultures in a hierarchy of values that is also applied to languages. Whereas Bildung is considered only in the singular, cultures are plural and hierarchized. The symbolism that guarantees a culture’s organic unity may be religious in nature. Within a cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) like Judaism, culture’s function is to regulate morals (sittliche Kultur). In his Religion der Vernunft (Religion of Reason), Hermann Cohen further notes that culture, the glue that holds a people together, is based on an unwritten religious law regarding “this eternal, this unwritten that precedes, must precede, all writing and so to speak all culture, because it creates the foundation for all culture.” In his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), Ernst Cassirer speaks of the “cultural myths (Kulturmythen) that differ from natural myths in that their function is not to explain the origin of the world and to legitimate a cosmology, but to explain the genesis of ‘cultural goods’ (Kulturgüter).” Through the intermediary of myths, notably salvation myths, “culture becomes conscious of itself.” C. Culture or civilization Did Freud write on “Civilization and Its Discontents” or on “Culture and Its Discontents” (Unbehagen in der Kultur)? The question that divides translators reveals a semantic dichotomy in which French privileged the term civilisation before gradually importing the stakes involved in the German dichotomy. It is certain that for Freud, Kultur corresponded to BILDUNG 119 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Edited and translated by Gregory Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1953. Translation by James Strachey: Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1961. Goethe. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In Werke. Vols. 7–8. Edited by E. Trunz. Munich: Beck, 1973. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York: Humanities Press, 1977. Herder, J. G. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. In Werke. Vol. 1. Edited by W. Pross. Darmstadt: WBG, 1984. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Briefe an Fr. A. Wolf 1792–1823. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990. . Über das Studium des Altertums. In Werke. Vol. 2. Darmstadt: WBG, 1986. Jaeger, Werner. Humanistische Reden und Vorträge. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1960. Jeismann, Karl-Ernst, and Peter Lundgreen, eds. Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 3, Von der Neuordnung Deutschlands bis zur Gründung des deutschen Reiches 1800–70. Munich: Beck, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. Über Pädagogik. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 9. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1923. First published in 1803. Le Rider, Jacques. “Cultiver le malaise ou civiliser la culture?” In Autour du malaise dans la culture de Freud, edited by J. Le Rider et al., 79–118. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke. Vol. 6. Edited by G. Göpfert. Munich: Hanser, 1974. Translation by E. A. McCormick: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Menze, Clemens. Die Bildungsreform Wilhelm von Humboldts. Hanover: Schroedl, 1975. Natorp, Paul. Die Seele des Deutschen. Jena: Diedrichs, 1918. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. 2nd ed. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Werke. Vol. 1. Edited by K. Schlechta. Munich: Hanser, 1966. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Of Human Freedom. Translated by J. Gutmann. Chicago: Open Court, 1936. . On University Studies. Translated by E. S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966. . Schellings Werke. Edited by O. Weiss. Leipzig: Eckhardt, 1907. Schlegel, Friedrich. Ausgabe. Vol. 5. Edited by E. Behler. Munich: Schöningh, 1962. Spengler, Otto. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Munich: DTV, 1974. Troeltsch, Ernst. Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Tübingen: Mohr, 1922). Translation: Historicism and its Problems. Tübingen, 1922. Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Introduction by T. Parsons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. These definitions show the spiraling overdeterminations to which these terms have been subjected. Taken over by the social sciences long ago, the term “culture” can have in German the sense that Elias gives to the term Zivilisation. But the national closure of culture in 1936 made the word unusable in German for a discourse that intends to be international. The term Zivilisation, against which Thomas Mann railed during the First World War, was invested with the most positive semantic core of the term “culture,” culture becoming in turn the refuge of Geist, with which the sociologist was incapable of coping. Kultur and Zivilisation are in fact semantic variables that can draw, depending on the intellectual context, on an interpretive tradition based on the postulate of a Franco-German opposition. REFS.: Assmann, Aleida. Construction de la mémoire nationale. Une brève histoire de l’idée allemande de Bildung. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1994. Benveniste, Émile. Civilisation: contribution à l’histoire d’un mot. In Eventail de l’histoire vivante, Mélanges Lucien Febvre, edited by F. Braudel, vol. 1, 47–54. Paris: Armand Colin; repr. in Problèmes de Linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966, 336–45. Translation by M. E. Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Berg, Christa, ed. Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1870–1918. Von der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges. Munich: Beck, 1991. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Klett, 1972–. Art. “Bildung” by R. Vierhaus, vol. 1 (1972) and art. “Civilization, Kultur” by J. Fisch, vol. 7 (1992). Burckhardt, Jakob. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1976. Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Vol. 2. Darmstadt, 1964. Cohen, Hermann. Religion der Vernunft. Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1988. Dumont, Louis. L’idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1991. Eisler, Rudolf. Kant-Lexicon. Edited by A.-D. Balmès and P. Osmo. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1994. Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Translation by Edmund Jephcott: The History of Manners. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 2 Kulturgeschichte In 1909, the historian Karl Lamprecht founded in Leipzig an Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschichte (Institute of Cultural and Universal History). Its goal was to introduce into the field of historical studies, in opposition to the political mode of historiography that was then dominant, the economy, artistic productions, the history of printing, and all the other phenomena of life that might play a role in defining a historical period. While the notion of Kultur designates an effort to apprehend concrete life in all its aspects, an effort facilitated by the regionalist orientation of Lamprecht’s first works, the epithet “universal” immediately corrects that limitation. Cultural history seeks to be universal, and Lamprecht’s institute was characterized by a concern to see to it that the cultural histories of the diverse nations were taught, and in their own language. It was the whole method of historical studies that was overthrown by cultural history’s self-definition, unleashing in the last years of the nineteenth century the methodological quarrel (Methodenstreit), but also echoing a tradition discernible among the historians in Göttingen at the end of the eighteenth century. Even though the direct connection is controversial, cultural history precedes and in a way anticipates the kind of investigations carried out by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre under the name of the history of mentalities. The theoretical basis for Lamprecht’s attempt to write a cultural history was located farther back in German psychology’s tendency to broaden its domain of application from experimental psychology to the psychology of peoples. The term Völkerpsychologie, which is the logical if not lexical antecedent of Kulturgeschichte (cultural history), does not designate the psychological characteristics that an empirical science is supposed to have attributed to (continued) 120 BILDUNG different peoples. For Wilhelm Wundt, it was a matter of attempting a universal history of the psyche after observing that when experimental psychology ignores the social dimension, it ends up in an impasse. This general history of the psyche brings in social practices, the economy, and art. A particularly important element of collective psychology explored by Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt, who thus opened the way to the concept of cultural history, was provided by language. Although Wundt’s psychology, like Lamprecht’s historiography, rejects Hegelianism, one cannot fail to see a continuity between cultural history and the efforts made by Hegel’s disciples and readers to realize the concrete elements of an encyclopedic system that was only sketched out. The history of art played an especially important role in this deconstruction-realization of Hegelianism. It cannot be denied that in some respects the universalist dimension of Kulturgeschichte could serve as a justification for the Wilhelmine Empire’s imperialist tendencies, the reference to Kultur not being capable, in the context of 1900, of eliminating all ambiguity. It was only through a series of predictable linguistic shifts that the term “cultural history” came more recently to designate the history of intellectual life in these diverse forms, reducing the initial Kulturgeschichte to only one of its dimensions. (continued) 3 “Humanities” (or “The Unnatural Sciences”) The Anglo-American term “the humanities” overlaps with the French sciences humaines and the German Geisteswissenschaft but only to a small and questionable degree. Most of the sciences humaines would be called social sciences in English, and Geisteswissenschaft is usually translated, all too narrowly, as “intellectual history.” History itself, understood in its broadest sense, is taken in some (although far from all) American divisions of the territory to be a social science. “Humanities” is a term much used now in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Latin America, but until recently the applicable word, in the United Kingdom especially, was “arts,” as opposed simply to “sciences.” This old usage is still visible in the names of faculties in the United States called Arts and Sciences. Confusingly, “the Arts” now refers more and more to the practice of the arts, and “humanities” refers to the informed study of such arts (literature, theater, cinema, painting, sculpture, dance, photography, etc.), along with philosophy and languages, native and foreign. Nietzsche did not have all of these matters in mind when he wrote of the “unnatural sciences,” but his notion of the unnatural in this context evokes almost everything that now seems difficult, bewildering, and necessary about the humanities: The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness—with the unnatural sciences, one might almost say—rests precisely on the fact that they take the strange as their object, while it is nearly contradictory and absurd even to want to take the not strange as one’s object [The Gay Science]. “Psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness” have turned specifically into (some) psychology, (some) philosophy, and several zones of literary theory and anthropology—and more broadly into the humanities themselves. Again, Nietzsche says, “What is known is what is hardest to know,” which we might translate as “The humanities as forms of organized knowledge seek to make intelligible what seems mysterious because it is familiar.” Students of literature, for example, manage to make interesting sense of a whole series of magnificent but not-at-all strange objects, from the predictable rage of Achilles to the inevitable fall of Milton’s Adam and Eve, and from Candide’s unsurprising adventures to Molly Bloom’s repetitive infidelities. In his book The Humanities and the Dream of America, Geoffrey Harpham recognizes that the term “humanities” “did not appear for the first time in the United States,” and astutely tracks its European history, and its shifting meaning within the United States. In the 1980s the humanities in America were part of what Professor Harpham calls “the milieu,” in the 1990s they bore the blame for every instance of disaffection, relativism, and “weakening of our vision and resolve.” Harpham lists some of the “many notions associated with the humanities,” and the list is impressive: [they] inculcate, often through attention to works of art, a sense of other minds and cultures; require and reward attention to formal and textural features as well as to literal or manifest meaning; invite individual interpretation and inference; cultivate the faculty of judgment; awaken a sense of values; engage the emotions as well as the intellect; enlarge our imaginative capacities; challenge, deepen, and enrich our understanding of the world; provide fertile ground for the growth of self-knowledge; and under the right circumstances, open the way to tolerance, restraint, humility, and even wisdom. This is a lot; but there is also a certain modesty lurking everywhere in the list, except perhaps in its last clause. The humanities will not make bad persons good, they may even help them to justify the way they live; and they will not support one political program rather than another. This is why Harpham’s last clause, even with its careful “under the right circumstances” and “open the way,” goes too far. People have been known to become tolerant and wise while pursuing humanistic studies, and it may seem as if their studies have made them tolerant and wise. But as long as those same studies are pursued by torturers and camp commandants, without any noticeable effects on their careers, it is fitting to claim less rather than more for the disciplines of the humanities. Indeed, properly understood, less is more. It would, in an extreme but not perverse sense, be part of humanistic understanding to allow even torturers and camp commandants to make what they will of their education. Whether they should be allowed to have the jobs they have is another question. Harpham carefully considers useless knowledge, knowledge that is “useless in Slavic languages. There is an uninterrupted tradition, both literary and practical, that leads from the Greek Hesychasts (Gregory Palamas, Gregory of Sinai, Nicholas Cabasilas, Nicephorus) to the Russian Hesychasts (Nil Sorksy, fifteenth century) and ultimately to the startsy [стapцы] (eremitic fathers) of Optina Pustyn’, a monastery in Central Russia that Vladimir Solovyov and Dostoyevsky visited during the summer of 1878, the year in which Solovyov wrote his Lectures on Godmanhood (Bessedy o Bogočelovečestve). In the Lectures we encounter for the first time the term bogočelovečestvo [богочеловечество] with a philosophical meaning, in the context of universal history. In turn, Sergei Bulgakov considerably enriched this notion by attributing to it strictly theological—and particularly Christological and Trinitarian—meanings in his work on divine wisdom and theanthropy (1933–36). The notion was developed in the direction of religious existentialism and Russophile universalism by N. Berdyayev in his Spirit and Reality (1932), The Russian Idea (1946), and The Divine and the Human (1949). It was later given various inflections—cosmic and salvational in the work of G. Fedorov, personalist in L. Chestov and S. Frank, and “mathematicizing” in P. Florensky. Bogočelovečestvo is the strange product of disparate intellectual influences in the form of a synthesis of the Jewish Kabbalah, the anthropology of the Greek church fathers, the mysticism of Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart, and finally of Spinoza and the German philosophy of identity, in particular in Schelling’s system. The latter’s influence on the work of V. Solovyov is remarkable. Thus vseedinstvo [всеединство] (uni-totality), a central notion in Russian universalist philosophy, is nothing other than a Russian version of the German Alleinheit; similarly, Solovyov’s vseobščee znanie [всеобщее знaниe] echoes Schelling’s Anschauung. For his part Berdyayev wrote two important studies on Jakob Böhme and his influence on Russian thought (Berdyayev, Mysterium Magnum, 1:5–28, 29–45). The influences of German philosophy were exercised on this notion in parallel (Stepoun, 1923) with purely Russophile intentions, creating a conception of the world based on the ecclesiastical consciousness of Russian Orthodoxy (A. Khomiakov, I. Kiryevski, I. Samarin, C. Aksakov). BOGOČELOVEČESTVO 121 the best sense.” He also writes of “the usefulness of useless knowledge.” There are two crucial ideas lurking in these phrases. One is that much useful knowledge, especially in physics and medicine, started out as useless knowledge, that is, as disinterested inquiry, inquiry for inquiry’s sake. If no one risks pursuing knowledge for no reason, there will finally be no knowledge that matters. This is a powerful claim, and a fine argument against eager pragmatists. The other claim is more elusive but also more humanistic. It is that disinterested inquiry is a value in its own right, even if it is never cashed in materially. It is one part of being human, and in this sense string theory is as humanistic as Aristotle, more so in a way because less practical. It is easy to see that these two claims go together: the first denies ultimate or inevitable uselessness, the second helps scholars to keep going in the dark, and redeems uselessness if it needs redeeming. The first claim on its own is a little too pragmatic, and could be accused of selling inquiry short, even in the longest run; the second claim may be a little too pure, and certainly, in hard political times, needs all the reinforcement it can get from the first. Michael Wood REFS.: Daedalus (Winter 2009) (“Reflecting on the Humanities”). Harpham, Geoffrey. The Humanities and the Dream of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translation by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Deus-Homo BOGOČELOVEČESTVO [богочеловечество] (RUSSIAN) FRENCH divino-humanité, théanthropie, déihumanité, théandrie τὸ θεανδϱιϰός v. GOD, HUMANITY, and AIÔN, GOOD/EVIL, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, MENSCHHEIT, MOMENT, NAROD, RUSSIAN, SOBORNOST’, SVET “богочеловечество,” “divino-humanity,” a Russian term that refers to the Greek patristic concept “τὸ θεανδϱιϰός,” has a central place in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Russian philosophy. It designates two movements directed toward each other: that of the divine moving toward man and that of humanity rising toward the divine. It presents both Christ in the hypostatic union of his two natures, divine and human, and the humanity of men taken in the sense of the accomplishment of their true divine-human relation. In both cases it involves an ontological encounter. The term bogočelovečestvo is marked by the influence of diverse philosophical traditions, mystical par excellence, and Western as well as Eastern. Two aspects are essential for understanding it. An initial interpretation allows us to see in it a “theanthropy” that takes into account a whole previous patristic heritage and appeals solely to debates about the nature of Christ, the Incarnation, and the meaning of salvation and original sin. A second interpretation is authentically Slavophile and Russocentric and refers to questions concerning the destiny of humanity, the Russian people, Slavic unity, Orthodoxy, and the universal church (vselenskaja tserkov’ [bселенсkaя цеpkовь]). I. The History of the Word In the form obožitisja [обожитися] (become God), which refers to theôsis [θέωσις] (divinization), the idea of the ontological encounter of the human with the divine is already present in 1076 in the Izbornik (“Compilation”) (RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka, 2:532). Greek authors (such as John Climacus, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, and Gregory Palamas) who stressed the idea of the divinization of man were subsequently translated into 122 BOGOČELOVEČESTVO of God” (Adversus haeresis [Against heresies], III, 19, 1, 939b) and was abundantly taken over by Saint Athanasius, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa, the notion itself, whose meaning bogočelovečestvo rearticulates, goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The creation of the word bogočelovečestvo is nothing more than a nominalization of the adjective “theandric” [θεανδϱιϰός] used by Pseudo-Dionysius in his fourth letter to express the idea of the humanity of Christ (RT: PG, vol. 3, letter 4, col. 1072C). The adjective “theandric” designates a mode of activity peculiar to the God-made-man (andrôthentos theou [ἀνδϱωθέντος θεοῦ]), which he has carried out in our favor (kainên tina tên theandrikên hêmin pepoliteumenos [χαινήν τινα τὴν θεανδϱιϰὴν ἡμῖν πεπολιτευμένος]; ibid.) Pauline anthropology opened the way to the idea of the ontological encounter between the divine and the human in the person of Christ, the second Adam, whose sacrifice paved the way for the renaissance of humanity (Rom 5:12; 1 Cor 15:22, 45; Gn 1:26). The whole later anthropology of the Greek church fathers develops this idea. Orthodox patristics proposed a mystical vision of the world in which the divine work is never finished and goes on in the creation of humanity by humanity itself. In some passages Russian authors literally echo patristic expression. “It is toward the God-man [bogočelovek (богочеловеκ)] that the whole history of humanity tended,” Solovyov writes in his Lectures. In the theological register bogočelovečestvo is the synthetic notion that expresses in a single concept two symmetrical events in Christian history. The first of these events is the Incarnation of the Word, its kenôsis [ϰένωσις], that is, in Greek enanthrôpêsis [ἐνανθϱωπήσις] (in Russian, bogovoploščenie [боговоплοщение] in which voploščenie [воплοщение] (incarnation) has its origin in plot’ [плοть] (flesh)). The second event is the divinization of man, theôsis, that is, anakephalaiôsis [ἀναϰεφαλαίωσις] (in Russian, oboženie čeloveka [обожение человеκa]). The term kenôsis was formed by the Greek fathers on the basis of the verb kenoô [ϰενόω], that is, “to empty” (with the reflexive pronoun “to empty oneself”). It has its origin in an expression in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, 2:7. The naming of Jesus as Lord (ibid., 2:9) is preceded by a sequence that describes the humbling of the one who was “in the form of God” (ibid., 2:6). His elevation comes at the end of a descent (in Russian, sošestvie [сοшествие]) and an annihilation (heauton ekenôsen [ἑαυτὸν ἐϰένωσεν]) until he reaches the obedience that makes him accept death on the Cross. This theory of kenôsis also invaded Russian Orthodoxy. V. Tareev (1866–1934) developed the idea that the creation itself was a kenotic act. But his most original ideas had to do with the temptations over which Christ triumphs by accepting his kenotic state. Bulgakov reinforces this idea of Tareev. For him, there is kenos [ϰενός] in the Incarnation only because there is a kenôsis in the Trinity as a whole and a divine kenôsis in the Creation. The kenôsis in the Trinity consists in the mutual love of the divine persons, which surpasses any individual state. The Creation inserts God into time and includes a certain risk. The kenôsis of the Incarnation is located above all in God, in the Word’s will to love (Solovyov, Lectures), and appeals to the personalization of the Trinity that turns out to be so important for Orthodox theology. II. Semantics: Theandry or Divino-Humanity Bogočelovečestvo is translated in English in different ways: by “theanthropy” or “theandry,” or again by “divino-humanity” or “Godmanhood.” From the linguistic point of view, the term is composed of two parts: God (bog [Бог]) and humanity (čelovečestvo [человечество]). Both Berdyayev and Solovyov define divinity (božestvennoe [Божественное]) by drawing on Eckhart’s Gottheit and Böhme’s Ungrund but also on the mystery of the Trinity so dear to the Greek fathers. For Berdyayev, “divinity is deeper than God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is absolute freedom, the result of everything, including God, freedom in which even the difference between good and evil is not defined. This ineffable, transcendent Divinity has come into the world in the form of the Trinity, in three hypostases,” to complete its creation with humanity, whose goal is to become divino-human (Berdyayev, Meaning of the Creative Act). This difference between divinity and God implicit in bogočelovečestvo refers to the process of a theogony that is pursued in the revelation of the divine through the history of humanity. Berdyayev draws on the “divine void” (božestvennoe ničto [божественное ничто]), in Greek to meon [τὸ μέον]), which is the basis for all creation and is located within human nature (particularly within the person (ličnost’ [личность]). Solovyov emphasizes instead the primordial universalism of human consciousness, which, once restored in Christ, will return universality to all partial existences and restore the unitotality vseedinstvo [всеединство] lost by fallen humanity: Since the divine principle is the real object of religious consciousness, that is, an object that acts on consciousness and reveals its content in it, religious development is a positive, objective process, a real interaction between God and man, and thus a divino-human process. (Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood) Semyon Frank goes still further in affirming an incomplete creation of the world. He considers knowledge (znanie [знaние]) the true blossoming of being, the growth of life: thanks to this form of anthropogony, theogony and cosmogony attain their real goal (cf. Berdyayev, Tipy religioznoj mysli v Rossii [The variety of Russian religious thought]). The second part of the term bogočelovečestvo—that is, čelovečestvo (человечество [humanity])—raises fewer problems of translation. While signifying the humanity of Christ, čelovečestvo has in Russian religious thought a second, very specific meaning: that of a humanity united in the community of Spirit (sobornoe čelovečestvo [собоpное человечество]). Vladimir Solovyov writes: “Reunited with its divine principle through the intermediation of Christ, humanity is the church” (Solovyov, Lectures); thus it is, according to an idea dear to Gregory of Nyssa and adopted by G. Fedorov, the unity constituted by the living, by the dead, and by those who are yet to be born. III. The Actualization of the Patristic Heritage Although it echoes the capital formula of Saint Irenaeus (“The Word of God was made man and the one who is the Son of God was made the son of man, united with the Word of God, so that man might be adopted and become the son BOGOČELOVEČESTVO 123 the historical conception peculiar to Russian Slavophiles of the period, at the center of which was the Russian idea (russkaja ideja [русская идея]). The latter’s historical source resides in the quasi-nationalistic and statist construct elaborated by the monk Philotheos (end of the fifteenth century), who made Moscow the “third Rome.” In the nineteenth century the Russian idea consisted in a critical, messianic vision of European humanity as divided into two opposed worlds: the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. Solovyov, and later Berdyayev, following the Slavophiles, condemned the “decadent West” and asserted the particular role of Russia, which is neither Eastern nor Western, but a great “comprehensive East-West” that, alone on earth, “holds the divine truth and represents God’s will” (Solovyov, Lectures). The opposition between East and West has its roots in the history of the Christian church, namely in the schism between a Catholic West (the material part) and an Orthodox East (the spiritual part): Thus before the perfect union, there is the division of Christianity into two halves, the East clinging with all its strength to the divine principle and preserving it by maintaining within itself the necessary conservative and ascetic spirit, and the West expending all its energy on developing the human principle, to the detriment of divine truth, which is first deformed and then completely rejected. (Ibid.) In Greek patristics kenôsis and theôsis are symmetrical. The notion of theos anthrôpos [Θεὸς ʼʹAνθϱωπος] was the cornerstone of Greek soteriology, whose meaning is found literally in the idea of the real union of man and God. The Incarnation represents the two sides of a single mystery: We say in fact that God and man serve each other as models, and that God humanizes himself for man in his love of man, to the very extent to which man, strengthened by charity, transposes himself for God in God. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, RT: PG, 91:10, 113) In Christian theosophy the point of contact between these two movements of kenôsis and divinization is man, but the way of conceiving the latter’s relation to God differs in the Catholic and Orthodox anthropologies. Bogočelovečestvo and the “Russian Idea” The Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often emphasized the elaboration of a new kind of philosophy opposed to the positivism and empiricism prevalent in the West. They considered themselves the inventors of a genuine religious anthropology and of its true language, in which bogočelovečestvo is a central term. The originality of this notion consists in the intense attempt to make the subtleties of the dogma of the humanity of Christ work together with the idea of the divinization of man and 1 Orthodox and Catholic soteriologies Beyond the historical and theological subtleties of the period of ecumenical councils, this is where we find the key to the divergences between the anthropologies of the Greek and Latin fathers. Starting out from the idea that original sin introduced death into human existence and caused man to lose the grace of being “in the image of God,” Orthodox anthropology remains very attached to the idea of the spiritual improvement of humans in their history and to the accomplishment of the deifying contemplation at the end of time (apokatastasis [ἀπоϰατάστασις]), the restoration of humanity and things at the Last Judgment, adopted by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. The Word was made flesh, according to the Greeks, in order to restore to man the resemblance to God that he had lost through Adam’s sin and to deify him. This resemblance guaranteed man’s immortality, which original sin had caused him to lose. That is why the Incarnation of the Word is defined by the Greek fathers as the necessary condition for accomplishing the promise of eternal life. It is through love for man that God sought, by means of the sacrifice of Christ, to save fallen humanity (Athanasius [295–373], De incarnatione, 6, 5) (Méhat, 1966, 82–86). Man “would have been lost had the Son of God, the Lord of the Universe and the Savior, not come to put an end to death” (Athanasius, De incarnatione, 9, 2). The metaphor that is important for the whole Orthodox terminology and that remains present in Russian philosophy is that of the “divine thirst,” the “lack” manifested by God with regard to humanity, to which he shows his love by creating it pure and wanting to save it. Confronted by this Orthodox soteriology, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) developed a Latin soteriology in terms of “divine dominium,” of cosmic order and justice corrupted by human sin. It is especially in accord with the register of property or legitimate possession (possessio, dominium, dominus) that Anselm sets forth the relations between the creature and his Creator. The latter is the master (dominus), and the creatures endowed with intelligence (angels and men) are this master’s slaves, the serfs or servants (servi, conservi). Man has offended the Creator of justice and order in his will and in his honor (Dei honori): original sin consisted in disobeying the Dominus. The ideas of rectitudo, of rectus ordo, which are identified with those of justitia or debitum, are essential in Saint Anselm’s doctrine (Roques). Having fallen, man is not capable of giving God his due. Christ, on the other hand, owes the Father nothing but repays the human debt to him. Finally, humanity is indebted in two ways: for Adam’s sin and for the death of Christ. The Greek (Orthodox) and Latin (Catholic) anthropologies are opposed as being, respectively, that of divinization and that of redemption, of grace and debt, of restoration (re-creation) and reparation (restitution), of divine love and divine honor, of participation in order, of rebirth and buying back, of loss and debt, of economy and speculation, of contemplation and calculation, of sanctification and satisfaction. This difference between the Greek and Latin anthropologies is taken over by Dostoyevsky in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov). 124 BOGOČELOVEČESTVO other than the intrusion of eternity into historical time, a sort of accomplishment of time, the kairos [ϰαιϱός] that manifests itself solely in encountering the sobornost’ of reunited humanity. Tatyana Golitchenko REFS.: Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury. “Cur Deus Homo: Or Why God Was Made Man.” In Basic Writings, edited and translated by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. Berdyayev, Nicolay. The Bourgeois Mind and Other Essays. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966. . Christian Existentialism: An Anthology. Translated by D. Lowrie. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965. . The Destiny of Man. London: G. Bles, Centenary Press, 1937. . The Divine and the Human. London: G. Bles, 1949. . The Meaning of the Creative Act. Translated by Donald A. Lowrie. London: Gollancz, 1955. . The Russian Idea. Translated by R. M. French. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992. . Spirit and Reality. London: G. Bles, 1946. Bulgakov, Sergei. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993. Koyré, Alexandre. La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXème siècle. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1929. Maximus. St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts. Translated by Despina D. Prassas. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Godmanhood, introduction by Peter Zouboff. London: D. Dobson, 1948. According to Solovyov, if modern history had been limited to the development of the West, it “would have ended in disintegration and chaos” (ibid.) However, “if history had stopped with Byzantine Christianity, the truth of Christ [divino-humanity, bogočelovečestvo] would have remained incomplete for lack of the free and active human principle that is indispensable for its accomplishment” (ibid.) Russia’s messianic vocation consists in combining the “divine element of Christianity” preserved in the East and the human principle freed and developed in the West (ibid.) The “catholic character” (narod [народ]) of the Russian people, that is, its “conciliarity” (see SOBORNOST’) makes it possible to realize this vocation. Solovyov picks up here the idea of the Slavophile A. Khomiakov, according to which it is within the ideal church as a divino-human, theanthropic unity, that sobornost’ [соборность] (the communion of the Spirit) is developed. However, since man can receive the Divinity only in his absolute wholeness, that is, in union with all things, the man-God is necessarily a collective, universal being: it is pan-humanity, or the universal church [vselenskaja tserkov’]. (Ibid.) Solovyov’s universal church is the living analogy of the Absolute. Thus, according to the Russian idea, humanity is bogočelovečestvo: a human community in the history of which the divine is manifested and gradually reveals itself. In overcoming its division, this community must pass from the stage of history to that of metahistory. The latter is nothing other than the intrusion of eternity into historical time, a sort of accomplishment of time, the kairos [ϰαιϱός] that manifests itself solely in encountering the sobornost’ of reunited humanity. Tatyana Golitchenko REFS.: Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury. “Cur Deus Homo: Or Why God Was Made Man.” In Basic Writings, edited and translated by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. Berdyayev, Nicolay. The Bourgeois Mind and Other Essays. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966. . Christian Existentialism: An Anthology. Translated by D. Lowrie. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965. . The Destiny of Man. London: G. Bles, Centenary Press, 1937. . The Divine and the Human. London: G. Bles, 1949. . The Meaning of the Creative Act. Translated by Donald A. Lowrie. London: Gollancz, 1955. . The Russian Idea. Translated by R. M. French. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992. . Spirit and Reality. London: G. Bles, 1946. Bulgakov, Sergei. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993. Koyré, Alexandre. La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXème siècle. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1929. Maximus. St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts. Translated by Despina D. Prassas. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Godmanhood, introduction by Peter Zouboff. London: D. Dobson, 1948. ÇA The French demonstrative pronoun ça, a contraction of cela, is the widely accepted translation of the German es, a thirdperson singular neuter pronoun that Freud uses, in his second topology, to designate the third construct (id) of the psychic apparatus alongside the Ich (ego) and the Über-Ich (superego): see ES, and DRIVE, I/ME/MYSELF, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf. ANXIETY, ENTSTELLUNG, LOVE, PLEASURE, VERNEINUNG. Es is also used in the German expression es gibt, which French renders as il y a. See ES GIBT, ESTI, IL Y A. v. CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, IDENTITY, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SELF, SUBJECT CARE FRENCH souci, soin, sollicitude GERMAN Sorge, Fürsorge, Besorgen v. SOUCI and ANXIETY, AUTRUI, DASEIN, GENDER, LAW, LOVE, MALAISE, MORALS, SECURITAS, SEX, SORGE, VERGÜENZA The word “care” has recently been used with increasing frequency in English philosophy, but its translation into other languages raises a problem for two reasons in particular. First, it is used to translate the Heideggerian term Sorge (Sein und Zeit), and second, it appears in the expression “the ethics of care,” which feminists oppose to the impartiality of “masculine justice” (Gilligan, Different Voice; Young, Justice). In both cases, it is impossible to translate “care” into French. I. The Translation of Sorge by “Care” We must note first that “care” does not derive from Latin cura but rather from Old High German or Gothic Kara, which means “care,” “lament,” “sorrow.” The word initially designated a painful mental state such as concern or anxiety, and it was indeed appropriate to use “care” to render the German Sorge as it is used by Heidegger. For Heidegger the very Being of Dasein is “care” (Sorge) (Sein und Zeit), so that the latter is in the world in the form of Besorgen (concern). Cares, tribulations, and melancholias are distinct states, but they are part of the ontological structure of Sorge: “Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue” (Being and Time, 274). The word “care” also designates the effort to anticipate a danger or to protect oneself from the uncertainties of the future by acting responsibly. That is the most common meaning of the term in English, and here again we see how well the importance of temporality in “care” corresponds to Heideggerian concerns: “The ontological meaning of care is temporality” (ibid.). But the deficiencies of the English translation of Sorge by “care” rapidly make themselves felt because the element of nothingness is absent in “care”: “Death, conscience, and guilt are anchored in the phenomenon of care.” Finally, Heidegger connects Sorge with curiosity, which leads him to retranslate Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to see” (pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei) (ibid.)— taking eidenai in the original sense of “to see” and connecting oregontai (lit., “seek”) with Sorge, “care.” And he translates Aristotle in these terms: “The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being.” Thus he makes an association between “seeing” and “thinking” in Western metaphysics that the English translation as “care” cannot render. There is no possibility of making the connotations specific to the German Sorge flow into the English “care,” and the current development of the meaning of “care” that is drawing this word in the direction of interpersonal relations and concern about others makes the translation of Heidegger given here in English rather enigmatic. II. “Care” and “Solicitude” German distinguishes more clearly than English or French between care for oneself or Selbstsorge (which, Heidegger says, is “tautological,” Being and Time, 366), on the one hand, and on the other Fürsorge or “care for the other,” which Macquarrie and Robinson translate not by “care” but by “solicitude” and which the French translator renders as assistance. Solicitude, which is “an affectionate care for others,” has a meaning different from “care” and must be attached to a different register, that of action in matters of help and social aid. “Care” designates the whole set of public arrangements necessary for the welfare of the population in a welfare state. That is a meaning for which there is no French equivalent. For example, the expressions “prenatal care” and “postnatal care” refer particularly to the responsibilities of public health agencies with regard to pregnant women and infants. Caregivers are people who, whether as volunteers or not, take care of the elderly or anyone in need. Since in many countries the great majority of caregivers are women, feminists have offered a critique of the ethics of justice in the name of the virtues attributed to these disinterested, noncompetitive, nonquantifiable, nonpossessive behaviors that constitute most of women’s nonremunerated work: caring for children and the elderly, efforts to keep the family group intact, etc. Thus these militants seek to oppose to the “masculine” ideal of an ethics of impartiality and justice an “ethics of care.” Without taking a position regarding the “feminine” character of the values in question, we can say that these feminists’ reflections have led to a genuine “deconstruction” of universalist morality and the principle of identity, in accord with a trajectory that merges with the Heideggerian heritage of Sorge, though we cannot say that the common use of the word “care” has played a role in this matter. Catherine Audard REFS.: Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1953. First Published in 1927. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. it is applied to water, to grain; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque), with the moral or religious purity of the soul—thus Empedocles’s Purifications contains both a project of perpetual peace, constructed around metempsychosis, and alimentary prohibitions. Katharsis [ϰάθαϱσις] is an action noun corresponding to the verb kathairô [ϰαθαίϱω] (clean, purify, purge). Initially it had the religious sense of “purification,” and referred particularly to the ritual of expulsion practiced in Athens on the eve of the Thargelia. During these festivals traditionally dedicated to Artemis and Apollo, a loaf of bread, the thargêlos [θάϱγηλος], made from the first grain harvested that year, was offered; but beforehand the city had to be purified by expelling criminals from it (cf. Harpocration’s lexicon: “The Athenians, during the Thargelia, drove two men, as purifying exorcisms, out of the city, one for the men, the other for the women,” and then scapegoats, according to the ritual of the pharmakos [φαϱμαϰός]). Apollo himself is called katharsios [ϰαθάϱσιος], “purifier,” and moreover is forced to purify himself after killing Python in Delphi. According to Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus, he is fittingly named apolouôn [ἀπολούων], “the washer,” insofar as the music, medicine, and divination that characterize him are so many katharseis [ϰαθάϱσεις] and katharmoi [ϰαθαϱμοί], practices of purification (405a–c). According to the kathairontes [ϰαθαίϱοντες], the “purgers,” “the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles [ta empodizonta tis ekbalêi [τὰ ἐμποδίζοντα τις ἐϰϐάλῃ] have been removed” (Plato, Sophist, 230c). The purgative method that works for the body also works for the soul, which cannot assimilate knowledge before it has been purged of its opinions by elegchos [ἔλεγχος], “refutation”; the patient “must be purged of his prejudices and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more” (230d). But there is a still more radical purification that Plato transposes from the religious domain, Orphic and Pythagorean, to philosophy (cf. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, chaps. 3 and 5): “purification consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body” (Phaedo, 67c); if only the pure, purified thought can take possession of the pure, the unmixed (to eilikrines [τὸ εἰλιϰϱινές]) that is truth, mustn’t the soul leave the body? Katharsis connects purification with separation and purging, not only in the religious, but also in the political (Plato, in the Laws [5.735b–736a], describes painful purges as the only efficacious ones) and the medical domains. In Hippocratic medicine, katharsis was connected with the theory of the humors and names the process of physical purgation through which harmful secretions are expelled, naturally or artificially, through the upper or the lower orifices: the term can designate not only purging as such, but also defecation, diarrhea, vomiting, and menstruation (Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 5.36; 5.60; cf. De mulierum affectibus). This Hippocratic meaning is valid in Aristotle’s whole naturalist corpus (in the Historia animialium, 7.10.587b, for example, the term designates the rupture of the amniotic sac, various bodily discharges, etc.; cf. RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v.). However, as a remedy—Greek to pharmakon [τὸ φάϱμαϰον], the same word, in the neuter gender, as the one designating the scapegoat— katharsis implies more precisely the idea of a homeopathic medicine: purgation is a way of curing harm by harm, the 126 CATEGORY CATEGORY “Category” is derived, via Vulgar Latin, from the Greek katêgoria [ϰατηγορία], (kata [ϰατά], against, on, and agoreuô [ἀγορεύω], speak in public), which designates both the prosecution in a trial and the attribution in a logical proposition—that is, the questions that must be asked with regard to a subject and the answers that can be given. From Aristotle to Kant and beyond, logic has therefore determined a list of “categories” that are as well operations of judgment (cf. JUSTICE); see ESTI (esp. Box 1) and HOMONYM. On the lexical networks implied by this ontological systematics, see BEGRIFF, MERKMAL, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SUBJECT, and cf. ESSENCE, PROPERTY, TO BE, TRUTH, UNIVERSALS. v. AUFHEBEN, GENRE, OBJECT, PRINCIPLE, WHOLE CATHARSIS, KATHARSIS [ϰάθαϱσις] (GREEK) FRENCH purgation, purification v. ART, MELANCOLY, MIMÊSIS, MITMENSCH, NATURE, NEIGHBOR, PATHOS, PLEASURE, PROPERTY, SUBLIME The word katharsis initially was connected with rituals of purification before becoming a Hippocratic term in the theory of humors. Aristotle’s Poetics inflected its meaning by maintaining, in opposition to Plato, that tragedy and theater can care for the soul by giving it pleasure. In the traditional translation as “purgation,” it was part of French classical discourse on tragedy (Corneille, 1660) before reappearing in its Greek form in Lessing’s works criticizing Corneille’s criticism of Aristotle (the Greek word, which was already present in English, then returned in nineteenth-century discussions of Lessing; see RT: DHLF, s.v. “Catharsis”). In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the “cathartic method” that Freud gradually disengaged from its association with hypnosis is connected with abreaction, the emotional discharge that makes it possible, through language, to eliminate the affect bound up with a traumatic event. The word’s oscillation between the meanings “purification” and “purgation” while remaining constant through various languages has continually provided material for polemics and reinterpretations. I. From Scapegoat to Tragic Pleasure The adjective katharos [ϰαθαϱός] associates material cleanliness, that of the body (Homer calls it an “uncovered place”; CATHARSIS 127 in relation to new concerns connected with a profoundly different conception of the passions. From a Christian point of view, it is the passions themselves, and not merely their excesses, that are considered bad. It is no longer a matter of purifying the passions but of purifying oneself of passions, that is, of purifying morals. What seventeenth-century authors meant by “purgation of the passions” thus does not have quite the sense that katharsis had in Aristotle. The French emphasize the moral and especially the pedagogical aspect attached to the idea of theatrical katharsis. “The main goal of poetry is to benefit by purifying morals,” Father Rapin wrote (Réflexions sur la Poétique, 9). “Poetry is an art that was invented for the instruction of men. The ill are treated, and tragedy is the only remedy from which they are able to benefit, for it is the only amusement in which they can find the pleasant and the useful,” Dacier wrote in the preface to his French translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (1692). Although it appeals to Aristotle’s authority on this point, this way of conceiving the purgation of the passions in the theater has little to do with Aristotelian katharsis. Corneille makes the same error when he criticizes Aristotle on this point, rejecting the idea that tragedy can purify the spectators’ passions: he thinks he is deviating from Aristotle, whereas he is merely opposing the interpretation his contemporaries gave of him. Racine is one of the few writers to remain faithful to Aristotle: “Tragedy,” he wrote, “exciting pity and terror, purges and tempers these sorts of passions, that is, by arousing these passions, it deprives them of what is excessive and vicious in them, and returns them to a state that is moderate and in conformity with reason” (Œuvres complètes, quoted by J. Tricot in his translation of Aristotle’s Politics). It is true that unlike Corneille, Racine understood Greek, and translated and annotated whole passages of the Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics. . Relying on Corneille’s criticism, but at the same time respecting convention and what he thought was Aristotle’s thought, Du Bos developed a rather confused reflection on this subject that concludes as follows: “Thus tragedy purges the passions rather as remedies cure, and as defensive weapons protect against offensive ones. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does!” (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture [1719], §44, “Que les poèmes dramatiques purgent les passions”). III. The “Carthartic Method” in Psychoanalysis The “cathartic method” is part of the prehistory of psychoanalysis. It was developed by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud on the basis of their research on the etiology of symptoms of hysteria, as they explain in their work Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, 1895). In seeking the causes of the pathological phenomena of hysteria, the two Viennese physicians noticed that their patients’ symptoms were causally connected with a traumatic situation that the patient could not consciously remember (cf. “Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene” [“On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,” 1893], in Studien über Hysterie). The affect involved in this “psychic trauma [psychische Trauma],” “blocked” (eingeklemmte) and same by the same, and it is also why every pharmakon is a “poison” as much as a “remedy,” the dosage of the harmful thing alone producing a good result (see NATURE). Here we have one of the possible keys to the rhetorical, poetic, and aesthetic meaning of katharsis, which Lausberg characterizes as “a homeopathic hygiene for the soul” (RT: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, §1222). This kind of cure is connected with the katharsis produced by sacred melodies, mentioned in Aristotle’s Politics. There are enthusiastic, possessed individuals who “fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a result of the sacred melodies—when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy (tois exorgiazousi melesi [τοῖς ἐξοϱγιάζουσι μέλεσι])—restored as though they had found healing and purgation (iatreias kai katharseôs [ἰατϱείας ϰαὶ ϰαθάϱσεως])” (7.1342a 7–11). More generally, for Aristotle (who here goes beyond a Plato, whom he salutes but subverts; cf. Republic, 3, starting at 398) katharsis is one of the functions of music, along with education and a good way of life, and with leisure and a relaxation of tension: for all those in the grip of passion “are in a manner purged and their souls lightened and delighted (kouphizesthai meth’ hêdonês [ϰουφίζεσθαι μεθ ήδονῆς]).” The purgative melodies likewise give humans an innocent pleasure (charan ablabê [χαϱὰν ἀϐλαϐῆ]) (Politics, 7.1342a 14–16). This homeopathic meaning is maintained in the Poetics: tragedy includes “incidents of pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis (katharsin [ϰάθαϱσιν]) of such emotions” (6.1449b 27–28). This is a purgation of the same by the same, or rather by the representation of the same. But unlike participants in Corybantic rites that seek to cure the soul of a furious madness, the spectator of tragedy is in full command of his faculties; he has no need to be cured. Whence a second meaning, which is in a way allopathic: the passions are purified by the spectator’s seeing them, to the extent to which the poet shows him things that have themselves been purified and transformed by mimêsis [μίμησις]: “The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear, and the poet has to produce it by a work of imitation” (14.1453b 4–13). Purgation, that is, the representation of diagrams by means of a musical or poetic work, substitutes pleasure for pain. Ultimately it is pleasure that purifies the passions, lightens them, relieves them of their excessive, invasive character, and resituates them in a point of equilibrium. Finally, to radicalize catharsis, we have to follow the skeptical physician Sextus Empiricus in choosing for the soul as for the body a remedy capable of “eliminating itself at the same time that it eliminates the humors” or dogmas: the skeptical modes of expression are thus in their very form, which includes doubt, relativity, relationship, and questioning, self-purging (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.206; cf. 2.188; cf. Voelke, “Soigner par le logos”). II. Purgation of the Passions and Purification of Morals in the Classical Theater This twofold meaning connecting the remedy with pleasure is the basis for the ambiguity and at the same time the richness of later interpretations. The influence exercised by Aristotle’s Poetics on the French theory of the dramatic poem was accompanied by a reworking of the ancient problematics 128 CATHARSIS Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasure: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Bernays, Jacob. Zwei Abhandlungen über die aristotelische Theorie des Drama. Berlin: W. Herz, 1880 ; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. . Chief Plays. Translated by L. Lockert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Dacier, André. La poétique d’Aristote. Barbin, 1692. . The Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1959. First published in 1705. Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1994. First published in 1719. Translation by T. Nugent: Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music: With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients. London: Printed for J. Nourse, 1748. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie.” Vol. 13 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922. . Selbstdarstellung. Vol. 14 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922. . The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press–Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74. . Studien über Hysterie. Vol. 1 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1895. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published in 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. Papanoutsos, Evangelios P. La catharsis des passions d’après Aristote. Athens: Collection de l’Institut français d’Athènes, 1953. Plato. Sophist. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Racine, Jean. Complete Plays. Translated by S. Solomon. New York: Random House, 1967. . Œuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952. Rapin, René. Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote, et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes. Edited by E. T. Dubois. Geneva: Droz, 1970. First published in 1674. Translation by M. Rymer: Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie. London, 1694. Voelke, André Jean. “Soigner par le logos: la thérapeuthique de Sextus Empiricus.” In Le Scepticisme antique. Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 15. Geneva, 1990. not discharged through the normal channels, is transformed into a hysterical conversion. “Catharsis” is produced when under treatment the path leading to consciousness and the normal discharge of the affect [normale Entladung des Affekts] is opened up (“Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie” [Psychoanalysis and Theory of the Libido] [1922]). The “cathartic procedure,” as Breuer called it, consists in using hypnosis to treat the patient through catharsis. The narrative of the “psychic trauma” is in fact usually followed by a discharge of affect (abreaction) that constitutes “catharsis” proper (cf. Selbstdarstellung [Self-representation], 1924). After the publication of Studien über Hysterie, the two collaborators’ positions regarding the etiology of hysteria diverged: “Breuer gave priority to what might be called a physiological theory,” whereas Freud confirmed the sexual content at the origin of hysterical phenomena, also pointing out the importance of “the differentiation between unconscious and conscious mental acts” (Selbstdarstellung). Later on, Freud abandoned hypnosis and suggestion in favor of free association, thus creating “psychoanalysis.” However, the effectiveness of catharsis allowed him to confirm two fundamental results, which were subsequently confirmed, as he says himself: First, hysterical systems have meaning and significance because they are substitutes for normal mental acts; and second, the disclosure of this unknown meaning coincides with the suppression of the symptoms, and thus here scientific research and therapeutic effort coincide. Studien über Hysterie Barbara Cassin Jacqueline Lichtenstein Elisabete Thamer REFS.: Aristotle. Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by J. Barnes, vol. 2, 2316–3240. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. . Politics. Translated by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1970. 1 From Aristotle to Corneille and back Corneille’s criticism of the idea of theatrical catharsis illustrates the way his contemporaries transformed this problem. The purgation of the passions in the sense in which Corneille thought Aristotle understood it is for him purely “imaginary”: tragedy, he wrote, has the particular “utility” that by means of pity and fear it purges such passions. These are the terms Aristotle uses in his definition, and they tell us two things: first, that it [catharsis] excites pity and fear, and second, that by means of them, it purges similar passions. He explains the first at some length, but he says not a word about the latter, and of all the conditions he uses in this definition, this is the only one he does not explain. If the purgation of the passions happens in tragedy, I hold that it must happen in the manner that I say; but I doubt that it ever happens, even in those that meet the conditions set by Aristotle. They are met in Le Cid and caused its great success: Rodrigue and Chimène have the probity subject to passions and these passions cause their misfortune because they are as unhappy as they are passionate for one another their misfortune elicits pity, that is certain, and it cost the audience enough tears to make that incontestable. This pity must make us fear that we will fall into a similar misfortune and purge the excessive love that causes their misfortune and make us feel sorry for them, but I do not know whether pity gives it to us or if it purges it, and I fear that Aristotle’s reasoning on this point is just a fine idea that has never actually produced its effect. I leave this up to those who have seen the performances: they can examine it in the secrecy of their hearts and go over what moved them in the theater, in order to see if in this way they arrived at reflective fear, and whether it rectified in them the passion that caused the disgrace that they so lamented. Discours de la tragédie, 1660 CHANCE 129 In his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–68), Lessing reproached Corneille precisely for not having understood the sentence in chapter 6 of the Poetics and of having unfairly criticized Aristotle: Finally, as for the moral goal that Aristotle assigns to tragedy, and that he thought he had to include in his definition, we know how many debates about it have arisen, particularly recently. I feel sure that I can show that those who have blamed Aristotle on this point have not understood him. They have lent him their own thoughts before finding out what his were. They are battling chimeras with which they are themselves obsessed, and flatter themselves that they victoriously refute the philosopher when they defeat the phantoms of their own brains. 48th Evening REFS.: Corneille, Pierre. Discours de la tragédie. In Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published by 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. CERTITUDE “Certitude,” from ecclesiastical medieval Latin certitudo, designating in particular “Christian conviction,” is heir to two meanings of the adjective certus, one “objective” and the other “subjective”: “beyond doubt, fixed, positive, real,” regarding a thing or knowledge, or “firm in his resolutions, decided, sure, authentic,” regarding an individual. Although certitudo has no Greek equivalent, the Latin verb cerno, cernere, from which certus is derived, has the concrete meaning of “pass through a sieve, discern,” like the Greek krinein [ϰρίνειν] (select, sieve, judge), which comes from the same root. Thus begins the relationship between certitude, judgment, and truth, which since Descartes has been connected with the problematics of the subject and of self-certainty. The whole terminological system of truth is thus involved, from unveiling and adequation to certitude and obviousness: see TRUTH, and ISTINA, PRAVDA. I. Certainty, Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Linguistic Systems 1. The objective aspect manifests itself first, certitudo translating for example the “determined nature” of objects or known properties (as in Arab commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics translated into Latin), or the incontestably true nature of principles: see TRUTH, cf. RES (and THING), PRINCIPLE. 2. With the revolution of the subject inaugurated by Cartesian philosophy, the second aspect comes to the fore: some “reasons,” “ideas,” or “propositions” are “true and certain,” or “true and evident,” but the most certain and the most evident of all, and thus in a sense the truest, is the certitude of my own existence, a certainty that the subject attributes to itself: see SUBJECT and I/ME/ MYSELF, SELBST. The thematics of certainty precedes that of consciousness both historically and logically, but it ends up being incorporated and subordinated by it: see CONSCIOUSNESS; cf. ES and UNCONSCIOUS. 3. Certainty thus becomes a quality or disposition of the subject that reproduces, in the field of rational knowledge, the security or assurance that the believer finds in religious faith, and that shields him from the wavering of the soul, see CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE]; cf. DASEIN, MALAISE, and esp. LIFE/LEBEN, SEHNSUCHT. 4. It will be noted that French retains the possibility of reversing the perspective by exploiting the Latin etymology, as Descartes does in the Principles of Philosophy when he transforms the certitudo probabilis of the Scholastics (Aquinas) into “moral certainty.” On the other hand, English tends to objectify certainty to the maximum in opposition to belief (see BELIEF), whereas German hears in the term Gewissheit the root wissen (to know, to have learned) and situates it in a series with Bewusstsein and Gewissen (see CONSCIOUSNESS), clearly marking the constitutive relationship to the subject in opposition to Glaube on the one hand, and to Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit (lit., “appearance of truth,” i.e., “probability”) on the other (see TRUTH, II.B). II. Knots of Problems 1. On the relations between certainty and belief, the modalities of subjective experience, see CROYANCE. 2. On the relation between individual certainty and the wise man’s constancy, see PHRONÊSIS and PIETAS; cf. MORALS, VIRTÙ, WISDOM. 3. On the relations between certainty and truth, the confrontation between subjectivity and objectivity in the development of knowledge, see—in addition to TRUTH— ANSCHAULICHKEIT, EXPERIENCE, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION. 4. On the relations between certainty and probability, the modalities of objective knowledge insofar as it is related to a subject’s experience, see—in addition to PROBABILITY— CHANCE, DUTY, DOXA, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE, SENSUS COMMUNIS], MATTER OF FACT. v. SOUL, TO BE, UNDERSTANDING CHANCE / PROBABILITY FRENCH chance, probabilité, avantage v. PROBABILITY, and DESTINY, ENGLISH, HISTORY, UTILITY The English notions of chance and probability, which were long confused with each other, each took on a specific meaning with their entry into the field of mathematical calculation, which made it necessary to distinguish them as early as the second half of the eighteenth century and to distinguish them even more clearly in the nineteenth century. No doubt there were some cases in the eighteenth century where “chance” had exactly the same meaning as “probability.” For example, in his Essay towards Solving a Problem 130 CHANCE and constitutes a genuine epistemological obstacle to its evaluation. II. Subjective Probability (Chance) and Objective Probability (Probability) Cutting across this first opposition between the “probability of chances” and the “probability of causes” and contradicting it to some extent, there is another opposition that has been even more influential not only in mathematics, but also in the domains of religion, economics, jurisprudence, and society: the one that distinguishes subjective probability (generally called chance) and objective probability (generally called probability). Price is correct in saying that Bayes (An Essay) deviated from common usage on this point. If I roll a mathematician’s six-sided die that is well balanced and not loaded and that clearly shows one of its faces when it has finished rolling, the probability of obtaining an ace, or indeed any other face, is one in six. Probability seems here to apply directly to the event, even if that is not the case and if it is a pure fiction connected with the discourse that allows us to make a prediction. But if I am in a situation where I am drawing winning and losing lots from an urn, I calculate the value of the relation between the number of losing lots and the number of winning lots that it contains on the basis of the drawings I have already made, and I attribute a probability to the outcome of the drawing I am about to make with a chance of being right or wrong. Bayes’s rule relates the probability that an event will occur to the chance of being mistaken when I calculate it. His rule calculates, as Price puts it, borrowing Bayes’s own expression: the chance that the probability for the happening of an event perfectly unknown should be between any two named degrees of probability, antecedently to any experiments made about it. Chance no longer bears directly on the event but, rather, indirectly on my estimate of its probability. In a given initial situation, I can decide as I wish to situate between two degrees the probability that an event will occur; the “chance of being right” changes, of course, as this situation develops, that is, as I collect new information regarding the event in question. The degree of chance is calculated by an understanding that measures the value of a decision in relation to the probability of a given event in a given situation or at various stages of that situation. Curiously, since in this new function it is difficult to use the term “chance” in the plural, an author like Price substitutes the word “odds” for it and speaks of the “odds of chance” or the “odds of probability” (An Essay). The point is all the more remarkable because for a long time the English word “odds” was used only in the singular. Although “odds” clearly takes on the meaning of the French word cote in a wager that can receive a cardinal number, “odds” initially designated the strangeness of an event, the unexpected characteristic that made it an unusual, even unparalleled, event; but this does not mean that the word has no relation to arithmetic, since we commonly speak of odd numbers. In its singularity, the event is incommensurable, but in a contradictory fashion it thereby acquires the status of a unit constitutive of a number that preserves its character of being imperfect, odd, and difficult to divide. in the Doctrine of Chances (1763), Thomas Bayes declares that “[b]y chance I mean the same as probability,” even though his work brilliantly demonstrated that they are not the same. Chance clearly retains the “subjective” spirit of arbitrary randomness, since we speak of the “chance of being right” (in assigning a degree of probability between two selected degrees); thus it represents, in the tradition of J. Bernoulli’s Ars conjectandi, a fraction of certainty. On the other hand, probability is clearly “objective” in that it seems to apply more directly to events. In dice, the probability of rolling an ace is one in six; it seems to be a property of the situation. Nonetheless, the preceding proposition can also be interpreted and formulated as follows: the chance of being right when one says that an ace will be rolled is one in six. I. Probability of Chances and Probability of Causes Between the 1650s, when Pascal, along with Fermat, invented the “geometry of chance” (géométrie du hasard) and tried to enumerate the chances and to calculate odds (calculer le parti), and the end of the eighteenth century, “chance” and “probability” had time to change meaning. The last chapter of La logique de Port-Royal—of which Pascal was at least the inspiration, if not the author—determines probability by calculating the odds (of winning if a given event occurs). At each step in the complex gaming situation he is analyzing, Pascal calculates the players’ odds, that is, the amount each would have to be paid if the game were to stop before chance determined the winner in accord with the rules. Nonetheless, “calculating the odds” is taken as a verb, whereas “probability” is usually taken by Pascal and in the La logique de Port-Royal as the equivalent of “chance.” In 1739, Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, grasped the two major axes along which the two notions are divided when they are not considered synonyms. The first opposes the “probability of chances” to the “probability of causes.” When in a given situation we can draw up a table of all the possible outcomes and calculate that a given situation will occur rather than another, we speak of the “probability of chances.” Thus, in calculating the odds in a game, we tend to speak of the “probability of chances” because the mind can make a concise inventory of all the situation’s possible outcomes. The Pascalian term hasard is perfectly rendered by the English word “chance” (Maistrov, Probability Theory). We speak of the “probability of causes” in very different circumstances, which Hume clearly distinguishes: if a sequence of similar events A1 B1 , A2 B2 , A3 B3 An Bn has been witnessed by one or more persons and an event of type A occurs, we can use Newton’s binomial to calculate the probability that an event B will occur; in this case we will speak of the “probability of causes.” Note that on the basis of an event of the type B, we could have calculated in the same way the probability that an event A preceded it. It is clear that, borrowing Hume’s image, the probability of causes is assessed not by making a complete count in a system of cases that have to be inventoried in every direction, but more linearly, in the way that one plows a furrow in a single direction. Although the weight of past cases bears on the determination of the probability of a cause or an effect in a present situation, taking into account past situations in the situation of a game (of chance) has nothing at all to do with the probability of chances CHÔRA 131 This is the place to note that the idea of subjective probability arose in a language that allowed this complicated formation by means of gerunds that cannot really be translated into French (see ENGLISH)—even if, a few years later, Continental mathematicians dealt with this idea with the same ease as mathematicians working in English. Jean-Pierre Cléro REFS.: Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. La logique de Port-Royal. 1662. Translation by James Dickoff and Patricia James: The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Bayes, Thomas. An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. New York, Hafner: 1963. First published in 1763. Bernoulli, Jakob. Ars conjectandi (opus posthumum). “Pars Quarta (tradens usum & applicationem praecedentis Doctrinae Civilibus, Moralibus Oeconomicus).” Basel: Thurnisiorum fratrum, 1713. Translation by E. Dudley Sylla: The Art of Conjecturing, Together with Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1779. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Laplace, Pierre-Simon de. Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements. In vol. 8 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891. . Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Translated by A. I. Dale. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995. . Théorie analytique des probabilités. Paris: Courcier, 1814. Maistrov, Leonid E. Probability Theory. A Historical Sketch. Translated and edited by S. Kotz. New York: Academic Press, 1974. First published in 1967. Moivre, Abraham de. The Doctrine of Chances. Guilford: Frank Cass, 1967. First published in 1718. Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. . Pensées and Other Writing. Translated by H. Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Poisson, Siméon-Denis. Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile précédées des règles générales du calcul des probabilités. Paris: Bachelier, 1837. Todhunter, Isaac. A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to That of Laplace. New York: Chelsea, 1965. First published in 1865. III. The Importance of the Distinction between Chance and Probability in Religious and Juridical Debates We can now see why the reversal of a “subjective” interpretation of the arguments of natural religion, which had been previously based on analogies (e.g., God is to the universe as an architect is to a building) turned out to be particularly devastating. The “chance of being right” evaluates various competing hypotheses; it does not limit itself to the examination of a single analogy whose terms are considered without showing any imagination. This technique of argumentation, which does not always adopt Bayes’s terminology, is that of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The shift from a perspective that is allegedly de re (bearing directly on things) to one that is de dicto (by chance) proved to be very efficacious in the juridical domain, especially in criminal law. Jacques Bernoulli, who in his Ars conjectandi defined probability as a fraction of certainty, saw very early on the interest of probabilities for economic, juridical, political, and social calculations; but it was the Bayesian perspective, which was to be that of Bentham’s utilitarianism down to our own time, and also that of Laplace and Poisson, that gave these calculations their true value. If society, not only as the guardian of the laws, of order, and of security but also of justice, has an interest in such and such a crime or offense being punished, we can calculate our chances of being right in attributing this crime or offense to such and such a person whom we are preparing to punish, and at the same time evaluate, on that basis, whether it is just to proceed with this punishment (see EIDÔLON). Probability, Chance, Expectation. Our difficulty in translating the terms “probability” and “chance” can thus proceed from certain contradictions in the use of “chance”: in the first opposition between chances and causes, it has an essentially objective meaning connected with counting up situations, whereas in the second opposition, it has the subjective meaning of a relationship of values; the context will always indicate which type of opposition is concerned. Nevertheless, the notion of expectation, which is very close to those of probability and chance, adds to the difficulty. Although it is usually appropriate to avoid translating “expectation” by the French word attente in contexts where it clearly refers to an evaluation of probability and to prefer the term espérance, we have to acknowledge that the latter term lacks clarity. Pascal, whom we have presented as the author par excellence of the “probability of chances,” reasons less on probability than on expectation; however, it is a question of calculations that belong precisely to the domain of objective probabilities. Subjective probabilities, on the other hand, were later to be characterized by a fundamental use of expectation on the basis of which probability alone is defined, as we see in Bayes (An Essay), who posits the probability of an event as the relation between the expectation attached to this event and the benefit one hopes to realize if it occurs: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. CHÔRA [χώϱα] (GREEK) v. DESCRIPTION, FORM, GREEK, LIEU, POLIS, REASON, TO TRANSLATE, WORLD Inasmuch as chôra has no meaning—at least not in this classical sense—it is intrinsically untranslatable. It is such as to disrupt the very operation of translation. —Sallis, Chorology In general, where it is used in Plato’s Dialogues, the word chôra [χώϱα] has, according to the context, the commonplace meaning of “land,” “place,” “space,” or “room” (Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought). As Casey points out, its primary connotation is “occupied space,” as in “a field full of crops or a room replete with things” (Casey, The Fate of 132 CHÔRA “unable to render an account at all points entirely consistent with itself and exact (or) furnish accounts no less likely than any other” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶29c). And, as Derrida will note, the problem extends not only to reasonable stories, but also to naming. Even the “Heaven,” “world,” or “cosmos” may take different names: “let us call it,” says Timaeus, “by whatsoever name may be most acceptable to it” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28b). This, then, is the procedure of the “demiurge,” compared by Plato to a craftsman (dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός]), who as “intelligence” itself, “framed the universe,” fashioning “reason within soul, and soul within body,” as a living creature. Not a god, or “God,” the demiurge operates like a craftsman on materials he did not himself create, with reason guiding his design. Out of the four primary bodies—fire, air, water, and earth—he fashions a universe bound together by proportion and thereby “visible and tangible” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶32b). The aesthetics of this work, “a living being whole and complete, of complete parts single, nothing being left over,” “a single whole consisting of all these wholes” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33a), has had a long history in Neoplatonism and neoclassicism: this “shape rounded and spherical, equidistant every way from center to periphery—a figure the most perfect and uniform of all perfectly smooth” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33b) has held a privileged position in the theory of ideal forms. Endowed with a centrally positioned world-soul, itself the embodiment of reason and harmony, and incorporating, like some perfect armillary, the motions of the seven planetary rings, this world incorporates time within its circularity, marked by the differential motions of the planets. Such was the world constructed as Plato recounts “by the craftsmanship of Reason” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶47e); but it failed to take note of a second equally powerful cause, that of Necessity (anankê [ἀνάνϰη]). Here Plato makes it clear that his “demiurge” is by no means the omnipotent creator of everything out of nothing construed by later religions. Rather his craftsman works with materials already at hand—fire, water, air, and earth “before the generation of the Heaven” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48b), materials whose prior existence has not been explained by Reason’s work, and that demand what Plato terms an “errant cause” as “origin.” But this origin is immediately subject to question, for as Plato states, “‘first principle or ‘principles’—or whatever name men choose to employ” are exceedingly difficult to explain. Indeed, Timaeus affirms that the explanation should not be demanded of him, as it poses too “great a task”; rather he promises to give “the worth of a probable account,” one “no less probable than any other, but more so” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48d). In beginning again, then, “once more” and in moving toward “the conclusion that probability dictates,” in starting over with his account of creation, Plato acknowledges the impossibility of certainty for the first time. If one can be certain about the forms of Reason, those of Necessity demand a more speculative approach. The need for this fresh beginning, principle, or starting-point arises from this intrusion of the irrational, that which can be controlled by Reason, but that Reason did not bring into being. Place). This is the signification of the first appearance of the word in the Timaeus, where Socrates is characterizing the country outside the city proper (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶19). Such a sense of extraterritoriality and extension certainly anticipates the way in which it is used later in the dialogue. But in the following creation story, narrated by Timaeus, Plato endows chôra with a special significance, and a corresponding ambiguity, which has been debated ever since, from Aristotle to Derrida. The Timaeus as a whole is concerned with foundation of the just city, and with the corresponding idea of beginning, starting with the creation of the cosmos itself. The dialogue purportedly takes place following a conversation the day before concerning the perfect city—a summary of the conversation by Socrates makes a clear reference to the central aspects of the city outlined in the Republic; but Socrates professes to be dissatisfied with the static and abstract nature of the picture drawn so far. He demands a livelier image, one that sets the city in motion so to speak, and Critias suggests that the heroic story of the war between ancient Athens and Atlantis would supply the requisite action. But before a narrative of city foundation, Timaeus, with his astronomical knowledge, proposes to establish the story of cosmic becoming. This then is the context for the elaboration of the concept of chôra. The word chôra itself first appears in its newly ambiguous, but philosophical, form in paragraph 52b of the Timaeus. But its appearance has been prepared for by Plato some paragraphs before. In brief, the argument up to the introduction of chôra goes something like this: Timaeus has, in the first part of the dialogue, given an account of how the universe “came into being” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶27), distinguishing between two states: “that which is always real and has no becoming” and “that which is always becoming but is never real.” The former is “apprehensible by the intelligence with the aid of reasoning,” the latter is an “object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28). Thus separating out the unchanging (rational) reality, from the changing (sensible), lived, reality, Timaeus uses this well-known Platonic distinction between the ideal primary reality and the physical secondary reality to sketch out the steps taken by the demiurge (dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός], “maker,” “father,” “constructor”) as he “keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product.” This is so that he can ensure a “good” result, for whenever he looks to “something which has come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28). Timaeus uses the word kalos [ϰαλός], which can mean “good,” but also “satisfactory,” “desirable,” and, of course, “beautiful.” In this way, as Francis Cornford notes, “the visible world is a changing image or likeness (eikon) of an eternal model” (Plato’s Cosmology). A postulate that raises as many questions as it answers: if something is in a state of becoming, does it begin at any one point? Or, what might be the “cause” of such becoming, as opposed to the state of being, or the same? Or, finally, is the “real,” as copy, really real, or simply a dream or shadow of the real? Plato compounds these difficulties by having Timaeus state that what he is describing is no more than a “likely story,” for mortals are in the end CHÔRA 133 which now gains a name: chôra (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52). Chôra is now finally “defined” as “everlasting, not admitting destruction,” somewhat like the Form, but different in that it can be apprehended. Its apprehension, however, is not by reason or the senses, but by what Plato calls “a sort of bastard reasoning” with a status somewhere between the two; you have to think about it, but nevertheless it is in the visible world, invisibly (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b). We apprehend chôra then as “in a dream” forcing ourselves to acknowledge that “anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room, and that which is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b). This very act of recognizing that all objects demand situation, Plato argues, leads to the “hybrid” or “bastard” reasoning that in turn forces recognition of chôra. The ambiguity of chôra’s nature is further complicated by Plato’s next analogy, advanced to explain the emergence of chaos, a chaos readying itself for the reasoning work of the demiurge. Chôra once again becomes the “nurse of becoming,” but a nurse immediately transformed into a winnowing basket that is shaken by its contents and in turn shakes them: “just when things are shaken and winnowed by means of winnowing-baskets and other instruments for cleaning corn, the dense and heavy things go one way, while the rare and light are carried to another place” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52d). In this way were like and unlike things separated, and made ready for the demiurge. At this point in his attempt to characterize the invisible chôra, Plato has assembled a number of apparently contradictory “images” or what were later to be called “metaphors,” drawn from the arts of fabrication (technê [τέχνη]) as if to underline the action of the demiurge. Yet the chôra anticipates the arrival of this grand artisan—chôra is, so to speak, always already there. It is at once all-receiving, a receptacle, and something that harbors, shelters, nurtures, and gives birth. It is infinitely malleable like gold, and it is a matrix for all things. As things shake, it winnows like a basket, separating out the chaff from the grain. What is clear, as Cornford points out, is that the chôra, while not a void, is not “matter” in itself, as subsequent interpreters will have it. (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology). When resituated in the context of the city narratives of the Timaeus and Critias, it becomes clear that Plato’s use of the word’s ambiguities is consistent with the need to provide a firm and original foundation, one that originally emerged out of the earth and the cosmos, not only for ancient Athens but for a renewed city that could be projected as emerging out of and within a chôra that was ever-ready to receive and nurture, and that in all its connotations was connected to a content-filled and cultivated land, with room for the polis. In subsequent rereadings and reinterpretations, the Platonic chôra was subjected to oversimplification (Aristotle) and overinterpretation (Chrysippus, Proclus). In Aristotle, place (topos [τόπος]) takes precedence over Plato’s semi-mystical creation fables—as Casey remarks, “Chôra yields to Topos, the bountiful to the bounded” (Casey, The Fate of Space; and Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought). Indeed, Aristotle’s reading of the Timaeus explicitly (and perhaps deliberately) identifies the receptacle with the chôra, and thence the chôra with Here then is the already uncertain context into which chôra is introduced. For in starting again to describe the universe, Plato now joins to his two principal orders of existence—the unchanging intelligible model and the changing and visible copy—a third, a medium of sorts that supports the two. This medium is of a “form difficult and obscure” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶49) but its nature can be stated as that of the “receptacle (hupodochê [ὑποδόχη])—as it were, the nurse—of all Becoming.” Such a “receptacle” unlike its contents—fire, water, air, and earth that are in a perpetual state of change—is unchanging and permanent. Plato, as Cornford notes, somewhat misleadingly, compares it to the gold out of which one makes all kinds of figures. The receptacle “must be called always the same; for it never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50b). It is, Plato explains, a kind of “matrix” for everything, that, although it is changed by the things that enter it, and may appear to have different qualities at different times, is in itself always the same. In a passage that much later had implications for feminist readings, Plato, always trying to explain that “which is hard to express,” seeks another comparison through gender: “the (intelligible) model in whose likeness that which becomes is born,” is compared to a father; “that which becomes (the copy)” is like an offspring, and “that in which it becomes” (the receptacle) inevitably takes on the characteristics of a mother (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50 c–d). This apparently simple simile, one that gives the character of generation to the receptacle, is, however, immediately contradicted in what follows: for Plato insists that the receptacle, whatever else it is, is “invisible and characterless, all receiving,” a “nature” that, precisely because it is free of all the characters that come from elsewhere, enter into it, and pass out of it, cannot be endowed with a specific gender. Plato compares this lack of character to the liquid base used by the makers of perfumes that is as odorless as possible: “Thus it is, in the first place, for the perfumes that one prepares artistically, in order to give them a good odor. The perfume makers avoid first of all as much as possible all odor in the liquid base which must receive them” (Timaeus, 50e). It should be noted here, as Derrida will observe in his essay “La Pharmacie de Platon,” that “the pharmakon also means perfume. Perfume without essence, as we said above, drug without substance. It transforms order into ornament, the cosmos into cosmetic.” Would this mean that, by the same token, Plato is comparing the “receptacle,” not yet named chôra, to a pharmakon [φάϱμαϰον], a drug that, without smell, receives all smells that pass into, through, and out of it, with the implication that such smells are transformed into dangerous perfumes? At this point we are better taking Plato at his word when, even as he struggles for comparisons and mixes his metaphors, he states baldly that this receptacle partakes “in some very puzzling way of the intelligible” and is “very hard to apprehend” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶51b). What is certain is that Plato has determined the need for three things: the unchanging “Form,” “ungenerated and indestructible”; that which “bears the same name and is sensible”; and a third, previously called the receptacle, but 134 CHÔRA of passing from one language to another, or even from one philosophical language to another, and more of a question within the Greek language itself, of that “violent” tradition whereby a non-philosophical language is transferred into a philosophical one. “With this problem of translation,” Derrida notes, “we will be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage to philosophy.” And later he concludes: “La khôra est grosse de tout ce qui se dissémine ici” (chôra is pregnant with everything that is disseminated here). For Derrida, indeed, chôra was “grosse,” a word that indicated the difficulty of naming, categorizing, or even writing the “origin,” or at least that “origin” posited by Plato, before the entry of the demiurge in order to shape the world. Derrida was already engaged in writing his essay “Khôra” in homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant. Here he takes on the apparent confusion of “metaphors”—he prefers not to call them metaphors for reasons he will later divulge—used by Plato to describe, characterize, or define chôra, or the “receptacle,” in order to demonstrate that these turns of phrase are irreducible questions of writing. In a long citation from Albert Rivaud’s edition of the Timaeus, Derrida demonstrates the confusion surrounding the word and question of “place,” or chôra (citing Rivaud, Platon). Rivaud had noted the proliferation of what he called “metaphors for chôra, metaphors for the ‘place,’ the ‘site,’ ‘this in which’ things appear, ‘this on which’ they manifest themselves, the ‘receptacle,’ the ‘matrix,’ the ‘mother,’ the ‘nurse’—it is container and contained at the same time, ‘the space that contains the things.’ ” Rivaud himself translates chôra as a “porte-empreinte,” literally “carrier of the imprints” (as in porte-parole, “carrier of the word”), the “excipient,” or, “the entirely de-odorized substance, or the gold with which the jeweller can impress a quantity of different figures.” Derrida exposes the ambiguity of Plato’s introduction of the “third genre” of being. Derrida, however, was inevitably dissatisfied with the notion of “metaphor,” and “comparison,” working rather to identify the aporias in Plato’s own discourse. The paradox is clear: what is named “chôra” or “place” cannot itself be situated or “assigned a home”; “it is more situator than situated.” Indeed, Derrida resists all attempts to define the word, translate the word, or supply additional metaphors or comparisons for the word. Indeed, the “interminable theory of exegeses” (Derrida, Khôra) that surrounds chôra “seems to reproduce that which, following the discourse of the Timaeus, would happen not with Plato’s text, but with khôra herself.” All translations, he writes, remain “on the level of interpretation” and thereby subject to anachronism. There is, therefore, no question of proposing “le mot juste” for chôra; rather than reducing it falsely to a name or essence, it has to be understood as a structure. As Derrida concludes, “one cannot even say of it that it is neither this, nor that, or that it is at the same time this and that.” Marking the continuing ambiguity, Derrida and Sallis engaged in a friendly debate as to whether the word should be written without an article (khôra) as Derrida insisted, or with an article (the chôra) as Sallis preferred. For Derrida the article “presupposes the essence of the thing,” which had no such essence in Plato’s usage; for Sallis omitting the article “would risk effacing all difference between the word and that of which the word would speak” (Sallis, Verge of Philosophy). Chôra, indeed, remained elusive matter, going on to conflate chôra with topos (Aristotle, Physics, 4.209b; cited in Sallis, Verge of Philosophy). For Epicurus, however, chôra retains a certain Platonic energy; the root verb is chôrein, “to go” or “to roam.” As Sextus Empiricus explains, Epicurus distinguished among “void” (kenon [ϰενόν]), “place” (topos), and “room” (chôra), where “room” affords the space for the constant motion of the atoms, the “spielraum of atomic bodies,” as Casey calls it. The Stoic Chrysippus goes further, characterizing such a “room” or chôra as space for both roaming and also extension, a connotation followed by the Neoplatonist Syrianus (Casey, The Fate of Space), and thence by Proclus in his exhaustive commentary on the Timaeus. Since Proclus’s commentary, and throughout the myriad subsequent textual analyses that have ranged in their emphasis from Pythagorean geometry, cosmological symbolism, and biological geneticism, to the form of the ideal polis, the search for the lost Atlantis, and the mythologies of ancient Athens, little or nothing indicated chôra as a keyword, beyond the indices accompanying the translation of many such terms in Plato. Indeed, John Sallis, in his attempt to describe or found a “chorology” after Plato is hard pressed to find, save by omission and post-Derridean inference, a problematic role for, or even a mention of, the word. Nevertheless, the word chôra gained ground as a keyword in philosophy in the 1970s. Its status as a term to be confronted by and for deconstruction was tagged by Derrida in 1968, adopted within semiotics by Kristeva in 1974, and taken by Irigaray and others as a point of departure for a questioning of gender categories. In 1985 it was presented by Derrida as a problem for (Peter Eisenman’s) architecture, thence to become a moment for reflection on architecture’s gender in the work of Anne Bergren, on deconstruction and architecture in Jeffrey Kipnis, and on the grounding of architecture itself in Eisenman and Derrida’s project for a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s La Villette. Taken back into philosophy by Derrida in 1987 and 1993, chôra was re-inscribed within Neoplatonic interpretation by John Sallis in 1999. It was Derrida, who, in a sideways glance at the word in his discussion of “La Pharmacie de Platon” (“Plato’s Pharmacy”) first opened up a question that has since developed into a critical field of inquiry of its own. The context is significant. The essay is concerned with another word whose meaning is obscured by multiple uses, significations, and (mis) translations, but which nevertheless, when identified as a sign, stands out as a mark of Plato’s deep ambiguity toward writing, a pharmakon that might be at once a “drug” or “remedy,” dangerous or helpful. Speaking of the untranslatability of the word pharmakon in the Phaedo (but also everywhere that it appears in Plato), Derrida writes of “this regulated polysemy which has allowed, by ineptness, indetermination or over determination, but without contradiction, the translation of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ philter,’ etc.” Such errancy in definition and translation has indeed undermined “the plastic unity of this concept, its very rule, and the strange logic which links it to its signifier” in such a way that it has “been dispersed, masked, obliterated, struck with a relative unreadability, by the imprudence or empiricism of the translators, certainly, but first and foremost by the redoubtable and irreducible difficulty of translation.” But this is the result, Derrida argues, less of the difficulties CIVIL RIGHTS 135 the customary classifications of rights that distinguish civil rights (such as property) from political rights or social rights. In the second case, the reference is to the meaning acquired by “civil rights” in the context of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, whose main goal was to put an end to racial segregation and, more generally, to the discrimination of which minorities were the victims. If we want to understand why English speaks of “civil rights” (including the right to vote) and even of “civic rights” (i.e., citizens’ rights), where we might think the “rights of man” or “human rights” ought to be in play, we have to refer to American constitutional history. After the Civil War, the United States adopted three amendments to the Constitution that should have put an end to slavery and its aftereffects. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment states that [a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens’ right to vote against any restriction based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But the juridical and political development of the United States led to these amendments being deprived of much of their substance by racial segregation and various artifices designed to deprive blacks of their right to vote on various pretexts (e.g., literacy tests); moreover, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to prohibit racial discrimination in public rights, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in deciding a set of civil rights cases in 1883. To the extent that the fight against discrimination, relying on the new liberal orientation of the 1960s Supreme Court, sought to restore the full scope to the rights of American citizens, and not simply to guarantee the rights of individuals, it was natural that it would present itself as a movement for civic rights. Its goal was not only to guarantee human rights, but also to see to it that black Americans would be recognized as full-fledged citizens. Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Balkin, Jack, ed. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Boxill, Bernard. Blacks and Social Justice. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Holmes, Stephen, and Cass Sunstein. The Cost of Rights. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Kersch, Kenneth. Constructing Civil Liberties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Waldron, Jeremy. Liberal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. to the end and still, as a recent commentator notes, the question remains “multilayered” and “incoherent” (Sayre, “Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle”). But perhaps the problem of chôra would not have surfaced in so poignant a form if, as he recounts, Derrida had not been introduced by the architect Bernard Tschumi to the architect Peter Eisenman in 1985, and suggested that a concept on which he was writing a paper would perhaps serve to open a discussion that would launch their collaboration in the design of a garden for Parc La Villette. The concept was named “chôra”; in common translation, the special nature of this term, taken from Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, was rendered “place” or “space.” Apparently an innocent enough suggestion, the debates over the “meaning” of the word extended into seven taped discussions, seemingly replicating the Socratic model of the original, and eventually a book of transcriptions, drawings, and the translation of a version of Derrida’s own essay on chôra appeared. In this way, a word, long-forgotten in the footnotes of Plato translation and exegesis was launched into a veritable, architectural discourse, not perhaps as a solution to any “space of deconstruction,” but rather as an insoluble conundrum set by the philosopher for the architect, to test the capacity of architecture to signify its own origins, its groundings in chôra. Anthony Vidler REFS.: Algra, Keimpe. Concepts of Space in Greek Thought. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Bergren, Anne. “Architecture Gender Philosophy.” In Strategies in Architectural Thinking. Edited by J. Whiteman, J. Kipnis, and R. Burdett. Chicago: The Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism and MIT Press, 1992. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Cornford, Francis. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. London: Routledge, 1935. Derrida, Jacques. “La Pharmacie de Platon.” Tel Quel 32–33 (1968); repr. in La dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. . “Khôra.” In Poikilia. Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1987. . Khôra. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. Translation by J. Kipnis and T. Lesser: Chora L. Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1974. Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. Plato. ŒUvres completes. Timée, Critias. Edited by Albert Rivaud. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. . The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sayre, Kenneth. “The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle.” In Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, edited by Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. CIVIL RIGHTS FRENCH droits civils, droits civiques v. DROIT, and CIVIL SOCIETY, CIVILTÀ, LAW, MENSCHHEIT, POLITICS, RULE OF LAW, STATE The expression “civil rights” can be rendered in French by both droits civils and droits civiques. In the first case, the reference is to 136 CIVIL SOCIETY