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

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 CIVIL SOCIETY ENGLISH civil society, political society GERMAN bürgerliche Gesellschaft GREEK koinonia politike [ϰоινωνία πоλιτιϰή] LATIN societas civilis v. BILDUNG, CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVILTÀ, DROIT, ECONOMY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, LAW, OIKONOMIA, PEOPLE, POLIS, POLITICS, SECULARIZATION, STATE Far from simply designating a recent notion introduced by Hegel or Marx in the wake of Anglo-Scottish economists, the expression “civil society” (societas civilis, société civile, bürgerliche Gesellschaft) belongs to the most classical vocabulary of political philosophy. Originally, it corresponded to the Latin (and then French) translation of Aristotle’s koinonia politike [ϰоινωνία πоλιτιϰή] (political community). It thus initially designated the form of human existence that prevails when men live under political or civil laws. The same situation persists with modern contractualist theories, in which “civil society” is opposed to the state of nature (Hobbes) and fuses with political society (Locke) or even in authors like Kant, for whom civil society is another name for the state. The distinction between civil society and the state, which seems obvious since Hegel and Marx, should thus be understood as the fruit of a complex and paradoxical history. And the history of these concepts is inseparable from that of their translation. I. Koinonia Politike and Societas Civilis In order to understand the history of the concept of civil society, our first obligation is to avoid confusing the Aristotelian lexicon for political community with that for society, by identifying, for example, man’s character as a “political animal” with a simple natural sociability. The political community described in book 1 of the Politics is not the simple product of sympathy or of the incapacity of each individual to suffice on its own, since it is distinguished essentially from such other forms of community as the couple, the family, or the village. The domestic community is characterized by an unequal relation of authority in which the head of family commands those who are by nature destined to obey him, whereas in the “political community” (he polis kai he koinonia he politike [ἡ πόλις ϰαὶ ἡ ϰоινωνία ἡ πоλιτιϰή]), authority is exercised over free and equal men who, in various ways, participate in public affairs. Understood in such terms, the city is first in nature because it is what makes it possible to “live well” and for man to realize fully his nature, but it is encountered only under certain conditions, which are not to be found, for instance, in despotic regimes or empires. Aristotle’s thought on political community is thus strictly derived from the political experience of the Greek city-state. And it can be easily understood that the translation of Aristotle’s concepts posed some difficulties in the Roman—and subsequently Christian—world. Conventionally, in keeping with a usage to be found in medieval translators of Aristotle, polis [πόλις] was translated as societas civilis while maintaining as synonyms the city-state, the political community thus become civil society, and the republic (civitas sive societas civilis sive republica), but the Latin plainly has different connotations from the Greek. Societas designates a juridical link that is not necessarily political and is defined above all by consensus and the pursuit of common ends. Latin authors like Cicero also evoke the Stoic idea of a society of the human race (societas generis humani) that could certainly not consititute a political community in the Aristotelian sense. Civis, civilis, and civitas thus acquire a universalist dimension, linked to Rome and Roman law’s capacity to spread citizenship quite broadly, in a manner unknown in the classical Greece of the city-states (Moatti, La Raison de Rome). The properly French notion of contemporary civil society, which evokes the universality of the juridical bond between individuals more than a shared belonging to a particular civic entity, continues to bear the trace of that transformation. . II. City of God and Civil Society The fate of civil society derives equally from an intellectual and moral revolution favored by Roman experience, the spread of Christianity, and particularly the theory of two cities defended by Saint Augustine in The City of God. For Saint Augustine, civil society is assuredly a natural reality, participating in the goodness of the created world, but the corruption of human nature that followed the Fall prevents attributing full self-sufficiency to him and renders precarious in advance all efforts to attain happiness on earth, which is nonetheless the object of the earthly city. While awaiting the Last Judgment, the two cities coexist in humanity (like the elect and the reprobate), and their relation cannot be resolved by the pure political abstention of the just. On the one hand, the Christian must indeed obey the civil power and accomplish his civic duties, but on the other, he can and must not forget that the natural societas is linked to original sin and that it is grounded in self-love pressed to the point of contempt of God, the heavenly city being alone able to establish true communication between men. Even if the visible church does not coincide with the celestial city (since it contains sinners and reprobates), that complex relation between the two orders of nature and grace manifests itself in the church’s ambivalent relation to the state: the church must acknowledge the specific consistency of civil society, but it must also act in the earthly city to help men attain their natural and supernatural ends. The medieval posterity of Saint Augustine would explore the possible solutions to this theologico-political dilemma, which went from pontifical theocracy to Luther’s doctrine of the two realms by way of theories favorable to the primacy of the emperor or the king (Quillet, Les Clefs du pouvoir au Moyen Age). In the evolution of modern thought, one can schematically distinguish five solutions to the problem of the relations between civil society and the city of God. The first is that of the Catholic Church, which is remarkably stable and consists of positing simultaneously the consistency proper to civil society and its essential incompletion, which implies an acceptance of the civil power, but also the affirmation of a minimal (and eminently variable) political competence of the church. This is why, even today, the expression “civil society” is synonymous, for political theologians, with “political order.” That position can be distinguished simultaneously from Luther’s (which insisted on the essentially repressive role of the political power while affirming the principle of inner liberty) and from the doctrines of the Catholic Counter-Reformation CIVIL SOCIETY 137 (Bonald, de Maistre), which led to the negation of any autonomy of civil society, all to the benefit of the church. The millenarian tendencies of the Thomas Münzer sort (violently opposed by Martin Luther) can, for their part, be considered attempts to achieve the city of God on earth, to the detriment of all the institutions of civil society, such as marriage and property. The fascination exercised by Thomas Münzer on Marxist thinkers, from F. Engels to E. Bloch, thus connects them to fanatical currents hostile to civil society (Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism). Finally, the philosophies of history issuing from German idealism are the fruit of an effort to think the continuity between civil society (or the state) and the heavenly city: thus it is that for Hegel the true Christian state is the one that fully ensures the autonomy of the political order—on the condition, to be sure, of its distinctness from civil society. III. State and Civil Society If the Roman invention of the societas permitted a certain affirmation of the universality of law, it could do so only by insisting on the law’s foundational capacity, which, in the case of Rome (whose tradition on this matter was quite different from what prevailed in canon law), was not without a certain artificiality (see, for instance, Thomas, “Fictio legis,” on the importance of fictio in Roman law). It also had the effect of undoing the bond, affirmed by Aristotle, between the political community and political freedom, following a logic amplified by the Christian transformation of the political order: the universality of humanity is emphatically proclaimed by Christianity, but Christian monarchies (in which power, to be sure, is not exercised over free and equal men) are fully accomplished forms of civil society. Whatever the case, despite the distance separating the political community of Aristotle from the civil society of the Christians, the two notions share the feature of designating a natural reality which, even if it may entail an internal hierarchy, fully coincides with the human political order; and it was precisely on these two points that the subsequent transformations of the concept of civil society would bear. Contractualist theories of modern natural law fully maintain the equivalence between civil society and the political condition or the Republic, and that feature would be maintained in the Continental tradition up to and including Kant’s Doctrine of Right. But the dominant trend in modern political philosophy, embodied by Hobbes, is also clearly artificialist, in that it is opposed to the Aristotelian idea of the naturalness of the political bond, which is not without consequences for the status of civil society. The logic at work here leads, in fact, on the one hand, to making of the preservation of subjective freedom the aim of political association, and thus of affirming the eminent value of what is today called the private sphere, all the while entrusting to political power the protection and even the definition of the rights of the members of the civil association. This is why, on the one hand, thinkers as statist in orientation as Hobbes or Rousseau are also individualists and, on the other, a philosopher like Kant affirms the necessary primacy of public law while considering as rational and irreducible the distinction between private and public law. It thus is possible, on the basis of the distinction between private and public law that guarantees it, to think something like an opposition between civil society and the state, even if, for example, Kant calls natural 1 Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society Even if the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which was introduced in sociological theory by Ferdinand Tönnies (Community and Society), has no true equivalent in the prior history of political philosophy (Pasquino, “Communauté et société”), it can be compared to certain major themes introduced in Germany by political romanticism and the School of Law: where German jurists distinguished two modes for the formation of law (“natural” and spontaneous or, on the contrary, “artificial” and deliberate), Tönnies opposes two types of human collectivity. Community (Gemeinschaft), in which familial economy and agriculture predominate, rests on unanimous and spontaneous adherence to substantial values, whereas society (Gesellschaft), which is commercial and industrial, is based on an individualization of interests, a quest for compromise, and voluntary association. Gemeinschaft evokes themes out of romanticism, and the model of Gesellschaft is furnished by the anthropology of Hobbes. It is not merely types but also stages of cultural development that follow each other according to a logic that runs the gamut from unconscious to deliberate: “the age of society follows that of community. The latter is characterized by social will as concord, custom, and religion; the former by social will as political convention and public opinion” (Tönnies, Community and Society). Tönnies, however, is not a simple nostalgic conservative: he is rather in search of a way of moving beyond the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which explains his interest in modern socialism, which, while expressing the conflicts in society, shows the necessity of reconstructing a lost unity. The distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be connected with other couplings of similar concepts in the sociological tradition, such as the organic and critical epochs in Auguste Comte, the dual—mechanical and organic—forms of solidarity in Durkheim, or, more recently, the holistic and individualistic societies of Louis Dumont. Max Weber offered a reconstruction of the opposition in individualistic terms, through his distinction between Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, which puts the accent on the type of activity—affective and traditional or, on the contrary, rational— predominating in social relations (Raynaud, Dictionnaire de philosophie politique); but most contemporary representatives of methodological individualism tend to reject Tönnies’s conceptions, bringing to the fore the conflictual or calculating dimension of communitarian bonds (see RT: Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie, s.v. “Communauté”). REFS.: Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. Edited and translated by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964. 138 CIVIL SOCIETY the antinomy of ancient virtue and modern commerce, even while making of civil and political existence the guarantor and truth of the “right to subjective freedom” that lies at the core of the modern world. Civil society in the strict sense, which succeeds the family, allows the individual to surpass the immediate naturalness of familial relations and is comprised of three moments: the system of needs (which corresponds to the world of political economy), the protection of freedom and property by the administration of law, and finally the police and corporation (understood as organs of economic regulation and not only of maintenance of political order), which are necessary to correct the spontaneous effects of mercantile economy. Civil society thus itself calls for a superior unity, which will be given in the state, which alone allows man to lead a universal life. Thus, even as it is the point in which the greatest split between the particular and the individual is effected, civil society is also what permits that higher unity of the individual and the whole that endows modernity with its meaning. Significantly, Hegel, moreover, indicates that civil society is the privileged terrain of the development of culture (Bildung), which indicates simultaneously its debt to the English problematic of civilization and its will to distinguish itself from it (Bildung is said to be more internal than civilization). Starting with Hegel, the meaning of the notion of civil society appears to be more or less fixed, a circumstance that in no way prevented it from being the object of profound meditations. This is not the place, for instance, to show the extent of Marx’s originality, concerning which we will offer but a few brief terminological remarks. The first concerns the perpetual interplay of two notions that Marx distinguishes quite well, but often takes pleasure in fusing: civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) cannot be reduced to bourgeois society, even if it is the emancipation of property that allowed the state to acquire “a specific existence alongside civil society and outside it.” That interplay shows Marx’s ambivalence regarding the notion of civil society: of the original English concept he scarcely retains anything but the economic aspect (“the conditions of material existence”) since he makes juridical relations elements of the superstructure. On another front, Marx—from the Critique of Hegelian Political Right to The Civil War in France (1871)—was always a determined adversary of the state, for whose final reabsorption in a regenerated civil society he called. Historical materialism thus appears to be a radicalization of English political economy, pressed into the service of a radical critique of the divisions of the human city. It remains for the reader to determine whether we are confronted with a fertile reversal of juridical idealism or a radical negation of the juridical and political conditions of civil society. Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Abramson, Jeffrey. Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Colas, Dominique. Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Colliot-Thélène, Catherine. “État et société civile.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. society the sphere of private relations in order to reserve the title of civil society (societas civilis) for public law and the state (Ferry, “L’émergence du couple État/société”). The genesis of the contemporary concept of a civil society essentially distinct from the state thus passes through the invention of new schemata, native to English-language philosophy, on the basis of an idiosyncratic experience and juridical categories quite different from those of the law and philosophy of the Continent. The most familiar aspect of that invention is the formation of political economy accompanying the expansion of mercantile relations: modern economics leads to seeing in society the fruit of an indefinite quantity of political behaviors, which brings one to “a new conception of society, as opposed to the idea of a political nature of man (Aristotle) as it is to a sociality constructed against nature (contractualist theories)” (Collot-Thélène, “État et société civile”). Now that experience is all the more easy to conceptualize in the framework of English thought in that that thought disposes (with “common law”) of juridical categories that allow one to distinguish with relative ease between law and statute law (i.e., such law as is advanced by a legislator) and to recognize the necessity of a power of constraint to force respect of the law without for as much according it a pre-eminent role in the formation of law. “Civil society” thus includes institutions that are already political, such as tribunals, because its “other” is less the state than the government, which is not the sole source of law. Anglo-Scottish reflection on civil society also presents another extremely important aspect, developed by Ferguson (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1759), by Millar, and by Hume: civil society has a history, which passes through the affirmation of civility and leads to a general progress of civilization. That history shows how, in modern Europe, the growth of mercantile exchanges permitted the enrichment of human experience while reducing the importance of constraint and military force in the government of societies. It is inseparable from the great modern debate over the respective merits of (modern) “commerce” and (ancient) civic virtue, in which, moreover, Ferguson and even Smith have more nuanced positions than is usually believed (Gauthier, L’Invention de la société civile; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History). Finally, it encounters the thought of Montesquieu, for whom the apology of the British regime was inseparable from the idea that the ancient civic sense belonged to a past long gone. It was by way of this motif that the “English” problematic of civil society was to have an echo in all of European philosophy, including among authors with an investment in the traditional identification between civil societyand the state (see, for example, Kant, Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View, 1784). The extraordinary power of the reconstruction effected by Hegel is evident in his Principles of the Philosophy of Law, in which one finds both the heritage of antiquity and that of Christianity, the contribution of modern natural law and that of the Anglo-Saxon thinkers or Montesquieu (including the opposition virtue/commerce). We have already seen how Hegel’s philosophy can be considered as a legitimization of the process of secularization of modern societies, as a truth of the Christian state; in the same manner, the distinction between civil society and the state allows one to surmount CIVILTÀ 139 2. The German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, discussed in the entry on BILDUNG (see CULTURE). II. Civilization and Politics On the relation between politics and “civil/civic,” see CIVIL SOCIETY. More particularly, see the following: • on the Greek notion of political community and its connection with the humanity of man, see POLIS and LOGOS, II.A; • on “barbarity,” see TO TRANSLATE, Box 1; • on Latin civitas, see LEX; • on civil society, see LIBERAL, and the difference between “politics” and “policy” in POLITICS. See also DROIT, JUSTICE, and LAW. On the relationship to progress, see CORSO, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, PERFECTIBILITY, PROGRESS, SECULARIZATION; cf. DESTINY, GLÜCK, MENSCHHEIT. v. CULTURE Ferry, Luc. “L’émergence du couple État/société.” In Histoire de la philosophie politique, edited by Alain Renaut. Vol. 4, Les Critiques de la modernité politique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999. Gautier, Claude. L’Invention de la société civile: lectures anglo-écossaises: Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. Hammond, Scott J. Political Theory: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary and Classic Terms. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. Moatti, Claudia. La Raison de Rome: naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Pasquino, Pasquale. “Communauté et société.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Quillet, Jeanine. Les Clefs du pouvoir au Moyen Age. Paris: Flammarion, 1972. . “Augustin. Saint Augustin et l’augustinisme médiéval.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Raynaud, Philippe. Max Weber et les dilemmes de la raison moderne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. Thomas, Yan. “Fictio legis. L’empire de la fiction romaine et ses limites médiévales.” Droits 21. La Fiction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. CIVILITY “Civility” derives from Latin civilitas, which means first of all everything that has to do with the city, civitas, and the citizen, civis; for example, civilitas is the term Quintilian chooses (2.15.25) to translate Plato’s hê politikê [ἡ πολιτιϰή]. But the Latin word also designates a certain kind of relationship, gentle and ennobled, among people (clementiae civilitatisque, “his clemency and courtesy,” Suetonius says [Augustus, 51.1]); see MENSCHHEIT, Box 1; cf. PARDON. In the eighteenth century, “civility” thus became a synonym of “politeness,” with various subtle variations depending on the authors. Here we examine mainly: 1. Italian thought on civility and politeness; see CIVILTÀ, “civility/civilization,” and CIVILIZATION, SPREZZATURA. 2. The way in which “civility” continues to spread in “civil society”; see CIVIL SOCIETY. On the more general relationship to politics and progress, see CIVILIZATION. v. BEHAVIOR, CULTURE, INGENIUM, PRUDENCE, WITTICISM CIVILIZATION “Civilization” is a word that emerged in the eighteenth century (Mirabeau the elder, L’Ami des hommes, 1758) to designate dynamically what civility designated “statically” (see CIVILITY): civilization is a process through which humans become “civil” by overcoming primitive barbarity through gentler customs and the establishment of “civic” ties. I. “CIVILIZATION,” CIVILISATION, CIVILTÀ, ZIVILISATION Here we have chosen to give priority to the following: 1. Italian thought about civiltà, a single term to designate what French calls civilité and civilisation (cf. SPREZZATURA and VIRTÙ). CIVILTÀ (ITALIAN) ENGLISH civility, civilization FRENCH civilité, civilisation GREEK asteiosunê [ἀστειοσύνη], paideia [παιδεία], politeia [πολιτεία] ITALIAN cortesia, urbanità, gentilezza, buona creanza LATIN civilitas, urbanitas v. BILDUNG, CIVILITY, and CIVILIZATION, and INGENIUM, POLIS, SPREZZATURA, STATE, WITTICISM In French, two different words, civilité and civilisation, correspond to two distinct notions, whereas in Italian, a single word, civiltà, covers a broad semantic field that includes them both. Here we will seek, if not to explain this divergence from a common origin (Lat. civis and its derivatives), at least to show how reflection on this terminological proximity and distance sheds light on the way in which Western societies have conceived their historical destiny. I. The Connection between Politics and Ethics The Italian word civiltà and the French words civilité and civilisation have common etymological roots: the Latin civis (free member of a city, citizen), its abstract derivative civitas (citizenship, citizenry, city), the adjective civilis (relating to a citizen, civil; concerning the citizenry as a whole, politics; what is suitable for citizens; popular, affable, benevolent, gentle), the noun civilitas (quality of being a citizen, sociability, courtesy), and the adverb civiliter (as a citizen, as a good citizen; lawful; with moderation, with gentleness). In all of these uses, we must note the twofold connotation: one political, referring to the particular way of organizing life in common represented by the ancient city-state, and the other moral and psychological, referring to the moderation of manners that life in a city is supposed to produce. The second meaning is also expressed by the term urbanitas, which alludes to the urbs, the city in its concrete reality, understood as a place where individuals are in permanent 140 CIVILTÀ interest in the term, which better expresses the “citizen” (citoyen) aspect (the word citoyen now being used, contrary to its classical use, adjectivally with a view to supplanting civique) of the felt need to return to a minimal politeness. II. When “Civilization” Separates from “Civility” The question is when and how, if not why, the word civilisation appeared in the French language (especially since it is so close in form and etymology to civilité, though it has a different meaning), whereas in Italian civiltà continues to express a semantic content that is now divided between two different words in French. The history of the French word civilisation is well known. If we grant that this noun appears for the first time in a work by the Marquis de Mirabeau, L’Ami des hommes ou traité de la population (1757), it is interesting to note that in this author’s writing, the neologism still has a meaning very close to that of civilité, since Mirabeau writes elsewhere that “civilisation is the moderation of manners, urbanity, politeness, and knowledge disseminated in such a way that decorum is observed and takes the place of detailed laws” (L’Ami des femmes ou traité de civilisation, draft for a book, cited in Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 7). It was only a little later that civilisation acquired the meaning that it still has in French, the definition of which we can take from François Guizot, who wrote Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828). For Guizot, civilization was a “fact,” “a fact like others, that can be studied, described, narrated,” but also a fact that is not like others, because it is “a fact of progress, of development,” so that “the idea of progress, of development” seemed to him “the fundamental idea contained in the word civilisation” (trans. Hazlitt, 12, 16). The French linguist Émile Benveniste, in his article “Civilisation,” has shown how civilité’s ending in -té made it a static term that no longer sufficed to express an idea that was becoming established in the second half of the seventeenth century, the idea of a general progress of human society through time, and how civilisation, by its ending in -isation, corresponded better, by its very form, to the dynamic aspect of this development. This explains the ease with which people at the end of the century of Enlightenment adopted the Marquis de Mirabeau’s neologism. However, we must note the significant resistance of the English writer Samuel Johnson, who, in 1773, as his biographer James Boswell tells us, refused to include the word “civilization” in his famous Dictionary, because “civility” sufficed (Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson). Italian, we might say, agrees with Johnson. As we have seen, it has preserved civiltà in the sense of “civility” and “civilization.” The less frequently used term incivilimento expresses the dynamic movement of which civiltà is the result. Civilizzazione, modeled on the French civilisation, was introduced into Italian in the early nineteenth century, and is found in Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi, but it never became really established, for revealing reasons. Around 1860, for example, Filippo Ugolini wrote: “Civilizzazione; let us leave this word to the French, and let us be satisfied with our incivilimento, from costume, or with vivere civile, from civiltà. We had these words long before the French had either the word civilisation or the state that corresponds to it” (Ugolini, Vocabulario di parole contact, thanks to which manners and language lose their “rusticity” (from rus, “countryside”), Rome being the City par excellence, the Urbs. Moreover, in the semantic field of Greek, we can note the same group of meanings. Civitas corresponds to polis [πóλις], civis to politês [πολίτης], civilis to politikos [πολιτιϰóς] (the latter meaning “what concerns citizens,” “what concerns the state,” and also “capable of living in society,” “sociable”). In addition, astu [ἄστυ] designates, like urbs, the city as opposed to the countryside, and often, when used without an article, Athens. The adjective asteios [ἀστεῖος], “regarding a citizen,” qualifies “what is in good taste, cultivated, elegant,” and, speaking of language and style, “subtle, witty” (asteia are bons mots). It is worth pointing out here that the French word politesse does not derive, as is often thought, from Greek polis, but from Italian polito (smooth, clean), which is itself derived from Latin politus (made smooth, clean, by polishing). We find the same duality in the Italian, French, and Spanish words derived from the Latin root. In contemporary Italian, civiltà (formerly civilità) designates on the one hand “the state of a people that has reached a certain degree of technical and intellectual progress,” “all human achievements in the political, social, and cultural domain,” “all the manifestations of the economic, social, and moral life of a people at a given point in its history” (RT: Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, s.v.). In the first two senses (the third being modern), the word was already used by Torquato Tasso, in his verse play Aminta (1573), for example. Giambattista Vico speaks of “laws suitable for domesticating a barbarous people to lead it to un’ umana civiltà” (La scienza nuova, §100), but in general he uses instead the word umanità, which in his work does not designate “the human species,” but rather both the process through which nations cease to be “barbarian” and become “fully human,” and the final result of this process. On the other hand, civiltà also designates a behavior characterizing social life, that of “a cultivated, educated person with elevated feelings.” In this case, the word is synonymous with cortesia, urbanità, gentilezza, and buona creanza. A comparison with French is instructive. Civilité is first attested in the fourteenth century, in Nicole Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, where it is defined as “the manner, ordering, and government of a city or community” (2.1.9). Here the word retains its first Latin meaning, which is political. But as early as the following century, by a shift already found in Latin, as we have seen, the meaning becomes moral and psychological, designating a certain quality of the relations between members of a community. Thus Antoine Furetière, in his Dictionnaire universel, defined civilité as “a decent, gentle, and polite way of acting or conversing together” (RT: Dictionnaire universel, s.v.). A century later, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie noted that “civility and politeness are a certain decorum in manners and words tending to please and to show the respect that we have for each other” (RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire, s.v.). The word continued to have this meaning, though it was used increasingly less frequently. According to the dictionaries (e.g., RT: Le nouveau petit Robert, s.v.), civilité is an “old-fashioned” word. However, at the present time there seems to be a renewed CLAIM 141 verb “claim” and the noun “claim” lack equivalents in French. Contemporary French translations of “claim”, such as revendication, réclamation, and pretention, all have a tone that is, if not pejorative, in any case negative, as if the demand expressed in “claim” needed to be supplemented by a justification (as in the French expression revendication légitime). But in its initial usages, juridical or political, “claim” posits the demand as founded, in nature if not in right, and it could be adequately translated in French by titre: thus we have to explore the complex relationship between “claim” and “right” (droit), a notion which, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, emerged later on and of which “claim” (a demand founded on a need) might have constituted an early form, thus raising the problem of rights itself. This juridical use has persisted in contemporary Anglo-Saxon discussions of the philosophy of law, of which it constitutes one of the specific features. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “claim” moved from the political and juridical fields to that of the theory of knowledge, and then more generally to the philosophy of language. “Claim” becomes a “claim to know” and then a “thesis.” The use of the term raises first the problem, which emerged from English empiricism and was then taken up by Kant, of the legitimacy of knowledge, of my claims to know and say. There is an equivalent in German (Anspruch), but none in French. Finally, “claim,” as in Stanley Cavell (The Claim of Reason), becomes a “statement” to be maintained or claimed (“my claim is”). I. “Claim” as a Juridical and Political Demand A. “Claim about,” “claim to”: A demand for something that is owed, the demand for a right The noun “claim” and the verb associated with it designate a demand for something as owed: “Not to beg and accept as a favor but to exact as a due.” Then “claim” is rendered in French by exigence or titre. But this raises the question of the legitimacy of the demand, whereas “claim” acquires a juridical (and philosophical) meaning only with the emergence, apparently relatively late, of the term “right.” Its meaning then becomes more specific: “an assertion of a right to something” (RT: Oxford English Dictionary). A whole juridical vocabulary develops around “claim,” as is shown by a multitude of expressions such as “lay claim,” “make a claim,” “enter a claim,” and so forth. The development of the uses of “claim” raises essential problems connected with the nature of rights. “Claim” originally designated a fundamental demand, the satisfaction of a physical need, or the recuperation of a vital good that has been taken away (which is the use we find in Shakespeare: in King John, a character claims his wife when she has been taken away by another). But this raises the question of the naturalness and the possession of rights. One reason why claims about goods necessary for rational agency are so different from claims to the possession of rights is that the latter in fact presuppose, as the former do not, the existence of a socially established set of rules. [T]he existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance. Lacking any such social form, the making of a claim to a right would e modi errati). This remark, which is obviously polemical, was inspired by Italians’ exacerbated nationalism at the time, but it is also connected with an older trend of thought, the equivalent of which is found in Germany. It was France, the country of the Enlightenment and then of the Revolution, that was in question. France is reproached for its political, ideological, and linguistic expansion, and more profoundly, for its dry rationalism, its conception of progress based solely on scientific, technical, and economic values, its loss of the sense of historical values, of tradition, of popular roots. In contrast, Italian civiltà refers, if not to ancient Rome, at least to the Renaissance, a period in which Italy was a model for Europe as a whole. It is the bearer of humanistic values and expresses itself in every domain, from politics and morals to aesthetics. Less oriented toward the future than toward a certain past considered as a model, exempt from hubris, it emphasized the improvement of humans as individuals and still more as social beings (whence the very important dimension of “civility,” rather than mastery over nature, in the notion of civiltà). Alain Pons REFS.: Benveniste, Émile. “Civilisation: Contribution à l’histoire du mot.” In Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Translation by M. E. Meek: “Civilization: Contribution to the History of the Word.” In Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Edited by R. W. Chapman and Pat Rogers. Rev. ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. First published in 1791. Febvre, Lucien. “Civilisation: Évolution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’idées.” In Civilisation: Le mot et l’idée, Première semaine internationale de synthèse, 2nd fasc. Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1930. Guizot, François. Histoire de la civilisation en Europe. Paris: Hachette, Pluriel, 1985. First published in 1828. Translation by W. Hazlitt: The History of Civilization in Europe. Introduction by L. Siedentop. London: Penguin, 1997. Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, Marquis de. L’Ami des hommes ou traité de la population. Reprint, Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010. First published in 1757. Oresme, Nicole. Le livre des Éthiques d’Aristote. Edited by A. D. Menut. New York: G. E. Stechert, 1940. Starobinski, Jean. Blessings in Disguise. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. . “Le mot civilisation.” In Le temps de la réflexion, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1983. Ugolini, Filippo. Vocabulario di parole e modi errati. Naples, It.: G. de Stefano, 1860. Vico, Giambattista. La scienza nuova. In Opere, edited by A. Battistini. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. First published in 1744. Translation by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. CLAIM FRENCH exigence, revendication GERMAN Anspruch v. EXIGENCY, and DROIT, DUTY, ENGLISH, LAW, POWER, VOICE Derived from Old French clamer (in Latin, clamare, from the same semantic field as clarus, “clear, strong”), the verb “to claim” initially meant, in its first historically recorded uses, “to call, cry, proclaim” (call loudly). However, the current uses of the English 142 CLAIM power over a subject must always be explained and justified in terms of natural law: it is because of this justification that it is necessarily a claim, and not a natural authority. Thus in Locke a claim can be illegitimate, made without the people’s consent and against its interests, and in fact it is usually in this sense that Locke uses the term. If anyone shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by its own authority, and without consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government [emphasis added]. (Ibid., §140) The one who holds power is not a lawgiver, but a mere representative of the law (executor), and has a right to be obeyed only in this capacity; he cannot claim it for himself: Allegiance being nothing but an obedience according to law, which, when he violates, he has no right to obedience, nor can claim it otherwise than as the public person vested with the power of law. (Ibid., §150) Locke’s theory can thus be interpreted as an attempt to bring claims into the field of rights, and to subordinate the claim to power to natural law. That is what determines, for him, the possibility of the people rejecting authority. A bad ruler who “claims that power without the direction of the law, as a prerogative belonging to him by right of his office” (ibid., §164), thus gives the people a reason to “claim their right and limit that power.” A claim therefore requires a right, and is no longer a foundation or origin but a demand that itself has to be grounded. Thus in Locke we find for the first time the curious verb “disclaim” (ibid., §191): I can disclaim my membership in the community governed by law and withdraw from it (I will then be outside its jurisdiction, losing the rights inherent in that membership). Whence the later appearance of the expression “to issue a disclaimer” (symmetrical with “enter a claim”), which means to reject a responsibility or to renounce a right and thus one’s membership. Thus in and with the notion of a claim, a twofold problem is posed: that of the foundation of authority, of entitlement, and that of the recognition of this authority by its subjects: here we move from the political question to the more general question of the community. II. “Claim” as a Demand for Knowledge The problem of authority, of the claim to power, moves from the political field to that of knowledge and argumentation, but the political question still underlies the epistemological problem. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell explores this semantic transfer and remarkably develops the relationship of the juridical to the cognitive, and then to the linguistic. The cognitive concept, like its political ancestor, emerges from discussions of empiricism. What is the question of empiricism, and correlatively, of skepticism? It is the question of legitimacy, of the right to know. What allows us to say that we know? Hume examines our claim to know by reasoning on the basis of experience (note that when in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he asks “what is the foundation be like presenting a check for payment in a social order that lacked the institution of money. (A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 67) Thus is raised the problem of the status of property claims or titles, which has become central in Anglo-Saxon juridical and political thought: a claim is a demand and a title to ownership of an object that one already legitimately owns. It is, moreover, noteworthy that the use of the term underwent a concrete extension precisely at the time when pioneers were conquering new territories. In America and in Australia, a claim designated a parcel of land acquired by occupation (and not granted or inherited), for example, by miners. This “local” American sense of the word “claim” underlies a certain conception of the claim to property rights as fundamental, and perhaps also to rights in general as (re)taking possession of one’s own territory (a territory later claimed by Native Americans was called an “Indian claim”). This clarifies a meaning of “claim to a right”: I demand what is mine and always has been. It is obvious that a certain conception of claims is based on these earlier senses of the word, and that the latter, far from having been erased or integrated into “right,” remains in competition with it. We see the result of this in the numerous recent discussions of W. N. Holfeld’s book Fundamental Legal Conceptions (1919), in which a claim becomes the right par excellence, defined as a privilege or immunity, a “perimeter of protection” (cf. J. Y. Goffi, Le philosophe et ses animaux). A “right-claim” is more than a simple right, for it is not merely the permission to perform a certain act (tolerance), or even a prohibition on preventing someone from performing it (right), but implies society’s obligation to see to it that the claim is respected, to make the act possible. The theoretician of the norm, Von Wright, shows in Norm and Action (86f.) that deontic logic cannot function in accord with two contradictory terms A/non-A, for example, prohibited/ authorized, but it is necessary to posit a third term, a supplementary degree of authorization, or of the right, which is the claim. A claim, far from being absorbed into the idea of right, is thus a radicalization of the latter, which explains the antiauthority and territorial form taken too often by questions of right(s) when they have the status of a claim. B. “Claim on”: Locke, or the possible illegitimacy of the political “claim” This radical, possessive dimension is found in another use of “claim,” in the sense of a “claim on” someone. The political sense of “claim” exists in neither Hume nor Hobbes, though it is widespread in Locke. In Hume, a right (that of property, for instance, or that of a sovereign over his subjects) is connected with a conventional agreement or contract that does not need to be founded on anything other than custom and habit. Conversely, Locke calls a “claim” the ruler’s authority over a subject, and differentiates it from paternal authority. “Governments claim no power over the son because of that they had over the father” (Second Treatise on Civil Government, §118). Here we encounter an idea of a claim that applies to the person the originary concept of a claim, but—and this is the specificity of Locke and his heirs—redefines it. The claim to CLAIM 143 My society must be my expression. That is what the theoreticians of democracy always hope, and it is the illusion that Cavell denounces in the work of John Rawls, for instance: if others silence my voice, claim to speak for me, in what way have I agreed to this? To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff— on some occasions, perhaps once for all—of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff—on some occasions, perhaps once for all—those who claimed to be speaking for you. (Ibid.) The social contract implies the constant possibility of withdrawing from (“disclaiming,” Locke said) the community. Linguistic or political agreement among humans, precisely because it is still a claim, is as fragile as it is profound. This essential fragility of political agreement, which is always threatened by skepticism, constitutes the linguistic sense of “claim.” III. “Claim,” The Voice of Ordinary Language Political agreement is of the same nature as linguistic agreement, which Wittgenstein called Übereinstimmung (Philosophical Investigations, §241), and which is translated in French as either concorde or accord, the better to indicate the presence of the voice, the Stimme (see STIMMUNG). This agreement exists only insofar as it is claimed, invoked, appealed to. Thus, along with “claim” is defined an agreement that is neither psychological nor intersubjective and is founded on nothing other than the validity of a voice (Stimme): my individual voice claims to be, and is, a “universal voice.” With the appeal to the voice, we encounter the first sense of “claim” (clamare, “to cry out, to call”). The concept of voice turns out always to underlie the technical concept of “claim.” A voice claims when it asserts, on the basis of itself alone, a universal assent—a claim that, no matter how exorbitant it might be, Cavell seeks to formulate in a still more shocking way, without basing it, as in Kant, on something transcendental, or on some rational condition. To show how the concept of “claim” rethought in this way provides a reply to skepticism, we can point to the universality characteristic of aesthetic judgment in Kant. In his earlier book Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell shows how close the approaches of ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin are to Kant’s: for them, I always appeal to myself to say what we say, and this can be rendered only by “claim,” or Anspruch. To understand this, we have to see what the ordinary language philosophers’ approach consists in, on the basis of “what we say when”: I will suggest that aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs. (Cavell, The Claim of Reason) It is Kant who offers the deepest thinking about “claim.” The idea of a universal agreement based on my individual of all reasoning and conclusions from experience?” he uses, not “claim,” but “pretension”). We “claim” to know, but with what right? The question is taken up again by Kant, in whose work we can discern the emergence of an equivalent of “claim”: Anspruch, which designates the claim of reason to ask questions that are beyond its power but are legitimate and natural. The legal sense of “claim” can thus be found in the Kantian quid juris. The problem of reason is the problem of the claim: a demand that is both inevitable and impossible to satisfy, and is thus fated to remain a claim forever. Cavell develops this tension between the arrogance and the legitimacy of the philosophical pretension indicated by “claim.” At the outset, The Claim of Reason defines “claims” as “claims to community.” Underlying the question of the basis for knowledge is the political and not solely epistemological question of the foundation of our common use of language. For Cavell, my claim to know masks a prior claim: the claim to speak for others, and to accept that others speak in my name. The philosophical appeal to “what we say,” and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community. And a claim to community is always a search for the basis on which it can be, or has been, established. (Cavell, The Claim of Reason) The juridical and gnoseological problems raised by “claim” are transformed into a question about our common criteria, our agreements in language. When I remarked that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for community, I was in effect answering the second question I uncovered in the face of the claim to speak for “the group”—the question, namely, about how I could have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know what they are. (Ibid.) The question is that of my membership in the community of language, and also that of my representativeness: where do I get the right or claim to speak for others? According to Cavell, this question is the very one that ordinary language philosophers like Austin and Wittgenstein ask. The meaning of “claim” is inseparable from the possibility of losing my representativeness or membership, of being reduced to silence. For all Wittgenstein’s claims about what we say, he is always at the same time aware that others might not agree, that a given person or group (a “tribe”) might not share our criteria. (Ibid.) Thus Cavell offers an analysis of Rousseau in terms of claims: What he claims to know is his relation to society, and to take as a philosophical datum the fact that men (that he) can speak for society and that society can speak for him. (Ibid.) 144 CLASSIC CLASSIC, CLASSICISM NEOCLASSIC, NEOCLASSICISM FRENCH classique, classicisme; néoclassique, néoclassicisme GERMAN klassik, Klassizismus ITALIAN classicismo; neoclassico, neoclassicismo LATIN classicus v. AESTHETICS, BAROQUE, GOÛT, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, NEUZEIT, ROMANTIC The ease of translating the term “classic” into all European languages, which is due to a common Latin root (classicus), masks differences in content depending on the languages and cultures concerned. The adjective classicus (first-class) was used by Aulus Gellius to designate the best authors, from Demosthenes to Virgil, the ones humanist educators used in their classes (whence an amusing false etymology, still given in Furetière’s dictionary [RT: Dictionnaire universel]). The word is used in this sense in all European languages, each of which has its own “classics.” It is also used more specifically to designate the artistic works inspired by antiquity (the classical language of architecture, classical sculptures and ornaments) that the romantics opposed. But two derived and divergent uses—in France, on the one hand, to qualify the art of the century of Louis XIV, considered as the period of a perfection equal to that of the centuries of Pericles and Augustus, and on the other hand in Germany, to designate the formal system of the Italian High Renaissance in opposition to that of the baroque—eventually created a semantic nexus that was complicated still further by a final difference between the German use of Klassizmus, the reaction to Rococo that itself came to be opposed to romanticism, and other Europeans’ use of “neoclassicism” (néoclassicisme, neoclassicismo) to describe the renewal of taste connected with the discovery of Pompeii, Greece, and Egypt. I. The Adjective “Classic” In seventeenth-century France, only the adjective classique was used: “it is used almost exclusively to describe the authors read in classes, or who enjoy great authority,” Furetière notes in his RT: Dictionnaire universel (1690). Following Aulus Gellius, he cites, among these good classical authors, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, and Horace, “who lived in the time of the Republic and toward the end of Augustus, when good Latin was still written, before it began to be corrupted in the time of the Antonines,” thus suggesting a threefold link between the idea of the classic and the authority of the ancients, the purity of the language, and teaching. But in his Discourse on Theophrastus, which is situated in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, La Bruyère observes, “We who are moderns, will be ancients in a few centuries.” As early as the eighteenth century, the word is extended to good French authors, “whose perfect models should be imitated as much as possible”; “you have given me great pleasure,” Voltaire writes, “in telling me that the Academy is going to do France and Europe the favor of publishing a collection of our classic authors, with notes that will stabilize language and taste” (see 1761 letter from Selected Letters of Voltaire, trans. L. C. Syms, 150). We find again here the role of authority—in this case, of the Academy—and the concern for the preservation of a good state of the language and for the imitation of good models. The lectures given at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, in which the voice makes its appearance in the famous §8 of the Third Critique. In aesthetic judgment, Kant discovers “a property of our cognitive faculty,” “a claim [Anspruch] to the universal validity [Allgemeingültigkeit] of its judgment,” so that “satisfaction in the object is imputed to everyone” (trans. Bernard, Critique of Judgment, §8, 49). We know how Kant distinguishes the pleasing from the beautiful (which claims universal assent) in terms of private versus public judgment. How can a judgment that has all the characteristics of the private claim to be public? That is the problem raised by the notion of a claim. Judgments of taste require and demand universal assent; “in fact it imputes this to everyone for each of its judgments of taste, without the persons that judge disputing as to the possibility of such a claim [Anspruch]” (ibid. §8, 49). In such a claim, “nothing is postulated but a universal voice (allgemeine Stimme)” (ibid., §8, 50). This is the “voice” that is heard in übereinstimmen, the verb Wittgenstein uses with regard to our agreement (“in language,” cf. Philosophical Investigations, §241). The proximity of the Kantian universal voice and the theses of ordinary language philosophy appear with this final sense of “claim,” simultaneously Anspruch and Stimme: a claim that is empirically unfounded and thus threatened by and pointed out by skepticism, to speak in the name of everyone. Kant’s “universal voice” is what we hear in Cavell’s claims about “what we say” (Must We Mean What We Say? 94). By redefining “claim” in this way, Cavell brings together the diverse semantic traditions. My assertions or theses— claims—are always based on an agreement in language, on a claim to my representativeness, which is itself political and legal in nature—hence on my voice as singular and universal. To recognize the close connection between all these senses of the word “claim” is to recognize that language, expression—in the cognitive as well as in the political domain—is always also a voice that wants to make itself heard. Sandra Laugier REFS.: Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Pres, 1979. . Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. . A Pitch of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Goffi, Jean-Yves. Le philosophe et ses animaux. Nîmes, Fr.: Jeanine Chambon, 1994. Holfield, Wesley Newcomb. Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919; reprint, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. First published in 1748. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: HafnerMacmillan, 1951. Larrère, Catherine. “De l’illicite au licite, prescription et permission,” CREDIMI 16 (1996): 59–78. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Civil Government. Edited by J. W. Gough. Oxford: Blackwell, 1946. First published in 1690. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Wright, Georg Henrik von. Norm and Action. London: Macmillan, 1963. COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION 145 works in the king’s collection (especially those by Poussin, considered the leader of the French School of painting), on the one hand, and on the other the courses given by Jacques François Blondel, who celebrated the works of François Mansart, paved the way for the extension to the fine arts of this notion of “French classics,” and particularly the “classics” of the century of Louis XIV. This development was not limited to France: the preface to the first volume of the Literary History of France published by the Benedictines in 1733 emphasizes that “[w]e have seen several foreign nations, far less studious than ours, priding themselves on collecting in a library all the authors they have given to the Republic of Letters.” II. How French Classicism Became Baroque The French word classicisme was created on the basis of the adjective classique in the context of the battle with romanticism. In 1873 Émile Littré still considered it a neologism, and defined it as the “system of the exclusive partisans of the writers of antiquity or of the classic authors of the seventeenth century.” The word is also used in a related sense in the field of the fine arts: works that “claim to imitate the works of ancient statuary” are called classique, and David’s “new school” is called the école classique because its “compositions are regular and imitate the Greeks.” In Germany, the term Klassizismus is still used to designate the international movement at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, which in France is called néoclassicisme, a more accurate term because the source of classicism, the imitation of the ancients, was renewed at that time by the discovery of Greek architecture and by the rationality of the Enlightenment. In French culture, on the contrary, the notion of classicism was shifted to the art and literature of the second half of the seventeenth century. In the aftermath of the battle over romanticism, instruction in the universities and schools tried to make French literature of the seventeenth century the expression of the French genius: clearness of expression, sober elegance, nobility, and decorous sentiments. This notion was extended to the fine arts, and it was claimed that the same qualities could be found in the works of Poussin, Le Sueur, and Lebrun. Since this period corresponded to the reign of Louis XIV, it was called the “Classic Age,” as the Spanish speak of the “Golden Age.” However, writers on German art history adopted the term Barock, which had up to that point been pejorative (see BAROQUE) in referring to the art of the Seicento (H. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barok), and, on the other hand, they constructed a visual analysis on the basis of the contrast between the classical aesthetics of the early Cinquecento and the baroque aesthetics of the Seicento (H. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915). French classicism was thus contemporaneous with Italian baroque. Certain national specificities (it was forgotten that they were not peculiar to the century) and the existence of lively debates regarding the role of ornament or antique models (it was forgotten that they cut across the two cultures) made it possible for a time to maintain the opposition between (French) classicism and (Italian) baroque. But when the notion of baroque was broadened on cultural (stile trentino) or formal (the “grand style”) bases, it was difficult not to see that some aspects of French art in the seventeenth century, from Simon Vouet’s decorative lyricism to the grand style of Hardouin-Mansart, belonged to this international model. Describing French classical art as baroque reversed the way it was read, leading to a rediscovery of the theatricality of works that had earlier been admired for their balance and clarity, and of the baroque grandiloquence of Versailles, previously celebrated for its classical moderation—whence the necessity of introducing other notions like that of Atticism (Merot, Éloge de la clarté, 1998). Roland Barthes discerned a dark Racine who might have read Sade, and Anthony Blunt found in François Mansart a paranoid anxiety about the perfect form that relates him to Borromini. The internal tensions within the two cultures were rediscovered in their common reference point, which was, however, differentiated from that of antiquity: the tense expression of Pierre Puget’s statue of Milo of Croton, conceived in emulation of the ancient Laocoön, is contrasted with the calm gestures of the nymphs in Girardon’s sculpture Les bains d’Apollon, which is inspired by the Apollo of Belvedere; Bernini takes the same statue as his starting point, giving it life in his “Apollo and Daphne,” whereas Poussin, inversely, idealizes the figures or the models that pose for him. For literature as for the arts, classicism is not a doctrine but a horizon. Claude Mignot REFS.: Mérot, Alain. Éloge de la clarté, un courant artistique au temps de Mazarin, 1640–1660. Dijon-Le Mans, Fr.: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998. Summerson, John. The Classical Language of Architecture. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. Voltaire. Selected Letters of Voltaire. Translated by L. C. Syms. New York: American Book Company, 1900. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Die Klassische Kunst, eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance. Munich: Bruckmann, 1899. Translation by P. and L. Murray: Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1994. . Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. Munich: Bruckmann, 1915. Translation by M. D. Hottinger: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. New York: Dover, 1950. . Renaissance und Barok. Bâle, Ger.: Schwabe, 1888. Translation by K. Simon: Renaissance and Baroque. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966. COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION A “Particle Metaphysics” in German v. GERMAN, and DESTINY, ENGLISH, FRENCH, TO BE, TO TRANSLATE While the use of any linguistic system is based on a double operation of selection (paradigmatic) and combination (syntagmatic), the German language is characterized by the great importance of combination, both at the systemic level and as a process of semantic innovation. This “Lego set” functions both in everyday language and within each code or subsystem. We also find it in philosophical language, where the omnipresence of combinations plays a crucial role 146 COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION Of course, the rules of combination are governed by numerous constraints, whether within the words or in their arrangement; it remains that the resources of combination in German are particularly rich in comparison with those of other European languages. They are even virtually unlimited, and the result is constant linguistic innovation. Although German has retained a certain number of combinations that eventually join the reservoir of words reflected by a given historical state of the dictionary, creation is incessant. New combinations can be invented at any time, no matter what later happens to them. We could say that in a certain sense combination is more important than selection, or that it draws selection to it, or that it exercises a pressure on it, with the result that a few elements make it possible to deploy a multiplicity of meanings. For example, it suffices to take verbs as polyvalent as those corresponding to mettre and poser in French—setzen, legen, and stellen—and to combine them with prepositions such as an, aus, ab, vor, etc., or with verbal particles such as dar, ver, zu, ent, um, etc., in order to deploy, by combining verb and preverb, a considerable number of meanings that in French would require recourse to an equally considerable number of different verbs. If we actuate the combinatorial process that governs the syntagmatic environment of the verbs legen, stellen, and sitzen alone, we obtain the following translations— and here we are limiting ourselves to indicating just a few of their common arrangements—sich auf etwas einstellen, “adapt to something” (whereas “to meddle or be involved in something” is expressed by sich mit etwas abgeben); etwas umstellen, “invert or rearrange something”; sich umstellen, “adapt to a new situation”; seine Uhr umstellen, “reset one’s watch”; auf ein Pferd setzen, “bet on a horse”; Wert auf etwas legen, “assign value to something”; zulegen, “speed up”; eine Platte auflegen, “put a record on”; etwas verstellen, “mislay something”; sich verstellen, “dissimulate”; sich einsetzen, “go to bat for something or someone”; sich durchsetzen, “assert oneself” or “pay dearly for something”; etwas jemandem zustellen, “mail something to someone”; Vieh umlegen, “slaughter livestock”; sich auf etwas hinsetzen, “sit down on something”; jemandem etwas hinstellen, “deposit or put something somewhere for someone,” etc. It has to be emphasized that in German determination by particles and preverbs is very clearly spatial in nature: for example, the preverb an is formed on the basis of the preposition an, which indicates the idea of contiguity, whereas the particle um is formed on the basis of the preposition um, which means “around.” But an also has a temporal, inchoative value, and the preverb um can indicate a process of change (seine Uhr umstellen, “to reset one’s watch”; sich umstellen, “to adapt”; etwas umwerfen, “overturn something”); the idea of a Freudian Verschiebung (displacement) is already in the particle ver-, which itself indicates movement or delay, just as Entstellung is semantically invoked by the particle ent-, itself indicating an idea of deformation, etc. Not only is the concrete and spatial aspect usually more visible than it is in French, whose Latin substrate is not in principle obvious and requires a knowledge of etymology (for example, to discern the Latin preposition ad in apporter, from ad and portare, or inde in emporter, from inde and portare), but the rise from the empirical to the transcendental is implicit in the play of in conceptualization. That certainly does not mean that speakers of German spontaneously become “philosophers” or theoreticians merely by virtue of their language, but it remains that in German one can, quite differently from in French, conceptualize on the basis of the language’s basic rules and, as it were, “do philosophy with grammar.” But the philosophical use of German grammar is based on a paradox. On the one hand, philosophical language seems to seek to make manifest language’s ontological implications, and on the other, it extracts itself from the natural gangue of language by using the flexibility inherent in writing to bring out the difference between the concept and the linguistic given, thus emphasizing the emergence of the concept. Without claiming to offer a historical account or a rigorous study of the properly linguistic aspect of this question, we will first examine briefly the role played by combination at the level of individual words and then bring out, using the extreme example of the language games peculiar to Heidegger, the simultaneously linguistic and philosophical conditions of the translatability and untranslatability of the concept of Gestell. Then we will show how, by creating the concept of Gefährt, the philosopher Hans-Dieter Bahr rewrites and unwrites the Heideggerian Gestell by giving language still another twist. I. Combinations and Conceptual Resources A. The double register of combinations The German language constantly uses a double register of combinations. The first register corresponds to the mechanism that Saussure called, in chapter 6 of his Course on General Linguistics, “syntagmatic interdependence,” and which is a generalizable phenomenon of the constitution of meaning. The second register is completely specific to German and entails important consequences regarding the nature of philosophical writing. By “syntagmatic interdependence” Saussure refers to the fact that in any arrangement of signs, the combination of elements functions as a mathematical “product” insofar as combination creates meaning independently of the original meaning of the elements it arranges. He speaks of a “combination of interdependent elements, their value deriving solely from their mutual contributions within a higher unit” (see RT: Cours de linguistique générale; English trans. here by Roy Harris) and gives as an example désireux, which is not a semantic addition of two elements— désir and eux, but rather the mathematical “product” of their juxtaposition. But for word construction German uses a parallel type of construction in which, at the end of the process of combination, each original element retains more or less completely its literal meaning. Whence the impression that German is more “motivated” than French, that is, that the sign is less arbitrary in German because the relation between signifier and signified is more constantly discernible. Thus a railway station or yard is called a Bahnhof (Bahn = way [cf. Eisenbahn (railway)] + Hof = court or yard), whereas Bauernhof (Bauer = farmer + Hof), that is, a farm, is verbatim a “peasant’s yard,” and Gasthof (inn) is the combination of Gast (guest) and Hof, etc. Similarly, a restaurant in a railway station is a Bahnhofgaststätte, that is, a railway (Bahn) + court (Hof) + guest (Gast) + place (Stätte). COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION 147 gives it, whereas the verb aufheben can in fact mean “preserve,” “raise,” or “cancel.” The properly dialectical meaning that Hegel gives the noun Aufhebung is as distant from the norm in German (because normally Aufhebung means simply “abolition,” “suspension [of a session]”) as it is irremediably untranslatable in French. On the other hand, Hegel himself often uses the verb aufheben in the completely customary sense of “cancel.” The concept deepens the gap between ordinary language and philosophical language but without there being any need to invent a new terminology (see AUFHEBEN). It is here that we encounter the problem of the Fremdwort, that is, the use of a foreign term, usually of Latin or French origin, in order to express what German can say by means of the procedures we have just isolated. Concepts of foreign origin, precisely because they are outside the ordinary language / philosophical language circuit, are perceived as odd, arbitrary, even incomprehensible. Thus Willkür, from Wille, “will,” and Kür, “choice,” hence “free will,” but the word Arbitrarität is “not well-received.” It is spontaneously rejected. C. Untranslatability and the evolution of translations Taken all together, these phenomena are prodigiously effective for German philosophical writing and constitute one of the main reasons why a large part of its vocabulary cannot be translated word for word. The latitude that German grants combination contrasts very strongly with the situation of French, where the irreducible distance between one word and another requires conceptual creation to take quite a different path: the concept of writing cannot mean the same thing in German and French because the processes of conceptualization do not take place on the same stage. The result is a strange to-and-fro between German and French, the direction of which can be totally reversed over time. Thus, it is striking to note that in the nineteenth century French translations of German philosophical texts had a strong tendency to Gallicize the text, whereas in the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, the tendency was on the contrary to “Germanize” French philosophical language. Under the pressure of this new habitus, we are no longer surprised to read chosification (modeled on Verdinglichung) or déterminité (modeled on Bestimmtheit). The effect of contamination is obvious and in no way disconfirms what has just been said. In this case, although the words are French, it is a question of a peculiarly German philosophical idiom that has been acclimated in the philosophical language. Generalized, it would lead to an idiom completely separate from everyday French, whereas for the German philosophical language the same phenomena have their very distant source in the abandonment of Latin as the scholarly language in modern Germany, especially since the eighteenth century. II. An Extreme and Revealing Example: The Heideggerian Ge-Stell A. The terminological constellation of technology Let us take, as an extreme illustration, the case of Heidegger. In Die Technik und die Kehre, he sets forth his philosophy of technology on the basis of a small group of words whose treatment illustrates perfectly the mechanisms under combination in German, since it allows the passage from the spatial to the temporal, from the concrete to the conceptual, and from the representable to the idea. B. The resources made available to philosophical language by ordinary combination These procedures, which are particularly effective at the level of the linguistic system, offer conceptualization and philosophical language unlimited resources. It suffices, in fact, to repeat this movement of language by reusing its elements and the rules of their combination to promote the word to the status of a concept. But moreover, this reuse of grammar is never limited to a simple repetition. There is repetition and differentiation. In his book on Freud’s language, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt states, not without forcing things a bit: There is nothing simpler or more immediate than the philosophical vocabulary. Chapter 1 of the Phenomenology of Mind, “Die sinnliche Gewißheit” (“Sense-certainty”; it is true that German can hardly differentiate between “sensible,” “sensorial,” and “sensual”), consists from beginning to end of words familiar to a five-year-old child (with perhaps the exception of Vermittlung, “mediation,” and Unmittelbarkeit, “immediacy”). (G. A. Goldschmidt, Quand Freud voit la mer) There is something profoundly true in this exaggeration, and it is hardly exaggerated to say that the most common, everyday German is very often potentially the German of ontology. For example, when one wants to say that someone is undergoing withdrawal (from drugs, etc.), one says that er leidet unter (he suffers under) Entzugserscheinung. Erscheinung also means “apparition,” “phenomenon” in the philosophical sense, and Entzug, which here means “weaning,” also means “withdrawal.” Suffering is thus expressed by the same words that serve to refer to the withdrawal of Being. It would, of course, be a kind of fetishization to conclude that German, like Greek, is from the outset and by nature the language of metaphysics (the shame-faced French version) or, worse yet, that one can philosophize only in German (the triumphalist German version). All the examples just mentioned show that two effects are in fact conjoined: at the lexical level we see the possibility of an immediate passage from ordinary language to philosophical language—as if the latter “mirrored” the everyday, and vice versa; and at the syntactical level, combinatorial procedures that are particularly effective for language proper offer major resources for conceptualization and philosophical language. Let us emphasize once again that this does not mean that we move immediately from everyday language to the language of philosophy. There is both repetition and differentiation. There is repetition because it suffices to reduplicate processes of linguistic combination, reusing their elements and rules to extract the concept from a preconceptual discourse. But the repetition is marked as both repetition and difference. To give a famous example, the noun Aufhebung does exist in language in its normal and normed state, but it does not have the double meaning that Hegel 148 COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION (1957). Technology calls nature to account, boards and inspects it [l’arraisonne], requires that everything justify itself before the tribunal of reason and in accord with its norms. In Questions IV, the translator’s note on p. 155 is hardly more illuminating, and translators, who rightly challenge the translation given in Essais et Conférences, clear themselves of responsibility by concluding that the term is untranslatable: And they add: “It seemed to us impossible to find in French a word corresponding to Stellen and rendering all the derivations Heidegger attaches to the verb stellen: Gestell, Nachstellen, nachstellen, verstellen, Bestellen. There is, of course, no single verb that translates the German stellen in all cases and in such a way that one could find it in all the combinations of the original. But there are other factors that help make Ge-stell untranslatable. To lay out the logic of the concept insofar as it arises in and through writing, we can start from the place in the text where Heidegger explains the reasons for his choice. He writes: Wir nennen jetzt jenen herausfordernden Anspruch, der den Menschen dahin versammelt, das Sichentbergende als Bestand zu bestellen—das Ge-Stell . Ge-Stell heißt das Versammelnde jenes Stellens, das den Menschen stellt, d.h. herausfordert, das Wirkliche in der Weise des Bestellens als Bestand zu entbergen. Ge-Stell heißt die Weise des Entbergens, die im Wesen der modernen Technik waltet und selber nichts Technisches ist. Zum Technischen gehört dagegen alles, was wir als Gestänge und Geschiebe und Gerüste kennen und was als Betandstück dessen ist, was man Montage nennt. Here is André Préau‘s French translation of this passage in Essais et Conférences: Maintenant cet appel pro-voquant qui rassemble l’homme (autour de la tâche) de commettre comme fonds ce qui se dévoile, nous l’appelons—l’Arraisonnement . Ainsi appelons-nous le rassemblant de cette interpellation qui requiert l’homme, c’est-à-dire le pro-voque à dévoiler le réel comme fonds dans le mode du « commettre ». Ainsi appelons-nous le mode de dévoilement qui régit l’essence de la technique moderne et n’est lui-même rien de technique. Fait en revanche partie de ce qui est technique tout ce que nous connaissons en fait de tiges, de pistons, d’échafaudages, tout ce qui est pièce constitutive de ce que l’on appelle un montage. (28–29) Here we can make three observations: 1. Heidegger clearly distinguishes between the technicity of technology, represented by the terms for which he gives the generic principle of construction, and thus technology as a material procedure functioning by means of machine-like arrangement, from the nontechnical essence of technology, which is the object of his reflection. This distinction itself corresponds to a double use of language: the normal use, which describes technology as machinery, and the term Ge-Stell, which reconstructs language by combining two elements against their nature: Ge, which refers to the seme of discussion: the concept is dissociated from ordinary language in accord with principles of combination and remarking. The word Kehre, which was used from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and meant “turn,” “return” (like the plow at the end of the furrow) or, in a Pietist context, “(spiritual) conversion,” has disappeared from ordinary language, which uses the forms of kehr- only in the form of a combinatory element—for example, Rückkehr, “return from,” Abkehr, “the act of turning away from,” Verkehr, “commerce, traffic,” Wiederkehr, “return, comeback,” etc.—or of kehrt- (for example, kehrtmachen, “make a U-turn, turn back”). The linguistic “turn” represented by die Kehre, the “twist” that Heidegger gives language, thus consists in fabricating a word, die Kehre, by analogy with die Wende, “the turning point, the reversal,” with the strong connotations of temporality that the word implies, especially in the sense of “historical turning point” or “reversal of the sequence of events.” The twist to which Heidegger subjects the language leads him to a deliberate overdetermination: die Kehre is a return(ing), a turning like returning. Heidegger designates thereby the return/anamnesis of Being manifested and concealed by technology, or a new way of conceiving technology in its nontechnological essence. The two other verbs that provide the linguistic core of conceptualization in this text are bergen and stellen. Bergen, stellen, Ge-Stell, Kehre, to which is added Bestand (from the verb bestehen, “exist”), form a constellation of words on the basis of which Heidegger conceptualizes technology’s relation to Being. B. The re-marking of Ge-stell In the case of Ge-stell, a typical example of the untranslatable, Heidegger, who is well aware that the word he is creating is unusual, excuses himself for the challenge that his creation represents and feels obliged to explain it in order not to be incomprehensible. “Wir wagen es, dieses Wort in einem bisher völlig ungewohnten Sinne zu gebrauchen” (“We dare to use this word in a way completely unusual up to now”; Die Technik und die Kehre, 1978, p. 19). After reminding us that the Platonic term eidos is far more daring than Ge-Stell, he concludes by saying that the use he makes of the latter almost demands too much of language and thus might lead to misunderstandings. . Ge-Stell, an untranslatable term par excellence, has unfortunately been acclimated in French in the form of the term arraisonnement. In André Préau’s translation of Heidegger’s Essais et Conférences, we find the following note (p. 26), which seeks to justify the choice of the term: We have seen this root figure in a small group of verbs designating either fundamental operations of reason and science (following the trace, presenting, highlighting, representing, explaining) or measures of technology’s authority (questioning, requiring, deciding, committing, setting up, ensuring, etc.). Stellen is at the center of this group; here it is “to stop someone in the street to demand an explanation, to force him to rationem reddere” (Heid.), that is, to ask for his sufficient reason. The idea is taken up again in Der Satz vom Grund COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION 149 of their cohesion is this collector we call a ‘mountain range’ ” (Was die Berge ursprünglich zu Bergzügen entfaltet und sie in ihrem gefalteten Beisammen durchzieht, ist das Versammelnde, das wir Gebirg nennen) (Die Technik und die Kehre), this sentence is difficult to understand if one does not see in it the play of oppositions between traits (Bergzügen, translated here as “lines” [lignes]), fold (entfaltet, “unfolds,” and gefaltet, “folded,” with all the Leibnizian and Goethean connotations of Vielfalt and Mannigfaltigkeit, “multiplicity” and “diversity”), and cohesion (Beisammen). In this semantic constellation the Ge- in Gebirge (der Berg, “mountain,” das Gebirge, “mountain range”) is equivalent to the seme Totality construction (the act of putting together, assembling) and stell, torn away from the usual semantics of the word Gestell, which can mean, for instance, “scaffolding, rack, skeleton” (these are Heidegger’s own examples). There is a layering, and the product thus obtained becomes useless for ordinary use—whence Heidegger’s fears of being misunderstood. The word is uprooted, and the usual rules of combination (Ge + stell) have produced a surplus of meaning well indicated by Heidegger’s way of writing the word with the dash characteristic of re-marking. 2. When Heidegger writes: “What originally unfolds mountains in lines and runs all through them in the fold 1 Gestell v. VORHANDEN In German, the word Gestell usually means frame(work), mount, setting. As Heidegger remarks, “In ordinary usage, the word Gestell refers to some kind of apparatus, for example, a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a skeleton” (Question concerning Technology). The word entered the philosophical vocabulary in Heidegger’s work—probably in the 1953 lecture “The Question of Technology,” where it characterized the essence of modern technology—or technology as such. Although it is not a neologism, the term must nonetheless be understood as a neologism in view of the fact that it is used by Heidegger in a broad, unexpected, unusual sense to designate the whole or the collection (which is indicated by the prefix Ge-) of all the modes of setting (Ger. stellen) that causes man’s way of wanting to impose modern technology on the whole planet ultimately to enslave him as the servant of what he intended to have at his service. Starting in the 1950s, Heidegger called Gestell what in the 1930s he had called Machenschaft—not, of course, in the common sense of “machination,” but as “the realm of doing” or even “efficiency.” Regarding the choice of the term Gestell, Heidegger told the German news magazine Der Spiegel: Das Wesen der Technik sehe ich in dem, was ich das “Ge-Stell” nenne. Der Name, beim ersten Hören leicht mißverständlich, recht bedacht, weist, was er meint, in die innerste Geschichte der Metaphysik zurück, die heute noch unser Dasein bestimmt. Das Walten des Ge-Stells besagt: Der Mensch ist gestellt, beansprucht und herausgefordert von einer Macht, die im Wesen der Technik offenbar wird. (I see the essence of technology in what I call the Ge-Stell. This term, which is easily misunderstood when first heard, when correctly conceived refers what it designates back to the innermost history of metaphysics, which still determines our existence. The reign of the Ge-stell means: man is subject to the control, the demands, and the provocation of a power that is manifested in the essence of technology.) (“Martin Heidegger im Gespräch,” in Antwort; M. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges) As he remarked as early as a lecture given in 1953, Heidegger proposes to interpret Gestell in a “completely unusual” (völlig ungewohnt) way, on the model of Gebirg (mountain range) or Gemüt. Let us attempt here a brief comparison of two French translations of the term Gestell. Arraisonnement, a public-health term, means “a careful examination of a ship that is suspect for health reasons” (Littré), and arraisonner un navire also means, in a maritime and hygienic context, “to find out where a vessel is coming from and where it is going.” But, in addition, arraisonner means “to seek to persuade by giving arguments.” It is this twofold meaning that A. Préau has in mind when he justifies his translation: “Technology calls nature to account, boards and inspects it [l’arraisonne], requires that everything justify itself before the tribunal of reason and in accord with its norms” (translator’s note in “La question de la technique,” tr. Préau, 26). The translation of Gestell by arraisonnement is certainly a discovery that stimulates thought by situating the essence—or rather the site of modern technology—in the realm of reason and the principle of reason, rationem reddere. But it is also open to criticism because the Gestell does not express itself using the vocabulary of reason. “A good translation” and at the same time one that is “eminently interpretive,” says F. Fédier, and in addition one that “lets us glimpse what the word Gestell means as Heidegger uses it,” but only on condition that the word arraisonnement be understood “to express a rational, systematic treatment in which everything is already grasped in the framework of arrangements to be made in order to provide a solution for problems” (Regarder voir, pp. 206–8). Fédier himself proposes dispositif (apparatus) as a translation for Gestell or, in a more developed way, dispositif unitaire de la consommation, meaning by that “all the prior measures by means of which everything is made available in advance in the framework of a putting in order.” Here all explicit reference to reason has disappeared. On the other hand, the root stell of the verb stellen (set, set up) has a prominent place in the apparatus. Nonetheless, a circumlocution is necessary to render the meaning of the German collective prefix Ge- : unitaire and the cum in consommation indicate it doubly. Pascal David REFS.: Fédier, François. Regarder voir. Les Belles Lettres/ Archimbaud, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Antwort—Martin Heidegger im Gespräch. Pfullingen, Ger.: Neske, 1988. . “The Question concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. . “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger.” In Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker, edited by T. Sheehan, 45–67. Chicago: Precedent, 1981. . Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. In Gesammtausgabe, vol. 16. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. 150 COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION it, redistributes it, and in that way brings it out, reveals it—that is the concept of Entbergen. The constellation of concepts grouped around the verb bergen—which is central for Heidegger, since it is explicitly developed elsewhere to explain the concept of truth as Unverborgenheit, on the basis of the Greek alêtheia—refers in German to an original ambivalence given by language. Like the famous verb aufheben at the origin of Hegelian thinking, the verb bergen is ambiguous from the outset, because it means both “conceal” (like verbergen) and “bring out” (for example, victims buried under ruins). Heidegger recomposes the Greek alêtheia by resorting to the concept of Unverborgenheit, constructed on the basis of the verb verbergen (“conceal,” but also “hide from our sight”). Thus alêtheia is the essence of what was hidden from our sight (verborgen) and appears as if unburied, un-concealed. That is why the “poïetic” part of Ge-Stell refers to the ambivalence of technology, which brings out Being but at the same time veils it, since reason receives back only its own image, which it sends to itself. However, since each displacement, each condensation of the term, encounters not words belonging to the “natural” state of language but ones that have already been displaced, uprooted from their meaning, things are still more complicated. For example, there is bestellen, which is caught up in the rhizomatic links surrounding -stell and Ge-stell, and in no way corresponds to the normal sense. Normally, to bestellen something means to “order something” (as one orders an article from a catalogue), or to “reserve” (for example, a theater seat), or again “ask someone to come somewhere, summon,” not to mention other uses, such as schlecht bestellt sein um jemanden, “someone is in a bad way.” But in Heidegger, and especially in the context of Die Technik und die Kehre, the verb bestellen means something else. Its use, which is completely unusual and in reality incorrect in all its occurrences, elicits each time, and always indirectly, the idea of having something at one’s disposal, of using an apparatus or being dependent on it. As such, bestellen is thus opposed to Bestand, “inventory,” as Ge-Stell is opposed to the idea of construction; the opposition is anchored in part in language, through the opposition between stehen, “to stand,” and stellen, “to set up.” Bestellen is the act of “putting in” (put in an order, put in place, put in cultivation, etc.). Reason catches nature in a trap and by doing so is caught in its own trap. The technological availability of the world thus catches Being in a trap, tracks it down; entities are thus sought, observed, invented; nature is pursued in an apparatus of representation until the object (Gegenstand: that which is [steht] before [gegen] the eyes) disappears as an object and, becoming inconsistent (gegenstandlos), it reappears as a simple inventory, as consistency (Bestand): it is the movement from Gegenstand to Bestand (see OBJECT). In ordinary language Bestand corresponds to being appropriated and possessed (patrimony, inventory, substance, list), to whatever constitutes some existing thing in the mode of belonging. To constitute a Bestand is to store up such things, in and through technology. Ge-Stell is thus the part of Being that we have made available (bestellbar, in Heidegger’s vocabulary) and which manifests it by disguising it as Bestand. That is why, as Heidegger (a collecting totality). Just as the range is what “runs through” and collects the diverse, the Ge- in Ge-stell attracts attention to what, beyond the functionality of machine-like construction, is the whole—an ideal, nonpresentable whole that merges with Being and masks it in and through its function and state. That is what all French translators note, following in the footsteps of Heidegger (Essais et Conférences, 26n1 and 348n2; Etre et temps, 355n1). It is clear that the French term arraisonnement in no way reflects these remarks, unlike Fédier’s dispositif unitaire. 3. The semantic derivation of Gestell on the model of Gebirge (the idea of collection) and not of Gestänge or Geschiebe (assembly or collection) thus moves the seme “assembly” toward the seme “collection.” But this holds only for the Ge- in Ge-stell. The second part of the term has to be related to the system of conceptual marks that Heidegger elaborates around stellen, and which it is not impossible to describe, despite what the translators of Questions IV say. The meaning of stellen that André Préau borrows from Heidegger and cites in his note (“to stop someone on the street to demand an explanation, to force him to rationem reddere”) might provide support for the idea of arraisonnement. But in Der Satz vom Grund, Heidegger gives a quite different commentary on the relation between stellen and rationem reddere. As always in his work, the commentary gives rise to new expansions of the conceptual constellation. Everything turns on the meaning of reddere. Heidegger emphasizes that ratio is ratio reddenda, reason is a rendering. After proposing as German translations for reddere the words zurückgeben, “to render, give back,” and herbeibringen, “to bring,” he adds zu-stellen, with the hyphen of the philosophical remark. The postal analogy is explicit: “Wir sprechen von der Zustellung der Post. Die ratio ist ratio reddenda” (We are speaking of delivering the mail. Reason is ratio reddenda) (Der Satz vom Grund, 47). “Delivering the mail”: we are far from the pirate metaphor of boarding and inspecting (arraisonnement); instead, we are concerned with the logic of the return to sender. Reason sends the world back to itself and thereby renders account of it. The spatial metaphor (return to sender) can be related systematically to the thematics of Being as “a sending” (Schickung or Geschick), rendered in French as envoi, a word that plays cleverly (let us note in passing that “cleverly” can be translated as geschickt, mit viel Geschick) on the semantic ambivalence between destiny (see SCHICKSAL) and sending, which in Heidegger is systematically related—but in a rhizomatic way—with history and historicity (see GESCHICHTLICH). Heidegger never ceases to zu-stellen. In the lines following the paragraph quoted above, he says explicitly that he includes in the verb stellen the connotations of her-stellen, “fabricate, produce,” and dar-stellen, “represent,” both referring to poiêsis. If then Ge-Stell brings together the whole of the construction, it produces and represents. It is the essence of technological construction as presenting totality. But in order to present Being, technology penetrates it. It opens it up, pierces it, transforms COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION 151 Befruchtungen zwischen Natur und Menschen begriffen werden sollen. (The vehicle For many reasons, it seems to me that technology is more precisely understood as Gefährt [vehicle] than as Gestell. Heidegger does refer to technology as a journey and a danger, but in doing so remains too closely bound to a narrow dialectic of the erratic [unbeständigter] preservation of what has been acquired [Bestandssicherung: “preservation of the status quo, of a stock of goods”] as if we already had a new writing style that renders this technology. Beyond the technology of controlling, securing, and regulating sendings, with all its catastrophic derailments, technology is also trans-mission, it exceeds its sendings and reports, its deliveries and its jurisdiction, and writes itself beyond our capacities and our understanding, in writings that humans will decipher with no less difficulty than those of nature, perhaps even more, especially if trust in genealogy shoulders its way in and technological things are seen as a kind of human children, an expression of ourselves, our drives and our wills, or as the progeny of unnatural cross-fertilizations between humans and nature.) (Sätze ins Nichts) Here Gefährt is played against Gestell. But it is not enough to note the substitution of one term for the other; we also have to look into the use of language that makes the substitution possible. Hans Dieter Bahr, who refuses to continue thinking technology on the basis of the idea of “collection” (Versammlung), prepares his operation of destitution by thematizing—using the example of the description of Greek vases based, from Aristotle to Heidegger by way of Simmel, on the concept of collection—their multiple function as “trans-lators.” The word “trans-lation” (Übertragung) does not mean “transport” in the sense that the distance between two places is abolished. The translation carried out by the recipient is a vehicular movement, in that it accompanies what it moves, and the history of its sending is one of the dangers that lie in wait for both its content and its goal. The vehicle/recipient is not only the bearer of changing contents, but is itself borne, it is the bearer/ borne, and its content is as ambivalent as its being since it can both “bring misfortune by transporting the damage, the poison, or even the ashes of the dead or a simple emptiness, after being robbed on the way.” Whereas in the Interpretation of Dreams Freud uses the two different concepts, Übertragung (“translation,” and then “transfer”) and Verschiebung (displacement) to make a distinction between the transportation of one entity into another, Bahr connects them. This connection, and the semantic renewal that it produces, is based on what claims to be a literal interpretation of the verb übertragen: über-tragen means movement (über) and carrying (tragen), and thus Übertragung is a kind of “passagesupport.” For Bahr the trans-lation (Über-tragung) carried out by the recipient is a vehicular movement insofar as it accompanies what it moves. Although the content of the text runs counter to Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, whose “narrow says toward the end of the text, if the fate of being (das Geschick), its sending, reigns in the mode of the Ge-Stell, then we are “in the greatest danger.” But this conclusion differs from the view of the ecology movement because the famous “return/turning point” (Kehre), the “conversion” with which Heidegger’s reflection ends, is the recognition that the greatest danger is also the greatest good fortune—even the salvation that is evoked by Hölderlin’s verses quoted by Heidegger: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” Salvation consists in turning toward that which—in technology, but beyond its Ge-Stell and the narcissistic trap of its apparatus—manifests the sending/destiny of Being. The Ge-Stell is thus not an arraisonnement. It might be better to render Ge-Stell as “un-hiding” or even “hide and seek.” III. Gefährt and Gestell: Hans-Dieter Bahr’s reply to Heidegger Heidegger’s language constitutes a limit-state for philosophical writing, and if the contagion of the operation of re-marking is unlimited in his work—the term “rhizome” is clearly not excessive to describe what happens in it—it would be wrong to believe that the contagion is limited to the margins of his work. In philosophy, as in literature, a text never comes along all by itself. From Adorno to Ernst Bloch or Ulrich Sonnemann, to mention only them, there is no lack of examples that would show the permanence of a philosophical writing that contrasts strongly with the pompous waffling of certain contemporary German philosophers, who consider the excess of personal writing style peculiar to Heidegger as inseparable from his political compromises and who have inevitably concluded that precision of thought involves giving up a personal style. The following few lines by Hans Dieter Bahr, one of the young German philosophers who have not given up on a personal writing style, shows that the reply is never long in coming. In the essay from which these lines are taken, which appeared in 1985 under the title Sätze ins Nichts (Sentences [cast] into Nothingness, or Leaps into Nothingness) and which is devoted to the subject of the city, Bahr replies, in a very beautiful language whose richness makes most of the terms untranslatable into French, to the Heideggerian Ge-stell. Das Gefährt Aus mehreren Gründen scheint mir das Technische genauer als Gefährt denn als “Gestell” verstehbar zu sein. Beschreibt Heidegger auch durchaus Fahrt und Gefahr der Technik, so doch zu sehr an eine enge Dialektik unbeständiger Bestandssicherung gebunden, als verfügten wir bereits über eine neue Schrift, die jene Technik wiedergebe. Über das Technische der Verfügungen, Sicherungen und steuernden Verschickungen hinaus mit all ihren katastrophalen Entgleisungen, ist Technik zudem Trans-Mission, schwappt über sich als Sendung und Nachricht, als Zutragung und Zuständigkeit hinaus, schreibt sich über unser Können und Verstehen hinaus, in Schriften, die man nicht weniger mühevoll dechiffriren wird als jene der Natur, schwerer vielleicht, zumal wenn sich das genealogische Vertrauen vorschiebt und technische Dinge als irgendwie menschliche Kinder, Ausdruck unserer selbst, unserer Triebe und Willen oder als Geburten artungleicher 152 COMMON SENSE . Die Technik und die Kehre. Pfullingen: Neske, 1978. Translation by W. Lovitt: “The Turning.” In The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, 36–49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1982. Rousseau, André. “Fonctionnement des préverbes allemands.” In Les préverbes dans les langues d’Europe. Introductions à l’étude de la préverbation, 127–88. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1995. dialectic” it criticizes, the counter-thesis remains inseparable from a subversion of the writing style, which consists in disengaging the Heideggerian Gestell from its semantic interconnections and in displacing it, as it were, in situ. This is precisely the idea of displacement that then proceeds to disturb the play of Heideggerian style and to destabilize its stakes. Das Gefährt is the vehicle. The word in ordinary language would be Fahrzeug or in technical language, Vehikel, and the term Gefährt is, moreover, old-fashioned. But once it has been torn out of the register to which usage has limited it, it “de-dialecticalizes” that which, in the Heideggerian Gestell, referred multiplicity and arbitrariness to the fate of Being. Language, no less inventive and filled, by its very richness, with untranslatables, is open to the world as the thematics it sets forth, namely, a technology that is, like language, a mode of writing, and to which it would be vain to think that we can ever get the key in advance. Heidegger is no doubt the one who has made the most vertiginous use of the procedures described here, and few German philosophers currently use the resources of German style to as much effect as Hans Dieter Bahr. The question remains open to what point this extreme tendency shown by Heideggerian writing reconnects with a kind of writing whose tracks lead back to the mystics of the Rhineland, and also to what extent it is connected with the affirmation of a specifically German philosophical tradition whose appearance coincided with the need to distinguish itself from both the use of Latin and the literary use of the language. There are many studies on this question, and research is far from complete. The role of Christian Wolff in the eighteenth century and his explicit project of constituting a linguistic artificiality drawing its resources exclusively from German, notably by elaborating adequate artifices, Künstwörter, were crucial for the specific development of German philosophical writing. But we also have to take into account the archeology of the German philosophical language and the play of exchange and differentiation between linguistic procedure and conceptual procedure proper that we have described here. No doubt this work remains largely to be done. Jean-Pierre Dubost REFS.: Bahr, Hans Dieter. Sätze ins Nichts. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1985. Belaval, Yvon. Les philosophes et leur langage. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952. Dubost, Jean-Pierre, and Winfried Busse. Französisches Verblexikon: Die Konstruktion der Verben im Französischen. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1983. Goldschmidt, Georges Arthur. Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande. Paris: Buchet-Castel, 1988. Reprinted 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. . Essais et conférences. French translation by A. Préau. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1958. . Etre et temps. Translated by Claude Roëls and Jean Lauxerois. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1986. . Questions IV. French translation by F. Beaufret. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976. Translation by A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul: Four Seminars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. . Der Satz vom Grund. Pflullingen: Neske, 1957. French translation by A. Préau. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Translation by R. Lilly: The Principle of Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. COMMON SENSE (ENGLISH) FRENCH sens commun LATIN sensus communis v. SENS COMMUN, and ENGLISH, MORALS, PHRONÊSIS, POLITICS, PRINCIPLE, SENSE, TRUTH The clearest philosophical uses of the expression “common sense” date from the early eighteenth century and especially the work of Shaftesbury and Thomas Reid. The tradition of commonsense philosophy that begins with eighteenth-century English and Scottish writers starts from the meaning of “common sense” as a shared way of feeling and assessing (sensorium commune) to find its origin in an evocation of sociability, a sense of community (sensus communis). But English-language philosophy also defends the possibility of common sense as a true judgment or opinion that serves as the foundation for philosophy. Philosophical discourse is thus based on principles that are obvious truths for common sense and are preliminary to any knowledge. Reflection on common sense assumes that ordinary life has truth-value. I. The Concept of “Common Sense” Common sense, according to a minimal definition, is not a philosophical term. It designates a form of popular good sense. When one says, “Just use your common sense!” one is referring to the possibility of a practical wisdom, an ordinary apprehension of things. Thus to help people better understand love, marriage, children, and so on, there exist books with titles like The Common Sense Book of Love and Marriage and The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. “Common sense” can also refer to the register of shared opinion. In David Hume, recourse to the general opinion of humanity, which prevents philosophy from going astray, functions like a common sense: “The general opinion of mankind has some authority in all cases; but in this of morals ’tis perfectly infallible” (Treatise of Human Nature, 552). Though the general opinion of mankind defines a common sense necessary for the establishment of a moral philosophy, the resort to common sense is sometimes more ambiguous; thus Hume mentions the truth of the proverb about the pointlessness of arguments about taste: “And thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the sceptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision” (Essays, 235). Even if common sense is part of a relationship to the world different from that of philosophy, it sometimes allows us to save philosophy from the dangers of metaphysical uses by bringing it back to the ordinary uses of discourse. In other words, common sense serves as a point of anchorage in the usual, in the ordinary, in order to invoke the position of opinion with regard to COMMON SENSE 153 The definition of the apprehension of the social world in the mode of social criticism continues this tradition of the sense of the common interest. III. The Epistemology of “Common Sense” It remains that common sense is also a fundamental concept for the theory of knowledge. The thought of Thomas Reid presupposes a rational comprehension of sense as judgment in order to establish an epistemological role for common sense: In common language sense always implies judgment. Good sense is good judgment. Common sense is that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business. (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 426) In this case, common sense is close to good sense. Common sense as good sense is a judgment: it designates the part of reason that includes the primitive and natural judgments common to all humanity. It is, in a way, a common intelligence that spontaneously bears upon a certain number of objects of knowledge. From this point of view, this activity of the mind or exercise of judgment is more or less developed in each of us, depending on whether we are more or less experienced in making such judgments, more or less gifted: Common sense is an exercise of the judgment unaided by any Art or system of rules: such an exercise as we must necessarily employ in numberless cases of daily occurrence. He who is eminently skillful in doing this, is said to possess a superior degree of Common Sense. (Whately, Elements of Logic, preface) Not having common sense does not amount here to a lack of wisdom in life’s ordinary affairs; according to both Whately and Reid, it is, in a way, to lack intelligence, to deprive oneself of an a priori undetermined mode of judgment. Common sense constitutes the practical precondition for any knowledge, the whole of the pre-knowledge that is taken for granted and that it is harmful to put into doubt. It is embodied in principles that simply affirm the existence of our different ways of knowing. That is the case for the principle of the reality of the phenomena of consciousness: it has to be considered selfevident that people think, remember, and so on (Essays). The existence of the knowing subject is a factual truth, a principle of common sense or a natural judgment that is common to humanity and can thus be produced by anyone. IV. Common Knowledge and Ordinary Life Common sense is thus part of a philosophy and an epistemology through which, according to G. E. Moore, a commonsense view of the world can be achieved. It is not that common sense does not contain some false propositions, but the massive certainties that it contains, taken all together, constitute the truth of the commonsense view of the world. In a way, in conformity with Thomas Reid’s philosophy, the mind can have immediate knowledge of the existence of objects, of matter, of other minds, that defines true beliefs for which it is pointless to provide a justification. Common sense is the mental authority through which we know with a philosophical question: “Are there any irreducibly social goods? Common Sense is divided on the issue, and confused” (Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 127). We might say that this recourse to the sensus communis has existed since Greek antiquity and does not constitute something specific to common sense. The originality of the tradition of common sense resides in the concern to move from a simple appeal to common sense to a concept of common sense. That is the goal of Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor. The work begins with an account of an entertaining conversation on morals, politics, and religion. Among the different participants, some occasionally take “the liberty to appeal to common sense” (Characteristics of Men). Next, common sense is defined: But notwithstanding the different Judgments of Mankind in most Subjects, there were some however in which ’twas suppos’d they all agreed, and had the same Thoughts in common. However, this definition of common sense is not developed further, because the emphasis is put on the impossibility of finding fundamental principles or common ideas of religion, morals, or politics. How could common sense help construct a practical philosophy? II. The Sense of the Common Good Shaftesbury, who was a great reader of the Stoics, took an interest in the use of “common sense” as sensus communis. In the works of Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, 1.16), sensus communis, which translates the Greek hê koinonoêmosunê [ἡ ϰοινονοημοσύνη], designates a sense of community, a sociability. Shaftesbury adopts this heritage and then gives priority to common (what is common to a community, the common good) over sense (the sensorial or cognitive faculty). “Common sense” refers to critical work performed on our representations to make them conform to the common good. Common sense expresses the “sense of publick weal, and of the common interest, the love for community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species” (Characteristics of Men). It is both a moral and a social sense of reason, structured by a virtue that consecrates the profound nature of man, honesty: “Men’s first thoughts, in this matter, are generally better than their second; their natural notions better than those refined by study, or consultation with casuists. According to common speech, as well as common sense, Honesty is the best policy” (Characteristics of Men). Common sense differs from good sense to the extent that the latter, as the natural faculty of distinguishing the true from the false, is a factor of knowledge rather than of practical philosophy. Common sense is the social and political equivalent of moral sense. The latter designates a disposition or ability to form adequate ideas of the moral good. In contrast, common sense designates a disposition to form adequate ideas of the common interest. It presupposes the idea of a public space or public sphere. It is this meaning of “common sense,” which is particularly present in English-language philosophy, that Michael Walzer discusses in Interpretation and Social Criticism. 154 COMMONPLACE and artistic development. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, lieu commun, or “commonplace,” was a technical term in France and across Europe. Broadly speaking, it had two very distinct meanings, which are both in their own way present in the modern sense of the term. On the one hand, “commonplace” was an element of oratorical training; on the other, it referred to the different headings of a catalogue. These two senses in turn go back to the sense of topos [τόπος] in ancient rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as “that which groups together a multiplicity of enthymemes” (Rhetoric, 2.26.1403a16–17), those syllogisms of probability that characterize rhetoric. I. Topos: The Commonplace as a Reservoir of Premises The first of the three meanings goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The Greek word was simply topos [τόπος], “place” (or lieu in French, which was how Médéric Dufour translated it in his edition, Aristote, introducing in French a distinction between lieux propres or lieux spécifiques [particular or specific expressions] and lieux communs [commonplace or general expressions] in 1.2.1358a13ff., and in 2.22.1396b28). The topos, according to Aristotle, is a stoicheion, an element of the enthymemes: “It is that which groups together a multiplicity of enthymemes” (eis ho polla enthumêmata empiptei [εἰς ὃ πολλὰ ἐνθυμήματα ἐμπίπτει], 2.26.1403a17). This is why, unlike premises, or “protases,” which are specific to only one of the oratorical genres—the deliberative, the judicial, and the epideictic; so, for example, the useful or honest instead of the deliberative—a “place” or generality is always “common” (houtoi hoi koinoi [οὗτοι οἱ ϰοινοί], or koinêi [ϰοινῇ]: “generalities are the commonplaces of law, of physics, of politics”; 1358a13–14), for example, “the generality of the more or less.” As Jacques Brunschwig emphasizes, “the topos is a machine that produces premises from a given conclusion, so that one and the same generality has to be able to deal with a multiplicity of different propositions, and one and the same proposition must be able to be to dealt with by a multiplicity of generalities” (preface to his edition of the Topics). In the subsequent history of rhetoric, this first meaning of “commonplace” will obviously not be forgotten. In Latin rhetoric, that of both the ancients and the moderns, locus communis is contrasted, in a way that is clearer and more pedagogical than in Aristotle, to the “particular” expressions of each of the three genres. “Commonplace” refers, then, to a list that has almost no variants, which goes from the Definition (then the Etymology, the Enumeratio partium, etc.) to “Adjoining expressions” (Adjuncta), by way of expressions of Opposition and of Comparison. As in Aristotle, these expressions are, by hypothesis, “general invented expressions.” Every generality is indeed a reservoir, a “place-to-find” arguments (see COMPARISON). Moreover, Aristotle did not invent the term topos, which in all probability goes back to the arts of memory. But his distinctive gesture was to have completely reconceived, as he so often did, a term that the usage of the Greek language gave to him in an unelaborated form. So it is logical that all the subsequent topics should refer topos as a concept back to the Rhetoric, and even more so to the Artistotelian Topics. . certainty that many very ordinary propositions are true. In the register of the definition of a theory of knowledge, the question of common sense suggests a way of approaching a common fund of knowledge, a common knowledge in which anyone with judgment can share. There is a community of judgments that can reconcile us all, despite doctrinal philosophical differences. Common sense suggests the possibility of a philosophical communicability: There is this advantage in putting questions from the point of view of Common Sense: that it is, in some degree, in the minds of us all, even of the metaphysicians whose conclusions are most opposed to it. (Sidgwick, Philosophy, 42) The philosophical meaning of “common sense” presupposes a defense of common sense. Reflection on common sense is in part continued by reflection on ordinary life in contemporary American philosophy—for example, in the work of Stanley Cavell (In Quest of the Ordinary), who does not limit himself to saying that the formulations of ordinary life are true in their ordinary sense. He tries to determine what their ordinary sense means—just as the philosophy of common sense seeks the meaning of common sense. Fabienne Brugère REFS.: Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Hume, David. Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985. First published in 1777. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. First published in 1739–40. Moore, George Edward. Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959. Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. First published in 1785. In Thomas Reid: Philosophical Works, edited by Derek Brookes, 8th ed. Edinburgh, Scot.: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Schulthess, Daniel. Philosophie et sens commun chez Thomas Reid. Bern: Lang, 1983. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sigdwick, Henry. Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations. London: Macmillan, 1902. Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Walzer, Michael. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Whately, Richard. Elements of Logic. 9th ed. London: John W. Parker, 1851. COMMONPLACE FRENCH lieu commun GREEK topos [τόπος], topêgoria [τοπηγοϱία], deinôsis [δείνωσις] LATIN locus communis, indignatio v. COMPARISON, CONCETTO, CONSENSUS, DESTINY, DOXA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, PATHOS, PROBABILITY, SUBLIME, TRUTH The modern expression “commonplace,” in the sense of a cliché or banal saying, has a history going back at least three centuries. If it has a pejorative connotation nowadays, for a long time it had a positive meaning, as an essential element of one’s intellectual COMMONPLACE 155 clearest texts on this is without doubt Cicero’s On Invention, at the end of book 1, §100–105. In a legal context, the canonical moment for the commonplace expression is the peroration. This is the moment when the prosecution makes its closing speech, and when the accuser speaks no longer against the accused he is facing, but against the crime in general—when our prosecutors inveigh no longer against Mr. so-and-so who has raped or killed, but against rape or murder in general. In ancient treatises, the usual example was parricide, which in Rome was the unforgiveable crime par excellence: in Cicero’s For Milon, the classic example is the praise of self-defense. As for the doxa, it is immediately apparent how serious the stakes are. Of course doxa is a matter of mere opinion, not of truth. But for the rhetorician, the fact that the doxa is not true does not mean it has no value. On the contrary, it is heavy with gravitas. We thus encounter one of the meanings of the word doxa in Greek, the positive meaning of “reputation, fame”: the doxa is all of the values that are current in a given society, and it is defined most clearly whenever these values are treated with contempt. Parricide aroused particular indignation among the Romans—and indignatio is precisely one of the words Cicero uses to refer to the commonplace. This new word has the advantage of being less formal than the expression locus communis, which for II. The Latin Locus Communis: The Commonplace as a Part of Oratorical Training This second sense bears the trace of the other great thinker on rhetoric, Cicero, even if this meaning was already present in the Rhetoric to Herennius. In the Latin Europe of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it was the predominant meaning, and also paradoxically the one we have lost from sight. On first analysis, it appears not to fit with the Aristotelian topos. Even though it is also linked to doxa and to the general, its essential difference is that it cannot be defined solely in terms of invention. The topos is not a set of propositions (or of sentences, if one prefers), but the means by which propositions are produced. The locus communis in Cicero’s sense of the term is first of all an often very oratorical embellishment, or quite simply a passage in a speech, or even what is commonly known as a tirade (so in Aristotelian terms, a set of propositions, of arguments, etc.). It is only very distantly and indirectly a “place.” Whatever the case may be, it would be best at this point to treat this new concept or object as a simple homonym of its Greek predecessor. The Ciceronian locus communis has three characteristics. The first is the fact that it gathers up received ideas, or doxa. The second is that it speaks in general terms, generaliter. Finally, this generalization is extensive; it is not limited to a brief statement, or to a proverbial saying. One of the 1 Rhetorics of the topos, rhetorics of the kairos v. ART, LOGOS, MOMENT Rhetoric, or rhêtorikê [ῥητοϱιϰή ], is a term that appeared for the first time in Plato’s Gorgias. It only appears for its claim to be an art, technê, to be discredited, and reduced to the paradoxical status of alogon pragma [ἄλογον πϱᾶγμα] (a thing deprived of logos [λόγος], or if one prefers, a “practice without reason”; 465a). It is thus the eloquence of Gorgias and of the Sophists (their oratorical success and their teaching) that is excluded from philosophical discourse and rationality. A good rhetoric still needs to be invented: the philosophizing rhetoric of Phaedrus, that is, the “dialectic,” “the art of dividing and gathering together” (266b), whose aim is not to persuade but to elevate the soul (this is what was termed “psychagogy”; 261b). The subsequent elaboration of rhetoric in Plato, as well as in Aristotle, consisted in devaluing, even prohibiting, a certain type of rhetoric in favor of another type. Deprived of art and of reason, this rhetoric deals with time and speech (a rhetoric of improvisation, schedioi logoi [σχέδιοι λόγοι], or “hurried,” ex tempore speech; a rhetoric of the kairos [ϰαιϱός], or the “opportune moment,” which is able to exploit the paradoxes of speech with these kataballontes [ϰαταϐαλλόντες] invented by Protagoras, or catastrophic arguments that are inverted as soon as they are spoken). This rhetoric is valued as authentic and truly technical; it focuses on what is said, and it brings time back to the space being dominated. Described by the philosophers, discourse was an organism that was widespread and finely articulated, and one had to be able to “divide it up” while respecting its overall plan (cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 265b). It was made up of a hierarchy of sun [σύν], “with,” which went from predicative syntax to the syllogisms, and conformed to the norms of hama [ἅμα], or “at the same time,” as prescribed by the principle of noncontradiction. It thus privileged stability of meaning over the disruptive effects of the signifier, of homonymy, of puns (the entire organon, Aristotle’s metaphysical and logical apparatus from the Metaphysics Γ to the Sophistical Refutations); it described “periods” (literally, “complete turns” that could be taken in with a single glance; Rhetoric, 3.9.1409b1) and used visual figures of speech (“metaphor,” which carries across, and “metonymy,” which takes the part for the whole) at the expense of auditory ones (those alliterations that claim to be poetic; 3.1.404a24–29). The importance accorded to topos [τόπος], or “place,” was obviously an essential part of this system. It is easy to see how the power of place could fire the imagination of commentators, and they proposed a whole series of rich metaphors relating to space in order to define this term: mold, matrix, seam or vein, circle, sphere, region, well, arsenal, reservoir, seat, store, treasure house, and not forgetting Ross’s “pigeon-hole” (Brunschwig, preface to Topics). With topos, philosophizing rhetoric spatialized the temporality of speech, and succeeded in turning even invention into a kind of thesaurus. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique [Part 3]. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1995. McCoy, Marina. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Poulakos, John. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 156 COMMONPLACE equivalent is for locus communis or indignatio in Aristotle, and the Greek rhetoricians generally. It would indeed be surprising if Aristotle’s Rhetoric paid no attention to such an important phenomenon. For the later Greek rhetoricians, and in particular those who came after Cicero, the answer is easy. As a technical term, the strict equivalent of indignatio is deinôsis [δείνωσις]. A very full history of this term can be found in the article “Deinotes” in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, in particular, column 468: “der früheste rhetorische Terminus, der mit deinos verwandt ist, ist deinôsis (= lat. Indignatio).” The emblematic figure for deinôsis was Demosthenes; for example, when Quintilian quotes in Greek the word deinôsis and associates it with indignus and indignitas (6.2.24; see also 8.3.88 and 9.2.104); or in Longinus (12.5 in particular: “Demosthenes is sublime in the deinôseis [ἐν ταῖς δείνωσεις]”). Denys of Halicarnassus more than anyone, in his Demosthenes, attributed deinotês [δεινότης] to his hero as one of his major qualities. The deinos was, first and foremost, the terrifying appearance of the sacred, the equivalent of the Latin terribile—so Phoebus Apollo’s bow that sent down a plague was described as deinos (Iliad, 1.49). From there the meaning shifts to “powerful” and also “skillful,” used for any artisan who is a master of his art, and, in particular, for the rhetorician or the Sophist. The artisan who is deinos, as a master of his art, is like a god whose techniques are hidden and whose effects are spectacular. How to become deinos is the only thing that Gorgias promises to teach (Plato, Meno, 95c). The adjective denotes an entire program: power and skill, mastery of the effects on the public, a “huge” success, all of the truly terrifying and sacred promises of rhetoric are condensed into this one word—the art of making oneself a master and possessor of the hearts of men. So when Demosthenes is deinos, he is no longer an orator, but a god who paralyzes and galvanizes his audience, who does what he wants with them, irresistibly. This is no longer a “tirade,” but what one might call a thunderous “exit,” a cataclysmic lightning bolt hurled down by Jupiter. So deinôsis limits the locus communis to its most visible dimension, that of the prosecution, and forgets pity (which in Cicero is also a construction, a commonplace). From this limitation we even move on to a further one. Longinus describes deinôsis solely in terms of its brevity, so as to contrast it with the particular form of the Ciceronian sublime, which involves extension or copia. On the one hand, the thunderous “exit,” on the other the devastating river of the Ciceronian commonplace: these are the two modalities of the same sublime. What is more, when Longinus writes in Greek to a Roman he invents the neologism topêgoria [τοπηγοϱία], which would never actually pass into general usage, to designate Cicero’s locus communis. The term was formed from topos, but with a suffix that referred to public speaking, or agora (agoreuein [ἀγοϱευείν], “to speak in front of the Assembly”); On the Sublime, 12.5: Demosthenes is sublime “in the deinôseis and the violent passions,” Cicero “in the topêgoriai and the perorations.” As for Aristotle, his Rhetoric only uses deinôsis incidentally, four times according to the Belles Lettres edition, which quite rightly translates the term as a “feeling of revolt, indignation, exaggeration.” This incidental usage underlines the fact that Aristotle, for once, has not reformulated the rhetoricians used to the very idea of “place” is grammatically incorrect. In-dignatio allows us to reformulate what is at work, since within the word we find dignitas or “dignity”, or even the “decency” of decet and non decet, which are close etymologically, that is, the notion of “decorum” (see MIMÊSIS, Box 6; and the article “Decorum” in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik). Parricide, racism, even rape, shatter the decorum or, in the French of the seventeenth century, the bienséance (rules of social propriety), that is, they threaten the entire edifice of social relations. In this legal context, this shift to the general also takes on a particular significance. By generalizing, a lawyer “elevates” the debate, as we still say, quite justifiably. This elevating movement also elevates emotion, raising it to a higher level, since in raising up we appeal to the great and general principles. General principles move the general public, by arousing great feelings. We are at the height of the effects that rhetorical art is capable of producing, what Cicero named movere, and which translates the Greek pathos [πάθος]. And once the movement of generalization is a movement that raises up, at its highest point we inevitably find the question of the political. In Cicero himself, we go very quickly from parricide trials to properly political trials, whose theme is that one’s homeland is in danger. When Verrès crucifies a Roman citizen in Sicily with his eyes turned toward Italy, he is assassinating the very idea of Roman citizenship. As Quintilian notes, with this example we reach not only the highest point, or summum, but in a way what is above the highest point, the supra summum (“non modo ad summum, sed quodam modo supra summum”; Institutes of Oratory, 8.4.4). We are at the highest point of emotion and of the intolerable, that is, the height of the sublime. The third and final trait of the commonplace relates to another term that is no less important for rhetoric, particularly in Latin: length or extent, copia. It is not just a matter of long, flowing speech, of quantitative length, since copia is above all qualitative. Formed from opes (forces, particularly military forces), copia is an army of arguments, a Roman army. Depending on which of the images Cicero happens to like, copia is either a river that has burst its banks or a devastating fire. In both cases, it is irresistible. It is not for nothing that the canonical moment of indignation is the peroration. The end of the river-speech sweeps one up and finishes one off; the last remaining dikes of resistance collapse. Indignation against the accused and pity for the victims are the two essential loci communes, typical of peroration, for which Cicero’s De inventione gives a list of particular “places,” this time in the canonical sense of argument. One could ultimately compare such oratorical arguments with a great aria from an opera rather than with a tirade. What people expect the most is not the least enjoyable and arouses no less applause. Great emotion unites a public, and even more so a community. It can even, as in the case of Verdi, lead to the birth of a nation. So pathos is not vulgar, but worthy of that beautiful name common, which has indeed, since Cicero, been one of the connotations of locus communis. It is clear, then, that the Ciceronian locus communis is in no way a synonym for the Aristotelian topos. The same word refers to two quite distinct realities. Now that these two senses have been identified, one might wonder what the Greek COMMONPLACE 157 appear as the very incarnation of Justice. Here as elsewhere, Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows that it is truly an ethics, much like Quintilian’s (who makes a number of remarks along the same lines). In the seventeenth century, the Christian rereading of this chapter is not entirely self-evident. Is one not, in feeling indignant toward those who are unworthy (indigne in French), acting as if one were God himself, and doubting his Providence, which mysteriously rewards those on this earth who do not deserve it? A professor of rhetoric such as Christoph Schrader (at the University of Helmstedt) argues for the rights of Christian indignation in the choices that depend on human free will. One should not, for example, in use and in public office “prefer the unworthy to the worthy (ne indigni dignis praeferantur)” (commentary ad loc, 332: this opens up the question of merit or worthiness). But other than this, and from a more metaphysical point of view (De rhetoricorum Aristotelis sententia et vsv commentarius), he uses Aristotle’s chapter as an incitement to asceticism, for example, toward the goods listed in 1387a12, “riches, power,” as well as the gifts one is born with, which is in fact everything that comes from Fortuna or Providence. At that point we need to hold back our desire for indignatio, and leave this feeling to God alone. We are not Nemesis, and this is a way of emphasizing the extent to which the sublime that is described here, from Aristotle to Longinus, is a manifestly pagan sublime. III. Commonplaces as Categories of an Index This is again a homonym. In the sixteenth century, “commonplaces” in the plural was used to designate the categories under which a reader would classify the quotations that for him seemed noteworthy. So it was a sort of filing system, or index, or repertoire. This pedagogical tool had two objectives: to train one’s memory, and to develop one’s judgment. One term from this period expressed this dual ambition, the verb “to digest,” and the noun “digest” is still used to convey this idea in English. Technically speaking, the verb refers to the idea of classifying a quotation under such and such a category: digerere means to distribute elements, each one into the box where it belongs. The usual expression designating this sorting out of commonplaces is thus “per locos communes digesta” (each thing in its own category). The word “digest” has to do with the body, but also with the mind. The mind will retain better what it has digested better. This is the meaning of the famous image of the bee that Seneca uses in his letter 84 to Lucilius, the terms of which are endlessly cited and reworked by Erasmus throughout his work—Erasmus himself transforms it into a real cliché that is constantly borrowed and adapted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The bee gathers pollen from flowers: this is the moment when a pupil notes down in his notebooks or on a slate the “flowers” of literature and history (cf. Hamlet noting down in his “common-place book” that his uncle is a “villain,” just after he has seen the ghost!). When the bee is back in the hive, the pollen that has been gathered is redistributed into the different alveoli of the hive: this is the moment of “digestion,” of distribution, when the pupil copies out onto the large in-folio of blank pages that he keeps at home. It is then that the mind can make its own honey and incorporate knowledge from outside. term as a concept. He takes the usage as it is given to him and does nothing more with it. The usage he records is rather interesting since on the face of it, it is already codified by rhetoric: either pity or deinôsis (ê oikton ê deinôsin [ἢ οἶϰτον ἢ δείνωσιν]) (3.16.1417a13); “the passions (pathê [πάθη]) to be aroused when the facts are established are pity, deinôsis, anger (eleos kai deinôsis kai orgê [ἔλεος ϰαὶ δείνωσις ϰαὶ ὀϱγὴ])” (3.19.1419b26). We again find the crucial moment of the peroration, once the facts are established (see also its use in 2.24.1301b3), as well as the fundamental vacillation of the prosecution between pity for the client and indignation for his accuser. This vacillation is already in Plato, who also records the usage of his time: “pity and deinôsis [ἐλεινολογίας ϰαὶ δεινώσεως] (Phaedrus, 272a). The vacillation recalls, in Aristotle’s Poetics (6.1449b28), the famous passage on katharsis (purification, purging), in which “pity and phobos [φόϐος]” serve as emblems and as a condensed form of other passions [ἐλέου ϰαὶ φόϐου] (see also Poetics, 13; and in 19.1456b1: “and the others of this kind”; cf. CATHARSIS). This detour through the Poetics is useful in putting our investigation onto the right track. Four incidental usages do not constitute a theory. But there is one place where the Rhetoric systematically discusses indignatio, but gives a completely different name than deinôsis; this is in 2.9, which is the precise counterpart to 2.8, on pity. We are in the moment of fundamental vacillation, between pity and then sacred terror. The clue that Aristotle is at this point rethinking the trivial notion of deinôsis is in the change of vocabulary. In 2.9 he names it nemesis [νέμεσις], as the goddess or incarnation of Justice. Most of the Latin translations of Aristotle are quite content to render it as indignatio, along with its derived terms, as is the French Belles Lettres translation, which talks of “indignation.” The immediate opening of the chapter underlines the fact, as if it were necessary, that the use of such a highly charged term relates to the sacred: “if we attribute indignation to the gods” (nemesan [νεμεσᾶν]; 1386b14), it is because the gods feel this sentiment when they see that those who do not deserve to be, who are thus unworthy of it, are happy. Such a divine emotion is clearly distinguished from the more human envy, or phthonos [φθόνος], that we feel toward the happiness of our equals and rivals, which in our eyes is undeserved. Indeed, like spectators in a tragedy, we will be like gods if in this respect we have “no personal interest” (1386b15–20). That we are clearly dealing here with a work of conceptualization is again emphasized by the comparison with the Nichomachean Ethics (7.1108b1), where it is once again stated that nemesis is to envy what true courage is to temerity. Nemesis is the “happy medium” of indignation, it is a just form of indignation. By reformulating the concept, Aristotle draws out what is truly at stake. His description is clearly informed by that of deinôsis, like Demosthenes’ “exit” or Cicero’s peroration. But the sacred quality of deinos could always be suspect, and anyone who places himself in the divine role of prosecutor could be motivated by personal interests. The fundamental question is: who made you the prosecutor? In order to reach the truly sublime, the one who thunders must by this very fact be inhabited by a god, who for both Demosthenes and Cicero is the god of the homeland in danger. Or to put it another way, he has to have Justice with him, he has to be able to 158 COMMONPLACE Cicero the movement toward generality was at the heart of his rhetoric. The movement upward from the particular to the general produced the essential ideas, the framework, and the overall articulation, and these ideas organized the arguments of the speech and aroused the moments of most intense emotion. IV. The Commonplace in the Modern Era The commonplace in the modern sense is both a faux ami, which looks deceptively like the word in its classical sense, and a true heir. It is a faux ami in a text as apparently simple as the following, written by Pierre Bayle in 1686: C’est ce que je réponds au lieu commun qui a été si rebattu par les ignorants, que le changement de religion entraîne avec lui le changement de gouvernement, et qu’ainsi il faut soigneusement empêcher que l’on n’innove. (This is what I reply to the commonplace, which has become so worn out from use by ignorant people, that the change of religion brings with it a change of government, and that therefore we have to be careful to prevent any innovation.) (Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ) The proximity of lieu commun and rebattu gives the impression that we are already dealing with its contemporary meaning. We are already, it is true, in generality, and even political conservatism, the very kind that Flaubert scorns so joyously in his Dictionary of Received Ideas. But what the faux ami prevents us from seeing is that Bayle is here referring to an entire historical development. Those who are ignorant have for a long time, passionately, discussed the question that concerns, as in Cicero, the homeland in danger. The category-word is something like “Government” or ‘Dangerous Innovations,” and on this subject arguments and quotations have been collected eagerly since it is known in advance that they can be reused. The author only gives us the substance of these long developments on a question of principle. He is the one who abbreviates it, and who gives us the false impression that the commonplace is reduced to one or two expressions, to what we nowadays understand as “cliché.” And yet the very possibility of such a reduction is not unfaithful. A cliché only needs to be expanded, just as the expansion itself can be abbreviated. This is not the main point, which is rather the excessive visibility that the method of commonplaces has given to the commonplace. Bayle is not reproaching the commonplace for being overused, but for being worn out through overuse by ignorant people. What we reproach the cliché for, following Flaubert, is to be overused, period, by intelligent as well as by ignorant people. In other words, if the commonplace in the modern sense is truly the distant heir of former meanings of the term, it is that the legacy itself has become too ponderous. Doxa was once near to Wisdom, and we now find it closer to Stupidity. Francis Goyet It is clear that without any judgment or critical perspective this act could turn into one of pure compilation. This was strongly emphasized by the Reformer Melanchthon (1497–1560), who was rector of the celebrated university at Wittenberg after Luther. The pernicious double of digerere was congerere: to accumulate for the sake of accumulating. The solution was order at every moment of the process (see the booklet De locis communibus ratio). Order reigns, both in reading and in writing: to classify well was to think well, was to write well. One of the aims of commonplaces was to educate oneself in the field of knowledge one decided principally to pursue. As far as reading was concerned, for Melanchthon the category-words had to be organized in analytical order, which he preferred to the jumble of alphabetical order. The model was the encyclopedia, as a tree with branches. Whatever his domain, a student would develop his memory and his critical faculties by organizing his collection of commonplaces according to the big and then small categories of his discipline. As for writing, his discourse would also benefit from this same order, since without a well-conceived plan it could turn into a compilation of arguments. One has only to reread Quintilian’s comments on dispositio to find the same aversion to what is, precisely, difficult to digest: “a copious abundance of ideas, no matter how large, would merely provide a heap or a kind of congestion [cumulum atque congestum], if they were not put into order by this same disposition [in ordinem digestus]” (7, prologue 1). As an essential element of the pedagogy of the Jesuits, this method played a very important role in the organization of study across Europe and in all fields of knowledge. For commonplaces in the sense of categories was by no means confined to literature, or even to the humanities more broadly speaking. The method was an often explicit adaptation of the first tool of Aristotle’s Topics (1.14.105a ff.), that is, the idea of collecting premises, commonly accepted propositions (endoxai [ἔνδοξαι]). Aristotle himself earned the sobriquet of “reader” because of this: read everything, index everything. This was how he wrote The History of Animals or Politics, beginning by drawing up an inventory and classifying—by “digesting”—all the available information. This was also how Bodin wrote his République in the sixteenth century: the vast compilation of all the existing constitutions was a prelude to his induction, which for Bodin would then reveal a new concept of sovereignty. What is the relationship between oratorical training and an index of categories? We might turn again to Melanchthon for the answer. We should first of all emphasize the context, which was not rhetorical but theological. His Lieux communs de théologie (Commonplaces of theology), which appeared in 1521, was conceived as a manual, and we can see it as one of the first comprehensive works of Lutheranism. The main doctrinal questions were addressed systematically and provided a coherent body of doctrine that was contrasted with the previous one. Order here was only necessary because of the context of theological controversy. If one’s principles were not good, one could not formulate good discourses, and if Melanchthon drew attention to the term “commonplace,” it was because the Reformer had read Cicero very well. He understood that for COMPARISON 159 COMMUNITY “Common” derives from Latin communis, “what belongs to everyone,” from cum, “with,” and munis, “what fulfills its task, its duty” (related to munus, office, gift); it corresponds to Greek koinos [ϰοινόϛ], “common, public,” in which we probably see the same root as in the Latin cum, and which contrasts with idios [ἴδιοϛ], “peculiar, private.” “Community” designates the fact of being in common, what is held in common, and the group or institution that shares what is held in common. I. Common and Community 1. What is held in common is opposed to what is one’s own and to property: see PROPERTY. 2. “Common” can be used in reference to different levels of community. It can refer to humanity as a whole: see LOGOS, SENS COMMUN, UNIVERSALS, as well as AUTRUI, HUMANITY [MENSCHHEIT], IDENTITY, [I/ME/MYSELF, SAMOST’, SELBST]. Or it can refer to a particular human community defined as a people (see PEOPLE and NAROD; cf. HEIMAT), or as a culture (see BILDUNG, CIVILTÀ, CULTURE, TO TRANSLATE) considered distinctive because of some privileged trait (see MALAISE). II. Political Community and Society 1. The entry CIVIL SOCIETY explores the main systems used to describe the community, as opposed to society and the state. For Greek, in addition to koinônia politikê [ϰοινωνία πολιτιϰή] (CIVIL SOCIETY, I), see the entries for POLIS, OIKEIÔSIS, OIKONOMIA. For Latin, in addition to societas civilis (CIVIL SOCIETY, I), see PIETAS, RELIGIO, and cf. LEX. On the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in German, see CIVIL SOCIETY, Box 1. 2. In mir [мир], Russian has a special constellation that refers simultaneously to peace, the world, and the peasant community; see MIR and SOBORNOST’ (conciliarity, communion), and cf. NAROD (people); cf. CONCILIARITY. 3. The contemporary avatars of the political promotion of the community are considered in the entry LIBERAL, Box 3. v. ALLIANCE, CONSENSUS, OBLIGATION, STATE REFS.: Amossy, Ruth. Les idées reçues: Sémiologie du stereotype. Paris: Nathan, 1991. . Stéréotypes et clichés: Langue, discours, société. Paris: Nathan, 1997. , and Michel Delon, eds. Critique et legitimité du prejugé (XVIIIe–XXe siècle). Brussels: Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles, 1999. , and Elisheva Rosen. Les discours du cliché. Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1982. , and Meir Sternberg. “Doxa and Discourse: How Common Knowledge Works.” Poetics Today 23 (2002): 369–555. Aristotle. Aristote: Rhétorique. 3 vols. Edited and translated by Médéric Dufour. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973. . The “Art” of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. . Rhetoric. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Bollingen Series, 71. Vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. . Topiques. Edited and translated by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007. First published in 1967. Bayle, Pierre. Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus-Christ: Contrain-les d’entrer [= sur les conversions forcées]. In Œuvres diverses, edited by P. Husson et al., 1727, vol. 2. Repr. E. Labrousse, ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1965. Blair, Ann. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Bodin, Jean. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Translated by Beatrice Reynolds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945. Cauquelin, Anne. L’art du lieu commun: Du bon usage de la doxa. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Cicero. De invention. De optimo genera oratorum: Topica. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. . The Treatise on Rhetorical Invention. In The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, vol. 4, translated by C. D. Yonge. New York: Dodo Press, 2008. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Couzinet, Marie-Dominique. Histoire et méthode à la Renaissance: Une lecture de la Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem de Jean Bodin. Paris: Vrin, 1996. Dionysius of Halicarnassus. “Demosthenes.” In The Critical Essays, translated by Stephen Usher. Vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Goyet, Francis. Le sublime du “lieu commun”: l’Invention rhétorique dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1996. . “Hamlet, étudiant du XVIe siècle.” Poétique 113 (1998): 3–15. Hesk, Jon. “‘Despisers of the Commonplace’: Meta-Topoi and Para-Topoi in Attic Oratory.” Rhetorica 25 (2007): 361–84. Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985. . Poetics. Edited and translated by W. H. Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library, 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Melanchthon, Philipp. De locis communibus ratio, fascicle bound with De formando studio of Rodolphus Agricola. Bâle: H. Petrus, 1531. Mortensen, Daniel E. “The Loci of Cicero.” Rhetorica 26 (2008): 31–56. Moss, Ann. “Commonplace-Rhetoric and Thought-Patterns in Early Modern Culture.” In The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, edited by R. H. Roberts and J.M.M. Good, 49–60. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia of Virginia, 1993. . Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Murphy, James J. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. 5 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Schrader, Christoph. De rhetoricorum Aristotelis sententia et usu commentaries. Helmstedt, Ger.: H. D. Müller, 1674. Summers, David. “‘The Proverb Is Something Musty’: The Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies 20 (1998): 9–34. COMPARISON FRENCH comparaison GREEK sugkrisis [σύγϰρισιϛ], antithesis [ἀντίθεσιϛ], parathesis [παράθεσιϛ] ITALIAN paragone LATIN comparatio, contrapositum, adpositum v. ANALOGY, COMMONPLACE, CONCETTO, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, PROPERTY Comparison or simile has suffered by the recent success of metaphor. It has served as a foil for its brilliant alter ego. To restore its interest, we have only to recall that the apparently canonical comparatio-metaphora pair is deceptive. This pair comes from a passage in Quintilian that has been taken out of context. In Latin, comparatio designates 160 COMPARISON and Lysias, or between Demosthenes and Cicero. A pairing like Demosthenes and Cicero, developed at greater length, is the basis for Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Plutarch concludes the discussion of almost every pair of men with what he calls literally a sugkrisis: a comparison of Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, and so on. II. Eikôn and Metaphora, Similitudo and Tralatio: The Status of “Like” With respect to this fundamental meaning, a comparison in the modern sense is called a “simile”; the English renders the Latin similitudo, which itself rendered the Greek eikôn, “icon” or “image.” Moreover, the idea that metaphor is an abbreviated simile comes from Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 8.6.8). Quintilian takes from Aristotle the excessively famous example of “Achilles is like a lion,” as opposed to “Achilles is a lion” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.4.1406b20–24; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.9). Aristotle distinguishes between eikôn [εἰϰών] and metaphora [μεταφορά] (Rhetoric, 3.4.1406b20–23), and Quintilian between similitudo and tra[ns]latio, the latter word being itself the Latin equivalent of the Greek metaphora, which Quintilian also uses: Aristotle Quintilian eikôn = similitudo metaphora = tra[ns]latio . Note that the concept of comparatio is not part of this table— of this register of concepts. Quintilian imports the noun comparatio for explanatory purposes, to show what happens in a simile and thus also in a metaphor. In his work, comparatio is hardly more than a deverbal noun derived from the verb comparare, which he had initially used. A simile is “like” a parallel/difference, the latter being as familiar to readers of Quintilian—or Aristotle—as it is unfamiliar today: In totum autem metaphora brevior et similitudo, eoque distat quod illa comparatur rei quam volumus exprimere, haec pro ipsa re dicitur. Comparatio est cum dico fecisse quid hominem “ut leo,” tralatio cum dico de homine “leo est.” (On the whole metaphor is a shortened form of simile, while there is this further difference, that in the latter we compare some object to the thing which we wish to describe, whereas in the former this object is actually substituted for the thing. It is a comparison when I say that a man did something like a lion, it is a metaphor when I say of him, “He is a lion.”) (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.8–9, trans. Russell) From comparare to comparatio, the verb and noun are there to make it understood that the essential point is not the presence or absence of the word “like.” The point is that a parallel between Achilles and a lion would develop at length everything that belongs to the hero and everything that belongs to the animal to discriminate between them by means of a parallel/difference. This very intellectual process is thus the inverse of metaphor. The simile maintains the distance only in a marginal way a similarity introduced by a word such as “like.” It refers to a mental operation: making a parallel between x and y in order to bring out resemblances and differences. The expression comparaison n’est pas raison (comparison is not reason) reminds us both that comparison is an instrument for producing intelligibility and that this instrument works well, almost too well: from here comes the need to be prudent in using the extremely fertile method of comparatisme (comparative studies). I. Comparatio, Sugkrisis, “Parallel” Comparison is an image or figure of speech in a specialized and marginal sense. In the whole of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (The Orator’s Education), this sense appears only once among the twelve occurrences of the words comparatio and comparativus listed in the index of the Belles Lettres edition. In a massive, generic way, comparatio designates a parallel: the comparison of x and y in order to discern their resemblances and differences, and often to emphasize the superiority of one over the other. In Greek, the equivalent word is sugkrisis [σύγϰρισιϛ], which is frequently used with this meaning, but in the late period (from Philodemus to Plutarch). As sugkrisis suggests, the point is to exercise one’s judgment, to judge one thing in relation to another—sug-krisis [σύγ-ϰρίσιϛ] is put together from sun (with) and krisis (judgment). The result is not a little formula tossed off in passing, a figure of style, but a long, complete development. Thus comparatio is one of the preliminary exercises given in rhetoric classes (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.4.21). It has the length of an academic “assignment,” and as such, it was part of the baggage of every cultivated person from antiquity to the ancien régime. In this culture, to make a comparison was also to provide oneself with the means to construct a whole development. Thus comparison is a “figure of thought,” or more literally, a “figure of sentences” (Lat. figura sententiarium), that is, one that extended over one or more sentences. Similarly, comparison is related to conception and invention: considering something in a nutshell and then developing what one has seen in all its consequences. A visionary like Victor Hugo was well aware of its virtually endless possibilities. For example, in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, the formula “Ceci tuera cela” (This will kill that, 5.2) launches the extensive comparatio between x, the book, and y, the cathedral. One example of a class assignment with its possible developments is found in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (8.4.14; cf. 8.4.9–14). Discussing one of Cicero’s speeches, Quintilian notes that “here Catiline is compared to Gracchus, the constitution of the state to the whole world, a slight change for the worse to fire and sword and desolation, and a private citizen to the consuls, all comparisons affording ample opportunity for further individual expansion, if anyone should desire to do so.” This allows us to understand better the most common specialized sense of sugkrisis. The Greek word designated a classic exercise in literary criticism: a parallel between two authors or two works, the better to differentiate them. There again, academic culture long retained the memory of this: we recall the classic assignment on Racine and Corneille, people as they are and as they should be. Longinus’s On the Sublime includes a number of such exercises, whether the parallel/ difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey, between Plato COMPARISON 161 that your clients be not taken at a disadvantage, he that cities or camps be not so taken.) (Cicero, Pro Murena, 22, quoted in Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.3.32, trans. Cousin) This is a good example of the possible length: the parallel extends over ten paragraphs, from §19 to §28. Moreover, it is accompanied by another that serves as its conclusion, the parallel between the orator and the jurist, the orator being just as superior to the jurist as the military leader is (§29–30). Quintilian quotes this passage and comments: “In antitheses and comparisons [in contrapositis vel comparativis], the first words of alternate phrases are frequently repeated to produce correspondence [solet respondere primorum verborum alterna repetitio]” (9.3.32). Contra-positum: this is not far from the Italian word contrapunto, “counterpoint,” and the French contraste, one of the words by which French rhetorical textbooks of the eighteenth century retranslate comparatio. III. Contrapositio and Antithesis Contrapositio is the Latin word that Quintilian uses in the same chapter 3 of book 9 to render the Greek antitheton [ἀντίθετον] in referring very specifically to the verbal figure called “antithesis.” In all of these words, the prefixes anti- [ἀντί] or contra- largely determine the meaning. The Greek word for “antithesis” can designate any kind of parallel. It refers literally to the act of setting one thing next to another, -positum translating -theton, and contra- translating anti-. In this very general sense, antithesis is a special case of parathesis. When two elements are set opposite each other, they correspond between Achilles and the lion (see here the verb distat, which is typical of comparatio), whereas metaphor fuses these two poles in a flash of intuition. Length in one case and brevity in the other merely indicate the difference between these two mental processes. On the whole, the presence of “like,” which has so hypnotized criticism, is just the tip of the iceberg. It emblematizes the essential, since the “like” forestalls complete assimilation. But making it the absolute criterion for distinguishing between simile and metaphor is erroneous and leads to many disappointments: this criterion doesn’t work. So let us set aside comparison in the modern sense. In “comparison” in the sense of parallel/difference, the point is to juxtapose two elements that then correspond—without ever being conflated. Let us take an example. In his chapter on the verbal figures, Quintilian deals with an effect of repetition taken from Cicero. Here the repetition involves the first words of the parts of the period, “you” and “him,” in a parallel between you the jurist and him the military leader—a famous parallel because, contrary to all expectations, Cicero gives the advantage to the military man: Vigilas tu de nocte ut tuis consultoribus respondeas, ille ut eo quo intendit mature cum exercitu perveniat; te gallorum, illum bucinarum cantus exsuscitat; tu actionem instituis, ille aciem instruit; tu caves ne tui consultores, ille ne urbes aut castra capiantur (You pass wakeful nights that you may be able to reply to your clients; he that he and his army may arrive betimes at their destination. You are roused by cockcrow, he by the bugle’s reveillé. You draw up your legal pleas, he sets the battle in array. You are on the watch 1 Reminder: Aristotle’s definition of “metaphor” v. ANALOGY, INGENIUM, LOGOS The recent success of metaphor draws its title of nobility from Aristotle. Metaphor, unlike comparison or simile, is a trope, a “figure of words,” namely, according to its canonical definition in the Poetics, “giving a thing a name that belongs to something else” (onomatos allotriou epiphora [ὀνóματος ἀλλοτϱίоυ ἐπιφоϱά], 1457b7–8, trans. Bywater, 1476). This may be done by moving from the genus to the species, from species to species, or, finally and especially, in accord with a relationship of “analogy”: a metaphorical expression then abbreviates and summarizes a proportional relationship (to call the evening “day’s old age” is to imply that evening is to day as old age is to life). Whereas for Quintilian, metaphors are “abbreviated similes,” for Aristotle “comparisons [eikones (εἰϰόνεϛ)] are metaphors that need logos [logou deomenai (λόγου δεόμεναι)],” that is, as Dufour and Wartelle translate it, that “need to be developed” (Rhetoric, 3.4.1407a14–15), but “just because it is longer, it is less attractive” (3.10.1410b18–19). Both metaphor and simile are mental operations. So far as metaphor is concerned, “when the poet calls old age a ‘withered stalk,’ he conveys a new idea, a new fact [epoiêsen mathêsin kai gnôsin (ἐποίησεν μάθησιν ϰαὶ γνῶσιν)] to us by means of the general notion of ‘lost bloom’ which is common to both things” (3.10.1410b15–16). And “in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances [to homoion theôrein (τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν)] even in things far apart” (3.11.1412a12–13). The success of a metaphor, even in the form of a witticism (asteion [ἀστεῖον], 3.11.1411b22–24), has to do with the brilliance of the connection it makes between philosophy and poetry. One of our problems with the passage from Aristotle to Quintilian is a problem of translation, namely, a difference in the way the Greek is rendered in Latin and in French: Quintilian translates eikôn, the other word Aristotle uses for “metaphor,” which is generally translated in French by comparaison, as similitudo and not comparatio. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Ingram Bywater. In Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. . Rhetorique. Edited by M. Dufour and A. Wartelle. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980. 162 COMPARISON instruments, or organa, that provide an abundant source of propositions. These are the third and fourth instruments: attention directed toward differences and then resemblances (Topics, 1.16.107b–17.108a). . As Aristotle described it, comparison serves first of all to make inductions: to bring out the universal by comparing individual cases (Topics, 1.18.108b). By whatever mediation, the idea of comparatio is at the origin of all the comparative disciplines that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Comparative anatomy was inaugurated by Georges Cuvier’s Leçons d’anatomie comparée (1800–1805), and was soon followed by comparative physiology (1833), comparative embryology, and so on. François Raynouard’s Grammaire comparée des langues de l’Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours (1821) provided the foundation for the discipline of Romanistik founded by Friedrich Diez some fifteen years later. Comparative geography was inaugurated by Carl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde im Verhaeltnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen oder allgemeine vergleichende Geographie (1817–59), part of which was translated into French by Eugène Buret and Édouard Desor as Géographie générale comparée (1835–36). In his anthology, Cours de littérature comparée (1816–24), François Noël limited himself to juxtaposing texts in French, Latin, English, and Italian. In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50), Chateaubriand went so far as to call his Essai sur les révolutions, originally published in 1797, “a comparative work on revolutions [un ouvrage sur les révolutions comparées].” The general movement is in fact that of the “double attention” Condillac talked about. More than comparé (compared), this should be called comparant (comparing), as in German (vergleichend), or “comparative,” as in English. What counts is not so much the two objects juxtaposed as the intellectual act of bringing them together. The fact that comparison does not always provide proof in no way deprives the method of interest: because it is inherently plural, comparison elicits thought. To put the point in the old terms, comparison is part of topics, which is a matter of invention and not of criticism, which concerns judgment. First invenire, then iudicare. First find, produce results, then weigh and reweigh, decide what the results mean. To reject the comparative method because some of its results are unacceptable is to fail to understand its role as an instrument, a tool. This negative judgment generally goes hand-in-hand with an inability to explain one’s own topics, one’s way of collecting the materials for thought. Comparison thus understood can be used not only as an intellectual tool but also as an aesthetic means. We have seen this in the quotation from Cicero’s Pro Murena, in which the alternating repetition of the first words produces a figure, a sort of rhythm, “you him.” Here are two further examples. In musical terms, contrast or contraposition is somewhat like counterpoint. The Greek word sugkrisis is attested, in the Septuagint, in the very specialized sense of “musical concert”: Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 32 (35):7. Here we are in a context of harmony: the person presiding over the banquet is asked not to “strike a false note” by inappropriately lecturing people who want to party. Good taste consists, on the contrary, in being like “a carbuncle seal on a ring,” like “a either by being similar, symmetrical (para [παρά], parallelism, parathesis, adposita; cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.10.86: “Adposita vel comparativa”) or by being dissimilar, opposed (anti-, contrast, antithesis, contraposita). Furthermore, antidoes not necessarily signify the exact contrary: the island of Anticythera is simply the one that is across from Cythera; x and y face each other. We could say the same about the prefix para-; parallêlos [παράλληλοϛ] is constructed on the basis of allêloi [ἀλλήλοι], “one and the other”: to juxtapose. One of the words in the entry on sugkrisis in Hesychius of Alexandria’s Greek dictionary even combines the two prefixes anti- and para-. This word is antiparathesis [ἀνθιπαράθεσιϛ], which is used, for example, by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to designate, very simply, a parallel/difference—in short, a contrast, in this case between the bad Hegesias and the excellent Homer (On Literary Composition, 6.18.24). Elsewhere, Quintilian says again that he translates the Greek antistasis [ἀντίστασιϛ] by comparatio: this clearly emphasizes that the essential element is the prefix (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 7.4.12). IV. Comparison and Comparatism: Double Attention and the Aesthetics of Counterpoint This terminological complex thus allows us to broaden the brief article “Comparaison” in Lalande’s Vocabulary (RT: Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, s.v.). The latter refers, rightly, to Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and his school. The quotation from Condillac’s Logique (1.7) is interesting: As we give our attention to an object, we can give it to two at once. Then, instead of one exclusive sensation, we experience two, and we say that we are comparing them, because we experience them exclusively in order to observe them side by side, without being distracted by other sensations: and this is exactly what the word “compare” means. Comparison is thus only a double attention. This quotation reminds us in a remarkable way of the following passage in Petrarch, which Condillac probably did not know. Petrarch develops his long and famous parallel, or comparatio, between solitude and urban life (On the Solitary Life, 1.1.8). He notes: I think that I shall describe all this better if I do not devote separate developments to everything that it seems to me could be said about these two ways of life; I shall on the contrary mix them, referring by turns to a given aspect of one of them, so that attention [animus] is directed now to one side, now to the other, and that it can gauge, looking from the right and from the left as one does with an alternate movement of the eyes, the difference that separates the most dissimilar objects placed next to each other. This quotation show how reductive it would be to limit oneself to Condillac alone. The philosopher elaborates in his own idiom, explicating a notion that he finds in “ordinary” language—a notion that was elaborated a long time before and that he inherited from the whole rhetorical culture of his time. Before Condillac there was at least Aristotle. In his Topics, comparison is involved in two of the four COMPARISON 163 2 The comparison of the arts The comparison of the arts is a literary genre that began in the Renaissance and continued throughout the classical period. It took several forms. The first and most important was a parallel between the arts of the visible and those of discourse: painting and sculpture on the one hand, poetic arts on the other. On the basis of this comparison, which is in a way generic, more specific forms of comparison emerged—comparisons between painting and sculpture, or between painting and music. The Italian word paragone, which means “comparison” in general, was used in all European languages to designate the comparison between painting and sculpture that gave rise to many debates in the sixteenth century. The comparison between painting and music (the analogy between sound and color, reflections on the notion of harmony) was also present in the Renaissance and in the classical age. It was revived in the twentieth century with the birth of abstract art. The comparison between the arts of the eye and those of the ear is part of a long tradition that, according to Plato, goes back to Simonides, and that was spread during the Renaissance through the reading of Horace. In the Art of Poetry, Horace says, “What is heard, not seen, is weaker in the mind than what the eyes record faithfully as it happens” (Art of Poetry, trans. Raffel). But it is another remark of Horace that was to play a crucial historical role, the one in which he drew a parallel between painting and poetry: “ut pictura poesis erit,” a poem is like a picture (ibid.). Adopted by the theoreticians of the Renaissance, this comparison is at the origin of what has been called the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. But this doctrine is based on a misunderstanding, or rather an inversion: whereas Horace compared poetry to painting, relating the arts of language to those of the image, Renaissance authors inverted the direction of the comparison. “A poem is like a picture” became “a picture is like a poem.” The phrase ut pictura poesis, as it was understood in the field of discourse on art, always consisted in defining painting, in determining its value, in relation to criteria of the poetic arts. This doctrine was unquestionably fertile for several centuries; it played an essential role in helping painting acquire the dignity of the liberal arts (see ART). Through this comparison, the painter was able to accede to the rank of the poet and the orator. The expressions pictura loquens and muta poesis are topoi that serve to qualify poetry and painting, the latter being often represented in engravings by a figure wearing a blindfold or holding a finger to its mouth. Painting is a “mute poetry” and poetry is a “speaking picture.” Seventeenth-century French writers called them “sisters” (sœurs; the English called them the “sister arts”) and described them as united in a constant relationship of reciprocal emulation. Thus André Félibien, in his work Le songe de Philomathe, stages ut pictura poesis by means of a dialogue between two sisters, one blonde, the other brunette, the former expressing herself in verse, the latter in prose (published in 1683, reprinted as an appendix to book 10 of the Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, 1666–88). Ut pictura poesis did not limit itself to changing the image and status of the painter; it also transformed the definition of the painter by imposing on him the categories of poetics and rhetoric (inventio, dispositio) and by attributing a narrative goal to him. The doctrine of ut pictura poesis also triumphed in history painting, long considered the most noble kind of painting. But very early on, reservations were expressed with regard to a comparison that subjected painting a little too much to the order of discourse. Thus Leonardo da Vinci preferred to describe poetry as blind painting rather than as speaking painting, to maintain the equality between the two arts: “Painting is a mute poetry and poetry a blind painting; both seek to imitate nature in accord with their means” (Traité de la peinture, trans. Chastel, 90). But Gotthold Lessing, in his Laocoön (1766), was the first to provide a systematic critique of the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Disqualifying the very idea of a comparison between the arts, Lessing insists on their differences and the limits that separate them, as is shown explicitly by his book’s subtitle: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. The rejection of the parallel in the name of the argument for specificity was extensively developed in the nineteenth century, following Charles Baudelaire, by all the defenders of “modernity.” This argument has played a major role in the contemporary analysis of art. In 1940, Clement Greenberg published in the Partisan Review an article, “Towards a New Laocoön,” that was to become one of the main texts of “modernist” criticism. Appealing specifically to Lessing, Greenberg writes: “The avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its ‘legitimate’ boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy” (1:32). Jacqueline Lichtenstein REFS.: Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a New Laocoön.” In Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by J. O’Brian, 1:23–37. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Horace. The Art of Poetry. Translated by B. Raffel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Lee, Rensselaer Wright. Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Leonardo da Vinci. Traité de la peinture. Translated by A. Chastel. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1987. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay of the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by E. A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. musical concert during a banquet”—that is, the ornament that crowns everything. The Vulgate translates this as “et comparatio musicorum in convivio vini.” Although very specialized, this meaning is within the logic of the terms sugkrisis and comparatio. Whether it be music as harmony or social harmony as music, in both cases the idea is that each element should be in its proper place. It is a matter of decorum, that is to say, of appropriateness (see MIMÊSIS, Box 6). The focus of attention is shifted from the parts to the whole. It is no longer a double attention, but, so to speak, a triple one. If intellectual contrast serves to examine each of the two elements, to illuminate each by the other, contrapuntal harmony seeks to merge them into a whole that simultaneously transcends and respects them. Then the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts in turn are enhanced by the light that their comparison yields. Taken as a whole, the aesthetic dimension is the pleasure of com-prehending in the sense of holding the two contrapuntal lines together. The other example reminds us that this phenomenon is exceedingly classical. This example is poetry. In this case, 164 COMPORTMENT Regarding the relation between an organism and its environment, see AFFORDANCE, DISPOSITION. On modalities of action, see ACT, AGENCY, PRAXIS. On the relation between the mind or the mental and the corporeal, see particularly CATHARSIS, CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, FLESH, MALAISE, PATHOS, SOUL, UNCONSCIOUS. On the specificity of the human, see HUMANITY; cf. ANIMAL, ERLEBEN. v. DASEIN, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, STRUCTURE what does it mean to set two things face to face so that they correspond to each other? The effect of contrasted symmetry is emblematic of the Italian sonnet. First, there are the two quatrains. Not only is each symmetrical in itself, ab and then ba, but also and especially the two quatrains correspond to each other. The repetition of rhymes is not in itself very important. The essential fact is that this repetition is accompanied by a general schema in which everything tends toward symmetry: to comparatio. All of the variations of symmetry are then possible, whether the poet draws the symmetry from resemblance or from difference, from the adpositum or from the contrapositum. Joachim Du Bellay’s L’Olive reintroduced the sonnet in France in 1550; the same year, Pierre Ronsard’s Odes broadened the practice. The imitation of the Pindaric model made it possible to make two segments and not merely two quatrains correspond to each other: strophe and antistrophe. In Greek poetics, the antistrophe corresponded to the strophe in having the same metrical scheme; the chorus chanted the strophe while dancing in one direction, and the antistrophe while dancing in the opposite direction. In the Ronsardian ode, though the rhyme scheme is the same in the strophe and the antistrophe, the rhymes themselves are not the same, unlike those in the quatrains of the Italian sonnet. This underlines the essential fact. The symmetry has to do not with the repetition of rhymes but with the will to symmetry: with the pure fact of counterpoint, of setting two elements beside one another, of comparing. Francis Goyet REFS.: Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities. Translated by E. Cary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–50. Hesychius Alexandrinus. Lexicon. Edited by M. Schmidt. Halle, Ger.: Dufft, 1861. Reprinted Amsterdam, Neth.: Hakkert, 1965. Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. Revised by D. Russell. In Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Petrarca, Franscesco. De vita solitaria: The Life of Solitude. Translated by J. Zeitlin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. French translation by Jean Cousin: Institution oratoire. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975–80. Ronsard, Pierre. Odes. In Œuvres complètes, edited by J. Céard, D. Ménager, and M. Simonin. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1993–94. . Poems of Pierre de Ronsard. Translated and edited by N. Kilmer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. COMPORTMENT “Comportment” corresponds to the French comportement, which, along with conduite, serves as the standard translations of the English “behavior.” Adjacent to “behavior,” “comportment” particularly emphasizes the objective, observable aspect of ways of acting, as reactions to the world and manifestations of internal dispositions. The article BEHAVIOR studies the differences between behaviorism and the psychology of comport(e)ment. CONCEPT “Concept” is borrowed from the Latin conceptus, based on concipere (cum-capere, take entirely, contain). The conceptus is what one conceives in two senses of the term, the product of an internal gestation (the concept is mind’s fetus) and collection in a unit, generality: CONCEPTUS; cf. INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, SOUL, UNDERSTANDING. On the difference between “nominalism” and “conceptualism,” see TERM. Only the act of intellectual grasp subsists in Begriff, which corresponds to comprehendere and comprehensio, and belongs to the Stoic idiolect katalepsis [ϰατάληψιϛ] (BEGRIFF, Box 1); see BEGRIFF, where the development of terminologies of understanding is analyzed through German and English; cf. AUFHEBEN, MERKMAL, PERCEPTION. Finally, Italian concetto has a very special status. It is an ingenious invention situated between aesthetic design and witticism; see CONCETTO; cf. ARGUTEZZA, DISEGNO, INGENIUM. v. CATEGORY, EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTICE, REASON CONCEPTUS(LATIN) ENGLISH concept FRENCH concept v. BEGRIFF, CONCEPT, CONCETTO, and INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPECIES, TERM, UNDERSTANDING, UNIVERSALS, WORD The Latin masculine noun conceptus (genitive: conceptus) came to occupy a distinctive place in Western philosophical terminology only in the second half of the thirteenth century. Meaning literally “fetus,” it had been used figuratively since Roman antiquity to designate an intellectual representation developing in the mind (Macrobius, Priscian). But it was with Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1255–74) that the noun conceptus became prominent and then spread among epistemologists. This rapid success can be explained by two factors. First is the ambiguity of the term that had previously been dominant, intellectus, which designated both the intellectual faculty and the units it represented—and sometimes even the meanings of words. Second and above all is the very semantics of conceptus: on the one hand, it denotes, in the literal sense, the product of internal gestation; on the other hand, its etymology (con-capere, “take together”) alludes to the collection of a plurality of elements in a single perception, that is, nothing less than the notion of generality. The internal production of thought on the one hand, and generality on the other: these are the two key components of conceptus. Though the later use of CONCEPTUS 165 that the word signifies the thing itself rather than a mental concept (Compendium studii theologiae, 61). It is with Aquinas, between about 1255 and 1274, that the noun conceptus becomes really prominent in the philosophical vocabulary. A half-century later, at the time of William of Ockham, it was in widespread use among epistemologists. In fact, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the ambiguity of intellectus, which denoted both the intellectual faculty and its units of representation, and sometimes even the meaning of words, became all the more intolerable because the ambient Aristotelianism distinguished not only various types of intellectual representation (“intellectus simplex” and “intellectus compositus,” for example), but also various types of intellect, or in any case, various functions of the intellect (“intellectus agens,” “intellectus possibilis,” “intellectus adeptus,” “intellectus speculativus,” “intellectus practicus,” etc.; see INTELLECTUS); using a single word obviously risked leading to the most complete imbroglio. Conceptus, related to the verb concipere, which was already current in the philosophical vocabulary, had a twofold semantic peculiarity that was particularly attractive in this context: on the one hand, it denoted, in the literal sense, the product—or sometimes the process—of internal gestation; on the other hand, its etymology (con-capere: “take together”) itself suggested the unification of a plurality in a common apprehension. But a major epistemological problem faced by Aquinas and his contemporaries was precisely how to join the Augustinian doctrine of verbum mentis (literally, “mental speech”) that was so important in theology and that emphasized the mind’s engenderment of an internal, prelinguistic thought, with the Aristotelian theory of abstraction that was taught in the faculty of arts on the basis of De anima, and that was supposed to account for the formation of general ideas in the mind. II. Mental Speech and Internal Discourse For Aquinas, the conceptus—which he also calls conceptio, ratio, or verbum mentis—is a purely ideal object, an internal product existing in the mind in an “intentional” rather than a real way, and representing some external reality in the order of the intelligible. The metaphorical relationship between this conceptus and the fetus, often forgotten in modern translations, has to do precisely with the fact that the intellect has to give birth to the conceptus within itself, as Aquinas clearly explains: “And when it is in the act of understanding, our intellect forms something intelligible that is, so to speak, its child [proles], and that for this reason we call a mental concept [mentis conceptus]” (De rationibus fidei, chap. 3). This recourse to conceptus understood in this way was very controversial at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. Several authors, especially Franciscans such as Pierre de Jean Olivi and William of Ware, complained that Aquinas had introduced between the act of understanding and the external thing that is its true object a useless and harmful intermediary that could act as a screen (cf. Panaccio, Le discours intérieur, chap. 6). Gauthier Burley, for example, is very explicit: “There are in the understanding no such concepts that are formed by the act of understanding and are at the same time representations of things [similitudines rerum]” (Quaestiones in librum Perihermeneias, 3.8). “concept,” or Begriff, oscillates between reference to an abstract, entirely depsychologized object (as in Frege) and reference to a mental representation (as in the cognitive sciences), the medieval notion surely belongs far more to the second of these two approaches. I. Intellectus/Conceptus The Latin used in medieval schools had numerous terms for the mental unit of intellectual representation. Intellectus designated the understanding itself, of course, but often also the internal objects of understanding. Species intelligibilis—paired with species sensibilis—put the accent on the representation of the thing in thought, the term species initially signifying something like aspect, appearance, or image (see SPECIES). Verbum mentis or verbum cordis—literally, the mind’s or heart’s word—related, in the wake of Augustine, to the comparison of human thought with the divine Word. Intentio often refers to the unit of thought insofar as it is directed toward some external object (from which comes the famous theme of intentionality). As for conceptus, which at the end of the Middle Ages became the key term in this semantic field, it referred first of all to something produced internally. Literally, conceptus designates the fetus conceived in the womb of the mother, but already Macrobius (fifth century) used it in the derivative sense to say that intentions are born from a mental concept (conceptus mentis, in Saturnales, 1.18.17). But especially the grammarian Priscian (sixth century) wrote, in a passage that was very influential in the Middle Ages, that the spoken word (vox, see WORD) indicates a mental concept (mentis conceptum), which he also called cogitatio (Institutiones grammaticae, 11.7). But this use remained metaphorical and marginal. The term was not part of Augustine’s usual vocabulary (though he often uses—especially in De Trinitate— the corresponding verb concipere to designate the mental act giving rise to a “mental verb” within itself). Boethius, translating and commenting on Aristotle’s logic in the early sixth century, resorted to intellectus to refer to units of intellection (and to render the Greek noêma [νóημα]). Intellectus is also frequently used in the same sense during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—especially by Abelard. Bonaventure and Albert the Great, for example, much prefer to use conceptus for what we would now call a “concept.” In the first half of the thirteenth century, in fact, conceptus used in the abstract sense seems to appear regularly only in direct or indirect relationship with the passage in Priscian mentioned above, according to which the spoken word signifies a “mental concept.” In this case, it is opposed to affectus, grammarians and logicians (for example, Peter of Spain, Syncategoreumata, 2.2, and 8.6) distinguishing between signifying in the mode of the concept (“per modum conceptus”) and signifying in the mode of affect (“per modum affectus”) (cf. Rosier, La parole comme acte, chaps. 2, 3, and 5). But even in this limited context, when one encounters the form conceptum— the most frequent, and the one that appears in Priscian—it is not always easy to decide whether it is the accusative of the noun conceptus or the past participle of the verb concipere. The difference between these two possibilities is large, because taken as a past participle (nominalized or not), conceptus—or conceptum—normally refers to the thing conceived and not to a mental unit. Roger Bacon in particular proposes to interpret Priscian’s work this way, and consequently sees in it the idea 166 CONCETTO Panaccio, Claude. Le discours intérieur: De Platon à Guillaume d’Ockham. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. . Ockham on Concepts. London: Ashgate, 2004. Peter of Spain. Syncategoreumata. Edited by L. M. de Rijk. English translation by J. Spruyt. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1992. Priscian. Institutionum grammaticarum libri XVIII. Edited by M. Hertz. In Grammatici latini, vols. 2–3. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1961. Rosier, Irène. La parole comme acte: Sur la grammaire de la sémantique au XIIème siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1994. Thomas Aquinas. An Aquinas Reader. Edited by M. Clark. 3rd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. . De rationibus fidei ad Cantorem Antichenum. In Opera omnia, vol. 40. Rome: Leonine, 1969. . Quaestiones disputatae de potentia. In Quaestiones disputatae, edited by P. Bazzi, M. Calcaterra, T. S. Centi, E. Odetto, and P. M. Pession, vol. 2. Turin: Marietti, 1965. . Quaestiones disputatae de veritate. In Opera omnia, vol. 22. Rome: Leonine, 1970. . Summa contra Gentiles. In Opera omnia, vols. 13–15. Rome: Leonine, 1918–30. Translation by A. C. Pegis: On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa contra Gentiles. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955–57. . Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999. William of Ockham. Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part 1 of the Summa logicae. Translated and with an introduction by M. J. Loux. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. . Ockham’s Theory of Propositions: Part 2 of the Summa logicae. Translated by A. J. Freddoso and H. Schuurman, introduction by A. J. Freddoso. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998. . Summa logicae (1325). In Guillelmi de Ockham Opera philosophica, edited by P. Boehner, G. Gál, and S. Brown, vol. 1. New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1974. But for all that, the word conceptus was not abandoned, even by Thomism’s adversaries. Ultimately, the main debate was about whether conceptus, understood as an intellectual representation, had to be seen as a purely ideal object that was the mental correlate of the act of understanding, as Aquinas maintained, or as this act itself. Medieval thinkers were thus very aware of an ambiguity that was long to affect ideas like “concept,” “understanding,” and “representation,” suggesting sometimes a process or an episode (an “act,” the Scholastics said) and sometimes its object or result (occasionally seen as a purely intelligible entity). After a few hesitations, William of Ockham ended up adopting the theory of the act. From this point of view, the terminus conceptus—or just conceptus—loses its status of intentional object and is identified with a mental quality of the individual subject, a quality endowed with a real existence in the mind (like that of “a white spot on a wall,” Ockham explains), and in this school of thought, the original idea of an ideal product of the understanding fades away. Starting in the fourteenth century, the remaining element common to most schools’ use of the widespread term conceptus was the idea of a general intellectual representation that could appear as either subject or predicate in true or false mental propositions and play certain precise roles in reasoning. William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and their followers made abundant use of conceptus to designate the simplest unit of mental discourse (“oratio mentalis”), in which they saw a natural sign that could have various semantic properties (significatio, connotatio, suppositio). Logical and semiotic functions thus become more important in this vocabulary than the mental dynamics. But the psychological dimension was not eliminated—far from it: contrary to the Fregean Begriff, the medieval conceptus is always mental; it exists, in one form or another, only in individual minds. The common English translation of conceptus by “concept” remains, of course, the best available choice, but the very obviousness of this simple transposition usually conceals the complexity and diversity of characteristics that were simultaneously or successively associated with this term in the Middle Ages, from the relationship to the vocabulary of childbirth to the crucial insertion of the word into the very heart of the logic called “terminist” and seen as a grammar of thought. Claude Panaccio REFS.: Augustine. On the Trinity. Translated by A. W. Haddan. Revised by W.G.T. Shedd. In Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, edited by W. J. Oates, 2:667–878. New York: Random House, 1948. Bacon, Roger. Compendium of the Study of Theology. Edited and translated by T. S. Maloney. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1988. Boethius. First and Second Commentaries. In On Aristotle On Interpretation 9, edited by David L. Blank, translated by N. Kretzmann and David L. Blank. London: Duckworth, 1998. . In librum Aristotelis Peri Hermenias. Edited by C. Meiser. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1877–80. Gauthier, Burley. Quaestiones in librum Perihermeneias. Edited by S. F. Brown. Franciscan Studies 34 (1974): 200–295. First published in 1301. Macrobius. The Saturnalia. Translated by P. V. Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. CONCETTO(ITALIAN) ENGLISH conceit, concept, idea, thought, representation FRENCH concept, idée, pensée, représentation GERMAN Begriff LATIN conceptus v. BEGRIFF, CONCEPT, CONCEPTUS, and ARGUTEZZA, COMPARISON, DISEGNO, GENIUS, IDEA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SPECIES, STRUCTURE The word concetto presents no particular difficulties in contemporary Italian philosophical discourse insofar as, like the word concept in French, its meaning is presently strongly determined by the massive contribution of German philosophical texts. Since Immanuel Kant, French and Italian have reelaborated their definitions of concept and concetto with reference to Begriff. But this modern equivalence threatens to obscure the fact that in the Italian tradition from Dante to Benedetto Croce, concetto, indissolubly philosophical and rhetorical, refers both to the ingenious invention at work in the image and in the idea, and to the operation of the understanding involved in what we call the “concept.” Only since the nineteenth century has the word referred almost exclusively to the operations of generalization and abstraction as we understand them today. In fact, neither Giordano Bruno, nor Tommaso Campanella, nor Giambattista Vico saw in the concetto an act having to do with the intellect alone and with its logical and cognitive functions. I. The Semantic Autonomy of Concetto with Respect to Conceptus At a time when Latin (that is, the Latin of the Scholastics) constituted almost the whole of the intellectual language, CONCETTO 167 Campanella, “Il mondo è il libro dove il sénno eterno scrisse i propri concetti” (La città del sole [1623], in Seroni, 326), we can propose, “The world is a book in which eternal reason writes its own thoughts” or “its own ideas.” But we will never be able to translate propri concetti by “its own concepts,” because the divine intellect, which is identified with universal reason, does not really express itself through concepts, but through ideas. Moreover, the topos of the Book of the World refers back to the idea that the totality of the objects in the universe constitutes a system of signs expressing God’s thought, which cannot be treated as simple concepts. The difficulties regarding the possible translation of concetto as a specific expression of the modalities of thought culminate in the work of Giordano Bruno. In De gl’heroici furori (On heroic furor), Bruno’s philosophical and sapiential thought is usually analogic: he sets forth his ideas most precisely in the interpretations of allegories, emblems, and devices around which the dialogues are articulated. The text tends to exemplify all the modalities of the idea insofar as it is based on a symbolic image and is fully intelligible in relation to the latter. Bruno usually calls this idea a concetto, as in this passage: On the doubtful road of uncertain reason and affection to which Pythagoras’s letter refers, where on the right appears the difficult path, thornier, rougher, and more deserted, on which the hunter unleashes his hounds and mastiffs to track down wild beasts, which are the intelligible species of ideal concepts [le specie intelligibili de concetti ideali]. (De gl’heroici furori [1585], 1.4) Because we cannot use the word “idea” to translate concetti ideali, the translator has to content himself with rendering the Italian literally. The difficulty is not that truth and beauty can be adequately designated only in the allegorical mode (in this case, the allegory of the myth of Acteon), but that concetti ideali can be attained only through a symbolic image. The notion of an ideal concept, which is already vague, is not capable of making it clear how concetto has a connotation that is in a way figurative and closely connected with the activity of the imagination. Another example, also from Bruno, shows the proximity of the concetto and the idea: High and deep, and always alert, o my thoughts [pensieri], ready to leave the maternal lap of the suffering soul, you, archers well-armed to hit the target from which the sublime idea [alto concetto] is born, along these rough paths Heaven does not allow you to encounter a cruel beast. (Ibid.) This passage describes symbolically how the soul, seeking reconciliation with the heart, must call upon archers whose function is to drive away the seductions of the senses, those of sight, so as to allow access to a superior beauty. These archers must in addition repress their own sight, close their eyes, the better to flush out the alto concetto, well rendered by “sublime idea” insofar as it is a matter of a quest for the beautiful and the true in a perspective inspired by Neoplatonism in the wake of Marsilio Ficino. Dante’s use of the word concetto already raised most of the problems we encounter in philosophical language proper. This is all the more remarkable because it was only starting in the fourteenth century that the word was gradually affected by the rhetorical tradition, the aesthetic and artistic thought of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, and the Aristotelianism of the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. In Dante, concetto shows an amazing autonomy with respect to the Latin conceptus, as if there were no interpenetration between Scholastic discourse and poetic discourse. Thus in the Paradiso (in the Divine Comedy), Dante offers us a number of ways to use the term; for example: 1. “Ne’ mirabili aspetti vostri risplende non so che vi trasmuta da’ primi concetti” (In your admirable appearance something divine shines forth that transmutes your earlier image). 2. “Queste sustanze non bisogna / rememorer per concetto divisa” (These substances need not / be remembered by separate ideas). 3. “O quanto è corto il dire e come fioco al mio concetto!” (O how inadequate is speech and how dim my thought!). (Paradiso, 3.58–59, 29.79–81, 33.121–22, trans. Sisson) Idea, concept, thought, image, intention (in the sense of an intellectual and artistic project), an act of the creative imagination, the concetto thus tends very early on to designate a number of intellectual activities, in an extension that produces an exceptional polysemy. . II. The Productivity of Concetto In the sixteenth century, the word concetto tends to bring out the originality of the production of schemas and representations by showing in actu, as it were, the activity of the mind, which can be the ingegno or the intelletto. From this comes the gradual extension of concetto, which, while claiming to be the expression of the idea, shows ostensibly the activity of the imagination, the subtlety of the mind in the metaphorical comprehension of the world that is specific to conceptismo. The semantic polyvalence of the word, which is used in extremely heterogeneous fields of application, can proliferate in a single text (the Platonic or pictural, symbolic, or metaphysical meaning, as in Giordano Bruno) and end inevitably in ambiguities. But these semantic ambiguities are not derived from etymological contingencies; on the contrary, they are carefully maintained and favored by authors insofar as the goal is precisely to substitute for the idea the more subtle nuances of the concetto. That is why it is ultimately not important to know that concetto is derived from concepire in the sense of “conceive” or “imagine,” since only the multiple goals in the service of which the word is used matter. The diversity of uses, intentions, and meanings is such that German translators of the word concetto, particularly when used in reference to the baroque, usually retain the Italian word, except, of course, in the case of poetic texts. In the case of philosophical texts, French translations of con-cetto by concept, idée, or pensée are merely arbitrary solutions and are seldom satisfactory. Thus, to translate a sentence from 168 CONCETTO makes it possible to construct a priori the system of rules governing the production of artworks. The clear desire to intellectualize the theory of art rapidly eventuates, at the end of the sixteenth century—that is, with the generation that followed Vasari—in a semantic inflation of the word concetto that could only produce further ambiguities. From then on, no art was conceivable without the productive activity of the intelletto, of the ingegno (in the sense of ingenuity or genius), so that the concetto tends to slowly eclipse the idea in metaphysical reflection on art. This ascension of the act of conceiving ends up including metaphysics, theology, and thought about art, as is shown, for example, by Federico Zuccaro’s theory of disegno: Ben è vero che per questo nome di disegno interno io non intendo solamente il concetto interno formato nella mente del pittore, ma enco quel concetto che forma qual si voglia intelletto. (It is quite true that by this name of disegno interno I mean not only the internal concept formed in the mind of the painter, but also this concept that any intellect can form.) (L’idea de’ pittori, scultori e architetti [1607]) Disegno is almost identified with concetto in the sense of an original conception of the intellect, since it is a matter of analyzing the faculties that make artistic creation possible. We see here how concetto expresses an allegorical, symbolic, and philosophical procedure that results in an increasingly redoubtable polysemy. Two currents glorify still further the productivity of the concetto: on the one hand, the theory of art, whose paradigm, after Alberti’s De pictura, remained Cicero’s De oratore, which emphasizes artistic invention; and on the other hand, conceptismo, which connects the activity of the mind solely with language as such. III. Concetto in Theories of Art In Georgio Vasari, the word concetto is close to the idea considered as a general representation: Da questa cognizione nasce un certo concetto e giudizio, che si forma nella mente quella tal cosa che poi espressa con le mani si chiama disegno. (From this apprehension is formed a concept, a reason engendered in the mind by the object, whose manual expression is called drawing.) (Vasari, Le vite [1568]) In Vasari, concetto denotes a particularly active intellectual act, a conception, whose function is to promote the art of drawing as a form of thought. The idea of the beautiful in the sense of “ideal” is the ultimate reference point of the artist’s thought, and the concetto becomes the mark of the activity of the intelletto, which, through its ingenuity and fecundity, 1 The concetto, an aesthetic rival of “idea” Although they seem far from a philosophical procedure, Michelangelo’s two verses cited by Erwin Panofsky in Italian in his book Idea perfectly exemplify the difficulties that translators still encounter: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto ch’un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva col suo soverchio” (The excellent artist has no concetto that a marble alone does not include with its superabundance: Le rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti). The Italian text is rendered by the French translator of Panofsky’s book this way: “L’artiste excellent n’a aucun concept qu’un marbre seul en soi ne circonscrive de sa masse” (Panofsky, Idea, trans. Joly). We could point out to the translator that the word concept does not reflect Michelangelo’s obvious Neoplatonism, and that the word idée would have already been more adequate. But above all, we must explain that concept cannot really illuminate the problematics at work in concetto as it is encountered in Renaissance theoreticians of art, so that the word concept means almost the opposite of what Michelangelo intended. The German translator Karl Frey (Die Dichtungen des Michelangelo Buonarroti [1897]) shows that he is better informed and more prudent when he renders “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto” as “Im Geiste kann nicht mal der grösste Meister ein Bild sich machen” (literally, “The greatest master cannot form an image in his mind”). Of course, “ein Bild sich machen” lacks Platonic overtones, suggesting activity that is more properly psychological than aesthetic and metaphysical. In reality, a satisfactory understanding of the ways in which the word is used by Italian theorists would require a more precise knowledge of their own philosophical reference points. Even in Michelangelo, the question of whether he takes concetto in a Neoplatonic or an Aristotelian sense is controversial (Panofksy and Götz Pochat are opposed on this point). This divergence in interpretation regarding concetto already appears among Michelangelo’s contemporaries. Fortunately, we have a text written during the author’s lifetime by an academician, Benedetto Varchi, that correctly analyzes Michelangelo’s text from a philological point of view. Even if we take into account Varchi’s tendency to Platonize the sense of Michelangelo’s poem, as a philologist and historian he confirms the correspondence—or even equivalence (which is more debatable)—between concetto and idea: As our poet uses it, concetto corresponds to what the Greeks called idea, the Romans exemplar, and what we call modello, that is, the form [forma] or representation [imagine], called by some “intention,” that we have in the imagination [fantasia], of everything we intend to do or say; which intention is spiritual and serves as an efficient cause for everything we say or do. (La lezzione di Benedetto Varchi sopra il sottoscritto sonnetto di Michelangelo Buonarroti, in Barocchi, Scritti d’arte, 2:1330) Through the tension it maintains between a poorly elucidated Platonism and an Aristotelianism that holds that the artist realizes his concetto in matter, Varchi’s analysis has the merit of showing the extraordinary plasticity of the word, its fundamental polysemy that proves to be very fertile in the expression of intellectual functions. The definitions Varchi gives are simply possible interpretations of the word as it might have been understood by a Renaissance humanist who was especially concerned to show that the aesthetic thought of the period was in perfect harmony, in Italian, with Neoplatonic ideas. CONCETTO 169 thought insofar as it succeeds in realizing itself in an analogical and metaphorical mode. Conceptismo as it was theorized by Jesuit pedagogy postulates very explicitly that every thought and every language are originally metaphorical, so that the existence of a literal meaning of a proposition or even of an image seems not only prosaic or illusory, improbable or deficient, but also a form of potential symbolism. And that means that every concetto, that is, every concetto ingegnoso, presupposes a conception of metaphor and figure situated in a kind of general semiotics. To think in a concettosa manner is to know how to reconcile the austere rigor of the concept with the inventiveness of metaphor. That is why the word “concept” cannot adequately translate concetto. The concetto della bellezza cannot be rendered precisely by the “concept of the beautiful,” because the English word remains in conformity with the Latin conceptus, that is, it is incapable of rendering the productivity of the imagination and the aesthetic inventiveness peculiar to the Italian word. In authors like Matteo Peregrini and Emanuele Tesauro, who were theoreticians of metaphor, symbolic expression, and the witticism, the concetto was subjected to the new requirements of argutezza, an infinite source of ingenious expression. Argutezza became the supreme faculty of inventions and symbolic creations in most of the arts of discourse and plastic arts, so that in his Cannochiale aristotelico (1654), Tesauro declared it the “gran madre d’ogni ’ngnoso concetto” (grandmother of every ingenious concetto). The word concetto refers to what consciousness produces in its metaphorical activity and to any representation that contains wit and subtlety. Here, the problematics of the concetto are completely absorbed by the hegemony of the rhetorical and sophistic problematics of the argutezza. Jean-François Groulier REFS.: Barocchi, Paola, ed. Scritti d’arte del cinquecento. Milan: Ricciardi, 1971. Bruno, Giordano. De gl’heroici furori. Milan: Mondadori, 2011. First published in 1585. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Edited by D. H. Higgins. Translated by C. H. Sisson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Düez, Nathanaël. Dittionario italiano e francese—Dictionnaire italien-français. Leiden, Neth.: Jean Elsevier, 1670. . Oxford-Paravia Italian Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lange, Klaus Peter. Theoretiker des literarischen Manierismus. Munich: Fink, 1968. Michelangelo. Die Dichtungen des Michelangelo Buonarroti. Translated by Karl Frey. Berlin: Grote, 1897. . The Poetry of Michelangelo. Annotated and translated by James M. Saslow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Panofsky, Erwin. Idea, ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924. English translation by J.J.S. Peake: Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. French translation by Henri Joly: Idea. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. Peregrini, Matteo. Delle acutezze, che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti, volgarmente si appellano. Genoa, It.: Ferroni, 1639. Pochat, Götz. Geschichte der Äesthetik und Kunsttheorie. Cologne, Ger.: Du Mont, 1986. Seroni, Adriano, ed. La città del sole e Scelta d’alcune poesie filosofiche. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico. Turin: Bartolomeo Zauatta, 1654. Vasari, Georgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. Florence: Appresso I Giunti, 1568. Translation by J. Conaway Bondanella and P. Bondanella: The Lives of the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Zuccaro, Federico. L’idea de’ pittori, scultori e architetti. Turin: Disserolio, 1607. Thus concetto is deliberately distanced from the idea in the Platonic sense and becomes the intellectual act of a creative freedom exercised on signs, forms, representations. But sometimes the concetto is so strongly imbued with divine ideas that it is no longer a product of the intelletto, but rather a form of the intellect’s participation in God, as Zuccaro says explicitly: In questo modo essendo l’intelletto e i sensi soggetti al Disegno e al concetto, possiamo dire, che esso Disegno, come Principe, rettore e governatore di essi se ne serva come cosa sua propria. (In this way the intellect and the senses being subjected to the disegno and to the concetto, we can say that this disegno, as the Prince, orator, and governor, makes use of them as its own property.) (Ibid.) In this case, we could translate concetto as “ideal representation” or even “ideal and ingenious representation.” With Zuccaro’s generation and the first treatises written by the Jesuit theoreticians of the seventeenth century, the concetto acquires the remarkable characteristic of being both very close to the idea as the principle of the production of forms, and very distant from it because it breaks with any reference point, and especially with any possible resemblance, to become only a mental, plastic, figurative, and symbolic expression. From this comes the confusion of translators— for example, those of the seventeenth century—who limited themselves to terms that were frequently too general, such as conception d’esprit, pensée, or imagination, as did Nathanaël Düez in his Dictionnaire italien-français (1670). At the opposite pole from the idea, which retained its prestige as a metaphysical authority, the concetto gained a field of application extending beyond ingenious inventions (all the symbolic figures: allegories, emblems, devices, graphic enigmas) as far as the language of the angels (i concetti divini) and even the coded language of God that transforms the world into a vast system of enigmatic, allegorical, emblematic signs. From that point on, the possible ways of translating concetto become steadily more limited and should lead us to resort to the equivalents proposed by French theoreticians of the seventeenth century: idées ingénieuses, représentations savantes, and even inventions savantes. IV. Concetto and Conceptismo From the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, concettismo (Italian) or conceptismo (Spanish) was an effort to radicalize the rhetorical tradition in the sense of an almost exclusive primacy of metaphorical thought that was developed both in the order of discourse (the art of the witticism) and in that of plastic or symbolic representations. The authors sought to extend all forms of eloquence as far as possible, from discourse to pictorial representation, in order to glorify the resources of the ingegno. The theoreticians of mannerism and the Jesuits tried to reconcile the Ciceronian ideal of eloquence with the philosophical categories of Aristotle and Aquinas. The expression of the idea henceforth demanded a more witty, more concettoso discourse, more subtle than really conceptual. The concettosità of an ingeniously formulated idea is precision of 170 CONCILIARITY CONCILIARITY This is the customary translation of the Russian sobornost’ [соборность], which designates the type of solidarity and community connected with the Russian Orthodox Church; see OBLIGATION and SOBORNOST’; see also NAROD (people) and PRAVDA (truth, justice), and cf. BOGOČELOVEČESTVO (theandry), MIR (peace, world, peasant community), SVET (world-light). Cf. Hebrew BERĪT [ריתְּ ִב ,[which designates the pact between the people and itsgod; see BERĪT, ALLIANCE; cf. DUTY and EUROPE. v. COMMUNITY, CONSENSUS, GOD, HUMANITY DENOTATUM, CONNOTATION FRENCH connotation GERMAN Konnotation LATIN connotatio, consignificatio v. ANALOGY, HOMONYM, PARONYM, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SENSE, SUBJECT, SUPPOSITION Commonly used in linguistics since L. Bloomfield (1933), theorized by Hjelmslev, abundantly exploited by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, and central to semiotics and the theory of the text, the notion of connotation has a number of remarkable ambiguities that can be described, if not completely mastered, by considering the term’s slow maturation, opposed to that of “denotation” (Fr. dénotation, Ger. Denotation), at the heart of the system of notions that articulate, in modern philosophy, the fields of ontology, semantics, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of language. The first documented uses of the word connotation in French designate the confused meaning of a word or a concept, as opposed to a clear meaning (Port-Royal). This French sense of the word corresponds to the stress put on an element that was initially present in the semantic field of the medieval Latin connotatio—the derivative or secondary aspect, also marked in the synonymous term consignificatio—as if the confused/distinct pair were superimposed on the more general derived/direct pair. The original meaning of the Latin connotatio, which is also found in the English expression “associative meaning” (equivalent to “connotative meaning”) poses no particular problem. Linguists and theoreticians of literary texts both oppose the “contextual coloring” (coloration contextuelle) or “implications” that a term can have in a given context (i.e., its “connotation”) to its so-called referential, conceptual, or cognitive meaning indicated by the term “denotation.” However, the idea of connotation involves a philosophical difficulty because of the possible interferences between the system of direct (distinct) and secondary (confused) signification on the one hand, and on the other the Fregean system of Sinn and Bedeutung, whose discordant translations (“sense” vs. “reference,” or “sense” vs. “denotation”) are a source of troublesome ambiguities. I. Connotation/Clear or Primary Meaning and Connotation/Denotation The sense of “confused meaning” was introduced in the Grammaire de Port-Royal (1676): the reason that a noun cannot subsist by itself is that in addition to its distinct meaning, there is another confused meaning that can be called the connotation of something associated with the distinct meaning. Thus the distinct meaning of “red” is redness. But it signifies it by indistinctly marking the subject with this redness, and that is why it does not subsist alone in discourse, because it must be implicit in the word that signifies this subject. Just as this connotation makes the adjective, when it is separated from words that signify accidents, substantives are made from them, as from coloré, couleur; from rouge, rougeur; from dur, dureté; from prudent, prudence, etc. And when on the contrary we add to words that signify substances this connotation or confused meaning of something with which these substances are connected, we make adjectives of them: from homme, humain; genre humain, vertu humaine, etc. The Greeks and Romans have an infinite number of such words, ferreus, aureus, bovinus, vitulinus, etc. But Hebrew, French, and other vulgar languages have fewer of them. French explains it by a de, d’or, de boeuf, etc. If these adjectives based on the names of substances are stripped of their connotation, they are made into new substantives, called abstract or separate. Thus homme having made humain, from humain we make humanité, etc. In English, we find the same opposition in John Stuart Mill, where it is colored by an additional trait, the opposition between the comprehension and the extension of a concept or a term, which enables him to define denotation as “the things an expression applies to,” connotation being the complementary “information” that any common noun normally “brings to mind” regarding the objects that it “denotes.” The problem raised by the use of connotation in philosophy is that its opposite, “denotation,” has gradually merged with the German Bedeutung taken in its Fregean meaning. As a result, there is a danger of confusing two oppositions that do not necessarily coincide: denotation (Bedeutung) and meaning (Sinn), on the one hand, and primary meaning (significatio prima, principalis) and secondary meaning (significatio secundaria, ex consequenti, connotatio) on the other. Even if English tends to use the term “denotation” to explain that two expressions applying to the same thing (i.e., having the same denotation) can differ in meaning, we must avoid identifying, by means of the word “connotation,” this meaning with Frege’s Sinn. A quick examination of the origins of the term “connotation” shows that this tendency or temptation is connected with the polysemy of the Latin connotatio, which, from the outset and through the diversity of disciplines in which the notion is used, mingles inextricably the logical, linguistic, and ontological registers. The Latin term connotatio appeared in the twelfth century, and its first use was essentially theological, in the domain of Trinitarian semantics. The verbs used to express the idea of connotation (notare, connotare, consignificare, innuere) all refer to the same idea: making something different known with (cum) itself—whence the specialization of connotation in the sense of “secondary meaning of a word” and the close connection of the various terms expressing this idea with the idea of consignification (consignificatio) or co-intellection (cointellectio). . CONNOTATION 171 In the late Middle Ages, the analysis of connotatio focused on a more specific phenomenon: the meaning of “denominative” terms (denominativa; see PARONYM), that is, concrete accidental terms (like “white”), and finally ended up in Ockham’s distinction between absolute and connotative terms. This shift explains in part the diversity of the problems the Middle Ages encountered with the notion of connotation: the distinction between signification in itself and accidental signification (significatio per se and significatio per aliud), primary signification and secondary signification (principaliter significare and secundario significare), direct signification (in recto) and indirect signification (in obliquo), signification according to the anterior and the posterior (secundum prius et posterius) or analogical (see ANALOGY)—all combined with the problems involved in the semantic distinction between signification (significatio) and reference (suppositio, appellatio). II. Connotatio and Consignificatio Secondary meaning, as opposed to primary meaning, was at first designated by the term consignificatio and the corresponding verb, consignificare. These terms were used for different problems: 1. “Secondary signification” is used for tense, which is “consignified” and not signified by the verb, and also for composition, or the predicative function (prossêmainein [πϱοσσημαίνειν] in Aristotle)—the questions of contingent future tenses, of divine prescience, and of the unity of the articles of faith could all benefit from this notion of consignification because it made it possible, for example, to posit a unity of the articles of faith independently of the accidental, temporally determined forms in which they were formulated (Christ will be born / is born / was born). 2. It is also said that the denominative term (or paronym) consignifies the subject (e.g., album signifies whiteness primarily, and consignifies the subject of the whiteness). 3. In the Platonizing analyses of the early twelfth century, the paronyms “whiteness” (albedo), “whitish” (albet), and “white” (albus) are said to signify the same quality, or form, or idea, but in different ways, and hence with different consignifications (cf. Bernard of Chartres: “ ‘whiteness’ signifies a pure virgin, ‘whitish’ the same entering a bed chamber or lying on a bed, ‘white’ again the same, but deflowered”). 4. “Consignification” is used for all parts of speech that are neither subject nor predicate, those that are “consignificant” (consignificantia, consignificativa) or syncategorematic; then it is said that not everything signifies the universal, but consignifies universally. We can mention two other less important meanings: 5. Consignificare can also be equivalent to “signify the same thing,” as when one says that in a proposition the subject and the predicate “consignify.” 6. It is also said that the parts of a compound noun “consignify,” for example, equus (horse) and ferrus (savage) in the compound equiferrus because they retain something of their meanings, but do not signify strictly speaking because these meanings merge in a single meaning, which is that of the compound. By extension on the basis of (1), most grammatical accidents will be described, starting in the twelfth century, as consignifications (person, number, etc.) because they are properties that are accidental with regard to the primary grammatical meaning that makes it possible to define the word as belonging to this or that part of speech. The Modists of the thirteenth century maintained that all grammatical properties, both essential (defining the class of words and its species) and accidental, were consignified because they corresponded to different ways of apprehending the thing signified. The modes of signifying (or modes of consignifying) are here opposed to the lexical meaning, whereas earlier consignificata were only a part of the latter, the accidents. The term consignificare can thus have two distinct meanings, either “signify with” (significare cum), as when one says that the verb consignifies the tense (it refers to its signified with 1 Denotatio/connotatio in medieval logic In medieval logic, the distinction between “connotation” and “denotation” does not exist in the form of an opposition between connotatio and denotatio. The verb denotare emerged along with terminist logic. It is found in Peter of Spain, for instance. Analyzing the sentence “sedentem possibile est ambulare” (it is possible that the person who is seated walks), Peter notes that the participle “refers to” or “includes a simultaneity” (importat concomitantiam). This concomitantia can be signified either in relation to the verb ambulare (in the sense of “dum sedeo, me ambulare est possible” [while I am sitting, I can walk]), which is false, or denoted relative to the predicate (in the sense of “dum sedet, potentiam habet ad ambulandeum postea” [while he is sitting, he has the capacity to walk later], which is true. Peter therefore observes, in a more general way, that Quando denotatur concomitantia respectu hujus verbi ambulare, tunc ponitur possibilitas supra totum dictum, et sic est falsa; quando autem denotatur concomitantia respectu praedicati, tunc possibilitas ponitur supra subjectum dicti, et sic est vera. (When simultaneity is denoted in relation to the verb “to walk,” then the possibility bears on the whole of the dictum, and the proposition is false; when it is denoted in relation to the predicate, it concerns the subject of the dictum, and the proposition is true.) Tractatus, 7.70 This example suffices to show that denotare was not initially opposed to connotare, as “denotation” is opposed to “connotation” in modern linguistics. In Peter of Spain’s text the verb denotare/denotari is a simple synonym of significare/significari. REFS.: Peter of Spain. Tractatus Called Afterwards “Summulae Logicales.” Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth: Van Gorcum, 1972. 172 CONNOTATION statements (e.g., “Man is just and courageous”) conjunction associates the signifieds; in theological statements (e.g., “God is just and merciful”) it associates (copulat) the “consignifieds” (consignificata), namely, the effects that are “compredicated” in this proposition, but not the divine essence, which is identically “predicated” by each of the two adjectives. The problem of co-reference raised by statements such as “Deus est justus et talis est Petrus” (God is just and so is Peter) is resolved in an analogous way: even if divine justice and Peter’s justice have nothing in common, they can be compared because the comparison is made solely on the level of consignification. The identity of predicates in God thus becomes compatible with the diversity of names that designate them and the meanings that are conventionally associated with them. This theory of consignification allowed Prévostin to propose the idea that there is a univocatio et non equivocatio (see HOMONYM) in the statements “God is just” and “man is just,” precisely because the two predications have something in common. Toward the end of the twelfth century, the terms connotare/connotatio were used instead of consignificare/consignificatio, which nonetheless continued to be used in the logical and grammatical traditions. We note as well the use of compraedicare and coassertare to distinguish between primary and secondary predication. However, the ad hoc character of this idea of connotation elicited criticisms. It was appealed to whenever there was a need to distinguish within a single term something identical and something different; it could even be used to demonstrate the doctrinal unity of the “authorities” that are supposed to be strictly speaking contradictory since one had only to say that the controversial pages use the same words with different “connotations.” At the turn of the thirteenth century, there were lively debates about how to determine this difference indicated by connotation: should connotation be thought from the point of view of God (the cause) or from that of the creature (the effect) (connotatio a parte rei/a parte creaturae)? Should one acknowledge that relational nouns, even when predicated of God (e.g., “Deus est creator”), connote something about creatures, but not about God? Indeed, why not attribute all names to God since he is the cause of all the things they signify? These difficulties eventually undermined the theory of connotation, and first Albert the Great, then Aquinas, found new solutions to the same problems. (Cf. Rosier, “Res significata et modus significandi”; Valente, “Justus et misericors”) . IV. Connotative Terms For William of Ockham, the classification of categorematic terms into absolute and connotative terms is central, and is based on the same criteria as before. The connotative name “is one that signifies something in a primary way [primario] and signifies something else in a secondary way [secundario].” The absolute name is one that does not signify something in a secondary way, and is thus such that it signifies everything it signifies primarily and in recto. Thus “animal” signifies an ox, an ass, etc.; it signifies and thus constitutes a reference (suppositio) to each of the individuals of whom it may be true to say “this is an animal.” It corresponds to “natural kind terms.” The category of absolute name includes all the a secondary temporal meaning), or “signify in such a way” (significare sic), as when one says that the noun motus signifies movement in the mode of substance, the verb movere signifies it in the mode of movement, etc. It was only in the first sense that consignificare was replaced, notably in the logical tradition, by connotare; in the fourteenth century, for instance, writers referred to a verb’s temporal connotation (cf. Maierù, Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica). The notion of consignificatio is a useful tool for distinguishing between terms that are clearly related on the semantic level without being synonyms. This holds for the first three meanings listed above, and for their extensions: the noun cursus (race) and the verb currit (he runs) have the same meaning, but they differ because only the second consignifies time; the denominative “white” signifies the same thing as the corresponding abstract noun “whiteness,” but by connoting the subject of the quality; the noun “suffering,” the verb “to suffer,” and the interjection “ow!” all mean the same thing, but signify different real properties that are indicated by membership in different grammatical categories. III. Connotatio in Theology Theologians are confronted by the problem of distinguishing not between terms that are close in form and differ only partly in meaning, but between terms that are “identical” when they are used to speak of created realities and God. Moreover, they have to explain why different attributes can be predicated of God, signified by different words, whereas God himself is simple and indistinct. The notions of consignificatio and connotatio proved to be useful tools for coping with these two problems. Starting in the second half of the twelfth century, theologians believed that it did not suffice to oppose a predication regarding God to the same predication regarding a created reality—as in the example of Boethius’s De Trinitate: “God is just/ man is just,” where they said that in the latter case the usage is correct because it is in conformity with the first meaning of the term, whereas in the former case we are dealing with a figurative, transferred, equivocal usage (see TO TRANSLATE). In “God is just” and “God is good,” the same divine essence is predicated, but these statements are not identical in meaning because something different is consignified or “compredicated,” for example, that God is the cause of justice, on the one hand, and that he is the cause of goodness on the other. Analogously, “God is just,” in which “just” consignifies that God is the cause of justice, can be contrasted with “man is just,” where the same adjective consignifies that man is the effect of divine justice. Thus it was possible to maintain that every predicate amounts to attributing to God the same divine essence, which is “essentially signified,” but that it “signifies secondarily” or consignifies a different effect in the creature. This explains why different attributes are not synonymous when they are attributed to God: even if “just” and “merciful” signify the same thing in God, in the sense that there is no distinction between justice and mercy in God, who is an absolutely simple entity, it is not tautological or redundant to say “God is just and merciful” because the two adjectives have different connotations, since the effects of justice and mercy on human beings are different. From this two rules regarding the functioning of conjunction are drawn: in ordinary CONNOTATION 173 and thus are not synonyms since what intervenes in recto in the definition of one is found in obliquo in the definition of the other, and vice versa. Also included among the connotatives are categorematic terms belonging to categories other than those of substance and quality, negative expressions (e.g., “immaterial”) and philosophical terms such as “true,” “good,” “intellect,” “will,” and so on. This notion of connotation also allows Ockham to defend the fundamental idea of an extensionalist conception of reference, according to which all categorematic terms signify and refer to particular substances or qualities. One of the points that has been controversial among Ockham’s interpreters is whether there were connotative terms in mental language or whether they could always be eliminated from mental language if a nominal definition that included only absolute terms was substituted for them (Paul Spade). A crucial argument against this claim is based on relational terms (e.g., “father”) whose nominal definition necessarily includes their correlative, as we have seen; this shows that it is impossible to totally eliminate connotatives from mental language (Claude Panaccio). According to Spade, since a connotative term could always be substituted for its nominal definition, which contained only absolute terms (if the first nominal definition contained a connotative term, the latter could in its turn be replaced by its nominal definition until there were no longer any connotative terms), there was no need to postulate connotative terms in mental language. Panaccio has opposed this analysis, on nouns (abstract and concrete) of the category of substance, and the abstract nouns of the category of quality (William of Ockham, Summa logicae, I, chap. 10). Absolute nouns have no nominal definition (definitio quid nominis) but only a real definition (definitio qui rei); conversely, connotative nouns have no real definition (because they cannot be defined by reference to a particular class of objects) but only a nominal definition that accounts for their hierarchized semantic structure, composed of at least one word in the nominative (in recto) and one word in an oblique case (in obliquo). They include, first, the concrete categorematic terms of the category of quality, the denominatives (denominativa/paronyma). Thus “white” means “something formless informed by whiteness” or “possessing whiteness”; it signifies primarily individual substances that are white, and connotes secondarily their individual whitenesses: what is in recto in the definition designates the significatum (something), and what is in obliquo designates the connotatum (whiteness). Relational nouns like “father” are also connotative; in a propositional context, “father” refers to the individuals of whom it is true to say “this is a father,” but in addition it connotes something else, namely, the individuals who have a father, and this implies that a relational term cannot receive a complete definition without the intervention of its correlative, and vice versa (“father” = a sensible substance having a child; cf. Summa logicae, III–3, chap. 26); the two correlatives do not have the same nominal definition 2 Connotatio in the work of Roger Bacon In De signis and then in the Compendium studii theologicae, Roger Bacon developed a sophisticated analysis of connotation. For him, the different modes of connotation are based on analogy: connotation is produced when a term signifies, by imposition, one thing, and one or more things are associated with it through a relation of natural signification, so that several things are “made readable” by the same word. The word thus signifies one thing “conventionally,” but because of the different natural relations that exist between that thing and other things, it can “naturally” signify these other things. Because of the conventional relation of the word to the thing signified, and because of the natural consequent relation between the thing signified and the thing connoted, we can say that the word naturally implies the latter. Roger Bacon distinguishes seven modes of connotation: 1. non-being is understood in being by privation; 2. the names relating to God connote the creature (the Latin word creator signifies secondarily the creature, which is the result of the relation of creation); 3. the names of creatures imply the creator, because of their dependence on him (whence the valid inference: “there is a creature, therefore there is a creator”); 4. the accident connotes the substance, and vice versa; 5. the universal implies the vague particular (“man exists, therefore a man exists”) or the particular in disjunction (“man exists, therefore Socrates or Plato or ... exists”); 6. an essential part (e.g., a roof) implies another essential part (e.g., a wall)—this example is taken from Avicenna and al-Ghazālī; 7. the name of a relative implies its correlative (e.g., father-son). In a statement, the word signifies only its primary signified (“double” does not signify “half”) and the statement is verified only for this primary signified. However, the speaker can do as he pleases (ad placitum) by reimposing the word, changing its meaning, so that the secondary signified becomes the primary signified and that the word then signifies the latter ad placitum. It is interesting to note that Bacon does not use the term connotare in De signis, although in the Compendium he uses it with the same examples, calling attention to the theological origin of this term: The name given to a single thing outside the soul may signify several things outside the soul at the same time, and these are what philosophers call cointellecta and theologians call connotata. In fact, all things that follow by natural and necessary implication from the name of another thing are understood with it (cointellecta) and connoted by it, for otherwise we could not say that they follow from it necessarily, for example, “creature therefore creator” and “creator therefore God,” since only God creates. And every specific accident connotes its subject, thus “capable of laughter, therefore man.” Among the examples we find words that clearly indicate this theological origin of the notion, such as “creator,” which was also to be the case in the work of William of Ockham. REFS.: Bacon, Roger. Compendium studii theologiae. Edited by T. Maloney. Leiden, Neith.: Brill, 1988. 174 CONSCIOUSNESS the one hand by pointing to passages clearly indicating that for Ockham there were connotative terms (notably relational terms) in mental language, and on the other hand by showing that this was an essential part of Ockham’s theory. The previously mentioned argument based on relational terms is crucial: since the nominal definition of a relational term necessarily contains another connotative term, namely, its correlative, this implies that relational terms, and thus connotative terms, cannot be totally replaced by absolute terms at the level of mental language, and thus that they exist in mental language (cf. Panaccio, “Guillaume d’Ockham”). We find interesting elements in other medieval logicians. Buridan in particular attributes a referential function both to what is signified (the suppositio) and to what is connoted (the appelatio): the connotative term (e.g., “white”) connotes that to which the corresponding abstract term (“whiteness”) refers; it “refers to” what it signifies primarily and “calls” what it connotes (see SUPPOSITION). Elsewhere, Buridan explains: There is essential predication between two terms when neither of them adds to the signification of the other a connotation extraneous [extranea] to that to which the terms refer. There is non-essential or paronymic predication when one of the terms adds to the signification of the other a foreign connotation, like “white,” which refers to a man and calls up (that is, connotes) whiteness insofar as it is added to it. Therefore: the proposition “Man is [an] animal” is essential, whereas “Man is white” or “Man is capable of laughter,” is paronymic. Summulae de dialecta, III–3, chap. 26; cf. Klima, John Buridan Alain de Libera Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Buridan, Jean. Sophismata. Critical edition by T. K. Scott. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977. Klima, Gyula. John Buridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Maierù, Alfonso. Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1972. 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