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

EPISTEMOLOGY FRENCH épistémologie GERMAN Erkenntnistheorie v. ANSCHAULICHKEIT, BELIEF, CHANCE, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH When the term épistémologie enters French, no doubt upon the translation in 1901 of Bertrand Russell’s Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, it is met above all with the apparent serenity of a consensus. As Louis Couturat writes, “Epistemology is the theory of knowledge (connaissance) based on the critical study of the 270 EPISTEMOLOGY necessary to look at E. Reinhold’s Theorie des menschlichen Erkenntnisvermögen (1832); in 1876, H. Vaihinger attributes the beginnings of Erkenntnistheorie to Reinhold. B. Embracing Kant’s legacy Although we do not know the exact date when the term Erkenntnistheorie took its place in the language, its meaning is clearly tied to the embrace of Kant’s legacy as against that of Hegel’s philosophy of nature and German idealism in general. The aim of Erkenntnistheorie is, in the most general sense, the study of the presuppositions of knowledge, both in the exact sciences and in historical ones. According to A. Diemer and C. F. Gethmann, we may thus distinguish the following in nineteenth-century German philosophy: (a) a psychological trend, which begins with J. Fries and later develops as empirical psychology—Erkenntnistheorie as an “analysis of sensations” (Beneke, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Wundt, Stumpf, Avenarius, Mach); (b) opposed to this, a logico-transcendental trend, placing its emphasis either on the methodology of natural sciences with the Marburg School (H. Cohen, P. Natorp, then E. Cassirer), or on moral and historical knowledge (W. Windelband, H. Rickert, E. Lask); (c) a metaphysical realist trend inaugurated by J. F. Herbart and F. A. Trendelenburg, in which Erkenntnistheorie is composed of philosophia prima (E. Zeller, F. Überweg, E. von Hartmann, and so forth). The diversity of these references to Erkenntnistheorie, though irreducible to a single orientation, nonetheless indicates a single general direction: that of a return to an analysis of the power of knowledge and the process of the objectification of phenomena, in opposition to those successors of Hegel and Schelling who claimed to legislate for the natural sciences. Köhnke suggests, thus, that Erkenntnistheorie marks three successive returns to Kant: around 1830 with Reinhold, around 1860 with Helmholtz (Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie), and finally at the beginning of the twentieth century with the Marburg School. In all three cases, the term Erkenntnistheorie seems to act as a reference point or a sign of recognition for preoccupations that are, in fact, not really Kantian in the strict sense, and are in any case very different from one another (logic, philosophy of language, psychology, physiology, sociology, history, hermeneutics, and methodology of the natural sciences). . C. Generalizations and ambivalence in early twentieth-century usage Though the term Erkenntnistheorie is still in use around 1920–30, more than ever in fact, its usage is almost purely symbolic: it serves to maintain a general requirement of rationality and an interest in the problem of knowledge, but in a context in which it is recognized that Kantianism has reached certain principled limits. We may take four examples of this ambivalence. a. For Husserl, philosophy is still Erkenntniskritik, as distinct from the “ingenious and methodical work of the individual sciences” (Logical Investigations), and assigned to the elucidation of the essence of the concepts of thing, event, cause, effect, space, time, and so on (ibid., II.15). However, this Erkenntniskritik is understood in the new sense of intentionality. In the first of sciences, or, in a word, Critique, as Kant defined and founded it.” When Émile Meyerson, for his part, writes the introduction to his Identité et Réalité in 1907, he clarifies, “The present work belongs, in its method, to the domain of the philosophy of science or epistemology, to use a more or less appropriate term which is becoming widely used.” He thereupon places the work under the aegis of Hermann von Helmholtz and his theory of unconscious psychic processes. Kant, Russell, Helmholtz: we are dealing with a study of the general laws of thought with reference to the sciences, and there seems at this point to be no difference of emphasis or usage among the terms“epistemology,” épistémologie / philosophie des sciences, and Erkenntnistheorie (or Erkenntnislehre/ Wissenschaftslehre). Today almost none of that homogeneity, posited or hoped for, remains among the different names given to the various discourses concerning science in German, English, and French. The French term épistémologie, as well as the German Wissenschaftstheorie, simply absorbs under a somewhat superficial harmony a multiplicity of approaches—general theory of knowledge, technical and logical analysis of scientific theories, historical analysis of their development—which English tends to distinguish (epistemology, philosophy of science, history of science). In reality, however, there remains neither a foundational doctrine nor a unified direction in the domain of the theory of knowledge and science. The experience of translation has correspondingly become that of a proliferation of “untranslatable” terms: German terms without exact correlates in English or in French (Anschaulichkeit, Zusammenhang), English or American terms without exact correlates in German or in French (“inference to the best explanation,” defeasibility). The work of epistemologists today makes the loss of unity in their vocabulary very clear, and they work as though under the assumption that in order to identify their problems, a map of the words is required first. I. Erkenntnistheorie A. First occurrences of the term The term Erkenntnistheorie appears rather early in the history of German philosophy in the nineteenth century, at least, well before the standard attribution to E. Zeller, who in fact fixes the academic meaning only in the 1860s (see his Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie, 1862). Despite the diversity of its meanings, Erkenntnistheorie is used into the 1930s to refer to discourse that analyzes the power of knowing by the different sciences (Wissenschaften), whether “of the mind” (Geisteswissenschaften) or “of nature” (Naturwissenschaften). But the history of the term is also in large part that of the reception of Kant over the course of the nineteenth century, a history that evolves from a polemical embrace to a recognition of the intrinsic limitations of the Kantian approach. The term Erkenntnislehre is mentioned as early as 1827, in W. T. Krug’s lexicon, which defines it as “the philosophical theory of human knowledge, also called Metaphysics” (see his Allgemeines Handwörterbuch, 447). According to K. Köhnke, following F. Ueberweg, the general meaning of Erkenntnistheorie had already appeared in Schleiermacher’s lectures on dialectic, given in 1811 and published in 1839, the first post-Kantian attempt to develop a theory of knowledge founded not only on pure thought but on sense perception as well. To find the first precise references to a Theorie der Erkenntnis, it is no doubt EPISTEMOLOGY 271 und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik, is to measure the displacement of the center of gravity of theoretical physics from the point of view of knowledge (erkenntnistheoretisch), that is, from the point of view of the determination of the concepts of object and reality, of thing and attribute, of substance and accident. As early as Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910), however, the term Erkenntnistheorie is released by Cassirer from its strict affiliation with neo-Kantianism, since his aim is to widen the erkenntnistheoretisch project at its very base. The Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923, 1925, 1929) suggests a “critique of culture” and a morphology of the human mind in all its manifestations—sciences, myths, languages, religions—unified by the notion of symbolic form, seen as a rule governing cognitive functions in their concrete diversity. The 1936 book on quantum physics, then, describes the definitive limitation of simplification and profound changes in the forms of thought. Here again, as a result, the Kantian aspect of the term Erkenntnistheorie is weakened to the point of almost disappearing entirely. d. As a last example, the term Erkenntnistheorie is spontaneously used by the founders of quantum mechanics: it is common in the titles of N. Bohr’s articles (thus, in 1939, “Erkenntnistheoretische Fragen in der Physik und die menschlichen Kulturen,” or in 1949, “Diskussion mit Einstein über erkenntnistheoretische Probleme in der Atomphysik”), as well as in publications by W. Heisenberg, W. Pauli, M. Born, and so on. The use of the term in these cases no longer has any association with Kantianism, which is explicitly rejected by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli at the end of the 1920s. The term is used, rather, to indicate a series of philosophical questions concerning the “new situation of knowledge,” which requires us to “make a fresh start”: the foundations of the description of nature; the widening of the concept of Anschauung and of the criteria of Anschaulichkeit of a physical theory; the transformation of the conditions of objectivication through the renunciation of simultaneously spatial and causal determinations of phenomena; the necessary redefinition of objectivity with reference to the possibility the Logical Investigations, we find Erkenntnislehre, Erkenntnistheorie, and Erkenntniskritik used to refer to any approach distinct from empirical psychology, biologism, and skepticism. Phenomenology, for its part, bases its critique of knowledge in a completely different way, relying on a pure ontology of experience. Although the continuing use of the term Erkenntnistheorie reveals Husserl’s retention of a large part of Kant’s approach to the constitution of objectivity, it is in this new perspective of the phenomenological method that he uses the word. b. According to Moritz Schlick, in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre [General Theory of Knowledge] (1918), philosophy is identified in a very classical way as the “theory of knowledge,” with the latter being rigorously distinguished from psychology. The theory of knowledge is defined as the search for the universal foundations of the possibility of valid knowledge in general, which must make possible the clarification of the fundamental concepts of the sciences (that of consciousness in psychology, that of axiom and number in mathematics, those of space and time in physics, and so on). However, Schlick claims to continue the thought of Helmholtz, Kirschhoff, and Hilbert. He understands knowledge as a process of “designating objects” that is radically different both from “intuitive penetration” and from the search for “subject-object correspondence”; he relates this process of designation to a “recognition of the like,” which must lead to a reduction of the number of explanatory principles, and claims that the only rigorous method is that of mathematics. Schlick’s Erkenntnistheorie, though based on an analysis of the power of knowing, thus already represents a clear departure from Kant, and opens the way for the principled kind of anti-Kantianism that characterizes the first writings to come out of the Vienna Circle. c. The term Erkenntnistheorie is just as ubiquitous for Cassirer. Besides the four volumes of Das Erkenntnisproblem (1906, 1907, 1920, 1957), his 1920 book on the theory of relativity is entitled Zur Einsteinchen Relativitätstheorie, erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen, and the aim of his 1936 book on quantum mechanics, Determinismus 1 Epistemology Louis Couturat, in the Lexique philosophique, cited by B. Russell (An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry), writes, ÉPISTÉMOLOGIE (English: Epistemology) — This term, which epistemologically signifies “theory of science,” corresponds to the German Erkenntnistheorie or Erkenntnislehre (Theory of Knowledge), and to the French expression Philosophie des sciences. It refers to a fundamental part of philosophy, which is wrongly confused in France either with Psychology or with Logic. It is distinguished from Psychology insofar as it is, like Logic, a normative (Wundt) science, that is, its object is not the empirical laws of thought as it is in fact, a mixture of truth and error, but the ideal laws (rules or norms) to which thought must conform in order to be correct and true. It is distinguished from Logic insofar as the latter studies the formal rules or the directive principles that thought must obey in order for its conclusions to follow and to be internally consistent, whereas Epistemology seeks constitutive principles of thought, which provide it with a starting point and assure it an objective value. Finally, it is distinguished from applied Logic or Methodology insofar as the latter studies the methods proper to the different sciences (axioms, hypotheses, or postulates) which serve as their bases, and discusses their value and origin (empirical or a priori). In sum, Epistemology is the theory of knowledge based on the critical study of knowledge, or, in a word, Critique as Kant defined and founded it. 272 EPISTEMOLOGY a degree of evidential support, and so on. Even proper names do not have the same meaning. Aristotle, Descartes, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas are terms that function as “definite descriptions,” which differ from one language to the next. It is clear that “epistemology” refers to different preoccupations from Erkenntnistheorie, and that it makes sense only within the network of specific concepts associated with it. B. The evolution of “epistemology” How was this difference between two worlds of thought in the philosophy of knowledge established? To understand it, it would be necessary to delve into the history of Englishlanguage philosophy in detail. Here, we will only briefly recapitulate four moments in this history. a. The first, usually considered to be the birth of analytic philosophy, is the revolt of Russell and Moore against the Hegelian idealism that had become fashionable in English philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Russell, a “new philosophy” began with Moore’s article, “The Nature of Judgment,” published in Mind in 1899, in which he rejects both the Kantian problem of the possibility of knowledge and the Hegelian one of the Absolute Spirit. This beginning is more sensational than subtle, but we must grasp its polemical necessity: “With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas” (B. Russell, “My Mental Development,” 12). b. Established from the beginning in opposition to Kantianism and to German idealism, the English tradition of epistemology subsequently acquires its distinctive character with the creation of a new link between empiricism and symbolic logic. Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (“On Denoting,” in Mind [1905]) thus gives a model for the resolution of a philosophical problem by means of logic. Philosophy is thus grouped with mathematics and logic, as a deductive and a priori approach whose function is clarification and analysis— while the natural sciences are seen as the essential route to any new knowledge about the world. The ideas, common to Russell and Wittgenstein, that logical analysis makes it possible to break language up into a collection of atomic propositions and that the structure of propositions and the structure of reality mirror one another, persist throughout all the subsequent developments of epistemology. The hypothesis that there is a logical form hidden in ordinary language continues to divide the two branches of Wittgenstein’s legacy today: the one being that of his Tractatus and the other that of his Philosophical Investigations. c. A third essential moment is that of the appearance of “logical positivism” and “logical empiricism.” The movement of the Vienna Circle, born informally in 1924 and endowed in 1929 with a manifesto entitled “The Scientific World-Conception” (see English translation in The Emergence of Logical Empiricism), takes up the opposition to idealism and metaphysics and amplifies it further, as well as the faith in the power of logic of unambiguous communication; the critique of the traditional concept of the subject as pure and isolated understanding, placed at the first level of language; the transformation of the concept of reality; the displacement of the opposition between Wissen and Glauben; and so on. Here then, on the scientific side, the internal difficulties among the questions peculiar to Erkenntnistheorie come to a head. II. “Epistemology” A. From the problem of objectification to that of “justified belief” Can we translate Erkenntnistheorie by “epistemology”? Erkenntnistheorie, however generally we construe it, remains essentially related to the problem of knowing how a subject turns a phenomenon into an object of knowledge, to a certain relationship between an intuition (that is, to the representation of a phenomenon in space and time) and a concept. No doubt “epistemology”—the term appears in English in 1856 in the works of the Scottish philosopher James F. Ferrier—is still defined in dictionaries today as the study of the sources, nature, and limits of human knowledge. However, it is immediately clarified that the central occupations of epistemology, determined by the Fregean starting point and by the “linguistic turn,” concern logic and formal systems, language and the concept of truth, mind and mental states, and that one of its major projects is to understand what a “justified belief” is (where “belief” refers to the act of holding a statement to be true), as well as a “justified true belief.” Several types of responses are offered to this question and to the questions associated with it (the concept of truth, the notions of truth and demonstration, the theory of valid inference, and so on): there are “normative” responses, “naturalistic” responses, or “skeptical” responses; understanding these responses requires in turn that one master a specific tradition and its vocabulary. The paradoxes are no longer the same: we move from L. Nelson’s argument for the impossibility of the theory of knowledge (Die Unmöglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, 1912; cf. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. P. Bernays et al.) to Gettier’s problems (E. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” 1963). Nor do the divisions occur in the same places: foundationalism unifies classical empiricism and rationalism in the idea that there is a foundational structure comprising fundamental beliefs, by contrast with “coherentism,” which claims that each belief receives its justification from other beliefs. But both are in conflict with naturalized epistemology, which considers that human understanding is a natural entity, interacting with others, and that the results of its scientific study are crucial for the epistemological enterprise. Concepts or topics that are universally known in current English-language literature sometimes provoke no particular reaction in other languages. To take some particularly gross examples: though distinctions such as that between sense and reference or examples like “the present King of France is bald” are now classic, it remains difficult in French to discuss the import of Bayesianism or different interpretations of the notion of probability, or problems related to the underdetermination of theories by experience, the private language argument, the notion of projectible predicates, or the notion of EPISTEMOLOGY 273 III. Conclusion What does the foregoing sketch of a map of words show? That if we allow that the alleged current loss of homogeneity in the vocabulary proper to philosophical discussions of science comes from a precise and datable break in the history of philosophy, then the most plausible hypothesis is one that locates this break at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the divisions made then between German Erkenntnistheorie and English “epistemology.” The term Erkenntnistheorie, regardless of the diversity of its meanings, referred in German philosophical language to an approach whose aim was a determination of acts of objectification— that is, that would allow for an understanding of how the knowing subject transforms given phenomena into objects of knowledge. Opposed to this approach of objectification or constitution inherited from Kant, and providing a common language to the natural sciences up until the 1930s, the utterly different approach of epistemology is defined first by B. Russell and G. E. Moore by a polemical affirmation of “the independence of facts with regard to experience,” and then develops in the direction of the logical analysis of language and the structure of physical theories. The untranslatability between the two traditions is, as it turns out, so large that the epistemology of German scholars between 1850 and 1930 was long suspected of being unintelligible in English-language words of philosophers of science after 1945, or it was simply ignored. This division of the field by Erkenntnistheorie and epistemology is what this article has so far attempted to analyze. It remains to retrace more precisely the development of the numerous differences that have since deepened within languages, especially in French, where epistemology takes on a distinctive character with the introduction of theories of the nature of concepts supported by the history of science and a reflection on the notions of value and power (G. Bachelard, G. Canguilhem, M. Foucault). But it bears repeating that the break between Erkenntnistheorie and epistemology, if it marks a turning point, should not be viewed as the effect of an irreducible divergence between the philosophical thought of the two languages, or between traditions of thought that do not communicate with one another. In the 1930s, the term Erkenntnistheorie ended up referring to such a variety of positions that it could no longer strictly be associated with the Kantian approach in which it originally appeared. Similarly, in the 1970s, the term “epistemology” comes to refer to a variety of positions that are just as distant from Russell’s original claims. The linguistic difference thus clearly expresses only a difference of perspective regarding the problems posed by discourse on science and the philosophy of knowledge since the first third of the twentieth century, under the influence of the crisis in logic, mathematics, and physics. These problems, in turn, are driving the search for very different avenues in philosophy even today, and it is natural that the untranslatability of these conceptual networks is revealed more strongly where the avenues have diverged the most. . Catherine Chevalley and the idea that the function of philosophy is to clarify the meaning of scientific statements and concepts. Associated with an analytic-synthetic distinction that is rejected by W. V. Quine in 1951, the different versions of the criterion of empirical verifiability (verifiability criterion of factual meaningfulness), whose first formulation by M. Schlick simply stated that the meaning of a statement was its means of verification, were tirelessly discussed between 1930 and around 1960—first in the context of the theory of protocol sentences and physicalism, then in that of the different conceptions of “testability,” of confirmation, falsifiability, of the structure of the theories, and of reductionism. d. Finally, a fourth moment that characterizes the tradition of epistemology is that which marks, at the end of the 1960s, the recognition of the failure of logical empiricism and the rather chaotic search for new directions. Leaving to one side the philosophy of mind and its debates about the new materialism, as well as the sociology of science, we may say that in the domain of the philosophy of science, the epistemology of the past twenty years has attempted in several ways to move beyond the opposition between a normative theory of knowledge and a skeptical or historicist conception. It is in this perspective that we must situate the debate over “scientific realism” and its alternatives—“antirealism,” “constructive empiricism,” “fictionalism”—or more technically, over conceptions of physical theories that are, respectively, syntactic, semantic, or structuralist. . C. “Untranslatability” Given all this, is it still possible to translate Erkenntnistheorie by “epistemology,” even though the latter is based on an open opposition to the German tradition of the analysis of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, as well as on a collection of new theses in logic and the philosophy of language? No doubt the term Erkenntnistheorie was sufficiently broad to include numerous alternatives to Kantianism, from Helmoltz’s theory of signs to the positivism of Schlick and the Vienna Circle, as well as to Cassirer’s critique of culture. There is, however, a profound difference between the ways of posing the question of knowledge that respectively characterize Erkenntnistheorie and epistemology: the former beginning with a relationship between intuitions and concepts, and reflections concerning the mode of presentation of phenomena; the latter beginning with the analysis of language and the logical form of theories. This difference does not derive from anything essential to either language, nor to any grammatical characteristic of their structure. Some aspects of epistemology, indeed, were developed thanks to works (those of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap) that are rooted in the German language. We might thus think that the existence of an “untranslatability” is primarily a sign of an evolution within philosophy itself, because of a recognition of the limits of the approaches of Erkenntnistheorie and the search for fundamental reformulations of the problem of knowledge. 274 EPISTEMOLOGY 2 Major trends in contemporary epistemology Just as the term “knowledge” refers both to ordinary knowledge and to scientific knowledge, the word “epistemology”—from the Greek epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη], knowledge—refers to the theory of knowledge understood either in the narrow sense of a theory of scientific knowledge, or in the wider sense of a theory of knowledge without any distinction as to its objects. This latter sense is the more prevalent for the English term “epistemology,” relating to the study of knowledge and the justification of belief, that is, what may be called the “theory of knowledge” and, in French, gnoséologie. In this sense of the term, science is neither the only nor even the primary domain of inquiry for epistemology, since the question of the justification of beliefs and knowledge is also raised in the ordinary case of judgment from perception, memory, or beliefs formed on the basis of testimony from others. Epistemology understood in this sense is not called upon to describe or to evaluate particular systems of argument or proof, but rather to make explicit what, exactly, constitutes justification for true beliefs, such that they achieve the status of knowledge. The concept of justification may itself be understood either as an “internalist” requirement, dealing with the characteristics of the knowing subject and the reasons he or she has for holding a given proposition true, or as an “externalist” demand that there be an appropriate link—causal, or more generally, nomological—between the knowing subject and the known object. There are two ways of approaching epistemological problems: one is “normative” and seeks to clarify the principles that justify the rational acceptance of a belief; the other is “naturalist” and derives the status of a belief from the conditions in which it is acquired. The normative sense of epistemology is subdivided into two trends. “Foundationalism” starts with the empiricist thesis according to which all knowledge derives from experience. In its strongest version, it maintains that all of our beliefs are built up from basic beliefs whose content is immediately given in sensory experience, and that beliefs about these contents of experience are infallible (R. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge). The main objection to foundationalism is that no belief is infallible. By believing that things seem to be thus, the subject is not infallible, since he or she may use the wrong term to qualify the experience. A weaker version of foundationalism posits that certain beliefs have prima facie justification, that is, they may be contradicted by other, subsequently acquired true beliefs (they are “defeasible”). “Coherentism” maintains, for its part, that the system of beliefs is not deployed in an asymmetrical way from basic beliefs obtained through perception up to inferred beliefs, but rather constitutes a coherent totality of mutually explanatory beliefs: no belief is in principle “immune to revision” (K. Lehrer, Knowledge). From the coherentist point of view, justification is a question of degree, which depends on the support given to each belief by the others. The rules of inference, equally, find their justification in the increase in coherence resulting from their adoptions. Fallibilism does not constitute a defect, as it does in foundationalism, but is rather an integral part of the work of revising beliefs in order to achieve greater coherence. Coherentism, unlike foundationalism, considers the acquisition of knowledge to be a social phenomenon: the testimony of others can increase the coherence of a system of beliefs and its degree of justification. These two normative currents were endangered in spectacular fashion by E. Gettier (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?). In a threepage article, the author shows that a true belief may be derived from a proposition that is “justified” but false. Gettier thus shows that the truth of the belief in question, which is justified from the foundationalist and from the coherentist points of view, is a matter of coincidence—and we cannot call such a belief “knowledge.” The normative tradition has responded to Gettier by offering a theory of defeasibility (according to which knowledge is a justified true belief that is not defeasible by other truths). Naturalist epistemology has, for its part, adopted a different strategy, consisting in the search for the properties of a process that leads to the formation of knowledge. We may again discern several meanings covered by the term “naturalist epistemology,” depending on the part played, respectively, by rational evaluation and the pursuit of truth or the description of psychological and social processes of knowledge formation. The naturalist/evaluative trend explores the notion of a “reliable” method of belief acquisition by examining the cognitive properties that allow the subject to deal with information and to reason (A. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition). “Social epistemology” pursues this “reliabilist” approach, while extending the role of social factors in the formation and justification of beliefs. “Evolutionary epistemology” (the term comes from Donald T. Campbell) places epistemic norms in the context of the history of approaches and the choice of theories. Karl Popper, one of the philosophers who reinvigorated this Darwinian-inspired trend, developed all the consequences according to a strictly “falsificationist” point of view, according to which knowledge (scientific or ordinary) consists in hypotheses that have survived competition. The most descriptive sense of naturalist epistemology attaches to the attempt to retrace the stages of development of operational and conceptual capacities at work in knowledge, which inspired the genetic epistemologist Jean Piaget. It is often objected that the neutralization of the critical and reflective dimension of epistemological inquiry forces the term “epistemology” to undergo a semantic mutation that goes beyond what doctrinal flexibility may authorize. Joëlle Proust REFS.: Chisholm, Roderick. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966. Goldmann, Alvin. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. . Knowledge in the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Lehrer, Keith. Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Piaget, Jean, ed. Logique et connaissance scientifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Popper, Karl. Objective Knowledge, an Evolutionary Approach. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979. 3 “Knowledge,” savoir, and epistêmê v. DOXA Though the works of Michel Foucault have received a great deal of attention in Englishspeaking countries, it has largely focused on his questioning of the established order of dominant morality, and only to a lesser degree on the critical aim of his approach to the sciences. The specifically epistemological import of his work has not excited much interest, and remains largely ignored (or a subject EPISTEMOLOGY 275 of irony) by specialists in the history of science. On the continent, on the other hand, and especially in France, it has had lasting influence. No doubt the works of Bachelard and Canguilhem prepared the way: they drew attention to the notion of epistemological rupture, and the latter taught that we should use caution when handling the notions of a precursor or a source, if we wish to avoid the retrospective illusion that consists in retaining from the past only what might foreshadow a future that leads to our present. However, is this only a matter of opposing schools of thought and context? It may also be that what can seem imprecise or even confused in Foucault’s work is accentuated by the necessity of translating it, because of subtle differences in the senses of certain key terms. The first of them is savoir. The most natural and most legitimate term to render it is “knowledge.” But is this an exact equivalent? Knowledge is dominated by the notions of acquaintance and understanding (connaissance). There is, first, a subjective sense: that of which we have experience, of which we are informed, or which we have learned; second, an objective sense: that which is the material of experience, information, or learning. In both cases, it is a matter of positive cognition, whether empirical, factual, theoretical, or scientific. There are various meanings for savoir. However, where English uses a single term, to know, French has two, savoir and connaître, which are not always interchangeable. To say that one knows Pierre, connaît may be used, sait may not (except in a nuanced way of indicating that one knows which Pierre is “ours”). On the other hand, to say that we know Pierre has arrived, sait is used, not connaît. From this difference, there arise semantic distinctions that are difficult to translate. Savoir indicates a more performative state than connaître, which implies the intellectual grasping of an objective given. To knowsavoir a language is to be able to understand it, to speak it, to read it, and write it a little; to know-connaître a language is to have a grasp of its vocabulary and grammar such as may lead to an inspired vision of it—it is to have a more or less reflective consciousness of what it is. It is not for nothing that we translate know-how by savoir-faire and not by connaissance du comment. Savoir relates to a technical and cultural domain that one has mastered; connaissance relates to reasons one has to think that one’s beliefs are true. The distinction is present starting with classical French: “And anyway, as for bad doctrines, I considered myself already to know [connaître] well enough what they were worth, so that I would no longer be deceived, not by the promises of an alchemist, nor by the predictions of an astrologer, nor by the magician’s fraud, nor by the artifices or puffery of any of those who claim to know [savoir] more than they know [plus qu’ils savent]” (R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode). It is not a recent development that savoir refers to a cultural achievement conferring prestige and power on its possessor, which may or may not derive from objective understanding (connaissance). Foucault deepened this distinction between savoir and connaissance by contrasting the depersonalized anonymity of knowledge-savoir in which one moves after having found it already built up (it is a historical a priori that we all appropriate for ourselves) with the subject of knowledge-connaissance in classical theories (empiricism, critical philosophy, and so on), going by degrees from perceptual awareness to conceptualization and science. Rather than running along the consciousness-knowledge (connaissance)-science axis (which cannot be freed from the index of subjectivity), archaeology runs along the practical axis of discourseknowledge (savoir)-science. And, while the history of ideas finds the equilibrium of its analysis in the element of knowledge-connaissance (finding itself thus forced, even against its will, to meet with transcendental interrogation), archaeology finds its equilibrium point in knowledge-savoir—that is, in a domain where the subject is necessarily situated and dependent, without ever being able to be the owner (either through transcendental activity, or empirical consciousness). (M. Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir; trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, Archeology of Knowledge) Of course, Foucault includes under knowledge-savoir everything left unsaid concerning the order in which things are classified in a given culture, changes that lead to decisive transformations. What we would like to uncover is the epistemological field, the epistêmê where understandings (connaissances), seen outside of any criteria referring to their rational value or their objective forms, bury their positivity and thus manifest a history which is not that of their increasing perfection but rather that of their conditions of possibility. Rather than a history in the traditional sense of the word, it is an “archaeology.” (Ibid.) However, the choice of the term epistêmê to refer to an epistemological field that makes knowledge of a certain type possible, to the exclusion of others (the analysis of wealth and not political economy, natural history and not biology, and so forth) was an unhappy one: in Greek, epistêmê usually refers to knowledge and science, whereas the term here refers, by contrast, to the historical a priori without which they cannot be built up. Besides, as Foucault indicated himself (L’Archéologie du savoir, 27), “the absence of methodological markers may have created the belief in analyses in terms of cultural totalities,” further blurring the initial intention. Foucault’s analysis of knowledge-savoir remains, in addition, nourished by the continental conception of philosophy and the theory of knowledge. No doubt he repeats often enough his rejection of anything that might recall the primacy of the subject, and in his critique of a history of ideas he places the transcendental point of view of an underlying subject on the same level as the empiricist point of view of a genesis of the known entity from a sensation that is supposedly its origin. But this double rejection in fact masks a false symmetry. For, with the notion of an a priori, he takes up in terms of cultural historicity what was dealt with in the Kantian tradition in terms of human nature, and thus goes further than Kant in affirming the idea of a preconstituted rationality that organizes experience, in opposition to the Lockean tabula rasa. A given epistemological field, even if it characterizes a culture and is transitory, even if it is a question of things left implicit that must be discerned by the analysis of the archaeologist, is the directing element of interpretation of the data for the people of that time, and what determines the distribution and the norms of their statements. This presence of a tertium quid between the said and the perceived puts Foucault at the furthest remove from logical positivism and analytic philosophy. Thus, between Foucault’s savoir and the term “knowledge,” there is a deep divide, for reasons that are both semantic and philosophical, which may have produced reactions of incomprehension and rejection—especially in the domain of epistemology, where his contribution remains largely unknown in English-speaking countries. Gérard Simon REFS.: Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. Vol. 6, Part I. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1973. First published 1637. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris : Gallimard, 1966. English translation: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science. Reprint. London: Routledge, 2002. . L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Translation by A. M. Sheridan Smith: Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. 276 EPOCHÊ refers to the stopping of all search for truth, which corresponds to a decisive step in attaining happiness. In effect, the Pyrrhonist finds himself initially destabilized by the variety of philosophical systems, which contradict one another. Trying in vain to discover which one is true, he resolves to cease (epeschen [ἐπέσχεν]) looking—makes a stop (epochê)—and in doing so discovers ataraxia, the peace of the soul (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism, I: 49): “Suspension of judgment gets its name from the fact that the intellect is suspended (epechesthai [ἐπέχεσθαι]).” In its Skeptical meaning epechein [ἐπέχειν] is used in the intransitive sense of “to stop” or “to cease,” but it may also be used in the transitive sense of “to stop judging” or “to withhold one’s judgment.” It is this transitive sense that is later taken up by the Stoic academician Archesilas: “I suspend my judgment” here means “I abandon any claim to truth” or again, “I consent to not knowing as long as I do not have complete certainty.” In effect, in the Stoic doctrine as Cicero presents it (Academica priora, II: 59; Letters to Atticus, XIII: 21), the freedom of the sage comes from his capacity not to make rushed (propetôs [πϱοπετῶς]) judgments, that is, to restrain himself from giving his assent (assensus) as long as he is not entirely certain of his possession of the truth. B. Assent and suspension: The later Pyrrhonism In Sextus Empiricus (Hossenfelder, Einleitung, 54ff.), we find the two semantic inflections of epochê mixed together. There is the initial Skeptical sense, that is, the stopping of all search for truth because of the contradictions among different philosophical systems, and the later Stoic sense, that is, the ethical requirement not to affirm anything, not to assent to anything as long as absolute certainty concerning truth is not established, which can, in fact, lead to the same result: suspension extended to all judgment. Such is the syncretic position of the late Pyrrhonist Aenesidemus, who combines Stoic suspension of judgment with the skeptical arrest in the face of contradiction among different positions, while at the same time eliminating the ethical dimension peculiar to Stoicism. By doing so, he comes very close to the initial Skeptical position (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism). II. From Antiquity to the Present Day: Montaigne Their sacramental word is epechô, that is, I stay still, I do not move. That is their refrain, and others of similar substance. Their effect is that of a pure, complete, and perfect surcease and suspension of judgment. (Montaigne, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” Essais, Bk. 2, chap. 12, ed. Strowski, 2: 229–30) The “epechists,” as he calls them, are characterized by their immobilism (“I do not move”), and consequently by the fact that they abstain from making any judgment whatsoever (“a perfect surcease”). In this sense Montaigne inherits immobilism from Skepticism, and from the Stoics the suspension of judgment made in full freedom. In any case he paraphrases epechô, rather than translating it. REFS.: Bohr, Niels. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: Wiley, 1958. Cassirer, Ernst. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1906–7. Translation by W. H. Woglom and C. W. Hendel: The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950. Chevalley, Catherine. “Hermann von Helmholtz.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward Craig. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1998. Diemer, Alwin, and Carl Friedrich Gethmann. “Erkenntnistheorie, Erkenntnislehre, Erkenntniskritik.” Vol. 2 of Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by J. Ritter. Basel: Schwabe, 1972. Fichant, Michel. “L’épistémologie en France.” Pp. 135–78 in Histoire de la philosophie. Le XXème siècle, edited by F. Châtelet. Paris: Hachette, 1973. Gettier, Edmund. “Is Justified Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121–23. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2001. Köhnke, Klaus. Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: The Rise of Neo-Kantianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Krug, W. T. Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1832. First published in 1827. Nelson, Leonard. Die Unmöglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie. In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by P. Bernays et al. Hamburg: Meiner, 1970–77. Die Unmöglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie first published in 1911. Orth, Ernst Wolfgang. Von der Erkenntnistheorie zur Kulturphilosophie. Würzburg, Ger.: Königshauen und Neumann, 1996. Papineau, David, ed. The Philosophy of Science. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Russell, B. Russell, Bertrand. An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. London: Routledge, 1996. . “My Mental Development.” In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by P. A. Schilpp. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1944. Sarkar, Sahotra, ed. The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: From 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Schlick, Moritz. General Theory of Knowledge. Translated by Albert E. Blumberg. Peru, IL: Open Court Books, 1985. First published in Germany in 1918. Suppe, Frederick, ed. Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Theories. Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1977. First published in 1973. Van Fraassen, Bas C. Laws and Symmetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. EPOCHÊ [ἐποχή] (GREEK) ENGLISH epochê FRENCH epokhê GERMAN epochè v. CONSCIOUSNESS and BELIEF, EPISTEMOLOGY, ERLEBEN, GREEK, OBJECT, PERCEPTION, PHANTASIA, PHÉNOMÈNE, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH This Greek term, which originates in ancient skepticism and is taken up with slight modifications by Stoicism, literally means “stop, interruption, rupture” and has endured through the centuries in its original linguistic form. It is used frequently by Montaigne as early as the sixteenth century but especially by Husserl in the twentieth, without either substituting a standard French or German term. The question is thus: why choose this Greek term? Why was it preserved in its initial form, without ever being translated? I. The Two Greek Sources for Epochê: A Double Inflexion A. From Skeptical suspension to Stoic assent Epochê [ἐποχή] is a central term for ancient Skepticism. Introduced into philosophy by the Pyrrhonian school, it EREIGNIS 277 activity of a subject put to the test of a decision that has matured over a long period of time: that of not assenting until the evidence of truth is truly undeniable. Natalie Depraz REFS.: Claesges, Ulrich. “Epochè.” In J. Ritter and K. Gründer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 595–96. Vol. 2, Basel, Switz.: Schwabe, 1972; Vol. 4, Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976. Couissin, Paul. “L’origine et l’évolution de l’épochè.” Revue des Études Grecques 42 (1929): 373–97. Hossenfelder, Malte. Einleintung zu Sextus Empiricus, Grundriß der pyrrhonischen Skepsis. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1968. . “Epochè.” In J. Ritter and K. Gründer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 594–95. Vol. 2, Basel, Switz.: Schwabe, 1972; Vol. 4, Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976. Husserl, Edmund. Husserliana, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1950–1968. Lowit, Alexandre. “L’épochè de Husserl et le doute de Descartes.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (1957): 2–17. March, J. L. “Dialectical Phenomenology: From Suspension to Suspicion.” Man and World 17, no. 2 (1984): 121–42. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Translation by C. Smith: Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. Migniosi. “Reawakening and Resistance: The Stoic Source of Husserlian Épochè.” Analect Husserliana 11 (1981): 311–19. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Essais 2, edited by Fortunat Strowski. Bordeaux, Fr.: F. Pech, 1906. Translation by J. M. Cohen: Essays 2. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Skepticism. Translated by J. Annas and J. Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Ströker, Elizabeth. Das Problem der Epochè in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1970. III. The Central Methodological Role of Epochê in Husserl’s Phenomenology: What Legacy, What Continuity? The importance accorded by Husserl to epochê in its ancient Greek origin may be seen through his abundant use of the Greek term, accompanied, depending on context, by “phenomenological,” “transcendental,” or even “ethical” adjectives (no fewer than thirty occurrences in the Lectures of 1923–1924 of First Philosophy alone): a recent work is devoted to the Skeptical theme of suspension in phenomenology, including its meaning of suspicion (March). Further, the fortythird lesson, which contains the first occurrence of epochê in the lectures, analyzes the activity of the spectator who abstains from acting and from manifesting an interest in the objects of the world, who thereby suspends all belief in the world. However, the Stoic origin of phenomenological epochê is equally attested (Migniosi); finally, it has been clearly shown how Husserl both based his model directly on the Cartesian method of doubt as a source and radically modified its import without, nevertheless, returning to Skeptical epochê (Lowit). Phenomenological epochê is a complex act that retains characteristics at least of its three sources, while also freeing itself from them in order to present its own originality. This is probably one of the reasons for which Husserl retains the Greek term. A. Ausschaltung: Placing the object’s existence out of bounds Husserl retains from Skeptical epochê the move of halting, interrupting the flow of our natural attitude by an act that removes our contradictory beliefs and prejudices from the field (March), what Merleau-Ponty calls in the Phenomenology of Perception the “faith of the world” (371). It is, in fact, a question of placing objects out of bounds, of excluding them, with respect to the validity of their contingent existence. However, though Skeptical epochê throws radical doubt on the truth of any given object, phenomenological epochê consists simply in abstaining from positing the existence of the object. B. In Klammer Setzung: Bracketing the character of being of the object What remains is only the object’s meaning for me. There is also a methodical dimension that comes back to Cartesian doubt; the latter, however, is provisional (I doubt in order to leave doubt behind), whereas phenomenological epochê, like skeptical epochê, is definitive: the suspension is an attitude that I adopt in a lasting way (Lowit). Though it involves putting aside the contingent existence of the object, this is in order to better include the sense of its being for me. The object is literally bracketed insofar as it is for me an appearance in flesh and bone. C. Beschränkung, not Einschränkung: Liberation, not delimitation, of the immanent sphere of pure consciousness Such is the deep meaning of epochê: the liberation of a pure field of consciousness whose objects are invested with meaning and are not realities that remain external to it. Such a liberation with regard to objectivism allows the ethical import of epochê to shine through, which takes place, in fact, in complete freedom. This is a feature that recalls the early Stoic meaning (Migniosi), which presupposes the reflective EREIGNIS (GERMAN) ENGLISH event, appropriation, surprise FRENCH événement, appropriation, appropriement, sidération, amêmement v. APPROPRIATION, EVENT, and DESTINY, ES GIBT, OIKEIÔSIS, PROPERTY, TRUTH, VORHANDEN Ereignis, the key word in Heidegger’s thought from 1936 onward, is an equivocal term, which makes it difficult to translate into other languages. “Event,” the standard sense of Ereignis, does not capture the other dimensions that Heidegger associates with the word, those of an appropriation (Ereignung) and of a demonstration (Eräugnis, from das Auge [“eye”]). It is a case in which the standard sense of a word hides the depth of its philosophical import. I. Semantic Arc: To Display, to Show, to Show Oneself, to Occur “Ereignis since 1936, the leading term of my thought”: this comment by Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, 1976) raises questions concerning the meaning of this Leitwort (leading term) from the middle of the 1930s, with the Beiträge zur Philosophie of 1936–1938 (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65), which were published only in 1989. The subtitle, Vom Ereignis, in fact, announces “the real title of the ‘work,’ which only finds its start here.” Ereignis is not the object of the Beiträge at all but rather the origin (von). Heidegger is not 278 EREIGNIS But what pertains to us is not necessarily what we are looking at. It is not even rare that we lack a view of what pertains to us properly speaking. It is not a chance happening nor a regrettable failure, but a structure, and Heidegger’s thought reserves the term Ereignis for that structure. What pertains to us is never reducible to what we look at, but inversely, we would be unable to look at anything if there were not something that pertained to us which we were not looking at. (David, “Heidegger,” 104–5) The thought about Ereignis takes us back to the foundation of modern philosophy, considered as a “metaphysics of subjectivity.” In this sense it consists in “restoring to being what makes it into something other than an object. That which makes it the case that water is not a simple liquid, for example, or light a simple lighting; that nothing, in a word, is trapped in functionality. The manifestation of the independence and of the gratuitousness of everything which is—that is precisely what Heidegger successively called being and later event (Crétella, Heidegger Studies, 9:70). As for translation, however, the event-related or eventual dimension that comes into the foreground in the standard sense of Ereignis in German does not authorize us to translate it in Heidegger by “event,” rather the contrary. We would have to be able to indicate both the appropriating (Er-eignung) and the ostensive (Eräugnis) dimensions at the same time. We should note, finally, that if the leading term of Ereignis becomes such from the middle of the 1930s in Heidegger’s thought, this coincides with that thought’s becoming open to poetry, in an elective relationship with Hölderlin’s poetry, whose Mnémosyne made emphatic use of Ereignis and sich ereignen. The difficulty of the thinking concerning Ereignis comes no doubt in part from the fact that it resists any thoughts about causality, even divine causality, as is emphasized by a passage from Heidegger’s On the Way to Language: What Appropriation [Ereignis] yields through Saying is never the effect of a cause, nor the consequences of an antecedent. What is yielding is Appropriation itself— and nothing else [Das Ereignende ist das Ereignis selbst—und nichts außerdem]. There is nothing else from which the Appropriation itself could be derived, even less in whose terms it could be explained. The appropriating event is not the outcome (result [Ergebnis]) of something else, but the giving yield [die Er-gebnis], whose giving reach alone is what gives us such things as an “es gibt.” Reflection from and of Ereignis, which must not be confused with reflection that has Ereignis as its object, tilts toward the dimension of the Es gibt, “there is,” as irreducible to a disguised form of exchange and even to a gesture whose initiative comes only from the human being. The resistance of the term to translation does not come from complexity but rather from a strange simplicity, from its singular equivocity. As Heidegger says in Identity and Difference, “As such, it is just as untranslatable as the Greek Logos or the Chinese Tao.” Pascal David using the term here in its standard sense of “event” (Ger. Begebenheit, Vorkommnis, or Geschehnis, “that which has happened,” “what took place”) but rather in terms of eigen, “one’s own,” or even Er-äug-nis, “what is placed before one’s eyes.” “Er-eignis (as long as we understand eignis from eigen: what is one’s own, proper to one) means the movement that leads to being properly one-self” (Fédier, Regarder voir). In this sense Ereignis means an “appropriation,” which presupposes the contrary possibility of a dis-appropriation (Ent-eignis). This term retrospectively clarifies the pair Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit, laid out in paragraph 9 of Sein und Zeit: “propriety/impropriety,” rather than “authenticity/inauthenticity,” since Heidegger has already distinguished an unechte Eigentlichkeit (inauthentic proper-being) and an echte Uneigentlichkeit (improperly being in an authentic way) (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21, 1976). The Eigentlichkeit of 1927 is itself not possible except through Er-eignis (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66, 1997), in “the captious figure, in fact already ap-propiated [er-eignete] from ‘fundamental ontology’ ” (ibid.). Nevertheless, as Wolfgang Brokmeier emphasized, Ereignis recalls, even more properly speaking, Eräugnis, from the verb eräugen, which the Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Grimm brothers paraphrases using vor Augen stellen (to place before the eyes) or in Latin ostendere, manifestare. The matrix of the meaning is indeed the verb äugen, which also used to be written eugen or eigen. There are thus two homonyms whose meaning must not be confused: one is (like the English own) the indication of what is proper to one, whereas the other indicates the fact of placing something before one’s eyes. To use Ereignis in a sense faithful to its etymology requires above all retaining the ostensive aspect that is manifested in it. (Fédier, Regarder voir, 116) Though the translation of this leading term of Heidegger’s late thought seems certainly to be thoroughly insufficient, the one that is most commonly offered in its place, “appropriation,” which emphasizes the root eigen, proper, is just as insufficient. (Romano, L’événement et le monde) Ereignis (event, appropriation—Kahn: “propriation”) comes from eräugen—thus, Auge [“eye”]—to look at fixedly, “to astonish [sidérer],” and from eigen: “properly.” That which is grasped by Ereignis is not alienated but transformed into what it has most properly. Ereignis is thus event, arrival, “appropriating astonishment [sidération], the fact of being looked at, concerned by, deeply touched. It is the permanence of a look. Cf. in Greek: Mοῖϱα [Moira]. (Beaufret, Leçons de Philosophie, 1:27) II. Import of the Term Ereignis pertains to us and takes hold of us before we can exercise or influence anything at all, just like that which constitutes “in a way the photographic negative” (Gesamtausgabe, 15: 366, 1986) of the essence of modern technique, interpreted by Heidegger as Ge-stell. ERLEBEN 279 (marquante), whereas German makes immediate reference to a cognitive, though elementary, process (etwas erfahren: to learn something, even by hearsay). In fact, in all these contexts, an intimate experience whose meaning escapes us is privileged (RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 12, “Leben”). Having a given of this sort within us pushes us beyond ourselves. We thus live every day without reflecting upon what is lived or appreciating the intertwining of these individual experiences with the social and political context, which is always present, if sometimes unperceived. Only toward the middle of the nineteenth century did Erlebnis acquire conceptual significance and find itself bound up with the fundamental notions of the theory of knowledge. In this respect, Fichte is the precursor, who noted the implicit transitional moment where the subject forgets himself in a state of unreflective fullness, by the conjunctive expression leben und erleben (Sonnenklarer Berich). The first, remarkably precocious, definition of Erlebnis is found in the third edition of Krug’s Enzyklopädisches Lexikon of 1838: “Erlebnis means everything one has oneself lived [erlebt]: felt, seen, thought, wanted, done, or allowed to happen. Such experiences are by consequence the foundation of internal experience [eigene Erfahrung].” Following him, Lotze tends to use Erlebnis in his 1841 work Metaphysik as a synonym for “interiority,” whereas Dilthey, in the framework of a veritable “theory of Erlebnis” makes it equivalent to “psychic” (Einleitung). Phenomenology makes this psychic and internal life its central theme: Erlebnis is understood as a subjective immanent experience that nevertheless, in order to be known and thus communicated, must be linked to the world through the axis of intentionality, which gives sense and reference to objects. An Erlebnis without intentional reference cannot be treated as an object, that is, it cannot be known. Nor is Erleben an isolated experience of the subject, but rather is part of the intentional and temporal dynamics of consciousness, which links one Erlebnis to the next. . Under the subsidiary expressions of “natural attitude,” of “flux of experiences” (Erlebnisstrom [Husserl]; cf. RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, “Erlebnisstrom”), of “perceptual faith,” of Merleau-Ponty’s “recomprehension” (Le visible et l’invisible), and of Husserlian Erlebnis, phenomenologists attempted to capture this highly peculiar quality of our presence in the world as subjects. We are, in effect, living beings who are always behind in our capacity to make what we live from day to day explicit. II. The Reflexive Mediation of Erleben However, to live is only the simple fact of living for a living thing without self-consciousness, that is, reflexivity. In this respect, German has a term that captures this pure life without selfconsciousness: dahinleben, which is judiciously translated into French as végéter. Though plants are living things without selfconsciousness, we cannot say the same for animals, which do indeed have an immanent consciousness of themselves that is visible in the way they displace themselves and nourish themselves and in the different forms of social life they manifest. Phenomenology gave itself the task of describing this folding-over that life does upon itself, in which I consciously REFS.: Beaufret, Jean. Leçons de Philosophie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Brokmeier, Wolfgang. “Heidegger und wir.” Genos (Lausanne, 1992): 61–95. Crétella, H. Heidegger Studies 9:63–75. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1993. David, Pascal. “Heidegger, la vérité en question.” In La Vérité, edited by R. Quilliot. Paris: Ellipses, 1997. Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Fédier, François. Regarder voir. Paris: Les Belles Lettres-Archimbaud, 1995. Guignon, Charles B., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie; vom Ereignis. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989. . Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976–2011. . Unterwegs zur Sprache. Translation by P. Hertz: On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Padrutt, Hanspeter. Und sie bewegt sich doch nicht. Zurich: Diogenes, 1991. Romano, Claude. L’événement et le monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Translation by S. Mackinley: Event and World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. ERLEBEN / ERLEBNIS (GERMAN) ENGLISH to live, to experience, lived experience FRENCH vivre, faire l’experience, faire l’épreuve, le vécu GREEK biônai [βιῶναι], zôê [ζωή], bios [βίος] SPANISH vivir, experimentar, vivencia v. EXPERIENCE, LIFE/LEBEN, and ANIMAL, CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, EPOCHÊ, INTENTION, LEIB, PATHOS, POLIS Does life reside in the simple fact of living? Is it natural life as given and nothing more, an experience of the immediate? How did the various languages fashion this simple and self-blind fact of living? They attempted to grasp its modes of deployment, whether in communities (as inscribed in the Greek polis [πολις] or the practical sociability of the Lebenswelt) or as individuals (its reflexive interiorization or its “meaning for me,” which the terms “experience” and “existence” also state in their own ways). From Leben to Erleben and Erfahrung, from life to experience, from zôê [ζωή] to bios [βίος], such a mediation can be seen. Romance languages, which have only one word for life (e.g., vie), seem to have folded an excess of life into itself, which seems constitutive of it by means of the term “experience.” Does the latter suffice to cover this spectrum? I. The First Sense of Erleben: A Manifestation of the Given In both its current meaning as well as its classical definitions, whether in the scholarly philosophy of the eighteenth century—in romantic thought or in German idealism (from Kant to Hegel)—or in nineteenth-century psychology, erleben is practically indistinct from leben, “to live.” Erleben is characterized by immediacy, immanence, and passivity, which equally define the simple fact of living, as opposed to the abstract meditation represented by reflection and speculation (RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie). This is the case of the proverb: wir werden es ja erleben (lit., we shall live to see it). More often, nevertheless, the word is translated into French by appealing to the paradigm of experience rather than to that of life. Thus, ich habe etwas erlebt becomes, in addition to j’ai vécu ceci ou cela, j’ai fait telle experience, j’ai connu tel évenement. Similarly, das war ein Erlebnis: c’était une expérience 280 ERLEBEN precisely in Greek with the distinct usage of the terms zôê [ζωή] and bios [βίος]. . In this respect, the Husserlian “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) lies in between the two forms of community distinguished by Aristotle. It is both a natural world of living beings—perceptible, immanent, and practical, situated in close proximity to the natural, prereflective attitude—and also a social, lived world, already penetrated with the common reflexivity proper to the intersubjective experience of the collective being. The Crisis of European Sciences brings out this ambivalence in section 38, which the translation “lifeworld” awkwardly renders, refusing to choose between the world of the living and that of experience (Biemel, “Réflexions”). The world of life is this social a priori, the correlative of the a priori of transcendental subjectivity, which aims to hold together the immanent possibility of a self-organization in the natural world of living beings and its irreducibility to the lived social consciousness that emanates from it. In this respect, the most antireductionist contemporary cognitive approach uses the term “emergence,” and, more specifically, the expression couplage structurel autopoiétique between consciousness and the world (Varela, Principles) to refer to that dynamic of collective life. Natalie Depraz REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Biemel, Walter. “Réflexions à propos des recherches husserliennes de la Lebenswelt.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 33, no. 4 (1971): 659–83. Depraz, Nathalie. “La vie m’est-elle donnée?” Etudes Philosophiques 4 (1991): 359–73. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1914–. First published in 1883. Translation by R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Wilhem Dilthey: Selected Works, vol. 1, edited by R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publikum über das eigentliche wesen der neuesten Philosophie. In Fichtes Werke, vol. 3, edited by perceive myself living a given moment of my life. Thus the German term Erlebnis, in addition, expresses a state rather than an action. Its translation by the past participle vécu captures this moment of arrest, practically in the past, in which I perceive that “I have lived.” There is discontinuity between the blind push of life, which generates itself, emerges from itself, and the consciousness we have of it (Henry, C’est moi; Varela, Principles) in a temporality of the moment after, however immediate. Reflexivity (in its dynamic in statu nascendi) is constitutive of the apprehension of life, as is the case for Lipps with the notion of natural epoch (Psychologie des Schönen). For Husserl, who takes up this notion of immanent life from Lipps (Erleben/Ausleben), life appears constantly in his writing, whether it is to characterize consciousness (Bewußtseinsleben), its experiences (Erlebnisse) modalized as “transcendental,” constituting and phenomenologizing life (Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation), or to refer to the world as the world of life (Lebenswelt), weaving together the universal correlation of consciousness and the world (Depraz, “La vie”). If we stay for a moment with the mediation of reflexive consciousness, experience refers to this very intimate quality that consciousness has at the moment it perceives itself in the past. It is thus the upwelling of reflexivity itself from the unreflected given, the reflecting activity that is in play with Erlebnis. In this regard, one may also speak of Erfahrungsleben (life as experience), as if to separate (the prefix “ex”) life that is immanent through experience from its explicit rendering: in phenomenology, “living” is interiorized straightaway, even reflexive. Beside, to speak of a “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung) to refer to “natural life” is the indication of a phenomenological life that already contains, in virtue of the position occupied by the observing self, a reflexive distance with respect to itself. III. The Social Mediation of Erleben: From the Greek Polis to Husserlian Lebenswelt Erleben’s reflexive distance in its phenomenological sense with regard to immediate and natural life is captured 1 The Spanish translation of erleben by vivencia It was started by Ortega y Gasset. Translating the first volume of the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, he renders Erlebnis by vivencia, thus choosing an immanentist interpretation of experience, as opposed to a reflexive one. In this regard, if we were translating vivencia back into French, we would do so by way of vivacité rather than vécu (experience). Javier San Martin, an active Spanish phenomenologist, perpetuates this choice of translation in La estructura del metodo fenomenologico. Jorge Semprun, a contemporary writer, has the following judicious note regarding the different translations of Erlebnis in French and Spanish (L’écriture ou la vie): In German, there is Erlebnis. In Spanish, vivencia. However, there is no French word to grasp at one blow the notion of life as experience itself. They must resort to periphrasis, or use the word “vécu,” which is approximative. And disputable. It is a weak and soft word. First and foremost, it is passive. And in the past tense. The experience of life, however, which life has by itself, of itself while living, is active. And in the present, necessarily. This is to say that it is nourished by the past in order to project itself into the future. In sum, Spanish grasped what French missed in Erlebnis, namely, pure living, whereas French, when translating the German, stops with a simple nonprocessive vécu. REFS.: Ortega y Gasset, José. Investigaciones psicologicas. Madrid: Revista de Occidente en Alianza Editorial, 1979. Translation by J. GarciaGomez: Psychological Investigations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. San Martin, Javier. La estructura del metodo fenomenologico. Madrid: Universidad de Educacion a Distancia, 1986. Semprun, Jorge. L’écriture ou la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Translation by L. Coverdale: Literature or Life. New York: Viking, 1997. ERSCHEINUNG 281 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott. Encyklopädisches Lexikon in Bezug auf die neueste Literatur und Geschichte der Philosophie. 2nd ed. 6 vol. Leipzig: Brockaus, 1970. First published in 1838. Lipps, Theodor. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. Vol. 1 of Grundzüge der Ästhetik. Hamburg: Voss, 1903. Lotze, Hermann. Metaphysik. Edited by G. Misch. Leipzig: Meiner, 1912. First published in 1841. Translation by B. Bosanquet: Metaphysic, in Three Books, Ontology, Cosmology, and Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. La nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Translation by R. Vallier: Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. . Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Translation by A. Lingis: The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by C. Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Varela, Francisco. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. With E. Thompson and E. Rosch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. . Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: North Holland, 1979. Fritz Medicus. Leipzig: Fritz Eckardt, 1911–12. First published in 1801.Translation by John Botterman and William Rasch: A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand. In Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling: Philosophy of German Idealism, edited by Ernst Behler, 39–118. New York: Continuum, 1987. Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Translated by R. Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Henry, Michel. C’est moi, la vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Translation by S. Emmanuel: I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. . Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Macmillan, 1931. 2 G. Agamben: The pertinent distinction between zôê and bios v. AIÔN, OIKONOMIA Like Leben, zôê captures the simple fact of living and characterizes living beings— animals, men, or gods—at the biological level. Bios further indicates a mode or a kind of qualified life: bios theorêtikos [βίος θεωϱητιϰός] (contemplative life), bios apolaustikos [βίος ἀπολαυστιϰός] (life of pleasure), bios politikos [βίος πολιτιϰός] (political life). These are attitudes or behaviors that when confronted with life place it straightaway in an ethical or social framework (Plato, Philebus; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics). The dividing line is thus drawn between natural, biological life (zôê) and the life of the polis [πόλις] (bios) to the point where the former is confined to the private life of the family and reproduction (oikos [οἶϰος]) and is excluded from the polis (Aristotle, Politics, 1252a26–35). Even if natural life is a good in itself (ibid., 1278b23–31), and even if God is apprehended as being the bearer of a zôê aristê kai aidios [ζωὴ ἀϱίστη ϰαὶ ἀίδιος] (a most noble and eternal life; Metaphysics, 12.1072b28), political life nevertheless does not refer to an attribute of the living being but rather to a specific difference of the genus zôion. Further, although Aristotle refers to the political man as a politikon zôion [πολιτιϰὸν ζῷον] (Politics, 1253a4), one may equally maintain that this is due to the fact that the use of the verb bionai in Attic prose is practically nonexistent. There is thus a discontinuity between the natural community of living beings, whose primary figure is that of the family, and the political community, which introduces a specific kind of life that includes language and the awareness of justice and injustice. REFS.: Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ERSCHEINUNG / SCHEIN / PHÄNOMEN / MANIFESTATION / OFFENBARUNG (GERMAN) ENGLISH appearance / illusion / phenomenon / manifestation / revelation FRENCH phénomène, apparition, apparence / apparence, illusion, simulacra / phénomène / manifestation / révélation v. APPEARANCE, DOXA, EPOCHÊ, ERLEBEN, GERMAN, IMAGE, INTENTION, OBJECT, PERCEPTION, PHÉNOMÈNE, REALITY, THING, TRUTH The vocabulary of phenomenality is distributed in German over several linguistic registers: alongside terms of Germanic origin based on the verb scheinen (to shine, to appear, to seem) and on the adjective offenbar (manifest, clear, obvious)—terms such as Erscheinung (phenomenon, appearance) and Offenbarung (revelation)— we find terms from foreign languages that constitute the technical vocabulary of modern philosophy, such as Phänomen, borrowed from the Greek, or Manifestation, taken from Latin. It is Kant who, with his rigid distinction between Erscheinung and Phänomen on one hand and Schein on the other, gives “phenomenon” its modern definition, whereas Lambert, who was probably the first to use the term “phenomenology,” continues to operate under the traditional distinction between truth and appearance. In Hegel, the vocabulary of manifestation appears alongside the Kantian distinction between Schein and Erscheinung, which he renews; and Schelling, following Fichte, gives the concept of Offenbarung (revelation) its fullest range. However, it is in the framework of phenomenology that the concepts of Phänomen, Erscheinung, and Schein, in a new distribution, will return to the center of philosophical debate with Husserl, who emphasizes their “equivocations” and Heidegger, who assigns 282 ERSCHEINUNG “Phenomenology as a Doctrine of Appearance (Schein).” In his letter to Lambert on 2 September 1770, Kant takes up this terminology and seems at this time to wish to consider the science of the perceptible only as a simple propaedeutic to metaphysics: A quite special, though purely negative science, general phenomenology (phaenomologia [sic] generalis), seems to me to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as has heretofore almost always happened. (Kant, Correspondence, 108) At this time, Kant, like Lambert, is still working with the traditional distinction between being and appearing, the intelligible and the perceptible: “It is clear, therefore, that representations of things as they appear are sensitively thought, while intellectual concepts are representations of things as they are” (Kant, Dissertation of 1770, § 4, p. 54). Later, the Critique of Pure Reason offers the “transcendental aesthetic” as an elucidation of Erscheinung, in opposition to Lambertian “phenomenology.” What Kant refers to with the term is defined as the “undetermined object of an empirical intuition.” This definition presupposes that we distinguish between its matter and form: “I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 34, 155–56). This form, which structures perception, cannot be given a posteriori as the matter is and must therefore be found in the mind a priori. With the distinction between matter and form, Kant thus showed that “appearances” are characterized by an intrinsic order. However, they may be further subordinate to a superior order, which is that of the understanding and which alone distinguishes the objectivity of genuine phenomena: Appearances, to the extent that as objects they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories, are called phaenomena. (Erscheinungen, sofern sie als Gegenstände nach der Einheit der Kategorien gedacht werden, heissen Phänomena.) (Ibid., A 249) A new distinction is drawn here between Erscheinung and Phänomen, with the Fremdwort being given a special nuance. It is by moving from apparitions to phenomena that Kant is able to break out of the traditional division between truth and appearance. We can only know what appears to us, of course, but our knowledge is not exclusively drawn from the appearances themselves, since it deploys the a priori forms of our understanding, which, though they can only apply to appearances, nonetheless do not originate in them but rather in the human mind. The “apparition” (Erscheinung) is therefore not a simple, fallacious “appearance” (Schein) and must be considered as something real and objective, even though we must distinguish between the object as Erscheinung and the object in himself the task in 1927 of providing a fundamental clarification of their meaning. I. Schein and Erscheinung: The Kantian Distinction between Phenomenon and Appearance The work written in Latin and known as the Dissertation of 1770 that earned Kant the rank of ordinary professor at the University of Königsberg contains the first properly Kantian definition of the phänomenon as an object of perception (objectum sensualitatis), as opposed to the noumenon or intelligible object, which is only knowable through intelligence (per intelligentiam cognoscendum): The object of sensibility is the sensible; that which contains nothing save what must be known through intelligence is the intelligible. The former was called, in the ancient schools, phenomenon; the latter, noumenon. (Kant, Dissertation of 1770, II, § 3, p. 54) Kant thus breaks with the sense that Descartes and Leibnitz gave to the term phaenomenon, a transposition into modern Latin of the Greek phainomenon [φαινόμενον], itself a substantive use of a participle of the verb phainesthai [φαίνεσθαι], which means “to be visible, to appear,” itself derived from phôs [φῶς], “light.” Phaenomena in the Kantian sense no longer refer to known empirical facts, to apparitiones, to what appears to consciousness, but simply to perceptible objects, and it is as such that they are opposed not only to noumena but also to simple appearances (apparentiae): In things of sense and in phenomena (Phaenomenis), that which precedes the logical use of intellect is called appearance (Apparentia), and the reflective cognition that arises from the intellectual comparison of a number of appearances is called experience. (Ibid., II, §5) A complex game of differentiations is thus presupposed here. We move from the distinction between phänomenon and apparitio to a double distinction between phänomenon and noumenon at the highest level, but also between phänomenon and apparentia. These distinctions are taken up again in the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, in which, alongside Phänomenon, borrowed from Latin, appear the terms Erscheinung and Schein. Erscheinung is usually translated into French as phénomène (whereas in English it is translated as “appearance”) in order to distinguish it from Schein, which is translated as apparence (and by “illusion” in English), which of course creates some confusion. The difficulty of Erscheinung is marked by the fact that apparence and “appearance,” despite being related, are aligned with the most widely opposed terms, with “appearance” seeming, further, to retain only one aspect of Kantian Erscheinung (the first aspect of phänomenon of 1770, distinguished from experientia); as for the English “illusion,” it does capture the aspect of deception contained in Schein, but the latter must be immediately corrected by the doctrine of transcendental—that is, necessary—illusion (see infra). The term Phänomenologie itself, probably invented by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), first appears in his work of 1764, Neues Organon, the fourth part of which is entitled ERSCHEINUNG 283 attend to the logical rule. Rather, it deals with what Kant calls “transcendental illusion,” which is a “natural and unavoidable illusion (Illusion),” and which derives from the substitution of objective principles for merely subjective ones (A 298). The Critique of Pure Reason thus teaches us not only “that the object should be taken in a twofold meaning, namely as appearance [Erscheinung] or as thing in itself [Ding an sich] (B 27),” but also to distinguish all objects in general into phenomena (Phänomena) and noumena (Noumena), which Kant attempts to explicate in the last chapter of the “Transcendental Analytic.” For if the objects of the senses, the Erscheinungen, may be named Phänomena insofar as they are subordinated to the categories of the understanding, it remains possible to allow for things, which, as simple objects of the understanding, may be given to nonperceptual intuition: these are what Kant called Noumena (A 249). As objects of nonperceptual intuition, Noumena have only negative signification (B 342) and do not serve any purpose other than to mark the limits of our perceptual knowledge (B 345). The distinction between Phänomena as objects of the senses and Noumena as intelligible objects (B 306) is thus superimposed on that between Erscheinung and Ding an Sich. II. From Erscheinung to Offenbarung: Phenomenon, Manifestation, and Revelation in Post-Kantian Idealism To the extent that what unifies the post-Kantians is the desire to complete what Kant began by attempting to place metaphysics on the safe ground of science, it is not surprising to see them attack what Kantianism retains as unrepresentable for human reason, that is, the “thing-in-itself” and the “noumenon.” The stress is thus placed in post-Kantianism on the dimension of appearance, of Erscheinen, as a dimension that is internal to the absolute itself, which would be completely ineffective without it. This leads Hegel to claim, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that Appearance (Erscheinung) is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is “in itself” [i.e., subsists intrinsically], and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, § 46, 27) Hegel nonetheless retains the distinction between Erscheinung and Schein, between appearance and illusion, as he explains in the third chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit, which deals precisely with Erscheinung, where illusion is defined as “being that is directly and in its own self a non-being,” whereas phenomenon or appearance is “a totality of show” (“ein Ganzes des Scheins,” ibid., 87), insofar as it refers not only to the moment of disappearance, to non-being, but to the whole movement of coming into being and passing away. Insofar as an Erscheinung no longer reveals anything other than itself, since, as Hegel says, “it is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves” (ibid., 103), it may be understood as the dimension itself of manifestation. That is, in fact, the term by which Jean Hyppolite, the first French translator of Phenomenology of Spirit, often translated Erscheinung, though the translations apparition or apparition phénoménale, used by another itself (B 69). Kant defines Erscheinung very precisely in a note added to this passage in the Critique of Pure Reason: “What is not to be encountered in the object in itself at all, but is always to be encountered in its relation to the subject and is inseparable from the representation of the object, is appearance [Erscheinung]” (ibid. B 70, note). This object in itself, which is the nonperceptible cause of our representations and which remains entirely unknown to us, is what Kant called the transcendental “object” (B 522), and which he notes in the first edition is simply “=X” (A 109). This distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is nevertheless not simply a reiteration of the classical distinction between appearance and truth but on the contrary the logical consequence of the definition of Erscheinung as apparition. For, as Kant explains in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: Yet the reservation must also be well noted, that even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think them as things in themselves. For otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance [Erscheinung] without anything that appears [ohne etwas was da erscheint]. (Ibid., B 26) The concepts of Ding an sich, “thing-in-itself,” and of Erscheinung, “appearance,” are thus correlatives and do not refer to two different objects. This is what Kant emphasizes most clearly in the Opus postumum: What is an object in appearance, however, in contrast to the same object but as thing in itself? The [aspectabile of Space and Time] is, a priori, as unconditional unity, the formal element of appearance, in contrast with the thing in itself [ens per se] = x, which is not itself a separate [absonderliches] object, but is only a particular relation (respectus) in order to constitute oneself as object.” (Kant, Opus postumum, 22:43, p. 179) As for fallacious illusions (Schein), they arise precisely when we take appearances for things in themselves (B 70, note). For illusion does not arise from perception at all but from judgment: Still less may we take appearance [Erscheinung] and illusion for one and the same. For truth and illusion are not in the object, insofar as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it insofar as it is thought. Thus it is correctly said that the senses do not err; yet not because they always judge correctly, but because they do not judge at all. Hence truth, as much as error, and thus also illusion as leading to the latter, are to be found only in judgments, i.e., only in the relation [Verhältnis] of the object to our understanding. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 293/B 350) The transcendental dialectic, as a “logic of illusion,” does not deal with either empirical appearances, which come, like optical illusions, from judgments that are led astray by imagination, nor with logical illusions, which come from a failure to 284 ERSCHEINUNG we find an analysis of the concept of Offenbarung characterized from the formal point of view as a kind of “making known (Bekanntmachung)” (Fichte, Attempt at a Critique, 51), and a rational deduction of the concept that allows it to be defined as “a special appearance [by God] in the world of sense, determined expressly for this purpose” and by which he “would therefore have to proclaim himself as moral lawgiver” (ibid., 65). Fichte’s goal in this essay, which made him famous since, though published anonymously, it was taken to be Kant’s fourth Critique, is in effect to reduce religion to morality, as is made clear by one of the conclusions that this critique of the concept of revelation arrives at: “The universal criterion of the divinity of a religion with respect to its moral content is, therefore, the following: only that revelation can be from God which establishes a principle of morality that agrees with the principle of practical reason and only such moral maxims as can be derived therefrom” (ibid., 103). We should place Schelling’s posthumous work, the Philosophy of Revelation (Philosophie der Offenbarung), in the same philosophical rather than strictly religious perspective. The project of these lectures given in Munich and Berlin between 1827 and 1846 was not to lay out a Christian philosophy but only to understand the specificity of Christianity. Schelling explains this point very clearly at the end of the first book, by contrasting his Philosophie der Offenbarung with an Offenbarungsphilosophie, a revealed philosophy, and he clarifies that he takes the Revelation “as an object, not as a source or authority” (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 165). The concept of Revelation in effect undergoes an extension with Schelling beyond what Fichte understood by it. The word does not here indicate only “the act by which the divinity would become the cause or author of representations in a given individual human consciousness,” but in fact relates to “the universal of Revelation” (ibid., 166–67)—to its content, which, though revealing itself factually in history, relates nevertheless to “a more elevated historical sequence, that is to a sequence which goes beyond history itself and Christianity taken as a particular phenomenon” (ibid., 169). What is thus in question in the Philosophy of Revelation is not the historical phenomenon of Christianity but the very object of philosophy for the post-Kantians, namely the effectivity of the absolute. The young Schelling, still very Fichtean, affirms this in one of his very first texts, On the Self (Vom Ich): the ultimate end of philosophy is “absolute pure being” and its duty is “to unveil and to reveal that which can never be reduced to concepts.” His Philosophy of Revelation, which, from the fact that it gives itself the task of thinking that which goes beyond reason, constitutes the ultimate goal of speculative idealism, continues with the same goal: “It will understand even more and something other than the Revelation alone; what is more, it will only understand the latter because it has earlier understood something else, namely the actually real God” (ibid., 166). III. Erscheinung and Phänomen: The Phenomenological Concept of Phenomena (Husserl and Heidegger) In 1901 the term “phenomenology” reappears in the title of Husserl’s work, Studies in Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge, which is the second part of the Logical Investigations, whose first volume had appeared the year before under the title Prolegomena to Pure Logic. At this time, still under the translator (Jean-Pierre Lefebvre), are perhaps preferable. We may thus construct the following table, in which the various translations make the difficulty of Erscheinung clear: Erscheinung Schein Phänomen Kant manifestation sensible (Barni), image sensible (TP), appearance (English) apparence illusion Phénomene Phainomenon Hegel manifestation (Hyppolite) apparition (Lefebvre) phénomène (Labarrière-Jarczyk) For Hegel, however, the term Manifestation itself, as well as Offenbarung, “revelation,” which he uses as a synonym, only truly acquire their technical senses in the Science of Logic. In effect, Erscheinung is again in question in the “Doctrine of Essence,” the second book in the first volume of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where “Die Erscheinung” is the title of the entire second section of the “Doctrine.” The general movement of Erscheinung is summed up at the end of the introduction to the second book as follows: “At first, essence shines (scheint) or shows within itself, or is reflection; secondly, it appears (erscheint); thirdly, it manifests itself (offenbart sich)” (Science of Logic, vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 391). These three verbs characterize the stages of the process of externalization of essence, as it unfolds in the first two sections of the logic of essence and as it culminates in the third, which deals with actuality (Wirklichkeit). The vocabulary of revelation (Offenbarung) and manifestation (Manifestation) appears in this last section, in order to express the “identity” at this level between form and content, internal and external, whereas their difference is what is made evident in the language of illusion (scheinen) and appearance (erscheinen). As Hegel emphasizes: “As this movement of exposition, a movement which carries itself along with it, as a way and manner which is its absolute identity-with-self, the absolute is manifestation not of an inner, nor over against an other, but it is only as the absolute manifestation of itself for itself (sich für sich selbst Manifestieren). As such it is actuality” (ibid., 536). It appears clearly here that the terms Manifestation and Offenbarung refer to the absolutely non-Kantian idea of an externalization without anything left over. The German term offenbar, which derives etymologically from the idea of openness or obviousness, is in fact most often translated by the adjective “manifest.” Finally, we must add that in German Manifestation and Offenbarung are terms that belong to theological vocabulary. In effect, Offenbarung is most often translated by “revelation,” making use of another Latin term, in which we find an idea that is absent from the term manifestatio, namely that of an action consisting in removing a veil (velum) and thus uncovering something that was previously hidden. As a term belonging to religious vocabulary, Offenbarung is a concept that acquires great importance in post-Kantian philosophy. Here we must mention Fichte’s first work, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, published in 1792, in which ERSCHEINUNG 285 original concept of Erscheinung,” that is, “the concept of what appears or what can appear, of the intuitive as such.” Insofar as all experiences, whether they derive from an internal intuition or an external one, may be objectified in reflection, it is possible to call all of these experiences Phänomene, which thus become the object of phenomenology defined as the “theory of experiences in general” (Logical Investigations). For what was not clear in 1901 was the status of what Husserl called, in his 1907 lectures on The Idea of Phenomenology, the “pure phenomenon (Phänomen) in the sense of phenomenology,” which is to be distinguished from the “psychological phenomenon,” the object of psychology as a science of nature (ibid., 68). Such a Phänomen, insofar as it is an absolute given, is the result of what Husserl here calls, for the first time, “phenomenological reduction,” which consists in bracketing—submitting to an epochê—the entirety of the transcendent. The pure phenomenon, the object of a pure phenomenology, is thus the “reduced” phenomenon, that is, the appearing object as such, independent of its existence outside of consciousness. Husserl has thus managed to account for the two sides of the phenomenon—subjective and objective: The word “phenomenon” (Phänomen) is ambiguous in virtue of the essential correlation between appearance (Erscheinen) and that which appears (Erscheinenden). Phainomenon in its proper sense means that which appears, and yet it is by preference used for the appearing itself, for the subjective phenomenon (Phänomen) (if one may use this expression which is apt to be misunderstood in the vulgar psychological sense). (Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 11) The phenomenon in the sense of phenomenology is thus radically distinguished from Kantian Erscheinung, which derives from the unknown thing-in-itself or that X that is the transcendental object. In his 1913 work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl insists on the contrary that it is an “error of principle” to imagine that God “should possess the perception of the thing in itself which is refused to us, finite beings,” for that implies the reduction of the perceived thing to an image or a simple sign (ibid., § 43). In effect, according to Husserl it is “absurd” to consider what appears as deriving from anything else that is separate and that would be considered its “hidden cause” (ibid., § 52). For it is of the very essence of the spatial thing to present itself by way of the mediation of Erscheinung (which Ricoeur, the French translator of the Ideas, always translates by apparence) which, precisely because they are not a simple appearance (blosser Schein, pur simulacre in Ricoeur’s translation), do not derive from some “in itself,” since everything must in principle be able to become a phenomenon. Husserl’s break with the Kantian limitation of the phenomenon by the noumenon is here manifest. Nonetheless, for Husserl as for Kant, Phänomen and Erscheinung are not clearly distinguished. Heidegger, by contrast, insists on precisely this distinction when he attempts to clarify the sense of the word phenomenology on the basis of its two components, phainomenon and logos [λόγος], first in his lectures of 1925, devoted to the “Prolegomena to the history of the concept of time,” then later in the introduction influence of Brentano and his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Husserl gives the term the sense of a “descriptive analysis,” which restricts itself to the pure phenomenal given without presupposing the existence of what it describes. This analysis allows it in effect to distinguish what belongs to the object itself from what belongs to the experience or, in Husserlian vocabulary, the immanent from the transcendent. Take the example of color used by Husserl in the fifth Investigation: we often confuse the colored sensation (immanent) with objective coloration (transcendent). However, the object as such is neither perceived nor conscious, any more than the color that is perceived as belonging to it. It is “outside,” not “in” consciousness; however, “in” consciousness there is a corresponding colored perceptual experience. This is not a simple difference of perspective according to which the same phenomenon is considered either objectively or subjectively. The confusion in question comes from the ambiguity in the term “phenomenon” (Erscheinung): We cannot too sharply stress the equivocation (Äquivokation) that allows us to use the word “appearance” (Erscheinung) both of the experience in which the object’s appearing consists (Erscheinen) (the concrete perceptual experience, in which the object itself seems present to us) and of the object which appears as such. The deceptive spell (Trug) of this equivocation vanishes as soon as one takes phenomenological accounts as to how little of the object which appears is as such to be found in the experience of its appearing. The appearing of the thing (the experience) is not the thing which appears (Die Dingerscheinung [das Erlebnis] ist nicht das erscheinende Ding) (that seems to stand before us in propria persona [in leibhaftiger Selbstheit]). As belonging in a conscious connection, the appearing of things is experienced by us, as belonging in the phenomenal world (als der phänomenalen Welt zugehörig erscheinen uns die Dinge), things appear before us. The appearing of the things does not itself appear to us, we live through it (die Erscheinungen selbst erscheinen nicht, sie werden erlebt). (Husserl, Logical Investigations, Investigation V, 1, §2, 2:83) In the final appendix to the Investigations, Husserl comes back to the “ambiguities” of the term Erscheinung that make it possible to refer to both objects and experiences in which they figure as “phenomena.” In this regard he distinguishes three different meanings given to the word: the concrete experience of an object, the appearing object itself, and, wrongly, the real components of the experience of the object, for example, sensations, which may prompt us erroneously to see phenomenal objects as simple compounds of perceptual contents. Husserl’s concern is the strict distinction between the transcendent and the immanent: he aims to distinguish himself from his teacher, Brentano, who considers the intentional object to be immanent in consciousness, whereas for Husserl, on the contrary, consciousness is not a container, nor is the object a real part of the experience. In a passage added to the second edition of 1913, Husserl emphasizes that of the three meanings attributed to the term Erscheinung, the second is the one that constitutes “the 286 ERSCHEINUNG by themselves in philosophical analysis. For the phenomenon of phenomenology is not “given.” It must have, on the contrary, an “explicit exhibition” in order to be perceived. A phenomenon properly speaking is thus what is “hidden” in what is shown at first glance and most often, but nonetheless constitutes the essence and basis of what is manifested, namely the existence of being. Between phenomenon and appearance there is thus the same difference as between existence and being. Phenomenology and ontology are thenceforth one: “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible” (Sein und Zeit, 60). Heidegger has thus managed to show, like Husserl, that “behind the phenomena of phenomenology, there is essentially nothing else” and that nonetheless what becomes a phenomenon may well be hidden. For “just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology” (ibid.). Françoise Dastur REFS.: Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Versuch einer Kritik der Offenbarung. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. Translation by Garrett Green: Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Meiner, 1952. Translation by A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay: The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. . Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1, Die objective Logik. Hamburg: Meiner, 1978. Translation by A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay: Hegel’s Science of Logic. New York: Humanity Books, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 20. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979. Translation by T. Kisiel: History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. . Sein und Zeit. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2. Frankfurt : Klostermann, 1977. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Husserl, Edmund. Die Idee der Phänomenologie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian: The Idea of Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964. . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Bk. 1. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Bk. 1. 3 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980–89. . Logische Untersuchungen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1900. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Correspondence. Edited by A. Zweig. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. Translated by William J. Eckhoff. New York: Columbia College, 1894. . Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Translation by P. Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation].” In Kant Selections, edited by L. W. Beck. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. . Opus postumum. Translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lambert, Johann Heinrich. Neues Organon, oder Gedanken über die Erforschung und Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein. Leipzig, 1764; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1: Philosophische Schriften (Vom Ich) and vol. 13: Philosophie der Offenbarung (Bk. 1). Stuttgart: J. C. Cotta. Translation by F. Marti: The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794–1796. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980. Translation by V. C. Hayes: Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1995. to his 1927 treatise, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Returning to the primitive meaning of the Greek work phainomenon, Heidegger defines Phänomen as “that which shows itself in itself,” “the manifest” (das Offenbare), and sees in appearance (Schein) a privative modification of Phänomen by which a thing shows itself precisely as it is not: Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself—that is, of being a phenomenon (Phänomen)—can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it “merely look like so-and-so” (nur so aussehen wie). (Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, 51) Heidegger insists on the fact that the term Phänomen, like Schein, has nothing to do with that of Erscheinung, which he claims in his lectures from 1925 has caused more ravages and confusion than any other (Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, 112). Erscheinen has, in effect, as Kant himself had emphasized, the sense of an indication by one thing of another, which latter precisely does not appear. Erscheinen (to appear) is thus paradoxically a “not-showing-itself,” which implies that “phenomena (Phänomene) are never appearances (Erscheinungen),” and that one therefore cannot explain the first term by means of the second, since on the contrary Erscheinung, insofar as it is an indication of something that is not shown by means of something that is shown, presupposes the notion of Phänomen (Sein und Zeit, 52). It is thus of the utmost importance for Heidegger not to place Schein and Erscheinung on the same level: the former, as a privative modification of Phänomen, includes the dimension of the manifest, while the latter, like all indications, representations, symptoms, and symbols, already presupposes in itself the dimension of the self-display of something, that is, the Phänomen: “In spite of the fact that ‘appearing’ (Erscheinen) is never a showing-itself (Sichzeigen) in the sense of ‘phenomenon’ (Phänomen), appearing is possible only by reason of a showing-itself of something” (Sein und Zeit, 53). Sometimes, however, without regard for the difference in meaning of the two terms, Phänomen is defined as the Erscheinung of something that does not reveal itself, which leads on the one hand to an opposition between the realm of appearance and that of being in itself, and on the other, insofar as we tend to give ontological priority to the “thing in itself,” to devalue Erscheinung as “blosse Erscheinung”—mere appearance—which is itself identified with Schein, illusion. As Heidegger emphasizes in his Lectures of 1925, “Confusion is then carried to extremes. But traditional epistemology and metaphysics live off this confusion” (Prolegomena, 114; History of the Concept of Time, 83). Kant himself fell into this confusion, since by defining Erscheinung as the object of sense, he understands the latter both as Phänomen, that is, what shows itself by itself and is opposed to Schein, “illusion,” and as Erscheinung—the appearance of what never shows itself, the thing in itself. So, in the end, what is a phenomenon in the sense of phenomenology? For Kant himself, it is not what he calls Erscheinung, “apparition,” that is, the object of perceptual intuition, but what shows itself in the appearances themselves in a nonthematic way, namely time and space as forms of intuition that must be able to become phenomena, that is, to show themselves ERZÄHLEN 287 of literary critique behind it, or even a vocabulary appropriate to what would be called art in France and craft in English. The result is a knowledge and consciousness that are not secure in the specificity of literary works (literarische Kunstwerke) and a sort of inhibition in speaking, in discussions of literature (Dichtung), about that for which we only have the deceptive term “technique.” (Müller, “Zeitgerüst,” 389–90) Everything changes in the 1950s. Important works such as Lämmert’s Bauformen des Erzählens, Stanzel’s Typische Formen des Romans, or Käte Hamburger’s Die Logik der Dichtung mark the transition to a rigorous analysis of fiction with its own language. Their terminology is both new, suited to their breakthrough in terms of analysis (Erzählakt [act of narration], Erzählstimme [narrative voice], Ich-Origo: new words for new problems), and respectful of the classical and romantic tradition. However, if we compare the language of poetics and the analysis of narratives as generally practiced in German-language Literaturwissenschaft through the end of the 1960s with the language in which those same questions are currently treated, we see that the old romantic vocabulary was replaced by a language introduced in the 1970s by importing semiotic and structuralist research, especially from France (though also from English-speaking and Soviet countries, as Germany had to catch up in the space of a few years after lagging behind in the theory of texts, from Russian formalism to French structuralism). Thus, Struktur replaced Aufbauform, Form replaced Gebilde, Figur replaced Gestalt, Konfiguration replaced Gefüge, Artikulation replaced Verknüpfung, and so on. Nothing makes the naturalization of this radical change clearer than the language in which Rainer Rochlitz translated the three volumes of Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et Récit: Kompositionsregeln, Konfiguration, Refiguration, Konfigurationsvorgang, Rekonstruktion, relogifizieren, entchronologisieren, Modalitäten der Fabelkomposition, etc. (règles de composition, configuration, refiguration, reconstruction, relogification, déchronologization, modalités de la mise en intrigue). All of that would have been unthinkable thirty years earlier. In some cases it would not have been possible to import the concept except through familiarization with the Fremdwort, without which the box for its idea would have remained empty. This is the case, for example, with Semiotik, Aktant, and Funktion, three concepts that did not exist under the old vocabulary: the first two because they could not have been transformed without compromising the rigor of the Greimasian theory (just as for Diegese, a calque of Genette’s diégèse), the third because, before the terminological upheaval of the 1970s, the idea of function had no place in the vocabulary, which had remained resistant to a logico-semantic treatment of the art of language. Nevertheless, it would be false to speak of a radical change in the environment. In general, rather, we have a cohabitation of two vocabularies: German, to which analytic terminology is now turning for revitalization after having purged the language of its “old-language” obstacles to rigorous analysis, and words of French or English origin (mise en abyme, “stream of consciousness,” intradiegetisch, implotment), when it seems that clarity is gained by using the foreign word. ERZÄHLEN / BESCHREIBEN (GERMAN) FRENCH raconter/décrire v. RÉCIT, and ART, BILD, DESCRIPTION, DICHTUNG, EREIGNIS, FACT, FICTION, HISTORY, IMAGE, LOGOS, MIMÊSIS, ROMANTIC, STRUCTURE, TRUTH The very different styles of literary studies and the textbooks on which they rely in France and in Germany provide interesting perspectives on the notion of a story and the way in which it is determined by different linguistic and national traditions. The language of the story (and its cognate notions: event, history, description) is marked in German both by the weight of the tradition and by the character of terminological adjustments coming in large part from French literary theory. On the basis of a few key terms—Erzählung, Bericht, Geschehen, Geschichte, Begebenheit, Beschreibung, Schilderung—it is possible to see how the untranslatable coming from the tradition is combined with the difficulties entailed by the recent acclimations of vocabulary in this domain. I. The Collapse of the Romantic Terminology By including the terms narrativ/Narrativität in the sixth volume, Joachim Ritter’s Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie celebrated the entry into philosophical language of terms that until the late 1960s were welcome neither in Germanlanguage philosophy nor in the language of poetics and literary critique. From the eighteenth century through the 1950s, not only was there no real textual analysis that required its own vocabulary (even today, terminological questions are neglected in the reedited versions of Gero von Wilpert and Wolfgang Kayser’s reference works), but in addition the terminology of Literaturwissenschaft (“the science of literature,” where French would say “théorie litteraire [literary theory]”) was still entirely subordinate to the romantic perspective of a literary absolute. The language in which the analysis of texts and questions of poetic narrative were expressed in German, up through the great canonical texts that maintained their influence through the postwar period (Emil Staiger, Günther Müller, Karl Vietör), thus remained that of Goethe, Hegel, or the Schlegel brothers. A literary work was a literarisches Kunstwerk (work of literary art), literature was a Dichtkunst (see DICHTUNG), and the concepts upon which the analysis of narrative texts was based were those of Gebilde, Gestalt, Gefüge, Fügung, Gliederung, Αufbau, Dichtwerk, all untranslatables, composite words that are equivalent—but only equivalent—to the ideas of structure, composition, or organization, for the first six. As for the term Dichtwerk, made up of Werk (work), and Dicht for Dichtung, we might be able to translate it by the term “work of literary art.” There is not a single Fremdwort in the 590 pages of Günther Müller’s Morphologische Poetik (1968), which collects studies from the years 1923 to 1954. Müller himself, in fact, in the article “Über das Zeitgerüst des Erzählens,” published in 1950 (Gerüst meaning “scaffolding,” so that Zeit gerüst might be translated as “temporal structure”), writes that It is a well-known fact that the study of literature in Germany (die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft), in conformity with its Herderian, Schlegelian, and Hegelian origin, is essentially based on the perspective of a historical consideration of facts and that it barely has a tradition 288 ERZÄHLEN unterrichtet werden / sein would be used) is to be in possession of the true version of things and of just wisdom (today, einer Sache kundig sein). A Bericht is thus a true message (Kunde). It is only later that a schism arises in the language between the transmission of truth (or of the sacrament of the Truth) and the narrative and that Bericht evolves toward the protocolbased semantics that it essentially has today (ein Bericht: a report, as in Kafka, Bericht an eine Akademie [Report addressed to an academy]). However, even though this shift has been attested by Adelung and Heyse (Heyse defines Bericht as “pflichtgemäße, meist schriftliche Meldung oder Darstellung eines Herganges oder Sachbestandes [official communication, usually written, or representation of an event or state of affairs]”), the Bericht of literary theory could not affirm it and take on its dominant contemporary meaning of an objective report as long as the vocabulary for describing narratives did not have a word to refer to the articulation of the narrative language. This is still the case, for example, with Emil Staiger: in his Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Basic concepts of poetics), which was an authority for a long time and continues to be one in German studies, he placed the words Erzähler and Bericht as a pair to express the relation of narrator/story, and this with regard to Homer: Er redet die Musen an. Er unterbricht nicht selten einen Bericht, um eine Bermerkung, eine Bitte an die Himmlischen einzuschalten. (He [Homer] speaks to the Muses. It is not rare for him to interrupt a Bericht, in order to insert a remark or prayer addressed to the gods.) (Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik) How should we understand Bericht here? The term opposes the intrusion of the narrator to what we can only translate as “narrative,” but a narrative where the narration and what is narrated form a single continuum: such is the classical use of the term in German literary theory. We ought to be astonished to find the use of the same term in Käte Hamburger’s Logik der Dichtung, that is, in the fundamental work that creates a break with the very tradition represented by Staiger, who had only contempt for any technical treatment of the untouchable Dichtung. Yet, in a passage where she demonstrates that in certain cases II. Erzählung / Bericht: Récit and Its Untranslatables How can we translate the French récit: Bericht, Geschichte, Erzählung? Germany never had anything like Gérard Genette’s attempt in this domain, which led to the trio of narration, diégèse, and histoire, and the language must either make use of its own resources or fall back entirely on Genette’s analysis and look for correlates term by term. Before this terminological cleaning, it was necessary to proceed in a different manner. Thus, for the récit as a process, we could use the term das Erzählen, literally “the telling” (that is how Käte Hamburger, for example, refers to the narrative process), as opposed to die Erzählung, the product of the narrative process. If we wish to avoid all ambiguity, we may appeal to a second distinction, as Käte Hamburger also does, between das Erzählte (what is narrated) and das Erzählende (the narration), so as to avoid any collision between the intratextual product of the narrative process and the product of the narration as a formal category of the narrative genre (where Erzählung corresponds to what we would call “stories”: Kafka’s Erzählungen are Kafka’s “stories.” This is the only dimension taken into account by Wilpert, for example). . Though there is no fundamental ambiguity in the distinction between Erzählen/Erzählung—as long as we are as clear as Käte Hamburger was in the usage of the traditional vocabulary—there is nevertheless much that is untranslatable about the relations between Erzählung and Bericht. The Latin equivalents that Grimms’ dictionary gives for the term Bericht are relatio, expositio, nuntiatio [Kunde, Nachricht, and Unterricht], which cover a wide field, both rhetorical and narrative, and do not distinguish between an act of discourse, an artifact of discourse, and the transmission of a piece of information or knowledge. Bericht’s origin is the same as that of richtig (right), and in the sixteenth century berichten meant either “to correct mistaken information” (today berichtigen is used) or, in its pastoral meaning, “to administer a sacrament.” Luther explicitly gives the Greek and Latin equivalents of synaxis and communio (synaxis griechisch, cummunio lateinisch, und Berichten auf Deutsch, cited by Grimms, “Bericht”). In both cases, whether it is a matter of transmitting information or of administering a sacrament, the issue is one of truth: berichtet werden / sein (today 1 Narration, “diegesis,” “story” If diegesis is the recounted world as it appears in a fiction, narration is the universe in which one recounts, that is, the set of acts and narrative procedures that give rise to and govern this fictive universe. This distinction, analytic in nature, requires that we do not confuse the different instances and levels of a narrative fiction and that we maintain the distinction between these two universes. We must, for example, distinguish in principle between a character and a narrator, or a narrator included in a story and a narrative voice at the source of a “recounted world” into which other elements of fiction (words, acts, and events) may be inserted. As for the story as a sequence of actions and events, it does not necessarily correspond to the diegesis, or “recounted world,” which implies other fictive elements like descriptions, for example. Gérard Genette, who has developed these definitions (borrowing from Souriau the use of the term “diegesis” in this sense) and has shown their application through the example of an analysis of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust (Figures III, Seuil), returned to these distinctions in an attempt to clear up certain misunderstandings in his Nouveau discours du récit, 5–10. ERZÄHLEN 289 begebenheiten, das geschichtswerk,” we might translate it as “the narrative cohesion of events, the story as a work.” However, there is not a single word here that does not pose problems: neither bericht, begebenheit, nor geschichtswerk, nor even the sense of zusammenhängend. Of course, Aristotle’s Poetics is indeed about the “sustasis tôn pragmatôn” [σύστασις τῶν πϱαγμάτων] of the “presentation of facts,” but Begebenheit does not translate pragmata, and the distinction we should respect between Bericht and zusammenhängend (the narrative continuum that a narrative holds together as a whole) is not found in Greek. What, then, is the relation between Geschichte and Geschehen, Geschehen and Ereignis, Ereignis and Begebenheit? A. Begebenheit, casus narrativus Let us consult the Grimms again, for Begebenheit. They give eventus, vorfall, ereignis, geschichte as synonyms. Begebenheit is “what happens,” derived from the verb sich (hin) begeben, “to go somewhere.” In the eighteenth century many novels were titled as Begebenheiten—the equivalent of the French histoire (Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut). Goethe greatly contributed to establishing its meaning. First, he used it, contrary to the norm, in the singular: die Begebenheit is thus “what happens to us,” the force of accident—“Stürzen wir uns in das Rauschen der Zeit, ins Rollen der Begebenheit [Let us throw ourselves into the roar of Time, in what happens to us like the roll of a wave which carries us]” (Faust I, around 1775). Second, he distinguishes it from Tat (action), so that Begebenheiten takes the meaning of gesta, Taten of pragmata: “Im Roman sollen vorzüglich Gesinnungen und Begebenheiten vorgestellt werden, im Drama Charaktere und Taten [In the novel opinions and Begebenheiten are what should mainly be presented, whereas in drama, characters and Taten]” (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, bk. 5, chap. 7, Weimar ed., 22:178). In this sense, Begebenheit would be the casus narrativus, an important occurrence of life or history worthy of being taken into account by the narrative, since it contains both chance and meaning at the same time. It would be a “prenarrativity” in Ricoeur’s sense. According to Goethe in Literarischer Sanculotism (Weimar ed. 40:148), a Nationalautor, a classical national author, is someone who “in der Geschichte seiner Nation große Begebenheiten und ihre Folgen in einer glucklichen und bedeutenden Einheit vorfindet [finds in the history of his nation great Begebenheiten and their consequences (gathered) into a significant unity].” Deliberately mixing the “pre-narrative” given and the narrative organization, Goethe says, with regard to a subject that he seeks to exploit in narrative and whose content is suicide: Es wollte sich nichts gestalten; es fehlte eine Begebenheit, eine Fabel, in der sie sich verkörpern konnten. (Nothing wanted to take form (sich gestalten); there was lacking a Begebenheit, a Fable, in which they [i.e., his thoughts on suicide] could have been embodied.) (Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Weimar ed., 28:200) Though the structure of the narrative is the body, its object here is not an idea but a “Fable.” “Fable” (Fabel), however, is the word that, from the Middle Ages to Brecht, translates the Aristotelian muthos [μῦθος], the sustasis—not just Ereignis, but also Begebenheit—a prearticulated given. it becomes impossible to find a criterion of distinction between the narration and what is narrated because the narrative voices become one, Hamburger does say that in such cases “Bericht und Rede fließt uns zusammen in der gestalteten Welt der betreffenden Dichtung [The Bericht and the discourse only reach us as a single flux, in the world created in the Dichtung].” The Bericht here is not a protocol, or the communication of a truth, but the continuum of what is narrated, where the narrative structure dissolves in the flow of the fiction. For Staiger, there was Bericht because there was still no conceptual distinction between “narration” and diégèse (the fictional world was the work of Homeric diction). For Hamburger, by contrast, insofar as it yields the disappearance of the procedure in the fictional image, the narrative as Bericht is the undifferentiated product of the word of differentiation. Bericht is the mixture of the narrative sequence, the naturalization of the narration in the language of fiction, as Barthes would have said. In a sense closer to rhetoric than to narratology, Bericht may mean narration without ornament (sachlichnüchtern), as opposed to description (Beschreibung) or the presence of reflections and commentary (Erörterungen) in the narrative. This, for example, is the definition given by Wilpert. However, the question of Bericht comes for him from Stilkunst (that is, from the stylistics of literary forms). If narrative fiction is not simply an art of discourse on paper but a language in itself, Bericht is therefore both what seems not to be a part of the narrative and the mark of the power of narrative language (of its “magic,” as Borges would say). Thus, Bericht turns its back on contemporary usage, just as Erzählen moves beyond its origins, since erzellen, in Middle High German, meant “to count” (the number of facts). The Grimms give two groups of synonyms for erzählen: narrare, enarrare, recitare, on one hand, enumerare, recensere, aufzählen (to count), vortragen (to report, to present) on the other. Between berichten and erzählen we therefore have a chiasmus: whereas berichten means initially “to transmit truth” and then “to transpose the given in the continuum of the narrative artifact,” erzählen is “to make actions and events follow one another in the proper order of the narrative presentation, to order the sequence.” From one to the other, the issue is that of an antagonism between Aristotelian poetics, where the account gives order, and a Platonic poetics, where the given is re-given—between recitation and citation. III. The Narrative of the Event: Geschichte / Geschehen / Begebenheit Suppose we follow Genette and give the name of histoire (story) to the sequence of actions and events organized by a certain narrative mode. German has an equivalent term— Geschichte—and Genette’s German translators did indeed translate histoire by Geschichte and diégèse by Diegese. It remains the case that, if we define “story” as a sequence of recounted events, the German words at the disposal of translators are problematic. We may translate “recounted event” by Ereignis, but we could also use Geschehen (or Geschehnis). The two terms come from the same root as Geschichte (Old High German gisciht, Middle High German gesciht, sciht, or schiht, coming from the Old High German scehan, from which Geschehen comes as well). When the Grimms define Geschichte (narrative? story?) as “der zusammenhängende bericht über diese 290 ERZÄHLEN IV. Beschreibung / Schilderung: From Images to Writing The vocabulary of description also has its untranslatables, since the idea of description is distributed over two words, Beschreibung and Schilderung. Far from being simple equivalents, the words come from two different worlds: that of writing and that of painting. Gero von Wilpert’s definition of Beschreibung in his Sachwörterbuch der Literatur explains them in terms of one another, and both of them through a third, ausmalen (to paint). BESCHREIBUNG: “Schilderung und ausmalende Wiedergabe eines Sachverhalts, Gegenstandes (Landschaft, Haus, Raum) oder einer Person durch sprachliche Mittel.” Beschreibung is the Schilderung, i.e., the “reproduction” (ausmalend, literally “what paints”) of a state of affairs, an object (landscape, house, room), or a person by means of language. A. Painting and writing To tease the members of this group apart, we should begin by pointing out that beschreiben does not originally mean describe in the sense of “to make a description,” but inscribe, “to put down on paper.” We still find this meaning today in everyday language when we say, for example, ein Blatt beschreiben to mean “cover a page with writing” (the Grimms give vollschreiben and implere paginam as equivalents for this meaning). On that basis beschreiben in geometry means “to draw geometrical figures.” The same usage exists in English—no untranslatable here: descriptive geometry is called beschreibende Geometrie. In its adjectival use beschreibend, “descriptive,” corresponds in poetics to the usage of the epithet descriptif: beschreibende Poesie = “descriptive poetry.” Let us also note that although the term Beschreiber, the German calque of the Latin scriptor, has survived up to the present day in the sense of someone who describes an object or event by a narrative (someone who recounts a journey is a Reisebeschreiber, someone who recounts a life is a Lebensbeschreiber), the scriptor has not been der Beschreiber in German since the sixteenth century (Luther uses it in this sense), but rather der Schriftsteller. The word was invented by analogy with Briefsteller (hence the public writer, who composes [stellt] letters [Briefe] for others). If Beschreibung is mimêsis [μίμησις] by (in)scription, Schilderung “thinks” of it as painting. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word Schilderei, imported from the Dutch, was the equivalent of Gemälde and indicated a painting. In his Geschichten (Strasbourg, 1677) Philander von Sittewald (Johannes Michael Moscherosch) writes: “Also hat Horatius die picturam der poesi, die Schilderei der Poeterey vorziehen wollen (Horace thus wished to give preference to pictura over poetry, to painting over Poeterey [which could be translated by ‘literature’]).” As equivalents for Schilderei, the Grimms give bildliche Darstellung (imagistic representation), Gemälde (painting), tabula picta, imago, simulacrum, effigies. Schilderei is the ut pictura poiesis. In the eighteenth century the word cedes its place to Schilderung, which has kept it to the present day. The Grimms note in the nineteenth century that the proper sense of peinture, a painting, was forgotten and that the image of description as image-painting had actually been lost “lately.” But this was only partly true. Adelung still noted that Schilderung was “lebhafte Beschreibung eines Dinges It is on the basis of this conception that Goethe was able to give one of the most pertinent formulations of the genre of the story (nouvelle): “Was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignende unerhörte Begebenheit?”: “What is a story other than an incredible Begebenheit that takes place (sich ereignend)?” The event (Ereignis), the casus, is here explicitly distinguished from the casus narrativus. As for the rest, Goethe adds, call it what you wish: Erzählung or otherwise. B. The (re)appearance of a collective-singular: das Geschehen If Begebenheit is a prearticulated given, what is the situation with regard to the relations between Geschichte (history) and Geschehen—or Geschehnis (recounted event)? In everyday language Geschehen may be a synonym of Ereignis, and it is often used as such by the traditional language of Literaturwissenschaft. Gero von Wilpert moves quite simply from Geschichte to Erzählung, which he defines as “Darstellung des Verlaufs von wirklichen oder gedachten Geschehnissen [representation of the unfolding of true or imagined events].” Here again, it is only by importing the terminology of theories of narrativity that the term finds a new precision and becomes reserved, not for the how, but for the what of narration. In the most current state of play (M. Martinez and M. Scheffel, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie), Geschehen and Geschichte are the objects of a strict differentiation: a series of events (Ereignisse) when related for a Geschehen—corresponding to the English “story” or histoire in Genette’s sense. The term Geschichte is reserved, however, to indicate that we are no longer considering the whole of a sequence of actions and events but their unfolding insofar as it reveals a logic of causality and responds to a motivation in the sense of the Russian formalists (thus to a presentation of this plausible series according to the causality inferred by the narration). In this case Geschichte corresponds to the English “plot.” As for Geschehen, it would be, according to this definition, the Whole of the narrative at the level of the story—histoire in Genette’s sense, that is, insofar as it is a sequence of recounted events. However, if we no longer envisage the difference between the unfolding that is recounted in the continuum of history and the unfolding that is motivated by the structures involved in placing it in a narrative, and we consider the fact that this Whole is also the continuum of the fictional, then we may say that Geschehen is also the Whole of what is recounted. This is how Käte Hamburger saw it: “Das Erzählen ist das Geschehen, das Geschehen ist das Erzählen [the telling is the story, the story is the telling].” It is interesting to note that this promotion of Geschehen from the status of event (Ereignis) to that of the Whole of a series of events or of the Whole of the telling only repeats, some 200 years later, the move from Geschichten (narratives) to the collective-singular die Geschichte, whose appearance—which does not take place without resistance (we still find die Geschichten [here still in the plural] in Herder for stories in the sense of res gestae)—accompanied the emergence of a philosophy of history starting in the second half of the eighteenth century (cf. R. Koselleck; see HISTORY, II). ERZÄHLEN 291 in the Aristotelian tradition, the procedure of inscriptionimage, whose goal is not to rival the universality of the idea but rather to return to the living of the real its “truth”—after a mimetic detour. This is indeed what Aristotle says about mimêsis and its power: “the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g., that the man there is so-and-so” (Poetics, 4, 1448 b 15). This faculty of giving the truth back its images, the Aristotelian apeikazein [ἀπειϰάζειν], is not the production of an ideal object as with Plato. Transcendental idealism, which in Germany exerted such pressure on poetic discourse, continues to cast its shadow—that of an inverted Platonic mimêsis, one that perdures through the romantic collusion between the Subject and the Bild. For Heidegger the Bild (Kant-Buch, §20) still remains “Versinnlichung von Begriffen (a making perceptible of concepts)”: from the schema of Kantian representation to the Anblick, in viewing the world, the image remains a power of the mind, even though in the end it is kept in its Otherness, like the existence of a painting of the world, in front of the eyes of the mind. If the vocabularies of narratological instances and mimetic structure still have so much difficulty in freeing themselves from their metaphysical cast, it is precisely because romanticism countered transcendental Idealism with a literary absolute for which the infinite freedom of the mind remains that of the writing or imagining subject. As long as the schematization of language remains short-circuited by the absolute of the “I,” poiêsis [ποίησις] can only be conceived as an infinite power of image production, one that is all the more free as the figures of its infinity are freed from any linguistic categorization (Frederick Schlegel baptizes them unendliche Fülle [infinite plenitude] or Arabeske). Diametrically opposed, if the infinite will is all that remains for “overthrowing Platonism,” as for Nietzsche, the “Schematisierung der Welt (schematization of the world)” is indeed the imposition on the world of a Kunstwerk that is only the form of the will transformed into a possible world—and real at the same time—beyond the Platonic cleavage between image and truth, and whose infinite Wagnerian melody was for Nietzsche at one time the proof, confirming that the schema and the anti-schema of form are only one single thing as long as the form is not structured “like a language,” but free as the song of the Kantian nightingale. The overthrow of Platonism in the vocabulary of the literary imagination is barely underway in Germany, and the need for it is still far from being perceived in all its domains. Jean-Pierre Dubost REFS.: Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Translated by C. von Boheemen. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Frühromantik. In Gesammelte Schriften, I/1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Translation: The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. In Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–26, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Translation by Jane E. Lewin: Narrative Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. nach allen seinen Teilen, ein rednerisches oder poetisches Bild [living description (Beschreibung) of an object according to all its parts, the image of the orator or the poet],” simply transposing the rhetorical imperative of hypotypose and ekphrasis (ut ante oculos videatur) into the domain of literature. And although the meaning of tableau in the proper sense disappeared with the arrival of Schilderung in the eighteenth century, it remains the case that Schilderung, unlike Beschreibung, always retained the trace of this lost origin. It is remarkable, for example, that toward the end of the nineteenth century, that is, when German social democracy began to become aware of its power, a large number of titles appeared such as Schilderung des sozialen Elends (Painting of social poverty), Schilderung des Aufstandes der Arbeiter von Paris vom 23. bis zum 26. Juni 1848 (Schilderung of the uprising of Parisian workers), Schilderung des vom preußischen Parlament und vom Zentrum gegen die Bergarbeiter ausgeübten Verrats (Schilderung of Prussian parliament’s betrayal of the workers . . .), etc. just as, in the middle of the nineteenth century, we find titles like Schilderung der in Berns Umgebung sichtbaren Gebirge (Description of mountains around Bern, 1852). From creating an image of the picturesque Alps to giving a true recounting of the class struggle, Schilderung could not mean “description,” but rather, in the case of the Alps, “picturesque tableau” and, in the case of political conflicts or poverty, “lively and truthful reconstruction.” Whether it is a matter of romantic picturesqueness or political enthusiasm, Schilderung is the heir to the figures of ekphrasis [ἔϰφϱασις] and hypotypose (see DESCRIPTION, Box 1). In the vocabulary of narrative technique, it is thus not a simple technical term related to the structuring of the plot or the paradoxes of the relation between narration and description, but the survivor of the power of the imagination in fiction. But if that is the case, why does Gero von Wilpert need, in his definition of Beschreibung, to add to the equivalent Schilderung the criterion of ausmalen—which comes, like Schilderung, from painting rather than writing? Ausmalen is not only depingere, but to do so in detail. Whence the assimilation of the term to the rhetorical figures of amplificatio and ornatus and its extension toward two poles. For ausmalen is either to lift up by means of more color (in the most concrete sense, of repainting a facade with more lively colors) or to intensify the vivacity of the fictional image by adding details to the narration. B. From the painting to the image: Schilderung and Bild What relationship is there between the fictional tableau and the philosophical status of the word Bild? A fictional tableau is not a Bild but rather Abbild. It is not the schematization of the world but its living tableau. And when romanticism led its crusade against classical imitation, it was by extending the Fichtean view of the imagination as a limitless expansion of the “I” ’s powers of self-invention (cf. Walter Benjamin’s analyses in his study of German romanticism)—moving from reflection (Nachahmung, Wiedergabe) to the absolute reflection of the imagination in its images, both speculative and in competition with the theoretical. It was thus possible to conceive of the imagination, Einbildungskraft, as an originating power, and of the work as its product and its origin at the same time. However, the Schilderei of the descriptive artifact does not derive from a notion of an originative absolute. It remains, 292 ES translations, and lead Lacan to reintroduce, following Edouard Pichon, a distinction between moi (me) and je (I). I. The Pronoun Ich Ich, the personal pronoun in the first-person singular, corresponds to the Greek ego [ἐγώ], the Latin ego, the French je, and the English “I.” German does not have an equivalent of the French moi, that is, to a “tonic form” of “I,” or as Littré defines it, a “pronoun whose primary role is to serve as an object, but which is also used as a subject when a nonenclitic form, such as je and me, is required” (RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française). In the sixteenth century je was felt to be enclitic (we still find in Scarron, Le Virgile travesti, “je qui chantai jadis Typhon d’un style que l’on trouvera bouffon”). In German, Ich is both the strong and the weak form: Ich, Ich = moi, je; Ich, der = moi qui, and so on. Thus the famous phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” is translated into French as “Moi aussi, j’ai vécu en Arcadie,” and in German (by Schiller, Thalia) as “Auch Ich war in Arcadia geboren.” This reinforced form was, reasonably, nominalized in French. It thus represents the I that is the object of psychology: Moi, en tant que pensant (Ich, als denkend), je suis un object du sense interne et je m’appelle une âme (und heisse Seele). Si bien que l’expression: moi (der Ausdruck: Ich), en tant qu’être pensant, désigne déja l’objet de la psychologie. (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft) The Fichtean distinction between Ich and Nicht-Ich thus becomes that of the I and the not-I, and moi transcendental naturally translates Husserl’s tranzendentale Ich: Par l’ἐποχή phénoménologique, je réduis mon moi humain naturel (mein naturalisches menschliches Ich) et ma vie psychique—domaine de l’expérience de soi psychologique (meiner psychologischen Selbsterfahrung)—à mon moi (Ich) transcendental et phénoménologique, domaine de l’expérience de soi (Selbsterfahrung) transcendentale et phénoménologique. (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen) We may therefore put the question thus: is the Freudian Ich a strong or weak subject? This question seems abruptly to reduce a theoretical question to a grammatical one: however, grammatical considerations are essential for understanding the debates that have animated French psychoanalysis. . II. The Neuter Pronoun Es The translation of Es by ça in French was not established without difficulty. The group that gathered on 31 May 1927 did indeed adopt ça as proposed by Édouard Pichon, against the opinion of Angelo Hesnard, but when Freud apparently voiced disapproval, soi was chosen in the end on 20 July 1928. We find a remarkable trace of these difficulties of translation in a note by Hesnard, added to the translation of Freud’s Le moi et le ça by S. Jankélévitch: The Freudian Es, neuter pronoun in German, is untranslatable into French. It was suggested that we translate . Introduction à l’architexte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979. Translation by Jane E. Lewin: The Architext: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. . Nouveau Discours du récit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Translation by Jane E. Lewin: Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Hamburger, Käte. Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957. Translation by M. J. Rose: The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Kayser, Wolfgang. Das sprachliche Kunstwerk. Berne: Francke, 1948. Lämmert, Eberhard. Bauformen des Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1955. Müller, Günther: Morphologische Poetik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968. Staiger, Emil. Grundbegriffe der Poetik. Zurich: Atlantis, 1946. Translation by Janette C. Hudson and Luanne T. Frank: Basic Concepts of Poetics, edited by Marianne Burkhard and Luanne T. Frank. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Stanzel, Franz K. Typische Formen des Romans. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1964. Translation by J. P. Pusack: Narrative Situations in the Novel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. ES, ICH, ÜBER-ICH ENGLISH id; I, me, self; super-ego FRENCH id; ça; je, moi; surmoi GREEK egô [ἐγώ] LATIN id; ego v. CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, ES GIBT, I/ME/MYSELF, IL Y A, PERSON, ROMANTIC, SELBST, SUBJECT, UNCONSCIOUS The first topography developed by Freud starting with The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and that includes the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious is based on the classical vocabulary of philosophy and psychology. The only innovation here from the linguistic point of view is the introduction of the preconscious (das Vorbewusste). That model thus does not pose any particular problem of translation. It is entirely otherwise with the second topography, which, beginning with the publication in 1923 of the essay “Das Ich und das Es” (The Ego and the Id), uses a vocabulary that is entirely specific to the German language, in order to define the psychological as a complex system in which are confronted, balanced, and dissolved what we might call psychic “figures,” bearers of “personality” (the Ego and the Superego), with the latter two deriving their energy from the reservoir of drives that is the Id. Thus, we may say that the Ego is the “center” of the personality and that it tries to find a balance among the threefold demands of reality, of the Superego (which bears the ideal and prohibitions), and of the Id, that is, archaic desires. However, far from being an autonomous being supporting the transparent identity of a subject, the Ego itself is the product of a series of identifications. To give a lively representation of what he calls the “decomposition of the psychic personality,” Freud chooses to use substantival pronouns (Ich, the personal pronoun of the first-person singular; Id, the neuter pronoun of the third-person singular), which he finds in the philosophical and psychological traditions (das Ich), among recent authors (das Es), or which he invents (das Über-Ich). The difficulty of translating these terms into English or French thus rests both on the difference between the systems of pronouns in the two languages and on the “classical” translations of the substantival Ich. Finally, the interpretations themselves of this new topic, and especially of the meaning of Ich, help orient the ES 293 to refer to that part of our being which is impersonal and thus subject to natural necessity [Naturnotwendig].” It remains the case that neither Nietzsche nor any of his predecessors (e.g., Georg Lichtenberg and Eduard von Hartmann) construct a real concept of the Es. The claim of paragraph 17 of Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) is certainly not to replace the Cartesian “I think” with “it thinks,” but to show that, in both cases, what remains is the belief in a subject of thought, even if it is impersonal: It thinks (Es denkt): but that with this “it” (dies “es”) we should in fact be dealing with the ancient and celebrated “I” (“Ich”) is only, to speak politely, an assumption. . But we still do too much with this “it thinks” (“es denkt”): this “it” (dies “es”) already contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. Nietzsche is thus critiquing Romantic and especially NeoRomantic usage (note that he preserves the lowercase: he is interested in a grammatical function). This usage is precisely the same as Groddeck’s, who gives the expression its nominalizing turn. Freud is able to take over the phrase and to give it a role and a rigorous definition, while still recognizing its fundamentally irrational nature. While not everything dissolves into the Es, everything does come out of it. it by the Latin Id. Usage favored the term Ça (or cela). Many psychoanalysts keep the German term Es, contrasted with Ich (Moi) and Über-Ich (Sur-Moi). In German, Es is a neuter pronoun that is used in a large number of expressions translated in French by ça or il (e.g., es regnet, il pleut; es geht, ça va; see ES GIBT). Its nominalization in Freud’s writing is the consequence in German of a whole train of thought (philosophy of nature, Romantic medicine, vitalism), which, over the course of the nineteenth century, used the impersonal Es to refer to activities that cannot be controlled by the will or consciousness (cf. Staewen-Haas, “Le terme ‘es’ [‘ça’]”; “Zur Genealogie des ‘Es’ ”). In what is called in French Le moi et le ça, Freud claims to be borrowing the term, in its nominalized form, from Groddeck, and further back, from Nietzsche: I propose to take it into account, by proposing to call das Ich that which comes from the system of perception and which is at first preconscious, and to call the other psychic element, into which the Ich extends and which behaves like the unconscious, the Es, following Groddeck’s usage. Freud clarifies in a note: “Groddeck probably followed Nietzsche, who frequently uses this grammatical expression 1 Je and moi, from Pichon to Lacan Founded in 1926, the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) counted among its members the grammarian Édouard Pichon, co-author with Jacques Damourette of the Essai de grammaire de la langue française. He started a linguistic commission for the unification of French psychoanalytic vocabulary. At its meeting of 29 May 1927, Pichon was the only one opposed to the translation of Ich by moi: M. Pichon explains why the translation of Ich by “moi” seems wrong to him. “Moi” is opposed to not-“Moi”; it contains everything in the subject’s psyche; it answers just as well to das Es as to das Ich: what is proper to Ich in his view is the ability to be the subject of conscious thought: this is why he suggests ego as a translation, or je, terms which are as it happens the least inexact correlates for Ich. (Revue française de psychanalyse 2 (1927): 404–5) Moi won by four votes to one. Despite his curious assimilation of Ich with consciousness, did Pichon anticipate, on the basis of purely grammatical considerations, Lacan’s splitting of Ich into je and moi? One might think so on the basis of an article entitled “La personne et la personnalité vues à la lumière de la pensée idiomatique française,” dedicated precisely to distinguishing je and moi, but in a sense rather far away from Lacan’s (which Roudinesco does not seem to make clear in Histoire de la psychanalyse en France). For Lacan, the distinction between je and moi corresponds to two fundamentally different psychic functions. The je is the subject of the unconscious, the subject of the signifier; yet, the subject, in the “circle of the signifier,” cannot “count itself and only act as an absence.” Where, then, does the moi come from? From the need to overcome this absence, or “the invisible mark that the subject has from the signifier,” which “alienates him in the primary identification which forms the ideal of the moi” (“Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir”). In any case, we will see below whether the Lacanian distinction between je and moi is necessarily located “inside” the Ich. In the above-cited article, however, Pichon, on the basis of grammar, distinguishes the je-me as “thin personality” with the moi as “thick personality.” It is true that the je, however thin, represents the unchangeable part, and the moi the changeable, notably by means of the cure: one thus helps a patient “by explaining to him that destroying one part of his moi may temporarily cause suffering to his je-me, but not mutilate it. And the patient will feel that his new moi, that is, the new thickness of his person, fits better than the old one with his je-me.” Pichon does not show how the moi is produced from the je. Further, nothing is more foreign to Lacan than this doctrine of thicknesses: how can we be sure of not being taken in by a new narcissistic mirage, by identifying with the analyst? The Lacanian cure is more of a procedure of paring down the moi, and grammar should not mask the meaning of psychic functions: analyzing whether and how the je and the moi are distinct and how they overlap in each particular subject is not a matter of the grammatical conception of the functions in which they appear. (Lacan, “La chose freudienne”) REFS.: Lacan, Jacques. “La chose freudienne.” In Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. . “La personne et la personnalité vues à la lumière de la pensée idiomatique française.” Revue française de psychanalyse 3 (1938): 447–59. . “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir.” In Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Pichon, Édouard, and Jacques Damourette. Essai de grammaire de la langue française (1911–40). Repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1983. Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France. Vol. 2. Paris: Fayard, 1994. 294 ES about the scientific character of his invention, the second topic is more in line with Freud’s place in German Romantic literature. Though both French and English translators are aware of this aspect of Freud, the latter did everything possible to hide it and thus give themselves a way of preserving continuity in Freud’s work. The former are more hesitant, which is partly due to the absence of a theoretical unity in the French psychoanalytic movement (logic would have required the moi and the soi or the je and the ça). Lacan did try to exemplify this unity, but his je was not adopted. This was not only because of linguistic inertia: rather, it is because, by splitting Freud’s Ich into moi and je, he seems to clarify some aspects of Freud’s text at the cost of a formalism that seems excessive. As a Romantic, Freud was no doubt attached to the ambiguity of his notions, which thus reinforces their power of metamorphosis. Alexandre Abensour REFS.: Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man’s Soul. London: Hogarth Press, 1983. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Translated by J. Riviere. London: Hogarth Press, 1927. . Le moi et le ça. Translated by S. Jankélévitch. Paris: Payot, 1971. . The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press–Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74. Groddeck, Georg. The Book of the It. Translated by V.M.E. Collins. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen. In Husserliana, vol. 1. La Haye: Nijhoff, 1950. Hayman, A. “What Do We Mean by Id?” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 17, no. 2 (1969). Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by Bruce Fink: Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Nitzscke, Bernt. “Zur Herkunft des Es. Freud, Groddeck, Nietzsche-Schopenhauer und E. von Hartmann.” Psyche 9 (1983). Scarron, Paul. Le Virgile travesti. Paris: Delahays, 1858. Schiller, Friedrich. Thalia. In Resignation, Eine Phantasie, in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, vol. 1, Geschichte, 1776–99. First published in 1786. Staewen-Haas, Renate. “Le terme ‘es’ [‘ça’], histoire de ses vicissitudes tant en allemand qu’en Français.” Revue française de psychanalyse 4 (1986). . “Zur Genealogie des ‘Es.’” Psyche 2 (1985). Winnicott, Donald Woods. “Le corps et le self.” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 3 (Spring 1971). III. The English Translation: “Ego and Id” As with other Freudian terms, the English translation took a scholarly direction early on (beginning in 1927 with the translation of The Ego and the Id by Joan Riviere): the use of Latin terms, even though English of course possesses an array of pronouns (“I” and “it”), as well as “me,” an equivalent of the French moi (c’est moi, “it’s me”—in German, Ich bin es). Unlike in France, the choice did not occasion much discussion. It corresponds fully with the medical orientation of psychoanalysis in the Anglo-Saxon world. It must be noted, however, that “ego” was used from the middle of the nineteenth century in psychology to refer to the psychic function corresponding to the pronoun “I”: nominalizing this pronoun for psychoanalytic usage would have been a genuine terminological invention. Bruno Bettelheim, in Freud and Man’s Soul, shows just how much the English translation introduces abstractions where Freud attempts to anchor his second topic in the most everyday language. English can also, however, use its own resources for creating terms: this is the case, for example, with Winnicott, who creates, alongside the ego, a distinct notion: the “self.” Here is how he defines it, in a letter addressed to the translator of one of his articles, who is having difficulty with the translation of “self”: “For me the self, which is not the ego, is the person who is me, who is only me, who has a totality based on the operation of the maturational process” (letter of 19 January 1971). However, the French tradition of translating German terms also leads to the rejection of the solutions offered by the French language. In translating “self” by moi, the translator of the article in question fears no longer having this term available to translate “ego”: whence the preservation, in the translation, of the term “self,” declared untranslatable. As we see, the problem does not reside at all in the absence of resources of the target language. But, with the “self” having been declared untranslatable by Winnicott’s translators, and without je being brought into play, here is the authorized translation: “Pour moi, le self, qui n’est pas le moi, est la personne qui est moi.” . In conclusion, we may see that the choices of translation are not unrelated to the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis. The second topic represents Freud’s desire to break with abstract character of the first (unconscious, preconscious, conscious) and its roots in the vocabulary of psychology and philosophy. Whatever Freud’s declarations 2 The Phrase: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” What is perhaps Freud’s most famous phrase, used at the end of his lecture on “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” (included in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, vol. 22 of the Standard Edition), presents a particular translation difficulty that results from the use of nominalized pronouns. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that Freud seems to re-establish the pronominal use (without the articles) while maintaining the nominalized dimension (by writing the pronouns with capitals): “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse). Word for word, this yields: “Where That was, I should be,” or “Where It was, I should be” (Strachey translates it: “Where id was, there ego shall be,” thus eliminating the capitalized pronouns). No translation can preserve the extreme subtlety with which Freud keeps the nouns ES GIBT 295 ES GIBT (GERMAN) DANISH der er ENGLISH there is FRENCH il y a v. ESTI, IL Y A, HÁ, and COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, DASEIN, EREIGNIS, ES, FICAR, LIGHT, LOGOS, OBJECT, SEIN, SUBJECT, TO BE, VORHANDEN Unlike other Germanic languages (Eng. “there is”; Dan. der er), German expresses the Gallicism il y a by the phrase es gibt—literally “he/it gives” (+ accusative), by combining the impersonal pronoun es with the verb geben, “to give.” There thus seems to be a predisposition in the German language to think of what exists under the aspect of being given and to think of its origins as impersonal. This entry investigates that predisposition by following the ways in which German thought exploits and orchestrates the two components of the phrase es gibt. I. From Datur to Es Gibt No doubt we should not exaggerate the idiomatic, even specifically Germanic aspect of the phrase es gibt, whose strange (seltsam) character was noted by the Grimms themselves, while nonetheless underlining its relationship, at least in scholarly language, to the use of the Latin dare (“to give”) in the passive, hence, dari. The Grimms refer to Spinoza (Ethics, II, 49): in mente nulla datur absoluta facultas volendi et nolendi (“There is in the mind no absolute faculty of positive or negative volition”). They comment: datur gleich es gibt, “datur being here equivalent to es gibt.” We still speak in this sense of the “givens in a problem,” the “immediate givens of consciousness” (Bergson), of sense data (Wittgenstein). What exists, what presents itself to our thought (intuition, etc.), without the latter’s doing anything is a datum, a Gegebenes. German philosophy, from Kant to Husserl, explores this route, following the vocabulary of giving (and hence receiving), in the expression es gibt. Another route, carved out by Heidegger, instead underlines the strangeness of the impersonal es in es gibt. The numerous variations in German philosophy that derive from the simple phrase es gibt oscillate between the appearance created by the giving itself and that of which or by which the giving takes place (though it is fair to ask: the giving of what, exactly?). . II. From Es Gibt to Gegebenheit: Kant and Husserl Intuition takes place only insofar as the object is given to us (gegeben wird); “by the intermediary of sensation, objects are given to us (gegeben), and it alone brings us intuitions”: the whole beginning of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is directed by the distinction between what is given and what is thought (gegeben/gedacht), where the priority of the former is recognized. In shifting from a in writing, even while eliminating them in speech. There are thus two directions: 1. That of the published translations, which do not worry about these subtleties and simply choose to treat Es and Ich as nouns. The first French translation, by Anne Berman in 1936 (which was the only one available until 1984), even adds a verb that was not in the text: “Le moi doit déloger le ça.” The two recent translations, published by Gallimard (1984) and by Presses Universitaires de France (1993), are very close: “Là où était du ça, doit advenir du moi” (Gallimard), and “Là où était du ça, du moi doit advenir” (Presses Universitaires de France ). The choice of treating Es and Ich as partitive is based on the grammatical logic of German: we might miss the pronominal resonance, but the partitive corresponds equally well to the context. Freud, in the immediately preceding sentence, claims in effect that the goal of psychoanalysis is “to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id” (“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” New Introductory Lectures, vol. 22, Standard Edition, and Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15). 2. The other direction, one taken by Lacan, grandly ignores this context. Of the several translations that he gives of this Freudian passage, the simplest is no doubt from “La science et la vérité”: “Là où c’était, là comme sujet dois-je advenir.” This translation, both literal and interpretive at the same time, adds some precision (“comme sujet”), which is completely absent from Freud’s text. But the Lacanian interpretation of the second topic is what is at issue here. For Freud, it is clear that the moi must conquer territory belonging to the je, which is precisely what he calls “cultural work” (Kulturarbeit): it is, in fact, the contribution of psychoanalysis to culture at large. Lacan interprets the Es in the phrase not as an “uncultivated” part, but as the very location of the subject of the unconscious: in other words, the moi must, by entering the location of the subject, become the subject, hence je. And the lack of an article does not, for Lacan, make the pronouns into partitives, but rather allows him to leave substantialism behind in order finally to speak the language of ontology: it appears here that it is into a place: Wo, where Es, a subject without any das or other objectival article, war, was, it is a matter of the place of a being, and that in this place: soll . . ., Ich, I, there must I (as we said: this I-am [suis-je], before it is said, is me [moi]), werden, to become, that is, to come to light from this very place insofar as it is a place of being. The distinction between je and moi thus only enters into the Ich with regard to the place of the Es, that is, for Lacan, of the S: but is Lacan’s homophonic trick for moving from one language to another comparable to the game that allows Freud to write one sentence and mean another? REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15. London: Imago, 1915. . The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. Vol. 22 (1932–36). London: Hogarth Press–Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74. Lacan, Jacques. “La chose freudienne.” In Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. . “La science et la vérité.” In Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. 296 ES GIBT Latin to a German terminology, Kant is the witness and the privileged agent in the transposition from the Latin dari in the vocabulary of receptivity. In effect, the Dissertation of 1770 can claim (II, §10): “Intellectualium non datur (homini) Intuitus [There is no intuition of intelligibles (for man)]” or again (II, §5): “dantur conceptus [concepts are given]”! The Latin dari, which, in Spinoza and up until the pre-Critical Kant, kept the thoroughly geometrical aspect of the given in a problem, will find itself explicitly thematized and transformed. The modality of what is given to us (= what is presented to intuition) is fixed by Husserl in the term Gegebenheit (which Kant had not yet ventured), thus nominalizing the past participle of the verb geben (to give) in favor of an extension of the sphere of intuition and of the shift from a receptive intuition to a “giving” intuition” (gebende Anschauung, in Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie Husserliana, vol. 2). Would these variations, Kantian or Husserlian, have seen the light of day if they had not been stimulated by the familiar es gibt of everyday conversation? An emphatic use of es gibt, in fact, begins to appear in Husserl: “es gibt also Bedeutungen [There are meanings]” (Recherches logiques, II, §36). III. Es Gibt, Es Gilt, Es Gibt Nicht: Meinong The exploration of Gegebenheit is not, however, restricted to Husserlian phenomenological research. Natorp, Lask, and Meinong all made use of the concept at more or less the same time. In section 3 of his Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong writes: Es gibt Gegenstände, von denen gilt, daß es dergleichen Gegenstände nicht gibt. (There are objects about which it is valid to say that they do not exist [about which the proposition according to which they do not exist is valid].) This is not a crude contradiction, but we should point out that there is some subtle play within es gibt: for certain objects we must say that they can only be envisaged as not existing and incapable of existing. This play is redoubled with the assonance between es gibt and es gilt (“it is valid”). The es gibt, for Meinong, applies no less for the unreal. Es gibt here is practically equivalent to an “it so happens”: it so happens that some objects are nowhere. “What, then, does ‘es gibt’ mean?” IV. From Being to Words, Heidegger’s Es Gibt This is the question asked by Heidegger in the 1919 lecture at Freiburg titled Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Three stages may be distinguished in the Heideggerian meditation on es gibt: 1. the discussions prior to Sein und Zeit, 2. the 1927 treatise, Sein und Zeit, 3. the reappraisal of this question in the “Letter on Humanism” (1946), then in Zeit und Sein (1962). 1. What, then, does es gibt mean? Es gibt Zahlen, es gibt Dreiecke, es gibt Bilder von Rembrandt, es gibt U-Boote; ich sage: Es gibt heute noch Regen, es gibt morgen Kalbsbraten. Mannigfache “es gibt,” und jeweils hat es einen anderen Sinn und doch auch jedes wieder ein in jedem antreffbares identisches Bedeutungsmoment. Auch dieses ganz abgeblaßte, bestimmter Bedeutungen gleichsam entleerte bloße “es gibt” hat gerade wegen seiner Einfachheit seine mannigfachen Rätsel. Wo liegt das sinnhafte Motiv für den Sinn des “es gibt”? (There are numbers, there are triangles, there are paintings by Rembrandt, and there are submarines; I say: there will be more rain today, there will be roast veal tomorrow [cf. RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, sense II, 17, e, b, s.v. geben]. So many es gibts, each one having a different sense, even though each one of these senses contains an identical moment of meaning. And yet this simple es gibt, so dull, emptied of precise meanings in a way, contains, in virtue of its very simplicity, numerous riddles. Where does the sense-bearing pattern (Motiv) lie for the sense of es gibt?) (Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung) Heidegger thus underlines the multivocity of es gibt, its unsuspected richness, and the unity of the generative sense of such a plurality. 2. The occurrences of es gibt that we find in Being and Time, beginning with section 2, deal either with the world (Sein und Zeit), with truth, or with being. The phrase es gibt generally occurs in quotation marks, indicating a problematization of the everyday expression, which is thus picked out and questioned. Leibniz asked, “Why there is something rather than nothing?” (Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison, §7). For Heidegger, who often came back to Leibniz’s declaration, what there is is only something inasmuch as it is not anything, as this something is not equivalent to anything in existence. There is the there is (D. Panis). 1 A personal construction of the impersonal In certain dialects of Thuringia and Hesse, etc., we find this same turn of phrase (es gibt) governed by the nominative, as in the example given by the Grimms: “es gibt ein tüchtiger Regen heute” (“there’s going to be a lot of rain today,” “that’s quite some rain we’re going to have today”), the meaning of “give” being erased and the object becoming the subject (grammatically: in the nominative), where es gibt = es ist, es kommt (“it is,” “there is going to be”). The documented passage from the accusative to the nominative indicates that the very idea of giving may no longer have been felt in the very turn of phrase es gibt. We also find (notably in Luther), as a variant of es gibt: es ist gegeben (“it is given”). ES GIBT 297 3. However, it is before Time and Being, in the “Letter on Humanism” that es gibt is directly addressed, notably with the phrase “Es gibt Sein [There is Being]”: In “S. u. Z.” (S. 212) is mit Absicht und Vorsicht gesagt: il y a l’Être: “es gibt” das Sein. Das il y a übersetzt das “es gibt” ungenau. Denn das “es,” was hier “gibt,” ist das Sein selbst. (In Being and Time (p. 212), il y a [es gibt] Being is said with design and caution. The il y a only approximately translates es gibt. For the cela [es] that donne [gibt] is Being itself.) (Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”) Heidegger interprets the “giving” of es gibt immediately afterward as a gewähren, “to accord,” “to grant.” More disturbing is the remark that follows: “Doch über dieses il y a kann man nicht geradezu und ohne Anhalt spekulieren [But one cannot speculate straightaway and without reserve on this il y a].” No doubt we should see this as refusing to dissociate il y a from Being, since this il y a is above all aiming, in this context, to say that Being is not in the same manner in which entities are. This does not prevent Heidegger from coming back to this point in Time and Being: “Das in der Rede ‘Es gibt Sein,’ ‘Es gibt Zeit’ gesagte ‘Es’ nennt vermutlich etwas Ausgezeichnetes [There is reason to presume that the ‘It’ said in ‘There is being,’ ‘There is time’ names something typical and exceptional]” (Time and Being). Heidegger clarifies the es of es gibt in the direction of Ereignis (see EREIGNIS). In the Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture “Time and Being,” finally, Heidegger declares after citing a passage from Rimbaud’s Illuminations (“Enfances, III”): “The French il y a (cf. the idiomatic phrase particular to southern Germany, es hat) corresponds to the German es gibt but has a greater extension. The exactly parallel translation of Rimbaud’s Il y a would, in German, be es ist (il est)” (Questions IV). There remains the question of what separates il y a from es gibt. The phrase’s firm accent on giving—certainly literally indicated, but usually inaudible—may have led J.-L. Marion to overtranslate it by the rendering cela donne (“that gives”): The standard translation of il y a, certainly admissible in everyday language, is no longer justified if we desire conceptual precision. It effectively masks the entire semantics of giving that nevertheless structures es gibt. We really do not understand F. Fédier’s reverse argument: “Every time, then, in translation, es gibt is developed in the direction of a giving, the translation goes a little too far” (note in Questions IV, Paris, 1976, p. 49). Why? Can such a brutal denial be accepted without the slightest justification? (Marion, Étant donné) “Conceptual precision” is certainly not the aim of the Heideggerian understanding of the everyday expression es gibt: rather than setting up an operational conceptual tool, the point is to listen to the language and its unsuspected resources. F. Fédier’s resistance to developing es gibt “in the direction of a giving” is nevertheless far from lacking “the slightest justification” if we look carefully at the cited passage: We should remember that geben is the Germanic development of the Indo-European root ghabh—, which yielded the Latin habere. It is necessary to try to hear the Latin habere in accord with geben to perceive what avoir means in il y a—and which is no doubt closer to tenir [to hold] than to posséder [to possess]. Etymologically, es gibt is thus closer to il y a than it seems at first blush: it derives from an avoir whose meaning, in il y a, is surely still worth thinking about. At the same time, this indicates the direction in which es gibt must still be examined, both in its proximity to and its difference from il y a: in its relationship with the deployment of the word, as Heidegger indicates in Unterwegs zur Sprache: We are familiar with the expression es gibt in many usages, such as es gibt an der sonnigen Halde Erdbeeren (there are strawberries on the sunny hillside); il y a, es gibt, there are, strawberries; we can find them as something that is there on the slope. In our present reflection es gibt is used differently. We do not mean “there is the word”—we mean “by virtue of the gift of the word there is, the word gives.” The whole spook about the “givenness” of things, which many people justly fear, is blown away. (Heidegger, On the Way to Language) When made to refer to words being used, the phrase es gibt thus no longer means that there is a word (or words), but that it, the word, gives (es gibt das Wort  es, das Wort, gibt). Speech is the domain in which “there is that which gives,” as always giving, never given. A final transformation of es gibt in Heidegger’s thought: the word (das Wort) gibt (das Sein), the word gives being in the domain in which “there is that which gives.” Pascal David REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. Brief über den Humanismus. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Frank A. Capuzzi: “Letter on Humanism.” In Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Sein und Zeit. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. . Unterwegs zur Sprache. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by P. D. Hertz: On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. . Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. In Gesamtausgabe, vols. 56/57. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987. Translation: Towards the Definition of Philosophy. New Brunswick: Athlone, 2000. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Bk. 1. 3 vols. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980–89. . Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Bk. 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. . Die Idee der Phänomenologie (Husserliana II). Lahaye: Nijhoff, 1950. 2nd ed., 1973. Translation by W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian: The Idea of Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964. . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1913. . Logische Untersuchungen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1900. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. De mundus sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. Königsberg, 1770. Translation : “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation].” In Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 298 ESSENCE recognize the semantically rich prephilosophical features of language (like the Lat. substantiam habere, substantiam capere); and (2) the new doctrinal framework that makes it possible to create new terms (essentia is no doubt the most apposite example), or to reappropriate old ones (such as existentia) and give them a new career. At the level of fundamental ontological concepts, the plays made are all the more complicated because the end result is very limited: more or less the same cards are redistributed, but at each round new rules and constraints are imposed. By this we mean that the very idea of “retroversion” can only have a limited application, and that we do not return from existentia to huparxis [ὕπαϱξις] or to the Aristotelian question “ei esti? [εἰ ἐστι ;]” without disturbing the conceptual and dialectical context. I. The Multiple Meanings of “Is” in Most Languages A. Predication or existence In his System of Logic (1843), John Stuart Mill warned of the “double meaning” of the verb “to be” (“is”), which is used both as a “sign of predication” (see PREDICATION, V) and as a “sign of existence”: Many volumes might be filled with the frivolous speculations concerning the nature of Being (τὸ ὄν, οὐσία, Ens, Entitas, Essentia, and the like) which have arisen from overlooking this double meaning of the word to be; from supposing that when it signifies to exist, and when it signifies to be some specified thing, as to be a man, to be Socrates, to be seen or spoken of, to be a phantom, even to be a nonentity, it must still, at bottom, answer to the same idea; and that a meaning must be found for it which shall suit all these cases. The fog which rose from this narrow spot diffused itself at an early period over the whole surface of metaphysics. Yet it becomes us not to triumph over the great intellects of Plato and Aristotle because we are now able to preserve ourselves from many errors into which they, perhaps inevitably, fell. The Greeks seldom knew any language but their own. This rendered it far more difficult for them than it is for us to acquire a readiness in detecting ambiguities. One of the advantages of having accurately studied a plurality of languages, especially of those languages which eminent thinkers have used as the vehicle of their thoughts, is the practical lesson we learn respecting the ambiguities of words, by finding that the same word in one language corresponds, on different occasions, to different words in another. Without this exercise, even the strongest minds will find it hard to believe that things that have the same name do not have the same nature. Yet it becomes us not to expend much labour very unprofitably (as was frequently done by the two philosophers just mentioned) in vain attempts to discover in what this common nature consists. B. A terrible ambiguity In The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell laid out the ambiguity of the verb “to be” much more precisely: The word is is terribly ambiguous, and great care is necessary in order not to confound its various meanings. We have (1) the sense in which it asserts Being, as in . Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Kartknoch, 1781. Translation by P. Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Principles of Nature and Grace. In Philosophical Texts, translated by R. S. Woolhouse and R. Francks, introduction by R. S. Woolhouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Marion, Jean-Luc. Etant donné. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Translation by J. L. Kosky: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Meinong, Alexius. Über Gegenstandstheorie. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988. Translation by I. Levi, D. B. Terrell, and R. M. Chisholm: “On the Theory of Objects.” In Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, edited by R. M. Chisholm. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960. Panis, Daniel. Il y a le il y a. Brussels: Ousia, 1993. Spinoza. Ethics. Translated by G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.