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

CONSCIOUSNESS, CONSCIENCE, AWARENESS DUTCH innerlijke medewetingh, innerlijckste bewustheyt, meêwustigheyt FRENCH conscience GERMAN Bewusstheit, Bewusstsein, Gewissen, Gewissheit GREEK sunaisthêsis [συναίσθησις], suneidêsis [συνείδησις], sunesis [σύνεσις], suntêrêsis [συντήϱησις] ITALIAN consapevolezza, coscienza LATIN conscientia v. ACT, CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE], FAITH, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, SENSE, SOUL, SUBJECT, UNCONSCIOUS Although it was created by philosophers, the concept of consciousness has become absolutely commonplace, denoting the individual’s or the group’s relation to itself. Thus it refers to what the philosopher and the “common man” have in common, and as a result, like “criticism” or “wisdom,” it can designate philosophy itself. The same was not true of the ancient terms (suneidêsis or even conscientia), which are usually given as its equivalents. Thus modern European philosophy has endowed itself with a common past, though it cannot establish a complete equivalence between essentially untranslatable paradigms. After distinguishing the effects of retroversion associated with the Greco-Roman heritage proper, we will show how, starting in the sixteenth century, three great episodes in the European invention of consciousness followed one another. The mark they left is visible everywhere: the religious and political institution of “freedom of conscience” that led to the identification of the latter with the “citizen subject”; the construction of a theory of consciousness as a general faculty of knowledge by John Locke and his successors (Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant); the conflict of metaphysics of personal identity and of self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein). The circulation of concepts and the relative unification of terminologies obtained by the early nineteenth century, when philosophical modernity sought new foundations for itself, did not erase major differences among Romance languages, German (Gewissen and Gewissheit, Bewusstsein and Bewusstheit), and English (“consciousness” and “awareness”), without which it would be difficult to understand the way in which the heritage of transcendental philosophy and the new field of the “cognitive sciences” or the “philosophy of mind” are developing today. This is what makes it possible to foresee, if not an end of consciousness, at least a change in its referents and in the possibilities of translating it. In France, the national point of view gives rise to an illusion that the different senses of the French word conscience are distributed over two or more corresponding words in other languages or that the French term unifies what other languages divide. But it is not clear that the semantic fields of other languages are divided, or that they are all included in what French calls conscience. It may be that taken together they effect a displacement in usage, which is broader than any one of them, but more restrictive than their sum. This illusion goes hand in hand with a question peculiar to French, which is whether the apparent unity of the word conscience should be considered a simple homonym or an analogy, the expression of a kernel of signification circulating among particular meanings. Dictionaries do not take a single view on this point, and they are evolving. Obviously, these fluctuations are related to the history, which is itself transnational, of linguistic innovation in the area of “thought about thought.” Here we find ourselves confronted by a CONSCIOUSNESS 175 institution: at once the “interior master” and a guarantee of autonomy. This union of contraries, to which the Augustinian tradition was to give an ontological weight, has persisted down to our own time. . The Church Fathers identified conscientia with the soul that had to confront its creator, and it was thus not only judge but judged. In Augustine, conscientia is subordinated to a more fundamental notion, memoria, the true name of the self-presence that has always already confessed God’s Word: by questioning the “secrets of his conscience” in his “innermost depths” (“interior intimio meo,” Augustine says in his Confessions [book 3]), man does nothing less than discover transcendent truth in himself (“superior summo meo,” “higher than all my height”). St. Jerome says that the spark of conscience put within us, scintilla conscientiae, continues to burn even in criminals and sinners (Commentary on Ezekiel, in RT: PL). As for Scholasticism’s speculative developments of the term, they also proceed from Jerome, but through a stunning error: copyists, thinking they had found in his text a word suntêrêsis [συντήρησις], interpreted it at first as a derivative of têrêsis [τήϱησις], conservatio (preservation), then as a derivative of hairesis [αἵϱεσις], electio (choice). Thus was forged a fictive Greek word, synderesis, that performed the essential task of making double use of consciousness as a passive faculty (a trace of divine creation) and an active faculty (operating under conditions of sin, after the Fall). Scholastic theologians then formulated the “practical syllogism” of the process through which Revelation illuminates our actions and guides them: (1) syntheresis, (2) conscientia, (3) conclusio (cf. Chollet, “Conscience”). This is a fundamental intellectualist scheme of thought that continued to be influential after its theological justification evaporated: without referring to it, it would be difficult to understand the place that consciousness occupies in G.W.F. Hegel as the middle term of the spirit’s becoming, between universality and singularity. With the Reformation, however, syntheresis (or sunderesis, or synderesis) fell into disuse, and the immediacy of conscientia as the inner testimony of morality and a sign of grace won out: it became in German (Luther) the Gewissen, with its own certainty (Gewissheit), in French (Calvin) the conscience associated with the systematic practice of the examen de conscience. Thus we find ourselves at the starting point of the drama in three episodes that led to making “self-consciousness” the privileged expression of the philosophical idea of “subjectivity” in the West: in it we witness the European invention of consciousness. . II. The European Invention of Consciousness The first episode in the drama corresponds to the debates aroused by the Reformation concerning “freedom of conscience”; the second leads to an identification of the “self” with the mind’s reflective activity, to which Locke gave the name “consciousness”; the third, at the turning point of the eighteenth century, led to a reinterpretation of the principles of knowledge and morality as expressions of Selbstbewusstsein. privileged case for the study of what Renée Balibar calls “European co-lingualism.” I. The Legacy of Antiquity and Scholasticism In Romance and Germanic languages, the main terms derive from two main roots: on the one hand, scire, scientia, whence conscius (and its antonyms nescius and inscius), conscientia, conscient and conscience, and so on; on the other hand, wissen, whence gewiss, Gewissen and Gewissheit, bewusst (unbewusst) and Bewusstsein, Bewusstheit, and so on. It has become customary to say that the meanings of the modern French word conscience are connected with different uses of the Latin conscientia and the Greek suneidêsis. As far as the Greek word is concerned, this clearly involves retroversion on the basis of correspondences established by Romans seeking to create their own moral terminology. From the poets to the philosophers, the Greek terminology for the relationship to oneself in the order of knowledge and ethics is much more complex. Thus it was only in the Hellenistic period that suneidêsis came into common use in the schools of ethics to designate the way in which the individual, “[alone] with himself,” evaluates the worthiness of his conduct and the value of his person, in this life or in anticipation of death. The question remains whether St. Paul had such a meaning in mind in important passages in his epistles such as this one: They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness [summarturousês autôn tês suneidêseôs (συμμαϱτυϱούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως)] and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men [ta krupta tôn anthrôpôn (τὰ ϰϱυπτὰ τῶν ἀνθϱώπων)] by Christ Jesus. (Romans 2:15) However that may be, it was on the basis of these formulations and metaphors they share with the Stoic tradition (the “inner voice,” the “stage” on which each person makes his acts appear, or the court before which he “bears witness” for or against himself, etc.) that the age-old dialectic between the “natural” and “supernatural” character of the moral consciousness was carried out. . Although it still poses problems, the history of the Latin conscientia is better known. Before Cicero made it a key term in humanitas, the uses of the word developed in the two directions in which cum can be interpreted (cf. C. S. Lewis, “Conscience and Conscious”): on the one hand, the direction that connotes appropriation and achievement (know well, be well informed about); on the other hand, the one that connotes a private or secret “sharing.” From that point on, there was the idea of a knowledge reserved for a few people, each of whom “confided in himself.” This meaning led to the fundamental representation of an internal testimony given to oneself (whence Quintilian’s famous formula: “conscientia mille testes” [conscience is as good as a thousand witnesses]), and finally to the idea of a “judgment” that is made within us with regard to our acts and thoughts. This is the source of an authority that can be opposed to that of any 176 CONSCIOUSNESS 1 The Greek for “consciousness”: Retroversions v. OIKEIÔSIS, SENSE It is said that the Greeks did not know about consciousness. In fact, there is no Greek word corresponding to “consciousness,” but there is a great variety of terms and expressions onto which “consciousness” is projected, and that sometimes refer to a relationship to the self, sometimes to a moral judgment, and sometimes to a perception, often producing a crossing or derivation among several of these meanings. From the Homeric poems to the Socratic dialogues by way of tragic dramaturgy, every Greek hero essentially carries on a conversation with himself, and in doing so he thinks his thoughts, feels his emotions, and debates courses of action. The “organs of consciousness” (RT: Origins of European Thought, chap. 2) of the Homeric hero are words that we find very difficult to translate because they refer to a physiology loaded with meaning: kêr [ϰῆϱ], or kradiê/ kardia [ϰϱαδίη/ϰαϱδία], the “heart” or even the “stomach,” as an organ that can be pierced; êtor [ἦτοϱ], the “heart” as the seat of emotions and intelligence. But it is especially the thumos [θυμός], which is lodged in the phrên [φϱήν] or the phrenes [φϱένες] (the entrails, the diaphragm, the lungs, but the word belongs to the family of phronein [φϱονεῖν], “to be informed, think”), which is also rendered by “heart,” that constitutes the privileged interlocutor in the dialogue of the self with itself. The thumos is both an impulse (Chantraine connects it with thuô [θύω], “to rush forward with fury”; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) and the breath of life, a vapor or spirit connected with hot and boiling blood (Boisacq [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque] derives it from the Sanskrit dhûma-, whence the Greek thumiaô [θυμιάω], “make smoke” [Latin fumus], which must be clearly distinguished from psuchê [ψυχή], the breath of the “soul” that escapes from the mouth of the dead and goes to reside in Hades, whereas the thumos is eaten and dissipates) (RT: Origins of European Thought, chap. 3). Thus, when he is about to abandon Patroclus’s body, Menelaus “speaks to his magnanimous thumos” and “launches [these words] through his phrên and his thumos” (Iliad 17.90, 106). The philosophical outcome of this reflexive conversation is the Platonic definition of thought (dianoia [διάνοια]) as “the internal dialogue of the soul with itself, without voice [entos tês psuchês pros hautên dialogos aneu phônês (ἐντὸς τῆς ψυχῆς πϱὸς αὑτὴν διάλογος ἄνευ φωνῆς)]” (Sophist 263e; cf. Theatetus 189e), which opens out, through the Socratic demand for “the agreement of the self with itself [homologein autos heautôi (ὁμολογεῖν αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ)]” (Protagoras 339c), onto the moral dimension of self-consciousness. To the individual who never ceases to refute Socrates and to shame him, “his closest relative, who lives in the same place,” “centuries to come were to give the name of consciousness” (Hippias Maior 304d). There is no Greek term that brings together all of the values of this dialogue of the self with itself, but we see the concurrence of several words in sun- (con-) followed by a verbal action whose meaning varies considerably depending on context, and which is translated by “consciousness.” In the domain of perception-apperception, sunaisthêsis [συναίσθησις] is, particularly in Plotinus (Enneads 3.8.4), translated by “self-consciousness” (RT: LSJ, s.v.): as Bréhier put it, the “intelligence” (sunêsis [σύνεσις], another candidate for “consciousness”) and “self-knowledge” (sunaisthêsis) allow nature to see and produce what is around it. But the term is in competition, even in Plotinus, with the sequence “to aisthanesthai kai parakolouthein hautôi [τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι ϰαὶ παϱαϰολουθεῖν αὑτῷ]” (in Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie: “feeling and self-consciousness”—literally, “the accompanying of oneself”) that characterizes wisdom when it refers, no longer to this nature that is to us as a sleeper is to a person who is awake, but rather to the wise man himself, concerning whom the Stoics wondered whether he remained happy when he was sleeping. Furthermore, we should note that in Aristotle in particular, it is aisthanes-thai [αἰσθάνεσθαι] (to feel) alone that is most commonly translated as “to be aware of” (Tricot, referring precisely to the apperceptive function of “common sense,” translates it this way in the Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, where the question is whether the happy man needs friends), whereas sunaisthanesthai [συναισθάνεσθαι] means very explicitly “feel with,” like “eat with,” or “live with,” not with oneself, but with other selves that are one’s friends (see Eudemian Ethics 7.12, 1244b26 and 1245b25). We move imperceptibly from the epistemic to the ethical with sunesis (from suneimi [σύν-ειμι], says Cratylus 412b, “to go with, accompany,” or from sun-iêmi [συνίημι], “to throw together, bring closer,” and in both cases, “understand”), whose meaning ranges from sagacity to the awareness of wrong. Thus sunesis, translated as “intelligence,” is, with eusunesia or “perspicacity,” the critical virtue of those who know how to use “prudence” (phronêsis [φϱόνησις]; see PHRONÊSIS), because they learn quickly (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.11); but Dumont chooses conscience in translating in Democritus (B77 DK: “Fame and riches without consciousness are fragile possessions”), and here is how Méridier translates Orestes’s reply to Menelaus when the latter asks what illness is killing him: “Ma conscience. Je sens l’horreur de mon forfait” (hê sunesis [ή σύνεσις]—literally, “the awareness that I know [sunoida (σύνοιδα)] I have committed terrible acts,” Euripides, Orestes 396). Finally, suneidêsis (from sun-oida, precisely) is retrospectively the best calque for consciousness. Democritus uses it to designate “the awareness of the badness of a life” that arouses fear and encourages the invention of eschatological fictions (B297). The sense of the noun (which is not found in Plato) becomes clearer starting in the Hellenistic period, especially in the Stoic doctrine of oikeiôsis [οἰϰείωσις]. Thus, regarding the animal’s primitive inclination to preserve itself, nature attaching it to itself from the outset, Diogenes Laertius (7.85, trans. Yonge) quotes this comment of Chrysippus, in the first book of his treatise De finibus: “The first and dearest object [oikeion (οἰϰεῖον)] to every animal is its own existence [tên hautou sustasin (τὴν αὑτοῦ σύστασιν)], and its consciousness of that existence [tên tautês suneidêsin (τὴν ταύτης συνείδησιν)]. For that it is not natural for any animal to be alienated from itself [allotriôsai (ἀλλοτϱιῶσαι)].” Its scope, from the Stoics to the New Testament, ranges from the appropriate relation to oneself to the awareness of good and evil. None of these terms, of course, shows as well as the Homeric descriptions how much the Greek “subject” speaks to himself at the same time that he thinks and acts. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. Éthique à Nicomaque. Translated by J. Tricot. Rev. ed. Paris: Vrin. 1994. Bréhier, Émile. Histoire de la philosophie. Vol. 1: L’antiquité et le Moyen Age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Cancrini, Antonia. Suneidêsis: Il tema semantico della “con-scienti” nella Grecia antica. Lessico intellettuale Europeo 6. Rome: Ateneo, 1970. Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by Charles Duke Yonge. Riverside, CA: Ulan, 2012. CONSCIOUSNESS 177 identified with the internal testimony of a double of the subject, but as the other name of a single individual. This personification is manifested in the possibility of qualifying consciousness-subjects with regard to their actions and experiences: a conscience noble, conscience éclairée, conscience A. The metonymy of conscience The first episode is here named the “metonymy of conscience” because its most striking achievement was the possibility of using the French word conscience to designate not only a faculty of the mind, even personified or 2 Conscientia The language of Latin philosophy, even though it is marked by the spread of Stoicism (), was elaborated at the same time that Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca were helping to write a critical history of philosophy. That is why the uses of conscientia in classical Latin present—synchronically—the different historical and literary strata that constituted the experience of and ways of expressing consciousness. In many of its occurrences, conscientia designates the experience of having done something wrong (the latter is often made explicit by a genitive: conscientia scelerum) and the remorse that flows from it: these uses have to be related to those we find in juridical contexts, where conscientia and conscius designate recognized guilt and the sentence handed down. As a form of remorse, conscientia appears in the lists of the passions (“ardentes tum cupiditate, tum metu, tum conscientia,” “inflamed by passion, fear, remorse,” Cicero, De legibus 2.43, trans. Keyes) and is the object of topical descriptions derived from tragedy: “conscius ipse animus se forte remordet” (The soul that knows itself to be guilty torments itself: Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.1135). Thus the noun includes both the tragic moment of the self’s knowledge of itself through the suffering of the body (gnawing, burning, suffocating) and the interpretation that Hellenistic philosophies gave of this moment: “Mens sibi conscia factis / praemetuens adhibet stimulos torretque flagellis” (The conscience-stricken mind through boding fears applies to itself goads and frightens itself with whips: Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.1018, trans. Munro, 134). Lucretius’s analysis is also found in Cicero’s De legibus (1.40): “Non ardentibus taedis sicut in fabulis sed angore conscientiae fraudisque cruciatus” ([The guilty are not pursued] by flaming torches but by the fear to which their fear gives rise and by the crime that tortures them). More positively, conscientia coincides with the experience of self that is not immediately given but is constructed in (re)collection, recapitulation, memory (which is suggested by the formation of the word, cum-scire)—that is, what Cicero refers to in De re publica (6.8), “sapientibus conscientia ipsa factorum egregiorum amplissimum virtutis est praemium” (For the wise, the simple awareness of having performed remarkable acts constitutes the highest reward of their virtue), and in De senectute (9), “conscientia bene actae vitae multorumque bene factorum recordatio iucundissima est” (Nothing more pleasant than the consciousness of having led one’s life well and the memory of many good acts that one has done). This movement of self-evaluation is also clearly marked in a second series of occurrences in which the term appears especially in expressions that explain the origin of moral evaluation: conscientia deorum / conscientia hominum (Cicero, De finibus 1.51: “qui satis sibi contra hominum conscientiam saepti esse et muniti videntur, deorum tamen horrent” [Those who think themselves sufficiently protected and sealed off to escape the judgment of men are nonetheless afraid of the gods’ judgment]). Taking others’ judgment into account in evaluating responsibility gives conscientia a meaning close to that of pudor (aidôs [αἰδώς]): the internalization of this judgment (which may or may not be emphasized in the syntagma conscientia animi) is developed in two divergent directions. Either one appropriates external norms of judgment, in accord with a split point of view that tends to be expressed in metaphors of an internal theater (one judges oneself, one provides a spectacle for oneself ), or one opposes one’s own criteria of evaluation to those of external authorities: images of barriers and roofs delimit a space of interiority that protects the rectitude of judgment and its inalienable character against fama and opinio. The first direction can be seen in the following remarks by Cicero: “nullum theatrum virtuti conscientia maius est” (Virtue has no greater theater than the conscience: Tusculan Disputations 2.64, trans. King); and by Seneca: “conscientia aliud agere non patitur ac subinde respondere ad se cogit” (The guilt [that tyrants feel] does not allow them to amuse themselves: it constantly forces them to answer for their acts before its tribunal: Epistulae 105.7, trans. Gummere), “bona conscientia prodire vult et conspici ad se cogit” (Good conscience wants to show itself and subject itself to public view: ibid., 97.12). The second direction can be seen in these remarks: “dicitur gratus qui bono animo accepit beneficium, bono debet; hic intra conscientiam clusus est” (It is said that a man who gladly receives a favor and gladly returns it is grateful: he is grateful in the innermost chamber of his conscience: Seneca, De beneficiis 4.21); “mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo” (In my opinion my conscience is worth more than what everyone else says: Cicero, Ad Atticum 12.28.2). Between these two aspects of internalization, we cannot see the lines of an evolution any more than we can rigorously divide the uses of the genitive or the dative in the phrases conscientia animi / scelerum / hominum—conscius sibi. On the contrary, the uses of conscientia—and their networks of metaphors—suggest at the same time interiority and exteriority, at the moment when the fundamental question of ethics concerns the validity and the scope of natural norms. Then we grasp, in the unceasing back-and-forth movement, the historical and philosophical moment in which the subject can be constructed. Clara Auvray-Assayas REFS.: Cicero. De re publica, De legibus. Translated by Clinton Walker Keyes. London: Heinemann, 1928. . On Moral Ends. Translated by Raphael Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. . On Old Age and Friendship. Translated by W. A. Falconer. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1923. . Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1927. Munro, H.A.J. The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers. New York: Modern Library, 1957. Seneca. Moral Epistles. Translated by Richard Gummere. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1917–25. 178 CONSCIOUSNESS 3 Conscientia and Gewissen in Luther v. BELIEF, GLAUBE Luther has been called “the inventor of the Gewissen” (Hermann, Luthers Theologie), and Lutheranism the “religion of Gewissen” (Holl, “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?”). For many people, Luther, the first theoretician of Gewissen in the German language, is also the first modern theoretician of the conscience. That is what his famous 1521 reply at the Diet of Worms is supposed to proclaim, in a heroic mode, when he states the reasons that prevented him from retracting when confronted by the Church of Rome: Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures or evident reason (for I believe neither in the Pope nor councils alone, since it has been established that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures adduced by me, and my conscience [Gewissen] has been taken captive by the Word of God, and I am neither able nor willing to recant, since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen. (Verhandlungen mit D. Martin Luther auf dem Reichstage zu Worms [1521], in Dr Martin Luthers Werke 7:838.2–9) This refusal has often been seen as an appeal to freedom of conscience and thus as the birth certificate of modernity. On reading the text, however, one may be astonished by this view: What is this conscientia that Luther invokes as an inalienable good but that he says has been “taken captive by the Word of God”? 1. In the wake of the historical debate regarding the birth of modernity, the debate about Luther’s notion of conscience has often concerned the latter’s autonomy. Without being explicitly rejected, the distinction between suntheresis and conscientia henceforth becomes secondary. This is Luther’s conceptual innovation in relation to Scholastic theories of conscience: for him there is now only one conscience, defined as “the origin or site of the strongest affects” (Hirsch, Lutherstudien), that a person can experience. Confronted by the Law, by the Promise, the conscience alternately rejoices, hopes, worries, gets frightened, despairs: Luther’s conception of conscience involves first of all descriptions of states, feelings, affects. These analyses, which we could call “psychological” if we were sure that they were ultimately based on a concept of the psyche, show that conscience is no longer so much a faculty of the mind tending toward the good as the precise site where the relation between man and God is produced. It is there that man is destroyed or raised before God (cf. Vorlesung über den Römerbrief [1515–16], in Werke, 56:526.31–32). Thus Luther did not conceive of the conscience as autonomous. If it is defined as “something higher than Heaven and Earth,” that is only by virtue of its tendency to be “killed by sin” or, on the contrary, “given life by the Word of Christ,” depending on the nature of the relation between man and God (Vorlesungen über 1. Mose [1535–45], in Werke, 44:546.30–31). At no time is man alone with his conscience. The latter is in no way productive, it is only the reflection or “bearer” (Träger: Hirsch, Lutherstudien) of a relationship whose establishment does not depend on it. That is why Luther’s statements regarding conscience vary so much. He also calls it an “evil beast” (mala bestia) that “makes man oppose himself” when it persuades him to put his trust in good works rather than in faith to gain salvation (Vorlesungen über 1. Mose, in Werke, 44:545.16–17). The conscience may be praised or blamed, depending on whether it is Christ or the Devil who controls it: in both cases, it is not free in the sense that it constitutes an original site of freedom. 2. Beyond these contradictory judgments, according to Luther the conscience is nonetheless unified by a certain number of conceptual decisions and linguistic usages. Luther’s other great innovation is in fact to have established conscience in a paradigm that also includes “faith” and “certainty.” He breaks with the intellectualism of Scholastic theories by associating conscience with “faith” and the “heart” (cf., e.g., Invokavitpredigten [1522], in Werke, 10/3:23–24). The principle is this: as faith is, so is conscience, so are the works; or, only faith can give conscience the certainty that the works accomplished are good (cf. Von den Guten Werken [1520], in Werke 6.205.1–13). In at least three ways, the relation between conscience and certainty is central to Luther’s theory of conscience. Conscience is defined first of all by a need for certainty: it is this need that Luther objects to in what he considers to be Erasmus’s skepticism (De servo arbitrio [1525], in Werke, 18:603.23–24). Second, conscience is the site of certainty, on the condition that it has been previously invested with faith (cf. Das schöne confitemini [1530], in Werke, 31/1:176–77: “Ein hertz, das fur Gott von allem dinge gewis urteilen und recht reden kan ein froelich, sicher, muetig gewissen” [A heart that can judge with certainty and speak correctly of all things a joyous, sure, courageous conscience], once again associating faith with the heart). Finally, the conscience serves as a refuge from the uncertainty of faith, and in that very way, as the ultimate certainty: no one is ever certain (gewis) of having faith, but everyone has to rely on the Gewissen that tells him that faith alone provides salvation (cf. the important text in Von der Wiedertaufe an zwei Pfarrherrn [1528], in Werke, 26:155.14–28, in the context of the Anabaptist polemic). It is in this perspective that we must understand the famous theory of “freedom of conscience,” which is, according to Luther, synonymous with “Christian or Evangelical freedom.” Luther’s conscientia is in no way a principle of action; it is “not a faculty for performing works, but a faculty of judging these works” (De votis monasticis [1521], in Werke, 8:606.30–35). Here, internalization is pushed so far that freedom of conscience can coexist with the servile will (see ELEUTHERIA, Box 2). This is because conscience does not draw its freedom from itself: here, we find once again the motif of its heteronomy. However, the most important thing is that in Luther, freedom of conscience merges with its certitude: a conscience is free only if faith has made it sure (cf. Vom Abendmahl Christi. Bekenntnis [1528], in Werke, 26:505.34 : “frey und sicher ym gewissen”). In Luther’s German, the association of conscience with certainty, gewiss with Gewissen, is immediate: it will be found again, raised to a concept, in Hegel, Gewissheit replacing the adverb gewiss, to which Luther usually limits himself (cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 6.C.c). However, we must avoid concluding that it is the proximity of the words that led Luther to associate the ideas, to the point of imbuing certainty with his concept of conscience. It is remarkable that Luther’s Latin makes exactly the same connection, this time without an echo effect, between conscientia and certitudo: from Latin to German, Luther’s concept of conscience does not vary (cf., e.g., De servo arbitrio, in Werke, 18:620.3: “certitudines conscientiae”). From such a convergence, we might conclude that Luther’s Latin is CONSCIOUSNESS 179 former, who translated the Rhineland mystics into Latin and French, was the great theoretician of freedom of conscience, understood as an inalienable individual right. He established its originary character by adopting the classical form of the elegchos [ἔλεγχος]: I find that the first and efficient cause of the sedition and war that torments you is necessarily [a matter] of consciences. I am sure that the cause that I am now dealing with would be voided by a single word of evident truth, and that no one would dare to contradict it even a little. For all one has to say to those who compel other people’s consciences is: “Would you want yours to be compelled?” And suddenly their own consciences, which are worth more than a thousand witnesses, would convince them so fully that they would all be struck dumb. (Conseil à la France désolée, 1562) As for Coornhert, in 1582 he published Synodus van der Conscientien vryheyt (Synod on freedom of conscience). Arguing against both rigorous Calvinism and the Neostoic reason of state, he naturalized in a very Latinized Dutch the “compulsion of consciences” as “dwang der conscientien” and became the master of “Christians without a church” all over northwestern Europe. Traces of his “individualism” or “subjectivism” are still found even in some late seventeenth-century German Socinians—in the sect of the Gewissene or “conscientious people,” for whom conscience was the sole authority in matters of faith (Glauben) or certitude (Gewissheit) (Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens). The connection between the two may be found in the pages of Louis Meyer’s Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres (1666), in which Meyer, who was a friend of Spinoza’s, appealed to “clear and distinct perception” to reject both literalist interpretations of the Scriptures and the inspired “enthusiasm” of the Quakers. In malheureuse, conscience déchirée, and so on (following a procedure that under other circumstances can also be applied to the soul, the mind, the heart, and the understanding). Such a potentiality is exercised especially in the languages in which the Calvinist Reformation, humanist irenicism, skepticism, and Neostoicism collided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a period when absolutism was developing and the first demands for citizen’s “rights” were being heard. Everything begins with John Calvin’s definition of conscience: identified with the Christian’s faith, which resides in his “innermost heart” (for intérieur), it expresses in itself the mystery of an absolute submission that is at the same time a liberation because it subjects the individual only to grace. The metonymy is already common in Calvin: “I say that these remedies and reliefs are too narrow and frivolous for troubled consciences that are downcast, afflicted, and frightened by the horror of their sin” (Institution de la religion chrétienne, 4.41). Nonetheless, it is the experience of political struggle that puts this metonymic play at the heart of the uses of the word conscience by making the for intérieur also a “fort” and a “force” (whose concept competed throughout the seventeenth century with those of “mind” and “genius” to designate the principle of individuality). Whereas the Anabaptists invented the “objection of conscience,” Calvin defended the “adhesion of conscience.” The English Puritans of the seventeenth century subjected all their actions to the absolute command of conscience from which conviction proceeds (“convinced in conscience of the righteousness of the Parliament’s cause,” quoted in Walzer, Revolution of the Saints). The corresponding adjective is “conscientious.” The Wars of Religion also produced the idea of a withdrawal into the for intérieur when people were called to account by states and churches. The two representatives of the European irenicist trend that played a decisive role here are Sebastian Castellion and Dirck Coornhert. The “completely imbued with his German” (Bornkamm, Luther’s World of Thought): in writing conscientia, Luther might have been thinking Gewissen. Without trying resolve this question of precedence (did Luther think first in German or in Latin?), we can suggest that Luther’s theological invention, the establishment of the Glauben-GewissenGewissheit paradigm, was taken over by the potentialities of the German language, which were in turn more than exploited, and this time explicitly, by the tradition that the Wissen-Gewissen-Gewissheit paradigm followed in philosophy from Kant to Wittgenstein. By reattaching Luther’s invention to its antecedents (first of all, the theological debates of the thinkers of the Middle Ages and the Reformation regarding the certainty of salvation), we would gain the means to give a long historical account of conscience that would at the same time be a history of bilingualism (in this case, German/Latin) in European philosophy. Philippe Büttgen REFS.: Bayer, Oswald. Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation. Translated by T. H. Trapp. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2008. Baylor, Michael G. Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1977. Bornkamm, Heinrich. Luther’s World of Thought. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2005. Hermann, Rudolf. Luthers Theologie. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967. Hirsch, Emanuel. Lutherstudien. Vol. 1. Gütersloh, Ger.: Bertelsmann, 1954. Holl, Karl. “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1948. Jacob, Günter. Der Gewissensbegriff in der Theologie Luthers. Tübingen: Mohr, 1929. Lohse, Bernhard. “Gewissen und Autorität bei Luther.” In Evangelium in der Geschichte. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988. . Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Translated by R. A. Harrisville. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999. Luther, Martin. Dr Martin Luthers Werke. 121 vols. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar, Ger.: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1883–2009. . Works of Martin Luther. Edited by Henry Eyster Jacobs and Rudolph Spaeth. Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1943. 180 CONSCIOUSNESS that of consciousness but of “certitude” and its modalities. Descartes nonetheless played a role in the invention of consciousness in the seventeenth century because of his thesis that “the mind always thinks,” on which he founded the idea that the soul or mind is “easier to know than the body.” As Geneviève Lewis has shown, the term conscience was spread by the first Cartesians, who were in reality mainly “Augustino-Cartesians,” though they were no more faithful to Augustine’s question (How does God make himself felt in the “innermost part” of my soul?) than to Descartes’s (Who am I, I who am certain of my thinking existence?). The first of these followers was Louis de La Forge, author of the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme (1667). In this work he described the “admirable function” of thought as “the perception, consciousness or internal knowledge that each of us feels immediately by himself when he perceives what he is doing or what is happening in him.” Antoine Arnauld identified the Latin conscius esse with the “reflection that may be called virtual and that is found in all our perceptions,” and that allows us to define thought as “essentially reflecting on itself” (Des vraies et des fausses idées, 1683). In this sense, the Cartesians are the true inventors of what Wolff was to call “rational psychology.” This first trend in the (re)definition of consciousness is at the origin of the tradition of French spiritualisme (cf. Victor Cousin), the influence of which has never really disappeared. Far more important is the English development manifested in the invention of the neologism “consciousness.” The first to use it was Ralph Cudworth, in The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678): this is a refutation of atomism and materialism, to which the leader of the Cambridge Platonists opposed a monism based on Neoplatonism. For Cudworth, nature can be understood as a hierarchy of beings based on the sole principle of the formation of individuals in which vital force and thought are two successive degrees. It is to mark the passage from one to the other that Cudworth forged the word “consciousness” (itself part of the series Con-sense, Consciousness, Animadversion, Attention, Self-Perception), merging Plotinus’s terms sunaisthêsis and sunesis. Consciousness is thus the highest form of the feeling or perception of the self (which is also a “self-enjoyment”) that characterizes all life. Of course, it does not belong essentially to human beings, but eminently characterizes the divine spirit. In opposition to Cartesian dualism, Cudworth maintains that the obscure or dormant forms of consciousness begin below humanity, just as its lucid or purely intellectual forms extend beyond the human mind. That is why he also uses the term “inconscious.” His influence was to be considerable, especially on Gottfried Leibniz, to whom he transmitted Plotinus’s term “monad.” Locke appears to be far more Cartesian. The drafts of the Essay on Human Understanding (1690; 2nd enlarged ed., 1694) show that the word “consciousness” was not part of his vocabulary before Cudworth published his work. In the final version, however, he sums up the essence of the gap between the immediacy of sensation and the reflection by which the mind perceives its own operations, giving the definition that was to become famous: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind” (2.1.19). From this proceed all the developments of Locke’s philosophy of mind, from the reformulation of the Cartesian idea that the mind cannot the Dutch version of his book, Meyer himself sought equivalents of the Latin conscientia: innerlijke medewetingh, innerlijckste bewustheyt, meêwustigheyt. Finally, we should mention the itinerary followed by the skeptics, of whom the most brilliant is Montaigne, who began from a philosophy inspired by Stoicism to create an unprecedented mode of public confession. Jean Starobinski (Montaigne in Movement) showed how personal identity is infinitely sought here in the movement of writing, which in Montaigne becomes the real basis of consciousness: Let me excuse here what I often say, that I rarely repent and that my conscience is content with itself—not as the conscience of an angel or a horse, but as the conscience of a man. I speak as an ignorant inquirer, referring the decision purely and simply to the common and authorized beliefs. I do not teach, I tell. (Essays of Montaigne, 3.2, trans. Frame) In politics, Montaigne was a conservative, an admirer of Justus Lipsius. In his work, conscience is related to inscience and opposed to “faith” (“an enormous distinction between devoutness and conscience”: ibid., 3.12). If we do not keep these facts in mind, we can understand neither the effects of the Cartesian revolution nor Hobbes’s attack on the idea of conscience. In his Leviathan, Hobbes relates the word “conscious” to its Latin etymology (con-scire, “to know together”) and identifies “conscience” with “opinion.” Such a notion is intermediary between the concept of judgment and what we would now call “ideology.” It allows us to understand why the “plea of Conscience” must be absolutely rejected by the state, and dissociated from the for intérieur: And last of all, men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions gave those their opinions also that reverenced name of Conscience, as if they would have it seem unlawfull, to change or speak against them; and so pretend to know they are true, when they know at most, but that they think so. (Leviathan, 1.7) Hobbes’s citizen constructs his personality not on the basis of consciousness/conscience, but on “will” and “authority” or on representation. B. Knowledge and ignorance of the “self” Historians of philosophy tell us that the major moment when consciousness begins to designate the essence of subjectivity coincides with a return to the metaphysical foundation of the faculty of judgment summed up in the Cartesian cogito. The reality is more complex, as is shown by a remarkable series of semantic shifts and lexical inventions. René Descartes was not the “inventor of consciousness.” The French word conscience never appears in his work, either in the texts he wrote himself or in translations of them that he read and revised. And conscientia in Latin comes up only once, in a paragraph in the Principia philosophiae (1.9) devoted to the definition of “thought” (cogitatio). The equivalent of conscius esse that Descartes accepted was simply connaître, which was here close to sentir. The philosophy of the Meditations is not CONSCIOUSNESS 181 consciousness. But it is especially significant retrospectively, insofar as it marks for us the starting point of the conflicts in modern philosophy. Coste was not able or willing to translate, but added in a note: “Self-consciousness: an expressive word in English that cannot be rendered in French in all its force. I put it here for the benefit of those who understand English.” The difference between the psychological and the transcendental that is latent here could be made explicit only in another language. Bewusstsein (a nominalized infinitive, at first written Bewusst sein to translate the Latin [sibi] conscium esse) was invented by Wolff only in 1719, while he was writing works that wrenched the term Psychologie away from its first meaning of the theory of specters or spirits to make it a “science of the inner sense” (Psychologia empirica, 1732; Psychologia rationalis, 1734). In this neologism, introduced alongside the traditional Gewissen as the term corresponding to conscientia, we can see, more than a transposition of the Cartesian conscientia-cogito (as is usually thought), a response to Locke’s distinction between “conscience” and “consciousness.” From then on, Bewusstsein was used in Germany both by the metaphysicians of the Aufklärung (Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten) and by the theorists of a more empirical anthropology (Johannes Niklaus Tetens). For Kant, Bewusstsein, whether empirical or pure, is always a knowledge of our representations of objects, that is, a connection between the elements that constitute them: intuitions and concepts. The underlying link is basically a speculative interpretation of the conjunction of sunaisthêsis and suneidêsis, which Kant understands negatively, in the famous formula: “Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood). To sense-consciousness must be added an intellectual consciousness to produce the mechanism typical of transcendental consciousness, which is capable of grasping its own form (or of “thinking thought” in its conditions of possibility, in accord with the ancient Aristotelian ideal of a noêsis noêseôs [νόησιϛ νοήσεως]). . The difficulties of “self-consciousness” constitute both a point of contact and a source of permanent misunderstandings between the German and French traditions in the philosophy of the subject. The “same” expressions take on values that are in fact profoundly different. The Selbst- that is part of constructions such as Selbstachtung, Selbst-bewegung, Selbst-bestimmung, and Selbst-bewusstsein, is understood sometimes in a subjective sense, sometimes in an objective sense: as spontaneous self-expression or as a capacity for being affected by something that is “oneself.” Thus Kant immediately turns around the question from which the concept of transcendental apperception emerged. He asks not only how we can separate the pure form of an “I think” (Ich denke) from the empirical consciousness and its contents, but also how our activity of thinking affects us ourselves, in the “inner sense.” How does the “I think” know itself or perceive itself thinking? This auto-affection is still a Selbst-bewusstsein, this time in the sense of a consciousness (of the activity of) the self, that is, of an experience (which is sensible in a way, even though think without knowing, to the description of “the experience of consciousness”: an uneasy movement in the course of which all knowledge is formed. In a supplementary chapter in the second edition (2.27, “Of Identity and Diversity”), loaded with allusions to the controversies of the time regarding the immortality of the soul and the perspective of the Last Judgment, he makes consciousness the criterion of personal identity and responsibility. In this chapter, Locke deepens his conception of the relations between consciousness and the “inner sense,” described as essentially an internal memory, in a kind of secularization of Augustinian theses. Consciousness, which is self-identical in the continual flux of its perceptions, can thus function as the operator of a selfrecognition: it is through consciousness that an individual can consider “himself as the same,” that is, as a Self. The French translation of “consciousness” as conscience could not, as is now acknowledged, be taken for granted: it collided with the linguistic habit that reserved this term for a moral faculty, and conflicted with the new uses introduced by the Cartesians and by Malebranche. That is why Locke’s first translators (J. Le Clerc, P. Coste) preferred at first to render “to be conscious” by concevoir or être convaincu, and “consciousness” by sentiment or conviction. It took a semantic revolution to re-create the word conscience in French with a new meaning. But this revolution put European philosophy on a new path (because in the eighteenth century, the whole “Republic of Letters” read Locke in Coste’s French translation), where the conflict between psychologism and transcendental philosophies would eventually arise. . In the end, not until Condillac did conscience become a fullfledged metaphysical term. Condillac made no reference to Descartes; he introduced, in addition to the concept of consciousness, that of attention, which is a differential consciousness, an “additional consciousness” accorded to some perceptions and not to others. Following Locke, and so to speak in the margins of his text, Condillac arrived at “the feeling of my being,” the recognition of the permanence of a “being that is constantly the same,” the identity of the “self of today” with the “self of yesterday.” Consciousness then became in French as well a concept designating the perception of an internal unity subsisting through the succession of its own representations, but also capable of splitting into “multiple personalities” (Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines). C. A conflict in continental philosophy: Selbstbewusstsein or sens intime Locke himself uses “self-consciousness” just once: For as to this point of being the same self, it matters not whether this present self be made up of the same or other Substances, I being as much concern’d, and as justly accountable for any Action that was done a thousand years since, appropriated to me now by this self-consciousness, as I am for what I did the last moment. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.27.16) This formulation, which closely links (self-)consciousness, memory, and responsibility, is in the logic of equivalence that it constructs between the problematics of self and of 182 CONSCIOUSNESS The question raised by Maine de Biran (Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie [1811], published in 1859), and after him by a French tradition that extends to Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is quite different. For Maine de Biran, self-consciousness (for which he also uses the Latin expressions conscium sui and compos sui), “an original fact of the inner sense” that founds all philosophy, is an individual feeling (as in Malebranche) and has as its prototype the “immediate apperception” of one’s own body. He expresses the irreducibility of the union of mind and body as it is experienced in particular in “effort”; this feeling contains it refers to any content of consciousness). Kant identifies it with the pure experience of time and is concerned to show that it must never be confused with the concept of transcendental apperception, since it constitutes the Ich as a phenomenon. But he also shows that the confusion is constantly induced by the very structure of thought (“Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood). This aporia is the starting point for all of the discussions of German idealism concerning the “experience of consciousness” torn between truth and illusion, infinitude and finitude, interiority and exteriority. 4 Consciousness and con-science: The role of Coste’s translation Produced in close collaboration with the author and reprinted several times between 1700 and 1755, the translation of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by the Protestant Pierre Coste is still the only complete French version available. Two translator’s notes concerning new terms necessary to translate “the Self” and “consciousness” indicate the difficulty of finding in French, at the end of the seventeenth century, an equivalent for the neologism created by Cudworth and Locke: The English word is “consciousness,” which could be expressed in Latin by conscientia. In French, we have, in my opinion, only the words sentiment and conviction that correspond to some extent to this idea. But in several places in this chapter they can express only imperfectly Mr. Locke’s thought, which makes personal identity depend absolutely on this act of Man quo sibi est conscius. After having reflected for some time on ways of remedying this difficulty, I found nothing better than to use the term conscience to express this very act. But, it will be said, it is a strange license, to turn a word away from its ordinary meaning and give it one that it has never been given in our language. I see finally that I could have simply used our word conscience in the sense that Mr. Locke used it [“consciousness”] in this chapter and elsewhere, since one of our best writers, the famous Father Malebranche, did not scruple to make use of it in this same meaning in several places in La recherche de la vérité. (Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain, 2.27.9n) In her study Conscience as Consciousness, Davies shows that here we see not only important evidence for the formation of the modern conception of “consciousness,” but also an actual moment of that formation. Why did Coste render the definition in 2.1.19 by “cette conviction n’est autre chose que la perception de ce qui se passe dans l’âme de l’Homme” before suddenly changing in 2.27.9 to render “since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes everyone to be, what he calls self,” as “puisque la conscience accompagne toujours la pensée, et que c’est là ce qui fait que chacun est ce qu’il nomme soi-même”? The only evidence provided by the context is the collocation in the same sentence of the two fundamental theoretical terms that are henceforth correlative: “the self” and “consciousness.” Coste thus invents con-science at the precise moment when he is forced by the theoretical matter to create not one but two neologisms, one lexical, the other semantic. An enigma arises here, however. If the term conscience in the sense of pure selfknowledge already existed, why did Coste allow himself a neologism? In reality, this is one and the same problem. If Locke’s translator, obliged to create con-science, has to try to differentiate himself from Malebranche at the same time that he appeals to him as a precedent, that is because the meanings of conscience as Malebranche uses it and Locke’s “consciousness” are in reality in conflict. The notion of conscience that Malebranche identifies with the “inner feeling” (Recherche de la vérité, 3.7, ed. Lewis) is ultimately anti-Cartesian: it is the imperfect knowledge we have of the soul (“we know of our soul only what we feel happen in us”), thoroughly mixed with the “feeling of what is happening in our body,” and liable to all sorts of illusions. Malebranche is well aware that he is thereby destroying the very heart of Cartesianism: I have said in several places, and I believe I have sufficiently proved that we have no clear idea of our soul, but only conscience or inner feeling; that thus we know it much more imperfectly than we do extension. This seems to me so evident that I did not believe it was necessary to prove it at length. But the authority of M. Descartes, who says positively that the nature of the mind is better known than anything else, has so preoccupied some of his disciples that what I have written has served only to make me seem to them a weak person who cannot take a clear position and hold firm to abstract truths. (XIe Éclaircissement, in Recherche de la vérité, 3:98ff.) Thus Malebranche’s conscience has to do less with knowledge than with ignorance of oneself, whereas Locke, for his part, is opposed to Descartes not epistemologically but ontologically. His “consciousness” is not ignorance but, on the contrary, the immediate recognition by the mind of its own operations on the inner “stage” of which it is the spectator. What Locke inaugurates is the turning of the Cartesian idea of self-knowledge against the idea of the mind or soul (mens) as substance. For all that, the ignorance of the self inherent in consciousness will not disappear: it reemerges, notably in Kant’s analysis of the “paralogism of rational psychology” that opens the critical phase of transcendental philosophy and bases it on the idea of an originary ambivalence inherent in the subject’s relationship to itself. REFS.: Davies, Catherine Glyn. Conscience as Consciousness: The Idea of Self-Awareness in French Philosophical Writing from Descartes to Diderot. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation,1990. Malebranche, Nicolas de la. Recherche de la vérité. Edited by Geneviève Lewis. Paris: Vrin, 1945–. CONSCIOUSNESS 183 the French paradigm of science. The second concerns the difficulties inherent in psychological discourse, as shown in the problem of translating the English words “consciousness” and “awareness.” They develop in opposite directions, but in both cases they illustrate the latent competition between the dichotomous oppositions of which philosophy is so fond (the moral point of view versus the psychological point of view) and more complex derivations that better reflect the mutual influence of language and concept. A. “Conscience” and “certitude”: Gewissen, Gewissheit, and Bewusstsein from Kant to Wittgenstein The paradigm of wissen (Gr. oida [οἶδα], Lat. scire) is of fundamental importance for modern philosophy as a whole. In general, it does not have the same structure as that of the French savoir (as is shown by the different uses of science and Wissenschaft). But the correspondence between conscience and Bewusstsein raises specific problems. This has to do first with the fact that Bewusstsein’s etymology implies a more explicit decomposition than the one found in conscientia (cum + scire). Present from the start (in Wolff) in the competition between Bewusst sein and Bewusstsein, this latent decomposition is still at work in philosophical writing. It is reinforced by the parallelism between the active and the passive forms: bewusst werden (become conscious) thus corresponds to bewusst sein immediately the positing of an antithesis between the self and the external world to which it is opposed. Thinking about self-consciousness is thus thinking about the two terms of this antithesis, their separation and their complementarity insofar as they are part of the same lived experience. The problem Maine de Biran raises is thus at the origin of French existentialism, and in this sense explains why French philosophy has never ceased to “translate” into existential terms the problems of the relation between psychology, phenomenology, and the transcendental dialectic of consciousness. But correlatively, the detour through Bewusst-sein (a way of writing it introduced in the twentieth century in analogy with the Heideggerian Da-sein) allows us to understand what is at stake in the post-Kantian aporia of “auto-affection” as well as in the post-Biranian questioning of the duality of the “simple fact”: a reflection on the being of the “conscious being.” III. Contemporary Theoretical and Semantic Problems Since the invention of consciousness, two problems have dominated the expression of the subject in the three great European philosophical languages and maintain permanent gaps among them, bordering on untranslatability, whereas the equivalences are in theory fixed. The first problem concerns the gap between the German paradigm of Wissen and 5 Consciousness, self-consciousness, and “apperception” In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant makes Selbstbewusstsein the supreme principle of knowledge and, at the same time, its own critical judge. Such an act of thought must therefore be considered a “transcendental apperception,” that is, a grasping by the understanding itself of the pure form of the unity that it imposes on every representation of an object. This is another translinguistic equivalence that conceals, however, a syntactical and historical difficulty. This difficulty begins with Leibniz, who, confronted by the Cartesian conception, had taken a position opposite that of Locke: for innate ideas, but against the idea that the mind can know itself through its own thinking. In his correspondence with Arnauld, Leibniz still referred to conscience (associated with expérience intérieure, pensée, and réminiscence). But in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (2.27), he retranslates “consciousness” as consciosité or conscienciosité, rejecting Coste’s neologism. This attempt, which was not adopted by others, clearly shows the tension between the two aspects of the notion of “consciousness”: “self-presence” and “self-knowledge.” For Leibniz, however, the only really adequate notion is that of “apperception” (from the verb apercevoir, or rather from s’apercevoir); it makes it possible to hierarchize perceptions: a clear perception is not necessarily distinct, that is, it does not necessarily include a knowledge of its own constitution (Monadologie, §14). Leibnizian apperception is the mind’s perception of the representations that develop (or unfold) in front of it the world of which it is a part, so that it can situate itself in it. The Kantian transzendentale Apperzeption, on the other hand, is only the way the consciousness reflects its own invariant form through the diversity of objective contents. But in exchange, it immediately raises itself to universality; it is the condition of all possible experience, individual or collective. Must we then render Selbstbewusstsein in French by conscience de soi or, as translators like Pierre-Jean Labarrière and Gwendolen Jarczyk, who have reflected at length on Hegel’s use of the term, prefer, by auto-conscience? It seems that in Kant’s text (and notably in the “Transcendental Deduction” section of the Critique of Pure Reason), we can find a significant difference between the notions of the “Bewusstsein [der Identität] seiner [meiner] selbst,” and Selbstbewusstsein: the homonymy of the psychological and the transcendental is constitutive. In Hegel, on the contrary—as Derathé emphasizes (96) in his translation of the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821)—the “play” between Selbstbewusstsein and Bewusstsein von sich occupies an important place, but refers rather to the subtle distinction between conscience de soi and conscience du soi (or du moi) (“selfconsciousness” and “consciousness of the self”). Note that this can be translated into Italian without apparent problems by autocoscienza—and by coscienza di se—with a clearer connotation of “consciousness of the self,” which consapevole suffices to express in practice. English, obviously, uses “selfconsciousness.” These variants are connected with a more general problem in expressing reflexivity on the basis of Greek and Latin models (auto-, sui). REFS.: Hegel, G.W.F. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Translated into French by R. Derathé. Paris: Vrin, 1975. English translation by T. M. Knox: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. English translation by H. B. Bisnet: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 184 CONSCIOUSNESS defined by Kant using symmetrical formulas that attach both of them to Bewusstsein as the “common name” of transcendental subjectivity. Gewissheit is defined as “consciousness of the necessity [Bewusstsein der Notwendigkeit] of judgments” (Logic, Introduction, 9). Gewissen is defined as “consciousness [Bewusstsein] of a free submission of the will to the law” (Critique of Pure Reason), or else as “the consciousness [Bewusstsein] of a tribunal within man” (Metaphysics of Morals), and so on. The complete organization of the notions is thus as follows: Bewusstsein, insofar as it grasps itself as a pure form, is the transcendental unity of Apperzeption; insofar as it is the theoretical consciousness of necessity, it is Gewissheit (we might say “pure logical feeling”); insofar as it is the practical consciousness of the law, it is Gewissen; finally, in one or another of these modalities, the subject affects itself, “from the inside,” as a psychological Selbstbewusstsein. This semantic organization is ternary, not binary. The Hegelian organization is entirely different, particularly as it is set forth in the Phenomenology of Mind. There, Hegel offers an account of the genesis of Bewusstsein from Gewissheit, taking the latter’s modalities as a guiding thread. From “sense certainty” to “the mind’s certainty of itself,” Gewissheit is Bewusstsein’s active relationship to itself, which explains why consciousness can experience itself as truth in each of its experiences, and why it must nonetheless repeatedly divest itself of itself in discovering its error. As a concept, Bewusstsein can emerge only with a first negation of Gewissheit, of perception; but on the other hand, the problem of Gewissheit can be taken beyond Bewusstsein, or better yet, it can take consciousness beyond itself, into the concept of absolute Spirit or Knowledge. In this context, the question of the Gewissen is treated in a localized way, as a particular figure of consciousness (Bewusstsein) and of its own Gewissheit (certitude). But this figure is privileged: it is the key moment in which Bewusstsein knows (weiss) itself as a pure subject (the concept of a pure subject is thus fundamentally a moral concept), and conceives itself essentially as Selbstbewusstsein, having only itself as its “object.” This subjective figure of truth, which is deeply illusory, is entirely imbued with a selfreferential Gewissheit. . In Sein und Zeit (§§54–55), Heidegger centers his analysis of the Gewissen on the common expression “the voice of conscience.” Contrary to the “metaphor of the tribunal,” it is supposed to refer to an originary characteristic of Dasein: interpellation, the “call” (Ruf, Anruf) to responsibility (Schuld), to “being oneself” (Selbstsein). Such a voice by which “Dasein calls to itself” is always already of the order of discourse (Rede), even though it is essentially quiet or speaks only by keeping silent, that is, it determines no task or duty (Pflicht). This description is thus opposed termfor-term to Kant’s definitions. Neither Gewissheit nor Bewusstsein plays any role in it. They are concepts basically foreign to Heidegger’s thought, which reserves them for the description of the metaphysical moment of subjectivity that was opened up historically by Cartesianism and culminates in Hegel. It is hard to imagine that this phenomenology did not play a role in the way Jacques Derrida “deconstructed” the Husserlian conception of consciousness, in a chapter entitled (to be conscious), which connotes the result or the faculty (consciousness). Whereas rational and later experimental psychology takes the new substantive for an equivalent of the English term “consciousness,” Hegel and his followers restored the ontological emphasis on Sein. From this comes Karl Marx’s formula: “Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything other than the conscious being [das bewusste Sein]” (Marx, The German Ideology). Martin Heidegger also played on this, but turned it around, opposing to the Bewusst-sein of the critical tradition simply Da-sein, “being there,” thrown into the world, rather than “being conscious” or being as consciousness. On the contrary, the transcendental tradition from Kant to the Marburg School and Edmund Husserl tried to erase this ontological mark and retain only the idea of faculty or function. In the end, it had to situate this denegation in the terminology itself: it seems that Bewusstheit, a substantive of quality that escapes the question of “being” and is basically a German transposition of Leibniz’s consciosité or conscienciosité, was introduced by Paul Gerhard Natorp and at the same time by Wilhelm Wundt (on this point, see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, “Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Erkenntnislehre,” part 2, “Remark on the Translation of Certain Terms”). The Bewusstheit/Bewusstsein pair separates in the negative: die Unbewusstheit corresponds to “unawareness” (which would be rendered in French by inconscience), whereas das Unbewusste corresponds to “the unconscious” (which would be rendered in French by l’inconscient) (Ellenberger, Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient, 728n). But the most interesting point lies elsewhere. The paradigm of wissen is broader than that of scire: it includes not only Gewissen and Bewusstsein, but also Gewissheit, taken as an equivalent of the Latin certitudo. Thus here we should abandon the idea that all the relevant meanings are included in the field of the French conscience. For German philosophy, it is not from outside that certitude intervenes in consciousness: from the outset, it is part of the same kernel of meanings, which philosophers organize in different ways. Keeping in mind the theological background (gewiss and Gewissheit are essential signifiers in the Lutheran faith, closely linked to the anti-intellectualism of the Reformation; ), we will discuss four configurations. In Kant, the fundamental problem concerning Bewusstsein resides, as we have seen, in the distinction between an empirical phenomenon and a transcendental condition for the possibility of thought (“It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all of my representations,” Critique of Pure Reason, §16, trans. Guyer and Wood), followed by the return to the empirical in the form of the subject’s selfperception. Selbstbewusstsein thus connotes simultaneously an auto-affection of the subject, an “internal sensibility,” and the pure logical form of self-identity (for which Johann Gottlieb Fichte later created the formula Ich = Ich). The possibility of this critical distinction rests not only on the abstract opposition of two heterogeneous modes of representation (transcendental apperception and the inner sense), but also on the actual discovery of forms of consciousness that are concerned solely with pure thought: in the area of theory, the experience of the apodictic certainty of judgments; in the area of practice, the experience of the categorical imperative or the moral consciousness. It is remarkable that these two concepts are CONSCIOUSNESS 185 6 Translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind It is remarkable that none of the three French translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind has adopted the same equivalent for Gewissen. Each has recognized the difficulty and chosen to draw the system in a different direction. J. Hyppolite (1939) translates Gewissen as conscience morale or bonne conscience, in order to “avoid the possible confusion of Bewusstsein and Gewissen.” J.-P. Lefebvre (1991) is the only translator who has noted “the connotation of certainty that is associated with [Gewissen]” and translated it as conviction morale, “so as to indicate the intimate dimension of Gewissen” (in your soul and conscience) by reserving persuasion for Überzeugung. Finally, G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière (1993)—who proposed that Selbstbewusstsein be rendered as auto-conscience ()—render Gewissen as certitudemorale, which fuses the two concepts, but give the tautology “la certitude inflexible de la certitude-morale” as a translation of “die unwankende Gewissheit des Gewissens”— reserving conviction for Überzeugung. For his part, in a note to his translation of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (168), Derathé offers this comment on the difficulty: The German language distinguishes between Gewissen and Bewusstsein. It thus has two words to designate what we call in French la conscience. For Hegel, the words Bewusstsein and Selbstbewusstsein (self-consciousness) are related to Wissen, to scientific knowledge or to knowledge in general. On the other hand, Hegel regards Gewissen as a form of Gewissheit, of certainty, or, more exactly, of self-certainty: “This pure self-certainty, Hegel says, pushed to its extreme limit, is manifested in two forms, one of which passes immediately into the other in the form of conscience and in the form of evil . . .” (Encyclopaedia, §511). To avoid confusion, Gewissen is often rendered in French by conscience morale and Bewusstsein by conscience. I prefer to follow the example of Bayle and Rousseau and translate Gewissen simply by conscience without further qualification. However, let us recall that for Rousseau, conscience is “the infallible judge of good and evil, which makes man like God,” whereas for Hegel, it is simply a subjective certainty that can deviate from the truth and take evil for good. That is why Hegel raises the question (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §137) of true or veridical conscience [Gewissen], which is the disposition to want that which is good in itself and for oneself and that, for Hegel, appears only at the level of ethical life or Sittlichkeit. “The Voice That Keeps Silence,” writing, for example, that “it is this universality that ensures that, structurally and by right, no consciousness is possible without the voice. The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as con-sciousness [con-science]” (La voix et le phénomène, 89). Thus Derrida plays in French on the etymology and connotations of a German concept, but at the same time he diverts them and to some extent can authorize criticism of them. His “con-sciousness” (which he writes as Coste did when translating Locke) is a Bewusstsein haunted by the Heideggerian analytic of Gewissen, which makes the certainties of phenomenological experience vacillate in a special Ungewissheit. We might quote partly similar remarks from Paul Ricœur’s Soi-même comme un autre (1990). Our last witness is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here again, Bewusstsein is no longer central, but for reasons different from Heidegger’s. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus replaced this term with Gefühl, moving it entirely into the realm of subjectivism and even of “mysticism” (§6.45). And the posthumous collection Über Gewissheit reduces Bewusstsein completely to the latter term, understood in its subjective meaning. The whole book is constructed around the question of what Ich weiss (I know) means, and thus around the relationship between wissen and Gewissheit in various language games. Something of the battle Wittgenstein’s aphorisms wage against tautology is irremediably lost as soon as we pass into French or English: And in fact, isn’t the use of the word “know” [wissen] as a preeminently philosophical word altogether wrong? “I believe I know” [Ich glaube es zu wissen] would not need to express a lesser degree of certainty [Gewissheit]. (Über Gewissheit, trans. Paul and Anscombe) Against the heritage of “Cartesianism,” we need to return here to a very close examination of Descartes’s own language. B. Consciousness or experience The translation of the terms “awareness” and “consciousness” has the interest of bringing out a theoretical difficulty of which insular philosophers may themselves not be aware. “Aware” is an old English word meaning “to be awake, on one’s guard, recognize.” On the other hand, “awareness” does not appear before the nineteenth century (RT: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.). Short of a paraphrase, it can, of course, be translated into French by conscience when the term is used by itself. The difficulties begin when it is necessary to render “consciousness” and “awareness” in the same context (expressions such as “conscious awareness” even occur). The situation becomes critical when statements in the form of definitions risk turning into tautologies: “Conscious experience names the class of mental states that involve awareness” (Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered); “This consciousness, in the 20th century, has come to mean a ‘full, active awareness’ including feeling as well as thought” (Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”). Then translators hesitate between indicating the English term in parentheses (Dennett, Consciousness Explained) and the introduction of expressions that particularize usage and suggest philosophical interpretations (connaissance immédiate for “awareness”: Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind) Thus we can understand why, in his own French adaptation of his famous lecture “Does Consciousness Really Exist?” (1912), William James used the French word aperception, which current French translators no longer dare to use. The essence of the problem seems to be the following: The uses of “awareness” and “consciousness” are obviously not distinct, 186 CONSCIOUSNESS “intentionality”). On closer inspection, we see that here “intentional” and “intentionality” are based on the same “double negation” as “aware” and “awareness”: it is a matter of naming the “not-unconscious.” This amounts to saying that in all cases, the “definitions” of “consciousness” that want to avoid self-reference rely on the attempt to find a word to express this limit of thought. IV. The Borders of Conscience and Linguistic Clues Ever since consciousness was invented, the expression of the problems it has synthesized has constantly been racked by the gaps between linguistic paradigms. The plurality of meaning we have described is clearly not a defect, but the source of a continually renewed dynamics of thought that plays with the possibilities of problematization that are concealed by words in other languages that are more or less equivalent to the French word conscience. This process can change reference points, but it cannot stop. Its meaning has been temporarily masked by the way in which the philosophy of the first part of the twentieth century (Léon Brunschvicg, Ernst Cassirer) brought the various “manifestations” or “degrees” of la conscience into a figure of a great progress, which was ultimately identical to humanity’s march toward the realization of its own essence, conceived on the classical European model. The debates aroused by psychoanalysis (attached by Freud to the expression das Unbewusste, “the unconscious,” which was forged by the Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century), or by the “deconstruction of the subject” in the twentieth century after Heidegger and the various structuralisms, did not alter significantly the feeling that it was unequivocal. The same will not be the case, probably, for the two phenomena that are going to mark the coming years: the intensification of confrontations between the ways of conceiving of individuality, personality, the psychic apparatus, knowledge, and so on in Western and non-Western cultures and systems of thought, and the diffusion and development of the paradigm of the cognitive sciences. These two phenomena (which are perhaps connected) will go hand-inhand with a new revolution in the economy of linguistic exchanges, both in the sense of a multiplication of translations between European and extra-European idioms, and in the sense of the imposition of a new technical-conceptual koinê, basic Anglo-American. The question of what place the words and notions “conscience,” “consciousness,” and “awareness,” Bewusstsein, Gewissheit, and Gewissen, will have at the point where philosophy, the sciences, ethics, and even mysticism intersect, in common language and in scientific languages, now seems wide open. Étienne Balibar REFS.: Ayers, Michael. Locke: Epistemology and Ontology. New York: Routledge, 1991. Azouvi, François. Maine de Biran: La science de l’homme. Paris: Vrin, 1995. Baldwin, James Mark. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1905. Reprint, 1960. Balibar, Renée. Le colinguisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. Bourcier, Elisabeth. Examen de conscience et conscience de soi dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle en Angleterre. In Genèse de la conscience moderne: Études sur le développement de la conscience de soi dans les literatures du monde occidental, and even less codified. On the other hand, they are dominated by recurrent questions regarding the pertinence of the concept of consciousness inherited from classical philosophy: ontological problems (as James Mark Baldwin put it, “It is the point of division between mind and not mind,” Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology), or problems bearing on the ability of the neurosciences to “explain consciousness”—that is, to objectivize the subject—or on the connection between consciousness and personal identity. The contexts show that the term “awareness” sometimes constitutes a nontechnical equivalent of “consciousness,” which is supposed to provide access to a common experience and serve as a point of reference for the elaboration of a scientific concept, and sometimes the name of an elementary phenomenon to which the enigma of the specificity of psychic phenomena might be reduced. It is a question of simultaneously showing the circular nature of the definitions of consciousness and trying to break it. Then we see that the argumentative structure of the expositions generally consists (with or without a classification of the forms or degrees of consciousness, as in Ryle [The Concept of Mind] or Flanagan [Consciousness Reconsidered]) in situating the field of the phenomena of consciousness between the two extreme poles of “awareness” and “the self.” For the whole of this field, a metonymic term is necessary, one that transcends the difference between “awareness” and “consciousness,” while at the same time expressing their intrinsic relationship: this term is generally “experience,” which thus represents, as in Locke, Hegel, or James, the most general name of subjectivity. This remark leads to another. Since awareness forms the first anchoring point for consciousness within experience, its meaning is obviously not unequivocal: it depends on theoretical positions that are mutually contradictory, oscillating between the idea of the necessary presence of a personal subject and that of the latter’s absence. However, what remains constant is the argumentative function of refutation or elegchos performed by the reference to awareness. In fact, “aware” is synonymous with “not unconscious”: consciousness is that which is not unconscious, thus aware, or present to itself. As always in philosophy, double negation tends to connote the originary. The semantic structure (awareness + consciousness = experience) is not at all limited to cognitive contexts. On the contrary, it appears in the same way in the contexts of moral and political philosophy. Thus it shows the dependency of all these domains in relation to a single implicit phenomenology. But furthermore, it competes with a second, formally similar structure that seems to be more or less reserved for the adversaries of cognitivism (like Searle [Minds, Brains and Science]), and that is based on the interpretation of experience in terms of consciousness + intentionality. This seems to pose no problems of translation. But our desire to resolve the problem (which is basically insoluble) raised by the doublet “consciousness”/“awareness” can thereby only be whetted. The symmetry of these two constructions competing with “experience” corresponds to the fact that from an “objectivist” point of view, the problem is the immediate relation of the subject to himself (designated by “awareness”), whereas from a “subjectivist” point of view, the problem is the immediate relation of the subject to objects (designated by CONSERVATIVE 187 Walzer, Michael. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Über Gewissheit. In Werkausgabe, vol. 8. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Translation by D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe: On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. edited by R. Ellrodt. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. Chollet, A. “Conscience.” In Dictionnaire de théologie Catholique. Edited by Alfred Vacant, Eugène Mangenot, and Émile Amann. Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1903. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. In Œuvres philosophiques, edited by G. Le Roy. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947. First published in 1746. Translation by H. Aarsleff: Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Edited by H. Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. French translation by P. Engel: La conscience expliquée. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. La voix et le phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Translation by Leonard Lawlor: Voice and Phenomenon. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Ellenberger, Henri F. Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient. Translated by J. Feisthauer. Paris: Fayard, 1994. Flanagan, Owen. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Edited by F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Jung, Gertrud. “Suneidesis, Conscientia, Bewusstsein.” In Archiv für die Gesamte Pyschologie, vol. 89. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kittsteiner, Heinz D. Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992. Koffka, Kurt. “Consciousness.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 4, edited by E.R.A. Seligmann and A. Johnson. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Kolakowski, Leszek. Religion: If There Is No God. London: Fontana, 1993. . Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna: Studia nad chrześcijaństwem bezwyznaniowym XVII wieku. Warsaw: Wydawn. Nauk, 1997. Lewis, Clive Staples. “Conscience and Conscious.” In Studies in Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Lewis, Geneviève. Le problème de l’inconscient et le Cartésianisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. French translation by Pierre Coste: Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain. Edited by Emilienne Naert. Paris: Vrin, 1972. Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus, 1998. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson. Edited by J. Deprun. Paris: Vrin, 1978. Translation by P. B. Milan: The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul. Edited by A. G. Bjelland Jr. and P. Burke. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001. Meyer, Louis. La philosophie interprète de l’Écriture sainte. Edited by J. Lagrée and P. F. Moreau. Paris: Intertextes, 1998. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958. Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. French translation by F. Balibar and C. Tiercelin: L’esprit, l’ordinateur et les lois de la physique. Paris: InterÉditions, 1992. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949. Schrader, Wolfgang H. Theorien des Gewissens. In Oikeiôsis: Festschrift für Robert Spaemann, edited by R. Löw. Weinheim, Ger.: Acta Humaniora, 1987. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by J. Butler and J. W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992. Searle, John. Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Movement. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Stelzenberger, Johannes. Syneidesis, Conscientia, Gewissen, Studie zum Bedeutungswandel eines moraltheologischen Begriffes. Paderborn, Ger.: Schöningh, 1963. Tugendhat, Ernst. Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Translation by P. Stern: Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. CONSENSUS “Consensus” is a direct borrowing from the Latin, which means “agreement, unanimous judgment” (from cum, with, together, and sentire, perceive, feel, think, judge), and translates the Greek sumpatheia [συμπάθεια] (sun- [σύν], with, like the Latin cum-, and paschein [πάσχειν], to be affected, undergo, suffer). It was used in particular by the Stoics to designate agreement, conspiracy, and a certain number of things between the two, and it was adopted by physiology to designate the interdependence of bodily organs (cf. IMPLICATION, OIKEIÔSIS, PATHOS). But “consensus” is also, at least in English and French, a good translation of Greek terms such as homonoia [ὁμόνоια] (literally, identity of thought, whence unanimity, concord), and even homologia [ὁμоλоγία] (identity of discourse, whence agreement), which opens out onto the city and the constitution of politics; see LOGOS, II.A, LOVE, II.B.2, SPEECH ACT (esp. Box 1); cf. POLIS, POLITICS (cf. IMPLICATION, OIKEIÔSIS, PATHOS). Consensus clearly points toward “common sense,” that to which everyone can adhere: see SENS COMMUN [SENSUS COMMUNIS, COMMON SENSE] and SENSE, as well as COMMONPLACE and DOXA. In contemporary usage, “consensus” designates not only agreement but the human community that is based on it beyond its divisions, whether the unifying element is civil or religious: see ALLIANCE, CIVIL SOCIETY, PEOPLE, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION (esp. Box 1),SOBORNOST’; cf. COMMUNITY,DROIT,WELTANSCHAUUNG. v. PRAXIS, SECULARIZATION, WHOLE CONSERVATIVE The word “conservative” derives from the Latin conservare (to preserve, respect, save), which designates the fact of preserving and faithfully observing: see PIETAS, RELIGIO. Here we will focus, as in the entry for “liberal,” on the difference between modern political uses of the term in French and English. The English term “conservative” originally designated one of the great traditional parties in Great Britain, occupying the place that would in France be that of the “right” (droite), and later referring to a more general political and even moral position hostile to the most antitraditional aspects of modern society. In any case, the position of the “conservatives” is always understood in a relative way, as is shown by the two series of oppositions analyzed here: see WHIG/TORY, for the birth of the modern British political system, and LIBERAL, for the contemporary usage that divides the main political currents into conservative, liberal, and radical. v. CIVIL SOCIETY, LAW, LIBERTY, POLITICS 188 CONTINUITET CONTINUITET / CONTINUERLIGHED / CONTINUERLIGT (DANISH) ENGLISH continuity, continual FRENCH continuité, continuellement/continûment GERMAN Kontinuität, Kontinuierlichkeit/kontinuierlich v. CONTINUITY, and AIÔN, DASEIN, LEIB, PERSON, PLUDSELIGHED, PRESENT, TIME To render the idea of continuity, the Kierkegaardian lexicon uses two terms: Continuitet and Continuerlighed, which are denoted in the following by “continuity (A)” and “continuity (B).” In French and English, there is a subtle difference between continûment/“continuously” (without interruption) and continuellement/“continually” (possibly repeatable). In some cases, either of the two Danish concepts can be used, and yet one can recognize in the use of the second one (Continuerlighed) a concern to emphasize the dialectical particularity of the existential continuity, to oppose it to permanence and to the stability of nature. Continuity (B) designates the fact that an existing individual is continuous in becoming by virtue of a decision that has the value of an origin. For nature or for ordinary existence, time is only “the dialectic that comes from outside.” On the other hand, for the individual who lives his existence on the basis of himself, who is “originally dialectical in himself,” time operates in such a way as to bring out “the metamorphosis of the most precisely determined continuity as process, succession, continuous transformation through the years.” Continuity (B) characterizes the cohesion of ethical life in harmony with the requirements of social reality, of life that escapes dissolution, diffusion (dœmrer) in the humors, and momentary affective tonalities. This concrete continuity, which “masters the humors [Stemning]” (see STIMMUNG), is described in contrast to the abstract continuity of the mystic. The ethical choice of oneself involves becomingoneself as a task of existence in its continuity in accord with duration. That is the origin of “the concrete person in continuity [A].” Ethical triumph has to do with the “fact of being continuous”—continuity (B); it is the fact of being at once hope and memory. In fact, the unhappy relationship to the past and to the future of man deprived of presence is at the opposite pole from the positivity of movement backward (repentance) and forward (desire), which characterizes the purity of heart of the person who desires the One. “Repentance must have its time,” which is nothing other than the return to a past marked by the lack of this desire. It works in favor of the cohesion of life animated by movement forward. Aside from continuity (A) as the permanence of humanity, that is, “descent as continuity in the history of the species,” recourse to this notion appears especially when there are figures or situations whose traits are marked by an absence of continuity. That is the case for the aesthetician, the ironist, who has no continuity (A) other than boredom. Kierkegaard was inspired here by the ironic negativity that Hegel dealt with in his Aesthetics apropos of romantic art. (It also anticipates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who is “tired of poets.”) The ironist frees himself from continuity (A) with the real conditions of a temporal existence; he lives an “eternity without content,” a felicity without joy, a superficial depth of the being at the same time starved and sated. He lacks continuity; being prey to successive humors “that instantly succeed one another,” he is, as it were, confusedly diffused in them. To that is connected, in Either/Or, “the poetic infinity” of boredom or of the void characteristic of “demonic pantheism” (ibid.), or again, of the unhappy eternity of the bookkeeper, sketched in counterpoint to the happy eternity of “a voluptuously beautiful woman in a harem, reclining on a sofa in all her allure” (ibid.; see PLUDSELIGHED). The interruption of continuity also has a gnoseological meaning. For instance, when faced by becoming in its diverse forms, it is not bodies of knowledge in continuity with each other but, rather, “opposed passions” that are established. That is the case of faith and doubt, which are dependent not on conclusions but on a decision. The loss of “continuity with oneself ” marks the “new creature” constituted by the believer, who is, as it were, born a second time. The demonic and this believer are thus two antagonistic figures with respect to continuity. Alongside the properly theological development of the continuity of sin and eternity, the Christian theory of the instant is the occasion for a barely veiled critique of Hegelianism. It denounces the reduction to this “simple continuity [A]” that is carried out by thinking that ignores the instant as a “plenitude of time.” It consists in believing that the meaning of the past can be brought out, not on the basis of what it really was (incarnation, redemption), but in a relationship of “simple continuity” with the future, namely, progress and history in conformity with the Weltgeist. Similarly, to think we can access the future not on the basis of what it will be (resurrection, judgment) but in continuity with the historical present is to underestimate the import of the instant instituted by Christianity. The most explicit discussions of continuity and discontinuity with respect to the rhythm of thought are found in the great “theoretical” work of 1846, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. When thought believes it can find a foundation in the “solidity of the continuous,” it feels sure of itself, and consequently directly communicable sub specie aeterni. Like Socrates, the existent aware of “the deceptive life” in which he interacts with the idea finds himself “isolated,” having only an “extremely private relationship with it.” The possibility of death, which foils infinity’s deceptions, casts doubt on any kind of positive assurance. The consciousness of finite time impedes continuous thought and situates man in the time of becoming. Time imposes its law and prevents this “abstract continuity which is not a continuity” from being prolonged. Thought’s passion is opposed to the false continuity of abstract thought, because it is the “momentaneous continuity [B] that both slows the movement and is its impetus.” Time, which cannot fail to affect thought, imposes on it a discontinuous rhythm, suspends the immanent continuity of conceptual sequences. It is in the staccato temporality of individual existence and not in the great continuity of world history that the relationship to the Absolute is played out, a relationship that consists of suffering and tribulation. Whereas in the ethical order temptations and tests attack temporal existence at CORSO 189 its weak points, (religious) tribulations are like “Nemesis bearing on the powerful instant of the absolute relationship.” Continuity (B) is broken when “the real resistance of the Absolute” is expressed. Jacques Colette REFS.: Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Edited by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. 25 vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. CONTINUITY “Continuity” (from tenere [to hold, last, persist] and cum [with, together]) designates an uninterrupted persistence in time and also in space. Kierkegaard’s proposal of original terminological distinctions in Danish is discussed in CONTINUITET; we will complete the Kierkegaardian lexicon concerning time in the articles PLUDSELIGHED (suddennesswithout-consequence), MOMENT, Box 3, and NEUZEIT, Box 1. We have also studied the expression of continuity through the “aspect” of verbs, which denotes the mode in which action develops: see ASPECT. More broadly, see TIME [AIÔN, MEMORY, PRESENT]. v. EPISTEMOLOGY, FORCE, PERCEPTION CORSO, RICORSO (ITALIAN) ENGLISH course, return, recurrence FRENCH cours, retour, récurrence v. RÉVOLUTION, TIME, and AIÔN, AUFHEBEN, CIVILTÀ, DESTINY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, MENSCHHEIT, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION, PERFECTIBILITY Two words in everyday Italian, corso and ricorso, have acquired philosophical status because of Giambattista Vico’s use of them in his Scienza nuova (1744). These words are associated with the idea of a cyclical conception of history that Vico is supposed to have defended at a time when the linear conception of an indefinite progress of humanity was being established. For a long time, Vico’s work has been generally known only from this point of view, but an attentive study of his texts shows that it is very questionable whether in his Scienza nuova Vico merely adopts the ancient theme of the cyclical nature of time. This superficial and even erroneous interpretation of what he calls the corso and ricorso of nations prevents us from seeing the depth and originality of his thought. I. Neither Cycle nor Spiral The Italian word corso derives from Latin cursus (from currere), which designates a race, the act of running, and figuratively the course or itinerary followed by something (cursus rerum, cursus vitae). Vico uses it in the expression corso che fanno le nazioni (the course followed by nations), which serves as the title of Book Four of the Scienza nuova, designating the development of nations through time (Vico speaks only of “nations,” which are concrete realities, and not of “humanity,” an abstract term designating the human species). The “scientific” study of this necessary, universal evolution and unfolding is the Scienza nuova’s chief goal: “since these institutions have been established by divine providence, the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” (§348). This is what Vico calls “eternal ideal history” (storia ideal’ eterna). The actual history of nations is thus governed by a law of succession and can be divided into three “ages,” that of the gods, that of heroes, and that of men. In the course of this history human beings, starting from a virtually animal state, develop the seeds of “humanity” that exist in them. The last state is that of “reason completely developed” (ragion tutta spiegata), with the appearance and flourishing of abstract thought, of philosophy and science. On the political level, it coincides with the emergence of the popular republic or democracy. Thus we might think that corso so defined is a kind of constant progress leading, as Vico puts it, to an akmê (culmination). But history, with the examples of Greece and especially Rome, on which Vico concentrated his analyses almost exclusively, shows that it is difficult if not impossible for nations to maintain themselves in this state of complete perfection of their humanity, and that, as is shown by the paradigmatic fate of Rome, the principle of freedom, which is that of democracy, makes the latter degenerate into anarchy and corruption. This is where Vico’s text has to be examined very closely. For this state of disorder in which cities then find themselves, divine providence has three remedies, according to Vico. The first is the appearance of a monarch who, like Augustus, holds the institutions and the laws in his hands, makes order and equity reign, and makes subject peoples content with their fate. The second is that degenerate populations fall into the hands of better populations and are reduced to the status of provinces. The third and most radical occurs when the first two have proven impossible. When the social disintegration provoked by the “barbarity of reflection” (barbarie della riflessione) has reached its extreme, nations return to the primitive state of “barbarity of sensation” (barbarie del senso) from which they had long before emerged. A new corso begins, which Vico calls a ricorso, and it will repeat, not in their events, but in their temporal structure, the three stages of the corso defined through the study of the history of Greece and Rome. The fifth and last book of the Scienza nuova, which is devoted to the ricorso delle cose umane (the ricorso of human affairs), thus offers a panorama of the history of Western nations taken as a whole and seen as one and the same nation after the fall of the Roman Empire. The West moves from an “age of the gods,” then from an “age of heroes”—which coincides with what we call the Middle Ages and what Vico calls “the barbarous times come again” (tempi barbari ritornati)—to an“age of men” (età degli uomini), which is the modern world. As we see, the word ricorso does not refer, as is often believed, to a backward movement, to a regression, a process of involution that makes nations retrace their steps and brings them back to their point of departure (understood in that way, the ricorso would be the inverse of the corso). The return to the starting point comes at the end of a corso, and makes it possible for another corso (ri-corso), identical in its general structure, to begin. 190 CROYANCE and that to save humankind providence must always use its ultimate means, which is to bring nations violently back to their principles, which are also their beginnings, in order to allow them to begin all over again? This is not certain. Vico offers few explanations on this point, but in any case we find nowhere in his work the idea of a mechanical or organic necessity that would condemn nations to an ineluctable death, other nations taking their place in order to follow the same process. In the case of Rome, the final dissolution was the result of the failure, due to humans themselves, of the first remedy that providence provided them, namely the establishment of a rational monarchy. Was this failure inevitable? Are “human” times, those of “completely developed” reason, always condemned to corruption and death? The question remains open, and Vico himself gave no categorical response to it. When at the end of the Scienza nuova he speaks of the situation of modern Europe, he appears to think that “today a complete humanity [umanità, in the sense of “civilization”] seems to be spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples” (§1089). But this declared optimism is counterbalanced by a severe judgment on modern culture, and in particular on the philosophy of his period, whose dominant trends seem to Vico to adopt the positions of those who, in antiquity, participated in the general corruption by preaching a dissolving individualism (Skeptics, Epicureans, Stoics). But he never predicts the final catastrophe, even if he fears it. The world of nations, he repeats, is not prey to the casus (accident) or to the fatum (fate). The “new science” he claims to have founded permits him, as he says in a passage in the 1725 edition, only to offer a “diagnosis” of the state of the nations, to call them to the order of freedom and justice, with respect for the founding principles of every society, religion, and the family. So far as the rest is concerned, nations hold their destiny in their own hands, under the watchful eye of the providence that wants to “preserve the human race upon this earth” (§1108). Alain Pons REFS.: Vico, Giambattista. The First New Science. Translated by L. Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The first edition of Scienza nuova was published in 1725, with subsequent editions in 1744 and 1774. . The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translation of the third edition (1774) with the addition of “Practice of the New Science.” Edited by T. Goddard Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Before inquiring into the view of the history of nations that emerges from these analyses, we must note two important points. On the one hand, Vico does not speak of the “ricorso of human affairs” in the first edition of the Scienza nuova (1725), in which the principles of his “science” are already laid out, which proves that the question is not essential for him, and that it is merely a confirmation of the general validity of these principles. And on the other hand, he never uses, in the final version of his work, the words corso and ricorso in the plural, which disconfirms the common interpretation that holds that for Vico history offers the spectacle of a series of corsi and ricorsi indefinitely succeeding each other—unless, to give this succession the appearance of a progress, these cycles are seen as a spiral; but neither this image nor the idea connected with it is found in Vico’s work. Corso can be translated into French by cours, but the translation of ricorso is more delicate. Recours (recourse, appeal) appears in the juridical vocabulary, and if we can acknowledge that Vico’s ricorso does indeed have the meaning of an “appeal” that nations might make before the tribunal of history, it does not refer, or no longer refers, to the repetition of a course, of a run (the verb recourir, in one of its common meanings, preserves this idea, and a course that has not been properly run has to be rerun). Jules Michelet translates ricorso by retour, but we might also suggest récurrence as a rendering. II. Is the Ricorso Inevitable? While the common interpretation of ricorso in Vico as merely a simple (and regrettable, according to some writers) borrowing of the old theme, naturalistic in origin, of the cycle of life and death, here applied to nations, is not defensible, the Scienza nuova nonetheless raises questions that are difficult to answer. However, a careful reading allows us to arrive at some reasonable conclusions. For Vico, the corso followed by nations is an “idea” realizing itself in time, an idea inferred from an informed observation of the history of various nations, and whose specifically “scientific” value derives from the fact that it can be deduced, in an axiomatic way, from the study of fallen human nature after original sin. This idea allows us to understand the temporal destiny of all nations, and has at the same time an heuristic value: thus Vico “discovers” the true identity of Homer (Book 3 of the Scienza nuova is entitled “Discovery of the True Homer), and between the first and last editions of his work, he “discovers” that the Middle Ages is simply a repetition of the “divine” and “heroic” ages of Greek and Roman antiquity. An idea cannot be pluralized; it is unique, and this implies, as we have seen, that all nations that have existed, or now exist, or will exist, have had, have, and will have a history whose general movement follows the corso outlined by Vico. Ultimately, and in a more concrete way, Vico merely affirms that the emergence and development of all human societies are based on religious, moral, juridical, and political values embodied in institutions whose form changes in accord with an immutable temporal order, as the nature of fallen man changes and transforms itself, “humanizes itself,” without the effects of the original Fall ever completely disappearing. Does that mean that at the end of the corso followed by each nation there is necessarily a final decadence and dissolution, CROYANCE The French word croyance derives from the Latin credere, which means “to confide in,” “believe, think,” and, in an intransitive sense, “to be confident” or “to believe, have faith.” The term is thus capable of combining two heterogeneous notions: a logical and epistemological one of opinion and assent, and another religious or even superstitious one of faith. I. Croyance and Foi: Der Glaube The two registers are not, however, differentiated in the same way in all languages. While French can choose to oppose croyance and foi, as English opposes “belief” and “faith,” the German expression der Glaube (belief, faith) cannot by CULTURE 191 I. Cultura (Lat.), Paideia (Gr.), Bildung (Ger.) The Latin cultura, which concerns the harmonious adaptation of nature, proposes a model entirely different from that of the Greek paideia [παιδεία], in which we hear the Promethean art of making a little man (pais [παῖϛ]), or rather a little Hellene (see BILDUNG, Box 1, TO TRANSLATE, I, and ART, I). The term, which is exceptionally rich and full of connotations, is connected with Bild, “image” (see BILD and IMAGE), with Einbildungskraft, “imagination” (see IMAGINATION), and refers to “formation” (bilden) and “plasticity” (see PLASTICITY and ART, Box 2). II. Bildung/Kultur/Zivilisation (Ger.), Culture/ Civilisation (Fr.), Civiltà (Ital.) Bildung, which retains the element of particularity in the notion of individual formation, is distinguished from both Kultur and Zivilisation in an unparalleled triplet. See BILDUNG for the evolution of these three terms from the Enlightenment onward (cf. LIGHT). See the same entry for the way in which the Franco-German relationship has been determined by the meaning and value of the French word civilisation in relation to the German Kultur. Finally, Italian civiltà refers both to “civilization” and “civility”; see CIVILTÀ. III. Culture/Cultures On the tension between universal civilization and particular culture, see MENSCHHEIT, Box 1; TO TRANSLATE, Box 2; cf. EUROPE, LOGOS, NAROD, PEOPLE. IV. The Great Interactions 1. On the relation between culture and nature, see ART, BILDUNG, FATHERLAND, GENIUS, INGENIUM, NATURE. 2. On the relation between culture and history, see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, SECULARIZATION. 3. On the relation between culture and art, see ART, KITSCH, MIMÊSIS (and BILDUNG, Box 1, for mimêsis rhêtorikê [μίμησιϛ ῥητоριϰή]). v. GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, RELIGIO itself indicate the distinction between logical assent and adherence to a religious content. Whence the difficulty encountered by French and English translators in making intelligible both the Kantian adage “I had to limit knowledge [Wissen] to make room for belief/faith [Glauben]” and the transition to the Hegelian problem of the relations between “faith” and “knowledge” after the Enlightenment: see GLAUBE. See also FAITH, RELIGION, SECULARIZATION. II. Croyance and Assentiment 1. The English term “belief,” which is derived from Germanic Glaube, gradually detached itself from “faith” (from Latin fides [faith, confidence, sincerity, protection]) to designate, from Hume to Wittgenstein, the whole field of a “grammar of assent” on the basis of the polarity of feeling and judgment. See BELIEF. 2. On the degrees of assent and the relationship to the object or to reality, see DOXA, PERCEPTION, Box 3, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH, WILL. See also VERNEINUNG; cf. CERTITUDE, PROBABILITY, REASON. 3. On the belief in the external world, the existence of the object, and the “suspension” demanded by skepticism and phenomenology, see EPOCHÊ; cf. BEGRIFF, Box1, GREEK, OBJECT. v. CLAIM, EPISTEMOLOGY, MATTER OF FACT CULTURE The French word culture, like its analogues in various European languages, comes from the Latin cultura, which designates agriculture and the transformation of nature, implying a relationship to places and to gods (colere, the verb from which it derives, also means “inhabit” and “worship”), and, starting with Cicero, the cultivation of the mind and the education of the individual. It denotes a tension between the natural and art or artifice, on the one hand, and between the human universal and particularity or singularity on the other. 193 DAIMÔN [δαίμων] (GREEK) ENGLISH demon FRENCH démon v. DEMON, and BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, DESTINY, DEVIL, DUENDE, GENIUS, GOD, HAPPINESS, MORALS “Demon” was closely associated with “devil” in early Christianity and thus acquired very negative connotations, but the Greek daimôn was initially undetermined axiologically. Neither good nor bad in itself, it was characterized just as much by its ontological ambivalence. I. Daimôn and Distribution (Daiomai) In Homer the word may designate a theos [θεός], a god, but in a relatively vague way. More exactly, in its use in Homer, daimôn seems to refer sometimes to a divine power that manifests itself in a diffuse way, and sometimes to a particular god who is not precisely identified. To determine this more closely, we will begin with the etymology of daimôn. Plato suggested that the daimôn was a daêmôn [δαήμων], that is, an intelligent, clever being (Cratylus, 398b), but it is in fact a term derived from the family of daiomai [δαίομαι], “share (out)” or “distribute,” and dais [δαίς], “part” or “lot.” In accord with this etymology, the daimôn can be understood as the being that distributes lots, or as the effect of this distribution: then it is—and this is once again a significant indeterminacy—either the power that distributes lots or the lot itself that falls to someone, whence in both cases a strong connection with the idea of fate (heimarmenê [εἱμαϱμένη]; potmos [πότμος]). And although Homer’s use of the word scarcely reflects this etymology, we can clearly see its influence in the compound adjectives eudaimôn [εὐ-δαίμων], “happy,” literally, “one who has a good daimôn,” used from Hesiod on, and its antonym dus-daimôn [δυσ-δαίμων], which Empedocles created precisely to qualify fate (potmos, cf. 31 B 9, 4 DK). For his part, Hesiod presents daimons as men of the golden age who have become “guardians of mortal men” after their own deaths (Works and Days, 122–23). This usage persisted for a long time because taken literally it helped to endow daimons with personal, functional characteristics and situated them as a category of beings intermediary between gods and humans that played a providential role with regard to the latter. Was this the result of learned reflection on the adjectival use? In any event, Empedocles went still further than Hesiod, and in his poem Hoi Katharmoi (The purifications) he created a narrative whose protagonist is a daimon who has been exiled, like others of his kind, from the domain of the gods (31 B 115 DK; in this narrative the daimon, designated as an active, knowing subject, expresses himself in the first person). The real etymology of daimôn plays a major role here: Empedocles’s demonogonic narrative shows explicitly that the daimon is the result of a willed separation from the divine world—and that its development, begun by this exile far from the gods and punctuated by the incarnations that necessity imposes on it, involves moving from the misfortune of birth and mortality (a true dus-daimonia [δυσ-δαιμονία]) to happiness and apotheosis (31 B 146–47 DK). The result is a mutation: it is no longer a matter of becoming eudaimôn but rather makar [μάϰαϱ], the equal of the gods, that is, blissful. By individualizing the daimon in this way, Empedocles inaugurates, although he does not pursue, a profound evolution in the use of the term that makes it signify a kind of personal principle, connected with the individual human without merging with the latter. II. Plato: Interpreting the Intermediary It can be said that all the later semantic developments of this term in philosophical thought are determined by the use made of it by Homer, Hesiod, and Empedocles. Plato summed up pretty much all of them, and provided in the Symposium the standard philosophical text that was to nourish and guide all later demonological speculations. The daimon, of which Eros is the prototype, is seen as an intermediary (metaxu [μεταξύ]) between humans and the gods that allows them to enter into communication (202d). Elsewhere, Plato also refers to daimons that serve as guardians (Laws, 713d, for the golden age of the past) or even as upholders of the laws, when he endorses the widespread idea that a personal daimon is attached to each soul and determines its life on earth (Republic, 10.617e) and after death (Phaedo, 107d–108c). But in the Timaeus, it is man’s nous, his intellect, which is designated as a daimon within him (90a); this metaphorization of the term, this connection between the daimon and humans, reminds us not only of Empedocles, but also of Heraclitus’s enigmatic formula, frequently glossed by commentators: “man’s character, his daimon” (ethos anthrôpôi daimôn [ἦθος ἀνθϱώπῳ δαίμων], B 119 DK; see MORALS, Box 1), not to mention Socrates’s famous daimon. . Plato’s diverse uses of the term show how many interpretive possibilities it provides. III. Demonologies: From the Principle of Transcendence to the Fallen Angels The whole later tradition down to the period of the Roman Empire was marked by abundant speculation on the nature of daimons, inspired by the meanings we have just examined, coordinating them or selecting them in order to found a genuine demonology. Thus various medio- and Neoplatonic D texts, as well as Stoic, hermetic, or Gnostic texts, bear the marks of thought about demonic beings classified into types: personal or not, simple or double, guardian or avenging, good or bad, and so on. Questions were raised about their nature and capacities for action, about where they were, and also about their ability to transform themselves, for a certain plasticity was attributed to these gods who were less than gods. A classic view in this regard, reflecting the speculations of the Old Academy (Epinomis, Speusippus, Xenocrates), is that of Plutarch, who defines daimons as divine beings subject to passions, even though they have no bodies (cf. De defectu oraculorum, 416C), a position that allows him to detach the true gods from mythological narratives that were supposed to represent daimons. At the same time, Plutarch acknowledges that daimons manifest themselves in diverse forms; located on the moon, they have a place in the hierarchy of beings between the gods and the souls of humans and animals. But in the end, for Plutarch daimons represent a superior degree of purification for souls. Up to the third century CE, the meaning of daimôn remained unstable, so that we see a proliferation of the types of daimons, encouraged by unbridled interpretation of poetic and philosophical texts and religious traditions (but occasionally condemned by the Epicureans). It is remarkable that a quite different mode of interpretation was proposed by Plotinus in the third century, although it spiritualized the daemonic principle too much to succeed in permanently affecting the use of the term. Plotinus saw in the daimon nothing other than the name of a principle of transcendence for the being to which it is attached (cf. Enneads, 3.4 [15]). Plotinus thereby combines the idea of destiny with that of personal identity, while at the same time overcoming the antinomy between them: we are ourselves our daimons insofar as we are our destiny, and insofar as we are capable of transcendence. This way of spiritualizing the notion of the daimôn was conveyed instead in the notion of genius, that is, through a translation that made the Greek daimôn correspond to the Latin genius (which evolved much more clearly from the meaning of “daemonic being” to that of a personal principle). To the church fathers writing after the New Testament, the term daimôn (taken literally, it was simply transliterated into Latin: daemon) was seen as referring to a powerful, evil being. In Christian doctrine, demons are fallen angels who obey the orders of their leader, the Prince of Evil, Satan, the devil (diabolos [διάϐολος], “slanderer” in classical Greek, taken in a radical sense corresponding to sāṭān [ןָטָ שׂ [in Hebrew, of which it is essentially a translation). The anti-pagan polemic led logically to presenting the pagan gods themselves as demons; Plutarch’s argument against mythology was thereby amplified and generalized. With Christian doctrine’s association of the daimon with the devil Satan, the term underwent a decisive and almost permanent change. Although at first it had referred to a divine manifestation, “daimon” subsequently designated a mediating semi-divine being and a personal principle for humans before it came to be the name of evil beings hostile to God and to humans—through an almost complete semantic reversal. Jean-François Balaudé REFS.: Balaudé, Jean-François. Le démon et la communauté des vivants: Étude des interprétations antiques des Catharmes d’Empédocle. PhD diss., Lille, 1992. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Translated by J. Raffan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. 1 Socrates’s demon According to the testimony of Plato (more precise than that of Xenophon), Socrates’s demon is most often designated by the adjective to daimonion [τὸ δαιμόνιον]: this would be, in Socrates’s own sayings, “the demonic” that manifests itself to him; but in truth the complete expression is “demonic sign” (to daimonion semeion [τὸ δαιμόνιον σημεῖον]; see, particularly, Republic, 496c and Euthydemus, 272e). These terms suggest that he perceives this internal sign as a direct intervention of which he does not seem to be able to specify the exact nature (except to note that this sign manifests itself to him as a voice; cf. Apology, 31d). “Demonic” means no more and no less than that it is a matter of something that is beyond him, related to the divine, to a form of transcendence (for the first time in the Apology Socrates evokes “theion ti kai daimonion” [θεῖόν τι ϰαὶ δαιμόνιον], “something divine and demonic”; 31c), although (according to Plato at least) this “demonic” is never taken by Socrates to represent a demonic being. “Demonic sign” means therefore for Socrates a sign sent by the god and for this reason of a demonic nature. What is more, this “demonic” manifests itself only in a negative manner, and it only distracts Socrates from doing such and such a thing, without offering any positive incitement (Apology, 31d). Socrates’s demonic sign would thus be the minimal form of the personal demon of which we see the emergence beginning with Empedocles (or even Heraclitus), and which Plato will constantly refer to; indeed, this sign, which is beyond Socrates, is at the same time what most intimately belongs to him: it addresses itself to him and to him alone; it is a sign sent by the god, through a personal relation to this individual who is Socrates. Is it the mark of a chosen man? Socrates does not contest or confirm that others apart from him could be the beneficiaries of such divine signs, but he compares, without claiming they are identical, this demonic communication to a sort of divination, an art that is itself exceptional and of which he does not in any case deny the reality (cf. Apology, 33c). For these reasons, we will not take the Socratic demon as a simple figure for internal consciousness or conscience—this rationalist interpretation is too reductive; the phenomenon of the demonic certainly indicates Socrates’s adherence to a divine principle, in the absence of a profound belief in the traditional gods. Truth is, for Socrates, the exclusive possession of the god—the demonic helps him to grasp shreds of it, which are valid for him and comfort him in his divine “mission,” as it was announced by the Delphic oracle (cf. Apology, 21ab). 194 DAIMÔN DASEIN 195 dasein (to be present, vorhanden) nominalized, and far from being a technical term, it was formidable only in its disarming simplicity, comparable to that of the French expression ça y est (that’s it; there you have it). We should distinguish the various acceptations with which the term is loaded: modal (Kant), emphatic (Goethe, Schiller, Jacobi, Hamann, Herder), passive (Fichte), ecstatic (Schelling), and finally ontological or existential (Heidegger). I. Dasein, Wirklichkeit, Existenz: Kant In his 1763 opuscule, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God), Kant renders the Latin existentia by the expression Dasein Gottes, a translation that Hegel adopted in his 1829 Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this acceptation of Dasein is found again, in the table of the categories, under the second category of modality: as a dynamic category, Dasein is opposed to Nichtsein (nonbeing), and is intercalated between the possible and the necessary. The second of the postulates of empirical thought in general is called wirklich, which is in accord with the material conditions of experience. Dasein is thus what is (the existent, nature) as wirklich. It is the real insofar as it is differently “positioned” than the possible, but without “containing” anything more than the possible: “Sein ist offenbar kein reales Prädikat” (Being is obviously not a real predicate; Critique of Pure Reason). Kant seems not to have distinguished between Dasein and Existenz. The article “Dasein” (RT: Kant-Lexikon) refers to Existenz, Sein, Wirklichkeit, Natur, etc. We know that the ens realissimum whose Dasein the 1763 opuscule sought to prove was in 1781 assigned the status of a simple ideal of pure reason. The paradox inherent in Kant’s use of Dasein as a Germanic substitute for existentia is that the ecstatic dimension of the notion of existence (in the sense of a movement toward an outside) is subverted, turned inside out. The Dasein Gottes, or the “there is–ness” of God (“Es ist ein Gott” [There is a God], Kant writes in boldface letters at the beginning of his 1763 opuscule: Akademia Ausgabe des Kants Schriften (AK), 2:65—cf. Wolff, Deutsche Metaphysik, §946: “Das ein Gott ist” [That there is a God]) will in fact be understood in Kant’s mature critical philosophy as inherent to ethical-practical reason, “but not as a being outside man.” Kant’s unpublished work is very explicit on this point (AK, 21:144–45): “Gott muss nicht als Substanz ausser mir vorgestellt werden. Gott ist nicht ein Wesen ausser mir sondern bloss ein Gedanke in mir” (God must not be pictured as a substance outside of me. God is not a being outside of me but simply an idea in me). If existing means “having a being or substance outside my thought”—ex-sistere—Kant is the one who asserts both that there is a God and that God, strictly speaking, does not ex-sist, or has no being other than that of a simple ideal of pure reason, a rational fiction necessary for the deployment of practical reason. If Descartes could write, “[B]y essence we understand the thing insofar as it is objectively in the intellect, by existence [existentia], this same thing insofar as it is outside the intellect [rem eandem prout est extra intellectum]” (Correspondance, vol. 4), we can see how aberrant it is to render existentia by Dasein when the Chantraine, Pierre. “La notion de divin depuis Homère jusqu’à Platon.” In Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique. Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1954. Détienne, Marcel. De la pensée religieuse à la pensée philosophique: La notion de “daïmon” dans le pythagorisme ancient. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Doods, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Boston: Beacon Press, 1951. François, Gilbert. Le polythéisme et l’emploi au singulier des mots Theos et daïmon dans la littérature grecque d’Homère à Platon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957. Gernet, Louis, and André Boulanger. Le génie grec dans la religion. Paris: Albin Michel, 1969; repr., Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1992. Hesiod. Hesiod: The Works and Days. Translated by R. Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959. Langton, Edward. Essentials of Demonology. London: Epworth Press, 1949. Plato. Socrates’ Apology; Cratylus; The Laws; The Republic; Phaedo; Timaeus. In Complete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Plotinus. Ennead III, 4 [15]. In Plotini opera, edited by P. Henry and H. S. Schwyzer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. . The Enneads. Translated by S. MacKenna. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Plutarch. On the Failure of Oracles. In Plutarch’s Moralia, vol. V. Loeb Classical Library, 405. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. . On the Sign of Socrates. In Plutarch’s Moralia, vol. VII, translated by P. H. de Lacy and B. Einarson. Loeb Classical Library, 405. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Soury, Guy. La démonologie de Plutarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1942. DASEIN / EXISTENZ (GERMAN) ENGLISH life FRENCH existence, réalité humaine, être-là/existence, temps, durée d’une existence, présence, vie, être GERMAN Kampf ums Dasein (struggle for life) ITALIAN essere-ci, esserci, adessere LATIN existentia v. ESSENCE, LIFE/LEBEN, and ACT, AIÔN, DESTINY, EREIGNIS, ERLEBEN, ES GIBT, I/ME/MYSELF, PRESENT, REALITY, SOUL, SUBJECT, TO BE, VORHANDEN Dasein, in its contemporary (Heideggerian) usage, has become a paradigm of the untranslatable. It is a common word that Heidegger transformed into a neologism (as is also the case for his use of terms such as Bestand, Machenschaft, Gestell, Ereignis, etc.) to the point of proposing an alternative pronunciation, accenting, against normal usage, the second syllable, sein (being). When Heidegger injected a new meaning into Dasein to make it signify, in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), the being whose own existence is at stake, the term was already charged with history and diverse meanings: time, the duration of an existence, presence, and also life, being, existence, being-there. All these meanings intersect with one another in the course of a tumultuous history, especially from Kant to Schelling, by way of Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte. Nonetheless, they have a common denominator in the complex relationships between Dasein and its pseudo-doublet Existenz, which emerged directly from Latin existentia. Dasein’s resistance to any translation emerged in the twentieth century as an outcome of the Germanization of the Latin existentia into Dasein, as if Dasein had ultimately never recovered from this blow and continued to point toward an entirely different area of meaning from the one to which the metaphysical term existentia tried to assign it. It is this history that we need to look into first. As a substantive, Dasein appeared only rather recently in German: not until the seventeenth century was the verb 196 DASEIN his guide the Wolffian equation existentia-actualitas and identifying Dasein with what is wirklich (real, actual). In Wolff, the question of the existentia Dei was summed up in the demonstration of an independent essence, a being that was “autonomous” or “self-standing,” for which the name “God” was appropriate because of the connection between stare, sistere and stehen, and ständig (Deutsche Metaphysik, §929). Wolff’s latter term is supposed to express an in-existence, an ideal being in mir (in me). . Thus the Latin word existentia already had a rather turbulent past, without which we cannot really understand it, when Kant took it up and Germanized it as Dasein, taking as 1 Note on Latin existentia and French existence Before we arrive at the problematic rendering of the Latin existentia by the German Dasein, we encounter a difficulty in (a) the plasticity of existentia and (b) the gap between the Latin existere (i.e., exsistere) and the French exister. Even in Latin, during the classical, patristic, and Scholastic periods, their meanings overlap and sometimes blur in instructive ways. In classical Latin, the verb exsisto (a compound of ex and sisto, from stare, “stand”) does not mean “exist,” but rather “step up, come forth, arise,” and by extension, “appear, emerge.” Thus in Cicero we read “timeo ne existam crudelior” (I fear to show myself too severe; Letters to Atticus, 10.11.3) and “existunt in animis varietates” (there emerges a certain diversity among minds; De officiis, 1.107), or in Lucretius, “existere vermes / stercore” (living worms spring out / of stinking dung; De rerum natura, 2.870–71). The young Descartes still echoes this classical sense when he mentions, in his Cogitationes privatae: “hoc mundi theatrum , in quo hactenus spectator exstiti” (this theater of the world in which I have up to now appeared only as a spectator). Unknown in classical Latin, the noun existentia seems to appear only in the fourth century CE, in Marius Victorinus, who, after his conversion to Christianity, translated Plotinus’s Enneads into Latin, and in Candidus the Arian, who also uses (De generatione divina 1; RT: PL, 8.1013) the derivatives existentitas (existentness) and existentialitas (existentality). According to Marius Victorinus (Adversus Arium 1.30.1062 c 18ff.), “the sages and the ancients” definitely distinguished between existencia and substantia, defining exsistentiam (existence) and existentialitatem (existentiality): “praeexistentem subsistentiam sine accidentibus ” (as the initial foundation, preexisting the thing itself, in its accidents ), even though, according to the usual meaning of the terms (in usu accipientes), exsistentia and substantia did not differ, and it was even “permissible to use equivalently existence, substance, or being” (sive existentiam, sive substantiam, sive quod est esse). Contrary to all expectations, existentiality refers to an existing substance provided with all its accidents. We can gauge here the violence deliberately and explicitly done to the usual meanings of the terms exsistencia and exsistentialitas by using them as technical terms in the context of the Trinitarian controversies. This violence is connected with the difficulty of acclimating in Latin, and in Christian dogma, the vocabulary of Greek Platonic and Neoplatonic ontology. From a strictly lexicographic point of view, Candidus the Arian and Marius Victorinus are nonetheless the precursors of the vocabulary of existentiality (German, Existentialität) in the twentieth century. In general, “ex-sistere signifies less the fact of being itself than its relationship to some origin” (Gilson, L’être et l’essence), and that is why the Scholastics basically understood existere as meaning ex alio sistere, that is, “accede to being by virtue of another origin,” thanks to a detachment with respect to a provenance that was ultimately to be interpreted as causa (French, cause; German, Ursache; cf. Gilson, L’être et l’essence). In a classic text (De Trinitate 4.12), Richard of St. Victor strongly emphasizes that when we say that something exists (exsistere), subintelligitur non solum quod habeat esse, sed etiam aliunde, hoc est ex aliquo habeat esse. Quid est enim existere nisi ex aliquo sistere ? (this implicitly refers, not only to what has being, but to what derives it [i.e., being] from elsewhere, namely, from some other. What is it, in fact, to exist [exsistere], if not to receive one’s being from something else [ex aliquo sistere] ?) The question of existentia then undergoes a shift toward that of causa, and that is the tradition, via Suárez, Leibniz, and Wolff, of which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the heir: Kant took up the “privileged” dimension attributed to human existence (as a disposition of the “personality”) in freedom, as the ratio essendi of the moral law, only under the banner of causality (Transcendental Dialectic, third antinomy)—whence also the crucial issue constituted by the question of causality in the debate between Kant and Hume. For Suárez, in fact, ex-sistere is extra causas sistere, “to stand outside causes,” or even “to be apart from causes,” as is established in the Disputationes metaphysicae, 31.4.6: existentia nihil aliud est quam illudesse, quo formaliter et immediate entitas aliqua constituitur extra causas suas ( existence is nothing other than this being by virtue of which a certain entity is constituted, formally and immediately, apart from its causes ) Similarly, for Eustache de Saint-Paul (Summa philosophiae, 4.37) what “exists” (existit) “is the thing [that] is said to be in actuality or outside its causes” (res [quae] dicitur esse actu sive extra suas causas), and this thing “begins to exist only when it advances outside by virtue of its causes” ([res] incipit existere cum virtute causarum fors prodit). For something to exist, it has to come out of its hole, and in being driven out, to emancipate itself from its causes, but also thereby confirm their tutelary power. It is under the pressure of actuality that the fate of existentia will henceforth be played out, rethought in the light of the two pairs, causa/effectus and potentia/actus, as is the case in Wolff, where existentia is equivalent to actualitas (Philosophia prima sive ontologia, §174). We owe to Leibniz the further enrichment of the Latin vocabulary of existere, which was already very rich, as we have seen, with the derivatives existentia, existentitas, and existentialitas, by resorting, in his General Investigations Concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truths, and in a Latin worthy of Hermolaus Barbarus (cf. Theodicy, art. 87), to the present participle of the factitive of existere, existentificans (existifying), as well as to the desiderative existiturire. We probably cannot understand “Omne possibile EXISTITURIRE” as meaning that “everything possible is a future existent” (cf. M. Fichant’s French translation), given that the author of De libertate elsewhere asserts that he has considered “those things among the possible that are not, will not be, and have not been.” The meaning is rather that every possible is “futurable,” admissible, DASEIN 197 As for Jacobi, he adopts this emphatic sense of Dasein, especially in a typical, even emblematic expression of his enterprise: Dasein enthüllen (disclose the Dasein). The term Dasein could thus serve as a banner for an antiphilosophical enthusiasm (according to Schelling) in the context of the pantheism controversy. A passage in Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, copied out by Hölderlin (Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe) and by Schelling (cf. the preface to Vom Ich), calls the disclosure and revelation of Dasein “the greatest merit that a thinker can have.” The feeling of existing/Gefühl des Daseins, what Rousseau called, in the fifth of his Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, “the feeling of existence divested of any other affection,” seems to have been the rallying cry of a new sensibility that defined an era (Tieck, Moritz, Jean-Paul [Richter], Novalis. On this point, cf. X. Tilliette, L’intuition intellectuelle de Kant à Hegel). III. Daseyn, Daseyen, Da-sein: Fichte and Hegel A frequently overlooked passage in Fichte’s Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben makes a great deal of the term Daseyn (using its old spelling): German work nonetheless remained very Latin in its conceptualization, and it was for the generations that followed Wolff and Kant to rediscover, beneath the outer bark of a borrowed conceptuality, a very vital sap. II. Dasein: The Reconquest of the Verb—From Goethe to Jacobi From Goethe to Jacobi, and even as late as Nietzsche (cf., for example, The Gay Science, bk. 4, §341: “die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins”), Dasein was to be revived in a form quite different from that of a technical term. That explains its use in Goethe, which is indissociable from wonderment before the very presence of things, the simple fact of their coming into being. Goethe seems to reconnect with a prephilosophical or at least pretechnical sense of Dasein as life, being, existence, the pure miracle of things offered to human perception. It is the good fortune, always unique and singular, of being able to say “I was there!” (ich war dabei), as in Goethe’s famous declaration after the battle of Valmy. Dasein comes to mean dabei sein, as if the verbal nature of the verb dasein had been wrested away from its conceptual fixation in Dasein. promotable, or susceptible to be promoted to reality, except when it conflicts with other copossibles. Leibniz does not say that every possible exists by futurition, if not virtually, but rather that the realizable non-real can—and wants to—present itself as something realizable, or “existentiable,” namely, “existentifiable.” Commenting on this Leibnizian hapax, Heidegger (in Nietzsche) writes: “Existence itself is of an essence such that it provokes the power of wanting oneself [to be].” We can also compare the way Leibniz uses the word existere, in his meditation on the status of the possible, on the formation of the future tense in ancient Greek, as it developed from an earlier desiderative present and includes, unlike Latin, a genuine future infinitive (RT: Meillet, Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque). Thus, by means of an unprecedented radicalization of what remained in a state of incubation during the Middle Ages, Leibniz can be said to have pushed to its ultimate consequences, and at the same time to its last entrenchments, the saturation of the vocabulary of existence by that of efficiency, in conformity with his interpretation of substance as “a Being capable of action” (Principes de la nature et de la grâce, art. 1), and faithful to the language of causality and the principle of reason—ratio seu causa. From Candidus the Arian and Marius Victorinus to Suárez and Leibniz, by way in particular of Richard of Saint Victor, Latin philosophy was able to discern a major speculative issue in the lexicon of ex-sistencia, to the point that it exhausted the field of its lexical variations. From Suárez’s extracausal existentia to Leibniz’s existentification, or the reinterpretation of existence on the basis of efficiency, to the Kantian inquiry into the Kausalität der Ur-sache, the “causality of the cause” (Critique of Pure Reason), the history of the problems that critical philosophy took up was played out, in a secret genealogy, and handed on to German idealism. Whatever may be said about the various acceptations of the Latin existentia, we have finally to note the narrow but sensitive and delicate difference between existentia and the French existence. The difficulty inherent in translating the Latin word by the French one was emphasized by Scipion Dupleix in his Métaphysique (1617): [W]e are obliged to note that in our French language we have no term that corresponds energetically to the Latin existentia, which means the bare entity, the simple and naked being of things, without considering any order or rank that they hold in relation to the others. REFS.: Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. Edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965–68. Descartes, René. Cogitationes privatae. In Oeuvres, vol. 10. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1897–1913. Reprint, Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin, 1983. Dupleix, Scipion. Métaphysique. Paris: Fayard, 1992. First published in 1617. Éthier, Albert-Marie. Le “De Trinitate” de Richard de Saint-Victor. Paris: Vrin; Ottawa: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1939. Eustache de Saint-Paul. Summa philosophiae. Paris, 1609; 2nd ed., 1626. Gilson, Étienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949. . “Existentia.” In L’être et l’essence. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1972. First published in 1948. . Index scolastico-cartésien. Paris: Vrin, 1979. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Translated by D. F. Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979–87. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. General Investigations Concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truths. Translated by W. H. O’Briant. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968. . Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Dan Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. . Principes de la nature et de la grâce. Edited by A. Robinet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. Translation by R. S. Woolhouse and R. Francks: Principles of Nature and Grace. In Philosophical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. . Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Edited by A. Farrer. Translated by E. M. Huggard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. Marius Victorinus, Caius. Adversus Arium. In Theological Treatises on the Trinity. Translated by M. T. Clark. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981. Suárez, Francisco. Disputationes metaphysicae. Hildesheim, Ger.: George Olms Verlag, 1999. Wolff, Christian von. Philosophia prima sive ontologia. Halle, Ger.: In Officina Libreria Rengeriana, 1736. 198 DASEIN Grund (obscure background). Nothing exists, strictly speaking, except that which is capable of dissociating itself from its own background, wrenching itself away from it in response to a crisis, as analogically, light extracts itself from mass. Existenz is not simply Daseyn, because it detaches itself from Daseyn and posits outside itself, at its own peril, something that, unless it resolves to exist, must be content simply to be. All being is an ex-stans—cf. Schelling: das existierende [ἐξίσταμαι]/existo/[ἐξιστάμενον] = “ein außer sich gesetztes Seyendes” (an existent set outside itself). While Kant moved from existentia to Dasein, Schelling awakens, in the torpor of Dasein, the mute and disturbing dimension of the Existent, in its constitutive “eccentricity,” of that “existence which is precisely nothing other than ecstasy,” as he put it in the 1830 introductory course in philosophy (Einleitung in die Philosophie, lecture 27). The term Existenz is thus privileged in relation to Dasein, which for Schelling is strongly marked by Jacobi’s vocabulary, but does not for all that go beyond ordinary usage. How should we understand Schelling’s “extra-logical nature of existence [Existenz]”? How can we think of that which exceeds all thought without thereby making it a simple content of consciousness? That was to be the question of positivist philosophy. In Schelling, the Existent (das Existierende) takes on a pregnant meaning that was to echo, via Kierkegaard, as far as Heidegger. V. Heidegger’s Dasein The development that began with Kant’s little work of 1763 reached its high point in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). From Kant to Heidegger, the movement seems to have been reversed: it is no longer Dasein that is conceived on the basis of existentia/Existenz, but existence, understood quite differently, that is conceived on the basis of Dasein. Except that the existential analytic, which in 1927 is a structure for the acceptance of Dasein, presents itself as an implicit theology (cf. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik Gesamtausgabe): the expression even of a Dasein Gottes (Kant, Hegel) has become impossible, the term Dasein being reserved, in Heidegger’s thinking, for menschliches Dasein, human Dasein. The breadth acquired by the term Dasein goes hand in hand with its restriction to the being of the human being, delimiting a finite realm. The history of Dasein thus finds, in Sein und Zeit, an unexpected new departure. In this work the term reaches its culmination and its limits: it designates the very being of the being that we are, essentially or inessentially, not in the sense of an identity, but in proportion to a being that we have “to be”—zu sein, with movement (cf. Hier zu haben), which corresponds etymologically to the English “to be,” Russian do [цо], Danish at (vaere)—in a transitive and even factitive sense (whence the hermeneutics of factivity that was the prelude to Sein und Zeit). In Heidegger, the da in Dasein almost means zu (toward). Dasein is never “localized,” but localizing; it must be thought of with movement, in the accusative. Does that mean that the term Dasein, in Heidegger’s terminology, has no parallel in Western thought? Heidegger himself seems to have provided a way to explore that question: the being of Dasein was assuredly not unknown in antiquity, Inwiefern das göttliche Daseyn unmittelbar sein lebendiges und kräftiges Daseyen ist—Daseyen sage ich, gleichsam einen Akt des Daseins bezeichnend (Insofar as the divine existent is immediately its living and powerful existentifying—by which I mean an act of the existent, as it were ) Thus Fichte clearly distinguished between Daseyn and Daseyen, defining the latter as “an act of Dasein,” a pure acting, an “actness.” We can also admire both Fichte’s sure sense of the German language in his neologizing concern to reawaken, in conformity with the spirit of his philosophy, the verbal and even thetic character of Dasein, and the strange escalation represented by the nominalization (or deverbalization) in the sequence dasein—Daseyn—Daseyen. The Fichtean Daseyen is not “found there” in the sense of the equivalence between Seyn and Vorhandenseyn present elsewhere in Fichte; it “sets itself there.” Nonetheless, Fichte is probably the first philosopher writing in German to have seen a philosophical stake in the word Dasein. If Dasein was in Kant a classical philosophical term, but definitely not German, and in Goethe a German term, but definitely not a philosophical one, it is only with Fichte that it becomes a term of “classical German philosophy” (on the problematization of these oppositions, cf. Bourgeois, La philosophie allemande classique). Hegel, for his part, understood in Dasein the da of Sein, a figure of immediacy (cf. his Wissenschaft der Logik, bk. 1, §1, chap. 2 A.1). Hegel conceives Dasein as the Sein that is never solely da, in a “certainty of perception” that asks only to be allowed to mobilize and defer itself until “absolute knowledge” arrives, at first mesmerized by the immediacy of the hic et nunc, then shaken and set in motion by the dialectic that it bore within itself, without knowing it, from the start: the being-there of Dasein is where it is only because it has not yet reached the stage where what can be known through it awaits it. Thus the translation of Dasein by “being there” is probably more suited to Hegel’s language than to Heidegger’s. Moreover, Hegel himself did not fail to emphasize, in Wissenschaft der Logik: “Dasein, etymologisch genommen, Sein an einem gewissen Orte” (Dasein, understood etymologically, [is] being in a specific place). In Hegel, unlike in Heidegger, Dasein is thus conceived on the basis of its evident etymology. For the very numerous occurrences of the word Dasein in the Phenomenology of Mind, see the impressive inventory drawn up by Jarczyk and Labarrière as an appendix to their translation. IV. Existenz/Dasein: Schelling However, it was Schelling who reawakened in modern philosophy the ecstatic dimension of existence that the Kantian equation of existentia with Dasein had made somewhat dormant, and as a result, radically dissociated Dasein and Existenz: “in attributing to God Existenz, Daseyn, you have to recognize a nature in him.” These lines, from the first version (1811) of Die Weltalter, deliberately adopt a vocabulary that is more Jacobi’s than Schelling’s own, to divorce terms that Kant had married, to radically dissociate Daseyn and Existenz by understanding Existenz (returning from Scholastic Latin to classical Latin and from classical Latin to classical Greek) in opposition to DASEIN 199 But Hand is no more audible than, for example, main in contemporary French (cf. E. Martineau’s foreword to the French translation of Heidegger’s Interprétation phénoménologique de la “Critique de la raison pure” de Kant and the translator’s notes; J.-F. Courtine’s foreword to the French translation of Heidegger’s Les problèmes fondamentaux de la phénoménologie). If Heidegger later abandoned the expression menschliches Dasein (human Dasein), that is because it seems redundant, or does not sufficiently avoid the risk of being anthropologized: “Dasein is not the human being ” (Beiträge zur Philosophie). The connection between Dasein and Existenz is established by §9 in Sein und Zeit: “Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz” (The “essence” of Dasein resides in its existence; italics in the German text). The quotation marks around the word Wesen indicate that this no longer refers to the essentia traditionally distinguished, in the metaphysical vocabulary, from existentia, but rather of a “realm” that Heidegger’s translators have sought to render in French by déploiement (F. Fédier), aître (G. Guest), or in English by “root-unfolding” (P. Emad and K. Maly). Existenz designates the mode of being peculiar to Dasein, in its irreducible specificity, the dimension within which it is imparted and to whose share it has fallen to deploy its being, as distinguished from existence/existentia understood metaphysically in opposition to essence, that is, as Vorhandenheit. Existenz, in its pregnant sense, characterizes Dasein’s mode of being, its Weise (Sein und Zeit, §9), which should be understood as “guise” or “melody” (GA, vol. 29/30: “eine Weise im Sinne einer Melodie”; GA, vol. 79: “eine eigene Weise, mehr im Sinne von einer Melodie”). The existent is no longer understood as being what is at hand (Vorhandenes), but as being in proportion to Dasein (daseinsmäßig), which the existential analytic envisages purely and simply in its relation to being, to the exclusion of any other kind of consideration (cf. Sein und Zeit, §10). That is what underscores the difference between the existentiel and the existential. The set of the ontological structures of human existence constitutes existentiality as the dimension on the basis of which existence must be understood. The phrase “Dasein existiert” (Sein und Zeit, §12; GA, vol. 2) is thus in itself an extraordinary concentrate of the difficulties we have just pointed out. The history of the concept of Dasein and its semantic curve show the gradual emergence of a major philosophical issue in the very development of the language. Thus it is hardly surprising that its ins and outs are echoed in a text Heidegger addressed to M. Boss (Zollikoner Seminare): Sofern aber diese [i.e., Existenz] durch das Da-sein ausgezeichnet bleibt, muss auch schon die Benennung “Da-sein” in einem Sinn verstanden werden, der sich von der geläufigen Bedeutung des Wortes “Da-sein” unterscheidet. Die unterschiedliche Schreibweise [i.e., Da-sein] soll dies andeuten. Die gewöhnliche Bedeutung von “Dasein” bedeutet soviel wie Anwesenheit, so zum Beispiel in der Rede von den Beweisen für das Dasein Gottes. (However, insofar as this [i.e., Existenz] remains marked out by Da-sein, the term Da-sein must be understood in if only as praxis [πϱᾶξις] (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik). Consider as well the problem of the connection between Dasein and psuchê [ψυχή] in Sein und Zeit, §4. In certain respects, the history of the translations of Dasein into French reflects that of the (anthropological and existentialist) misunderstandings committed in the course of the reception of Heidegger’s thought: from réalité humaine (Corbin, Sartre) to être-là (Ital., esserci), to the point that Heidegger’s translators now prefer to translate Dasein as Dasein. The untranslatable (unübersetzbar) nature of Dasein was, moreover, emphasized by Heidegger himself in his letter to Beaufret on November 23, 1945 (published as an appendix to the bilingual French and German edition of the Lettre sur l’humanisme): Da-sein bedeutet für mich nicht so sehr “me voilà!” sondern, wenn ich es in einem vielleicht unmöglichem Französisch sagen darf: être-le-là. (For me, Dasein means not so much “here I am!” as, if I may put it into what may be impossible French: être-le-là [“being the there”].) Similarly, in a 1941 lecture (Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus), he observes that: Das Wort “Da-sein” ist daher auch in der Bedeutung, nach der es in Sein und Zeit gedacht wird, unübersetzbar. Die gewöhnliche Bedeutung von Dasein = Wirklichkeit = Anwesenheit lässt sich nicht mit présence oder “Realität” übersetzen. (Vgl. z. B. die französische Übersetzung von “Dasein” in “Sein und Zeit” mit “réalité humaine”; sie verbaut alles in jeder Hinsicht.) (The term Da-sein is therefore untranslatable, even in the acceptation in which it is conceived in Sein und Zeit. The usual meaning of Dasein = Wirklichkeit = Anwesenheit cannot be translated by “presence” or “reality.” (Cf. for instance the French translation of Dasein in Sein und Zeit by “réalité humaine”; this blocks everything in every regard.) Hence Heidegger himself tells us that Dasein is untranslatable, reversing Kant’s assumption that existentia can be translated by Dasein. The vocabulary established in Sein und Zeit allows us, however, to situate Dasein, to know this being that we are, and that we have to be, as part of an existential, and no longer categorical, logic that requires the existential analytic to bring out these existentials that are irreducible to properties attributed to things. Vorhandensein, or “being at hand,” no longer characterizes anything but the mode of things’ presence, which “are found there,” in contrast to Dasein struggling with its “difficulty of being” and with the care that is its essence, its arkhê-structure (Urstruktur, in Gesamt-ausgabe [GA], vol. 20). In the francophone world, the debates about the translation of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit have probably been too marked, or even obsessed, by the presence of the word Hand in these two compounds—the comparison made by J. Taminiaux, in Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale, between the Vorhandenes in Sein und Zeit and the procheira [πϱόχειϱα] mentioned in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (A2 982b 13) is an example of this. 200 DECEPTION . Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Edited by K. Hammacher, I. M. Piske, and M. Lauschke. Hamburg: Meiner, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes. In Akademia Ausgabe des Kants Schriften, vol. 2. Berlin, 1902; reprint, 1968. Translation by G. Treash: The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. First published in 1763. . Nachlass. In vol. 21 of Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Akademia Ausgabe, 1936. Translation by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher: Notes and Fragments, edited by P. Guyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. De summa rerum: Metaphysical Papers, 1675–1676. Translated by G.H.R. Parkinson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. . General Investigations Concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truths. Translated by W. H. O’Briant. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968. Martineau, Emmanuel. “Avertissement à la traduction française de Heidegger.” In Interprétation phénoménologique de la “Critique de la raison pure” de Kant. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by B. Williams. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire. In vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1959. Translation by Peter France: Reveries of the Solitary Walker. New York: Penguin, 1980. Schelling, Friedrich von. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by W. E. Ehrhardt. Schellengiana, no. 11. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989. First published in 1830. . Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen. In Werke, edited by W. G. Jacobs, J. Jantzen, W. Schieche, et al. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976–. Translation by F. Marti: The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794–96. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980. First published in 1795. . Die Weltalter. Edited by M. Schröter. Munich: Beck, 1946. Translation by F.d.W. Bolman Jr.: The Ages of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. First published in 1811. Taminiaux, Jacques. Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995. Tilliette, Xavier. L’intuition intellectuelle de Kant à Hegel. Paris: Vrin, 1995. Vezin, François. “Le mot ‘Dasein,’” in an appendix to the French translation (Être et temps) of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Wolff, Christian. Deutsche Metaphysik. Halle, Ger., 1751. Reprint, Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1997. a sense distinct from the usual meaning of the word Dasein. That is what the different way of writing it [i.e., Dasein, with a hyphen] is supposed to indicate. The usual meaning of Dasein is roughly synonymous with existence, as for example when one speaks of proofs of the existence [i.e., Dasein] of God.) From the Dasein (Gottes) to the Da-sein Heidegger speaks of, from the existence of God designating simply his Daß (that he exists) to his existential (existential) dimension at the heart of which the being of the human being is electively deployed, structured by care / Lat. cura / Ger. Sorge, a movement, a gap has occurred, which a simple hyphen seeks to mark, typographically. Pascal David REFS.: Beaufret, Jean. De l’existentialisme à Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1986. . Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy. Translated by M. Sinclair. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Bourgeois, Bernard. La philosophie allemande classique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Courtine, Jean-François. Suárez et le système de la métaphysique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Descartes, René. Correspondance. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 4 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1976. . Philosophical Essays and Correspondence. Edited by R. Ariew. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre. Vol. 5 in Fichtes Werke. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Translation by William Smith: The Way towards the Blessed Life; or, The Doctrine of Religion. In The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Bristol, UK: Thoemes Press, 1999. First published in 1806. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. . Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes. Edited by G. Kasson. Hamburg: Meiner, 1966. Translation by E. B. Speirs and J. B. Saunderson: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Together with a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895. . Wissenschaft der Logik. Edited by Georg Lasson. Hamburg: Meiner, 1923. Translation by W. Wallace: Hegel’s Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989. First published in 1936–38. . Lettre sur l’humanisme. Translated to French by Roger Munier. Paris: Aubier, 1964. First published in 1946. . Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 49. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991. First published in 1941. . Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 26. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2007. First published in 1928. . Les problèmes fondamentaux de la phénoménologie. Translated to French by J.-F. Courtine. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. . Sein und Zeit. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. First published in 1927. . Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, herausgegeben von M. Boss. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987. Translation by Franz Mayr: The Zollikon Seminars, Protocols—Conversations—Letters. Edited by M. Boss. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Edited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1943–85. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill.” Edited by G. di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. . The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi. Translated by G. Vallée, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chapple. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. DECEPTION From the Latin decipere, which literally means “to take [capere] by causing to fall into a trap, to fool, to deceive,” “deception” implies illusion, seduction, and fraud. The term relates in philosophical contexts to the power of speech or discourse to create illusion (apatê [ἀπάτη] in Greek), and becomes a theme in the discussion of rhetoric and sophistry. See TRUTH, Box 3; see also RUSE [MÊTIS]; cf. FALSE, FICTION, LOGOS, LIE, SPEECH ACT. “Deception” relates equally to the notion of desengaño characteristic of the golden age of Spanish literature, where the term refers to disillusionment as both “being saved from error” and “disenchantment”; see DESENGAÑO; cf. BAROQUE, MALAISE, RÉCIT, SECULARIZATION, SPREZZATURA. v. NEGATION, VERGÜENZA DEMOS 201 “nationalism” require at least a third concept, for which there also exists a Greek name: laos. The system of oppositions is a more complex one. And so, accordingly, are the applications to contemporary dilemmas. Recent uses of the “Greek” pair of words ethnos versus demos seem to have been initiated by the Austrian-born sociologist Emerich K. Francis in 1965. In his presentation, the opposition has a primarily anthropological meaning, contrasting “prenational societies,” whose collective identity and integration are secured by the domination of “genealogy” (in the strict sense of kinship, or in a broader sense of inherited traditions and memberships), with “nations” (or “national societies”), where the dominant principle of integration (what he calls the “demotic bond”) is territorial and legal, relating each individual citizen to the state and the public administration. The model for the national society is provided by European states, and the opposition clearly matches other evolutionary patterns invented by the sociological tradition: “status” and “contract,” Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and so forth, albeit with a special insistence on the “deconstruction of kinship” carried on in the process of nation building. Apart from applications in the anthropological field, the main fortunes of the antithesis followed from its subsequent use within debates bearing on what type of collective identity could be provided by European integration. They followed from a seminal 1986 essay by Rainer M. Lepsius, in which he also discussed the latent conflict of two traditions in the history of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa): one of “ethnic nationalism” and one of “civic nationalism.” The question was now to decide whether this “unnamable political object”—the new European Union—should involve a return to the idea of a shared inherited identity, or a progress toward a purely “constitutional” construction. After being adopted in that sense by Jürgen Habermas in his discussion of Verfassungspatriotismus (patriotism of the constitution) and the “postnational constellation,” it became standard in political and philosophical debates. It is indeed interesting to observe the variety of “cases” to which the ethnos versus demos antithesis, whether explicitly referred to a “Greek” dilemma or not, has now been applied, retrospectively or prospectively. The following are but a few examples, but they bring interesting connotations: 1. When the demonstrations against the regime of the German Democratic Republic began in 1989, in the form of popular marches around the main citysquare in Leipzig, the motto was Wir sind das Volk! (meaning “we are the citizens,” in whose name this regime falsely claims to govern); but toward the end, when the Federal Republic of (Western) Germany had announced that it would integrate the Eastern Länder immediately, the motto became Wir sind ein Volk! (meaning “we are a single historical people,” or nation, ranging from East to West, and divided artificially by history). One could easily argue that the demonstrators had passed from demos to ethnos, even if the Federal Republic could be perceived—in spite of the name—as more “democratic” than its socialist counterpart. DEFORMATION 1. “Deformation,” as well as “distortion” and “displacement,” are standard translations of the German Entstellung, which Freud uses to designate one of the mechanisms of repression. See DRIVE, ENTSTELLUNG, VERNEINUNG, WUNSCH; cf. ES, SUBLIME, Box 3, UNCONSCIOUS. 2. On the distortion of reality implicated in the act of putting into speech, see HISTORY, LOGOS, MIMÊSIS; cf. FICTION, RÉCIT. 3. On the form of the word itself, see COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION; cf. NEGATION. v. CONSCIOUSNESS, FORM DEMON In modern English, demon (Lat. daemon, Gr. daimôn [δαίμων]) is, by way of Church Latin, very close to devil; see DEVIL (diabolos [διάϐоλоϛ] in the Greek Bible, Semitic and Arabic .([שָׂ טָן] ān.Sāt In Greek, a daimôn may be either good or bad; see DAIMÔN, and its semantic descendants in German (e.g., Hölderlin’s “demonic”); see also the Spanish DUENDE, which contains the same ambiguity. Through daiomai [δαίоμαι], “to share,” daimôn is related to destiny; see DESTINY [KÊR]. The semantic field also implicates singular aesthetic creation; see notably DICHTUNG, GENIUS, INGENIUM, LEGGIADRIA, MADNESS; as well as satisfaction, moral or otherwise: HAPPINESS, GLÜCK, MORALS, PLEASURE, WISDOM; cf. ACEDIA. On the relationship between religion and revelation, see DEVIL and GOD. See also BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, PIETAS, RELIGIO. v. AIÔN, EUROPE, PEOPLE DEMOS [δεμός] / ETHNOS [ἔθνος] / LAOS [λαός] (GREEK) v. GOVERNMENT, STATE, and LAW, POLIS, POLITICS, RULE OF LAW, STATE/ GOVERNMENT, STATO Many debates among historians, sociologists, political theorists, and philosophers in the twentieth century were framed in terms of an opposition between “two concepts of the nation”: one (closest to the etymology of Lat. natio, from nascere, natum, which also generates natura) associates it with a traditional bond transferred from one generation to another (whence the idea of a common “substance” of the community, be it cultural or racial); the other (often supposed to have triumphed with the great “bourgeois” revolutions of the late eighteenth century: North American, French, Haitian, Venezuelan), would embody the ideals of the Enlightenment and follow the model of a contractual community of “citizens.” This ideal dichotomy is often combined with genealogies of nationalism and imperialism as typical “modern” phenomena, whose roots may lie in a bifurcation in the understanding of the notion of a “people.” This is nowadays increasingly defined as the opposition of the people qua demos, and the people qua ethnos, following ancient Greek models. One can argue, however, that this is a truncated genealogy, leading to a mystifying alternative. Debates about “nations” and 202 DEMOS theorists (in particular comparing the discriminations in Israel with those of apartheid South Africa—whether rightly or wrongly) have supported the idea that the modern demos is haunted by the figure of the ethnos, particularly in regimes that grant a legal privilege, or a “leading role,” to one of the “nationalities” forming the nation itself. The ethnos versus demos opposition thus proves capable of generating a complete system of theoretical distinctions. The reference to a “Greek” model becomes, then, all the more surprising. As it was presented, for example, in Aristotle, a Greek conception of the political distinguishes two great types of “communities” (koinôniai) in which human beings can live: some are based on the tribal structures and obey chieftains or kings, and they are called ethnè; others, considered more civilized (therefore more perfectly “human”), distinguish the private and the public sphere, they are called poleis (which we translate with the Latin name for “city,” civitas). Demos is not directly opposed to ethnos: rather, it names the multitude of the citizens, independent of their social status or rank. And insofar as in “cities” all citizens enjoy certain basic rights (such as deliberation in the public assembly), their regime contains, according to Aristotle, a “democratic element.” But there were several other terms in ancient Greek to designate the “popular” element (see PEOPLE). The most important for our purpose is laos: central in the Homeric terminology, where it designated the community of the warriors, whose collective power would normally become subjected to the authority of “princes” (anax), but could also challenge it (as in famous episodes of the Iliad), it had become an archaic notion in classical Greece. Its importance for modern debates about the political function of the nation comes from its having been selected by the translators of the Septuagint who, working in Alexandria between the third and the first century BCE, translated the Torah (followed by other parts of the Bible) into koinè Greek, to render Hebrew ‘am, the proper name of the “Elect People of God” (or the Hebrew nation). More precisely they used ethnè to call the “other nations” (more simply “the nations” [goy’im]) and laos for the Elect People. In Latin (Vulgata or “vulgate”) it became the opposition of populus (electus) and nationes or gentes (“the Gentiles”). This is a completely different opposition than ethnos versus demos; but it is from there that many of the emphatic notions of nationhood and its political mission derive in modern times, because it becomes the bearer of the “universalistic” and “messianic” dimension of the nation. Already in the eschatological perspective of the Old Testament, the universalistic perspective is present because the Hebrew people, which distinguishes itself from all others by the fact that “its God” is unique and is the (only) true God, is also the one that has been “chosen” by God to reveal the truth to humankind and achieve the redemption of the others through its own redemption. In the prophetic books (especially Isaiah, where the messianic perspective becomes explicit), this redemptory function is attributed only to the “remnant” (She’erit) who remained obedient to the Law or faithful to God in the Exile, therefore forming a group similar to a “people in the people” (or a “people of the people”). This function in Christian theology is displaced by the church (or 2. Sometime later (2000), the same (reunited) FRG modified its legal framework for the “normal” access to citizenship (apart from naturalization), both to ease the relationships with its increasing Turkish minority, and to come closer to the French and U.S. model of ius soli (as opposed to ius sanguinis), or to promote territorial law as opposed to genealogy—the former being perceived to incarnate a less “exclusivist” conception of the nation. This time it was moving from ethnos to demos. 3. Another interesting example is provided by the debate about the definition of the State of Israel (which originates in the Zionist project called by its founder Theodor Herzl der Judenstaat, “the State of the Jews”): it refers to itself officially as “a Jewish democratic state,” but the dominant political parties in Israel understand it as “a Jewish state that is also democratic” (therefore essentially deriving its collective identity from the real or mythical Hebrew origins of the majority, relegating the Arab minority to a condition of “internal outsiders”); whereas others understand it as “a democratic state” in which all citizens ought to be fully equal, even if it was founded by Jews fleeing persecutions and genocide in Europe at the expense of an autochthonous population. The situation is rendered even more complicated by the fact that both the Jewish majority in Israel and the dispersed Palestinian communities refer to a “right of return” based on a combination of descent and affiliation to the territory. In this case, ethnos and demos seem to be undermining each other. These examples, however partial and quick, show the semantic weight carried by the ethnos versus demos antithesis. They make it all the more important to explain why the discursive and historical pattern is, in fact, more complicated. This begins with two philological remarks. The full meaning and intentions of the opposition can hardly become isolated from a web of juridical, sociological, anthropological, and political contexts. One of them is particularly important because—in Foucauldian terms—it illustrates the relationship with the “biopolitics” of the modern (bourgeois) state. Ethnos could not be brought into this opposition independent of the fact that a “discipline” describing the customs and social structures of non-European peoples (colonial or virtually colonized) was called “ethnography” (created by German scholars in 1807). And demos could not be used independent of the fact that European modern states claimed to be essentially “democratic,” at least in this sense that their legitimacy derived from a collective right of “self-determination” and the “popular will.” The latent pattern is that of an “ethnographic object” observed by “democratic subjects.” But the European states also developed a discipline called “demography,” which includes questions of the type raised by ethnographers (social effects of marriage, for instance), albeit applied to nation-states and not to prenational “tribes” or “cultures” (the name was coined in 1855 in French to name statistics of populations, replacing the old “political arithmetic”). It is interesting to ask if the semantic quadrangle can be completed with a term “ethnocracy”: this is actually the case since political DEMOS 203 as “universal class” that an eschatological notion of the “people of the people” became reinvented—at the same time revolutionary and cosmopolitan (“internationalist,” or gathering its people among the excluded multitude from all countries). Whereas the French notion of laïcité (deriving from laikos, the opposite of klèrikos: as if the Christian people had liberated itself from its own hierarchy) until today retains the democratic and assimilationist connotations of the grande nation (see SECULARIZATION). Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem are thus more than ever providing symbols for the invention of political modernity. Centuries have passed, but who can say that this is over? Étienne Balibar REFS.: Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. . “What Is a People?” In Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Aristotle. Politics. Bks. 1 and 3. Edited by H.W.C. Davis. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008. Balibar, Étienne. “Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation.” In Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, translated by James Swenson, 61–84. New York: Routledge, 1994. . “Le moment messianique de Marx.” In Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, 243–64. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. Bastian, Adolf. Die Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie. Berlin: Dümmler, 1881. Boyer, Frédéric, trans. “Glossaire.” In La Bible. Introduction by F. Boyer. Paris: Bayard, 2001: “AM/GÔY,” 3103–4; “ETHNOS/LAOS,” 3152–54. Campbell, Richard Charles. “The Church as the New Israel.” Wheaton College, 1954. Cherry, Conrad, ed. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Cody, Aelred. “When Is the Chosen People Called a Gôy?” Vetus Testamentum 14, no. 1 (January 1964): 1–6. Francis, Emerich K. Ethnos und Demos: Soziologische Beiträge zur Volkstheorie. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1965. Translation: Interethnic Relations. An Essay in Sociological Theory. New York: Elsevier, 1976. Godechot, Jacques. La Grande Nation: L’Expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799. 2nd rev. ed. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1983. Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Translated by Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity Press 2001. Haubold, Johannes. Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jewish Encyclopaedia. “Chosen People.” http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ articles/4355-chosen-people. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1957. Le Bras, Hervé. “Démographie et démocratie.” Revue européenne des sciences sociales no. 31 (1993): 59–77. Lepsius, Rainer M. “Ethnos oder Demos: Zur Anwendung zweier Kategorien von Emerich Francis auf das nationale Selbstverständnis der Bundesrepublik und auf die Europäische Vereiningung.” In Interessen, Idee und Institutionen: Aufsätze zur Makrosoziologie. Opladen, Ger.: Westdeutscher Verlag 1990. Essay first published in 1986. Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Schmid, Bernard.: “L’Allemagne instille du droit du sol.” Plein Droit [special issue “Quelle Europe pour les étrangers?”] no. 49 (April 2001). Sériot, Patrick. “Ethnos et Demos: La construction discursive de l’identité collective.” In Langages et Société, 39–52. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1997. the community of the faithful who acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah and await his return) as the “New Israel,” and therefore the (mystical) equivalent of the “Chosen People.” It is this theological notion (also used to name the Christian or Roman Empire) that modern nationalism would “secularize.” Let us note here an important twist: if according to the general perspective, laos is the totality of the Christian people forming the church (ekklèsia, taken from the name of the “assembly of the citizens” in the Greek political terminology), it is also more precisely the “simple faithful” as opposed to the klèros (or the priests, who are the theological equivalent of magistrates). Therefore it retains at the same time a sense of mission or destination, and a “popular” determination—a very powerful way of merging the categories of universality and community. On this basis it becomes easier to understand how the (secularized) political theology of the modern states as “universal” political communities—both in the intensive sense (realizing equality and liberty, or rather, a universalization of rights, among their citizens) and the extensive sense (spreading civilization, or democracy, or republicanism, in the world, and easily associated with an “imperial” destiny)—permanently evokes the legacy of the laos rather than either ethnos or demos. Two “lines of descent” are particularly significant. One belongs to the English-American tradition. As extensively documented by J.G.A. Pocock (critically discussing Michael Walzer’s Revolution of the Saints), English Republicanism, especially in its “Puritan” form, during the Civil War developed a specific combination of apocalyptic and civic consciousness, which made it possible to represent “God’s Englishmen” as an “Elect Nation” constituting its Commonwealth against the tyranny of idolatrous monarchs. Pocock would also argue that an “apocalyptic Whiggism” formed part of the political heritage that Puritans carried over to the American colonies. And perhaps it is not wrong to accept that this combination was still there when, during the American Revolution and with decidedly more imperialist resonance than the Puritans’ uprising in England, the United States went on to conceive of itself as the subject of a “manifest destiny,” first in the Americas, then with respect to the world. Another line belongs to the French-German dialogue over the relationship between “nation,” “cosmopolitanism,” and “emancipation” in the nineteenth century (with twentieth-century sequels). It begins with the proclamation of the “sovereignty of the nation” (as opposed to the king) in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (a “secular” document undoubtedly, but also located at the core of a new “civil religion,” and often printed in images imitating the traditional representation of Moses’s Tablets of the Ten Commandments. When Republican France turned imperial and presented itself as La Grande Nation (not very different from the idea of a “manifest destiny” in American terms), it led German “Jacobins” like the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte to write about the special mission of Die Deutsche Nation, whose inflexible resistance to foreign invasion, based on absolute moral values, would restore the possibility of perpetual peace on the European Continent. But it is especially in the antithetic figure of the Marxian proletariat 204 DÉNÉGATION such lines as compose the features of a face”), but more in the sense of a drawing or delineation, whereas “depiction” contains the root “pict”—that is, paint, color, pigment. Svetlana Alpers continues to use “description” with visual connotation, opposing the description characteristic of Dutch painting and a new visual culture with the narration characteristic of Italian painting and traditional text-based culture. Most often, however, “description” designates a verbal mode of visualization or metaphorical representation that compares poorly with the visual arts. Addison emphasizes its ambiguous or secondary status as “resembling even less” than painting (which itself resembles its objects less than sculpture), though “description” is still closer to what it represents than music. Sometimes functioning as simple stylistic variations of “describe” and “description,” “depict” and “depiction” may denote both representations that are literally visual as well as metaphorical visualization by writing that “makes one see” (also called “picturing” or, in the manner of Ruskin, “word-painting”). Edgar Allan Poe uses “depict” to denote the art of the portraitist (“for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well,” in “The Oval Portrait”), but also for the art of the narrator or psychological portraitist (“This depicting of character constituted my design,” in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”). We find comparable uses in recent criticism. In Williams, “depiction” refers mainly to visual representation by daguerrotype (“depiction of face in portraiture,” passim), but also occasionally to painting by means of literary text (“depiction of portrait in sentimental fiction,” “depiction of spectatorship in The House of the Seven Gables”). Flaxman clarifies “description” as “visually oriented description,” while, by contrast, Krieger defines “ekphrasis” as a verbal description without thereby implying that there are nonverbal ones. He defines description as being essentially verbal in a quasi-tautological manner, and in fact uses “verbal depictions” as a variant with exactly the same meaning. Becker, on the other hand, in his detailed commentary on the shield of Achilles, falls back on a clear and explicit distinction between “description” and “depiction.” “Visual depiction” denotes what Achilles’s (fictional) shield is supposed to represent, while “verbal description” refers to the way in which the poet describes that representation: “In a description of a depiction of the sun (484), the same phrase is used as in a description of the actual sun (239).” According to Becker, Homeric ekphrasis is often a simultaneous description of the shield and what is depicted on the shield, and this Homeric mode of ekphrasis is distinguished from later modes precisely because it continues to direct our attention to the material nature of the fictional object, to the images in metal as well as the story they relate, rather than simply using the fictional imagistic representation as a pretext to introduce the narrative. . II. Modes of Denotation or of Perception? That this distinction has acquired the status of a conceptual opposition operative in philosophical discourse is essentially due to the work of Nelson Goodman. Goodman distinguishes between “verbal description” (where the adjective denotes, as Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Walzer, Michael. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. DÉNÉGATION Borrowed from the Latin denegatio (denial), the word was taken up in psychoanalysis to translate Freud’s term Verneinung: see VERNEINUNG. The German, word, however, refers both to negation in the logical sense (as opposed to affirmation, Bejahung; or assertion, Behauptung: see FALSE, NEGATION, NOTHING, PROPOSITION) and to the process Freud describes as a refusal, defensive or not, to admit that one has said something. Negation is thus a form of repression: see DRIVE, ENSTELLUNG, ES, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf. CONSCIOUSNESS, EGO, SUBJECT. The difficulty of translating Verneinung, notably into French and English, is thus related to the loss of the term’s logical and psychological ambivalence. v. BELIEF, CROYANCE, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH DESCRIPTION / DEPICTION FRENCH description, représentation GREEK ekphrasis [ἔϰφϱασις] LATIN descriptio, depiction v. RÉCIT, and CONCETTO, DICHTUNG, DISEGNO, ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, HISTORY, IMAGE, MIMÊSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SIGN, SPEECH ACT, STRUCTURE English and French distinguish description and narration in the same way. In English, however, description may also be opposed to depiction, the latter taking on a visual connotation that contrasts with the verbal resonance of “description.” This second distinction does not have a French equivalent. While French can distinguish the act of depicting (dépeindre) from that of describing (décrire) or narrating (narrer), of these three verbs dépeindre is the only one without a noun form in ordinary usage. Where English has “depiction,” French must use représentation. Hence the difficulty in translating into French the distinction between depiction and representation, which, like that between depiction and description, plays a very important role in theories of aesthetics in the analytic tradition. This has led to the recent introduction of the term “depiction” into French philosophical language. I. Different Ways of Making Someone See The Latin descriptio denotes either a drawing or a written or oral description. More rarely, a descriptio is a visual sketch, but also a verbal description or a representation in the imagination. There is an image in both cases, but the visualization is not necessarily literal: in both cases, the de- prefix indicates that one “de-scribes” or “de-picts” from a model or the original. Until the seventeenth century, the English word “description” could mean a pictorial representation—a portrait. The word is still used by Hogarth (“a description of DESCRIPTION 205 1 “Ekphrasis”: From word to word “Ekphrasis” (from phrazô [φϱάζω], “to declare,” and ek [ἐϰ], “completely”) is a putting into words that exhausts its object; the term denotes minute and complete descriptions of works of art. The first, and no doubt the most famous, known ekphrasis is the one Homer gives at the end of book 18 of the Iliad, the subject of which is the shield of Achilles, forged by Hephaistos. It was made at the request of Achilles’s mother, Thetis, not to allow her son to evade death, but so that “all should marvel”(466ff.) when he did meet his destiny. The work is cosmo-political, representing not only Earth, Sky, and Sea, bordered by the river Ocean, but also two cities in living detail, one at peace and one at war. The blind poet gives the first synthesis of the world of mortals, thus proving for the first time that poetry is more philosophical than history. Not only is this first ekphrasis a description of a fictional object, but its historical successor is a second ekphrasis whose model is the first ekphrasis, as though the author were doing a remake. Here the subject is the shield of Hercules, and is attributed to Hesiod. This palimpsest therefore does not follow a phenomenon—a real shield—nor does it follow nature itself or human cities, but only a logos. Swathed in culture, the object loses both its natural reference and what is called, following Aristotle, the life of the narrative. As Paul Mazon notes, making the value judgments we expect: “Through it all there is not a gesture which is truly ‘seen,’ which gives the impression of life. Nor is there a word on the lips of the characters which emits a clear and frank tone: everyone speaks a language of pure convention.” Ekphrasis is thus at the furthest remove from metaphor, the craft of which consists in placing things pro ommatôn [πϱὸ ὀμμάτων], “before the eyes,” following the doctrine of ut pictura poesis—in order to produce a new and original understanding. “When the poet calls old age ‘a withered stalk,’ he conveys a new idea, a new fact, to us by means of the general notion of ‘lost bloom’ which is common to both things” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.10.1410b 14–16; cf. Poetics, 21, 22). Ekphrasis is no longer here imitating painting insofar as it attempts to place the object before our eyes—to present the object as a painting would—but to imitate painting insofar as it is a mimetic art—to paint painting itself. Imitating imitation in order to produce an understanding, not of the object, but of the fiction of an object—of objectification: ekphrasis is literature. Ekphraseis proliferated in the second Sophistic period, including Philostratus’s Images and Callistratus’s Descriptions, to the point of constituting a genre in its own right. With the xenia, critiques of still lives that a host would give as presents to his guests, and which depicted the dishes they may have eaten at his house, the object itself is now at three removes, and has become a mere pretext for a literary representation of a pictorial representation. The original is no longer available to perception and can no longer be the object of an adequate description; it is at most presupposed or produced following an act of fiction (see SPEECH ACT, Box 1). The fate of ekphrasis is linked to that of the novel. Not only do novels abound with ekphrases, but more decisively, novels are often structured by an ekphrasis. In the opening lines of The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, for example, the narrator, having just escaped from a storm, looks at the votive offerings and stops at a hanging painting that contains the template of the story of the novel itself—in the course of which we witness the offering of the painting by the protagonist. The paradigm case of ekphrasis, however, comes from Longus’s pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloë. The entire novel is the ekphrasis of an ekphrasis since the story is modeled on a painting, which is itself, we learn, composed not of lines and colors but words: When I was hunting in Lesbos, I saw, in a wood sacred to the Nymphs, the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen—a painting that told a love-story. The wood itself was beautiful enough, full of trees and flowers, and watered by a single spring which nourished both the flowers and the trees; but the picture was even more delightful, combining excellent technique with a romantic subject. It had become so famous that crowds of people used to go there even from abroad, partly to pray to the Nymphs, but mainly to see the picture. In it there were women having babies and other women wrapping them in swaddling clothes, babies being exposed, sheep and goats suckling them, shepherds picking them up, young people plighting their troth, pirates making a raid, enemies starting an invasion. After gazing admiringly at many other scenes, all of a romantic nature, I was seized by a longing to write a verbal equivalent to the painting. So I found someone to explain the picture to me, and composed a work in four volumes as an offering to Love and the Nymphs and Pan, and as a source of pleasure for the human race—something to heal the sick and comfort the afflicted, to refresh the memory of those who have been in love and educate those who have not. In this story, nature is less beautiful than painting (“painting held more charm”). The painting that the ekphrasis describes is already a story: “a painted image, a love story.” This painted story, finally, requires a “response.” The Greek expression, “antigrapsai tei graphei,” is more precise: it is a matter of writing “against” the original and “starting over”—to replicate it and compete with it, playing the roles of both attorney for the defense and recording clerk. This “rewriting” or “response” is the interpretation of the painting over the course of four books. The ut poesis pictura of the graphê, that is, the painting, is followed by the ut pictura poesis of the antigraphê [ἀντιγϱαφή], the pastoral itself. There is thus only an ut poesis poesis that moves from word to word. With ekphrasis, we are at the furthest remove from both nature and the first natural science of philosophy, whose goal is to tell things as they are—and insofar as they are, and by what cause. We are also at the furthest remove from an immediate and ontologically innocent phenomenological description. We find ourselves in the world of art and artifice, ruled by and following the performative, effective power of speech that has been freed from truth and falsehood, as it sets out not to say what it sees, but to make seen what it says. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vols. 1–2. Edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Blanchard, Marc Élie. “Problèmes du texte et du tableau: les limites de l’imitation à l’époque hellénistique.” In Le plaisir de parler, edited by B. Cassin, 131–54. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986. Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiades, 1995. Imbert, Claude. Phénoménologie et langues formulaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France , 1993. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Longus. Daphnis and Chlöe. Translated by Paul Turner. London: Penguin, 1969. Mazon, Paul. Hésiode. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. 206 DESENGAÑO for Krieger, a constant feature of description), and “pictorial representation,” or “depiction” (in Reconceptions in Philosophy, Goodman professes a definite preference for “depiction” over “representation,” which he uses from then on in “a wider, more flexible sense”). Goodman sees in “description” and “depiction” two modes of denotation—two ways of referring to or representing something—but he vigorously opposes the idea that depiction has anything to do with resemblance. According to him, descriptions or predicates (nouns, descriptive phrases . . .) are composed of linguistic symbols that belong to digital systems (formed of discrete units), whereas pictures, in the case of depiction, belong to dense or analog systems. Goodman uses “description” in a wide sense that seems to cover practically any linguistic formulation. Alongside the description/depiction distinction, we find in Goodman distinctions between names and descriptions, on one hand, and pictures on the other, and again between paragraphs and pictures, or predicates and pictures. The distinction between depiction and representation, developed in particular by Peacocke, introduces a supplementary distinction, internal to the act of perception, between a first level that derives from a pure perception and a second level that requires the mastery of a symbolic system. This distinction, which is reminiscent of Panofsky’s distinction between the pre-iconographic and iconographic stages, plays an important role in the analysis of the perception of artworks. When I look at a painting, I can identify an object (a child, an old man, or a lamb) without knowing what it represents (love, time, or Christ). This first identification would correspond to the perceptual experience of the depiction. But the existence of a precognitive and pre-predicative level of perception, which would define what some call a stage of pure perception, is a thesis that is far from generally accepted today. Jean-Loup Bourget REFS.: Addison, Joseph. The Spectator [no. 416, 27 June 1712]. Edited by D. F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Becker, Andrew Sprague. The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. Flaxman, Rhoda L. Victorian Word-painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. Edited by R. Paulson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. First published in 1753. Irwin, Michael. Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth Century Novel. London: Allen and Unwin, 1979. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Peacocke, Christopher. “Depiction.” Philosophical Review 96, no. 3 (1987): 383–410. Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Works. Edited by T. O. Mabbott. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. Williams, Susan S. Photograph and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. DESENGAÑO (SPANISH) CATALAN desengany ENGLISH disillusionment, disenchantment, disappointment FRENCH désillusion GERMAN Enttäuschung ITALIAN disinganno PORTUGUESE desengano v. DECEPTION, and BAROQUE, FALSE, LIE, MALAISE, PLEASURE, SPREZZATURA, TRUTH, VERGÜENZA The noun desengaño comes from the verb desengañar (composed of the negative prefix des and the verb engañar), which comes, according to RT: Corominas and Pascual, Diccionario critico etimológico castellano e hispánico, from the medieval Latin ingannare (mock, scoff at, deride), which itself comes from the classical onomatopoeia gannire (yap, bark); similarly for the Catalan desengany, the Italian disinganno, and the Portuguese desengano. “Disillusion” in English and Enttäuschung in German represent the two senses between which the different significations of desengaño oscillate: on one hand, knowledge, overcoming blindness, being disabused, all of which correspond to the fact that one has escaped error and illusion; on the other, disappointment at the fact that a hope has not been realized. The word desengaño achieved its full splendor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning in 1492, when the Jews were forced to choose between leaving Spain and converting to Catholicism, the theme of desengaño in picaresque and mystical writing was a way for “new Christians” (children of converted Jews) to imagine pathways and openings in a hostile society that had closed all its doors to them. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in this spirit. A bit later, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Society of Jesus had consolidated its victory and Spain had become a bastion of the Counter-Reformation, Baltasar Gracián responded to the continuing experience of desengaño by dramatizing it and by praising appearance as the only reality. Today desengaño retains traces of its former richness and still has a variety of meanings. I. The Principal Meanings: Knowledge by Which We Are Disabused, Deception, Deceit 1. The first of the senses of desengaño that are currently in use is that of the grasping of a truth that lifts someone out of a state of being deceived or mistaken. In his RT: Tesoro de las dos lenguas española y francesa, César Oudin, the first translator of Don Quixote into French, translates desengañar as “détromper, désabuser quelqu’un, lui ouvrir les yeux.” According to Covarrubias (RT: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española), desengañar also means “to express oneself with full clarity such that one does not conceive something by taking it for something else” (hablar claro, porque no conciban una cosa por otra). The example he chooses confirms the idea that it is the truth itself that disabuses us (“La misma verdad nos desengaña”). Desengaño then takes on a two-part character: first, the revelation of a new truth—a veritable illumination; second, thanks to this acquired knowledge, a slower movement that consists in an “escape” from error (“conocimiento de la verdad con que se sale del engaño [deception] en DESENGAÑO 207 now indicates the horrible object that gives rise to the feeling: “Vida de San Borja: Vióse en su mismo original la cara del desengaño, tan terrible, que bastaba a introducir susto hasta en los mármoles del templo” (The Life of Saint Borgia: He saw in his own model the face of desengaño, so terrible that it alone sufficed to create fear even in the marbles of the temple). In a more satirical vein, but a no less serious one, Francisco Quevedo goes to the point of transforming this desengaño into a refusal of all illusion and all seduction; it becomes the truth— that of books, as opposed to the lies of living beings— truth that traversed the inanity of appearances as well as the vanity of pleasure and existence: Pareciéndome que los muertos pocas veces se burlan, y que gente sin pretensión y desengañada más atienden a enseñar que a entretener. (As it seemed to me that the dead rarely laugh and that, being unpretentious and disillusioned people, they would rather teach than amuse.) Visita de los chistes (cited in RT: Diccionario de construcción y regimen de la lengua castellana) II. Picaresque Contempt for the Law and Mystic Wisdom José Luis Alonso Hernández (RT: Léxico del marginalismo del siglo de oro) notes that the adjective desengañado takes on the sense of “crook, cheat, swindler” when it is turned into a substantive. Desengañado: a picaresque character, crook, or thief, in the sense that he is familiar with all possible forms of deception (engaño)—“he will return to drinking and invite others as disabused as he is” (tornó a beber y a convidar a otros tan desengañados como él; M. de Obregón). . Unlike in the religious sense, according to which desengaño is related to sin and failure, and hence to a sort of surfeit of law, the familiarity with evil in the picaresque novel is identified with contempt for the law bordering on insouciance, either real or fake (it does not matter which); sometimes it even approaches an uncommon degree of anger, as for Mateo Alemán (Life of Guzman). His revolt derives, of course, from being used to hunger and poverty, but especially from a keen sensitivity to the respectable arrogance of the affluent—that is, the “old Christians.” However, in the golden age as well as today, the adjective desengañado also indicates the opposite of pícaro and appears as a synonym for “wise.” It is applied to a man who, retired from the bustle and commerce of the world, lives privately and far away, desiring nothing other than to live in peace away from the tribunals of a society that has no room for nonconformists: Dichoso el que jamás ni ley ni fuero, Ni el alto tribunal de las ciudades; Ni conoció del mundo el trato fiero. (Happy he who has never known laws or statutes, Nor the high court of the cities, Nor the harsh treatment of the world.) (Luis de León, En una esperança que salió vaga) que se establa”), as in the Latin phrase ab errore deductus (RT: Diccionario de autoridades). Desengaño is thus a form of knowledge with practical effects: it deals not with an abstract truth, but with lived truth, one that provokes a change. 2. This change constitutes the second meaning of the word, which is defined by the RT: Diccionario de la lengua española as an “effect of this [new] knowledge on one’s state of mind” (efecto de ese conocimento en el ánimo). The Diccionario suggests a distinction between a neutral meaning and one that is clearly negative and restricted to the plural of desengaño, corresponding to “lessons learned at the cost of bitter experiences.” Manuel Seco et al. (RT: Diccionario del español actual) provide a synthesis of these two strains by characterizing desengaño as a negative impression felt by someone who discovers that a person or thing does not meet their expectations. He offers several examples taken from contemporary literature, notably from the work of Diaz Plaja, El español: “[S]exual intercourse includes a punishment, that of the violent death of Calisto and Melibea, or simply the desengaño that follows climax [el desengaño que sigue al goce]”; from Calvo Sotelo, Resentido: “Lo normal es que quienes sufren ese desengaño terrible se hagan resentidos” (It is normal for those who suffer this terrible desengaño to become full of resentment); from Miguel Delibes, Emigrante: “La chavala se ha llevado un desengaño de órdago, por más que ella diga misa” (The girl suffered a terrible desengaño, even if she claims otherwise)—literally, “even if she recites the Mass”; in informal Spanish “to recite the Mass” means to say things that no one believes, however solemn they appear. These quotations recall the context in which the different senses of desengaño developed from the classical to the contemporary period. When the word is close to disappointment or disillusionment, it deals primarily with disappointment in love, which may entail punishment, especially if there was pleasure (goce) involved. The informal common usage cited in the last passage shows how much desengaño remains secretly linked with a religious notion of lacking or loss, even today. 3. The third sense of desengaño indicates the word or judgment by which one blames someone for something. This meaning is primarily expressed by the familiar and figurative form taken by the adverb and adjective: desengañadamente (malamente, con desaliño y poco acierto [in a negligent and improper way]) and desengañado (despreciable y malo [despicable and bad]). The effect of disappointment is here attributed to the unsteady or poor character of the person who has disappointed; he did what he did without believing in it, that is, poorly: “Cuando se pondera que alguno ha ejeccutado mal alguna cosa, se dice bien desengañadamente lo ha hecho.” In this sense, desengañado translates the Latin perversus, “bad” (RT: Diccionario de autoridades). The adjective can sometimes pass on to the noun this sense of malignance. The RT: Diccionario de autoridades thus attributes to the object of deception a face that has become, in the context of sin, terrible and frightening. Desengaño 208 DESENGAÑO world, which pícaros scorn as useless anyway. Sometimes the distance between desire and reality becomes so great, as in Guzmán de Alfarache, that it is transformed into an immense revolt. For this antihero, desengaño becomes both submission and permanent transgression, which comes up empty, although it has a healthy outlet in writing. In mystical literature, on the other hand, desengaño comes with a flight into the backcountry of subjectivity and inner life in order to recreate another world through prayer and writing, a world that is invisible but truer, that of the El castillo interior, secret and indestructible, a castle of the soul “all of diamond and clear crystal,” as Teresa of Avila put it. She is, indeed, a great desengañada, but one whose desire never steered her wrong: “Dejánla [el alma] no solamente desengañada de lo que la falsa imaginación le ofrecía, sino tan ansiosa del bien, que vuela luego a él con deseo que hierve” (It [the soul] remains not only desengañada with what the false imagination offered it, but so avid for the good that it flies toward it boiling with desire; L. de León, dedication of Obras Sta. Teresa, quoted in RT: Diccionario de construcción y regimen de la lengua castellana). III. Desengaño and Desire to Live in Don Quixote Américo Castro was one of the first to point out the link between the eroticism of mystical texts and that of Renaissance pastoral literature, which is so present in Cervantes’s novel. In Don Quixote (pt. 1, chap. 14), the praise of desengaño belongs first to a woman. The shepherdess Marcela, having chosen, “in order to be able to live free, the solitude of the countryside,” refuses all blame for the suicide of her lover. She claims to have always opposed the hope that sharpens desire with the desengaño that disabuses. On her lips, desengaño becomes knowledge of the absolute freedom of the object of desire; in other words, recognition and acceptance of her independence: “Those whom I have made amorous by my appearance, I have disabused with my words” (A los que he enamorado con la vista he desengañado con las palabras). A tragic knowledge for Marcela’s suitors, blinded by her beauty and their own desire; an unacceptable knowledge to which Grisóstomo prefers death; a knowledge that the pretty shepherdess nonetheless defends until the end, refusing to confuse the truth of her desire—the cruel absence of reciprocity between men and Luis de Léon, an Augustinian monk with a subtle command of Greek and Hebrew, a professor at the University of Salamanca, and one of the greatest poets of his time, also dared to defy the law (which in his case was an Inquisitorial interdiction against translating the Bible into Castilian), offering a beautiful lyric version of the Song of Songs to a Carmelite nun. And yet his poems retain a clear and sharp aggressivity that is in the same vein as Mateo Alemán’s harsh and resounding revolt, despite being in a completely different register. Without actually naming them, the RT: Diccionario de autoridades shows that the adjective desengañado designates precisely these “new Christians,” such as Mateo Alemán, Luis de León, or Teresa of Avila, who endlessly told her charges that true virtue is hidden in works and not in one’s birth: “Los desengañados dicen, que la nobleza no se adquiere naciendo, sino obrando” (The desengañados say that nobility is not acquired by being born but by acting). Some words of classical Castilian, like desengaño, seem to have been forged through a play of violent and almost exaggerated oppositions in an extreme tension between an internal and external aspect with regard to social and religious laws, and sometimes at the edges of their laws’ own fluctuating boundaries. Américo Castro, a historian exiled from Spain after the civil war and a close confidant of Marcel Bataillon, “one of the masters of Cervantism” according to Jean Cassou in his introduction to Don Quichotte, offered constant reminders that all of the spiritual and mystic literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shared a common origin with picaresque novels, with La Celestina, and especially with Don Quixote. This literature is caught between a Christian optimism colored by Erasmism and a picaresque desengaño and was born and developed precisely among the children of the first converted Jews, who became Christians with lives “on the frontier,” psychologically speaking. In the picaresque novel, derision, provocation, and constant games with the law, as in Lazarillo de Tormes, often hide a distance as well as a brutal acceptance bordering on submission. Having become a respectable husband at the end of the novel, Lázaro accepts with philosophic calm that his wife, the servant of the archpriest, should remain the latter’s mistress—Lázaro’s world is too narrow, unlike that of Cervantes, to allow for a dream of freely chosen love or even nostalgia for an inner 1 Pícaro Of uncertain origin, this word means in the first instance “rascal,” “rogue,” or “beggar”; someone without shame in the sense of modesty (vergüenza) or honor (honra), the most Christian of values according to the drama of Lope de Vega, the “official” author of the Spanish Golden Age (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The pícaro is thus first and foremost a mischievous character, malicious (descarado) as well, but above all, an outlaw. In the hands of some authors, such as the writer of Lazarillo de Tormes, the character is a crafty one, sometimes dishonest, but with a genuine awareness both of himself and the boundaries of the world, in particular those that separate his world from that of his masters and those of his own subjectivity. Despite the apparent paradox of such a genealogy, the pícaro may be considered a remote descendant of the mystics. As in Mateo Alemán’s work, pícaros and mystics share an acute and sometimes tragic awareness of the rules of social power and the “falseness” of all worldly authority, which Teresa of Avila called, with “picaresque” contempt, “authorities of junk” (autoridades postizas). But Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache dares to attack God and his creation, which he considers to be an utter failure. The mystic’s rejection of the world as it is remains, for the pícaro, a rejection of all transcendence. DESENGAÑO 209 course of the story—all these words are there to indicate a radical alliance with the elements of life, including the most frightening ones, the most extravagant one, the craziest ones. And so desengaño, rather than taking the form of bitterness or escape, becomes a pure complicity with the adventure of living, painful or happy depending on the course of events. It is as though all these words of life and literature existed only for the sake of giving the most beautiful form possible to the experience of desengaño, one that is found especially in the gap between desire and reality and from which fiction is born—and for Sancho and Don Quixote, the space in which they can breathe. And it allows desire, if it cannot reach its object, at least to come back to itself after its long travels (pt. 2, chap. 72). IV. Gracían and the Strategy of Desengaño The cycle of desengaño was completed at the end of the baroque era in Spain with a triumphant Catholic form that was practically official: the Jesuit Gracián responded to desengaño with a strategy of stagecraft and manipulation, praising appearance as the sole reality. With Gracián, we are practically at the other end of the spectrum from picaresque and mystical desengaño and much closer to a kind of disillusionment that comes from perfect courtly duplicity. The bitter lightness of picaresque desengaño and the mystical audacity that consists in inventing an internal world to respond to the desengaño that comes from the world as it is become in this context the construction of a much weightier kind of staging, where the difference between being and seeming comes only in flashes before disappearing entirely in favor of the idea that being consists in nothing other than seeming—and in obedience to the rules of the court: “Man without illusions, wise Christian. Philosopher courtier: but without appearing so, let alone affecting it.” (Varón desengañado, cristiano sabio. Cortesano filósofo: mas no parecerlo; menos afectarlo; Art of Worldly Wisdom, §100). A rebel in his own bizarre way, Gracián spent half of his time in trouble with the Society of Jesus. Ignoring the interdictions, he went so far as to publish his books at his own expense—in particular the last parts of the Criticón (1653 and 1657), which he had printed without the slightest authorization and only partially hiding his identity—before later returning to the fold, which he had never completely left. For this “Christian” disciple of Machiavelli, a Hobbesian before his time, a defender of the power that comes with secrecy and dissimulation who was convinced of the need to manipulate in order to survive, and an ambitious connoisseur of the social passions that he dared to expose—for him, desengaño became a weapon, a projectile, an explosive destined to trap the naïve and the imprudent. The weapon became invisible, and he practically turned it on himself toward the end of his life by proclaiming his obedience to the law of the double life (which Pascal considered Jesuitical) and by transforming his initial disillusionment into a need for constant calculation, an infinite casuistry, in order to escape the threat of death lurking at all times: A breast without a secret is an open letter. Where there is a solid foundation secrets can be kept profound: there are spacious cellars where things of moment may be hid. Reticence springs from self-control, and to control women; that is, desengaño—with contempt: “Setting someone straight should not be taken for disdain” (Que los desengaños no se han de tomar en cuenta de desdenes). As with Marcela, the desire for life on the part of the knight errant and his squire is all the greater given the extent of the desengaño. Sancho, having been the governor of the imaginary island of Barataria and disappointed to learn that the dream of power was just a lack of freedom, feels a desengaño that is not at all bitter. It resembles, rather, a strong reassurance of feeling truly alive; stripped, Sancho feels his existence: “Desnudo nací, desnudo me hallo, ni pierdo ni gano” (I was born naked, and now find myself naked; I neither lose nor win; pt. 2, chap. 57). This book in which “Spain finds itself ceaselessly mirrored” (Cassou, Introduction) is also the work of a descendant of converted Jews, to whom Philip II twice refused the post in the Indies for which Cervantes pleaded. Only those who could prove their “Christian blood” had the right to such posts. Cervantes, like the majority of mystics and picaresque authors, invented points of reference other than the Church and social power to communicate the brutal conflict between dream and reality. Don Quixote dies of it—we do not know whether he dies “of melancholy [melancolía], of having been defeated, or of the will of Heaven” (pt. 2, chap. 74)—but Cervantes writes his own Don Quixote through to the end, despite the existence of the fake version by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. The term desengaño appears 357 times in the two parts of the novel. As if desengaño had become the bearer of an extraordinary life force, in the dedication of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which was written a few days before his death, Cervantes claims to live only through that desire: “Ayer me dieron la extremaunción y hoy escribo ésta; el tiempo es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan y, con todo esto, llevo la vida sobre el deseo que tengo de vivir” (Yesterday they gave me extreme unction and today I’m writing this. Time is short, my agony waxes while hope wanes, and yet despite all this, my desire to live keeps me alive). In Don Quixote, desengaño leads to a new richness, one that lies beyond good and evil, since dogmas and moral categories have disappeared in favor of writing that seeks neither to prove nor to convince but rather prefers to be a pure art of life. Further, the exceptional and fundamental feature of this art is that it is completely lacking in desire for any kind of religious solution. All that remains is fiction, dreams, nostalgia, anxiety, pleasure, and above all, a great need for true, genuine life—“la verdad adelgaza y no quiebra” (truth can be reduced to a thread but does not break; pt. 2, chap. 10). In the novel, life away from the court and big cities is made up of pleasure in the simplest things—Sancho and Don Quixote, both alone and together, often improvise delicious lunches on the grass by the side of the road, ones that would make the princes of the Earth die of envy. It also contains the most fantastical and unreal elements, like the dream of the cave of Montesinos, which resembles a Platonic myth (pt. 2, chaps. 22 and 23). And then again, life is made up of words as alive as anything: words read in books of chivalry; the words written by the author, Miguel de Cervantes, and by the Arab narrator of the second part, Cide Hamete Benengeli; the words translated by a Christian for the author; and also spoken words, usually reported by a witness of the countless characters who come and go and are transformed over the 210 DÉSINVOLTURE DÉSINVOLTURE Désinvolture is one of the possible translations of the Italian sprezzatura, introduced by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528), where it relates to Italian thinking about civility and politeness. See SPREZZATURA; see also CIVILITY, GRACE, ITALIAN, LEGGIADRIA, STYLE. oneself in this is true triumph. You must pay ransom to each you tell. The security of wisdom consists in temperance in the inner man. The risk that reticence runs lies in the cross-questioning of others, in the use of contradiction to worm out secrets, in the darts of irony: to avoid these, the prudent become more reticent than before. What must be done need not be said, and what must be said need not be done. (Gracián, Art of Worldly Wisdom) Desengaño enjoyed a resurgence with Romanticism, this time characterizing the disappointments and sufferings of love, politics, and history, in the spirit of the times. Originally, however, the underground complexity of desengaño developed on the side of the very ones who, “disabused” and “disenchanted” because of their banishment by a hostile society, often in highly marginalized situations—whether in prison like Luis de Léon or Cervantes or, like Gracián, in the heart of one of the most powerful institutions of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, in relation to which he remained independent and dissident— invented other worlds and alternative pathways, which are still present in the language of today, to communicate this experience and transform it through writing. Mercedes Allendesalazar REFS.: Alemán, Mateo. The Life of Guzman d’Alfarache; or, The Spanish Rogue. To Which Is Added, the Celebrated Tragi-comedy, Celestina. 2 vol. Reprint, London: Constable, 1924. First published in 1707–8. Baruzi, Jean. Luis de León, interprète du livre de Job. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Cassou, Jean. Introduction to L’ingénieux hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, by Miguel Cervantes. Paris: Gallimard, 1934. Castro, Américo. Cervantes y los castisimos españoles. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974. First published in 1966. . De la edad conflictiva. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. First published in 1961. . Hacia Cervantes. Madrid: Taurus, 1967. First published in 1957. . El pensiamiento de Cervantes. Barcelona: Editorial Noguer, 1972. First published in 1925. . Teresa la Santa y otros ensayos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971. First published in 1929. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated and edited by J. Rutherford. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. . The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. Translated by C. R. Weller and C. A. Colahan. Reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009. Criado del Val, Manuel. “Santa Teresa de Jesús en la granpolémica española: Mística frente e picaresca.” Revista de Espiritualidad 22 (1963): 377–84. Gracián, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Translated by Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1991. The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. Translated by T. Roscoe. London: J. C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881. Pelegrín, Benito. Ethique et esthétique du baroque: L’espace jésuitique de Baltasar Gracián. Arles, Fr.: Actes Sud, 1985. Rojas, Fernando de. The Celestina: A Novel in Dialogue. Translated by L. B. Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. Rosales, Luis. El sentimiento del desengaño en la poesía barroca. Madrid: Ediciones de cultura hispánica, 1966. Rosset, Clément. Appendix 2 of Le choix des mots. Paris: Minuit, 1995. Teresa of Avila. The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus. Translated and edited by E. A. Peers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1950. Wardropper, Bruce W. Siglos de oro: Barroco. Historia y crítica de la literatura español, under the direction of Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, Grijalbo, 1983. DESIRE The etymology of “desire” is highly informative. The word comes from the Latin desiderare, composed of the privative de- and sidus, sideris (star). Thought to be an ancient term from divinatory or maritime language, desiderare literally means “to stop seeing the star,” “to condemn the absence of, to miss,” while considerare means “to see the star,” “to examine with care or respect.” The term appears here first insofar as it is relevant to the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, and more precisely, as one of the received translations of the Freudian Wunsch: see WUNSCH and DRIVE (especially DRIVE, Box 2). Cf. ES, UNCONSCIOUS. More widely, it is part of a variety of networks: 1. The network of absence and satisfaction, of lack and plenty: see PLEASURE as well as GLÜCK (cf. HAPPINESS) and MALAISE; cf. ACT. 2. The network of love, including sexual love, and passion: see LOVE, PATHOS (cf. PASSION), TALENT, and cf. GENDER, GESCHLECHT, SEX. 3. The oppositional network of freedom and the will: see LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA], WILL, WILLKÜR. 4. The network of the powers of the soul: see SOUL, GOGO; cf. I/ME/MYSELF, GEMÜT. v. GOÛT, INTENTION, MADNESS DESSEIN Dessein is, along with dessin, one of the received translations of the Italian disegno. Eighteenth-century French broke with Italian tradition and, like German and English, separated the semantic fields of dessein and dessin. See DISEGNO and DESSIN; cf. CONCETTO and LEGGIADRIA. Nevertheless, disegno is to be thought of alongside “design,” which not only means “drawing” (dessin) but also “the ability to grasp patterns”; see STRUCTURE, IV. On the importance of dessein for aesthetics, see also GENIUS, INGENIUM, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, TABLEAU. For the relation between dessein and finality, see DESTINY and especially KÊR, Box 1; for boulê [βоυλή], the design of Zeus, see OIKONOMIA and TALAT. T. UF; HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS; cf. PRINCIPLE. On the relation between design, intelligence, and moral action, see AGENCY, INTENTION, MÊTIS, PHRONÊSIS, POSTUPOK, PRAXIS, WISDOM, VIRTÙ, WILL. v. IDEA, SENSE DEVIL 211 DESSIN Dessin is, along with dessein—from which it diverges around 1750—one of the received translations of the Italian disegno. See DISEGNO and DESSEIN. Cf. CONCETTO and LEGGIADRIA. The term is similar to “design,” which means not only “drawing” (dessin) but also the “ability to grasp patterns”; see STRUCTURE, IV. See also, for the role of dessin in aesthetics, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, TABLEAU. DESTINY The use of “destiny,” from the Latin destinare (to fix, to subject), is in Romance languages one of the ways in which we designate the part of what happens to us that escapes us or is not in our power. The terminological networks of Greek and German are especially well furnished in this regard. I. The Important Constellations A. The fortune of Greek representations The Greek words related to the idea of destiny are numerous, and they carry images and representations along with them that are always present: death, one’s lot, thread, linkage, constraint, completion, suspense. See KÊR [MOIRA, AISA, HEIMARMENÊ, ANAGKÊ, PEPRÔMENÊ, TUCHÊ]. While fortuna translates the occurrences characteristic of tuchê [τύχη] (see KÊR, Box 3, and VIRTÙ, I), the Latin fatum, from fari (to speak) opens up another paradigm (see KÊR, I.C; see also PORTUGUESE, Box 1). See also DAIMÔN, THEMIS. B. Calling, destination, historicity In German, Heidegger brings out the connotations belonging to Schicksal in which determinism and history are interwoven. See SCHICKSAL; cf. EREIGNIS, GESCHICHTLICH. The network includes Verhängnis (suspense, in the Stoïc sense of heimarmenê [εἱμαρμένη]), and Bestimmung, which opens up a new swath of terminology related to call and response (see BERUF, STIMMUNG, VOCATION) and to determinism. See also ES GIBT, HISTORY, TO BE. II. Destiny, Freedom, and Necessity 1. “Destiny” relates to necessity, whatever its nature may be, reasoning or divine decision, the natural or cosmological course of events that controls human life and therefore expresses determinism, finality, and freedom. See LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA, Box 2; SVOBODA], WILL. 2. For the relationship between God and humans, see especially ALLIANCE [BERĪT, PIETAS, RELIGIO, SOBORNOST’], BELIEF, DAIMÔN, DEVIL, GOD, HUMANITY. 3. For causality, see EPISTEMOLOGY, FORCE, NATURE, PRINCIPLE, THING, WORLD. For probability and chance, see CHANCE and KÊR, Box 2. 4. For human life, see MALAISE, LIFE [AIÔN, ANIMAL, DASEIN, ERLEBEN]. 5. For the relationship between necessity, freedom, and moral action, see GLÜCK, MORALS, POSTUPOK, PRAXIS, PRUDENCE, VIRTÙ. 6. It is also possible to imagine other ways, referring to humans themselves, of theorizing that part of human life that escapes us; see DRIVE, ES, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG; cf. GENDER, GESCHLECHT, MALAISE, PATHOS, SEX. v. LAW, PERFECTIBILITY, PROGRESS, SECULARIZATION DEVIL FRENCH diable GERMAN Teufel GREEK diabolos [διάϐολος], daimôn [δαίμων] HEBREW sāt. [שָׂ טָן] ān ITALIAN diavolo, demonio, demone LATIN diabolus, daemon SPANISH diablo v. DAIMÔN, DUENDE, GOD, GOOD/EVIL, IMAGE [EIDÔLON], INGENIUM, MADNESS, PLEASURE, RUSE Within the theologies and demonologies of the different religious and philosophical systems of the East and the West, we find questions such as that of whether, if they accord individual existence and power to an agent of Evil, that agent is fully autonomous (as in dualist systems) from the principle of Good or, on the contrary, acts only under the power of the latter, the supreme god who alone is eternal, to whom all evil influence in the world is subordinate. There follow questions concerning the relationship between the Prince of Evil and the lesser demons who function as his instruments. Regardless of the possible answers to these questions, the Evil One is designated in most European languages by reference to the daimôn [δαίμων] of Greek or Latin antiquity, as well as to the Semitic (sāt. ān [ןָטָ שׂ [in Hebrew, šayṭān [شيطان [in Arabic, and satanas [Ʃατανᾶς] in Greek), designated by the name of diabolos [διάϐολος] in the Greek Bible. Thus, in French, Satan may be called Diable or Démon indifferently (with a variety of synonyms). In German, on the other hand, the two semantic paths remain distinct. The second, that of daimôn [see DAIMÔN] or “demonic” remains clearly detached from that of diabolos, that is, what we understand by the words “diabolical” or “satanic.” I. From Satan to the Devil The Hebrew name sāṭān is given to the Prince of Demons in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the New Testament and the Qu’ran. The Septuagint translates the name by the Greek noun diabolos [διάϐολος], created from diaballein [διαϐάλλειν] (ballein [βάλλειν], “to throw,” “to push”; dia [δια], “between,” “across,” “from one end to the other”; hence “to divide,” “to separate,” “to accuse,” “to slander”). The biblical Satan (from the root satan, derived from the Akkadian sattânu, which means “to attack,” “to urinate on,” “to fight”) is named as “the adversary” (cf. 2 Sm 19:23; 1 Kgs 5:18; 11:14, 23, 25) or “the accuser [before a tribunal], the slanderer, the denigrator” (cf. Ps 109:6). But in Job 1:6, as well as Zechariah 3:1–2, this name, preceded by an article, is still only a common noun. It does not seem to become a proper noun until the first book of Chronicles, where it is said that “Satan rose” (21:1), behavior arising from pride. In the Qu’ran, “Satan” is not at first a proper noun. It is used sometimes in the singular, šayṭān [شيطان ,[sometimes in the 212 DEVIL plural, šayāṭîn [شياطين ,[and usually with an article. Al Šaytân thus designates the Demon, while al šayâṭîn designates the various demons. Satan is the same word in Arabic and Hebrew, related to a verb meaning “to be separated [from the truth or divine mercy]”. The Qu’ran also mentions this same Satan by the name of Iblis, which is related to the Greek diabolos and designates the rebel angel, head of the revolt against God and of unbelief: “And when we said to the angels ‘Prostrate yourselves before Adam,’ they all prostrated themselves except Satan, who hid his pride, refused and became an unbeliever” (2:32). The six other passages mentioning the name of Iblis in a similar context also describe him as an angel, cursed and fallen because of his disobedience, like the demon of the Jewish and Christian traditions. In effect, the three great monotheistic religions originally viewed the angels as members of a celestial court, then as messengers from the Most High, some of whom revolted against the divine order. The spread of the Greek Septuagint among the early Christian communities led the holy writers and the church fathers to adopt the Greek diabolos and the Latin diabolus to indicate the Satan of the Hebrew texts. The book of Revelation (12:9) designates the evil spirit as “the Diabolos or the Satanas [Ʃατανᾶς]”: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world (of the oikumene [οἰϰουμένη]).” In the Gospel of John (8:44), Jesus tells his coreligionists at the height of a quarrel with them: “Ye are of your father the devil (humeis ek tou patros tou diabolou este [ὑμεις ἐϰ τοῦ πατϱὸς τοῦ διαϐόλου ἐστὲ; in the Vulgate, vos ex patre diabolo estis]).” In the same way, Latin Christian literature, for example, Tertullian (De anima, 35), adopts the term diabolus from the Septuagint to designate Satan, even while giving a number of other names to the principle of evil, such as the Demon, the Adversary, the Tempter, the Father of Lies, the Prince of This World, the Antichrist, the Beast, the Clever One, the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer. In addition, the New Testament, the apocryphal Christian writings, and the church fathers use the term “demon” to designate fallen angels, as well as the pagan gods, which they call “the idols” (eidôla [εἴδωλα]: 1 Cor 12:2; cf. Septuagint, 4 Kgs 17:12). . Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism could not accept the translation of the Bible by the Alexandrian diaspora without reservation, and remained faithful to the name of Satan (or Sammaël, the Angel of Death), mentioned, however, with the definite article. “The Satan” reigns, then, over a certain number of demons (šëdῑm [ים שׁד ׅ ([ ֵdescribed as “pernicious” (mɑzzῑqῑm [קים ׅזיׅמ ([ ַby the Midrash and the Talmud, such as Beelzebub, Azazel (the personification of the desert into which the scapegoat is sent in the ritual of Yom Kippur), Belial (or Beliar), Asmodeus (the demon who kills in succession the first seven husbands of Sara, the future wife of the young Tobias), Behemoth, and Leviathan. We also find female demons in these writings, such as Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to Rabbinic Judaism, or even the consort of Sammaël: according to the Targums and the midrashim, Sammaël was the serpent from Genesis 3 who seduced Eve, fathering Cain, henceforth known as the “son of the Devil.” However, it is the Hellenistic tradition of diabolos that has been taken up in our current languages to name the Evil Angel, as we see with “devil,” diavolo (Ital.), diablo (Sp.), and even with Teufel (Ger.), as well as the Iblis of the Qu’ranic tradition. II. From the Slanderer to the Tempter In the three monotheistic traditions, the Devil commands a legion of demons as his servants or instruments, so that it is difficult to tell from one text to another whether we are dealing with Satan himself or one of his acolytes. With the exception of the aforementioned passage in Chronicles, the Hebrew Bible generally refers indeterminately to a satan (or diabolos). It may be the same with the angel who becomes Job’s accuser in the midst of his trials, before the tribunal of God. And even in the first part of Goethe’s Faust, when the hero meets Mephistopheles (a name whose etymology is uncertain but recalls the Low Latin adjective mephiticus, 1 Lucifer The name Lucifer (Lat. “bringer of light”), which designated the planet Venus among the ancients, was incidentally attributed in the New Testament to Christ himself, who is there referred to, according to Ecclesiastes (50:6), as Stella matutina. The name remains, however, in the early centuries of the church and under the persistent influence of Judaism, one of the names of Satan. Beginning with Saint Jerome and especially in the Middle Ages, the Prince of Demons comes to be assimilated, as in Dante (Inferno, 31, 143; 34, 89; etc.), with the figure of the fallen angel. The source is no doubt the biblical passage in Isaiah on the fall of the king of Babylon, either Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus, or perhaps another Assyrian tyrant, either Sargon or Sennacherib: How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. Isaiah 14:12–15. Thus, for Christianity, Lucifer, the angel of light, becomes Satan through his revolt against God. According to some esoteric traditions, this revolt took place in the framework of a cosmic battle. DEVIL 213 (σύμϐουλος ἀνθϱώπου)] who enjoys ruining what is better than him.” . III. Devil or Demon? While “Devil” and “Demon” seem to function as equivalents in Christian theology or ordinary ways of speaking, the same cannot be said for the German Teufel and Dämon. The latter, which is synonymous with Unhold (malevolent or harmful spirit—antonymous with hold, “gracious,” “charming”), corresponds to the ancient idea of a daimôn [δαίμων] in the sense of a divinity or personal spirit, even a goblin, good or bad. The religious sense of “demon,” on the other hand, can only be adequately rendered by Teufel. Thus, Freud’s work entitled “Eine Teufelneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert” was translated into French in 1933 by M. Bonaparte and E. Marty as “Une névrose démoniaque,” then in 1985, in a new edition by J.-B. Pontalis, as “Une névrose diabolique”—the two translations being semantically identical. In the reverse case, however, the expressions névrose démoniaque and névrose diabolique, when they relate to a pact between a person and the Devil (Teufelsbund or Teufelspakt), as they do in Freud’s work, would both be translated into German as Teufelsneurose rather than Dämonsneurose—the latter could possibly refer to a case of pathological enthusiasm. In English, the Devil is also called the “Evil One” or the “Fiend.” “Fiend,” like “demon,” has rather the same sense as Dämon in German; in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Lancelot calls Shylock “the fiend who is the devil himself.” The different contemporary languages use the terms “devil” and “demon” in derivative senses which seem to downplay or exorcise the malignance retained by these other terms. Thus, in French and English we find various locutions that involve sympathy mixed with indulgence or admiration (petit diable, pauvre diable, bon diable, un diable d’homme, little devil, poor devil, the devil of a time, the devil’s luck), a nuance of rejection or repulsion (envoyer au diable, aller au diable, go to the devil), obsessions or volatile situations (avoir le diable au corps, tirer le diable par la queue, démon de midi, démon de jeu, face one’s demons, needs must when the devil drives). These generally have to do with metaphorical senses whose extreme character is indicative of the personality of the possessed (Ger. besessen) or the “energumen” (energumenos, formed by the early Christian writers from the passive of energein [ἐνέϱγειν] to indicate someone who is “worked on” by an evil spirit, but also, in the first instance, someone who is struck with a physical disability preventing him from being baptized). Along these lines, we find Dostoyevsky’s novel translated into French with the title Les possédés (and in English, The Possessed), even though the novel deals precisely with demons—the book cites a passage from the Gospel of Luke (8:32–36) in which Jesus drives a multitude of tormenting spirits from the body of a victim, and allows them to enter a herd of pigs, which then throw themselves into a nearby lake and drown. In fact, while the French diable, the Latin diabolus, the Italian diavolo, the English “devil,” and the German Teufel may have figurative meanings like those listed above (not to mention interjections like que diantre invented in order “exhaling a pestilential and harmful odor”), he only sees him as “the frozen fist of the Devil [die kalte Teufelsfaust],” that is, one of the many “negating spirits” constituting an anonymous infernal society. However, the texts of the New Testament and the Jewish and Christian apocrypha, as well as the Mishna and the Talmud, designate the Devil more and more frequently by his proper name, presenting him most of all as the Tempter (Lat., temptator; in Gr., ho peirazôn [ὁ πειϱάζων]; in Hebrew, the equivalent would be massâh [הָסַ מ ,[which means “test”; cf. Ex 17:7). In this way, according to Matthew 4:1–3, “was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil [peirasthênai hupo tou diabolou (πειϱασθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ διαϐόλου)]. And when the tempter came to him, he said.” The fact that the Devil goes from being the “accuser” to being the “tempter” or “seducer” may be explained by the emphasis on the notion of envy or jealousy (phthonos [φθόνος] in the Septuagint; invidia in the Vulgate). That notion is in fact not far from some of the recognized meanings of the Hebraic sāṭān, notably that of the denigrator, the malevolent, the divider. It is envy that prompts the Evil One to introduce death into the world (Wis 2:24), and to persuade Eve to disobey and eat the forbidden fruit, as Flavius Joseph (Antiquities of the Jews, 1.1–4) and especially Philo of Alexandria (De opificio mundi, §151–69; De agricultura, §95–110) point out. According to the De opificio mundi, it is because he loves pleasure (philêdonos [φιλήδονος]), especially pleasures of the senses (aisthêsis [αἴσθησις]), that man may be tempted by the serpent, the personification of sensual pleasure and its charms (hêdonê sumbolon [ἡδονἠ σύμϐολον]): “It is said that of old the venomous reptile having one day approached the wife of the first man, reproached her for her slowness of mind since she postponed and delayed gathering the most beautiful fruit to be seen, the most pleasant to taste [hêdiston (ἥδιστον), superlative of hêdus (ἡδύς), pleasant], and besides the most useful, since, thanks to it, she could know good and evil.” For the serpent’s part, it is not a matter of persuading (peirô [πειϱῶ]) his victim, but of tempting, in the sense taken on by the Greek peirazô [πειϱάζω] (derived from peira [πεῖϱα], “test”) in the Bible and the New Testament. Thus, Jesus says in his agony, “Pray, that ye enter not into temptation” (eis peirasmon [εἰς πείϱασμον]) (Lk 22:40), just as the prayer that he teaches his disciples, the Our Father, ends with the phrase “And lead us not into temptation” (eis peirasmon [εἰς πείϱασμον]) (Lk 11:4). Neither Josephus nor Philo identifies the serpent-tempter with the Devil himself. The genre of allegory, however, which, especially in Alexandrian literature, consists of “philosophizing by symbols,” provides the basis for a psychotheology that turns the serpent into a symbol, not for just any demon, but for the Tempter himself. Under the aspect of a serpent, portrayed here in his capacity as a seducer of the feminine soul (by the intervention of sensation or aisthêsis), the Tempter here represents according to the Jewish and Christian traditions the Devil’s role as the “Counselor of Man” with regard to perversity. The role of sumboulos alluded to by Philo in his De agricultura (§97) may be an allusion, though attenuated and unique to Philo, to the diabolos of the Septuagint: “counselor of man [sumboulos anthrôpou 214 DEVIL [Ʃατανᾶς]) and diabolos. The latter term is more common in the Septuagint, but it is found with equal frequency as Satanas in the New Testament. The Alexandrian Bible, however, also gives the name of daimonia (neuter plural of the adjective daimonios [δαιμόνιος]) to the infernal spirits, such as Asmodeus (Tob 3:8). The same term is used in the New Testament (along with pneumata [πνεῦματα]) to designate these harmful beings. The Vulgate and Church Latin translate daimonion by daemonium, but with the unique meaning of malevolent spirit, and with no trace of the ancient sense of divinity, guiding spirit, or inner voice. Considering in addition that the daimôn in Matthew 8:16 is a hapax in the New Testament, we can see that Christian demonology creates a turning point with regard to the Greek and Latin meaning of the term. Thus, in French, demoygne appears in the thirteenth century, and démon in the sixteenth, which corresponds to just such a change, whereas Anglo-Saxon languages, especially German, remain faithful to the primitive meaning of daimôn, as though they held back from fully adhering to this semantic transformation. Moreover, French, like Italian and other Romance languages, furnishes itself with the metonymy assimilating the “Démon” to the “Diable” of the Septuagint Bible. to avoid naming the Unnamable One directly), those terms which, in contemporary languages, are derived from the Greek daimôn or the Latin daemon are not used to refer to the person of the biblical Satan himself, not even to evil spirits when it is a matter of demons in the extended, religious sense. For example, with regard to those among them who wish, according to Luke the Evangelist, to enter the herd of pigs, Luther invariably translates the Greek plural daimonia [δαιμόνια] (or polla daimonia [πολλὰ δαιμόνια]) by Teufee (or viel Teufee). As a result, in Anglo-Saxon languages, the “demonic” (a term known by 1422, and no doubt borrowed from the Greek daimonikos [δαιμονιϰός], an adjective that means “possessed by a god” in Clement of Alexandria) remains distinct from what is called in French the démoniaque (demoniacal). This is still the case in German, where démoniaque would be translated as teuflisch (or satanisch), and démonique as dämonisch. The fact that Satan is known in French, on the other hand, as either “le Démon” or “le Diable,” unlike in other languages (especially Anglo-Saxon ones), seems to be due to the distance these other languages have acquired from ecclesiastical vocabulary. In Jewish and Christian writings, there is no semantic difference between Satan (Hellenized as Satanas 2 Satan the Contradictor as “historical being” according to Schelling v. OIKONOMIA, SUBLIME Schelling develops his conception of the figure of Satan, and particularly “of his eminent place and function” in the history of Christianity, in his Philosophy of Revelation (especially Lesson XXXIII). He contests the standard representation of the Prince of Shadows common to pagan as well as Jewish mythology, according to which he is an angel, originally good, a spirit created as an individual, who wished to rise above God, and was for this reason cast down, bringing the world and humanity down along the way. Schelling clarifies straightaway that this act of opposition, which is peculiar to him, does not diminish Satan’s dignity in any way, but rather ascribes to him a great reality and a more pre-eminent significance, although these are inscribed in determinate moments of the history of salvation. He notes that in the Hebrew Bible, the name of Satan in the first instance refers only to the notion of “contradictor in general,” and then—only with the article—to that of a determinate contradictor, as when, for example, said Satan argues with Yahweh concerning the suffering Job. The Hebrew verb saṭan [ןָטָ שׂ [in effect has the very general meaning of contradicting someone or opposing an undertaking. Thus, in the story of Balaam (Num 22:22), “when the Lord’s Angel places himself in his path in order to ‘resist’ him and hold him back, the Hebrew uses the verb saṭan, which consequently means nothing more than ‘to hold back,’ to thwart or hinder a movement. The Hebrew noun was translated into Greek as diabolos [διάϐολος], from diaballein [διαϐάλλειν], which means nothing more than ‘interjicere se ad obstinendum,’ whence our German word Teufel.” The same Greek word “is also originally used in a completely general way with regard to any contrarium, to anything by which one is led astray” (Philosophy of Revelation). This role of Contradictor, however, is one that Satan exercises most notably with regard to Christ himself. The Scripture informs us that a kingdom belongs to this adversary, just as one belongs to Christ, even if the former’s is “opposed to and resistant to that of Christ.” Thus, Satan “finds himself to a certain extent placed on the same footing as Christ, even if it is as a contradictor, as he whose reign and works Christ has come to destroy.” It follows that a certain sublimity (Erhabenheit) is attributed to him, just as to Christ, in such a way that this elevation entitles him, according to a large part of the New Testament, to be considered the prime author of evil. In his role as master of such a kingdom he “appears as a principle belonging to the divine economy” and is recognized by God as such. Facing God, Satan places himself at determinate moments as the great skeptic and contradictor who casts doubt on all belief, notably in the creation, through the seduction he works on the first man and in his debate with God regarding the tests of Job. As a part of the divine economy, Satan is thus defined, according to Schelling, as a “historical being” who one day sees his work completed. “His mission ends and, with it, his power,” which consisted in “maintaining contradiction, malediction, discord and disunity,” but which needed to be broken by Christ and by the triumph of the cause of God (Sache Gottes). Until that time, “it is a great power, necessary to the final glorification of God, and which for this reason must be neither criticized nor held in contempt.” Such a representation of Satan as a principle of the divine economy that is necessary at a given time thus breaks with the traditional mythological representations, which persist in seeing in this Contradictor an absolutely bad (although created) principle of self, universal and as eternal as God himself. REFS.: Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von. Philosophie der Offenbarung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Translation by V. C. Hayes: Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Armidale, NSW: Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1995. DICHTUNG 215 In these languages, the title of Demon (in the singular) simply reinforces the authority of the leader over his agents and accomplices, the innumerable demons or demonesses and she-devils, among which popular, romantic, and religious imagination places a host of infernal spirits of varying degrees of lewdness: werewolves, incubi, succubi, ghouls (from the Arabic ġūl [غول” ,[demon”), vampires, and so on. In the eighteenth century, these satanic fiends were also called oupires, from the Russian upyr’ [yпьıpь]—and perhaps from the Turkish uber, “witch”—whence the first occurrence of the term in Europe, as the German Vampir. This monarchy of the Devil or the Demon at the head of a kingdom of evil was already present in Iranian dualism, but unknown in the majority of other Eastern cultures; it is explained by the monotheism on which it is based, in the medieval demonology of the religions of the Abrahamic tradition. Satan represents, in effect, the One God’s antagonist, and is characterized in the image of his adversary. Nor is this uniqueness compromised when his medieval mask is removed, and he is transformed into the angelic lord of the revolt by the literary Satanism of the nineteenth century. In reality, the role that Western imagination assigned to the Devil has, according to Freud, the same origin as that which it assigned to God—the antagonism between the two figures both derive from a single source, namely, the figure of the father. In his study of the “diabolical neurosis” of an Austrian painter in the seventeenth century, Freud shows that the Devil of Christian mythology originally constituted, with God, a single figure, that this unitary being was then divided into “two clearly contrasted opposites”—one good, the other bad—and finally, that this antagonism only reflects the ambivalence, in a cultural deployment, which affects the paternal figure himself. Thus the Devil is “the substitute for the father,” according to Freud, and the vocabulary of demonology takes up the tyrannical and cruel aspects of the father figure. What made the troubles of Freud’s Austrian painter so memorable was that he reinforced these aspects of the figure of the Devil in his nostalgia for his dead father, by way of a pact with Satan. Charles Baladier REFS.: The Apocryphal New Testament. Edited by J. K. Elliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Browning, W.R.F. A Dictionary of the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Citati, Pietro. Goethe. Translated by R. Rosenthal. New York: Dial Press, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. “Ein Teufelneurose im Siebzehnten Jarhundert.” Imago 9, 1.34; GW, vol. XIII, 317–53. Translation: “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, edited by J. Strachey, vol. XIX, 72–105. London: Hogarth Press, 1923. Kirschschläger, W. “Satan et demons.” In Dictionnaire de la Bible. Supplément, vol. 12. Paris: Letouzey, 1996. Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Firenza: Sansoni, 1966. Translation by A. Davidson: The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. The Qu’ran. Translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Satan, special issue of Études carmélitaines. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948. Teyssèdre, Bernard. Le Diable et l’enfer au temps de Jésus. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. . Naissance du Diable: De Babylone aux grottes de la mer morte. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. DIALECTIC The history of “dialectic,” of the understandings and reinterpretations, of the appraisals and reappraisals, of the term beginning with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, and continuing through the modern age, would by itself be a good account of the history of philosophy. The word, however, travels across competing senses while itself remaining the same, starting with the Greek and by way of its Latin transliteration, through different European languages. For this reason, we will give only an indirect presentation of it here. 1. The Greek dialektikê [διαλεϰτιϰή] (classified as a technê [τέχνη], and sometimes as epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη], thus, the craft or science of dialectic) derives from logos [λόγоϛ]. It refers to the art of discussion (dia [διά], from “dialogue”) by question and answer, practiced by Socrates, and thus opposed to long discourses and Sophistic epideixis [ἐπίδειξιϛ]; see SPEECH ACT, I. Plato invests the term with great significance; in his hands it designates the practice of philosophy itself, reaching up to the “ideas”; see SPECIES, Box 1, and BEAUTY, MIMÊSIS. For Aristotle it refers to a part of logic, related to the rhetoric of what is probable, in contrast with scientific demonstration; see DOXA. The Stoics bestow upon it the status of a science (and make it a virtue), dealing with language and reasoning, the true and the false, the signifier and the signified; see WORD, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, and BEGRIFF, Box 1. These terminological tensions among Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism determine the complexity of medieval usage, notably visible in Augustine’s De dialectica; see also PROPOSITION. On all of this, obviously, see LOGOS. 2. Beginning with a negative interpretation of Scholastic usage, according to which dialectic is a rhetorical exercise making use of subtleties in formal logic (see SOPHISM), the moderns, from Descartes to Kant, see in dialectic an appearance of logic or a logic of appearance; on “transcendental dialectic,” the logic of transcendental appearance, see ERSCHEINUNG. The positive re-evaluation is related to the Hegelian and Marxist analysis of the processes at work in the history of being and thought; see AUFHEBEN, PLASTICITY, and GERMAN, ATTUALITÀ, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, PRAXIS, RUSSIAN, II; cf. IDENTITY. Dialectic is part of cutting-edge philosophical metadiscourse today; see, for example, CONSCIOUSNESS or CONTINUITET. v. EPISTEMOLOGY, OIKONOMIA, PRINCIPLE, SUBJECT, TERM, WORK DICHTUNG (GERMAN) ENGLISH literature, poetry, fiction FRENCH littérature, poésie, fiction, invention, affabulation v. POETRY, and ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, HISTORY, LOGOS, PRAXIS, SPEECH ACT, WORK The German word Dichtung does not, properly speaking, have an equivalent in other European languages, except for those Scandinavian languages that borrowed it. To translate it, English and French must resort to the words“literature” (littérature), “poetry” (poésie), 216 DICHTUNG in the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General theory of the fine arts), and Adelung cites it as a “new term” in the first edition of his dictionary (see RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 1, s.v. “Dichtung”). Herder gives us what is essentially the introduction of Dichtung to the German language—a paternity that also explains the unique aura that surrounds it. In his 1770 essay on the origin of language, Herder resorts to the hitherto unused word to refer to the faculty of poetic invention that presided over the first language of humanity—this original and natural language that preceded prose. Dichtung is “the natural language of all creatures [Natursprache aller Geschöpfe],” transposed into images according to which, to cite a later variation on the theme, its source lies in nature (Über den Ursprung der Sprache, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5:¶ 56, 1772; Über Bild, Dichtung und Fabel, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 15:535ff., 1787). Beginning with its birth, then, the notion of Dichtung is invested with a triple meaning. It is poetic, original, and natural, to which qualities an ultimate one is added: it is authentic. An idea, in effect, consistently underlies the Herderian usages of the term: the fictional universe to which Dichtung relates is no less real than reality itself. It is not opposed to the sensible world but in fact, rather, is its “distillate”—a principle that is given hidden support by the lucky homophonic proximity of the term to the words Dichte and dicht (density, dense). The idea will be developed in a philosophical mode a little later by Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790, §53) and then by Schlegel. The limit between science and art [Wissenschaft und Kunst], between the true and the beautiful, has at this point become so blurred that the certainty of the fixity of these eternal boundaries has been shaken practically everywhere. Philosophy creates poetry [poetisiert] and poetry [Poesie] philosophizes [philosophiert]: history [Geschichte] is treated as fiction [Dichtung], and the latter is treated as history. (Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie [1795]) . II. Deutsche Dichtung and Französische Literatur Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, Dichtung quickly became loaded with heavy national associations. In a Germany seeking a national identity, it was easy to see how much could be wrought from this specifically German noun, rich in multiple semantic or homophonic connotations and, for these reasons, difficult to translate into other languages. Dichtung allowed the German language to refer to a specific mode of intellectual invention, whose products—literature, language, and poetry—became loaded with singular qualities: unmediated relations with nature, original naïveté, poetic inspiration, brilliance, and so on. The Herderian distinction between Naturpoesie and Kunstpoesie, partially directed against French classicism, was reinterpreted by posterity in the sense of an opposition between a deutsche Dichtung and a französische Literatur, with the Germanic Dichtung designating literary production blessed with originality and or more vaguely, “fiction” (fiction). These words certainly get close to the meaning of the German noun but do not nearly exhaust the multiple notions of semantic unrealities (invention, confabulation, poetry). The German language also has the terms Literatur, Poesie, and Fiktion—but Dichtung, while it participates in all of these, contains and goes beyond them. This German-specificity confers peculiar density upon Dichtung, a sort of closure that was well exploited in German discussions on language, from Herder—who played knowingly on the essentially German character of the word—to Heidegger. Further, in 1973 the Germanist K. Hamburger emphasized that the concept of Dichtung is “superior to that proposed by the terminology of other languages, and in the first instance, to the very concept of literature [Literature].” By Dichtung, the German language tends to define for itself a specific operation of thought and language. The proximity of Dichtung with dicht (dense, sealed) is therefore not the result of purely accidental homophony. Dichtung yields such a dense succession of strata of meaning that the word becomes effectively sealed off from other languages. I. Dichtung and Dichten: The Natural Language of Humanity, between Literature, Poetry, and Fiction Dichtung is derived from the verb dichten, which even in the Old High German period had two principal meanings. In the broad sense, firstly, dichten means to invent, to imagine, to make up—a meaning that may also have negative connotations. Close to erdichten in that regard, dichten thus means to invent in order to delude, or to imagine in order to deceive. In the narrow sense, on the other hand, the word refers to the action of conceiving a poem or text so that it may then be written down and read. According to this meaning, the word has a particular predilection for the domain of poetic creation and thus means to versify, to compose a poem (even if the application to prose is not ruled out). From dichten, Dichtung inherited its semantic substance as well as its difficulties. Like the verb, the noun has at its core the complex relationship between fiction and reality. In a pejorative sense Dichtung relates to the idea of fallacious invention or confabulation, of lying. In a positive sense, however, the term designates the creation of a fictional world, invested with a singular truth. Dichtung evokes the creation of an imaginary universe, self-contained, produced by the power of invention of a single individual—the elaboration of an unreal space, in sum, but for all that no less veridical than concrete reality. In this sense Dichtung is intimately related to the romantic consecration of artworks. This meaning oscillates between the negative and positive kinds of virtuality of Fiktion, but a narrower meaning may be added to it. Dichtung may simply designate literary creation in the precise sense of the term, especially poetic creation, hence merging the terms Literatur and Poesie. Even though Dichtung participates in these three meanings of Literatur, Fiktion, and Poesie, it has nonetheless continuously strived to distinguish itself from them by assimilating unique meanings, born of the historical and philosophical circumstances that created it. The term, in fact, is a recent creation. It is certainly attested from 1561 onward, but only in the 1770s does it make its real and imposing entrance into the German language, even though its verbal template, dichten, had existed for centuries (see RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2, s.v. “dichte” and “Dichtung”). Sulzer completely ignores the noun DICHTUNG 217 1 Verum factum and poetic wisdom in Vico v. ACT, CIVILTÀ, CORSO, FICTION, GOD, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, ITALIAN, RELIGION, TRUTH In De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the very ancient wisdom of the peoples of Italy), 1710, one of his first works, Vico affirms that in Latin, “verum et factum convertuntur” (the true and the fact are convertible), and as a consequence verare (to tell the truth) and facere have the same meaning: “it follows from this that God knows the physical things, and man the mathematical ones” (chap. 1). As early as 1709, in the discourse De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (The method of studies of our time), he had written that “the propositions of physics are merely likely,” because God alone is able to know Nature, insofar as he created it: “we will demonstrate geometrical things, since we create them; if we could demonstrate physical things, we would create them” (chap. 4). Vico has a positive use for this metaphysical and epistemological principle, which initially seems to condemn human knowledge to what is merely likely, reserving the title of “science” for mathematicians alone; he uses the principle as the basis of his Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Principles of the new science concerning the common nature of nations), the first edition of which dates from 1725 and the last, extensively revised, from 1744. In this last text he lays out, in effect, the foundations of the “new science,” which he prides himself on having invented, in the following terms: But in this night of thick shadows that covers early antiquity, so far away from us, appears the eternal light which is never extinguished of this truth that one can in no way call into question: this civil world was certainly created by men, and as a result we may, because we must, find its principles in the modifications of our human mind itself. Whoever thinks about it can only be surprised to see how all the philosophers have spent their best efforts trying to acquire the science of the natural world, of which God alone, since he created it, possesses the science, and how they have neglected to consider the world of nations, or the civil world, of which men, since they created it, may acquire the science. (Principles of the new science, 1744, § 331) What is the meaning of this famous claim, which has been interpreted in a variety of ways and in which Michelet and many others have wished to discover a “Promethean” proclamation? In fact, Vico’s claim is unequivocal: the principles of the world made by man must be sought in the “modifications of [the] human mind.” Classically, these modifications are, according to Vico, the modes of the thinking substance—sensation, imagination, and understanding. Vico’s originality consists in placing these modes in order, both chronological and logical, in the evolution of humanity (Vico speaks rather of “nations”), as they are manifested and developed in the individual. This means that the fully human man, whose reason is “fully developed” and whose umanità is fully realized, has not always existed. He was preceded, rather, and prepared by a man who was practically entirely animal, “immersed in the body,” given only to sensation, only to passion, then by a man dominated by a powerful imagination (fantasia), that is, a function that is still largely dependent on the body. Vico is primarily interested in this “imaginative” moment, which Descartes and his successors refused to accept, and does not rest with merely rehabilitating the imagination; he gives it a primary role, “poetic,” properly speaking—that is, “creative”—in the genesis of the institutions that characterize the humanity of all nations: The first men of the pagan nations, as the children of the nascent human race created things by imagining them, which is why they were called “poets,” which in Greek means “creators.” (Ibid., § 376) Vico devotes Book II of the New Science, entitled On Poetic Wisdom, to this “poetic” creation of things. What does this creation, discussion of which occupies almost half the book, consist in? To analyze what we call the “primitive mentality,” he uses tools provided by classical poetics and rhetoric (he was a professor of rhetoric), in particular the theory of metaphor and of tropes in general. The most sublime work of poetry is to give sensitivity and passion to things that lack sensitivity, and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and, in play, to speak to them as if they were living persons. This philosophico-philological axiom proves that the men of the world were, in their infancy, sublime poets by nature. (Ibid., § 186–87) Men are therefore sublime poets by nature by virtue of the fundamental axiom according to which “man, because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, makes himself the measure of the universe when he falls into ignorance” (ibid., § 120). Another axiom makes it clear that “men who are ignorant of the natural causes that produce things give things their own nature, when they cannot explain them by similar things” (ibid., § 180). It is thus that man, “by himself, made an entire world [di se stesso ha fatto un intiero mondo]”: In the same way in which the metaphysics born of reason teaches that “homo intelligendo fit omnia,” this metaphysics born of the imagination likewise demonstrates that “homo non intelligendo fit omnia”; and this latter claim may be more true than the first, since man, by understanding, spreads his mind and grasps things themselves, while when he does not understand, he makes things from his own self, and by transforming himself into them, he becomes those things. (Ibid. § 405) This “metaphysics born of the imagination” is at work in fables and in pagan mythology, of which Vico has an extremely original reading: he distances it from purely literary analyses and turns it into the testimony of the way in which people from the “dark times” understood the natural world and constructed their human world. Poetic metaphysics, in effect, is nothing other than a “theology”: “Poetry may be considered as a poetic metaphysics, by which the theologian poets imagined that bodies were for the most part divine substances” (ibid., § 400). The “theologian poets” are the first men, not insofar as they speak poetically of the gods, but rather insofar as they “speak gods,” as one speaks a language. Their speech is the “fantastic speech of animate substances, imagined for the most part as divine” (ibid., § 401). These gods are what Vico calls “poetic characters,” or again “fantastic universals,” that is, “marks” or signs, concrete images allowing people without any capacity for abstraction or universalization to escape the infinite diversity of the sensible world, to perceive stabilities, to have a first experience of the world. By creating gods, men began to think in a human way. However, one cannot simply create gods with impunity. Vico cites the dictum of Tacitus: “fingunt simul creduntque [they imagine, and at the same time, they believe].” This is to say that these imagined gods speak to men, give them orders, make themselves feared by them. The lives and actions of men will be determined by these animated substances that were created by their own imagination. This is what is expressed so well by the story in the Scienza nuova of the birth of the first divine “character,” the “first of all the human thoughts of paganism,” of (continued) 218 DICHTUNG and painting). In 1853 G. G. Gervinus reedits a history of German literature, originally published in 1835–42 as Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen, with the new title of Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung. It is under the name of Dichtung rather than that of Literatur or Poesie that German literary production reaches a veritable historical consecration in the nineteenth century. Very often used between 1900 and 1950, from Dilthey to E. Staiger by way of T. Mann or J. Petersen, the word nonetheless seems to undergo a decline in the second half of the twentieth century. The very connotations that had been the basis of its ascent rendered it suspect in postwar Germany. In 1973 the Germanist Rüdiger pleads on that basis for the proscription of the term from scientific usage and suggests replacing it with the wider, more neutral term Literatur (“Was ist Literature?”). Restricted to the henceforth abandoned tradition of belles lettres, Dichtung seems moreover to be too tarnished with romantic holiness and nationalist connotations. This abandonment, clear in usage and sanctioned by dictionaries, did not take place without some resistance, as indicated by Hamburger’s plea (“Das Wort ‘Dichtung’ ”). It is worth noting that the term, though abandoned by literary types, is given a central role by the philosopher Heidegger, even in his last works. . Although Dichtung certainly takes its meaning from a conceptual network peculiar to Heideggerian language, it is authenticity, while the Latin-derived Literatur, on the other hand, evoked artifice and complexity. These diffuse connotations, implicit in use but rarely mentioned in the dictionaries, are what explain the remarkable ascent of the term in the German lexicon between 1770 and 1850. Still largely dominated by its rivals, Poesie and Literatur, at the end of the eighteenth century, Dichtung appears to have completely supplanted them by the middle of the nineteenth century. The process was tentative at first. Thus, only in the second edition of the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in 1800, does Schiller decide to introduce the word Dichtung in the title; the term itself, as it happens, is noticeably rare in the actual work. The publication, starting in 1811, of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (usually translated into French as Poésie et Vérité), marks an important stage in this ascent: the word Dichtung is, according to the author’s repeated declarations, complementary rather than in opposition to the word Wahrheit. “Therein lies all that results from my life, and each of the facts recounted here only serves to support a general observation, a higher truth [eine höhere Wahrheit]” (Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 30 March 1831). Already by 1787, in the poem Zueignung, Goethe had described himself as receiving “the veil of poetry from the hand of truth [der Dichtung Schleier aus der Hand der Wahrheit empfangen]” (v. 96). The growing success of the term is confirmed by Hegel, who, in his Lectures on Aesthetics given between 1818 and 1829, baptizes Dichtung as the third “romantic” art (the others being music the first god, Jupiter, a radical event that will place men on the road to the fulfillment of their destiny. In the “immense forest” that has covered the earth since the flood, barely human beings, bestioni, wander about without end. Suddenly the first thunderclap rings out. Horrified and astonished by this great effect whose reason they do not know, they raise their eyes and pay attention to the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human spirit is led to attribute its own nature to the effect, and since the nature of these beings was that of men who were only the robust forces of body and who expressed their violent passions by screaming and roaring, they imagined that the sky was a big animate body, which, under this aspect, they named Jupiter and who wished to tell them something through the whistling of the lightning bolts and the noise of the thunder. (Ibid., § 377) According to Vico, in effect, Jupiter was first named lous by the Latins, after the noise of thunder, and Zεύς by the Greeks, after the whistling of lightning (ibid., § 447). And he clarifies: The first men, who spoke by signs, believed according to their nature that lightning bolts and thunderclaps were signs made by Jupiter (this is why “divine will” was called numen, from nuo, “to indicate with the head”), that Jupiter gave commands by signs, and that these signs were real words [that is, having the character of “things”], and that nature was the tongue of Jupiter. (Ibid., § 379) Thus was imagined “the first divine fable, the greatest of all that were imagined later, that of Jupiter, king and god of men and gods, casting a lightning bolt: a fable that was so popular, so troubling, and so instructive that even those who invented it believed it, and with dreadful religious practices feared him, revered him, and honored him” (ibid., § 379). The effects of this initial fear are religion, family, property, the law, cities (first aristocratic, then popular, finally monarchical), until such time as “fully developed reason” should rule. Having reached this point, however, nations risk losing the “poetic” force, which Vico also calls “heroic,” and which allowed the birth of the civil world. Cynicism, skepticism, materialism, and atheism thus led to the dissolution of social bonds and to “barbarity of thought.” Thus begins a new corso, a ricorso, which will run through the same stages whose succession constitutes the “eternal ideal history” (see CORSO). Alain Pons REFS.: Vico, Giambattista. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944. . The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. . On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language: Including the Disputation with Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia. Translated by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. . On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated and edited by Elio Gianturco, with a translation of “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” translated by D. P. Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. . Opere, 2 vols. Edited by A. Battistini. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. . Vico: Selected Writings. Edited by L. Pompa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (continued) DICHTUNG 219 REFS.: Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Vol. 2: 1828–1832. Leipzig: Barsdorf, 1895. Translation by J. Oxenford: Conversations of Goethe. Edited by J. K. Moorhead. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Hamburger, Käthe. Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957. Translation by M. J. Rose: The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. . “Das Wort ‘Dichtung.’” In Literatur und Dichtung. Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung. Edited by H. Rüdiger, 33–46. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973. nonetheless worth recalling that it is not to be understood solely within the bounds of that philosophy. The word brings with it a semantic history—of which Heidegger is highly conscious—beginning with Herder in the eighteenth century and still resonating with nationalist sentiments about the genius of the German language expressed in the nineteenth century. Élisabeth Décultot 2 Heidegger’s Dichtung: Poetry and thought The term Dichtung begins to stand out beginning with § 34 of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), in a way that is still discreet, but whose importance should not, according to Hermann (“Poétiser et penser . . .,” 2000, p. 78), be overlooked: Die Mitteilung der existenzialen Möglichkeiten der Befindlichkeit, das heißt das Erschließen von Existenz, kann eigenes Ziel der “dichtenden” Rede sein. (Sein und Zeit) La communication des possibilités existentiales de l’affection, autrement dit l’ouvrir de l’existence, peut devenir le but autonome du parler “poétique.” (The communication of the existential possibilities of affection, in other words the opening of existing, can become the autonomous goal of “poetic” language.) (Être et Temps) La communication des possibilités existentiales de la disposibilité, c’est-à-dire la découverte de l’existence, peut être la fin que se fixe la parole qui “parle en poème.” (The communication of the existential possibilities of arrangeability, that is the discovery of existence, may be the end that is set for itself by the word that “speaks in poems.”) (Fr. trans. F. Vezin) The quotation marks surrounding the term dichtend (poetic, speaking in poetry) are at least the formal indication of a completely new way of approaching poetry, such that it is no longer subordinate to but coordinate with thought: poem and noema. Such a gesture supposes a return to the revelatory character of Dichtung and a distinction between Dichtung in the strict sense (“poetry”) and in a wider sense. The return to the revelatory character of Dichtung can be accomplished, but in fact it is rather rarely the case, in light of the etymology of the term, which suggests a distinction into four stages, as the following text shows: “Dichten”—was meint das Wort eigentlich? Es kommt von ahd. tithôn, und das hängt zusammen mit dem lateinischen dictare, welches eine verstärkte Form von dicere = sagen ist. Dictare: etwas wiederholt sagen, vorsagen, “diktieren,” etwas sprachlich aufsetzen, abfassen, sei es einen Aufsatz, einen Bericht, eine Abhandlung, eine Klage—oder Bittschrift, ein Lied oder was immer. All das heißt “dichten”, sprachlich abfassen. Erst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert ist das Wort “dichten” eingeschränkt auf die Abfassung sprachlicher Gebilde, die wir “poetische” nennen und seitdem “Dichtungen.” Zunächst hat das Dichten zu dem “Poetischen” keinen ausgezeichneten Bezug. Trotzdem können wir uns einen Fingerzeig zunutze machen, der in der ursprünglichen Wortbedeutung von tithôn—dicere liegt. Dieses Wort ist stammesgleich mit dem griechischen deiknumi. Das heißt zeigen, etwas sichtbar, etwas offenbar machen, und zwar nicht überhaupt, sondern auf dem Wege eines eigenen Weisens. (Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen) Dichten—what does that word actually mean? It comes from the Old High German tithôn and is related to the Latin dictare, which is an intensified form of dicere = to say. Dictare: to say something repeatedly, to say out loud, to “dictate,” to set something out in speech, to compose, whether it is an essay, a report, a treatise, a complaint—or a request, a song, or whatever. All of this is called dichten, to express linguistically. It is only in the seventeenth century that dichten was restricted to the composition of pictures in language, which we call “poetic,” and since then Dichtungen (poems). Originally dichten had no privileged relation to the “Poetic.” Nevertheless, we can make use of a quick indication contained in the original meaning of the word tithôn. This word has the same root as the Greek deiknumi. This means: to show, to reveal, to make visible or manifest, and not as a general revelation but as an indication leading up a specific path. (Ibid.) Whence the necessity of distinguishing wide and strict senses of Dichtung. In the strict sense, which thus corresponds to its modern meaning dating from the seventeenth century, Dichtung is equivalent to Poesie (poetry), that is, one art among others, which Heidegger calls “a mode among others of the project of clarifying the truth” (Pathmarks). In the wide sense Dichtung is this very “project of clarifying the truth” in all its fullness—what Heidegger also calls Dichten, to poetize (ibid.): poetry comes from the Poem, as do architecture, sculpture, or music. Every work of art is thus a Poem, insofar as it is rooted in the deployment or the domain of the word, which is only Urpoesie (primordial poetry), in its turn by virtue of being a Poem (ibid., 84). Pascal David REFS.: Froment-Meurice, Marc. That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics. Translated by J. Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Étre et Temps. Translated by E. Martineau. Authentica, 1985. . Étre et Temps. Translated by F. Vezin. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1986. . Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. . Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Translation by J. Young and K. Haynes: Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. . Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Neimeyer, 1976. Hermann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von. Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Warminski, Andrzej. “Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin.” Yale French Studies, no. 77, Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions, 1990. 220 DICTUM of diction-dicibile-res, and the omission of the fourth term, verbum, completely distorts the sense of the original (Metalogicon, 3.5: “Est autem res de quo aliquid, dicibile quod de aliquo, dictio quo dicitur hoc de illo”). II. Abelard and Dictum Whereas Abelard gives dictum a technical sense in the exposition of his theory of propositions, as we will see, the term enuntiabile becomes generalized a bit later, both in logic and in theology. An author from the end of the twelfth century considers it a novelty in his time: In reading and rereading Aristotle and Boethius, I have not found a single passage in which it is written that the true and the false were “statable,” or inversely, and Aristotle has always taken “statable” for “predicable,” saying “statable of something”, i.e., “predicable of something,” and “to be stated” for “to be predicated,” from which it follows that the proposition is the statement of something about something [Aristotle, De interpretatione, 5.17a 25–27, translatio Boethii, Aristoteles latinus II, 1–2]. Later, both terms were perceived as equivalent (cf. Ars Burana). They have distinct histories, however, which are divided into two periods in which different problems are discussed. We should note, first of all, that the discussions of dictum or enuntiabile are related to the existence in Latin of infinitive clauses. “Socrates currit” says that Socrates runs; the infinitive “Socratem currere” (or the completitive “quod Socrates currit”) is the name (appellatio) of what the proposition (dictum) says. The statable is “called” by the “appellatio dicti” (“hominem esse animal”) (just as the individual Socrates is called by the proper name Socrates), and “signified” by the proposition (“homo est animal”). One may speak of modality de dicto, when the modality bears on the dictum, in contrast with modality de re: “Socrates currit est possibile” according to the de dicto interpretation signifies “(that Socrates runs) is possible”; or the de re interpretation, “Socrates can run.” A single phrase may naturally be capable of different truth values depending on the interpretation given to its modality. Thus, to take a Sophistic example, “possibile est stantem sedere” is false de dicto: it is impossible for the proposition “he who is standing is sitting” to be true; on the other hand, the same proposition is true de re: the “thing” that is standing can certainly sit. Classical Latin tended to prefer infinitive clauses, with the subject in the accusative, for the de dicto interpretation—“Dicitur Homerum caecum fuisse”—and the attribute in the nominative, constructed with the infinitive, for the de re interpretation: “Homerus dicitur caecus fuisse.” In medieval Latin, logicians considered the first example to be capable of two interpretations. There are various possibilities for translating the infinitive clause: one may use the complement clause (“it is possible that Socrates runs”), but then we lose the distinction with the Latin complement phrase as well as its status as a nominal phrase, or a gerundive phrase (“Socrates-running is possible”). The introduction in the beginning of the twelfth century of the notion of dictum is motivated by logico-grammatical questions. Abelard is inquiring as to the nature of the declarative proposition, to demonstrate that what characterizes Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language and History. Edited by M. Bunge. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. . Sämtliche Werke. 33 vols. Edited by B. Suphan. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913. . Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Edited and translated by G. Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Rüdiger, Horst, ed. Literatur und Dichtung: Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1973. Schlegel, Friedrich. Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie. In Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 1. 35 vols. Edited by E. Behler. Paderbon: Schöningh, 1958–. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schöen Künste. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 1771–74. DICTUM / ENUNTIABILE (LATIN) ENGLISH stateable FRENCH dictum, dit, énoncé; énonçable; exprimable GREEK lekton [λεϰτόν] v. PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SACHVERHALT, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/ SIGNIFIED, TRUTH, WORD The terms dictum and enuntiabile are used, beginning in the twelfth century, to indicate of a proposition “what it says” or “what it may state.” This begins with a series of questions that are not only semantic in nature (do propositions have a signification, like words, and if so, of what nature—real or in the world or in the mind), but also logical (the problem of truth-bearers), and ontological (the problem of what makes a proposition true). Further, a host of different questions of a theological nature arise as well; when we inquire as to the nature of divine knowledge, which is necessarily eternal (if God knows eternally that P, what is P?) I. Lekton and Dictum Seneca uses the terms effatum, enuntiativum, enuntiatum in a passage from letter 117 (117.13; RT: Die Fragmente zur Dialektik der Stoiker 892), to characterize what is in fact only a subgroup of lekta, (a) those that are complete, and (b) those that are capable of being true or false, that is, assertions or axiômata (see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, PROPOSITION). The term dicibile, as used by Augustine in the De dialectica, cannot be considered a translation of lekton for two reasons: first, Augustine focuses his discussion on the basic unit, the word, dictio, whence the use of a term formed from the same verb dicere, that is, dicibile, whereas the Stoic lekton is not necessarily simple. Second, the lekton is more often than not a thought insofar as it is expressed by words. Augustine, however, defines the dicibile as something that exists in thought before being expressed (ante vocem), that can be expressed, and that is created in the mind of the hearer by the sign (see WORD, Box 3). Dicibile seems rather to translate the Greek ekphorikon [ἐϰφοϱιϰόν], as used by the Stoics (see Nuchelmans, Theories of the Proposition). The claims of equivalence between lekton and dictio or dictum are isolated and derive from Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, 2.22.2: “nam lekton dictio dicitur”), followed by Alcuin, who explains that dialectic deals with dicta, then in the twelfth century, by Jean of Salisbury in the Metalogicon (2.4: “lekton greco eloqui [sicut ait Isidorus] dictum appellatur”). The latter only appeals to Augustine’s De dialectica in order to align the Boethian triad of vox-intellectus-res with a supposedly Augustinian triad DICTUM 221 (cf. “If someone says, for example, Socrates will eat or will die tomorrow, he posits an indeterminate event which the nature of things can in no way make certain for us [indeterminatum eventum proponit de quo scilicet nulla natura rei cujusquam nos certificare potest]; “eventus proprie dicimus dicta propositionum”), and it is in this sense that the dictum is “nothing at all.” Even if the terms dictum and enuntiabile are sometimes seen as equivalents, it is often noted that the second has a nuance of potentiality that the first lacks (whence its translation as “stateable,” correlative with “statement” for enuntiatio, in Lewis, “William of Auvergne’s account of the enuntiabile”): “The stateables, according to the Ars Meliduna (ca. 1170) are what propositions signify; they are thus called in virtue of the fact that they are stated or apt to be stated.” The anonymous author can thus claim that the enuntiabile remains true even if it is not stated, even if there were no longer any expression for stating it, since it would still be possible to “impose” a new vox in order to state it: “the stateable, in effect, is not so-called according to the act, but according to aptitude (non ab actu, sed ab aptitudine).” Thus, whereas Abelard’s dictum resembled a conception of the proposition as an “act” or “statement,” the enuntiabile is better placed alongside the objectified and independently existing propositions of the Fregean tradition. That said, the nature of the enuntiabile varies greatly from theory to theory, but these differences are related to a problem that is not strictly logical. III. The Question of Divine Knowledge The theological implications of the notion of dictum become apparent when we inquire, as Robert de Melun does, as to the eternal nature of dicta: if dicta exist for all eternity, this implies that something other than God himself is eternal. That unfortunate implication was the object of lively debate until the end of the fifteenth century, in the wake of the Parisian condemnations of 1241, when William of Auvergne declared that it was forbidden to teach “quod multae sunt vertates ab aeterno quae non sunt Deus” (that there are a large number of eternal truths distinct from God). In the twelfth century, the notions of dictum and enuntiabile were used more specifically to discuss the problems related to the immutability of divine knowledge, power, and will. Although he does not use the notion of dictum developed in his logic textbooks, Abelard is the first to introduce a thesis often considered characteristic of nominalism, called semel/semper: what God knows once, he knows forever, since “what is true once, is true forever [quidquid semel est verum, semper est verum].” The term dictum designates the object of knowledge among his contemporary theologians, who are also divided as to the nature of the dictum or enuntiabile, its truth, and its changeless character. The Nominales think that stateables are the objects of divine knowledge, that, once true, they are always true, and are thus independent of time. A single stateable-type (e.g., “Christ is born”) uttered at t1 (before the birth of Christ), t2 (at the moment of Christ’s birth), t3 (after Christ’s birth), corresponds to three different stateables (a given stateable associates Christ and his birth at a given time, and so if it is true at a given moment, it will always be true). A single stateable (“Christ is born”) is expressed at different moments in time by three statements, at t1 by “Christ will be born,” at t2 it cannot be its meaning: in effect, “Socrates currit” means the same thing as “Socratem currere” or “Socratem currens,” and we find in each the expression of the inherence of a quality in a subject. All of these expressions involve “complex intellections,” though this point was not unanimously agreed upon at the time. What characterizes the first is that it says (dicit) or “proposes” (proponit) something, that something is the case (“state” in English is a good approximation; see PROPOSITION). These expressions mean the same thing, have the same intellection (intellectus), but only the first has a modus enuntiandi or modus proponendi. A proposition thus signifies a complex intellection, composed of the intellections of its categorematic parts, but beyond this, “says” or “poses” its dictum. For Abelard, the statement of a declarative sentence (such as “Socrates est albus”) corresponds, in effect, to a threefold action of the intellect, consisting in focusing one’s attention on something (Socrates), on a quality (the individual whiteness), and associating the two objects by a further act. For this reason, Abelard maintains that the dictum is “not absolutely anything,” that it is “not a thing”: in effect, if a proposition (understood here as a significant sequence) speaks of things (“agit de rebus”) and not intellections of words, what it says is not a thing, but rather corresponds to the way in which the intellect puts things in relation to one another, or in which it posits their existence. Only as a subsequent step, by confronting what the proposition says with the state of things (“eventus rerum” or rei, “esse rei,” “status rerum” or rei, “natura rerum”; cf. “natura rerum ex qua veritatem vel falsitatem [propositiones] contrahunt [the nature of things from which propositions take their truth or falsity]; Glossae super Peri hermeneias), may the dictum be declared true or false (“Et est profecto ita in re, sicut dicit vera propositio, sed non est res aliqua quod dicit [It is indeed thus with things [or with reality] as the true proposition says, but what the proposition says is not a thing]”; Dialectica). The dictum is thus not the state of things, that is, the truth-maker, but the truth-bearer, which can receive the predicates “true” and “false.” It is not itself a “something” since the intellect may liberally “posit” relations between things, or, in other terms, put forward a hypothesis about things, whether things are as it says or not. I may just as easily say “Socrates est homo” (Socrates is a man) as “Socrates est lignum” (Socrates is wooden): each of these propositions says something—has a dictum—and the “existence of things” said by the proposition are no more a part of reality in the first case than in the second. The proposition is true when what it posits corresponds to what is (“Omnis enim propositio vera dicitur, qui ita est in re, ut proponit”; Glossae super Peri hermeneias). The expression eventus rerum contains a remarkable ambiguity, in fact, as Abelard explains in a discussion of future contingents (Glossae super Peri hermeneias). In one sense, it relates to reality as it exists, to the things as they come about (“res ipsas quae eveniunt”), independently of the way in which they are conceived or spoken of, to the objective “event” (in the sense of what “happens” or “occurs”; evenit), which makes the proposition true or false (“veritas propositionum ex eventu rerum pendet”). In another sense, the expression relates to reality as we speak of it (“id totum quod propositio dicit”) and which in that sense has no reality other than that of being said: it is the event as it is posited by the proposition or eventus propositionis 222 DICTUM truth of any sort (contingent or necessary). But the claim can only be fully understood by noting that Gregory’s goal is not, contrary to what is often said, to build a nominalist theory of the proposition (or, a fortiori, a “realist” one), but only to explicate the notion of notitia judiciaria (judicial knowledge) of God. The difference between “things” and Sachverhalte may be confirmed in Gregory’s thought only insofar as it is fundamentally related to the problem of divine knowledge. That being the case, two incompatible semantic theories confront one another over the “signifiable,” whose “offspring” are still observable at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. One, standard “reductionist” nominalism, distinguishes truth-maker, the individual thing signified by the subject term, and truth-bearer, the token proposition; the other, that of Gregory of Rimini, ultimately identifies truth-maker and truth-bearer in the form of the “complexly signifiable,” called “true” or “false” by an “intrinsic denomination” on the basis of the uncreated Truth. Take, for example, Mark 14:40: “Verily I say unto thee, That this day, [even] in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.” Was the corresponding stateable, that is, “Petrum esse paccaturum in A” (that-Peter-would-sin-at-time A) true for all eternity? Gregory sets aside the hypothesis according to which the “created statement,” the oral proposition reported in Mark 14:30, would have been true for all eternity: since it did not exist for all eternity, it could not have been true for all eternity. As for the stateable that the proposition states, he distinguishes “being for all eternity” from “being true for all eternity.” If the proposition of “created statement” had existed for all eternity (which is not the case), it would be true for all eternity, but contingently so. The complexely signifiable “Petrum esse peccaturum in A” was, on the other hand, true for all eternity, but it was neither eternal nor everlasting. The importance and the meaning of the thesis affirming the non-existence of the significabile complexe here clearly appear. The complexly signifiable “is nothing”: it is not and never was an “entity by itself.” It cannot therefore be or have been for all eternity. On the other hand, the “signified complex” of Mark 14:30 was true for all eternity, not necessarily, but contingently, “by an extrinsic denomination coming from the uncreated Truth and from the eternal judgment of God judging that ‘Peter-would-sin-at-time A.’ ” The expression “extrinsic denomination” derives from a widely used medieval distinction between two types of denomination, that is, paronymic attribution (see PARONYM): (a) formal denomination in which what gives the name is in what is named “as in a subject”—this is the case with the whiteness that denominates x in “x is white,” and (b) causal denomination, in which what gives the name is in the agent or efficient cause, not in the patient—this is the case with the thought or intellection that the thinking mind has of it in “x is [a] thought” or “x is thought.” The thought is “as in a subject” with respect to the thinking mind, not what is thought. This second type of denomination is what Gregory calls “extrinsic denomination.” The truth of the stateable relative to Peter’s sin is thus in the first instance, and causally speaking, in God, who makes the judgment—in his judgment or act of judging; it is only an attribute of the stateable in an external, “paronymic” way. It by “Christ is born,” and at t3 by “Christ has been born.” On the other hand, the Reales think that the objects of divine knowledge are the res, and that the stateables vary in their truth conditions. Subsequently, the analysis of propositions expressing divine knowledge (e.g., “Deus praescivit Antichristum esse”) is expanded to include propositions containing a belief-verb, and thus return to the domain of logic. There are multiple opinions as to the nature of an enuntiabile: several are mentioned by the Ars Meliduna (see De Rijk, Logica modernorum; Iwakuma, “Enuntiabilia”). The differences turn on (a) the simplicity or complexity of their nature, (b) the nature of what is composite: terms (mental, spoken, or written), or the things signified by these terms; (c) their eternal or temporally bound character; (d) their mode of existence: some posit that they do not exist (cf. Abelard), others that they do; for the latter, they are therefore things (res), but some consider them to be substances, others accidents, and still others consider them “extracategorial” (extrapredicamentale) entities, enjoying their own distinct mode of existence, as universals do. While there is no clear path from the Stoic lekton to the medieval dictum or enuntiabile, the doctrinal relations between these notions are not evident either. We may note, however, that when Seneca associates the lekton with quod nunc loquor (what I say now), he is close to Abelardian formulations of dictum as “what the proposition says.” There is nothing mental about Abelard’s dictum, however: it is precisely by explaining that the predicates “true” and “false” cannot apply to either words or intellections that he is able to show that they apply to dicta. These dicta are more on the side of things, even if they are not existent things: just as names have a signification in thought (a simple intellection) and a signification in things, propositions have a signification in thought (a complex intellection) and a dictum. As for subsequent theories, we have seen that at the ontological level, the dictum or enuntiabile may be of different natures, real or mental, depending on the theory. IV. The “Complexly Signifiable” In the fourthteenth century, dictum and enuntiabile are replaced by the notion of the “complexly signifiable,” significabile complexe (Gregory of Rimini) or “signifiable by complex,” significabile per complexum (Adam Wodeham), that is, what is signifiable only by a linguistic complexum (an infinitive clause, or what English-speaking logicians call a “that-clause,” in German, Daß-Satz). Since Hubert Élie, the “complexly signifiable” has been considered a medieval formulation of the notion of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt), interpreted more or less in a realist sense, making it related to Meinong’s Objektiv (see SACHVERHALT). That is how its medieval adversaries understood it; using the support of the condemnation of 1241, they accused those who accepted the significabile complexe of maintaining that mundum fore ([the fact] that the world would exist) and Deum esse ([the fact] that God exists) have been throughout eternity, “without being God.” This interpretation does not take account of all aspects of the theory, however. Gregory of Rimini affirms, as Abelard sometimes does, that the significabile complexe is “nothing”—that it does not exist. This claim suggests that the “signifiable by complex” cannot be something in the world that would make true a DISCOURSE 223 Marty, Anton. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Vol. 1. Halle: Niemeyer, 1908. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1973. . Late-scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1980. Rosier-Catach, Irène. “Abelard and the Meaning of Propositions.” In Signification in Language and Culture, edited by H. S. Gill, 23–48. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002. Smith, Barry. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago: Open Court, 1994. is insofar as it is judged by the primary Truth that the stateable is called “true” and hence also “true for all eternity.” The structure of “extrinsic denomination” expresses a central thesis of Gregory’s ontology: the alethic modality “true” is an attribute of the Judge and his eternal act of judging, not of the object of judgment or its content, which are all called true by causal denomination (Gregory of Rimini, Lectura, I, d. 38, q. 2). In other words: a stateable is called “true” paronymically by extrinsic denomination on the basis of the primary uncreated Truth and its eternal judgment, and, in turn, this stateable, which is not itself an “entity,” is what verifies our own judgment, our own propositions. There are thus two stages of correspondence, or “rightness,” for a true stateable according to Gregory: a stateable is true insofar as it corresponds to the act of divine judgment, and it is that to which thought makes itself correspond (“consents,” “acquiesces,” or “assents”) when it judges—what makes judgment and proposition true. The second correspondence brings the Gregorian theory close to the phenomenological theory popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century by Anton Marty, who redefines truth (see TRUTH)—in Latin—as “adaequatio cogitantis et cogitatum” (correspondence of the thinker with the content of thought), instead of “adaequatio rei et intellectus” (correspondence between the thing and the intellect). The “complexly signifiable” is, as we can see, an important element in the genealogy of the theory of Sachverhalte. Alain de Libera Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Abelard, Peter. Glossae super Peri hermeneias. Edited by Bernhard Geyer. Munster: Aschendorff, 1927. Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. “Theories of the Proposition: Some Early Sixteenth Century Discussions.” In Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics. London: Variorum Reprints, 1985. De Rijk, L. M. “La signification de la proposition (dictum propositionis) chez Abelard.” Studia Mediewistyczne 16 (1975): 155–61. . Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. 2 vols. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962–67. Élie, Hubert. Le signifiable par complexe. La proposition et son objet: Grégoire de Rimini, Meinong, Russell. Paris: Vrin, 2000. First published in 1936. Gregory of Rimini. Lectura. Vol. 3 in Spätmittelalter und Reformation Texte und Untersuchungen. Edited by D. Trapp and V. Marcolino. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1978–87. Iwakuma, Yukio. “Enuntiabilia in Twelfth-century Logic and Theology.” In Vestigia, imagines, verba, edited by C. Marmo, 20–35. Brepols, 1997. Jacobi, Klaus, Christian Strub, and Peter King. “From intellectus verus/falsus to the dictum propositionis: The Semantics of Peter Abelard and His Circle.” Vivarium 34, no. 1 (1996): 15–40. Jolivet, Jean. Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard. 2nd ed. Études de philosophie médiévale, 57. Paris: Vrin, 1982. Kneepkens, Cornelius H. “Please don’t call me Peter: I am an enuntiable, not a thing. A note on the enuntiable and the proper noun.” In Vestigia, imagines, verba, edited by C. Marmo, 82–98. Brepols, 1997. Lewis, Neil. “William of Auvergne’s Account of the enuntiable: Its Relations to Nominalism and the Doctrine of the Eternal Truths.” Vivarium 33 (1995): 113–36. Libera, Alain de. “Abélard et le dictisme.” In Abélard. Le “Dialogue.” La philosophie de la logique, Cahiers de la revue de théologie et philosophie 6 (1986): 59–97. . La référence vide. Théories de la proposition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Maierù, Alfonso. Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica. Rome: Edizione dell’Ateneo, 1972. Marenbon, John. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. DISCOURSE “Discourse” is a transposition of discursus, from the Latin discurrere (to run here and there, run through in all directions). Discursus acquires the sense of “conversation, dialogue” rather late, following a metaphor that highlights the hazardous nature of verbal exchange (RT: Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française). Philosophers, however, focus on the order and method with which propositions and thoughts succeed one another: “discursiveness” implies entailment and correct reasoning, and practically becomes a synonym for “rationality.” It is thus that “discourse” is one of the received translations for the Greek logos [λόγоϛ], which is just as well translated by “reason,” although logos refers as well to each of the elements that compose language: see LOGOS. I. Discursiveness, Rationality, and Humanity Discursiveness, as a faculty and exercise of language and reason, is conceived (explicitly by Aristotle) as peculiar to man: see, besides LOGOS (under which, notably, the Hebrew dāḇār [רָבָ ּד [and the German Sprache, Rede, are also discussed), CONSCIOUSNESS, DIALECTIC, DICHTUNG, HOMONYM, II.B, HUMANITY, REASON [CONCEPTUS, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING], TRUTH; cf. BILDUNG, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, PLASTICITY, SUBJECT. II. Discourse, Language, and Languages 1. On the relation between discourse and multiple languages, see EUROPE, TO TRANSLATE. 2. On the possible divisions (or lack thereof) among what the French language refers to, after Saussure, as langue, langage, and parole, see LANGUAGE. 3. On the relationship between discursiveness and linguistic performance, see SPEECH ACT; cf. ÉNONCÉ, PERFORMANCE, PRAXIS, VOICE. III. Discourse, Internal and External 1. On the parts of discourse, see PROPOSITION, TERM, VERB, WORD; cf. PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SUPPOSITION, UNIVERSALS. 2. On the kinds of discourse, see GENRE, I/ME/MYSELF [ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY]. 3. On the relationship between discourse and external reality, see NONSENSE, OBJECT, REALITY, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, THING, TRUTH, as well as PRAVDA, ISTINA; see the following more specifically for its logical content: MATTER OF FACT, PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT, 224 DISEGNO evokes a necessary relation between the drawing and the thought. The loss of a letter thus does not simply lead to a loss of meaning. Rather, it corresponds to a genuine semantic mutation that implies a completely different conception of drawing than that which the French took over from the Italians. Since dessein became dessin, French no longer has an equivalent to disegno. Several words are henceforth required to say in French what a single word, faithful to its Italian roots, said in the seventeenth century through several meanings. This is why the modernization of spelling in the publication of French texts on the art of the seventeenth century actually leads to serious confusions of meaning. The same is true for English and German, which borrow from different lexica in order to say either drawing or intention. English thus distinguishes “drawing,” in the sense of an outline, from “design,” which corresponds to the French dessein and thus retains a part of the semantic field that the Italian disegno covered. In fact, it was starting with the Italian word that Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, constructed the concept of design, which he is the first to have introduced into English (Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design, 1812). Faithful to the double meaning of the Italian and French words, Shaftesbury constantly plays on the senses of “design” as the unity of a project and as a drawing. In this sense, “design” is a pure translation of disegno and dessein. As in French, however, the two meanings come apart very quickly in English, and the separation arises from the same transformations in the theory of art. The double meaning of conception and execution nevertheless reappears in the modern and worldwide usage of “design” today, as referring in all languages to a certain kind of industrial art coming out of the Bauhaus tradition. In German, Zeichnung (drawing) is not related to the terms for intention or intellectual projects either, terms such as Abzicht or Entwurf. Like disegno, which comes from signum, Zeichnen derives from Zeichen, which means sign. It can mean a plan or project, but only in a material sense (for example, an architectural plan), not in a purely speculative sense like disegno and dessein. The fact that Zeichnen is derived from Zeichen (sign), that it is related to bezeichen (designate), indeed to zeigen (to show), may justify the strongly logocentric presuppositions of some contemporary research on the nature of pictorial images. Thus, Walter Benjamin, in a text entitled “Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal,” builds his definition of painting using Zeichen as the source from which Zeichnen is a sort of derivative product, akin to a stain or spatter (das Mal). This means that all figurability would in the end be predetermined by a Zeichen, that is, an act of naming (Benennung or Benennbarkeit), such that the end of all figuration would be referred implicitly and necessarily to the word as such (Ästhetische Fragmente, in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:603f.). The lexical distinctions that exist in English and German thus make a mockery of any attempt to translate disegno in the sense intended by the Renaissance writers. Conscious of this difficulty, historians and art theorists tend more and more to keep the Italian word without attempting to translate it into their own language, and speak of Raphael’s disegno or Vasari’s definition of disegno. REPRÉSENTATION, STATE OF AFFAIRS. See also DECEPTION, DOXA, and FALSE. 4. On the relation between discursiveness and invention, at the intersection of the ontological relationship with things in the world and the literary relationship with genres of discourse, see especially, besides DICHTUNG and GENRE, I, CONCETTO, FICTION, IMAGINATION, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, WITTICISM. SIGNATUM, DISEGNO (ITALIAN) ENGLISH design, drawing FRENCH dessein, dessin GERMAN Zeichnung LATIN designo v. DESSEIN, DESSIN, and ART, BAROQUE, CONCETTO, IDEA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, INTENTION, SIGN Disegno is one of the major concepts of the Renaissance theory of art. It means both design and project, outline and intention, idea in the speculative sense as well as in the sense of invention. It thus refers to a thoroughly intellectual activity. The French word dessein, as used by theorists of art in the seventeenth century, is an adequate translation of the Italian meaning of disegno as used in the preceding century, and preserves its double meaning, but the distinction between dessin and dessein (design and drawing), which comes into use around the 1750s, yields a fundamental break with the Italian tradition. In the eighteenth century, Racine may still write, “le dessein en est pris, je pars cher Théramène” (the plan is made, I am leaving, dear Theramenes), but from that time on at the Académie Royale of Painting and Sculpture, the arts of “dessin” were taught, but not of “dessein.” The two semantic fields that were unified in disegno are separated from then on in French, as in English and German. I. From Disegno to Dessein and Dessin, to “Design,” to Zeichnen In the seventeenth century, what the French now call dessin, that is, the part of painting that is distinct from color, was always written dessein, sometimes even desseing. It is derived from the Italian disegno, and it kept all the richness of the Italian word. Antoine Furetière defines it thus in his RT: Dictionnaire universel: “Project, enterprise, intention. Also, the thought one has in the imagination of order, of the distribution and construction of a painting, a poem, a book, a building. Also said in painting of images or paintings that are without color.” There is no homonymy here, however. When used about painting, dessein means something more but not something different. Though it has a specialized usage, it continues to signify the project or intention. The word expresses here in the most explicit way what the thing is for the artist, an art theorist, or an expert on the seventeenth century. It implies a certain way of thinking about drawing, as the realization of a design—that is, an intellectual project. The word dessin, which would be substituted for it a century later has a much narrower meaning, restricted to the last sense given by Furetière. It no longer DISEGNO 225 As, therefore, in mere bodily shape and figure there is a kind of perfection, to whose ideal appearance every production which falls under the notice of the eye is referred by imitation; so the semblance of what is perfect in Oratory may become visible to the mind, and the ear may labour to catch a likeness. These primary forms of thing are by Plato (the father of science and good language) called Ideas. (trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, De oratore [On the orator]) Giovanni Pietro Bellori, indeed, defines “idea” in the following way, just before citing the same passage from Cicero: “The idea of the painter or the sculptor is this perfect and excellent model in the mind which things before our eyes resemble, since they imitate the imagined form” (Idea del Pittore et scultore é quel perfetto ed eccellente esempio della mente, all cui immaginata forma imitando si rassomigliano le cose, che dadono sotto la vista) (trans. A. Sedgwick, “Idea of the Painter,” in The Lives of the Modern Painters). Disegno is not just “idea,” however; it is also, as Vasari says, the perceptible expression of the idea. The difficulty we may have in grasping the problem of disegno in its full complexity derives from the fact that it is both a pure act of thought as well as its visible result, in which the physical work of the artist participates as well. As the act of the painter’s mind, disegno corresponds to invention, in the rhetorical sense of the term—that is, to the choice of subject. As the action of the painter’s hand, it presupposes a technical skill. “Disegno,” writes Vasari, “when it has extracted the invention of something from thought, requires the hand, practiced through years of study, to be able to render exactly what nature has created, with the pen or the point, the pencil, the stone, or any other means” (The Lives of the Artists). Material disegno, which we call drawing, is thus always the realization of a mental disegno. This is why disegno is, according to its theoreticians, superior to color. Unlike drawing, they say, whose quality demonstrates not only the skill of the painter but also the beauty of the idea that animates and directs the hand, color owes its luster entirely to the materials that compose it. Several decades later, Federico Zuccaro systematizes his theory of disegno by distinguishing disegno interno from disegno esterno: Per questo nome di disegno interno io non intendo solamente il concetto interno formato nella mente del pittore, ma anco quel concetto che forma qual si voglia intelletto. (By the word disegno interno I mean not only the internal concept formed in the mind of the painter, but also the concept which any intellect forms.) (Zuccaro, Idea de’pittori, in P. Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 2065; Eng. trans. based on Fr. trans. by C. Alunni in La Peinture, ed. J. Lichtenstein, 147) The definition of disegno interno thus extends well beyond the domain of art: “e il concetto e l’idea che per conoscere et operare forma chi sia” (the concept or the idea formed by anyone in order to know and to work) (ibid.). Zuccaro, II. Disegno in the Renaissance Disegno certainly has the sense of “drawing” in the Renaissance, as in Benvenuto Cellini, who distinguishes between several types of disegni, each corresponding to a modo di disegnare (Barocchi, Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno, 8:1929). Like disegnare however, which means both to draw and to formulate a plan, disegno embeds the notion of drawing in a special configuration, made up of a twofold network of meanings that overlap with one another. Disegno is in a way a topical term that refers to the spread of this entanglement. To indicate drawing in the sense of line, outline, or contour, the theorists use other terms, notably circonscrizione, which we find, for example, in Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (It., Della Pittura; Eng., On Painting). In the first version of the treatise, published in Latin, Alberti writes, “Nam est circumscriptio aliud nihil quam fimbriarum notatio” (Circumscription is nothing other than the notation of contours) (trans. C. Grayson, De pictura / On Painting). When he adapts his text into the vernacular a short time later, Alberti translates notatio as disegnamento—“la circonscrizione é non altro che disegnamento dell’orio”—which goes into English as “Circumscription is nothing but the drawing of the outline” (trans. J. R. Spencer, Della Pittura Della Pittura / On Painting, 68). Disegno is thus not circonscrizione, nor linea, nor orlo, even if it implies all of these. It is not drawing. Disegno brings drawing into a completely different semantic field from that to which its properly physical characteristics belong. It means drawing as an expression of a mental representation, of a form present to the mind or imagination of the artist. Giorgio Vasari defines it thus: This is like the form (forma) or idea (idea) of all the objects of nature, always original in its proportions. Whether it is a matter of the human body or those of animals, plants or buildings, sculpture or painting, one grasps the relation of the whole to its parts, the parts amongst each other and with the whole. From this grasping (cognizione) a concept (concetto) is formed, a reason (giudizio) engendered in the mind (mente) by the object, the manual expression of which is called drawing (disegno). The latter is thus the perceptible expression, the explicit formulation of a notion internal to the mind or mentally imagined by others and developed as an idea [si pu conchiudere che esso disegno altro non sia che una apparente espressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’animo, e di quello che altri si è nella mente imaginato e fabricato nell’idea]. (trans. L Bondanella and P. Bondanella, The Lives of the Artists) By linking disegno to forma, concetto, and especially to idea, this text illustrates the way in which the Renaissance used the categories inherited from the rhetorical tradition, and, through it, Aristotle’s philosophy, in order to develop a new theory of art. As Panofsky showed, the meaning of “idea” among art theorists results from a transformation of the idea into an ideal, which derives from the passage in Cicero’s De oratore in which he defines the Platonic Idea as a form, an interior model existing prior to and informing its realization: 226 DISEGNO proportion, and imitates all the visible things, going so far as to express the passions. (Lecture of 9 January 1672, in A. Mérot, Les Conférences de l’Académie, 219) It is precisely this distinction that calls the colorist doctrine, as formulated by its exponent, Roger de Piles, into question. Upending a hierarchy that was believed to be solidly established by tradition, the latter in effect reduces drawing to its purely practical dimension. For him, drawing constitutes the “mechanical” part of painting, though he means this word in a very different sense from that given to it in the Middle Ages, and which bears witness to a new way of understanding technique. Drawing comes from training based on the imitation of ancient work, the study of perspective and anatomy, all indispensible knowledge for the acquisition of “accuracy of the eyes and facility of the hand” (Cours de peinture par principes, 194). This part, common to painting and sculpting, is certainly necessary to the work of the painter, but is insufficient to define the particularity of his or her art. Obeying the rules of accuracy of proportion and correction of contours, drawing is no longer the expression of an intellectual design, for Piles, but a manual dexterity that is based on a technical kind of knowledge, in which theory is entirely subordinated to practice. All the characteristics that gave disegno its intellectual and metaphysical, even theological, significance—genius, fire, invention, idea, form—are stripped from drawing and attributed to color. There is thus no longer any reason to use dessein for dessin. With the victory of colorist ideas at the dawn of the eighteenth century, a profound change was thus produced in the theory of art, which its language takes into account several decades later. Jacqueline Lichtenstein REFS.: Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura / Della Pittura. Bilingual Latin/Italian edition. Edited by Cecil Grayson. Rome: Laterza, 1975. De Pictura was first published in 1435, Della Pittura in 1436. Translation by Cecil Grayson: De Pictura /On Painting. Bilingual Latin/English edition. Edited by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin, 1991. Translation by J. R. Spencer: Della Pittura / On Painting. Bilingual Italian/English edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966. Barocchi, Paola, ed. Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. 3 vols. Milan: Ricciardi, 1971–77. . Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings. Edited by B. Dooley. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. “L’Idea del Pittore, della scultore e dell’architetto,” introduction to Le vite de’pittori, scultore e architetti moderni. Rome, 1672. Translation by S. Sedgwick: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Ästhetische Fragmente. In vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Cellini, Benvenuto. Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno. In vol. 2 of P. Barrochi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. Discorso was first published in 1568. Cicero. De oratore [On the orator]. 2 vols. Translated by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. Letter Concerning the Art or Science of Design. In vol. 3 of Characteristicks. London, 1733. Written in 1712. Mérot, Alain. Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVII siècle. Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996. . French Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by C. Beamish. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. in fact, recognizes that he could just as well have used the terms intenzione, essemplare, or idea, but he preferred to leave those to the philosophers and theologians, as he was writing as a painter, addressing artists. Thus, though it comes out of a usage peculiar to the domain of art, the concept of disegno has a theological underpinning according to Zuccaro. It allows for an analogy between artistic creation and divine creation: “To work externally, God necessarily looks at and contemplates the internal disegno in which he knows all the things that he has accomplished, that he is accomplishing and that he will accomplish, or that he could accomplish at a single glance” (ibid.). In forming his internal disegno, the painter thus resembles God. The operation by which he conceives it in his mind is a pure act, a spark of the divine within him, which makes disegno a veritable segno di dio, Zuccaro writes, playing on the word to get the meaning across. As for disegno esterno, “It is nothing other than disegno delimited as to its form and denuded of any material substance: pure line, delimitation, proportion and shape of anything imagined or real” (altro non é che quello che appare circonscritto di forma senza sonstanza di corpo. Simplice lineamento, circonscrizzione, misurazione e figura di qual si voglia cosa imaginata e reale) (in Barocchi, 2084; in Lichtenstein, 150). By defining painting as an arte del disegno, Italian theorists thus do not rest with affirming the superiority of drawing over color. They proclaim the intellectual nature of pictorial activity, which they raise up to the nobility and dignity of a liberal art. It is disegno that makes painting una cosa mentale, to take over Leonardo’s expression. This explains why the concept of disegno often takes on a polemical function, and why it could be used against all pictorial forms that seemed to endanger the newly acquired status of painting as a liberal art, from the “Gothic” manner of drawing to the practices of the colorists. III. From Dessein to Dessin The French adopt more or less the same use of dessein, though they add a slightly more polemical touch. This is, first, in order to defend a certain style of drawing—the grand manner—whose grandeur comes from the fact that it is the expression of a grand design, as Michel Anguier states in the lecture he gave on 2 October 1677, at the Académie Royale of Painting and Sculpture, “Sur le grand goût de dessein”: “Great design [dessein] is a fire that illuminates the understanding, [inspires] the will, strengthens memory, purifies the mind, in order to penetrate the imagination. One would have to be Prometheus to steal the fire from heaven in order to illuminate this beautiful intelligence for us.” A second reason is to respond to Rubenists who, starting in 1670, increased their attacks against the prestige of drawing. Thus, Le Brun praises drawing by adopting Zuccaro’s distinction: One ought to know that there are two sorts of drawing: one which is intellectual or theoretical, the other practical. That the first depends purely on the imagination. That practical drawing is produced by the intellectual and thus depends on the imagination as well as the hand. The latter, by means of the pencil, gives the form and the DOR 227 More generally, for the network of terms that detail the strict relation between agency and passivity, objectivity and subjectivity, with respect to being affected as well as to action, see AGENCY, PATHOS; cf. DRIVE, GEMÜT, LOVE, PLEASURE. The neologism “affordance” picks out in particular the intersection between perception and the possibility of acting; see AFFORDANCE; cf. LEIB, REPRÉSENTATION. v. UTILITY Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Berlin: V. Spiess, 1985. Translation by J. S. Peake: Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. Piles, Roger de. Cours de peinture par principes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. First published in 1709. Translation: The Principles of Painting. London: J. Osborn, 1743. Vasari, Giorgio. La vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. Florence, 1568. Translation by Linda Bondella and Peter Bondanella: The Lives of the Artists. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Zuccaro, Federico. L’Idea de pittori, scultori et architetti. In vol. 2 of P. Barrochi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. L’Idea was first published in 1607 in Turin. DISPOSITION “Disposition,” from the Latin disponere, refers to an arrangement, an organization, in particular in the rhetorical (dispositio/inventio, cf. COMMONPLACE and COMPARISON) and religious (dispositio/dispensatio, see OIKONOMIA) traditions. But a related group of words in French, such as disponible and dispositif, is enjoying a resurgence, notably by way of Gilles Deleuze and his translations of Heidegger. I.“Disposition,” Disponible, Dispositif, “Utility” Disponible is not a technical philosophical term, but rather a translators’ expedient for rendering Heidegger’s distinction between vorhanden and zuhanden (adj.), or Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit (n.). Zuhandenheit is the mode of being of what is manipulable, at hand, or within reach (procheira [πρόχειρα]), while Vorhandenheit is the more neutral or indifferent mode of being of what is present, what is there (for example, books on the shelves of a library), what is subsistent. See VORHANDEN. Similarly, dispositif is a possible translation of Gestell (frame, mount; a shelf, in fact), which for Heidegger characterizes the essence of modern technique. See COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION; cf. DASEIN, ES GIBT, IL Y A. This mode of being intersects with the ways of saying and understanding what a thing is: see RES, Box 1, on the Greek chrêma [χρῆμα], pragma [πρᾶγμα], and cf. GEGENSTAND, OBJECT, REALITY. Finally, English confers a special value on utility, through the neologism “utilitarian” invented by Bentham: see UTILITY, and cf. ECONOMY, FAIR, VALUE. On the arrangement that constitutes a dispositif, especially in the Deleuzian sense, cf. STRUCTURE and FRENCH. II. Subjective Disposition “Disposition” is one of the possible translations of Stimmung, although it lacks the musical resonance emphasized by Heidegger to designate a certain “harmony” of the subject: see STIMMUNG (with the term Befindlichkeit, sometimes translated into French as disposibilité); cf. ANXIETY, DASEIN, GESCHICHTLICH, HEIMAT, MALAISE, SERENITY, SORGE, SUBLIME. On the disposition of the soul, particularly in ethics (diathesis [διάθεσιϛ]), related to one’s habitual way of being (hexis [ἕξιϛ]), see MORALS, I, PHRONÊSIS, VIRTÙ; for Stoic “diathesis” and the relation between physics, ethics, and grammar, see I/ME/MYSELF, Box 1. On the relation to naturalness implied by “disposition,” and its link with aesthetics, see also GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM; cf. GEMÜT. DOMINATION Etymologically, “domination” suggests the power of the master (dominus) over things (dominium, “property rights”), and even more, the power of the master over the slave (potestas dominica); cf. OIKONOMIA and ECONOMY, PROPERTY. “Domination” is, according to the RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française, an “authority which, accepted or not, exercises itself fully”; the language of law and political theory is faithful to this idea, since it uses “domination” to refer to an asymmetric relation, which may be legitimate, but which exists prior to the consent of which it may be the object; compare the significant hesitation of Max Weber’s translators over the German Herrschaft, which they render in French not only by domination but also by autorité; see HERRSCHAFT and MACHT; cf. AUTHORITY, POWER. v. DROIT, DUTY, LAW, LIBERTY, PRINCIPLE, RIGHT OXONIENSIS, ENGLISH The English Language, or The Genius of the Ordinary v. AGENCY, ASPECT, CLAIM, COMMON SENSE, FEELING, MATTER OF FACT, SENSE, SPEECH ACT A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic of classical English philosophy (from Berkeley to Hume, Reid, and Bentham) and American philosophy, whether in transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau) or in pragmatism (from James to Rorty). But this orientation did not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by Wittgenstein, Ryle, and especially Austin, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of “ordinary language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the English language (such as the gerund) that often make it difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to emphasize this paradox because English claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as the dominant philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century. English-language philosophy has a specific relationship to ordinary language, as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is not limited to the theories of the “philosophy of language,” in which English philosophers appear as pioneers. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical speculation (that is, metaphysics) and always prefers to return to its “original home,” as Wittgenstein puts it: the natural environment of everyday words (Philosophical Investigations, §116). Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the ordinary in Hume, Berkeley, Reid, and Bentham and what will become in Moore and Wittgenstein (after he started using English, at least orally) and then Austin ordinary language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several areas: first, in the exploitation of all the resources of the English language, which is considered as a source of information and is valid in itself; second, in the attention given to the specificities—and even the “defects”—of English which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can learn; and finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the (technical) language of philosophy—the former being the object, as we will see, of an “agreement” deeper than the latter. . I. The Variety of Modes of Action A. The passive In English there are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in translation. Agency is a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself (see AGENCY). A classic difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from John Stuart Mill’s 258 ENGLISH To gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to examine a couple of newspaper headlines: “Killer’s Car Found” (On a retrouvé la voiture du tueur), “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead” (On craint la mort du fils Kennedy); or the titles of an American philosophical article and book: “Epistemology Naturalized” (L’Épistémologie naturalisée; translated by J. Largeault as “L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle”; a famous article by Quine that was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American philosophy) and Consciousness Explained (La conscience expliquée) by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this kind of construction—which seems so awkward in French compared with the active voice— is perceived by its English users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of English so profound that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse récessive (the loss of the agent) has become a characteristic of the English language itself, and not only of the passive. Thus, for example, a French reader irresistibly gains the impression that a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions: “This book reads well” (ce livre se lit agréablement); “His poems do not translate well” (ses poèmes se traduisent difficilement); “The door opens” (la porte s’ouvre); “The man will hang” (l’homme sera pendu). In reality, here again, English simply does not need to mark (by means of the reflexive pronoun se) the presence of an active agent. B. “Do,” “make,” “have” English has several terms to translate the single French word faire, which it can render by “to do,” “to make,” or “to have,” depending on the type of agency required by the context. Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of examples of translation problems in the work of Austin. In Sense and Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say that . . .” To translate such a passive construction, French is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” (je) as if it were considered from the outside: “On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que . . .” But at the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified, and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Contemporary English philosophical language also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented by Chomsky’s discovery (Syntactic Structures, 1957) of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an “undergoing,” as is shown by the example “She was offered a bunch of flowers.” In particular, language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the ellipsis of the agent (as is shown by the common expression “English spoken”). For philosophers, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in French only by on, an indeterminate subject (defined as differentiated from moi, I): It is clearly implied, that Now this, at least if it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as examples, “familiar objects” The expression is not further defined (On sous-entend clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des “objets familiers” On n’approfondit pas la définition de l’expression . . .) 1 Langage, langue, parole: A virtual distinction v. LANGUAGE Contrary to what is too often believed, the English language does not conflate under the term “language” what French distinguishes (following Saussure) with the terms langage, langue, and parole. In reality, English also has a series of three terms whose semantic distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as French: “tongue,” which serves to designate a specific language by opposition to another; “speech,” which refers more specifically to parole (but which is often translated in French by discours); and “language” (in the sense of faculté de langage). Nonetheless, French’s set of systematic distinctions can only remain fundamentally virtual in English, notably because the latter refuses to radically detach langue from parole. Thus in Chrestomathia, Bentham uses “tongue” and “language” interchangeably and sometimes uses “language” in the sense of langue: “Of all known languages the Greek is assuredly, in its structure, the most plastic and most manageable.” He even uses “speech” and “language” as equivalents, since he speaks of “parts of speech.” But on the contrary, he sometimes emphasizes differences that he ignores here. And he proceeds exactly like Hume in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” where we find, for example, But it must also be allowed, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for from the very nature of language. The word, virtue, with its equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. Chrestomathia. Edited by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Four Dissertations. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 1995. First published in 1757. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by C. Bally and A. Sechehaye. Translated by R. Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986. First published in 1983. ENGLISH 259 circulation among these forms. This formal continuity promotes a great methodological inventiveness through the interplay among the various grammatical entities that it enables. 1. The gerund: The form of “-ing” that is the most difficult to translate English is a nominalizing language. Any verb can be nominalized, and this ability gives the English philosophical language great creative power. Nominalization is in fact a substantivization without substantivization: the verb is not substantivized in order to refer to action, to make it an object of discourse (which is possible in any language, notably in philosophical French and German), but rather to nominalize the verb while at the same time preserving its quality as a verb (see SENSE), and even to nominalize whole clauses. French can, of course, nominalize faire, toucher, and sentir (le faire, le toucher, even le sentir), and one can do the same, in a still more systematic manner, in German. However, these forms will not have the “naturalness” of the English expressions: “the making,” “the doing,” “the feeling.” Above all, in these languages it is hard to construct expressions parallel to, for example, “the making of,” “the making use of,” “my doing wrongly,” “my meaning this,” “his feeling pain,” etc., that is, mixtures of noun and verb having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of the gerund—the external distribution of a nominal expression and the internal distribution of a verbal expression. These forms are so common that they characterize, in addition to a large proportion of book titles (for example, The Making of the English Working Class, by E. P. Thomson; or, in philosophy, The Taming of Chance, by I. Hacking), the language of classical English philosophy. The gerund functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger between grammatical forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic by introducing into it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the language itself, a kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the translator finds awkward when he understands the message without being able to retain its lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks, regarding “the idea,” of “the manner of its being conceived,” which a French translator might render as sa façon d’être conçue or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not quite the same thing. And we see agency and the gerund connected in a language like that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb and noun: “much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having yet been brought within the reach of the English reader” (Chrestomathia). Translators often feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le fait de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its gerund, English avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and arguing only on that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by French when it translates the English gerund is all the more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when English uses “the fact” or “the case” from when it uses the gerund. The importance of the event, along with the distinction between “trial,” “case,” and “event,” on the one hand and “happening” on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the doctrine that we do perceive material things. (Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous devons embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses matérielles.) Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative, which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of “do” and on its sense of action, a duality that seems to be at the origin of the theory of the performative (see SPEECH ACT, IV): “I do (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)—as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony” [Oui (à savoir: je prends cette femme pour épouse)’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words]. On the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, English uses “to make” and “to have”—“He made Mary open her bags” (il lui fit ouvrir sa valise); “He had Mary pour him a drink” (il se fit verser un verre)—with this difference: that “make” can indicate, as we see, coercion, whereas “have” presupposes that there is no resistance, a difference that French can only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century English philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in “A Plea for Excuses,” Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression “doing something,” and the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of action—“Is to sneeze to do an action?” There is indeed a vague and comforting idea that doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements. Further, we need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in “acting.” (Philosophical Papers) No matter how partial they may be, these opening remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation between ordinary language and philosophical language in Englishlanguage philosophy. This enables us to better understand why the most prestigious representatives of contemporary English-language philosophy are so comfortable resorting to idiomatic expressions (cf. H. Putnam) and even to clearly popular usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head”; “It ain’t necessarily so.”As for the title of Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of View, which at first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a logical point of view, / Always marry women uglier than you.” II. The Operator “-ing”: Properties and Antimetaphysical Consequences A. “-ing”: A multifunctional operator Although grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of “-ing”—present participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what strikes the reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the free 260 ENGLISH in philosophy, “You are seeing something” (Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding a stick in water); “I really am perceiving the familiar objects” (Ayer, Foundations of Empirical Knowledge). The passage to the form “be” + verb + “-ing” indicates, then, not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the metalanguage peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of perception. The sole exception is, curiously, “to know,” which is practically never used in the progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and epistemological literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or “he was knowing,” as if knowledge could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great variety of what are customarily called “aspects,” through which the status of the action is marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in French or German, once again because of the “-ing” ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb “to be” with a verb ending in “-ing” (imperfect or progressive), by opposition to the simple present or past (perfect). Moreover, English mixes several aspects in a single expression: iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in “it cannot fail to have been noticed” (Austin, How to Do Things). These are nuances, as Labov and then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written English but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or allegedly ungrammatical. The American black vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working”—that is, between having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment, standard American usage being limited to “he is working” (Pinker, Language Instinct). Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in English there is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads English-speaking philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising inventions. B. The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance 1. Fictive entities Thus the verb + “-ing” operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb, that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the substantiality of the “I think” asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually all the English philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity can be constituted “by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures” (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature), it does not require positing a substance: the substantivization of “making” and “giving” meets the need. We can also consider the way in which Russell (Analysis of Matter, chap. 27) makes his reader understand far more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category of an “epistemological obstacle,” that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on “subjective probability,” is based on this status of the “happening,” the event conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. 2. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses “-ing,” a new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An interesting case of translation difficulty is, for example, the one posed by Austin precisely when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to distinguish between the sentence and the act of saying it, between “statement” and “utterance”: there are “utterances,” such as “the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action” (How to Do Things). The translation difficulty here is caused by the combination in the construction in “-ing” of the syntactical flexibility of the gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the “-ing” construction indicate the act, or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to choose to translate “On Referring” (P. F. Strawson) as “De la référence” rather than as “De l’action de référer.” Should one translate “On Denoting” (B. Russell) as “De la dénotation” (the usual translation) or as “Du dénoter”? The progressive in the strict sense—“be” + verb + “-ing”— indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has already begun but is not yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to gauge the ease of English in the whole of these operations: “To utter the sentence is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing.” The French translation gives, correctly: “Énoncer la phrase, ce n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je suis en train de faire en parlant ainsi,” but this remains unsatisfying at best, because of the awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de is simply not suitable insofar as the “-ing” does not indicate duration: for example, in “At last I am seeing New York.” It is interesting to examine from this point of view the famous category of verbs of perception. It is remarkable that these verbs (see, hear) can be in some cases used with the construction “be” + verb + “-ing,” since it is generally said (even in grammar books) that they can be used only in the present or simple past and not in the progressive. This rule probably is thought to be connected with something like the immediacy of perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the verbs “to know” and “to understand” are also (almost) always in the present or the simple past, as if the operations of the understanding could not be presented in the progressive form and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the contrary, they transcended the course of time. In reality, there are counterexamples: “I don’t know if I’m understanding you correctly”; “You are hearing voices”; and often ENGLISH 261 English-language philosophy, especially in America, which makes their translation particularly indigestible, especially in French, where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to the classifications translated. In addition to the famous term “realism,” which has been the object of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates over past decades that it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention some common but particularly obscure (for anyone not familiar with the theoretical context) terms: “cognitivism,” “noncognitivism,” “coherentism,” “eliminativism,” “consequentialism,” “connectionism,” etc. Such terms (in which moral philosophy is particularly fertile) are in general transposed into French without change in a sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost forgone translation. More generally, in English as in German, words can be composed by joining two other words far more easily than in French—without specifying the logical connections between the terms: “toothbrush,” “pickpocket,” “lowlife,” “knownothing”; or, for more philosophical terms: “aspect-blind,” “language-dependent,” “rule-following,” “meaning-holism,” “observer-relative,” which are translatable, of course, but not without considerable awkwardness. 3. Toward an international philosophical neo-language? Contemporary philosophy in English seeks to establish a language that is stylistically neutral and appears to be transparently translatable. Certain specific problems—the translation of compound words and constructions that are more flexible in English and omnipresent in current philosophical discourse, such as “the thesis that” (la thèse selon laquelle), “the question whether” (la question de savoir si), and “my saying that” (le fait que je dise que)—make French translations of contemporary English philosophical texts very awkward, even when the author writes in a neutral, commonplace style. Instead, these difficulties, along with the ease of construction peculiar to English, tend to encourage French analytical philosophers to write directly in English, following the example of many of their European colleagues, or else to make use of a technical “vernacular” (we have noted the “-isms” and compounds) that is frequently heavy going and not very inventive when translating terms which are usually transliterated). This situation is certainly attributable to the paradoxical character of English, and then to American English, which established itself as the dominant philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century: it is a language that is apparently simple and accessible and that thus claims a kind of universality but that is structured, both linguistically and philosophically, around major stumbling blocks (to do, -ing, etc.) that often make it untranslatable. It is paradoxically this untranslatability, and not its pseudo-transparency, that plays a crucial role in the process of universalization. . III. The Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Philosophy The proximity of ordinary language and philosophical language, which is rooted in classical English-language philosophy, was theorized in the twentieth century by Austin and can be summed up in the expression “ordinary language philosophy.” Ordinary language philosophy is interested This sort of overall preeminence in English of the verbal and the subjective over the nominal and the objective is clear in the difference in the logic that governs the discourse of affectivity in French and in English. How would something that “one is” correspond to something that “one has,” as in the case of fear in French (avoir peur)? It follows that a Frenchman—who takes it for granted that fear is “something” that one feels or senses—cannot feel at home with the difference that English naturally makes between something that has no objective correlative because it concerns only “feeling” (like fear; see FEELING) and what is available to sensation, implying that what is felt through it has the status of an object. Thus in English something is immediately grasped that in French seems a strange paradox, namely that passion, as Bentham notes in Deontology, “is a fictive entity.” Thus what sounds in French like a nominalist provocation is implicated in the folds of the English language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus more easily undertaken in English than in French, and if an ontological conception of affectivity had to be formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would be encountered. 2. Reversible derivations Another particularity of English, which is not without consequences in philosophy, is that its poverty from the point of view of inflectional morphology is compensated for by the freedom and facility it offers for the construction of all sorts of derivatives. a. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using suffixes such as “-ity,” “-hood,” “-ness,” “-y.” The resulting compounds are very difficult to differentiate in French and to translate in general, which has led, in contemporary French translations, to various incoherent makeshifts. To list the most common stumbling blocks: privacy (privé-ité), innerness (intériorité, not in the same sense as “interiority”), vagueness (caractère vague), goodness (bonté, in the sense of caractère bon), rightness ( justesse), sameness (similarité, in the sense of mêmeté), ordinariness, appropriateness (caractère ordinaire, approprié), unaccountability (caractère de ce dont il est impossible de rendre compte). b. Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous suffixes: “-ful,” “-ous,” “-y,” “-ic,” “-ish,” “-al” (e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic, attitudinal, behavioral). c. Verbal derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with the suffixes “-ize,” “-ify,” “-ate” (naturalize, mentalize, falsify), and even without suffixes when possible (e.g., the title of an article “How Not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau” ([i.e., how not to “Russell” Carnap’s Aufbau]). d. Polycategorial derivatives based on verbs, using suffixes such as “-able,” “-er,” “-age,” “-ism”(refutable, truthmaker). The reversibility of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential result of preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more difficult to avoid in French and German, where nominalization hardens and freezes notions (compare intériorité and “innerness,” which designates more a quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an entity or a domain). But this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip side: the proliferation of “-isms” in 262 ENGLISH liberties with the natural uses of the language. The philosophers ask, for example, how they can know that there is a real object there, but the question “How do I know?” can be asked (in ordinary language) only in certain contexts, that is, where it is always possible, at least in theory, to eliminate doubt. The doubt or question “But is it a real one?” has always (must have) a special basis, there must be some “reason for suggesting” that it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way in which it is suggested that this experience or item may be phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking “Is it a real table?” (a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney) and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss “how to prove” it is a real one. It is the use of the word “real” in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that “real” has a single meaning (“the real world,” “material objects”), and that a highly profound and puzzling one. (Austin, Philosophical Papers) This analysis of “real” is taken up again in Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticizes the notion of a “sense datum” and also a certain way of raising problems supposedly “on the basis of” common opinion (for example, the common opinion that we “really” perceive things)—but in reality on the basis of a pure construction. “To state the case in this way,” Austin says, “is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing to him, the so-called philosophers’ view.” Philosophy’s (frequent) recourse to the ordinary is characterized by a certain condescension toward the common man. The error (or deception) consists in arguing the philosopher’s position against the ordinary position, because if the in “what we should say when.” It is, in other words, a “philosophy of language,” but on the condition that we never forget that “we are looking not merely at words (or ‘meanings,’ whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about,” as Austin emphasizes (“A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers). During the twentieth century (or more precisely, between the 1940s and the 1960s), there was a division of the paradigms of the philosophy of language between the logical clarification of ordinary language, on the one hand, and the immanent examination of ordinary language, on the other. The question of ordinary language and the type of treatment that it should be given—a normative clarification or an internal examination—is present in and even constitutive of the legacy of logical positivism. Wittgenstein’s work testifies to this through the movement that it manifests and performs, from the first task of the philosophy of language (the creation of an ideal or formal language to clarify everyday language) to the second (the concern to examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses). The break thus accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement in his preface to The Linguistic Turn that “the only difference between Ideal Language Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement about which language is ideal.” In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal language, or a norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective that consists in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that is omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current analytical philosophy. A. Critique of language and philosophy More generally, Austin criticizes traditional philosophy for its perverse use of ordinary language. He constantly denounces philosophy’s abuse of ordinary language—not so much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A “defect” in the English language? “Between” according to Bentham English philosophers are not very inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it is in German or even in French and discourages a certain kind of commentary. There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., through which English constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topic. Let us take the case of “between,” which French can render only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre imply the number three in French, since what is entre intervenes as a third term between two others which it separates or brings closer (in Lat., in-ter; in Fr., en tiers; “as a third”). This is not the case in English, which constructs “between” in accord with the number two (in conformity with the etymology of this word, “by tween,” in pairs), to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comparison between three? relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually compared. The English language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared in this particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar to it. By the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word between (i.e., by twain), the number of the objects, to which this operation is represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Latin inter—by its French derivation entre—no such limitation seems to be expressed. (Chrestomathia) REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. Chrestomathia. Edited by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. ENGLISH 263 To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come to an agreement on “what we should say when” such and such a thing, though I grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is what is missing in philosophy: a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice. (“Performatif-Constatif”) Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: 1. Ordinary language cannot claim to have the last word. “Only remember, it is the first word” (Philosophical Papers). The exploration of language is also an exploration of “the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men” (ibid.). 2. Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and “embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations.” These are certainly more subtle and solid than “any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon” (ibid.). It is this ability to indicate differences that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the world. C. Who is “we”? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical philosophy, especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all the more powerful and surprising the “return to Austin” advocated by Stanley Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language philosophy that is emerging in his work and in contemporary American philosophy. What right do we have to refer to “our uses”? And who is this “we” so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All we have, as we have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We determine the meaning of a (given) word by its uses, and for Austin, it is nonsensical to ask the question of meaning (for instance, in a general way or looking for an entity; see NONSENSE). The quest for agreement is founded on something quite different from signification or the determination of the common meaning. The agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an intersubjective consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual agreements. It is an agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears as much on language as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this agreement? Where does it come from, and why should so much importance be accorded to it? That is the question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We Say? and then in The Claim of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Wittgenstein to say what they say about what we say? A claim (see CLAIM) is certainly involved here. That is what Wittgenstein means by our “agreement in judgments,” and in language it is based only on itself, “on the latter exists, it is not on the same level. The philosopher introduces into the opinion of the common man particular entities, in order then to reject, amend, or explain it. B. The method of ordinary language: “Be your size. Small Men.” Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our ordinary use of ordinary words that have been confiscated by philosophy, such as “true” and “real,” in order to raise the question of truth: “Fact that” is a phrase designed for use in situations where the distinction between a true statement and the state of affairs about which it is a truth is neglected; as it often is with advantage in ordinary life, though seldom in philosophy. So speaking about “the fact that” is a compendious way of speaking about a situation involving both words and world. (Philosophical Papers) We can, of course, maintain (along with a whole trend in analytical philosophy from Frege to Quine) that these are considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any conclusions at all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to determine the nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary language as a relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s approach: “the foot of the letter is the foot of the ladder” (ibid.). For Austin, ordinary words are part of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful objects is their complexity, their refinement as tools (ibid.): We use words to inform ourselves about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if that seems too naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the situation in which we find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this claim possible is the proximity of dimension, of size, between words and ordinary objects. Thus philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is a substance, a quality, or a relation, “take something more nearly their own size to strain at” (ibid.). (The French translators render “size” by mesure, which seems excessively theoretical; the reference is to size in the material, ordinary sense.) One cannot know everything, so why not try something else? Advantages of slowness and cooperation. Be your size. Small Men. (Conversation cited by Urmson in “A Symposium”) Austin emphasizes that this technique of examining words (which he ended up calling linguistic phenomenology) is not new and that it has existed since Socrates, producing its “slow successes.” But he is the first to make a systematic application of such a method, which is based, on the one hand, on the manageability and familiarity of the objects concerned and, on the other hand, on the common agreement at which it arrives in each of its stages. The problem is how to agree on a starting point, that is, on a given. This given, for Austin, is language, not as a corpus consisting of utterances or words, but as the site of agreement about “what we should say when.” Austin regards language as an empirical datum or experimental data. 264 ENGLISH Bayes, Thomas. An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. New York: Hafner, 1963. First published in 1763. Bentham, Jeremy. Chrestomathia. Edited by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. . Deontology. Edited by A. Goldworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. . “Essay on Language.” In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by J. Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–43. Berkeley, George. “Of Infinities.” In vol. 2 of The Works, edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 408–12. London: Nelson, 1948–57. Reprint, New York: Kraus, 1979. . A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by J. Dancy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. . In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. . Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. . This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989. Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1957. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays, First and Second Series. New York: Library of America, 1990. Hacking, Jan. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. . Essays, Moral, Political and Literary Edited by E. F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978. Laugier, Sandra. Du réel à l’ordinaire. Paris: Vrin, 1999. . Recommencer la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mill, John Stuart. Considerations on Representative Government. In Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 19 of Collected Works, edited by John M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. . Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society. Vol. 10 of Collected Works, edited by John M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969. . A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Nedeljkovic, Maryvonne. David Hume, approche phénoménologique de l’action et théorie linguistique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977. Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin, 1994. Putnam, Hilary. Mind, Language and Reality. Vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. . Realism with a Human Face. Edited by J. Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Quine, Willard V. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. . Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. First published 1967. Russell, Bertrand. The Analysis of Matter. London: Allen and Unwin, 1954. . An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. New York: Routledge, 1996. First published in 1950. Tesnière, Lucien. Éléments de syntaxe structural. Paris: Klincksieck, 1965. Urmson, J. O., W.V.O. Quine, and S. Hampshire. “A Symposium on Austin’s Method.” In Symposium on J. L. Austin, edited by K. T. Fann. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and the Brown Books. Edited by R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. First published in 1958. . Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. we,” as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of translation we have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is (and because it is ) terrifying. (Must We Mean What We Say?) The fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a reason for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize: the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature, finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s Americanization of ordinary language philosophy there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But isn’t this “ordinary,” for example, that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one that the whole of English philosophy has been trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like “Experience” or Essays in Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more available to the senses. Jean-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. . “Performatif-Constatif.” In La philosophie analytique, edited by J. Wahl and L. Beck. Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1962. Translation in “Performative-Constative.” In Philosophy and Ordinary Language, edited by C. E. Caton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963. . Philosophical Papers. Edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. . Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Ayer, A. J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract (an established price) to execute a project (collection of taxes, supply of an army, a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction), assuming the hazards related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices that became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century. Let us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in his project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur translated in various ways into English: by “contractor” if the stress is placed on the engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to conditions negotiated in advance (a certain time, a fixed price, firm price, tenant farming); by “undertaker” (now rare in this sense) when we focus on the engagement in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical realization, the setting in motion of the transaction; and by “adventurer,” “enterpriser,” and “projector,” to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French word entreprise acquired the new meaning of an “industrial establishment.” Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a business of production (superintendent, employer, manager). In France, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, “the largest trial ever conducted by pen” against the big financiers, “entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom,” who take advantage of its good administration (its political economy) in the name of the “entrepreneurs of commerce and industry,” who contribute to the increase in its wealth). Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. II. Chance in Business: Risk and Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale (Essay on the nature of commerce in general). Having shown that “all the classes and all the men of a State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land” (bk. 1, chap. 12), he suggests that “the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise, like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly” (bk. 1, of chap. 13). He then describes in detail what composes the “uncertain” aspect of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts “according to his ideas” and “without being able to predict,” in which he conceives and executes his plans surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—“naturally independent,” Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Latin enuntiare (to express, divulge; from ex [out] and nuntiare [to make known]; a nuntius is a messenger, a “nuncio”), ranges over the same type of entity as do “proposition” and “phrase”: it is a basic unit of syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the networks they constitute in different languages (especially in English: “sentence,” “statement,” “utterance”), appears under PROPOSITION. See also DICTUM and LOGOS, both of which may be acceptably translated by énoncé. Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD (especially WORD, Box 3). The essential feature of an énoncé is that it is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with its énonciation: see SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v. DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR (FRENCH) ENGLISH adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager, projector, undertaker, superintendent v. ACT, AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY At the end of the nineteenth century, a new word appeared in the vocabulary of anglophone economists: “entrepreneur.” It was explicitly borrowed from French political economy, and in particular from Jean-Baptiste Say, for whom the entrepreneur, the primary agent of production, must be distinguished from the owner of the capital. According to anglophone commentators, the naturalization of this word answered a need, since the English language did not have any term that could express the concept necessary for economists, and especially theoreticians of “free enterprise.” The concept of an entrepreneur, developed over the twentieth century in Anglo-American literature, there acquired its proper substance. The recent adoption of the English “entrepreneurial” (led by a spirit of enterprise) by French economic vocabulary marks in turn the desire to give the French word entrepreneur the specific values acquired by its English, and especially its American, usage, in particular to indicate that someone resolutely embraces the dynamics of free enterprise. Thus, at the end of the twentieth century in France, as at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States and England, entrepreneur is a concept that arrived from outside and is indeed a transnational linguistic creation. I. The French History of the Word When the economic concept of the entrepreneur appeared in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word already had a rich history. Its origin lay in the Old French emprise, then entreprise, which refers to an action insofar as it is an engagement with a project that implies risk. The semantic field of entrepreneur extends to the military domain: an entrepreneur is someone who leads a campaign or siege; to the political domain: someone who undoes the bonds that 266 ENTREPRENEUR the entrepreneur was forged in France. It is at the center of the reflections and inquiries conducted by politicians and administrators, beginning with Sully, then Colbert, Vauban, and Turgot. More essentially, the distinction between business and trust management is in fact that of conscience—taking care to fulfill the details of one’s obligations as described in the stipulations of the contract—and confidence—the immediate exercise (without the mediation of calculation of reciprocal interests) of faithfulness to the king, where action has no other motive than the attachment to the general interest of the kingdom. The tension between these two modes of realizing the general interest, and thus the search for their appropriate balance, animated the debates belonging to the history of French political economy and allowed the concept of business profits to be discovered. By taking over the opposition between “contract” and “trust,” Bentham introduced the logic belonging to the French debate over business profits into English economic analysis. His attempt was bound to fail, as it was in conflict with the conception of political economy being constructed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo: a science dealing with laws of exchange and the creation of value and prices in which profit can only be that of capital. IV. The Industrial Entrepreneur For Jean-Baptiste Say, the social importance of the “industrial entrepreneur,” who conducts the organization of his business, that is, the distribution of time, men, materials, and machines, is part of a radical position in the debate over business: an action is moral, he claims, if it is performed with a view to one’s own interest. “People complain that everyone only listens to their own interests: I am worried about the opposite! Knowing one’s true interests is the beginning of morality,” he writes in Olbie, ou essai sur les moyens de réformer les moeurs d’une nation, a utopia that is an “essay on the means of reforming the morals of a nation.” By formulating this idea in a utopia that allows him to give these principles the force of an absolute beginning, Say turns his back on French debates over business as a subversion or realization of the ties of the State and resolutely takes on a twofold project: to thrust the theoretical approach founded by Smith—whom he “reveres” and recognizes as his master (introduction to his Traité)—into French political economy and to give France, which was obsessed with the goal of closing the industrial gap with England, the means of doing so. Political economy can only contribute to this if it is restricted to “the knowledge of the laws which govern the creation, distribution, and consumption of wealth” (Say, Cours, vol. 1). It must not be separated from the analysis of the moral and political conditions of its realization, since it is “the economics of society,” “social economy,” or even more generally, “social science.” Say actively spread his analysis in society and, in particular, among heads of industry. As an ideologue—he was one of the founders and editors in chief of the Decade Philosophique—Say believed in the virtues of instruction understood as the education of judgment, of the entrepreneurial capacity to invent adequate solutions. His goal remained that of his teachers at out of their natural dependence by means of their frugality (which is the renunciation of the subsistence provided by their wages) and by their industriousness (which allows them to take on the risks of uncertainty). They thus acquire a relative independence, as much as is allowed by their capacity for acquisition and that is related to their ability to anticipate. Thus, Cantillon manages to reconcile the two values of the term that Boisguilbert could only make mutually exclusive, and he creates the concept of the entrepreneur. Cantillon, an Irish banker established in France, dabbled in the financial practices of entrepreneurs, to his advantage. But his analysis is markedly English, both in terms of the essay form employed and by the content. He relies on Petty for his calculations and for the “equated pairs”— consumption and production, land and work—which he draws out. He also is indebted to John Locke for the starting point of his theory of the origin of society, the importance given to freely entered contracts in the formation of political ties. However, he sharply criticizes each for their hasty empirical generalizations, whether it is Locke’s conventionalism or Petty’s inductions on the basis of a few calculations, and for their indifference to concrete conditions, especially sociopolitical ones, that determine the cycles of wealth and contribute to the uncertainty confronted by the entrepreneur. As a result, both the content and the importance of the concept of the entrepreneur seem to be the fruit of a confrontation between French political economy—understood as good administration of the kingdom, which can only be attained if we take the concrete determinations of the circulations of wealth such as currency, merchandise, and credit into account and in detail (Détail de la France is the title of a major work by Boisguilbert)—and English political economy, which is more focused on discovering the general laws of the market. Cantillon’s theory constitutes a paradoxical episode in relation to the commonplace that the French are theoreticians whereas the English deal with practice. III. Business and Innovation, “Projector” and “Contractor” In 1787, a second episode took place with the publication of Jeremy Bentham’s Defence of Usury. There, Bentham argues against Adam Smith on behalf of the entrepreneur (projector), who, by taking the risks related to invention and innovation, not only contributes to the opening of new avenues for industrial progress, but even by his failures, reduces the field of investigation for his successors and helps them avoid errors. Bentham’s attachment to the French intellectual tradition is well known. Less well known is the fact that his defense of the projector is part of a debate that was very active at the time in France among administrators and engineers over hommes à projets (project men). The same year, in Panopticon, he emphasized the importance for business of relying on contract management and on the interest of the entrepreneur, or contractor, rather than on the system of trust management used for putting prisoners to work. This question of the choice between business, where activity is motivated by the quest for profit, and trust management, where the “household”—the running of activities—is led by one’s attachment and faithfulness to the service of the king, is the crucible in which the representation of ENTREPRENEUR 267 V. Probability and Uncertainty It was left to Frank H. Knight to produce a theory of the entrepreneur and of business profits for Anglo-American discourse in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921). He clarifies in his preface: The particular technical contribution to the theory of free enterprise which this essay purports to make is a fuller and more careful examination of the role of the entrepreneur, or enterpriser, the recognized “central figure” of the system, and of the forces which fix the remuneration of his special function. Knight is attacking at the strong point of economic theory by trying to look closely at the irreducible aspect of innovative business: he distinguishes “insurable risk” from “non-insurable uncertainty”; this uncertainty, where the judgment of the entrepreneur enters the picture, yields situations that cannot be captured by science and calculation since they are not repeatable: “situations in regard to which business judgment must be exercised do not repeat themselves with sufficient conformity to type, to make possible a computation of probability” (Economic Organization). Since then, and in the same spirit, attempts have been made to further reduce the irreducible components of business profits, which has led to an emphasis on the action of the entrepreneur, which has thus become “the phenomenon which is more emphasized yet least understood by economists” (Kanbur, “Of Risk Taking”). Whether it is a matter, as with Schumpeter, of the will to innovate of the rebel entrepreneur; or, as with Keynes, of “animal spirits” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment) that animate the drive of undertaking something; or more recently, as with Shackle, of the entrepreneur as originator, in the same mold as an artist or great mathematician (Hebert and Link, intro., Entrepreneur), the fundamental question of business and the entrepreneur has been psychologized. What in French economic literature was related to the political order, then to the social one, has become in Anglo-Saxon countries that part of human nature which resists or goes beyond the rationality of economic discourse. VI. A French Word, an American Concept? Knight’s effort is part of a theory of economics that energetically claimed to be a theory of free enterprise. The same project drives French economists, who have adopted the adjective “entrepreneurial” into their vocabulary. Similarly, the recent transformation of the CNPF (Conseil du patronat français) into the MEDEF (Mouvment des entreprises de France) aims to contribute to spreading a different image of the entrepreneur. This change of name was accompanied by a publicity campaign, En avant l’entreprise (Forward, Business), whose founders noted their desire to “put business at the center of French society” by “promoting the freedom to undertake (entreprendre), entrepreneurial vocations, and their success in the economy” and “by pursuing the spirit of business and its spread throughout all the parts of society” (Le Monde, 28 October 1998). This falls entirely within the tradition of French political economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as expressed by Say or Gide. Either one could have written the École Normale in the year 3 who wished to transform minds to produce an enlightened opinion capable of influencing governmental decisions. John Stuart Mill, who was familiar with Bentham’s and Say’s works and a staunch francophile, takes up Say’s criticism of Smith and his disdain for “ ‘this supposed labour of inspection and direction’ [Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, chap. 6] of the work of the person he calls the undertaker” in his Principles of Political Economy (1848). Mill notes that the word entrepreneur, in the sense given it by Say, is not familiar to English speakers, which restricts the powers of analysis of English political economy. “French political economists enjoy a great advantage in being able to speak currently of ‘les profits de l’entrepreneur’ ” (bk. 2, chap. 15, §1). We thus owe the introduction of the term into English political economy to Mill. Francis A. Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, echoed Mill in 1876 in The Wages Question (chap. 14), noting: It is much to be regretted that we have not a single English word which exactly fits the person who performs this office in modern industry. The word “undertaker,” the man who undertakes, at one time had very much this extent; but it has long since been so exclusively devoted to funereal uses as to become an impossible term in political economy. The word “adventurer,” the man who makes ventures, also had this sense; but in modern parlance it has acquired a wholly sinister meaning. The French word “entrepreneur” has very nearly the desired significance; and it may be that the exigencies of politico-economical reasoning will yet lead to its being naturalized among us. However, the economic role of the entrepreneur as a driving force could not find a place in neoclassical economics. Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) contains remarks that indicate both the impossibility, after Mill and Walker, of entirely ignoring the economic action of the entrepreneur, and the impossibility, in a moral way, of thinking that “exceptional habilities, which are not made by human effort, and are not the result of sacrifices undergone for a future gain” might justify anything other than a surplus income, a “quasi-income.” Such action could in no way be considered “the prime mover of the whole economy,” as Charles Gide wrote in 1884. The idea of “business profits” and a “spirit of business” here comes into conflict with a moral position analyzed by Max Weber as the “spirit of capitalism” (only effort deserves compensation by profit), as well as with the attempts at mathematical formalizations that characterize neoclassical economics and does not allow for factors that are not reducible to scientific analysis. The word entrepreneur nevertheless entered into English economic vocabulary. In 1904, W. A. Veditz, an American professor of economics who translated—or rather adapted for anglophone students—Charles Gide’s Principes d’économie politique, noted that “The French term entrepreneur, literally meaning undertaker (the person at the head of any undertaking), has now acquired current usage in English.” 268 ENTSTELLUNG ENTSTELLUNG (GERMAN) ENGLISH deformation, disfiguration, alteration, displacement v. DEFORMATION and ANXIETY, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, FALSE, MEMORY, NEGATION, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, TRUTH, VERNEINUNG Derived from stellen, “to place something so that it stands upright,” “to put something on its feet” (Stellung, position), the noun Entstellung has two main meanings in ordinary language: deformation (change in something’s form) and falsification (change to the truth of, verfälschen). The second meaning clarifies the first one: deformation and disfiguration can extend to falsification (a report, an event, the truth). Freud uses Entstellung to refer to a mechanism that is the effect of a process: that of repression (Verdrängung), first, and later that of denial (Verleugnung). The meaning differs depending on the processes at work. I. Entstellung and Deformation Repression produces a deformation (Entstellung) of the contents of memory or fantasies. Memory, outside of the conscious part where everything is felt but nothing recorded, is made up of several layers of traces that undergo a number of deformations (lacunae, chronological disorder, unintelligibility). These deformations are the result of repression. Repressive psychic forces may be witnessed in the resistance, in therapy, to the reappearance of the memory: “The greater the resistance, the greater the deformation (Entstellung)” (“Freud’s Psychoanalytic Procedure,” in Standard Edition, vol. 7). Thus, in order to make the unconscious available to consciousness, the deformed materials must themselves undergo deformation. Similarly, “a piece of forgotten truth is present in the delirious idea, which, in returning, must have undergone deformations (Entstellungen)” (Freud, Moses and Monotheism). Deformation is the only means of access to this forgotten truth. II. Entstellung and Verschiebung (Displacement) In French, the term déplacement is used to render Entstellung, instead of déformation. It has the linguistic sense of metonymy, no doubt related to the contiguity of Entstellung and Verschiebung (displacement, slippage) in Freud’s Traumdeutung. Thus, Lacan speaks of the “displacement of the signifier” (Écrits, 11) or of “slippage of the signified under the signifier” (ibid., 511). Entstellung is a transposition of the dream in which the signification masks the desire of the dream; it is also a de-position (Ent-stellung) of the drives (ibid., 662) in the manner of a cohort of displaced persons. It is a distortion (disfiguring) in the grammatical forms of negation (ibid., 663). But in reality Freud distinguishes Entstellung from Verschiebung, displacement being an effect of deformation: Thus the fact that the content of dreams includes remnants of trivial experiences is to be explained as a manifestation of dream-distortion (by displacement); and it will be recalled that we came to the conclusion that dream-distortion was the product of a censorship operating in the passage-way between two psychical agencies. (Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, vol. 4) those sentences. We may even discern the echoes of the meaning of entrepreneur proper to the eighteenth century in France, in the desire expressed in this campaign to lead “a veritable ground war against State interventionism” (ibid.). However, in the booklet aimed at explaining the change of the organization’s name, E. A. Sellière explains that “ ‘Entreprises’ replaces ‘Patronat,’ and completely naturally invokes ‘entrepreneurs,’ a term that has become part of ordinary language.” Along with all of current economic literature, this confirms that the Anglo-American liberal economy constitutes the reference point: it created a new concept of an entrepreneur, which has since been naturalized into everyday language in France. This elusive concept, once again, smuggles in a word from abroad. Hélène Vérin REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. Defence of Usury. London: Routledge, 1998. First published in 1787. Boisguilbert, Pierre de. Détail de la France (1695), Factum de la France (1707), Traité du mérite et des lumières de ceux que l’on appelle gens habiles dans la finance ou grands financiers (1707). In Pierre de Boisguilbert ou la naissance de l’économie politique, vol. 2. Paris: Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, 1966. Cantillon, Richard. Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale. London: Fletcher Giles, 1755. Translation by Chantal Saucier: An Essay on Economic Theory. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010. Gide, Charles: Principes d’économie politique. Larose et Forcel, 1884. Reprint, Paris: Sirey, 1921. Translation by C.W.A. Veditz: Principles of Political Economy. London: Heath, 1904. Hebert, R. F., and A. N. Link. Introduction to The Entrepreneur, by G.L.S. Shackle. New York: Praeger, 1982. Kanbur, S. M. “Of Risk Taking and the Personal Distribution of Income.” Journal of Political Economy 87 (1979): 767–97. Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936. Knight, Frank H. The Economic Organization. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1951. . Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1921. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Civil Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. First published in 1690. Marshall, Alfred. Principle of Economics. London: Macmillan, 1961. First published in 1890. Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. In Collected Works, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 1996. Petty, William. Several Essays in Political Economy. London: Clavel, 1699. Say, Jean-Baptiste. Cours complet d’économie politique pratique. Osnabrück, Ger.: Otto Zeller, 1966. First published in 1828. . Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de réformer les moeurs d’une nation. Nancy, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1985. First published in 1800. . Traité d’économie politique. Paris: Slatkine, 1982. First published in 1803. Translation by C. R. Prinsep: A Treatise on Political Economy; or, The Production, Distribution & Consumption of Wealth. Philadelphia: Clayton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1880. Published in electronic form by Kitchener, ON, Canada: Batoche, 2001. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. . The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776. . The Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991. Vérin, Hélène. Entrepreneurs, entreprise: Histoire d’une idée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Walker, Francis A. The Wages Question. New York: Henry Holt, 1981 First published in 1876. EPISTEMOLOGY 269 This displacement is one of the essential procedures of deformation: “The consequence of the displacement (Verschiebung) is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion (Entstellung) of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious” (ibid.). Deciphering the dream unmasks the unconscious desire underneath its disfigurement, just as the access to a repressed memory or a forgotten truth is nothing less than the revelation of the deformations they have suffered. III. Entstellung and Verfälschung (Falsification) In 1939 Entstellung is used by Freud in a sense leaning toward that of falsification: The distortion (Entstellung) of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces. One could wish to give the word “Entstellung” the double meaning to which it has a right, although it is no longer used in this sense. It should mean not only “to change the appearance of,” but also “to wrench apart,” “to put in another place.” That is why in so many textual distortions (Entstellung) we may count on finding the suppressed and abnegated material hidden away somewhere, though in an altered shape and torn out of its original connection. Only it is not always easy to recognize it. (Freud, Moses and Monotheism) The notion of Entstellung as the trace of a process in the psychic apparatus is still present; however, by being applied here to any text whatsoever, whether metapsychological or biblical, it is no longer a trace of repression but of denial (Verleugnung). Thus, the meaning it acquires (Verfälschung: falsification, alteration, denaturing, counterfeiting) comes from the denial (Verleugnung) of the murder (of the father, of Moses) of which it is the written trace, by displacement of a letter or a date. The falsification of traces gives access, in the recording of its after-effects, to their origins: we read a text with the traces that have deformed it, and the modalities of deformation give access to what has been deformed in the text (true, real). Entstellung treats the letter of the text the way it treats the impressions of memory recorded, by displacing it, deforming it—by falsifying it. Even while he pulls entstellen closer to verfälschen, Freud continues to separate them: The text, however, as we find it today tells us enough about its own history. Two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, have left their traces on it. On the one hand, certain transformations got to work on it, have falsified (verfälscht) the text in accord with secret tendencies, maiming and extending it until it was turned into its opposite. On the other hand, an indulgent piety (schonungsvolle Pietät) reigned over it, anxious to keep everything as it stood, indifferent to whether the details fitted together or nullified one another. (Ibid.) Deformation is, of course, an effect of falsification (“all later distortions [Entstellungen] serve another aim. An endeavour was made to date back to an early time certain laws and institutions of the present , the picture of past times in this way became falsified [verfälscht],” ibid.). But Freud distinguishes them from each other. The first is reserved for tradition: of the religion of Moses, “a kind of memory of it had survived, a tradition perhaps obscured and distorted (entstellt)” (ibid., 87). The second applies to written narrative: the compromise at Kadesh was made in writing, but a long time was to elapse, however, before historians came to develop an ideal of objective truth. At first they [the people from Egypt] shaped their accounts according to their needs and tendencies of the moment, with an easy conscience, as if they had not yet understood what falsification (Verfälschung) signified. (Ibid.) In 1970, in L’envers de la psychanalyse, Lacan extracted the falsus as the fall of the written from the Verfälschung of the letter. The equivocity between falloir and faillir (see DUTY) is reunified in the etymology of fallere (in the past participle), the notions of “to miss, to fall” and “to mistake, to be deceived.” Falsus combines the defect of an error and the failure of duty in written mistakes, when a letter drops out or is displaced. Solal Rabinovitch REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. Der Mann Moses und die monotheistiche Religion. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1942. First published in 1939. Translation by K. Jones: Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. . “Freud’s Psychoanalytic Procedure” (1904 [1903]). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7. Translated by J. Strachey, 247–54. London: Hogarth, 1901–1905. . Traumdeutung. In Gesammelte Werke, vols. 2–3. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1942. First published in 1900. Translation by James Strachey: Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4 (1). London: Hogarth, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by B. Fink with H. Fink and R. Grigg: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. . L’envers de la psychoanalyse. In Le Séminaire. Vol. 17. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Translation by R. Grigg: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 2006. Weber, Samuel. Rückkehr zur Freud: Jacques Lacans Entstellung der Psychoanalyse. Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1978, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1990. Translation by M. Levine: Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.