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

ACTIVUM, PATHOS [πάθος] (GREEK) / PERTURBATIO (LATIN) ENGLISH emotion, feeling, passion FRENCH passion, émotion GERMAN Affekt, Begierde, Hang, Leidenschaft GREEK epithumia [ἐπιθυμία], orexis [ὄρεξις], pathêma [πάθημα], pathos [πάθος], thumos [θυμός] ITALIAN emozione, passione, sentimento LATIN affectus, emotio, morbus, passio, perturbatio v. PASSION, and ACT, CATHARSIS, DRIVE, FEELING, GLÜCK, I/ME/MYSELF, LEIB, LIBERTY, LOVE, MADNESS, MALAISE, PLEASURE, SOUL, STRADANIE, TO SENSE, WILL, WISDOM Psychic life is movement. The mind moves. Psychic life is passion. The mind is, in fact, moved. The vocabulary of feeling in European languages is organized around these two poles: on one hand, the idea of a turbulence, a becoming, an instability—something starts moving and transforms itself; there is a psychic activity; on the other hand, such an activity is the effect of an external cause to which the mind finds itself exposed, which it undergoes, passively. Something happens to it and transforms it. Agitation is the form that passivity takes. Thus in Greek, we have thumos [θυμός], epithumia [ἐπιθυμία], orexis [ὄρεξις], but also pathos [πάθος], pathêma [πάθημα]. In Latin, emotio, perturbatio, on the one hand; morbus, passio, affectus, on the other hand. In French, sentiment and passion and émotion. In English, “feeling,” “passion,” “emotion.” What is at stake theoretically here—the choice between a kinetic or passionate conception of feeling—can be understood in the context of a history of decisions regarding the way to translate the ancient words into modern languages. Discussions of the concepts often take the form of linguistic commentaries; for example, when Cicero translates the Greek pathos by the Latin perturbatio instead of morbus, or when Augustine criticizes this translation. This tension still determines our contemporary problematics, including that of psychoanalysis. I. From Epithumia to Pathêma Affective life is an excess of movement, a movement that is simultaneously spontaneous and reflexive: an impulsive response, a reaction, whose active and imperious aspect is 746 PATHOS allows itself to be carried away; accepts, in fact, to allow itself to be carried away. Nothing is more voluntary than passivity that is consented to and complicit with passion. II. From Pathos to Perturbatio It is on this point that the translation from Greek into Latin becomes a significant decision. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero asks how best to translate into Latin the concept that the Greek Stoics express by pathos. Pathos should be rendered by morbus if one wants a literal translation. Morbus, “illness,” would convey the meaning of what befalls you and puts you in an unhealthy state of suffering. To morbus, however, Cicero prefers another word, perturbatio: “Quae Graeci [πάθη] vocant, nobis perturbationes appellari magis placet quam morbos” (These movements that the Greeks call pathê, we prefer to call perturbations rather than illnesses), he writes (Tusculan Disputations, 4.4.10; cf. De finibus, 3.35). He defines perturbationes as swirling, jerky movements of the mind, contrary to reason. Perturbationes are the worst enemies of the mind and of a tranquil life (Tusculan Disputations, 4.15.34). Why does Cicero prefer—nobis magis placet—to call “perturbations” what the Greeks call illnesses or passions? For a series of reasons. The first is respect for Latin usage, consuetudo. Cicero notes that in the common language, Latins call perturbationes all the states that the Greeks call morbi (ibid., 3.4.7). But does that mean that we must take ordinary language as our guide, without reflection? No, because the choice of perturbatio is the correct one: “Nos autem hos eosdem motus concitati animi recte, ut opinor, perturbationes dixerimus” (We, I think, are right in calling the same motions of a disturbed soul perturbations; ibid.). (As is often the case, here Latin is a more accurate, more appropriate language than Greek—thus Cicero.) Consequently, it is preferable not to render the Greek word for word: verbum a verbo (ibid.). It is better—magis placet—to replace morbus, which would be the literal translation, by perturbatio. But substituting perturbatio for morbus means substituting perturbatio for pathos, and thus, in a way, correcting the Greek, reinventing the pertinence of the philosophical vocabulary and making it more reasonable. In a commentary that shows the complexity of the translation decisions he makes, Cicero justifies choices that are linguistic and philosophical. Another argument against a literal translation of pathos by morbus is that morbus is synonymous with aegritudo, which means “suffering,” “sorrow,” “distemper.” With an acute sense of exactitude, the Romans reserve aegritudo for pain, by analogy with bodily illness, whereas the Greeks call pathê all the movements of the soul, including those that are agreeable, such as desire and sensual pleasure. Thus translation offers an opportunity for a criticism of the source language, whose lexicon is presented as generic and contradictory. Pleasure and desire are not illnesses, Cicero observes, because one does not suffer from them. The translation of pathos by morbus is adequate for a specific perturbation, the one that is rightly called aegritudo, “distemper” (ibid., 3.10.22). The more he enters into probing explanations of the vocabulary of the passions, which he tries to transform into emotion, the more Cicero unveils an ambitious strategy: reforming a metaphorical field. The language of ancient emphasized. The metaphorical figure of such an activity is the horse, which, in Plato, represents the desiring soul: a spirited animal sensitive to the beauty of bodies and things that can be possessed and which, in their presence, displays an extraordinary energy that is difficult to contain. Rage and courage are also a horse full of spirit and energy. This characterization in terms of movement is inseparable from the idea that sense experience is in general an experience of change, of becoming, of the impermanent. As sensations— and just like other sensations/perceptions—pleasure and pain belong to the domain of what moves and never stops. Plato uses pathos [πάθος] and pathêma [πάθημα] only when he wants to emphasize the sick, morbid, incurable nature of the affects, their pathological side. His dominant lexicon is that of motivity. The Aristotelian vocabulary shifts the accent to the “pathetic” aspect of affects. Ethics and rhetoric are based on the possibility of acting on the mind, one’s own or those of others, in order to produce effects that are called, therefore, pathêmata. Instead of the Platonic obsession with turbulence and anxiety, in Aristotle we find an entire technique of influence or manipulation. Rage, love, hatred, shame, indignation are all responses that are both reasonable and irrational. They are reasonable because they are motivated by a thought, irrational because the thought is accompanied by a bodily change like cold, heat, tears, trembling. Each passion corresponds to a precise idea that is pertinent in a certain situation and includes a physical sensation: the idea of having suffered an inopportune offense, coupled with the desire for revenge, triggers what is called “rage” (orgê [ὀργή]). The anticipation of a danger is manifested in what is called “fear” (phobos [φόϐος]). The cognitive and intellectual nature of the emotion justifies the recentering of affective vitality around the concept of passivity: passion is what I am made to think, thus to feel. Passion is the echo of the world’s contingency in my understanding and my body. Passion is my way of interacting with what surrounds me and happens to me. What happens around me touches me, what is done to me affects me, what is said to me moves me. My passivity is my vulnerability with regard to what is external to me, to the milieu in which I live. Inevitable, passion is thus not pathological: on the contrary, suffering is healthy, it is cathartic. The word pathos was definitively established with the Stoics. In a theory that reinforces, on one hand, the cognitive conception of feeling and that proposes, on the other, a model of wisdom and happiness defined by impassiveness, passion becomes, still more clearly than for Aristotle, the subject’s reaction to the world. A cognitive operation effects the mediation between me and what happens to me: consent (sugkatathesis [συγϰατάθεσις]). I always have to say yes or no to my representations, perceptions, thoughts. Thus I am carried away by fury only if I say yes to the thought of an offense received and the anticipation of my vengeance. I am seized by panic only if I ratify the overestimation of a danger. I get angry and tremble only if I approve the beliefs of which rage and fear are the somatic effects. I am therefore responsible for my passions: what I feel, I want to feel with my assent. Such a theory makes voluntary the movements by which the mind PATHOS 747 such a semantic characteristic. The word perturbatio echoes what is in fact a perturbatio, echoes the thing that the word pathos obscures. In this particular case, the translation is an interpretation. It is a retrospective lesson in pertinence. It is also a reshaping of the history of philosophy. The preference for the metaphor of movement rather than for that of illness is part of a historiographical strategy. The Stoics, Cicero maintains, were right to center affectivity on movement. They understood that this was the essential point: a direct line could be traced to Pythagoras and Plato. On the other hand, the Aristotelians forgot it, and their ethic of moderate passions is dangerously tolerant. Saying that the affects are emotions makes it possible to see them as leaps into the void and as slippery slopes, that is, as movements that it becomes impossible to stop and that thus have to be prevented, rather than assisting them with moderation. The fact that perturbatio is a commotio, a turbulence, an excitation—a metaphoric leap, a plunge, a collapse—has consequences for the way in which the remedy is conceived. Although some illnesses are incurable, medical language is, by definition, a language of healing. In physics, on the other hand, what falls cannot stop midway; what slips will not come back up the slope; a person who drifts out to sea will no longer be able to swim back. We treat an illness when it is not an incurable plague, but we avoid falling off a cliff, because such a movement cannot be controlled. We avoid diving into a current that will carry us out to sea, where we lose our footing. We avoid starting down a slippery slope (ibid., 4.18.41). In short, it is imperative to block emotions from the outset, before they are born, for they force their way forward by themselves (ipsae se impellunt). It is they that move, that make you move, that move you. Cicero adduces Stoic arguments against Aristotelian arguments, taking the precautions that a good skeptic requires. These are efficacious, ad hominem arguments. Nonetheless, he does not conceal his approbation, even if it is critical, for the “virility” of Stoic morality and his scorn for the softness of Aristotle’s language and thought. Peripatetic ratio and oratio lack vigor (they are enervatae); for Cicero, the Stoic discourse wholly centered on prevention is necessary. On one condition, however: it has to adopt a more rigorous tone, strengthen still further the insistence on the irresistible, ineluctable, incurable aspect of the motus turbidus. To do so, and especially in order to deepen the contrast with Aristotle and his moderation, the Stoic oratio has to be reconciled with its contents, its ratio has to become intolerant: it has to be inflected toward the mechanics of movement. The vocabulary of physics is a vocabulary of the irreversible. The Latin translation of pathos by perturbatio reestablishes the pertinence of this vocabulary for ethics. In the words of a new language, philosophy and the philosophical vocabulary are once again in accord. III. From Perturbatio to Affectus Cicero reorganizes the vocabulary of the passions around their motivity and their tumult, in contrast with the immobility of reason. He does this through a translation and the commentaries that accompany it. This translation is discussed at length in Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Reflection on the best way to interpret Greek pathos and to psychology and ethics seems to him to be dominated by the paradigm of the body, of medicine, and hence of illness. But although this model works well as regards the perturbation that concerns him most, pain, it does not lend itself to the expression of the concept of affectivity in general. Morbus is not a good term because pathos is not a good idea— philosophically speaking. Why? Because for Cicero the history of the mind goes back to Plato and even further, to Pythagoras. First Pythagoras and then Plato had analyzed the structure of the psuchê [ψυχή] into two parts, one the basis of a distinctive characteristic, movement. Whereas one part is tranquil and constant, calm and placid, the other part is full of motus turbidi, movements and maelstroms, such as rage or desire (ibid., 4.4.10). It was this very precise concept of mobility, unrest, and inconstancy that was to resurface in the Latin word. Cicero took advantage of his role as a creative translator, as a fabricator of neologisms and importer of Greek notions, to refresh the philosophical memory that had faded in the Greek vocabulary. In Latin, a new language, we find on the surface of the word the originary signified that theory had always identified as essential in affective life: the idea of perturbation. In the Latin language, a work in progress that translators were shaping by the choices they made, words were to be, in sum, more appropriate, more adequate to notions. If it is a question of naming a motus turbidus, because that is the pertinent definition, then it must be called perturbatio. Through the decisions it requires, the act of translating offers an opportunity to find the correct word, to improve the fit between word and concept. Reformulating in another language makes it possible to bring out a forgotten or underestimated meaning and thus to amend an incoherent usage. Cicero seems to reproach the Greeks, from Pythagoras to Zeno, for not having preferred to pathos a word like tarachê [ταραχή] (alarm; see Lysias 6.35), for example, just as he has chosen perturbatio rather than morbus. It seems to him, in fact, that ancient ethics always thought “emotion” when it used the word “passion.” In the commentaries accompanying his lexical choices, we can discern his criticism of Stoicism: whereas he rejects the obsessional nosography of the classification of the pathê, he notes their tumultuous nature. However—and translation comes in here—the kinetic metaphor should have priority over the medical metaphor. Cicero observes that all the Stoics, and notably Chrysippus, tried very hard to compare the illnesses of the mind with those of the body. Let us instead examine more closely what the thing itself contains (ea quae rem continent pertractemus), he suggests. What has to be understood is the fact that perturbation is always in movement: intellegatur igitur perturbationem in motu esse semper (ibid., 4.10.24). Perpetual movement is thus the “thing” (res) whose essence the word perturbatio expresses. Moreover, Zeno had already defined a perturbation as a “commotion” (commotio) contrary to reason (ibid., 4.6.1). In doing so, he situated himself in the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition that identifies wisdom with peace of mind (ibid., 4.4.10). However, the Greeks, including Zeno, called this perturbatio—which they defined (wrongly) as a commotio—a pathos. A worn-out language failed to render adequately an essential idea. Another language was now able to rediscover 748 PATHOS excites us, terrifies us. We are affected by a cause, in the sense that we are invested by it, that it can put us in this or that disposition (afficere). Therein consists the failure of our will, of that perfect mastery, of that total freedom of choice that Adam and Eve perverted long ago. Now our will has gone off track (perversa voluntas). By allowing ourselves to be invaded by a pleasure or a pain, we are saying yes to something that we should reject. But we say yes because our will is now split, divided, and can take the wrong turn. Passion—that is, the finitude that makes us human—resides in this possibility of error, of this inflection of the will that allows itself to be influenced, carried away, convinced. IV. Modern Transpositions: “Endeavor,” Trieb European languages transparently translate the words whose Greek and Latin history we have sketched. The texts we have chosen, namely those by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Augustine, are constantly referred to in the conceptual and linguistic debates that punctuate the later history of the philosophy of the passions. In this long history, the work of Thomas Hobbes marks a critical moment that is of particular interest and can be compared with that in which Cicero found himself . . Like Cicero, Hobbes is aware of the importance of choosing the right word when he transposes into his language concepts that come from texts written in another language. And as was the case for Cicero, for Hobbes the problem arises in an acute form when he discusses the vocabulary of the passions: These small beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking and other visible actions, are commonly called endeavours. (Leviathan, 1.6) “Endeavor” is thus the generic term for this initial movement that is the condition of all desire and all repulsion. Appetite (desire) and aversion form a pair of contraries on which depend the passions, all of which can be analyzed and classified in one of these two categories (ibid): These words, appetite and aversion, we have from the Latins; and they both of them signify the motions one of approaching, the other of retiring. So also do the Greek words for the same, which are hormê and aphormê. “Appetite” and “aversion” are English translations of appetitio and aversio, which render, in turn, hormê [ὁρμή] and aphormê [ἀφορμή]. As a reader of Cicero, Hobbes adopts a vocabulary of the passions that we find in its Stoic version in the Academica (Lucullus, 8.24; cf. De fato, 17) and at the very heart of the Epicurean vocabulary in De finibus. For Hobbes, the human being’s cognitive, affective, and moral functioning is thus explained by two movements: a movement that impels us toward the object that causes it and a movement that repels us from such an object. These are the two endeavors—appetite and aversion—of which all the passions are only particular modifications. The requirement of clarity is fulfilled and the ease of translating from Greek and Latin into English is accompanied by a serene reference to the past. In these ancient languages, truth advances naturally, and the render it in Latin leads to the Christian turning point in the psychology of the affective. Between Cicero and Augustine, we therefore remain in the continuity of a single language, Latin, but we put back in question the pertinence of the Stoic vocabulary and the lexical transfer from the Greek. The passions that the Greeks call pathê, Cicero called perturbationes, Augustine writes, but most people call them passiones (City of God, 14.8.1). Thus we should avoid adopting Cicero’s term pertubatio without precautions; it is an idiosyncratic translation, a single author’s translation. It is better to adopt the general use of passio, or still better, to use the term affectus, because the latter allows us to speak of the emotions without applying to them a systematically and exclusively negative connotation. Since per-turbatio echoes, so to speak, the definition of motus turbidus, it is a term saturated with philosophical scorn. It is the right word in a theory of virtue that turns on apatheia [ἀπάθεια], “impassiveness”; and in an ethics in which “good” is only a synonym of “reasonable” and in which every form of affectivity is disqualified. Augustine, however, rejects the Stoic ideal of the imperturbable sage who is supposed not to be disconcerted, irritated, or moved by anything. For him, persons who never enjoyed themselves, never wished for anything, never suffered, and were afraid of nothing would be, ultimately, insensitive to good and evil. Christian morality requires us to love God, to desire good and hate evil. Contrition for sins committed and the fear of punishment are indispensable. How can we believe without fervor, how can we repent without tears? What would charity be without compassion, or fear without trembling? The Christian is a being of flesh and blood, a being who would lose his humanity if he pretended to a rigor that is nothing more than arrogance and vanity (ibid., 14.9.6). The Christian knows that after the Fall he was condemned to sin and that therefore he must feel and suffer. He knows that passions are the result of original sin, a memory of the lost Eden. The affects are only the perversion of a will that was once absolutely good but has now become good or bad. The relationship with good and evil is entirely affective: the emotions make us sin, but they are also our sole path to salvation. It is not reason that will save us. Rejecting the identification of the good with a-patheia means rejecting the idea that every movement is troubling, that every emotion is a motus turbidus. Consequently, this amounts to rejecting per-turbatio, a term that in Cicero’s language preserves the hard core of Stoic ethics. Augustine chooses affectus because it is neutral: we are affected by upright feelings if we lead an upright life; we have perverted feelings if our lives are perverted (ibid., 9.6). It is only the city of the impious, that is, unbelievers, that is shaken (quatitur) by bad (pravi) affects, which are illnesses and perturbations (tamquam morbis ac perturbationibus). Passion perturbs when there is no faith, for a perturbation is an affect, but in its negativity (ibid., 14.10. 26–27, 14.12.31). By preferring affectus, Augustine returns to the use of pathos. On the one hand, he criticizes the Stoic intransigence of which Cicero had made himself a spokesman. On the other hand, he places passivity, rather than movement, back at the heart of feeling. By endorsing another Stoic idea, namely that we voluntarily consent to our representations, he insists on the exteriority of what touches us, PATHOS 749 activity that is all the more active because it is governed by a neurotic constraint, a necessity all the more imperious because its manifestations are pathological, led on by the pathos of the repressed that is returning. The desire that formerly underwent repression, the desire whose realization in an act or in a movement has been inhibited, becomes, through this inhibition itself, infinitely powerful, insistent, “active.” Hyperactive now, because it was formerly passive. Giulia Sissa REFS.: Aristotle. The “Art” of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. . The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. New and rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Augustine, Saint. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Sixteenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kahn, Charles. “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine.” In The Question of Eclecticism, edited by John M. Dillon and A. A. Long, 234–59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Konstan, David. “The Concept of ‘Emotion’ from Plato to Cicero.” Méthexis 19 (2006): 139–51. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Plato. Phaedrus. In Euthyphro, Apology, Critic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rorty, Amelie O. “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Philosophy 57 (1982): 159–72. modern languages have only to take hold of these clear and distinct ideas. “For nature itself does often press upon men those truths, which afterwards, when they look for something beyond nature, they stumble at” (Leviathan, 1.6). The “trains of words” () pass from one language to another: this proves the lucidity of true philosophy. Hence they have passed the test of modernity. Hobbes thus carries out a task different from Cicero’s, but he shares with his Roman mediator a concern to establish links. Philosophy must not remain confined to a foreign idiom. The latter has to be either appropriated or rejected. To translate is to understand and make understood. To translate is to clarify. It is therefore not surprising to see translation become a crucial enterprise for the Enlightenment. Among the last contemporary avatars of the tension between external passivity and internal agitation, we may mention the way in which psychoanalysis conceptualizes this same oxymoron (see DRIVE and I/ME/MYSELF). Psychoanalysis makes a radical break with philosophy. The unconscious and especially the phenomenon of repression shift the problem of activity and passivity to another, more complex level. However, the same tension is at work. Here, there is a triple passivity of which the ego must become aware: first, the one that puts it at the mercy of the drives (Triebe), that is, the quantities of energy in movement and tending toward discharge; second, the one that it undergoes with regard to the super-ego, to the law that has been internalized and become unconscious; and finally, the impotence that the ego experiences in the symptom. The drive is a stimulus, but it acts chiefly through a phantasmatic resurgence. It is life, activity, desire to be, but also repetition, compulsion, reflex. The language of physics allows Freud to express the oxymoron of an 1 Hobbes and translation v. TO TRANSLATE Hobbes regards translation as a test of philosophical clarity and validity. Faced with a Scholastic tradition that in the middle of the seventeenth century continued to use Latin, he had the greatest scorn for this disfigured and worn-out Language, which no longer even corresponded to the great Roman models: The writings of School divines are nothing else, for the most part, but insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words, or words otherwise used than in the common sense of the Latin tongue; such as would pose Cicero, and Varro, and all the grammarians of ancient Rome. (Leviathan, 4.46) This usage cut off from common sense and grammar produced an esoteric, foreign language that no longer meant anything. To this barbarous language, which was neither authentically ancient nor truly modern, the author of the Leviathan issued a challenge (ibid.): just try to translate it! Which if any man would see proved, let him (as I have said once before) see whether he can translate any School divine into any of the modern tongues, as French, English, or any other copious language. That would be the only way to see if these “insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words” actually meant anything. If the translation of them was intelligible, it would have been proved that they were already meaningful in Latin. If not, it would have been proved that they were meaningless (ibid.): Which insignificancy of language, though I cannot note it for false philosophy, yet it hath a quality, not only to hide the truth, but also to make men think they have it, and desist from further search. Thus translatability becomes a criterion of truth. Precisely at the point where philosophical practice becomes a dissection of arguments to test their coherence and validity, the fact of translating acquires the status of an experimental method. It is an operation, an action on a text, whose result proves a hypothesis or replies to a question. In this work, considered foundational for the British tradition, philosophy becomes analytic thanks to translation. The requirement of clarity and intelligibility entails a linguistic commitment: it is not so much a matter of writing in modern languages—Hobbes himself wrote in both English and Latin—as of being able to translate. REFS.: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. 750 PEACE PEACE “Peace” is one of the possible translations of the Russian mir [мир], which means simultaneously “peace,” “the world,” and “the peasant community”: see MIR; cf. RUSSIAN and SOBORNOST , and CONCILIARITY. This can be compared with svet [свет], which designates simultaneously the world and light: see SVET and cf. LIGHT, PRAVDA, WORLD [WELT]. v. ALLIANCE, HERRSCHAFT, LOVE, MACHT, PLEASURE, POLITICS II. “People” and the American Innovation This ambiguity between the singular and the plural is related to the assertion that the people is simultaneously one and multiple, as is clearly indicated in the expression “We the people.” Thus we read at the beginning of the 1787 U.S. Constitution: “WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union … do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION.” For Hamilton and Madison (see Federalist Papers nos. 39 and 46), the “people” is “the great body of the people,” and it is in it that resides the sole source of sovereignty: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE” (Hamilton, Federalist Papers, no. 22). “The ultimate authority resides in the people alone” (Madison, Federalist Papers, no. 46). The question of this consent is basic to the whole of American thought specific to democracy: how to conceive the consent of the people, that is, of each individual, to society? This problem is connected with the ambiguity of the word “people,” which the Federalists were paradoxically to resolve by proposing a twofold definition: the people can be either a group of “individuals composing a single English nation” or a group of individuals “forming distinct and independent English states.” The political organization is defined as a “compound” divided into a federal and a national power, the people remaining the supreme authority that delegates its power. Madison (ibid.) particularly insisted on this absolute sovereignty of the people, which is the “common superior” of the federal and state governments, and thus “the ultimate authority.” Thus is affirmed the great principle of the original right to power vested in the people. James Wilson argued that the people of the United States disposed of and exercised its primitive rights, and it alone delegates (Hamilton, Federalist Papers, no. 23) its powers. According to the Federalists, all power resides in the people, and not in the government of the states. The now vaunted basis of federalism, the “mixed character” (Madison, Federalist Papers, no. 39) of political power, is thus inseparable from the idea of the delegation of power by the people, which has the authority to delegate power to its agents and to form a government that the majority believes will contribute to its happiness, the transcendent power of the people being competent to form the kind of government the people considers likely to produce its happiness. The redefinition of power reveals itself here to be connected with a redefinition of what a constitution consists in: it is not the definitive organization of a power, because at any time the people can rescind—without resorting to revolution—its delegation of power to a defective government and can subject its constitution to renewed debate. The constitution is thus based on the “assent and ratification of the people of America,” but the people are conceived “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent states to which they respectively belong”: “It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State—the authority of the people themselves” (Madison, Federalist Papers, no. 39). PEOPLE FRENCH le peuple, les gens v. PEOPLE/RACE/NATION, PERSON, and AGENCY, BEHAVIOR, COMMON SENSE [SENS COMMUN, SENSUS COMMUNIS], ENGLISH, LIBERAL, NAROD, POLITICS, WHIG The ambiguity of the English word “people”—which refers to both an indivisible unity and a plurality or federation of individuals, to the point that the term is dissolved in an impersonal plurality (“people say”) or even turned into a pronoun (“they say”)—is particularly interesting, the two senses being used alternatively and even coexisting in English philosophical and political language. The passage to American English is even more significant than in other cases, because the twofold use of the word and the transformation of its meaning played a central role in the definition of political power at the time of the American Revolution. I. “People,” Singular and Plural “People” was originally synonymous with “folk” (a word associated with “race,” “nation,” “tribe”; cf. Ger. Volk), and initially referred to a unit. The development of the term’s usage is marked on the grammatical level by the passage to the plural in the conjugation of the verb of which “people” is the subject (“people say,” “people want”). This is a possibility specific to English, in which “people” can be both singular and plural. In seventeenth-century English, and especially in the field of political philosophy (Hobbes, for example), the people constitute a unity (“All the duties of sovereigns are implicit in this one phrase: the safety of the people is the supreme Law”; On the Citizen, ch. 13), the body of citizens, which can be divided into parts. But the term coexists with the common and very loose use of “people” in the plural (“people are to be taught”; Leviathan, ch. 2). We also sometimes find a plural “peoples” (“the common-peoples minds”; ibid.), which clearly shows the indeterminacy of the word. These linguistic facts make particularly complex the definition of the relationship between individual and people, the word “people” referring both to a unit and to a plural conglomerate. To this is added another, nonspecific meaning (see PEOPLE/RACE/NATION) of the people as a class that is oppressed or in a relationship of inferiority, a meaning that has the same dimensions (both protesting and despising) as the French word peuple. We may note that a new and odd sense has appeared in English that radically inverts this one: “people” in the sense of celebrities, as in the case of the magazine People. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 751 Thus the essential duality of “people” implicit in the definitive passage from the singular to the plural (cf. “themselves”) is carried out in the Federalist project. The multiplicity of interests (of the individuals) that compose the people become compatible with the common interest through the multiplication of the centers of power. It is this phenomenon of the fragmentation of power that Gordon Wood has defined as the “disembodiment” of power (Creation of the American Republic). The paradox is that the people exercises its sovereignty in and through this very disembodiment. According to Wood, this is clearly related to a radical transformation of the meaning of the word “people” and of the relationship to politics in general following the overthrow of the old Whig concepts. When the American Revolution began, the people were considered a homogeneous entity in rebellion against the rulers. But under the pressure of reality, the idea gradually emerged of a non-homogeneous people without any genuine unified interest. Thus Americans transformed the people in the same way that the British had transformed rulers a century earlier: they broke the relationship of interest among individuals (Wood, ibid.). In conclusion, the political stake involved in the redefinition of “people” becomes clear. Politics could no longer be defined, Wood says, as a battle between rulers and the people: “In the future, political struggles would be internal to the people, they would oppose the diverse groups and diverse individuals that sought to create inequality on the basis of their equality” (ibid.). We see that this new sense of “people” sums up the American innovation in politics (even if much could be said about its possible perversions; cf. Wood’s concluding chapter, which seems to deplore a disconnection of the social and the political and perhaps a lasting impoverishment of political thought in America), in its desire to truly implement the classical idea of popular sovereignty. Thus in the United States, the people as a source of power—which we find in the use of the term in the sense of “electorate” or, in the judicial field, in the expression “the People vs. X”)—was to coexist with the “people” having divergent community interests (black people, my people) or simply “people” in an indeterminate, pronomial way (people say), and even, in more casual language, “he’s good people.” Sandra Laugier REFS.: Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Clinton Rossiter. New York: New American Library, 1961. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. . On the Citizen. Edited and translated by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Patterson, Thomas E. We the People: A Concise Introduction to American Politics. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Wootton, David, ed. The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. Indianapolis. IN: Hackett, 2003. Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION FRENCH peuple, race, nation GERMAN Volk, Rasse, Nation GREEK dêmos [δῆμος], genos [γένος], ethnos [ἔθνος], laos [λαός], ochlos [ὄχλος], plêthos [πλῆθος], hoi polloi [οἱ πολλοί] LATIN populus, gens, natio, plebs v. CIVIL SOCIETY, DROIT, GENRE, GESCHLECHT, LAW, NAROD, OIKONOMIA, PEOPLE, POLIS, POLITICS, STATE What the terms “people,” “race,” and “nation” have in common is that they designate types of geographical and historical, cultural, social and/or strictly political community. The difficulty of translating them has to do with the fact that from one language to another, and within each language from one period to another, they do not necessarily refer to the same types of membership, or distinguish, intersect, or share them in the same way. Hence by translating dêmos [δῆμος] or populus as “people,” ethnos [ἔθνος], natio, or the plural gentes by “nation(s),” genos [γένος] or genus by “race,” we fall victim to a retrospective illusion that projects onto Greek or Latin notions, ambiguities, and problematics that do not belong to them. Thus dêmos, like populus, designates both citizens as a group and the least wealthy (and sometimes the most numerous), least educated, and least noble part of that group, but never a natural and/or historical component of human diversity. But this is often the case for the notion of “people,” and still more for that of Volk (Völker), the uses of which give priority, on the contrary, to a community of birth or a shared history. Inversely, ethnos, natio, or gentes never had a political meaning (they do not imply any kind of citizenship), whereas the history of the term “nation” is understood as a history of its gradual articulation with the notion of the state, although its ethnic sense does not disappear. Finally, the idea of race, although fluctuating (as a component of human diversity, as a social category), remains inseparable from various theories that make the war of the races the motive force in history—something the terms genos or genus never connoted. I. People, Race, Nation A. “People” The Chevalier de Jaucourt’s article on “People” (Peuple) in the RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers testifies to the fact that the word is dauntingly polysemous: “People: a collective noun that is difficult to define because different ideas about it are formed in diverse places, in diverse times, and depending on the nature of events.” In reality, efforts to define the word “people” turn on a twofold ambivalence: that between a political creation and a natural or historical given, and that between citizens and the masses positively or negatively valued. The modern definition of “the people” as a political creation and in this case, a contractual institution—a definition that stems from Rousseau—thus collided from the outset with a double resistance: “the people” is also a factual reality anterior to the contract; moreover, the word sometimes designates the part of the population that, because of its poverty or lack of education, is excluded from the exercise of sovereignty. 752 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION the basis of the degree of political organization, but the distinctions vary and are reversed from one author to another. 2. The people: A body of citizens or a mass of outcasts? For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, “the people” was also that part of the population that was in fact deprived of political rights and thus totally dominated. The second ambivalence thus is located not at the level of the foundation, as a problem of political philosophy, but in ordinary language. Depending on whether it is evaluated positively or negatively, it testifies to the force of social prejudices or to the insufficiency, and even the hypocrisy, of the contractualist definiton of “the people,” so long as too numerous and too massive inequalities continue to exist within the body politic. The whole question is who belongs to the people and who, on the contrary, claims the right to except himself from it. Thus Abbé Coyer could deplore (in his Dissertations pour être lues, 1755; the first of these “dissertations” is on the old word patrie, the second on the nature of the people) the fact that the people saw itself constantly shrinking: “The people used to be the general estate [l’état général] of the nation, simply opposed to the great and the nobles. It included farmers, workers, artisans, merchants, financiers, men of letters and men of law.” In fact, that is what Vauvenargues might have had in mind when he wrote, “The people and the nobility do not have the same virtues, or the same vices.” But in the eighteenth century, “the people” was no longer defined by opposition to the nobility, but by opposition to the Third Estate. The bourgeosie’s increasing power, and its desire not to be confounded with the mass of the people, led to an increasingly narrow perception and definition of “the people.” It seems that everyone wanted to distinguish himself, and first of all Rousseau, who did not escape the rule when he wrote in his Confessions: “Born into a family superior in its manners to the common people, I had learnt only wisdom from my relations, who had shown me honourable examples, one and all” (II.66, trans. J. M. Cohen). The meaning of “people” is here quite close to the one that le public acquired in French at about the same time, understood as the formless, restless mass that included neither the nobles nor the members of the parlements nor yet even the merchants; a mass that was characterized not only by its lack of education and its potential violence but also by its association with labor. However, taken in this sense, the people was also lauded and even glorified in revolutionary literature: thus Jean-Paul Marat praised it when he asked whether the people or the bourgeoisie was the defender of the Revolution: “In the state of war in which we find ourselves, there is only the people, the common people so despised and so little despicable, that can inspire respect in the enemies of the revolution” (Textes choisis, 217). Going back to the Greek and Latin shows that this ambivalence is found in dêmos and populus, whose use tends sometimes toward plêthos [πλῆθος] and plebs, but here as well the evaluation can be either positive or negative. However, it is worth noting that no political construction, even the most democratic, succeeds in completely and permanently reducing this opposition between the body of citizens and de facto outcasts. That is why, on the fringes of the thought that institutes the people, a discourse that makes it an object of compassion permanently subsists. . 1. The act through which a people is a people Determining the meaning of “people” involves first of all the question of its origin or foundation, as is shown by Rousseau’s polemical attack on Grotius: “A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. So that according to Grotius, a people is a people before giving itself to a king. That very gift is a civil act, it presupposes a public deliberation. Hence before examining the act through which a people elects a king, it would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people” (The Social Contract, I.5; trans. J. T. Scott in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau). But the fact that the people has no political existence and therefore cannot deliberate before being instituted as such by the contract does not mean that it did not previously exist. On the contrary, the institution of the people as a political body is conceived all the more strongly when gauged by the distance between a point of departure and a point of arrival, a first form of community (a first “people”) and the form that gives this first people sovereignty. This is shown with particular clarity by the three chapters that deal with the people in The Social Contract (II.8–10): What people, then, is suited for legislation? One that, while finding itself already bound by some union of origin, interest, or convention, has not yet borne the true yoke of laws. One that has neither deeply rooted customs nor supersitions; finally, one that combines the stability of an ancient people with the docility of a new people. (trans. J. T. Scott, Major Political Writings; emphasis added) Thus the foundation of the people as a political body does not erase its natural or historical origin. On the contrary, it is based on the first bonds that define it. Although there is in the polysemic unity of “people” a persistent ambiguity that is difficult to eliminate, a glance back at Greek and Latin makes it easy to understand: the unity of “people” asserts, in a monothetic way, the transition, and even the consubstantiality, between the natural (geographical and historical) reality of the people as ethnos [ἔθνος], or even as genos [γένος], and the political reality of the people as dêmos [δῆμος]. The phrase “first people,” or “original people,” has in fact, none of the meanings that covered by dêmos or populus (see infra). It corresponds far more to what the Greek terms ethnos and genos suggest. As a result, if one had to give impossible Greek or Latin equivalents for the terms of Rousseau’s formula summing up the problematics of sovereignty, we would probably arrive at the following definition of the contract: the act by which a people (ethnos, natio) is a people (dêmos, populus). This confusion, which has major consequences, is still more manifest as soon as the notion is made plural. Then it is almost impossible to make a distinction between peoples and nations—understood as the anthropological components of human diversity. In The Social Contract, as in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, Rousseau uses both terms in the plural in an undifferentiated way, sometimes in the same sentence. Thus in the famous note 10 in the latter work: “there are whole peoples that have tails like four-footed animals.” No doubt some writers, like Buffon or Voltaire, tried to distinguish between peoples and nations on PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 753 1 People, the masses, and collective man in Gramsci The question whether “people” refers to a body of citizens or to a group of outcasts still influences the problematic nature of the relationship between the philosopher and the people. Whereas in the first case the intellectual is not distinguished from the people (or at least does not ask whether he is), in the second case he is forced to reflect on the conditions under which he can address the people. This is particuarly clear in Gramsci’s thought. In his work, the Italian word popolo appears to be linked to two complementary problems, that of philosophy, and that of revolution. The conceptual and terminological elaboration differs, opening in one case on the equivalence between people, the masses, and the uneducated, and in the other on the idea of a collective man. In his reflection on philosophy, Gramsci uses indifferently popolo (people), massa, (masses), and i semplici (the uneducated). Among the factors that explain the persistence of a philosophical trend is its adoption by the people’s common sense (senso comune). If there is a popular conception of philosophy, it is not unconnected with “specialists’ philosophies,” despite the gap between the intellectual elite and the masses. The relation between the two groups centers on the idea of the conscious direction of action. Described by Gramsci as the “healthy core of common sense,” it can be developed into a “unitary and coherent whole” and it is in this very development that resides “socalled scientific philosophy” (Gramsci dans le texte, 137). But the common meaning is itself only “a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions in which one can find whatever one wants” (307). Thus, popular philosophy must not be confused with philosophy as conceptual criticism. The relationship is mediated, and must be elaborated all the more because, in Gramsci’s view, philosophy undergoes a metamorphosis when it is diffused among the masses: it can be experienced by them only as a faith (158). Moreover, the people’s point of view is the yardstick by which philosophies should be evaluated. Thus some philosophies prove to be hostile with regard to the people. They help keep the people ignorant and do not offer it the means to acquire conscious direction of its action. This is the case of idealism, whose distance with respect to the people is manifested in the rejection of “cultural movements that want to ‘go to the peoples’; or again of “Jesuitized Christianity, transformed into a pure narcotic for the popular masses [le masse popolari]” (140, 155). In addition, the people’s point of view is made the criterion of a true “philosophy of praxis” (an expression that Gramsci uses to refer to communism in a veiled way, in order to keep his texts from being censored), so that it does not suffer from the weakness of “philosophies of immanence.” The latter, for example in the work of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, were not able to “create an ideological unity between the low and the high, between the ‘uneducated’ and the intellectuals [i ‘semplice’ e gli intelletuale]” (140). To establish the conditions for this unity between the low and the high, Gramsci seems at first to resort to a simple tactic: considering that all philosophy tends to become the common sense of a given milieu, no matter how restricted it might be, he recommends investing in a thought that is already that of common sense, in order to endow it with the “coherence” and “sinew of individual philosophies.” However, this investment is itself conditioned by the “‘felt’ demand for contact with the ‘uneducated’” (142). Thus, this is not a simple tactic, because in this “felt demand” we can clearly discern the political dimension of this philosophy of praxis: it depends on a commitment to “fight modern ideologies in their most refined form in order to be able to constitute one’s own group of independent intellectuals and to educate the popular masses, whose culture was medieval” (255–56). This commitment shifts us toward political questions that open up a new view of the people that involves analyzing the conditions for revolution. The success of the latter depends, according to Gramsci, on the consensus of the masses and their participation. The notions of the masses and the uneducated, which serve to describe from a cultural point of view the internal division of the people, are reinterpreted and put in the service of a unified vision that opposes the people as a whole to a minority of intellectuals and specialists. In an essay written in 1926, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” Gramsci notes the fracture lines separating peasants and workers, cities and rural areas, proletariat and intellectuals. He defines the revolutionary project on the basis of these fractures: given the divisions and the necessity of not making a “passive revolution,” a revolution without the people, the political ambition must at first be limited to the project of a revolution on the national scale. To carry out a successful revolution, it is thus necessary to achieve a “cultural-social unity [unità culturalsocial] that causes a large number of scattered wills, whose goals are heterogeneous, to be welded together to attain the same end, on the basis of a single, common conception of the world” (Gramsci dans le texte, 173). In the first of the notebooks devoted to the topic of “The Modern Prince,” Gramsci takes up the figure of Machiavelli, who conceived, according to Gramsci, the movement of a people and the process of forming a collective will: Throughout the book, Machiavelli discusses what the Prince must be like if he is to lead a people to found a new State; the argument is developed with rigorous logic, and with scientific detachment. In the conclusion, Machiavelli merges with the people, becomes the people; not, however, some “generic” people [si fa popolo, si confonde col popolo, ma non con un popolo “genericamente” inteso], but the people whom he, Machiavelli, has convinced by the preceding argument— the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be, with whom he feels identified. (trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks) A new notion emerges from this reflection. It expresses what the people must become in the revolution: the “collective man [uomo collettivo]” (Gramsci dans le texte, 173). It appears as the key formula for revolutionary thought and action, but it also takes us back to Gramsci’s thinking about the philosophy of praxis. The task of this philosophy, of its intellectuals, is to create the social-cultural unity of a people. In this sense, the “people” can be conceived as the key concept in Gramsci for connecting thinking about philosophy with thinking about revolution. Marie Gaille-Nikodimov REFS.: Gramsci, Antonio. Gramsci dans le texte. Edited by F. Ricci and J. Bramant. Translated into French by J. Bramant, G. Moget, A. Monjo, and F. Ricci. Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1953. . The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. Edited by David Forgasc. Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. New York: New York University Press, 2000. . Opere. 12 volumes. Turin: Einaudi, 1947–71. . Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 754 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION (exploitable and exploited resources) and public functions (the army, the judiciary, the administration, the church)— and by its juridical existence: “a body of associates living under a common law and represented by the same legislature.” To the extent to which the Third Estate itself is capable of providing this subsistence, of performing these functions, and constituting such a body, it forms “a complete nation” (Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?, 31). The nobility, on the contrary, imprisoned in its privileges and its idleness, is outside the common order, the common law. It forms, Sieyês wrote, “a separate people in the great nation.” Thus the semantic relationship between “people” and “nation” was shattered: the political dimension was no longer reserved for the former and history for the latter, but the other way around. This idea of a “complete nation” led first to the articulation of the idea of the nation with that of the state. Saying that the Third Estate is a complete nation does not mean that the nobility is excluded from the nation, but only that the Third Estate is capable by itself of assuming all the functions of the state that give the nation its unity. C. “Race”: A biological given or a social class? It remains that the political sense of “nation” does not put an end to the other meanings that the term has been able to acquire, starting with the meaning of a community of customs and language constituting, independently of any political unity, a part of human diversity—a subject of study for anthropology and history. That is why in translations that sometimes involve the retrospective illusion, ethnos or genos (see below) is occasionally rendered, especially in the nineteenth century but still today, by “nation.” Some discourses and some theories even explicitly oppose this relative “denaturalization” and “dehistoricization” of the notion, preserving its dimension of a natural and/or historical community. But then it is confused with “race.” It is particularly in the works of historians who make race the engine of history at the same time that they construct the idea of national history, such as Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1820, 1827), that we find this ambiguity between a strictly political and legal meaning of “nation” and its identification with a natural community. But “race” is also polysemous, and its use to designate the human communities of antiquity (through historical description or translation) is subject to just as much confusion. The philosophical use of the notion of race was initially linked, in the seventeenth century, with the broadening of anthropology (previously limited to humany anatomy and psychology) to describe the varieties of the human species—as in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle de l’homme or Voltaire’s Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. The notion of race was then used in a double register, descriptive and explanatory, which gave rise to numerous polemics, like the one between the polygenists and the monogenists. Ostensibly, the question is whether the differences for which this notion is supposed to account (differences that are primarily morphologial, such as skin color or the shape of the face) are original or derived—whether several races of human beings appeared simultaneously on Earth or at least independently of one another, or on the contrary they derive from a common source that contained B. “Nation”: The body of the king and the body of citizens The polysemy of “people” is further aggravated by the fact that its different senses are recuperated by “nation” as the latter term, through a whole series of mutations, acquires a rigorous political meaning; and all the more so because the meaning of “nation” becomes a historical and political issue. Under an absolute monarchy, the nation is initially summed up in the body of the king—the whole of his subjects insofar as they are his subjects. Thus the glory of the nation, so often invoked, is nothing other than the power of the king. That is what Rousseau points out in the Jugement sur le projet de paix perpétuelle (Judgment of the program for perpetual peace): “Every occupation of kings or of those to whom they entrust their functions is intended to realize two goals: to extend their domination abroad and to make it more absolute within. Any other design is either related to one of these or merely serves as a pretext for them. Such are the public good, the happiness of his subjects, the glory of the nation” (Œuvres complètes, 2:592). The politicization of the idea of the nation can be understood, then, as a series of efforts to break it away from its identification with the person of the absolute monarch. At first, the monarchical definition is opposed by an attempt to restore to the nation the sense of a historical community of customs and culture, and to turn against the king’s power the rights that his origin gives him. That is what is involved in the various theses like the one defended by Henri de Boulainvilliers in Essais sur la noblesse de France (1732), which undertake to distinguish two nations on the basis of their origins: the descendents of the Gauls conquered by the Romans, and the nobility descended from the Franks. Taken in this sense, the nation can no longer define all the subjects of a monarch, connected physically and legally with the king’s body, but that does not imply the unity of a territory either. As a nation, the nobility transcends state boundaries. Thus the nobles of all countries can claim to belong to an original community (of birth) in order to proclaim the rights of the nation that they constitute in opposition to other nations. The nobility’s historical appropriation of the term “nation” met with resistance on the part of the Third Estate, which was to turn the meaning and the use of the term in another direction. Against the nobility’s speculations, the Third Estate at first sought to regain control of the term “nation” by identifying it with the unity of a territory bounded by frontiers and subject to a common set of laws and government. That is, for example, what the article “Nation” in the RT: Encyclopédie does. Then the goal is to make the nation the source of sovereignty and the owner of the crown, the government, and public authority: “In a word, the crown, the government, and public authority are goods of which the body of the nation is the owner and of which the rulers have the usufruct,” Diderot wrote in the article “Autorité public.” And, reversing the terms of the monarchical definition, he adds in his Observations sur le Nakaz: “There is no true sovereign other than the nation.” But it was especially with the Abbé Sieyès’s pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? (“What is the Third Estate?”) that “nation” took on an essentially political and legal meaning. For Sieyès, a nation is defined both by its political ability to subsist—which requires particular works PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 755 Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right (the first part of his Metaphysics of Morals) and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Significantly, it is in the latter and not the former that we find a rigorous definition of Volk: By the word people [Volk] (populus) is meant a multitude of human beings united in a region [die in einem Landstrich vereinigte Menge Menschen], in so far as they constitute a whole. This multitude, or even the part of it that recognizes itself as united into a civil whole [einem bürgerlichen Ganzen] through common ancestry [gemeinschaftliche Abstammung], is called a nation [Nation] (gens). The part that exempts itself from these laws (the unruly crowd within this people [die wilde Menge in diesem Volk]) is called a rabble [Pôbel] (vulgus). (trans. R. B. Louden, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 213) Kant connects Volk with populus, but gives it a sense that is both narrower and vaguer than that of the Latin term. It designates, as it were, the first degree of union, before any recognition of a common origin, and a fortiori of a common fate. To indicate a meaning similar to that of Cicero’s populus—that is, a political meaning—Kant thus had to introduce other terms, this time in the Doctrine of Right: This condition of the individuals within a people [dieser Zustand der Einzelnen im Volke] in relation to one another is called a civil condition [bürgerlicher Zustand] (status civilis), and the whole of individuals in a rightful condition, in relation to its own members, is called a state [Staat] (civitas). Because of its form, by which all are united through their common interest in being in a rightful condition [im rechtlichen Zustande], a state is called a commonwealth [das gemeine Wesen] (res publica latius sic dicta). (trans. M. J. Gregor, Metaphysics of Morals, §43, 89) But it is above all Kant’s definition of the contract that manifests most clearly how much he reserves Volk to designate the natural element of the body politic. Unlike Rousseau, he does not say that the contract is “the act by which a people is a people,” but rather “the act by which them all in embryonic form. In reality, the goal is almost always to show the superiority of one race over the others. But the word “race” has still another meaning, and the difference it designates is not always and exclusively ethnic. In the nineteenth century, two meanings existed alongside one another: the first is the broad, open one that is implied by the theme of the war of the races that recurs in the discourse of historians. Races are not necessarily ethnically determined components but may also be social or cultural groups. In fact, Marx praised Augustin Thierry—the theoretician of the war of races as the engine of history (Sur l’antipathie de race qui divise la nation française)—as the “father of class struggle in French historiography” (letter to Engels, 27 July 1854). Here, “race” referred to distinct groups that, although they inhabited (or had inhabited) the same territory, had not been able to mix, for reasons that were not only ethnic but also cultural or social in nature. In the second sense, races are natural, biologically determined components of human diversity. Then we see how ambiguous it is to translate genos or genus by “race.” The translation is, of course, legitimate when “race” is situated in the tradition of natural history, to which genos in part belongs. But “race” also implies divisions that are too historically and ideologically determined to be transposable, and it suggests, at the price of a real retrospective illusion, that they have always been conceived that way. . II. VOLK, “NATION” A. Volk Volk, unlike “people,” and also unlike dêmos and populus, has the pejorative sense of “rabble” only in exceptional cases. This is connected with another of its characteristic traits: the word designates only marginally, in an exclusively political and juridical way, a body of citizens, and it refers to the natural basis of the political body rather than to this body itself. This basis may both be presented as an obstacle to the rational and political constitution of this body and exhibited, indeed sacralized, as the main reason for opposing it. 1. Volk: An obstacle to the Commonwealth That is so shown first of all by the complexity and complementarity of the definitions of Volk given by Kant in his 2 The malaises of ordinary language In French, an ambivalence persists in the different uses of the term race in ordinary language. 1. To say of someone that il a de la race or il est racé is first of all to reproduce a class judgment. Moreover, the expression has no meaning other than the one that attributes “class” to some person or other. But it is also to claim that there is a natural foundation for social distinctions; it is to seek in the genos a justification for inequality. 2. Inversely, the interdiction that weighs on the word race, taken in its ethnological sense, testifies to its basis in natural history. To avoid race is to refuse to reduce human diversity to a given of natural history. The races, it will be said, are good for animal species (in the sense of breeding), not for humans. And it is true that the history of the term is partly linked with the blurring of these boundaries and with the lifting of the moral interdictions that are attached to them. Speaking of human races as we speak of races animales used to be a way of justifying the fact that relationships between these different species of men (in this case, colonizers and colonized) could be as violent as those that organized the animal realm. Thus we will prefer to use the term ethnie (ethnicity), which preserves or restores the division between humanity and animality. 756 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Ideas for the philosophy of the history of humanity] (1784/91;): Nature raises families; the most natural state is therefore also one people, with one national character [ein Volk, mit einem Nationalcharakter]. [A] people is as much a plant of nature as a family, only with more branches. (Ideen in Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan et al., 13:384) The people (Volk) is thus conceived as a natural organism whose divisions can result only from a politics of violence. And government has no legitimacy except insofar as it belongs to this organism. But this strong naturalization of the notion of the people is also a historicization of it. It is, in fact, for the people to cultivate its specificity in the course of a history that, far from implying any attachment to its original nature (Kant), on the contrary preserves it. It is in this perspective that we should understand the development of several notions derived from Volk that put the unity of the people under the sign of its historicity, even its antiquity, or under that of its naturalness. . 3. The erasure of social inequalities This mutually exclusive naturalization and historicization of the Volk erases the tension between the juridical body of the citizens and individuals or groups whose social and political situation excludes them from that body. As a result, the object of compassion is shifted: it is no longer the most wretched part (the uneducated and impoverished people) that arouses pity, but rather the people as a whole (das Volk), a people forms itself into a state is the original contract. Properly speaking, the original contract is only the idea of this act” (ibid., §47, 91–92). The definition of the contract makes it possible to distinguish the “people conceived as subject” (the mass of individuals) from the “people unified itself ” (the people considered as a state). However, it will be noted that as soon as Volk no longer has the natural meaning given it by anthropology, a paraphrase is necessary, as well as a resort to Latin, as if Kant did not have confidence in the German language’s ability to express these matters of public law. As a final sign of Kant’s reluctance to give Volk a juridical meaning, we must mention the doubts he expresses regarding the legitimacy of using the expression Völkerrecht to designate the right of nations, in other words, his refusal to make peoples (Völker) the subject of international law. What is involved in this law are the relations not among peoples but among states: The right of states in relation to one another (which in German is called, not quite correctly, the right of nations, but should instead be called the right of states, jus publicum civitatem) is what we have to consider under the title Völkerrecht. (Ibid., §53.114) 2. Volk: Nature and history versus reason and law What appears in Kant as a semantic reluctance (he finds the term Volk unsuitable) becomes in other writers a way of resisting any rational and juridical conception of the body politic. The naturalness and historicity of the Volk were opposed in principle to any attempt to reduce the people to relationships of law. Thus Herder defends the people against the state 3 The ideology of Volk and Volkstum On the basis of Volk have been created Urvolk (aboriginal people), Volksgeist (spirit of the people), Volkslied (folksong), and Volkstum (people-ness), which never refer to either a legal determination of the people or to the people as the group composed of the wretched and excluded. That is why the expressions “folksong” or “popular element” are not suitable translations of these German words. Of all these words, Volkstum is the most untranslatable. Coined by Ludwig Jahn in 1810 (in a work entitled precisely Deutsches Volkstum), it designates the strength given a people by its organic unity and makes the latter the source of its sovereignty. Volkstum is in fact in tension with Königtum (royalty). Let us add that this substance (or element) of each people is also the principle of its opposition to all others, and that its greater or lesser importance determines its ability to dominate others; “What is it that makes England and France the leading world powers? Nothing other than the Volkstum that is constantly reborn in the midst of the greatest upheavals” (cf. La langue source de la nation, ed. P. Caussat et al., 134). But Volkstum is only one example among others of the different terms that can be forged by a nationalist ideology on the basis of the word Volk—as was shown by Victor Klemperer analyzing, day by day, the rhetoric of Volk and its derivatives in the discourse of the Nazis. REFS.: Barbour, Stephen. “‘Uns knüpft der Sprache heilig Band’: Reflections on the Role of Language in German Nationalism, Past and Present.” In “Das unsichtbare Band der Sprache”: Studies in German Language and Linguistic History in Memory of Leslie Seiffert, edited by John L. Flood, Paul Salmon, Olive Sayce, and Christopher Wells, 313–32. Stuttgart: Heinz Akademischer, 1993. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Caussat, P., D. Adamski, and M. Crépon, eds. La langue source de la nation: Messianismes séculiers en Europe centrale et orientale (du XVIIIe au XXe siècle). Hayen, Belg.: Mardaga, 1996. Faye, Jean Pierre. Langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison narrative. Paris: Hermann, 1972. Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig. Deutsches Volkstum. 1813. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1980. Klemperer, Victor. LTI—Notizbuch eines Philologen: An Annotated Edition. Notes and commentary by Roderick H. Watt. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1997. Translation by Martin Brady: The Language of the Third Reich: LTI-Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. London: Continuum, 2006. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 757 Once again, Kant resorts to Latin to designate the political character of the bond of birth, as if he could not count on the German term to do so. In reality, Nation was at that time already being used as part of a strategy to which Kant could not subscribe. For authors like Herder, the nation is a community of birth, to be sure, but it is much more than that. It is an organic whole, a unity both natural and historical, and its customs, traditions, language, and religion, as well as its feelings and imagination, are all subject to the same process of development. In this regard it is the object of a veritable sacralization that has nothing to do with attachment to common legal norms. Nations constitute a division of humanity foreseen by divine Providence: “The Creator alone is the only one who conceives the full unity of any one and of all nations [die ganze Einheit einer, aller Nationen], in all their great diversity without thereby losing sight of their unity” (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [1774]; trans. I. D. Evrigenis and D. Pellerin, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind, 26). Thus we can see in what a complex system of illusions we find ourselves entangled when Herder uses this same term, Nation, in referring to the Roman Empire’s violent treatment of the communities it conquered: “The walls that separated the nation from other nations were broken down, the first step taken to destroy the national characters of them all, to throw everyone into one mold called ‘the Roman people’ ” (ibid., 23). Herder gave the form Nation an atemporal dimension that perpetuated it. III. Dêmos, Ethnos, Genos, and Their Translations In Anatole Bailly’s Greek-French dictionary (RT: Dictionnaire grec-français) we find the same sequence, race-peuple-nation (as well as tribu, and also classe, caste, sexe, along with strange compounds such as race de peuples and famille de peuples) to render both ethnos and genos; and in any case peuple is one of the translations proposed for each of the three terms dêmos, ethnos, and genos. Thus the tripartite race, peuple, nation division as such does not constitute a significant system of differences in Greek: the Greek words in question evoke quite different series that distinguish them from one another or complicate them in different ways. A. Genos: From the biological to the political (genos and polis, “race” and “city”) and the logical (genos and eidos, “genus” and “species”) Genos, from gignesthai [γίγνεσθαι] (“to be born,” and then “to become, to occur”) had first of all the biological meaning of “birth, origin, descent.” It signifies “race, stock,” that of the gods (Hesiod’s Theogony) and that of mules, and within the human “genus” (genos anthrôpôn [γένος ἀνθϱώπων]), it takes on the narrower sense of “ancestry, kinship.” In Homer, a person introduces himself in terms of his genos (“My genos is Ithaca and my father is Odysseus,” says Telemachos, Odyssey XV.267), and Greek tragedies focus on the genos—the “family” of the Atreids, for instance. Thus genos functions as an equivalent of the two Latin words genus and gens (Greek gennaios [γενναῖος]: “noble, high-born”). It therefore connects the biological with two types of series, (1) sociopolitical and (2) logico-ontological. whether this compassion has to do with the people’s insufficiently recognized language, spoken and written, its insufficiently developed culture, the absence of international recognition, or the actual existence of a cultural or political domination. The register of the people’s self-pity certainly constitutes an element in the rise of nationalism that cannot be ignored. Nietzsche notes that such a perspective constitutes a genuine break with a whole tradition inherited from antiquity: To differentiate between government and people, as if two separate spheres of power, one stronger and higher, the other weaker and lower, were negotiating and coming to agreement, is a bit of inherited political sensibility that still accords exactly with the historical establishment of the power relationship in most states. When, for example, Bismarck describes the constitutional form as a compromise between government and people, he is speaking according to a principle that has its reason in history (which is, of course, also the source for that portion of unreason, without which nothing human can exist). By contrast, we are now supposed to learn (according to a principle that has sprung from the head alone, and is supposed to make history) that government is nothing but an organ of the people, and not a provident, honorable “Above” in relationship to a habitually humble “Below.” (trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann, Human, All Too Human, 215) Nietzsche challenges the unitary definition of “people” and in connection with his repeated criticisms of democracy as the weak’s revenge and domination, Volk usually has the meaning of vulgus or plebs in their pejorative sense. B. “Nation” Nonetheless, in German Volk does not cover by itself the whole of the naturalness of the body politic. Although it designates a group gathered in a single territory, another term is necessary to designate a community of birth. The latter is, as we have seen, the precise meaning that Kant gives to the term Nation in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). Except for when in The Doctrine of Right he wants to refer in a more political sense to the community of birth, the bond of kinship implied by the Latin terms gens or natio, Kant uses a lengthy paraphrase to avoid using Nation: As natives of a country, those who constitute a people [Volk] can be looked upon analogously to descendants [nach der Analogie der Erzeugung] of the same ancestors [von einem gemeinschaftlichen Elternstamm] (congeniti) even though they are not. Yet in an intellectual sense and from the perspective of rights, since they are born of the same mother (the republic) [von einer gemeinschaftlichen Mutter (die Republik)], they constitute as it were one family (gens, natio), whose members (citizens of the state) are of equally high birth. (trans. M. J. Gregor, Metaphysics of Morals, I, §53, 114; translation modified) 758 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION particularly 1252b16f.): the geographical land is substituted for the patriotic myth. At the same time, the “political” establishes from the outset an order radically distinct from the “domestic” or “economic” order, whose goal is no longer to “live” but to “live well” (eu zên [εὖ ζῆν]) (1252b30): it is neither the unity of place (topos [τόπος]) nor the genos of the inhabitants, their common origin, that can guarantee the identity of a polis, but only the politeia [πολιτεία], the “political constitution” itself (III.3). . 2. The genos, thus relieved of its mythical, epic, and tragic freight, opens out onto another kind of series that is properly philosophical, and makes the transition from genealogy to logic and ontology. The terminology elaborated in terms of natural history (the “class” of animals) lends itself to categorial uses. Established by Aristotle by means of the distinction genos/eidê [εἴδη] genus/species, it is reexamined by Plotinus and Porphyry, who try to elaborate on this transition. . B. Ethnos and dêmos: Geography and politics Ethnos designates a more or less stable group of individuals, soldiers, or animals that is characterized by a common ethos [ἔθος] (“habits,” “customs,” from the same root *swedh-) and that is distinguished from the genos as “foreign” (othneios [ὀθνεῖος])—thus in Rome, ta ethnê [τὰ ἔθνη] referred to the peoples of the provinces, and in the New Testament, it refers to the Gentiles as opposed to the Hebrews. Dêmos, which is generally related to daiomai [δαίομαι] (to divide up), signifies in Homer “country, territory” (for example, Iliad V.710: “The Boeotians who lived on a very fertile land [dêmon (δῆμον)]”); in Athens, the demes (divisions of tribes) were part of the administrative topography, and then the inhabitants of this country (“to the misfortune of your father, your city, and all your people [dêmôi (δήμῳ)]”) (ibid., III.50); finally, perhaps because they lived in the countryside, it refers to the “common people,” as opposed to the powerful (when Odysseus sees a “king or notable hero” [ibid., II.188]; “when he sees a man of the people [dêmou andra (δήμου ἄνδϱα)]”) (ibid., II.198). While genos implies a 1. The first series shows that birth is basic to social organization. Émile Benveniste describes how the “three concentric divisions of ancient Greece” (Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen, 1:257, cf. 1:316), genos, phratria [φϱατϱία], and phulê [φυλή], which are analogous to Latin gens, curia, and tribus—along with the quantification stipulated in Solon’s Athenian constitution, that thirty “clans” make a “phratry,” and three phratries make a “tribe”—broaden the fraternity of blood to a military solidarity (Homer, Iliad, II.362 f.) and then an institutional one. Genealogical divisions are then rearranged into a “nomenclature of territorial divisions” (É. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1:310) and embedded in sequences such as oikos [οἶϰος], kômê [ϰώμη], polis [πόλις] (household, village, city-state). For a long time, the essential question was as follows: what is the place of the genealogical and the “genic” in politics? One answer—which Plato attributed, not without irony, to Aspasia, a courtesan who was loved by Pericles and who is supposed to have influenced his famous funeral oration—makes the genos the foundation of the polis: the excellence of Athens comes from the Athenians’ eugeneia, represented by the myth of their “autochthony” (their ancestors, they say, were born from the soil itself of their “motherland”): “This good birth [eugeneia (εὐγένεια)] has as its first foundation the origin [genesis (γένεσις)] of their ancestors [progonôn (πϱογόνων)], who, instead of being immigrants and engendering their descendants [ekgonous (ἐϰγόνους)] metics were autochthons” (Menexenus, 237b; cf. 245d); it is the isogonia [ἰσογονία], the “equality of birth” of all these “brothers” that provides a natural basis for the isonomia [ἰσονομία], the “equality before the law” established by law among Athenian citizens (239a). Aristotle’s answer consists, on the contrary, in distinguishing among orders. The genos, the line of biological descent, takes in politics the form of the oikos (the home) and of the oikia [οἰϰία] (the family or household: man, wife, children, animals, servants). The polis is conceived as the outcome of successive local regroupings, several households forming a village (the “village” or kômê is a “colony,” apoikia [ἀποιϰία], an extension-externalization of the family, oikia), and several villages forming a city (Politics, I.2, 4 [Гένος] and genos: The caution of contemporary historians “So that there might be no ambiguity in the use of terms, we shall write the word génos [or genos] in French when it is a matter of the notion of génos, a social reality as it is conceived by modern historians” (F. Bourriot, Recherches sur la nature du Genos, 1:204). By means of this precaution, a contemporary historian tries to indicate that the Greek term γένος (genos) has in no case the meaning that nineteenth-century historians tried to give it, that it is a matter of a “clan” in the English sense (Grote, Morgan) or a “family line” (Geschlecht) in the German sense (Meyer). The opinion that has been common since Fustel de Coulanges and Glotz, namely that ancient history can be reduced to a confrontation between two powers, the genê [γένη] and the state, thus deserves serious reexamination: “In the nineteenth century, an omnipotent structure, the génos, was created in all domains. It is this mythical protagonist that has to be driven off the stage” (Bourriot, 232). In Athens, in the middle of the fourth century, to be part of the γένος (en genei einai [ἐν γένει εἶναι]) was, without any possible ambiguity, to be part not of the gens or clan, but of the three generations issuing from a single ancestor. REFS.: Bourriot, Félix. Recherches sur la nature du Genos: Étude d’histoire sociale athénienne, périodes archaïque et classique. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1976. Jones, C. P. “ἔθνος and γνος in Herodotus.” The Classical Quarterly 46 (1996): 315–20. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 759 “The cities were first governed by kings, as the ethnê still are today” (Aristotle, Politics, 1252b19f.). That is why the term is used above all to designate barbarian groups, all of which are characterized by a lack of differentiation and can be despotically hierarchized, and which do not know this form of political equality by reciprocity (being alternately governors and governed)—the only one that can preserve differences from being erased by uniformity: It is not like a military alliance [summachia (συμμαχία)]. The usefulness of the latter depends on its quantity even where there is no difference in quality [to auto tôi eidei (τὸ αὐτὸ τῷ εἴδει)] (for mutual protection is the end aimed at), just as a greater weight of anything is more useful than a less (in like manner, a state differs from a nation [ethnos], when community of origin, ethnos implies a community of mores and dêmos implies a community of territory that culminates in a political structure. In Aristotle’s Politics we find, repeated over and over, the most rigorous expression of the difference between ethnos and dêmos. Ethnos is first contrasted, in virtually all its occurrences, with polis (city, state). In the technical sense, the ethnê designate the “peoples” (peuples; cf. J. Aubonnet’s translation) or “tribes” (peuplades; cf. P. Pellegrin’s translation) or “nations” (nations; cf. J. Tricot’s translation) that have not yet reached the stage of the accomplished city, provisionally or definitively. This question, heavy with ideology, is subject to debate, depending precisely on one’s interpretation of the natural historicity of the city and whether one gives priority to the break or the continuity with the family and the village: 5 The genera of being: Genealogy or logic: Porphyry and his translation v. ANALOGY, HOMONYM, PRÉDICABLE, PRINCIPLE, TO BE The basic problem that determines the whole doctrine of the analogy of being can be formulated in terms of the semantics of the genos: how important a role is played by the Platonic and Neoplatonic genealogical meaning in the logical meaning that Aristotle established in the Organon? In Aristotelian theory, each science is the science of a single genus of being, but being is not genus, so that the recurrent problem arising from Aristotelianism can be formulated as follows: are the categories genera of being or are they multiple meanings indicating heterogeneous domains? It is in Porphyry’s Isagoge that the semantic stake is clearest. Porphyry opposes Plotinus, who, in the sixth book of the Enneads, “genealogized” Aristotle’s categories the better to Platonize them. Porphyry reAristotelianizes them: Porphyry’s genealogical tree does not have a single summit— there is no supreme genus like the Stoics’ ti, nor are there any lowly rootlets to feed the superb tree. There is no process of engenderment, no hierarchical procession that allows us to pass logically to the individual, even if the tree is often designed to lead from the genus generalissimum to the species specialissima (A. de Libera, La querelle des universaux, 46). However, Porphyry takes into account the influence of the genealogical meaning when he distinguishes the meanings of genos: “genus is thus expressed in three ways, and it is the third with which philosophers are concerned.” The three ways are (a) “the multiplicity of those who draw their origin from a single principle” (example: “the genus of the Heraclids” designates those who have Heracles as an ancestor); (b) “the principle of each individual’s birth,” whether this concerns the father (Heracles for Hyllos) or the homeland (Athens for Plato); (c) “‘genus’ is also used in another way: it is that beneath which the species is ranked, perhaps named in this way in imitation of the preceding meanings; in fact, the genus of which we are speaking is a sort of principle [archê (ἀϱχή)] for what is beneath it, and seems to embrace all the multiplicity [plêthos] that is under it.” Meaning (c) goes back to the literal definition given in Aristotle’s Topics: “genus is what is predicable [katêgoroumenon (ϰατηγοϱούμενον)] relative to the question ‘what is?’ [en tôi ti esti (ἐν τῷ τί ἔστι)]” (Isagoge, I.5), or “A ‘genus’ is what is predicated in the category of essence of a number of things exhibiting differences in kind.” (Topics, I, 5, 102a31 f.; trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge), with the example of the “animal” (or the “living being,” zôion [ζῷον]) as the genus for “man.” We will emphasize Alain de Libera’s notes: “Here there is an unavoidable translation difficulty in French: since Porphyry claims to illustrate the various meanings of ‘genus,’ we are forced to use the term, even if the words race or lignée would probably be preferable” (Isagôgê, 38, n. 11) for meanings (a) and (b). And especially, the relation to the “properly philosophical” meaning: “Here it is as if Porphyry were stressing the resemblance between the properly Aristotelian philosophical acceptation—the relation of genus to species—[and] the ‘ordinary,’ or at least nontechnical meanings of the term in order to overcome the opposition Aristotle himself makes between the genealogical meaning and the genus-species relation” (ibid., 39, n. 19). In opposition to Plotinus’s refutation, Porphyry thus outlines a Plotinization of Aristotle by regenealogizing the meaning of genos. But he does so the better to carry out the final movement, which is that of disjunction: by opting for the radical homonymy of being (Isagôgê, II, 10), Porphyry refuses to “suture the Aristotelian doctrine of categories by means of a genealogical notion of genus, understood as an ‘analogical’ unity, aph’ henos [ἀφ’ ἑνός]” (ibid., 39). The disjunction of the meanings of genos and the homonymy of being are connected; to promote the genealogical meaning is to support the analogical procession that engenders on the basis of a unique principle, against the logical and categorial sense necessary for the homonymic disjunction. In a certain way, the difficulties of translating Porphyry into French are what corroborate the power of the homonymy for us today. REFS.: Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1976. . Topics. Translated by W. A. PickardCambridge. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/ Aristotle/topics.html (last accessed 10 June 2013). Libera, Alain de. La querelle des universaux: De Platon à la fin du Moyen Age. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Porphyry. Isagoge: Texte grec, Translatio Boethii. Translated by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Translation and commentary by Jonathan Barnes: Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. 760 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION make up the polis (and from which are excluded by definition those who have no political rights, and in particular women, children, and slaves, whatever the system), and sometimes, exactly like “the people” and unlike the Volk, the most “deprived” among them (aporoi [ἄποϱοι]), who are also always, as if by accident, the most numerous. In this latter sense, other words bearing more negative connotations are sometimes substituted for dêmos: plêthos (from pimplêmi [πίμπλημι], “to fill,” like polus [πολύς], “numerous”), “the multitude, the crowd,” or even “the rabble” that Xenophon contrasts with the dêmos (Constitution of Athens, 2, 18), and in the plural ta plêthê [τὰ πλήθη], “the masses,” those whom, according to Plato, a demogogic Sophist would never fail to persuade (Gorgias, 452e); or again ochlos [ὄχλος] (ochleô [ὀχλέω] means both “to move” and “to disturb, harass,” probably from *wegh-, like “vehicle” and “wave”), the masses in disorder, the tumult of the crowd (Gorgias again, where Plato makes the meanings circulate among “popular assemblies,” for instance the tribunals [454b] and the ignorant crowd [458–59]). Similarly, Latin writers played on plebs and turba. This double polarity of dêmos is clearly connected with the polemics regarding democracy: the least bad of all possible governments, the government of all for all, or else a degenerate system that inevitably leads to power being seized by the most vile (phauloi [φαῦλοι]), the common people, as opposed to the good people (spoudaioi [σπουδαῖοι] from spoudê [σπουδή], “zeal”). Aristotle writes the history of democracy, drawing on the Sophists to rehabilitate the dêmos as plêthos, the people as multitude. . IV. Populus, Plebs, Gens The former genealogical names lose their institutional and social meaning and become a nomenclature for territorial divisions. Each language proceeds to rearrange its terminology. The way in which this transformation takes place in the different languages is extremely informative, because languages do not have the same way of being Indo-European. Latin is Indo-European in its fidelity to earlier usage, to the vocabulary of institutions, even when this vocabulary covers new realities; Greek is Indo-European in an inverse way, through the persistence of the primitive model organizing a new series of designations. (É. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1:310sq.) the nation has not its population [to plêthos (τὸ πλῆθος)] organized in villages, but lives an Arcadian sort of life); but the elements out of which a unity is to be formed differ in kind. Wherefore the principle of compensation [to ison to antipeponthos (τὸ ἴσον τὸ ἀντιπεπονθός)], as I have already remarked in the Ethics, is the salvation of states. (Ibid., II.1261a24–31; trans. B. Jowett in Basic Works of Aristotle, 1147) Ethnos, a geographical and not a political term, has to do in particular with a theory of climates. It is the word used by Hippocrates when he examines, in his treatise on Airs, Waters, and Places, the effects of climate on the temperament and customs of all species of human beings: “I want to explain now how Asia and Europe differ from each other in every respect, and in particular with regard to the physical appearance of their peoples [peri tôn ethneôn tês morphês (πεϱὶ τῶν ἔθνεων τῆς μοϱφῆς)], in which they are distinct and do not at all resemble each other” (XII, 1). This was, of course, the term Aristotle adopted (Politics, VII.7) to distinguish the ethnê of cold regions such as Europe, who are full of courage (thumos [θυμός]) but lacking in intelligence (dianoia [διάνοια]) and skill (technê [τέχνη]), and are thus free but not organized into cities (apoliteuta [ἀπολίτευτα], 1327b26), from those of Asia, who are inversely endowed (with dianoia and technê, but not thumos), and are consequently subjected or enslaved, with, in the middle, the genos of the Greeks, “the race of Hellenes,” which is endowed with both courage and intelligence, and lives freely and politically. But this genos consists of ethnê that are more or less balanced and more or less politically virtuous—Pierre Pellegrin, when dealing with the Greeks, shifts, unaccountably, from peuplades to peuples (1327b34), and entitles his study “Le caractère national: Qualités des peuples selon le climat”—though once again the rigor of the terms can only be etymological or conventional. However that may be, ethnos designates the geographical and very precisely ethological component of human diversity, in contrast to both the community of origin (genos) and the political structure (polis, politeia). . Dêmos, unlike the words that serve to translate it (populus, peuple, people, Volk), is one of the three terms that from earliest classical antiquity belonged exclusively to the vocabulary of politics. Sometimes it designates the body of citizens who 6 Dêmos / laos: “People” / “people” Many Greek words that are not related to each other are translated by “people,” which tells us something about the vagueness of the modern term. For example, phulon [φῦλον] (“tribe,” “race,” from phuô [φύω], “push”), alongside genos or ethnos. Above all, as Émile Benveniste has noted (Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes, 2:90), we translate without distinction two words that have absolutely different meanings and refer, as early as the Homeric poems, to historically distinct realities: dêmos and laos [λαός]. Laos, frequently used in the plural, without any corresponding term outside Greek, can be traced back to the Achaean period; it designates the people insofar as it bears arms (thus neither old men nor children) and implies the personal relation of a group to a leader whom it follows: thus Menelaos is a “shepherd of peoples.” Dêmos, which goes back to the Dorian invasion, and thus to a more recent date, implies on the contrary, as we have seen, a fixed relationship to a territory, and designates not a military community but the stability of a politicizable or political body. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 761 reinforcing the idea of collectivity. But in Cicero’s philosophical works these two notions are articulated in a more complex way. A people [populus] is not just any assembly of individuals brought together in just any way [non omnis hominum coestus quoquo modo congregatus], but the gathering of a multitude, carried out by virtue of an agreement regarding the law and a community of interests [coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitati communione sociatus]. (De republica, I.25, 39) A. Populus Whether we connect the word populus with the IndoEuropean root *pel-/ple- (Greek plêthos, Latin plenus) or with an Etruscan origin, it is recognized that it initially had a military meaning: populus designated the mass of infantrymen, and other words have retained a trace of this meaning, such as the Latin deponent verb populari, which means “to sack or devastate.” With the reorganization of the military and the comitiae, the term populus lost this meaning and came to apply to the citizenry as a whole, gathered together in the centuriuate assembly. Civitas was later added to populus, 7 Dêmos and plêthos: Democracy and the plurality of citizens v. POLIS To frame the problem, let us sketch a table of the different kinds of government or constitutions (politeiai [πολιτείαι]), that is, of the different types of governments (politeumata [πολιτεύματα]) set forth by Aristotle in Book 3 of the Politics. The “true” forms of government, listed according to the number and quality of the governors, may, as in Plato, undergo deviations regarding the goals that make them move from concern for the koinon [ϰοινόν] (public good, common interest,) to the selfishness of the idion [ἴδιον] (specific or private interest): then they change their names. Government True government (public good, to koinon sumpheron [Gr.]) Deviation (parekbasis) (private good, to idion [Gr.]) By one Monarchy Tyranny By a few Aristocracy Oligarchy By many Politeia Democracy hoi polloi [οἱ πολλοί] to plêthos [τὸ πλῆθος] The central enigma, which is well known, has to do with the fact that the true form of government by the many does not really have its own name: it is called just politeia. Democracy, government by the people, is of this kind and is only the deviated form of it; it is defined as the government “that seeks the advantage of the poor (pros to sumpheron to tôn aporôn [πϱὸς τὸ συμφέϱον τὸ τῶν ἀπόϱων])” (Politics, III.1279a9). Whence the prudence of Solon, the legislator par excellence: “Solon, himself, appears to have given the Athenians only that power of electing to offices and calling to account the magistrates which was absolutely necessary; for without it they would have been in a state of slavery and enmity to the government. All the magistrates he appointed from the notables and men of wealth” (II.12.1274a15–19, and III.11.1281b31f.; trans. B. Jowett in Basic Works of Aristotle). However, the dêmos, precisely because it is plêthos (mass, number), has thereby an intrinsic quality capable of conferring on democracy an unparalleled virtue and of making government by the many the government par excellence. This promotion is based on the very definition of the city, which for Aristotle, contrary to Plato, is not initially unified and hierarchized like the body or the mind, but multiple and synthetic like a chorus or a symphony, so that “in the virtue of each the virtue of all is involved” (VII.13.1332a38): But a state is a composite [tôn sugkeimenôn (τῶν συγϰειμένων)], like any other whole made up of many parts [sunestôtôn d’ ek pollôn moriôn (συνεστώτων δ’ ἐϰ πολλῶν μοϱίων)]; these are the citizens, who compose it [hê gar polis politôn ti plêthos estin (ἡ γὰϱ πόλις πολίτων τι πλῆθος ἐστὶν)]. It is evident, therefore, that we must begin by asking, Who is the citizen, and what is the meaning of the term? (Politics, III.1.1274b38–41; trans. B. Jowett in Basic Works of Aristotle) Quantity thus becomes a quality and justifies giving this plêthos the sovereign power: For the many [tous pollous (τοὺς πολλούς)] , of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together [sunelthontas (συνελθόντας)] may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively [ouch’ hôs hekaston, all’ hôs sumpantas (οὐχ’ ὡς ἕϰαστον, ἀλλ’ ὡς σύμπαντας)], just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. For each individual among the many [pollôn gar ontôn (πολλῶν γὰϱ ὄντων)] has a share of virtue and prudence, and exactly like a crowd [to plêthos],when they meet together, they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses; that is a figure of their mind and disposition (ta êthê kai tên dianoian [τὰ ἤθη ϰαὶ τὴν διάνοιαν]). Hence the many [hoi polloi] are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole. (Ibid., 1281a42–b10; translation by B. Jowett modified) Thus is justified the fact that “the mass of citizens” (to plêthos tôn politôn [τὸ πλῆθος τῶν πολίτων]), that is, “all those who have neither wealth nor title to virtue,” participate in the deliberative and judicial powers: When they meet together their perceptions are quite good enough, and combined with the better class they are useful to the state (just as impure food when mixed with what is pure sometimes makes the entire mass more wholesome than a small quantity of the pure would be), but each individual, left to himself, forms an imperfect judgment. (Ibid., 1281b34–38, trans. B. Jowett) Probably no one has ever praised the democratic deviation more subtly. REFS.: Cassin, Barbara. “De l’organisme au pique-nique.” Pp. 114–48 in Nos Grecs et leurs modernes. Paris: Seuil, 1992. 762 PEOPLE / RACE / NATION signature: Senatus populusque romanus. In this context one can probably speak of popular sovereignty. But apart from the appearance in the second century BCE of a democratic trend, it cannot be denied that a large part of Roman society tended to make the popular assembly the sole subject of power, which was, as it were, delegated to the magistrates (Cicero, De officiis, I.34, 124). Moreover, it was to be one of the ideological foundations of the Principate, and Seneca defined the monarch as a person “invested with the powers of the people in order to exercise them on the people” (potestas populi in populum data) (Letters to Lucilius, 14, 7). The political definition of the people takes into account only adult male citizens. Does that mean the women and children, who were nonetheless citizens, were excluded from it? In reality, populus sometimes also designates the whole of the citizenry. What difference is there, Julian wonders, between the laws, received after the people’s judgment (judicio populi), and “what the people has approved without any text [ea quae sine ullo scripto populus probavit]?” (Digest, I.3.32.1). This equivalence between leges and mores, which reflects the ambivalence of the word populus, characterizes the whole of the production of Roman law (F. Gallo, “Produzione del diritto e sovranità popolare nel pensiero di Giuliano”). B. Populus, plebs These three definitions (an organism bound together by law, an assembly of citizens, the totality of the citizenry) clearly distinguish populus from plebs. From a legal point of view, the term plebs groups together the proletarii, initially those who are outside the populus—that is to say, outside the legions— whence the archaic formula populus plebsque (the populus and the plebs). Later on, the plebs was gradually integrated into the populus, but the term plebs retained its exclusive meaning of a group outside the patrician families (Gaius, Institutiones, I.3; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, X.20, 5). Under the Republic, the word designated more generally all those who did not belong for tax purposes to the upper orders (senators and knights in Rome, decurions in the provinces). Thus plebs ended up designating “the popular masses,” “the common people,” and was sometimes synonymous with Originally, then, there were no isolated individuals, but a human group. Then, according to Cicero, it was the agreement regarding law (consensu juris)—and not individual interests or historical affinities—that “informed” the association, whereas the application of this agreement realized “the common interest.” Far from amounting to a collection of individual wills, and even independently of them, the populus thus appears as a collectivity structured by these two objective, specific bonds. Such a definition, which allows us to move beyond the moral-political dualism, emphasizes the natural foundation of the social bond; it also establishes an abstract idea of the public good; and finally it gives the populus a very strong juridical value as an independent organism that the Greek dêmos never had, a value that we find again in another definition of the populus as a corpus ex distantibus, “a body formed of disparate elements” bound together by the bond of law alone (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 102, 6). . For Cicero, the populus precedes conceptually the civitas, its institutional form, and the res publica, its patrimonial dimension (Peppe, “La nozione di populus,” 318): “Omnis populus qui est talis coetus, omnis civitas quae est constitutio populi, omnis res publica quae populi res est” (Every people, that is, the assembly I have described, a city that is the political organization of a people, a state that is the commonwealth; Cicero, De republica I.26, 40). Whereas all citizens participate in the commonwealth insofar as they form a group, as cives—that is, as individuals having citizenship and thus forming a part (pars) of the people—they share unequally in the government. It is for the mixed constitution, the historically determined constitutio populi, to set the rules for the attribution of power within the res publica. Thus inequalities emerge at the level of the civitas—where populus designates, in a narrower way, the whole of the citizens grouped together. Far from being merely theoretical, this latter sense of the word populus reflects the state of Roman society from the third century BCE onward, a society that recognized the legal equality of all citizens, patricians, and plebeians, but that, on fiscal principles, made the people a constitutional actor with limited power and managed by “good people,” that is, the Senate (and the magistrates)—as is suggested by the city’s 8 Cicero and Saint Augustine Cicero’s definition was criticized at length by Saint Augustine (De civitate Dei, II.17–19; XIX.21–24). “When man does not serve God, what justice can there be in man? There is therefore not that common acknowledgment of right [jus] that makes a multitude of men a people.” And further on, “What can be the true interest [utilitas] of those who live in impiety, as anyone lives who betrays the service of God for that of demons?” Augustine is thus led to propose a new definition: “Populus est coetus multitudinis rationalis rerum quas diligit concordi communione sociatus” (a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love) (City of God, XIX.24; trans. M. Dods, 706). Thus conceived, the populus is not a legal but a cultural unit; it is defined, not by a legal form, but by an ethical content, love for the same values and for God. No doubt Augustine recognized that historical peoples and even pagans had the right to bear this name: that is the case of the people of Rome in times of peace. But from his point of view, the Christian community is the authentic people and the spiritual city the true city. However, for Augustine, Cicero’s presupposition is that the people is an organized community, not a juxtaposition of individuals, and the connection with civitas remains fundamental. REFS.: Augustine. City of God. Translated by M. Dods. New York: Modern Library, 1950. PEOPLE / RACE / NATION 763 but not our city [civitas],” wrote Cicero (Philippics, X.10, 20). And for him, the populi are those who are organized into civitates; it is in this sense that they have their own law, a jus civile (De officiis, I.23) distinct from the jus gentium. Pointing out the different degrees (gradus) in Roman society (De officiis, I.53; III.69), Cicero lists the whole of the human species; then the noncivic groups, those that have in common a name (gentes), birth or place (nationes), language (linguae); and finally the civitas. In doing so, he situates the city less in a genealogical conception than in a universe constructed legally and alien to ethnic or geographical determinations. Christians used nationes (Greek ta ethnê) to designate pagans. In this they were simply imitating the Roman model: just as, for the law of the Empire, the nationes are outside a civitas and foreign to the populus romanus (Gaius, Insitutiones, I.79), so in the Christian vocabulary the term designates those who are outside the civitas christiana, the populus Dei. At the end of this itinerary, we can better understand what risk is involved in superimposing “race” and genos, “nation” and ethnos, and with them all the terms that designate human communities in various languages. It is the danger of the retrospective illusion. Beyond careless translations, an implicit philosophy of history is at stake. Thus the systematic use of “nation” to translate this or that Greek or Latin term organizes nothing less than the “nationalization” of all the communities of antiquity, that is, the construction of this particular form of community as an object of universal history, just as the use of “race” or Rasse extracts this notion from the historical and ideological contexts in which it emerged, in order to confer on it an ahistorical validity. Marc Crépon Barbara Cassin Claudia Moatti REFS.: Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett in Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Translation by J. Aubonnet: Politique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960–1989). Translation by Pierre Pellegrin: Les Politiques. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. Translation by J. Tricot: La Politique. Paris: Vrin, 1970. Benveniste, Émile. Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1935; reprint 1984. . Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Edited by Jean Lallot. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1969. Gallo, Francesco. “Produzione del diritto e sovranità popolare nel pensiero di Giuliano (a proposito di D. I, 3, 32).” IURA 36 (1985): 70–96. Gaudemet Jean. “Le people et le gouvernement de la république romaine.” Labeo 11 (1965): 147–92. “the poor” (Cicero, De republica II.39; De legibus, II.50). In this sense, the word had numerous equivalents: multitudo, turba, and also vulgus, which refers to the lowest part of the plebs. These terms, accompanied by a depreciative adjective, often took on a moral connotation: multitudo indocta, vulgus imperitorum, plebs et infima multitudo (uneducated masses, ignorant multitude, plebeians and common people) (Cicero, Pro Murena, 38 and 70; Pro Milone, 95). With this twofold moral and sociological connotation, plebs comes closer to the Greek plêthos, while populus renders dêmos. However, exceptions to this distinction emerged toward the end of the Republic, especially in the political vocabulary, where populus was often used to refer to the plebs (for example in Sallust or Livy). Under the Empire, the confusion increased because of the collapse of the populus’s powers. This confusion is also found in Greek texts of the period, where dêmos ends up expressing the idea of the crowd or “rabble” (Cassius Dio, 74, 13). . C. Populi, nationes, gentes Referring to a group of citizens, populus also had an international dimension. The jurist Gaius (Institutiones, I.1) defined the jus gentium as the natural law that governs “all the peoples” of the earth (omnes populi). Through this meaning, populi approaches gentes or nationes, but these notions in fact diverge on an essential level. Gens designates neither a political group nor the work of a legislator, but rather an assembly of men—“a multitudo that has issued from the same origin or was constituted after having separated itself from another nation [natio],” according to Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, IX.2.1). Although its members often bear the same name (Cicero, Topics, 29), the group is not genetically homogeneous (Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse, s.v. “Nomen,” 443), whether it is a Patrician clan (Greek genê) whose ancestor is often mythical, or one of the various peoples who compose the human race. As for natio, from nascor, “to be born,” it suggests more the idea of a natural origin or a common territory: “It is a group of men who have not come from elsewhere, but were born in the same place” (RT: De verborum significatu quae supersunt, s.v. “Natio”). In any case, natio, like gens, is outside the civic sphere. From these nonpolitical groups that usually lived under the direction of a chief, the Romans clearly distinguished the populus and its institutional form, the civitas, in which man manifested his liberty. “All peoples [nationes] can endure servitude, 9 Populus and popularis Contrary to French, in Latin it is difficult to discern an absolute reciprocity between “people” and “popular.” Nonetheless, in the conflictual context of the late Republic, a development begins: the populares, the leaders of the democratic party, define themselves as the representatives of the populus as a whole and as sovereign, whereas their adversaries depreciate them as demagogues who are seeking the favor of the plebs and the slaves. This debate clearly seems to prefigure the way populus and plebs approached one another under the Empire, whereby populus reconnects with its derivative, popularis. 764 PERCEPTION Descartes gave rise in French to a new pair of opposites, perception and aperception (perception accompanied by consciousness). This linguistic innovation and its transposition into German was the origin in Kant of a new economy of representation (Vorstellung) involving Wahrnehmung, Empfindung, and Apperzeption. I. Perception as an Operation of the Understanding: “Apperception” and “Perceive,” from the Noun to the Verb The Latin verb percipere, which originally meant, in the literal sense, “to take,” “to gather,” “to receive,” and then, by transposition, “to feel,” “to experience,” “to learn,” “to know,” gave rise to the noun perceptio translating the Greek term katalêpsis [ϰατάληψις], which derived from the vocabulary of Stoic philosophy and designated a comprehensive grasping of the reality of the thing given in its representation (see Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, 5.76, and Academica, 2.107: perceptio is a synonym of cogitatio, “thought,” and comprehensio, “comprehension” or “a gathering together in thought of what truly is”; see BEGRIFF, Box 1). Thus perceptio could be used in medieval philosophy to designate a philosophically formed concept, conferring in return on the verb percipere the correlative meaning of “receive into knowledge.” In modern philosophy, perception acquired the status of the fundamental relation between the knowing subject and what becomes an object for the subject. Descartes designates by perception all the cogitations of which the mind is the subject: Sunt deinde alii actus quos vocamus cogitativos, ut intelligere, velle, imaginari, sentire, etc., qui omnes sub ratione communi cogitationis, sive perceptionis, sive conscientiae conveniunt. (There are other acts, which we call “cogitative” [such as understanding, willing, imagining, sensing, etc.], all of which have in common the one feature of thought or perception or consciousness.) (Meditationes de prima philosophia) However, in a narrower sense, Descartes excludes the will from the field of perception, which is identified solely with the operation of the understanding, including when it implies imagination or sensibility: Omnes modi cogitandi ad duos generales referri possunt: quorum unus est perceptio, sive operatio intellectus; alius vero volitio, sive operatio voluntatis. Nam sentire, imaginari, et pure intelligere, sunt tantum diversi modi percipiendi. (All the modes of thinking that we observed in ourselves may be related to two general modes, the one of which consists in perception, or in the operation of the understanding, and the other in volition, or the operation of the will. Thus sense-perception, imagining, and conceiving things that are purely intelligible, are just different methods of perceiving.) (Principia philosophiae, pt. 1, principle 32) The detours taken by the French translator of the Meditationes show that at that time “perception” was not easily or directly acceptable in French. Its more familiar substitutes Herder, Johann Gottfried. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. First published in 1774. Translation by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin: Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004. . Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. In vol. 13 of Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke, edited by B. Suphan et al. Berlin: Weidmann, 1887. Ideen first published in 1784/91. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Vol. 7 of Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902. Translation by Robert B. Louden: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited by R. B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. . Metaphysics of Morals. 2nd ed. Translated by M. J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Marat, Jean-Paul. Textes choisis. Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1975. Moatti, Claudia. La raison de Rome: Naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République (IIe-Ier siècle avant Jésus-Christ). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “The Rise of the Plebs.” In Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders, edited by K Raaflaub, 174–97. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Translated by M. Faber and S. Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Peppe, Leo. “La nozione di populus e le sue valenze: Con una indagine sulla terminologia pubblicistica nelle formule della evocatio e della devotio.” In Staat und Staatlichkeit in der frühen römischen Republik: Akten eines Symposiums, 12. –15. Juli 1988, Freie Universität Berlin, edited by Walter Eder, 312–43. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1990. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. Translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1953. . The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by John T. Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. . Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1959–69. Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph. Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. First published in 1789. Yavetz, Zvi. Plebs and Princeps. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988. PERCEPTION / APPERCEPTION FRENCH perception, aperception GERMAN Empfindung, Wahrnehmung, Apperzeption GREEK katalêpsis [ϰατάληψις] LATIN perceptio, comprehensio, aperceptio v. BEGRIFF, CONSCIOUSNESS, EPISTEMOLOGY, ERSCHEINUNG, GEFÜHL, I/ME/MYSELF, LEIB, OBJECT, PATHOS, SENS COMMUN, SENSE, TRUTH, UNCONSCIOUS The noun “perception” had difficulty establishing itself in modern philosophical French. In Decartes, it retains the meaning of its antecedent, the Latin perceptio, which makes it a kind of intellectual operation, but a certain awkwardness is discernible in its usage, which explains why the more common verb apercevoir is frequently preferred to it. A tension between the noun and the verb was rapidly established because of the ambiguity of the latter, which can designate any act of knowing, the current meaning of sense perception being only one possibility among others. For Descartes, the common root of all these meanings is situated in consciousness’s reflexivity, which is supposed to be present in all these operations: it is this presupposition that was attacked by Leibniz on the grounds that every perception is not necessarily conscious. Leibniz’s critique of PERCEPTION 765 from things that are represented by it). Perception derives from this a twofold character: (1) it is a reception, which implies a passivity of the mind, even when it is the mind itself that is the cause of its own perceptions: “Bien qu’au regard de notre âme, ce soit une action de vouloir quelque chose, on peut dire que c’est aussi en elle une passion d’apercevoir qu’elle veut” (Although in regard to our soul it is an action to desire something, we may say that it is also one of its passions to perceive that it desires); (2) perception represents something that is of the mind itself, or of the body, or of external things. Thus it always has a referential function, through which “we relate” our perceptions to objects outside us, or to our body, or to our mind (titles of arts. 23, 24, 25). Nonetheless, and this was the conclusion of the Second Meditation’s analysis of the lump of wax, every perception includes the mind’s perception of itself. The previously mentioned equivalence between thought, perception, and consciousness has an entirely general import: in the Cartesian sense, every perception is conscious and thus so is the perception that the perceiving subject has of himself. That is why Descartes, like his translators, makes perception the equivalent of the act that is expressed by the reflexive verb s’apercevoir: the operation through which the subject perceives (s’aperçoit de) something is always also the operation through which the subject perceives him- or herself. II. Leibniz: The Opposition “Perception”/“Apperception” It was precisely in order to contest this equivalence that Leibniz was led to introduce a terminological and conceptual distinction between perception and apperception: The passing condition, which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unit [unité] or in the simple substance, is nothing but what is called Perception, which is to be distinguished from Apperception or were abandoned in favor of the new, technical term only in the two contexts of the Meditationes, where perceptio is thematized as such. In addition, this thematization introduces the duality of a perception considered sometimes as an intellectual operation or purely mental in nature and sometimes as an operation mediated by the senses and involving the body. . In the same way, Abbé Picot, the French translator of the Principia philosophiae, hesitated to use perception every time he encountered the Latin perceptio. In part 1, principle 32, he uses perception in the title, but in the body of the article he uses the verb instead of the noun, writing: “l’une [de nos façons de penser] consiste à apercevoir par l’entendement” (one [of our ways of thinking] consists in perceiving through the understanding). Similarly, in principle 45, he accepts perception in the title, but in the text he prefers to substitute connaissance (knowledge) (as in principles 46 and 48). In principle 35, intellectus perceptio is simply reduced to l’entendement (the understanding). Perception is absent from Descartes’s first writings in French: Le Monde, the Dioptrique, and the Discours de la Méthode (but apercevoir is frequent in Le Monde and is also used in the Dioptrique, in a sense for which French would now use percevoir: “les corps que nous apercevons autour de nous” [the bodies that we apperceive around us; Œuvres, 6:87]; “les qualités que nous apercevons dans les objets de la vue” [the qualities that we apperceive in the objects of vision; Œuvres, 16:130]; “apercevoir la distance” [apperceive distance; Œuvres, 6:137], etc.). Not until the Passions of the Soul (1649) did Descartes use the word perception as a philosophical term legitimated by its usage (see art. 17 and 19–25). Applied to the mind, the opposition between action and passion coincides with that between the will and the “perceptions ou connaissances” that the mind “reçoit des choses qui sont représentées par elle” (receives 1 From Latin to French: “Perception” in the translation of Descartes’s Meditations A difficulty arose in translating the Latin vocabulary transmitted by Scholasticism into a French acceptable to Descartes’s contemporaries. Perception was established only gradually, being justified at first on the basis of the more obvious and familiar meaning of the verb s’apercevoir, in the sense of “recognize,” “become aware of.” In the original Latin version of the Meditations (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641), perceptio occurs twenty-one times. To translate these, the Duke of Luynes’s French translation (published in 1644) uses perception only six times. Elsewhere, the translator uses connaissance (six times), notion (three times, once in the phrase connaissance ou notion), sentiment (two times, once in the phrase perception ou sentiment), and finally intelligence, conception, idée (once each); we also find the verbal transposition connaître et concevoir, and even, for recta rerum perceptio (lit., “the correct perception of things”), the periphrase le droit chemin qui peut conduire à la connaissance de la vérité. The verb percipere is preponderantly translated by concevoir (thirty-one times) and, more rarely, by connaître and apercevoir (five occurrences each), and even by comprendre (four instances). We occasionally find recevoir (“in the mind,” or “through the senses”), sentir, ressentir, penser, entendre, and also the periphrase avoir la notion de. The translator uses perception nine times, of which seven occur, remarkably, in two precisely localized contexts. First, three times, in the Second Meditation, in the famous passage in which the analysis of the perception of a bit of wax is supposed to yield the conclusion that the human mind is always involved in any perception or knowledge of a body and that it is in this regard “easier to know,” or “more notable,” than the body. In the first occurrence, the translator is careful to justify his use of an unusual word, offering a definitional explanation: “its perception [of the bit of wax], or else the action through which it is perceived [par laquelle on l’aperçoit],” an action that turns out to be nothing other than an intellectual operation or a “mental inspection” (inspectio mentis). The four other occurrences come in the Sixth Meditation, but this time in order to provide the equivalent of sentiment, which is taken to refer to knowledge derived from the senses. Finally, this last meaning occurs two more times, as a rendering not of perceptio but of comprehensio sensuum and sensus. 766 PERCEPTION this representation is accompanied by consciousness, and it is then that it is called thought. Now this expression takes place everywhere, because every substance sympathizes with all the others and receives a proportional change corresponding to the slightest change which occurs in the whole world, although this change will be more or less noticeable as other bodies or their actions have more or less relation with ours. (Letter to Arnauld, 9 October 1687, in Philosophical Papers and Letters) Although the Leibnizian vocabulary establishes with great clarity the distinction between perception in the general sense and apperception understood as conscious, reflective perception, the transposition of this lexicon into another language cannot be made without difficulty. . Although the German verb wahrnehmen is translated in French by s’apercevoir, Wahrnehmung can ultimately render perception only at the price of abandoning the formal universality of Leibniz’s definition and returning to a construction in which all perception implies consciousness of the reference to its object. But this does not amount to a return to Descartes’s position, because the perceived object can only be the object of sensation, and the notion of a purely intellectual perception fades away. Kant’s vocabulary testifies to the completion of this transformation. III. Kant’s Vocabulary: Vorstellung, Wahrnehmung, Empfindung, Apperzeption Kant situates perception (Wahrnehmung) in a generic domain of which “representation” (Vorstellung) constitutes the first, indefinable term: as a “state of mind” (blosse Bestimmung des Gemüts), the representation includes a subjective aspect (what Descartes called a mode or way of thinking, modus cogitandi) and at the same time it has an objective reference to what it is for the subject, the presentation of what is in front of (vor) him. Perception is a representation accompanied by consciousness (see also Logik [Logic], introduction, §8, in RT: Ak., 9:64): to perceive (Ger. wahrnehmen, Lat. percipere) is “to represent something to oneself consciously” (sich mit Bewusstsein etwas vorstellen); if it is related to the subject as a “modification of his Consciousness. In this matter the Cartesian view is extremely defective, for it treats as non-existent those perceptions of which we are not consciously aware. (Monadology) To make room for these perceptions that we do not perceive and that can be described as unconscious, Leibniz characterizes perception ontologically in its universality as a form of the relationship of the multiple to the true unity, which is that of the simple substance or monad: “It suffices that there be a variety in unity in order for there to be a perception. Perception is for me the representation of the multiple in the simple” (Letters to Bourguet, Die philosophischen Schriften, 3:581, 574). According to this description, perception designates the mutual relation that connects the world with each simple substance that represents it from a singular point of view and with a varying degree of clearness and distinctness: every perception includes the infinite in such a way that the hierarchy of beings is ordered in accord with the explicitation that they are capable of recognizing in the internal multiplicity of their representation. Thus “natural perception” can be distinguished, then “perception accompanied by memory,” and finally “perception accompanied by consciousness,” or the perceiving subject’s reflection on himself. In this regard, the different levels of perception are part of a much more general notion of which they constitute the species, which is that of expression, and which Leibniz sought to distinguish from knowledge: One thing expresses another, in my usage, when there is a constant and regular relationship between what can be said about one and about the other. It is in this way that a projection in perspective expresses a geometrical figure. Expression is common to all the forms and is a genus of which natural perception, animal feeling, and intellectual knowledge are species. In natural perception [perception naturelle] and feeling it suffices that what is divisible and material and is found dispersed among several beings should be expressed or represented in a single indivisible being or in a substance which is endowed with true unity. The possibility of such a representation of several things cannot be doubted, since our soul provides us with an example of it. But in the reasonable soul 2 From French to German: The case of Leibniz’s Monadology Heinrich Köhler, the German translator of Leibniz’s Monadologie (1720; originally published in French in 1714), must have constantly associated the Franco-Latin term perception with the equivalent that he gave for it, Empfindung, which implicitly emphasizes its receptive or felt character: “ce qu’on appelle la perception, qu’on doit distinguer de l’aperception ou de la conscience” (art. 14) becomes “welches man die Empfindung oder Perception nennet die man von der Apperception oder von dem Bewusst sein wohl unterscheiden muss.” On the other hand, to translate the verb s’apercevoir Köhler used wahrnehmen, which later yielded the substantive Wahrnehmung, which in turn became the accepted translation of perception. Thus “les perceptions dont on ne s’aperçoit pas” is rendered as “die Perceptiones oder Empfindungen deren man sich nicht bewusst ist, und welche man nicht wahrnimmt.” In article 23, “on s’aperçoit de ses perceptions” is rendered as “seine Empfindungen und Perceptionen wiederum wahrnimmet.” REFS.: Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadologie: Französisch und Deutsch. Translated by Heinrich Köhler, edited by Dietmar Till. Frankfurt: Insel, 1996. . Monadology. Translated by Nicholas Rescher. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. PERCEPTION 767 Mind, Hegel constructed an alternative theory of Wahrnehmung that differs from others in that it is based on the etymology of the term, “take for true” (Wahr-nehmen, “per-ceive,” per-cipio). . Herbart’s criticism of Fichte and Kant, which reduces apperception to the observation of perceptions that have already been formed in the mind and makes it the representation of “I,” a result and no longer an origin of the synthesis of representations in consciousness, marked the end of the philosophical use of the term “apperception” (Psychologie als Wissenschaft). On the other hand, perception became a major theme in the philosophy of knowledge and psychology throughout the nineteenth century before becoming central to the interests of phenomenology in Husserl’s work and in its later developments. The most widespread contemporary view is then that, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “to perceive is to make something present to oneself with the help of the body” (Le primat de la perception). In this sense, “perception” retains some trace of the meaning it had in the work of seventeenth-century philosophers—inasmuch as “perception” leans on representation, here reinterpreted as “presence”—but the corporeal basis of access to the world prevents it from being assimilated to a pure “mental inspection.” Michel Fichant REFS.: Arbini, Ronald. “Did Descartes Have a Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (1983): 317–38. Belaval, Yvon. “La perception.” In Études leibniziennes: De Leibniz à Hegel. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Brandom, Robert B. “Leibniz and Degrees of Perception.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 447–79. Descartes, René. Meditationes de prima philosophia. In vol. 7 of Œuvres, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1996. Translation by Roger Ariew and Donald Cress: Meditations, Objections, and Responses. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006. . Œuvres. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. 11 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1996. . Passions of the Soul. In vol. 1 of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. . Principia philosophiae. In vol. 8a of Œuvres, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1996. Translation by E. S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross: Philosophical Works of Descartes. New York: Dover, 1967. Fichte, Johann G. Second introduction to Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Vol. 1 of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s sämtliche Werke, edited by J. H. Fichte, 472 and 476. Berlin: Veit, 1845. Translation by Peter Heath and John Lachs: The Science of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet über Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik. Königsberg, Ger.: Unzer, 1824–25. Kant, Immanuel. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–. . Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kulstad, Mark. “Some Difficulties in Leibniz’s Definition of Perception.” In Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Michael Hooker, 65–78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. state,” it is sensation (Lat. sensatio, Ger. Empfindung), and if it is related to the object, it is knowledge (Lat. cognitio, Ger. Erkenntnis) (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A [1781] 320 / B [1787] S 376, in RT: Ak.). As such, perception thus implies three terms: a consciousness, the sensation that determines this consciousness, and the object appearing in the sensation, which is also called a phenomenon (see ERSCHEINUNG). If the latter is taken as the starting point, it can be said that “when combined with consciousness, it is called perception” (Erscheinung, welche, wenn sie mit Bewusstsein verbunden ist, Wahrnehmung heisst; ibid., A 120); but if instead consciousness is taken as the starting point, then “[p]erception is empirical consciousness, that is, a consciousness in which sensation is to be found” (Wahrnehmung ist das empirische Bewußtsein, d.i. ein solches, in welchem zugleich Empfindung ist; ibid., B 207), which can also be put this way: “The consciousness of an empirical representation is called a perception” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, §10). Sensation as such, which is henceforth termed Empfindung, is the state of the subject whose sense receptivity is affected by the object, which thereby presents itself as a phenomenon (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 19 / B 33, in RT: Ak.). But perception requires, in addition to consciousness, a way of synthesizing the diversity that it contains (the internal diversity of the matter of sensation present in each perception and the diversity of the “dispersed and isolated” perceptions themselves; A 120); this synthesis is first of all the work of the imagination, which “constitutes a necessary ingredient of perception itself” (ibid.), but the unity that makes it possible is none other than the unity of self-consciousness, for which Kant adopts the Leibnizian term “apperception” (Apperzeption). The terminological equivalence between “self-consciousness” (das Bewusstsein seiner selbst) and apperception makes the latter “the simple representation of the ‘I’ ” (die einfache Vorstellung des Ich) (ibid., B 68). But this completely general acceptation is valuable because it enables us to differentiate two levels of self-consciousness and apperception. On the one hand, self-consciousness as a determination of the changing state of the subject in the flux of internal phenomena will be called “empirical apperception. On the other, the unchanging consciousness of an identical “I think,” one and invariant (“It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations”) and the necessary and a priori condition of all consciousness, will be called “pure apperception” (reine Apperzeption) (ibid., B 131–32). The former is a self-consciousness that is simply subjective (a consciousness of the empirically determined internal state of the subject), whereas the latter expresses an objective self-consciousness (a unity necessary for the foundation of any concept of the object and of any judgment expressing the universal validity of phenomena in an experience). IV. The End of Theories of Apperception: Perception and the Body “The consciousness of myself as original apperception” (ibid., A 117) is also “an act of spontaneity” (ibid., B 132): it is in this sense that Fichte rehabilitates, in opposition to Kant’s terminology, the authentic meaning of “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung) as an immediate, nonsensible representation of the activity of the “I” (second introduction to Grundlage der gesamten). In the Phenomenology of 768 PERCEPTION 3 Wahrnehmung: Hegel’s lexical play v. TRUTH For a reader accustomed to Leibnizian and Kantian distinctions, the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind is puzzling because it simply ignores the Empfindung/ Wahrnehmung pair, that is, the coexistence of sensation and perception in the act of knowing. In Hegel, what precedes Wahrnehmung is called sinnliche Gewissheit (sense-certainty). It is no longer a question of the relation between sensation and perception—understood as a return to the principle, a movement from the compound (the manifold of sensation) to the simple (the synthesis of the manifold in consciousness, and then the unity of the “I”)—but rather of a two-stage process that implements diverse ways of registering truth in consciousness. Each of these two stages produces its own figure of truth, “its truth” (in the case of perception, the thing: the thing is the truth of perception), but they have in common the same aspiration to capture truth. The first sentence of the chapter “Perception,” which sums up what has been said about sense-certainty, should also be read as a play on the verb nehmen, “to grasp or take”: Die unmittelbare Gewissheit nimmt sich nicht das Wahre, denn ihre Wahrheit ist das Allgemeine; sie aber will das Diese nehmen. Die Wahrnehmung nimmt hingegen das, was ihr das Seiende ist, als Allgemeines. (Immediate certainty does not make the truth its own [does not seize the truth], for its truth is something universal, whereas certainty wants to deal with [to seize] the This. Perception, on the other hand, takes [seizes] what exists for it to be a universal.) (Phenomenology of Mind, emphasis added) Sense-certainty concerns a singularity, a “this,” but its own dialectic reveals that the latter is a universal, insofar as “here” is always a “set of other ‘heres’”; perception, on the contrary, immediately takes the thing for a universal and corresponds to good sense (ibid., p. 160), for which the world is a world of things. French translators of Phenomenology have all rendered the insistent repetition of the verb nehmen here (cf. the translations by J.-P. Lefebvre, p. 103, and J. Hyppolite, p. 93; Hyppolite accentuates this even more by rendering the initial nimmt sich as prendre possession). But in Hegel, nehmen can be used in different ways that mark the advance from sense-certainty to perception. Whereas sinnliche Gewissheit seeks “to take,” “to capture without mediation,” Wahrnehmung is a “taking for” (nimmt als), and more precisely, a “taking-for-true” (Wahrnehmen). It therefore explicitly presupposes an activity, or reflection, of consciousness; and, because perception is a “taking for,” the perceiving consciousness also raises the possibility of illusion (Täuschung), understood as the particular form of non-truth that it invents and opposes to the truth of the thing and its properties (Eigenschaften), of the One and the universal, of taking and reflection, everything that Hegel calls the Sophisterei (sophistry) of perception and that finds a provisional solution in the “sphere of understanding” (ibid., p. 175). The difficulty faced by the French translator is lexical: he cannot render Hegel’s play on the decomposition of the verb wahrnehmen. To render the inversion sein Nehmen des Wahren, referring to consciousness (consciousness’s seizure or capture of truth), Lefebvre offers what is probably the closest approximation: “sa captation du vrai” (p. 110), captation bringing out the capere in percipere (Hyppolite, p. 102, translated this as “sa préhension du vrai”); but the two nouns, put back in the correct order, do not coalesce to form a verb, as they do in German (das Nehmen des Wahren is an inversion of wahrnehmen). In French, perception is not necessarily the véri-captation that Hegel makes us hear in wahr-nehmen: no more is the English “perception” anything lexically like “truth-capturing” or “truth-seizure.” But for all that, Hegel’s play on the verb nehmen is, on the whole, translatable into French; on the other hand, what remains to be clarified is the internal coherence of the itinerary leading from Leibniz to Hegel. The history of theories of perception in Germany is a Franco-German history, as is clearly shown by the neologism aperception, a French term forged by the German Leibniz and acclimated in Kant’s language. Hegel’s initiative, which involves stressing for the first time the etymology of Wahrnehmung, constitutes a direct response to this tradition. It seeks to exclude from the word every trace of a partly French past, and operates at the very moment that Hegel opposes a paradigm of truth and certainty to an analysis of the different instances or organs of knowledge. In this sense, the substitution of the Gewissheit/Wahrnehmung pair for the old Empfindung/Wahrnehmung pair provides a good illustration of the methods of language and thought that Hegel deployed to move from a theory of knowledge (see EPISTEMOLOGY) to a doctrine of science. Philippe Büttgen REFS.: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 3 of Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. . Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. London: Allen and Unwin, 1910. . La phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by Jean Hyppolite. Paris: Aubier, 1941. . Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. . Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Laporte, Jean Marie Frédéric. Le rationalisme de Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology. Translated by R. Latta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898. . Philosophical Essays. Edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. . Philosophical Papers and Letters. Translated and edited by Leroy Leomker. 2nd ed. Dordrecht, Neth: Reidel, 1969. . Die philosophischen Schriften. Edited by Carl I. Gerhardt. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1960. First published 1875–90. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Translation by Colin Smith: Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2002. . Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques, communication et discussion à la Société française de philosophie, 23 novembre 1946. Grenoble: Cynara, 1989. Muralt, André de. La conscience transcendantale dans le criticisme kantien: Essai sur l’unité d’aperception. Paris: Aubier, 1958. Patterson, Sarah. “Clear and Distinct Perception.” In A Companion to Descartes, edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero, 216–34. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. PERFECTIBILITY 769 that is, the fear of boredom (De l’esprit, III, chap. 5). In 1773, in the summary of De l’homme, he reverses the reflexive mode of the formulation: the reactive faculty of self-improvement becomes basically the passive faculty of “being improved”: “As a result, the human mind is susceptible of perfectibility, and in men who are commonly well-organized, the inequality of talents can only be a pure effect of the difference in their education” (De l’homme, summary IV; cf. II, chap. 23). People are thus perfectible in the sense that they are “educable,” passively subject to the actions of their enlightened rulers, in conformity with a certain materialism. But the concept could also be appropriated by challenging one or another of its secondary characterizations. For example, it is possible to deny that perfectibility is peculiar to humans, and to make it a property of every living being. Then it becomes a cosmological concept, and that is just how Bonnet understands it in his Palingénésie philosophique: “Would a philosopher deny that an animal is a perfectible being, and perfectible in a limited degree?” Why then should we not think that oysters might one day attain knowledge of their creator? But it is just as possible to deny that this perfectibility is ambivalent and unlimited. In this sense, in 1765 Voltaire expressly declared, in opposition to Rousseau: “He [man] is perfectible; and from this it has been concluded that he has perverted himself. But why not conclude that he has perfected himself to the point where nature has marked the limits of his perfection?” Here, perfectibility no longer has much to do with a subjective faculty; it is absorbed into the historical fact of human progress, of multiple and reversible advances. It was for Condorcet, in the 1780s, to homogenize the latter in a single, irreversible process destined to be achieved in the cumulative and endless succession of generations: thus appears in France the “indefinite perfectibility” that is the vector of the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), and which Condorcet retrospectively attributed to the Turgot of 1750 (Œuvres). When Auguste Comte carefully distinguished the adequate concept of perfectionnement (improvement) from “the chimerical conception of an unlimited perfectibility” (Cours de philosophie positive, XLVIIIe), he was trying to eliminate a concept that was both useless and perilous: improvement without perfectibility is progress in order. II. On Perfektibilität as a Tendency to Perfection In Germany, things took a quite different, much more theological form; here, we have to recall Matthew 5:48: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In 1756, Moses Mendelssohn translated Rousseau’s Second Discourse; he rejected the neologism Perfektibilität and stuck to “Vermögen, sich vollkommener zu machen” (the ability to make oneself more perfect) (Rousseau, Abhandlung von dem Ursprunge). He justifies this choice in the long letter he sent the same year to Lessing, in which Vermögen becomes Bemühung, Bestreben, that is, an effort, an aspiration to come as close as possible to the “model of divine perfection” (das Muster der göttlichen Volkommenheit). Perfectibilité thus translated turns against Rousseau: far Pucelle, Jean. “La théorie de la perception extérieure chez Descartes.” Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie et d’Histoire Générale de la Civilization 3 (1935): 297–339. Thiel, Udo. “Leibniz and the Concept of Apperception.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 76, no. 2 (1994): 195–209. Wilson, Catherine. “Confused Perceptions, Darkened Concepts: Some Features of Kant’s Leibniz-Critique.” In Kant and His Influence, edited by George MacDonald Ross, 73–103. New York: Continuum, 2005. PERFECTIBILITY FRENCH perfectibilité GERMAN Perfektibilität, Vervollkommenheit LATIN perfectibilitas v. BERUF, BILDUNG, GLÜCK, GOD, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HUMANITY, I/ME/ MYSELF, LIBERTY, OIKONOMIA, RÉVOLUTION, VIRTUE Although the adjective perfectibilis appeared in 1612, it was only in 1755 that Rousseau and Grimm brought the noun perfectibilité into French. The term spread throughout Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was the object of multiple refractions that often interpreted it, contrary to Rousseau, as a necessary tendency toward perfection—so that it tended to be identified with improvement (“perfection,” Vervollkommnung). In the 1790s it became established with the sense of “indefinite perfectibility,” that is, as a major concept in the philosophies of history that were attracting the most attention; then people spoke, without further specification, of “the system of perfectibility.” This success nonetheless seems to have been ephemeral. On the one hand, “Progress” having become an objectively obvious fact, it was pointless to assert its objective necessary condition; on the other hand, in order to be conceived rationally, it could not be entirely “indefinite,” that is, absolutely indefinable, or dangerously utopian. I. From the Faculty of Self-Improvement to Indefinite Improvement Initially, perfectibility appears as a “faculty of selfimprovement,” that is, as a kind of metafaculty on which the development of all the other faculties depends (Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité des hommes). Its main characteristics are the following: (1) it is peculiar to human beings—to the individual and to the species; (2) its actualization is fortuitous—it depends on “circumstances”; (3) it is ambivalent insofar as it makes possible both insights and errors, both virtues and vices—the actualization of perfectibility therefore does not mean improvement because it signifies that one can “either come closer to the perfection inherent in his species, or move farther from it to the point of degeneration,” and, in fact, our first steps have always “led far beyond nature” (Melchior and Grimm, Correspondance littéraire); (4), finally, it is “almost unlimited” (Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité des hommes). In France, during the subsequent thirty years, the concept was subjected to an extreme overdetermination. Helvétius changed the status of the concept and then its definition. In 1758, he related this metafaculty to a principle of which it is only the consequence, namely, “the kind of concern that the absence of impression produces in the mind,” 770 PERFECTIBILITY Thus it is still the same schema that is found invested in multiple fields—historical, moral, anthropological. But we see that is also still ambiguous, for if perfectibility thus becomes the mute impulse that leads humans to perfection, it is still a task, a vocation (Beruf), and that is why it is so important to become adequately aware of it. We must therefore draw attention to the reflexive form of the verb: perfectibility is the duty that a person has, as a subject, to perfect oneself, and progress is thus nothing other than the accomplishment of that tendency (obligation) extended to the species as a whole. But when in the following century Hegel, in an act comparable to Comte’s, challenges Perfektibilität as “something just as deprived of determination as change in general,” essentially “without purpose or goal” (ohne Zweck und Ziel) (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte [Reason in History]), he does not do so because he opposes progress, but because he refuses to leave it to an indeterminacy similar to that of the old concept of Providence (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Elements of the Philosophy of Right], §343). III. From “Perfectibility” to the Withering Away of Government The first English translation of Rousseau’s Second Discourse appeared in London in 1761 (DOI, 1755). From the outset, it adopted “perfectibility” to designate what becomes a faculty of improvement, and the translation published by Becket in London in 1767 followed suit. However, pending a more detailed study, it seems that the term did not really “take” until the 1790s. Scottish thinkers clearly avoided it because they were trying to conceive a typical history of civil institutions which, far from setting aside the facts, resulted on the contrary from their inductive superimposition: the natural history of humanity is an abstraction from national histories. The violent criticism of the Second Discourse with which A. Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) opens is, in this respect, just as significant as the solemn homage paid to Montesquieu further on (I, 10). To avoid the neologism “perfectibility,” he said that “man is susceptible of improvement and has in himself a principle of progression, and a desire of perfection” (I, 1), on the condition that this be interpreted to mean that the fortuitous pressure of circumstances is indispensable to the actualization of this principle. Here we see the appearance of the major concept of improvement, whose least bad translation into French would probably be perfectionnement, (in contrast to German Vollkommenheit/Vervollkommnung, English does not construct an analogous noun on the basis of “perfection”). And in the Scottish “improvement,” we can probably also hear the verb “to prove” (in the sense of testing or trying out) because it is in fact a basically empirical process that is carried out through successive adjustments and readjustments to the previously mentioned circumstances. Instead, it is to the English Protestant dissidents that we must turn to find something comparable to what the Germans were working out at this time. In 1767 Richard Price attributed a natural “improvableness” to humans (Four Dissertations; cf. Laboucheix, Richard Price, théoricien de la from being satisfied to be a savage as long as circumstances allow him to do so, the human being always already aspires to the perfection of which God is the paradigm. This view was to be decisive. On 21 January 1756, Lessing replied to Mendelssohn, rejecting his translation and substituting for it Perfektibilität, by which he meant “the property by virtue of which a thing can become more perfect, a property that characterizes all things in the world and that is absolutely necessary for their perseverance” (die Beschaffenheit eines Dinges darunter, vermöge welcher es vollkommener werden kann, eine Beschaffenheit, welche alle Dinge in der Welt haben, und die zu ihrer Fortdauer unumgänglich nötig war). (Sämtliche Schriften). This was probably an attempt to substitute a Spinozist translation of perfectibilité, understood at that time as a thing’s pure power of persevering in its being, for the Leibnizian translation that Mendelssohn proposed as the internal principle of a continuous and necessary aspiration to perfection, that is, to a constant and harmonious improvement of one’s natural powers (Kräfte). But it was Mendelssohn who won out. Perfectibility, which had been a reactive faculty, now became a spontaneous tendency, a sort of eminently positive instinct that was henceforth constantly opposed to Rousseau. In 1764, in Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (On the history of humanity), it was certainly in opposition to Rousseau that Isaac Iselin translated perfectibilité by der Trieb zur Vollkommenheit (the impulse to perfection) in order to make it the basis for a veritable theodicy of history in which the latter tends to be identified with progress itself (Fortschritt, Fortgang): naturally inclined to perfection, the human race is destined to have a natural development in which Oriental sensibility, Mediterranean imagination, and finally Nordic reason succeed each other. In 1722, in his Versuch über das erste Prinzipium der Moral, J.M.R. Lenz sought to base morals on two major principles: “the impulse to perfection and the impulse to happiness” (der Trieb nach Vollkommenheit und der Trieb nach Glückseligkeit). For Lenz as well, Rousseau contradicted himself when he asserted that the human being, by essence perfectible, finds happiness in the tranquility of the state of nature. In reality, happiness is the state most in conformity with perfection, that is, with the optimal development of the strengths and faculties with which humans, like any living being, are naturally endowed. And in 1777, in the eleventh of his Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (Philosophical essays on human nature and its development), J. N. Tetens explains perfectibility anthropologically: Rousseau’s Vervollkommenheit is far too indeterminate and it has to be connected with something other than itself, namely, with the spontaneity that characterizes every living being. “Perfectible spontaneity” (perfektible Selbsttätigkeit) characterizes humans to the highest point in the sense that they are destined to become autonomous with regard to their environment, more slowly, but also more fully, than the animal individual. Moreover, it is significant that Tetens understands this process as an “impulse to development” (Trieb zur Entwicklung): once again, perfection finalizes perfectibility. PERFECTIBILITY 771 why T. R. Malthus reacted so violently in the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population. The history of the concept of perfectibility consists of two stages: Rousseau’s concept of “perfectibility” was first transformed into a spontaneous tendency to seek perfection, and then set aside in the name of Progress, as a kind of useless and even embarrassing scaffolding. Thus perfectibility was not a preliminary version of progress, but on the contrary what had to be concealed in order to be able to conceive progress in entirely diverse modalities depending on the context. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Rousseau’s neologism now appears to us as an enigma to which we never tire of returning. Bertrand Binoche REFS.: Affeldt, Steven G. “Society As a Way of Life: Perfectibility, Self-Transformation, and the Origination of Society in Rousseau.” Monist 83 (2000): 552–606. Behler, Ernst. “The Idea of Infinite Perfectibility and Its Impact upon the Concept of Literature in European Romanticism.” In Sensus Communis: Contemporary Trends in Comparative Literature/Panorama de la situation actuelle en littérature comparée, edited by János Riesz, Peter Boerner, and Bernhard Scholz, 295–305. Tübingen: Narr, 1986. . Unendliche Perfektibilität: Europäishe Romantik und Französische Revolution. Paderborn, Ger.: Schöningh, 1989. Beyssade, Jean-Marie. “Rousseau et la pensée du développement.” In Entre forme et histoire: La formation de la notion de développement à l’âge classique, edited by Olivier Bloch, Bernard Balan, and Paulette Carrive, 195–214. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1988.. Bonnet, Charles. Palingénésie philosophique. Lyon, Fr.: Bruyset, 1770. Buck, Günther. “Selbsterhaltung und Historizität.” In Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, edited by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, 29–94. Munich: Fink, 1973. Chonaill, Siobhan Ni. “‘Why May Not Man One Day Be Immortal?’: Population, Perfectibility, and the Immortality Question in Godwin’s Political Justice.” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 25–39. Comte, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive. Vol. 2. Paris: Hermann, 1975. Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Niclas. Œuvres. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1847. Ferguson, A. Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966. Frankel, Charles. The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. First published in 1948. Godwin, William. Political and Philosophical Writings. London: Pickering, 1993. Hegel, G.W.F. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Hamburg: Meiner, 1955. Helvétius, Claude Adrien. De l’esprit. Paris: Fayard, 1989. . De l’homme. Paris: Fayard, 1989. Hornig, Gottfried. “Perfektibilität: Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte und Bedeutung dieses Begriffs in der deutschsprachigen Literatur.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 24, no. 1 (1980): 221–57. Iselin, Isaac. Über die Geschichte der Menschheit. Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Füsselin, 1770. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Fortschritt.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 2, 375–84. Stuttgart: Klett, 1972–97. Laboucheix, Henri. Richard Price, théoricien de la révolution américaine, le philosophe et le sociologue, le pamphlétaire et l’orateur. Montreal: Didier, 1970. Esp. 192–205. Translation by Sylvia and David Raphael: Richard Price as Moral Philosopher and Political Theorist. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1982. Lenz, J.M.R. Versuch über das erste Prinzipium der Moral. In vol. 2 of Werke und Briefe. Leipzig: Insel, 1987. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Sämtliche Schriften. Leipzig: Göschen, 1857. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Chap. 9. First published in 1936. Malthus, T. R. Essay on the Principle of Population. London: Johnson, 1798. révolution américaine), and the following year Joseph Priestley averred that the human species was “capable of an unbounded improvement” (Essay on the First Principles of Government). In this context, “improvement” refers to an absolutely endogenous process that as such requires only an absence of obstacles in order to actualize itself: “It is a universal maxim, that the more liberty is given to every thing which is in a state of growth, the more perfect it will become.” The point is now not to discern the typical course of nations, but to affirm that human progress is the immanent work of society as opposed to government: the latter has no task other than to provide the conditions by ensuring a maximum liberty of discussion in the millenarian perspective of a fulfillment of all things in which truth will finally shine forth in vivo for those who have been able to prepare themselves for it. Humans are “perfectible” in the sense that by themselves, politically authorized and morally obliged to freely examine ideas, they move from truth to truth toward the heavenly Jerusalem. Thus, as in Germany, perfectibility becomes a spontaneous tendency to improvement of which progress is the irresistible manifestation. And again as in Germany, this tendency is a duty of which one must become aware. The difference arises from the fact that, on the one hand, the temporality in which it is expressed is clearly that of an eschatology, and on the other hand, and especially, it justifies a devaluation of politics as such: because humans are perfectible, their improvement is up to them, not to government. When William Godwin chose to use the term “perfectibility” in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), he sought to radicalize the latter orientation at the expense of the former: it is for humans to improve themselves infinitely until they can, in this world, do without any government at all. In the first edition of his book, Godwin’s use of the term remains allusive, and he limits himself to declaring that “there is no characteristic of man which seems, at least at present, to distinguish him so eminently, or to be of such great importance in all the branches of moral science, as perfectibility” (Political and Philosophical Writings). In the 1796 edition, he is more precise: “By perfectible, it is not meant that he [man] is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood.” Thus the human being, first as a rational animal, then as moral being, will gradually, constantly, and indefinitely improve him- or herself if existing institutions, chiefly government, do not prevent doing so. It is necessary and sufficient to allow the tendency toward truth that essentially characterizes humans to develop freely. But here it is no longer a question of a collective resurrection, but rather of an absolutely secular perfectibility that guarantees—in the long term, of course— that government will simply wither away: after all, if people are indefinitely perfectible, that is because when they are fully grown-up, they have to govern themselves, without any coercion being required. Thus once again perfectibility is supplanted by progress, and it is no accident that Godwin prefers the expression “progressive nature,” though progress is then the promise of a happy anarchy. We can understand 772 PERFORMANCE see ACTOR and MIMÊSIS. From the outset, “person” inherited a twofold semantic extension in modern languages: 1. “Person” belongs to the register of grammar (the “persons” as subjects of the verb, “personal” pronouns): see ACTOR, Box 1, ES, and I/ME/MYSELF. 2. “Person” belongs to the domain of law, which opposes “things” and “persons”: see DROIT [LEX], THING [RES, SACHVERHALT]; cf. CIVIL RIGHTS. II. Person and Subject 1. To these two registers must be added the theological register, via the work on the question of the Trinity, and the difference between hypostasis and huparxis [ὕπαρξις]: see ESSENCE, GREEK, II.C, and SUBJECT, Box 5. 2. The articulation of these registers paves the way for the adoption of the term “person” to designate in a privileged way, starting in the seventeenth century, the individual subject of thought and action, and by extension, subjectivity in general: see CONSCIOUSNESS, IDENTITY [SAMOST’, SELBST], SOUL, SUBJECT; cf. AGENCY. 3. In French, personne and personnalité draw from the registers of psychology and morality. Personnalité is a more abstract term that now commonly has, in addition to a juridical sense, a psychological sense (the primary character of an individual) and the moral sense of a free and autonomous individual: see on the one hand GENIUS, INGENIUM, PASSION, and on the other hand AUTRUI [DRUGOJ, MENSCHHEIT, NEIGHBOR], MORALS, WILLKÜR. On the ethics of the person and “personalism,” see the study of Russian ličnost’ [личность] in RUSSIAN, POSTUPOK (free act), SOBORNOST’ (conciliarity). 4. Finally, on the negative sense of “person,” personne, as a pronoun used in some Romance languages, see NOTHING; and, on the Greek wordplay mêtis/outis [μήτις/οὖτις], used by Odysseus, see MÊTIS, Box 1; cf. ESTI, NEGATION. Melchior, Friedrich, and Baron Grimm. Correspondance littéraire. Paris: Garnier, 1877. First published in 1755. Mendelssohn, Moses. Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843. Muller, Virginia L. The Idea of Perfectibility. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. Passmore, John Arthur. The Perfectibility of Man. London: Duckworth, 1970. Politzer, Robert L. “A Detail in Rousseau’s Thought: Language and Perfectibility.” MLN 72 (1957): 42–47. Pollin, Burton Ralph. Education and Enlightenment in the Works of William Godwin. New York: Las Americas, 1962. Price, Richard. Four Dissertations. London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767. Priestly, Joseph. Essay on the First Principles of Government. 2nd ed. London: Johnson, 1771. First published in 1768. Rousseau, J.-J. Abhandlung von dem Ursprunge der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen, und worauf sie sich gründe, ins Deutsche übersetzt Berlin: Voss, 1756. . Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité des hommes. In Œuvres completes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiades, 1964 Schandeler, Jean-Pierre. Les interprétations de Condorcet: Symboles et concepts (1794– 1894). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000. Spadafora, David. The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Chaps. 6 and 7. Tetens, J. N. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung. In Sprachphilosophische Versuche. Hamburg: Meiner, 1971. Tubach, Frederic C. “Perfectibilité: Der zweite Diskurs Rousseaus und die deutsche Aufklärung.” Études germaniques 15, no. 2 (1960): 144–51. Voltaire. Essai sur les moeurs. Paris: Garnier, 1963. PERFORMANCE (FRENCH) “Performance,” a term borrowed from English (first recorded in English in the fifteenth century), is one of the French translations of the English word “happening,” in which what happens is an oeuvre-event that involves an audience: cf. WORK, Box 2. It is also one of the established translations of Greek epideixis [ἐπίδειξις], which designates a rhetorical performance, especially epideictic. The entry SPEECH ACT explores the vocabulary of performativity, which is especially dependent upon English linguistics (J. L. Austin), in different languages. See also LANGUAGE (particularly LANGUAGE I.A, on the distinction between “competence” and “performance” introduced by Chomsky); cf. LOGOS. In any case, whether in logic or in aesthetics, a performance is an event (see EVENT) that is connected with a context and a moment in time (see MOMENT, II), and that refers to an act (see ACT [AGENCY, PRAXIS]). v. ART, IL Y A, PLASTICITY, PERSON PERSON I. Person and Persona “Person” comes from the Latin persona (from personare, “resound”), which initially designated an actor’s mask (Gr. prosôpon [πρόσωπον], “that which faces the eyes, the countenance”), the character played, and the actor himself (Gr. hupokritês [ὑποϰριτής], “he who replies,” or “he who interprets”; whence English “hypocrisy,” which passes from the register of imitation to that of artifice): PHANTASIA [φαντασία] (GREEK) ENGLISH imagination, fancy, appearing FRENCH imagination, image, (re)présentation GERMAN Phantasie, Einbildungskraft LATIN visum, imago, imaginatio v. IMAGINATION [FANCY], and APPEARANCE, CONCETTO, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], INGENIUM, LIGHT, MIMÊSIS, PERCEPTION, PHÉNOMÈNE, REPRÉSENTATION The standard translation of the Greek phantasia [φαντασία] by “imagination” raises more problems than it solves, if only because it resorts to a calque of Imperial Latin imaginatio, which was unknown to Cicero, for whom an imago was still chiefly a portrait (De finibus, V.1.3). The modern translation of phantasia by “representation,” which is increasingly accepted, is certainly preferable because it does not refer to a notion, the imagination, which for us designates something quite different from what the Greeks might have meant by phantasia, but it does not make room for what is at the heart of phantasia: appearing. PHANTASIA 773 this in French as sans image, Bodéüs better as sans représentation—are marks of phantasia’s reliability: therefore we can only be astonished by any interpretation tending to reduce phantasia to what governs internal visual images alone in the absence of any object, images (phantasmata) that are supposed, moreover, to be usually false (so that phantasmata is then rendered by “illusions,” whence our modern “phantasm”). In any event, this interpretation absolutely contradicts the Aristotelian definition of phantasia as “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of sense” [ὑπὸ τῆς αἰσθήσεως τῆς ϰατ’ ἐνέϱγειαν] (De anima, III.3.429a.1–2). If we stress this etymology and the connection between phantasia and phainesthai, we are not directed first of all to visual, “pictorial” mental images but rather to what has to do with apparition, with becoming apparent, with the presentation of an external entity thus brought to light, indeed, with the simple presentation of real things—which may very well be things heard rather than seen. . If Hobbes was very aware of the difficulties of moving from Greek to Latin, the Romans themselves had to experience them directly. Republican Latin, practiced by the author to whom we owe many of our translations of Greek notions, namely Cicero, had only three terms that could be used to render phantasia: (1) imago, which designated primarily a portrait, but could also refer to mental images, such as those used in mnemonic techniques; (2) imitor, which meant mainly to imitate in the attempt to reproduce an image, and which “translated” the Greek verb eikazô [εἰϰάζω], which meant “to make a portrait, to represent by means of a drawing or painting,” whence “to resemble”; (3) imaginosus, “subject to hallucinations.” We can now understand the difficulties Cicero encountered in translating the Greek word phantasia. On the one hand, probably to emphasize that the Stoics’ phantasia referred to the representation that “is engraved, struck, and impressed on the basis of an existing object in conformity with that object in such a way that it would not be produced if the object did not exist” (De legibus, VII.50), he resorted to the Latin word visum (Academica, I.40), which is usually translated by “representation,” but which signifies primarily “the thing seen.” But on the other hand, he also used visio and imago to render the Epicureans’ eidôlon (De divinatione, II.120; I. Phantasia, Apparition, and Representation The translation difficulties reflect the no less great difficulties involved in determining what the Greeks might have meant by phantasia: they have to do both with the polysemy of the Greek term, which is connected with the development of the Greek language itself, and with the complex and varied usage that Greek philosophers made of it. Let us explain at the outset that if phantasia must be related to phainô [φαίνω], “to make appear in the light” (phôs [φῶς]—and still more, to the middle-voice verb phainomai [φαίνομαι], “to come into the light, to appear”—it is also related to phantazomai [φαντάζομαι], “to become visible, to appear, show itself ” (phantazô [φαντάζω], “to make visible, present to the eye or to the mind” it does not exist in the active mood before the Hellenistic period and does not acquire the sense of “to imagine” until the first or second century CE, when, for example, it appears in the author of the Treatise on the Sublime [Pseudo-Longinus] and in Alexander of Aphrodisias. We see immediately that the term originally had very little to do with our modern “imagination,” whether reproductive or creative, and probably still less with Malebranche’s folle du logis (madwoman in the house) or with Pascal’s maîtresse d’erreur et de fausseté (mistress of error and falsity). Moreover, didn’t Herodotus use the verb phantazomai to mean simply “show itself ” (Histories, IV.124, where he says that the Persians no longer saw the Scyths because they had disappeared—aphanisthentôn [ἀφανισθέντων]—and no longer showed themselves—ouk eti ephantazonto [οὐϰ έτι ἐφαντάζοντο])? Thus we can understand Aristotle’s famous statement: “As sight [ὄψις] is the most highly developed sense, the name phantasia has been formed from phaos [φάος], because it is not possible to see [ἰδεῖν] without light” (De anima, III.3.429a.2–4; trans. J. A. Smith in Basic Works of Aristotle 9). The Stoics, adopting the same etymology, added the following: “phantasia gets its name from the word ‘light’ [φῶς],” and in fact just as light allows us to see both itself and what it envelops, phantasia allows us to see both itself and what has produced it” (Aetius, IV.12–15; Sextus Empiricus, M., VIII.162). The view peculiar to the Stoics (phantasia is index sui), and the fact that, according to Aristotle (De anima, III.7.431a.16–17; 8, 432a.9–10), “the soul never thinks without an image” (phantasma [φάντασμα])—Barbotin renders 1 Hobbes and the difficulties of moving from Latin to Greek Thus we are a priori very far from any idea of a representation in the absence of an object and still further from any assimilation of phantasia to Hobbes’s “decaying sense” (in the Latin version, sensio deficiens, sive phantasma dilutum et evanidum) (Leviathan, I.2). Whatever we moderns may owe to this conception and whatever we may think of this possible comparison, we have to note that Hobbes saw clearly that imaginatio very imperfectly translated as phantasia: For after the object is removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image [imaginem] of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call imagination [imaginatio] from the image made in seeing, and apply the same, though improperly to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it fancy [phantasia], which signifies appearance and is as proper to one sense as to another. [The Latin words between brackets are those used by Hobbes himself in the Latin version of the book, De Cive, 1641.) (Leviathan, I, 2) 774 PHANTASIA internal, silent dialogue with itself (Theatetus, 189e–190a; Philebus, 38b–40b), Plato distinguishes between the pure phenomenon of thought, which he characterizes as doxa, and thought that presents itself to the mind through the intermediary of sensation (aisthêsis [αἴσθησις]). It is this second form of thought, a mixture of opinion and sensation, that he chooses to call phantasia or to designate by phainetai (Diès translates it in French as j’imagine, but literally it means “it appears”), emphasizing that inevitably it will sometimes be false (Sophist, 2633e–246b). . While it is true that in Plato and Aristotle what appears through phantasia may be subject to doubt, phantasia cannot be reduced to this aspect. This is evident in the Stoics, but it is also the case in Aristotle, for whom the spectrum of the phantasmata ranges from the true ones, which are necessary for thinking, to the false or illusory ones, such as appear in dreams, hallucinations, and all situations in which the conditions of perception are difficult, by way of the phantasmata at work in local movement, in which the role of phantasia is to make the object in question appear to be desirable so that one moves toward it. Ultimately, what radically separates Aristotle from Plato with regard to the reliability of phantasia is the former’s express desire to distinguish it clearly from judgment: just because the sun appears (phanetai [φαίνεται]) to me to have a one-foot diameter does not mean that I will believe that it is smaller than the Earth we live on (De anima, III.3.428a–24b.10). Thus Aristotle regularly connects phantasia with the impersonal phainetai, “it appears,” explaining that these terms have to be understood in their literal and not their derived (“metaphorical” in Aristotle’s vocabulary) senses. Phainetai could in fact be used in Greek to signify anything that “appears,” whether it appears by virtue of phantasia (the literal sense, according to Aristotle) or by virtue of something else, like sensation or thought (derived senses, according to Aristotle). In other words, just as we can say “it appears” to signify what emerges from an argument, or simply to mean “it seems,” the same goes for Greek, with phainetai (and it is interesting that Aristotle himself does not fail to do so, as in De anima, III.10.433a.9, where phanetai introduces the conclusion of an argument that appeals precisely to phantasia). It is in this sense that we must understand this statement: “If then imagination [phantasia] is that in virtue of which an image [phantasma] arises for us, excluding metaphorical uses of the term” (De anima, III.3.428a.1–2), only what appears by virtue of phantasia deserves to be called phantasma, and not, as for Plato or in ordinary language, everything that appears or seems to be by virtue of sensation, opinion, or thought. III. Appear to, Appear as “Thus it appears” that if phantasia refers first of all to what appears, whether what appears is true or false (despite their redistribution of terms, the Stoics were hardly innovative from this point of view), we cannot identify it with our modern “imagination,” a notion that has in addition the disadvantage of emphasizing an activity on the part of the subject, whereas in Greek it is rather a matter of receiving. De finibus, I.21), that is, the simulacrum, to borrow Lucretius’s Latin (see IMAGE and SPECIES), which is the replica of the bodies emanating from themselves and producing in us an “image” (phantasia, which here takes on a strong sense close to phantasma, because this term, which presents a further difficulty, not only designates a faculty but can also designate what results from that faculty). It is not until Imperial Latin, then, that we find imaginor and its derivatives, beginning with imaginatio. Imaginor and imaginatio, however, render the late meanings of phantazô and phantasia. This is shown by the following statement by Quintilian (first century CE), casually made in the course of a discussion of the ways of eliciting emotion: The Greeks call [phantasia] [φαντασία] (we could well call it visio) the faculty of representing to ourselves the images of absent things, to the point that we have the impression that we are seeing them with our own eyes and holding them in front of us [per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesantur animo ut eas cernere oculisac praesentes habere videamur]. (Institutio oratoria, VI.2. 29) Quintilian still proposes to translate phantasia by visio, but the definition he gives it is already far more “modern”: it seems to be modeled, even in the appeal to emotion, on the definition given in the Treatise on the Sublime (XV), when Pseudo-Longinus emphasizes that in his age (probably the first century CE), the term phantasia is used regarding passages in which writers, orators, and poets, acting out of enthusiasm and passion, seem to have seen so vividly what they are describing that they succeed in bringing it before the eyes of their audiences. Thus imaginatio, which also does not at first refer to our modern conception of the imagination, can translate phantasia, but, strictly speaking, this translation is relevant only for a few late occurrences of phantasia. Later still, William of Moerbecke seems to have realized this in his translatio vetus of Aristotle’s De anima, since he does not hesitate to decline phantasia and phantasma in Latin, as if they were untranslatables, a usage followed by Thomas Aquinas in his commentary, which nonetheless sometimes uses imaginatio as well (In Aristotelis librum de anima, 644–45, where we see the marvelous usage phantasiantur in the context of a discussion of the seeming prudence of ants and bees). However, a century earlier phantasia was essentially pejorative and designated something that was related to apparitions, phantoms—which could also be designated in Greek by phantasma because of its relationship to phasma [φάσμα], “vision, specter, phantom” (see, for example, Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, v. 710, for phantasma; Agamemnon, v. 274, for phasma). II. Appearing and Appearance Although—or because, as it would probably be more correct to say—phantasia refers first of all to that which appears, it is nonetheless true that it can also refer to a mental image that is very likely to be false, or to pure appearance. It was Plato who gave this turn to the notion, to which it cannot, however, be reduced. Trying to understand thought, dianoia [διάνοια], as the mind’s PHANTASIA 775 “Appear” is undoubtedly the key word that allows us to define more precisely what the Greeks understood by phantasia (provided, that is, that it is not identified with appearance taken in a pejorative sense, with mere semblance). In fact, though it is not necessary to appeal to Wittgenstein’s “seeing as,” since Plato already provided us with the means, we must understand phantasia, no matter which phantasma it should cause to appear, as a structure with a twofold complement governing the fact that something, whatever it is, appears to X or to Y as this or that. . Jean-Louis Labarrière “Representation” is better, but it has in turn the disadvantage of stressing what presents itself “again,” which may, of course, be the case but is not necessarily the case. Whence the way of writing it in several languages: “(re)presentation.” But this is hardly satisfying, since what it is most important to preserve is the connection with phainomai and phantazomai, while at the same time finding a family of terms from the same root to translate phantasma, phantaston, and phantastikon, and to refer both to mental images (pictorial or not) and to simple apparitions, to dream-images and hallucinations and other phantoms or shades—the least of the paradoxes certainly not being that a term derived from the word “light” can also signify “shade.” 2 Plato’s ambiguity, Aristotle’s precision, and the Stoics’ redefinitions v. SUBLIME Three texts that echo each other allow us to gauge more accurately the oscillations in the philosophical use of a single family of words and the difficulty of translating them. Plato writes the following: SOCRATES: If a man sees objects that come into his view from a distance [πόϱϱωθεν] and indistinctly, would you agree that he commonly wants to decide [ϰϱίνειν] about what he sees? PROTARCHUS: I should. SOCRATES: Then the next step will be that he puts a question to himself. PROTARCHUS: What question? SOCRATES: “What is that object which catches my eye [φανταζόμενον] there beside the rock under a tree?” Don’t you think that is what he would say to himself, if he had caught sight of some appearance [φαντασθέντα] of the sort? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And then he would answer his own question and say, if he got it right, “It is a man.” (Philebus, 38c–d; trans. R. Hackforth in Collected Dialogues of Plato) Aristotle writes this: [E]ven in ordinary speech, we do not, when sense functions precisely with regard to its object [οὐδὲ λέγομεν], say [ἐνεϱγῶμεν ἀϰϱιϐῶς πεϱὶ τὸ αἰσθητόν] that we imagine it to be a man [ὅτι φαίνεται τοῦτο ἡμῖν ἄνθϱωπος], but rather when there is some failure of accuracy in its exercise. (De anima, 428a.10–12; trans. J. A. Smith in Basic Works of Aristotle) Regarding Stoicism, we read, [Chrysippus said that we have to distinguish phantasia, phantaston, phantastikon, and phantasma]. The phantaston [usually translated by “object represented”] is what produces phantasia [the “representation”]. The phantastikon [usually translated by “imagination” or “imaginary”] is an empty movement, an affection that occurs in the mind without any phanataston having given rise to it. The phantasma [“imaginary object”] is that to which we are drawn in this empty movement of the phantastikon. (Aetius, Placita philosophorum, IV.12.1–5) The situation described by Plato clearly refers to what appears to X or Y as this or that, in the presence of the object. As a result, the conditions of perception govern the veracity or reliability of what appears to us, and it is therefore misleading, to say the least, to translate phainetai in French by j’imagine, as Diès did in his translation of the Sophist, 264a. Similarly, when Aristotle, preparing to criticize Plato’s definition of phantasia as a mixture of sensation and opinion, virtually quotes the Philebus in seeking to distinguish phantasia from sensation, the French translator Barbotin senses the necessity of rendering phainetai by paraît in his rendering of Aristotle’s De anima, but he nonetheless thinks he has to add l’image, which spoils everything. The sentence put between quotation marks in Aristotle’s text—an obvious allusion to the passage in the Philebus quoted earlier—should be rendered in French not as “cela nous paraît être l’image d’un homme,” as Barbotin has it, but rather as something like “cela nous paraît être un homme,” because it is the object itself that appears to be this or that, and the better the conditions of perception, the better the apparition will be. Finally, the Stoics undertook a redistribution of terms by separating the phantasma from phantasia and making it responsible for everything that produces illusions. But by a strange reversal of the situation, we can nonetheless conclude that this act bore a new conception of the imagination as creative, to which Pseudo-Longinus and Philostratus testify: Orestes’s visions, which the Stoics always associated with the phantasmata of the phantastikon (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII.170, 244, 249; VIII.63, 67), were to become the very model of literary creation, Euripides having seen the Furies and succeeded in making us see what he had “imagined” [ἐφαντάσθη] (On the Sublime, XV.2). REFS.: Plato. Philebus. Translation by R. Hackforth: Philebus in Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. . Le Sophiste. Translated into French by Auguste Diès. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1925. 776 PHANTASIA 3 The reappearance of “phantasm” on the basis of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis As used by translators of Freud, “phantasm” is supposed to render the German Phantasie, that is, the idea of the products of the imagination through which the ego tries to escape the grasp of reality (such as daydreams) and that are often closely related to the unconscious. This term (along with its adjective phantasmatic), which reappeared in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, is now widely used in ordinary language. Despite the fact that in medical French fantasme was occasionally used as early as 1836 in the sense of visual hallucination, and that in the 1906 edition of the Nouveau Larousse illustré it is soberly defined as a “chimera that is formed in the mind,” in 1926 it is still absent from the eighth edition of the RT: Dictionnaire général de la langue française. Resurfacing in French psychoanalytic literature over the course of the first third of the twentieth century, fantasme reconnected with the persistence in everyday popular speech of the Latin phantasma, a late transcription of the Greek word given the same spelling, which signified an image presented to the mind by an extraordinary phenomenon and that remained linked with phantasia, a term that initially designated the mental operation accompanying such an image, and only later “shade” or “phantom.” Phantasma established itself in Imperial Latin in the form of fantauma, from the Ionian Greek phantagma and the Massalian Greek phantôma. This fantauma from what is now southern France is found again in the twelfthcentury French fantosme, with the meaning of “vision of a person from the other world” or “phantom,” and then “illusion” and “daydream.” In Romance languages, the Italian and Spanish fantasma very clearly retains this twofold meaning, first of specter and then of mental image, whereas in French the two medieval terms fantosme and fantasie long continued to designate an extraordinary vision (fantosme) and the power of imagination (fantasie). These last two terms are found in German in the form of Phantom (in English “phantom,” and by extension, “deceptive image, illusion”) and Phantasie (the word “imagination”). The pride of place that Freud gives to Phantasie led the first French psychoanalysts to translate the term by a word new to French, or newly rehabilitated in French usage: fantasme. However, Phantasie designates less the power of imagining (Einbildungskraft) than the imaginary world and the whole of its contents, the creative activity of dreams, images, and visions to which the mind lends itself and that are expressed by the verb fantasieren (substantialized in the form of das Fantasieren). So that as Laplanche and Pontalis note in their Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis, the French fantasme “does not correspond exactly to the German [die Phantasie], in that it has a more restricted extension; fantasme refers to a specific imaginary production, not to the world of fantasy or imaginative activity in general” (trans. D. Nicolson Smith). Nonetheless, although it was psychoanalysis that actually established the term fantasme in French—but by assigning it a more restricted meaning than German Phantasie—the corresponding concept has spread within the discipline to multiple levels or modalities (for instance: primal fantasy, fantasme originaire, fantasme de séduction, conscious and unconscious phantasm, the “family romance,” and so forth)—whether they come from Freud, Jung, Lacan, or Melanie Klein. But today the use of fantasme has moved far beyond the field of psychoanalysis, in which it was born in the early twentieth century. It remains that in French, and especially in English, “fantasm” or “fantasy” are sometimes written “phantasm” or “phantasy,” the school of Melanie Klein seeing in this—inappropriately, it seems—a way of distinguishing the unconscious phantasm (phantasy) from the conscious phantasm (fantasy). Independently of this interpretation, the British publishers of the Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works, who generally opted for phantasy, justified, in these somewhat awkward terms, the distinction between the two spellings: Phantasy is adopted here on the basis of a discussion in the Oxford English Dictionary, which comes to this conclusion: “In modern usage, the terms fantasy and phantasy, despite their phonic identity and their etymology, tend to be apprehended as being distinct, the predominant sense of the former being “caprice, whim, fantastic behavior,” whereas [the predominant sense of ] the latter is “imagination or hallucinatory representation.” Consequently, phantasy will be understood here with the technical meaning of a phenomenon concerning the psyche. But fantasy may also be used in certain appropriate occurrences. (Standard Edition, 1:24) Thus the difference from their French colleagues (for whom phantasme and fantasme have the same meaning), and also from their Italian colleagues (who use fantasia or fantasma) and Spanish colleagues (fantasía and fantasma), Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysts seem to insist on establishing a real distinction between fantasy and phantasy, the latter term being seen as closer, by its spelling, to the German Phantasie and indicating, in their view, a specific dependence, in relation to Freudian vocabulary, on the concept that is supposed to correspond to it. Charles Baladier REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited by John Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis. Translated by D. Nicolson Smith. New York: Norton, 1974. First published in France in 1967. REFS.: Armisen, Mireille. “La notion d’imagination chez les Anciens.” Pallas 15/16 (1979–80): 11–51 / 3–37. Aristotle. De anima. Translation by J. A. Smith: “On the Soul.” In Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Birondo, Noell. “Aristotle on Illusory Perception: Phantasia without Phantasmata Source.” Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001): 57–71. Blumenthal, H.J. “Neoplatonic Interpretations of Aristotle on ‘Phantasia.’” Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977): 242–57. Bundy, Murray Wright. The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927. Castoriadis, Cornelius. “The Discovery of the Imagination.” Constellations 1, no. 2 (1994): 183–213. Cocking, John M. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas. London: Routledge, 1991. Fattori, Marta, and Massimo Bianchi, eds. Phantasia~Imaginatio, Rome: Ateneo, 1988. Flory, Dan. “Stoic Psychology, Classical Rhetoric, and Theories of Imagination in Western Philosophy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 29, no. 2 (1996): 147–67. PHRONÊSIS 777 Heil, John F., Jr. “Aristotle’s Objection to Plato’s ‘Appearance’: De anima 428a24–b9.” Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003): 319–35. Imbert, Claude. “Théorie de la représentation et doctrine logique dans le stoïcisme ancien.” In Les Stoïciens et leur logique, edited by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Vrin, 1978. Labarrière, Jean-Louis. “De la ‘nature phantastique’ des animaux chez les Stoïciens.” In Passions and Perceptions, edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Martha Nussbaum, 225–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . “Des deux introductions de la phantasia dans le De anima, III, 3.” Kairos 9 (1977): 141–68. . “Jamais l’âme ne pense sans phantasme.” In Aristote et la notion de nature, edited by P.-M. Morel, 149–179. Bordeaux, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997. Labarrière, Jean-Louis, ed. “Aristote —Sur l’imagination.” Les Études philosophiques 1 (1977). Lycos, Kemon. “Aristotle and Plato on ‘Appearing.’” Mind 73 (1964): 496–514. Manieri, Alessandra. L’Immagine poetica nella teoria degli antichi. Pisa, It.: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998. Modrak, Deborah K. W. “Φαντασία Reconsidered.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 68 (1968): 47–69. Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Role of Phantasia in Aristotle’s Explanation of Action.” In Aristotle’s “De motu animalium.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. 221–69. Osborne, Catherine. “Aristotle on the Fantastic Abilities of Animals in De Anima 3.3.” In vol. 19 of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, edited by David Sedley, 253–85. New York: Oxford University Press. Schofield, Malcolm. “Aristotle on the Imagination.” In Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, edited by G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen, 99–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “Image et Apparence dans la théorie platonicienne de la Mimêsis.” Journal de Psychologie 2 (1975). Reprinted as “Naissance d’images.” In Religions, histoires, raisons. Paris: Maspero, 1979. 105–37. Watson, Gerard. Phantasia in Classical Thought. Galway, Ire.: Galway University Press, 1988. Wedin, Michael V. Mind and Imagination in Aristotle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. that is, obvious and constraining events, such as natural phenomena, that are sometimes remarkable and for which we have to account (apodounai ta phainomena [ἀποδοῦναι τὰ φαινόμενα] [Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ 1073a36–37]). The well-founded phenomenon has to be distinguished from the imaginary phenomenon, and it is legitimate to speak of the “reality of phenomena” (Leibniz, De modo distinguendi phaenomena ab imaginariis). See APPEARANCE, IMAGE. II. Phänomen/Erscheinung Unlike German, French has only a single term; as a result, it is difficult to render in French the subtle difference that may exist between Phänomen and Erscheinung, unless we resort to the term apparition for the latter (Leibniz still writes phaenomena sive apparitiones) or create the improbable term parence (jargon used by a few translators of Heidegger). In Kant, for whom everything that is the object of a possible experience is a phenomenon, the latter is opposed to the noumenon, but also to the thing in itself (Ding an sich) and, like Erscheinung, to Schein (deceptive appearance, illusion). See ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND; cf. OBJECT, REALITY, RES, THING. III. Phénomène, Conscience, Phénoménologie In French, the technical term phénomène designates everything that appears to consciousness. In this sense, phenomena are to be described first, without seeking laws, causes, or hidden principles. It is in accord with this meaning of the term that Descartes wrote in the Principles of Philosophy (III.4), “I shall give a brief description of the phenomena whose causes I claim to seek.” See CONSCIOUSNESS; cf. I/ME/MYSELF, REPRÉSENTATION, SUBJECT. Phenomenology (Ger. Phänomenologie, introduced by Lambert; see LIGHT, Box 1), especially Husserlian phenomenology, constructs a lexicon that makes it possible to reconfigure the relationship between phenomenon and consciousness. See EPOCHÊ, ES GIBT, INTENTION; cf. ERLEBEN, PLASTICITY. PHÉNOMÈNE (FRENCH) The word phénomène (in Greek, phainomena [φαινόμενα]) was introduced into French by Renaissance astronomers to designate the stars and constellations that shine so visibly to the eye. Today its philosophical usage lies at the intersection of the object and subject, between manifestation and consciousness. I. PHAINOMENON, “PHENOMENON” The English word “phenomenon,” like its analogues in other languages, including French and German, is a calque of the Greek phainomenon [φαινόμενον], a participle of the middle voice verb phainesthai [φαίνεσθαι] meaning “to show, shine, appear, become visible, show itself as.” We find the same Indo-European root *bh(e)ә2 – (illumine, shine) in phôs [φῶς] (light), in phantasia [φαντασία] (imagination, representation), and also in phêmi [φημί] (to say). See LIGHT, Box 1, and PHANTASIA, cf. IMAGINATION. Phainomenon retains a certain ambiguity. Sometimes the term designates that which “appears” or seems to appear as this or that, without really or truly being so (thus a phainomenos sullogismos [φαινόμενος συλλογισμός] is one that “merely seems to reason” [Aristotle, Topics, 1.100b25]); other times, it designates what we call, properly, “phenomena,” PHRONÊSIS [φϱόνησις] (GREEK) ENGLISH prudence, wisdom, practical wisdom FRENCH prudence, sagesse, sagesse pratique, intelligence, intelligence pratique, sagacité GERMAN Klugheit, praktische Vernunft ITALIAN prudenza, ragione pratica LATIN prudentia SPANISH prudencia v. PRUDENCE, VIRTUE, and ARGUTEZZA, INGENIUM, MADNESS, MÊTIS, PRAXIS, PRUDENTIAL, SORGE, SOUL, VIRTÙ, WISDOM The set of possible translations of the Greek term phronêsis [φϱόνησις] shows the extension of its semantic field in ancient Greek, the development of this notion, and the redistributions to which it gave rise in Greek philosophy, as well as its advent in philosophies in European languages on the basis of its Latin translation by Cicero as prudentia. Originally designating thought, without emotion or desire being necessarily excluded, phronêsis, which was long not distinguished from sophia [σοφία], “wisdom, 778 PHRONÊSIS it remains that Plato, more than any earlier philosopher, clearly distinguishes what belongs to phronêsis from what belongs to the body and its “entrails.” Thus in the Timaeus (71d–e), the “appetitive” part of the soul (to epithumêtikon [τὸ ἐπιθυμητιϰόν]), the one that is associated with hunger, thirst, and all bodily needs, is lodged under the phrenes so as to be kept as far as possible from the part that deliberates, thinks, and reflects, which is lodged in the head, itself separated from the rest of the body by the neck. Stressing the fact that this appetitive part of the soul participates neither in the logos [λόγος] nor in phronêsis (Timaeus 71d), Plato even maintains that our conceivers made the liver so that it might be impressed by “images” (phantasmata [φαντάσματα]), and this also makes dreams and divination possible. As force of mind, phronêsis, like thought and reflection, is thereby clearly opposed to aphrosunê [ἀφϱοσύνη], “dementia,” and the proof is, Plato says, that no man in possession of his nous [νοῦς] (see UNDERSTANDING, Box 1), his (good) senses, is capable of divination. Only someone whose phronêsis, “capacity for reflection,” is impaired in one way or another can succeed in divination (71e). The turn toward the intellectual aspect of the semantic field is thus very clear, and is also shown by the fact that in Plato, phronêsis and sophia are often used as synonyms: they belong to the domain of thought, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom. This is still sometimes the case in Aristotle as well, not only in his “early” writings, such as the Protrepticus, but also in the Metaphysics (Γ.5, 1009b13, 18, 32); Μ.4, 1078b15), notably when he reproaches the “ancients” for not having been able to distinguish between phronêsis, “thought,” and sensation (cf. De anima 3.3, 427a17–22, where we find the same association as in Plato between the noein [νοεῖν], “thought,” and phronein, “intelligence”). Nevertheless, as Aubenque has shown in his magisterial book La prudence chez Aristote, Plato’s usage must not mask the “traditional” sense of the term phronêsis. In fact, although the word phronêsis commonly designated thought in a very general sense, it designated as well, and perhaps especially, thought or intelligence in a more specific sense, namely, to use a formula that Aristotle would not reject, “the understanding of human affairs.” By this is meant both a certain kind of knowledge, the one that concerns precisely human affairs, which are changing and variable, and a certain kind of reasoning and behavior with regard to “life.” This attitude, we might say, is rooted in a solid experience that makes the person who has it “wise”: a person who is called a phronimos, a “prudent, intelligent, sagacious” person, will be able to gauge situations, anticipate them, and cope with them thanks to his experience and discernment. That explains why Aristotle sought to base himself on this “popular wisdom” in seeking, in opposition to Plato, to distinguish a person who is “wise” in the sense of having scientific knowledge, from a person who is wise in the sense of “prudent.” . II. Phronêsis as a Virtue When in the Republic, Plato adopts a four-part classification that was apparently already in use in his time, he hesitates, in designating what we usually translate as “wisdom,” between knowledge, scientific knowledge,” as Plato and even Aristotle often show, came to designate a virtue, an “excellence” (see VIRTÙ, Box 1), exercised in the practical domain. Traditionally included among the four “cardinal” virtues, along with courage, justice, and temperance (or moderation), phronêsis nonetheless has a special status. It is a “dianoietic” or “intellectual” virtue (Aristotle), and even a “science” (the Stoics); but it is also an attitude or behavior that is involved in both private and public affairs—in short, it is, as is usually said, a kind of “practical knowledge.” Every smart manager is a “prudent” person (phronimos [φϱόνιμος]); to be such a person “virtuously” or, better, to be one in a “virtuoso” manner, one also has to know how to anticipate the future and not limit oneself to a timid management style. From this point of view, the Greeks’ “prudence” has almost nothing to do with the “prudence in business” to which Descartes alludes in his prefatory epistle to the French translation of the Principles, where he seeks to distinguish it from the wisdom with which philosophy must be conducted. We can take as an indication of this complexity the fact that Cicero himself, who normally translates phronêsis by prudentia, nonetheless sometimes renders this first of the four virtues by the phrase sapientia et prudentia (De officiis 1.15–16) when he wants to distinguish it from the three other cardinal virtues by its status as the intellectual virtue. I. Phronêsis as Thought The word phronêsis is derived from the verb phroneô [φϱονέω], which, broadly speaking, means “to be intelligent, to think, to have feelings” (cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.). In Homer, “thought” (phronêsis) or “thinking” (phronein [φϱονεῖν]) resides in the thumos [θυμός], the “breath,” which is itself, according to Onians (see SOUL, Box 3), contained in the phrenes [φϱένες], the “lungs.” Onians (RT: Origins of European Thought) consequently notes that whereas in Homer, phronein may in fact designate the intellectual aspect of thought, as it does in later Greek (thus Agamemnon “thinking [phroneonta (φϱονέοντα)] in his mind [thumos] things that were not to be realized,” Iliad 2.36–37), this verb nevertheless has a broader sense that also includes the emotions and desire. This is shown again, later on, by the verse in Sophocles’s Philoctetes (1078) in which Neoptolomos hopes that Philoctetes will change his phronêsis with regard to his companions: “Meanwhile, perhaps, he may come to a better mind [phronêsin] concerning us” (trans. Jebb, 208). Here we see that phronêsis does not refer to a purely intellectual act, but rather to the sense of the term “thought” that we still find in expressions such as “have a thought for,” “our thoughts are with you,” and so on. Plato himself, who clearly emphasized the intellectual determination of phronêsis, is still dependent on this polysemy. Thus, after having strongly maintained that the body and the attachment to pleasure that may result from it hobble the development of phronêsis, “intelligence, thought,” which, as seekers of the truth, we ought to cherish, because it alone is worth the effort and will make us truly virtuous (Phaedo 65a, 66a–e, 68a–b, 69a–c), Plato, in the same dialogue, nonetheless classifies it alongside sight, hearing, and analogous functions when the blessed are concerned (111a3–4). Similarly, in the Theatetus (161c), he says that Protagoras, whom some might consider the equal of the gods in wisdom and knowledge (sophia), in reality has no more phronêsis (judgment, intelligence) than a tadpole. However, PHRONÊSIS 779 translates sôphrosunê by both temperantia and moderatio, and even by modestia or frugalitas; cf. Tusculan Disputations 3.16–18). . 1. The new classification of the virtues In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle adopts a distinction that was current in the Academy, but was also traditional, between the irrational part of the soul (which he limits for his current ethical inquiry to the desiring part of the soul, to orektikon [τὸ ὀϱεϰτιϰόν], sometimes simply called “the ethical part,” to êthikon [τὸ ἠθιϰόν], Nicomachean Ethics 6.132, 1144b15) and its rational part, the logos being properly possessed by the latter, whereas the former (at most) listens to the logos and obeys it. Then he distinguishes first the “moral virtues”—or, to give them their true name, the “virtues of character” (êthikai aretai [ἠθιϰαὶ ἀϱεταί])—which are those of the desiring part of the soul, from the “intellectual virtues” (aretai dianoêtikai [ἀϱεταὶ διανοητιϰαί]), which are those of the part to which the logos is specific. Courage, justice, and temperance are thus ranked among these moral virtues or virtues of character that one acquires in early childhood, because character or temperament (êthos [ἦθος]) is shaped and strengthened through habit (ethos [ἔθος]: ibid., 2.1, 1103b17–19; the same play on words is already found in Plato, Laws 7.792e; see MORALS). On the other hand, phronêsis and sophia are ranked not only among sophia and phronêsis (see, for example, Republic 4.427e versus 433b). Furthermore, phronêsis can also designate both the understanding as an ability to reflect in a general way (4.432a) and the understanding as an intellectual ability distinct from bodily abilities (5.461a). In other words, the terminology is still far from being fixed, and no matter what turn Plato tried to give to this notion, it remains that in his work, phronêsis continues to have multiple meanings. A. Aristotle’s work It is in the sixth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that phronêsis is first clearly treated as a virtue or “excellence.” It is not that Aristotle was the first to consider phronêsis a virtue, but that he gave this notion a special sense, basing himself on popular usage while at the same time radically reformulating things. Aristotle’s contribution is characterized by at least three features: a. a sharp break with Plato’s intellectualist turn; b. a clear distinction between the respective domains of sophia and phronêsis; and c. a redistribution of the four virtues (which, since Saint Ambrose, it has been customary to call “the four cardinal virtues”), namely, prudence (phronêsis/prudentia), courage (andreia [ἀνδϱεία] / fortitudo), justice (dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη] / iustitia), and temperance or moderation (sôphrosunê [σωφϱοσύνη] / temperantia-moderatio; Cicero 1 And Thales fell Thales, who is supposed to have been the first of the Seven Sages of Greece to have borne the fine name of sophos [σοφός], is said to have fallen into a well while he was looking at the heavens, causing him, moreover, to be mocked by his servant. Plato reports the anecdote in the Theatetus (174a), where he uses it to poke fun at ignoramuses with slaves’ souls who mock true sages, the philosophers who, even if they may in fact fall into a well and look silly, in reality possess true knowledge of the things of this world, namely, the knowledge that makes one truly free. It is also recounted by Montaigne, who gives it a quite different, juicier interpretation: I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. (“Apology for Raimond Sebond,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame, 402) (N.B.: Montaigne follows here the version of the anecdote given in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 1.34, in which the servant deliberately leads Thales to a hole that she has previously dug.) Unlike Plato, Montaigne thus adopts, and radicalizes, the point of view of the “popular opinion” that Aristotle mentions in order to convey the distinction he is trying to make between sophia and phronêsis: knowledge of things of a theoretical order is not of the same nature as knowledge of things of a practical order. The possession of the former in no way entails possession of the latter, as Thales’s fall into the well clearly shows (Nicomachean Ethics 6.7, 1141bff.). That is why Thales can be considered a sophos, but not a phronimos. Even when sophia wants to take revenge on the servant, and prove that she, sophia, is capable of practical applications, this does not guarantee her the status of phronêsis. Sophia can be practically effective without being ethically virtuous. That is the meaning of the anecdote reported in the Politics (1.11, 1259a6–23). Thales performed an epideixis [ἐπίδειξις], a “demonstration,” a display of sophia (a19; see SPEECH ACT): having predicted, thanks to his astronomical knowledge, that there would be an abundant olive harvest, he gave deposits for the use of all of the olive presses, and then rented them out again at the rate he wanted, thus inventing the monopoly and chrematistics, and proving that “philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but their ambition is of another sort” (1259a16–18, trans. Jowett). Phronêsis is not the same thing as sophia, even when the latter is applied; and the Aristotelian sage, whether he is a phronimos or a sophos, knows it in a way quite different from the Platonic sophos. REFS.: Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by R. McKeon. Translated by B. Jowett. New York: Random House, 1941. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by D. M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965. 780 PHRONÊSIS trans. Ross). For this definition concludes this way: “And by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom [phronimos] would determine it.” Thus Aristotle underscores the essential role of the prudent man in the very definition of moral virtue: it is the prudent man who determines the mean, the “happy medium.” Incarnated in the phronimos, phronêsis thus intervenes long before it is defined as such within the study of the intellectual virtues (ibid., 6.5–9). 3. Phronêsis and its field of action Aristotelian phronêsis thus occupies a rather special place that continues to be of great interest to modern thinkers (see PRAXIS, PRUDENTIAL). It is a virtue, but it is also a certain kind of knowledge, a certain kind of understanding: the understanding of practical things. Generally speaking, its domain is that of “doing.” That is why Aristotle does not hesitate to classify it among the “productive sciences” (poiêtika [ποιητιϰά], Eudemian Ethics 1.5, 1216b18; he is using the term “science” [epistêmê (ἐπιστήμη)] in a broad sense), even though phronêsis is distinct from poiêsis [ποίησις] in the sense of technê [τέχνη], because it does not “produce” anything external to itself (Nicomachean Ethics 6.4; see PRAXIS). But phronêsis is indeed “productive,” because contrary to the theoretical sciences, knowledge is not its only end. Only phronêsis governs action. If Aristotle bases himself on the fact that we recognize as “prudent” a person who manages his own affairs as well as possible, he immediately reworks this popular meaning by noting that “we think Pericles and those like him to be prudent men [phronimous] because they are capable of seeing [dunantai theôrein (δύνανται θεωϱεῖν)] what is good for them and for men in general” (ibid., 6.5, 1140b7–10). This is a clear break with Plato, who did not hold statesmen in high esteem, and Aristotle further emphasizes it by observing that “political wisdom and practical wisdom are the same state of mind” (ibid., 6.8, 1141b23–24). Once it is established that phronêsis is the art of deliberating well concerning the means to an end, Aristotle explains that it is especially a knowledge of particular things and is thereby closer to sensation than to knowledge in the strict sense. That is why, he says in substance, a young man may very well be an excellent mathematician—mathematics never involves, after all, anything but “discourse”—but he cannot be a good politician, because that requires experience, and thus time (ibid., 6.9, 1142a11–20). the intellectual virtues that are acquired through experience (empeiria [ἐμπειϱία]) and are obviously indispensable so far as phronêsis is concerned, but also among those acquired through education (didaskalia [διδασϰαλία]: Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1, 1103b14–17). 2. The distinction between sophia and phronêsis When he takes up the study of the intellectual virtues (Nicomachean Ethics 6.2), Aristotle begins by subdividing the properly rational part into a “scientific” part (to epistêmonikon [τὸ ἐπιστημονιϰόν]) and a “calculative” part (to logistikon [τὸ λογιστιϰόν]), also called “opinionative” (to doxastikon [τὸ δοξαστιϰόν],1144b14; it is less a matter of calculating in the literal sense of the term than of making conjectures). The scientific part of the soul is the domain of theoretical things, that is, those that cannot be other than they are—in other words, necessary things, which are the only ones that can be made the object of truly scientific study, precisely because they are necessary. The excellence of this part is called sophia, or “wisdom,” as it is usually translated. The calculative part of the soul, on the other hand, is the domain of things that can be other than they are, that is, contingent things—and, very specifically, within this domain it is the sphere of “human affairs” (ta anthrôpina pragmata [τὰ ἀνθϱώπινα πϱάγματα]), “things to be done” (ta prakta [τὰ πϱαϰτά]), that is the ambit of the calculative part of the soul. The excellence of this part is called phronêsis. Emphasizing the radical heterogeneity of these two domains, Aristotle thus breaks up what Plato had tried to unify: sophia, which understands nothing about the domain of things to be done, does not govern phronêsis; and phronêsis, insofar as man is not the most excellent thing in the world, does not govern sophia. The “conflict of faculties” is thus settled. As a result, in contrast to the moral virtues, the “intellectual” virtues do not form a homogeneous whole. Let us not delude ourselves, therefore, regarding the intellectual character of Aristotelian phronêsis: phronêsis and the set of moral virtues form a whole, an autonomous domain, that of practical life (see PRAXIS), which cannot be reduced to scientific knowledge properly so called. The proof of this is that Aristotle already presupposes phronêsis in the famous definition of moral virtue as “a state of character concerned with choice [hexis proairetikê (ἕξις πϱοαιϱετιϰή)], lying in a mean [mesotês (μεσότης)], i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.2, 1106b36–37, 2 The four cardinal virtues Plato, though he did not necessarily invent it, makes use of the four-part classification “wisdom (sophia or phronêsis), justice, courage, temperance.” The Stoics call these four virtues “primary” (tas prôtas [τὰς πϱώτας]: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 6.92; the term phronêsis was then adopted to designate the most important of them); but the expression “cardinal virtues” was not used by the Greek philosophers. Saint Ambrose uses this term to designate the civil virtues that every good Christian must possess in addition to the three theological virtues, namely, faith, hope, and charity. In fact, he usually calls them “principal” virtues (principales), and in this we can see a relic of Stoicism. However, Saint Ambrose enumerates seven “principal virtues”: the Spirit of wisdom and intelligence, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and piety, and the Spirit of holy fear (De sacramentis, 3.2.8–10; De mysteriis, 7.42). Finally, defining moderatio as the virtue that tempers justice, Saint Ambrose considers it for that reason to be the most beautiful of all (De paenitentia, 1.1.1–2). PHRONÊSIS 781 la langue latine). From this point of view, he was certainly not wrong, because we can read in Aristotle that “it is to that which observes well the various matters concerning itself that one ascribes practical wisdom [phronimos]. This is why we say that some even of the lower animals have practical wisdom, viz., those which are found to have a power of foresight with regard to their own life” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.7, 1141a25–28, trans. Ross). But while Aristotle based himself on popular beliefs, Cicero relies on the strict Stoic definitions of sophia and phronêsis when he translates the latter by prudentia: “By prudentia, in Greek [phronêsis (φϱόνησις)], we mean a virtue different from sapientia: prudence is the knowledge of what is to be desired and avoided; wisdom, which is, as I have said, the supreme virtue, is the knowledge [scientia] of things divine and human, which includes communal and social bonds between the gods and men” (De officiis 1.153). Thus even when Cicero, following in the footsteps of Panetius and middle Stoicism, maintains that honestum, “honorable conduct,” which is the foundation of all morality, derives from one of the four virtues the Stoics considered primary, he nonetheless stresses that these four virtues are “interconnected and interwoven” (ibid., 1.15). Moreover, since it is in this passage that Cicero translates the first of these virtues by sapientia et prudentia, defining it as “the quest for and discovery of the true,” we see that he clearly remains dependent on Stoic rationalism. Given that this definition of prudentia became common in the world of Greco-Roman antiquity—it was retained by Augustine: “Prudence [prudentia] is the knowledge [scientia] of the things that must be desired and the things that must be avoided” (On Free Will, 1.13.27)—we might see in this a good reason not to resort to the translation by “prudence” when it is a matter of Aristotelian phronêsis. However, it must be noted that Thomas Aquinas, who discusses prudentia at length in his Summa theologica (IIa, IIae, qu. 46–56) from an Aristotelian point of view, did not bother with this difficulty and avoided the obstacle presented by the authority of Augustine—prudentia is a virtue, and knowledge is contrasted with virtue (qu. 47, art. 4)—by saying that the latter “understood knowledge in the broad sense of any act of right reason [ibi large accipit scientiam pro qualibet recta ratione]” (ibid.). Similarly, when he reaffirms, following Aristotle, that “prudence intimates action” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.11, 1143b8, where we read that phronêsis is “imperative,” epitaktikê [ἐπιταϰτιϰή]), Aquinas once again gets around Augustine, who seems to limit phronêsis to “knowing how to be wary of the hazards that threaten action” (qu. 47, art. 8). Today, of course, prudence is seldom defined in any but this Augustinian manner, as caution—for example, when driving a car. But the French translation of phronêsis by sagesse, “wisdom,” is no better (French speakers will often say that a child is sage, and in France comités de sages are empanelled to give direction on matters of policy: is it not as if these sages could be expected to provide wise advice because they are not engaged in action?), and has, moreover, the great disadvantage that we then have to wonder how to render sophia and sophos. Translators who refuse to render Aristotle’s phronêsis by “prudence” (prudencia, B. The new Stoic order In proportion to their dogmatism or absolute rationalism— for them, the wise man’s knowledge is an unshakeable knowledge that covers every domain, all of them closely interwoven with the others, and the great majority of men must be considered a bunch of good-for-nothings (phauloi [φαῦλοι])—the Stoics make phronêsis as a virtue the “knowledge [epistêmê] of bad things, of good things, and of what is neither good nor bad” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.92). The founder of the school, Zeno of Citium, who was still influenced by Socratic monism, went back beyond Aristotle to the Socratic conception of the unity of virtue-knowledge. Then phronêsis, whose name could be preserved, was merely one of the multiple versions of this virtue-knowledge, even if, by basing oneself on Plutarch, one could probably attribute a certain precedence to it: it was part of the definition of each virtue, which means that the phronêsis that enters into the definition of each of the virtues had to be distinguished from phronêsis “in the special sense.” Thus, whereas courage is “prudence in domains requiring endurance, and moderation is prudence in domains requiring a choice, prudence in the strict sense [tên d’ idiôs legomenên phronêsin (τὴν δ’ ἰδίως λεγομένην φϱόνησιν)] is prudence in domains concerning distribution” (Plutarch, “On Stoic Self-Contradiction” 1034a, in RT: The Hellenistic Philosophers). Although this first conception did not persist among the Stoics, they did continue to reject Aristotle’s sharp distinction among domains, which was itself founded on a monist psychology: “They suppose that the passionate and irrational part is not distinguished from the rational part by any distinction intrinsic to the nature of the soul, but that the same part of the soul, which they call thought and the directive part [dianoian kai hêgemonikon (διάνοιαν ϰαὶ ἡγεμονιϰόν)], becomes a virtue or a vice insofar as it completely reverses itself and changes in the passions and alterations of its habitus or character, and that it contains nothing irrational in itself” (Plutarch, “On Moral Virtue” 441d, in RT: The Hellenistic Philosophers). Even if it continued to use the word phronêsis and to make it a virtue, Stoicism could not tolerate the existence of an autonomous and heterogeneous domain of science, as is found in Aristotle. That is why when Chrysippus, for example, seems to adopt the traditional classification of the four “cardinal” virtues, which the Stoics called “primary” virtues (), he insists at the same time on their strong cohesion: “[The Stoics] say that the virtues are in a relationship of mutual implication [antakolouthein allêlais (ἀνταϰολουθεῖν ἀλλήλαις)], not only because anyone who has one of them has them all, but also because a person who accomplishes an action in accord with one of them accomplishes it in accord with them all” (Plutarch, “On Stoic Self-Contradiction” 1046e, in RT: The Hellenistic Philosophers). Similarly, Chrysippus continues to maintain that all virtue is knowledge, even if each virtue is a different kind of knowledge. C. Phronêsis and prudentia In choosing to translate phronêsis by prudentia, Cicero heard in the latter an echo of providentia, the art of foreseeing. Prudentia is in fact derived from providentia (pro-video, “to see ahead, foresee”; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de 782 PHRONÊSIS aphrosunê (sottise in the French translation of Diogenes Laertius, ed. and trans. Goulet-Cazé) that, as a “primary” vice, is the contrary of the “primary” virtue phronêsis. Of course, we do not speak Greek better than do the Greeks, but we might have expected aphrosunê to be opposed not to phronêsis but to sôphrosunê, that other “primary” virtue that since Cicero we have translated as “temperance” or “moderation,” and whose task it is to regulate bodily pleasures, chiefly those of touch and taste, according to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 3.13–15; the moderation of the ancients will be opposed to Christian “concupiscence,” which has so much to do with vision). Aphrosunê is not opposed to sôphrosunê, however, but characteristically to phronêsis, “wisdom,” “virtue,” or “knowledge.” It was the term akolasia [ἀϰολασία], a word that designates literally the character of that which has not been pruned and has grown all by itself, that the Greeks usually opposed to sôphrosunê (cf. Plato, Republic 4.431b; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 3.15; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.93). The whole question, as Plato and all his posterity said, is education, the crucial period being when the child is learning to control his body (Republic 2.377a–b). This explains Aristotle’s strange play on words: “That is why we call temperance [sôphrosunê] by this name; we imply that it preserves one’s practical wisdom [hôs sôizousan tên phronêsin (ὡς σῴζουσαν τὴν φϱόνησιν)]” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.5, 1140b12): one may very well be dissolute and a good mathematician, be drunk and still know that two plus two equals four; but one cannot be both dissolute and prudent. B. Understanding the Aristotelian circle and contemporary questions For some of our contemporaries who are quick to seek in Aristotle the solution to the problems we face in dealing with G.W.F. Hegel’s strong criticisms of Immanuel Kant and moral formalism, Aristotle is supposed to have developed a formidable circle between phronêsis and the three other main moral virtues: we cannot be morally virtuous without prudence, Aristotle says, or prudent without moral virtue (Nicomachean Ethics 6.13, 1144b30–32; 10.8, 1178a14–19). But this is to forget that in Aristotle, phronêsis is above all a virtue or “excellence,” and not just any form of “practical reason,” even if it is an “intellectual” virtue. The apparent paradox has to do with the fact that the person who ensures the choice of the happy medium defining moral virtues, namely the prudent person, cannot exist without first having moral virtue, and in particular the moral virtue Aristotle considers the most important of all, sôphrosunê, temperance or moderation. But this is a matter of education. The explanation is not at all paradoxical, even in appearance: although moderation is necessary to guarantee the correctness of practical judgments, no such guarantee is necessary to ensure the correctness of theoretical or mathematical judgments, for example. That is why, following in this respect Plato’s adage, Aristotle puts such stress on the necessity of giving children a proper upbringing: the desiring part of the soul has to be accustomed to obeying the properly rational part, which will acquire all of its value when the time comes for reason to govern. The virtue of prudenza, etc.), whether because of its “technical” translation in Cicero, the meaning this notion acquired in Kant (in whose work “prudence” is no more than “cleverness,” Klugheit), or unfortunate modern meanings of the term, end up splitting “wisdom” into two: on the one hand, “wisdom” as such, to translate sophia, and on the other, “practical wisdom” or “practical reason” (praktische Vernunft, ragione pratica). There is no lack of resources; in French, the translation of sophia by philosophie and phronêsis by sagesse has even been proposed (Gauthier and Jolif, Aristote). III. Phronêsis, Sophia, and Sôphrosunê The translation problems that arise from the twofold Greek and Latin tradition, as well as the development of the terms “wisdom” and “prudence” in our languages, are obviously not simple issues. The difficulty has to do with what the “moderns” as well as the “ancients” call “wisdom” (sagesse). One symptom of this is the definition of the “Sage” that we find in Furetière’s dictionary: “A philosopher who, through the study of nature and past events, has learned to know himself, and to conduct his actions well. Plutarch wrote a fine Treatise on the Banquet of the Seven Sages. The Sage has passions and moderates them. The Stoics, seeking to create a Sage, only made a statue of him” (RT: Dictionnaire universel). But since, for the notion of wisdom (sagesse), Furetière refers first of all to God’s knowledge, and then to the knowledge that humans can acquire through the study of physics and morality, it is remarkable that through this very barb directed at the Stoics, it seems that one point in their doctrine is reaffirmed: wisdom is not only the superior art of living of a person who knows how to shelter himself from what torments other people—Montaigne’s famous “soft pillow”—but primarily a knowledge of a theoretical order that, because it is theoretical, proves the basis for a self-knowledge that enables us to conduct our actions well. (It would, moreover, suffice to add dialectics to physics and morality to obtain the three inseparable parts of the Stoic system that constitute the Stoic Sage’s virtues.) A. Phronêsis, aphrosunê, sôphrosunê This difficulty is illustrated by both Aristotle and the Stoics, to whom we owe our heritage with regard to phronêsis, a peculiar heritage in the sense that in antiquity, it was the Stoic heritage that prevailed and that ended up allowing the philosophy of modern times to reduce the Aristotelian heritage to almost nothing, whereas for our contemporaries, it is the Aristotelian heritage that seems to be the most interesting (cf. Pellegrin, “Prudence”). But that is to forget that in both cases, it is primarily a question of “virtue” and of what has to be called “wisdom” (sagesse). In this sense, if we recall that what Plato opposed to phronêsis as “wisdom” or “knowledge” was aphrosunê, “madness” (Timaeus 71e), it will not be without interest to note that when the Stoics oppose to the primary virtues the primary vices, which they define, consistently with their exposition, as “ignorances [agnoias (ἀγνοίας)] of things of which the virtues are the sciences [epistêmai]” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.93), it is again PIETAS 783 PIETAS (LATIN) ENGLISH piety, pity, filial piety FRENCH piété, pitié, piété filiale GERMAN Frömmigkeit, Mitleid GREEK eusebeia [εὐσέϐεια] ITALIAN pietà, pietà filiale SPANISH piedad v. PITY, and DUTY, GOD, JUSTICE, LOVE, MENSCHHEIT, MORALS, PARDON, RELIGIO, VIRTUE The Romance languages, and also English, have words such as piété (Fr.), pietà (Ital.), piedad (Sp.), and piety (Eng.) that seem to translate transparently the Latin pietas but do not take into account the meaning the Latin word had in the Roman world. That is because the semantic referent of “piety” has come to be limited exclusively to the religious domain as it has been marked out by Christianity. Today, the gap can be seen in the fact that in French the doublet piété/pitié has been constituted from a single etymon and that in the parallel doublet in English, “piety”/“pity,” the forms thus related took on clearly distinct semantic values as early as the seventeenth century. However, the situation is different in Spanish and Italian, where the use of a single signifier for these two signifieds makes piedad and pietà more polysemous words. On the other hand, the German words Frömmigkeit and Mitleid are not derived from the same etymon, nor even from a single one, and thus they are not formally related in any way. Frömmigkeit, based on the adjective fromm, signifies “pious” in the sense in which one is “imbued with religious consciousness,” “submissive to God’s will,” with which is connected the idea of profit, also found in the Middle High German vrum, vrom. Mitleid, which means “pity,” is composed in the same way as “compassion” (from Lat. compassio, Gr. sumpatheia [συμπάθεια]) and refers to the fact of “suffering with,” of “sharing others’ suffering.” The Latin pietas is based on the adjective pius, which relates it etymologically to the Italic languages and probably to purus (pure), the original sense of pius being perhaps “with a pure heart,” in relation to the verb pio (to purify; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine). But independently of etymological questions, we should restore to pietas its own semantic referent, which was first of all pagan and then gradually became Christian, before we consider the evolution of this notion in modern languages. I. Pietas, a Roman Virtue The Romans thought that they were distinguished from other peoples chiefly by the virtue of pietas: “[S]ed pietate ac religione atque hac una sapientia quod deorum numine omnia regi gubernarique perspeximus, omnis gentis nationesque superavimus” ([B]ut by the piety and religion and that unique wisdom through which we have understood that the world is directed and governed by the power of the gods, we have surpassed all other peoples and nations; Cicero, De haruspicum responsis, 9.19, in Orations). Thus pietas enters Cicero’s politico-religious philosophy, and then the ideology of the Principate, whose beginnings saw the emergence of the figure of pius Aeneas, and as such, “[pietas] alone [being able] to indicate the good accord between gods and men because it signifies first of all the concord between the sons and the father, between citizens and the prince , insofar as the destiny of Rome was, for five centuries, to merge with that of the emperor, [it] was to become the basic virtue of Roman history” (Meslin, L’homme romain, chap. 5). prudence is thus established only in someone who is moderate; in return, moral values, including moderation, with time become authentic virtues and not simple habits, the results of previous training. Aristotle is not caught in a logical circle here; he uses this entailment to guarantee that phronêsis will be a virtue, and not mere smartness or terrible skill (deinotês [δεινότης], Nicomachean Ethics 6.13, 1144a26– 34). For, understood as practical intelligence seeking to adjust means to ends, phronêsis can indeed be related to the form of wily, tricky intelligence that Détienne and Vernant have so well described in their famous book on the Greeks’ mêtis [μῆτις] (Les ruses de l’intelligence; see MÊTIS). Odysseus’s ruses, or those of the octopus, thus sketch the portrait of a certain type of phronimos, the “crafty devil.” That is why, according to Aristotle, “practical reason” and “deliberative procedures” are in no way proofs of the morality of the person deliberating. Without moral virtues, and first of all moderation, phronêsis is no longer a virtue and retains of that characterization—of its status as a virtue—only the worst: the art of adjusting means to ends. In other words, “the end does not justify the means,” but it is not for reason—or even for what some of our contemporaries would like to call “practical reason,” meaning by that Aristotelian phronêsis, and not Kant’s praktische Vernunft—to ensure the rectitude of the ends: that is a matter of desire—but of a “moderate” desire. Jean-Louis Labarrière REFS.: Aristotle. Aristote: L’éthique à Nicomaque. Edited and translated by R.-A. Gauthier and J.-Y. Jolif. Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1970. . Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by R. McKeon. Translated by W. D. Ross. New York: Random House, 1941. Aubenque, Pierre. La prudence chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Détienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Translation by Janet Lloyd: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Diogenes Laertius. Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres. Edited and translated by Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé et al. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1999. Labarrière, Jean-Louis. “La philosophie morale d’Aristote.” In Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, edited by M. Canto-Sperber. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. . “Sagesse et temperance.” In Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, edited by M. Canto-Sperber. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. . “La servante de Thalès riait-elle à bon droit?” Autrement 20 (1996): 41–56. Long, Christopher P. “Contingent Knowledge: Phronēsis in the Ethics.” In The Ethics of Ontology: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy, 131–52. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004. Pellegrin, Pierre. “Prudence.” In Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, edited by M. Canto-Sperber. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Rosen, Stanley. “Phronesis or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger.” In The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, edited by Riccardo Pozzo, 248–65. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Segvic, Heda. “Aristotle on the Varieties of Goodness,” “Aristotle’s Metaphysics of Action,” and “Deliberation and Choice in Aristotle.” In From Protagoras to Aristotle: Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy, edited by Myles Burnyeat, introduction by Charles Brittain, 89–171. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Sophocles. The Complete Plays of Sophocles. Translated by R. C. Jebb. New York: Bantam, 1967. 784 PIETAS ritual practice of all the forms of duties. Cicero’s philosophy (see in particular De republica, 1.46.70 and 2.2.4; De natura deorum, 3.2.5; De officiis, 1.17.53–57) accounts in this way for the fact that in Rome the familial, civic, and religious domains merged in the representation of the sacred character of the Roman lineage. Taken together, the different entities to which pietas applied sketch out a continuum that a certain etymological play emphasizes. Thus, pietas is exercised toward one’s parentes and relatives, then toward the homeland, patria, which has been received from these parentes, and goes back to that of the patres and beyond to that of the majores. The parentes include the pater, that is, the paterfamilias, one of the representatives of the sequence of generations through which the heritage is made. The word patres is also understood politically, the patria representing a Rome populated and defended by the heads of families, the patres. Finally, the majores are those who have given Rome its gods and its cults; thus they have a role in the “miracle” of the origin of Rome, which was later manifested in its conquest of the world, and they transmitted this mos majorum that the exercise of precisely this pietas from generation to generation is supposed to perpetuate. After Cicero, it was in the succession of the sovereigns of the empire, and of the lineages that “went back” to the heroes and gods (Mars and Venus, Apollo, Hercules, and Jupiter), that the miraculous and sacred character of the Roman lineage was then transmitted. II. Pietas, Piété, and Pitié Under Emperor Constantine, at the time of the official recognition of Christianity (313 CE), the Christian author Lactantius undertook a dialectical reflection against Cicero, whose remarks he discussed and deployed in order to combat his pagan contemporaries. Let us note first that he reconsiders the etymology of religio that Cicero had proposed and that he does so by referring to pietas in Divinae institutiones [Divine Institutes], 4.28 (RT: PL, vol. 6; see RELIGIO). But above all, in seeking to invalidate the pagan pietas by giving the term a new meaning, Lactantius makes reappear as in a photographic negative, so to speak, the conceptual unity peculiar to pagan pietas, a pietas that is simultaneously familial, sociopolitical, and religious. He defines pietas, in fact, in the chapter of his Divinae institutiones that is entitled “De justicia”: “[S]i ergo pietas est cognoscere deum, cujus cognitionis haec summa est ut colas, ignorat utique justitiam qui religionem non tenet” ([P]iety consists in learning to know God, and if this knowledge is summed up in worshiping him, someone who does not observe the religious worship of God surely is ignorant of justice; ibid., 5.14.12). Lactantius, opposing the Roman religion inherited from the majores, defends the religion of the human family that has issued from the same God and Father (ibid., 3.9.19): “pietas autem nihil aliut quam Dei parentis agnitio” [piety is nothing other than the knowledge of God (qua) Father]; the creator of the first couple, who were the parents of a single lineage, of a universal genealogy (“Nam si ab uno homine quem deus finxit omnes origimur, certe consanguinei sumus” [If, in fact, we have been born from this unique man whom God has assuredly made, we are all of the same blood]; ibid., 6.10.4), and thus share a single, identical Christian pietas (see also ibid., 2.11.19, 5.6.12, 6.9.21, etc.). Lactantius thereby delimits new contours and Thus pietas can be defined as the “feeling of duty,” or more exactly as the “disposition to fulfill one’s duty toward that to which one owes it,” that is, the three constituted entities that are the three spheres of origin and membership in society for the Roman: the family; the homeland (see Cicero, De inventione [On Invention], 2:66: “pietatem, quae erga patriam aut parentes aut alios sanguine conjunctos officium servare moveat” [piety, which forces us to fulfill our duty to our homeland, our family, and all those who are linked to us by blood]); and finally the gods (see Cicero, De natura deorum [On the Nature of the Gods], 1.41: “Est enim pietas justitia adversus deos” [Piety is justice toward the gods]). Republican pietas was replaced by the pietas that is due the emperor, notably in the imperial cult and that is itself relayed by the emperor’s pietas toward the gods, his relatives, and the citizens of the empire (Ulrich, Pietas). The different forms of pietas are thus related to these three domains of application. Most often, it is the moral character of this notion that prevails in the different acceptations of the word, but its affective character is also perceptible in drama, for example, in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and in the epistolary genre. There remained something in this term that attached to the notion of a code, a moral code, for instance; but that pietas was somehow “coded” does not necessarily mean that it was cold or rigidified by morality (such are the clichés often governing our image of the Romans), for here it is a matter of expressing love for a father, a mother, a daughter, a brother. The semantic field of pietas includes essentially the terms honestas, dignitas, and conscientia, as far as the subject’s internal disposition (Fugier, L’expression), and also officium and religio as the subject’s dispositions to a practice and as the exercise of that practice itself. Other terms help determine the meaning of pietas. Thus fides, as “dictorum conventorum constantia et veritas” (fidelity and sincerity in the words and commitments made; Cicero, De officiis [On Duties], 1.7), brings out the pertinence of the criterion of membership and origin in the notion of pietas. Voluntas (see Cicero, Pro Plancio, 80: “Quid est pietas nisi voluntas grata in parentes?” [What is piety if not a grateful disposition toward one’s parents?]) shows that it is a question of an internal disposition (here, grata) relating to others. Finally, justitia— which is part of the definition of pietas (see Cicero, De natura deorum, 1.41, according to a formula that probably goes back to Posidonios), just as dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη] is part of that of eusebeia [εὐσέϐεια] (see Plato, Euthyphro, 12e)—indicates that this virtue involves performing a duty. The Greek term eusebeia, to which pietas corresponds, has a great similarity to the Latin term, since the exercise of this virtue does not apply solely to the gods, but also to family and homeland. However, a first difference between the two terms has to do with the fact that pius probably originally meant “with a pure heart,” whereas eusebês [εὐσεϐής], “who respects the gods and their laws,” is based on sebomai [σέϐομαι], “to feel a respectful fear” (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). A second difference arises especially from the fact that pietas is an object of reflection peculiar to Latin authors. For the Romans, the fact that Rome had extended its empire so universally, seeing it as an application of justice in the world of that time in which human realities (res humanae) and divine realities (res divinae) mutually determined each other, could be explained only by their unfailingly loyal, traditional, PIETAS 785 Mitleid—a circumstance that makes the Latin pietas at times very difficult to translate into German today. The Italian pietà in particular poses translation difficulties. In Curzio Malaparte’s narrative entitled La Pelle (The Skin), pietà’s polysemy plays a significant role. This novel is imbued with the idea that the modern (moderno) Christianity of the American liberators of Italy (following the Second World War), which was full of solidarity but lacking in pity, contrasts with the Neapolitans’ piety, into which enters their atavistic pity for other people and for themselves: it is a Christian pity (pietà cristiana). Thus the novel describes the “crazy pity” (pazza pietà), the “ferocious pity” (feroce pietà) of desperate men and women tearing themselves away from the wretched remains of dead bodies that “pity and love” (pietà e affetto) make them think they recognize but that becomes “piety and love” (pietà e affetto) when these men and women gather to practice the funerary rites over the dismembered cadavers. But there is a play on the double sense of pietà that can probably also be found in the French technical term in (Christian) art, pietà, borrowed from the Italian, which finally replaced, at the end of the nineteenth century, the synonymous designation Vierge de pitié or Pitié. And there remains in French, as in most Romance languages, a trace of the pitié that also used to mean piété in the old expression montde-piété, Monte di Pietà (It.), or monte de piedad (Sp.): pawnshop. Blandine Colot REFS.: Ball, Robert. “Theological Semantics: Virgil’s Pietas and Dante’s Pietà.” In The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 19–36. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Bon, Bruno, and Anita Guerreau-Jalabert. “Pietas: reflexions sur l’analyse sémantique et le traitement lexicographique d’un vocable médiéval.” Médiévales 42 (2002): 73–88. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Back from Exile: Six Speeches upon His Return. Translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Chicago: Scholars Press, 1991. . On Duties. Translated by Walter Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913. . On Invention; The Best Kind of Orator; Topics. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. . On the Nature of the Gods; Academics. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. . Orations: Pro Archia Poeta; Post reditum in senatu; Post reditum ad quirites; De domo sua; De haruspicum responsis; Pro Plancio. Translated by N. H. Watts. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Colot, Blandine. “‘Latin chrétien’ ou ‘latin des chrétiens’: Essai de synthèse sur une terminologie discutée.” In Moussyllanea: Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature anciennes offerts à Claude Moussy, edited by B. Bureau and C. Nicolas, 411–19. Louvain: Peeters, 1998. . “Pietas, argument et expression d’un nouveau lien socio-religieux dans le christianisme romain de Lactance.” In Studia patristica, edited by M. F. Willes and E. J. Yarnold, 23–32. Vol. 34. Louvain: Peeters, 2001. Fugier, Huguette. L’expression du sacré dans la langue latine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Lactantius. Divine Institutes. Translated by Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Meslin, Michel. L’homme romain. Paris: Hachette, 1978. Saller, Richard P. “Pietas, Obligation and Authority in the Roman Family.” In Alte Geschichte und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, edited by Peter Kneissl and Volker Losemann, 393–410. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Ulrich, Theodor. Pietas (pius) als politischer Begriff im römischen Staate bis zum Tode des Kaisers Commodus. Breslau: Marcus, 1930. Wagenvoort, Hendrik. Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion. Leiden: 1980. introduces new traits into the meaning of pietas that include affectus, misericordia, and humanitas. A century after Lactantius, Augustine reconsidered the meaning of pietas and defined the meaning that was henceforth to prevail in Christianity. Having become a gift (the gift of the Spirit: Is 11:2; 1 Cor 12:1, as Tertullian notes, Adversus Marcionem, 3.17.3, and Adversus Judaeos, 9.26) and a virtue of the Christian religion, pietas also becomes the vera pietas that he seeks to define, permanently setting in history and the history of the language the mark of Christian dogma on this element of the Latin lexicon. Alongside the common uses of pietas applied by his contemporaries (“dicitur more vulgi”) to the accomplishment of duties toward parents or the needy, Augustine distinguishes pietas as designating “in the literal sense [proprie] the cultus Dei, the worship of God” (Civitas Dei, 10.1), which is based on the three theological virtues: “qui autem vera pietate in Deum, quem diligit, credit et sperat” (he who, with true piety, believes in God, hopes in him, and loves him; ibid., 5.20). It is this Christian definition of pietas that we repeatedly find in medieval literature (Bon and Guerreau-Jalabert, “Pietas”). For example, Saint Bernard writes: “[P]ietas est cultus Dei qui constat ex tribus: fide, spe et caritate” ([Pietas] is the worship due to God, consisting in three things: faith, hope, and charity; RT: PL, vol. 183, Sententiae, 3.21). Cicero’s definitions were, of course, still frequently cited during the Middle Ages, but the overall logic of the notion of pietas and the meaning it had in the Latin of the pagans had, in fact, disappeared. On the other hand, Jerome’s translation of the Bible shows that in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, efforts were being made to distinguish a pietas-worship that included the domain of Christian religion from another pietas which was seen as merely an affectus that was, in short, too human or too “pagan.” This is the distinction that is the origin of the piété/pitié doublet in French and the “piety”/“pity” doublet in English, even if its semantic differentiation was established only in the seventeenth century, probably under the influence of the Latin of Christian theologians and of the Church. In the eleventh century, Old French, as a vernacular language, had two words derived from pietas, namely pitié and, as a loan word, piété. But if this doublet existed formally, the meanings were not yet clearly distinguished: the two terms “appear as synonyms, and both have the meaning of the modern word pitié” (Bon and Guerreau-Jalabert, “Pietas”), and it was only in the middle of the sixteenth century that a semantic distinction between them appeared and was established in the following century. But at the same time that piété was defined as “affection and respect for God and holy things,” the term was extended to mean “respectful affection for relatives and the dead” (RT: Dictionnaire universel), and the expression piété filiale, or “filial piety” (a Latinism, modern dictionaries note), came into use. Contemporary French—in which piété is understood primarily as “a fervent attachment to God: respect for religious beliefs and duties” or, like its avatar in the pagan, polytheistic domain, “a feeling of respect for the gods, for religious practices” (being distinguished from pitié as “a sympathy that arises from the sight of the sufferings of others and makes us wish them to be relieved”)—is thus at least in part heir to this semantic structuring (Bon and Guerreau-Jalabert, “Pietas”), which is also found in the two German terms Frömmigkeit and 786 PITY form; for example, once shaped, marble cannot recover its initial form. This ability to preserve impressions is precisely what distinguishes plasticity from elasticity, and separates the malleable from the protean. Thus we can understand why a certain synthetic material that appeared in the early twentieth century was called “plastic”: it is capable of taking various forms and properties depending on the uses for which it is intended, but once it is molded, it nonetheless suspends the virtuality of its metamorphoses. This fidelity to form, in which receptivity and activity are combined, enables us to understand two other recent and apparently contradictory meanings of the term “plastic,” one in the realm of histology, the other in that of explosives. In histology, “plasticity” designates the ability of tissues to re-form themselves after having been injured (healing). “Plastic” also refers to a powerful explosive substance. It is as if plasticity put violence at the very heart of regeneration: the ability to receive a form, indeed to re-form tissue after a wound, via the necessity of enduring the explosion of an initial state: the formless, an inadequate or outdated form. II. Hegel and the Plasticity of the Subject Hegel sees in plasticity a means, both synthetic and disruptive, of qualifying in a perfectly adequate way the development of subjectivity, that is, the process of self-determination (Selbstbestimmung). In the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind he writes: “only that philosophical exposition can manage to become plastic in character which resolutely sets aside and has nothing to do with the ordinary way of relating the parts of a proposition.” The “parts of a proposition” designate here the subject, the copula, and the predicate. If, according to Hegel, philosophy had up to that point lacked plasticity, that was because it had always considered the subject non-plastic, that is, purely and simply passive, receiving its accidents or predicates from outside, without producing them itself. Conversely, philosophy has conceived the act of predication as a pure and simple imposition of form, an arbitrary movement, a transition (Übergehen) between juxtaposed terms consisting in relating the predicate to a subject that remains fundamentally foreign to it. “Usually the subject is first set down as the fixed and objective self; from this fixed position the necessary process passes on to the multiplicity of determinations or predicates.” That is why subjectivity, and consequently philosophy, have not yet found their true form. Excluding this kind of ordinary relationship between the parts of a proposition requires us to break with an excessively narrow understanding of predication that misses the essential point, namely, the mutual determination of the terms themselves that make it possible. The philosophical proposition nonetheless makes this determination manifest insofar as in it subject, copula, and predicate appear as immediately identical. As an example, Hegel takes the proposition “God is Being” as paradigmatic of every philosophical assertion. What is the subject, what is the predicate? And how could one proceed in a linear way from one to the other? “Thinking,” Hegel says, “instead of getting any farther with the transition from subject to predicate, in reality finds its activity checked [gehemmt] through the loss of the subject, and it is thrown back [es erleidet einen Gegenstoß], on the PITY The doublet pitié/piété renders in French the meaning of the Latin virtue par excellence, pietas, which designated the feeling of duty toward the gods, ancestors, and the homeland, and later came to refer to the emperor’s benevolence. See also PARDON, RELIGIO. On the relationship between humans and God, see ALLIANCE; cf. in particular DESTINY, GOD, HUMANITY, SECULARIZATION. On the vocabulary of duty, see OBLIGATION; cf. in particular DUTY, MORALS, SOLLEN, VALUE, WILLKÜR. v. LOVE PLASTICITY FRENCH plasticité GERMAN Plastizität GREEK plassein [πλάσσειν] v. ART, AUFHEBEN, BEAUTY, FICTION, FORM, GERMAN, I/ME/MYSELF, SPEECH ACT, SUBJECT It was around the turn of the nineteenth century that the neologism plasticity (plasticité, Plastizität) made its official appearance in European languages. It joined two already existing words formed on the same root (the Gr. plassein [πλάσσειν], “to model or shape”): first, the noun plastics (la plastique, die Plastik), designating the art of elaborating forms, and more particularly, sculptures; second, the adjective plastic (plastique, plastisch), which signifies on the one hand “capable of changing form” (like wax or clay), and on the other hand “capable of giving form” (like the plastic arts or plastic surgery; see ART, Box 2). Plasticity qualifies precisely the double aptitude for receiving and producing form. Hegel was the first to note the frequent but indeterminate use his contemporaries made of this term, and undertook to give it a conceptual value. The two contradictory meanings of receiving and giving form allowed him to situate Plastizität in the register of speculative terms with two opposed meanings that were to have great influence on later thought, which found itself obliged, as it were, to invent referents for them. In the case of plasticity, this invention consists of an exportation. Hegel tears it away from its native domain, art, and assigns to it its true domain of validity, the development of subjectivity. Then the essential task of translating the subject is incumbent upon plasticity. I. Between the Rise and Annihilation of Form: The Meanings of Plasticity “Plasticity” articulates several meanings, and can thus be broken down into a series of equivalents that never retain more than one characteristic. “Malleability” and Bildsamkeit qualify the simple register of receptivity to form. “Formation,” “information,” Einbildung, and Durchbildung emphasize only the process of giving form. To be sure, one of the essential aspects of plasticity is indeed its receptiveness to impression: the word “plasticity” designates the ability to be shaped or modeled, including by culture or education (la plasticité de l’enfant), and also the ability to adapt or evolve (the plasticity of the brain, the vertu plastique du vivant). Nonetheless, while the adjective “plastic” is opposed to “rigid” or “fixed,” it does not mean “polymorphous.” Something that is plastic retains PLASTICITY 787 the rise and annihilation of form, is both a virtuality of explosion (in his article on natural law, Hegel compares the process of mental self-determination to the action of a bomb) and a promise of reparation: meaning, injured by the initial conflict between the content and the form of the proposition, is restored, and the philosophical proposition is finally healed. If “plasticity” had finally to be translated, if its power of translation had to be translated, we might turn to the word “tone” and its derivatives (“tonic,” tonality”). Etymologically and literally, “tone” (Gr. tonos [τόνος]) means “tension,” and more precisely “good tension, midway between softness and hardness.” Whence its double field of application, medical (in medicine, “tone” refers to the consistency of healthy tissue) and musical. Translated in tonic terms, plasticity appears to be a thing’s power of transformation, as Hegel says in the Science of Logic (§189), “in its form itself,” that is, its ability to sculpt its own becoming. III. Nietzsche and the Ethical Value of Plasticity Nietzsche unexpectedly continues along the line of speculative idealism by radicalizing the Hegelian definition of plasticity—the relationship of the subject to the accident, that is, to the event as well. In plasticity, Nietzsche sees the affirmation of becoming. In the second of his “untimely meditations” he declares: There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, or a culture is: I mean by plastic power the thought of the subject because it misses this subject.” This has to do with the fact that the concept—or the speculative content of the proposition—immediately enters into contradiction with its own form insofar as it resists its predicative prolongation. It then deserts it to “return into itself.” For Hegel, this retreat is the real reason that philosophical texts are difficult. The difficulty is not due to the highly technical level of the discourse, but to the strange character of propositions that at first appear to be tautological (the terms of the proposition seem to be equivalent) and heterological (they seem to mean something different from what they say since their own content escapes them). However, this retreat of the concept into itself is an essential moment that prepares the passage from the simply predicative understanding of the proposition to its authentically speculative understanding. At this point in regression, the subject loses its fixed form. In the first stage of its plasticity it becomes malleable to the point of not having any form. Nonetheless, Hegel says, this retrograde movement does not last: “it is necessary that this return of the concept into itself be represented [dargestellt].” Having returned to the originary point where it rids itself of all forms, the subject is projected forward to give form—that is, to embody itself in a particular determination. In this way it affirms itself both as subject and as its own predicate: that is the meaning of self-determination. The plasticity of the subject characterizes its capacity to receive and to form its own content—in a word, to self-differentiate itself. . The plastic operation constituted by self-determination thus presupposes that the subject is malleable: it has to be capable of ridding itself of its initial form. It also includes a moment of formation: the subject forms its accident by particularizing itself. The synthesis of these two instances, carried out precisely by plasticity, intervening between 1 “Plastic individualities” Hegel’s exportation of the concept of plasticity (see ART, Box 2) from aesthetics into philosophy requires a mediation, which is provided by the concept of Greek “plastic individualities” (plastische Individuellen). By this expression Hegel means great historical figures like “Pericles, Phidias, Plato, and especially Sophocles, but also Thucydides, Xenophon, Socrates” who attained in life what statues realize in matter itself: the incarnation of the spiritual. Living sculptures, these are “exemplary” or “substantial” figures. Like statues, “plastic individualities” give body to the mind while at the same time allowing it to be imbued by the Thing itself. Receiving and giving meaning, they are qualified as selbstdeutende, self-interpreting. It is in referring to this auto-exegetical operation characterizing classical art and the Greek mode of being in general that Hegel comes to elaborate the concept of a specifically philosophical plasticity, the mode of being of subjectivity, and first of all the plasticity of the philosophizing subject. In the preface to the Science of Logic (1831), Hegel appeals directly to his reader’s plasticity: “A plastic presentation [plastischer Vortrag] requires a plastic sense of reception and comprehension [einen plastischen Sinn des Aufnehmens und Verstehens].” This plastic sense of comprehension requires that the subject allow itself to be dispossessed of its initial form in order to become itself a formative power, that is, an interpreter. Then the plasticity of the universal subject (Selbst, Soi), the specific imprint of subjectivity, which distinguishes it from every other kind of support, is in fact its ability to inform itself, that is, to hold the middle in the perpetual tension of a dialectical uneasiness, between evanescence and petrification. REFS.: Hegel, G.W.F. Cours d’esthétique. Vol. 2. Translated by J.-P. Lefebvre and V. von Schenck. Aubier, 1996. . The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 788 PLEASURE PLEASURE ENGLISH pleasure, enjoyment, delight FRENCH plaisir, jouissance GERMAN Lust, Wohlgefallen, Vergnügen GREEK hêdonê [ἡδονή], chara [χαϱά], chairein [χαίϱειν], terpsis [τέϱψις], euphrosunê [εὐφϱοσύνη] ITALIAN piacere, diletto, gusto, godimento LATIN suavitas, voluptas, delectatio, fruitio SPANISH goce, gozo, placer v. BEAUTY, DRIVE, GLÜCK, GOÛT, LOVE, MALAISE, PATHOS, PHRONÊSIS, PRAXIS, SENSE, SUBLIME, SUFFERING, UTILITY In the main European languages, the vocabulary of pleasure is determined by the heritage of Platonism. Archaic Greek distinguishes between the pleasure of existence (chairein [χαίϱειν], “to feel joy”; euphrainô [εὐφϱαίνω], “to charm”) and pleasure in the object (terpein [τέϱπειν], “to sate, to enjoy”; hêdesthai [ἥδεσθαι], “to find pleasure in”; adj., hêdus [ἡδύς], “pleasant,” “to qualify the object”). But philosophy chooses to combine all these terms under a generic term: hêdonê [ἡδονή]—which renders voluptas, pleasure (plaisir, piacere, etc.), Lust—determined as “the” pleasure in the object par excellence, the pleasure that the body takes in food or in love. Then all pleasure, enclosed in the two dominant systems, pleasure/pain and desire/ lack, could be reduced to this yardstick in order to be devalued. This reduction had several decisive effects on the use of these words in the history of philosophy. For one thing, it led to semantic inventions and refashionings. Sometimes, in fact, distinctions were made either to emphasize a pleasure that is noble or sublimated because of its subject (the Aristotelian god whose act is hêdonê; the Kantian soul capable of disinterested Lust, as opposed to the Vergnügen of the senses) or because of its object (the Spinozist series titillatio, laetitia, gaudium). At other times, lower pleasures are rehabilitated to change the relationships between desire and pleasure (delectatio morosa) and pleasure and pain (Lust/Unlust) and the distinctions between sensible and intelligible, body and soul (delight, joy). On the one hand, it produces a “moral” effect regarding the proper use of pleasures: this is the regime of the “metretic,” of moderation, from Aristotle to Foucault. I. From the Pleasure of Existence to Pleasure in the Object A. The Greek system: Charis, euphrosunê, terpsis/hêdonê In Homer, the pleasure par excellence is the pleasure of existence, the satisfaction taken in existing fully, which is expressed both as harmony with the outside (chairein [χαίϱειν], charis [χάϱις]) and as endogenous harmony (euphrainô [εὐφϱαίνω], euphrosunê [εὐφϱοσύνη]). For example, Odysseus, weeping at Alkinoos’s feast, explains, in verses that can only be under- or overtranslated, what is “most beautiful” for him: “I say there is no goal more pleasurable [telos chariesteron (τέλος χαϱιέστεϱον)] than the good cheer [euphrosunê] that imbues a whole group” (Odyssey, 9.5–6). The French translator Bérard renders this as “Le plus cher objet de tous mes voeux, je te jure, est cette vie de tout un peuple en bon accord,” while Jaccottet renders it as “Croyez-moi en effet, il n’est pas de meilleure vie que lorsque la gaieté règne dans tout le peuple.” The verb chairein means “to be delighted,” “to take pleasure” (in one’s heart, in one’s mind), and the noun that corresponds to it, chara [χαϱά], which is frequent capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way; to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds. Later on, plasticity, as life force and regeneration, as a midpoint between an excess of sensitivity and absolute indifference, even appears as an antidote to resentment: Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent. To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 10 It is clear that plasticity constitutes for Nietzsche a fundamental storehouse of meaning for a new conception of subjectivity that would free it from the form—simultaneously too vague and too strict—of the cogito in order to reveal its explosive and creative aspect. Catherine Malabou REFS.: Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. . The Encyclopedia Logic, with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by Theodore F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. . “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right.” In Political Writings. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: International Humanities Press, 1969. . Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baille. Repr. New York: Harper, 1971. First published in 1910. . Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel’s Bons Mots. Translated by Céline Surprenant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [On the Genealogy of Morals.] • On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. • On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. • Première dissertation. Translated by C. Heim. In Œuvres philosophiques complètes, edited by I. Hildenbrand and J. Gratien, vol. 7, 236. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. . Unfashionable Observations. Translated by Richard T. Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. . Untimely Meditations. 2nd ed. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Wake, Peter. “Nature as Second Nature: Plasticity and Habit.” In The Normativity of the Natural. Edited by Mark J. Cherry. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. PLEASURE 789 in the tragedians, for example, signifies joy in the fullest sense. Charis, the deverbal of charein, has two main types of meanings. First, it is the life force in its plenitude and superabundance (what Hegel would call Lebendigkeit, “liveliness” or “vitality”): the “grace,” in the sense of “charm,” of a woman; the “virile splendor” of the warrior; the “majesty” and “glory” of kings—in short, the brilliance, whatever it might be, that makes a person radiant (thus, before Odysseus appears before Nausicaa or Penelope, “Athena gilded with grace his head and shoulders”; Odyssey, 6.235, 23.162, etc.); similarly, adolescence is “the most graceful time of young manhood” (chariestatê hêbê [χαϱιεστάτη ἥϐη], ibid., 10.279). It is also “grace” in the sense of “favor” (including the “favors” granted by women: “The ancients called charis woman’s spontaneous consent to the male”; Plutarch, “On Love,” 751e) and “gratitude” that prevails in the feasting and presides over the exchange; the verb charizesthai [χαϱίζεσθαι] means “to be pleasing to someone,” “to gratify” (cf. the common prepositional turn of phrase genitive + charin [χάϱιν]: “for the pleasure of,” e.g., legein logou charin, “to speak for the pleasure of speaking” [Aristotle, Metaphysics, 4.5, 1009a 21], and the Latin gratia + ablative [see RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1:201]). Thus, in each occurrence of charis, it is a question of a pleasure that is attached to the person himself and not to objects or activities. The myth tells us this in its own way: the “beautiful Charis” is the hospitable wife of Hephaistos (Iliad, 18.382), and the Charites, the three Graces born of Zeus and the daughter of Oceanus, live with the Muses on Olympus (Hesiod, Theogony, 64.907–11) and “accompany all the gods” (Homer, “To Aphrodite,” v. 95). Their name indicates that they are divinities of beauty and seduction, of abundance, of the power of nature: Thalia (lit. “young shoot,” “abundance,” “feast”), Agleia (lit. “brilliant,” “radiant”); as for the third, Euphrosune (from eu [εὖ], “good,” and phrên [φϱήν], “mind”), her name directly expresses the pleasure of existence and, par excellence, the merriment of feast and the banquet, the “good humor,” well-being, and joie de vivre that, as we have seen, “imbues a whole group” when “the feasters up and down the houses are sitting in order / and listening to the singer, and beside them the tables are loaded / with bread and meats, and from the mixing bowl the wine steward / draws the wine and carries it about and fills the cups” (Odyssey, 9.7–10). . In the euphrosunê of the banquet, the pleasure of existence is already connected with enjoyment of the object. The verb terpein [τέϱπειν] (more often used in the mediopassive terpesthai [τέϱπεσθαι]) also designates the joy of the feast, pleasure that is simultaneously physical, social, and aesthetic and that is enjoyed with food, music, and song (e.g., Odyssey, 8.45). It expresses essentially the idea of full satisfaction (“to find full satisfaction of one’s desire”: Chantraine [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque], following Latacz [Zum Wortfed “Freude”]; the Greek term can be related to Sanskrit tarpayati, “to be satisfied”), which explains the extent of its application—from sexual relations to knowledge. This idea of plenitude helps us understand why terpesthai expresses particularly well the pleasure taken in nonmaterial things and in activities that have to do with togetherness, that involve play, and that produce harmony. Thus the Muses, by singing for Zeus, “rejoice his great spirit” (humneusai terpousi megan noon [ύμνευ~σαι τέρπουσι μέγαν νόον]; Hesiod, Theogony, 37), and terpsis expresses the irresistible, lethal charm of the Sirens’ singing (Odyssey, 12.52.186–8: “for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship / until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues / from our lips; then goes on, well pleased [ho terpsamenos (ὅ τεϱψάμενος)], knowing more than ever”). A formula of Democritus also reflects this particular sense of terpein: “tôn hedeôn ta spaniôtata ginomena malista terpei [τῶν ἡδέων τὰ σπανιώτατα γινόμενα μάλιστα τέϱπει]” (among pleasing things, we enjoy most those that come most rarely; B 232, RT: DK). Terpsis is thus characterized as a pleasure taken in the exercise of one’s faculties and in registering nonmaterial objects, without the constraint of need—more than a pleasure, a bliss. The substantive hêdonê [ἡδονή] is not found in Homer, but the adjective hêdus [ἡδύς] (pleasant) is, regularly designating pleasant objects and primarily, once again, the pleasures of the table: eating and drinking. Etymologically, a hedus is someone who has good taste: Chantraine (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) relates hêdomai (= domai) to the Sanskrit svadate, “to take good taste” (whence the Latin suavitas), and Greek also has the verb hêdunô [ἡδύνω], which means “to season,” whence “to charm.” This pleasure, irreducible because it is initially linked with the satisfaction of natural needs, can also turn out to be harmful because of the negative counterparts of the object of pleasure (as for the Cyclops, who “was terribly / pleased with the wine he drank [hêsato d’ainôs hêdu poton pinôn (ἥσατο δ’ αἰνῶς ἡδὺ ποτὸν πίνων)]”; Odyssey, 9.353–4, the only occurrence of the verb hêdesthai in Homer). On the whole, the archaic uses of hêdesthai and of hêdus refer to physical pleasure and involve contact, whether it is a matter of touching or of taste (cf. RT: LSJ, s.v. [ἡδονή] 2), connecting the feeling with an object that is its cause and is thus qualified as hêdus. Prodicus, following Plato (Protagoras, 337c, 358a; cf. Aristotle, Topics, 2.112b 22–24), still makes a careful distinctionbetween the charis and the terpsis of the hêdonê— too careful, because this lexical detail runs counter to the Platonic operation, which consists in merging all pleasures under the generic term hêdonê (which becomes established in the fourth century) the better to depreciate them ontologically. In the Philebus (On Pleasure [Peri hêdonês]), Plato deliberately puts charein or chara, terpsis, and hêdonê all on the same level (11b 4–5 and 19c 7), concluding with the depreciation of chairein (“all the oxen and horses and every other animal that exists tell us so by their pursuit of pleasure [chairein]”; 67b 1–2; Hackforth translation). The unification of pleasures under hêdonê is accompanied by an ontological hierarchization of true, pure pleasures on the one hand and impure pleasures on the other. In both cases, Plato analyzes hêdonê on the model of the satisfaction of physical needs: it is pleasure-repletion (plêrosis [πλήϱωσις]; cf. Gorgias, 493d–494e), impure pleasure being a pleasure associated with pain, whereas pure pleasure, taken, for example, in things that are always beautiful in themselves, is presented as a sublimated pleasure, involving a fulfillment unaccompanied by need or suffering (Philebus, 50a 1–51b 7). Consequently, a happy life is no 790 PLEASURE nor sublimating physical pleasure because he recognizes it, on the contrary, as the prime good (“the pleasure of the belly [tês gastros hêdonê (τῆς γαστϱὸς ἡδονή)] is the principle and root of all good”; Athenaea 546F, RT: The Hellenistic Philosophers). The prime pleasure is the pleasure of movement (kata kinêsin [ϰατὰ ϰίνησιν]), which alleviates suffering. The result is a second type of pleasure, a stable pleasure (katasthêmatikê [ϰαταστηματιϰή]), which corresponds to the calming itself, the absence of pain in the body (aponia [ἀπονία]) and the absence of disturbance in the mind (ataraxia [ἀταϱαξία]). This stable pleasure is the true principle of happiness as state of pleasure, the pleasure of existing. The use (chreia [χϱεία]) of pleasures must enable us to include the various kinds of pleasure in the stable unity of a life. The stability of the body thus makes possible the pure pleasures of the mind, consisting in an autonomous movement of the mind alone, which express themselves in the vocabulary of chara and euphrosunê and reinvest them. “Epicurus, in his treatise On Choices, puts it this way: ‘The absence of [mental] disorder and the absence of pain are static pleasures, whereas joy and gaiety are perceived in the act in a movement [ἡ μὲν γὰϱ ἀταϱαξία ϰαὶ ἀπονία εἰσιν ἡδοναί· ἡ δὲ χαϱὰ ϰαὶ ἡ εὐφϱοσυνὴ ϰατὰ ϰίνησιν ἐνέϱγει βλέπονται]’ ” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.136). B. Voluptas In Latin, the adjective hêdus and the noun hêdonê are translated, in conformity with their etymology, by suavis and suavitas. But Cicero prefers the term voluptas (which, according longer linked with pleasure, with hêdonê, but with wisdom, with phronêsis [φϱόνησις] (see PHRONÊSIS) (12b). The major later conceptualizations attempt, each in its own way, to go beyond or to undo the framework thus sketched out by Plato; in doing so they nonetheless follow Plato, concerning whom it is right to emphasize that, as always, he goes beyond himself. In Aristotle and Epicurus, the term hêdonê prevails, but it is reinvested, at least in part, as pleasure in existence. Aristotle separates hêdonê from its bodily model (see Plato, Republic, 9.584c): pleasure, felt by the mind alone, even if the source of the affect is bodily (cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 10.2), is primarily connected with life (zôê [ζωή]) and with energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], the activity, or actuality, that defines it (10.4.1175a 12). It follows that no pleasure is movement or becoming, because pleasure is “perfect, complete in its form [teleion to eidos (τέλειον τὸ εἶδος)] at every moment” (10.4.1174b 5–6). Hêdonê completes the act as an end given over and above (it is added “as the bloom of life is added to those who are at the acme of their strength [hoion tois akmaiois hê hôra (οἷον τοῖς ἀϰμαίοις ἡ ὥϱα)]”; 10.4.1174b 10) and acquires its value from the act itself to which it is joined. That is why the happy life of wisdom is also the most pleasing (10.7.1177a 4: “pleasure has to be mixed with happiness”); the greatest pleasure is that of the act of thinking, and the prototype of this is the pleasure of the first mover, pure act (“its actuality is also pleasure”; Metaphysics, 50.7.1072b 15). But the most complete reversal is carried out by Epicurus, who proceeds to redifferentiate hêdonê positively, neither devaluing 1 Chaire, or how to greet Comparing the two great traditional formulas of salutation, each of which connotes a different priority in the shared perception of the world, is very informative. The Greek expression is Chaire [Xαῖϱε], “Rejoice!” “Be glad (you’re alive)!” That is, Lucian tells us, a formula that Homer always used, not only when people saw each other for the first time, but even when they separated and hated each other. In its classical sense, the term obviously refers to joy, and in particular to the joy of victory (charma [χάϱμα] is the “desire for combat” and, with a concrete value, the word designates a “lance point” [Stesichorus, fr. 267 Page; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque]), and the first to use it is supposed to have been either Philippides, the messenger from Marathon, exhaling the word with his last breath, or Cleon, addressing the Athenian people after the Battle of Sphacteria (424 BCE). Pleasure and joy in life are certainly implied, as is shown by the criticism of the common epistolary formula found at the beginning of the Third Letter attributed to Plato: “[Plato] to Dionysius, Joy [Chaire]! Is it the best form of salutation to wish you ‘joy’ as I have, or would it be better if I were to follow my usual custom [eu pratte (εὖ πϱάττε)] and bid you ‘Do well’?” (“act well,” “succeed,” which Bailly renders in French, emphasizing the “success” aspect, by bonne chance, and Brisson, more correctly and emphasizing the moral condition of happiness, by a play on words: “[com] porte-toi bien”; Diogenes Laertius, 3.61). “That is the salutation that I use when I write to my friends. You of course descended to flattery and addressed even the god at Delphi in these very termsand wrote, they say, ‘Joy to you [Chaire]. Keep ever the pleasant life of a tyrant’” (Collected Dialogues). It is an inappropriate flattery, because, as the Charmides (164e) notes, the god at Delphi addresses humans with a “far superior salutation” when he says “Know thyself” instead of Chaire, in order to exhort them “not to rejoice, but to be wise” (or “moderate”: sôphrônein [σωφϱωνεῖν]). Finally, Pythagoras, among others, is supposed to have chosen to say Hugiaine [ʽYγίανε], “Health,” implying at the same time acting well and joy. This formula, generally reserved for saying farewell, is already very Roman. In Latin, when one arrives, one says aue or haue (this may be an adaptation of a Punic word, according to Ernout and Meillet, RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, who report that “the formulas of salutation are often borrowed”), and when one leaves one says vale (“Be well,” “Good health,” from valere “to be strong,” “to be powerful,” physically, but also socially). We may compare this with the beautiful wish for peace that is daily expressed in Hebrew and in Arabic and with the most banal wish for a “good” period of time (bonjour, bonsoir, “good morning,” buenos días, or even bonne continuation), which usually serves as a salutation—or a farewell— in our modern European languages. REFS.: Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Lucian. “A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting.” In Lucian, Vol. 6. Translated by K. Kilburn. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–67. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by L. A. Post and edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. PLEASURE 791 moralization of the body—and also to keep his fellow citizens from preferring the voluptas of contemplation to political work—Cicero tried to establish a linguistic distinction between the pleasures of the body and those of the mind, but it is not clear-cut. This attempted distinction—whose stakes are philosophical and political—involves a reorganization of the vocabulary of pleasure that claims to be based on the meanings of words documented by the founders of Latin literature. This is shown quite clearly by a passage in De finibus (2.13–14): What I mean by voluptas is exactly what he [Epicurus] means by hêdonê. No Latin word can be found which captures a Greek word more exactly than voluptas does. Everyone in the world who knows Latin takes this word to convey two notions: elation in the mind [laetitia in animo], and a delightfully sweet arousal in the body [commotionem suavem jucunditatis in corpore]. This elation is described by one character in Trabea as “excessive mental pleasure” [voluptatem animi nimiam] and by another in Caecilius when he tells us he is “glad with every gladness” [omnibus laetitiis laetum]. But there is the following difference: the term “pleasure” [voluptas] is applicable to the body as well as the mind (in the latter case it is an example of vice according to the Stoics, who define it as “the irrational exulting of a mind that takes itself to be enjoying some great good”), whereas elation [laetitia] and joy [gaudium] are not applicable to the body. Every Latin speaker takes pleasure [voluptas] to consist in the perception of some delightful stimulation [cum percipitur ea, quae sensum aliquem moveat jucunditas]. The term “delight” [ jucunditas] may, if you wish, also be applied to the mind, since “to delight” [juvare] can be used in either case, as can “delightful” [jucundus], which is derived from it. It must, however, be understood, that someone might say, “I am so elated [tanta laetitia auctus sum] that everything is in a whirl,” and someone else might say, “Truly my mind is now in torment.” The former is wildly delighted, the latter racked with pain, but there is room in the middle for neither joy nor anguish. Likewise, in the case of the body, between the enjoyment of the most sought after pleasure, and the agony of the most intense pains, there is the condition that is free of either. Although the distinctions proposed by this text have been hardened by the requirements of polemics, they nonetheless helped influence all the uses of the vocabulary of pleasure in Cicero’s readers, from Seneca to Augustine. II. From Desire to Pleasure: Delectatio, “Delight,” Lust A. Delectatio, or the snares of interiorized pleasure Plato had already conceived the so-called impure hêdonê on a physiological model as repletion or satisfaction of a lack that is in itself painful: the fact that suffering preceded or accompanied pleasure sufficed, in his view, to deprive it of any claim to constitute a good. But on the one hand, “pure” hêdonê persisted; on the other hand, the quest for moderation was still possible. If the pleasures of food or sex tended, in fact, to enslave desire (epithumia [ἐπιθυμία]), which they to RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, may derive from volo, with a broadening p from the Greek elpomai, which means “to hope,” “to wait for something”), asserting that voluptas renders the Greek hêdonê in Latin more precisely than any other word (De finibus, 2.13). In philosophical Latin, the vocabulary of pleasure is completely dominated by the role played by Epicureanism in Rome. Epicureanism was disseminated by Lucretius, whose De rerum natura begins by celebrating Venus as the mother of the nine Egyptian divinities, the Enneads, and as the pleasure of men and gods alike (“Aeneadum genetrix, horminum divomque voluptas”; De rerum natura, 1.1). The term voluptas is used in most occurrences as the exact equivalent of the Epicurean hêdonê, and the context is that of ethical doxography (see particularly Cicero, De finibus and Tusculan Disputations, and Seneca, De vita beata and De beneficiis). Voluptas, as the principle and end of Epicurean doctrine, is opposed to labor and dolor; these are the choices open to virtus. The conventional images in which voluptas, “pale and painted,” serves as a foil to a tanned and robust virtus, covered with dust and watching over institutions (Seneca, De vita beata, 8), are so many variations on Prodicus’s apologue showing Hercules at the intersection of vice and virtue (Cicero, De officiis, 1.118). Here, the condemnation of Epicurean voluptas draws on elements that Roman civic morality borrowed from Cynicism and Stoicism and reduces the meaning of the term to physical pleasures. But neither Cicero nor Seneca limits himself to this meaning: they both know that the word voluptas can also express the pleasure of the search for truth or aesthetic pleasure; and when they use the word with these meanings, they do not differ from the Epicureans, for whom voluptas is both the most physical pleasure (that of the newborn child and the dissolute person) and the most moralized pleasure (that of the sage who makes the suffering of a mortal illness disappear by remembering with pleasure conversations with friends). Seneca assumes this ambiguity when he uses, to evoke the joys provided by making friends, the words delectatio, jucunditas, and oblectamentum (Epistulae, 9). He even goes so far as to reject the restrictive sense given voluptas by the Stoics, resorting instead to the common use (ibid.: the pleasure of reading a friend’s letter). This use is already documented in Cicero, who mentions the peasant’s voluptas in seeing the natural growth of plants and the voluptas of aging writers who contemplate their works (De senectute, 50). Similarly, the vocabulary of aesthetic pleasure used in the part of De oratore devoted to movere (i.e., how to move the audience; 2.18.121) makes the transition from the pleasure of the senses to the pleasure of judgment with the terms venustas, suavitas, and lepos (ibid., 3.46.181). But Cicero’s refutation of the doctrine of pleasure depends on a series of distinctions: first of all, it is important not to confuse a being’s primary tendency to preserve itself with the “constitutive pleasure” that the Epicureans accorded to the infant and the sage. It is also necessary to distinguish a neutral state of the body, the absence of pain (indolentia), from the movements aroused by voluptas (whereas the Epicureans defined pleasure by the cessation of suffering). Finally, voluptas has to be characterized by a potential for excess, whereas the Epicureans postulated that the body set natural limits to pleasure. To forestall this 792 PLEASURE two aspects in delectatio: first, the attraction an object exercises on the mind (he repeatedly bases this on a quotation from Virgil’s Bucolics [2.65]: “Trahit sua quemque voluptas” [His (desire for) pleasure draws each one on]), and second, the joy the will takes in possessing the desired object. Augustine, who often plays, as do later Christian authors, on the alliteration between dilectio and delectatio, points out that the latter is precisely what the former seeks in its object and that therefore there can be no love without delight: “Non enim amatur nisi quod delectat” (Sermon, 159, RT: PL 38, col. 869). Regarding this alliteration, we can note that in modern Italian the same word, diletto, signifies “beloved” or “darling” when it is an epithet and “charm,” “attraction,” or “pleasure” when it is a noun: that is because it derives from dilectus in the first case and from delectatio in the second, whereas dilettante participates in both meanings and in this double etymology. In addition, Augustine acknowledges an intellectual delight (delectatio mentis), holy and celestial, which he puts in opposition to earthly or physical delight (delectatio carnis), both being part of appetitus. Thus for Scholastic theologians, appetitus oscillates between two extreme types of pleasurable things: the delectabile sensibile (pleasurable sensation) and the summum delectabile (greatest pleasure). When, in aroused and disappointed in an endless spiral, temperance allowed one to escape the panic of pleasure-seeking desire. Thus hêdonê ceases to have a pejorative value here only when it is either repressed or transposed into the search for truth. But with Christianity, the status of pleasure with respect to desire changed in a significant way: far from seeing in it a pure appetitus that finds pleasure only when it has attained its object, moralists saw desire as being already imbued with pleasure. That is what is at stake in the medieval debates on the problem of delectatio morosa. . The development of this problem also corresponds to an inflection of the concept of delectatio that also involves the etymology of the term. The Latin delectatio—from which the Old French delit (pleasure), modern French délice, and English “delight” derive—comes, in fact, from lax (lacio), which means “trap” or “snare”—whence delicere, “to catch someone in one’s nets.” These nets may remain sensible in nature, delectatio as such then being not at all suitable for the wise man. Nonetheless, delectare vel conciliare (to please or conciliate) is the second of the goals of ancient rhetoric, according to Cicero, the first being docere (to instruct), and the third movere (to move), or flectere (to persuade). Augustine distinguishes 2 Delectatio morosa In the field of moral philosophy, the close relationship between pleasure and desire has opened up a set of problems that Christian theologians have called delectatio morosa since the second half of the twelfth century. This expression, when translated into French as délectation morose, leads to a kind of misinterpretation. The epithet morosa refers here not to a complacent pleasure in some “morose” thought, but rather to the pleasure that the imagination savors deliciously as it is expectantly waiting (Lat. moratur) in the desire for an object that remains absent because it is inaccessible or prohibited. The conception of such a delectatio inherent in desire itself represents an important turning point in relation to the conception of desire in late Greek antiquity. For Plato in particular, bodily appetites and sensuality are irremediably insatiable, whether they involve—according to the triad mentioned in the Republic (580e) and destined to become traditional—food, drink, or erotic pleasures, to which we must add money as a means of acquiring such pleasures. In relation to each of these objects, the desiring mind, like the Danaides with their pierced jar, sees what it is waiting for constantly escaping it: the more it seeks to fill itself up, the more it empties out. Desire, except in the case of someone whose object of desire is wisdom, is thus condemned to be repeatedly reborn, always remaining unsatisfied and insatiable. But drawing on the Gospel according to which “everyone who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:28), Christian authors problematized this relationship between pleasure and desire in an entirely different way. They wanted to consider—and denounce, since in their view it involved forbidden lusts—less the insatiability of desire than the presence of pleasure within it, as if the simple imaginary representation of the desired object procured an enjoyment analogous to that of actual possession. It was in the context of a debate on the degree of culpability that might burden the spontaneous movement of sensuality (primus motus sensualitas) before the will’s explicit consent that the moralists developed, especially in the Middle Ages, the topos of delectatio morosa to produce a veritable psychology of the pleasure that is supposed to be provided by complacent savoring of the imaginary representation of a prohibited act. But as we have said, the expression delicatio morosa, which by itself evoked the gloomy idea of culpability only for Christian morality (which was later to criticize this psychic attitude as “sinning through thought”), raises a translation problem in languages such as English and French, in which the epithet “morose” generally serves to quality a morbid state imbued with sadness or despondent rumination. The Latin word morosus, in fact, has a double etymology: when written with the first syllable long, it derives from mos, moris (character trait, with a pejorative connotation of being difficult, somber, and acrimonious); when written with the first syllable short, it comes from the verb moror, -aris (to linger, to wait) and from the noun mora (delay, stop, pause). Since French and English have retained (except in the case of the contemporary use of moratoire and “moratorium,” respectively) only the meaning corresponding to the first etymology, it is very difficult for them to understand the medieval epithet morosa, which refers to the second meaning and qualifies the joy that one can draw, in one’s own heart, from desire itself. In Italian, on the other hand, where morosità means “delay” (particularly in acquitting oneself of a debt or an obligation), and where the French morosité or English “moroseness” is rendered by malinconia or tristezza, and in Spanish, where morosidad also means “delay” and moroso means “lazy” (“morose” being translatable by taciturno), the true meaning of the Scholastic delectatio morosa is more easily accessible, namely the meaning of a complacent pleasure that the mind takes in entertaining at length the fantasy of the desired object. In its philosophical usage, Lust is frequently followed by Unlust, without it being very clear whether Lust arises of its own accord or from the suppression of Unlust. Unlust poses a translation problem still more complex than Lust: Is the negation logical or real? Does it designate the absence of desire (indifference), reverse desire (repulsion), relative displeasure (grief), or positive displeasure (pain)? The register of Unlust is very broad. Lust and Unlust in Kant. Kant makes Lust a genus within which he distinguishes two species, sensible and intellectual: the former divided into sensual and aesthetic, and the latter into theoretical and practical subspecies. Hence, there are several sources of ambiguity in translations. When we read in French versions of the Critique of Judgment that the feeling of respect for moral ideas “n’est pas un plaisir” (is not a pleasure), we have to realize that Kant does not use Lust here, but rather Vergnügen, a term that could be rendered in French by contentement to take into account the root of the adverb genug, which means “enough,” “sufficiently.” A purely physical pleasure constitutes the core of Lust. But as soon as we seek to connect it with concepts or Ideas, don’t we lose sight of the aspect of organic comfort? How can the most individually subjective sensible affect be combined with a universal representation? Kant shifts the meaning of Lust in a decisive way by giving it a de jure universality in the domain of aesthetics. Refusing to see in it the cause or effect of the representation, he promotes it to the rank of a “predicate of a representation”: the exclamation “It’s beautiful!” can then be a judgment in the absence of any concept. Now we have to understand that alongside aesthetic Lust, we find what Kant calls teleological Lust. The first type of Lust is connected with the mode of the object’s presentation; the second considers its end or its concept, which, without determining the object, nonetheless makes reflection on its content possible. If in these two cases the translation by “pleasure” is insufficient, that is because of Lust’s tendency to maintain or reproduce the representative state that it provides. Lust is both pleasure and the desire for pleasure; the pleasure received is interwoven with the pleasure desired. That is not the case in the practical domain, where Lust is correctly translated by “pleasure,” since the German term is connected with the realization of an intention and not with the desire for a subjective state. Let us stress, in this regard, the historical import of the linguistic division that leads Kant to choose desirepleasure, Lust, to designate the faculty of aesthetic judgment, reserving Begierde (from Gier, “avidity”) to signify desire-will, under the legislation of practical reason. It will be noted that the Lust/Unlust opposition in the physiological register leads Kant, in a framework derived from Stahl, Hoffman, Haller, and Burke, to distinguish between the feeling of life being advanced and that of life being constrained: the latter is an essential preoccupation, since an uninterrupted joy might soon lead to death from overstimulation. In the aesthetic order, a tempered, direct, and positive pleasure is contrasted with a violent, indirect, and negative pleasure. The beautiful will then function to produce Lust, as a kind of favor, while the sublime will ensure the rise of Lust from Unlust, thus granting the witness of the speaking of delectatio morosa, these authors draw attention to the snares connected with the stasis of desire that lingers (moratur) on the image of the object, we understand how delectatio came to be predestined, as it were, to qualify aesthetic delight: the delight one takes in the object with relative indifference to its existence or its possession. Thus in his definition of painting, Poussin declares that the goal of this art is delight (délectation), understood, following the critics of the late sixteenth century, as the delight of the mind and not that of the senses (Lettres et propos sur l’art). “Delight” and the distancing of the reality of suffering: In the English term “delight,” the idea of lingering is combined with that of the distancing in relation to pain that characterizes, according to Edmund Burke, the aesthetic and transaesthetic feeling of the sublime. Burke was probably the first to distinguish clearly, beyond indifference and the pure forms of pain or pleasure, a “relative displeasure” that arises from a distancing of pleasure and is called, depending on the case, “grief” or “disappointment,” and a “relative pleasure” that accompanies the slow disappearance of suffering. Lacking an available word, Burke calls the latter “delight,” explaining the intensity inherent in it by the underlying idea of a victory over pain. His contrast between delight and pleasure runs counter to common usage, and he sums it up this way: Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight; and I shall take the best care I can, to use that word in no other sense. I am satisfied that the word is not commonly used in this appropriated signification; but I thought it better to take up a word already known, and to limit its signification, than to introduce a new one which would not perhaps incorporate so well with the language. I should never have presumed the least alteration of our words, if the nature of the language, framed for the purposes of business rather than those of philosophy, and the nature of my subject that leads me out of the common track of discourse, did not in a manner necessitate me to it. I shall make use of this liberty with all possible caution. As I make use of the word Delight to express the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger; so when I speak of positive pleasure, I shall for the most part call it simply Pleasure. (A Philosophical Enquiry) C. Lust and the Lust/Unlust pair The initial meaning of the German word Lust does not seem to have been “pleasure.” Like the English “lust,” it derives from the Indo-European *lutan, which means “to submit,” “to bend,” and is supposed to have originally designated only a more or less resistable inclination. But whereas English “lust” has retained the restricted meaning of “unbridled desire,” “cupidity,” or “craving,” the semantic range of the German term extends from “appetite,” “sexual desire” (Ich habe Lust von dir always means “I want you”), or “fantasy” to all the forms of satisfaction. In short, the semantic field of Lust extends beyond the sensible affect of pleasure to designate the desire that is Lust’s origin and effect. 794 PLEASURE under the category of destiny. Thus we could oppose Lust with hêdonê as a more or less evanescent affect, presupposing the implementation of complex and partially unconscious mechanisms, to the enjoyment of goods belonging to determinate hierarchies and leading to appropriative behaviors. III. Pleasure, Enjoyment, Fruition A. The juridical and affective senses of “enjoyment” The French word jouissance appeared in the fifteenth century as a derivative from the verb jouir. At first, it had the juridical sense of drawing from a property all the benefit it was supposed to provide. In the seventeenth century, this initial meaning was applied to the notion of usufruct, the right to make use of a good belonging to someone else. But in the meantime, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, jouissance also acquired the meaning of intense sensual pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. In French, as in other Romance languages, the conjunction of these two meanings took place under the primacy of the lexical lineage gaudium/gaudere. Thus it may seem surprising that the word jouissance (like the Italian godimento or the Spanish goce and gozo) first came into use in its juridical sense and only later acquired its hedonistic sense: in reality, this linguistic fact marks a break with the Latin vocabulary, which separated quite sharply the register of jouissance-pleasure—with voluptas, gaudium, suavitas, delectatio, and dulcedo—from that of jouissance-law—with possessio, usus, and fructus (the latter term also having, however, the initial meaning). German analogously makes use of two distinct lexical series to mark the difference between the enjoyment that provides pleasure (Genuss, Behagen, Wohlgefühl, Lust, Freude— and, more particularly, sensual enjoyment, Sinnengenuss and Wollust) on the one hand, and on the other hand, the enjoyment of one’s own property, which is expressed notably by Besitz (possession), Benutzungsrecht (right to enjoy), or Nutzung (use, enjoyment). However, between these two registers there is a kind of hinge word: Genuss, which covers both meanings, as does jouissance in French. But it should be noted that it acquired only by extension, and with more difficulty, the sense of jouissance-pleasure, because, having the same etymology as Nutzen (utility, profit, fruit, benefit), it was originally marked by the juridical sense of “use” (like Gebrauch), “possession,” and “usufruct.” In English, the distinction between the two meanings seems less clear than in German; “enjoyment” in the juridical sense is expressed by “use” or “possession,” and also by “fruition” (which recalls the semantic duality of Lat. fructus), and finally, perhaps under foreign influence, by “enjoyment” (to enjoy certain rights), which thus takes us back to the lineage of gaudere. In any event, whether in expressing legal enjoyment a language starts out from a term that originally belonged to the juridical vocabulary (like the Ger. Genuss) or from a term belonging to the vocabulary of affectivity (like the Fr. jouissance), it is a question of having or possessing something, insofar as that is opposed to feeling pleasure in something. Thus when the RT: Diccionario de autoridades of the Spanish Royal Academy attributes to the verb gozar the following meanings: “1. To have and possess something, like dignity, the right of sublime a sort of coerced privilege (see SUBLIME). The subject finds himself forced to experience the intense pleasure of the sublime, whereas in his taste for the beautiful, he freely enjoys the harmony of the representative state and of the communicability of a feeling connected with a representation. We have to observe that, when the sublime is involved, the translation of Lust by “pleasure” becomes a particular source of misunderstanding: in English and French, the idea of pleasure is disconnected from that of desire, where the idea of pleasure remains linked with favor and does not tolerate well the presence of a constraint. 2. Lust and Unlust in Freud Under the impact of Kant’s speculations on sensual pleasure and aesthetic pleasure, Lust and Unlust henceforth tended to be associated with a pair of oppositions—no longer in order to stigmatize, in the Platonic manner, the impurity of their alliance, but rather that the effects of their rivalry might be recognized: Lust and Unlust are less final causes consciously determining action than efficient causes implementing mechanisms of appropriation or avoidance. Thus Freud recognizes in Lust and Unlust the principles of psychic life that mark the paths to be followed or avoided and regulate the psychic apparatus’s functioning. More than that, Freud, presupposing a form of continuity between the initial functions and the superior functions of the mind, considers judgment as the “appropriated evolution” of absorption into the ego and of expulsion from the ego. “Affirmation—as a substitute for union—belongs to Eros; negation—a result of rejection—belongs to the drive to destruction” (“Negation”). Instinctive repulsion already prefigures a concerted rejection, and although Unlust may risk slipping into the form of destructive misunderstanding from which repression springs, it nonetheless constitutes the germ of the symbol of negation. Lust and Unlust are thus two opposed sources of judgment: those of the judgment of attribution, which concerns the (good or bad) property attributed to a thing, and those of the judgment of existence, which posits the existence or nonexistence of a reality peculiar to my representation (see VERNEINUNG). But since the affective process is forced to actualize itself more in repulsion than in assimilation, Freud tends to credit Unlust with a more important role than Lust. Conceiving negation in terms that are no longer solely dynamic but also economic, he seeks to grasp the stages of the transformation of desire and stresses the capacities of Lust and especially Unlust for metamorphosis and their “sublimating possibilities,” noting especially the relation between preliminary pleasure and the activity of thinking. The problems Freud encounters in his theory of sublimation thus have a great affinity with those encountered with regard to the sublime: they have to do with the complex relationships that thought processes entertain with the flow of Lüste and Unlüste, which are constantly refashioned under the impact of various influences but may be endowed with an intensity to which the subject has no choice but to adapt. While the motives of pleasure can be inventoried, repulsion and the desire for pleasure, inciting the psychic apparatus to movement, elude critical observation and force us to rethink the hidden coherence of actions and thoughts PLEASURE 795 the basis of the juridical vocabulary, it detaches itself from all the conventionally accepted meanings in any domain whatever of language. . B. Enjoyment and “fruition” Understood in the subjective sense of full satisfaction, the French term jouissance is an exact translation of Saint Augustine’s fruitio. Augustine borrows from Stoic eudaemonism the contrast between this register of frui (enjoy) or of the goal and that of the uti or means (make use of), and the idea that the only true enjoyment is that of the supreme good. For Jansen, simple delectatio represented a first-order affectus, especially when it accompanied love; but the true goal of this affectus is fruitio, which is congress with the beloved object for its own sake and which thus constitutes the final fruit (fructus) of love at the same time as its quiescence (quies); whence the interest of this notion for quietism and the mystics in general, who speak of “fruitful union.” In this sense, in French the archaic term fruition is still sometimes found in the literary language: “Ô fruition paradisiaque de tout instant!” (A. Gide, Journal, quoted in the Trésor de la langue française, s.v. “Jouissance”). “Fruition” continues to be used in English, but in the sense of “realization,” “concretization” related to “fruit” and “fruitful,” which recall the proximity of the Latin frui to fructus. The Italian fruire and fruizione (enjoyment, especially of a right or a benefit) remain loyal to this etymology, but to designate an intense pleasure, Italian resorts to the verb godire and the substantive godimento, which have the same origin as the French jouissance, namely the Classical Latin verb gaudere, via the intermediary of Vulgar Latin *gaudire. Old French joïr (in Provençal, jauzir)—from which the noun jouissance emerged in the sixteenth century—had the meaning of “welcome warmly” and “gratify [someone] with one’s love,” and then, already in the twelfth century, in the indirect transitive form, that of “possessing a good” and “getting full satisfaction from any kind of possession.” When the word jouissance appeared with its twofold meaning of “the possession of a good or a right” and “joy or intense pleasure,” it corresponded through the latter meaning to gaudere, whereas the former meaning connected it, paradoxically, with the signified of frui. The same phenomenon that makes it possible to move seamlessly from the meaning “pleasure” or “amorous joy” (cf. the “joy” of the troubadours) to that of a right that one appropriates (another person being expropriated of it) and that one can claim—or vice versa—is found in several other European languages, notably in the Romance languages, such as Italian, with godimento, and Spanish, with goce and gozo. IV. The Pleasures: Nomenclatures, Usages, Scales A. The legacy of placeo and placo While the German word Lust and, in a way, the English “pleasure,” have a twofold meaning (pleasure/desire), we cannot say that the French plaisir is itself perfectly simple semantically. It, too, retains a sense that is close to “desire” and “will”; more precisely, “what it pleases someone to do or to command.” This was the sense that established itself in earlier birth, or an income; 2. To draw pleasure and joy from something; 3. To know a woman carnally; 4. To feel a strong pleasure, sweet and agreeable emotions,” the objective sense of the first meaning is supposed to prevail over the subjective meanings of the second and fourth. It thus appears that in the languages we have just mentioned, the same word ends up designating “enjoyment” in both its objective and subjective senses. There is enough proximity between them so that one can easily—and indifferently—pass from enjoyment as the right of possession situated beyond the principle of pleasure/displeasure to enjoyment as an experience from which one receives an intense pleasure in the thing possessed, in which one makes another person (or oneself) the object of one’s own fruitio. However, the etymology of the word is not without importance, because here it is not just isolated nouns that are contrasted, but different semantic constellations. Thus Genuss refers directly to the vocabulary of use or possession (Nutzung, Benutzung, etc.), whereas jouissance spontaneously evokes pleasure and joy (gaudium) with the verb jouir (and especially the imperative: Jouis! which Lacan considers surmoïque [super-egoish]). In French, the verb jouir, taken in the intransitive sense, leads to the substantive jouisseur, which designates a person who seeks life’s pleasures, especially sensual pleasures. German calls such a person a Geniesser (from Genuss) or a Lebemann (“playboy,” always in the masculine!), whereas Italian calls him a gaudente, reserving fruente (di) for a person who enjoys a good. In English, a jouisseur is a “sensualist,” and often the French term itself is used. The relationship between enjoyment-pleasure and enjoyment-law has been refashioned in contemporary thought, particularly under the influence of Marxism and psychoanalysis, in a way that seeks to merge these two classic meanings in a notion of enjoyment endowed with an unprecedented extension making it thereby possible to rehabilitate the freedom of the inclination to enjoy and the right to have full use of oneself. In particular, this attempt constitutes the central motif of the “paradoxical economy” set forth by Georges Bataille in La part maudite (1949). For Bataille, “becoming aware of the crucial meaning of an instant in which growth (the acquisition of something) is resolved in an expense is precisely self-consciousness, that is, a consciousness that no longer has anything as its object” and man is given back the free enjoyment of himself. This is a thesis that seems to be a speculative repetition of an “ecstasy” that the author mentioned in L’expérience intérieure (1943): “At that moment, I thought that this dreamy pleasure would not cease belonging to me, that I would live from that moment on, endowed with the power to enjoy things in a melancholy way and to breathe in their delights” (Inner Experience). Among the reworkings of the concept of enjoyment in which contemporary thinkers have engaged, we must give a special place to the one that Jacques Lacan introduced into the field of psychoanalysis, which poses a problem for any translator. It even seems that the French word jouissance was included in the 1988 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary simply because in this unusual sense, it seemed untranslatable in English. Not only does the Lacanian concept of jouissance break away completely from the register of pleasure, but in addition, although it was elaborated on 796 PLEASURE (I try to please), which is related to the French expression j’apaise (I calm, conciliate). Along that line, the noun placitio (the action of pleasing) was marked by the graphic and phonic proximity of pax, so that placidus ceased to have the meaning “pleasant” and took on that of “calmed” or “peaceful.” This shift can already be seen with Saint Jerome. However, even in the thirteenth century, the old sense remained: thus Albert the Great translated the Augustinian notion of amorous knowledge (notitia cum amore) by the expression notitia placida (Commentarii in I Sententiarum, dist. 27, art. 8). This semantic movement associating the idea of pleasure with that of quiescence or satisfaction is found in the German word Befriedigung, which means “contentment,” “satisfaction,” and derives from Friede (archaic form of Frieden, “peace”). We can even see in it a lexicographic concordance with the fact that Freud conceives pleasure as the relief of a tension, that is, as a “negative pleasure,” as opposed to pain. In addition to the meaning of “pleasant feeling,” the French word plaisir also has, by metonymic derivation—and Old French, especially in such locutions as à son plaisir (“at will,” from the Latin gratum) and bon plaisir or à plaisir (as it pleases, as much as one wants), which have survived down to our own time and to which the German adjective beliebig corresponds. The latter, which means, both as an adjective or a pronoun, “any” and, as an adverb, “at will,” “at discretion,” “as much as one wants,” comes from the verb belieben (to find good, to desire, to love) and from the substantive Liebe, words that derive from the Indo-European root that in Latin produced libet and then libido. This line of signification seems to be the very one that Freud follows when he considers the libido as the equivalent of hunger in the register of sexuality and defines it as the appetite for an object whose enjoyment satisfies the goal of the sex drive. Jung himself, even as he desexualized it, made the libido an appetite or an “interest” reaching forward (see DRIVE, Box 2). The Latin verb placere, which probably began as an impersonal verb meaning “it seems good,” “it pleases,” “it has been decided” (placitum est), corresponded to the causative placo 3 Jouissance according to Lacan Although Freud himself mentioned jouissance (Genuss) with regard to both the satisfaction (Befriedigung) of vital needs and the fulfillment of a desire (Wunscherfüllung), it was Lacan who made this notion, constantly connected with either sexual pleasure or with the exercise of a right, a concept that is now considered important in the field of psychoanalysis. In an initial step, he distinguished it sharply from pleasure, placing jouissance at the foundation of his theory of perversion, understood no longer in the classic and pejorative sense of “sexual perversion,” but instead as one of the three major components of psychic functioning alongside neurosis and psychosis. The perverse structure is characterized by the subject’s obedience to the command of a law that he mocks while at the same time annihilating himself in this submission. In a second step, Lacan introduced the concept of jouissance into his theory of the difference of the sexes by distinguishing between phallic jouissance and feminine jouissance and by presupposing, on the one hand, that in humans desire is constituted by its relation to words, and on the other hand, that “there is no sexual relationship”; that is, that the subject, in the sex act, encounters neither the object of his desire that the other seems to him to represent nor the fulfillment that he expected to receive from such an experience. Thus the foreign translator who tries to find in his own lexicon of pleasure a term corresponding to jouissance as Lacan understands it finds that with Lacan one is always dealing with a very particular form of satisfaction, or at least with a satisfaction that is other than fully satisfactory. Everything seems to proceed from the exceptional jouissance experienced by the symbolic Father, the leader of the primal horde to whom the possession of all women is attributed and whose memory gives rise, in all other men, to the phantasm of an inaccessible, forbidden place of “absolute jouissance.” These other men will experience no jouissance other than the “phallic jouissance” that is subjected to the flaw of castration and that is consequently irreducibly marked by lack, and not by the plenitude usually connoted by this term. This masculine jouissance arouses the specter of “another jouissance” that is different from absolute jouissance and from phallic jouissance, and that Lacan suggests has been given to woman. The position of the latter in the field of sexuality consists in the fact that she is “not-all” (pas-toute) subject to the phallic logic of the castration complex, and that she exceeds, to that extent, such a determination. This excess, which is not simply complementary to masculine jouissance, constitutes a “supplement” with respect to the latter, but in woman it leads to a particular form of division (between “phallic jouissance” and the “other jouissance,” “this jouissance that she is not all, that is, that makes her somewhat absent from herself, absent as subject”). Thus the gap between the sexes can be defined in the following way: “As such, [jouissance] is destined to these different forms of failure that constitute castration, for masculine jouissance, and division, so far as feminine jouissance is concerned” (Le savoir du psychanalyste, unpublished, 4 November 1971). But the supplementary jouissance peculiar to women (about which they cannot say anything and that is felt in particular by women who are mystical) is also experienced as jouissance of the Other, and, precisely, of the lack in the Other (“Dieu et la jouissance de la femme”). This diversity of the forms of jouissance and the two major traits that they have in common—namely, the relation each of them has with the impossible and their radical distinction from the vagaries of the register of pleasure (feelings, emotions, affects)—means that different languages encounter great difficulties in translating the Lacanian term jouissance. Italian generally resorts to godimento. Spanish oscillates between goce (delight) and gozo (pleasure), some translators preferring the latter word, which seems to them more restrictive than the former in relation to the imagined complete satisfaction. Other languages, such as English, limit themselves to putting the French word jouissance between quotation marks or in italics. REFS.: Lacan, Jacques. “Dieu et la jouissance de la femme.” In Le Séminaire. Vol. 20, Encore. Translation by Bruce Fink, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. PLEASURE 797 practices, of the desires that lead us to them, and of the pleasures that they provide us. Immorality in this area is excess, intemperance, disorder. But the objective is not to do away with pleasures and desires. On the contrary, we must use desire to maintain the sensation of pleasure and use need to revive desire (a little, as when Freud says that the affective bond of love is what, during the “intervals free of desire,” enables this desire to arise again). Nonetheless, contrary to what Foucault seems to think, this connection between desire and pleasure was not entirely unknown to Christian moralists, who developed, notably in the Middle Ages, the topos of the delectatio morosa. B. From jucunditas to “jubilation” Although Latin terms such as suavitas, voluptas, delectatio, and placere have persisted almost as such in Romance languages, several other terms have been lost, especially in French. That is the case for jucundus, whose posterity concerns Italian in particular. This adjective—which was first and especially used by Cicero and Seneca, means “pleasant,” “agreeable,” and comes from juvo (to give pleasure to)—later yielded the noun jucunditas (joy). In Christian Latin, a popular etymology connected jucunditas with jocus (joke) and caused the word to be transformed into jocunditas. But the composite sense of “joke” and “joy” or “pleasure,” which French could translate by jeu and joie or plaisir, is rendered much more clearly and without requiring a periphrasis by the Italian giocondità: the latter benefits, in this case, from the phonic relationship between gioia (joy) and gioco (joke, game). Nevertheless, contemporary Italian dictionaries generally give the sense of “gaiety”; that is, they emphasize play more than pleasure. However rich its past may have been, in contemporary languages the only since the fifteenth century—the concrete meaning of that which produces such an affective state. Thus we speak of the usage des plaisirs (the use of pleasures). . However, as early as Greek antiquity, thinking about pleasures opens out, beyond their different categories or possible nomenclatures, onto the use that can or must be made of them and on their “moral problematization,” as Michel Foucault has studied it in the second volume of his History of Sexuality. As he emphasizes, the place the subject gives to pleasures is essentially a matter of ethics, that is, of the relationship to oneself or of “concern with the self.” Among the Greeks, the aphrodisia [ἀφϱοδίσια] are not acts listed in catalogues in which their legitimacy, or, on the contrary, their degree of deviation, of gravity and culpability, are evaluated, as Christian manuals of confession later tried to do. We can thus say that “what is at stake in the ethical system of the aphrodisia is the dynamic ensemble consisting of desire and pleasure associated with the act”: What seems in fact to have formed the object of moral reflection for the Greeks in matters of sexual conduct was not exactly the act itself (considered in its different modalities), or desire (viewed from the standpoint of its origin or its aim), or even pleasure (evaluated according to the different objects or practices that can cause it); it was more the dynamics that joined all three in a circular fashion (the desire that leads to the act, the act that is linked to pleasure, and the pleasure that occasions desire). It follows that the morality of the aphrodisia is a question of measure or moderation and of the supervision of sexual 4 Pleasure and pleasures (aphrodisia and venerea) In French, grammar marks in a special way the transition from pleasure as an agreeable affective state to pleasure understood as something from which one draws satisfaction, usually sensual. This metonymic use of plaisir can be expressed by an adjectival phrase modifying a place (un lieu de plaisir), a time (une soirée de plaisir), or a person (un homme de plaisir). We also find it when the substantive is determined by a definite article and remains in the singular (e.g., rechercher le plaisir, or in the partitive, se donner du plaisir), but even more frequently when it is in the plural. Then it may retain a generic meaning or be constructed with a complement specifying a place or a time (les plaisirs de Capoue) or else a kind of pleasure (les plaisirs de la chasse, du sport, de l’amour). Apropos of amorous pleasures, which are not limited to the sex act as such and which are described in Christian pastoral literature as “pleasures of the flesh” or “forbidden pleasures,” we can note that French, no doubt like many other modern languages, is usually obliged to make use of periphrasis, whereas ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin have a specific word for this purpose. Thus in Vedic literature, the word kama designates the pleasure of the senses or of sexual activity, even if it also covers, by extension, the whole semantic field of love. Still more clearly, in GrecoRoman antiquity there was a particular word to designate physical love: in Greek, the verb aphrodisiazein [ἀφϱοδισιάζειν] (to indulge in sexual pleasures, in the active voice in the case of a man, and in the passive voice in the case of a woman); in Latin, the neuter noun venus, -eris (sexual desire and pleasure), which has an exact counterpart in Sanskrit with uanah (desire). Each of these two Greek and Latin terms acquired that specific meaning because it had come to personify the divinity—Aphrodite or Venus—presiding over such pleasures (ta aphrodisia [τὰ ἀφϱοδίσια], among the Greeks; venerea, among the Romans). Unlike these ancient languages, our contemporary ones do not have a specific, stable term to designate sexual pleasures, unless we resort to the language of triviality: in French, la bagatelle, la gaudriole, la baise (or more obscene, particularly because it designates the sex act itself—the verb foutre [from the Lat. futuere], which was especially favored by Sade). Italian resorts to the adjunction of a qualifier, for example, in godimento venereo (“sexual [literally, ‘venereal’] pleasure”). As for the term érotisme, invented by Restif de la Bretonne in 1794, it designates a tendency, an interest, or a modality relating to physical love rather than to the pleasures themselves that are specific to the latter. 798 PLEASURE C. Taxonomies within the semantic field of “pleasure” We have already seen how Cicero tried to specify the meaning of the Latin word voluptas by means of other words that designate sensations or feeling concerning the body or the mind (laetitia, gaudium, jucunditas). However, the distinction between pleasure and joy, for example, remains rather poorly defined. Since this instability within a semantic field as extensive as that of pleasure concerns all languages, the translation of a term from one of them into another often raises problems. In the philosophical vocabulary, we can see this in particular in the rather fluctuating way in which the ternary hierarchy adopted by Spinoza is translated into French. . The great diversity of pleasure’s semantic field seems so universal that Bentham, seeking to determine it in English, ended up forging the concept of “fruitfulness” to designate a pleasure’s ability to produce further pleasures: fruitfulness is enjoyment extended to the technical sense of a structural property of affectivity. This demonstrates the English language’s specific ability to confer on fictive entities, beginning from real entities, a degree of supplementary reflexivity by giving them the suffix -ness. An entity is said to be real when, in a given case or in discourse, we intend to attribute existence to it, whereas a fictive entity is one to which we do not attribute a true existence. Thus for Bentham, pleasure and pain are real entities qua sensations that are not preceded by any other. However, pain takes precedence over pleasure in that it is usually felt more strongly. It follows that pleasure has a more “reflexive” character than pain and that the word “lust,” for example, which is considered to refer to a real entity, can genera te “lustfulness,” “luxury,” “luxuriousness,” etc. Consequently, English’s propensity to create substantives from verbs—gerunds such as “well-being”—also leads to the calculation of pleasures. To make verbs into substantives is to make it possible to classify them, as Bentham does when in “Table of the Springs of Action” he enumerates fifty-four field of pleasure and joy is covered by a plurality of terms that are semantically quite close to each other. Thus in French, in addition to plaisir and délectation, we find satisfaction, volupté, contentement, agrément, plaisance (archaic), complaisance, joie, allégresse, and jubilation. In German, the most common words are Lust, Vergnügen, Freude, Gefallen, Behagen, and Genuss. To these Kant adds Wohlgefallen (Critique of the Power of Judgment, §3), which has the sense of “satisfaction,” but he also uses Vergnügen, which the translators of the French Pléiade edition render by plaisir but which comes from genug (enough) and Genügen (sufficiency, satiety) and corresponds instead to contentement. English has a very comparable distribution of terms, which Bentham takes into account when he distinguishes in “Table of the Springs of Action” fifty-four synonyms of “pleasure.” Among them are “gratification,” “enjoyment,” “fruition,” “joy,” “delight,” “delectation,” “merriment,” “mirth,” “gaiety,” “content,” “comfort,” and “satisfaction.” Some of these French, German, and English words are particularly related to the expression or manifestation of pleasure and joy. This is the case, for example, of “jubilation,” a notion whose meanings can range from belligerent shouting or the sound of a battle trumpet to mystical ecstasy and narcissistic pleasure. Its Latin spelling, jubilatio, is borrowed from the Hebrew term that designates the ram’s horn ( yôbhei), the trumpet that is blown for great and solemn events and whose sound is translated, in the Septuagint, by the Greek alalagmos [ἀλαλαγμός] (from the verb alalazein [ἀλαλάζειν]), which means “war cry.” In the Christian world, jubilatio came to designate an inner joy (close to “spiritual intoxication”) that may be externalized in songs or cries (jubilus is the name given to singing exercises bearing on the last syllable of “alleluia” or on the whole of the word). Augustine saw in it the expression of an inexpressible spiritual delight, whereas Cassiodorus considered jubilare a synonym of juvare and delectare, emphasizing that this copiosa mentis exultatio (abundance of joy) is the outer manifestation of an ineffable mental pleasure. This term is found in the Romance languages and even in German, with jubilieren, which is, however, doubled by frohlocken (to rejoice). 5 The register of pleasure and joy in Spinoza’s translators In the Latin text of Spinoza’s Ethics (pt. 3, prop. 22.1, and prop. 18.2), we find the following descending gradation: gaudium, laetitia, and titillatio. The last term, which Spinoza associates with hilaritas (in the sense of “joyfulness”), corresponds in Descartes to the chatouillement des sens (the tickling of the senses), about which he says that it is “followed so closely by joy that most people do not distinguish between them” (Passions of the Soul, §94). But German translators, for whom, according to Ritter’s Wörterbuch, die Lust designates not the feeling of mere pleasure, but that of joy, also use the word Lust to render Spinoza’s laetitia, whereas they render the stronger word gaudium by Freude. French translators generally render laetitia by the Cartesian term joie and titillatio by plaisir, and more precisely, by plaisir local or chatouillement. But then it is harder for them to render gaudium: C. Appuhn opts for épanouissement and R. Misrahi for contentement, as do R. Caillois and B. Pautrat, whereas P. Macherey, who sees gaudium as a passion joyeuse, prefers satisfaction. The problem for German translators, who were able to render laetitia/gaudium satisfactorily by Lust/Freude, is then to translate the inferior term in the gradation as titillatio, whereas in French, if one considers plaisir correctly rendered by titillatio and laetitia by joie, resources seem to be lacking for gaudium. REFS.: Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. PLEASURE 799 Brunschwig, Jacques, and Martha Nussbaum, eds. Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De finibus bonorum et malorum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. Translation by R. Woolf: On Moral Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. . Ethical Writings of Cicero: “De Officiis” (On Moral Duties); “De Senectute” (On Old Age); “De Amicitia” (On Friendship), and “Scipio’s Dream.” Translated by Andrew P. Peabody. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1887. . Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. “Being in Love and Hypnosis.” In Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Liveright, 1951. . “Negation.” In vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by John Strachey, 233–39. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. . Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Gosling, J.C.B. The Greeks on Pleasure. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Haliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. Translated by Apostolos Athanassakis. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York, Harper and Row, 1967. . “To Aphrodite.” In The Homeric Hymns, translated by Apostolos Athanassakis. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. “Dieu et la jouissance de la femme.” In Le Séminaire. Vol. 20, Encore. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Latacz, Joachim. Zum Wortfed “Freude” in der Sprache Homers. Heidelberg: Winter, 1966. MacLachlan, Bonnie. The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Nasio, Juan-David. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Plato. Philebus. Translated by R. Hackforth. In Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. Plutarch. “On Love.” In Moralia. 15 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Poussin, Nicolas. Lettres et propos sur l’art. Edited by Anthony Blunt. Paris: Hermann, 1964. Russell, Daniel C. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Seneca. Four Dialogues. Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1994. . Moral Essays. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . Opera omnia, quae supersunt. Edited by Friedrich E. Ruhkopf. 5 vols. Leipzig: 1797–1811. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Taylor, C.C.W. Pleasure, Mind, and Soul: Selected Papers in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Weinman, Michael. Pleasure in Aristotle’s Ethics. New York: Continuum, 2007. synonyms of the term “pleasure,” including a certain number of neologisms: 1. Gratification; 2. Enjoyment; 3. Fruition; 4. Indulgence; 5. Joy; 6. Delight; 7. Delectation; 8. Merriment; 9. Mirth; 10. Gaiety; 11. Airiness; 12. Comfort ; 13. Solace; 14. Content; 15. Satisfaction; 16. Rapture; 17. Transport; 18. Ecstasy; 19. Bliss; 20. Joyfulness; 21. Gladness; 22. Gladfulness; 23. Gladsomeness; 24. Cheerfulness; 25. Comfortableness; 26. Contentedness; 27. Happiness; 28. Blissfulness; 29. Felicity; 30. Wellbeing; 31. Prosperity; 32. Success; 33. Exultation; 34. Triumph; 35. Amusement; 36. Entertainment; 37. Diversion; 38. Festivity; 39. Pastime; 40. Sport; 41. Play; 42. Frolic; 43. Recreation; 44. Refreshment; 45. Ease; 46. Repose; 47. Rest; 48. Tranquillity; 49. Quiet; 50. Peace; 51. Relief; 52. Relaxation; 53. Alleviation; 54. Mitigation. By means of a nomenclature of this kind (he draws up several others, notably for “desire”), Bentham does not seek to classify pleasures in order to hierarchize them for the purposes of action or politics, according to the degree of truth or value attributed to one or another of them. In his view, it is difficult to maintain that some pleasures are truer than others. Pleasure and, still more, pain, are only principles that have “authority” over our behavior, and play, within our actions, the role of motivating forces. They may be used as guides—fallible ones, in any case—to help us construct a world, either one of physical objects or one of interpersonal relations. They are thus fundamental to the whole of the “springs of action.” Hence the “fictive” or “reflexive” character of pleasures does not prevent us from considering them as neither good nor false, neither true nor false. The principle of utility, which postulates the quest for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, leads us to put them in a logical and quantitative form, to subject them, by means of multiple rules, to a calculus (see UTILITY). Thus when they are treated as nouns, the diverse pleasures constituted as entities can have a quantity, an intensity, a duration, a probability, a distance or proximity, a fecundity, and a purity that make them quantifiable, “associable,” capable of being subjected to laws and of entering into such calculations. Charles Baladier Clara Auvray-Assayas Jean-François Balaudé Barbara Cassin Jean-Pierre Cléro Baldine Saint Girons REFS.: Augustine, Saint. On Christian Doctrine. Translated by R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Baier, Annette. “Master Passions.” In Explaining Emotions, edited by Amelie O. Rorty, 403–23. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Translated by L. A. Boldt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. . La part maudite. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1949. Translation by Robert Hurley: The Accursed Share. 3 vols. New York: Zone Books, 1991–93. Bentham, Jeremy. “Table of the Springs of Action.” In Deontology; Together with A Table of the Springs of Action; and the Article on Utilitarianism. Edited by Amnon Goldworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. 800 PLUDSELIGHED PLUDSELIGHED / DESULTORISK (DANISH) ENGLISH suddenness/desultory FRENCH soudaineté /sans suite, décousu GERMAN Plötzlichkeit/desultorisch v. INSTANT and CONTINUITET, DAIMÔN, DASEIN, DEVIL, EVENT, EVIGHED, I/ME/MYSELF, JETZTZEIT, MOMENT, TIME The terms Pludselighed and Desultorisk occur in Kierkegaard along with Evighed and Continuitet. The absence of continuity (Desultorisk) takes on a special character when it occurs suddenly (Pludselighed), for example, when evil abruptly arises (Œuvres complètes, 4:37), as is suggested by the description of the demonic. “If one reflects on its content, the demonic is determined as closing in on oneself; if it takes time into account, it is determined as the sudden” (ibid., 7:226). Lawless, foreign to the continuity of natural phenomena, the demonic is not of a somatic but rather of a psychic nature. It appears and disappears suddenly, in the rhythm of a suddenness (Pludselighed) that consists in the “abracadabra continuity of one who communicates only with himself ” (ibid., 7:227). Like Mephistopheles it arises suddenly, being nothing other than itself, without content, like a shade that has died of boredom, given over to “continuity in nothingness” (ibid., 7:229). The Kierkegaardian approach to time (like other categories instrumentalized in experience, such as the interval or the interstice in the sense of inter-esse) is marked by the restless oscillation between two movements or antagonistic terms, between humor and irony, tragedy and comedy, doubt and confidence, seriousness and joking. Regarding temporality, this “pendular movement” (Pendulbevaegelse) ( Journal, 1:83) regulates the valorization and depreciation of the permanent and the sudden. As Kierkegaard writes, “Continuity in alternation governs the privilege of “the first time,” of the semelfactivity of “what occurs only once,” like “first love”) or the Incarnation (Œuvres complètes, 10:76, and 4:36–38). This does not exclude the supremacy of “the second time” ( Journal, 2:226, Œuvres complètes, 15:301–2; 17:171), which is not without analogy to Stendhal’s second crystallization, but whose source is biblical: “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). In its very ambiguity oscillation expresses the paradoxical aspect of discontinuity, as a fact, which gives time all its weight, its concrete continuity. In this we can see a kind of echo of the Platonic atopon: the nontemporal supremely active in time is the exaiphnês [ἐξαίφνης], the sudden, which interrupts mediation, not without having the value of metaxu [μεταξύ], of articulation or connection that, nonetheless, annihilates neither the tenor of the difference nor the violence of the collision. In Kierkegaard, terms with a temporal resonance are frequently the origin of thematics that are deployed in very diverse registers. Thus the fact of being discontinuous is often denoted by the adjective desultorisk (“inconsistent, disjointed”). Thought’s leaps are desultorisk (Hamann, Œuvres complètes, vol. 7): the incomprehensibility with regard to Abraham (vol. 3), the fragmentation of the posthumous writings (vol. 1), the seducer’s moves (vol. 3), the moments of aridity that, in the weary soul of the mystic, alternate with luminous moments (vol. 4), the irruption of evil (vol. 4). Continuity, on the contrary, is due to the ethical instant (vol. 2) of decision, to the recollection that maintains an eternal continuity (vol. 9). The aesthetician leads conquests, but since he is “incapable of possessing” (vol. 4), he can only “bend eternity in time in fantastic ways” (vol. 7). In continuity, the ethicist has the ardor of a conqueror, but also the humble patience to constantly acquire possession. The sudden (Plugselighed) character of the exaiphnês, of the lightning bolt (Blitz) are found again in the brusque eruption of obscurity of madness, of death, of the shadows on Golgotha (vol. 15), of the demonic. Sudden also is the strange passage from the singular existent to the fantastic I of speculation. But suddenness provokes not only fear or astonishment. The emergence of a new quality (sin or grace, vol. 13), the light and gliding arrival of the favorable moment (kairos [ϰαίϱος], vol. 16) also occur with suddenness (see MOMENT). Jacques Colette REFS.: Bohrer, Karl H. Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Kierkegaard, Søren. Journal (extracts). Translated by K. Ferlov and J.-J. Gateau. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1942–61. Vol. 1, rev. and expanded ed., 1963. . Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000. . Œuvres complètes. Translated by P. H. Tisseau and E. M. Jacquet-Tisseau. 20 vols. Paris: L’Orante, 1966–86. POETRY I. Poiêsis and Praxis The English word “poetry” (archaic, “poesy”) derives, via Latin, from the Greek poiêsis [ποίησις], from poiein [ποιεῖν] (to make, produce), referrring to the production of an object, as distinguished from praxis [πϱᾶξις], from prattein [πϱάττειν] (to do, act) referring to an action that is its own end. On this fundamental difference between poiêsis and praxis, see PRAXIS; cf. ACT [AGENCY, ATTUALITÀ, SPEECH ACT], ACTOR, MORALS, WORK. II. Poetry and Literature 1. In the entry for German DICHTUNG (from dichten, “to invent” and “to compose a poem”), which can be rendered by both “literature” and “poetry,” the difference in the demarcations of the domains of discourse are examined. See also ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, HISTORY, LOGOS. 2. On the relationship between poetry and prose, and the connection with figures, see SUBLIME, and COMMONPLACE, COMPARISON, TROPE; cf. MIMÊSIS, STYLE. v. CATHARSIS POLIS 801