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

CIVILIS, POLIS [πόλις], POLITEIA [πολιτεία] (GREEK) ENGLISH city-state, state, society, nation FRENCH cité, État, société, nation v. STATE [DEMOS/ETHNOS/LAOS, STATE/GOVERNMENT, STATO], and CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVIL SOCIETY, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, OIKEIÔSIS, OIKONOMIA, PEOPLE, POLITICS The word polis [πόλις] is considered untranslatable: city-state, state, society, or nation? But is it the word that is untranslatable in our languages, or the reality that it designates, which has no equivalent in our civilization? Polis designates the “political community” peculiar to a stage in Greek civilization. But the fact that today we still cannot designate anthropological reality in general without appealing to the word polis shows that it is not easy to distinguish between translating words and establishing correspondences between things or deciding between Greek particularity and human universality. Politeia [πολιτεία] seems to pose different problems: the politês [πολίτης] being a member of the polis (hence the citizen), politeia designates either, distributively, the citizens’ participation in the city-state as a whole, and thus “citizenship,” or collectively, the organization of citizens into a whole, and thus “constitution” or “regime.” But there again, it is difficult to separate historical realities from the concepts philosophy bases on them since that is the title Plato gives to his main work on politics—the Republic (Politeia)—and the name that Aristotle gives to a particular politeia among all those that seem to him possible. I. Polis and Political Philosophy The polis [πόλις] is first of all a political entity peculiar to archaic and classical Greek civilization between (at least) the eighth and the fourth centuries BCE, connecting a human community and a determinate territority. Whereas other peoples lived in empires having an “ethnic” identity (e.g., the Persians), the originality of the Greeks in the classical period was that they lived in small, free communities (the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, the Corinthians, et al.) having no unity other than political. Thus every city-state enjoyed territorial sovereignty, made its own laws (according to its politeia [πολιτεία]), and was protected by its own gods. Three governmental institutions were common to all the city-states: a large Assembly that brought together all or part of the polites [πολίτες] (“citizens,” which was never synonymous with “residents,” because minors, foreigners, “metics,” women, and slaves were excluded); one or more smaller councils, generally entrusted with preparing and executing the decisions made by the Assembly; and a certain number of public offices (the archai [ἀϱχαί], magistracies), exercised in alternation by certain people. The politeia specific to each polis defined the way these different bodies were recruited and their powers. Nonetheless, during the classical period, the poleis were distinguished from each other by whether they had adopted a democratic or an oligarchic politeia. In the former case, as in Athens, the Assembly brought together all the citizens and decisions were made by majority vote after a debate in the course of which everyone had an equal right to speak; in addition, everyone had an equal opportunity to take part in the councils and in most of the tribunals and magistracies (except the military and financial ones) through simple drawing of lots. In oligarchic city-states, only some of the members of the polis could take part in governmental organs and magistrates were chosen by election. This singular historical reality constituted by the polis can be designated by the term “city-state” so long as the polis is not confused with the city (in Greek: astu [ἄστυ]), which was only a part of the city-state. But the problem is not only linguistic, it is philosophical from the outset because political philosophy was born in the polis as a “reflection” on the polis itself, both as the community of the Greeks and a way of life for men, and as a critical investigation into the politeiai, the different real or possible ways in which citizens could live together. It is from this interweaving of the singular and the universal, of the historical and the conceptual, of the real and the possible, that arise the difficulty of translating and the philosophical fertility of these notions of the polis and the politeia. II. Polis: State, Society, Nation? The difficulty of translating polis is less a matter of language than of history. No modern political entity is identical with the ancient polis. We usually live in states, each of which has legal sovereignty over a community of individuals, families, and classes called “society,” and whose members feel themselves to be united by a similarity in language, culture, and history called “nation.” However, although the Greek polis appeals to the three elements of legal system, social interdependence, and historical identity, it is nonetheless distinguished from what we call a “state,” “society,” or “nation.” Every Greek felt connected to his polis by an attachment so strong that he was often prepared to sacrifice his time for its administration and his life for its defense, and he feared the punishment of exile more than any other. Nonetheless, this feeling was not exactly national, if by “nation” we mean a community of language and culture (what the Greeks called ethnos [ἔθνος], and which they distinguished precisely from polis), not exactly patriotic, since it is less a relationship to a “native land,” to a territory, than what the Greeks called chôra [χώϱα], an awareness of belonging to a human community bound together by a shared past and a future to be constructed in common. Each community was welded together by institutions that had a sovereign power over the whole of its members and its constituent groups. This relates the polis to the modern state, if we understand thereby the authority that “successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (Weber, Politik als Beruf).However, a polis is not exactly a “state,” the concept of which is correlative to that of the individual and “society.” The state appears as an omnipotent, anonymous, and distant legal institution against which individual liberties must—always and again and again—be defended: the state is “they” against “us”—and “we” are individuals, or society. The same was not true in the polis: the pressure exercised by the polis is still exercised by “us,” as such, by the community as a whole. To this extent, the freedom of the individual is gauged not by his independence with regard to the state but by the collectivity’s dependence with regard to him, that is, to his participation in the polis. The polis is thus first of all a community with a transgenerational permanence and a transfamilial identity, whose members feel a solidarity transcending all ties of blood. 802 POLIS term “constitution” seems to be the most appropriate translation of poleitai, on condition that it not be taken to imply any notion of a basic law written a priori. On the other hand, when Plato (Republic, 8) and then Aristotle (Politics, 3.6–7) classify and compare poleitai, they are concerned above all to discern in each case the fundamental principle on which the organization of power in the polis rests, and the term “form of government” seems more adequate. However, neither of these translations is sufficient because one of Aristotle’s poleitai, the one in which power is assumed by all citizens with a view to the common good, is called precisely poleiteia (“republic”? “constitutional regime”?), as if it incarnated, as it were, the essence of any politeia, by combining the two senses of the word: according to this politeia, in fact, all those who belong to the citizenry, and thus to the politeia, have the right to participate in the administration of the politeia. The words constitution (politeia [πολιτεία]) and government (politeuma [πολίτευμα]) have the same meaning, and the government, which is the supreme authority in states (to kurion tôn poleôn [τὸ ϰύϱιον τῶν πολέων]), must be in the hands of one, or of a few, of the many (ê hena ê oligous ê tous pollous [ἢ ἕνα ἢ ὀλίγους ἢ τοὺς πολλούς]). The true forms of government (politeias [πολιτείας]), therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest (to idion [τὸ ἴδιον]), whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state (politas [πολίτας]), if they are truly citizens (tous metechontas [τοὺς μετέχοντας]), ought to participate in its advantages (koinônein tous sumpherontas [ϰοινωνεῖν τοῦς συμφέϱοντας]). Of forms of government in which one rules, we call that which regards the common interests, kingship or royalty; that in which more than one, but not many, rule, aristocracy; and it is so called, either because the rulers are the best men, or because they have at heart the best interests of the state (polei [πόλει]) and of the citizens (tois koinônousin autês [τοῖς ϰοινωνοῦσιν αὐτῆς]). But when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name—a constitution [ὅταν δὲ τὸ πλῆθος πϱὸς τὸ ϰοινὸν πολιτεύηται συμφέϱον, ϰαλεῖται τὸ ϰοινὸν ὄνομα πασῶν τῶν πολιτειῶν]. And there is a reason for this use of language. (Aristotle, Politics, 3.7.1279a 25–39) But where translations of politeia by “constitution” or “form of government” are clearly inadequate is when the titles of the political works of numerous Greek thinkers, first of all Plato, have to be translated. These “Republics” do not limit themselves to presenting the functioning of a form of government, but found an overall project of common life, including programs of education, the organization of labor and leisure, moral rules, etc.: another proof, if one be needed, that the polis is indeed the unity of the community and power, two agencies that are for us divided between the state and society. Francis Wolff In this sense, it is related to a “society.” But it is not a “society” in the modern sense, for two complementary reasons. First of all, negatively, because for the Greeks, social and economic relations belonged to the sphere of the oikos [οἶϰος] and not to that of the polis—that is, they were private, not public matters. Second, the polis is not a neutral context of exchange or of the circulation of goods, but rather the center of a historical experience, past and future, real or imaginary; in other words, the unity of this community did not arise from the interdependency of its members, but from action with a view to administering or defending it: it was a political unity. The polis is thus neither a nation, nor a state, nor a society. It does not exist negatively, by inadequation, but positively, by definition. What constitutes the polis is the identity of the sphere of power (which for us concerns the “state”) and the sphere of community (which for us is organized into “society”), and it is to this unity that each individual feels affectively bound (and not to the “nation”). Thus we can understand why the first political thinkers were able to take it as both their object and their model: while being aware of the singularity of the polis, they saw in it the concept of a “political community” in general. Thus according to Plato, Protagoras thought that men have to live in poleis because they lack other animals’ biological qualities that fit them for the struggle for life, and thus have to unite by showing the virtues necessary for life in common (Plato, Protagoras, 320c–322d). Plato sees the polis as deriving from the necessity that humans cooperate and specialize (Republic, 2.369b–371e). Aristotle sees man as being by definition a “political animal” (Politics, 1.1253a 1–38), that is, “one who lives in a polis,” and by that we must understand not only a “social animal,” but also a being that can be happy only if he can freely decide, with his peers, what is right for their common life. It is as if the particularity of the polis, in which the sphere of the community merges with that of power, had made political thought as such possible. That is why the polis is neither the state nor society, but the “political community.” III. Politeia: Citizenship and Regime This particularity also explains the dichotomy of the meanings of politeia. If the politês is a person who participates in the polis, the politeia may be either the subjective bond of the politês to the polis, that is, the way in which the polis as a community distributes among those whom it recognizes as its participants (the “citizenry”), or the objective organization of the functions of government and administration, that is, the way in which the power of the polis is collectively guaranteed (the “form of government” or the “constitution”). The first meaning is anterior and corresponds to the single use of the word in Herodotus (Histories, 9.34), who offers, moreover, without using the term politeia, the oldest classification of “forms of government” (3.80–83), depending on the number of those who govern: a single individual (“tyranny”), several (“oligarchy”), or all (“isonomy”). However, it is the second meaning that was to prevail in political thought, for example, with the Poleitai of the Lacedaemonians or the Poleitai of Athens, two texts transmitted in the corpus of Xenophon’s works, or the “Collection of Poleitai” assembled by Aristotle, and of which only that of Athens is extant. Given that all these cases involve a kind of a posteriori codification, the POLITICS 803 political parties, the recruitment of governing elites, and, more generally, on the competitive and/or agonistic dimension of the regimes or political systems studied (see, for example, Campbell et al., The American Voter). But there also exist scientific approaches to policy that seek to bring out the conditions in which a particular policy can be implemented by a state, an administration, or, by extension, some kind of organization (a company may have a policy of investment, training, and so forth); significantly (insofar as it is a question of public organizations), this study of policy is generally called in French analyse des politiques publiques, in order to compensate for the indeterminacy of the word politique (for a general presentation, see Muller and Surel, L’Analyse des politiques publiques). As always in the social sciences, we find here a great diversity of approaches and theoretical oppositions to which we may give a political, even a partisan, meaning; but there is nonetheless a certain consensus in political science, at least in English-speaking countries, that has to do with the relations between scholarly discourse and common representations. The distinction between politics and policy is considered natural, even and especially when one inquires into the relations between them: the choice of a policy in a given sector obviously depends on politics, but that makes it only all the more useful to distinguish between the two notions. More deeply, most classical studies in political science have in common a combination of a certain confidence in the notions that have emerged from the common consciousness and an effort to critique and demystify the latter’s most naïve or most widespread representations. With regard to the analysis of political life, sociology has constantly sought, with varying success, to shed light on the gap between classical democratic principles (popular sovereignty, the expression of the enlightened citizen) and the real functioning of representative regimes, which are in many respects oligarchical, and which very easily tolerate a certain political passivity; it could also be shown that many classical analyses, like that of “party identification” in The American Voter, draw their persuasive force from the fact that they tend to dissipate the democratic prejudices on which democratic regimes live. (If identification with a party is a crucial element in electoral choices, that is not because it increases political consciousness, but on the contrary because it makes political participation easier by relieving voters of having to form their own opinions on every question). The analysis of public policies, which has developed in the wake of decision studies, is primarily concerned with explaining the gaps between the intentions of decision-makers and the results of their actions, as well as the general opacity of decisionmaking processes themselves (Leca, in Grawitz and Leca, Traité de science politique, vol. 1). The dominant trends in political science are thus based on what might be called a nonBachelardian epistemology that emphasizes the continuity between the common consciousness and scientific knowledge, and that probably reflects a more or less conscious adherence to the values of pluralistic democracy: that is no doubt what explains, a contrario, the reservations about this kind of political science expressed by French thinkers who reject this kind of naiveté and stress the discontinuity between science and common sense in order to bring out REFS.: Aristotle. The Politics, and the Constitution of Athens. Edited by Stephen Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Benveniste, Émile. “Two Linguistic Models of the City.” In Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Florida Press, 1971. Herodotus. The History. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Plato. Protagoras. Translated by Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. . The Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974. Weber, Max. Politik als Beruf. Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1919. Translation by Gordon C. Wells and edited by John Dreijmanis: Politics as a Vocation. In Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations. New York: Algora, 2007. Xenophon. “Constitution of the Lacedaemonians,” and “Constitution of the Athenians.” In Scripta Minora. Translated by E. C. Marchant and G. W. Bowersock. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. POLITICS, POLICY v. CIVIL SOCIETY, DEMOS/ETHNOS/LAOS, ECONOMY, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, GOVERNMENT, POLIS, STATE, STATE/GOVERNMENT In French, the noun politique refers to two orders of reality that English designates as two different words, “policy” and “politics.” In one sense, which is that of policy, we speak in French of la politique to designate “an individual’s, a group’s, or a government’s conception, program of action, or the action itself” (Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism): it is in this sense that we speak of politiques of health or education or of Richelieu’s or Bismarck’s politiques in foreign affairs. In another sense, which translates as the English word “politics,” la politique designates everything that concerns public debate, competition for access to power, and thus the “domain in which various politiques [in the sense of “policy”] compete or oppose each other” (ibid.). This slight difference between French and English does not generally pose insurmountable problems, because the context usually suffices to indicate which meaning of politique should be understood, but in certain cases it is nonetheless difficult to render in French all the nuances conveyed by the English term, or, on the contrary, to avoid contamination between the two notions that English distinguishes so clearly. On the basis of an examination of the uses of the two words in political literature in English, we will hypothesize that their respective semantic fields are not unrelated to the way in which scholarly theories (and academic institutions) conceive what French calls la politique. I. “Politics” and “Policy” in Philosophy In contemporary academia, the domain of politics designates first of all an essential part of the field of “political science”: the study of the forms of political competition, in accord with methods that arose from the analysis of pluralist regimes, but which can be transposed to the analysis of authoritarian regimes to shed light on conflicts among different opinion- or interest-groups that pursue opposed projects and distinct policies. Studies of electoral sociology (as well as analyses of other forms of political participation—demonstrations, petitions, activism, and so forth) belong to this domain, along with all kinds of studies on 804 POLITICS ethics, because it truly appears only when crucial problems are involved whose resolution may require violent clashes. This conception, which reflects the author’s hostility to the Treaty of Versailles and the ideology of the League of Nations, implied a radical criticism of the cosmopolitan and humanitarian ideals inherited from liberalism, and had dangerous aspects that Schmitt himself illustrated by supporting, for a time, the Nazi regime. But it would be unfair to see in this an appeal for a general subordination of human existence to the requirements of the political, itself reduced to violent conflict: the political is only one of the spheres of human action, in which, moreover, conflict is only one possibility that defines the limits of rationalization and not the ordinary forms of life. Strictly speaking, Schmitt’s theory does not imply general war or conquest, even if in principle it excludes the achievement of perpetual peace—which would mark the end of all political existence stricto sensu, and which, in the real political world, is in fact the theme that makes it possible to criminalize some political actors, who are presented as enemies of peace and humanity (ibid.). In itself, then, the idea of a distinction between the political and politics, which would enable us to conceive the political dimension of human life transhistorically, does not necessarily entail a complete or literal adoption of Schmitt’s themes, but it does suggest that the political is endowed with a dignity superior to that of politics, either because it is distinguished from everyday politics, or because it is the specific object of philosophy and grand theory, whereas most of the social sciences can hardly rise above the level of the empirical study of political life. In this sense, the concept of the political is no doubt part of the common fund of contemporary philosophy. (For a line of inquiry fairly close to Schmitt’s, see Freund, L’Essence du politique; for an approach faithful to the Aristotelian tradition, see Vullierme, Le Concept de système politique.) Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Aron, Raymond. Démocratie et totalitarisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Translation by Valence Ionescu: Democracy and Totalitarianism. Edited by Roy Pierce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. First published in English by Praeger, New York, in 1969. Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. The American Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Finley, M. I. Politics in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Freund, Julien. L’Essence du politique. Paris: Sirey, 1965. Grawitz, Madeleine, and Jean Leca, eds. La science politique, science sociale. L’ordre politique. Vol. 1 of Traité de science politique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Habermas, Jurgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Muller, Pierre, and Yves Surel. L’Analyse des politiques publiques. Paris: Montchrestien, 1998. Oakeshott, Michael. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Vullierme, Jean-Louis. Le Concept de système politique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. more clearly the oligarchical dimension of pluralistic regimes (see, for example, Lacroix, “Ordre politique et ordre social,” in Traité de science politique, vol. 1). Whatever one thinks of these debates, the existence of a political sphere in which conflict and public deliberation are the conditions of legitimate public action is not an eternal given of human life: it is in this sense that the great Hellenist Moses I. Finley could say, “Politics in our sense rank among the rarer activities in the pre-modern world. In effect, they were a Greek invention, more correctly perhaps, the separate inventions of the Greeks and of the Etruscans and/or Romans” (Politics in the Ancient World). The duality between policy and politics is also significant for political philosophy, insofar as the latter can hardly be understood without taking into account the distinction between the logic of command and the logic of deliberation. Most contemporary political philosophies, which implicitly accept the postulates of freemarket economics (even if, as in the work of J. Habermas, to appeal to its ideals against its actual functioning), tend to privilege politics while at the same time including the policy dimension in the general framework of strategic action that often borrows from economic analysis. In other, more classical philosophies, politics may be conceived, in a rather Aristotelian way, with reference to its architectonic function, but also to the role played in it by public deliberation and the civic bond, which also assumes that its domain is irreducible to the particular goals that guide the policy of particular communities (see, for example, Oakeshott, On Human Conduct). II. Politics and Policy The oscillation of contemporary practical philosophy between the celebration of the civic ideals of liberated communication and the public sphere, on the one hand, and the general prestige of theories of rational choice, on the other, no doubt shows that the distinction English makes between the two dimensions of what French calls la politique involves more than a simple linguistic usage. However, this distinction does not suffice to exhaust the study of politics, which has led some authors to speak of the political as a concept that cannot be reduced to politics. In the work of Carl Schmitt, who introduced “the political” in his 1932 book Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political), this distinction was framed as a polemic against liberalism, which tended, according to him, to reduce the specificity of “the political” to the advantage of the ethics-economy polarity, making “the political” the means of limiting ethical constraints to the benefit of individual freedoms. Schmitt’s theses are indissolubly scientific and normative (even polemical); from the scientific point of view, the problem is to find the fundamental distinction in the political order equivalent to good and evil in the moral order, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic order, and profitable and unprofitable in the economic order. But this quest is itself a way of discrediting liberal civilization, which underestimates the major role conflict plays in the constitution of political unities: “The specific distinction of the political, to which political acts and motives can be traced, is the discrimination between friend and enemy” (ibid.). The political is thus irreducible to culture, economics, or PORTUGUESE 805 PORTUGUESE A Baroque Language v. BAROQUE, DASEIN, DESTINY, FICAR, HÁ, MALAISE [SAUDADE], MANIERA, POETRY, SPANISH The Portuguese language, by virtue of its flexible syntax, the inversions of its punctuation, and its fondness for excess and rhetorical figures, is a baroque language. The characteristic traits of its philosophies—a penchant for aesthetic, metaphysical, existential, and “sensationist” questions—and the interweaving of its thought with literature derive from this original stamp. Although Portuguese literature has reached maturity, Portuguese philosophy, held back by the influence of Latin, has emerged only in recent centuries. Thus no one knows whether the baroque will persist or whether the philosophical language of the classics, which Portuguese is absorbing with the voracity of its “anthropophagic reason,” will take it in new directions. With its very concrete expressions, its vitalism with regard to fundamental questions, and its aura of occultism, it is a language that overthrows the traditions of Western thought. I. The Idea of the Baroque “The finite sea may well be Greek or Roman, / Portuguese is the infinite ocean” (Pessoa, Message). The bonds connecting the Portuguese language with the idea of the baroque are circular and in some sense umbilical. “Baroque” comes from a word in the Portuguese goldsmith’s art, barroco, which refers to irregular pearls, the rarest ones, whose obvious impurity gives them a high value, an additional mystery that cannot be grasped by reason and that invites us to go beyond it. Portuguese also uses barroca to refer to a cliff that overhangs an abyss, an escarpment produced by marine erosion that is unstable because it is made of clay, barro, a formless matter that has nonetheless retained the artisanal, biblical meaning of transcendence, like the lascivious flesh that can be brought to life by the divine breath. Before it spread to Italy and all of Europe during the Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the baroque style was already emerging at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the symbols of the Manueline style, that last breath of the Gothic in Portugal. Its emblem is the armillary sphere, a globe containing brass rings representing the circles of the heavens and symbolizing the voyages that discovered new worlds in the East and West. With the ornamental exuberance of the maritime motifs in Lisbon’s monasteries and palaces, which already overflow their Gothic skeletons and shed the melancholy greenish light of saudade, “Portugal offers us the archetype of the Baroque” (Ors, Lo Barroco), and along with it, the secret meaning of the spiritual history of Portugal. According to António Quadros (O espírito da cultura portuguesa), Portuguese writing “is viscerally baroque, expressing the sinuous, spiralling, spontaneous, dynamic, unpredictable, and creative practice of nature.” This conception of natural writing—writing as nature creates—which contemplates the mystery of an insinuating and veiled order, is described this way by António Vieira, the “prince” of baroque prose: What are these celestial expressions and words? The words are the stars, the expressions are their composition, their order, their harmony, and their course. Consider how the way of preaching in the heavens is in accord with the style that Christ taught on earth. In both cases, it is a matter of sowing: the earth sown with wheat, the sky sown with stars. One must preach as if one were sowing, not as if one were paving or tilling. Ordered, but like the stars: Stellae manentes in ordine suo. All the stars are in order, but it is an order that inspires, not a laborious order. God did not make the heavens in the form of a checkerboard of stars, as preachers make a sermon a checkerboard of words. (Sermão da sexagésima) Vieira’s original baroque was opposed to the affected mannerism of some seventeenth-century Dominicans who tried to imitate Góngora or slavishly followed petrified rhetorical manuals. But first of all, it was opposed to the straight and antithetical order of which the checkerboard is the quintessential image and to the Cartesian linearity of classical reason. Therefore it is not surprising that in a culture as rationalistic and measured as the French, the term “baroque” was given so many pejorative connotations: “irrégulier, bizarre, inégal” (RT: Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française); “le superlatif du bizarre” (RT: Encyclopédie méthodique); “d’un bizarrerie choquante” (RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française); “qui est d’une irrégularité bizarre, inattendue” (RT: Le nouveau petit Robert). Le nouveau petit Robert confirms this bias by the synonyms it suggests: “biscornu, choquant, étrange, excentrique, irrégulier.” Pellegrin outlines an explanation: this is a “defensive reflex” against “dangerous imperialism and the Counter-Reformation, the privileged vehicles of the baroque, of Roman and Jesuitical origin” (“Visages, virages, rivages du baroque”). The idea of the baroque defines thinking in the Portuguese language. We encounter this baroque question several times. First, in the interweaving of philosophy and art, since it is from art that we draw the idea of the baroque. Then in the intersection of the diachrony of language and so-called eternal philosophical problems: What does it mean to characterize a whole language by a privileged period, the baroque? Is there a crucial moment that henceforth determines in Portuguese a structure of writing and its philosophy? And this leads us to a final question, How do particular linguistic events peculiar to Portuguese provide access to a philosophical perspective, that is, to universal questions? II. Between Art and Philosophy A. A metaphysics of sensations In Portuguese, thought inclines toward questions that have to do with art, aesthetics, and feelings. This also holds for Spanish and even Italian, whether we see in this the influence of the sea or that of the sun, Camus would say, on southern peoples. But thinking i n Portuguese inclines toward art and feelings even when it decides to speculate metaphysically. It produces “a metaphysics of sensations,” to use an expression taken from Fernando Pessoa’s Sensationist Manifestos and adopted by José Gil. This speculation is, moreover, often treated physiologically, as a special case of malaise: “Metaphysics is the result of an indisposition” (Pessoa, Poesia de Álvaro de Campos). 806 PORTUGUESE B. A philosophy inscribed in literature “If a brilliant idea occurs to you, / it’s better to write a song. / It has been proven that it is possible / to philosophize only in German” (Caetano Veloso, “Lingua,” a song on his CD Velô). Portuguese thought, which is essentially baroque, often prefers to express itself by means of the art of the sermon, the novel, or poetry, as if the straightforward form of the philosophical treatise were unable to tame its overflowing vitality. Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa’s aliases, attributes this to the sonority of the language, and especially that of its vowels: That hieratic movement of our clear majestic language, that expression of ideas in inevitable words, like water that flows because there’s a slope, that vocalic marvel [assombro vocálico] in which sounds are ideal colours—all of this instinctively seized me like an overwhelming political emotion. And I cried. Remembering it today, I still cry. Not out of nostalgia for my childhood, which I don’t miss, but because of nostalgia for the emotion of that moment, because of a heartfelt regret that I can no longer read for the first time that great symphonic certitude. I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I am highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language. (The Book of Disquietude) An Italian noticed this as well: “There is no harmonic system comparable to the vocalic complexity of the Portuguese language which, including pure, nasal, and diphthongued vowels, has 43, forty-three voices—I say!” Metaphysics is usually approached from an existential point of view and deals with problems in philosophical anthropology, such as the feelings basic to nostalgia and melancholy (saudade, fado) or the moral ambiguity of sensual pleasure and of ecstasy. . It is once again an existential perspective that marks the ontology of the difference between ser and estar; most languages have only the verb “to be.” A question raised by some Iberian translators of Heidegger, who want to make him say in Spanish what German does not allow him to say; or by those who, like António Quadros, want to base the history of metaphysics on linguistic and cultural facts: [T]he philosophy of existence, preceded, moreover, by the work of Kierkegaard and by that of the Iberian thinkers Unamuno and Leonardo Coimbra, emerges systematically in Germany with the thought of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, as a reaction against the idealist absolutizing of a Being without qualities and blind to the concrete conditions of existence. These philosophers labored to distinguish between being in itself and being in the world, which the Portuguese language renders directly in the distinction between ser and estar. (O espírito da cultura portuguesa) The immediacy of the existential problematics conveyed by common usage, in Portuguese as in Spanish, is explored much further through the mediation of literature than through strictly philosophical speculation. 1 Fado v. DESTINY The word faco, from Latin fatum, refers first of all to fate or destiny, the irruption of time that thrusts the event into the midst of presence. This was undoubtedly understood as the result of the utterance (Lat. fari, fabula, Port. fala) of the gods decreeing directly what is and what will be without the symbolic intermediary of human language. For humans this is the irreversible condition in which they find themselves from birth on, the set of possibilities that cannot be transcended and that lead inexorably to death. Thus it is also the real power that marks human finitude. From this is derived a second meaning peculiar to Portuguese: fado is the melancholy feeling of the consciousness of this finitude and especially of its inexorability. Thus it is a feeling, or rather a disposition, that has its origin in a special metaphysical comprehension, probably drawn from some Stoic echo and from the Arab prophetic tradition. We can find in it an analogy with the late Roman Empire: a spiritual maturity that was achieved at the moment of economic and political decline. For Portugal, it was the overseas empire that collapsed; the Portuguese language remains, pluralized in its idioms, over five continents. Fado makes sensible an existential condition consisting in a feeling of weariness and aimless drifting. It is an often discreet melancholy by which one allows oneself to be borne along in places frequented specifically in order to experience it by listening to its expression: the most traditional kind of song in Portugal draws both its name and its inspiration from it. Fernando Pessoa describes it this way: All poetry—and song is an assisted poetry—reflects what the soul lacks. Thus the songs of sad peoples are gay, and the songs of gay peoples are sad. But fado is neither gay nor sad. It is an episode of interval. Before existing, the Portuguese soul conceived fado and desired everything without having the strength to desire it. Strong minds attribute everything to Destiny; only weak ones trust personal will, because it does not exist. Fado is the weariness of the strong soul, Portugal’s scornful glance at the God it believed in and that immediately abandoned it. In fado, the gods return, legitimate and distant. (“O fado e a alma Portuguesa”) REFS.: Pessoa, Fernando. “O fado e a alma Portuguesa.” O Notícias Ilustrado, 2nd series, no. 44, 14 April 1929. PORTUGUESE 807 semeador, ainda que caiu quatro vezes, só de três nasceu ; para o sermão vir nascendo, há-de ter três modos de cair. Há-de cair com queda, há-de cair com cadência, há-de cair com caso. A queda é para as coisas, a cadência para as palavras, o caso para a disposição. A queda é para as coisas, porque hão-de vir bem trazidas e em seu lugar; hão-de ter queda : a cadência é para as palavras, porque não hão-de ser escabrosas, nem dissonantes,hão de ter cadência : o caso é para a disposição, porque há-de ser tão natural e tão desafetada que pareça caso e não estudo : Cecidit, cecidit, cecidit. (It is not a matter of rising but of falling: Cecidit. Observe an allegory specific to our language. The sower’s wheat, although having fallen four times, rises up only three times: in order that the sermon rise, it has to fall in three senses: it has to fall in the fall, it has to fall in the cadences, it has to fall in the coincidences. The fall is for subject matter, cadence for words, coincidence for arrangement. The fall is for the subjects discussed, because they have to be well prepared and in their proper place; they will have a “fall.” Cadence is for the words, because they must be neither scabrous nor dissonant; they must have a “cadence.” Coincidence is for arrangement, for it must be so natural, so free of affectation, that it resembles a “coincidence” rather than something studied: Cecidit, cecidit, cecidit.) (Vieira, “Sermão da sexagésima”) C. Rhetoric and concrete expressions in ordinary language Repetition, excess, ostentation, play with mirrors, mise en abyme, and rhetorical figures are frequent, both in ordinary, everyday language and in more formal registers. Negation, whose placement is relatively free, can be repeated for emphasis without reversing the polarity of the sentence. Two negations do not equal an affirmation. For example, Não sei não (I don’t know at all) is a stronger form of Não sei or Sei não (I don’t know). In sentences with compound negations, a simple negation can also be added without changing the meaning: Eu nunca disse nada a ninguém (I’ve never said anything to anyone) is equivalent to Eu não disse nunca nada a ninguém and even to Eu nunca não disse nada a ninguém. The polarity is reversed only if the simple negation is placed immediately before the compound negation: Eu não nunca disse (It is not true that I have never said . . .). Syntactical inversions are frequent, and ambiguity is always felt to be closer to the real than the reasonable is, as in the expressions the realist writer Nelson Rodrigues likes to use that twist the common logic of meaning. He operates with an extremely flexible syntax that he bends in several different directions. The title of one of his tragedies, Perdoa-me por me traíres, (Pardon me for the fact that you are betraying me) reverses the expected Perdoa-me por te trair (Pardon me for betraying you) and loses in English (and in French) half the mirror-play and ambiguity of the original, which makes use, in order to carry out its twists, of the ellipsis of the subject and the personal infinitive conjugated in the second person singular. . (Vincenzo Spinelli, quoted in António Quadros, O espírito da cultura portuguesa). The number is correct, but he exaggerated the singularity: Greek, which moreover invented the vowels that the Phoenician alphabet lacked, has as many; Greek does not have the nasal diphthongs (ão, ães, ões), but Portuguese does not make the quantitative distinction between long and short vowels [ε/η, ο/ω]. If we add to this all the tonic riches explored by the Greeks in meter and by the Portuguese in rhyme, we understand that their first philosophers were poets. In Portuguese, a rhyme can appear in the last and in the penultimate syllable of a word: rime aguda (acute) for words whose tonic syllable is the final, like parangolé; rime grave for words whose tonic syllable is the penultimate, divided into masculines like fado and feminines like fada; and rime esdrúxula (lit., bizarre), for words in which it is the antepenultimate, such as âmago. In French, on the contrary, rhymes are more mnemonic supports than musical notations, since they are borne essentially by the last phonetic syllable. But this aesthetic penchant does not concern prosody alone. If a positivist philosopher like Euclides da Cunha, having decided to write an essay on the messianism of the man of the desert, ended up writing, despite his philosophical and scientific pretensions, an emblematic novel—Os sertões—that is because the theme, deploying antithetical ideas, along with the vocabulary and expressions of the language, carried him away. Thus the most significant philosophers writing in Portuguese are to be found in its literature, as if the latter were the primary way of grasping knowledge and existence: The preponderance of the improvised over the functional, the predominance of verve over argumentation, the prevalence of partying over work, the precedence of ritual over planning, the prejudice of the taboo against efficiency, the choice of superstition in preference to rationality, of thought in preference to knowledge, are the priorities that challenge the rigid parameters of evaluation, resist the constant rules of order, and reject the general principles of progress. (Carneiro Leão, “Tiers Monde”) These great philosophers of Portuguese literature, or if one prefers, these literary writers of its philosophy, are found far more frequently than philosophers who present themselves as such. This explains why António Vieira, for example, is sometimes reduced to being no more than a Jesuit preacher of the seventeenth century, and yet, as “a faithful mirror of the baroque mentality, Vieira is considered the greatest representative of classical Portuguese prose” (RT: Le nouveau dictionnaire des auteurs, 3:3319)—“classical” because he is a model of the baroque style, of course. But the man who fought from the pulpit the expulsion of the Jews in the Old World and against the enslavement of blacks and Indians in the New, the man who knew that to make its way into people’s stubborn understanding a good idea needs true rhetoric much more than good arguments is only rarely considered a philosopher: Não está a coisa no levantar, está no cair : Cecidit. Notai uma alegoria própria da nossa língua. O trigo do 808 PORTUGUESE ([T]he rebellious Dutchman has to be concerned to see our troops of four Portuguese and four blacks march [marcharem] so many leagues over such difficult roads, without camels or elephants to carry their baggage, and march [andarem] free and intrepid through their countrysides, razing and ravaging everything, despite their shackles.) (Cantel, Les sermons de Vieira) Portuguese occults words and even whole phrases by means of ellipses, the supreme figures of the baroque, often indicated by a series commas. It hides still more: sometimes, the whole conclusion of an idea is left up to the reader by the abundant use of ellipsis points. Skepticism? Insinuation? Esotericism? It is up to the reader to decide. Consider this bilingual title of André Coyné’s bilingual book, Portugal è um ente De l’être du Portugal (Portugal is an existent On the being of Portugal), whose punctuation conceals and announces the subject’s secrets. Receptive to mysteries, sometimes mystical and messianic, Portuguese culture indulges madly in its numerous revivals of Sebastianism: the belief in the advent of a fifth universal empire (according to Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream), more spiritual and ideal, when there shall be an upheaval of the heavens and the earth, or the land and the sea, with the mythical return of the young king Sebastian of Portugal, who disappeared mysteriously at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, in 1578, which was won by the Moors. Thus he became the “hidden king,” an emblem of the mystical spiritual power, in prophecies (as in The History of the Future, which caused Vieira to be accused of making prophecies and for which he was imprisoned from 1665 to 1667) and in The nonfinite modes—the infinitive, the gerund, and the participles—which are usually the most abstract in modern languages, are more concrete in Portuguese. In addition to the infinitive, which may be conjugated according to grammatical persons, the participle is frequently used in several verbal expressions: with estar, “to be” (estou cantando, I am singing), andar, “to walk” (ando comendo, I’ve been eating), and vir, “to come” (venho acreditando, since I have believed). Like the continuous tenses in English, which is also a very concrete language, the participle determines the imperfective aspect of actions. Brazilian Portuguese, which is closer to Latin usage, often uses the participle in circumstantial complements such as O garoto ouvia a história sorrindo (The boy listened to the story smiling), whereas in Portugal people frequently prefer the more modern prepositional form of the infinitive: A sorrir, o garoto ouvia a história. Its use reminds us strikingly of the use of the participle in Greek, which is so important for worldly temporal relationships that Plato made it the name of this relationship: participation. Another passage from Vieira, chosen by Raymond Cantel, shows that “the personal infinitive makes a more concrete presentation possible,” and, with the abundance of participles, makes us “feel better the cost and the difficulty” of the action: [T]em o Holandês rebelde de se perturbar, vendo as nossas tropas de quatro Portugueses, e quatro negros marcharem tantas léguas de dificultosíssimos caminhos, sem camelos, nem elefantes, que lhes levem as bagagens, e andarem livres, e intrepidamente em suas campanhas, talando, e abrasando tudo apesar de seus presídios. 2 The personal infinitive The personal infinitive is a nominalizable verbal form, like any infinitive, and temporally indeterminate, but it is conjugated in all three persons of the singular and plural. It may or may not have a grammatical subject, but the real subject that underlies the verbal action is indicated by the verb ending. It is used when one wants to express this subject: cantar (my singing, “my to sing”) cantares (your [fam.] singing, “your to sing”) cantar (his/her singing, “his/her to sing”) cantarmos (our singing, “our to sing”) cantardes (your singing, “your to sing”) cantarem (their singing, “their to sing”) To translate this into French, Italian, or Spanish, languages in which the infinitive usually takes on the function of a noun, the Portuguese expression may be attached to a grammatical person by adding a possessive adjective (mon chanter, mi cantar, etc.). Doing so is stylistically clumsy, but it avoids ambiguities. Consider this extract, in a truly untranslatable baroque style: O quereres e o estares sempre a fim do que em mim é de mim tão desigual faz-me querer-te bem, querer-te mal bem a ti, mal ao quereres assim infinitivamente pessoal e eu querendo querer-te sem ter fim (Your willing and desiring what in me is so different from me makes me wish you well, wish you ill, well to you, ill to your willing, so infinitively personal and I want to want you infinitely . . .) (Caetano Veloso, “O Quereres”) REFS.: Togeby, Knud. “L’Énigmatique infinitif personellel en portugais.” Studia Neophilologica 27 (1955): 211–18. Veloso, Caetano. “O Quereres.” Velô. Universal Distribution 824024, 1998, compact disc. Album originally released in 1984. PORTUGUESE 809 occupation up to the twelfth century. Originally a dialect of the region around the city of Porto, it was recognized officially only in 1256, by King Denis. That is no doubt why it is one of the modern languages closest to Latin. And that is not without importance in philosophy. The study of Latin remained obligatory in Brazilian and Portuguese secondary schools until the 1970s; all authors writing in Portuguese, except the very youngest, know it quite well. Jesuit scholasticism as a whole benefits from it. Vieira, one of the first philosophical writers in Portuguese, quotes the Vulgate in his sermons, as we have seen, without any pedantry. It was only with the expulsion of the Jesuits by the enlightened despotism of Prime Minister Pombal, at the end of the eighteenth century, that Portuguese replaced Latin in the university and the academic world. Plombal’s reforms did a great deal to impose the Portuguese language: from the prohibition on the use of other languages in the colonies (lanugages such as Tupi, still widely spoken in Brazil at that time) to the adoption of a program of educational reform inspired by the works of the philosopher and linguist Luis António Vernay, a follower, in his own way, of John Locke’s theories of knowledge. B. A structural effect The historical proximity of Latin marks the Portuguese language structurally, not only in its vocabulary but also in its syntax, which remains halfway between the old, inflected language and modern languages without declinations. Except for personal pronouns, Portuguese no longer declines words, but their syntagmatic positions in the sentence are nonetheless not fixed. There is a great syntactical mobility, which leads to problems of ambiguity—which is either explored or resolved by an abundant use of commas. All these elements of position and coordination dispose the Portuguese language to the rhetorical figures of the baroque: inversions, ellipses, syllepses, chiasmas, reiterations, etc. If the period is the absolute king of the classical sentence, the comma—twisted, sinuous, doubtful, concessive, reversing— dominates baroque discourse as a whole. Cunha and Cintra’s RT: Nova gramática do português contemporâneo (New grammar of contemporary Portuguese) lists about twenty different uses. The punctuation of Portuguese depends on its general way of constructing sentences. The long sentence full of subordinate clauses is very frequently used. There are even novels consisting of a single sentence, such as Raduan Nassar’s Um copo de cólera (A glass of choler/cholera), a monologue in which punctuation is eliminated and the pauses are determined by the reader’s need to breathe. The same oral eloquence is found in Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias (Galaxies), a poem that, when read aloud, calls for the rhythm of the repentistas, performers who challenge each other verbally until the improvised inspiration of their verses (their life) is finished. But in most cases, the long sentence does not eliminate punctuation; on the contrary, it multiplies commas, semicolons, colons, dashes. A single example will suffice—a sentence from Carneiro Leão’s Third World and his own free translation of it into French (“Tiers Monde”), which forgoes the baroque figures of the Portuguese original: numerous secret societies: the Templars, Rosicrucians, etc. (see SAUDADE). D. The masks of philosophy Although they did not speculate directly, writers, novelists, and poets nonetheless liked, in a manner somewhat resembling Plato or Diderot, to make their characters philosophize. The cynical philosopher Quincas Borba, a character created by the nineteenth-century writer Machado de Assis, resembles Voltaire’s Pangloss with his system of humanitism, which describes all human action as part of a single vital organism: Humanitas, he said, the principle of all things, is nothing other than the same man, distributed over all men. Thus, for example, the headsman who executes a condemned man can excite the vain clamor of poets; but substantially, it is Humanitas that corrects in Humanitas an infraction of the law of Humanitas. (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas) This spurious organicism cuts across the heterogeneous philosophies maintained by Fernando Pessoa’s aliases: personalities or characters, the personae of an author who enjoys describing writers when this author writes texts—art completely displacing the monist status of truth and exploding the idea of subjectivity’s self-identity. In this same vein, Guimarães Rosa’s Riobaldo speculates on the loftiest problems of metaphysics and morals in his language that is semi-illiterate but full of lived experience: At first, I did my damnedest, and didn’t think about thinking, I had no time for that. I lived a hard life, like a live fish in the frying pan: someone who’s wearing himself out doesn’t get all worked up. But now, seeing that I’ve got time, and no little worries, I just lie about. And I’ve discovered this taste for speculating on ideas. Does the devil exist or not? (Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas) It is a fine gloss in popular language but uses a vocabulary drawn from the oldest Western traditions, and in particular from the Aristotelian thesis about the connection between leisure and theoretical activity. III. The Structure and Diachrony of the Baroque in Portuguese It is hard to decide whether the baroque is a style that structurally determines Portuguese or is simply a stage in its history—a very long stage, to be sure, since its effects have persisted more than four centuries. There are arguments on both sides. In any case, it was, is, or will turn out to have been a style or a period for the constitution of Portuguese, just as the Renaissance was for Italian, classicism for French, or Romanticism for German. A. Portuguese among Romance languages Portuguese is the youngest of the neo-Latin languages— according to the Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac (1865–1918): “Latium’s last bloom, uncultivated and beautiful”—delayed in its constitution as the national language by the Arab 810 PORTUGUESE as a radical operation,” a translation of form, of the “mode of intentionality,” of the “aim” of a work, to speak in Benjaminian terms. Whether it be through transcreation or through intertextuality, “anthropophagic reason” is realized in the same perspective: discovering and disseminating the new text, broadening the poetic range of the Portuguese language, expanding the literature, in a renovated language, through the virtual and organically new poetic information. (“Le concret baroque”) After all, nothing prevents a language thoroughly crisscrossed by the appropriation of the classics from producing pages that remain just as rampant, twisted, curvy, sensual, baroque. Portuguese, perhaps by its existential and sentimental tendencies, or perhaps by its heterogeneous syntax, overthrows the abstract status of some universal philosophic notions. The important role played by the information of the aspectual details of verbs, which even multiplies copulative verbs (see FICAR and SPANISH) and which gives time a very humanized, lived, carnal character, undermines the rigid architecture of a very rectilinear reason. In this language, concepts are never columns of cold, white, eternal marble; instead, they are curves sensually shaped in soapstone, like those sculpted by Aleijadinho, which do not even try to conceal the ravages of time. Portuguese express the passage of time and the presence of death, especially because they feel them and usually suffer from them. Sadness, nostalgia, and lassitude are the shifting and swampy ground on which they establish their foundations. If sensual pleasure arises, that is only the result of this awareness of the brevity of life. Therefore it is not surprising that philosophy written in Portuguese tends toward a metaphysics of sensations, more aestheticizing and existential, more inclined toward worldly, human problems, and that more logical or mathematical abstraction has little success. The recent impact of analytical philosophy, which is stronger in Brazil than in Portugal, might turn philosophy toward a simpler and more rigid syntax, although it is closely linked to English-language sources and limited to academia. So long as the spirit of the language remains under the spell of melancholy and the sensual pleasure of the times, universities and philosophical institutions seem to be permanently supplanted by the arts and by literature, which are more sensitive to human experience. Unless, through an inversion that draws thought from the sensations of existence, philosophical abstraction might be perceived as the product of an extreme nostalgia without an object. Then thought would recognize as its own this area that is guarded only by the muses and the Horae, the seasonal gods: Vi que não há Natureza, Que Natureza não existe, Que há montes, vales, planícies, Que há árvores, flores, ervas, Que há rios e pedras, Todo passo é uma aventura de originalidade: passeando pela essência do real, nossos passos caminham pela originariedade do caminho, caminhar e caminhada. (Every step is an adventure in novelty/originariness: strolling through the essence of the real, our steps walk upon the originality of the path, to walk walked.) Car chaque pas est une aventure. En se promenant à travers l’essence de la réalité, nos pas cheminent dans l’originalité du chemin. (Every step is an adventure. In strolling through the essence of reality, our steps walk in the novelty/originariness of the path.) Originalidade and originariedade are both translated by originalité; caminho, caminhar, and caminhada become simply chemin; and the untranslatable paronymy passo, passear is lost. The sentence is divided into two. C. A season of language The fact that Portuguese is a young language may mean not that it owes it flexible syntax to a definitive structure but instead that it is still open to unexpected changes. Will these changes take place, freezing the language in a more rigid structure, or will it retain the characteristic traits of the baroque? Modern languages have generally gone through a process of maturation that involved the translation of classical Greek and Latin texts. During and after these great waves of translation, some of the most significant writers and philosophers in each language arose because they wanted to compete with the ancient models or detach themselves from them. The quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in France and the German Enlightenment and Romanticism are examples of this. Portuguese has not yet finished this task of translating the ancients; it is still at the beginning. Although some translations of Plato and the pre-Socratics have been published, the same cannot be said of translations of Aristotle, for example, which are often simply modeled on English or French translations. Is the acquisition of the classics preparatory to the advent of a language that is itself more classical? Brazil is developing an “anthropophagic reason,” propagated in literature by the concretist movement of Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Brazilian semiologists and poets who have been exercising their neobaroque influence since the foundation in 1952 of a group called Noigandres (the flower that leads ennui astray). Oséki-Dépré offers this comment on Haroldo de Campos’s work De la raison anthropophagique. Dialogue et différence dans la culture brésilienne: in total accord with Oswald de Andrade’s “anthropophagic reason,” which he conceives as “the thought of the critical devouring of the cultural and universal legacy elaborated not on the basis of the subjected and reconciled perspective of the ‘noble savage,’ but on that of the disabused point of view of the ‘bad savage’ who devours whites, the cannibal.” Haroldo de Campos makes explicit and confirms the idea of the “anthologist” attitude of transcreation, a “translation that presents itself POSTUPOK 811 POSTUPOK [пοступοк] (RUSSIAN) FRENCH action, acte libre, engagement v. ACT, and DASEIN, DRUGOJ, DUTY, ISTINA, LIBERTY, PERSON, PRAVDA, PRAXIS, RUSSIAN, SAMOST , SVOBODA, TO BE The Russian word postupok [пοступοк] has been rendered in French by action and by acte. However, action corresponds to the Russian dejstvie [действие], and acte corresponds to the Russian akt [аҡт]. Both translations are thus insufficient. Postupok designates a singular, personal action that presupposes responsibility, not necessarily a morally good act, but an “ethical act.” According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act, postupok is carried out from the position specific to each individual—what Sartre was to call engagement. I. Action: From Dejstvie to Postupok The Russian term dejstvie [действие], “voluntary manifestation of an activity,” is the equivalent of the French action. Unlike dejstvie, akt [аҡт] refers to an action that is more technical than voluntary and connotes the action’s completion (RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 1:9). Dejstvie is the modern neuter form of the old elevated word dejanie [деяние], derived from the verb dejati [деяти], “act” (see RUSSIAN, “L’opposition diglossique en russe”). Dejanie corresponds to the Greek pragma [πϱᾶγμα], and to the Latin actus, actio (RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka, 1:800). In Old Russian dejati also meant “touch” and “speak” (Sreznevskiĭ, Materialy, 1:800–802), but these meanings have now disappeared. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the term postupok [пοступοк] was presented in dictionaries as equivalent to dejanie (RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’, 3:348; RT: Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, 409). The word postupok comes from the Old Russian noun postup [пοступ], “movement, action, act” (Sreznevskiĭ, Materialy, 2:1270) and, finally, the verb stupat [ступать], “to walk, pace.” Etymologically, postupok thus means “the step one has taken.” In contemporary everyday language, the term means “intentional action,” “an individual’s behavior” (RT: Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 3:326). Thus, even in its prephilosophical usage, postupok refers to a singular, personal action; it is thus the best translation of Greek praxis, in the sense of an individual’s act (e.g., in Aristotle). II. Three Levels of Postupok in Bakhtin The contemporary philosophical meaning of postupok has been influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s ethical existentialism. In his unfinished work, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he connects the crisis in contemporary philosophy (he was writing in the early 1920s) with its inability to move beyond the limits of the theoretical world. According to Bakhtin, only the philosophy of the ethical act (postupok) can constitute a first philosophy capable of surmounting the split between culture and life. Bakhtin elaborates the concept of postupok on three levels. 1. The absolute level combines singularity (edinstvennost’ [единственнοсть]) and participation (pričastnost’ [причастнοсть]). Bakhtin’s starting point is the fact expressed by the assertion “I am.” This fact has two Mas que não há um todo a que isso apparpertença, Que um conjunto real e verdadeiro É uma doença das nossas idéias. (I’ve seen that there is no Nature, That nature does not exist, That there are hills, valleys, plains, That there are trees, flowers, pastures, That there are rivers and stones, But that there is no whole to which all this belongs, That a true and genuine whole Is a disease of our ideas.) (Pessoa, Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro) Fernando Santoro REFS.: Campos, Haroldo de. Galáxías. São Paulo: Editora Ex Libris, 1984. Cantel, Raymond. Les sermons de Vieira: Étude du style. Paris: Ediciones HispanoAmericanas, 1959. Carneiro Leão, Emmanuel. “Tiers Monde.” Sociétés 2, no. 2 (February 1986): 3–4. Costa, João, ed. Portuguese Syntax: New Comparative Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Guimarães Rosa, João. Grande Sertão: Veredas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 2006. First published in 1956. Translation by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onis: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. New York: Knopf, 1963. Levenson, Jay A. The Age of the Baroque in Portugal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Machado de Assis, Joachim Maria. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Ors, Eugeni d’. Lo barroco. Madrid: Tecnos, 1993. Oséki-Dépré, Inês. “Le concret baroque.” In Galaxies, by Haroldo de Campos, translated by Inês Oséki-Dépré. La Souterraine, Fr.: La Main courante, 1998. Pellegrin, Benito. “Visages, vivrages, rivages du baroque.” In Figures du baroque, edited by Jean-Marie Benoist and Suzanne Allen. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquietude. Translated by Richard Zenith. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. . The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro. Translated by Chris Daniels. London: Shearsman Press, 2007. . Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard Griffin. New York: Grove Press, 1998. . A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard Griffin. New York: Penguin, 2006. . Message. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. London: Menard Press, 1992. . Poesia de Álvaro de Campos. Lisbon: Ática, 1944. . Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Quadros, António. O espríto da cultura portuguesa. Lisbon: Sociedade de Expansão Cultural, 1967. . A idéia de Portugal na literatura portuguesa dos últimos 100 anos. Lisbon: Fundaçao Lusíada, 1989. Spinelli, Vincenzo. A língua portuguesa nos seus aspectos melódico e ritmico. Lisbon: Quandrante, 1940. Veloso, Caetano. “Lingua.” On Velô. Universal Distribution 824024, 1998, compact disc. Album originally released in 1984. Vieira, António. “Sermao da sexageima” [Sermon for Sexagesima]. In Obras Completas, vol. 1. Porto: Lello, 1951. First published in 1655. . Sermǒes. 2 vols. Sǎo Paulo: Hedra, 2000. . Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Dartmouth, MA: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Press, 2009. 812 POWER sobytie is “common being, common existence, co-existence.” Bakhtin metaphorically actualizes the term bytie-sobytie: The real being-event [bytie-sobytie] is determined not in and by itself, but precisely in relation to my own constraining singularity: If the “face” of an event is determined from the unique place of a participative self, then there are as many different “faces” as there are different [individual poles of subjective responsibility.] (Ibid., 45) The whole set of personal worlds creates a unique event. The word sobytie comes from the verb sbyvat’sja ([сбьɪваться], “to be realized”). Another meaning that is clearly present in sobytie is thus that of the realization of the singular existence of the Self (see SAMOST’). It is only in the world shared with others that this realization takes place: in sobytie the individual makes his singular place a responsible step (postupok) toward others (see SVOBODA and DRUGOJ). Thus the postupok is the responsible act through which a person participates in being. From the point of view of values, the postupok cannot be subordinated to the goals, desires, or needs of which it is the realization. Unlike the act considered by analytical philosophy, the postupok is a value in itself, that is, an ultimate value: “The act [potupok] is a final accounting, an ultimate, deepened conclusion” (ibid., 103). That is why, according to Bakhtin, only the postupok unites the world of culture with that of life. Andriy Vasylchenko REFS.: Bakhtin, Mikhail. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. aspects, the singularity of individual existence—it is I who am—and its participation—I am to be. Et ego sum (I ja—esm’ [И я—есмь]), I too, exist actually (dejstvitel’no [действительнο]) I, too, participate in Being in a once-occurrent and never repeatable manner: I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else. (Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy, 40) One must therefore understand the singularity of a person as his non-coincidence with everything that is not himself. The word esm’ in the expression ja esm’ (“I am”) is the archaic Slavonic (and therefore elevated) form of the verb est’ [есть], the infinitive of which, byt’ [бьɪть], is the root of the word bytie [бьɪтиe] (“to be”). Moreover, bytie is the elevated term in the opposition bytie/suščestvovanie [существοвание] (“existence”) (see ISTINA). To stress the absolute character of the fact of the “singular participation” of a person in Being, Bakhtin introduces the metaphor of the “non-alibi in Being” (ne-alibi v bytii [не-алиби в бьɪтии]). Man has no moral alibi: he can escape neither his own singularity nor his unique place. It is on this non-alibi in being that the duty to act is based: That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else. The uniqueness and singularity of presenton-hand Being is compellently [sic] obligatory. (Ibid.) 2. The level of existential choice is situated between responsibility (otvetstvennost’ [οтветственнοсть]) and duty (dolženstvovanie [дοлженствοвание]). However, duty is not absolute in character. One can in fact choose to assume responsibility for one’s own existence or to ignore it and become an impostor (samozvanets [самοзванец]). Only the acceptance of responsibility creates duty. Duty is possible only where there is a recognition of the existence [bytie] of a singular person within himself. The responsible act [postupok] is an act [postupok] based on the recognition of one’s constraining singularity. (Ibid., 113) 3. The ontological level concerns the act (postupok) and the event (sobytie [сοбьɪтие]). The singularity of a person is definitively realized only in a responsible act: The act [postupok] constitutes once and for all the actualization of the possible in the singular. (Ibid., 103) However, according to Bakhtin, the being in which I participate cannot be reduced to the world of my act alone. The ultimate subject of moral philosophy is “the being-event” (bytie-sobytie [бьɪтие-сοбьɪтие]), the world of the intersubjective event. The Russian prefix so-, the equivalent of Latin co-, designates a common characteristic of being. By its etymology POWER, POSSIBILITY “Power” derives from Latin posse, which itself goes back to the adjective potis, meaning “powerful, master of” (on the Indo-European root *poti-, which designates the leader of a group, family, clan, or tribe; cf. Gr. posis [πόσις], “spouse,” despotês [δεσπότης], “master of the house,” potnia [πότνια], “mistress”). However, the Latin verb, and in particular the impersonal potest, from which derived in the time of Quintilian the learned adjectives possibilis and impossibilis, created to translate Greek dunatos [δυνατός] and adnunatos [ἀδύνατος] (from dunamis [δύναμις], “strength”; see DYNAMIC), expresses, like the impersonal Greek dunatai [δύναται], “possibility” (fieri potest ut, “it may happen that”). Thus pouvoir operates in the area between, on the one hand, possibility as a logical category modality (possibilitas) that is distinct from the impossible, the contingent, and the necessary, and that is connected with potentiality as an ontological category (potentia) determining the real or the actual, and, on the other hand, power (potestas) in the moral and political sense, to establish a relationship with duty and authority. The interferences between these two major meanings, logico-ontological and ethicopolitical, within the diverse linguistics systems, are particularly noticeable in the entries DUTY and WILLKÜR, I.C. PRAVDA 813 I. Slavic Pravda and Indo-European “Justice” The Slavic word pravda [правда] corresponds to the Greek dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη] and the Latin justitia. It is formed on the Slavic root prav, “straight, just” (RT: Ėtimologicheskiĭ slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Etymological dictionary of the Russian language], 352). The most plausible etymology traces prav back to Indo-European *pro-vos, related to Latin probus, “good, honest” (probhus), Sanskrit prabhús, “exceptional, superior,” and Anglo-Saxon fram, “strong, active, courageous.” In Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Russian, the first sense of pravda is “justice” and the second “truth”; in Serbo-Croatian, prâvda means “legal prosecution, trial”; in Slovene, pravdâ means “regulation, law, legal action”; pravda in Czech and Slovak and prawda in Polish have analogous connotations. In contemporary Russian the word pravednik [праведник], “just man,” goes back to Old Church Slavonic and corresponds to Greek dikaios [δίϰαιος] (“just”), hagios [ἅγιος] (“saint”), martus Christou [μάρτυς Χριστοῦ] (“martyr to Christ”). To the antonym nepravda [неправда] correspond adikia [ἀδιϰία], anomia [ἀνομία], “injustice.” Logically, the word pravda should occupy a central place in the philosophical dictionary of the language to which it belongs. But if we try to find the article “Pravda” in the fivevolume philosophical encyclopedia published in the USSR, we have to acknowledge its absence. Why? This silence, which distances itself from the title of the periodical Pravda, the official voice of the authoritarian regime, leads far beyond ideological considerations and the circumstances of place, time, or censorship, and allows us to take another approach to classical theologico-political problems. The historian and philosopher George Fedotov, who emigrated to the United States after the Second World War, offers the following explanation: “The Russian word pravda has a particularly rich meaning: it can mean ‘justice,’ ‘righteousness,’ and even ‘truth.’ And we certainly encounter it through its contrary, nepravda (injustice) at every step of the way in the annals of relations between powers” (Russian Religious Mind, 2: 171). Translations do not betray us when pravda renders the Greek dikaiosunê in the Septuagint or dikê [δίϰη] in Heraclitus or Sophocles (Antigone’s dikê is rendered as pravda). Classical expressions such as “the sun of pravda”—sol justitiae—reflect a traditional ethico-cosmological analogy whose essence is revealed by the principle according to which “the world holds together thanks to the just.” The inverse is presupposed to be true: the just themselves depend on the analogy between the order of the world (mir [мир]) and the order of the city so long as this analogy lasts. Once this traditional bond was broken by modern physics, the semantic stability of pravda was affected, and first of all, its proverbial practical character. In the standard dictionary of V. I. Dal’, pravda is defined as “truth in action, truth manifested, the good; justice done, equity.” In the examples Dal’ gives, the accent is clearly on active participation and the act as such: “Practice justice and pravda,” “fight for pravda,” “live in accord with pravda”; and pravdivost’ [правдивость] (a substantive derived from pravda, signifying conformity with pravda and usually translated by “veracity, sincerity”) is explained as “complete adequation between utterance and action.” Many expressions of this kind remain alive in the Russian language today, going I. Power, Possibility, Potentiality A. Logical modality On the expression of possibility as a category of modality, in its relation to negation and time, see, for example, ASPECT, INTENTION, NEGATION, NOTHING, PRÉDICABLE, PRESENT, PRINCIPLE, VERNEINUNG, WUNSCH. Cf. PROBABILITY [CHANCE], and DESTINY. B. Ontological modality The “possible” is taken first of all in the sense of what is “potential” as opposed to what is actual: see ACT, I (esp. PRAXIS and FORCE, on the matricial difference dynamis/ energeia [ἐνέϱγεια]). Something that is “physically” possible satisfies the general conditions of experience: see EXPERIENCE, IL Y A, NATURE, PHÉNOMÈNE [ERSCHEINUNG]; cf. EPISTEMOLOGY. In a certain ontological perspective, possibility merges with reality (realitas): see in particular ATTUALITÀ, REALITY, RES ; cf. ESSENCE, SPECIES. II. Power and Political Power Power is nothing other than the ability to act and, more precisely, to act in an effective way in pursuing goals: see ACT, II[PRAXIS]. Political power designates the ability to make others act in a specific way, even if this requires coercion; thus it differs from authority: see AUTHORITY and HERRSCHAFT. On the relation between potentia and potestas, power and violence, see MACHT; cf. LEX, PIETAS, RELIGIO. Generally speaking, power is of considerable importance in modern moral and political philosophy, which stresses freedom more than virtues and the ability to coerce more than authority: see LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA, POSTUPOK, SVOBODA], OBLIGATION [SOLLEN], VIRTUE [VIRTÙ], WILL, WILLKÜR; cf. DROIT, LAW, MORALS, STATE. v. GOD, SECULARIZATION PRAVDA [правда] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH righteousness, justice, truth FRENCH justice, équité, vérité GREEK dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη] LATIN justitia v. JUSTICE, THEMIS, TRUTH, and DROIT, ISTINA, LAW, MIR, POSTUPOK, PRAXIS, SOBORNOST’, SVET The word pravda [правда], despite the unambiguous nature of the equivalents used to translate it: “truth,” vérité, Wahrheit—designates not only truth but also justice. The accent falls chiefly on the latter meaning when we examine words that have the same root: pravo [право] (law), spravedlivost’ [справедливость] (justice, equity), pravosudie [правосудиe] (justice, correct judgment). But pravda is not a homonym: its meaning resists a complete separation of the notions of istina [истина] (truth) and spravedlivost’ (justice), of theory and practice. Pravda is never used to designate scientific truth. We can gauge the effects of untranslatability by the fact that pravda is usually rendered by “truth,” neglecting its initial semantic field: justice, legitimacy, law, equity. 814 PRAVDA political problems. By relativizing our representation of the immutable essence of the word pravda, we discover its now concealed semantic dimensions, which have remained at the stage of unrealized possibilities. Untranslatable today, they represented potentialities of translation in the network of European idioms; but the course of revolutions has led to their not being actualized. However that may be, confronted by this massive forgetfulness, it is important to emphasize that the original legal meaning of the word pravda has passed through all sorts of vicissitudes, including the 1917 revolution’s systematic destruction and abolition of the Czarist regime’s legal institutions and the traditional linguistic representations of justice. III. The Bipolarity Pravda/Istina Law and ethics designate practical philosophy as the domain for the positive application of the notion of pravda; the negative definition of the limit of this notion’s use is provided by the theory of knowledge and the natural sciences: the latter operate with istina [истина] and not pravda. Modern sciences sometimes reject the word pravda and sometimes eliminate its immediate semantic context, as in “promises, oaths, injunctions, commands, decrees, regulations, laws, contracts, judgments, witnesses” (Uspensky, Jazykovaja situacija Kievskoj Rusi). Ancient philosophy broadened the domains in which the word “law” (nomos, [νομός]) could be applied by transferring it by analogy from the polis [πόλις] to the kosmos [ϰόσμος], from the human world to the natural world. Starting in the seventeenth century, under the influence of advances in mechanics, the analogy was turned around: the concept of “physical” law, following the demonstration of its unprecedented effectiveness in describing material objects, began to determine the conception of justice and “social physics.” Naturalism was erected into a social project. Of the different aspects of action—“who?” “where?” “when?” “how?”—naturalism absolutized the one most distant from humans and circumstances: “what (to do)?” The leveling of the dimensions constitutive of pravda—references to the person and the situation (“opportunity” [ϰαιρός]), see MOMENT, II; Aristotelian “equity” [ἐπιειϰής], see THEMIS, IV)—made pravda back to expressions that bear witness to the lasting influence of the first translations into Slavic of the liturgy, the psalms, and the Scriptures made by Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century, hundreds of years before the Latin Vulgate passed into other vernacular languages. The main instrument of literacy was the Book of Psalms, and learning to read conveyed this analogy between the order of the created world and that of the city. . II. Pravda and the Gap between “Legality” and “Legitimacy” The semantic development of pravda did not undergo the systematic and direct influence of Roman law. The limits of the word were not determined within a system of codified notions, so that a series of obstacles to radical inquiry into its relationships with jurisprudence in the strict sense of the term did not arise. But history provides unquestionable proof that these relations had all their meaning from the outset: pravda is a key notion in vernacular law and gave its name to the oldest collection of laws set down in writing by the East Slavs, The Russian Pravda (eleventh century). Although the modernization of legal terminology changed the semantics of pravda, its legal sense was not erased but given a superior status. At the same time that he asked Leibniz to draw up a system of social classification for his empire, Peter the Great ordered Feofan Prokopovich to define the emperor’s absolute legal power in a document entitled The Pravda of the Monarch’s Will (1722; we see in this text the direct influence of Hobbes and Pufendorf). Can pravda in this title be rendered as “legitimacy”? This translation was to be contested more than once. In response to the absolutist version of a radical rationalization of law, there followed a no less radical reaction on the part of the Russian Jacobins led by Colonel Pestel (hanged 1825), who entitled his constitution The Russian Pravda. But can pravda be translated here by “constitution”? This historical question was answered in the negative by the unsuccessful attempts to limit the monarch’s pravda constitutionally—until the revolution of 1905. Questions of this kind do not reduce the philosophical and philological problems of translation to historical and 1 The Slavic liturgical language In the twentieth century R. Jakobson and N. Trubetskoy demonstrated the fundamental linguistic and liturgical role played by Cyril and Methodius in constituting the lexicon of the principle Slavic notions. Their hermeneutics was explicitly developed in the course of the controversy in Venice in 867 regarding “the heresy of three languages,” in which translation into the Slavic language was accused of infringing on the sacred character of the three “untranslatable” liturgical languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The innovation of Cyril and Methodius was taken over in Hussite translations (fourteenth century), had repercussions on vernacular translations throughout Europe at the time of the Reformation, and finally led to the liturgical reform adopted by Rome in the twentieth century, as well as to the proclamation of Cyril and Methodius as patrons of united Europe (1980). But what is paradoxical today is the situation of the Slavic language itself (in which an important role is assigned to the word pravda): just as in the case of Latin until recently, a discussion is going on concerning Slavic’s untranslatable character (see RUSSIAN). In the precise case of the word pravda, its liturgical use has retained, in the language of Dostoevsky and Pasternak, traditional semantic strata that disappear when it is translated by the “secular” words “justice” and “truth.” REFS.: Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings. Vol. 6: Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads. New York: Mouton, 1985. Trubetskoy, Nikolai Sergeyevich. Obščeslovianskiy element v russkoj kulture [The pan-Slavic element in Russian culture]. In Histoire. Culture. Langue. Moscow: Éd. Progress, 1995. . Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague, no. 8. Prague, 1939. PRAVDA 815 lead to the emergence of “the new man” but is transformed into vengeance taken on anything that resists them. On the way to revenge, justice deteriorates into mere vengeance. Twisted in this way, pravda does not cut the Gordian knot of violence but finds itself still more tightly bound by it, losing its natural ally, freedom. All or nothing, thesaurus or tabula rasa, those are the two poles of the controversy between Solovyov and nihilism. The argument of Solovyov’s work Opravdanie dobra (1896 [The justification of the good]) seeks to demonstrate the conjunction of civil liberty (law) and freedom of conscience (morality) in pravda. Opposing Tolstoy’s juridical nihilism, Solovyov writes concerning pravda: Here we have a term which alone embodies the essential unity of the juridical and moral principles. In all languages, moral and juridical notions are expressed either by the same terms or by terms derived from the same root dikê and dikaiosunê, jus and justitia, as in Russian, pravo [право] (law) and pravda, in German Recht and Gerechtigkeit, in English right and righteousness. The two meanings are distinguished by suffixes. Cf. also the .[צְ דָ קָ ה] ṣedāqāh and] צֶדֶ ק] ṣèdèq Hebrew (Solovyov, Justification of the Good, 317) Solovyov defines pravda as “the right relation toward everything” (ibid., 136); it is the universal principle of his philosophical system. For his book L’Idée russe, written in French, Solovyov quotes and translates the Slavophile Axakov’s judgment regarding the transformation of the administrative structures of the church into a department of the state apparatus: “For the ideal of a truly spiritual government (pravlenie [правление], inner pravda) has been substituted by that of a purely formal and external order (pravda, ordre)” (191). Why did Solovyov translate pravda by the French word ordre? The translation difficulty arises in part from the noncorrespondence between two incongruent elements: on the one hand, external and internal pravda in Russian, and on the other hand, justiceinstitution and justice-vertu in French. In an article written in German, “The Russian Worldview” (1925), Siméon Frank, the greatest of Solovyov’s disciples, emphasized that The Russian language has a very characteristic word that plays an extremely important role in the whole structure of Russian thought—from the popular way of thought to creative genius. This untranslatable word is pravda, which designates simultaneously the istina and moral and natural law, just as in German the word richtig designates something appropriate or adequate on both the theoretical and the practical levels. The unity of pravda and pravo, broken and presented as archaic by the nihilist point of view, was reconstituted by Solovyov and Frank. In response to the charge of archaism, they undertook an archeology of pravda. V. Projects Seeking to Move beyond the Theory/ Practice Opposition with the Help of Pravda In the modern period the untranslatability of the word pravda is connected with the separation between the vita entirely dependent on an istina interpreted instrumentally. But that did not eliminate the bipolarity between istina, which corresponds to the question of “being,” and pravda, which corresponds to the question of “ought to be.” For instance, istina notes the “physiology” of a disease affecting an individual or a society; pravda moves to the question of what must be, in opposition to what must not be. The necessity of actively realizing pravda takes on a particularly menacing character when it is reduced to the practical application of an already known istina. Separating pravda from the concrete “who” (fundamentally inaccessible) and from the concrete “where” (which localizes knowledge), made it more abstract and manipulable. At the turn of the twentieth century, the “conflict of faculties” ended with the belligerent domination of the natural sciences and the Russian nihilists’ notion that it was possible to apply to society schemas as rigid as Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements. This model represses the semantic plurality of the term pravda illustrated by the proverb “to each his own pravda.” IV. The Short-Circuit between Pravda and Violence The revenge of pravda in a space geometricalized by science takes on a moral and universal character. Tolstoy’s protest against violence is not limited to a devastating criticism of the police state, war, and the military but is also directed against the judicial system, whose function of limiting violence cannot be performed without resorting to violence. What is required is the implementation of a radical separation between the pravda-pardon of the Gospels and the pravda-vengeance of the pagans. The petition that Solovyov and Tolstoy addressed to Alexander III in 1881 on behalf of regicide terrorists provides a historical example: “Using violence to render justice means admitting that pravda itself is powerless. Contemporary revolution shows by its acts that it acknowledges that pravda itself is powerless. But in reality pravda is strong, although the violence of contemporary revolution betrays its impotence” (Solovyov, Smysl sovremennyx sobytij, 38). The abolition of slavery in America and in Europe (including Russia, in 1861) explains in part the elevated level of hopes for justice and goodwill during this period. Solovyov ironically sums up this irrational leap into naturalistic argumentation in the following syllogism: “Man is descended from the apes, therefore let us love one another.” The fear that the “sources of the self” (to adopt Charles Taylor’s title) might go bankrupt or become insolvent is connected with the gap that opens between the moral precept and the one who formulates it in a “sermon on the mount,” on the one hand, and the space in which people try to put it into practice, on the other. The major factor of space—from the Baltic to the Pacific—has a considerable influence on the topos of pravda, subjecting it to a linear logic and the leveling that we find in the revolutionary tabula rasa. Geographers have calculated that the dimensions of Nicholas II’s empire amounted to one-sixth of the earth’s surface. The globalization of an egalitarian system of justice in this world without limits and borders sheds light on the implacable logic described in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils and put into action by Bolshevism. The determination expressed by his characters, who set out to erase evil as such on the continent, does not 816 PRAVDA c. “The unity of theory and practice” proclaimed by Marxism-Leninism is the main cause of the latter’s success in Europe, which seeks in vain the aforementioned unity. Marx returned the Aristotelian concept of praxis to the center of philosophy, reorienting it toward a “technology of history.” Marxism promised humanity that it would make political action intelligible in the present and historical theory intelligible in the past and the future, and it replaced the Bible in the libraries of the intelligentsia. But at the same time the biblical notion of pravda, which was full of forgotten eschatological promises, retained for the Russian intelligentsia its value as a symbol of a new synthesis. After the 1905 revolution it was subjected to criticism by thinkers who had broken with Marxism, such as N. Berdyayev, P. Struve, S. Bulgakov, S. Frank, et al. To the intelligentsia’s pravda, Berdyayev opposed the “philosophical istina” and called for a search for a different synthesis, “a synthesis that responds to the intelligentsia’s legitimate and positive need for an organic unification of theory and practice, of pravda-istina with pravda-justice) (Berdyayev, “Intelligentskaïa pravda,” 29). But in accord with Lev Shestov’s pessimistic analysis, pravda is helpless to resist the expansion of Utopia, that is, of a system of hypertheoretical responses to hyperpractical questions. VI. The Difficulties of Retroversion: Justice-Pravda-Truth Introduced by Saint-Simon and Fourier, the expression “social justice” is rendered in Russian by pravda. A century of the development of revolutionary ideas was also to confer on both the social idea and its lexical form a semantic freight absent in Western sources. In the nineteenth century, the word pravda, even without the adjective “social,” was loaded with an explosive connotation. It was a challenge to the old semantic order. This connotation is easily discernible in what Dostoevsky wrote when he was a young follower of Fourier; it is modified substantially, though it has not entirely disappeared in his last works, where he warns against the revolutionary obsession. It is around the word pravda that the web of the (meta)juridical trials in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov is woven. Pravda provides the axis of the “Pushkin speech” (1880), which is considered Dostoyevsky’s intellectual testament (Heidegger’s “European Nihilism,” for example, opens with a quotation from this speech). If we take into account the major semantic enrichment of the notion, retranslating pravda into French by resorting to the initial concept of “social justice” would be reductive and unacceptable. But translating pravda into French by vérité is an example of “untranslatability” that deprives the reader of the references that intersect in the search for “justice” in France and in Russia (francophone Russian intellectuals cross French ideas with Old Church Slavonic). Dostoyevsky writes: Truth [pravda] is not outside yourself, but in yourself; find it in yourself, subject yourself to yourself, dominate yourself yourself, and you will see the truth [pravda]. It is not in things, this truth [pravda], it is not outside you or somewhere beyond the seas, it is above all in your own work on yourself. Overcome yourself, repress yourself—and you will be free as you have never dreamed activa and the vita contemplativa (Hannah Arendt). The invention of “technology” (of the concept and of the phenomenon, as is shown by the school of Alexandre Koyré) is determined by the fact that the paradigm of the divergence between technê [τέχνη] and epistêmê [ἐлιστήμη] in Plato and Aristotle is replaced by that of their convergence in Descartes and Bacon. The axiomatics of “practical philosophy” and of basic concepts is transformed by terminological “practicism” as the decisive criterion of scientific theories and ideological doctrines. Dependence on a technological invention like the printing press paves the way for a political instrumentalization of pravda. After Kant’s two Critiques, setting rigorous limits to “theoretical reason” and “practical reason,” three paths leading toward their synthesis emerged in European philosophy: the aesthetic-anthropological (Schiller), the politico-speculative (Hegel), and the socio-historical (Marx). a. The aesthetic synthesis of Schiller’s Russian followers tended to unify practical good and theoretical istina within the concept of pravda: that is the specificity of the “message” of the Russian novel and the leitmotiv of literary and social criticism (beyond the cleavages between conservatives and revolutionaries). The way in which N. K. Mikhailovsky formulated this idea has gone down in the annals of the radical intelligentsia: Every time the word pravda occurs to me, I cannot help marveling at the extraordinary beauty it contains. This word exists, it seems, in no other European language. Only the Russian language, it appears, designates truth and justice by the same word, so that they seem to merge in a grandiose unity. (Mikhailovsky, Écrits) b. The Slavic Hegelians’ political synthesis tends to unify truth and justice in the concept of the state. But while in Germany the state is defined by the philosophy of right (Recht), in Russia it is defined by the philosophy of pravda (legitimacy-justice). The short-circuiting of the concepts of state and pravda characterizes the utopia of the right-wing Hegelians. Thus the ideologues of “Eurasianism” reconceptualized pravda in statist terms. In 1921 the Eurasianist historian M. Shakhmatov concluded his study “The Pravda State (Essay on the History of Statist Ideals in Russia)” (in Evrazijskij Vremennik [Eurasian annals], 4 (1925): 304) with the following diagnosis: Contemporary Europe has moved away from the “Pravda state.” Some of its elements have been preserved only in England, where religion and law, law and ethics, have not yet been completely separated. This kind of diagnosis conflates two orders of “untranslatability.” The rationalization of the jurisprudence of various European traditions has not made the concepts pravda/ Recht/“law” identical (whence the reference to a “traditional” England; see LAW). In addition, within the limits of the Russian language, one cannot formulate pravda in juridical terms, which in Europe are determined by the separation of religion, morality, and law, and especially of force and law. PRAVDA 817 it unmasked the hypocrisy concealing the contradiction between pious words and impious actions. The concept of contra-diction (protivo-rečie [противоречие]) thus recovered its initial practical meaning (more concrete than in Hegelian logic). Mutatis mutandis, we can say that for pravda the “criterion of contradiction in practical philosophy” established by Solovyov is just as fundamental as the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction is for istina in theoretical philosophy. Solovyov reintroduced, above and beyond German idealism, the initiative of carrying out the mutation of European practical philosophy; according to him, this project went back to Patristics, from Origen to Saint Augustine and Maximus the Confessor—in numerous Slavonic translations of Pseudo-Dionysius, Pravda-Dikaiosunê is one of the names of God. Moreover, we must emphasize the radical difference between this project and those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which are analogous to it in other respects, seeking the transformation of Western metaphysics. The point of departure for Solovyov and Dostoyevsky is not the isolated individual whose freedom breaks the bonds uniting people to each other and appears to be “irrational” with regard to universal reason but the verbal relationship between free beings, the verbal bond that counts on shared freedom and on a life open to the paradox of pravda. VIII. Nepravda: Principle and Effect of “Newspeak” Nepravda is the key word that allows us to characterize an ideological regime that systematically falsifies its discourse. In his novel 1984 George Orwell gave a precise description of the fundamental relation that links nepravda—lawlessness— to terror directed against traditional “untranslatabilities” and against formal logic (on the pediment of the “Ministry of Pravda,” we can read the slogan “War is Peace”). The path that leads to social arbitrariness passes by way of a semantic mutation of the vocabulary. The cleavage between two words derived from the same root, pravo (law) and pravda, is the result of the implementation of Soviet newspeak. In the twentieth century remarks concerning the original meaning of nepravda (“crime, infraction of the law”) disappeared from dictionaries. Dal’ ’s dictionary (1881) has this to say about nepravda: “any illegitimate, violent action contrary to conscience; vexation, unjust judgment, iniquity. Latin equivalents: injuria, injustum, improbitas, inaequitas.” But Dal’ explains the change in nepravda and pravda—which he regards as contemporary: The meaning of these words has been deformed almost before our very eyes, because now they have become synonyms of “lie” (lož [ложь]) and “truth” (istina). But originally istina referred solely to intellectual notions, while pravda referred to moral qualities, and that is why our first body of laws was called The Russian Pravda. (Dal’, Tolkovyĭ slovar’, 2: 529) What is emphasized here is a specific historical stage in the rationalization of pravda, the breaking of its ties with the juridical and moral spheres; these ties have been significantly loosened but are still perceptible in the uses of its antonym. In the article “Criminal Act” in Brockhaus and of being free, and you will undertake a great work, and make others free, and find happiness, for your life will be filled with joy and you will finally understand your people and its sacred truth [pravda]. ( Dostoyevsky, Diary of a Writer, 1356) VII. Pravda: A Word That Has the Force of Law and That Goes beyond the Law As a universal laboratory always in search of pravda, literature has powerfully contributed to shaping the idea: the “word” (slovo [слово]) replaces the judge and the supreme law (note that slovo is an “untranslatable”: it means both “word” and “discourse,” “address,” “saying,” and refers back to logos). “Starting with Gogol, Russian literature sets out in quest of pravda, and teaches us how to achieve it” (Berdyayev, Origins of Russian Communism). Vladimir Solovyov said that, before the defeat at Sevastopol, Gogol’s Dead Souls was for Russia the “Last Judgment.” The notion of pravda was then associated with the Inspector General (Revizor) in the old Czarist regime. Pravda, like the Inspector General, penetrates all the cells and affairs of the capital and the provinces of the empire, revealing his analytical power and imposing his fundamental criteria. Pravda and Revizor travel incognito. “One must not cheat with words”—this maxim of Gogol’s was used by Solovyov as an epigraph to the article written toward the end of his life about the question of freedom of conscience in the Russian Empire. The imbroglio of lies that characterized the relations among the state, the church, society, the secret police, literature, censorship, the universities, and the educational system became particularly unbearable in light of the judgments made by Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. The paralysis of the legal system and the imperial government’s tendency to infringe the law at all levels of the administrative hierarchy much more radically than in other European cultures led to distrust of the judicial system, whereas confidence in verbal judgment increased. The word that does justice—pravda—is not presented as a commentary on or a complement to existing law, or even as its competitor, but as a tribunal in the absence of law, as the legislator of an alternative justice. Assigned this function, the word is endowed with new potentialities revealed by the challenges and ordeals of Russian and Soviet history; for the same reasons, it is less developed than it is in countries that have not experienced totalitarianism. This is a historical reason for the difficulty of translating pravda as the uprightness of verbal judgment, of the word invested with the power to make final, authoritative decisions. Solovyov sought to examine from a philosophical point of view the theme of decision-making responsibility that constitutes the (non)correspondence of word and action in great empires. According to him, the Second Rome, the thousand-year-long Byzantine Empire, fell because of the contradiction between a pagan conception of the state inherited from the First Rome and the commands of Christ, affirmed in words but ignored in acts. It was this same contradiction that deprived Ivan the Terrible’s “Third Rome” of legitimacy. According to Solovyov, Peter the Great’s revolution destroyed less the organic unity of old Russia than 818 PRAVDA everyone. Fedotov deconstructs this a priori assumption that serves as the basis for all debate about communism. Instead of discussing the claims made about this tabula rasa that was the USSR, covering about one-sixth of the planet’s surface, Fedotov examines it as a palimpsest and deciphers the lines and meanings that have been effaced. Hegelians on both the right and the left (A. Kojève, G. Lukács) followed the course of the Absolute through history by reading the collective letters published in the newspaper Pravda; Fedotov, on the contrary, scrutinized the “effaced” and silent destiny of those who, despite the party’s orders, did not sign these letters, who crossed their names off the lists of the historical nomenklatura, who deprived their families of any place in the sun of Humanity. The rigorous distinction between the concepts of the “sense of history” and pravda gave these people effaced by the winners’ history a right to exile. “The Pravda of the Defeated” is the title of a programmatic article of 1933, in which Fedotov contrasts two opposed philosophies of history: the Hegelian and the Augustinian. The reexamination of the latter is guided by an axiom: the smallest movements toward good or evil are impossible to erase. Hospitality accorded to those who have no place in either the political system or the idealist system is situated in a hermeneutics of the palimpsest: “To bet on those who are today without power, who hide in ‘the caves and burrows’ of Soviet life, on those whose voices do not reach us, but of whom, in truth, neither Russia nor the ‘the entire world are worthy,’ let us dare to bet on these unknown people, in full awareness of the risk we are taking: that is Pascal’s wager, the wager of faith, the wager without which no one’s life is worth living” (Tiažba o Rossii, 313). An internal emigré, Osip Mandelbaum established the link between exile in the name of pravda and the topological analysis of Dante’s Inferno. The word pravdo-ljubie [правдолюбие] (philo-dikaia) refers us to a semantic matrix analogous to the one Émile Benveniste described in the combination of philos and xenos (see LOVE). The paradigmatic example of philo-dikaia was provided by the radical hospitality granted by the Glagolev family in 1941, in Kiev, to a Jewish family in danger of being shot by the Nazis. The Glagolevs gave their guests their house, their passports, and their name. An important document about this has been published: Father Alexis Glagolev, In the Name of His Friends (Novy Mir, no. 10, 1991). Here hospitality becomes synonymous with solidarity in exile. Paul Celan used Marina Tsvetayeva’s formulation of philo-dikaia as an epigraph: “Poets are youpins.” Here philo-xenia and philo-dikaia are one and the same thing. Such a topology of pravda is at the antipodes of the utopia of the “pravda-state.” X. The Paradox of Pravda In the American translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in thirty-five volumes—which is among the great dictionaries, being both a reference work and a unique testimony to the period of the cold war—the word pravda is translated as “truth.” No reference is made to justice, right, or righteousness. This biased translation of a biased article devoted to the newspaper with the largest circulation on earth represents the tip of the iceberg: the British called this encyclopedia “lies in alphabetical order.” Efron’s encyclopedic dictionary (RT: Entciklopediceskij slovar’ [Encyclopedic dictionary], vol. 25), “crime” and nepravda are considered equivalents, specifying the forms of juridical nepravda: criminal nepravda and civil nepravda. Soviet dictionaries completely rejected the juridical sense of nepravda and reduced its moral content to a minimum. We might say that the extreme narrowing of the word’s meaning corresponded to an extreme broadening of the reality of nepravda in a criminal state. In response to the Soviet dictionaries, George Fedotov wrote: The word pravda can reply to those who have not totally forgotten the meaning of this word. The pravda that is on the way to exile opposes participation in the general nepravda, in unjust proceedings, edification, work, or deeds at the bottom of which lies a fundamental nepravda. (Tiažba o Rossii, 200–201) IX. Exile for Pravda, Philo-dikaia, Philo-xenia The refusal to participate in a “collective nepravda” organized in a systematic fashion through the implication of everyone in a collective crime and responsibility is the initial act of George Fedotov’s philosophy of exile. He adds a particular topological accent to the ancient and modern theme of the exit from the totalitarian “cave,” that of “exile for pravda”: It is easy to be exiled for pravda; but it is difficult to live for pravda in exile. Pravda is not like statues of the gods that one can take along when fleeing Troy in flames. It has to be permanently vivified, felt again and again in the heart and mind. Otherwise it withers, leaving only a shell of desiccated words. (Ibid., 203) How can one reply when words like “freedom,” “democracy,” “equality,” and “justice” were so discredited during the period between the two world wars? One response, a difficult one, is exile, as an act and as an object of reflection, as a historical phenomenon specific to the twentieth century, that of “displaced persons.” Hannah Arendt expressed her high esteem for Fedotov’s thought in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and his liberal philosophy and critique of Soviet pseudo-pravda were developed in America by M. Karpovitch and M. Malia. In the liberal tradition the reestablishment of the connection between freedom and pravda (after their divorce in Marxism-Leninism) takes on a decisive importance, even if its price is exile. Fedotov analyzes the historical relevance of the Gospels’ encouragement of “those who are persecuted in the name of justice [pravda].” “Exiled” (izgnannye [изгнанные]) and “persecuted” (gonimye [гонимые]) are words that have the same root in Russian. The same goes for the two kinds of emigration, the one that moves “toward the outside” and the one that moves “toward the inside.” The topology of exile manifested externally, visible to all, discovers and offers a chance to reveal to the world the vast, invisible archipelago of “internal exile.” Its reality is denied by the ideologues of the new regime and written off by Western adversaries of communism. In both cases, the revolution’s tabula rasa is simply accepted as a given recognized by PRAVDA 819 the incomprehensible character of something) describes pravda. The criticism of the limits of translation is transformed into a way of understanding the untranslatable. Frank writes: We cannot speak of a superior pravda, express it as such with our concepts, because it speaks about itself, expresses and reveals itself silently; and we have neither the right nor the ability to express this self-revelation adequately by means of our thought; we must remain silent before the grandeur of pravda itself. (Frank, Unknowable, 313) Hegel described the modern world as a way of life in which the newspaper had been substituted for the morning prayer; in the twentieth century the newspaper Pravda tried to put into practice the ultimate consequences of this substitution or “revolution in communication.” To those who seek to interpret the postcommunist, atheistic world, the problem of the untranslatability of this key concept suggests the following strategy: not offering an overall interpretation of the “totalitarian system,” not deducing the meaning of the word pravda from the concept of “totalitarianism,” but reversing the point of view—questioning ideologies that claim to include theory and practice, past and present, vita contemplativa and vita activa, by opening up to the paradoxes of pravda. Constantin Sigov REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Averintsev, Sergei. Sophia-Logos: Slovar’. Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2000. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Berdyayev, Nicolai. “Intelligentskaïa pravda i filosofskaïa istina.” In Vekhi. Iz Glubiny. Moscow: Pravda, 1991. . The Origins of Russian Communism. Translated by R. M. French. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Diary of a Writer. Translated by Boris Brasol. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949. Fedotov, George. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 2: The Middle Ages: The Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944–46. . Tiažba o Rossii [The dispute over Russia]. Paris: YMCA Press, 1982. Frank, Simeon L. The Unknowable: An Ontological Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Translated by Boris Jakim. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983. Malia, Martin. Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Shestov, Lev. Athens and Jerusalem. Translated by Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966. . Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. Translated by Bernard Martin and Spencer E. Roberts. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969. Solovyov, Vladimir. Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Translated by Boris Jakim, Judith Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. . Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy. Translated by Nathalie A. Duddington. London: Constable, 1918. . “Smysl sovremennyx sobytij [The meaning of current events].” In Écrits en deux volumes, 34–38. Moscow: Pravda, 1989. Struve, Nikita. “Pravdobojasn’ [Pravdaphobia].” Vestnik [Le Messager] 2 (1986): 147. Uspensky, Boris. Jazykovaja situacija Kievskoj Rusi i eë znacenie dlja istorii russkogo literaturnogo jazyka [Linguistic situation in Kievan Rus and its importance for the study of the Russian literary language]. Moscow: MGU, 1983. Walicki, Andrzej. Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. At the opposite of this pole of lexicographic falsification, we find the simple absence of an entry for pravda in the five-volume Philosophical Encyclopedia. The figure of the unsaid is an expressive one, the sign revealing the situation of the hostage concept in the post-Stalinist vocabulary. The void where the article on pravda should be in the Philosophical Encyclopedia can be understood not as a lacuna in a text invested with ideological authority but as a rip or tear and a manifestation of the palimpsest on pravda on which Fedotov, from his exile in Paris, made his Pascalian wager. The catastrophe in Chernobyl in 1986 and the official lies about it revealed to millions of people the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet system: “the fear of pravda,” “pravdaphobia” (Struve, Pravdobojazn’, 101–3). Who is afraid of pravda?—that is the slogan of the liberating discourse of glasnost’ [гласность] (another untranslatable term, made ordinary by the “public voice” or by “transparency”). We are witnessing the collapse of the experiment with the “artificial eclipse” of the sun of pravda. Justice-truth regarding communism not only brings out the fundamental contradiction between words and acts; more profoundly, there is the contradiction between the word and its double in “newspeak.” The collapse of the word-idol leads to that of the word-usurper, which excludes verification by means of question and answer. Elaborated by the works of M. Bakhtin and S. Averintsev, the critique of monologic discourse—the rejection of the other—and the philosophy of dialogue enter into civic discourse. The empires of the twentieth century have not erased once and for all dialogue and tension between the two constitutive poles of Europe: the istina of Athens and the pravda of Jerusalem. Socrates’s ability to deliver a speech about truth (istina) during his trial presupposed a real legal framework that forbade his being interrupted by blows or by torture. In Jerusalem istina presupposes pravda in a significantly different sense. Like pravda, the Hebrew word ‘Èmèṯ combines the meaning of “truthfulness” (istinnost’ [истинность]) with that of “accuracy” and “justice” (Averintsev, Sophia-logos, 396). The corresponding French terms, justesse and justice, show the lasting influence of the translation of the Psalms. French leaves open the possibility of this semantic identity, for example in the expression “c’est juste,” meaning “it is true.” But the contrast between this marginal performative in French and a fundamental notion in the Slavic languages shows what a great philosophical task is faced by the translator. The paradox of pravda is not limited to the declination of justice and truth in a single word. The meaning of pravda is anterior to the distinction between the practical and the theoretical. But the bipolarization that characterizes these notions today leads to the formation of a discourse incapable of including the translation of the word pravda. Its resistance to translation indicates that pravda is irreducible to concepts and refers us back to the philosophical tradition of docta ignorantia. In his work The Unknowable, Simeon Frank demonstrates the link uniting pravda with this tradition, which goes back to Nicholas of Cusa and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. Pravda’s apophatic horizon here encounters Socrates’s awareness of his ignorance. The classic formula inattingibile inattingibiliter attinguntur (understanding through an awareness of 820 PRAXIS PRAXIS [πϱᾶξις] (GREEK) ENGLISH praxis, practice, action, agency FRENCH praxis, pratique, action GERMAN Praxis ITALIAN prassi v. ACT [ATTUALITÀ, TATSACHE], AGENCY, ART, EXPERIENCE, EXPERIMENT, I/ME/ MYSELF, LOGOS, PATHOS, PLEASURE, POETRY [DICHTUNG], PRUDENCE, SUBJECT, THING [RES], VIRTÙ, VORHANDEN, WORK The term praxis [πϱᾶξις]—always seen in modern languages as imported from Greek, even though German and to a certain extent Italian have naturalized it (die Praxis [with a German plural, die Praxen], la prassi)—is central in contemporary philosophy, where it designates, depending on the case, an alternative to the points of view and values of being of logos [λόγος] or language, of theory or speculation, of form or structure, and so on. It refers, then, either to an Aristotelian version (Nichomachean Ethics) that opposes it to poiêsis [ποίησις] and relates it to an ethics and a politics of “prudence” (phronêsis [φϱόνησις]), or to a Marxist version (Theses on Feuerbach) that identifies it with the effort to transform the existing world rooted in labor and class struggle (umwälzende or revolutionäre Praxis). Between these two poles there is a Kantian version of the practical element of action (das Praktische) and the “primacy of practical reason,” which, by assigning to philosophy an infinite task of moralizing human nature (a task called “pragmatic” [pragmatisch]), consummates the break with naturalism and prefigures the dilemmas of collective historical action. If all of these points of view continue to provide indispensable reference points for philosophy, that is because they correspond to ways of thought, to irreducible political and metaphysical choices that nonetheless constantly intersect and confront one another: in this way, an “ambiguity of praxis” has been constituted transhistorically and poses a problem for philosophy that is just as unavoidable as the “ambiguity of being.” Two key problems arise from praxis [πϱᾶξις]. First, should it be translated? Second, to what language does it belong, Greek or German? These two problems are not really separable: they define an exemplary process of appropriation that essentially comes down to the Marxist transformation of the Aristotelian category, by way of a Kantian or post-Kantian problematics. Most of the connotations attached to the use of praxis now come not directly from the Greek source, but from German uses of the term, especially post-Marxist ones, that have been sufficiently naturalized to constitute an autonomous reference competing with the Greek or overdetermining its heritage to the point of sometimes making paradoxically difficult a “Hellenism” that might otherwise seem unproblematic, as in the case of Hannah Arendt. We will examine first Aristotle’s constitution of the praxis-poiêsisepistêmê [πϱᾶξις-ποίησις-ἐπιστήμη] triad and its transformation into praxis-poiêsis-theôria [πϱᾶξις-ποίησις-θεωϱία], in order to determine its anthropological meaning. Then we will show how the Marxist thesis—which argues that Praxis provides a criterion of truth or reality for both the idea and the social power of emancipation— condenses the tensions of a “philosophy of practice” developed by German idealism in the wake of Kant. We will also note indications of another classic way of connecting “theory” with “practice” that stretches from Francis Bacon to positivism (Auguste Comte), by way of the French Encyclopedists. Finally, we will compare a few great twentieth-century returns to the problem of praxis (including projects for reconstituting a “philosophy of praxis”) that either try to fulfill the promises of Marxism (Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and, by antithesis, Louis Althusser), or seek to propose an alternative to its political conception (Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt), or to modify the term’s semantic value in order to locate it, along with nature, morality, and history, in the element of institution and usage (Ludwig Wittgenstein). I. The Aristotelian Conceptualization and Its Ambivalence The Greek noun praxis is one of the nouns of action corresponding to the verb prassô [πϱάσσω] (to go all the way the end of, to cross; and then to complete, to accomplish; and, more generally, to do or to act), alongside pragma [πϱᾶγμα], which is more concrete: praxis is usually rendered in English as “practice,” “experience,” “custom” (in French as action [action], in the sense of exécution, entreprise, conduite [execution, enterprise, conduct]), and pragma by pragmatics (in French, chose, affaire [thing, object], or, in the case of the plural, ta pragmata, as les faits [facts] but also les affaires, les choses de la vie [business, the things in life]). See in RES, Box 1. All uses of the term praxis in philosophy (its translations and nontranslations) are determined by the powerful Aristotelian concept introduced in the Nicomachean Ethics, where it is one of the main themes. It is by virtue of the privileged position of praxis in Aristotle’s thought that Aristotle’s work ended up shaping the “practical philosophies” centered on an ethical concern with a teleology of the good (telos [τέλος]), (agathon [ἀγαθόν]) with all of the compounds with eu [εὖ], and with individual and collective “value” or “excellence” (aretê) [ἀϱετή], traditionally translated as “virtue.” At a certain point, “practical philosophy” was transformed into “the philosophy of practice”: a shift made possible by the heft of the classical term praxis. A. The system of Aristotelian praxis Praxis is inseparable from the ramified uses of the verb prattein [πϱάττειν] and its qualifications as established in the first lines of the Nicomachean Ethics: “ta prakta [τὰ πϱαϰτά],” actions (1.1, 1094a1); “to d’ eu zên kai to eu prattein [τὸ δ’ εὖ ζῆν ϰαὶ τὸ εὖ πϱάττειν],” good living and good acting (1.1, 1095a19); “hoi de charientes kai praktikoi [οἱ δὲ χαϱίεντες ϰαὶ πϱαϰτιϰοί],” men of culture and men of action—practically synonymous with political action: “hoi politikoi [οἱ πολιτιϰοί]” (1.3, 1095b22); “to dikaiopragein [τὸ διϰαιοπϱαγεῖν],” acting in accord with justice (1.8, 1099a19); and so on. These uses have two basic types of extension and intension. On the one hand, there is the “broad” type, which we would today call “formal,” in which praxis connotes everything that has to do with action and operation (in contemporary philosophical English, the term “agency” is used) and that consequently is opposed to mere dispositions and to an “inactive” or speculative kind of life: “epeidê to telos estin ou gnôsis alla praxis [ἐπειδὴ τὸ τέλος ἐστὶν οὐ γνῶσις ἀλλὰ πϱᾶξις]” (Since the goal is not knowledge, but action: Nicomachean Ethics 1.1, 1095a5–6). What all of these uses have in common is their emphasis on the form of the “exercise,” the duration, repetition, and assiduity of which ensures the PRAXIS 821 improvement of results or of the agent’s abilities. That is why, even when praxis is opposed to knowledge or discourse, it nonetheless connotes them, as soon as they require repeated exercise and a learning process (2.3). In many passages, praxis or prattein could not be better translated than by “application” or “exercise”: “haper ek tou pollakis prattein ta dikaia kai sôphrona periginetai [ἅπεϱ ἐϰ τοῦ πολλάϰις πϱάττειν τὰ δίϰαια ϰαὶ σώφϱονα πεϱιγίνεται]” (A development that can come only from assiduous exercise of justice and wisdom: 2.3, 1105b4–5). On the other hand, the uses of praxis and the whole register of the “practical” are clearly connected—in a way we might call substantial—to a specified domain, which is that of approved behaviors. The latter, in turn, are organized around two poles: one that is specifically ethical and concerns the quality or value of individuals and their behavior, and another that is political (politics being, Aristotle tells us, the “organizing” or “fundamental” (architektonikê) discipline, and the object of the treatise on ethical virtues being “political in a way”: “politikê tis ousa,” 1.1, 1094b11), that is, relative to the city, to the way in which people act there toward others and on each other. The two sides of the term thus merge in the idea of “making oneself” by acting for the common good in accord with the virtue of phronêsis [φϱόνησις], “prudence” or “practical intelligence.” This is the ideal of self-sufficiency or autarkeia that is suitable, not for a “solitary animal,” but for man, who is “political by nature” (1.5, 1079b8–11)—an autarky that is, however, as we shall shortly see, likely to be quite differently reinvested. . B. The tripartite classification of praxis, poiêsis, and epistêmê/theôria Aristotle begins by distinguishing among praxis, technê as poiêsis, and epistêmê in order to valorize the field of praxis and the virtue or excellence that is peculiar to it (phronêsis, examined in book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics). He then shifts the opposition by substituting theôria for epistêmê, which sublimates its meaning and reverses the corresponding evaluation. He situates theôria at the limits of the human, as is indicated by its contact with divinity—for example, in book 10, which is devoted to the question of pleasure. Later thinkers tended, on the one hand, to erase the difference in point of view between the two triads—that is, to make theôria (which gradually lost its theological connotations) a simple equivalent of epistêmê—and, on the other hand, to reduce—not without exceptions and resistances, even within great systems—the ternary point of view to a dualist one, a simple opposition between “theory” and “practice.” The first triad (praxis-poiêsis-epistêmê) is constructed in the first lines of the Nicomachean Ethics (1.1, 1094a1), “pasa technê kai pasa methodos, homoiôs de praxis te kai proairesis [πᾶσα τέχνη ϰαὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πϱᾶξίς τε ϰαὶ πϱοαίϱεσις]” (Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit), and resumed a few lines later, “praxeôn kai technôn kai epistêmôn [πϱάξεων ϰαὶ τεχνῶν ϰαὶ ἐπιστημῶν]” (Actions, arts, and sciences: 1094a7, where technê [τέχνη] is definitional for poêsis). In this triad, there are in reality two-times-two pairs. On the one hand, there are poiêsis and praxis, the faculty 1 The metaphysics of praxis The relation of the concept of praxis to the doctrine of power and the act (whose principles are set forth in Book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics) is complex. Here we will note two important themes correlated with the terminology repeatedly used in the Nicomachean Ethics. The first concerns the relation between praxis and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], a term designating “being in actuality” or the full realization of an essence or form that has found its proper matter, which, in the Nicomachean Ethics, designates the being of man, of which praxis itself is a part. Energeia is in itself “practical” in its phenomenological relation to exercise, continuity (cf. Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a31–32: “The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well [tas d’ aretas lambanomen energêsantes proteron, hôsper kai epi tôn allôn technôn (τὰς δ’ ἀϱετὰς λαμϐάνομεν ἐνεϱγήσαντες πϱότεϱον, ὥσπεϱ ϰαὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων τεχνῶν)],” and disposition (hexis [ἕξις]) that results from practical activity becomes in turn its condition of possibility, in accord with a “virtuous” circle (2.2, 1103b29–30): “We must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states of character that are produced [anagkaion episkepsasthai ta peri tas praxeis, pôs prakteon autas; hautai gar eisi kuriai kai tou poias genesthai tas hexeis (ἀναγϰαῖον ἐπισϰέψασθαι τὰ πεϱὶ τὰς πϱάξεις, πῶς πϱαϰτέον αὐτάς· αὗται γάϱ εἰσι ϰύϱιαι ϰαὶ τοῦ ποιὰς γενέσθαι τὰς ἕξεις)].” It is “practical” also in its ontological relation to life (zôê [ζωή]), understood as a nonbiological realization of the human, from which come the collusive formulations that combine energeia and praxis (1.6, 1098a12– 14: “We state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle [anthrôpou de tithemen ergon zôên tina, tautên de psuchês energeian kai prazeis meta logou (ἀνθϱώπου δὲ τίθεμεν ἔϱγον ζωήν τινα, ταύτην δὲ ψυχῆς ἐνέϱγειαν ϰαὶ πϱάξεις μετὰ λόγου)]”; 10.6, 1176b5–7: “Those activities are desirable in themselves from which nothing is sought beyond the activity. And of this nature, virtuous actions are thought to be [kath’ hautas d’ eisin hairetai aph’ hôn mêden epizêteitai para tên energeian. toiautai d’ einai dokousin hai kat’ aretên praxeis (ϰαθ’ αὑτὰς δ’ εἰσὶν αἱϱεταὶ ἀφ’ ὧν μηδὲν ἐπιζητεῖται παϱὰ τὴν ἐνέϱγειαν. τοιαῦται δ’ εἶναι δοϰοῦσιν αἱ ϰατ’ ἀϱετὴν πϱάξεις)].” Thus energeia, which is for Aristotle the supreme mode of being, is in a sense conceived on the model of practice (praxis) and its “virtue.” But this proposition is very ambivalent, because it can also be understood as meaning that we must seek “beyond praxis proper,” at a higher level of generality, the “active” perfection that the concept of praxis allows us simply to approach. 822 PRAXIS lives a solitary life, since man is born for citizenship” (1.5, 1097b8–11). C. From Practical-Political Autarky to Theoretical Autarky Yet this presentation, which was to have immense influence (down to Machiavelli and the classical doctrines of prudentia and the art or skill peculiar to politics: Staatsklugheit, and even raison d’État, and so on), is questioned in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which discusses the relation between pleasure and activity (10.4, 1174b23: “teleioi de tên energeian hê hêdonê [τελειοῖ δὲ τὴν ἐνέϱγειαν ἡ ἡδονή],” pleasure completes—or “finalizes,” as we might now say— the activity). Aristotle is then led to reconstruct the question of autarkeia so as to detach it from its political model (“living well” inseparable from “acting well”) and to identify it with intellectual contemplation, with “the life of the mind”: “the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity” [“legomenê autarkeia peri tên theôrêtikên [sc. diagôgên] malist’ an eiê [λεγομένη αὐτάρϰεια πεϱὶ τὴν θεωϱητιϰὴν μάλιστ’ ἂν εἴη],” 10.7, 1177a27). Clearly, praxis is not subjected to the constraint of the matter on which the maker has to impose form, nor to the needs of the user who “orders” a product of technology, but it is still burdened with external dependencies: above all, social relations themselves, that is, the structure constitutive of the political sphere. In pursuing his ends, a politician depends on his fellow citizens (politai [πολίται]), his friends (philoi [φίλοι]), and his equals or peers (homoioi [ὅμοιοι]). It is rather surprising to see Aristotle reversing his earlier judgments here: what appeared to be a completion becomes a lack; ethical-political praxis still depends on poiêsis, because it produces not objects, but effects external to it. As a result, theôria becomes a genuine praxis: “Nothing arises from it [theoretical excellence] apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities [or excellences, aretai [ἀϱεταί], we gain more or less apart from [peripoioumetha (πεϱιποιούμεθα), from poiein] the action” (10.7, 1177b1–4). Ultimately, it is by conforming to the paradigm of praxis that theôria comes to take its place. But in reality, it is the definition of man himself that has changed. We are no longer in the immanence of the shaping of man by man, but in the break that relates the human (or rather, exceptional individuals) to the divine—which, according to a typically Aristotelian intellectualism, can only involve theôria; science as the contemplation of first principles and first causes, and the kind of life that corresponds to it, entirely devoted to thought and detached from any utility or efficacy. Obviously, in this perspective (or is this only a typically “modern” reaction?), the notion of autarkeia or self-sufficiency is associated in a contradictory way with a representation of the beyond on which human happiness is supposed to depend. But Aristotle’s idea is that speculative activity brings the human individual into the divine world of complete self-sufficiency, which thus realizes a transcendence of activity beyond the opposition between acting and disposition, or action and passion (10.7, 1177b27–28: “It is not insofar as he is a man that he will live so, but insofar as something divine is present in him” (“ou gar hêianthrôpos estin houtô biôsetai, all’ hêi theion ti en autôi huparchei of making and the faculty of acting, both of which differ from epistêmê in that they belong to the domain of genesis [γένεσις] (becoming, engendering) and of contingency (“ti tôn endechomenôn kai einai kai mê einai [τι τῶν ἐνδεχομένων ϰαὶ εἶναι ϰαὶ μὴ εἶναι],” the essence of the things whose essence is to be “capable of being or not being.” 6.4, 1140a12–13). The notions of contingency and becoming remain crucial even where poiêsis and praxis are used to underscore the “rational” (associated with a “reasoned state” [6.4, 1140a3–5] or “true course of reasoning” [“hexis meta logou alêthous (ἕξις μετὰ λόγου ἀληθοῦς),” 6.4, 1140a10, 20], one to produce and the other to act). Contingency, or proceeding case-by-case, distinguishes poiêsis and praxis from epistêmê, which deals with the necessary and the general. But on the other hand, praxis is paired with epistêmê in contradistinction to poiêsis: in fact, it is only in making (poien ti [ποιεῖν τί], “making something”) that there is a product (ergon) to be added, later and outside it, to energeia, to the implementation, to the activity itself, so that the product is more important than the activity: “Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities” (“beltiô pephuke tôn energeiôn ta erga [βελτίω πέφυϰε τῶν ἐνεϱγειῶν τὰ ἔϱγα],” 1.1, 1094a5–6). In other words, “While making has an end other than itself [telos heteron (τέλος ἕτεϱον)], action cannot; for good action [eupraxia] itself is its end [telos]” (6.5, 1140b6–7). (Tricot renders this in French as “la bonne pratique étant elle-même sa propre fin” [good practice being in itself its own end] to show that eupraxia involves both success [successfully completing the action] and a good action [acting well]). We have to grant that “action and making are different kinds of things” (6.4, 1140a2). Praxis involves the “shaping of man by man” (and for man); it is the whole set of activities guided by the virtue of “prudence” (phronêsis, 1140b1), through which human individuals construct the world of their social relations: “We consider that those can do this who [like Pericles] are good at managing households or states” (“einai de toioutous hêgoumetha tous oikonomikous kai tous politikous [εἶναι δὲ τοιούτους ἡγούμεθα τοὺς οἰϰονομιϰοὺς ϰαὶ τοὺς πολιτιϰούς],” 1140b10). Insofar as it is essentially energeia, tending to nothing other than its own improvement, praxis approaches epistêmê; but through its orientation in relation to the singular, acting “case by case” depending on the kairos (see MOMENT), it differs from epistêmê and to some extent goes beyond it (1141b14–15: “Nor is practical wisdom [phronêsis] concerned with universals only—it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars” (“oud’ estin hê phronêsis tôn katholou monon, alla dei kai ta kath’ hekasta gnôrizein; praktikê gar, hê de praxis peri ta kath’ hekasta [οὐδ’ ἐστὶν ἡ φϱόνησις τῶν ϰαθόλου μόνον, ἀλλὰ δεῖ ϰαὶ τὰ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστα γνωϱίζειν· πϱαϰτιϰὴ γάϱ, ἡ δὲ πϱᾶξις πεϱὶ τὰ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστα]”), and it is very precisely political in that regard (“Political wisdom and practical wisdom are the same state of mind,” 1141b23). It is this political praxis that comes closest, at this stage, to the ideal of autarkeia [αὐτάϱκεια]: “By self-sufficient [autarkes [αὔταϱκες], we do not mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for one who PRAXIS 823 of humanity’s self-transformation through history or Selbstveränderung). But this very formulation, with its Hegelian and Kantian overtones, indicates that one or more intellectual revolutions have occurred that we must mention here. Very schematically, there are four preconditions for the understanding of this formulation of praxis. The first, purely negative, is the fact that, in the course of the centuries intervening between the translatio philosophiae from Athens to Rome and the final establishment of European philosophies in vernacular languages, the Greek term praxis did not find any genuine Latin translation, with the result that the reactivation of this or that aspect of Aristotle’s problematics was always accompanied by recourse to the Greek word or to a transcription of it (such as “practice” and, a fortiori, the Italian prassi). Actio, in particular, is not such a translation, but rather is a term that has its own field of application (especially in the physical and oratorical domains; see ACTOR). The same goes, of course, for “theory.” The second precondition, viewed through the category of “idealism” to which Marx assigns the development of the “active side” of philosophy, involves the opposition, accorded crucial importance by Kantianism and post-Kantianism, between a practical point of view and a speculative point of view. This opposition will lead to a significant but paradoxical and evanescent use of the word Praxis (as a virtually German word). Here we see the mark of the “end of classical German philosophy” that Friedrich Engels identified with the Marxist revolution when the Theses of Feuerbach were published posthumously. The third precondition consists of the tendency to pose the theory/ practice opposition in German idealism against the more or less concurrent one in the French tradition that culminated in positivism. We find traces of this opposition within Marxism itself, down to the present time. The fourth and last [οὐ γὰϱ ᾗἄνθϱωπός ἐστιν οὕτω βιώσεται, ἀλλ’ ᾗ θεῖόν τι ἐν αὐτῷ ὑπάϱχει]”). And yet this transcendence, or this aptitude for transcending the “purely human,” is precisely the “specifically human” (1178a5–7): “That which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man” (“to gar oikeion hekastôi têi phusei kratiston kai hêdiston estin hekastôi; kai tôi anthrôpôi dê ho kata ton noun bios, eiper touto malista anthrôpos [τὸ γὰϱ οἰϰεῖον ἑϰάστῳ τῇ φύσει ϰϱάτιστον ϰαὶ ἥδιστόν ἐστιν ἑϰάστῳ· ϰαὶ τῷ ἀνθϱώπῳ δὴ ὁ ϰατὰ τὸν νοῦν βίος, εἴπεϱ τοῦτο μάλιστα ἄνθϱωπος]”). Theôria is energeia par excellence, more free of passivity even than praxis itself because praxis remained a contradictory essence, involving a conflict between independence and dependency. II. The Marxist Reversal: Preconditions, Alternatives, Irreversibility Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach introduces the other concept of praxis, in which the Greek is transliterated and linked to an entirely different relationship between politics and metaphysics. . It is certainly not impossible in this case to hear echoes of Aristotelian “practical philosophy” (as elaborated in the Nicomachean Ethics), which Marx read with admiration and commented on throughout his life. There is something here like an inversion of the doctrine of the excellence of theôria, (seen as “mystical” perhaps), and a return to the primacy of praxis, which is to be definitively situated in the political sphere of immanence (even at the cost of a transformation of the ideal of autarkeia or self-sufficiency into a principle 2 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach The first thesis of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach states: The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism is that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity [sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit], practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side [die tätige Seite], in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such [die wirkliche, sinnliche Tätigkeit] [Feuerbach] therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [in ihrer schmutzig jüdischen Erscheinungsform]. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical,” activity [der “praktischkritischen” Tätigkeit]. The second thesis states: The question of whether objective truth [gegenständliche Wahrheit] can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question [eine praktische Frage]. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Wirklichkeit und Macht, Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice [in der Praxis]. The dispute over the reality or nonreality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. The third thesis states: The coincidence of the changing of circumstances [Ändern der Umstände] and of human activity or self-change [der menschlichen Tätigkeit oder Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice [revolutionäre Praxis]. The eighth thesis states: All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries that lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice [in der menschlichen Praxis und in dem Begreifen dieser Praxis]. Finally, the eleventh thesis states: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways [verschieden interpretiert]; the point is to change [ändern] it. 824 PRAXIS humanity is made responsible for its own state of subjection). But within this very primacy, Kant guarantees the persistence of the deduction and the speculative principle identified with Reason. What change was made by “post-Kantian” systems in this regard? Neither Johann Gottlieb Fichte nor G.W.F. Hegel thematized a theory/practice opposition or made conceptual use of the term Praxis. They did, however, help enrich it after the fact by emphasizing both the dimension of the act and activity (Tat, Tätigkeit, Handlung, Tathandlung; see TATSACHE), and that of efficacy and reality (Wirkung, Wirklichkeit; see REALITY). Though act-activity and efficacy-reality both belong to what Marx called “idealism” itself bound up with the problematic of the will, they pull it in diametrically opposed directions. That said, between Kant and the radical essayists of the period preceding the revolutions of 1848 (the period Germans call the Vormärz), there was another conjuncture, in which the idea of the “emancipation of humanity,” (which is inseparable from the “goals of practical reason” as determined by critical philosophy), was aligned with the idea of a “transformation of the historical conditions” of human existence (including both knowledge and production or action). In this context the word Praxis took on these different valences, which are at once “subjective” and “objective,” and which expressed their fusion in a new “critical and revolutionary” concept of experience (according to the expression later used by Marx to characterize its dialectic). From this point of view, Marx’s writings (especially between 1843 and 1847) appear to be less an “exit” (Ausgang) than a culmination of the movement of “classical German philosophy” (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy). B. “Theory” and “practice” from Bacon to French positivism Alongside the German—Kantian and post-Kantian— constitution of the “philosophy of practice,” an entirely different formation developed in the French intellectual sphere, one that culminated in the positivist conception of the relations between “theory” and “practice” as systematized by Auguste Comte. Contemporary epistemology, both in its logical empiricist and its historical aspects, is heir to this tradition. To understand its importance and intrinsic connection with the “social status of modern science” (Canguilhem, “Le statut social de la science moderne”), we must go back to the Encyclopédie, and most specifically, to the inspiration it drew from the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon had designated scientia activa or operativa as the terms for a method derived from experience, a method drawn on for the indefinite expansion of the powers of humanity, freed from “fictions” or “idols,” and from speculative forms of Scholasticism (but not, for all that, radically anti-Aristotelian: on the contrary, it contained in embryonic form a first great convergence between nature and artifice, between poiein and prattein). Bacon had in fact employed the Greek praxis in a few places in the Novum organum (ed. Ellis and Spedding, 1:180, 268, 270, etc.) to show that recourse to experience did not divert study from its object, but constituted the sole means of “augmenting” it or bringing something “new” to it. The French Encyclopedists, who had the advantage over Bacon of coming after the development of a precondition lies in the coherence of the Marxist problematic of idealism’s reversal, a product of the peculiarly “philosophical” moment to which the Theses belong. Idealism was never to be purely and simply recanted, but instead set aside in the process of constituting “historical materialism.” It would subsequently re-emerge as a subject of debate in contemporary interpretations of Marx. A. Praxis in German idealism Praxis’s central position in German idealism may be due to the conjunction of one of Kant’s titles (that of an essay of 1793, “On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice [Praxis],” often abridged as Theory and Practice) and the role he (and his successors) assigned to “practical philosophy” as a doctrine of the supreme (moral) goals of reason. But a paradox arises almost immediately. Although Kant makes systematic use of the adjective praktisch (in his terms “practical reason” or “pure practical reason”), his only use of Praxis as a substantive occurs in the essay mentioned above. As has been explained by translators and commentators on this text (Alexis Philonenko), it is in this essay that Kant sets forth his conception of the role of judgment in the moral and political domain. This was of course in response to the adversaries of the French Revolution who were inspired by Edmund Burke and who made institutional tradition the indispensable guide to political wisdom, Staatsklugheit. Kant, as the author of the three Critiques, adopted the word Praxis and the “commonplace” that is attached to it by the very writers he is criticizing (the “popular” philosophers and the jurists and theorists of government of the Enlightenment). Thus, he assumed an academic legacy of the eighteenth century, even if he did not invest it with his own intentions. Kant nominalizes praktisch in the form of das Praktische, “the practical” or “the practical element.” For him, it is a matter of showing that this element does not reside in prudence or skill (Klugheit, phronêsis), because the latter concerns the intelligent arrangement of means and ends, or a “technique” and the conditions of its effectiveness, whereas das Praktische resides solely in morality. It thus determines the “concept of freedom,” and emerges as a “supra-sensible” principle inseparable from the categorical imperative. The practical element proper is thus not technisch-praktisch, but moralisch-praktisch. In a different context, Kant terms “pragmatic” the kind of anthropological research that studies the passage from the laws of practical reason to experience, so as to control the “pathological” element introduced by our sensible nature, and that thus controls disciplines such as pedagogy, applied morality, and politics, and in certain regards the philosophy of history as well (on all of this, see RT: Eisler, Kant-Lexicon, s.v. “Pratique,” 829–30). Kant’s philosophy thus forges a new concept of the practical, and accords it a central place in philosophy (a “primacy,” as Kant calls it), in relation to a pragmatic “task” (see SOLLEN) of moralizing human relationships or of an imperative to transform the world (which we find again, literally, in Marx, even if he conceived its realization quite differently). Kant makes the human race both the (transcendental) “subject” and the (empirical) “object” of this self-transformation and makes it “responsible” (as in the essay Was ist Aufklärung? PRAXIS 825 source in Saint-Simonianism and, through that, the French tradition of the Encyclopedists). Praxis and practice thus governed two distinct philosophical paradigms, especially in the French context. However, since such situations in the history of ideas never actually exclude intersections, there were some substantial ones, both on the side of positivism (think of the dialectical ferments that Karl Popper, on his own admission, drew from his intensive reading of Vladimir Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908) and on the side of Marxism (think of Louis Althusser’s conception of the “epistemological break,” influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s recasting of Comte’s positivism). C. Marxist praxis The “Young Hegelians” who reintroduced the term praxis into philosophy (at the junction of philosophy and politics), were of course circumscribed by the limit of the Hegelian system. But they transgressed this limit in reaffirming the primacy of a (revolutionary and creative) subjectivity over and against the apparent objectivism of “the end of history” and the legitimation of state institutions ( the latter, as in Hegel, imbued with liberalism). They also assigned fundamental importance to critique, which for them entailed not only the deconstruction of onto-theology, but also a questioning of the established order’s values. That is why they turned toward the Kantian heritage radicalized by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and F.W.J. von Schelling. In his Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (1838), August von Cieszkowski invented the expression “the philosophy of praxis,” to which he gave the meaning of an “auto-activity” (Selbsttätigkeit) or liberation of action that opens up the historical space of transformation and self-conciousness. In his opuscule of 1841, Die europäische Triarchie (The European triarchy), and his 1843 article Philosophie der Tat (Philosophy of action), Moses Hess (who was for a few years the closest interlocutor of Marx and Engels) systematized this idea of a free, collective praxis that bore the “future” of mankind, and associated it with a socialist credo. Hess also opposed it to another praxis that was materialist and “Judaic” in the sense that German Protestantism gave to this term, that is, oriented toward self-interest rather than toward universal emancipation; cf. his opuscule “Uber das Geldwesen” (1843). An ethical and political division thus passes through the heart of praxis, separating the world’s two movements of appropriation and transformation. For his part, Arnold Ruge (the co-founder with Marx of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, whose single issue was published in Paris in 1844) used praxis in the sense of the “philosophy of work.” All of these references are not only crucial for understanding the underlying allusions in the Theses on Feuerbach (which must in this regard be read as a cryptic formulary); they also shed light on the powerful tension that never ceases to influence Marx’s thought and that his use of the word praxis encompasses. He is also seeking to open a breach for the future in the enclosure of objective spirit and the institutions of bourgeois society. In this sense, he is in search of a form and a subject for “revolutionary” action (which he later thought he had found in the proletariat and workers’ socialism); but for all that, he cannot resign himself to abandoning the perspective of reality. He wants to extract emancipatory auto-activity (or the (Galilean-Newtonian) mathematical physics, and in particular of a mechanics to which some of them made fundamental contributions, constructed on this basis a new epistemology set forth in Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire and in the Encyclopédie articles “Application” (by d’Alembert) and “Art” (by Denis Diderot) (RT: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers). These latter reflect for the first time the technological connection (they did not use the term “technology,” which was invented in the early nineteenth century) between the science of physicists or chemists and the art of engineers. Military as well as civil technology thus lost the status of an “enterprise” (that is, of an adventure; see ENTREPRENEUR) and acquired that of a “systematic practice” whose principles are formulated by science, but which provides them with the indispensable complement of experience in the field. In the section on the classification of the sciences in his preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1784), Kant introduced this new dimension of applied knowledge under the name of a “systematic art.” But he continued to relegate it to an empirical domain, from which the a priori basis of the pure sciences—that is, mathematics—was definitively detached. It was Auguste Comte, in the second lecture of the Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844), to conceptualize the connection, simultaneously reciprocal and dissymmetrical, that mathematization, the experimental method, and technology had established between “theory” and “practice.” This connection, conceived as the relation between the abstract and the concrete, is both internal to the classification of the positive sciences, in accord with a progression from the simple to the complex (from mathematics to sociology), and external to their objective, which is properly speculative (a term that in Comte is synonymous with “theoretical”) insofar as knowledge of the laws governing phenomena makes it possible to predict (and indeed, in the simplest cases, to calculate) the technical results in the field of “productive operations.” From this comes the synthetic formula that, according to Comte, expresses the general relation between science and art (or “industry,” a term adopted by Saint-Simon’s followers): “from science to prediction; from prediction to action.” Comte notes that the “two systems” formed by the “whole of our knowledge of nature” and by the “knowledge of the procedures that we deduce from it in order to modify it” are at once “essentially distinct in themselves” and inseparable. He remarks that although from the “dogmatic” point of view, the simple necessarily precedes the complex and the abstract precedes the concrete, in accord with a deductive relationship, the same is not true from the historical point of view. The problems whose solution can be provided only by theory must first be identified in practice, even when the latter, since the dawn of civilization, had supposedly been accessible only under the veil of a “theological” or magical way of thinking. The more complex the domain of phenomena, the longer it would take to transcend these beginnings and arrive, in the contemporary period, at the domain of sociological phenomena to which political practice is addressed. It is well known that Marxism and positivism were at odds in their methods and objectives (even if they had a common 826 PRAXIS contemporary philosophical research dealing with the limits of representation and the philosophical genre itself. We can discern three reasons, legible in Marx himself, for the introduction of this rupture into philosophy. The first has to do with the fact that “practical activity,” that is, thought as the true “differential of history” (instead of consciousness or morality), abolishes the classical distinctions between praxis and poiêsis that itself governed the possibility of making theôria autonomous. As result, the assignment of the bearers of these peculiarly human authorities, agencies, or “powers of acting” to classes or isolated social types, defined once and for all (men of action, producers, intellectuals, or contemplatives), is put back in question. The second reason, which the second of the Theses on Feuerbach formulated with peerless vigor, has to do with the fact that the problematic of truth has now been torn away; not from the element of thought, but from the transcendence of thought with respect to its conditions, (a transcendence constituted on the model of a theological dualism). Marx will bring truth closer to Diesseitigkeit, a term that is difficult to translate but that is perfectly legible in its theological provenance. It refers to this world as opposed to the beyond, as well as to what philosophers have called “the world,” “experience,” “the things themselves,” “labor,” “the everyday,” and so on. To inscribe this orientation, which is both immanent and productive, in the philosophical tradition (a tradition, it is true, that is subterranean rather than dominant), Marx sometimes refers, in the same spirit, to Vico’s formula: “verum esse ipsum factum” (The truth is what is made). Finally, the third reason for this philosophical rupture is that practical activity or praxis (soldered to the poiëtic, and inclusive of theory) is originally social, or, better, “transindividual.” This means that the element of reciprocal action or relation always already forms the condition of its possibility. This opens up, at least in principle, the program of a transcendence of metaphysical oppositions between the singular and the universal or between the subject and the object (initially reduced by Marx to man and nature: praxis is the “humanization of nature and the naturalization of man,” that is, it is the real history of society—the theme of The German Ideology). III. After Aristotle and Marx: Dilemmas of the Contemporary Philosophy of Action The history of philosophy does not include modes of thought or languages that ever went out of date. Every conceptual coherence that has once been constituted can be reactivated, which does not mean that it will be reactivated in the same form. One of the causes of this shifting resides in the effect of the irreversibility of translations or re-creations of which certain words bearing a fundamental question have been the object. This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to praxis. To conclude this genealogical outline, we will indicate two types of terminological difficulty. One concerns, within the Marxist tradition itself or in close association with it, the resurgences of the idea of a “philosophy of praxis” in the twentieth century. The other concerns the obstacles that, in other contemporary philosophical trends, stand in the way of using the term praxis (including in the form of “returns to Aristotle” or “returns to realization of freedom) from the element of pure will, thus allowing its activism to become “materially” a transformation of the world. For that to happen, it has to be inserted into the development of social relationships and conflicts, and, in the final analysis, into the development of material life (and its “modes of production”). The Marxist use of the term praxis is thus both something inherited from the Young Hegelians and a criticism of their understanding of it. Praxis thus has a rather tenuous status in Marx’s work as well as in that of the later Marxists. The concept of praxis is central to the Theses on Feuerbach (written in 1845, at the same time as The German Ideology, and published posthumously in 1888), of which it is clearly the keystone; in return, the Theses systematically deploy its different aspects. But Marx had already resorted to the same term, or to the adjective “practical” (praktisch), especially in the series of essays written in 1843 and 1844: On the Jewish Question, Correspondence with Ruge, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (all of which had appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher), and The Holy Family (written in collaboration with Engels). The “settling of accounts” with the representatives of post-Hegelian liberal philosophy (Bruno Bauer) and anthropological communism (Ludwig Feuerbach) would contribute to reversing the idea of praxis. Initially, the idea was still negatively connoted, as shown by the allusion (in On the Jewish Question, which is loaded with anti-Semitic stereotypes) to “the practical spirit,” that is, to the supposedly self-interested spirit of Judaism. This “practical spirit” was set up in contrast to a Christian idealism whose trace is still found in the first of the theses on Feuerbach. Now, on the contrary, praxis becomes irreducible to any single representation; it forms the model of transformative action—of action capable of emancipating humanity—on the condition that it include dialectically, as part of its own determination, what appeared to be its contrary, or what it had to transcend, namely, the “sensible,” the real or material being of “social relationships.” This real or material being of social relations is the “actual essence” of man (sixth thesis). Marx will insist that its historical development coincides with the activities and productive powers of labor (consciousness of their being a function or expression that is more or less autonomized). There is a certain equivalence, then, between the “proletariat” as a “universal” class or agent of “human revolution” (beyond the simply “political” bourgeois revolution) and praxis as a historical development that involves replacing the “weapons of criticism” with the “criticism of weapons.” We have to acknowledge, however, that this equivalence, which had the performative effect of founding a “new materialism” irreducible to the sensualism of the Enlightenment, turned out to be fragile in its original construction; for, Marx, once past a certain stage in his thinking, would abandon the terminology of the argument and, most notably, the reference to praxis. We also have to recognize, after the fact, that the shift in terrain that this equivalence proclaimed is on the agenda more than ever. It governs the constant quest (constitutive of the Marxist point of view in philosophy) for an “encounter” between the science of historical material conditions and the insurrectional power of emancipatory movements. It also informs a great deal of PRAXIS 827 form, its “dissolution,” of what Marx called, after Hegel and Schelling, an “identical subject-object” of history, none other than the proletariat itself). The proletariat’s “class consciousness,” also called “practical consciousness” (that passes immediately from being to action without stopping at the stage of abstract representation), thus figures the obverse and necessary product of capitalist reification. The resort to this sociopolitical category of class consciousness, not found in Marx, demonstrates that in the unity of contraries in the “subject-object,” it is the subject that prevails. (This also corresponds to a rupture of the symmetry postulated by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach between the transcendence of pure naturalism and that of pure humanism, to the advantage of the latter.) That is why Lukács always speaks of praxis as a “praxis of the proletariat,” where the proletariat forms the ultimate empirical reference, but also incarnates the mythic movement of universal history and its end in a messianic “actor” that is both singular and omnipresent. Gramsci’s adoption of the expression “filosofia della prassi” has a very different genealogy that extends over a longer period. As has been pointed out by André Tosel (who has studied its history in a complete and subtle way), it was first forged by Antonio Labriola in the context of a historicist variant of the Second International’s Marxism. This claimed Giambattista Vico as one of its ancestors and emphasized the “morphogenesis” of societies that results from their internal conflict. The most decisive contribution to the Gramscian genealogy was, however, made by Gentile. . The pronounced influence of Gentile’s “actualism” on Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis is now becoming better known, even if the degree of its impact or the variety of its modalities remain the subject of passionate controversy (especially in Italy). “Actualism,” was read by Gramsci as a typical figure of coincidentia oppositorum, a tragic mark of the relations between philosophy and politics in the great “European civil war” of the twentieth century. At the time of the revolution of the councils in Turin, Gramsci himself began by practicing a vitalist, activist, and spontaneist Marxism influenced by Georges Sorel’s concepts of “proletarian violence” and the general strike (the latter seen as the specific form of the masses’ intervention in history). The later notion of praxis that Gramsci worked through in the Prison Notebooks was much more indebted to his novel reading of Machiavelli. Here, the action of the revolutionary party was compared to that of a “new Prince” seeking to transform the “passive revolutions” of contemporary society prompted by capitalist modernization into a “national-popular will.” Gramsci also did a re-reading (to which a very attentive reception of American “pragmatism” also contributed) of the Hegelian organic conception of the state in terms of cultural hegemony and the democratization of culture, where violence and education contribute to a single dialectic. What emerges is the idea of a process that is by definition unfinished and uneven. This process seeks to bring about the conditions for a collective praxis or a historical initiative on the part of the masses, manifest as a latent possibility inhering in the power relations of social structure. It essentially takes the form of a tendential transition Kant”) because of its appropriation by Marx (and that testify by that very fact to the power of this appropriation). The exceptions appear all the more significant. A. Antonio Gramsci and the “philosophy of praxis” The expression “philosophy of praxis” is one of the leitmotifs of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), a fragmentary work that many people regard as a “refoundation” of Marxist philosophy, written in Fascist prisons between 1926 and 1937 and published with varying classifications after 1945. It has to be recognized that in some respects, praxis was a coded expression intended to deceive the censors. But “philosophy of action,” coined in Italian in a naturalized form (filosofia della prassi, which is neither the more usual pratica nor a quotation of a foreign expression), sums up well the orientation of the intellectual enterprise undertaken by the martyred communist leader and conceived by him as a radicalization of historicism (storicismo assoluto). To understand the importance of that enterprise, we have to situate it in a double context, that of the “critical” recastings of Marxism and that of the Italian Hegelianism characterized by an “actualist” orientation (Giovanni Gentile). Paradoxically, the most influential of the texts of twentieth-century “critical Marxism” before Gramsci— namely, Georg Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness)—is a book that was renounced by its author after it had been condemned by the Third International, and that one might therefore expect to have been forgotten. On the contrary, it inspired the whole development of the Frankfurt School from Adorno and Horkheimer to Habermas, and various dissident philosophical movements within the countries of “real socialism.” Here we would mention the “Budapest School” (see Individuum und Praxis: Positionen der ‘Budapester Schule,’ by Georg Lukács, Agnes Heller, and Ferenc Feher [1975], cited in RT: Labica and Bensussan, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, s.v. Praxis, 912; the Yugoslavian “Praxis” group (particularly Gajo Petrovic), publishers of a journal of the same name since 1965; not to mention other, non-Marxist philosophies [Martin Heidegger]). Analogous to Gramsci’s later elaboration, though pursuing quite different directions, Lukács’s early work attests to the resurgence of an antinaturalist point of view (opposed to the interpretation of historical materialism as economic determinism) in Marxism, contemporary with the crisis of imperialism (the First World War), Soviet-style or “councilist” revolutions (not only in Russia, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Italy), and the quest for new forms of alliance between intellectuals and the working masses (a point of view that rapidly lost out within the official communist movement). Lukács’s whole enterprise in History and Class Consciousness is directed against the reification” (Verdinglichung) of thought and action in forms of commercial rationality extended by capitalism to all spheres of life, and the juridical, technological, and scientific objectivism that, according to Lukács, constitute its ideological counterpart. However, confronted by this generalized alienation, which has first to be conceived in its essence, the possibilities of criticism, resistance, and revolutionary overthrow do not reside in pure willpower, but in the constitution of society (particularly its immanent negative 828 PRAXIS In the two volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, of which only the first (The Theory of Practical Ensembles, 1960) was completed and published before his death, Sartre combined many sources of philosophical inspiration: not only Husserl, Heidegger, and Marx, but also Hegel, Kierkegaard, and other less obvious ones, Fichte and Bergson, not to mention countless other important figures in historiography and the human sciences. The central notion he elaborates is that of praxis: first as an “individual praxis,” and then as a “historical praxis,” via the essential mediation of the “group” (in accord with different institutional or spontaneous modalities that may be ephemeral, such as the movement of revolutionary crowds bound together by an “oath” like the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, or enduring, like social class, with its representative organizations). Sartre studies programmatically two movements or transitions: “from individual praxis to the practico-inert,” and “from the group to history.” Here we find again, even if under other names, the problematics we have already encountered (particularly that of reification, which Sartre connects with the original figure of the “seriality” of actions and groups). But Sartre was clearly also working out a new conception. An essential part of this new conception proceeds from what had preoccupied Sartre in his earliest writings: the necessity of establishing, against the transcendental tradition in which phenomenology was initially situated, a gap between the passivity that class domination imposes on “subaltern” social groups (what Gramsci calls “the economico-corporative stage”) and the “intellectual and moral reform” that is supposed to allow them to become actors in their own history (and in this sense seems to return strictly to the Aristotelian definition of motion: “The fulfillment of what is potential as potential”). But here we are concerned not with a “pure act,” but rather, according to a correction made by Gramsci himself in the Prison Notebooks, with an “impure act,” “real in the most profane and mundane sense of the word,” that is, inseparable from a matter that imposes its constraints on it. The “optimism of the will” and “pessimism of the intelligence”—the ethical components of an actualized and dialecticized phronêsis—also characterize the point of view of Gramscian praxis and forbid us to confuse absolute historicism with subjectivism or totalitarianism. B. Phenomenological problematics Contemporary, post-Marxist mutations of praxis are not limited to the Hegelian tradition. On the contrary, among the most interesting are those that emerge from the encounter with phenomenology (the problematics of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in particular), and which critique the exclusive orientation toward consciousness or speculative conceptions of existence. The important figure here is obviously Jean-Paul Sartre. 3 “Marx in Italics”: Labriola, Gentile, and the filosofia della prassi v. ATTUALITÀ In the work of Antonio Labriola, prassi designates specifically the fact that the “work of thought” (which includes science and philosophy) is part of the “work of history” (which is itself rooted in the history of the organization of labor). This insistence on work and this effort to generalize its notion unquestionably bear traces of Marx, but Aristotelian accents are not absent from Labriola’s formulations when he seeks to express prassi’s political and anthropological meaning: “For historical materialism, becoming is reality itself; just as the prodursi [self-production] of man, who rises above the immediacy of (animal) life to achieve perfect liberty (which is communism), is real” (La concezione materialistica della storia [1896]). Labriola’s texts were the object of a prolonged debate between two great representatives of the Italian idealism shaped by Hegel. Whereas Benedetto Croce, in a spirit that is fundamentally more Kantian than Hegelian, grants priority to pratica, Giovanni Gentile, the leader of neo-Hegelianism (and the future official philosopher of fascism) adopts the expression filosofia della prassi. Gentile exhumed the Theses on Feuerbach and demonstrated their importance, thus making himself the defender of a revolutionary interpretation of Marxism against both its social-democratic spokesmen (Labriola) and against its liberal critics (Croce). For Gentile, Marxism, even in its specialized economic developments, is a “great” philosophy, not so much of history as precisely of practice, that is, of the transformative action that expresses the intervention in history of a constitutive subjectivity that is simultaneously immanent to becoming and destructive of the continuity of time. It is to this theoretical view of praxis in terms of permanent revolution, which he perceives as an “inverted idealism,” that Gentile seeks to oppose his own spiritualist conception, to which he was to give the name “actualism” (cf. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, a reply to Croce’s Logica come scienza del concetto puro). The Hegelianism to which Gentile adheres cannot be constructed without understanding and going beyond Marx’s notion of the ontological identity of thinking and acting. In this combination we can once again hear “activist” accents (a radical critique of the idea of “passivity” and thus of any determination of action by its “given” conditions and circumstances) that proceed more from the Fichtean tradition (to which Gentile is also close in his formalization of the principle in terms of the affirmation of the “I,” the Io assoluto, the subject of “the pure act”). But ultimately, the objective of actualism, which Gentile was to imagine he could implement in the framework of the “total state” founded by Mussolini, resides in the institution of “society’s permanent self-education,” which would be the very form of the spirit’s concrete becoming, and, in this sense, praxis par excellence. REFS.: Croce, Benedetto. Logica come scienza del concetto puro. Edited by C. Farinetti. Naples, It.: Bibliopolis, 1996. First published in 1905. . Filosofia della pratica: Economia ed etica. First published in 1907. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1973. Gentile, Giovanni. “La filosofia della prassi.” In La filosofia di Marx, new ed. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. First published in Pisa, It., 1894. . L’atto del pensare come atto puro. Florence: Sansoni, 1937. First published in 1911. Labriola, Antonio. Saggi sulla concezione materialistica della storia. Edited by E. Garin. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1965. Tosel, André. Marx en italiques: Aux origines de la philosophie italienne contemporaine. Mauvezin, Fr.: TER, 1991. PRAXIS 829 for Sartre, will never abandon the pursuit of this impossible “liberation” from the inertia or adversity that is inherent in it. Praxis is the “despite everything” of the human condition. . C. The determinations of Marxism without its “horizon” One can suppose that the concern to escape Marxist determinations of praxis and its horizon accounts for why there is a resistance within a number of contemporary philosophical trends to adopting the terminology of praxis, even where it would seem natural to do so. A case in point would be when there is a “return to Aristotle,” either from the perspective of an ethics of prudence and judgment, or from that of a regulation of discourses and their public use. We will mention a few examples that are especially interesting because they also bring out problems of translation and idiomatic singularity. 1. Pragmatism without practice We might wonder why the term “practice” is so little theorized by American “pragmatism,” a philosophy founded on the recourse to experience, action, and practice. The term “pragmatism” was invented by Charles Sanders Peirce, adopted by William James and John Dewey, and later modified by Peirce, who, after it came into common use, rejected it in favor of “pragmaticism,” as is shown by the following passage in the Collected Papers: His [the writer’s] word “pragmatism” has gained general recognition in a generalized sense that seems to between the structure of consciousness as a field of “views” oriented toward objects (an essentially “immanent” structure that, in his 1937 article Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre went so far as to compare to Spinoza’s substance, as a production of its own modes) and the structure of the subjectego, not as a source of consciousness, but as something essentially transcending consciousness, a representative for it. Arguably the praxis that occupied him later on, after he had declared that Marxism was the “horizon that cannot be transcended for the philosophy of our time,” was a deepening of this gap within subjectivity, and as such a way of positing an immanent intentionality prior to all consciousness, and by that very fact exceeding it. That is why the movement of totalization that, according to Sartre, constitutes the structure of history’s intelligibility, and that runs through class struggle and leads to its transcendence, can only be rooted in praxis, even if it does so only in a negative or aporetic fashion. That is the other great originality of Sartre’s conception of praxis: insofar as it must always proceed from individuals, while at the same time aiming at their unification or fusion in a community, it is fundamentally lost, or, as Sartre puts it, “stolen” from its own subjects. In Sartre’s radically conflictual and ultimately very Hobbesian model of human history, praxis can be realized only by alienating oneself. It seeks the impossible: “to make history” out of the conditions of passivity and dependency, or the dominant institutions themselves. As Marx said, in a passage of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that Sartre never tired of interpreting, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it arbitrarily, in conditions they themselves have chosen.” Praxis, 4 Althusser: “Practices” versus praxis The influence of Lukács’s and Gramsci’s theories, and especially the influence of the Sartrean conception of praxis, helps us understand why the other great representative of French philosophical Marxism in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, radically rejected the concept. Althusser’s conception of Marxist philosophy clearly also proceeds from a critical reading of Hegel, a reading whose program the Theses on Feuerbach formulated as “new materialism.” It owes to Gramsci and, through him, to Machiavelli a radical conception of the equivalence of theory and politics. But Althusser, who participated in the structuralist adventure and was determined to ferret out in their furthest recesses the germs of subjectivism and historicism that prevented the constitution of a materialist science of revolution, refused to see in praxis, and particularly in the “dialectic” of human works and material or institutional inertia, any more than spiritualist dualisms in a new garb. Moreover, Althusser speaks not so much of “practice” as of “practices” (including “theoretical practice,” operating on the generality of concepts). He seeks, it seems, to provide a theoretical account of their analogy (in the sense in which metaphysics spoke of the analogy of being) on the model of a “generalized production,” consequently reducing prattein to poiein (and as we have seen, a certain French positivistproductivist tradition is not alien to this possibility). On closer inspection, however, we see that he does so in a very strange way, leading to a theoretical account that is as original in its own way as that of Sartre, to which it is opposed term for term. Theory is one kind of practice among others. Every practice is internally “overdetermined” by all the others, which it presupposes even as it represses them, in a “totality with a dominant” (totalité à dominante) that is subject to constant variations. A practice is “productive” not so much of “objects” or externalized results as of “effects” that are consubstantial with it (a typically structuralist thesis, but in Capital Marx had spoken of the “twofold character of labor” and shown that the effect of the latter is not solely to produce merchandise but also to reproduce social relationships): “effects of knowledge,” “effects of society,” “effects of subjectivity,” even “effects of transference” (in the field of the unconscious), and so on. A practice is essentially a “struggle,” on the model of the class struggle (and for Althusser, within its horizon), or a union of contrary tendencies: understanding and misunderstanding, production and exploitation, identification and distancing (in Brecht’s sense). It can be maintained that with these paradoxical characteristics, poiein has been essentially transformed into a complex form of prattein—although as a “process without a subject,” if not without an agent (or “agency”). REFS.: Althusser, Louis. Pour Marx. Paris: François Maspero, 1965. Lecourt, Dominique. La philosophie sans feinte. Paris: J. E. Hallier / Albin Michel, 1982. 830 PRAXIS a set of movements affirmative of natural law, and a battle against alienation, commodity fetishism, reification “projected into the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit]” where they become the object of debates and declarations, in such a way as to lead to an ideal of community. He then retranslates into Marxist language Max Weber’s distinction between action determined by an end (zweckrationales Handeln) and reasonable action in relation to values (wertrationales Handeln), giving strong preference to the latter. But when Habermas finally finds the specific concept of his philosophy, which expresses the connection between discursive forms and juridical norms in the development of “civil society,” while at the same time articulating it with the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt, a concept of Husserlian origin)—that of “communicative action” (Theory of Communicative Action, 1981)—he abandons the use of the term praxis. No doubt in his view the latter retains connotations too closely connected with decision theory and exclusively associated with the representation of the history of civil society as a development of the capitialist divison of labor and the market; in short, with everything culminating in a valorization of social antagonism detrimental to the production of a social consensus on the fundamental values of democracy. 3. Arendt and “action” The most important case for our purposes is that of Hannah Arendt, because she directly confronts the anthropological problem of recasting conceptions coming out of Aristotle and Marx. Arendt has a detailed knowledge of Marx’s work. She is continually carrying on a critical dialogue with it, especially when she takes up an original position in a “neoclassical” trend of political thought that seeks to reformulate the ideal of phronêsis (which she also calls, referring to Kant as much as to Aristotle, “judgment”). Her aim in doing so is to defend the autonomy of political goals against both ideological totalitarianisms and socioeconomic reductionisms (and, a fortiori, against their collusion). The central concept in Arendt’s thought, provisionally systematized in The Human Condition (1958), is “action.” Arendt’s conception of action, which underlies her construction of the relations between the different “spheres” of human existence (intimacy, the private sphere, the public sphere, the sphere of knowledge), and her critique of a modernity that has witnessed the triumph of utilitarian values (those of the animal laborans in search of material happiness) over the vita contemplativa and the vita activa itself, is set forth in another “triad” of which action constitutes the fragile apex: labor-work-action. How is this related to the Aristotelian triads we examined at the outset? And to the Marxist conceptualization of social practice? These two questions are difficult to treat separately. Arendt has apparently expelled theôria from her topics, and split the concept of poiêsis in two (drawing a distinction between technê and poiêsis, corresponding respectively to labor, which is supposed to reproduce the conditions of animal life or “well-being” and culminates in the ideal of consumer society, and to work, which is supposed to inscribe the mark of humanity on the duration of the world, or to guarantee the primacy of artifice over nature, through technology and especially through art). This new division (corresponding argue power of growth and vitality. The famed psychologist, James, first took it up, seeing that his “radical empiricism” substantially answered to the writer’s definition of pragmatism, albeit with a certain difference in the point of view. But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. So then, the writer feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:414) The word praxis never appears in Peirce, and “practice” is hardly examined, even though it is used quite often in established expressions (“in practice,” “the practice of”). The language of pragmatism is rather that of facts (including “facts of consciousness”), experience (including “pure experience”), and behavior (“conduct,” notably in Dewey and Mead). Practice is defined only by the recourse to facts, and by the passage to the practice with which theories are confronted, as is shown by typical expressions such as “practical application” and “application to practice” (ibid., 2:7). From an “Aristotelian” point of view, we have here a kind of reversal of praxis and pragmata. For example: The value of Facts to it [science], lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real. It therein takes an entirely different attitude toward facts from that which Practice takes. For Practice, facts are the arbitrary forces with which it has to reckon and to wrestle. Science regards facts as merely the vehicle of eternal truth, while for Practice they remain the obstacles which it has to turn, the enemy of which it is determined to get the better. Science feeling that there is an arbitrary element in its theories, still continues its studies . . .; but practice requires something to go upon, and it will be no consolation to it to know that it is on the path to objective truth—the actual truth it must have. (Ibid., 5:589) The emphatic recourse to Practice here hardly conceals the absence of a problematization of the concept, indeed, its depreciation in relation to true science—a paradox in a philosophy that calls itself “pragmatism,” but prefers to think in terms of facts and truth, and not of “practice.” 2. Habermas: From praxis to “communicative action” Educated within the Frankfurt School, of which he at first appears to be one of the followers, influenced by American functionalism and by the “linguistic turn” of the 1960s, and politically supportive of Kantian-inspired constitutionalism and cosmopolitanism, Jürgen Habermas began his career by adopting a “critical” opposition between technique and practice. To the former he ascribed, in a way reminiscent of Lukács, epistêmê or “objective” science. To the latter, or praxis, in the “German” sense of the term, he ascribed both PRAXIS 831 Foundations of Mathematics), and to actual, “everyday” usage. It is interesting that in the Brown Book, which is a kind of English version of Eine philosophische Betrachtung, Wittgenstein systematically uses “practice” as an equivalent of the German Praxis. Praxis is thus defined as the context that gives meaning to words: “Nur in der Praxis einer Sprache kann ein Wort Bedeutung haben” (Only in practice in a given language can a word have meaning: Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics); “Die Praxis gibt den Worten ihren Sinn” (Practice gives words their meaning: Remarks on Colour). The nature of this context is what is constantly debated by Wittgensteinians and post-Wittgensteinians: Is it linguistic, or social and institutional (cf. John Searle, Kenneth Jon Barwise)? Sociologists of science (D. Bloor) and ethnomethodologists thus make extensive use of Wittgenstein in their arguments that seek to situate knowledge in social practices. But it is in Wittgenstein’s reflection on the “rule” that the notion of praxis plays the most specific role. The idea of praxis indicates the repetition inherent in the rule, as in every kind of usage: for Wittgenstein there is no rule that is applied only once: “Ist, was wir ‘einer Regel folgen’ nennen, etwas, was nur ein Mensch, nur einmal im Leben, tun könnte?” (Is what we call “obeying a rule” something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life? Philosophical Investigations, §199); “Um das Phänomen der Sprache zu beschreiben, muß man eine Praxis beschreiben, nicht einen einmaligen Vorgang” (In order to describe the phenomenon of language, one must describe a Praxis, not a one-time event: Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics). In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein states that “ ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice [eine Praxis]” (§202) and “not an interpretation [eine Deutung]” (§201). And a little earlier, in §199, he indicates that there are all kinds of practices that involve “obeying a rule [Regel].” This does not mean that every practice is governed by rules, but inversely, that the meaning of systems of rules cannot be completely described without referring to the connections established between the different “practices” to which they belong and between these practices and “forms of life” (Lebensformen) specific to them, even though they vary indefinitely and can be attributed either to individuals or to groups. In fact, the word “practice” does not suffice to render the plasticity of this horizon of reality and everyday exercise to which Wittgenstein confines the philosophical aporias of meaning and modality (how can we conceive the contingency of the necessity of rules?). Wittgenstein also has to use the words “action” or “activity” (Tätigkeit), and especially “use” or “usage” (Gebrauch: “In der Praxis des Gebrauchs der Sprache,” Philosophical Investigations, §7), in both the sense in which one uses a tool and the sense in which one conforms to a tradition (unless one transgresses it). We do not first “understand a rule” and then, possibly, “apply” it; we make “use” of it. “The use of the word in practice is its meaning” (The Blue and Brown Book, 68). Thus praxis has not simply descended into the “here and now,” it has been disseminated in the multiplicity of common experiences that envelop discursive activity. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, philosophy is defined as activity and not as theory: “Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit. Ein philosophisches Werk to the distinction between “arts” and “crafts” in the subtitle of the Encyclopédie [RT: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers] and intended to promote them)—makes it possible to situate the Marxist conception of social practice not only outside the field of “action” or praxis, but also within the product of art and art itself, in the pure immediacy of making, and thus within the domain of “craft,” and the whole tradition stemming from John Locke that makes human labor the measure of value. Nevertheless, Arendt does not use the term praxis to designate the conception of the world held by the ancients, and by Plato and Aristotle in particular, except as an untranslatable “Greek word.” Nor does she seek simply to restore the Aristotelian point of view. This has to do not only with her desire to write in ordinary language, but also with her desire to introduce into the concept of “action” an element completely unknown to the ancients: historicity, in the form of the various kinds of uncertainty in human affairs, the constitutive function of representations or appearances in political activity (which affects the workers’ movement itself), the creative function of speech acts (pardons, promises, declarations), the loss of traditions that forces people periodically to start their political history over again, and finally, the development of institutions qua necessary conditions of theôria (or the vita contemplativa). These characteristics of historicity are certainly completely different from those described by Marx; indeed, they are exactly opposite to them. But precisely for that reason, we find ourselves here in the field of a genuine (and interminable) confrontation with Marx (though Arendt’s very simplified presentation of him resembles a caricature): one praxis versus another, except that the word praxis is, for reasons both contextual and symbolic, “crossed out.” 4. The originality of Wittgenstein’s Praxis Finally, the only one of the great protagonists of the philosophical adventure of the twentieth century in whose work the term Praxis plays an important and original role—even if it is not, strictly speaking, thematized— is Wittgenstein. For him it is, of course, a German word, apparently in common use. Only readers who are aware of the history of philosophy and are involved in various ideological disputes will wonder about its relationship to the Aristotelian, Kantian, postKantian, and Marxist meanings of the term. For Wittgenstein, the word refers first of all to the use of language, which in his later philosophy he opposes to the reduction of language to logic carried out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Dies ist leicht zu sehen, wenn Du ansiehst, welche Rolle das Wort im Gebrauche der Sprache spielt, ich meine, in der ganzen Praxis der Sprache” (You can easily see this if you consider what role the word plays in the use of language, I mean, in the practice of language taken as a whole: The Brown Book [Eine philosophische Betrachtung], 157). Wittgenstein also constantly refers to “the practice of language games” (die Praxis des Sprachspiels). Wittgenstein’s later philosophy thus represents a passage from theory to practice (the term praktisch is frequently used) through the attention given to playing language games (“in der täglichen Praxis des Spielens [in the daily practice of playing]”: Remarks on the 832 PRAXIS De Giovanni, Biagio. Marx e la constituzione della Praxis. Bologna, It.: Capelli, 1984. Engels, Friedrich. Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. Edited by C. P. Dutt. New York: International Publishers, 1941. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–2007. Habermas, Jürgen. Theory and Practice. Translated by John Viertel. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974. . The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. 2 vols. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984–87. Hess, Moses. Die europäischer Triarchie. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1841. . “Über das Geldwesen.” In Philosophische und socialistische Schriften, 1837–1850, edited by Wolfgang Mönke. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980. Höffe, Otfried. Praktische Philosophie: Das Modell des Aristoteles. Berlin: Akademie, 1996. James, William. Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy; The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Labica, George, ed. Karl Marx: Les thèses sur Feuerbach. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Macherey, Pierre. Comte: La philosophie et les sciences. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35. Rubinstein, David. Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Quintin Hoare. 2 vols. New York: Verso, 2004–6. Schwartz, Yves. “Philosophie et ergologie.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 94, no. 2 (April–June 2000). Tosel, André. Praxis: Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste. Paris: Éditions sociales, 1984. Vérin, Hélène. Entrepreneurs, Entreprise: Histoire d’une idée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. . Philosophical Grammar. Translated by Anthony Kenny. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. . Philosophical Investigations. Bilingual edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. . Philosophical Remarks. Translated by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975. . Remarks on Colour. Translated by Lina McAlister. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. . Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967. . Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen” (Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations: 4.112). Elucidation defines the philosopher’s activity, and thereby defines the ethical value of the Tractatus— or, as Wittgenstein frequently says, its “therapeutics” of thought, which is pursued in a different way in his later philosophy through the emergence of Praxis. Wittgenstein uses the term praxis more frequently than “therapy,” which appears only once in the whole of his work, or even than “activity” (Tätigkeit), which we still find in the writings of the intermediary period (“Das Denken heißt eine Tätigkeit” [Thinking is an activity]: Philosophical Grammar), but which is later entirely replaced by Praxis. Two final remarks. First, when returned to dependency on the Praxis that implements it, the “rule” is no longer subject to the great metaphysical opposition between a descriptive proposition or assertion and an imperative or prescription. The distinction between the normative and the theoretical is qualified, which makes it easier to approach the problematics of “discursive practice,” the speech act, or the truth effect. Next, and as a consequence, the most pertinent confrontation, in the end, is not with Aristotle or Marx, but with Kant. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant wrote: “A practical rule is always a product of reason because it prescribes action [vorschreibt die Handlung] as a means to an effect, which is its purpose” (RT: Ak., vol. 5). In Wittgenstein’s work, the “rule,” before prescribing an action or its goal, must be stated in the context of an action, that is, of a use, of a practice or praxis. Otherwise it will have no effect, and consequently no “meaning.” There is no doubt here that, despite all the differences, comparisons might be made with other problematics of use (like that of Foucault: “the use of pleasures”) or of activity (like that of the “ergologues about whom Yves Schwartz writes). But Wittgenstein is the only one to speak of praxis with a sublime unawareness of the historically acquired ambiguity of the notion. Étienne Balibar Barbara Cassin Sandra Laugier REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. First published in 1958. Bacon, Francis. Novum organum. Translated by James Spedding et al. Edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. New ed. London: Longmans, 1872. . The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. Edited by J. M. Robertson. London: Routledge, 1905. Ball, Terence, ed. Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Bensussan, Gérard. Moses Hess, la philosophie, le socialisme (1836–1845). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. Bernstein, Richard. Praxis and Action. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Canguilhem, Georges. “Le statut social de la science moderne.” Unpublished lectures given at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1961–62. Cieszkowski, August. “Prolegomena to Historiography.” In Selected Writings of August Cieszkowski, translated and edited by André Liebich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Comte, August. August Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. Edited by Gertrud Lenzner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975. PRÉDICABLE 833 PRÉDICABLE FRENCH prédicable GREEK katêgoroumenon [ϰατηγοϱούμενον] LATIN praedicabile v. CATEGORY, ESSENCE, LOGOS, PARONYM, PREDICATION, PROPERTY, SUBJECT, SUPPOSITION, THING, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI, UNIVERSALS A certain confusion prevails among translators of Aristotle regarding the fundamental terms of onto-logic: katêgoroumenon [ϰατηγοϱούμενον], katêgorêma [ϰατηγόϱημα], and katêgoria [ϰατηγοϱία]. Although J. Tricot, basing himself on a few actual uncertainties in Aristotle’s text, considers them as practically synonyms, it seems preferable to distinguish them in principle in a strict manner, in conformity with a certain medieval usage, reserving “predicable” (Lat. praedicabile) for katêgoroumenon, “categoreme” (Latin categorema [vs. “syncategoreme”]) for katêgorema, and “category” or “predicament” (Latin categoria, praedicamentum [see CATEGORY]), for katêgoria. In a sense, this clarification does violence to the texts, because it is obvious that the Greek katêgoroumenon means both “predicate” and “predicable.” However, modern logic and ontology use Latin (that is, Franco-Latin, Anglo-Latin, GermanoLatin, etc.) more than Greek, and we cannot consider negligible the decisions made by “Latinity” since the sixth century to “enlist” the Aristotelian-Porphyrian technical idiom. The term praedicabile was introduced by Boethius in his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge to render katêgoroumenon, which Marius Victorinus, the first translator of the work, had earlier rendered by appellativus. Although it is not always easy to recognize in Aristotle Porphyry’s distinction between “predicate” and “predicable” (we will see that some medieval thinkers did not consider it pertinent), it exists in Aristotle and is discussed in the Categories. One has to pay attention to this in order to estimate accurately the horizon, foundations, and stakes involved in the debate between nominalism and realism from the Middle Ages to the present—realism presupposing, today as always, the reification of the relations between “predicables” (that is, the “realization” of “Porphyry’s Tree”), whereas nominalism presupposes the neutralization of the difference between praedicamentum and praedicabile. I. Predicate and Predicable In Categories (1b.10-12), once he has posited the classification of four kinds of beings—secondary substances, primary substances, universal accidents, particular accidents—by permutation of the relations kath’ hupokeimenou legesthai [ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου λέγεσθαι] (“to be said of a subject”) and en hupokeimenôi einai [ἐν ὑποϰειμένῳ εἶναι] (“to be in a subject”), which constitutes the complete inventory of the “things that there are,” Aristotle formulates a general rule according to which “when something is predicated (katêgoreitai [ϰατηγοϱεῖται]) of something else as of a subject (hôs kath’ hupokeimenou [ὡς ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου]), everything that is said (legetai [λέγεται]) of the predicable (katêgoroumenou [ϰατηγοϱουμένου]) will also be said [ῥηθήσεται] of [this] subject (hupokeimenou [ὑποϰειμένου]).” The expression “be predicated of something as of a subject” does not mean “be attributed to a subject” in the sense in which one says that in a proposition the predicate is attributed to the logical subject by means of a copula (“S is P”), but rather the relation existing between a “predicable” and what is “subjected” to it in the serial order that constitutes a genus—the very type of relation that was later to be articulated in what is called “Porphyry’s Tree.” To illustrate this general law, Aristotle takes two examples (1b.12–15): that of “man” predicated of “this man” (a man), and that of “animal,” which, according to the rule, is also predicated of the individual man, since the individual man is both a man and an animal. The meaning of the rule is that when one thing—man (a species)—is predicated of another—individual man (a primary substance)—“as of a subject,” what is predicated of it— animal (a genus)—is predicated of it and of its subject. To present this rule, Aristotle does not employ the terms “genus” and “species,” but that is indeed what he has in mind, as is shown by the definitive formulation in chapter 5 of the Categories (3b.2–7), based on the general formula of 1b.10–12: “the definition of the species and that of the genus are applicable to the primary substance.” In his Commentary on the Categories “by question and answer” Porphyry explains the meaning of Aristotle’s expression “to be predicated of something as of a subject”: it means “to be stated by it as being part of its essence” (see Isagoge et in Aristotelis categorias commentarium, ed. A. Busse, 80.5 f.). Thus there is a clear distinction between the “predicate” in the logical sense of the term, the predicative part of a proposition, and “what is predicated” in the sense of the “predicable.” In a proposition such as “Socrates is walking,” the term “walking” is predicated of the term “Socrates” (which is the logical and grammatical subject of the sentence), but it is not “predicated as of a subject” because it does not express a constituent of its essence. On the other hand, as Porphyry emphasizes, in the statement “Socrates is [a] man,” “man” is predicated of “Socrates” as of a subject, for if we ask, “What is Socrates?” the correct answer (that is, the logos [λόγος] expressing his being) is this: “He is a man.” In “Socrates is a man,” “man” is thus both predicate and predicable. What Aristotle has in mind in 1b.10–15 is thus a relation of “predicability” based on another relation, that of “subordination,” which means that what is predicated of a predicable Y as of a subject is also predicated of that of which Y is predicated as of an individual subject X. The complete schema of the relation of predicability, corresponding to the vertical relations established on “Porphyry’s Tree,” is thus: Z →Y Y →X Z →X (where Z designates a genus, Y a species, X an individual, and → the relation “to be predicated of as of a subject”). This schema articulates entities that are ontologically subordinated to each other within the single genus (X is subordinated to Y, which is subordinated to Z). The same thesis is set forth in Isagoge 2.§14: “of everything of which the species is predicated, of that, necessarily, will also be predicated the genus of the species, etc.” Porphyry goes on to define the three “predicables” implied in the relation of subordination: Genus: Genus signifies what is predicable of several things differing in genus, relative to the question “what is it?” 834 PRÉDICABLE is the object of careful elaboration (cf. William of Ockham, Summa logicae, 1:26–29). Aristotle himself draws from his list an initial modified list; the final list in the Topics is an elaboration of an earlier table with four terms including genus, property, accident, and difference, which Aristotle modified by reducing difference to genus: “the differentia too, applying as it does to a class (or genus) should be ranked together with the genus” (Topics, 1.4.101b.18–19); (2) by dividing property into two parts, one of which, signifying “the essential of the essence” (to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι]), is definition, while the other, not signifying it, is the only one called “property” (to idion [τὸ ἴδιον]). By restoring “difference” to its list of predicables, the Isagoge combines Aristotle’s two lists, analyzing definition, which is eliminated from the new list, into its two constituents: genus and difference. The introduction of species alongside genus, difference, property, and accident is a change in perspective with regard to the Topics that has been criticized by some interpreters. In his book on Aristotle, W. D. Ross severely criticizes Porphyry’s revision: “Porphyry later muddled hopelessly [Aristotle’s classification of predicables] by reckoning species as a fifth predicable” (Aristotle, 2nd ed., 57). This modification is easily explained, however; the Isagoge is an introduction to the Categories, and its function is to explain, within the limits of the skopos [σϰοπός] (subject) of the Categories, the elements of ontology that they contain. As we have seen, the relation genus-speciesdifference-individual is the backbone of the Categories. In choosing species, Porphyry is performing his work as an interpreter: he exchanges the perspective of the Topics for that of the Categories. In the Topics, Aristotle examines only propositions (premises or problems) that have a general term as their subject: species thus does not figure on his list; in the Isagoge, on the other hand, Porphyry adds propositions having an individual term as their subject, and thus species necessarily figures on his list. This broadening of the typology of propositions results from an ontological decision: Porphyry Platonizes Aristotle’s theory of predicables as it is set forth in the Topics. However, this Platonization is consistent with the theoretical content of the Categories. Porphyry Platonizes Aristotle only at points where he is still Platonic or, at least, “Platonizable.” Having already mentioned the definitions of genus, species, and difference proposed in the Commentary on the Categories (Busse, ed., 82), we will cite here from the Isagoge only those of property and accident: Property Greek: [ϰαὶ γὰϱ ὃ μόνῳ τινὶ εἴδει ταῦτα δὲ ϰαὶ ϰυϱίως ἴδιά φασιν, ὅτι ϰαὶ ἀντιστϱέφει.] Boethius: et id quod soli alicui speciei. Haec autem proprie propria perhibent esse, quoniam etiam convertuntur. ([A property is] what belongs to a species alone [ ] [Properties] are precisely those [traits] which, according to [philosophers] are called properties in the strict sense, because they can be converted.) (trans. J. Barnes) ([τὸ ϰατὰ πλειόνων ϰαὶ διαφεϱόντων τῷ εἴδει ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱούμενον.]) (Busse, ed., 82.6–7) Species: Species signifies what is predicable of several things differing in number, relatively to the question: “what is it?” ([τὸ ϰατὰ πλειόνων ϰαὶ διαφεϱόντων τῷ ἀϱιθμῷ ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱούμενον.]) (Ibid., 82.10–11) Difference: A difference is what is predicated of several things differing in species, relative to the question “how is the thing?” ([τὸ ϰατὰ πλειόνων ϰαὶ διαφεϱόντων τῷ εἴδει ἐν τῷ ποῖόν τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱούμενον.]) (Ibid., 82.19–20) On this basis, Porphyry analyzes the relation between essence, animal, and man—the essence is not subordinated to anything, since it is “highest” (there is nothing anterior to it); the animal is a species in relation to the essence and a genus in relation to man; man is a species in relation to the animal and the essence—and then he explains that the relations among the three are determined by the rule that stipulates that what is “higher” is predicated on what is “lower” “synonymously” (sunônumôs [συνωνύμως]), a key term in the Aristotelian theory of predication. Next he introduces a distinction between “constitutive” differences (sustatikai [συστατιϰαί]) and “divisive” differences (diairetikai [διαιϱετιϰαί]). This set constitutes the foundation of what “Porphyry’s Tree” presents for the analysis of the genus “substance” or “essence.” II. The Five Predicables In addition to what he says in the Categories, Aristotle also sets forth the theory of predicables in Topics: 1.4, gives their “division”; 1.5 their “definition”; 1.8, the justification for this division; 1.6., 6.1, and 7.5, the analysis of their relations. Aristotle’s list of predicables has four entries: definition, property, genus, and accident ([ὁϱισμός, ἴδιος, γένος, συμϐεϐηϰός]). Porphyry’s, on the other hand, lists five: genus, species, difference, property, and accident ([γένος, εἶδος, διαφοϱά, ἴδιος, συμϐεϐηϰός]). If we juxtapose Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s lists, we see that the Isagoge refashions Aristotle’s division in two ways: (1) by substituting difference for definition; and (2) by adding species to the initial list. Medieval commentators did not fail to stress this elimination of definition. In his Summa logicae, William of Ockham gave it a special chapter at the end of his analysis of “Porphyry’s five predicables.” He even added three chapters on description, descriptive definition, and the terms “defined” and “described,” based on John of Damascus’s Dialectica. In this way he reconnected, at a distance, with a central element of Neoplatonic exegesis, in which the distinction between orismos [ὁϱισμός] (definition), logos [λόγος] (statement, formula), and hupographê [ὑπογϱαφή] (description), which is not made explicit in the Isagoge (although it is used in it), PRÉDICABLE 835 and Boethius, in the first edition of his commentary on the Isagoge also uses the term res—being universally predicable, it may seem pointless to distinguish in this case between “predicable” and “universal.” The terminist logicians of the thirteenth century, however, made a series of definitions that fully justify, from their realist point of view, a distinction between the two terms. According to them, “predicable” has two meanings: strictly speaking, a “predicable” is what “is predicated on several [things]”; in the broad sense, it is “what is predicated on a thing or of several [things].” Thus “predicable” and “universal” are synonyms, in the strict sense of “predicable.” They differ from one another, however, in that the predicable is defined by “being said” (dici) whereas the universal is defined by “being [in]” (esse in): “differunt in hoc quod praedicabile definitur per dici, universale autem per esse” (Peter of Spain, Tractatus, 2.§1.17). In this analysis, the predicable is thus “what is by nature capable of being said of several [things] [quod aptum natum est dici de pluribus].” The former is a term, the second a thing or property. . The pair dici versus esse in is not congruent with the two relations used in the Categories to produce the four classes of things: primary and secondary substances, particular and universal accidents. In the Categories, the relation kath’ hupokeimenou legesthai [ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου λέγεσθαι] (to be said of a subject) is the mark of universality, whereas en hupokeimenôi einai [ἐν ὑποϰειμένῳ εἶναι] (to be in a subject) is that of accidentality. The meaning of the words dici and esse in the terminist definition is thus either different from the Aristotelian meaning or it is unsuited to the situation. Moreover, the nominalists rejected, as a categorial error, the use of the notion “to be in” with regard to the universal. In the fourteenth century the terminist thesis was redefined on the basis of the theory of “supposition” (see SUPPOSITION). “Predicable” and “universal” are both metalogical or metalinguistic terms that designate other terms, including concepts and signs. In his Summulae (in fact a commentary on Peter of Spain’s Tractatus), Jean Buridan explains that “according to the literal meaning of the words” Peter’s thesis is false. One cannot say that the universal and the predicable are the same thing, but only that the terms “universal” and “predicable” are convertible. They differ, however, secundum rationem. In his explanation of this difference, Buridan, as a nominalist, erases the distinction initially made by Aristotle and Porphyry between predicate and predicable. “Predicate” (praedicatum) and “subject” (subjectum) are relative terms. The same goes for “predicable” (predicabile) and “subjectable” (subicibile). A term is said to be “predicable” insofar as (ea ratione) it is “suited by nature to be predicated of a subject,” while it is said to be “subjectable” insofar as (ea ratione) it “signifies equally several things and is suited to substitute for several things, without regard to the fact that it functions as a subject or as a predicate.” For Buridan, a universal term is thus not defined as such by esse in. A universal “is in nothing.” The expression esse in must be understood in the sense of “to be predicated truly and affirmatively.” The same metalinguistic redefinition of esse in as praedicari vere et affirmative appears in Ockham. In his commentary on the Isagoge, even the passage on the “subsistence” of the Accident Greek: [συμϐεϐηϰός ἐστιν ὃ ἐνδέχεται τῷ αὐτῷ ὑπάϱχειν ἢ μὴ ὑπάϱχειν, ἢ ὃ οὔτε γένος ἐστὶν οὔτε διαφοϱὰ οὔτε εἶδος οὔτε ἴδιον, ἀεὶ δέ ἐστιν ἐν ὑποϰειμένῳ ὑφιστάμενον.] Boethius: Definitur autem sic quoque: accidens est quod contingit eidem esse et non esse, vel quod neque genus neque differentia neque species neque proprium, semper autem est in subiecto subsistens. (df 1 Accident: An accident is what can belong or not belong to the same thing. df 2 Accident: or else it is that which is neither genus, nor difference, nor species, nor property, but which always subsists in a subject.) (trans. J. Barnes) In Porphyry, definition “df 2 Accident” corresponds to “df 1 Accident” in Aristotle, who also offers, in the Topics, two definitions: Greek: [Συμϐεϐηϰὸς δέ ἐστιν ὃ μηδὲν μὲν τούτων ἐστί, μήτε ὅϱος μήτε γένος, ὑπάϱχει δὲ τῷ πϱάγματι· ϰαὶ ὃ ἐνδέχεται ὑπάϱχειν ὁτῳοῦν ἑνὶ ϰαὶ τῷ αὐτῷ ϰαὶ μὴ ὑπάϱχειν.] Boethius: Accidens autem est quod nichil horum est, neque diffinitio neque proprium neque genus, inest autem rei et contingit inesse cuilibet uni et eidem et non inesse. (Topica, trans. Boethii in Aristoteles latinus, 11.1–2) df 1 Accident: An accident is something which, though it is none of the foregoing, i.e., neither a definition nor a property nor a genus—yet belongs to the thing. (Topics, 1.5.102b.4–5; trans. J. Barnes) df 2 Accident: something which may possibly either belong or not belong to any one and the self-same thing. (Topics, 1.5.102b.6–7; trans. J. Barnes) Porphyry’s definition differs from Aristotle’s by the addition of aei de estin en hupokeimenôi huphistamenon [ἀεὶ δέ ἐστιν ἐν ὑποϰειμένῳ ὑφιστάμενον] (but which always subsists in a subject), and this was to pose numerous problems for medieval thinkers. III. “Predicable” and “Universal” The distinction between “predicable” and “universal” is difficult to formulate. In one sense, there is no difference between these terms, since both designate the five entities that tradition has also called “five voices” [πέντε φωναί], extrapolated from the heading of one of the chapters in the Isagoge about the “common properties of the five voices” (Peri tês koinônias tôn pente phônôn [Пεϱὶ τῆς ϰοινωνίας τῶν πέντε φωνῶν]). These five entities—Apuleius speaks of five significationes, while Marius Victorinus speaks of partes or res, 836 PRÉDICABLE 1 Inhaerere/inesse: The ambiguities of the expression of inherence v. PREDICATION, Box 3, TERM The word “inhere” is used to render the two Latin verbs inhaerere and inesse without attending to the fact that they may have different meanings. In medieval texts inesse is used to indicate the fact that an accident is in a substrate, inhaerere being usually employed in the logical context of predication to indicate the quality signified by the predicate insofar as it is attributed to the subject, insofar as it is signified as being in the subject. The distinction seems to go back to Boethius, and to the developments of his thought proposed by Abelard. Boethius generally uses the verb inesse to describe the inherence of an accident, of a quality, for example, in a subject. The verb can thus signify an accident that inheres (inest) in a subject. But Boethius also uses the verb inhaerere repeatedly in his De topicis differentiis to describe the relations between terms, between the “subject term” and the “predicate term”: In praedicativa quaestione dubitatur an subiecto termino praedicatus in inhaereat. (In a predicative question, we ask whether the predicate inheres in the subject term.) (De topicis differentiis, 1177B; trans. E. Stump) Here the question is how to determine, in a given proposition, which of the four “modes of inherence” is the one in accord with which the predicate term is predicated on the subject term (quisnam modus sit quattuor inhaerendi, 1186C), that is, whether the predicate is predicated of the subject qua genus, definition, property, or difference (1179A–B). Although Boethius does use inhaerere for relations between terms, this relation seems to depend on a real relation, which he indicates by the verb inesse: In predicative questions one is asking nothing other than whether the subject inheres (inhaereat) in the predicate. If it is in (inesse), we must ask whether it is in qua genre, accident, property, or definition. And if it is not in, the question disappears. In fact, what is not in, is not either as an accident, or as a definition, or as a genus, or as a quality. But if it proves to be in, the question remains which of the four modes of inherence (modus inhaerendi) is involved. (De topicis differentiis, 1186C; trans. E. Stump) In his commentary on these passages, Abelard sought to clarify this terminological confusion. As a nominalist, he makes a clear distinction between real relations between things and relations between terms, which constitute the true object of dialectic. Thus he distinguishes between an “inherence of things” (inhaerentia rerum) and “inherence of words, of names” (inhaerentia vocum), discerning two questions in Boethius’s original question as to whether “the predicate term inheres in the subject term.” The “inherence of things” concerns the real relations between things: since every predication indicates a “coupling” of things or essences (see in PREDICATION, Box 3), it indicates that what is denoted by the subject term is identical to what is denoted by the predicate term. These real relations are thus not indicated by “being in” (inesse) but rather by identity, because “in every predicative affirmation we affirm that something is something (ibid.): In the questions, “Is Socrates a man?” or “Is Socrates white?” we are asking whether the predicate inheres (inhaereat) in the subject. (De topicis differentiis , 275; trans. E. Stump) Elsewhere, Abelard speaks of the “coherence” of two matters (cohaerentia) in the first case, and of the “adjacency” or “adherence” of a form to a matter in the second (Dialectica, 329). On the other hand, the “inherence of names” concerns the different modes indicating the relations between the subject and predicate terms, for example relations of identity for property or definition, of superiority for genus, and so forth. In this sense, asking whether the predicate inheres (inhaereat) in the subject amounts to inquiring into the mode in which it suits (conveniat) the latter. For example, when Boethius explains that “when something is posited as being in (inesse) something, it can be superior,” it is clear, Abelard says, that the question is not whether the “animal” thing is superior to the “man” thing, since they are really identical, but rather to see if, in saying homo est animal the term “animal” is superior to the term “man,” which determines that the former is genus in relation to the latter, and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the three other predicables. In fact, he concludes, in asking this question about the modes of inherence, “Boethius really wanted to speak of the terms of which the proposition is composed, rather than of the things that they signify” (Super topica glossae, 270; cf. Dialectica, 165–66, “Edition super porphyrium”). The truth of the proposition “snow is white” depends on real relations between things; to determine whether the accident is in (inest) the subject, we have to ask whether one thing (snow) is identical with another thing (this white) and not with this essence (whiteness); but the topical relations depend on relations between terms—and Abelard is here in open opposition to his realist teacher William of Champeaux, who maintained that they concerned real relations between things. The distinction between these two meanings of the term inhaerere is mentioned apropos of other questions. For example, in discussing adverbs of modality, Abelard explains that they cannot qualify real inherence (the modality de sensu, later called de re), but only verbal inherence: in the proposition “Socrates possibiliter est episcopus” (“Socrates could be a bishop”) one cannot speak of the real inherence (or “coherence”) of bishop in Socrates (because Socrates is, at the time one speaks, a layperson), which is still clearer in the example “Socratem impossibile est esse lapidem” (“It is impossible that Socrates is a stone”). In opposition to William of Champeaux, who was a partisan of an interpretation of modalities de dicto, Abelard maintains that modality acts on the level of enuntiatio, and refers to the manner in which the predicate term is joined to the subject term (Dialectica, 191–98, Glossae super peri hermeneias, 484). Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Abelard, Peter. Dialectica. Edited by Lambertus Marie de Rijk. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1956. 2nd rev. ed. 1970. . “Editio super porphyrium.” pp. 3–42 in Scritti di logica, edited by Mario Dal Pra. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. . Glossae super peri hermeneias. Part 3 of Logica “ingredientibus.” Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2010. . Super topica glossae. Part 7 of Logica “ingredientibus.” In Scritti di logica, edited by Mario Dal Pra. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Boethius. De topicis differentiis. English translation by Eleonore Stump. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. PREDICATION 837 Porphyry. Aristoteles latinus. In Isagoge, translatio Boethii accedunt isagoges fragmenta M. Victorino interprete, edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966. . Isagoge. French translation by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: J. Vrin, 1998. . Introduction to Isagoge. Edited by A. Busse in Isagoge et in Aristotelis categorias commentarium, CAG 4.1. Berlin: Reimer, 1887. English translation by E. Warren: Porphyry the Phoenician: Isagoge. Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1975. English translation, with commentary, by Jonathan Barnes: Introduction to Isagoge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ross, W. D. Aristotle. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1930. Simplicius. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca. Vol. 8. Edited by K. Kalbfleisch. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1907. . On Aristotle’s Categories 1-4. Translated by Michael Chase. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. . On Aristotle’s Categories 5-6. Translated by Frans A. J. de Haas and Barrie Fleet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. . On Aristotle’s Categories 7-8. Translated by Barrie Fleet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. . On Aristotle’s Categories 9-15. Translated by Richard Gaskin. London: Duckworth, 2000. William of Ockham. Opera philosophica. Vol. 2 of Expositionis in libros artis logicae proemium et expositio in librum Porphyrii de praedicabilibus. 7 vols. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1974–88. . Summa logicae. 3 vols. Edited by Philotheus Boehner. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1951–54. Translation by Michael J. Loux: Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa logicae. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. Translation by Alfred J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman: Ockham’s Theory of Propositions: Part II of the Summa logicae. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. accident in a subject is redefined in this way: according to Ockham, the second definition of “accident” merely elaborates on the first, because in the expression semper autem est in subjecto subsistens (“is always also subsisting in the subject”), subsistere means praedicari. For Ockham, the meaning of the second definition of “accident” in Porphyry is thus purely “logical”: df 2 Accident: omne praedicabile de multis, quod neque est genus neque species neque differentia neque proprium, et non praedicatur de omnibus sed de aliquibus praedicatur et de aliquibus non, est accidens, hoc est contingenter praedicabile. (Everything that is predicable of several subjects and is neither a genus nor a species nor a difference nor a property, and which is not a predicable of all subjects but is predicable of some and not of others, is contingently predicable.) (Expositio in librum Porphyrii de praedicabilibus, 2:99, 30–34) The neutralization of the distinction between predicable and universal, to the advantage of the meaning of “predicable” (= a term is universal when it “signifies several things”), is a characteristic of nominalism, whether medieval or modern. Alain de Libera REFS.: Ammonius. Ammonii in Porphyrii Isagogen sive V Voces. Edited by Adolf Busse. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 4.3. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1891. Apuleius. The Logic of Apuleius, Including a Complete Latin Text and English Translation of the Peri Hermeneias of Apuleius of Madaura. Translated by David Londey and Carmen Lohanson. New York: E. J. Brill, 1987. Aristotle. “Categories” and “On Interpretation.” Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. . Topica. Vol. 5.1–3, in Aristoteles latinus. Latin translation by Boethii (Boethius). Edited by Minio-Paluello. Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1969. English translation by Jonathan Barnes: Topics. In Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. French translation by Jacques Brunschwig. Topiques. Edited, and with an introduction, by J. Brunschwig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. Barnes, Jonathan. “Property in Aristotle’s Topics.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 52 (1970): 136–55. Brunschwig, Jacques. “Sur le système des ‘prédicables’ dans les Topiques d’Aristote.” pp. 145–57 in Energeia: Etudes aristotéliciennes offertes à Mgr. Antonio Jannone. Paris: J. Vrin, 1986. Buridan, Jean. Summulae de praedicabilibus. Edited by L. M. de Rijk. Nijmegen: Ingenium, 1995. Code, Alan. “Aristotle: Essence and Accident.” pp. 411–39 in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, edited by Richard Grandy and Richard Warner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Ebbesen, Sten. “Boethius as an Aristotelian Scholar.” In Aristotles, Werk und Wirkung, vol. 2, edited by J. Wiesner. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1987. Elias [olim Davidis]. Eliae in Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria. Edited by Adolf Busse. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 18.1. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1900. Evangeliou, C. “Aristotle’s Doctrine of Predicable and Porphyry’s Isagoge.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23, no. 1 (1985): 15–34. John XXI, Pope. The Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain. Edited by Joseph Patrick Mullally. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1945. Matthews, Gareth B., and Sheldon Marc Cohen. “The One and the Many.” Review of Metaphysics 21, no. 4 (June, 1968): 630–55. Peter of Spain. Tractatus. Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth: Van Gorcum, 1972. PREDICATION, PREDICATE, ATTRIBUTE FRENCH prédication, prédiquer, attribuer GERMAN Aussage, aussagen GREEK katêgoria [ϰατηγοϱία], katêgorô [ϰατηγοϱῶ] ITALIAN attribuzione, attribuire LATIN praedicatio, praedicare v. ANALOGY, CATEGORY, CONCEPT [BEGRIFF, CONCEPTUS], ESSENCE, ESTI, HOMONYM, LOGOS, PARONYM, PRÉDICABLE, PROPOSITION, SUBJECT, TERM, TO BE, UNIVERSALS “Predication” designates the logical form par excellence: the attribution of a predicate to a subject in a proposition is the basic unit of classical logic. The canonical predicative form defining the association of two concepts, subject and predicate, is traditionally presented as the connection of two terms (or “extremes”) by means of a copula (lexicalized by the verb “to be”), expressed by the formula “S is P.” This analysis is generally traced back to Aristotle—not entirely correctly, however. In fact, the three expressions that appear in his work to designate predication are huparchein [ὑπάϱχειν] (belong to), legesthai [λέγεσθαι] (be said of), and katêgoreisthai [ϰατηγοϱεῖσθαι] (be predicated of), so that the copula has the function of implementing the imposed/supposed equivalence of huparchein, legesthai, and katêgoreisthai. This assimilation is consummated in all the summae of medieval logic, and the predominance of the tripartite analysis of logical form into “S is P” gives the impression that the distinction “subject”-“predicate,” which derives from the hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον]–katêgorêma [ϰατηγόϱημα] pair, is universal. 838 PREDICATION is, the terms that attribute a property to these subjects being transcribed as “predicates” (cf. M. Pohlenz, Die Stoa). G. Schenk, commenting on Diogenes Laertius (VII.70), thus writes that among the Stoics, “the normal form of the statement/proposition is the case in which the subject is presented in its fundamental form, that is, the one in which the connection is made by means of a nominative” (Als normale Form der Aussage betrachten sie den Fall, wo das Subjekt sich in seiner Grundform aufrecht erhält, d.h. die Verbindung in einem Nominativ vollzogen wird [Zur Geschichte der logischen Form, in Einige Entwicklungstendenzen von der Antike bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1:216]; see section V of this entry). In his translations of Aristotle, Boethius (ca. 480–524/25 CE) uses praedico to render katêgorô [ϰατηγοϱῶ], and praedicatio to render katêgoria [ϰατηγοϱία], which is also rendered by praedicamentum. The word praedicatio appears, of course, in a great variety of contexts. It raises no particular problem; it is the distinctions that it involves that require explanation in some cases. In the Scholastic vocabulary, praedicatio appears in a great variety of contexts in expressions such as praedicatio essentialis versus praedicatio accidentalis, praedicatio per essentiam versus praedicatio per accidens, and praedicatio per se versus praedicatio per aliud, which are so many unproblematic calques of Aristotle’s technical language. Other uses of praedicare can be easily explained: in abstracto versus concretive, in plurali (or pluraliter) versus in singulari (or singulariter), negative versus positive, per prius versus per posterius, simpliciter versus secundum quid. On the other hand, some uses of praedicatio/praedicare, although also of Aristotelian origin, raise genuine problems. For example, in quid (or in eo quod quid, or in eo quod quid est) versus in quale (of in quale quid, or ineo quod quale) or de ut de subjecto versus ut in subjecto and de univoce versus denominative. For the first group, the difficulty concerns only the translation, because the conceptual content is clearly accessible; for the second group, it is the notion itself that poses a problem, the translation difficulty disappearing as soon as the content is identified. II. Predication In Quid / Predication In Quale The expression praedicatio in eo quod quid est (or in eo quod quid sit praedicari) first appears in Marius Victorinus (ca. 280–365), the translator of Porphyry’s Isagoge, which was later popularized by Boethius’s translations of Aristotle’s Organon and by the Logica vetus. That is the case, for example, of the definition of genus in Aristotles’ Topics (I.5.102a31–32): “Genos esti to kata pleionôn kai diapherontôn tôi eidei en tôi ti esti katêgoroumenon” [Ґένος ἐστὶ τὸ ϰατὰ πλειόνων ϰαὶ διαφεϱόντων τῷ εἴδει ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱούμενον], which Victorinus renders in Latin by “Genus autem est quod de pluribus et differentibus specie in eo quod quid est praedicatur.” J. Brunschwig’s French translation (“Est genre un attribut qui appartient en leur essence à plusieurs choses spécifiquement différentes” [Genus is an attribute that belongs in its essence to several specifically different things; Topics]), as well as J. Tricot’s (“Est genre l’attribut essentiel applicable à une pluralité de choses différant entre elles spécifiquement” [Genus is the essential attribute that applies to a plurality of things differentiated among themselves in specific ways; Topics]), although very clear, allow us to discern a certain confusion with regard to the basic Thus it was on the basis of the “Aristotelian” conception of predication and its tripartite analysis of propositional form as it was established in the Middle Ages, following Boethius’s Latin translations, that the tradition developed and then, starting with G. Frege, threw into crisis—to the advantage of the “function”—the logical theory of predication. The problems encountered by a translator of ancient and medieval texts on logic, which were simply extended in pre-Fregean logic, are thus all concentrated on the avatars of katêgoreisthai/legesthai. Here we will discuss only the main difficulties—praedicatio in quid versus praedicatio in quale; praedicatio ut de subjecto versus praedicatio ut in subjecto; praedicatio univoca versus praedicatio denominativa—before returning to the problem of the copula. I. The “Aristotelian” Conception Aristotle’s three ways of designating predication, huparchein [ὑπάϱχειν] (“belong to”; Ger. kommen zu), legesthai [λέγεσθαι] (“be said of”; Ger. ausgesagt werden), and katêgoreisthai [ϰατηγοϱεῖσθαι] (“be predicated of”; Ger. behauptet werden), must all be understood on the basis of huparchein, at least insofar as predication proper is concerned, occurring in the context of syllogistic reasoning, and thus in that in which the basic unit is the proposition understood as a “premise.” In fact, although since the Middle Ages all propositions have commonly been analyzed in the so-called Aristotelian form—“A is B”—Aristotle himself never writes “A estin B” (A is B) (except in presenting defective arguments or acknowledging ordinary usage), but only “to A huparchei tôi B” (the A belongs to B), in series such as “If [the] A belongs to all B, and if [the] B belongs to all C, then [the] A belongs to all C.” Naturally, since the same thesis can be expressed using legesthai, as Aristotle himself does in the Prior Analytics, I.4.25b, 35n.), basing himself on the definition of the dictum de omne (“That one term should be included in another as in a whole [en holôi (έν ὅλῳ)] is the same as for the other to be predicated of all of the first. And we say that one term is predicted of all of another, whenever no instance of the subject can be found of which the other term cannot be asserted”) (I.24b, 28.n.; trans. A. J. Jenkinson), the Aristotelian conception of predication on the basis of huparchein can easily be reduced to a form that is simpler and easier to handle “in languages”: the copula “is” functions to implement the socalled equivalence of huparchein, legesthai, and katêgoreisthai. This assimilation, which is found in all medieval treatises on logic, is taken further by another assertion in the Prior Analytics (I.37, 49a.n.): “The expressions ‘this belongs to that’ and ‘this holds true of that’ have to be understood in as many different ways as there are different categories,” interpreted as meaning that for Aristotle in various propositions the copula has as many meanings as there are categories (Bochenski, A History of Formal Logic). The predominance of the tripartite analysis of the logical form into “S is P” gives the impresssion that the distinction “subject”-“predicate,” which arises from the hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον] – katêgorêma [ϰατηγόϱημα] pair (see PRÉDICABLE and SUBJECT), is universal. That is how the Stoic distinction between ptôsis [πτῶσις] and katêgorêma is understood: the “inflections,” that is, the terms or proper nouns (onomata [ὀνόματα]) and general terms (prosêgoriai [πϱοσηγοϱίαι]) that, in a statement, designate an object, being transcribed as “subjects,” and the katêgorêmata, that PREDICATION 839 est? [which bears on the essence or the essential]) and “How is X?” (qualis est? [which bears on the poion ti]) incorporated by Aristotle and Porphyry in the definition of the two types of predication, the matrix of the distinction between essential predication and accidental predication, detailed in another form in the following distinctions: “predication as of a subject” versus “as in a subject” and “univocal predication” versus “denominative predication.” III. “Predication as of a Subject” versus “Predication as in a Subject” The distinction between praedicatio ut de subjecto and praedicatio ut in subjecto raises no translation problems. However, the meaning of the notions is more difficult to grasp, especially when praedicatio ut in subjecto is replaced in the Scholastic language by praedicatio denominativa (see PARONYM). We can describe the phenomenon this way: the Aristotelian theory of predication, as it is set forth in the Categories, is based on a distinction between “beings that are said of a subject” and “beings that are in a subject.” This distinction is often obscured by modern translations. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand, the confusion of PS “be said of a subject” and Pp “be a predicate in a proposition,” and on the other hand the relative homonymy (or only partial synonymy) of PS “be said of a subject” and P*S “to be predicated of a thing as of a subject.” The expression “be said of a subject” appears for the first time in the Categories (1a20–21): “Of things themselves some are predicable of a subject, and are never present in a subject” [τῶν ὄντων τὰ μὲν ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου τὶνὸς λέγεται, ἐν ὑποϰειμένῳ δὲ οὐδενί ἐστιν]. They designate a property (kath’ hupokeimenou legetai), which, combined with the other (en hupokeimenôi einai), makes it possible to distribute beings in four classes. Contrary to what one might expect, “be said of a subject” does not mean “function as a predicate in a proposition” but rather “be applied to a plurality,” that is, “be universal,” and even, for the same reason, “be capable of functioning as a predicate in a proposition” (in fact, a particular cannot be predicated). Interpreting “be said of a subject” as meaning “be a predicate” is reverse cause and effect: it is because it is applied to a plurality that what is said of a subject is capable of then being a predicate in a proposition. The expression kath’ hupokeimenou legetai designates the property that makes it possible to distinguish universals from particulars—en hupokeimenôi einai designating, for its part, the property that makes it possible to distinguish substances from nonsubstances. In chapter 2 of the Categories, Aristotle thus based on these two relations the classification that allows him, by permutation, to classify, as the commentators (introducing at the same time a distinction between substance and accident that Aristotle had not previously mentioned) were to say, the “four kinds of beings”: universal substances, particular nonsubstances, universal nonsubstances, and particular substances—which characterizes each existing substance as not being in a subject (all nonsubstance), being in a subject (all universal), being said of a subject (all particular), and not being said of a subject. This theory of the “four combinations” was made more precise by Porphyry, and then, among the Romans, by Boethius (under the title quatuor complexiones), formula of essential predication: en tôi ti esti katêgoreisthai [ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱεῖσθαι]. It is this expression that raises the greatest problems for the translator. The formula “to be predicated” (en tôi ti esti [ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι]), introduced by Aristotle and later adopted and established by Porphyry, contains a reference to the idea of a question. What is predicated en tôi ti esti is what is predicated to answer the question “What is that thing?” The answer to the question is the ti esti, which, insofar as it is expressed in a definition, is the to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι] (see TO TI ÊN EINAI). The Latin praedicare in eo quod quid est, like the Greek en tôi ti esti katêgoreisthai, thus means “be predicated as to what is,” “be predicated by indicating the ‘what it is’ ”—that is, “be predicated in the rubric ‘What is?’ ” or “ be predicated in the relationship of ti esti,” in short: “to be predicated relative to the question ‘What is?’ ” In the Middle Ages, the Boethian expression was often abbreviated to praedicari in eo quod quid, and then to praiedicari in quid. The meaning is clear: the reference is to essential predication. However, if we want to retain the technical aspect of Scholastic language, we find ourselves somewhat perplexed. A first solution is that adopted by medieval thinkers, conveyed by J. Biard in his translation of Ockham’s Summa logicae (I, chap. 20): “Le genre est ce qui se prédique de plusieurs choses différentes par l’espèce, en en indiquant la quiddité” (Genus is what is predicated of several things differing in species, indicating the quiddity). This makes it possible to avoid using the term “essence,” which is in fact better to reserve for to ti ên einai— and that is why Biard also uses the Franco-Latin expression se prédiquer in quid. Another medieval solution, adopted by O. Boulnois in his translation of Duns Scotus (Sur la connaissance de Dieu et l’univocité de l’étant), is se prédiquer dans-le-quoi. The same difficulty arises, still more acutely, for the expression in eo quo quale si praedicari. This formula is particularly notable in the Isagoge, VIII.§5, where Porphyry explains the way in which difference is predicated: “eti to men genos en tôi ti estin, hê de diaphora en tôi poion ti estin, hôs eirêtai, katêgoreitai” [ἔτι τὸ μὲν γένος ἐν τῷ τί ἐστιν, ἡ δὲ διαφοϱὰ ἐν τῷ ποῖόν τί ἐστιν, ὡς εἴϱηται, ϰατηγοϱεῖται], which Boethius translates as “amplius genus quidem in eo quod quid est, differentia vero in eo quod quale quiddam est, quemadmodum dictum est, praedicatur.” With the most natural translations of en tôi poion ti estin (in eo quod quale sit) and en tôi ti estin being “to be predicated relative to the question ‘What is?,’ ” we can render the passage by “In addition, genus is predicated relative to the question ‘What is’ and difference, relative to ‘How is?’—as has been said.” Translating the passage with “to be predicated in quale” (to be predicated in what it is) is another possibility. In his French translation of the passage, J. Tricot proposes the following: “Le genre est inhérent à l’essence, tandis que la différence rentre dans la qualité” (Genus is inherent in essence, whereas difference is included in quality). Warren’s English translation gives the following: “Further, as has been said, genus is predicated essentially, but difference qualitatively.” For the definition of difference (“difference is what is predicated of several things differing in species, relative to the question ‘How is the thing?’ ”), Tricot once again renders en tôi poion by “in the category of quality.” This seems a poor solution even if it is not basically incorrect. What matters is still to use the vocabulary to make as clear as possible the distinction between the questions “What is X?” (quid 840 PREDICATION a man, the same name (“animal”) and the same logos [λόγος]. The difficulty of 2a19–21 is thus that in R1, “be said of a subject” does not have the same meaning as in PS: tôn kath’ hupokeimenou legomenôn does not designate all things that are applicable to several things (that is, all universals, whether substances or accidents), but rather a subset of these things, those that apply to other things “according to the name and the definition” (in other words, only secondary substances and differences). Even if this cannot be directly formulated in a translation, in order to understand R1 properly, we must then see that its main expression—the “things said of a subject”—refers to neither Pp nor PS, which, unfortunately, is not possible once P*S has been introduced. . It is in R2 that P*S is introduced. This may explain why Aristotle presents this rule, which is logically posterior to R1, before the latter. R2 has to do with the transitivity of intracategorial predication. There again, Aristotle does not specify this. On the other hand, he uses the expression P*S, which supports his whole theory of predication. The intervention of P*S in 1b10–11 is neutralized by Tricot’s translation. The text says, “ὅταν ἕτεϱον ϰαθ’ ἑτέϱου ϰατηγοϱῆται ὡς ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου, ὅσα ϰατὰ τοῦ ϰατηγοϱουμένου λέγεται, πάντα ϰαὶ ϰατὰ τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου ῥηθήσεται.” Tricot offers this translation: “Quand une chose est attribuée à une autre comme à son sujet, tout ce qui est affirmé du prédicat devra être aussi affirmé du sujet” (When a thing is attributed to another thing as it is to its own subject, everything that is affirmed as belonging to the predicate must also be affirmed as belonging to the subject). The function of R2 is to explain that in the case in which three entities, x, y, z, “belong to the same category,” that x is predicated of y by synonymy and that y is predicated of z by synonymy, x is predicated of z by synonymy. The problem raised by this rule is that of correctly interpreting the expression “be predicated of a subject,” which assumes that what has been said in R1 has been introduced into it. This necessity is more or less well emphasized in the main translations. . The problem of R2 is not, in fact, the variety of expressions used to render the series kathêgorêtai/legetai/rhêthêsetai— namely, for kathêgorêtai: est attributé, praedicatur, è predicata, “is predicated,” “will be said,” gilt; for rhêthêsetai: devra être affirmé, dicentur, saranno dette, “will be predicable,” “will be said,” gelten (muß), gelten (wird)—but rather the implicit claim that it conveys, that is, that it is valid only for realities belonging to the same category. The transitivity of predication emphasized by R2 has only an intracategorial validity; it holds only in the context of synonymous predication (defined by R1). The significance of the system formed by R1 and R2 is thus properly understood only if one grasps the import of the difference between PS and P*S. Even if, in fact, the expressions “be said of x” and “be predicated of x as of a subject” are often treated as though they were interchangeable, it remains that in the Categories the main function of P*S is to explain the predicative relation of secondary substances or of differences to their subjects. This is made explicit in three theses set forth in Categories 5. with a distinction between universal substance, particular substance, universal accident, and particular accident (cf. RT: PL, vol. 64, cols. 169–71), which can be represented as follows: Said of a subject In a subject + + universal accident - + particular accident + - universal substance - - particular substance Although the distinction between PS “be said of a subject” and Pp “be a predicate in a proposition” is not always recognized or correctly rendered by modern translations, what both distinguishes and unites PS “be said of a subject” and P*S “be predicated of a thing as of a subject” is still less clear. The reason is that this distinction is from the outset neither comprehensible nor sharply defined, and moreover it is not uniformly maintained in Aristotle or his commentators. To grasp its import, we have to first see that it operates in the horizon of a distinction between intracategorial predication and transcategorial predication. Then we have to understand that although the theory of predication sought by Aristotle in the Categories has as its main goal to explore the first of these two forms of predication, that is, P*S, the meaning of P*S appears on the basis of two rules mentioned in the inverse order of their presupposition: the first in accord with the logical order (notated here as R1), which defines the “synonymy” of predication within the same category, formulated in 2a19–21, whereas the second (R2), which defines its “transitivity,” is formulated in 1b10–11. The meaning of P*S thus appears only by combining the stipulations of R1 and R2—that is, once Aristotle’s formulas have been put back in their true logical order. R1 says [φανεϱὸν δὲ ἐϰ τῶν εἰϱημένων ὅτι τῶν ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου λεγομένων ἀναγϰαῖον ϰαὶ τοὔνομα ϰαὶ τὸν λόγον ϰατηγοϱεῖσθαι τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου]. J. Tricot translates this as follows: “Il est clair, d’après ce que nous avons dit, que le prédicat doit être affirmé du sujet aussi bien pour le nom que pour la définition” (It is clear, after what we have said, that the predicate ought to be affirmed by the subject and equally for the noun and the definition). This translation, which omits tôn kath’ hupokeimenou legomenôn, does not allow us to grasp the function of R1. By giving R1, Aristotle formulates, without saying so explicitly, the first characteristic of intracategorial predication: attribution (sunônumos [συνωνύμως]). What R1 means in fact is that in the case in which two entitites x and y belong to the same category and y is predicated of x, the definition of y and “y” (that is, the term designating y) are both predicated of x. The problem for the translator and reader of 2a19–21 is that Aristotle does not make it clear that R1 holds for the entities belonging to the same category. Nonetheless, what R1 defines, namely what 3a33–34 calls “predication by synonymy” is, in Aristotle’s view, the fundamental trait of intracategorial predication valid for “synonymous” things, those that have, according to the first chapter of the Categories, like an ox and PREDICATION 841 albedo]. Similarly, if we say that a body is white and that a color is white, the definition of the predicate is not predicated equally of the two subjects. (Avicenna, Logica [Venice, 1508], f. 3vb.) IV. “Univocal Predication” versus “Denominative Predication” The reformulation of predication “as of a subject” as “univocal” predication continues Porphyry’s kath’ hupokeimenou interpretation in the form of “essential” predication. On the other hand, the notion of “denominative” predication emphasizes the original Aristotelian notion of accidental attribution. The source of Avicenna’s terminology is clear: the passage in the Topics (II.2.109b4–8) in which, concerning the attribution of genus to species, Aristotle himself distinguishes predication “by synonymy” from predication in a “paronymic” form—a distinction that J. Brunschwig renders in French by means of the univoque/dérivée pair and J. Tricot by d’une façon synonyme / dans sa forme dérivée: [L]’attribution d’un genre à son espèce ne se fait jamais sous une forme dérivée: les genres se prédiquent toujours de manière univoque à leurs espèces, puisque Porphyry seems to have been the first philosopher to see the importance of the difference beteen PS and P*S. In his Commentary on the Categories “by question and answer,” he explains clearly the meaning of P*S: “be predicated of a thing ‘as of a subject’ means ‘be stated of a thing as being part of its essence’ or as ‘constituting its essence’ ” (trans. S. K. Strange, On Aristotle’s Categories). As a reader of Porphyry, Boethius transmitted this interpretation to the Romans. That is why in his work essential predication, intracategorial predication, is usually called praedicatio ut de subjecto in opposition to accidental, transcategorial predication, which is called praedicatio ut in subjecto. Porphyry, rather than Aristotle, seems to have been the origin of this expression. In any case, it is these two varieties of predication that we find expressed in the Middle Ages by the pairs univocal predication / denominative predication and essential/accidental: There are two kinds of predication: one is univocal, as when we say that Socrates is a man, because man is predicated of Socrates truly and unequivocally [vere et univoce]; the other is denominative, as when whiteness is predicated of man, in fact, the man is said to be white and having-whiteness, but he is not said to be whiteness [dicitur enim homo albus et habens albedinem nec dicitur esse 1 The translations of the First Rule (Aristotle, Categories, 2a19–21) [φανεϱὸν δὲ ἐϰ τῶν εἰϱημένων ὅτι τῶν ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου λεγομένων ἀναγϰαῖον ϰαὶ τοὔνομα ϰαὶ τὸν λόγον ϰατηγοϱεῖσθαι τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου]. “Manifestum est autem ex his quae dicta sunt quoniam eorum quae de subjecto dicuntur necesse est et nomen et rationem de subjecto praedicari.” (trans. Boethius, Aristoteles Latinus) “È chiaro da quello che si è detto che anche il nome e la definizione delle cose che son dette di un soggetto è necessario che siano predicati del soggetto.” (trans. M. Zanatta) “It is plain from what has been said that both the name and the definition of the predicate must be predicable of the subject.” (trans. E. M. Edghill) “It is clear from what has been said that if something is said of a subject both its name and its definition are necessarily predicated of the subject.” (trans. J. L. Ackrill) “Aus dem Gesagten erhellt, daß bei solchem, was von einem Subjekt ausgesagt wird, der Name und der Begriff gleichmäßig von dem Subjekt ausgesagt werden müssen.” (trans. E. Rolfes) “Aufgrund des Gesagten ist klar, daß bei dem, was von einem Zugrundeliegenden ausgesagt wird, sowohl der Name als auch die Definition von dem zugrundeliegenden prädiziert werden müssen.” (trans. K. Oehler) 2 Translations of the Second Rule (Aristotle, Categories, 1b10–11) “ὅταν ἕτεϱον ϰαθ’ ἑτέϱου ϰατηγοϱῆται ὡς ϰαθ’ ὑποϰειμένου, ὅσα ϰατὰ τοῦ ϰατηγοϱουμένου λέγεται, πάντα ϰαὶ ϰατὰ τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου ῥηθήσεται.” “Quando alterum de altero praedicatur ut de subjecto, quaecumque de eo quod praedicatur dicuntur, omnia etiam de subjecto dicentur.” (trans. Boethius) “Quando una cosa è predicata di un’altra come di un soggetto, tutte quelle cose che son dette del predicato saranno dette anche del sogetto.” (trans. M. Zanatta) “When one thing is predicated of another, all that which is predicable of the predicate will be predicable also of the subject.” (trans. E. M. Edghill) “Whenever one thing is predicated of another as of a subject, all things said of what is predicated will be said of the subject also.” (trans. J. L. Ackrill) “Wenn etwas von Etwas als seinem Subjekt ausgesagt wird, so muß alles, was von dem Ausgesagten gilt, auch von dem Subjekt gelten.” (trans. E. Rolfes) “Wenn das eine von dem anderen als von einem Zugrundeliegenden ausgesagt wird, wird alles, was von dem Ausgesagten gilt, auch von dem Zugrundeliegenden gelten.” (trans. K. Oehler) 842 PREDICATION celles qui sont dénommées d’après ces qualités, ou qui en dépendent de quelque autre façon.—Ainsi dans la plupart des cas, et même presque toujours, le nom de la chose qualifiée est dérivé [de la qualité]: par exemple, blancheur a donné son nom à blanc, grammaire à grammairien, et justice à juste. (Qualities are thus determinations that we have enunciated: as to qualified things, they are those that have been named after qualities, or that depend on them in some other way. In most cases, almost always in fact, the name of the qualified thing is derived from the quality: for example, whiteness gives a name to white, grammar to the grammarian, and justice to the concept of the just.) In Categories, 8, the examples of morphological derivation provided by Aristotle are whiteness/white, grammar/ grammarian, and justice/just. The first already appeared in Categories, 5, the second in Categories, 1, in the definition of “paronyms” (parônuma [παϱώνυμα]), the third replacing the courage/courageous pair that is also introduced in Categories, 1. In Categories, 5, the example of the color white serves to distinguish primary substance, secondary substance, and accident “from the point of view of signification.” Primary substance signifies a tode ti [τόδε τι]. Substance, or rather secondary essence, seems to signify a tode ti because of the “form of its appellation”; in reality, it signifies a poion ti [ποιόν τι], because the subject to which it is attributed is multiple and not unique, as in the case of primary substance. In this respect it is comparable to an accident, which also signifies a poion ti. There is, however, a difference between them: the accident signifies the poion absolutely (haplôs [ἁπλῶς]); the species (eidos [εἶδος]) and the genus (genos [γένος]) do not signify it absolutely, “they delimit the poion in relation to the ousia,” that is, they signify an ousia in one way or another. Once again, Aristotle’s play on poion is not rendered by Tricot, who, interpreting the text on the basis of Boethius’s Latin translation, uses the abstract qualité and the term qualification (cf. Catégories 5.3b13–21, 15): Pour les substances secondes, aussi, on pourrait croire, en raison de la forme même de leur appellation, qu’elles signifient un être déterminé, quand nous disons, par exemple, homme ou animal. Et pourtant ce n’est pas exact: de telles expressions signifient plutôt une qualification, car le sujet n’est pas un comme dans le cas de la substance première ; en réalité, homme est attribué à une multiplicité, et animal également.—Cependant ce n’est pas d’une façon absolue que l’espèce et le genre signifient la qualité, comme le ferait, par exemple, le blanc (car le blanc ne signifie rien d’autre que la qualité), mais ils déterminent la qualité par rapport à la substance : ce qu’ils signifient, c’est une substance de telle qualité. (For secondary substances, as well, one might assume, by virtue of the form of their appellation, that they signify a determinate being, when we say, for example, man or animal. And yet, that is not quite right: such expressions actually signify a qualification, because the subject is not one, as in the case of the primary substance. In reality, man is attributed to a multiplicity, les espèces admettent à la fois le nom et la définition de leur genre. (The attribution of a genus to its kind is never done under its derived forms: genus is always predicated in a uniform way to its species, whereas species allow for both the name and the definition of their genus.) (Fr. trans. J. Brunschwig, Topiques) [L]e prédicat tiré du genre n’est jamais, dans sa forme dérivée, affirmé de l’espèce, mais c’est toujours d’une façon synonyme que les genres sont affirmés de leurs espèces. (The predicate taken from the genus is never, in its derived form, affirmed in the species, but it is always in a way synonymous.) (Fr. trans. J. Tricot, Topiques) The distinction between these two kinds of predication, which develops the basic intuition of Categories, 5.3b7–9, allows Aristotle to define the attribution of the accident as “paronymic” (or, as Brunschwig translates it, based on l’utilisation d’une expression dérivée): [E]n disant que le blanc est coloré, on ne présente pas l’attribut comme un genre, puisqu’on utilise une expression dérivée [parônumôs legetai (παϱωνύμως λέγεται)]; on ne le présente pas non plus comme un propre ou comme une définition, puisque définition et propre n’appartiennent à aucun autre sujet, alors qu’il existe bien d’autres choses colorées que le blanc, par exemple un morceau de bois, une pierre, un homme, un cheval; il est donc clair qu’on le présente comme un accident. (In saying that white is colored, one does not present the attribute as a genus, since one is using a derived expression [parônumôs legetai (παϱωνύμως λέγεται)]; nor does one present it as something proper or as a definition, since “definition” and the “proper” belong to no other subject; even though there are many colored things other than white, for example, a piece of wood, a stone, a man, a horse. It is clear that one presents it as an accident.) (Fr. trans. J. Brunschwig, Topiques, II.2.109b8–12) The expression parônumôs legetai appears in the Categories, 8.10a27–31, regarding the distinction between poiotêtes [ποιότητες] and poia [ποιά], qualities and qualia: Aristotle explains that a quale is “something spoken of paronymically”—that is, about which one speaks “using a paronym”— (when the initial quality has a name) or “in some other way” (when the initial quality does not have a name). An important aspect of the Aristotelian vocabulary is that paronymic attribution, which is characteristic of accidental predication, and designation by derivation, which is characteristic of the formation of a concrete noun, are covered by the same expression, parônumôs legetai. This is not perceptible in Tricot’s translation (cf. Catégories 8.10a27–31): Sont donc des qualités les déterminations que nous avons énoncées ; quant aux choses qualifiées, ce sont PREDICATION 843 proposition toward the subject. The verb “to be,” having only a weak meaning, cannot bear the weight of the proposition, which then shifts toward the hupocheimenon, which is declared to be the ousia, that is, “beingness” [étantité] proper, which its identification with the sub-jectum, the substrate, leads it to be translated in Latin correctly as sub-stantia, that is, the subsistent and permanent basis perduring under the variability of the attributes. In a parallel manner, the predicate, which in the verbal phrase is the action or event expressed by the verb, is reduced to an attribute, that is, to an accident of the subject, which is “essential” only because it is substantial. (Ibid., 102–3) . Although it did not take place, for good reason, in the context of a European language, Arabic reflection on the Aristotelian logical schema deserves notice. Averroës, for example, strongly emphasizes that “in Arabic one can form an apophantic statement on the basis of two nouns without a connecting verb, a nominal statement being no less predicative than a statement containing a verb.” To do justice to the Aristotelian analysis, he thus resorts to the notion of “potential” interpreted in the sense of “implicit,” and presents the tripartite product of the nominal statement as an explicitation/actuation. Of the three notions imported in a predication (Ar. ḥaml [الحمل—([the subject (Ar. mawḍū‘ [موضوع ,([the predicate (Ar. maḥmūl [محمول ,([and the relation (Ar. nisba [نسبة ,([which links the subject and the predicate— two are explicit (the subject and the predicate), while the other (the relation) is implicit. To make the relation explicit, one can resort either to the word huwa [ھو) [him) or to mawğūd [موجود) [existent). In this sense, one will say, “Zayd is just.” The copula is thus not a “necessary part” of the premise (which one obtains through analysis), it is in it only potentially, and serves only to make explicit or to lexicalize the connection between subject and predicate, “by compensating for a linguistic defect” (because “in Arabic there is no word designating this kind of connection, whereas it exists in other languages,” Commentary on the “De interpretatione,” §19). The “third element” is thus only an “addition.” In modern logic, essentially starting with Frege, the copula is no longer considered solely as an unnecessary addition but as a useless and misleading one. The analysis of the proposition in two terms, subject and predicate, connected (or separated) by a copula, has been denounced by many modern thinkers as the result of a projection of the linguistic asymmetry of the (grammatical) subject and predicate into ontology or logic themselves (in the Aristotelian manner, I can say “Socrates is a man,” not “the/a man is Socrates”). It is generally thought that this deficit is made up starting with Frege (cf. M. Dummett, Frege’s Philosophy of Language). For Frege, a proposition such as “Two is a prime number” is vitiated by “the inexactitude of its linguistic expression,” the use of the copula “making it appear that something is added to the object and to the concept, as if the relation of subsumption were a third element.” Without returning to the Stoic schema of incompletion and completion (the verb-predicate and so is animal. Thus there is no absolute way in which species and genus signify a quality, as in the case of the color white (because white means nothing other than a quality); but both determine the quality in relation to substance: what they signify is the substance of a given quality.) The convergence in Categories, 1, 5, and 8, of the level of attribution, that of derivation, and that of signification in a single terminological network is noteworthy. We observe, however, that derivative names and paronyms must not be purely and simply identified. All paronyms are derivative, but all derivatives are not paronyms—since Boethius, Latin has drawn a distinction between sumpta and denominativa (see PARONYM). V. The Problem of the Copula The dominance of the “Aristotelian” analysis of logical form suggests that it is natural to interpret the structure of the proposition on the basis of the verb “to be.” This pseudonaturalness has been strongly denounced in the modern period, in terms that have now become almost scholastic: the confusion between the existential and the predicative senses; the verbal illusion that consists in believing that the verb “to be,” detached from the terms that follow it, has the same function in judgments of relation as in predicative judgments, leading to the inevitable reduction of the former to the latter. Some writers have attributed to the “Aristotelianization of the mentality of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean” (cf. L. Rougier, La métaphysique et le langage, 105) the responsibility for this major “corruption” of logic (cf. Geach, “History of the Corruptions of Logic,” 44–61). Up until Frege’s challenge to the formula “S is P,” there have been two opposed, dominant models of predication: Aristotle’s, based on the attributive proposition, and the Stoic model, often said to have made the most radical challenge to the attributive model of predication. Even overlaid by the language of “subject” and “predicate,” the Stoic theory seems in fact to be a complete reversal of the so-called natural schema. For the Stoics, the “subject” has only a complementary value; being both an inflection of the verb and a case of the noun, it is what “completes” the katêgorêma, “an [expressible] incomplete lekton [ellipês lekton (ἐλλιπὴς λεϰτόν)] awaiting completion” (cf. P. Aubenque, “Herméneutique et ontologie,” 103: “It [the Stoic subject] is a ptôsis, a kind of inflection of the verb, whereas in Aristotle, the subject-form is the onoma itself, and not a case of the noun”). This devaluation of the attributive sentence is accompanied by an ontological choice: “Stoic ontology is an ‘ontology’ without Being; it perceives the world as a succession of events in search of subjects, and not as a juxtaposition of stable existents awaiting attributes” (ibid.; cf. P. Hadot, “La notion de cas dans la logique stoïcienne,” 109–12; see PARONYM, Box 2, and SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). Medieval writers’ choice of the Aristotelian analysis, which ensured the victory of the attributive proposition, had important consequences: By introducing the verb to be as the copula, that is, as an explicit operator of synthesis (whereas any verb, Aristotle himself notes, has the power to exercise this synthetic function), Artisotle tips the balance of the 844 PREDICATION 3 Copula in Medieval Logic v. PRÉDICABLE, Box 1 It was in the Middle Ages that the notion of the copula was fully worked out, within a system in which there was a problematic connection between the distinction between the existential meaning and the predicative meaning of the verb “to be,” in the form of the distinction between secundum and tertium adjacens; the conflict between the predicative sentence and the verbal sentence; and the distinction between two types of predication: identity and inherence. In order to grasp all the elements in this system and the way in which they are related, we have to go back to a specific passage in the Peri hermêneias in which Boethius and, following him, the grammarians and logicians of the eleventh century interpreted these problems, introducing a new terminology. Although the verb copulare is ordinarily used by Boethius as a synonym of conjungere or componere, in the sense of “conjoin” or “connect,” with terms or things as its object, starting at the end of the eleventh century we see it take on a very particular meaning in the analysis of predication. The grammarians and commentators on Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae, followed by Abelard a few decades later, introduced the idea that the verb is characterized by a “coupling value” (vis copulandi), a property that allowed it to connect the subject and the predicate; this property is clearly inspired by the definition Aristotle gives of the verb in the Peri hermêneias, and it led to the introduction of the terms copula and verbum copulativum. For example, we read the following in an anonymous commentary from the early twelfth century: Praedicativa propositio est illa quae alia praedicatum et subjectum, ut “homo est animal,” subjectum ut “homo,” praedicatum ut “animal,” et “est” praedicatum ut “animal,” et “est” copula quae copulat ista duo. (A predicative proposition is a proposition in which there is a predicate and a subject, like “man is an animal,” a subject “man,” a predicate “animal,” and “is,” which is the copula coupling the two.) (Iwakuma, “Introductiones dialecticae artis secundum magistrum G. Paganellum”) Similarly, in Abelard: Haec est autem proprietas, quod verbum semper est nota, id est copula praedicatorum de altero, id est copulativum est praedicatorum, quae praedicata de altero quam de ipsis verbis copulantibus necesse est praedicari. Nunquam enim verbum copulativum praedicati subici potest, ut “lego” vel “legis” vel “legit” nunquam alicui potest in propositione subici, sed praedicari, quando scilicet gemina vi fungitur [copulantis] scilicet et praedicati. (It is a matter of a property, that the verb is always the mark, that is, the term that couples the predicates with something else [to the other term, the subject], that is, it has the property of coupling the predicates; and these predicates have to be predicated of something other than the verbs that couple themselves. In fact, the coupling verb can never be the subject of the predicate, for example, “I read” or “you read” can never be the subject in a proposition, but always the predicate, when they have a double value, both of coupling and of predicate.) (Super Peri hermeneias) This passage in Abelard is taken from the grammarians that preceded him: they introduced the idea that every verb has a double value, a value of coupling (vis copulandi) and a value of predicate (vis praedicati, vis verbi) that corresponds to its particular meaning. The same holds for the verb “to be,” which has this value of coupling, or substantive value (whence its name of verbum substantivum, “substantive verb”), and its own value, which is, depending on the author, an existential or a specifically semantic value (see R. W. Hunt, “The Introductions to the ‘Artes’ in the Twelfth Century” ). This double value was to play a role in the analysis of predication. When the verb “to be” is in secundum adjacens, the two values are active, a value of copula and a value of predicate (it couples the thing that it signifies). But the case in which it is in tertium adjacens, when there is predication of an accident, such as Socrates est albus (Socrates is white), is harder, the question being whether it can have a purely connective function, to the exclusion of its existential value. This elicited divergent interpretations. The grammarians and Abelard considered this kind of proposition to be susceptible of two analyses, even though they disagreed regarding the priority to be attributed to each, and Abelard himself was to modify his position on this point. First, there is a “coupling of essences” (copulatio essentiae) signified by the terms “subject” and “predicate”: the verb “to be” “signifying all essences qua essences, it has property of coupling all essences”; it “couples” the essence or “thing” Socrates with “this white thing,” with the meaning “this white thing Socrates is that white thing”—this initial analysis originates in the “substantive value” of the verb “to be” (ex vi substantivi). Second, the quality signified by the predicate albus, namely whiteness, albedo, is signified as inhering in the subject Socrates—this second analysis has for its cause the nature of the predicate (ex vi praedicationis). These two analyses, which we juxtapose here, were to be the origin of two major, and separate, analyses of predication in the Middle Ages: the theory of identity, according to which the predicate is taken in extension, predication amounting to positing an identity between what the subject denotes and what the predicate denotes; and the theory of inherence, according to which the predicate is taken intentionally, predication amounting to positing the inherence of the quality in the subject. It should be noted that this particular usage of the term copulare to designate the connection of the “things” denoted by the subject and the predicate originates in the interpretation of an extremely problematic passage in Peri hermêneias, 3, which Boethius translates this way: Ipsa quidem secundum se dicta verba nomina sunt, et significant aliquid— constituit enim qui dicit intellectum, et qui audit quiescit—sed si est vel non est, nondum significat. Neque enim “esse ” signum est rei vel “non esse,” nec si hoc ipsum “est ” purum dixeris. Ipsum quidem nihil est, consignificat autem quandam compositionem, quam sine compositis non est intelligere. (In themelves, verbs are in reality nouns, and they signify something—the person who is speaking constitutes in fact an act of understanding, and the one who listens can rest (for the signification is completed, he expects nothing more)—but they do not yet signify that something is or is not. Neither “being” nor “not being” is a sign of a thing, if one says “is” all by itself. It is, in fact, nothing, but it consignifies a composition that cannot be understood without the component terms.) (Aristotle, Peri hermêneias 3.16b20–25, trans. Boethius in Aristoteles Latinus) This passage is of capital importance for the developments regarding the substantive verb (does it mean something or not?) and the notion of “consignification” (see CONNOTATION). Boethius, in opposition to Porphyry, thinks that Aristotle means to say here, not that the verb “to be” has no meaning, but that it does PREDICATION 845 being “completed” by a ptôsis), Frege, thanks to the notions of unsaturation and saturation, carries out the same reduction of the useless “third”: “the unsaturation of the concept has as its effect that the object that performs the saturation adheres immediately to the concept, without needing a particular connection” (cf. G. Frege, Über Schoenlies). Alain de Libera REFS.: Aristotle. Aristoteles Latinus. Vols. 1–3, Topiques, translatio Boethii. Edited by L. MinioPaluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1969. . Le Categorie. Translated and edited by Marcello Zanatta. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1989. . Categories. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon, 1975. Translation by E. M. Edghill: Categories in vol. 1 of The Works of Aristotle, edited W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928. . Catégories. Translated and edited by F. Ildefonse and J. Lallot. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. Translation by Jules Tricot: Catégories. In vol. 1 of Organon. Paris: Vrin. 1984. . Kategorien. Translated and edited by Klaus Oehler. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984. . Organon. Translated by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1946–60. . Prior Analytics. Translated by A. J. Jenkinson in Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. . Topica. Translated by E. S. Forster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1989. . Topiques. Translated and edited by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. Aubenque, Pierre. “Herméneutique et ontologie: Remarques sur le Peri hermêneias d’Aristote.” In Penser avec Aristote, edited by A. Sinaceur, 93–105. Toulouse: Érès, 1991. Averroës. Averroës’ Middle Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Categories” and “De Interpretatione.” Translated, with notes and introduction, by Charles E. Butterworth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. . Commentaire moyen sur le “De Interpretatione.” Translated, with notes, by A. Benmakhlouf and S. Diebler. Paris: Vrin, 2000. Bäck, Allan. Aristotle’s Theory of Predication. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2000. Barnouw, Jeffrey. Propositional Perception: Phantasia, Predication, and Sign in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Bochenski, J. M. A History of Formal Logic. Translated by I. Thomas. New York: Chelsea, 1961. Bréhier, Émile. La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme. Paris: Vrin, 1962. Brunschwig, Jacques. Papers in Hellenistic Philosophy. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. de Rijk, Lambertus Marie. Logica modernorum. Vol. 2.1 of The Origin and Early Development of the Theory of Supposition. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1967. Dummett, Michael. Frege’s Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth, 1973. Duns Scotus. Sur la connaissance de Dieu et l’univocité de l’étant. Translated by O. Boulnois. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. Ebbesen, Sten. “Boethius as an Aristotelian Scholar.” In vol. 2 of Aristoteles Wirk und Wirkung, edited by J. Wiesener, 286–311. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1987. Frege, G. Über Schoenlies: Die logischen Paradoxien der Mengenlehre. In Kleine Schriften, edited by H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach. Hamburg: Meiner, 1969. Geach, P. T. “History of the Corruptions of Logic.” In Logic Matters. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972. not yet signify the true and the false. In order to explain why it realizes its signification only in conjunction with the terms it serves to link, Boethius introduces a distinction between two uses, depending on whether it is employed alone or in conjunction with a predicate. It is in this context that, in the first commentary on the Peri hermêneias, Boethius uses the term copulare to mark the connection of things signified by the subject and the predicate (duas res copulat atque componit). In the second commentary, we find the analysis of what was later called the “coupling of essences,” both for predications de secundo adjacente, like Socrates est, which can be glossed as “Socrates is one among those who exist” (Socrates aliquid eorum est quae sunt), and in predications de tertio adjacente, like Socrates philosophus est, which is interpreted as making it possible to conjoin “Socrates” and “philosophy,” but also signifies that Socrates participates in philosophy, this second value then being transformed into the signification of an inherence of the quality in the subject. It is in relation to this value of “coupling” or “conjunction” that Aristotle’s statement is justified, even when it is in secundum adjacens, Boethius explains: the verb “to be” “has a value of conjunction, not of thing [vim conjunctionis cujusdam obtinet, non rei]”; here Boethius adopts a formulation of Porphyry’s: “it designates no substance” (nullam substantia monstrat) (cf. ¬Boethius, Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias). On the basis of this passage and the commentaries of the grammarians, Abelard made a clear distinction between copulare and praedicare, which is coherent with his position on universals: since there is no whiteness qua essence, but only individual whitenesses and white things, in saying Socrates est albus we can only “predicate whiteness in adjacency, and white, or, in other terms, what is affected by whiteness, in an essential way”; whiteness is thus predicated in the sense in which one means that whiteness inheres in the subject, but Socrates is coupled with this white thing or with this thing that is affected by whiteness. Each term used here has a precise meaning: the adjective albus is “conjoined” with the verb, it “predicates” an adjacent form, and “couples” the “foundation of whiteness that it denotes” (fundamentum quod nominat); the accidental form is predicated, but it is the substrate in which it is found and which the term “accident” denotes or “names” that is coupled (whence the gloss: Socrates is what is affected by whiteness). It is because of the imperfect nature of the verb “to be,” and because it can never be a “pure copula,” that this essential or existential value is always present, along with this “coupling of essences” leading to the positing of an identity or an identification of two singular existing things, denoted by the subject and the predicate (Abelard, Super Peri hermeneias). Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Abelard, Peter. “Glossae Super Periermenias Aristotelis.” In Peter Abaelards Philosophische Schriften. I. Die Logica “Ingredientibus”. 3. Die Glossen Zu Peri Ermhneias, edited by Bernhard Geyer, 306–504. Münster: Verlag der Aschendorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927. Aristotle. Peri hermêneias. In Aristoteles Latinus II 1–2. De Interpretatione vel Periermenias. Translatio Boethii, Specimina Translationum Recentiorum. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée, de Brouwer, et Cie., 1965. Boethius. Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias. Edited by K. Meiser. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1877/1880. Hunt, R. W. “The Introductions to the ‘Artes’ in the Twelfth Century.” In Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, edited by G. L. Bursill-Hall. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980. Iwakuma, Y. “Introductiones dialecticae artis secundum magistrum G. Paganellum.” In Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Âge grec et latin, no. 63, 1993. 846 PRESENT modern languages, the twofold past and present in German (vergangen/gewesen, Gegenwart/ Anwesenheit), and the twofold future in French (futur/avenir). I. Time and Grammatical Tenses In English and in French, “past,” “present,” and “future” designate both grammatical tenses and temporal zones, or, to put it another way, tenses (Lat. tempora) within time (Lat. tempus), but this is far from being the case in all languages. The tripartite division of time into past, present, and future, which can be traced back as far as Homer only with many qualifications, is found in the verbal systems of the Indo-European languages, even if the future, which issued from an ancient desiderative present, is a late formation (Gr. opsomai [ὄψομαι], “I want to see, I am going to see, whence I shall see”; and in addition the Indo-European expresses above all an aspectual value). The constitution of a future tense signals the development in the Greek verb of the expression of time, which had become more important in Greek than in Indo-European in general (cf. Meillet, Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque). Linguists have often pointed out how “aberrant” German is in this respect; an expression like “I shall become” is rendered by Ich werde werden (on the rather unnatural “clumsiness” of the expression of the future in German, cf. Vendryès, Langage, who also notes that “it is a general tendency of language to use the present in relation to the future: an old present serves as a future in Russian, in Welsh, in Scottish Gaelic, and elsewhere”). Here we touch on questions related to the way philosophical speculation is connected with the establishment of grammatical categories. Was Aristotle unconsciously guided by the “categories” of the Greek language, as Benveniste claimed (“Catégories de pensée et catégories de langue,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale), or did he rediscover something of which his language was the depository, thus ultimately confirming the accuracy of his analyses, as Trendelenburg (Geschichte der Kategorienlehre) and then Brentano (De la diversité des acceptions de l’être d’après Aristote) had maintained? It is interesting to see that diametrically opposed conclusions could be drawn from a single fortunate coincidence. This problem, which we will have to limit ourselves to mentioning in passing, nonetheless finds expression in the diversity of names given to the parts—grammatical and physical or experienced—of time. From problems connected with the thematization of time, grammatically and philosophically tripled, we must distinguish those raised by the various appellations relative to the past and the future in particular. What is it that differentiates the German terms vergangen and gewesen, Gegenwart and Anwesenheit? Why does French have two words for the future, futur and avenir? II. The Tripartite Division of Time In §168 of his RT: Syntaxe grecque, J. Humbert introduces the system of tenses in Greek in the following way: Grammarians have accustomed us to mentally divide time into three zones: past, present, and future. We have in our minds a very spatial representation of time: it is supposed to be imaged as a line without limits, running Gochet, Paul. Esquisse d’une théorie nominaliste de la proposition. Paris: A. Colin, 1972. Hadot, P. “La notion de cas dans la logique stoïcienne.” Actes du XIe Congrès des sociétés de philosophie de langue française. Neuchâtel, Switz.: La Baconnière, 1966. John XXI, Pope. The “Summulae logicales” of Peter of Spain. Edited by Joseph Patrick Mullally. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1945. Newton, Lloyd, ed. Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Categories.” Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2008. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973. Pohlenz, Max. Kleine Schriften. Vol 1 of Die Begründung der abendländischen Sprachlehre durch die Stoa. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1965. . Die Stoa. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1948. Porphyry. Einletung in die Kategorien. Translated by E. Rolfes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1958. First published in 1925. . Introduction. Translated, with commentary, by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Translation by Edward W. Warren: Isagoge. Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975. Translation by Steven K. Strange: On Aristotle’s Categories. London: Duckworth, 1992. . Isagoge. Translated into French by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: J. Vrin, 1998. . Isagoge. Translated into Italian, with introduction and commentary, by Bruno Maioli. Padua: Liviana, 1969. Translation, with introduction and commentary, by G. Girgenti: Isagoge. Milan: Rusconi, 1995. . Isagoge, translatio Boethii accedunt isagoges fragmenta M. Victorino interprete. Vol. 1, books 6–7 of Aristoteles Latinus, edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966. . Isagoge et in Aristotelis Categorias Commentarium. Edited and introduced with notes by A. Busse. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1995. First published in 1887. Rougier, L. La métaphysique et le langage. Paris: Denoël, 1973. Schenk, G. Zur Geschichte der logischen Form. Vol. 1 of Einige Entwicklungstendenzen von der Antike bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1973. Strawson, Peter. Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar. London: Methuen, 1974. Surdu, Alexander. Aristotelian Theory of Prejudicative Forms. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 2006. William of Ockham. Summa logicae. 3 vols. Edited by Philotheus Boehner. St ¬Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1951–54. English translation by Michael J. Loux: Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa logicae. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. French translation by Joël Biard: Somme de logique. Mauvezin, Fr.: Trans Europe Repress, 1988. TEMPUS, PRESENT, PAST, FUTURE DANISH præsentisk, nuværende, tilkommende FRENCH présent, passé, futur GERMAN gegenwärtig, anwesend, Gegenwart/Anwesenheit ; vergangen/gewesen; zukünftig GREEK paron [παϱόν], parelthon [παϱελθόν], mellon [μέλλον] LATIN praesens, praeteritum, futurum v. TIME, and ASPECT, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, ENGLISH, ESSENCE, ESTI, HISTORY, MEMORY, MOMENT, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI Is our way of dividing up time into past, present, and future determined by the divisions made in languages, that is, by the different systems of grammatical tenses? Derived from Benveniste, the question can be fully answered only by attentively examining these systems, and in particular the different expressions of aspect. Several approaches open up, however, in the words themselves that express, in different languages, the parts of time and/or grammatical tenses: an archeology of the Greek tripartite division of time, which is anything but obvious on first inspection, will be followed by an examination of the differentiations internal to PRESENT 847 In the archaic period, various verbal roots coexisted that did not belong to “this coherent and complete system that we call a conjugation,” namely, “a set of themes each expressing a ‘time’ or a mode of the process and being deduced from each other by simple morphological procedures” (Chantraine, Morphologie historique du grec, §175). The aspectual value of the Greek verb in the aorist arises from considerations other than the simple concern to situate action on a temporal axis as past, present, or future. In the Georgics, Virgil seems to echo Homer when he speaks of the seer Proteus embracing things “quae sint, quae fuerint, quae mox ventura trahantur” (which are, have been, and will soon occur in the future). The classical discussion of what Plato’s Timaeus calls the “parts” or “divisions” of time—merê chronou [μέϱη χϱόνου]—saying of “eternal substance” that “it was, it is, and it will be” [ἦν ἔστιν τε ϰαὶ ἔσται] (37e 3–6), is given by Aristotle in the Physics (4, chap. 10), where it is the instant (to nun [τὸ νῦν]) that discriminates the parelthon [παϱελθόν]/ past from the mellon [μέλλον]/future. In late antiquity, finally, Augustine acknowledges the usual tripartite division, even though he sees in it no more than an unfortunate habit that has been only too much used and abused: “Dicatur etiam: tempora sunt tria, praeteritum, praesens et futurum, sicut abutitur consuetudo; dicatur etiam” (Let it be said too, “there be three times, past, present, and to come”: in our incorrect way; Confessions, 11.20, 26). Antiquity thus was at first unaware of, and then thematized and investigated, the tripartite division of time into past, present, and future that is familiar to us. To conceive the genesis of this division means, however, going back to the initial lack of obviousness on the basis of which it was forged, even if that means agreeing with Augustine that the effect of obviousness that it seems to have enjoyed since late antiquity is unfortunate. III. The Two Pasts: Vergangen and Gewesen “The past is never dead, it is not even past”: this statement of Faulkner’s, quoted by Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future), well emphasizes what it is about the past that is irreducible to what is only passé, dépassé, trépassé (to use from left to right: the line which, on the left, constitutes the past, is segmented over a certain distance that is our present, and then continues to the right, extending indefinitely into the future. This abstract conception, which makes time something realized, is said to be even more inexact in Greek than in other languages. While it is not essentially linear, despite the Aristotelian analogy of the line, the tripartite division of time appears very early in the world of ancient Greece. In the Iliad (1.5.70), Homer says that the seer Calchas knows “the present, the future, the past” [τά τ’ ἐόντα τά τ’ ἐσσόμενα πϱό τ’ ἐόντα]. We note that these times are not listed successively, and that here the reference is less to times than to what they bear, what is conveyed by them. In reality, this verse does not, strictly speaking, distinguish times but rather (intratemporal) existents, and it resorts, remarkably enough, to the same substantivized present participle in the neuter plural (eonta) to characterize what P. Mazon’s translation renders respectively by le présent and le passé, whereas Homer refers, more literally, to “what is, what will be, and what is earlier,” just as does Hesiod, in whose Theogony the same expressions are found in the same order (Theogony, 38). In Parmenides’s Poem (8.5), the “is” is described this way: “it never was nor will be, for it is in the present” [οὐδέ ποτ’ ἦν οὐδ’ ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν]. All we have to do is identify being with being-present, even if that means splitting the latter between what was and what will be, for time itself to be conceived, Montaigne wrote, as “necessarily divided into two,” between “what has not yet come into being” and “what has already ceased to be”: And as for these words present, immediate, now, on which it seems that we chiefly found and support our understanding of time, reason discovering this immediately destroys it; for she at once splits and divides it into future and past, as though wanting to see it necessarily divided in two. Essais, II . 1 The sense of time In the Dictionnaire complet d’Homère et des Homérides published by Napoléon Theil N. and Hippolyte Hallez-D’Arros in 1841, we read: [ὀπίσω] [opisô]: adv. 1) with reference to place: behind 2) with reference to time, lit. what is still behind, what cannot be seen [ἅμα πϱόσσω ϰαὶ ὀπίσσω ὁϱᾶν], to see at once the present and the future, literally things that are behind, that is, which have not yet reached us and which will come, that is, the future; it is always in this sense that Homer uses [ὀπίσσως], the past, he calls [τὸ ἔμπϱοθεν] what has already passed by us; as for [πϱόσω], they are the things that are before us,which we have so to speak at hand [τὰ ὑπὸ χεῖϱα]. [πϱόσω] [prosô]: adv. 1) with reference to space: before, in front of, in advance 2) with reference to time: before, in advance, that is, the past and not the future, according to an error that I see shared by people who are nonetheless very competent; this has to do with the fact that the Greeks did not represent time as a river they have gone up; for them, time flowed in the opposite sense; the waters ahead of them were the ones that had passed by them and were, consequently, the past; those they had behind them were the future; many examples from Homer support my view. 848 PRESENT range [das Gebirge] is the group of mountains, beinghaving-been is what gathers being in its unfolding. Second seminar on Kant at Cérisy in 1955 This reflection on the properties of German is accompanied, in many writers, by a meditation on the Greek heritage. To what point is temporality a constitutive dimension of Greek knowledge as essentially retrospective, and to what point is the past far from purely and simply disappearing by slipping into the non-being of what has been and is no more—that is what is shown not only by Platonic anamnesis, and by the emphasis put on a mythical past, but even by the name of knowledge, [οἶδα] ([*Ϝοῖδα]), like “having seen,” from the same root as the Latin video, the German wissen— as Schelling pointed out (Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology) before Heidegger: “The perfect tense ‘I have seen’ is the present tense of ‘to know’ ” (Holzwege; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.). The enigma of the temporal constitution of knowledge, which is traced in a way by the genealogy at the beginning of book A of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, culminated in the expression Aristotle created, to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], Latin quod quid erat esse, quidditas, “being-what-it-was.” For a discussion of what Aristotle designates by this “strange title” and of its supposed prehistory (Antisthenes, Solon), see Aubenque, Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote and his claim: “It is idea, so profoundly Greek, according to which every essential view is retrospective, that seems to us to justify the ên [ἦν] (“was”) of the to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι].” The vocabulary of Aristotelian ontology is thus illuminated by a tragic source; but we may also think of the grammarians’ imperfect of discovery (RT: Syntaxe grecque §180, rem.), to which Aubenque also refers (see TO TI ÊN EINAI). IV. The Two Presents: Gegenwart and Anwesenheit Grammatically speaking, the present is not a univocal category in the various European languages. It exists in English in a form called the “present progressive” that considers the process in its unfolding. Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, generally translated in English as “I think, therefore I am,” should probably be rendered instead as “I am thinking, therefore I am,” which has the advantage of bringing out the fact that existence, far from being deduced from thought, is already present in the very act of cogitatio: cogito = sum cogitans. The present progressive reinjects the present participle into the indicative. In French, the term présent is as polysemous as the German term Gegenwart. The French présent indicates (a) the time at which things occur, (b) that in the presence of which we find ourselves (Ger. Anwesenheit), (c) that which we witness, indeed that which is present to us, or what we receive, in the sense in which sensibility is thoroughly determined as receptivity to a given (as in Kant), and in the sense in which the phenomenon of phenomenology is what is visible in its being-given (Gegebenheit, Husserl). As for the German term Gegenwart, which seems at first to designate the attitude consisting in confronting (gegen) in expectation (-wart), in resolutely awaiting what will come of the encounter, the RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch saw in this an “inconceivable contradiction,” that of a presence that Apollinaire’s expression). Whereas Descartes could assert that “when one is too curious about things which were practised in past centuries, one is usually very ignorant about things which are practised in our own time” (Discourse on Method), a modern historian—Marc Bloch, for example— would insist not so much on what separates past and present as on what connects them (“The past may very well not dominate the present altogether, but without it the present remains incomprehensible”; L’Étrange défaite), or on their interpenetration (Apologie pour l’histoire). What is past, insofar as it no longer exists, corresponds to the German vergangen, “past” in the sense of “over.” Vergangen is the past participle of the verb vergehen, “to pass [by or away],” with an idea of decay contained in the prefix ver-, “pass” in the sense in which it is said that time passes (vergeht). But what is past in the sense in which it has not ceased to be corresponds to the German gewesen. The prefix ge-, which is used to form the past participle of many verbs, here indicates collection or recollection in a recapitulating presence. Hegel’s formula, “Wesen ist, was gewesen ist,” does not mean that the “essence” is “what has been.” This literally exact translation of Hegel’s remark makes no sense, seeing that the last words of the “Doctrine of Being” in the Science of Logic determine essence as “being insofar as it is the fact of not being what it is, of being what it is not”: an essence is that in which being is collected, but internalized, which, no longer being, has not ceased to be, or to put it in Hegelian terms, “the truth of being.” The essence (Wesen) is not “l’être [entendu] comme cet être purement-et-simplement intériorisé” that is being “rassemblé avec soi dans sa négation,” as P.-J. Labarrière and G. Jarczyk render it on the last page of the “Doctrine of Being” (Hegel, Science de la logique). Here the essential is involved in the interpretation given between brackets, which blocks the very movement of “logic” as it animates, from within, Hegel’s remark: not being understood other than it was earlier, as if the point were merely to vary the meanings of a single term, but instead promoting itself to the rank of essence by virtue of its own movement. Unlike French, German includes in its conjugation of the verb sein (to be) both being (Sein) and essence (Wesen in gewesen). Hegel does not fail to insist on this repeatedly in the Science of Logic, especially at the very beginning of the “Doctrine of Essence”: “The [German] language has preserved in the verb sein the Wesen [essence] in the past participle gewesen; for the essence is past being, but intemporally past” (1812 edition; emphasis supplied). At this point, Hegel separates gewesen from vergangen, that is, from what is purely and simply over, and brings it closer to the Wesen that is heard in it, so that the past is thereby detached from its temporal dimension, to express itself, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis. Meditating in his own way on the relationship between gewesen and Wesen, Schelling regretted that “in the German language the old verb wesen [has] gone out of use (it is found only in the past tense—in the form gewesen)” (Schellings Werke). Heidegger returned to this point as well: I understand what has been and has not ceased to be [das Gewesene] in the following way: just as the mountain PRESENT 849 the human being cannot be said in the present because it is illuminated on the basis of the being-mortal of the person who says “I am.” “I am,” ich bin, which is however no longer the German translation of the Cartesian ego sum (= ich bin vorhanden, I am occurrent, as is also this bit of wax that you see there), but corresponds instead to the Latin sum moribundus (Heidegger Gesamtausgabe). Thus in Heidegger, it is on the basis of the future that time is, or rather matures, ages. . V. Futur and Avenir Etymologically, the French word futur, from the Latin futurus (fated to be), is related to fus ([je] fus), Latin fui, and thereby to the Indo-European root *bhu- (to grow), whence the Greek phuô [φύω], “to cause to be born, to cause to grow” (whence phusis [φύσις]; see NATURE; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, D.4.1014b 16–17), German bin, English “be” (cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique du français). As an autonomous grammatical category, the future is, as we have seen, a relatively late development. In some languages (German, Russian), the future is more apt to be expressed by a near future with a desiderative value: “I am going to go” or “I want to go,” rather than “I shall go.” In modern Greek, the future is formed by adding [θὰ] before the present indicative, the abbreviation of [θέ λω νὰ], “I want” (RT: Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque). In English, which has no future paradigm in its verbal morphology, a modal distinction persists in the distinction between the two auxiliaries “shall” and “will.” In French, the personal morphemes of the future are derived from the present tense indicative of the verb avoir: modern French chanterai (I shall sing) comes from Vulgar Latin cantaraio and Classical Latin cantare habeo, “I have the prospect of singing” (RT: Grammaire de l’ancien français). According to D. Maingueneau (RT: Précis de grammaire), in language there is a “fundamental dyssemmetry between the past and the future: the future is a projection on the basis of the present, and is radically modal , whereas the past, that which is over and done, gives priority to the aspectual dimension. The future is always supported by the wills, hopes, fears, etc. of subjects.” So much so, in fact, that in Old French the verb voloir (to will or desire) is sometimes used in the future instead of the present, which highlights its modal function because of its perspective sémantèse, as in the Prose Tristan, 216, 15: “Et li rois quant il entent cest parole, il descent et s’en vet a la fosse, car il voudra veoir qui cil est qui dedenz gist [qui donc est celui qui repose là-dedans]” (cf. RT: Grammaire de l’ancien français). Let us add that today, grammarians see the future as including the form previously called “the conditional” in the form of a “future II,” belonging to the same “tiroir.” Ultimately, the future does not exist as an original grammatical form. French avenir corresponds to German Zukunft (and to Dan. tilkommende): the avenir is à venir (to come) and Zu-kunft is derived from kommen (to come). But French has two terms, futur and avenir, whereas the German Futurum refers only to the grammatical category of verb tenses. Futur and avenir are not synonyms, but opposites in terms of modality: futur indicates only what will be, while avenir indicates what might be. In this sense, the futur is thus the suspension of the avenir, is expressed only by anticipation, a tending toward what it calls for; unless we should discern in it a futurity immanent in every present. Moreover, we should note that the term Gegenwart itself presupposes a relationship between past and present that is not one of strict continuity, but rather of opposition. The present is less what follows the past, in a peaceful, continuous flow, than what is strong enough to oppose the past and break away from it, in the promising discontinuity begun by this rupture. In the “genealogy of time” that he proposes in his Ages of the World (Die Weltalter, 1811–15), Schelling obviously understands Gegenwart, in all its antithetical dimension, in relation to Gegensatz, Entgegensetzung (opposite, opposition): “Der Mensch, der sich seiner Vergangenheit nicht entgegenzusetzen fähig ist, hat keine, oder vielmehr er kommt nie aus ihr heraus, lebt beständig in ihr” (The man who is not capable of opposing his past has none, or rather he never emerges from it, lives constantly in it). The present can thus be conquered only through a living and conflictual relationship of antagonism to the past, beyond any attachment to the past that does not allow the past to be constituted as such. For the present understood in this way, the avenir is à-venir, avenant. But to the French présent and its presence also corresponds the German Anwesenheit, which bears the hidden harmony of being and time. How is this German term composed? According to Jean Beaufret, Heidegger noticed “one day” that to the Platonic and Aristotelian name of being, ousia, which also means, in ordinary language, a peasant’s property, directly corresponds, from this point of view, the German Anwesen, but on the other hand, nothing is closer to the neuter Anwesen than the feminine Anwesenheit, in which the ending -heit brings to language, making it shine, so to speak, that which in Anwesen still remains opaque. Thus Anwesenheit says: the pure brilliance of Anwesen. But on the other hand Anwesenheit is synonymous with Gegenwart, and thereby also says that what shines, when the Greek name of being (ousia, as the apheresis of parousia) resounds, is essentially of the present. Dialogue avec Heidegger The interference, given in the word itself, between the present defined in opposition to the past or to the future, on the one hand, and the present in its presence by opposition to absence, on the other hand, was to lead Heidegger, notably in Being and Time, to emphasize a concordance of times in the heart of the present, such that it subverts the traditional relation of the subordination of time (and of the nunc fluens [the now that flows away]) to eternity (as nunc stans [the now that remains]). So that “past and future meet or rather correspond to each other in an entirely different way than the adverb ‘successively’ indicates.” Beaufret continues: “Present, past, and future, far from following one another, are ek-statically contemporary within a world in which the present is not the passing instant but extends as far as a future corresponds to a past.” The German Gegenwart, to designate the present, shows a futurity immanent in the present. The present is thus drawn toward the future, which illumines it in return. The being of 850 PRESENT following Husserl, in the ego-pole radiating from its “living present” and its retentions and protentions, or, following Heidegger, in the contemporary character of ekstases. This seems to be what led Sartre to see in the tripartite classification past-present-future a kind of triple profusion or triple attachment, even when it does not present itself as such, whether in the triple synthesis of the “Transcendental Deduction” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) or in Nietzsche’s division of history into antiquarian, monumental, and critical. Pascal David REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 1961. Aubenque, Pierre. Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Saint Bishop of Hippo. Translated by E. B. Pusey. New York: Modern Library, 1949. Beaufret, Jean. Dialogue avec Heidegger, Vol. 4. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1945. Translation by Marc Sinclair: Dialogue with Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1997. given that it conceives the latter only as what proceeds anticipatively from the present and not what comes to the present in an unanticipated way. Thus the avenir differs from the futur as the possible differs from the real. Fundamentally, it may be that the understanding of the verbal system on the basis of the tripartite division pastpresent-future was outdated, grammarians now tending to consider as aspectual values that used to be considered, wrongly, strictly temporal. From this brief survey we can conclude that there is a certain homogeneity in the verbal system of Indo-European languages (even if the future infinitive, for example, is hardly found outside ancient Greek), but also a remarkable heterogeneity in the diverse expressions of times and tenses (Ger. Zeiten and Tempora) in the few languages examined here. In each case a certain division of reality is made, but this division (to which, moreover, both the French term temps and the German Zeit are etymologically related [see TIME]) is rarely the same. Contemporary phenomenology has sought to rethink the unitary focal point prior to the tripartite division we have studied, while at the same time acknowledging the latter, and even trying to provide it with a rigorous foundation: either, 2 Præsentisk/nuværende: Presence in Kierkegaard’s Danish Præsentisk is a neologism in Danish that was apparently coined by Kierkegaard, the usual terms being nuværende (being now) and nœrvœrende (being near, before the eyes, current). It refers to presence (Nærværelse) to oneself: sig selv præsentisk (Either/Or), as opposed to absence (Fraværelse). Total selfpresence is defined as “being today,” as the exclusion of unhappiness: the “blessed God who eternally says ‘today’” [idag] (The Lily of the Fields and the Bird of the Sky). Whereas the absence of the past and the future signifies perfection, presence (praesentes dii) is that of a “powerful support” (kraftige Bistand) (The Concept of Fear). In The Most Unhappy (Den Ulykkeligste, 1843), the pseudonymous author tells a story (similar to Kafka’s The Hunter Gracchus) that extends, under the sign of lived temporality, Hegel’s analysis of the unhappy consciousness. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes the unhappiness of the divided (entzweit) consciousness, which is absent from itself because it lives separately, without the horizon of union, marked by a doubling (Verdoppelung) that cannot be unified. It is the consciousness animated by pious fervor (Andacht), nostalgia (Sehnsucht), and a hope that is never fulfilled, without presence (ohne Erfüllung und Gegenwart). To explore concretely the forms of absence from oneself (sig selv fraværende), Kierkegaard analyzes in terms of temporality this consciousness, which, according to Hegel, has its essence, the content of its own life, outside itself. That is what leads him to oppose to the present of the past and the present of the future the pluperfect (plus quam perfectum) and the future anterior (futurum exactum), in which there is nothing present. Whence the portrait of individualities that memory or hope makes unhappy. Nonetheless, the man of hope’s absence from himself includes “a happier deception” than that of the man deceived by memories. For the former, the future, the infinite of the possible, remains, whereas the latter turns toward a past that was not the presence of anything. But “the most unhappy man” is the one who experiences both misfortunes. Since the two passions oppose each other, he is the theater of the powerlessness that consists in “not having time at all” (slet ingen Tid). To this is opposed “repetition, the serious aspect of reality and existence,” a repetition that is “the interest of metaphysics, and at the same time the interest against which metaphysics fails” (Repetition). The privilege of the present signifies that true life is in the instant and not in the state. Whatever the forms of life, the existential stages, might be, it is in each instant that their meaning is given, in the event itself through which it is contracted (pådrage). This holds for joy as well as for despair, for fear and for serenity, “each instant (ethvert Øjeblik) being “real” (virkelig) only in the “present time” (nærværende Tid) of a “relationship to oneself” (Forholdet til sig selv) (The Sickness unto Death). As is shown by a passage in Kierkegaard’s Journal for 1847–48 (Papirer, VIII A 305), this præsentisk moment involves freedom, and thus tends toward the future (see EVIGHED). Jacques Colette REFS.: Kierkegaard, Søren. Samlade Vaeker. Edited by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen, 1920–36. Translation: Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000. . Papirer. Edited by P. A. Heiberg and V. Kuhr. 20 vols. Copenhagen, 1909–48. . The Last Years: Journals, 1853–1855. Edited and translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Collins, 1965. . Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. 2 vols. General editor, Bruce H. Kirmmse, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007–8. PRINCIPLE 851 the various axiomatics that emerged between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: Grundsatz was then used in the sense of the initial laws of a formal system on the basis of which a certain number of theorems, propositions, Sätze, can be derived. I. Archai and Archê A. The ambiguity of archê and telos, principium and finis Archê [ἀϱχή] derives from the verb archô [ἄϱχω], which in Homer means both “begin” (to take the lead or initiative: êrche hodon [ἦϱχε ὁδόν], “he showed the way,” Odyssey, 8.107; archein polemoio [ἄϱχειν πολέμοιο], “begin the fighting,” Iliad, 4.335) and “command” (Iliad 16.65); then it was used especially in the middle voice, archesthai [ἄϱχεσθαι]; we can easily understand how the latter meaning emerged from the former, either because the leader was the first to act (cf. its uses in religion, music, and dance) or because he walked in front (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). Archê thus signifies both the beginning (principle, point of departure, for example, euthus ex archês [εὐθὺς ἐξ ἀϱχῆς], from the beginning) and command (responsibility, authority, power, magistracy, for example, archên archein [ἀϱχὴν ἄϱχειν], exercise a responsibility). From “archaism” to “archetype” or “architecture” its numerous combined forms emphasize one and/or the other of these two meanings. A philosophy of the origin may thus be based on the way in which the beginning is decisive in Greek. The Latin principium, from princeps (a combination of primum and capio, literally, “he who takes first,” “he who occupies the first place”), has the same ambiguity (the principium, like the archê, of a discourse is its exordium; cf. RT: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik); the plural, principia, which designates the front lines of an army, is used, like the Greek archai, to signify both the parts from which a whole is formed (principia rerum), and natural impulses (principia naturae; Cicero, De officiis, 1.50) or the foundations of law (Cicero, De legibus, 1.18; cf. Gaffiot, s.v.). The corresponding antonyms are no less ambiguous. Greek telos [τέλος] signifies achievement, in the sense of achieving an end (in the sense of goal or purpose); it is seconded by teleutê [τελευτή], which belongs to the same family, to signify the end in the sense of cessation or conclusion (in particular, death). The Latin finis covers the whole of this semantic field, and we still see this in English “end” and French fin: it signifies first limit, boundary, frontier, like the Greek horos [ὅϱος] (which RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque relates to the Homeric ouron [οὖϱον], furrow), which, in its abstract or logical meaning, is rendered precisely by “de-finition”; and then “cessation, the end” (res finem invenit [the thing is finished]) no less than “goal” (domus finis est usus [the goal of a house is to be used]; Cicero, De officiis, 1.138, renders exactly the final cause, the hou heneka [οὗ ἕνεϰα], Aristotle’s “that for which”) and the culmination (fines bonorum et malorum [the supreme degree of goods and evils], Cicero, De finibus, 1.55). Cicero, precisely in De finibus, comments on the richness of the Latin term: Sentis me, quod τέλος Graeci dicunt, id dicere tum extremum, tum ultimum, tum summum ; licebit etiam finem pro extremo aut ultimo dicere. Bloch, Marc. Strange Defeat. Translated by Gerard Hopkins with an introduction by Maurice Powicke and Georges Altman. New York: Norton, 1968. . Apologie pour l’histoire. Paris: A. Colin, 1949. Brentano, Franz. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Edited and translated by Rolf George. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Chantraine, Pierre. Morphologie historique du grec. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1961. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. In Philosophical Works of Descartes. Translated by E. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Dover, 1955. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. . Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (GA). Series edited by Vittorio Klostermann. Vol. 20, edited by P. Jaeger, 1979, 2nd ed., 1988, 3rd ed., 1994. . Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege]. Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. . What is Called Thinking? New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Hintikka, Jakkao, and Simo Knuuttila, eds. The Logic of Being. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986. Luchte, James. Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality. London: Continuum, 2008. Meillet, A. Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque. Paris, C. Klincksieck, 1965. Montaigne. Essais, Vol. 2. Edited by P. Villey. Paris: Alcan, 1922. Translation by D. M. Frame: The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. The Ages of the World. Translated by Jason M. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. . Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Translated by M. Richey and M. Zisselsberger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. . Philosophie der Mythologie. Edited by Andreas Roser and Holger Schulten. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996. Tredelenburg, Adolf. Geschichte der Kategorienlehre. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1979. First published ca. 1846. Vendryès, Joseph. Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History. Translated by Paul Radin. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1925. Valpy, F.E.J. The Etymology of the Words of the Greek Language in Alphabetical Order. London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860. PRINCIPLE, SOURCE, FOUNDATION FRENCH principe GERMAN Satz, Grundsatz, Prinzip, Principium, Anfangsgrund, Grund GREEK archê [ἀϱχή], aitia [αἰτία] LATIN principium v. LAW, MACHT, NATURE, PROPOSITION, REASON, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SOLLEN, THING, WORLD The principle, archê [ἀϱχή], principium, is what begins and dominates, the two meanings being connected in both Greek and Latin. It is a generating element of being and/or a point of departure for knowledge. The Aristotelian distinctions are determining: principles and causes (archai kai aitiai [ἀϱχαὶ ϰαὶ αἰτίαι]), principles and axioms or hypotheses (axiômata [ἀξιώματα], hupotheseis [ὑποθέσεις]); but they do not pose any translation problem. In German, however, the paradigm of the beginning (Prinzip) is reduplicated in that of the foundation (Grund). The Kantian distinctions overthrew the Aristotelian nomenclature by introducting a sharp distinction between the logical and analytical domain, on the one hand, and the transcendental on the other hand. The logical meaning, which proceeds from the Posterior Analytics, was shaken up by 852 PRINCIPLE The causes of the fact are thus the premises (protaseis [πϱοτάσεις], from pro-teinô [πϱο-τείνω], “tend toward”) of the demonstration, that is, the causes of the conclusion, and constitute the “specific principles” (hai archai oikeai [αἱ ἀϱχαὶ οἰϰεῖαι], 71b 23) of the knowledge of the fact: “a ‘basic truth’ in a demonstration is an immediate proposition” (protasis amesos [πϱότασις ἄμεσος]), (72a 7–8), that is, a proposition (apophansis [ἀπόφανσις]) that is affirmative, apophasis [ἀπόφασις], or negative, kataphasis [ϰατάφασις]; see PROPOSITION), and is not preceded by any other. However, the Posterior Analytics makes very precise distinctions among the different kinds of principles (book 1, chaps. 2 and 10): the protasis is a “thesis” (thesis [θέσις], from tithêmi [τίθημι], “to set or posit”) when it is not necessary to have it in order to learn something; in the contrary case, it is an “axiom” (axiôma [ἀξίωμα], from axioô [ἀξιόω], “evaluate, believe to be right or true”). The thesis thus has a limited validity, while the axiom has a general validity. When a thesis rules on the existence of its object, it is a “hypothesis” (hupothesis [ὑπόθεσις], from hupo-tithêmi [ὑποτίθημι], “put on top of, suppose”; see SUBJECT), and if the hypothesis is contrary to what the student thinks (or if the student has no opinion about it), then it is a “postulate” (aitêma [αἴτημα], from aiteô [αἰτέω], “to ask, demand”) (10.76b 30–31); when a proposition does not rule on the existence of its object, it is a simple “definition” (horismos [ὁϱισμός], from horizô [ὁϱίζω], “limit”) (2.72a 20–24). However, the common denominator of all these kinds of principles remains: “there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premises” (Posterior Analytics, 2.19.100b 10–11); the principles are undemonstrable primary truths: “Whereas the rest can be demonstrated by the principles, the principles cannot be demonstrated by something else” (Topics, 8.3.158b 2–4). In this sense, there are two kinds of truths: secondary truths, established syllogistically—these are conclusions obtained thanks to the presence of a middle term (to meson [τὸ μέσον]) in two premises, a middle term that established the proportion between them and thus makes it possible to produce a third proposition—and primary truths, which are the only ones called “principles.” C. The question of the first principle To understand what an archê, in the singular, really is, however, we must determine what resists this convenient classification enabling us to situate the physical (the principles of being) on the one hand, and the organon (the principles of knowing) on the other, but leaves room between the two for metaphysics in its relation to the scientific nature of knowledge (Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote). All the complexity or hesitation constitutive of Aristotelian ontotheology can be expressed in terms of archê: is the knowledge sought, which deals with the prôtê archê [πϱῶτη ἀϱχή], the theology of book Λ of the Metaphysics, according to which “on such a principle [viz. God], then, depend the heavens (ek toiautês archês êrtêtai ho ouranos [ἐϰ τοιαυτῆς ἀϱχῆς ἤϱτηται ὁ οὐϱανὸς]) and the world of nature” (Λ, 7.1072b 14)? Or is the knowledge of being qua being described in book Ґ of the Metaphysics, according to which the principle that “is the most certain of all” (bebaiotatê pason [βεϐαιοτάτη πασῶν], is also the best known, gnôrimôtatê [γνωϱιμωτάτη], and it is anupotheton [ἀνυπόθε τον], not depending on any (You see, what the Greeks call telos, I sometimes call extremity, sometimes ultimate degree, and sometimes culmination; but I could say end instead of extremity and ultimate degree.) 3.26 B. Archai and aitia (principles and causes) / archê et protasis, thesis, hupothesis, axiôma, aitêma, horismos (principle and premise, thesis, hypothesis, axiom, postulate, definition) It is common, then, to all beginnings to be the first point from which a thing either is or comes to be or is known. to prôton einai hothen ê estin ê gignetai ê gignôsketai [τὸ πϱῶ τον εἶναι ὅθεν ἢ ἔστιν ἢ γίγνεται ἢ γιγνώσϰεται]. Aristotle, Metaphysics, D.1.1013a 17–19 A distinction is traditionally drawn between the principles of being (principia essendi, principia realia) and principles of knowledge (principia cognoscendi): Bonitz (RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v. Arkhê), for example, setting aside the univocal meanings of initium (used chiefly in meteorological or biological texts) and imperium (used chiefly in rhetoric and politics), arranges the occurrences of the term in Aristotle under these two rubrics. Principia realia are the Pre-Socratics’ archai, which Aristotle classifies, in book A of the Metaphysics, thereby providing the matrix of later doxographies, and even for an initial history of philosophy. The archêgos [ἀϱχηγός], or “founder,” of this kind of theory was Thales, for whom water was the sole archê of all things (A.3.983b 19–22): this type of archê, whether single or multiple, belongs to the order of the stoicheion [στοιχεῖον], of the “element” (b 11), that is, of the material cause. Aristotle reinterprets these principles to show how they prefigure and confirm his own systematics of causes: Anaxagoras’s nous [Noῦς], Empedocles’s Love and Hate, as efficient causes (archê kinêseôs [ἀϱχὴ ϰινήσεως]; 7.988a 33), the Platonic Ideas as embryonic formal causes, the One and the Good as final causes. These archai are aitiai, and in this case there is no difference between principles and causes (988b 16–21) or, more precisely, as chapter Δ of the Metaphysics explains, “all causes are beginnings” (5.1013a 17). The principia cognoscendi, “principles of knowledge,” are one of the three constitutive elements of any demonstrative science, namely: “(1) that which it posits; the subject genus whose essential attributes it examines; (2) the so-called axioms, which are primary premises of its demonstration; (3) the attributes, the meaning of which it assumes” (Posterior Analytics, 1.10.76b 11–16). Principle and cause are clearly connected in scientific knowledge because to know something is to know its cause: We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing [ἐπίστασθαι ἕϰαστο] when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends [τήν δ’ αἰτίαν δι’ ἣν τὸ πϱᾶγμά ἐστιν], as the cause of that fact and of no other [ὅτι ἐϰείνου αἰτία ἐστί], and, further that the fact could not be other than it is [ϰαὶ μὴ ἐνδέχεσθαι τοῦτ’ ἄλλως ἔχειν]. Posterior Analytics, 1.2.71b 9–12 PRINCIPLE 853 It is one thing to seek a common notion that is so clear and so general that it can serve as a principle for proving the existence of all Beings, all Entia, which we will discover later on; and another to seek a Being whose existence is better known to us than any other, so that it can serve as a principle for knowing them. Letter to Clerselier, June or July 1646 As an example of the first sense of “principle,” Descartes gives the example of the principle of non-contradiction, which he formulates as follows: “impossibile est idem simul esse et non esse” (it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time). But he refuses to reduce every kind of principle to this one because this principle does not produce true knowledge; it merely confirms truths we already know: “For it may happen that there is no principle in the world to which all things can be reduced; and the way in which other propositions are reduced to this one: impossibile est idem simul esse et non esse, is superfluous and useless.” That is why in order to know we must turn to other principles: “in the other sense, the first principle is that our mind exists, because there is nothing whose existence is better known to us.” The Principia philosophiae date from 1644; they give us useful, not superfluous principles; they are “first causes” and include both “the principles of human knowledge” (the first part) and “the principles of material things” (the three other parts). These two types of principles are both clear and distinct, but the former are called “principles” stricto sensu; the latter relate to “what is most general in physics” and are called “laws of nature” or “rules” in accord with which changes in nature take place, as well as the other laws of nature formulated in articles 37–40 of the second part of the Principia. These laws “established in nature” are “imprinted upon our minds” in the form of “common notions” (Descartes, Discours, V). What is required of the principle is that it not promote an enterprise of reducing truths to a first notion. In reality, there are several innate common previous postulate), the one that has passed on to posterity under the name of the principle of non-contradiction, which is formulated as follows: ‘it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be’ ” (Metaphysics, Ґ, 3.1005b 19–20)? A science that is universal because it is primary, and deals with the ousia prôtê, primary substance, insofar as it is a first principle, or a science, first because general, which deals with the whole of being and first principles? In any case, God and non-contradiction are both simultaneously principles of being and principles of intelligibility, ontological. Non-contradiction is clearly a logical law because it defines the truth condition of a demonstrative construction (arguments, syllogisms) and of a terminological construction (propositions), and, still more crucially, because it requires us to signify something when we speak (univocality and definition; see HOMONYM); it is also, as Heidegger emphasizes, a law of being that affirms “nothing less than this: the essence of the existent consists in the constant absence of contradiction” (Nietzsche). The Leibnizian principle of reason is also expressed, very explicitly, in the Monadology, for instance, as a principle of being and as a principle of discourse (“no fact can be real or existent, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise”; §32). The principle is at once the cause and the reason for first truths as the middle term is both cause (the Scholastics’ principium essendi, Kant’s Realgrund) and reason (the Scholastics’ principium cognoscendi, Kant’s Idealgrund) of the syllogism (“A cause in the realm of things corresponds to a reason in the realm of truths”; Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, book 4,chap. 17). . II. Principia, Laws, Common Notions While recognizing that the notion of principle has several meanings, Descartes refused to grant an exclusive privilege to the principle of non-contradiction; he tries to justify his use of the plural in the title of his Principia philosophiae: 1 Petitio principii In Greek, to “beg the question” is aiteisthai to en archêi [αἰτείσθαι τὸ ἐν ἀϱχῆ] (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Ґ.4.1006a 15–16), “to ask what is in the principle.” Every first principle as such is necessarily undemonstrable. To demand (aitein [αἰτείν]) that it be demonstrated is a sign of the lack of education, apiaideusia [ἀπαιδευσία], characteristic of the Sophists—“for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education (esti gar apideusia [ἔστι γὰϱ ἀπαιδευσία])” (Metaphysics, 4.1006a 6–8). Thus Aristotle does not propose a “demonstration” (apodeixis [ἀπόδειξις]) of the principle of non-contradiction, but rather a “negative demonstration” or refutation (elegchos [ἔλεγχος]; 1006a 18), so that the adversary of the principle bears all the responsibility for the demand: it is he who will be allowed to speak first so that by stating his rejection, he says something that is significant for himself and for others and thus always already obeys the principle that he claims to deny (1006a 18–27) (cf. Cassin and Narcy, La Décision du sens; see HOMONYM). Principle and petitio principii refer to the problem of the ultimate foundation. The necessity of a stopping point (anagkê stenai [ἀνάγϰη στῆναι]) has the force of a postulation. That is why Heidegger can see in the petitio principii not a logical error but a founding act. Petere principium, in other words, tending toward the foundation and its foundation, is the single and unique step taken by philosophy, the step that moves beyond, ahead, and opens up the only domain within which a science can be established. Heidegger, “Ce qu’est et comment se détermine la phusis” REFS.: Cassin, Barbara, and Michel Narcy. La Décision du sens. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. “Ce qu’est et comment se détermine la phusis.” French translation by F. Fédier: Questions II. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1968. 854 PRINCIPLE Locke prefers to use the terms “source” and “foundations” when discussing what seems to him to be the starting points for human knowledge: “perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, in the consideration of the things themselves” (I, 4, 23). This “fountain” consists in simple ideas: sensation and reflection. The advance of knowledge is measured, then, by the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, and not by the status of principle that we confer on general propositions of the type “what is, is.” Hume, having recognized the difficulty of finding principles, emphasizes that we must substitute for conjectures imposed on nature or the mind a knowledge of the principles that would enable us to connect phenomena with each other in a regular way: such a project involves the analysis of the origin of our ideas (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §2) and knowledge of their derivation. Hume’s analysis is not limited to a morphology of our ideas that divides them into ideas of reflection and ideas of sensation. He radicalizes Locke on the question of principles by questioning not only the source of knowledge but also its origin. His analysis is thus more genetic, and accords to the notion of origin, and to its corollary, the notion of derivation, such importance that this general maxim can be formulated: That all our simple ideas, in their first appearance, are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent. A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, chap. 1, §1 IV. Principium, Grundsatz, Prinzip, Satz, Grundgesetz A. Kantianism and post-Kantianism In the French translation of Kant, principe may render six German words that the philosopher frequently uses and sometimes distinguishes: Satz, Grundsatz, Prinzip, Principium, Anfangsgrund, Grund. This translation is perfectly legitimate in some instances: it would be pointless, pedantic, and erroneous to render Satz des Widerspruchs as proposition de contradiction. But the impoverishment of the Kantian vocabulary has sometimes corresponded to an absence of conceptual distinctions that results in major lacunae and even interpretive confusions. Within Kantianism, the terminology just described is used in the following contexts: 1. The principium retains the meaning of “principle” as beginning and command. It is a specification of the “principle” (Prinzip) to which Kant denies, in its generality, any value as a foundation for knowledge: “The term ‘principle’ [Prinzip] is ambiguous, and commonly signifies any knowledge which can be used as a principle [Prinzip], although in itself, and as regards its proper origin, it is no principle [Prinzipium]” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 356). On the other hand, the Prinzipium is valid in the legislative order (Gesetzgebung) because in this case we are in fact the authors, the source itself (die Ursache) of the laws, which are “entirely our own work” (B 358). 2. Principles in the sense of Grundsätze (sing. Grundsatz) are used by Kant in two ways: notions (Euclid’s koinai ennoiai [ϰοιναὶ ἔννοιαι]) whose use is so constant that it is no longer governed by systematic discernment on our part; principles in the sense of common notion-axioms are then in our minds as it were virtually or implicitly, in the manner of “the propositions suppressed in enthymemes, which are omitted not only outside our thought but also within it” (Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, book 1, §4). The principle fulfills its function when, on the one hand, it is so obvious that it cannot be denied, and on the other hand, it allows us to recognize the deductions that depend on it, in other words, the laws. Let us emphasize that this vocabulary is not always used: Descartes sometimes calls the three laws of movement “principles” (Principia, II, §36); similarly, Leibniz gives the name of “law” to the principle of the conservation of energy (Discours de métaphysique, §17). Along with Newton’s Principia, we have here an effort to systematize natural philosophy; in Newton’s work, principles are everything that allows us to account for the “first and last sums and ratios of nascent and evanescent quantities” (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [1687]), which includes not only the “definitions” and “axioms or laws of movement” that Newton places before the first book, but also the lemmas and theorems of the three books of the Principia. III. “Principle,” “Foundation,” “Source,” “Original”: Principles and the Connection of Ideas Locke takes up the notion of principle in arguing against the theory of innate ideas. At the beginning of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he notes that “it is an established opinion amongst some men, that there are in the understanding certain innate principles: of primary notions, koinai ennoiai” (book I, chap. 2, §1). His refutation bears on both speculative and practical principles, taking the ironic form of a critique of the argument from authority: the schoolmasters and teachers maintaining the thesis that there are innate ideas postulate as “the principle of principles that principles must not be questioned” (I, 4, 24). The obviousness of some general propositions and the general consent to which they give rise do not, however, transform these general propositions into innate propositions. Moreover, the most general propositions, such as “what is, is” or “it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be” do not by themselves advance knowledge; on the one hand, the ideas of which they are composed—the ideas of identity and impossibility—are far from clear to everyone; on the other hand, in the best of cases they have only an argumentative value and serve to “stop the mouths of wranglers” (IV, 7, 11). In the transformation of general maxims into principles Locke discerns a survival of the dialectical method that consists in starting from the endoxa [ἔνδοξα], from generally accepted propositions, in disputes. But accepting such maxims does not imply that knowledge has to recognize them as principles: And then these Maxims, getting the name of Principles, beyond which men in dispute could not retreat, were by mistake taken to be the Originals and the Sources, from whence all knowledge began, and the Foundations whereon the sciences were built. IV, 7, 11 PRINCIPLE 855 this sense they are “logical.” Kant distinguishes three of them: (1) “a principle [Prinzip] of the homogeneity of the manifold under higher genera”; (2) “a principle [Grundsatz] of the variety of the homogeneous under lower species”; and (3) “the affinity of the concepts—a law [Gesetz] which prescribes that we proceed from each species to every other by gradual increase of the diversity” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 657/B 685). We see here that the Kantian nomenclature, which is recapitulated in terms of “principles” (Prinzipien) of homogeneity, specification, and continuity, blurs for the translator and the French interpreter the initial distinction between Grundsatz and Prinzip (Principium). This is because the concepts of “fundamental proposition” (Grundsatz) and “principle” (Prinzip) are given different meanings depending on whether the context in which they are used is formal logic or transcendental logic. In the transcendental register, only the understanding has fundamental propositions (of which, as the “faculty of rules,” it is the origin), whereas only reason has these (unconditioned) principles of which it is the source. In formal logic, Grundsatz designates a proposition to which we have gone back, and which, a parte ante, is thus not founded on an anterior proposition, whereas Prinzip designates the ability to derive, a parte post, other propositions. For traditional logical principles such as the principle of identity and the principle of contradiction, Kant uses the term Sätze (Satz, proposition) to indicate that these principles do not have foundational value, and that they are therefore only “criteria” of truth: “The principle of contradiction must therefore be recognized as being the universal and completely sufficient principle of all analytic knowledge; but beyond the sphere of analytic knowledge it has, as a sufficient criterion of truth, no authority and no field of application” (A 151/B 191). Mathematical philosophers of the nineteenth century like Bolzano retained the same terminology in speaking of the principles of identity and contradiction—Satz der Einerleiheit and Satz des Widerspruches—but far from being simple criteria of truth, these principle-propositions were considered as the universal source of all analytical judgments. On the other hand, the principle of reason (Satz vom Grunde) is for Kant a synthetic proposition that accounts for judgments. This principle assumes the intuition of time and yet, as Bolzano once more points out, “it is also valid where there is no time” (§8), namely, when the existence of noumena has to be justified. From both the logical and transcendental points of view, the distinction between Satz, Grundsatz, and Prinzip is thus not merely reasonable: on the one hand, if a proposition can play the role of principle, a principle, since it can be founded on a superior proposition, is not necessarily a fundamental proposition; on the other hand, transcendental fundamental propositions have their source in the understanding, while principles have theirs in reason. Here we see the root of a possible confusion. In a logical sense, the understanding has principles and reason has fundamental propositions, which in a transcendental sense would be contradictory; if the logical sense is taken for the transcendental sense, the critical nomenclature and the architectonics that underlie it will be upset: reason will already be involved in the “Analytic of a. First, they are the formal “fundamental propositions [Grundsätze] of the sensible world” (1770 Dissertation, §14 and 15), or space and time: they indicate the impossibility of the Leibnizian reduction of principles to the principle of identity and to the “great principle” (reciprocally related to the latter) according to which the predicate is in a subject (praedicatum inest subjecto; letter from Leibniz to Arnaud, 14 July 1686). b. Second, the fundamental a priori propositions (Grundsätze) of the understanding found the possibility of knowledge and are in this sense “rules for the objective employment of the former [the categories]” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 161/B 200). They are foundational and take the form of “axioms of intuition,” “anticipations of perception,” “analogies of experience,” and “postulates of empirical thought in general.” They are demonstrable and their formulation is followed by a proof. Their theoretical role is to found the possibility of knowledge, their critical role is to break with the assimilation of “first principles” to “first causes”: we cannot arrive at the notion of cause through a simple concept. “If the reader will go back to our proof of the principle of causality he will observe that we were able to prove it only of objects of possible experience” (B 289). The post-Kantian and anti-Kantian traditions both radicalize this point of view, especially in matters of logic; not only are first principles no longer first causes, but they are not necessarily connected with intuition to found knowledge. The question is: how can a subjective principle like intuition found objectivity, how can it realize the necessity that only a judgment can contain? B. Bolzano indicates that necessity is related first to the judgment, where concepts and, indirectly, our intuitions and representations, are connected with each other. In the Beyträge zur einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik (partial French translation in J. Laz, Bolzano critique de Kant), Bolzano notes his reservations regarding Kant’s foundation of synthetic judgments on intuitions, even if they are a priori: It is well known that some people have been shocked by these a priori intuitions of critical philosophy. For my own part, I willingly concede that there must be a certain reason (Grund) completely different from the principle of contradiction, for which the understanding joins, in a synthetic judgment, the predicate to the concept of subject. But that this reason might be, and be called, an intuition, and what is more, a pure intuition in the case of judgments a priori—that I do not find clear. 3. The principles (Prinzipien) of reason have a regulative value through which reason is “interested” in the constitutive use of the fundamental propositions (Grundsätze) of the understanding. This interest gives them a subjective character that leads Kant to consider them as “maxims” (Maximen) instead. Their role is to give a “systematic or rational unity” to knowledge, and in 856 PRINCIPLE that constitute the justification (Berechtigung) for our assent” (The Foundations of Arithmetic, §3). In the domain of logic, the basic laws are general (allgemein) and “neither lend themselves to nor require a proof (Beweis).” Here Frege is directly borrowing one of Leibniz’s formulas, though he does not cite him (Nouveaux essais, book IV, chap. 9, §3). The fact that Grundgesetze cannot be proven is connected with their “obvious” (selbstverständlich) character (Basic Laws of Arithmetic, vol. 2, §60; Frege apparently uses the adjective einleuchtend in the same sense: cf. The Foundations of Arithmetic, §90). Finally, the basic laws are often described as Urwahrheiten (first truths): cf. The Foundations of Arithmetic, §3. In Frege, the notion of basic law is opposed to those of definition (Definition), axiom (Axiom), and theorem (Lehrsatz). In “Logic in Mathematics” (1914), Frege states that definitions, although important from a psychological point of view, are not essential to logic: they are simple abbreviations. A basic law is thus not a definition that bears on the signs used. Despite the fact that Frege often treats them as propositions (Sätze), basic laws, axioms, and theorems are not linguistic in nature. In his mature writings, Frege clearly indicates that they are thoughts (Gedanken) independent of the mind and of language. The notion of basic law also differs from that of axiom, but in a more subtle way. Every axiom is a basic law, and thus a primary truth, but the reciprocal statement is not true. A law is an axiom when it is used as the point of departure for a system of inferences. On the basis of axioms and rules of inference, one can derive a set of theorems (Lehrsätze). A primary truth considered as an axiom in one system can be considered a theorem in another, and vice versa (“Logic in Mathematics”). In relation to the Kantian tradition, the originality of Frege’s notion of basic laws is twofold. First, Frege thinks that the comprehension of axioms does not depend on intuition but on inference, that is, on the ability to derive theorems from axioms in accord with the order of proof, and also on the correlative ability to go back from the theorems to the axioms. No source of intuitive knowledge, spatiotemporal or other, is required to grasp the obvious character of the axioms. Second, while Frege thinks that logical laws are purely general, he believes he can derive from them the existence of numbers considered as “objects,” whereas Kant thought that only sense intuition can present objects to the understanding (Critique of Pure Reason, A 51/B 75). In his introduction to the Foundations of Arithmetic (Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, 1884), Frege states three principles (Grundsätze) that guide his inquiry. The first advocates separating “the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective.” The second is that “we must find out what words mean (bedeuten) not in isolation but taken in their context.” This is what we now call the Fregean principle of contextuality. Finally, the third principle prescribes that we “never lose sight of the difference between concept and object.” These methodological principles must not be confused with the laws of Fregean conceptual notation. For example, the distinction between object and concept cannot be formulated within the logical system; it only “shows itself” in the correct use of the symbolism, which does not allow the denotation of a concept by means of an expression suited to an object. the Understanding,” but that would destroy the enterprise of Criticism, if it is true that, according to a Kantian leitmotif, its systematicity is the foundation of its scientific character. In the strictly practical (moral) domain, the vocabulary used in the Critique of Practical Reason is explicitly mathematical: “definition,” “theorem,” “axiom,” “postulate,” “law” (Gesetz), and this may seem surprising, coming from a thinker highly critical of the mathematical method in philosophy, and all the more so because this mathematical usage is adopted for an essential term in the Kantian vocabulary, that of “formula” (Formel), which is substituted for “principle” in referring to morality: A reviewer who wanted to find some fault with this work [The Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals] has hit the truth better, perhaps, than he thought, when he says that no new principle of morality is set forth in it, but only a new formula [kein neues Prinzip der Moralität, sondern nur eine neue Formel]. But whoever knows of what importance to a mathematician a formula is, which defines accurately what is to be done to work on a problem, will not think that a formula is insignificant and useless which does the same for all duty in general. Critique of Practical Reason It is possible to grasp the reasons for this change: on the one hand, it is only a matter of setting forth the doctrine, an exposition that has to be dogmatic; hence the formulas expressing the objective principles of knowledge constitute the fundamental propositions of transcendental philosophy. The latter thus produces a formulaic representation of the principles of knowledge: a system of statements which, through successive transformations, must return to the initial statements, those of the doctrinal empirical sites (letter to Markus Hertz, 26 May 1789). On the other hand, Kant maintains even in this lexicon a distinction between mathematics and philosophy since he reserves Definitionen for the former and Erklärungen for the latter. Thus Kant, seeking to conceive a genuinely philosophical revolution that resembles only by analogy the revolution in physics, nonetheless found himself led back to a dangerous proximity to mathematics. In this return, to which the terms “principle” and “formula” testify, we can see the sign of how difficult it is to conceive a specifically philosophical demonstration. This difficulty is the constitutive knot that modern philosophical reflection seeks to undo when it inquires into its status as truth. . B. Frege: Grundgesetz, Grundsatz, Axiom, Definition The term Grundgesetz, commonly used by Frege, can be translated as “basic law.” This translation unfortunately preserves only one aspect of the German term Grund, which means both “basis” and “reason.” In the preface to his Begriffschrift (“Concept Notation,” 1879), Frege divides all truths that require a foundation (Begründung) into two kinds: those whose proof is entirely logical and those that are based on the facts of experience. The notion of basis or foundation is thus intimately connected, in German, with those of reason and proof: the basic laws are “the deepest reasons” (die tiefsten Gründe) PRINCIPLE 857 Descartes, René. Principles of Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 3 including Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Frege, Gottlob. Concept Script, a Formal Language of Pure Thought Modelled upon that of Arithmetic. Translation by S. Bauer-Mengelberg: From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Edited by J. van Heijenoort. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. . The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry Into the Concept of Number. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by J. L. Austin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. . Nachgelassene Schriften. Edited by H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969. . Posthumous Writings. Translated by P. Long and R. White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Gaffiot, Félix. Dictionnaire latin-français. New edition revised and expanded by P. Flobert (ed.). Paris: Hachette, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Translation by David Farrell Krell: Nietzsche. 4 vols. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979–82. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by L. A. SelbyBigge, 3rd edition revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. 6th ed. Vol. 5 of AK. Translated by T. K. Abbott. London: Longmans, 1967. First published in 1879. . Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp-Smith. London: Macmillan, 1958. In an essay entitled “Der Gedanke” (“Thought,” 1918), Frege asserts that logic must seek to discover the laws of being true (Gesetze des Wahrseins). However, he adds that the word “law” is ambiguous. People speak of moral or political laws in a normative or prescriptive sense, whereas the laws of being true are primarily descriptive; they refer to an ontological domain independent of natural processes and psychological representations. We can nonetheless draw from them “prescriptions (Vorschriften) for opinion, thought, judgment, reasoning.” In this sense, the laws of logic, or of being true, are also laws of thought (Denkgesetze). Ali Benmakhlouf Fabien Capeillères Barbara Cassin Jérôme Dokic REFS.: Aubenque, Pierre. Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Bolzano Bernard. Beyträge zur einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik. Prague: Caspar Widtmann, 1810. . “Contributions to a Better-Grounded Presentation of Mathematics.” In The Mathematical Works of Bernard Bolzano, edited by Steve Russ, 83–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 2 Principle of reason, Satz vom Grund In 1955–56, Heidegger gave, under the title Der Satz vom Grund, a series of lectures at the University of Freiburg that took as their theme the “great” Leibnizian principle, the principium magnum, grande et nobilissimum: the principium (sufficientis) rationis, the one that answers the fundamental question (Grundfrage) formulated notably in the Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison (§7): “‘ Why is there something rather than nothing?’ assuming that things must exist, we must be able to account for why they must exist this way, and not otherwise.” Starting from the standard formulation of the principle nihil est sine ratione, Heidegger highlights the most rigorous statement of the principium rationis as principium reddendae rationis: what requires that this be accounted for? To whom? By whom? The lectures as a whole are thus presented as a long variation on a theme: that of the translation of principium rationis—Satz vom Grund; a variation with repetition, transposition, change in accentuation, “alternation of tones,” so as to hear, in accord with all its harmonies, echoes, and resonances (Anklänge) what is said by the “principle”: Grundsatz, fundamental proposition, or rather “ground proposition,” since it—as a thesis or positing of the ground—is the ultimate presupposition of language and truth understood as propriety of judgment. The principium rationis—Satz vom Grund, understood as Grundsatz—is thus what makes the ground of every proposition: der Satz vom Grund als Grund des Satzes. The whole procedure of the lecture is then, by playing on accentuation (Tonart), to retranslate or reinterpret, in accord with other possibilities of the language, the Satz as a “leap” (Sprung) and as a “movement” in the musical sense of the term, and ratio, reason/Grund, as Grund, ground, abyssal ground (Grund—Abgrund). The powerful motif of play (Spiel) runs like a leitmotif from one end to the other of the lectures, which conclude with this surprising transposition of fragment 52 of Heraclitus (see also AIÔN, I.A): [αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων] (Seinsgeschick, ein Kind ist es, spielend ) (The fateful sending of being is a child who plays) Der Satz vom Grund The text can thus be presented explicitly as a play on words (Wortspielerei) laboriously woven and intended to reinvest the principle in an ultimate paratactic reformulation: Sein und Grund : das Selbe ./ Sein: der Ab-grund. (Being and ground: the Same. / Being: the abyss.) To play the game, or to accompany the movements of this game (Sätze dieses Spiels), is also, regressing from German to Greek, to understand Being/Ground as logos [λόγος], or to emphasize the abyss between the rationem reddere characteristic of the principium and the logon didonai [λόγον διδόναι] that is heard “with Greek ears” (!): etwas Anwesendes in seinem so und so Anwesen und Vorliegen darbieten, nämlich dem versammelnden Vernehmen. (offer what enters in presence in its unfolding in presence so or so—and offer it to the grasp that collects) Jean-François Courtine REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 858 PROBABILITY PROGRESS Derived from the Latin progressus (walking forward), the word “progress” designates an improvement related to time, and it may refer to the individual and/or to history. I. Progress and Self-Improvement The reader will find under PERFECTIBILITY a study of the passage, in various traditions, from “improvement” (perfectionnement, Vervollkommnung) and progress. See also BILDUNG, CULTURE, MENSCHHEIT, VIRTÙ. II. Progress and History On the interpretation that can be given to a history oriented toward a goal or determined in its course by an origin that governs its development, see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS; see also CIVILIZATION, CORSO, NEUZEIT, SECULARIZATION. III. Ethics, Economics, and Politics On the boundary between the individual and the collective, see BERUF, ENTREPRENEUR, and OIKONOMIA. See also, in the aesthetic domain, WORK, Box 1 especially. v. DESTINY, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, HISTORY, TIME . Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by the Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer, 1902–13. Laz, Jacques. Bolzano critique de Kant. Paris: Vrin, 1993. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology. In Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Dan Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. . The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. Translated by R. Latta. London: Oxford University Press, 1898. . New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. . The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence. Edited and translated by H. T. Mason. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967. . Discourse on Metaphysics. In Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Dan Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: A New Translation. Translated by I. B. Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. PROBABILITY “Probable” is related to proof (probare, “try out, test”) and approbation (probus, “solid, upright, honest”). Thus it operates in several registers, epistemological, logical, and rhetorical, and it opens out onto ontology as well as aesthetics and ethics. I. Proof and Probability 1. The vocabulary of proof and demonstration is examined under EPISTEMOLOGY, IMPLICATION, and PRINCIPLE. Also see TRUTH. 2. More precisely, “probability” and its calculation are discussed on the basis of the English term “chance,” in contradistinction to “probability”; see CHANCE. 3. The expression of the probable, which is connected with the possible and the contingent as a distinct modality of the necessary, is attached to one of the senses of “owe/ought”: see DUTY; cf. SOLLEN, WILLKÜR. See also, regarding linguistic expression, ASPECT. 4. The probable then merges with the possible, by contrast with the actual: see ACT, POWER. 5. Finally, the probable is related to dialectical demonstrations. See DOXA, II.C especially. II. Probability and Verisimilitude 1. In rhetoric, the probable (Greek eikos [εἴϰος]) is connected with what appears, and it belongs first of all to the vocabulary of the image and the imagination: see EIDÔLON, Box 1; cf. APPEARANCE [DOXA], IMAGE, IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], TRUTH. 2. It is attached in a privileged way to commonplaces. See COMMONPLACE; cf. COMPARISON and supra, I.4. 3. It is connected with aesthetic imitation: see MIMÊSIS concerning the relation between the true and the verisimilar in theories of art; cf. ART, PLASTICITY. On the discursive modalities then put in operation, see DICHTUNG, ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, HISTORY. 4. It implies faith and belief. See CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE]. v. DIALECTIC, FALSE, LIE PROPERTY FRENCH propriété, propre GERMAN Eigenschaft, Eigentum, eigen GREEK idiotês [ἰδιότης], to idion [τὸ ἴδιον], idios [ἴδιος] LATIN proprietas, proprius v. COMPARISON, EREIGNIS, I/ME/MYSELF, OIKEIÔSIS, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SELF, TRUTH, UNIVERSALS The term “property,” in the abstract sense of a thing’s mode of being, has a twofold origin, theological and juridical, which can still be discerned in the French expressions amour propre or biens propres (private property). This twofold origin goes back to the general meaning of “proper” as the unsoiled, the intimate. This Latin genealogy (calqued by the French propre and the English “proper”) is reduplicated by a Germanic genealogy that derives from Eigenschaft (property), from eigen (own), from Eigentum (property [in the sense of what one owns]). The connection between “proper” and “property” thus seems to be more than an accident in a single language; it seems to be a constant. The Latin etymology traces proprius to pro privo (privately, RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 540). Proprius is equivalent to perpetuus (ibid., 539): what is proper to an individual is a permanent characteristic of that individual. Proprietas is a relatively late derivative from proprius, with the twofold sense of possession and characteristic: it is a “calque of idiotês” which is found in Cicero (ibid., 540). The Greek idios [ἴδιος] is related to what is private, proper to someone, whether it be a good or a mode of being, by contrast with what is public (koinos [ϰοινός]). Idiotês [ἰδιότης] designates property, the proper character of something, and idiôtês [ἰδιώτης], for which there is no Latin calque, PROPOSITION 859 designates both the private citizen as opposed to the public man, and the nontechnician, the “idiot” in contrast to the specialist (cf. RT: Le Vocabulaire des institutions européennes, 1:328 ; see ART, and LANGUAGE, II.B.1). Idios is based on the Indo-European root *swe-d, from which is derived suus (his); *swe (which appears not only in *swe-d but also in swe-t, connected with étes [Fr., allié], and in *swe-dh, connected with ethos [ἔθος]), on the one hand “implies membership in a group of ‘one’s own,’ and on the other it specializes the ‘self ’ as individuality” (ibid., 1:332). The logical sense of idion [ἴδιον], “the proper, own” is strictly determined in Aristotle: “A ‘property’ [idion] is a predicate which does not indicate the essence of a thing [to ti ên einai, (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι)], but yet belongs to that thing alone, and is predicated convertibly of it [monôi d’huparchei kai antikatêgoreitai tou pragmatos (μόνῳ δ’ ὑπάϱχει ϰαὶ ἀντιϰατηγοϱεῖται τοῦ πϱάγματος)]” (Topics, 1.5.102a.18–19; trans. W. A. PackardCambridge in Basic Works of Aristotle). Along with genus, definition, and accident, property is one of the predicables (ibid., 1.5; see PRÉDICABLE and TO TI ÊN EINAI). J. Brunschwig comments, “When a property is attributed to a subject, the name (of the subject) is attributed to everything to which the formula (of the property) is attributed, and the formula (of the property) is attributed to everything to which the name (of the subject) is attributed” (Brunschwig, Introduction to Topiques, by Aristotle, 122). In English, “property” is derived from “proper.” A proper name is one that is proper to the individual (the French nom propre appears in 1549 as a modernization of the Old French propre nuns, which appears around 1155 [RT: DHLF]). The proper name is the one that is appropriate[d] to the individual. In this sense, “God” is an archetypal proper name: it is perfectly appropriate[d]. In French, propre has two meanings, the second a late development (1842, RT: DHLF) that is attributed to a person who bathes frequently and includes two derivatives with distinct senses: A: propriété, and B: propreté (in Walloon French it has been appropriated for “cleaning”). Sense A is present in the expression le propre de X, meaning “the essence of X”—for example, “le propre de la puissance est de protéger” (Pascal). Sense B is the origin of a general sense of “good order” and came to designate hygiene only later on—in the seventeenth century, a dinner or a garden could be said to be propre in the sense of appropriate for a situation or use, suitable: “Personne ne l’embarrasse, tout le monde lui convient, tout lui est propre” (La Bruyère). What sense A and B have in common is the idea of suitability (Greek prepon [πϱέπον]; see MIMÊSIS, Box 6). German distinguishes among Eigenschaft, Eigentum, and Eigenheit (“peculiarity”): an Eigenschaft is shared by several individuals (for example, “being red”), whereas an Eigenheit is possessed by a single individual (for example, “being myself”). In the seventeenth century, Eigenschaft appeared as a translation of qualitas and attributum, and was part of the vocabulary of technical philosophy established by Wolff in particular: “That which is uniquely and solely founded in the essence of a thing will be called a property [Eigenschaft].” Medieval and later mysticism in the Rhineland and in Flanders exploited the semantic affinity of the derivatives of eigen: it is just as much a matter of renouncing possessions as of transcending both general and individual qualities (Suso’s noble man is literally a “man without qualities” (Eigenschaften). In this sense Musil’s “Man without Qualities” descends from the “noble man” of Meister Eckhart and Suso. In this context, the juridical term Aneignung (a German translation of appropriatio) designates much more than taking material possession, the acquisition of an egoity (self-hood) or even an ipseity; and the ascetic and then mystical path is identified with disappropriation (syn.: detachment, abnegation, deprivation), which means renouncing what we have of our own, whether it be properties or possessions: “The monk must not only renounce ownership of material things, but also that of his own will [proprietati propriae voluntatis]” (quoted in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 335–36), but also “the doctrine of the cynical philosophers which was the spirit of disappropriation” (Voltaire). In the contemporary period, Heidegger reappropriated the proper, Eigentlichkeit (genuineness, authenticity) and Ereignis (propriation, event; see EREIGNIS). The abstract philosophical concepts Eigenschaft, property, and propriété thus have not only a juridical origin but also an ascetic origin. Frédéric Nef REFS.: Aristotle. Topics. Bks. 1 and 8. Translation by W. A. Packard-Cambridge: Topics. In Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Translation with commentary by Robin Smith: Topics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Brunschwig, Jacques. Introduction to Topiques, by Aristotle. 1:vii–cxlviii. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. PROPOSITION / SENTENCE / STATEMENT / UTTERANCE FRENCH proposition, phrase, énoncé GERMAN Satz, Rede, Aussage GREEK protasis [πϱότασις], logos [λόγος], phasis [φάσις], apophasis [ἀπόφασις], apophansis [ἀπόφανσις], logos apophantikos [λόγος ἀποφαντιϰός], thesis [θέσις], axiôma [ἀξίωμα] LATIN propositio, praemissa, oratio, oratio enuntiativa, sententia, elocutio, enuntiatio, sermo v. DICTUM, ÉNONCÉ, INTENTION, LOGOS, PREDICATION, PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, SUPPOSITION, TERM, TROPE, TRUTH, WORD The term “proposition” designates a complex unit intermediary, in the analysis of language, between the “word” or the “term” on the one hand, and “discourse” on the other. The “word” is the minimal unit endowed with meaning; combined with other words, it constitutes the sentence (see WORD, which itself can be analyzed as a SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED; see also HOMONYM). The “term” is more precisely the product of the decomposition of the proposition (see TERM). “Discourse” is the signifying totality constituted notably by propositions (see LOGOS and LANGUAGE). A basic unit of logical syntax, the proposition is also the crossroads of philosophical semantics. The analysis of its constituents, 860 PROPOSITION languages of logic and the modern philosophy of language. There are two keys to this exploration: make an inventory, starting with Greek and Latin, of the concurrent words belonging to other registers of analysis (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and conveying other pairs of theoretical and doctrinal oppositions; and look into the recurrent questioning—found in modern philosophy, but pertinent very early, as is shown by fourteenth-century debates about “propositions composed of things” or “real propositions”—bearing on an archetypal problem: namely, whether it is propositions or statements that are primarily the bearers of the true and false— “one of the most important subjects that future philosophy of language will have to discuss” (Bar-Hillel, “Universal Semantics and Philosophy of Language,” 17). I. What Is a Propositio? A. Greek retroversions: The ambiguity of Aristotle’s protasis and the Stoics’ axiôma In the course of a translation from Greek, many terms are rendered by “proposition.” For example, there is a first group of words around phasis [ϕάσις] (from phêmi [ϕημί], “to say”), which means “saying, speech, sentence”; but when phasis, neither entirely the same nor entirely different, is understood as connected with phainô [ϕαίνω] (make luminous, bring to light; and, in the middle voice, be luminous, be shown [as]), it means “denunciation, accusation,” or “appearance of a star, phase of the moon.” Apophasis [ἀπόϕασις], when the prefix before phainô indicates its provenance, means “declaration, explanation, response, report, judicial decision, inventory” (to limit ourselves to Bailly’s Greek dictionary, RT: Dictionnaire grec français); but, when apo denotes distance, apophasis, which is then supposed to come from apophêmi [ἀπόϕημι], means “negation.” Apophansis [ἀπόϕανσις], which is clearly derived from phainô, means “explanation, declaration,” and it designates, for example, a “property inventory.” Another candidate is protasis [πϱότασις] (throw ahead), which refers to the question proposed, the proposition, the premise. Yet another is thesis [θέσις], from tithêmi [τιθήμι] (set or lay), which refers to the action of instituting, or to convention, affirmation, or positing. Still another is axiôma [ἀξίωμα], from axioô [ἀξιόω] (evaluate, assess, believe to be right or true), which signifies price, consideration, resolution, principle, proposition. To these words we must still add logos [λόγος], one of the best candidates for any translation in the discursive and logical domain, which founds what modern logic can see only as the matrix of the greatest confusions (see LOGOS). But the major fact crucial for the comprehension of the history and semantics of “proposition” is the conjunction of protasis, in the technical sense of the “premise” of a syllogism, with apophansis (or its developed expression, logos apophantikos [λόγος ἀποϕαντιϰός]), “declarative statement,” starting with the Latin translations of Aristotle; this is the point that determines the meaning of propositio and founds the ambiguity of “proposition.” We can assume that this Latin confusion was made possible, or favored, by Aristotle’s broad use of protasis: by itself, as it is explained in the Analytics, protasis has almost the same sense as propositio. The term is in fact defined in the first lines of the Prior Analytics (1.1, 24a16–17) as a logos kataphatikos ê apophatikos tinos kata subject and predicate (or more classically, subject, copula, and attribute; see PREDICATION), governs the semantics of terms, meaning and reference being originally approached as expressions of the “subject” function (see SUPPOSITION and SUBJECT). The question of the meaning or of the signified of the proposition opens in turn onto the notion of the “stateable” (see DICTUM), and onto all the problems of reference (see SENSE), deriving from the relation among intention (see INTENTION), objectivity, or state of affairs (see GEGENSTAND and SACHVERHALT) and truth-value (see TRUTH). The “proposition” remains an enigmatic and even contested entity, however. Is it a matter of a thing or a matter of a word? That is the whole problem. Those who reject the existence of propositions and those who accept it are not talking about the same thing, the former thinking of the entities signified and the latter of the signifying forms. The semantic definition of the proposition as a subject (“bearer”) of “true” or “false” predicates is rejected by all who believe that it is sentences in a given language that are true or false. Focusing on the meaning of the word “proposition” in modern philosophical texts involves confronting a network formed by the moving triad “proposition”-“statement”-“sentence” in its relations with the notions of “fact” or “state of affairs.” If this is the case, it is the status itself of the set of these distinctions as it has been handed down by tradition in languages that has to be clarified. Two kinds of ambiguity are connected with “proposition.” The first has to do with the fact that in languages such as French, German, and English, the respective semantic fields of French proposition, German Satz, and English “proposition” are not completely congruent and refer to distinct terminological complexes. This leads to certain disparities that stubbornly confuse the reader of texts on logic, like the twofold meaning of the German Satz—“proposition” (Satz comes from setzen, “to pose”) and “principle”—to which testify, for example, the use of the formula Der Satz vom Grund to render principe de raison (principium reddendae rationis), or the translation of the Aristotelian title Peri hermêneias [Πεϱὶ ἑϱμηνείας] by Lehre vom Satz (theory of the proposition; see PRINCIPLE and TO TRANSLATE). The confusion is at its height when the French term proposition is used to render Gottlob Frege’s Satz, as opposed to its content, Sinn or Gedanke, which is rendered in English by “proposition.” The second ambiguity is connected with the difficulties specific to the Greek and Latin philosophical languages: propositio is in fact a Latin term that is ambiguous from the start, because it means both a statement (oratio) signifying the true and the false, and a statement serving as a premise for a demonstration. Latin-speaking logicians derived propositio from pro alio positio, an etymology according to which the proposition ultimately appears as a statement calling for another—the conclusion to be drawn (pro alio, id est pro conclusione habenda). Thus they exploited the possibility offered by Latin of expressing what was already contained in the Greek protasis [πϱότασις], whose Aristotelian technical sense (the major premise in both an argument and a proposition) remains imbued with the idea of a question proposed (and thus to be established or verified), but also common, nonphilosophical senses corresponding to a spectrum ranging from “set in advance” (a period of time) to “place someone in the first rank” (in order to speak in the name of a group or to protect someone). The two sorts of ambiguity are difficult to distinguish, and there is a tendency to impute to the “genius of the language” what in fact has to do with the history of idiolects: in any case, we have to take into account the effects of ancient terminologies on the technical PROPOSITION 861 33E), but the translation by “ ‘proposition’ is much the least misleading,” Long and Sedley assert (205). In fact, according to them, once the characteristics that belong to the linguistic act have been eliminated from axiôma, “no serious confusion need arise in attributing to the Stoics a doctrine of propositions” (206), a theory that anticipates significant characteristics of contemporary theories, and in particular the paradoxes of reference according to Bertrand Russell (207–8; see below, III; and see SENSE, SPEECH ACT, and IMPLICATION). B. Propositio, or the seizure (arraisonnement) of the apophantic by the syllogism In the “Summas” of thirteenth-century terminist logic, the definition of the propositio always contains two formulas: (1) “propositio est oratio verum vel falsum significans” (A proposition is a statement signifying the true or the false), and (2) “propositio est oratio secundum quod ponitur in praemissis ad aliquid probandum” (A proposition is a statement insofar as it is formulated in premises to prove something). The writers of logical summas thus put under the same term what Boethius called oratio enuntiativa or enuntiatio, namely Aristotle’s logos apophantikos, and what Aristotle generally calls protasis in the Prior Analytics. 1. Propositio-praemissa Let us begin with the second meaning, which is backed in both Latin and Greek by an etymology: “proposition” is used in the sense of “positing in order / with a view to the conclusion to be drawn [dicitur propositio quasi pro alio positio, idest pro conclusione habenda]” (cf. Nicholas of Paris, Summa Metenses, in De Rijk, ed., Logica modernorum 2.1, p. 452). We should note that in some texts, such as the Posterior Analytics (1.2, 71b20– 22), Aristotle defines scientific demonstration without mentioning protasis. This silence is maintained in James of Venice’s Latin translation (Aristoteles Latinus, 4.1–4, ed. MinioPaluello and Dod, 7.16–18), which gives: “Si igitur est scire ut posuimus, necesse est et demonstrativam scientiam ex verisque esse et primis et inmediatis et notorioribus et prioribus et causis conclusionis” (“anagkê kai tên apodeiktikên epistêmên ex alêthôn t’ einai kai prôtôn kai amesôn kai gnôrimôterôn kai proterôn kai aitiôn tou sumperasmatos [ἀνάγϰη ϰαὶ τὴν ἀποδειϰτιϰὴν ἐπιστήμην ἐξ ἀληθῶν τ’ εἶναι ϰαὶ πϱώτων ϰαὶ ἀμέσων ϰαὶ γνωϱιμωτέϱων ϰαὶ πϱοτέϱων ϰαὶ αἰτίων τοῦ συμπεϱάσματος]”). However, it is broken in modern translations. Jules Tricot (in Organon, 8) renders this as “Si donc la connaissance scientifique consiste bien en ce que nous avons posé, il est nécessaire aussi que la science démonstrative parte de prémisses qui soient vraies, premières, immédiates, plus connues que la conclusion, antérieures à elle, et dont elles sont les causes.” Seidl (Aristoteles: Zweite Analytiken) gives: “Wenn nun das wissenschaftliche Verstehen solcher Αrt ist, wie wir ansetzen, dann erfolgt notwendig die beweisende Wissenschaft aus [Prämissen], die wahre, erste, unmittelbare, bekanntere, frühere und ursächliche sind in Bezug auf die Konklusion.” Other, more rigorous translators use the term “things,” as does Barnes (Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, 3): “If, then, understanding is as we posited, it is necessary for demonstrative understanding in particular to depend on things which are true and primitive and immediate and more familiar than and prior to and explanatory of the conclusion.” “Premises”? Or “things”? Or, tinos [λόγος ϰαταϕατιϰὸς ἢ ἀποφατιϰός τινος ϰατά τινος] (a sentence affirming or denying one thing of another). At the same time, all kinds of protases (universal, particular, or indefinite, dialectical or demonstrative) are qualified as “syllogistic” (24a28): the protases or “premises” are “that on the basis of which there is a syllogism,” “that of which it is made” (cf. 1.25, 42a32: every syllogistic conclusion “follows from [ek] two premises and not from more than two”). The commentators gloss the etymology of protasis, “that which one holds out and proposes first” (cf. Bonitz, RT: Index aristotelicus, citing Ammonius, s.v.), from which emerges the apodosis, “given,” deduced, from them. And the syllogistic premise will be “demonstrative” (apodeiktikê [ἀποδειϰτιϰή], the object of the Analytics) “if it is true” (ean alêthês êi [ἐὰν ἀληθὴς ᾖ], 24a30): since in De interpretatione, the true and the false are characteristics of the logos apophantikos as the affirmative or negative connection between a noun and a verb (17a2–3 and 8–10), we see that the superimposition is carried out without further question. We will limit ourselves to locating a few sets of problems. 1. The phasis-apophasis-apophansis complex by itself leads to certain difficulties in the Aristotelian terminology that interpreters are not always able to monitor. . 2. The development of the vocabulary from Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics ended up settling on axiôma as the best candidate for a term to be translated as “proposition” in the corpus of the grammarians and logicians. The Aristotelian axiôma is a “principle on the basis of which a demonstration is conducted,” and thus that others are asked to accept (that is the definition given by Bonitz [RT: Index aristotelicus], who refers to Posterior Analytics 2.72a17; see PRINCIPLE, I.B), and it can be rendered precisely by modern “axiom.” On the other hand, the Stoics’ axiôma is defined, in a way very similar to the way logos apophantikos is defined in De interpretatione, as “what is true or false” (“axiôma de estin ho estin alêthes ê pseudos [ἀξίωμα δέ ἐστιν ὅ ἐστιν ἀληθὲς ἢ ψεῦδος],” Diogenes Laertius 7.65; cf. RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers 34A, 1:202 and 2:204). “The ‘complete sayable’ ” (“lekton autotelês [λεϰτὸν αὐτοτελής]”: Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 8.74 = RT: Long and Sedley 34B, 205; see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, II) is, as Long and Sedley say, the “basic material of Stoic logic” (ibid.; on the difference between Aristotle’s logic and that of the Stoics, see in particular SIGN). The meaning of “judgment,” “demand”—indeed, of “requirement” or “claim” (see CLAIM), which is discernible in the verb axioô—is emphasized by Diogenes Laertius, but English and French translations elect to use “propose” and “proposition”: “Someone who says ‘it is light’ seems to be proposing that it is light [axioun dokei to hêmeran einai (ἀξιοῦν δοϰεῖ τὸ ἡμέϱαν εἶναι)]. Then, if it is light, the proposition put forward [to prokeimenon axiôma (τὸ πϱοϰειμένον ἀξίωμα)] proves to be true, and if not, it is revealed to be false” (7.75 = RT: Long and Sedley 34E). Latin translators give effatum (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 117.13 = RT: Long and Sedley 33E; Cicero, Academica 2.96 = RT: Long and Sedley 37H; Cicero also gives enuntiatum and enuntiatio, see RT: Long and Sedley 862 PROPOSITION 1 Phasis, apophasis, apophansis, kataphasis: Problems of Aristotelian terminology v. LIGHT, Box 1 In his Organon, Aristotle establishes the technical vocabulary of classical logic relative to words and terms, sentences and propositions, arguments and syllogisms (see LOGOS, SENSE, TERM, WORD). This contribution, which was decisively precise, nonetheless included a certain number of ambiguities, due especially to the subsistence of nonterminological uses. Two main difficulties concern the intermediate level. 1. Apophasis/apophansis and apophasis/ kataphasis A first difficulty has to do with the possible confusion of two signifieds of a single signifier that are dangerously close because they belong to the same semantic field: apophasis can mean either “declaration” or “negative statement.” Whether there was originally a single root (as Chantraine seems to think, RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. phainô) or two roots that are phonetically distinct and semantically convergent (pha- [φα-] / phê- [φη-], which designates above all the expression of thought, the assertion of an opinion in speech; and fan, which means, depending on the diathesis, “to be luminous” or “to make luminous,” the latter being specified in certain compounds with the sense of “to manifest through language, to declare”), we seek in it the source of the confusion. Related to apophanein, apophasis means, in Demosthenes, for example (47.45), the “sentence uttered,” and in Aristotle, “assertion,” “declaration” (Rhetoric 1.8, 1365b27: “kuria estin ê tou kuriou apophasis,” “Sovereign is the declaration of the sovereign body,” which varies depending on the object; and, in the greatest proximity to the gnômê or doxa [see DOXA], Metaphysics Δ.8, 1073a16: “memnêsthai dei tas tôn allôn apophaseis,” “We must recall the declarations made by others”). Related to apophaskô (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 485) and apophêmi (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 317), apophasis takes on the sense of “negative statement,” in contradistinction to kataphasis, the “affirmative statement” with which it is already associated in Plato’s Sophist (263e). The two meanings do coexist in Aristotle, but the danger is less serious than it seems. Aristotle, in accord with his linguistic policy of “de-homonymization” (see HOMONYM), largely wards off the danger by establishing apophansis (with its derivative, apophantikos) as the stable technical designation of “assertion” in the sense of “predicative statement” in general, and by reserving apophasis for negation or the negative statement, as opposed to kataphasis, “affirmation, affirmative statement,” both constituting an antiphasis or “contradiction.” Thus in chapter 6 (17a23–26) of the Peri hermêneias, we find the following: Esti d’hê men haplê apophansis phônê sêmantikê peri tou ei huparchei ti ê mê huparchei, hôs hoi chronoi diêirêntai. Kataphasis de estin apophansis tinos kata tinos, apophasis de estin apophansis tinos apo tinos. To be perfectly clear, this statement is nonetheless difficult to translate, as is shown by Tricot’s version, whose internal incoherences are easy to emphasize: La proposition [apophansis] simple est une émission de voix possédant une signification concernant la présence ou l’absence d’un attribut dans un sujet, suivant les divisions du temps. Une affirmation [apophasis] est la déclaration [apophansis] qu’une chose se rapporte à une autre chose; une négation [kataphasis] est la déclaration [apophansis] qu’une chose est séparée d’une autre chose. The simple proposition [apophansis] is a vocal utterance possessing a meaning related to the presence or absence of an attribute in a subject, according to divisions in time. An affirmation [apophasis] is the declaration [apophansis] that one thing is related to another thing; a negation [kataphasis] is the declaration [apophansis] that one thing is separated from another thing. No doubt it would be more judicious to always render apophansis by énoncé (statement: Categories and On Interpretation, trans. Ackrill, 46–47), but translators always abandon the attempt to make the reader hear the connection, explicit in Aristotle and heavily emphasized by Heidegger, between apophansis and apophainesthai, “to show on the basis of” (“epei de esti kai to huparchon apophainesthai hôs mê huparchon,” “But since it is also possible to make appear not to belong what belongs”). The text of Peri hermêneias (17a26–28) seeks, following these remarks, to make explicit the definition of the true and the false characteristic of the apophantic register (see below, and TRUTH). 2. The meanings of phasis The astronomical sense of phasis (cf. phainesthai) appears once in Aristotle’s Meteorology (1.6, 324b34). In all other occurrences—more than fifty, chiefly in the Organon and the Metaphysics—phasis (cf. phanai) has the following meanings, in decreasing order of frequency: a. It is used as a synonym of kataphasis opposed to apophasis; thus in Metaphysics Γ.4, 1008a9–10: “peri tas allas phaseis kai apophaseis homoiotropôs” (And all other assertions and negations are similarly compatible). (This text then proceeds with the presentation, three times in a row, of the verbal pair phêsai kai apophêsai, “affirm and deny”; see also Prior Analytics 37a12, 51b20, 33, etc.; Sophistical Refutations 180a26, b30; De anima 430b26; Topics 136a5–6 [with the very unusual play on phasis and tês phaseôs idion], 163a15, etc.). b. It is used as a generic synonym of apophansis, except that it has more to do with propositional than apophantic logic, as in the recurrent expression “hai antikeimenai phaseis”—for example, Metaphysics Γ.6, 1011b13–14: “bebeiotatê doxa pasôn to mê alêteis hama tas antikeimenai phaseis” (The firmest opinion of all is that the opposed statements are not simultaneously true). In the same vein, see Peri hermêneias 12.21b17–18. c. Finally, phasis is used twice in the Peri hermêneias to designate the semiotic status of a “separate part of the logos,” a noun or verb “isolated” (kechôrismenon) from its phrastic context. “A sentence is a significant portion of speech, some parts of which have an independent meaning, that is to say, as an utterance [hôs phasis; Ackrill renders this as ‘expression’], though not as the expression of any positive judgment [all’ ouch’ hôs kataphasis]. Let me explain. The word ‘human’ has meaning, but does not constitute a proposition, either positive or negative. It is only when other words are added that the whole will form an affirmation or denial” (4.16b27–30). Aristotle thus proposes to call the noun and the verb “an expression [phasis] only” (“to men oun onoma kai to rhêma phasis estô monon,” 5.17a17–18). Instead of following Bonitz in seeing this as the princeps use, to which Aristotle does not limit himself (RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v. phasis), the simplest thing to do is probably just to say that when he characterizes the type of signification of a phrastic constituent that, detached from a construct that may be either a kataphasis or an apo-phasis, loses thereby all assertive capacity, Aristotle falls back, PROPOSITION 863 (“quando ordinatur ad aliquam conclusionem probandam vel inferendam”: William of Sherwood, Introductiones, ed. Lohr, 222). For some writers, it is the whole system that is based on such a distinction of reason. As Lambert of Auxerre put it (Logica, ed. Alessio, 12): Ista nomina: enunciatio, dictio, [as]sumptio, quaestio, conclusio, propositio, idem sunt realiter, nam una et eadem oratio secundum rem et secundum substantiam potest nominari hiis nominibus realiter, unde solum differunt secundum rationem. These names—“utterance,” “word,” “[hypo]thesis,” “question,” “conclusion,” “proposition”—are the same thing, really, for it is one and the same thing, regarding substance, namely discourse [or: the utterance], which can really receive all these names. All that differs only in reason. The logos apophantikos is approached in various ways by modern translations. Participating in the “reduction of the apophantic to the predicative” emphasized by Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, §44; see TERM), Tricot translates, as we have seen, by duplicating the substantive: “Tout discours n’est pas une proposition, mais seulement le discours dans lequel réside le vrai ou le faux.” Rolfes, who starts from Rede (discourse), proposes, elliptically, a verbal formation, aussagen (state), corresponding to the noun Aussage (statement, French énonciation, Italian enunciazione): Dagegen sagt nicht jede [Rede] etwas aus, sondern nur die, in der es Wahrheit oder Irrtum gibt. Das ist aber nicht überall der Fall. So ist die Bitte zwar eine Rede, aber weder wahr noch falsch. On the other hand, not every [discourse] states something, but only the one that includes in itself truth or falsity. But this is not always the case. A request [a prayer] is a discourse, but is neither true nor false. (Aristoteles, Kategorien: Lehre vom Satz, German trans. Rolfes, 97–98) Similarly Zanatta: “Ma non ogni [discorso] è enunciativo, bensì quello nel quale sussiste il dire il vero o il dire il falso. E non in tutti quanti i discorsi sussiste: per esempio, la preghiera è sì un discorso, ma non è né vera né falsa” (Della interpretazione, 85). Ackrill, on the other hand, opposes “sentence” and “statement-making sentence”: “Every sentence is significant . . ., but not every sentence is a statement-making sentence, but only those in which there is truth or falsity. There is not truth or falsity in all sentences: a prayer is a sentence but is neither true or false. [The present investigation deals with the statement-making sentence]” (Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, trans. Ackrill, 45–46). perhaps, “principles”? The word is used by translators immediately following the passage above (71b22–23): “sic enim erunt et principia propria ei quod demonstratur” (James of Venice); “c’est à ces conditions, en effet, que les principes de ce qui est démontré seront aussi appropriés à la conclusion” (Tricot); “for in this way the principles will also be appropriate to what is being proved” (Barnes). The choice between “premises,” “things,” and “principles” hardly matters. Here it suffices to see that the French and German resort to “premise,” Prämisse, rather than “proposition” or Satz. Then it is “premise,” a calque of the Scholastic Latin praemissa (a neuter plural considered as a feminine singular, from praemitto, “to send on ahead”), that relieves propositio of its ambiguity. 2. Propositio—oratio enuntiativa The first meaning finds its starting point in a quite different corpus, that of the Peri hermêneias (4.16b33–17a4): Esti de logos hapas men sêmantikos apophantikos de ou pas, all’ en hôi to alêtheuein ê pseudesthai huparchein. Ouk en hapasi de huparchei, hoion hê euchê logos men, all’ out’ alêthês oute pseudês. [Ἔστι δὲ λόγος ἅπας μὲν σημαντιϰός ἀποϕαντιϰὸς δέ οὔ πᾶς, ἀλλ’ ἐν ᾧ τὸ ἀληθεύειν ἢ ψεύδεσθαι ὑπάϱχειν. Οὐϰ ἐν ἅπασι δὲ ὑπάϱχει, οἷον ἡ εὐχὴ λόγος μἐν, ἀλλ’ οὔτ’ ἀληθὴς οὔτε ψευδής.] When one reads this passage in Tricot’s French translation, it provides a definition of the proposition that every reader will consider to be of cardinal significance: Tout discours n’est pas une proposition, mais seulement le discours dans lequel réside le vrai ou le faux, ce qui n’arrive pas dans tous les cas: ainsi la prière est un discours, mais elle n’est ni vraie ni fausse. Not every discourse is a proposition—only that in which truth or falsehood dwell, and this is not universally the case. Prayer, for instance, is a form of discourse, but it is neither true nor false. When Boethius translates it, he gives oratio enuntiativa: “enuntiativa vero non omnis [oratio], sed in qua verum vel falsum inest; non autem in omnibus, ut deprecatio oratio quidem est, sed neque vera neque falsa” (Aristoteles latinus, 2.1–2, ed. Minio-Paluello, 8.8–10). The lexicon of propositionality thus includes not only what has to do with the elements of the syllogism, with the syllogistic protasis, but also what has to do with the possibility of saying the true and the false. Depending on the author, this double register refers to a simple “distinction of reason”: the same oratio is called enuntiatio when it is considered “alone and absolutely” (“quando per se sumitur et absolute”), and propositio when it is related to the conclusion to be proved or inferred in order to designate what remains of meaning, on what remains of kataphasisapophasis when the verbal prefixes that make them a species of assertive statement have been removed, namely, phasis. For example, to signify hôs phasis when we say “[the] man” or “is in good health” is thus to present the listener with a signifier bearing a lexical signified that he recognizes, but that provides him with no information regarding what is or is not. We might render phasis here by “mention,” but we would at the same time be abandoning the relationship to the family of terms. 864 PROPOSITION of this principle. Using such principles in a philosophical commentary on a medieval work, as many English-speaking interpreters of Brinkley and his contemporaries do, involves attributing to the ancients distinctions that are themselves far from being unanimously accepted in modern philosophy. II. How Should Linguistic Units of Reference Be Defined? A. The “sentence” in Latin antiquity Propositio is not the only way of designating in Latin a complex unit endowed with meaning. In classical Latin the term belongs, in accord with the influence of the syllogism, to the rhetorical and dialectical registers rather than to the grammatical register. In nontechnical works, there are numerous terms that can be applied to a linguistic unit of the phrastic type: in particular, sententia, which derives from sentire, “to feel, to experience a sensation or feeling,” designates in general an opinion, a way of seeing, a view that one expresses, an idea and, by extension, the form that this idea takes, which means that sententia can correspond contextually to what is called a sentence (but often signifies, more particularly, a maxim or aphorism, and thus the “twist” or witticism that concludes the sentence; see SENSE and ARGUTEZZA). As for oratio, which derives from orare, “to utter a ritual formula, a prayer, a plea,” it is applied to language, and more specifically to prepared language, to eloquence, style, and particularly to prose, but also to more limited achievements—discourses, oral expositions—and hence, but very rarely in these nontechnical works, to still more limited wholes that may coincide with units of the phrastic type. These are only coincidental effects. Alongside these general uses, technical texts in which language is analyzed present linguistic units whose classification depends on precise theoretical choices. Three domains are concerned: rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar. (Metrics, which we may consider in the Latin domain as a subset of grammar, has to do with preoccupations that are too particular to be taken into account here.) 1. The rhetorical “period” The standard linguistic unit is the “period,” periodos [πεϱίοδος] in Greek, literally a “path that goes around” (perimeter wall, revolution of the stars, etc.), which Aristotle defines in his Rhetoric as a “sentence [lexis (λέξις ); see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED and WORD] that has a beginning and an end by itself and an extent that can be taken in at a single glance [megethos eusunopton (μέγεθος εὐσύνοπτον)]” (3.9, 1409a36–38). The Latins rendered it by the loan word periodus or by the calques ambitus and circuitus, or again by various adaptations, such as circumscriptio, comprehensio, and continuatio, which mark the unit and the whole thus “circumscribed” or “embraced,” or the continuity of the whole formed. This period may be constituted by subsets: the member (membrum) and the phrase (incisum or incisio), which have no absolute definition, but only a definition relative to the whole of which they are the constituents. In general, a period forms a sentence (but not necessarily: a succession of questions and responses can form a period). However that may be, the criteria determining the period clearly distinguish it from the sentence: first, because of the context in which it appears, that of the oratorical discourse: the period has no application outside this context and is absolutely inseparable from it; In choosing to use two nouns (discours, proposition), Tricot thus removes from the logos apophantikos the apophantic dimension preserved (only in appearance, if we follow Heidegger) as enonciation by other translations (note that he even directly translates apophansis by proposition in the first lines of De interpretatione [16a22]; Ackrill renders it by “statement”). Logos Apophansis Logos apophantikos Oratio Enuntiatio Oratio enuntiativa Discours Énonciation Proposition Sentence Statement Statement-making sentence Rede Aussage Satz, indikative Rede Discorso Enunciazione Discorso enunciativo Up to a certain point, contemporary controversies over the truth-value bearer are programmed in the wake of equivalencies noted in the table here. The polysemy of the term logos, which includes the notions of “sentence” and “statement”— crucial in the modern debate—among its many meanings, is not the only thing involved; more profoundly, the logical arraisonnement of the logos, which claims that the enuntiatio, or oratio (= logos) qua “bearer of truth-values,” is fundamentally “ordered to the syllogism [ordinata ad sillogizandum]” and not only “apt to be ordered in a syllogistic argument [ordinata in sillogizando]”—a theme that flows from the “ordering” of Aristotle’s logical corpus, and results from the recursive reading of the Organon, from the “scientific” syllogism (Posterior Analytics), the more complex, to the simplest, the oratio and its ingredients, the noun and the verb (De interpretatione). The difficulties of the European logical vocabulary also depend, however, on the idiolects specific to each philosophical tradition (“continental” or “analytical”), and even to each philosophy. The recent English translation of an important sixteenth-century work, the De significato propositionis by the Oxford philosopher Richard Brinkley, under the title Theory of Sentential Reference, expresses the philosophical point of view of the translator, M. J. Fitzgerald, who reserves, for theoretical reasons, the English term “proposition” for what is “expressed” in a sentence. In this case, it is the whole theoretical apparatus stipulating that “two sentences that express the same proposition have the same truth-value,” or that “sentences have their truth-values in virtue of the proposition they express,” which is present in the background, that poses a problem—a philosophical problem, not a problem of comprehension or translation. In the case of De significato propositionis, the translator’s choice, once it is made fully explicit, amounts to reserving the word “proposition” for the signified of what the Latin expresses by propositio, and what he expresses by “sentence.” The same goes for principles such as “nonsynonymous sentences express distinct propositions”: the problem is how to know to what the word “proposition” refers—for example, an abstract entity, Frege’s “sense” (Sinn)—and to determine on that basis the nature of the difference between “sentence” and “proposition” that is supposed by every user PROPOSITION 865 second, because of its dimension, which is necessarily developed—the simple combination of the elements that are indispensable but sufficient to constitute a sentence would never suffice to form a period (“A period has a minimum of two parts [habet periodus membra minimum duo],” Quintilian says); finally, because of the reference to rhythm, both in the consideration of the relative volume of the various parts of the period (whence an ascending, descending, or staccato rhythm, etc.), and in the fundamental importance attributed to the combination of the syllabic quantities at the end of the period, that is, the clausula: the presence of a clausula is part of the definition of the period. Another unit, the propositio, appears in the context of rhetoric, but in uses that are shared with dialectic, and that we therefore have an interest in examining here in the framework of this other discipline. 2. Dialectical terminology The standard linguistic unit in the domain of dialectical terminology is what the Greeks, and in particular the Stoic tradition (cf. I.A above), call axiôma, the assertion, a linguistic unit that can be true or false. The Romans resorted to various translations to render this unit: Varro, in the first century BCE, cites profatum, a proposal that was not adopted, and proloquium (which had already been used a generation earlier by Aelius Stilon, and was known to Cicero, but which did not persist either). For his part, Cicero cites pronuntiatum (later abandoned), enuntiatum (which we find in Seneca in the first century CE and in Apuleius in the second century CE), and enuntiatio (still present in the fourth and sixth centuries in Donatus and Boethius). Varro (cf. Aulus Gellus, Attic Nights 16.8) defines the proloquium as “an assertion or a sentence in which there is nothing lacking [sententia in qua nihil desideratur],” but this criterion of completeness is isolated: the criterion of determination cited is generally the ability to be true or false (even if the point is debated regarding assertions in the future tense). In opposition to this sense of axiôma as the true-or-false assertion, Martianus Capella (fourth century), in his book on dialectic, creates the term eloquium, as opposed to proloquium, to designate utterances that are neither true nor false (orders, questions, etc.). These other types of utterance are usually related to the term oratio (oratio imperativa, interrogativa, etc.), whose generality lends itself to all kinds of specification. The term propositio represents what is “posed,” what is “advanced,” the “thesis.” In the syllogism, where three structural elements (major, minor, conclusion) are distinguished, the propositio is thus the major (strictly speaking, what is “posed” or “posited”). The criterion is unity of content: the propositio is a proposition in the sense in which it is a statement that sets forth a single idea (“x killed y”). As a result, when a single statement implies that “x killed y and wounded z,” Quintilian speaks, in the plural, of propositiones. This plural shows that the propositio cannot be confused with the sentence. 3. Grammatical analysis Grammatical analysis is constructed on the basis of a hierarchy of units: littera, syllaba, dictio or pars orationis, oratio (or its rare variant, elocutio). Each level results from the combination of units from a lower level and itself constitutes an element of the unit at a higher level. In this perspective, the categories of words are partes orationis (“parties du discours,” to use the French calque). This means only that words are an inferior unit in relation to oratio, which results, in most cases, from a combination of words. The oratio has as its sole specificity in relation to the word its ability to be “complete”: in accord with the Stoic problematic, the oratio is complete or incomplete. That being the case, the nature of this completion, syntactical or semantic, or even pragmatic, remains open, and is not analyzed, except to a certain extent by Priscian at the very end of classical antiquity. The oratio plena is thus a construct that incontestably coincides with the sentence (or, when only a reply is involved, with a phrasoid expression), but before Priscian, nothing is said about the nature of this construct, except that it is complete. In short, whereas the sentence is opposed to the proposition, one forming an independent construct, the other a virtually dependent construct, the completion of the oratio is opposed to its “incompletion.” What is an incomplete utterance? Originally, among the Stoics, it was a predicate when it is alone, without a point of application (that is, without a subject), but later on it was more generally any utterance in which something is lacking. Some grammarians even added intermediate levels. Thus Servius speaks, regarding an utterance including a pronoun (subject) and a verb, of a “semi-complete” utterance: it lacks something, which in this case is of the order of reference (a determinate referent for the pronoun and an object of the predicate verb). In fact, according to the progressive schema in which it is situated, the oratio is understood in a problematic of part and whole: there are “parts of the oratio” (categories of words), and the oratio itself, composed of these parts, is incomplete or complete. Whereas the sentence is understood in a problematic of independence with regard to dependence, the oratio is understood in a problematic of the achieved in relation to the unachieved. (Medieval posterity sought to specify the nature and modalities of this completeness.) More vague than oratio, among the grammarians (e.g., Diomedes or Charisius) sermo sometimes designates a linguistic sequence that can constitute what we call a sentence, but these are either general uses, with the meaning “remark,” or very specialized uses, probably in the Stoic perspective of the predicate as a propositional kernel, with sermo ending up being equivalent to the verb alone. Here we find again the difference in point of view that opposes the ancients to the moderns on this point: whereas the notion of the sentence advanced in early modern grammar sought to discover where the construct examined stops (and thus what the framework and conditions of its independence are), the ancients sought to discover where this construct began (from which comes the problematics of incompletion, that is, of the “not yet” in relation to the complete utterance). B. The medieval criteria for defining oratio: Congruitas/perfectio The definition of the sentence, oratio (but “sentence” is, as we have seen, only one of the possible equivalents of oratio; see also LOGOS, III.A), took place in the Middle Ages on the basis of various criteria inherited from both Aristotle and Priscian, but profoundly rethought to take into account the 866 PROPOSITION l’auditeur, lequel aussitôt la tient en repos), mais ils ne signifient pas encore qu’une chose est ou n’est pas” (Tricot); “When uttered just by itself a verb is a name and signifies something—the speaker arrests his thought and the listener pauses—but it does not yet signify whether it is or not” (see TERM, Box 1). Boethius and medieval thinkers draw from this the idea that it is the “constitution of an intellection” that is the criterion of the utterance—or of the complete utterance. This may be interpreted as a semantic completeness: if the utterance produces an intellection, then it is “completed” (perfectus: we will see later the consequences of this interpretation, which makes it possible to transgress the criterion of formal completeness). In addition, a principle of compositionality is constructed at the same time: as Boethius says, if one hears a noun, the moment it is spoken an intellection is constituted, but our mind is still in suspense; if then we hear the verb, at the moment when the last syllable is pronounced, then our intellect can rest easy. The principle of the constitution of meaning is parallel on the level of the sentence and on the level of the word: it is only when the final syllable of imperritus (who is without fear) is pronounced that the mind can rest, so far as simple intellection is concerned. The listener’s mind progresses in a linear way as the syllables are pronounced (cf. Boethius, In Peri hermêneias 2). Some twelfthcentury authors try to determine the precise moment when the meaning of the utterance is produced, with the paradox that if it is when all the parts have been pronounced, then it signifies when it no longer exists. Others maintain that the utterance signifies while it is being uttered, the meaning being realized at the last moment of the pronunciation (“in ultimo puncto illius prolationis”), which is the first instant in which it produces a complete intellection. We find a comparable position in the discussions of the theologians as to the moment when the meaning of the utterance of the Eucharistic conversion is produced, and therefore when the conversion itself is produced (see SPEECH ACT). Once pronounced, the parts no longer exist qua vocal form, but only in their genus, which is quantity. Abelard proposes a solution rather analogous to the one that we find later in Duns Scotus: we constitute the intellection of the utterance by remembering that of its parts. To say that a sentence signifies thus means simply that the mind of someone forms an intellection of it by a process of assembling the partial intellections (recollectio; see de Libera and Rosier, “Les enjeux logico-linguistiques”). . Medieval texts hesitate to give priority to one or the other of these two criteria, formal completeness or semantic completeness. A formalist approach like that of the thirteenth-century Modists privileges the former: formal completeness entails semantic completeness, or in other terms, grammaticality automatically implies semanticity. Congruitas indicates a construction’s degree of correctness, perfectio an utterance’s degree of completeness (requiring the presence of a suppositio and an appositio); the Modists excluded proprietas, or semantic compatibility: the compatibility (convenientia) or noncompatibility (repugnantia) of the signifieds does not have to be taken into account by grammar. By expelling from their domain non-sense, illustrated by examples such as “capa categorica” (“a categorical—or formal, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the utterance, which are not always mutually compatible. 1. The principle of composition Consider Aristotle’s and Boethius’s definition (De interpretatione 4.16b26): “Logos esti phônê sêmantikê hês tôn merôn ti sêmantikon esti kechôrismenon, hôs phasis all’ ouch hôs kataphasis [Λόγος ἐστὶ ϕωνὴ σημαντιϰὴ ἧς τῶν μεϱῶν τι σημαντιϰόν ἐστι ϰεχωϱισμένον, ὡς ϕάσις ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὡς ϰατάϕασις]”; “Oratio est vox significativa, cuius partium aliquid significativum est separatum (ut dictio, non ut adfirmatio)”; “A sentence is a significant spoken sound some part of which is significant in separation, as an expression not as an affirmation” (Ackrill); “Le discours est un son vocal [possédant une signification conventionnelle] et dont chaque partie prise séparément présente une signification comme énonciation et non pas comme affirmation [ou négation]” (Tricot). The distortion of the equivalences shows quite clearly the general weakness of the linguistic vocabulary. The essential criterion is composition. Various problems arise: (1) How can we distinguish the sentence from the compound noun (for instance, the noun respublica)? Usually we distinguish, in the first place, the simple noun (domus), which is composed of parts that can themselves be significant (do = I give; mus = mouse), but whose meaning does not contribute to that of the whole; in the second place, the compound noun, composed of parts that contribute to the meaning of the whole, but lose their meaning in the whole, so that the meaning is simple—Boethius says that in the compound, the parts “consignify”; and in the third place, the oratio, composed of parts that retain, in the compound, their full meaning. (2) This definition is often associated with a principle of compositionality, which posits that the meaning of the whole must be constructed on the basis of that of its parts. This raises a problem in the case of utterances that are figurative or include metaphorical uses. In such cases—as, for example, in the expression prata rident (The prairies are flowering)—it is inversely on the basis of the meaning of the whole that we can understand that ridere does not have its ordinary meaning of “laugh,” but rather the transferred meaning of florere. Some authors maintain that in cases of this sort, we must understand the meaning in an overall way, without bringing in the principle of compositionality. They go so far as to conclude that figurative utterances are “instituted,” whereas institution was generally reserved for simple units alone (a position held notably by Abelard). 2. The criterion of semantic completeness (producing an intellection) The criterion of semantic completeness was forged on the basis of the Peri hermêneias (On Interpretation) 3.16b19–22: “auta men oun kath’ hauta legomena ta rhêmata onomata esti kai sêmainei ti, histêsi gar ho leêgôn tên dianoian, kai ho akousas êremêsen, all’ ei estin ê mê oupô sêmainei [αὐτὰ μὲν οὖν ϰαθ’ αὑτὰ λεγόμενα τὰ ῥὴματα ὀνόματά ἐστι ϰαὶ σημαίνει τι, ἵστησι γὰϱ ὁ λέῆγων τὴν διάνοιαν, ϰαὶ ὁ ἀϰούσας ἠϱέμησεν, ἀλλ’ εἰ ἔστιν ἢ μὴ οὔπω σημαίνει]”; “ipsa quidem secundum se dicta uerba nomina sunt et significant aliquid—constituit enim qui dicit intellectum, et qui audit quiescit—sed si est vel non est nondum significat”; “En eux-mêmes et par eux-mêmes ce qu’on appelle les verbes sont donc en réalité des noms, et ils possèdent une signification déterminée (car en les prononçant on fixe la pensée de PROPOSITION 867 noun is connected with a feminine adjective]), semantic redundancy, and the semantic incompatibility of the constituents composing the subject or predicate groups, the impossibility of assigning a reference (e.g., “omnis Socrates,” which violates the rule according to which a distributive sign can be applied only to a common term whose extension is greater than two; or, again, “omnis phoenix” [all phoenix]— the phoenix existing, by definition, as a unique entity at a certain moment in time, like “omnis sol” [all sun]); or cases of empty reference, such as “Asinus rationalis currit” (A rational ass runs; cf. Ebbesen, “The Present King of France”; de Libera, La référence vide). This last case can be analyzed in various ways: a proposition such as “Asinus est rationalis” (The ass is rational) is generally considered false; but “Asinus rationalis currit” may be analyzed as incorrect (incongrua); or as correct but asemantic or impropria (incapable of producing an intellection); or as nonreferential (rationalis not being able to perform its function of determining the substantive, and thus preventing the group from “supposing” something); or, sometimes, as false. The “implication of a possible falsehood” (“Homo qui est albus currit [The man who is white runs],” if there is no white man: the fact that there are white men, implied here, is possible, even if that is not the case) is distinguished from the “implication of an impossible falsehood” (“Asinus qui est rationalis” [The ass that is rational],” the distinction having consequences that are analyzed in diverse ways, in terms of correctness or of truth; see IMPLICATION). The question of empty reference was the subject of lively debate in the thirteenth century: Can one say, “Homo est animal, nullo homine existente” (Man is an animal, no man existing)? Is this sentence false or ill-formed, because it cannot give rise to an intellection, the subject itself not being able to give rise to an intellection and/or to have a denotation (cf. de Libera, “Roger Bacon et la référence vide,” and La référence vide)? This case, where it is impossible to assign a reference to one of the terms because of the state of the world and of affirmative—hat,” an incongruous association of a metalinguistic adjective with a nonmetalinguistic substantive), the Modists thus tried, as Noam Chomsky did, famously, by means of the exemplary phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” to found a syntax that dispenses with any reference to the lexical meaning of the units. Other attempts to articulate formal and semantic criteria resulted in accounts that favor the pragmatic dimension of language—as in the works of the intentionalist grammarians of the thirteenth century, who were inspired by both Priscian (“Every construction must be related to the intellection of the expression,” Institutiones grammaticae 17.187) and Aristotle (the principle of the “constitution of intellection” that satisfies the listener): an utterance must be judged acceptable if it corresponds to the speaker’s deep intention, and if it can be interpreted and recognized as such by the listener, whether it is grammatical or not. Thus a substantive such as aqua, uttered alone, is not an oratio perfecta; but if water has to be sought when a house is on fire (a particular intonation would be required), then it acquires the status of oratio perfecta, corresponding adequately, by its elliptical form, to the speaker’s state of panic. Inversely, a grammatically correct utterance that does not correspond to the speaker’s intention will accordingly be rejected (see actus exercitus in SPEECH ACT). C. Correctness / completeness / truth The connection of these different criteria with the notion of truth is carried out mainly in the context of logic. In the philosophical tradition that concerns us, cases of ill-formed utterances give rise to the problem of how to determine whether such utterances (orationes) thereby lose the status of a proposition (propositio), that is, if an ill-formed sequence is automatically deprived of truth-value: such malformations include grammatical incorrectness (such as “homo est alba” [“man is white” or “a white woman,” where a masculine 2 The definition of oratio according to Priscian Priscian gives the following definition of the statement: “Oratio est ordinatio dictionum congrua, sententiam perfectam demonstrans” (The statement is a correct combination of words indicating a complete meaning: Institutiones grammaticae, in RT: Keil, Grammatici latini, 2:53.28–29). Thus labeled, this definition describes oratio first of all as a correct combination, which for Priscian implies that it includes a noun and a verb and that, in addition, the rules of agreement are respected. The semantic characteristic comes in only secondarily: the statement must indicate a complete meaning. The difficulty was to arise from the juxtaposition of the two criteria, formal and semantic. But according to another reading of the text, the definition goes this way: “ordinatio, congruam perfectamque sententiam demonstrans.” The combination that characterizes the statement is not qualified, whereas the meaning it conveys is: it must be complete and finished. This is a less frequent variant, but one that is nonetheless based on the Greek text of the scholia on the Technê grammatikê, and that may go back to Apollonius (Grammatici graeci, ed. Hilgard, vol. 1, fasc. 3, p. 214.5). The question is whether the adjective congrua is related to the combination of words (a reading supported by other passages in Priscian; RT: Keil, Grammatici latini, 3:201.1 or 208.25: “est enim oratio comprehensio dictionum aptissime ordinatarum” [The statement is in fact a group of words ordered in a completely suitable way]), or to the meaning. In the latter case, it is the criterion of formal semantic completeness that is primary. According to Priscian, this implies that we must find on the formal level principles that account for this completeness, even if they are not ordinary rules, as in the case of figurative or elliptical statements. Thus even a simple word like honestas can be considered complete and thus acceptable as a reply to the question “Quid est summum bonum in vita?” (What is the supreme good in life?). Hence it is intelligibility that governs grammaticality (Baratin, La naissance de la syntaxe à Rome). The copyists’ hesitations regarding the choice of the variant congrua or congruam testify here to the difficulty of choosing between the formal criterion and the semantic criterion in defining the oratio. REFS.: Grammatici graeci. Edited by Alfred Hilgard. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1965. 868 PROPOSITION certain speech act, what the sentence “does.” (4) The proposition is the content of a certain psychological state. How can so many different senses of the word “proposition” coexist? A. Frege and his translations—Satz/Gedanke: Proposition/ pensée (French) or “sentence”/“proposition” (English)? In his articles “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (Sense and reference) and “Der Gedanke” (Thought), Frege, after defining the sense and reference of proper names, inquires into “the sense and reference of a whole declarative sentence [Behauptungssatz].” Such a sentence, he tells us, “has a thought as its content”: Wir fragen nun nach Sinn und Bedeutung eines ganzen Behauptungssatzes. Ein solcher Satz enthält einen Gedanken. (“Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” 32) Here Frege clearly distinguishes the Satz, the “sentence,” from the content or thought (Gedanke) expressed by this Satz (see SENSE, BELIEF). The content or Gedanke turns out, later in the text, to be the sense (Sinn) of the sentence. Frege emphasizes the objectivity of thought and thus of sense, which can, he says in a famous note, be common properties of several subjects and are thus clearly distinct from the psychological content, like Bernard Bolzano’s “proposition in itself” (Satz an sich: Wissenschaftslehre, 1.19). Ich verstehe unter Gedanken nicht das subjektive Tun des Denkens, sondern dessen objektiven Inhalt, der fähig ist, gemeinsames Eigentum von vielen zu sein. By a thought I understand not the subjective performance of thinking but its objective content, which is capable of being the common property of several thinkers. (“Thought,” in The Frege Reader, 156n) the moment of predication, is often compared with the cases previously described in which “empty reference” occurs because of the incompatibility of a proposition’s constituents (as in asinus rationalis). The notion of congruitas/incongruitas is always clearly distinguished from that of veritas/falsitas: if we consider that a proposition cannot be true unless it is well formed, it is obvious that there are well-formed propositions that are not true, and that one cannot say of all ill-formed propositions that they are false (since some of them cannot have truth-value). . Medieval thinkers’ reflections on the construction, correctness, completeness, and proper formation of utterances (orationes) thus brings into play the great possible options in the analysis of language, since we can take an interest in the utterance itself (with its formal or semantic properties), or in its production (taking into account the speaker’s intention), or in its interpretation (considerations on the freedom of the interpreter), the problem then always being to determine whether an ill-formed or uninterpretable utterance is still an utterance, and if only well-formed utterances can be true or false. III. From “Proposition” to “Utterance”: The Competition of Idiolects Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege played a key role in the constitution of what might be called the modern system of the proposition. At the beginning of his monograph La norme du vrai (The norm of truth) on the philosophy of logic, Pascal Engel describes this system as follows: (1) The proposition is what can be true or false, and has a truth-value: truthbearer. (2) The proposition is the meaning of a sentence, and is clearly distinguished from the latter. A sentence is a series of signs, a proposition is what a sentence expresses. (3) The proposition is the content of what is said or conveyed by a 3 Congruitas v. TRUTH The word congruitas can be rendered rather well by “correctness,” “congruence,” “proper formation,” and congruus by “correct, congruent”; we also find Latin (in) competens. In grammar, incongruitas refers essentially to the rules of proper formation, which imply formal marks (agreement) or syntactical characteristics (modes of signifying); in logic, it refers exclusively, or in addition to these first rules of proper formation, to the rules of proper formation that make use of the semantic traits of the constituents. The terms “proper formation” and “well/ill formed” render the two meanings fairly well. Let us note that constructio congrua can mean either the correct process of construction, or the result of the process (and, in that case, constructio can be equivalent to oratio). Writers discuss the conformity (conformitas) or the nonconformity (discrepantia) of accidents and modes of signification; of the compatibility (convenientia) or incompatibility (repugnantia) of semantic traits; proprietas is given a privileged place on the semantic level: an expression is said to be impropria if, for example, it includes a term taken in a figurative or inadequate sense (it is not taken in the literal or “proper” sense). Nugatio (a term that may have no modern equivalent) refers to improper formation on the semantic level; in its strict sense, it covers pointless semantic redundancies (e.g., homo animal [man animal], homo rationalis [man endowed with reason], corvus niger [black crow], homo vthe incompatibilities of the semantic traits of the constituents (e.g., spero dolorem [I hope pain], homo irrationalis [man without reason]). The term perfectus is difficult to translate; the notion of perfectio, defined in the twelfth century on the basis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Δ.16, 1021b21–25, in Averroës’s reading, is well summed up in the adage “perfectum est cui nihil deest quod ei sit necessarium” (The perfect is that in which nothing of what is necessary to it is lacking); it covers both completeness and “perfection” (cf. the perfective in grammar) in the sense of the English adjective “achieved” (see ASPECT). This double meaning can be rendered by the term “completeness,” but not by the corresponding adjective “complete.” PROPOSITION 869 note, by affirming the existence of a thought independent of its bearer and not psychological. The English translation of Gedanke by “proposition” might at first seem to jump to conclusions; but far from being audacious, it draws back before the idea of a thought that is not “thought by someone.” The shared form of the noun (“thought”) and the participle (“it is thought”), which is more obvious in English than in other languages, may play a role here—and it may also be that English-language philosophy finds it especially difficult to integrate an anti-psychologizing mode of thought. B. Gedanke, “proposition” (English), phrase (French) The transposition of Gedanke as the English “proposition” allows us to clearly differentiate the proposition both from the mental or psychological act of thinking, and from the sentence, of which the proposition becomes the content or the objective meaning, common not only to different thinkers, but also to different languages. We find a very clear exposition of this double view in Alonzo Church: the proposition (1) is not the particular declarative sentence, but rather the content of meaning that is common to the sentence and its translation into another language, and (2) is not the particular judgment, but the objective content of the judgment, which can be the common property of several people. The proposition thus turns out to be an abstract proposition, the object designated by the sentence. It will be noted that Bolzano arrived at a similar theoretical result by using a single term, distinguishing between “proposition” (Satz) and “proposition in itself” (Satz an sich), which does seem to cover the transition from particular sentences to propositions. In such a perspective, the sentence/proposition relation also emerges in the type/token distinction, the proposition being a type of which the different sentences expressing it are occurrences or tokens. That is what seems to be shown by the example, frequently used in this context, of a sentence and its translation (Time flies / Tempus fugit) as expressions of a single proposition. . We can see how the notion of proposition, established in such a context, would later be exposed to all of the criticisms aroused by the idea of translation. The passage into a foreign language is in fact crucial in Church’s argument regarding propositional attitudes (Introduction to Mathematical Logic): if the object of a belief was a sentence, for example, the utterance of a propositional attitude “I believe he is here” would be equivalent to “I believe the sentence ‘he is here.’ ” To translate such statements correctly, we have to consider that it is the proposition qua abstract object, and not the sentence, that is the object of belief or of any other propositional attitude or act; thus there is a radical difference between the token sentence and the abstract proposition. In “standard” analytical philosophy, beginning in the 1940s, we thus find a basic unit of expression, the sentence, which, when it is endowed with a meaning, expresses a complete thought, and is then defined as a declarative sentence— in which we find the Aristotelian and medieval problematic of the logos apophantikos and of completeness. Sentences are conceived (in a reformulation of Frege’s theory) as names. This may seem rather unnatural, Church says, insofar as the In conformity with the philosophical tradition, Claude Imbert, in her translation of Frege’s “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” chooses to render Satz in French as “proposition.” If we compare this translation with English ones, we encounter an interesting problem. In Frege, the Sinn, as the objective content of the sentence, is clearly distinguished from the sentence itself. But in the first translations and adoptions in English of the Fregean distinction, it is the objective content of the sentence, the Gedanke or Sinn, not the sentence (Satz) itself but what it signifies, that is rendered by “proposition.” Simply translating Satz into French as proposition can create a difficulty, but translating Gedanke into English by “proposition,” as is done in this case, raises other, still more serious problems. The translation choices made in the first half of the twentieth century, starting with the spread of the philosophy of language (of which Frege is the founding father), have several consequences for the status of propositions: 1. Propositions are “detached” from sentences as a result of the twofold translation of Satz: Satz as a sentence (for example, systematically in Rudolf Carnap, first in the English translation of Logische Syntax der Sprache [The Logical Syntax of Language], and then in Meaning and Necessity), and Satz as “proposition,” understood as the meaning of the sentence or as expressed by the sentence. 2. Propositions are closely connected with meaning (Sinn) and thoughts (Gedanken), and become abstract, objective entities. These entities are then considered not only as “what is signified,” but also as “what is named” by sentences. The first English translation of the passage from Frege previously cited thus reads: We are now going to inquire into the sense and the nominatum of a whole declarative sentence. Such a sentence [Satz] contains a proposition [Gedanke]. (Feigl and Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis, 89) The Satz/Gedanke pair, which in French becomes proposition/ pensée, is here translated by “sentence”/“proposition,” not without incoherence and difficulty, because in the subsequent sentence we find: Is this thought [Gedanke] to be regarded as the sense [Sinn] or the nominatum [Bedeutung] of the sentence? Whereas the note concerning the objectivity of thought is, with a certain lack of appropriateness, translated as: By proposition [Gedanke] I do not refer to the subjective activity of thinking [Tun des Denkens], but rather to its objective content. It is clear that what caught the attention of the translators and philosophers who introduced Frege’s thought to the United States in the 1940s was the objective, desubjectivized character of the Fregean Gedanke. This led to their reluctance to translate this term by “thought,” which it seems impossible to objectivize in this way. But this is perhaps to underestimate the theoretical impact Frege achieved, especially in the 870 PROPOSITION the sentence itself and the meaning of the sentence. It provides in English a distinction not easily expressed in other languages, and makes possible a translation of Frege’s Gedanke which is less misleading than the word “thought.” C. “Proposition-statement” (Satz) versus Tatsache, propositions versus faits Bertrand Russell uses the word “proposition” in an entirely different sense, far removed from Church’s translation of Frege’s Gedanke, to designate the description of a state of affairs (see SACH-VERHALT). A sentence is associated not only with a meaning, but also with a fact: it is not solely expressive, but also indicative. The denotation of the proposition is seen as a state of affairs, and not a truth-value: its truth-value will be determined by its relation to a state of affairs. In “On Denoting” (1905), Russell rejects the Fregean conception of meaning in order to assert that the only important dimension of a proposition is its “denotation” (see SENSE). He distinguishes between a “verbal expression” and a “proposition” (as a logically structured unit composed of elements). A proposition, just like a verbal expression, has no meaning, only (in certain cases) a denotation that depends on its “denoting phrases” and its logical structure. . use of sentences is not in principle to “name something,” but to “make an assertion” (ibid., 24). Thus we must distinguish an assertive use and a nonassertive use of sentences. Considering sentences as names, we can inquire into their denotation and meaning. Their denotation is an abstract object, namely, their truth-value (true or false); their meaning is “that which is grasped when we understand the sentence, or that which two sentences in different languages must have in common in order to be correct translations each of the other” (ibid., 25). We can grasp the meaning of a sentence without knowing its denotation (truth-value), but knowing (thanks to its meaning) that it has a truth-value. Then we have this new version of Frege (ibid., 26): Any concept of truth-value, provided that being a truthvalue is contained in the concept, and whether or not it is the sense of some actually available sentence in a particular language under consideration, we shall call a proposition, translating thus Frege’s Gedanke. We arrive at a radical theory of the proposition as abstraction, entirely detached from the linguistic entity that is the sentence. Church recognizes, lucidly, that this is a characteristic of English, where in nontechnical usage “proposition” has long signified the meaning, not the sentence (ibid.): This is the happy result of a process which, historically, must have been due in part to sheer confusion between 4 “Type”/“token” (English), type/occurrence (French) v. SIGN, SPECIES The distinction between “type” and “token,” invented by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce, plays an essential role in linguistics and in the philosophy of language. A “token” of a sign is a particular, physical occurrence of this sign, whereas its “type” is, depending on the point of view, the class of the actual or possible occurrences of this sign. The token is a specific utterance of a given linguistic expression, itself considered as a type. The expressions themselves can be considered as tokens of a proposition or of a meaning “type,” at least according to a certain approach to signification. The basic text is found in Peirce’s Collected Papers. Peirce notes that on a page printed in English, one can find “about twenty the’s on a page.” There are in one sense twenty “the’s,” and in another sense a single word “the”: “There is but one word ‘the’ in the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on a page, for the reason that it is not a Single thing or Single event.” It is “such a definitely significant Form” that Peirce defines as a “Type.” The individual object or event (a given word, a given line on a page) will be a “Token.” The token is thus a “Sign of the Type” and “hence of the object that the Type signifies.” The token is an “instance” of the type. There are twenty instances of the type “the” on a page (see Peirce, Collected Papers, 4:537 [article written for The Monist,1906]). Peirce’s distinction had a remarkable influence on later developments. In a review of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, F. P. Ramsey noted that the use of Satz in the Tractatus has an ambiguity that Russell’s concept, for example, is lacking, and that could have been avoided by using the type/token distinction (review of the Tractatus logicophilosophicus, in Mind 32 [1924]: 464–78). The distinction is also adopted in a fertile way in Ogden and Richards’s influential book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) (see SPEECH ACT, in particular IV.B). On the linguistic level, we can note that linguistic “types” and “tokens” have different statuses: types belong to “competence,” whereas tokens belong to “performance” (see SPEECH ACT). One of the most interesting extensions of the distinction is found in semantics. The sentence itself (disregarding the debate concerning the proposition) can be considered a type or a token: each time someone utters the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” we have a new instance of this type-sentence. Peirce’s distinction also has fertile uses in the philosophy of mind (see SOUL). A distinction is drawn between types and instances of mental states, and this distinction founds “token physicalism”—translated into French by Récanati and Rastier as physicalisme occasionnel—a materialist theory according to which the identification of mental states with cerebral states can be established only at the level of instances. “Every instance of a mental state is an instance of a cerebral state, but (according to physicalisme occasionnel) that does not mean that a type of mental state can be reduced to a type of cerebral state” (F. Récanati, in RT: Vocabulaire des sciences cognitives, s.v. “Type/token”). REFS.: Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, 1923. Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. PROPOSITION 871 meaning (whereas names have only a denotation), which is what we know when we understand a proposition, the state of affairs it depicts. It is in fact a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) and not an object that has here the absolute independence that defines logical atomism (Russell). The proposition thus acquires a logical and ontological priority. The Tractatus connects sense (Sinn) and reference or denotation (Bedeutung) in a different way from Frege, by defining the proposition (Satz) both by thought (Gedanke) and by fact (Tatsache). 4.021. Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit: denn ich kenne die von ihm dargestellte Sachlage, wenn ich den Satz verstehe. A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation that it represents. 4.022. Der Satz zeigt seinen Sinn. Der Satz zeigt, wie es sich verhält, wenn er wahr ist. A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. 4.024. Einen Satz verstehen, heisst, wissen was der Fall ist, wenn er wahr ist. A new concept of the Satz emerges in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, which is generally translated into English and French by “proposition”: the Satz is indissolubly the expression-demonstration of a meaning (and in that way, Fregean) and a depiction (Abbildung; see BILD and DESCRIPTION) of a state of affairs (and in that way, Russellian). It is defined as a “perceptible expression of thought”: 4.3.1. Im Satz drückt sich der Gedanke sinnlich wahrnehmbar aus. In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses. We see that Wittgenstein rejects the interpretation of the proposition as an abstract entity, and makes the Satz a propositional sign “that can be perceived by the senses [sinnlich wahrnehmbar].” He also rejects the idea that a proposition’s denotation is a truth-value, without abandoning the connection Frege established between Gedanke and Satz. The notion of the meaning of the proposition turns out to be central in the Tractatus. For Wittgenstein as for Russell, the proposition is a function of components, that is, of expressions (Ausdrücke). But for Wittgenstein (and here he differs from Russell), the proposition does not refer to a complex object; it has a 5 Real propositions and states of affairs: The current relevance of the medieval debate Some realist logicians of the fourteenth century acknowledged the existence of “propositions of things” or “real propositions” (propositio in re). This theory shifts into reality itself the question of the relation between proposition and reality. In so doing, it anticipates certain modern reflections on the state of things as the denotation of the proposition. In the thirteenth century, the text of Aristotle’s Categories 14b21–22 was paraphrased as “res est causa veritatis orationis” (The res is the true cause of the statement), which poses the problem of how to interpret res: as an individual thing or as a state of things (see SACHVERHALT). The notion of a “proposition composed of things” seems to have been invented by Gauthier Burley, William of Ockham’s main adversary. For Burley, the “ultimate signified” of mental propositions must be something real. Since this can be neither the individual thing supposed by the subject and the predicate, nor—on pain of infinite regress—a “complex of concepts,” it can be only a “complex of things”—and it is this composite that he calls a “real proposition”: “Ergo in rebus est aliquod compositum cuius subiectum est res et praedicatum similiter, quod dicitur propositio in re.” Contrary to the nominalists and almost all of his contemporaries, Burley thus distinguished not three but four kinds of proposition: the written proposition (in scripto), the oral proposition (in voce), the mental proposition (in mente)—also called “conceptual” (in conceptu)—and the real proposition (in re). The point of departure for the theory of the real proposition is Aristotelian: the goal is to determine “what corresponds” in reality to “complex truth,” that is, to the “intellectual” combination and separation Aristotle mentions when he defines the true in the logical sense of the term by positing that “he who thinks the separated to be separated and the combined to be combined has the truth” (Metaphysics Θ.10, 1051b3–4), or when, in the Categories 14b21–22, as translated by Boethius, he posits that “ex eo quod res est vel non est oratio dicitur esse vera vel falsa” (From this it follows that whether a proposition is true or not depends on whether the thing is true or not). Burley’s originality is to have taken this as a basis for seeking a “truthmaker” in a “reality” seized and rationalized as a “real proposition composed of things.” The argument in favor of the real proposition is founded on a principle common to many medieval theories of truth as correspondence: in order for a proposition in mente, in prolatione, or in scripto to be true, “it must really be so, as in the proposition that signifies it [oportet quod sit in re sicut propositio significat].” This assertion presupposes another: that there is something, in reality, that is such that the proposition signifies it. This “something” is the real proposition, also called a “complex thing” (res complexa), a “connected being” (ens copulatum), or, more simply, a “composite” (compositum). Burley’s main theoretical justification is given in his Middle Commentary of ca.1310 on the De interpretatione: “Res significata per istam ‘homo est animal’ non dependet ab intellectu nec etiam veritas istius rei; immo ista esset vera etsi nullus intellectus consideraret. Et ista similiter ‘Chimaera est Chimaera’ esset vera, etsi numquam aliquis intellectus consideraret.” If neither the signified nor the truth of a proposition depend on the intellect, that is because what is signified by the proposition is the truthmaker of the proposition, and this signified is a complex reality independent of our activity of thought: a state of things, a fact, or a complex object. REFS.: Burley, Walter. “Walter Burley’s Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias.” Edited by S. Brown. Franciscan Studies 33 (1973): 45–134. Cesalli, Laurent. “Le réalisme propositionnel de Walter Burley.” Archives d’Histoire Littéraire et Doctrinale du Moyen Âge 68 (2001). Miverley, Guillaume. Compendium de quinque universalibus. In Johannes Sharpe, Quaestio super universalia. Edited by Alessandro D. Conti. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1990. Pinborg, Jan. “Walter Burleigh on the Meaning of Propositions.” In Medieval Semantics: Selected Studies on Medieval Logic and Grammar, edited by S. Ebbesen. London: Variorum Reprints, 1984. 872 PROPOSITION It is this tendency that Quine criticizes. If a German utters the declarative sentence “Der Schnee ist weiss,” we are tempted to say that his sentence is true by virtue of its meaning (the meaning of the German sentence is that snow is white) and the fact (that snow is white), because “the fact of the matter is that snow is white.” But here there is a redundancy or, as Quine puts it, a “philosophical extravagance”: Why resort to two elements that are not only identical (they both state that snow is white), but also useless? We have the declarative sentence, and snow is white; why appeal to “intangible intervening elements”? This is a “hollow mockery.” Quine’s violent objection to propositions (a tendency that, according to him, “cannot be excused”) is motivated by the indeterminate status of meanings and the impossibility of establishing and defining a relation of synonymy between sentences. Meanings of sentences are exalted as abstract entities in their own right, under the names of propositions. These, not the sentences themselves, are seen as the things that are true or false. These are the things that are known or believed. (Ibid., 2) Quine’s critique of propositions and facts is accompanied by a linguistic analysis and a justification of his constant choice to speak of sentences and not propositions. French translators of Quine often render “sentence” by énoncé, following a well-established usage in French translation of contemporary texts on the philosophy of logic. Philosophers’ tolerance toward propositions has been encouraged partly by ambiguity in the term “proposition.” The term often is used simply for the sentences themselves, declarative sentences. Some philosophers have taken refuge in the term “statement.” (Ibid.) Or, still more systematically, in a recent translation of a passage that sums up the whole problematic: What are true or false, it will be widely agreed, are propositions. But it would not be so widely agreed were it not for the ambiguity of “proposition.” Some understand the word as referring to sentences meeting certain specifications. Others understand it as referring rather to the meanings of such sentences. What looked like wide agreement thus resolves into two schools of thought: for the first school the vehicles of truth and falsity are the sentences, and for the second they are the meanings of the sentences. It seems perverse to bypass the visible or audible sentences and to center upon sentence meanings. (Quine, Pursuit of Truth, 77) It is amusing to note that the French translation, by rendering “sentence” as énoncé, makes, by also seeking consensus, the same error as the one pointed out by Quine in the passage itself regarding the consensus choice of “proposition.” In French, énoncé also introduces an ambiguity, being a kind of intermediary between “sentence” and “statement” To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true. D. “Proposition” / “statement” / “sentence” Understood in this way, the proposition (Satz) raises in a new way the question of the relationship to facts, as is shown by the way English translators of Satz hesitate between “proposition,” “sentence,” and “statement.” The deployment of the different translations of Satz results in a complex table of the “meanings” that the word “proposition” can take in French and English. The proposition (Satz) understood as a depiction of a state of affairs, or “saying that,” does not name a fact, it states it. The proposition should then be called (as it is by J. L. Austin) a statement. A proposition expresses a meaning, it states what? A fact. It is this idea of fact as what is asserted, stated, that can determine, in a minimalist way, truth as correspondence, as is shown by the expression “It is a fact that . . .” A fact, from this point of view, is defined as a true statement (as is shown, according to Austin, by the parallel “to be a truth” / “to be a fact”). Thus a statement is, extending the Satz, a problematic notion, falling between the sentence and the fact. Such a theorization of the statements/facts pair is found in diverse forms in Russell and G. E. Moore. We can, however, inquire into the status of these facts, which are not simple situations, but are also “objective,” and ask if they are not subject to certain criticisms formulated with regard to propositions/thoughts understood in Frege’s sense. To assert a fact is to make an assertion. To state a proposition is to make an assertion. F. P. Ramsey was one of the first to criticize, in “Facts and Propositions,” what he called the “linguistic muddle,” which is connected with the idea of truth, but which is also associated with the idea both of the proposition and of fact. To say that a proposition is true, or that it corresponds to the facts, is simply to state that proposition, to make that assertion. Thus there is no need for facts, or propositions, or truth. This “redundancy theory” of Ramsey’s (see TRUTH, V.B) has been subjected to a number of criticisms, but its radicality has continued to make it interesting. It was probably Quine who struck the fatal blow to propositions, and thus to facts. The thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (see TO TRANSLATE, Box 4) already constituted a challenge to the Fregean Gedanke, and even to the very notion of meaning itself: there is no entity intermediary between two linguistic expressions that are translated from each other, and that express each other. There are always several possible translations, and indeterminacy. This criticism could be formulated in Quine, as in Ramsey, on the basis of the question of truth, in a passage in the Philosophy of Logic that draws attention to a new configuration of the terms “statement,” “sentence,” “utterance,” and “proposition”: When someone speaks truly, what makes his statement true? We tend to think that there are two factors: meaning and fact. Quand quelqu’un dit vrai, qu’est-ce qui fait que son assertion est vraie? Nous avons tendance à croire que deux facteurs sont en jeu: la signification et le fait. (Quine, Philosophy of Logic, 1) PROPOSITION 873 problem, just as is assertion, because the expression “state a fact” is more natural than affirmer un fait, and a fortiori is more natural than asserter un fait. We can also note the equivalence between “state a fact” and “make a statement,” which institutes the connection between statement and fact, but also defines the statement as an action (unlike “sentence” and “proposition”). In a note, Austin adds: It is, of course, not really correct that a sentence ever is a statement: rather, it is used in making a statement, and the statement itself is a “logical construction” out of the makings of statements. (Ibid.) The difficulty of translating the “makings of statements” indicates the problem: an assertion, like a proposition, is supposed to be an abstraction elaborated on the basis of the tokens constituted by acts of making statements. Moreover, there are utterances (the French translations usually give énonciations, which better renders the oral character of the utterance than does énoncé; German translates this by Äußerung) that are not statements; “many utterances look like statements” but “do not state a fact.” These “pseudo-statements” refer and are comparable to the Scheinsätze defined by Carnap. The basic unit that includes all the others is thus said to be the utterance. We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of “statement.” (Ibid., 4) The utterances that interest Austin are such that to utter the sentence is not to describe or state, it is to do (see SPEECH ACT, IV). This is what defines the “performative,” which is short for “performative [or performatory] utterance [or sentence].” Here is established the relation, rather close in Austin, between “utterance” and “sentence.” Utterances include sentences, without the difference between them being clearly marked, which attenuates their immediately spoken character (the “speech act”): “What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type?” (ibid., 6). “Utter a sentence” and “make [or issue] an utterance” are not very different. “Utterance” makes it possible to play on the verb “to utter” and on constructions like “uttering” and “utterer” (cf. Grice, Utterer’s Meaning). It is with Austin’s definition of the utterance that the idea of the proposition as an entity disappears. There is no longer an object separate from the utterance, so to speak, no type of which it would be the token: what is said is absorbed into the saying, what is said does not exist independent of its occurrence and its utterance. French has the good fortune of having a basic terminology for this vocabulary, established by Austin himself in the paper he presented at Royaumont in 1958, “Performatif-constatif,” which he had written himself in French (the English version, “Performative-Constative,” published after his death, was translated by Geoffrey Warnock and is less colorful than the original). Austin uses énoncé for “utterance,” assertion for “statement,” and effectuer for “perform.” We could take our inspiration from these (cf. énoncer que . . .). But the use of “statement,” as Quine clearly saw, is an “evasive use”: “statement” means something different from “sentence,” and designates, since coming into use by the Oxford philosophers, an act. I gave up the word [statement] in the face of the growing tendency at Oxford to use the word for acts that we perform in uttering declarative sentences. Now by appealing to statements in such a sense, instead of to propositions, certainly no clarity is gained. (Quine, Philosophy of Logic, 2) Thus we must once again examine the new vocabulary targeted here by Quine, which, according to him, perpetuates the mythology of propositions. In reality, we could also maintain that the introduction of the new terms “statement” and “utterance” takes a further step in the critical task (begun by Ramsey and Quine) of abandoning propositions in favor of sentences. The relation of the proposition-type to the sentences-tokens that, according to the traditional doctrine, express it could be set in parallel with the relation of the sentence to its real occurrences (utterances). For ordinary language philosophers, the primary objection to propositions is that a sentence-type can have different truth-values, and of course different meanings, in its different concrete occurrences. It is clear that the theory of performatives and speech acts developed by Austin and later generalized by John Searle poses a radical challenge to these concepts of truth and meaning (see SENSE, SPEECH ACT, TRUTH). We will limit ourselves to a few remarks on the vocabulary designating linguistic units, which becomes more complex here. The proposition/sentence pair, a development of the German Satz, becomes a system, sentence-statement-utterance, whose terms are combined in various ways. We have to recognize (cf. Quine’s critique) that the notion of “statement” (like that of “utterance”), initially proposed as a minimal term (like French énoncé), rapidly acquired, through the theory of speech acts that made use of it, an inevitable theoretical importance. The two terms have been used to indicate the dimension of doing involved first in certain utterances (performatives), and then in all utterances. Of course, this can be seen not as a performative dimension of all utterances, but, trivially, as the action implied in the very fact of making an utterance: the difficulty remains, as we see, to find the term that is as neutral and minimal as possible, and that is what, at least initially, was sought in “statement,” “utterance,” and énoncé. We can see some of these difficulties at the beginning of How to Do Things with Words. Austin begins with “statement” to criticize the idea that assertions are always descriptive, and thus the equivalence of statement and proposition: It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a “statement” can only be to “describe” some state of affairs, or to “state some fact.”. . .Not all “sentences” are (used in making) statements. (How to Do Things with Words, 1) “Statement” is difficult to translate into French. In French it tends to be translated as affirmation, which is a 874 PROPOSITION . The Philosophy of Language. Edited by John R. Searle. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Ayer, Alfred J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1953. Baratin, Marc. La naissance de la syntaxe à Rome. Paris: Minuit, 1989. Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. “Universal Semantics and Philosophy of Language.” In Substance and Structure of Language, edited by Jaan Puhvel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Benmakhlouf, Ali. Bertrand Russell: L’atomisme logique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Bolzano, Bernard. Wissenschaftslehre. Sulzbach, Ger.: Seidel, 1837. Translation by Rolf George: Theory of Science. Edited by Rolf George. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Brinkley, Richard. Richard Brinkley’s Theory of Sentential Reference: “De significato propositionis” from Part V of His Summa nova de logica. Translated and edited by Michael J. Fitzgerald. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1987. Burley, Walter. Commentarius in librum Perihermeneias Aristoteles. In “Walter Burley’s Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias,” edited by S. Brown. Franciscan Studies 33 (1973): 45–134. Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Syntax of Language. Translated by Amethe Smeaton. London: Kegan Paul, 1937. . Meaning and Necessity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956. . “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” Erkenntnis 2 (1932): 219–41. Translation by A. Pap: “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” In Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer. New York: Free Press, 1959. Church, Alonzo. Introduction to Mathematical Logic. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. Colloque philosophique de Royaumont. La philosophie analytique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962. De Rijk, Lambertus Maria, ed. Logica modernorum. Vol. 2.1, The Origin and Early Development of the Theory of Supposition. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1967. Dummet, Michael. Frege’s Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth, 1973. Ebbesen, Sten. “The Present King of France Wears Hypothetical Shoes with Categorical Laces: Twelfth-Century Writers on Well-Formedness.” Medioevo (1982): 91–113. Élie, Hubert. Le signifiable par complexe: La proposition et son objet: Grégoire de Rimini, Meinong, Russell. Paris: Vrin, 2000. Originally published ca. 1937. Engel, Pascal. La norme du vrai. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Feigl, Herbert, and Wilfrid Sellars, eds. Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1949. Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by M. Beaney. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997. . Nachgelassene Schriften. Edited by H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969. Translation by P. Long and R. White: Posthumous Writings. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979. . Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Edited and translated by P. Geach and M. Black. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. . “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100 (1892). French translation by Claude Imbert: Écrits logiques et philosophiques. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Gochet, Paul. Esquisse d’une théorie nominaliste de la proposition. Paris: A. Colin, 1972. Grice, H. P. “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions.” Philosophical Review 78 (1969). Reprinted as chap. 5 in Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hyder, David. The Mechanics of Meaning: Propositional Content and the Logical Space of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002. Katz, Jerrold. Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force: A Study of the Contribution of Sentence Meaning to Speech Acts. New York: Crowell, 1977. Kneepkens, C. H. “On Medieval Syntactic Thought with Special Reference to the Notion of Construction.” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 12, no. 2 (1990): 139–76. Lambert of Auxerre. Logica. Edited by Franco Alessio. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971. Laugier, Sandra. L’anthropologie logique du Quine. Paris: Vrin, 1992. . “Frege et le mythe de la signification.” In Phénomenologie et logique, edited by Jean-François Courtine. Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1996. choices, even if assertion lacks part of the factual dimension of “statement,” and énoncé lacks the physical dimension of “utterance.” Similarly, Austin himself translated “speech act” into French as acte de discours, which seems in fact more adequate than acte de langage, which has since been generally adopted. There are numerous philosophical meanings of the term “proposition” that have been sedimented in various contemporary uses. Defined semantically in terms of true or false, a proposition no longer has any apparent relationship with the logos-apophansis-logos apophantikos complex inherited from Aristotle. It is an extra- or translinguistic entity: a sentence is French or Turkish; a proposition is not and cannot be either. An énoncé, like a sentence, is always in a language. The French proposition (German Satz, English “proposition”) seeks to transcend this linguistic difference, to define a content of language or an independent thought. This semantic definition of the proposition is rejected by everyone who thinks that it is the sentences of a given language that are true or false—“It is what human beings say that is true and false” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §241). Others purely and simply reject “propositions,” seen as mythical beings subsisting independent of thoughts and sentences (as Russell puts it, “a proposition is only a symbol,” “propositions are only sentences in the indicative,” “propositions are shadows, they are nothing”). Focusing on the meaning of the word “proposition” (Satz, etc.) in modern philosophical texts means being confronted, as we can see, with theories rather than with linguistic fluctuations, and sometimes with a departure from usage. But the constant passage from one language to another allows us to bring out the polysemies and to eliminate the ambiguity from words in languages, as when protasis becomes praemissa and propositio, or Satz becomes simultaneously “statement,” “utterance,” and “sentence.” Marc Baratin Barbara Cassin Sandra Laugier Alain de Libera Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Aristotle. Aristoteles Latinus. Volume 2.1. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965. . Aristoteles Latinus. Volume 4.1–4. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello and B. G. Dod. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1968. . Aristoteles: Zweite Analytiken. Translated by H. Seidl. Amsterdam, Neth.: Rodopi, 1984. . Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. . Categories and On Interpretation. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. . Della interpretazione. Translated by M. Zanatta. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. . Kategorien: Lehre vom Satz. Translated by E. Rolfes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1925. 2nd ed., 1958. . Organon. Translated by J. Tricot. 6 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1950–69. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. . “Performative-Constative.” Translated by Geoffrey Warnock. In The Philosophy of Language, edited by John R. Searle, 13–22. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. . Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. PRUDENTIAL 875 opens onto contemporary English and American analytic philosophy, and for which French produces descriptive translations that make the problem obvious. See, on the one hand, DICTUM, INTENTION, PROPOSITION, SENSE; on the other hand, ERSCHEINUNG, FACT, GEGENSTAND, IL Y A, MATTER OF FACT, OBJECT, TATSACHE, THING [RES], TO BE; finally, TRUTH. v. STATE OF AFFAIRS Libera, Alain de. “Roger Bacon et la référence vide: Sur quelques antécédents médiévaux du paraoxe de Meinong.” In Lectionum varietates, Hommage à Paul Vignaux, edited by J. Jolivet et al., 85–120. Paris: Vrin, 1991. . La référence vide: Théories de la proposition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Libera, Alain de, and Irène Rosier. “Les enjeux logico-linguistiques de l’analyse de la formule de la consécration eucharistique.” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Âge Grec et Latin 67 (1997): 33–77. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam, Neth.: North-Holland, 1973. Perler, Dominik. Der Propositionale Wahrheitsbegriff im 14. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992. Pinkster, Harm. Latin Syntax and Semantics. London: Routledge, 1990. Pitcher, George, ed. Truth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Prior, A. N. The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms. Edited by P. T. Geach and A.J.P. Kenny. London: Duckworth, 1976. Quine, W.V.O. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. . Philosophy of Logic. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. . Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990. . “Russell’s Ontological Argument.” In Essays on Bertrand Russell, edited by E. D. Klemke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. . Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Ramsey, Frank P. “Facts and Propositions.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 7 (1927): 153–70. . The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays. Edited by R. B. Braithwaite, with a preface by G. E. Moore. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Recanati, François. La transparence et l’énonciation. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Rosier, Irène. “La definition de Priscien de l’énoncé: Les enjeux théoriques d’une variante, selon les commentateurs médiévaux.” In Grammaire et l’histoire de la grammaire: Mélanges à la mémoire de Jean Stefanini, edited by Claire BlancheBenveniste, André Chervel, and Maurice Gross, 353–73. Aix-en Provence, Fr.: Université de Provence, 1988. Russell, Bertrand. My Philosophical Development. London: Routledge, 1955. Searle, John R. Speech Acts. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Sherwood, William, fl. Introductiones in logicam. Edited by Charles H. Lohr. Traditio 39. Also published in William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic. Translated with an introduction and notes by Norman Kretzmann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations: Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. . Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT This is one of the possible translations of the German Sachverhalt, which in everyday language designates the “facts of the case.” But this translation emphasizes the propositional formulation of the object of judgment at the expense of the properties of the objects of experience. The other, no less frequent translation as “state of affairs” suffers from the inverse defect. See SACHVERHALT. Here we are dealing with a logical terminology connected with the greatest questions (the relation thing-word-mind and the definition of truth), which makes the transition from a medieval Latin term (DICTUM) that emerged from Stoicism in its competition with Aristotelianism (see lekton [λεϰτόν] under SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, II) to the German of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which PRUDENCE “Prudence” derives from the Latin prudentia, in which Cicero still heard providentia, the “foresight” that characterizes “providence.” The Latin word, which was connected with a civilization based on law (jurisprudentia; see LEX, II.B), seeks to render the Greek phronêsis [φϱόνησις], which designates practical wisdom, both intellectual (phronein [φϱονεῖν], “to think,” phrenes [φϱένες], “lungs”; cf. SOUL, Box 3 and cf. HEART) and moral: see PHRONÊSIS for an exploration of the interpretations and translations of this key term in the various linguistic systems (in particular, German Klugheit). See MORALS, VIRTUE, WISDOM. Cf. LOGOS, MÊTIS, UNDERSTANDING. The term has been reinvested in contemporary English, with prudential ethics connected to economics: see PRUDENTIAL; cf. MORAL SENSE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, UTILITY. v. DUTY, ECONOMY, GLÜCK, INGENIUM, SENS COMMUN, VALUE PRUDENTIAL / PRUDENCE FRENCH prudentiel, prudence GERMAN Klugheit GREEK phronêsis [φϱόνησις] LATIN prudentia v. PRUDENCE [PHRONÊSIS], WISDOM, and ECONOMY, FAIR, OIKONOMIA, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, UTILITY, VIRTÙ, WUNSCH The adjective “prudential” does not present any genuine translation problem. But in relation to the introduction into contemporary philosophical language of this technical term borrowed from economics, it is interesting to inquire into the connection between this term and its philosophical ancestors. What contemporary exponents (mainly English speaking) of rational choice theory understand by “prudential” too easily assumes that the dilemmas regarding the nature of practical reason have been resolved, in the sense in which the great classical conceptions of phronêsis and prudentia, from Aristotle and Cicero to Kant and Sidgwick, tried to understand it. These dilemmas are still being debated by writers who, even when they draw on both traditions, try, like James Griffin, to reevaluate the relations between prudential virtues and ethics or to derive all of ethics from prudential reason, like David Gauthier or John Rawls in his early work. 876 PRUDENTIAL the grounds that it is too “normative.” The conception of the growth of a pleasant state of mind is replaced by the economics of welfare; pleasure or happiness is replaced by the satisfaction of desires or preferences, even if we do not always desire what makes us happy. Second, in accord with methodological individualism, we as rational agents are interested only in our own satisfaction; the Other is taken into account only in estimating the chances of succeeding in negotiating or threatening. We are in an individualist, conflictual model in which cooperation is chosen only because it will maximize our chances (the prisoner’s dilemma). The self-contradictions of self-love and selfesteem are eliminated. Finally, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy (“Prudence et rationalité”) rightly points out, the economic model’s conception of temporality reverses the flow of time in the sense that arguments are made on the basis of what would have happened if decision X had been made earlier, leading to a result that will never occur, because in the meantime we will have taken care to make a more advantageous decision. Catherine Audard REFS.: Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Books 2–4. Translated with an introduction and commentary by C. Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. . Nicomachean Ethics. Books 8 and 9. Translated with a commentary by M. Pakaluk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. “Prudence et rationalité.” In Une prudence moderne? Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Griffin, James. Well-Being. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Hariman, Robert, ed. Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by L. W. Beck. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. . Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary McGregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. 2nd ed. Edited by G. Sher. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 7th ed. London: Hackett, 1981. I. From the Reason for Acting to Self-Interest and Anticipation Philosophers used to understand the notion of prudence in three dimensions. In the first place, it was understood as providing reasons for acting that, while not necessarily being moral in the sense of the categorical imperative of duty, are nonetheless good reasons. Here, “good” means what enables us to realize maximally our essence (Kant) or our happiness (the utilitarians). Prudence, Kant writes, is “skill in the choice of means to one’s own highest welfare” (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, §2). Because of this relationship to happiness, prudential reason is distinguished from instrumental reason or technics, whose end, in the Kantian vocabulary, is not real but only possible (the imperative of prudence, Klugheit, is an assertive hypothetical and not a problematic one). In a second sense, the domain peculiar to prudence is limited to self-interest. The whole difficulty proceeds from how this limit is interpreted: is it selfishness or self-esteem that takes the Other equally into consideration? Sidgwick asks whether the imperatives of prudence are compatible with the utilitarian maxim of rational good will or with the axiom of justice or equity, and this indicates that the question is far from being resolved (Methods of Ethics). The third characteristic of the notion resides in its relation to temporality. Prudence is the contrary of the kind of short-term, irrational thinking that Mill calls “expediency” (Utilitarianism). It presupposes a capacity for rational anticipation, complex modes of reasoning to evaluate one decision in relation to another—for example, an immediate advantage in relation to one that is greater but more distant. We must not forget that the Latin prudentia comes from providentia, that is, “foresight.” II. The Rational Agent’s Interests In the technical sense conveyed by the term “prudential,” we see shifts taking place in the three directions we have indicated. First, we as ideal rational agents on whom economic theories are based are interested solely in maximizing our utility, that is, our expressed preferences, and not our happiness, a notion that has been abandoned on 877 access, and which they can know in an infallible way, or at least with an exclusive authority. But how can we explain the privileged status of the access enjoyed by subject of the experience relative to the knowledge of corresponding objective properties such as temperature, form, and length, which is in each case eminently subject to error? One of the ways of responding to this difficulty consists in treating qualia as a domain that cannot be reduced to any physicalist approach (Chalmers, The Conscious Mind). The quale thus becomes a weapon in a dualist argumentative apparatus. The other way consists in maintaining, inversely, that the existence of qualia does not threaten the monist materialist conception of the world, while at the same time recognizing that a functionalist explanation (that is, an analysis based on the causal relations between an object giving rise to qualia and the subject’s dispositions to believe or to act) cannot be given for qualia. It is, in fact, emphasized that qualia are by nature “intrinsic” properties that cannot be explained by a differential and relational approach. One of the ways of showing this is to imagine that a subject has a deviant experience of color in which the colors of the spectrum are reversed. Given that language learning is not affected by the intrinsic characteristics of experience, the anomaly of this subject’s qualia could not be discerned by someone else, or detected by a relational analysis of the functionalist type (Block and Fodor, “What Psychological States Are Not”). Similarly, no one could discover the anomaly of a subject who was totally deprived of qualia but who gave the same verbal and behavioral responses as a subject capable of qualitative experience. A final argument draws from the discovery of qualia the proof of functionalism’s incompleteness as a theory of the mental. Let us imagine that a subject named Mary has lived in a black-and-white world but has learned everything one can know about the perception of colors. Let us further suppose that one day Mary emerges from this colorless world and sees a red object: it seems indisputable that Mary thus discovers a new fact. We must therefore conclude that the functionalist analysis does not offer a complete explanation of mental events (Jackson, “What Mary Did Not Know”). These arguments led adversaries of dualism to make numerous attempts to show either that a nonfunctionalist explanation of qualia is possible (for example, by studying the properties of the neurons that implement them), or that qualia are the object of practical knowledge and not of conceptual knowledge; or, finally, that qualia are a myth of which science must rid itself (Dennett, “Quining Qualia”; Tye, The Imagery Debate). Joëlle Proust QUALE, QUALIA FRENCH quale, qualia GERMAN Quale, Qualia LATIN quale, qualia v. CONSCIOUSNESS, ERLEBEN, PERCEPTION, PROPERTY, REPRÉSENTATION, SOUL, SUBJECT The term “quale” (plural “qualia”) refers to the qualitative properties of experience insofar as they elicit in the subject the experience of a distinctive impression. This blue that I perceive, this pain felt, this coffee fragrance, are “qualia.” Since the middle of the twentieth century several words have been competing as designations of these properties: they have been called “subjective qualities” or “sensuous qualities,” “phenomenal properties” or “phenomenological properties,” or even immediate impressions (“raw feels”; see Herbert Feigl’s 1967 book The Mental and the Physical). The Latin word prevailed in Englishlanguage philosophy, and has been adopted in German and French translations, probably because of the symmetry with the quantum/ quanta pair, one representing a qualitative differential, the other a quantitative differential. In many uses of the term, “qualia” refers to singular events, such as the manifestation of a pain at a given moment (Casati, “Qualia”) or to instantiated (that is, nonrepeatable) singular properties (this way of suffering here and now being necessarily different from all others). Other uses of “qualia” refer to general properties of such events (for example, the intensity or the type of pain). In this use, the concept of “quale” does not coincide with the notion of secondary quality: the term can be applied to primary qualities such as forms as well as to secondary qualities such as colors, because, for example, one can have an objective experience of “seeing” a square form (different from the experience of “touching” a square surface). The word “quale” cannot be used interchangeably with the term “sensation” insofar as, unlike a sensation, a quale cannot be treated in a quantitative or relational manner. Moreover, the word can be applied to data that are not strictly sensorial, such as the impression of knowing or that of imagining: some philosophers maintain that mental states of the propositional type (such as believing that P or desiring that Q) also give rise to qualia that are at the origin of the subject’s understanding of what the mental state in question is. It seems indisputable, at least at first sight, that some of our mental states have qualia in the sense that they give rise to a distinctive qualitative impression. It is often thought that conceding this point amounts to recognizing that there are facts to which subjects have a privileged epistemic Q REFS.: Block, Ned, and Jerry Fodor. “What Psychological States Are Not.” Philosophical Review (1972): 159–81. Casati, Roberto. “Qualia.” In Vocabulaire de sciences cognitives, edited by O. Houdé, D. Kayser, O. Koenig, J. Proust, and F. Rastier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Clémentz, François. “Qualia et contenus perceptifs.” pp. 21–56 in Percepion et Intermodalité. Approches actuelles de la question de Molyneux, edited by Joëlle Proust. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Dennett, Daniel. “Quining Qualia.” pp. 42–77 in Consciousness and Contemporary Science, edited by A. Marcel and E. Bisiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Jackson, Frank. “What Mary Did Not Know.” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291–95. Shoemaker, S. “A Case for Qualia.” In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. 878 QUIDDITY QUIDDITY “Quiddity” is a technical termed modeled on the Scholastic Latin quidditas (quiditas) and translating the Aristotelian to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι] (we also find a Latin calque, which is purely descriptive and grammatically ill formed: quod quid erat esse): see TO TI ÊN EINAI and ESTI, SEIN, TO BE. The term quidditas was introduced by Latin translations of Avicenna’s Metaphysics. It was later overdetermined as a response to the question quid sit (what is?), as opposed to the question an sit (is it?), which is said to have produced anitas, a word that soon disappeared. While quiddity refers to the essence as it is articulated in the definition, the anitas refers to existence, or rather to the quod est, “what it is.” See ESSENCE, OMNITUDO REALITATIS, and cf. PREDICATION, REALITY, RES. v. ACT, IL Y A, SPECIES 879 in Opera omnia; see TO TI ÊN EINAI). Of course, the realitates or formalitates have no separate existence and thus no defined ontological status; they subsist only in and through the res (thus realitates are always realitates rei), from which, however, they are distinguished formally a parte rei. Thus they provide the foundation for a “real” distinction (i.e., of one thing in relation to another); in other words, for a distinction that is neither actual nor potential, but only virtual or merely formal. . In the Scotist tradition, realitas is thus a term broader than res and has an indifferent ontological status with respect to objective reality. Reality or formality is in fact independent of the intellect: Et ideo potest concedi quod ante omnem actum intellectus est realitas essentiae qua est communicabilis, et realitas suppositi qua suppositum est incommunicabile; et ante actum intellectus haec realitas formaliter non est illa. (And we can thus grant that anterior to any act of intellect there is the reality of the essence, through which it is communicable, and the reality of the subject through which the subject is non-communicable; and that anterior to the act of intellect, this latter reality is not formally the former [reality].) (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 1, dist. 2, pt. 2, qu. 1–4, n. 403, in Opera omnia, 2:357) Understood in this way, reality is radically separated from the fictum, or the rational entity, and far from being purely and simply conflated with the res, it is composed of formal notes (formalitates) or reasons (rationes) that distinctly constitute the complete essence of the res, considered as such, in the multiplicity of its aspects or its intelligible determinations: Quodlibet commune et tamen determinabile, adhuc potest distingui, quantumcumque sit una res, in plures realitates formaliter distinctas, quarum haec non est illa. (Everything that is common and yet determinable can, however, be distinguished, insofar as it is a thing, into several formally distinct realities, one of which is not the other.) (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 2, dist. 3, qu. 6, n. 15, in Opera omnia) The res positiva thus is initially not the individual and singular reality posited extra intellectum (outside the intellect, in the nature of things), but rather what is presented to the mind as a realitas; that is, as a mental content (Sachbestand)