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

HUMANUM, MENSCHHEIT, HUMANITÄT (GERMAN) ENGLISH humanity FRENCH humanité, sentiment d’humanité LATIN humanitas v. HUMANITY, and ANIMAL, BILDUNG, GESCHLECHT, MITMENSCH, MORALS, OIKEIÔSIS, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION Belonging to the human race (Menschengeschlecht), the fact of being a human and of being part of humanity (Menschentum), does not necessarily mean that one shows one’s humanity, or that one is moved by a sense of humanity (Humanität). The relatively recent introduction into German of the term Humanität (which is not, however, in the Grimms’ dictionary) answers the need to make an even more rigorous distinction between the quality of a human being (Menschlichkeit) and the virtue of “humanity,” since Menschlichkeit and Humanität can quite easily be confused. But mankind (Menschheit) considered as an ethical horizon, and ideal, is in its turn distinct from a simple belonging to the human race. I. Human, Human Nature: From Humanitas to Humanität/Menschlichkeit The classical Latin humanitas does not refer to the human race, but contrasts that which pertains to human nature to everything animal, and then by extension refers more precisely to what characterizes human nature and its behaviors, and finally, its virtues and distinctive qualities. This broad range of meanings is illustrated by Cicero. Even though we first see with him the emergence of a “universal society of humankind” (“societas universalis humanitatis,” De finibus MENSCHHEIT 651 1 The complex architecture of humanitas in Latin humanism The Latin term humanitas first appeared around 80 BCE (the first instances of its use are in the Rhetoric to Herennius [2.24, 26, 50; 4.12, 23], anonymous and of uncertain date, and in Cicero’s For Publius Quinctius §§51 and 97). At that time it meant a brotherly disposition based on the feeling of belonging to the same species, the genus humanum (humanitas would not signify “humanity” in this latter sense until the Christian authors; cf. Saint Jerome, Letters, 55.3, 4). The concept subsequently assumed the full extent of its meaning with Cicero, who elaborated a theory of both individual and collective human development through culture, particularly the liberal arts and literature, which explains the direct link between the modern term “humanities” and its original Latin meaning. Beginning with his speech Pro Roscio Amerino (Roscius was accused of parricide in 80 BCE), Cicero reflects first of all on the specificity of the human as opposed to the state of savagery, and then goes on to discuss the fundamentally enriching effects of civilization, which turn man into a cultural being, in contrast to the forms of barbarism, which abandon him to the state of nature verging on animality (see the speech On Behalf of Archias the Poet, and the treatise De republica, in particular 1.28). Humanitas thus establishes itself as a set of characteristics that supposedly define what a civilized man is, as opposed to what he is not, and from which follow certain duties he has to observe in his relation to himself, and to his fellow humans (this is the theme of Cicero’s treatise On Duties). We have, then, a complex architecture, under the constant threat of destruction from the poles against which humanitas is defined; animality, savagery, barbarism, monstrosity. Humanitas can only be preserved through our constantly exercising the human duties of solidarity, of justice, and of mercy (the term humanitas covers all of these meanings). Exercising these duties requires us to draw from the wellspring of the cultural memory to which humanity has consigned its own definitions of values (in philosophical discourse, in particular), and the illustration of its principles (notably through historical exempla). This accounts for the importance of the humanities, whose role is not a decorative but a constitutive one. In two exemplary texts, Cicero thus appeals both to the sense of community created in sharing the same culture, and to the adherence to the values of this culture. He does this, on the one hand, in the speech On Behalf of Archias the Poet, when he asks the Romans not to exclude the foreign poet from its civic body, and on the other, in the programmatic letter to his brother, the governor of the province of Asia (To His Brother Quintus 1.1), when he urges him to show the greatest humanitas toward those he administers in Greece. In each case, humanitas is opposed to the force of exclusion represented by acerbitas, or a harshness verging on cruelty, and saevitia, which is one of the characteristics of a moral monster (see Seneca, On Anger and On Clemency). Anti-humanis is then defined as immanis: this adjective, the antonym of manis (good), refers generally to all that is out of proportion, and thus frightening, or monstrous. This is particularly true of the animal nature of wild beasts, ferae, an animality that, when transferred to men, denies all humanity by inverting its values. Seneca thus says of Caligula (“To Polybius,” On Consolation, 17.5–6) that he “savored in the misfortunes of others the most inhuman consolation [alienis malis oblectare minime humano solacio],” a perfect perversion of the motto of Latin humanism we find in Terence (The Self-Torturer 77): “I am a man, and I deem nothing pertaining to man foreign to me [homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto],” an even more eloquent echo of which we find in Seneca himself, who defines humanitas (Letters 88.30) as “not thinking of any misfortune as foreign [nullum alienum malum putat].” It is worth adding the following clarifications to this very general presentation: 1. The contribution of the Greeks was, of course, a determining one (see Cicero’s avowed debt, To His Brother Quintus 1.27– 28). The sense of the unity of humankind is no doubt as old as man, but beyond this immediate awareness, we recognize within the idea of a necessary fraternity between the members of a same species the Greek philantrôpia, which was associated with paideia through the cultural side of the Roman humanitas (the difference being that the intellectual training to which humanitas refers is that of a fully developed man, and not the early training of the child, pais, as he is being taught). The originality of the Roman term, which has no equivalent in Greek, was first and foremost to associate the two words within a unitary, balanced conception of man. However, this lexical balance would not last a generation, and in the widest sense of the term, humanitas would be, generally speaking, the invention of the generation of Cicero and Varro, and would lose its complexity during the Roman empire, when it was reduced either to philantrôpia or to paideia (see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.17). We can see here the effects of a generation that had been brought up with the cultural contributions of Hellenism, and that expected culture, perceived in its universality, to provide new tools for understanding the drama of contemporary events, and to remedy these by preserving the best of the national tradition, the mos maiorum, that is, those aspects in the historical evolution of Rome which marked the full development of civilized man (see Novara, Les idées romaines, 1:165–97). 2. Historical relativism has a philosophical counterpart: recent studies have thus emphasized how closely the Roman construction of humanitas was bound up with the imperial politics of Rome (see Paul Veyne, “Humanitas: Les Romains et les autres,” in Giardina, Les idées romaines, 421–59; and Braund, “Roman Assimilations,” 15–32). The alleged universality of the concept of humanitas in fact imposed the model of the Roman equipped with a Greco-Roman culture, gradually dominated by the Latin language, and imbued with the values of the mos maiorum. This model worked first of all by casting everything incompatible with it into the void of savagery and barbarism, and then by offering itself as a tool for integrating the conquered populations into the body of the empire through a process of harmonious romanization, which was synonymous with civilization, pure and simple. 3. Roman thinkers were not, however, unaware of any properly universal claims made in the name of humanitas. This surfaces specifically in regard to slavery, and with the influence of Stoicism; the limit of this universalism can be seen, however, in the absence of any questioning of slavery, even though slaves were recognized as men (see Cicero, On Duties 1.41 and 150, and especially Seneca, Epistles 47). Stoicism even provided the means for thinking what appears to us as a contradiction, by making the slave an employee in perpetuity who was looked after by his master. More generally, philosophical (continued) 652 MENSCHHEIT both what characterizes man as an “object of experience” and the ideal of his freedom, “humanity raised in its Idea” (Conflict of the Faculties, §1, General Remark, “On Religious Sects,” trans. Gregor, 105). Menschheit, then, referred both to a generic humanity, and to what it is within humanity, and only within humanity, that makes it no longer a fact, but a gradual evolution toward an ethical ideal: it is at the very core of this generic humanity that the driving force of its evolution is situated. Defined as freedom, this driving force is generic humanity’s final cause, humanity perfected and reconciled, humanity having made real the idea that (by its very nature) it also is. Borrowing this double Kantian sense, Hermann Cohen emphasizes that in Kant, the term both is “equivalent to a rational being,” and has a “universalist, cosmopolitan meaning.” Cohen, moreover, links Kant to Herder: Herder, who was a rebellious and thus ungrateful disciple of Kant, still engaged with his thought through the idea of humanity it is no coincidence that he was also the author of On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. He recognized the spirit of humanity in the earliest texts of the Old Testament. This was an important intuition which guided Herder in his general conception of the spirit of the Bible: he recognized the messianism in the principle of monotheism. (Religion of Reason, chap. 13: “The Idea of Messiah and Humanity,” §11) Three perspectives converge at a sort of future vanishing point: politics has as its ideal the confederation of States, driven by the spirit of cosmopolitanism that ultimately tends toward the disappearance of nation-states, then of sovereign states. The spirit is based on the properly ethical aspiration to the ideal of a reconciled humanity, that is, an ethics that coincides with culture to the extent that it would render religion useless, since religion will have been, as a messianic monotheism, the revelation of the meaning of before the Addresses to the German Nation, in Herder’s great work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), book 4, chapter 4: “I would hope to be able to capture in the term humanity [Humanität] everything I have said up until now on the superior formation of man in terms of reason and freedom.” The title of this chapter is explicit: “Man is formed with a view to humanity and religion.” Humanität, moreover, is emphasized throughout this book, and, like humanitas in Cicero, although it is never given a positive definition, Herder’s Humanität includes everything that enables man to rise above his empirical ground, as well as everything that is aimed for in this movement of overcoming, since humanity is the “finality of mankind”: the future of reason is to establish a “lasting humanity.” II. “Humanity” (Menschheit) as an Ethical Ideal? Kant also draws a distinction between Humanität and Menschlichkeit on the one hand, and Menschheit on the other. In the appendix to the second part of the Critique of Judgment (§60, “Of the Methodology of Taste,” Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment), Kant reminds us in discussing the humanities that they are so called “because humanity [Humanität] means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation [Teilnehmungsgefühl] and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate [mittheilen] one’s inmost self universally, which properties taken together constitute the sociability that is appropriate to humankind [Menschheit].” But the problem is no longer one of a semantic differentiation between an originally Latin term and a German term, since Kant introduces a double meaning of the term Menschheit. For animality also exists within man, and is opposed to “the idea of humanity [Menschheit] that he bears in his soul as the archetype of his actions” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Dialectic,” 1.1, trans. Guyer and Wood, 397), since one cannot determine “the highest degree of perfection at which humanity must stop however great a gulf must remain between the idea and its execution” (ibid.). Humanity is thus cosmopolitanism, which in theory eradicated all inequalities of status, was in no way aiming to overthrow the political and social frameworks of the time, but cultivated respect for the existing structures and institutions by projecting human equality into the ideal state of a utopian City of Wise Men. It is nonetheless remarkable that the philosophical discourse on slavery certainly defined man in terms of the freedom to act well the role given to him by Fortune—a freedom, however, that was seen against the backdrop of a primary enslavement. Every man is a slave to his destiny and also, with the exception of ideal wise men, a slave to his own passions, a secondary enslavement that is ultimately worse than any other because it is voluntary, and involves one’s own self-abasement (cf. Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 5, on the theme “Only the wise man is free”; and Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 10. 3: “All life is slavery”). Perhaps the Roman humanitas testifies not only to an imperialist pragmatism, and to an all-too-human inability to free oneself from the social and institutional framework of a given culture, but also, by contrast to the optimism of contemporary human rights, to an ancient sense of the fragility of human affairs and the weakness of man, who can never be helped enough by the whole of human culture in his attempts to escape a degradation that is often of his own making. François Prost REFS.: Bauman, Richard A. Human Rights in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge, 2000. Braund, Susanna Morton. “Roman Assimilations of the Other: Humanitas at Rome.” Acta Classica 40 (1997): 15–32. Giardina, Andrea, ed. L’uomo romano. Rome: Laterza, 1989. Translation by Lydia G. Cochrane: The Romans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Novara, Antoinette. Les idées romaines sur le progrès d’après les écrivains de la République: Essai sur le sens latin du progrès. 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982–83. (continued) MENSCHHEIT 653 make any distinction between man and nature. But to get rid of this folding back means taking away from humanity (Menschheit) any teleological meaning. Indeed, it is when one considers that humanity (Menschheit) is never sufficiently human (Humane) that one makes one or the other a goal: Man, not humanity [die Menschheit]. Humanity [die Menschheit] is much more a means than an end. It is a question of the type: Humanity [die Menschheit] is only material of experience, the enormous excess of what has not succeeded, a field of rubble. (Nietzsche, frag. 14 [8]) And also: In our present humanity [Menschheit] we have attained a considerable degree of humanity [Humanität]. The very fact that we are generally not aware of it is already a proof. (Nietzsche, frag. 15 [63]) This attachment to the idea of Humanität in Nietzsche’s late writings, and the regret they express that there is never enough humanity, become a symptom of decadence. Marc Crépon Marc de Launay REFS.: Cohen, Hermann. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Fock, 1919. Translation by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Introduction by Simon Kaplan. Introductory essays by Leo Strauss, Steven S. Schwarzschild, and Kenneth Seeskin. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Reden an die deutsche Nation. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte. In Fichtes Werke, 7:257–501. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Originally published in 1808. Translation by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull: Addresses to the German Nation. Edited by George Armstrong Kelly. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Edited by Wolfgang Pross. 2 vols. In Werke, vol. 3. Munich: Hanser, 2002. Translation by T. Churchill: Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. New York: Bergman, 1800. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. . The Conflict of the Faculties [Der Streit der Fakultäten]. Translated and introduction by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris, 1979. . Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. . Critique of Practical Reason. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. . The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters. Based on the critical text by Giorgio Colli and Mazzimo Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–). Edited by Paolo D’Iorio. http://www.nietzschesource.org Osamu, Nishitani. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being.’” In Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, 259–73. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Wood, Allen. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. these ideals in the figure of the Messiah. (Christianity and Judaism are not fundamentally opposed if Noah is recognized as “the first Messiah,” and if one accepts the essential role played by the prophets in the constitution of the historical and moral ideal of humanity; the real and irreducible point of divergence is, of course, the fact of accepting or refusing Jesus as the Messiah.) Cohen, who is openly hostile to the idea of miracles, does not imagine the Messiah other than in the secularized and rationalized form of a coincidence between the ideal and the real, between the fieri and the factum; he knows that it is not a matter of a promised effective reality, but of a tendency, of an asymptote. Unified humanity is merely an ideal: monotheistic messianism is its historical expression, and Kantian ethics and cosmopolitanism are its rational formulation. The feeling of humanity—Cohen makes no distinction between Humanität and Menschlichkeit—is an essential virtue since it is thanks to this virtue that humankind (Menschentum, which is merely Menschengeschlecht as far as science is concerned) has access to humanity (Menschheit), that is, to the true meaning of what would be the progress of humanity. In Nietzsche’s thought, the potential confusion between the different terms used to designate humanity (Humanität and Menschheit) and the human (das Menschliche and das Humane) becomes the object of constant critical attention. Nietzsche denounces, in the folding back of Menschlichkeit onto Humanität, one of the most enduring effects of Christianity on the way we conceive of the human, and the most telling sign of how Christianity has supplanted antiquity. Indeed, it is in studying closely what constituted the humanity of the Greeks, from a philological and historical perspective, that the deceptive, cunning (witzig) nature of this folding back becomes apparent. This study enables us to understand the extent to which the idea of the human (das Menschliche) becomes confused as soon as one banishes everything that Christianity designates as inhumanity (Inhumanität): The human [das Menschliche] which Antiquity shows us should not be confused with the human [das Humane]. The human [das Menschliche] of the Greeks consists in a certain naivety by which, for them, are distinguished man, the State, art, society, the rights of war and of peoples, the relations between the sexes, education, looking after the home; this is precisely the human [das Menschliche] as it manifests itself everywhere, among all peoples, but for them, with no mask and inhumanly [in einer Unmaskirtheit und Inhumanität], which one must not overlook if one is to draw any lesson from it. (Nietzsche, frag. 3 [12], March 1875, in “Notes for ‘We Philologists’ ”) III. Man and Inhumanity This confusion is in essence due to the fact that the idea of Humanität aims to separate man from nature. Reestablishing the meaning of Menschheit assumes that one can show how much “the natural qualities, and the properly called ‘human’ [menschlich] ones have grown up inseparably together” (Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf”). One can thus no longer 654 MERKMAL MERKMAL (GERMAN) ENGLISH mark FRENCH marque distinctive, marque, note ITALIAN, SPANISH marca LATIN nota v. CONCEPT, LOGOS, MOMENT, OBJECT, PREDICATION, PROPERTY, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SIGN, THING (RES), TROPE The German Merkmal is generally considered as a term from Gottlob Frege’s philosophical idiolect. Indeed, the word appears in contrast to Eigenschaft (property) in the Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations of arithmetic) from 1884, when he introduces a new theory of predication (§53). According to this theory—readily reformulated with the help of a standard example in the history of logic—in a proposition such as “man is an animal,” “animal” will not be analyzed in Fregean terms as a property of man, but as a “mark” of the concept of man. However, Merkmal is not only a technical term belonging to a particular philosophy; it is at the intersection of two series, whose initial convergence, and then progressive divergence, are linked to a fact of translation between Greek and Latin that is worthy of a philosopher’s attention. More than its English or French equivalents, the clarity of the oppositions that structure its domain of application in German allow it to describe the aforementioned “intersection,” its sources, its mechanisms, and its philosophical stakes. The first series is the one denoted by the synonymous pair Merkmal-Zeichen (sign); the second, which corresponds to Frege’s usage, is the one denoted by the antonymous pair Merkmal/Eigenschaft. These two series do not normally have any necessary meeting point. Their intersection can only be explained by other philosophical languages: before becoming part of Frege’s idiom in opposition to Eigenschaft, the notion of Merkmal had a protohistory, entailing a certain number of shifts in the understanding of what a concept, a judgment, and an object of judgment are, and how they are expressed in “languages.” This is what we will reconstruct briefly here. I. Merkmal and Zeichen, “Mark” and “Sign” The synonymous pair Merkmal-Zeichen has its origin in the Latin of Boethius, in this case via the translation of the first chapter of Peri hermêneias (On interpretation) (16a2–7), in which Aristotle puts in place what has come to be known, since C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, as the “semantic triangle.” In the Latin version, Boethius in fact translates two distinct Greek words, sumbolon [σύμϐολον] and sêmeion [σημεῖον], as the same Latin word, nota: Sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae et ea quae scribuntur eorum quae sunt in voce. Et quemadmodum nec litterae omnibus eaedem, sic nec eadem voces; quorum autem hae primorum notae, eaedem omnibus passiones animae sunt, et quorum hae similitudines, res etiam eaedem. (Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.) (Aristoteles latinus, 2.1–2, p. 5 [4–9]; trans. Edghill) (See SIGN, and on the current options for translating the Greek original, Box 1 there). Boethius’s translation doubly modifies the relation of meaning according to Aristotle: first, through the (relative) elimination of what was conveyed by the distinction between sumbolon and sêmeion, and second, by bringing signifying and noting closer together. This explains the paired set of terms we find among certain medieval commentators of the Peri hermêneias, between nota and the speaker on the one hand, and signum and the interlocutor or listener on the other. (Cf. the text by Robert Kilwardby, cited in SIGN: “dicendum quod differunt nota et signum, quia nota est in quantum est in ore proferentis, set signum est in quantum est in aure audientis” (We will reply that nota and signum are different, because nota is used for what is in the mouth of the speaker, but signum for what is in the ear of the listener), and the commentary by I. Rosier-Catach). The replacement of nota by the pair sumbolum/signum in Guillaume de Moerbeke’s medieval translation of the text plays no part in the genesis of the first series of Merkmal; many logicians had become used to reorganizing the semantic triangle with signum well before this translation. So there are two all-encompassing linguistic mechanisms in Latin, based on the neutralization of sumbolon/sêmeion, that account for the alternation between Merkmal and Zeichen in common philosophical usage in German, and that identify a mark and a sign (as they also do, more or less, in everyday language): the system of nota, and the system of signum. “To be a mark of” and “to be a sign of” are considered synonymous, by virtue of the simple fact that Zeichen contains, depending on the context, the same dimension of notification as the French signe (sign; signifier [in French] can have the meaning of “to let know,” “to notify”; “donner un signe de” [to give a sign of] is synonymous in French with “donner une marque de”; and so on; cf. the analogous expression “signify” in English: “I signified my assent . . .”; and the use of “signify” and “signifyin’” in the African American tradition). To this is added, however, the transitivity of the posited relationship that Aristotle articulates in the “semantic triangle,” and that subsequently acquires a historial dimension. Aristotle’s formulation generally appears among Scholastics in the form of a saying based on signum: “Quicquid est signum signi est signum signati” (Anything that is the sign of a sign is the sign of its signified)—meaning that the vocal sound (Aristotle’s phônê [φωνή]), insofar as it is the sign of the “passions” or the “affections of the soul” (“pathêmata tês psuchês [παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς]”), is therefore also the sign of the things signified (the pragmata [πϱάγματα]) by these passions. There is, though, another expression attested as early as the twelfth century, “Nota notae est nota rei” (The nota of a nota is the nota of the thing), which initially has the same meaning as the first formulation, since it simply says the same thing in the language of Boethius’s translation. But it will progressively assume a new meaning, explaining how Merkmal becomes part of a configuration we might describe as “pre-Fregean,” which will lead to the opposition between Merkmal and Eigenschaft. II. Marks of Concepts / Marks of Things By positing that “animal” is not a property of “man,” but a Merkmal of the concept of man, a Fregean means that animal is a “part” of man, or more precisely, that animal is a “part” of MERKMAL 655 the concept man, whereas, for example, it is a “property” of the concept man to “have n individuals,” and a property of a given individual to “fall under the concept man” (which is expressed in the single proposition that the concept has an extension: multiple individuals “fall under the concept”). In a letter published in 1941 (cf. Unbekannte Briefe Freges, ed. Steck, 9), Frege himself explains that the mereological and intensional relation of the marks to the concepts they constitute is comparable to the relation that stones have to the house that they are used to build, and that consists of this building (“Ich vergleiche die einzelnen Merkmale eines Begriffes den Steinen, aus denen ein Haus besteht” [I compare the individual marks of a concept to the stones from which a house is built]). In an article from 1903 on “The Foundations of Geometry” (373), the parts of a concept are presented, in a less visually figurative way, as its “logical parts [logische Teile].” The question that interests us here is not the origin of this new meaning of Merkmal, but rather this: what makes possible, even facilitates, the transition from the pair Merkmal-Zeichen to the opposition Merkmal/Eigenschaft? A part of the history of Merkmal was traced by Kasimir Twardowski in a essay from 1894, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (On the theory of content and of the object of representations). . It is, however, in a text by Adolf Reinach from 1911, Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftschlüsse bei Kant (The supreme rules of reasoning in Kant), that we can find the most original indication of the trajectory that Merkmal takes before Frege. This trajectory, however, takes a surprising material form in the radical change of understanding that the Scholastic saying undergoes: “Nota notae est nota rei.” When Reinach presents the two main rules of reasoning according to Kant, he refers to the 1672 text Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren (The false subtlety of the four syllogistic figures), and makes a distinction between “the general rule of all affirmative reasonings” and “the general rule of all negative reasonings.” The first, R1, is: “Ein Merkmal vom Merkmal ist ein Merkmal der Sache selbst” (A mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself); the second, R2, is: “Was dem Merkmal eines Dinges widerspricht, widerspricht dem Dinge selbst” (What contradicts the mark of a thing contradicts the thing itself). These rules show that, in the “pre-Fregean” use of the term, Merkmal is related to “things,” or rather to “the/a thing,” and not, as in Frege, to “concept” (Begriff) as a part of the concept. Moreover, judgment is defined in relation to “things” in Kant’s short text: “Etwas als ein Merkmal mit einem Dinge vergleichen, heißt Urteilen” (Comparing something as a mark to a thing is called judging). How should we therefore translate Merkmal? Reinach offers a fortuitous indication for a francophone translator when he makes explicit reference to the “Scholastic sayings adapted by Kant” in his two rules: in other words, for R1, “nota notae est etiam nota rei ipsius” (The nota of a nota is also the nota of the thing itself), and for R2, “repugnans notae repugnant rei ipsi” (What contradicts the nota contradicts the thing itself ) (cf. Reinach, Die obersten 1 Merkmal, moment, “trope” Paragraph 13 of Kasimir Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (On the content and object of presentations) is devoted to Merkmal. In referring to the term, Twadrowski does not distinguish between either the level of the concept or the level of things, but between the level of representation (Vorstellung) and that of the object of representation. On this point, he mentions the “eminent authorities” who paved the way for our understanding of the “mark.” The first is Kant, and the introduction to his Logic, from which he gives a long quotation: A distinctive mark is, on a thing, what constitutes a part of the knowledge of this thing, or even a partial representation, which amounts to the same, insofar as it is considered as the basis of the knowledge of the entire representation. All thought is nothing other than the fact of representing itself using distinctive marks. (In Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 171) The second authority is the Aristotelian Adolf Trendelenburg, if we accept Twardowski’s rewriting of the definition proposed in his Logische Untersuchungen (2:255): a Merkmal is “that which forms the concept in the thing [Sache].” Twardowski comments, “Although the meaning of this definition appears to be rather unclear,” it can be justified by “making it more explicit that what is understood by distinctive marks is what ‘in the thing’ provides the necessary material from which the concept of this thing is formed. What corresponds in the thing to the concept are the distinctive marks of this thing” (in Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 172; it is worth noting the distinction he makes between Sache [thing as affair, matter] and Dinge [thing as object]). The third authority is Albert Stöckl (Lehrbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, §75): What we understand by distinctive marks are generally all the moments by which an object is recognized as what it is, and is distinguished from all other objects. (In Husserl and Twardowski, Sur les objets intentionnels, 172) Merkmal is thus a veritable conceptual “exchanger”: with Trendelenburg, it brings together Kant’s “mark,” the world of representation, and Aristotle’s “part of logos [λόγος],” the world of essences; with Stöckl, it opens out onto the Husserlian notion of “moment” (see MOMENT), and thus onto the notion of “trope,” since the Rotomomente (moments of the color red), the individuelle Röte (individual reds) of, or in, a red thing, are defined as Einzelfall (particular cases) of the Spezies Röte (redness species), and for Husserl (Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, §§31, 34, 39) clearly correspond to the tropes of recent trope theory (see TROPE). REFS.: Husserl, Edmund, and Kazimierz Twardowski. Sur les objets intentionnels (1893–1901). Translated into French by J. English. Paris: Vrin 1993. Stöckl, Albert. Lehrbuch der Philosophie. Mainz, Ger.: Kirchheim, 1868. Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf. Logische Untersuchungen. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1964. First published in Leipzig, 1870. 656 MERKMAL “simply confused [confusa tantum]” supposition, and means something that is described; in the minor, it has a “determinate [determinata]” supposition, and means “this something”; see SUPPOSITION.) Aristotle touches on the question on several occasions, particularly when he discusses certain predicates of Man in himself (∅ man) that do not apply to man plain and simple (this man or that man)—for example, “immobile being” (cf. Topics, Ε.7, 137b3–10). The clearest passage is, however, in Metaphysics, Μ.4, 1079b3–11, in which he contrasts the theory of Ideas with a “pre-Fregean” argument: if there is an Idea of the circle, a Circle in itself, the Idea of the circle will have to contain all the marks of the essence of the circle as well as the property of “being an Idea (of).” To what part of the essence will this be added? Remarkably, the note by Tricot (Métaphysique, 2:738), based on the commentary by Bonitz, quotes the passage in which Bonitz uses the term nota to refer to the constitutive elements of the Idea. The “pre-Fregean” thesis is clearly expressed by Leibniz when, faced with the paralogism “animal est genus, Petrus est animal, ergo Petrus est genus” (Animal is a genus, Peter is an animal, therefore Peter is a genus) (of the kind poion ti / tode ti), he replies that the major is not universal, since ∅ animal is not a genus (“maiorem non esse universalem, neque enim is qui est animal est genus,” Defensio Trinitatis, in Die philosophischen Schriften, 4:120), which, as Angelelli points out, amounts to saying that “ ‘genus’ is not a mark of ‘animal’ ” (Studies on Gottlob Frege, 149 n. 56). We also find this thesis prefigured in Albert the Great, when he explains that in “homo praedicatur de pluribus,” the referents of “man” do not have the property of being the predicates of many (“nihil est in appellatis ipsis quod de pluribus praedicatur”), since the predicate “to be the predicates of many” is contingent on the form “man” without being contingent on its referents (“tale enim praedicatum contingit formae, ita quod non contingit appellatis,” Metaphysica, 7.2.1, ed. Geyer, p. 339, 24–29). III. Merkmal and Urteil, “Mark” and “Judgment” A recurrent difficulty of the notion of judgment as an act of “linking marks together” (Merkmalsverknüpfung), governed by Kant’s rules R1 and R2, is distinguishing between R1, the rule of Categories 3b 4–5, and the rule of the “Dictum de omni.” For some authors, there is no difference between the two: “To say: ‘If A is an attribute of every B, and B an attribute of every G, A is an attribute of every G,’ is the same as saying: ‘Everything that can be affirmed of the attribute must be affirmed of the subject’ ” (Tonqueduc, Critique, 54). Others who regularly use the notion of “mark,” like Husserl, reject the formulation “Nota notae est nota rei” (cf. Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, §41). Starting out from the definition of “judgment” as “linking marks together,” we cannot fail to notice the difference that exists between this approach and the “logical” approach to judgment, as it is discussed in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. There, Immanuel Kant indeed points out that he has “never been able to satisfy [himself] with the explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is, they say, the representation of a relation between two concepts [die Vorstellung eines Verhältnisses zwischen zwei Begriffen],” because it “fits only categorical [kategorische Urteile] but not hypothetical [hypothetische] and disjunctive [disjunktive] judgments (which latter two do not Regeln, 51 n. 2). The obvious translation into French of Merkmal would thus be note (note), via the Scholastic Latin. This choice, though, was not uniformly adopted, and marques (marks) and marques distinctives (distinctive marks) are found more commonly. The use of marques in this context has an illustrious precedent. Gottfried Leibniz, writing in French, presents the (Scholastic) notion of a “nominal definition” by proposing that it “explique le nom par les marques de la chose” (explains the name by the marks of the thing) (cf. Die philosophischen Schriften, 5:18): the German and the French are here in agreement. But we can find other equivalents, pertaining to a different field. In the Logique (Logic) of his Cours de philosophie, published in Louvain in 1897, Desiré Mercier uses the term caractères to illustrate an idée inadequate: “L’idée inadequate nous présente l’objet au moyen de caractères qui ne suffisent pas à nous le faire distinguer de tout autre” (An inadequate idea presents an object to us by means of characters that are insufficient to distinguish it for us from any other object; Cours de philosophie, 83). We thus have several pairs expressing the same basic distinction: the distinction nota/res, the German pair Merkmal/Ding, and the French pairs marques/choses and caractères/objet (see OBJECT). What in fact is la chose/Ding that Kant as well as Leibniz discuss? It is an open question: la chose can refer either to man (common or universal), or to this man (singular or particular), or to ∅ man (man as neither universal nor particular, what Kant himself sometimes calls Gegenstand, in the sense of the “matter” [Ger. Materie] of the concept, in other words, the res that is neutral, or indifferent to particular or universal, as opposed to the individual Gegenstand existing in intuition [Ger. Anschauung]). If we consider that ∅ “man” refers to the whole set of “marks” taken “in itself” (Man in himself), the universe of Merkmal is connected to that of the “triplex status naturae” or the “triplex respectus essentiae” (in se, in anima, in re), that of the “indifference of the essence” (see UNIVERSALS). Kant’s rules R1 and R2 open out onto another problematic: the one inaugurated by Aristotle when he postulates in the Categories that “as far as definitions are concerned, the first species include the definition both of the species and of the genera, and the definition of the species includes that of the genus,” and that, “in the same way, species and individuals also include the definition of the differences.” In order to justify this affirmation, Aristotle introduces a rule that recalls R1: “Everything that can be said of the predicate can also be said of the subject [hosa gar kata tou katêgoroumenou legetai, kata tou hupokeimenou rhêthêsetai (ὅσα γὰϱ ϰατὰ τοῦ ϰατηγοϱουμένου λέγεται, ϰατὰ τοῦ ὑποϰειμένου ῥηθήσεται)]” (Categories 3b4–5, trans. Cooke). Besides the paralogisms that are easily dismissed, such as “Socrates is a man, man is a species, therefore Socrates is a species,” the problem for commentators is that of the status of the “predicates of predicates” in Aristotle. (See, among others, the thirteenthcentury Fallaciae ad modum Oxoniae [ed. Kopp, 106–7], which explains that this paralogistic type of reasoning constitutes the third mode of error of the figure of expression, based on a mistaken commutatio of the quale quid—“described,” Greek poion ti [ποιόν τι]—as hoc aliquid, “this something,” Greek tode ti [τόδε τι]; the author of the Fallaciae exposes the error in the analytical language of the suppositio: in the major, homo has a MÊTIS 657 Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen. Edited by Ursula Panzer. Husserliana 19. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kopp, Clemens. “Die ‘Fallaciae ad modum Oxoniae’: Ein Fehlschlußtraktat aus dem 13. Jahrhundert.” Dissertation. Cologne, 1985. Leibniz, Gottfried. Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. Edited by C. J. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1960. Porphyry. Isagoge: Texte grec, translatio Boethii. Translated by Alain de Libera and Alain-Philippe Segonds. Introduction and notes by Alain de Libera. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Translation by Jonathan Barnes: Porphory’s Introduction. With commentary by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Reinach, Adolf. Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftsschlüsse bei Kant. Edited by Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, 1989. Rosier-Catach, Irène. La parole comme acte. Paris: Vrin, 1994. Tonquédec, Joseph. La critique de la connaissance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1929. Twardowski, Kazimierz. On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation. Translated and introduction by R. Grossmann. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. contain a relation of concepts but of judgments themselves [als welche letztere nicht ein Verhältnis von Begriffen, sondern selbst von Urteilen enthalten])” (Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., §19, trans. Guyer and Wood, 251). This implies, among other “troublesome consequences,” that the “widespread doctrine of the four syllogistic figures” in effect “concerns only [betrifft nur] the categorical inferences [die kategorischen Vernunftschlüsse]” (ibid., 251 n. 1). It is also worth noting that this same passage introduces the notion of an “objectively valid” relation of judgment, defining it thus: Diese beiden Vorstellungen sind im Object d.i. ohne Unterschied des Zustandes des Subjects, verbunden und nicht bloß in der Wahrnehmung (so oft sie auch wiederholt sein mag) beisammen. (These two representations are combined in the object, i.e., regardless of any difference in the condition of the subject, and are not merely found together in perception [however often as that might be repeated].) (Ibid., 252 [emphasis added]) With this Object/Subject opposition, we can see that the idea of “combination in the object,” which up to a point is very close to R1, invests the “thing” (Ding) with a new coefficient, which belongs to the universe of the Critique and which assumes the distinction between “empirical intuition” and the “originary synthetic unity of apperception” (the “unity of transcendental apperception”). The change in the lexicon of judgment goes hand in hand with a change in the lexicon of the object. Alain de Libera REFS.: Albertus Magnus [Albert the Great]. Metaphysica, Pars II: Libri 6–13. Edited by Bernhard Geyer. In Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, vol. 16, part 2. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1964. Angelelli, Ignacio. Studies on Gottlob Frege and Traditional Philosophy. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1967. Aristotle. The Categories. Translated by Harold P. Cooke. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. . De interpretatione vel Periermenias. In Aristoteles Latinus, vol. 2, parts 1–2, edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995. . Métaphysique. Translated by Jean Tricot. 2 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1991. Barnes, Jonathan. “Property in Aristotle’s Topics.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 52 (1970): 136–55. Bonitz, H. Aristotelis Metaphysica. 2 vols. Bonn: Marcus, 1848–49. Cunningham, Stanley B. “The Metaphysics of the Good.” In Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great, 93–112. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Frege, Gottlob. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl. Edited by Christian Thiel. Centennial ed. Hamburg: Meiner, 1986. Translation by J. L. Austin: The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number. 5th rev. ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980. . “Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie.” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 12 (1903). . Unbekannte Briefe Freges über die Grundlagen der Geometrie und Antwortbrief Hilberts an Frege. Edited by M. Steck. Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, part 2. Heidelberg: Veiss, 1941. Gates, Henry-Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. MÊTIS [μῆτις] (GREEK) ENGLISH ruse, skill v. RUSE, and ART, DESTINY, DOXA, INGENIUM, MEMORY, PRUDENCE, SOPHISM, TALAT . T. UF, TRUTH, UNDERSTANDING, WISDOM Mêtis [μῆτις], in ancient Greek, covers a wide semantic field, including the idea of practical intelligence, of astuteness, of a supple mind. This mental category had only sporadically caught the attention of scholars (Carlo Diano) before the groundbreaking book by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mêtis des Grecs (Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society). The word derives from a verbal root that means “to measure” (Gr. metron [μέτϱον], mêtra [μήτϱα], “measure”; see LEX, Box 1). It is linked to the important root *med-, whose meaning Benveniste defines as follows: “to take the appropriate measures with authority” (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes; see RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “medô”). This root offers a number of terms signifying measure, moderation, and modality (Lat. modus), as well as the attention of someone who “meditates,” dominates, rules, decides (Gr. medomai [μήδομαι], “to attend to”; but also mêdomai [μέδομαι], “to meditate a plan, to have in mind”), including in the field of law and “medicine.” Mêtis characterizes—for better or for worse; between omnicompetence and charlatanism— the posture adopted by the Sophists, “at the intersection between the traditional mêtis and the new intelligence of the philosopher” (Detienne and Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence). It was destined to become a category in contemporary anthropology, and is associated with the Anglo-Saxon category of the trickster, as well as with Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage. Through a number of interconnected studies, M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant sketched out a vast panorama that presents the whole range of mental attitudes covered by the term mêtis (astuteness, flair, shrewdness, foresight, feigning, disguise, resourcefulness, attention, vigilance, etc.), as well as the role of mêtis in a series of functions and strategies employed by the gods, by men, and by animals. The book begins by analyzing the figure of the Oceanid Mêtis, “Prudence” (this is P. Mazon’s chosen French translation 658 MÊTIS The section of the book dealing with Chronos, Zeus, and the epic heroes, Menelaus, Antilochus, and, above all, Ulysses, is based on the great epic texts and a number of examples from Greek tragedy. For mêtis is essentially a term from the epos, and although the comic theater of Aristophanes is full of ruses, the word never appears, just as we never find it in Herodotus, except in a quotation from Homer, nor in Euripides, and very rarely elsewhere in Greek tragedy. This accounts for the many recent studies devoted to the analysis of mêtis, particularly in the Odyssey, linking the notion to the polytropism of Ulysses, with his “thousand tricks,” as well as to the ironic and treacherous writing of Homer’s text itself (P. Pucci). . The word mêtis is sometimes used in its Odyssean sense by modern critics. Thus, James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State (1999), uses this word to describe the ingeniousness of traditional resourceful peasants who are good with their hands and able to adapt to changing situations, as opposed to rational and scientific technicians, who are abstract and who prefigure industrial agriculture and globalization. Pietro Pucci in Hesiod’s Theogony), the first wife of Zeus, who, in an unforeseen move that is more cunning than astuteness itself, grabs her and swallows her while she is already pregnant with Athena (Theogony, ll. 886–900). Mêtis, which is no less fundamental than in the Orphic version, is added to force, and in the case of Zeus, renders him unbeatable. The semantic field of mêtis is covered by many other notions, such as that of a trap (dolos [δόλος]), of disguise, and above all of technê [τέχνη] (art, skill, and the technical crafts), of kairos [ϰαιϱός], or “the opportune moment” (see MOMENT), of poros [πόϱος] (open passage), and of apatê [ἀπάτη] (ruse, deception; see TRUTH, Box 6). It is under the aegis of this vast semantic field that a number of different strategies are developed in hunting, fishing, war, etc., and used by the gods (especially Athena and Hephaistos), by men (blacksmiths, sailors, etc.), and by animals (the octopus, the fox, etc.). A new horizon is thus invented, opening out onto aspects and ideologies of ancient Greece that had been unknown, and that are symbolized by the practical intelligence of Athena, who distinguishes herself from the master of horses and of the sea, Poseidon, precisely because she uses technique, or mêtis, to make the farmer’s plow, the bit for the horse’s teeth, or the tiller to guide ships. 1 Ulysses: “My name is no-one,” the first dramatization of mêtis v. ESTI, NEGATION, NOTHING, PERSON, WITTICISM Ulysses and his traveling companions are imprisoned on their return journey by the maneating Polyphemus, who, instead of offering them hospitality, devours them two at a time for his meals. How Ulysses carries out his “finest plan” (aristê boulê [ἀϱίστη βουλή]; Odyssey, 9.98) is well known: he offers wine to Cyclops to get him drunk, blinds him while he is asleep using a stake he has hardened in the fire, and he and his companions escape from the den once he has removed the rock from the entrance, each of them hanging underneath a sheep’s stomach. But this audacious plan, which entails tricking a monster, would not succeed without a preparatory ruse involving words, and which can be read in the Greek text through what Victor Bérard called “a cascade of puns.” All of these puns revolve around the relationship between outis [οὖτις] and mêtis. Outis, from the negative particle ou [οὐ] (no, not) and the indefinite pronoun tis [τίς] (someone), is the hero’s name that Odysseus declares to Polyphemus to be his own: “Outis [οὖτις], No-one, is my name. I am called Outis, No-one, by my mother, my father, and all my companions” (366–67). So that when his neighbors the Cyclops, awakened by the screams of Polyphemus, ask him: “Is one (mê tis [μή τίς]) of the mortals coming to steal your flock? Is someone (mê tis [μή τίς]) killing you by ruse or by force?” (406), the monster can only reply: “My friends, no-one is killing me (Outis me kteinei [Oὖτίς με ϰτείνει])” (408). However, because of the Greek syntax of negation, the sentence as a whole is to be understood, from the point of view of Polyphemus for whom No-one is the name of someone, to mean: “[It is] No-one [who] is killing me by ruse and not by force” (Outis me kteinei dolôi oude biêpsin [Oὖτίς με ϰτείνει δόλῳ οὐδὲ βίηψιν]), whereas the Cyclops, for whom no-one is negative, have to understand it to mean: “No-one is killing me, neither by ruse nor by force.” The negative particle ne in the French “ne … personne” (no-one) is particularly useful in translating the Greek here since it is linked to the primarily positive meaning of personne, so if Polyphemus had been a good Frenchman, he might well have made himself understood. The chorus continues: “If no-one uses force on you” (ei mên dê mê tis se biazetai [εἰ μὲν δή μή τίς σε βιάζεται]) (410), it is because Zeus is inflicting an illness on you, and no-one can do anything about it. Now, in this response, just as immediately before in their questions, they rely upon the other negative particle, not ou, a factual negation, but mê [μή], the prohibitive negation, also known as “subjective” negation. This sort of negation is indeed very characteristic of Greek, implying a will or thought, and one finds it essentially in other moods than the indicative as a means of expressing all the nuances of prohibition, of deliberation, of want, and of regret, or, as in this case, of eventuality or of virtuality: ei mê tis se biazetai. This is where, in focusing on this construction that is so attuned to the subtleties of negation, we find the really telling relationship to mêtis. No longer mê (negative particle) tis (someone), as two words, but mêtis, this time as a single word, the celebrated mêtis of the Greeks, their practical and cunning wisdom, embodied in the figure of Odysseus, who has any number of tricks up his sleeve. When he sees the Cyclops heading away, Odysseus laughs into his beard and rejoices in his heart: “It is my name that tricked him, and my irreproachable wit” (hôs onom’ exapatêsen emon kai mêtis amumôn [ὡς ὄνομ᾽ ἐξαπάτησεν ἐμὸν ϰαὶ μῆτις ἀμύμων]) (414). And he uses the word again in book 20, exhorting his heart to be patient: “How courageous you were, in waiting until the mêtis released me from this den where I thought I would die!” (20–21). One can understand why the mêtis of Odysseus, like that of Homer, as an effective mastery of speech, and of the very grammar and syntax of language, and as a play on being and non-being, were the heroic models for Sophistic rhetoric, which philosophers considered to be such a deceptive and scandalous art. REFS.: Bérard, Victor, trans. and ed. L’Odyssée “poésie homerique.” 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. MIMÊSIS 659 theory of imitation that developed starting in the Renaissance and that dominated thinking about art for several centuries. It is found in the idea of imitazione, as well as in those of imitation and Nachahmung, but by way of numerous transformations that affected its meaning deeply. The Italian theorists reinterpreted mimêsis on the basis of the idea of imitatio, transmitted by the Latin that they continued to use. And it was on the basis of the theory of imitatio that they developed a theory of imitazione. It was subsequently on the basis of the idea of imitazione, and in opposition to it, that the French in turn appropriated the Aristotelian theory of mimêsis. And the critique of mimêsis that developed in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century was in fact a calling into question of the French doctrine of imitation that had dominated European thought since the seventeenth century. All these displacements, adaptations, and “translations” from one language to another did no more, in a sense, than develop one of the aspects of the concept of mimêsis and exploit its prodigious semantic richness. I. Mimêsis in Plato and Aristotle A. Theater or painting? Like other words of the same family (mimêtês [μιμητής], mimeîsthai [μιμεῖσθαι], etc.), mimêsis [μίμησις] is related to the noun mîmos [μῖμος]. Initially the term referred only to mime, dance, music, in other words, to activities aimed at expressing an inner reality and not at reproducing external reality. Its application to the visual arts was concomitant with the semantic shift that took place in the fifth century when it began to designate the reproduction of the external world. That new use would play a crucial role in the orientation Plato would give to the problematic of mimêsis. The philosophical elaboration of the concept of mimêsis was in fact born of a reflection on painting and sculpture. To be sure, the first sense of mimêsis subsists in Plato, who persisted in applying the term to music, dance (Laws, 7.798d), and the theater. We thus find the theatrical origin of mimêsis in the distinction between mimêsis and diêgêsis [διήγησις], mimetic discourse corresponding to the forms of tragedy and comedy, as opposed to a simple narrative in which the poet recounts in his own name, without hiding behind a character (Republic, 3.392c–394d). But such uses, which remain traditional, themselves stemmed from the establishment of a new sense of mimêsis based on a reference to the visual arts, and more specifically to painting, that is, a mimetic activity whose characteristic is to imitate outer reality and to do so in an image. The pictorial origin of the concept of mimêsis as elaborated by Plato thus inscribes the analysis of the concept in a field far removed from the one to which it was linked by the theatrical origin of the word. The problem no longer concerns the identity of the subject, the confusion between the actor and the author (as in the case of theatrical mimêsis), but the identity of the object, that is, the relation of the image (eidôlon [εἴδωλον]) to its model. The fact of connecting the question of mimêsis to that of the image gives mimêsis the sense of resemblance or likeness, and the definition of mimêsis as resemblance allows one to condemn pictorial mimêsis as a false and bad likeness, that is, to reject it in the name of the very criterion that it served to elaborate. To be sure, Plato did not reject all forms of pictorial mimêsis, as is evidenced by the division he establishes in The Sophist between two sorts of REFS.: Détienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Translation by Janet Lloyd: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978. Diano, Carlo. Forma ed evento: Principii per una interpretazione del mondo greco. Venice: Pozza, 1952. Faraone, Christopher A., and Emily Teeter. “Egyptian Maat and Hesiodic Metis.” Mnemosyne 57 (2004): 177–208. Ferretto, Carla. “Orione tra ‘Alke’ e ‘Metis.’” Civiltà Classica e Cristiana 3 (1982): 161–82. Goldhill, Simon. The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Holmberg, Ingrid Elisabeth. “The Sign of Metis.’” Arethusa 30 (1997): 1–33. Piccirilli, Luigi. “Artemide et la mêtis di Temistocle.” Quaderni di Storia 13 (1981): 143–46. Pucci, Pietro. Odysseus Polytropos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Richlin, Amy. “Zeus and Metis: Foucalt, Feminism, Classics.” Helios 18 (1991): 160–80. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Solomon, Jon. “One Man’s Metis: Another Man’s Ate.” In Hypatia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Hazel E. Barnes on Her Seventieth Birthday, edited by William M. Calder et al., 79–90. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1985. Schein, Seth L. “Odysseus and Polyphemus in the Odyssey.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 11 (1970): 73–83. Slatkin, Laura M. “Composition by Theme and the Mêtis of the Odyssey.” In Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays, edited by Seth L. Schein, 223–55. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. MIMÊSIS [μίμησις] FRENCH imitation, représentation GERMAN Nachahmung, nachmachen, kopieren, nachbilden ITALIAN imitazione, rassimiglianze; rittrare LATIN imitatio, similitude v. IMITATION, and ACTOR, ANALOGY, ART, BEAUTY, COMPARISON, DESCRIPTION, DICHTUNG, DOXA, HISTORY, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [PHANTASIA], INGENIUM, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH Since the Renaissance, the translation and interpretation of the term mimêsis [μίμησις] have been the source of important philosophical and theoretical debates that have played a crucial role in the history of artistic thought. The development of the theory of art, first in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then in France in the seventeenth century, is fundamentally indebted to the Greek definition of art, in the general sense of techne [τέχνη] and the restricted sense of poiêsis [ποίησις], as a mimetic activity. And that definition, on each occasion, for the French as for the Italians, raised the same questions. In what does artistic imitation consist? What distinguishes it from resemblance, copy, reproduction, and illusion? What is its function: is it in the service of lies or the truth, pleasure, or knowledge? What is its object: is it nature or the idea, the visible or the invisible, the inner world or outer reality? All these questions are inscribed within a problematic largely determined by the semantic ambiguity of the concept of mimêsis in Greek philosophy. They correspond to the dual orientation given to the problematic of mimêsis by Plato and Aristotle, that is, to the opposition between a concept elaborated with reference to a pictorial model, giving mimêsis the meaning of “resemblance,” and a concept elaborated with reference to a theatrical model, giving mimêsis the sense of “representation.” This opposition between two meanings of mimêsis, between Platonic and Aristotelian mimêsis, is in a way constitutive of the 660 MIMÊSIS referential definition of mimêsis with the idea that the imitation can be accurate while being inadequate to its model? This properly conceptual difficulty, evidence of a tension between contradictory demands, is already inscribed in the language. As R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot observe in the notes accompanying their translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, whatever the difference between Aristotelian and Platonic mimêsis, there is “a feature common to verbs of imitation in the two authors: the fundamental ambivalence of the accusative of an object—affected (= model) or effectuated (= copy)—constructed with those verbs.” And it is precisely in order to preserve that ambivalence that they chose to translate mimeîsthai by représenter and not by imiter: “unless there be elements in the context allowing one to discriminate, ‘to represent (représenter) a man’ offers the same ambiguity as mimeîsthai anthrôpon [μιμεῖσθαι ἄνθϱωπον], whereas the traditional translation by imiter (to imitate) abusively selects an interpretation of the accusative as it does that of the model.” This grammatical ambiguity, which allows one to focus the verb on the imitation as well as on the object imitated, is in agreement with the dual descent, both philological and philosophical, of the concept of mimêsis, that is, with the fact that its meaning was constituted to a twofold reference—both theatrical and pictorial. Those two lines of descent determine two distinct ways of envisaging the object of mimêsis. The first, which opens onto a space of fiction, leads one to connect the mimetic activity with its product, the object that Dupont-Roc and Lallot call the “object effectuated,” which is given to be seen and heard in its actual presence—as in a theatrical performance (représentation). The second, which opens onto a world of images, connects it, on the contrary, with its model, what they call the “object affected,” an object whose presence is duplicated in paint on an illusory mode— as in a pictorial imitation. It is plainly that second sense that is dominant in Plato, but without annulling the effects of the other line of descent, which continues to affect the Platonic tradition. The tendency is in some sense reversed in Aristotle, who reinserts the meaning of mimêsis into the realm of poetics. As Ricoeur has written, in mimêsis, according to Aristotle, “one should not understand a reduplication of presence, as might be understood of Platonic mimêsis, but the break which opens up the space of fiction” (Temps et récit). . Just as the theatrical genealogy of mimêsis comes to disturb, in Plato, the coherence of a construction based on a visual paradigm, the Aristotelian analysis of poetic mimêsis, in a movement that is similar but reversed, is haunted by the question of the pictorial image, which draws the problematic of mimêsis in an entirely different direction. The comparison with painting invoked by Aristotle on innumerable occasions, and which attests to the underlying (but active) presence of the pictorial reference, is not made without raising several difficulties. Poetic mimêsis, as defined by Aristotle, is, as is known, a mimêsis of action: it concerns “the imitation [representation] of men in action (prattontas [πϱάττοντας])” (Poetics, 2.1448a 1). Representing action means representing a plot (muthos [μῦθος]): “the Plot is the imitation of the action—for by plot [muthos] I here mean the arrangement of the incidents” (6.1450a 2). This correlation between mimêsis mimêsis: a mimêsis eikastikê [μίμησις εἰϰαστιϰή] and a mimêsis phantastikê [μίμησις φανταστιϰή] (235d–236c). The first consists of reproducing the model by respecting its proportions and imbuing each part with the appropriate colors: an art of the accurate copy. The second, on the other hand, involving above all works of large dimensions (which thus need to be viewed at a distance), deforms the exact proportions and uses colors that do not correspond to those found in reality. This mimetic does not seek to reproduce the real as it is, but as it appears to the spectator given his point of view— “these artists give up the truth in their images (tois eidôlois [τοῖς εἰδώλοις]) and make only the proportions that appear to be beautiful, disregarding the real ones” (ou tas ousas summetrias, alla tas doxousas einai kalas [οὐ τὰς οὔσας συμμετϱίας ἀλλὰ τὰς δοξούσας εἶναι ϰαλάς]) (236a 4–6)—and it is there, of course, that we find lodged the art of sophistry, always considered “relativistic” (268c–d). It is a mimetics that does not reproduce being but appearance: a “phantastics,” then, which is translated as the art of the “simulacrum” or of “illusion” (see PHANTASIA): it is, in keeping with good Platonic doctrine, to be condemned under the double heading of imprecision and deception, simultaneously because it is at a remove from truth and because it would have us believe its truth. Now there is “a great deal of this kind of thing in painting” (pampolu kata tên zôgraphian [πάμπολυ ϰατὰ τὴν ζωγϱαφίαν]) (236b 9). The quality of the mimêsis is to be gauged by the standard of its reference, evaluated in terms of accuracy and exactitude, that is, as a function of criteria that belong to the realm of knowledge and truth: in the arts of imitation, “it is first of all equality, whether of quality or quantity, that gives truth or rightness (tên orthotêta [τὴν ὀϱθότητα])” (Laws, 2.667d 5–7). This strictly referential conception of mimêsis nonetheless poses several problems with relation to the image—that is, as soon as one applies it to the type of imitation on which the Platonic theory of mimêsis is, in fact, based. The criteria of good mimêsis in the sense of likeness cannot be those of mimêsis in the sense of reproduction. An image that would reproduce the dimensions and all the characteristics of its model would no longer be an image but an identical duplicate of the original. One would no longer have Cratylus and the image of Cratylus, but two Cratyluses: Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in images (“allên chrê eikonos orthotêta zêtein” [ἄλλην χϱὴ εἰϰόνος ὀϱθότητα ζητεῖν]), and also in names; and not insist that an image is no longer an image when something is added or subtracted. Do you not perceive that images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent (“hosou endeousin hai eikones ta auta echein ekeinois hôn eikones eisin” [ὅσου ἐνδέουσιν αἱ εἰϰόνες τὰ αὐτὰ ἔχειν ἐϰείνοις ὧν εἰϰόνες εἰσίν])? Cratylus, 432c 7–d 2 B. Resemblance or representation? How is the resemblance of an image to be thought? How are we to think that other accuracy that presupposes the existence of a deviation between the product of the imitation and the object imitated? How are we to reconcile the MIMÊSIS 661 of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. 2.1448a 1–9; trans. S. H. Butcher If the definition of mimêsis as a mimêsis of plot or action links poetry to history—from which it is distinguished, moreover, since actions are represented on stage by characters who are themselves in action—mimêsis of character, on the contrary, leads one to a linkage with painting, and more precisely with a genre of painting that raises in the most pointed manner the question of likeness, namely, that of portraiture. This twofold reference—to history and portraiture—attests anew to the impossibility of giving an unequivocal definition of mimêsis. If the mimêsis-muthos link fully justifies the translation of mimêsis as “representation,” the existence of that other link, between mimêsis and portraiture, attests to the permanence, in Aristotle, of an interpretation of mimêsis in terms of image and thus of likeness, which would justify an occasional return to translating mimêsis as “imitation.” As is the case in chapter 4, in which Aristotle suspends the Platonic condemnation of artistic imitation by assigning from the outset a cognitive function to the pleasure procured by mimetic activity, a tendency said to be inscribed in human nature. This pleasure in recognition, which, for Aristotle, lies at the source of knowledge, is directly linked to the existence and muthos by way of plot results in giving primacy to plot over characters in the definition of tragedy: “The plot (ho muthos [ὁ μῦθος]), then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character (ta êthê [τὰ ἤθη]) holds the second place” (6.1450a 38–39). The comparison with painting, which intervenes immediately following this sentence, justifies that hierarchy by establishing a parallel between outline and plot, on the one hand, and color and character, on the other: “A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.” But this comparison, which is in some sense structural and which establishes a hierarchical correspondence between the parts entering into the composition of a poem and those entering into the composition of a painting, agrees poorly with the one developed in chapter 2, again on the subject of character. It rests on an entirely different distinction that, in this case, calls into play the idea of resemblance or likeness: Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type . . ., it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life. Now it is evident that each of the modes 1 The translation of mimêsis as “representation” in Aristotle One of the strongest aspects of R. DupontRoc and J. Lallot’s translation into French of Aristotle’s Poetics is indeed the way it takes into account the dual philological and philosophical natures of the questions raised by the translation of mimêsis. The reasons they give to justify their choice of translating mimêsis as representation are of course first and foremost philological: “We can now see why, against an entire tradition, we chose to translate mimeîsthai not as ‘to imitate’ but as ‘to represent’: the decision was thus made on the basis of the theatrical connotations of this verb, and above all the possibility, as is also the case with mimeîsthai, of having the complement be either the ‘model’ object or the produced object—whereas ‘to imitate’ excluded the latter, which is the most important.” But this choice also reflects a properly philosophical concern to account for the specificity of the Aristotelian conception of mimêsis in relation to the Platonic one, that is, a concern to resolve the many confusions and misinterpretations produced by the translation of mimêsis in the two authors as “imitation.” Their translation thus has the great advantage of clarifying a conceptual difference by inscribing it into a lexical distinction, that is, of clarifying retrospectively the Greek text itself. But it also adds a further degree of complexity to a history that is already fairly complicated, and the meaning of “representation” nowadays is indeed no less equivocal than the meaning of “imitation” was then. If “imitation” pulls mimêsis towards “resemblance” by conceiving of it as part of a problematic that was based on the paradigm of the image, “representation” draws us on the other hand to a theory of the sign founded on a linguistic model. Its present-day meaning has largely been determined by a history that has its origins in the seventeenth century, notably with the logicians of Port-Royal, and that was extensively developed in the twentieth century in the field of discourse theory. If the theatrical connotation of representation is still there in the everyday usage of the term, it has to a large extent disappeared from theoretical usage, where its connotation is primarily semiotic, including the application of the word to the analysis of the pictorial image. The way in which the term is nowadays used pervasively in art criticism, where it tends to replace the term “image,” is particularly interesting in this respect. To think the image as representation amounts to thinking the image as sign, and thus to obliterating its specifically visual dimension, which is still present in the word “imitation.” It is thus hardly surprising that the translation of mimêsis as “representation” is consonant with certain recent analyses that have been undertaken in the context of the philosophy of language, independently of any philological or historical concern. So Kendall Walton, for example, in the opening pages of his book Mimêsis as Make Believe, is careful to warn his reader that the word mimêsis, as he uses it, has to be understood in the sense of representation, that is, without reference to any theory of resemblance or imitation. He immediately goes on to say, however, that if the meaning of mimêsis corresponds for him to that of “representation,” it is in the particular sense that he himself gives to the term “representation”! It was doubtless in order to avoid all of these ambiguities that Walton preferred to return to the Greek term, but without translating it. REFS.: Aristotle. La poétique. Translated by R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Walton, Kendall. Mimêsis as Make Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. 662 MIMÊSIS techne is distinguished from praxis, those two terms then corresponding to two different modes of regulated and finalized activity: “the disposition to act accompanied by a rule [τῆς ποιητιϰῆς ἕξεως]” (6.4.1140a 3–5; see PRAXIS). The theory of imitation, as it was to develop in the Renaissance and the classical age, would give a new meaning to the link between the idea of art and that of rules by redefining the rule within an artistic realm that affirmed and was intent on defending its autonomy in relation to the domain of “mechanical” activities. The misinterpretation of the Aristotelian idea of mimêsis was thus not the cause, but in fact the effect of the labor of reinterpretation that the transformation of the artistic domain (and the new stakes with which art was charged) made necessary. . II. From the Imitation of the Visible to the Expression of the Invisible: The Powers of the Imago In chapter 1 of his book published in 1637, De pictura veterum libri tres, a veritable summa of humanist thinking about art, Franciscus Junius enumerates the different definitions of imitation. After citing chapter 4 of the Poetics, the preface to Eikones, and book 2 of the Life of Apollonios by Philostratus, he writes: “In any event, for grammarians, image (imago) means what proceeds from imitation (imitago).” This sentence bears witness to the transformation visited on the idea of imitation through the transition from mimêsis to imitatio, as a result of the connection established in Latin between imitatio and imago. In this sense, the history of imitatio becomes inseparable from that of imago. Imago belongs to the same semantic field as simulacrum, signum, effigies, and even exemplar and species. Signifying the imitation of a portrait, the word imago was applied to the image of the deceased. It designated the mask made from the imprint of a face. Initially referring to ancestral cults, it also designated, in classical Latin, the image of the gods, associated with terms referring to the realm of the sacred. The transformation of the meaning of imago in the course of the Middle Ages by the theological problematic of the image would simultaneously modify the meaning of imitatio by inscribing it in a new network of signification articulated around the idea of likeness, but a likeness or resemblance that was also thought in new terms, as evidenced by the extraordinarily complex use of “similitude” and its offshoots. The meaning taken on by imitatio in the fourteenth century, for example, in the expression imitatio Christi, illustrates the amplitude and the nature of this transformation. The use of imitatio refers in this case to a problematic of resemblance that developed from a reinterpretation of imago, the relation of son to father and that of man to God, giving a radically new meaning to the term. The idea according to which man had been created in the image of God required one to no longer think of the resemblance of the imago solely in terms of a copy, but also in terms of an analogy. Under the influence of Neoplatonic doctrines (Boethius, Scotus Erigenus, and above all the School of Chartres), analogical thinking would bring about a complete re-elaboration of the meaning of imitatio as applied to artistic activities. To a theorist of the Middle Ages, the artist seeks to imitate the of images, that is, to grasping a likeness or resemblance: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness chairousi tas eikonas horôntes [χαίϱουσι τὰς εἰϰόνας ὁϱῶντες]) is that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he’ ” (1448b 15). C. Nature or history? The definition of art in general and of painting in particular has often received legitimacy, notably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the authority of Aristotle. Even at present, numerous interpreters see clear evidence of the influence of the Stagirite on the constitution of the theory of art. Yet although that theory does indeed borrow its elements from Aristotle, there is no basis for attributing to him such a determination of art. It conflates in a single idea definitions that, in Aristotle, belong to quite different registers. It associates with painting, and more generally with the arts in the modern, artistic sense of the term, that is, to activities that belonged, for Aristotle, to the realm of poetics, the definition that the philosopher gives for techne (τέχνη) in the Physics: “Generally speaking, art (techne) either executes what nature is impotent to effectuate or imitates it. If, then, artificial things are produced with a view to a certain end, it is clear that this is equally the case for the things of nature; for in artificial as well as in natural things, antecedents and consequences have between them the same relation” (2.8.199a.15). Poetic mimêsis is referred by Aristotle not to nature but to history; it is an imitation of human actions (mimêsis praxeôs [μίμησις πϱάξεως]). Attributing to Aristotle the idea according to which art, in the artistic sense, is an imitation of nature thus implies a transfer of meaning from the realm of physics to that of poetics, from art in the sense of techne to art in the sense of poiêsis [ποίησις]. The translation of techne as ars, then as “art,” the fact that Greek does not possess a term to designate what we call “art” in the sense of the fine arts, that is, the fact that it conflates in a single term two things that European languages, since the Renaissance, have strained to distinguish, namely, the art of the artist, the painter or sculptor, and the art of the artisan or worker (a distinction renewing one established in the Middle Ages between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts; see ART) are certainly not unrelated to this transfer. And that in itself would undoubtedly not have been possible if the meaning attributed by Aristotle to mimêsis, mimeîsthai, when those words refer to images and not plots, had not in some way included a space to welcome and incorporate it. The fusion, in a new conception of art, of mimêsis in the sense of an imitation of actions and mimêsis in the sense of an imitation of nature may have received its authority from the secondary sense that mimêsis has within the Poetics itself. We are dealing here with one of the multiple transformations that allowed the Poetics, starting with the Renaissance, to become a foundational text for the theory of painting. It effectively allowed one to reassign priority to the pictorial paradigm in the definition of mimêsis. And also to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the synthesis previously effected in the Middle Ages, by way of the word ars, between the definition of techne given in the Physics, where techne is opposed to phusis [φύσις], and the one found in the Nicomachean Ethics, where MIMÊSIS 663 Bonaventure writes, with reference to the classical theories of rhetoric: “Dicitur imago quod alterum exprimit et imitator” (It is said that the image expresses something other than what it imitates) (quoted by De Bruyne). The transformation of imitatio in relation to that of imago adds to the horizontal definition of imitation as outer likeness a twofold dimension, both vertical and in depth, expressiveness being characterized as a movement from inner to outer and from low to high. The first consequence of this transformation is to allow theologians to resolve in a manner favorable to images the thorny question that had been raised by the iconoclasts and that would be endlessly renewed until the Council of Trent, namely, the question of the worship of images (see OIKONOMIA). The second is plainly to furnish a major argument for legitimating artistic activity. The theoretical labor of Scholastic thought consisted of giving substance, an ontological dimension, to concepts such as imago or forma and to confer on them a properly theological function. III. From Imitatio to Imitazione: Renaissance Theories of Art It was thus this rather complicated history, extending over several centuries, that the humanist thought of the Renaissance would inherit. It was on that basis that the Italian theoreticians returned to the Greek and Latin texts that they discovered in the original, those of Aristotle, Plato, Horace, and Cicero. They were related to the problematic of mimêsis through the mediation of a field in which the idea of imitatio was gradually inscribed. A. Hesitations in vocabulary The definition of art as imitation first developed in the domain of the visual arts, giving to imitare, imitazione, the meaning of likeness, an image faithful to visible reality. The idea visible world created by God as the creative work of God, to create in the image of God by prolonging the activity of nature. The relations between human creation and divine creation are governed by a principle of concordance and similitude, resting on the application of the rules of harmony, proportion, symmetry, and clarity, which the artist discovers in himself as in nature, and which allow him to attain that beauty which is nothing other than the visible manifestation of the divine splendor. The artist imitates not only natura naturata, but also natura naturans. As Panofsky writes, “the thesis according to which art imitates nature as much as possible or rather imitates according to nature, means that a parallel (but not a relation) is being set up between art and nature: art (under which rubric one must naturally and perhaps principally understand as well the artes that are foreign to the three arts based on drawing) does not imitate what nature creates, but works in the manner in which nature creates, pursuing, through specific means, objectives that are themselves defined, by realizing determined forms in materials that are themselves determined” (Idea). The visible form achieved by the artist is the material expression of a form immanent to his mind or imagination (fantasia) that the artist discovers in his contemplation of the visible world. In imitating the visible, art expresses the invisible. Commenting on a sentence of Robert Grosseteste: “Forma est exemplar ad quod respicit artifex ut ad ejus imitationem et similitudinem formet suum artificium” (The form is the idea that the artist has in sight in order to produce the imitations and likenesses of his art),” Edgar De Bruyne writes as follows: “The material work does not necessarily and faithfully copy the visible form but inevitably it expresses the representation of what the artist conceives in his soul. It is that spiritual model that the form imitates above all else” (Etudes d’esthétique médiévale). As Saint 2 Alberti’s window The new definition of painting that was developed during the Renaissance would mean that these different and initially heterogeneous levels of meaning were able to coexist, and this coexistence would sometimes bring with it certain contradictions. Far from being a sign of logical inconsistency, these contradictions in fact attested to the difficulty that the first theoreticians of art had in combining the two senses of mimêsis in a fully unified theory. The definition of a painting as an “open window,” which we find in book 1 of Alberti’s De pictura, is in this respect exemplary, particularly in light of the endless misunderstandings to which it has given rise. For Alberti, this window frames a narrative representation; it does not open out onto nature but onto a story: “First of all about where I draw. I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see the story (historia) I want to paint” (English translation, slightly modified; in the Italian translation of his treatise, Alberti uses the word storia which, like historia, corresponds to Aristotle’s muthos [on the two versions of Alberti’s treatise, see BEAUTY]). But this definition does not match the one we find elsewhere in the text, where pictorial representation is characterized by its function of showing, that is, its function as an image: “No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing (repraesentare) what can be seen.” This explains how this analogy with the window could have been interpreted in a sense that was completely alien to Alberti’s thought, as a window opening out onto the visible world, like those vedute one comes across in so many Renaissance paintings. We find the same ambivalence in Poussin a century later. In one of his last letters, he defined painting as “an imitation, made up of lines and colors on some surface, of whatever is visible under the sun” (letter to Fréart de Chambray, 2 March 1665). But elsewhere he writes that “painting is nothing but the imitation of human actions,” this second definition of imitation conforming to the Aristotelian idea of poetic mimêsis, since it was in fact a translation of a sentence by Torquato Tasso, which Poussin contented himself with copying out by replacing the word “poetry” with the word “painting.” REFS.: Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated by J. Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Poussin, Nicolas. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin. Paris: Fernand de Nobèle, 1968. 664 MIMÊSIS vernacular would be accompanied by numerous distinctions attesting to the permanence of the difficulties encountered. In his Tratatto delle perfette proporzioni, published in 1567, Vicenzo Danti, basing himself on the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history, thus proposed to reserve imitare for art and to use ritrarre to designate an imitative likeness, one that reproduces things as one sees them. (Ritrarre from the Lat. ritrahere, “to pull backward”—as in Fr. retirer [withdraw] or retrait—initially had the general meaning of representing, describing, recounting; applied to painting, it took on the meaning of a representational likeness.) Already in Ceninni, one encounters the expressions retrarre da natura or ritrarre naturale (Il libro del arte). As for Castelvetro, the author of an Italian translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, published in 1570, which would be strenuously challenged by the French during the following century, he chose to translate mimêsis as rassomiglianze, resemblance, and not as imitazione. . B. Imitate nature or the idea? These divergences found in the Italian translators, whether translating into Latin or the vernacular, illustrate the extreme diversity of conceptions competing (and doing so without cease) over a span of several centuries. The uncontested reign of the idea of imitation from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century would never imply the existence of a systematic and unified theory of imitation. As previously stated, the problem of imitation was first posited in the realm of painting before being taken up and formulated in very different terms by theoreticians of poetics. Was one to imitate nature or the idea, an external model or an inner model, the real or the beautiful? Ought the painter to seek to render visible reality as faithfully as possible, in that art was to imitate nature appeared among painters and theoreticians of painting at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is found in Alberti (De pictura, III, 1435), Ghiberti (I commentarii, 1436), and even in Leonardo, who stated that the painting most deserving of praise was that which was faithful to the thing imitated (“conformità co’la cosa imitata”) (Trattato della pittura, fragment 411, in Libro di pittura). It was not until the second half of the sixteenth century and the dissemination of Aristotle’s Poetics that the concept of imitation would be applied to the poetic arts, thus taking on a new meaning. (The first Latin translation of the Poetics from the original, by Lorenzo Valla, appeared in 1498; the Greek text was printed for the first time in 1503. In the second half of the sixteenth century, numerous translations in the vernacular appeared, accompanied by commentaries, along with poetics of Aristotelian inspiration.) How is one to reconcile Aristotelian mimêsis with the idea of imitatio and above all with that of imitazione as it is expressed in the realm of painting? That conceptual difficulty first presented itself as a problem of translation. How was one to translate mimêsis? If imitatio, borrowed from classical Latin, finally prevailed in Renaissance Latin, certain translators nonetheless hesitated with regard to that term as an adequate rendering of the sense of mimêsis. It was thus that in 1481, the translator of Averroes opted for assimilatio, while Fracastoro, in the following century, anticipating the solution proposed by Depont-Roc and Lallot, thought that one could opt for either “imitation” or “representation”: “sive imitari, sive representare dicamus” (Naugerius; sive de Poetica dialogues). The complete triumph of imitatio and its Italian derivative, imitazione, which would in turn give birth to the French and English variants of imitation, would not be sufficient to remove all those hesitations. The transition to the 3 The resemblance of the portrait The use of the word ritratto, derived from ritrarre, to refer to a portrait illustrates the richness of the identification between portrait and resemblance that made the portrait the paradigm of resemblance, and thus of painting as a lifelike image (just as the words po(u)rtraire and po(u)rtraiture were used in the seventeenth century to mean painting in general). But this identification also explained why the portrait came to be considered as an inferior genre in terms of the hierarchy of genres elaborated in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics, and which implied the primacy of narrative painting. How could the status of the portrait as a genre be defended from the perspective of Aristotelian criteria? It was precisely in order to resolve this difficulty that an author such as Mancini proposed making a distinction between two types of portrait: il rittrato simplice, or simple portrait, conforming to the Platonic definition of mimêsis eikastikê [μίμησις εἰϰαστιϰή], which “expresses nothing more than the dimension, proportion, and resemblance of the thing it imitates (similitudine della cosa que imita),” and il rittrato con azione et espressione d’affetto, or portrait with action and passion, in which there is “besides resemblance (similitudine), action and passion, which is imitated (imitandosi) by representing (rappresentar) the mode of this passion (il modo di quell’affetto)” (Mancini, Considerazione sulla pittura). Of course, the variety of terms used by Mancini—similitudine, imitare, rappresentar—and the link between action and passion, which connects the problematic of action to that of the expression of emotions, attest to the changes that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance brought to bear on Aristotle’s mimêsis, as well as Plato’s. But this distinction between two genres of portrait, as foreign as it is to Aristotle’s thought, was a response to the difficulty that originates with the double meaning Aristotle gives to mimêsis, depending on whether he relates the term to discourse or to the image. Roger de Piles would also invoke Aristotle in describing the portrait genre, yet used a different argument: “If painting is an imitation of nature, it is doubly so with respect to the portrait, which not only represents man in general, but such and such a man in particular” (Cours de peinture par principes). REFS.: de Piles, Roger. Cours de peinture par principes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. First published in 1708. Hénin, Emmanuelle. Ut pictura theatrum. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Mancini, Giulio. Considerazione sulla pittura. Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956–57. First published ca. 1620. MIMÊSIS 665 for a painter. He imitates with words, not images. His imitation, contrary to the painter’s, cannot be conceived in terms of resemblance. The theory of disegno was in this respect characteristic of the reversal effected by ut pictura poesis, that is, by the comparison between painting and poetry (see COMPARISON); by referring image to idea, to concetto, it defined pictorial imitation on the model of poetic imitation. This dissociation between imitation and likeness is at the origin of most of the problems posed by the idea of imitation in the field of poetics. How is one to reconcile the definition of poetry as imitation with the various licenses that are part of poetic invention? Does not the referential character of the idea of imitation contradict that right to be all-daring that Horace ascribes to the poet? Some did not hesitate to denounce the perils of a theory that imposed far too narrow limits on artistic activity. The poet, Patrizi would say, is not an imitator but a facitor, facitor being in this case a perfect equivalent for the Greek poietes (Della poetica). The opposition between imitator and facitor nonetheless raises a genuine problem. The poet does indeed fabricate fictions. Whereas the idea of imitation allows one to ascribe to art a function relating to knowledge and thus to truth, the idea of fiction implies one relating to mendacity and falsehood. In the Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville had labored to distinguish falsum from fictum, but his distinction had barely left a trace. In the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, a number of theoreticians of art would continue to speak of the beautiful lies—or even the innocent lies—of art, thus using for the benefit of art the very argument that had long served, and would continue to serve, to condemn it. D. Imitating the masters: The problem of invention The conception of imitation elaborated in the Renaissance on the basis of readings of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero enabled a partial resolution of the opposition between imitation and fiction. Poetic invention can be legitimated by the authority of ancient authors. But that very authority brought to the fore a new difficulty that radically transformed the elements of the problem of mimêsis and formulated it in new terms. Imitation was no longer conceived solely with reference to nature but also in relation with the ancients, whose works were posited as models of the imitation of nature. The imitation became in a way an imitation to the second degree, the imitation of an imitation: art was to imitate art in order to imitate nature. This notion according to which art was to rest on an imitation of the masters constituted the true novelty of the theory of imitation as it developed in the framework of humanism. But it would also give rise to a number of reservations, particularly among artists and theorists invoking a Platonic conception of art, such as those of the Academy of Florence, who were rather hostile to the principle of imitation. Although they recognized a pedagogical value in the imitation of the ancients, they refused to regard the ancients as unsurpassable models to whom the artist was to submit. The debate provoked by the idea of a model in the realm of poetry was thus in all ways analogous to one previously evoked on the subject of painting, even if it was formulated in different terms. The story of Zeuxis took on paradigmatic value not only for the painter but also for the poet, on the condition that the beauties of art be substituted its details and with its imperfections, or, on the contrary, to render visible that ideal image of beauty that exists only in the mind or the imagination, on the model of the perfect orator as described by Cicero in a passage of the Orator that all theoreticians of painting would refer to for centuries (see BEAUTY and DISEGNO)? However important it was, the influence of Neoplatonism and Ciceronianism on thinking about art during the Renaissance is insufficient to explain the existence, or even the meaning, of such a series of questions. Like all questions addressed to painting, they have their source, first of all, in the very history of that art. They refer to what might be called painting stories, in this case to those of two paintings of Zeuxis, recounted by Pliny. In one, Zeuxis had painted grapes that were so well imitated that birds swooped down on the canvas. In the other, he had the most beautiful virgins of Crotona pose for him. Unable to find perfect beauty in a single model, he had borrowed from each what she had that was most beautiful. These two tales would long assume paradigmatic value in reflections on the idea of imitation in the field of painting. The first legitimates a realist interpretation of imitation as likeness, and would be constantly invoked by all those who praised the illusionary powers of painting (the mirror and the monkey are two traditional emblems of painting). The second functions in favor of a more intellectualist conception of imitation, submitting imitazione to the idea and the concetto, and whose purpose is no longer to give an illusion of the real through a faithful likeness with things, but to attain perfection and beauty (see CONCETTO). Thus did Alberti, referring to the story of Zeuxis and the virgins of Crotona, recommend to the painter to imitate several models because it is impossible to find perfect beauty in a single body. Such was the method used by Raffaello, as he confessed in a letter to Castiglione on the subject of the difficulty he had in finding a model to paint his Galatea: “Since there is a penury of good judges and beautiful women, I make use of a certain idea (certa idea), which comes to my mind (mente).” It is that certa idea discussed by Raffaello that the artist imitates through his disegno. To defend “il primato del disegno” in painting, as the Florentines did, implies a Platonic (or rather Neoplatonic) conception of imitation as imitation of a mental representation to which the painter relates as to a model in his imitation of things. Reviving a theological problematic developed in the Middle Ages, Zuccaro would go so far as to make of the disegno interno an imprint of divinity, a segno di dio, and thus to define painting as an activity that consists not in imitating things but in acting in a way resembling God ( L’Idea de’pittori, scultori, et architetti; see DISEGNO). C. To imitate is not to lie: The problem of fiction Adopted by theoreticians of poetics, the idea of imitation would undergo a certain number of transformations that would affect in turn the pictorial conception of imitation. First, because they often expressed themselves in Latin, and even while writing in Italian, they would think of imitazione as a translation of mimêsis and imitatio. Associated with the translation and interpretation of texts, consideration of the subject took on a more scholarly cast. Moreover, it was inevitable that the application of the principle of imitation to the language arts would inflect its meaning in a new direction. For a poet, imitating does not mean the same thing as 666 MIMÊSIS perspective of grammarians or philosophers. Since they had more experience of study and speculation than of the theater, reading them can make us more erudite, but will not shed much light on which we can depend for success in the theater” (Discours de l’utilité du poème dramatique). Corneille’s refusal to dissociate theory from practice attests to a change in perspective that affected the entire range of reflection about art in the seventeenth century. Whether focused on theater or painting, aesthetic theory developed in France on the basis of art and was elaborated principally by artists. The redefinition of the idea of imitation was largely a function of this very specific feature of aesthetic theory in France. If imitation was always posited as a principle, it was above all conceived as a problem, or rather as a set of problems that it fell precisely to artists to solve. Now the nature of those problems (as of the solutions given them) was itself determined by the subordination of the principle of imitation to the pleasure principle, which displaced the idea of imitation by integrating it into a problematic that was no longer one of the causes of art, but rather of its effects. Painting is an imitation, Poussin would say, and “its end is delectation” (letter to Fréart de Chambray, 2 March 1665). For the French, if imitation did indeed define the nature of art, it was not its aim. The sole aim of art was to please, and it was always in terms of that aim that the principle of imitation was conceived. Its application was entirely subject to that finality. Defining artistic imitation thereupon consisted in determining the rules through which imitation could achieve that goal: “The principal rule is to delight and to stir the emotions,” wrote Racine in his preface to Bérenice. “All the others have been forged only to satisfy that first one.” Corneille, like many others, did not, moreover, hesitate to ascribe that notion to Aristotle at the beginning of his first Discours on dramatic poetry: “Even though the sole aim of dramatic poetry for Aristotle was to delight the audience.” . This definition of imitation in terms of pleasure illustrates the influence exercised by thinking about rhetoric on artistic theory. It effectively has its source in the hierarchy established by Cicero between the finalities of the art of oratory: docere (to instruct), delectare (to delight), movere (to move), and which gives pride of place to movere. The application of the Ciceronian problematic to the realm of the poetic and visual arts would be accompanied in France by numerous debates attesting to the same difficulties as those already encountered by theoreticians of rhetoric in aligning the necessities of docere with the exigencies of movere. If some went so far as to call into question the pedagogical and moral purpose of art, all were in agreement in denying it priority and in affirming with Racine that the principal rule of art was to delight and to stir the emotions. Which does not at all mean that they refused to ascribe to art a value rooted in knowledge. On the contrary, since that value was attributed to pleasure itself, as in La Fontaine, whose art was undoubtedly the best example of that harmonious and perfectly balanced synthesis between the exigencies of pleasure and those of knowledge, which corresponded to the classical ideal of perfection. for those of nature. No model was perfect enough for it to have sufficed for the artist to imitate it in order to achieve beauty. This is why it was necessary to imitate several models and above all to imitate them with discernment, as Pico wrote in the course of the polemic that pitted him against Bembo on the idea of imitation: “Imitandum inquam bonos omnes, non unum aliquem, nec omnibus etiam in rebus” (I say that one must imitate all good writers, not merely one, and not in everything). It is not in authors who wrote before him that the poet finds the source of his inspiration, he said, but in a “certain inner idea” (idea quaedam), which is not without evoking the certa idea of Raffaello. To the normative conception of imitation defended by Bembo, Pico thus opposed a critical relation to the tradition compatible with the freedom of the poet and his originality: “Inventio enim tum laudatur magis, cum genuine est magis, et libera” (Since the more an invention is free and original, the more is it worthy of praise). Conceived as inventio, imitation was transformed into true emulation, allowing the artist to surpass his models and to create works superior to those of the past. In authors writing in Latin, imitatio, moreover, was gradually cast aside to the benefit of inventio. That term, borrowed from rhetoric, did not have the modern sense of inventing. Inventio harmonized with the idea of imitation, as opposed to creatio, which belonged to the lexicon of theology. IV. From Imitazione to Imitation: French Aristotelianism A. The ends of imitation The Poetics played a major role in the birth and development of the theory of art in France in the seventeenth century. Whether defining art in general or various forms of artistic representation, pondering the nature of tragedy or that of historical painting, establishing the rules governing the composition of a dramatic poem or those intervening in the composition of a painting, classical theorists for the most part sought inspiration in Aristotle and borrowed most of their categories from him. They did not, however, have at their disposal a French translation of the Poetics until 1671, the date on which Norville’s version appeared, followed in 1692 by Dacier’s. It was thus initially by way of Italian translations, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, that Aristotelian thinking on art penetrated into France, as well as by way of Italian (but also Dutch) exercises in poetics, such as those of Daniël Heinslus (De tragediae constitutionae, 1511) or Gerald Jan Vossius (De artis poeticae, 1647), which would have a great influence on French thought. Even when they read Greek, the French related to Aristotelian mimêsis by way of its re-elaboration via the idea of imitatio and imitazione. Those translations were the object of a certain number of critiques whose stakes broadly exceeded the framework of a narrowly philological dispute. In contesting the interpretation of mimêsis given by the Italians, what was at stake was also affirming the originality of the French theory of artistic imitation, along with the superiority of French over Latin and Italian. The principal reproach addressed to the Italians was having obscured Aristotle’s text as a result of not knowing anything about the art of the theater. Most interpreters, Corneille wrote, explained it only “from the MIMÊSIS 667 of Port-Royal, who would notably apply it to the problem of the Eucharist: the bread and wine represent the body of Christ but do not resemble it. But it was plainly in the realm of painting that its effects would be most conspicuous, giving a new orientation to the debates that had until then inspired the idea of imitation. . The other transformation clearly concerns the concept of nature, which took on a new sense in the seventeenth century, both on the physical and the metaphysical levels. If the word “nature” continued to designate the visible world for painters, it became charged at the same time with numerous meanings that combined in a more or less confused or contradictory way in the language of artists. It was at times taken in an empirical sense, as a synonym of observable reality, at others in a rational sense, as a synonym of essence, rule, law, at still others in a normative sense, as a synonym of beauty and truth, and most of the time in all those senses simultaneously. It referred as much to the object of artistic imitation as to the effects which that imitation sought to produce. In all cases, it implied the idea of a model, whether the model to be imitated or as a model for imitation. The re-elaboration of the idea of imitation on the basis of a problematic of representation, like the new significations attributed to the word “nature,” explain the fact that the definition of art as an imitation of nature did not have the same meaning for the French as for the Italians. More Aristotelian than Platonist, the French were less interested in the powers of the idea than in the necessity for rules (of composition, construction, design, color, etc.). As Cartesians, they thought that even the most extravagant fictions originate in a “certain mix and composition” of parts that are not “imaginary, but true and existent,” as Descartes puts it in his first Meditation, taking as his example precisely the B. Imitating according to nature and the true What is a good imitation? How to distinguish between imitation and likeness? What does it mean to imitate nature? What is the nature of the model to be imitated? Although the French raised the same questions, on the whole, as their Italian predecessors, they nonetheless posed them in a palpably different manner. That difference was not solely a function of the political and institutional conditions in which reflection on art developed in France, but also of the existence of a new theoretical, philosophical, and scientific context; it involved epistemological changes affecting the entirety of concepts around which the theory of artistic mimêsis had always been articulated. And, in the first place, that of the image. The idea of representation, as it was elaborated in France, resulted in calling into question the traditional definition of the image in terms of resemblance, thus necessitating a different manner of conceiving of images. It was indeed the new concept of representation that underlay the comparison frequently invoked by Descartes between idea and image. When he stated that ideas were “like images of things,” or even “like pictures or paintings,” that did not mean that ideas resembled things but that they were related to things in the same manner as images that imitated the appearance of things, that is, through representation. All of this presupposed a radically new conception of the image, based on the idea of the sign and no longer on resemblance. As Descartes writes in La dioptrique, an image does not need to resemble that which it is an image of in order to represent it, and often even “to be more perfect, insofar as they are images, and to better represent an object, they ought not to resemble it, like those engravings which, being composed of but a bit of ink scattered here and there on paper, represent to us forests, cities, men, and even battles and storms.” This problematic of the sign and representation would be broadly developed by the logicians 4 Pleasure: From the cause to the aim In his concern to restore the truth of Aristotle’s text, Dacier would denounce what in his eyes was a completely erroneous interpretation of the idea of mimêsis, particularly in the commentary accompanying the famous passage from chapter 4, which he translated as follows: “There are two main causes, both quite natural, which seem to have produced poetry; the first is imitation, a quality innate to men, since they differ from the other animals in that they are all inclined toward imitation, it is by means of imitation that they learn the first elements of the sciences, and all imitations give them a singular pleasure.” The commentary concerns the final point: The most learned commentators of Aristotle have made a very considerable error here in taking these words as an explanation of the second cause they give for poetry, as if Aristotle said: And the second is that all imitations give them pleasure. Aristotle was incapable of saying something whose meaning was so mistaken, and of giving to one effect two causes that are only a single cause. It is as if one said that two causes make a plant cultivated by a gardener grow: the first is that he waters it, and the second is the pleasure he takes in watering it. There is no one to whom this does not appear absurd. This philosopher says, then, that the first cause of Poetry is imitation, to which men are naturally inclined, and since this inclination, however natural it is, would be useless if men took no pleasure in producing imitations, he adds: and in which they take a singular pleasure. Dacier, La Poétique d’Aristote If the mistake of learned commentators was in believing that pleasure was the second cause that Aristotle attributes to imitation (when it in fact is the tendency to rhythm and melody), Corneille’s mistake was even greater since it consisted of turning this cause into an aim, and even of making it the sole aim of art. But this “mistake,” which was the foundation of all classical aesthetics, was an extremely productive one in the field of art. REFS.: Dacier, André. La poétique d’Aristote: contenant les règles les plus exactes pour juger du poème héroique, & des pièces de théâtre, la tragédie & la comédie. Amsterdam: George Gallet, 1692. 668 MIMÊSIS normative. It consisted in defining art as a representation of human actions. Taking up the Aristotelian definition of poetic mimêsis, the French applied it to the full range of the arts, not only the poetic arts, but also sculpture, painting, and even ballet. For the French, as for Aristotle, imitating an action meant first of all representing the plot or what was called the fable (the term with which most translators of the Poetics rendered muthos). The first effect of that definition of art in the realm of painting would be the establishment of a hierarchy of genres dominated by historical painting, that is, by narrative painting. But imitation was not solely concerned with plot; as in Aristotle, it also took as its object character, the passions, sentiments, what the seventeenth century would call mores (a term utilized to translate the êthos [ἦθος] of the Poetics). It was thus that Claude François Ménétrier wrote: Ballet does not imitate solely actions; it also imitates, according to Aristotle, passions and customs, which is more difficult than the expression of actions. This imitation of the customs and affections of the soul is based on impressions that the soul makes naturally on the body, and on the judgments we make of the customs and inclinations of persons on those inner movements. Des ballets anciens et modernes This text also illustrates the transformation to which the classical theoreticians subjected Aristotelian mimêsis. It will be noted that on the subject of actions Ménestrier employs the terms “imitation” and “expression” indiscriminately. bizarre and extraordinary forms that painters invent in their works: “This art in general,” Félibien wrote about painting, “extends to all manners of representing entities that are in nature. And although painters occasionally have formed some that are not natural, like the monsters and grotesques that they invent, which are nonetheless composed of parts known and taken from different animals, it cannot be said that they are pure effects of the imagination” (“Préface aux Conférences de 1667”). Just as they refused to oppose imitation and imagination, the French did not see a contradiction between a concern for exactitude in the observation of reality and the application of analytic criteria in the elaboration of representation. The opposition between realist imitation and ideal imitation was absorbed into a conception of imitation far less dogmatic than is commonly thought and that submitted imitation to criteria of selection and correction that were no longer ideal but rational. One must imitate nature through reasonable choice, as Le Brun would say. That reasonable choice meant that artistic imitation was to satisfy simultaneously the rules of art, the exigencies of truth (whence the importance given at the Academy to the study of anatomy, proportion, geometry, perspective) and those of verisimilitude and decorum. . C. Representing action If the definition of artistic imitation according to its modalities (nature and truth) was, as we have seen, rather flexible, that which defined it as a function of its object was far more 5 The resemblance of the portrait (bis) It is hardly surprising that the effects of this new concept of representation should manifest themselves most clearly in relation to the portrait. If a good portrait is lifelike, what defines the lifelike resemblance of a portrait? Félibien gave a completely original answer to this question, which the Italians had already asked themselves, and which recalled Descartes’s analysis. “How is it,” Félibien asks, “that a mediocre painter is sometimes more successful in painting a lifelike portrait than an experienced and learned man? Be aware that what often appears as a lifelike resemblance in these mediocre portraits is nothing but that. From the moment, by some sign, an image is formed in our mind which is in some way related to a thing we know, we immediately believe that we find in it a great resemblance, even though, in looking at it more closely, it was often nothing more than a rather weak idea.” Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies REFS.: Félibien, André. Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987. 6 Decorum “Decorum” has the same meaning as it does in Latin, that is, appropriateness. In the artistic field, decorum has, like prepon [πϱέπον] in Greek rhetoric, a double meaning; it is determined both upstream and downstream, so to speak. The first determination is referential in nature: the rule of decorum requires that characters are represented in a way that is in keeping with their state, their situation, their nature: a king could not be expressed or be clothed in the same way as a peasant, each passion has to be represented in a manner that befits the state of the person, etc. The second is moral and social in nature. Representation has to be in keeping with the moral sentiments of the spectators, it must not shock them, and it has to respect the rules of propriety. Furetière only mentions this second meaning in his dictionary (RT: Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots français tant vieux que modernes, et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts): “ Decorum: A Latin, then French word, which is expressed in this proverbial saying: to observe decorum, meaning to respect all the rules of polite society.” MIMÊSIS 669 and that precisely because it was born of a reflection on the idea of fiction, and fiction fell under the rubric of poetry and not painting, which raised in turn the question of illusion— dramatic poetry presenting the particularity of bringing into play simultaneously the pictorial question of illusion and the poetic question of fiction. Reconciling these various exigencies was not always possible, but the freedom of the poet also consisted in casting aside all contradictions, as may be seen in the case of Corneille, who, in his prefaces, did not hesitate to resort to the most disparate arguments, in keeping with the needs of the play in question. It was thus in the name of the rules of art, and consequently the necessities of representation, that he justified the liberties he had taken with history in La Mort de Pompée, where he opted to “reduce to two hours what had transpired over two years.” One rediscovers here the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history. This did not prevent Corneille elsewhere from invoking historical truth, and thus the necessities of resemblance, but on this occasion to justify freedoms taken with the rule of verisimilitude or plausibility (“the truth is not always plausible”) and that of morality (i.e., of catharsis in the moral sense as understood in the seventeenth century), which demanded that criminals inspire horror and crime be always punished. That argument from resemblance, which is a pictorial argument, was developed at length in the dedication to Médée, precisely on the basis of a comparison between poetry and painting: Poetry and painting have this in common, among many other things, that one often makes beautiful portraits of an ugly woman, and the other beautiful imitations of an action that should not be imitated. In portraiture, it is not a matter of wondering whether a face is beautiful but whether it bears a resemblance; and in painting, one should not consider whether behavior is virtuous but whether it is similar to that of the person being introduced; it consequently evokes for us good and bad actions indiscriminately, without offering us the latter as an example; and if it wishes to impose a measure of horror on us, it is not at all because of their punishment, which it does not affect to show us, but because of their ugliness, which it attempts to represent to us naturally. However different they be, the justifications of Pompée and Médée are not at all incompatible. They both express the same The use of the word “expression” as an equivalent of “imitation” conveys the new manner in which the action/passion relation was conceived in the seventeenth century. . The problems raised by the representation of history were the object of numerous debates in the seventeenth century, in the domains of both theater and painting. Such discussions called into play the same distinction between likeness and representation that we have already encountered with regard to portraiture, but in a somewhat different manner. Does the fact of imitating history in accordance with nature and the truth, as required by the principle of imitation, demand of the artist that he faithfully respect historical truth, or can he deviate from it should it enter into conflict with the necessities of representation, that is, with the nature and truth of art? That question led to a rather lively exchange between Philippe de Champaigne and Le Brun on the subject of Poussin’s painting, Eliézer et Rébecca. Whereas Champaigne reproached Poussin for not having “treated the subject of his painting with all the faithfulness of history, since he had eliminated from it any representation of the camels mentioned by history,” Le Brun thought to the contrary that the painter was right to take that liberty with history, “that the camels had not been eliminated from the painting without solid consideration; that Monsieur Poussin, constantly seeking to refine and to unburden the subject of his works and to bring forth in an agreeable manner the principal action being treated, had rejected the bizarre objects that might debauch the eye of the spectator and amuse it with minutia” (Academic Lecture of 7 January 1668). But it was surely in the realm of poetry that the representation of history raised the most difficulties. For poetry represents history by way of fiction. Faithfulness to history thus poses two problems of a rather different nature for the poet. The first involves the difference between resemblance and representation: as in painting, a faithfulness to history may enter into conflict with necessities imposed by the rules of art. The second no longer brings into play the autonomy of art, but rather that of the artist: a respect for history imposes constraints that may be incompatible with the freedom of the poet, that is, with his right to dare anything. This problem plainly concerned the powers of the artist in general, be he painter or poet. But in France, as previously in Italy, it was envisaged essentially with reference to the activity of the poet, 7 Expression The word expression entered the French vocabulary of painting around 1650, and this new usage remained for a long time without an equivalent term in other languages (espressione was still absent from Baldinucci’s Vocabulario toscano dell arte del disegno in 1681). Expression was used first of all in the general sense of the expression of the subject of a painting, that is, as a synonym for representation. But it quickly took on a second, more restricted meaning, referring to the representation of passions. Le Brun thus made a distinction between general expression, which “is a naïve and natural resemblance of the things one wishes to represent,” and particular expression, “which indicates the movements of the heart, and makes visible the effects of passion” (Conférences académiques of 7 April and 5 May 1668 on L’Expression des passions). The first meaning would gradually disappear in favor of the second, making way for the distinction representation/expression. 670 MIMÊSIS refusal to subject art to extrinsic constraints, whether they be the constraints of historical truth or those that morality and society are intent on exercising over representation. D. To imitate is not to copy: From the idea of invention to that of originality This will to autonomy explains the interest brought to the question of the imitation of masters, which had resulted in the polemic between Pico and Bembo. But here too the position of the French was less dogmatic than is often believed. They were unanimous in acknowledging that imitation of the masters played an essential role in the education of a painter, sculptor, or writer. It is in imitating art that one learns to imitate according to nature and truth, that is, that one becomes an artist oneself. But the imitation of art cannot be conflated with artistic imitation in the strict sense; it is its necessary but by no means sufficient condition. It was thus that Philippe de Champaigne lashed out at those he called “copyists of a manner,” who “limit themselves servilely to copying the particular manner of an author, taken as their aim and as the sole model they need consult. They judge on the basis of that author alone the manner of all others and have no eyes to discern the beauties and various agreements that nature offers for our imitation” (Academic Lecture, 11 June 1672). In the image of Zeuxis, one must imitate several models and not one alone, and, as Pico already said, do so with discernment, which meant, for the French, by imposing on oneself nature and truth as a rule. But it was above all another motif that was taken up in the seventeenth century to characterize the artist’s approach: that of the bee gathering from all flowers to produce a honey that is its alone. Like the bee, the artist was to borrow from different masters in order to become finally his own master, that is, in order to find a manner belonging to him alone. This is precisely the manner in which La Fontaine describes what may be called his poetic method. After acknowledging the extreme diversity of his sources of inspiration, he mocks the “foolish herd” of servile imitators who “follow like real sheep the shepherd of Mantua”: “I make use of him in a different manner, and, letting myself be guided, often make bold to strike out on my own. I will always be seen to practice this custom; my imitation is in no way a form of slavery” (É pître à Mr l’É vêque de Soissons). This proclamation of independence and freedom is all the more important in the case of La Fontaine in that he was a partisan of the ancients. The quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, which developed over the last decades of the seventeenth century, did in fact change the nature of the debates over the imitation of masters. The partisans of the moderns did not call into question the idea of imitation, but rather that of the masters, French artists of the century of Louis XIV being for them infinitely superior to those of the past, which included not only the Greeks and Romans, but also the Italians of the Renaissance. Whether partisans of the ancients or the moderns, everyone in the seventeenth century defined artistic imitation in the same way—with reference to nature and truth. They thus all made the same distinction between genuine artistic imitation and that of servile imitators content with merely imitating the manner of someone else. Those who defended the ancients did not present them as models to imitate, but as models in imitating according to nature and truth. And it was precisely for the same reason that the partisans of the moderns refused to consider the ancients as models, because they did not imitate according to nature and the truth, contrary to the French, they claimed, whose success on this point was without example in the past. “Voiture did not model himself on anyone,” wrote Charles Perrault; the art of La Fontaine, he said, “is of an entirely new species,” and there is not a single one of his inventions “which has a model in the writings of the Ancients” (Parallèle des anciens et des modernes). The idea of invention, constantly associated since the Renaissance with that of imitation, no longer had the merely rhetorical sense of inventio; it also took on the meaning of novelty, which in turn gave a new meaning to the idea of imitation by inscribing it in a problematic that was no longer, as in Pico, one of emulation, but of originality: “Never has anyone,” wrote Perrault about La Fontaine, “more deserved to be regarded as original and of the first of his kind” (Les hommes illustres). E. From a regulating principle to a normative principle: The idea of imitation in the eighteenth century Although reflection on the idea of imitation was pursued in the eighteenth century, it no longer aroused the same passions as in the previous century. First, because such reflection now developed outside the sphere of practicing artists, among theoreticians of art approaching the idea of imitation from an exclusively theoretical angle and no longer as in the seventeenth century, under its twofold—theoretical and practical—aspect. Escaping from the artists, reflection about art became more systematic, as may be illustrated by the title of the abbé Batteux’s work, published in 1746: Les beauxarts réduits à un seul principe (The fine arts reduced to a single principle). The generalization of the principle of imitation to the full range of the fine arts was thus accompanied by a theoretical hardening that transformed what was a rather supple regulating principle, intervening in the training of artists, for the classics, into a simultaneously normative and explanatory universal principle, which claimed to account for all forms of art. In addition, the emergence of an aesthetic of sentiment and an aesthetic of nature (both linked to the rise of new forms of sensibility and to transformations in the idea of nature) resulted in giving pride of place to a definition of art as the imitation of nature to the detriment of all other definitions, and at the same time giving that definition a sense rather removed from the one it had in the seventeenth century. One no longer thought, as did Boileau, that “there were no longer serpents or odious monsters who, once imitated by art, were unable to please the eyes” (Art poétique). The preference now went to imitating the beauties of nature, in pleasing tones of verisimilitude and decorum. This new conception of the idea of imitating nature, accompanied by a disaffection regarding the great genres (tragedy, historical painting), plainly rendered most of the thinking of the previous century on the subject of the relations between nature and history out of date. In art as in philosophy, nature would henceforth be opposed to history. One would have to wait for David for the Aristotelian definition of art as the representation of human actions to regain a second wind in painting. These various transformations affecting the idea of imitation did not prevent the authors of the eighteenth MIMÊSIS 671 used with regard to imitation and nature as subject of imitation [Nachahmung], are subject to many misunderstandings,” Lessing announced in 1768 in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. . At times invested with Aristotelian dignity, at others associated, on the contrary, with the minimally prestigious register of the copy (nachmachen, kopieren), the notion of Nachahmung issued in increasingly subtle lexical differentiations, which constitute a problem for the translator. In this regard Winckelmann’s use of the term is eloquent. Whereas he had made of imitation the core and very title of his first essay, “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst” (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and in Sculpture) of 1755, Winckelmann would use it in his subsequent texts only with increasing embarrassment. In 1759, he undertook to distinguish genuine imitation (nachahmen) from mere copying (nachmachen): To personal thought, I oppose the copy (das Nachmachen), but not at all imitation (die Nachahmung): by the term copy I understand a slavish tracing (knechtlische Folge). In imitation, on the contrary, what is imitated, if handled with reason, may assume an other nature, as it were, and become one’s own (gleichsam eine andere Natur annehmen und etwas eigenes werden). Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst The lexical discomfort is evident. Following Winckelmann, Herder attempted a subtle distinction between nachahmen as a transitive verb, the synonym of slavish copying, and nachahmen as an intransitive verb, designating imitation proper. “Einen nachahmen signifies, in my view, to imitate the subject, the work of others; einem nachahmen signifies, on the contrary, to borrow from an other his manner of treating that subject, or a comparable subject” (Einen nachahnem heißt, wie ich glaube, den Gegenstand, das Werk des andern nachahmen; einem nachahmen aber, die Art und Weise von dem andern entlehnen, diesen oder einen ähnlichen Gegenstand zu behandeln) (quoted from J. and W. Grimm, RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 13, s.v. “Nachahmen”). Restitution into French becomes complex: one would have to translate the transitive nachahmen as copier, reproduire servilement (slavish copying), and the intransitive nachamen as s’inspirer, rivaliser avec (to be inspired by, etc.). For Winckelmann and Herder, the strategy was the same: it was a matter of inventing a kind of negatively charged yet extremely close twin of nachahmen, such as nachmachen or einen nachahmen, in order to save the word Nachahmung from its disastrous possibilities. But the lexical ruse barely fooled anyone, and it was the term Nachahmung itself that ended up with the blemish of the slavish epigone. B. Nachahmen and the decline of the principle of imitation around 1800 Later developments bear this out. In subsequent decades it was not only words of the same family (kopieren, nachmachen, nachbilden) that became suspect, but the semantic matrix century from voicing the same convictions on a number of scores as their predecessors. And specifically concerning the necessity of distinguishing the imitation of art from all other forms of imitation, resemblance, or reproduction. Developing thought on the nature of the senses and the role of sensations thus led theoreticians of art to radically pit artistic imitation against illusion. As Marmontel wrote in the article “Illusion” in the Encyclopédie, what is called theatrical illusion or pictorial illusion are but “demi-illusions,” “the pleasure taken in art being a function of that tacit and inchoate reflection that warns us that it is but a feint.” The specific nature of artistic imitation is expressed in the specific nature of the pleasure which that imitation procures for us. It was thus through another perspective—that of the analysis of sensations—that the theorists of the eighteenth century rediscovered the Aristotelian idea, which lay at the heart of classical doctrine, according to which the pleasure produced by mimêsis was a pleasure specific to mimêsis. V. Nachahmung: The Calling into Question of Mimêsis The use of the term nachahmen (to imitate) posed a problem in Germany already in the first half of the eighteenth century, and was the symptom of a lexical malaise that was fueled by the more general crisis of the Aristotelian principle of mimêsis. More and more authors, such as J. J. Winckelmann and J. G. Herder, attempted subtle differentiations in order to rescue the word from any confusion with its pejorative correlates, nachmachen and kopieren (to copy, to reproduce). But such subterfuges barely fooled anyone. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was no longer those correlates that were contested, but the word nachahmen itself. Over and again, Jean Paul and F. Schlegel associated Nachahmung (imitation) with mere copying, an evolution concluded by A. W. Schlegel with his peremptory refutation of the axiom ars imitatur naturam. Art was not obliged to imitate nature. The word nachahmen, in his view, would henceforth be supplanted by the terms bilden (to fashion, to give form to) and darstellen (to represent). A. A latent lexical malaise (1700–1760) It was only after 1700 that the principle of mimêsis, which had so broadly occupied Italy, England, and France since the Renaissance, began to be debated in Germany. But at the time the discussion began, the formula ars imitatur naturam could no longer be taken for granted since each of the terms in the axiom had been invested with multiple meanings. Imitation could be understood at times as strict reproduction, at others as an inventive recomposition of the real and nature, at times as natura naturata, and at others as natura naturans. As of the 1740s there was thus a deep linguistic malaise regarding the use of the word nachahmen (to imitate), with attempts alternately to save it at whatever cost or to burden it with negative virtualities. If, still in the middle of the century, recourse to the word Nachahmung seemed stripped of ambiguity and difficulty for J. C. Gottsched or J. E. Schlegel (“a poet is a skillful imitator of all things in nature” [ein geschickter Nachahmer aller natürlichen Dinge]; Gottsched, Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst), such was not the case for J. J. Bodmer, J. J. Breitinger, or G. E. Lessing. “The terms faithful and beautified [getreu und verschönert], 672 MIMÊSIS itself: nachahmen. The attack came above all from the Romantic school and its surroundings. . In his Vorschule der Asthetik (Pre-School of Aesthetics) (1804), Jean Paul adopted Herder’s lexical distinction between a transitive and intransitive use of nachahmen, but brought it to an abrupt close: Does the expression die Natur nachahmen mean the same thing as der Natur nachahmen, and is repetition imitation? Verily, the principle that consists in faithfully following nature scarcely makes sense. (Aber ist denn einerlei, die oder der Natur nachzuahmen, und ist Wiederholen Nachahmen?—Eigentlich hat der Grundsatz, die Natur treu zu kopieren, kaum einen Sinn.) Vorschule der Asthetik, §3 In 1785, in order the better to disqualify imitation, Jean Paul made of nachahmen a synonym pure and simple of kopieren: “The imitation of nature is not yet poetry since the copy cannot contain more than the original” (Die Nachahmung der Natur ist noch keine Dichtung, weil die Kopie nicht mehr enthalten kann als das Urbild) (Uber natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft [On the Natural Magic of the Imagination]). More and more frequently associated with the terms wiederholen, kopieren, nachäffen, the word nachahmen has the French reader hesitating between several translations: répéter, copier, singer, or imiter. Between F. Schlegel, who, on the subject of imitation, spoke of “artificial counterfeits” of Greek works (künstliche Nachbildungen in the first edition, changed to Künstliche Nachahmungen in later editions, Uber des studium der griechischen Poesie [On the Study of Greek Poetry]), and Novalis, who, in a letter to his brother Karl, probably dating from 1800, stated peremptorily that poetry was at the strict antipodes to imitation, the status of the word Nachahmung continued to be degraded and the span of translations to broaden. In 1801–2, A. W. Schlegel put a radical halt to the discussion. In his Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (Lectures on Literature and the Fine-Arts) delivered at the University of Berlin, he offered a systematic refutation of the Aristotelian principle of mimêsis: Aristotle had posited as an unchallengeable principle that the fine arts were imitative (die schöne Künste seien nachahmend). This was precisely the case on the condition that one meant by it a simple thing: they have something imitative (es komme etwas Nachahmendes in ihnen vor); but it was imprecise if it meant, in the sense in which Aristotle himself understood it, moreover, that imitation constituted their entire essence (die Nachahmung mache ihr ganzes Wesen aus).Numerous moderns have subsequently transformed this principle into the following axiom: art must imitate nature (die Kunst soll die Natur nachahmen). The imprecision and ambiguity 8 The critique of the idea of the imitation of nature in Lessing The use that Lessing made of Nachahmung was consistent with his general methodology in art theory: he availed himself of the notion, but in order to point out its internal contradictions. As he said, if one applied literally the principle of imitation of nature that Breitinger and Batteux were so attached to, then the worst deformities would pass for art, and perfect harmony of proportions would be something very unusual: The example of nature which has to justify the connection between the most solemn seriousness and the most frivolous gaiety, could equally well be used to justify any dramatic monstrosity that would be unstructured, disconnected, and lack all common sense. The imitation of nature (Die Nachahmung der Natur) should absolutely not be the principle of art (Grundsatz der Kunst); or rather, if it had to remain so, art would thereby cease being art, or at least high art. According to this way of thinking, the most artistic work would be the worst, and the most mediocre would be the best. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, §70, 1 January 1768 (1769) Lessing was not attacking the principle of imitation as such, but the imitation of nature. If the imitation of nature is the essence of art, then one has to follow this to its logical conclusion. A perfect reflection of reality can only reflect back to us representations and images that are often ugly, even hideous. The strict application of the principle of the imitation of nature produces the opposite of what it is aiming for, namely, beauty, and thus loses all validity as an artistic principle. In his essay Laocoön, the word Nachahmung reappeared, but in relation to the modes of representation in painting: “Painting employs wholly different signs (Zeichen) or means (Mittel) of imitation (Nachahmungen) from poetry, —the one using forms and colors in space” (Lessing, Laocoön). Lessing retained the word Nachahmung, which seemed the most appropriate to express the quest for the ideality of the beautiful, and thus for the essence of art itself. So Nachahmung was not rejected, but it did not really have the status of an artistic and aesthetic concept. When he discussed painting in Laocoön, he identified more with Darstelling, representation. The other, far vaguer meaning made allusion to the poetic and pictorial models of the ancients. Nachahmung was not yet explicitly opposed to mimêsis; without being actually empty in terms of content, the word expressed at best a concession to the worship of the classical ideal of beauty. In other words, it still had some legitimacy because of the authority of Winckelmann, but its theoretical validity had become so problematic that only the aesthetics that were taking shape in Germany could give it back its productive capacity. Jean-François Groulier REFS.: Lessing, G. E. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Stuttgart, Alfred Kröner Verlag. . Laocoön. Translated by Ellan Frothingham. BiblioBazaar, 2009. MIMÊSIS 673 of the terms “nature” and “imitate” have provoked the greatest misunderstandings and led to the most diverse contradictions. For A. W. Schlegel, the symptoms of the inadequacy of the term nachahmen were numerous. In Batteux, for example, who postulates that art ought to imitate beautiful nature, or elsewhere that art ought to imitate it as more beautiful, the word “imitate” is incorrect “since one either imitates nature as it is, in which case it is possible that the result will not be beautiful, or one gives it a beautiful form (man bildet sie schön), and one is no longer dealing with imitation (so ist es keine Nachahmung mehr). Why not say straightaway: art should represent the beautiful (Warum sagen sie nicht gleich: die Kunst soll das Schöne darstellen)?” The word nachahmen, an incorrect term that translates in this case the incorrect notion of imitation in Batteux, ought simply to be eliminated. And Schlegel concludes: “A more accurate formulation of the principle would be: art ought to give a form to nature (die Kunst muß Natur bilden).” Bilden and darstellen would replace nachahmen. With enough untranslatability, the untranslatable is voided. VI. Realism or Conventionalism: New Perspectives The concepts of reference, correspondence, and resemblance, which were at the origin of various theories of imitation, have by now become quite problematical. The idea of imitation, as it functioned for centuries through numerous transformations, assumed that the object was given in experience and that the representation might adequately refer to reality. “To perceive similarities,” wrote Aristotle, “is to give evidence of a sagacious mind” (Rhetoric, 3.11.5). That proposition, which defined resemblance as a condition of the possibility of representation, possessed the value of an axiom in theories of art until the nineteenth century. The naïve realism underlying conceptions of representation based on the idea of resemblance has largely been called into question by the epistemology and analyses developed in particular by various philosophies of language. Nelson Goodman radicalized a conventionalist position, ending up in a relativism. For him, what links A and B consists in a relation between elements that may be totally heterogeneous, and that relation brings about a symbolic productivity every bit as efficacious as traditional resemblance of an Aristotelian sort: “Almost any picture can represent anything” (Languages of Art). The principle according to which the representation of reality must rest on resemblance to the thing represented is thus based more on a belief than on logical arguments. This conception of representation was born of an aesthetic reflection on the functions of metaphor, but was extended to the whole gamut of symbolic creations of art by basing itself on a new theory of reference. Ernst Gombrich opposed what he called the “extreme conventionalism” of Nelson Goodman and defended the existence of “a real visual resemblance” with recourse to contemporary research in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy on the subject of perception. Without denying the importance of codes and what Goodman calls “inculcation” in the process 9 Formative imitation in Karl Philipp Moritz By the end of the eighteenth century, imitation no longer implied the idea of a rational order inherent in nature, or that was particular to a system of artistic rules. It was faced with a dual process: on the one hand, the increasing subjectivization of all aesthetic categories, and on the other, the development of a new concept of nature. Art was seen from that point on as having to produce works in accordance with a principle of autonomy analogous to the autonomy that was immanent to living organisms. So a work of art had to be accomplished as a dynamic, internal, and autonomous process. But for Moritz, this movement was not at all, as it was for Goethe, part of an investigation of nature as such. Or rather, art and nature were connected as part of a whole that was analogous to the cosmos of the Greeks and that closely conditioned them. Art should in effect aim to find the language of nature, either through imitation or through symbolism. The aesthetic orientation of Moritz was thus as far removed from the rationalism of Breitinger as it was from the exclusively artistic vision of Winckelmann or of Lessing. It was the enthusiasm and mysticism of the whole that inspired the thought of Moritz: the essential criterion of beauty could only be something that was perfectly finished or accomplished (Vollendete). But this beauty was itself only one moment of a movement tending toward the apprehension of the whole. According to him, if we do not possess the concept of what is right or good in an ethical sense, we cannot grasp in its fullness the idea of a formative imitation (die bildende Nachahmung), to the extent that this imitation is immanent to the creative faculty of the beautiful as it is manifest in a work of art: Die eigentliche Nachahmung des Schönen unterscheidet sich also zuerst von des moralischen Nachahmung des Guten und Edlen dadurch, dass sie, ihrer Natur nach, streben muss, nicht, wie diese in sich hinein, sondern aus sich heraus zu bilden. (So the imitation of what is properly speaking beautiful is first of all distinct from the moral imitation of the good and the noble in that it has to strive, according to its nature to form an image that is not, like this imitation, an image in itself, but to form its image out of itself.) Moritz, Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen The “aus sich heraus zu bilden” (to form its image out of itself ) dissipates the ambiguity of the sentence. Formative imitation has nothing in common with imitation as Lessing, for example, understood it; it is a poiesis, inspired by a Bildungskraft, a formative power. Nachahmung is all the more untranslatable since Moritz uses the word by defining it as what it is not, that is, an activity of the creative imagination. The break with the artistic tradition of imitation was thus complete; Moritz envisaged an idealization of beauty involving as much a mystical experience as an aesthetic experience. It was, however, in function of this new and sometimes obscure meaning that the aesthetic orientation of German Romanticism would be determined. Jean-François Groulier REFS.: Mortiz, Karl Phillip. Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen. In Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik, Tübingen: Niemayer, 1962. First published in 1788. 674 MIMÊSIS Boileau, Nicolas. Art poétique. Chant III in Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Bruyne, Edgar de. L’Esthétique du Moyen Âge. Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1947. Translation by Eileen B. Hennessy: The Esthetics of the Middle Ages. New York: Ungar, 1969. . Études d’esthétique médiévale. 3 vols. Bruges: De Tempel, 1946. Cennini, Cennino. Il libro del arte. Milan: Longanesi, 1984. First published in 1437. Corneille, Pierre. Discours de l’utilité du poème dramatique. In Œuvres completes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. Descartes, René. Œuvres et lettres. Edited by A. Bridoux. 2nd exp. ed. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1953. . The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Félibien, André. Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes: Entretiens I et II. Edited, introduction, and notes by René Démoris. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987. . “Préface aux Conférences de 1667.” In Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. énsb’a, 1996. Fracastoro. Girolamo. Naugerius; sive de Poetica dialogues. Bari: Laterza, 1947. First published in 1555. Ghiberti. I commentarii. Florence: Giunti, 1988. First published in 1436. Gombrich, Ernst. The Image and the Eye. Oxford: Phaidon, 1982. . “The ‘What’ and the ‘How’: Perspective Representation and the Phenomenal World.” In Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman, edited by Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler, 129–49. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Gottsched, Johann Christoph. Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1751. Hohner, Ulrich. Zur Problematik der Naturnachahmung in der Asthetik des 18 Jahrunderts. Erlanger: Palm and Enke, 1976. Isidore, of Seville. The Etymologies. Translated by Stephen A. Barney et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Jauss, Hans Robert, ed. Nachahmung und Illusion. Munich: Eidos, 1969. Jean Paul. Über natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft. In Werke. Edited by Norbert Miller. Vol. 4. Munich: Hanser, 1962. 195–205. . “Vorschule der Ästhetik.” In Werke. Edited by Norbert Miller. Vol. 5. Munich: Hanser, 1963.7–456. Translation by Margaret R. Hale: Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Junius Franciscus. De pictura veterum libri tres. Amsterdam, 1637. Translation: The Literature of Classical Art, Vol. 1, The Painting of the Ancients. Edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. La Fontaine, Jean de. Épître à Mr l’Évêque de Soissons. In Œuvres completes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965. First published in 1687. Leonardo. Tratatto della pittura, fragment 11. In Libro di pittura. Florence: Giunti, 1995. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. Translation by Helen Zimmern: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New introduction by Victor Lange. New York: Dover, 1962. First published in 1890. Mancini, Giulio. Considerazioni sulla pittura. 2 vols. Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956–57. First published in 1620. Ménétrier, Claude François. Des ballet anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre. Chez René Guignard, 1682. Repr. Geneva: Minkoff-Reprints, 1972. Mérot, Alain, Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996. Panofsky, Erwin. Idea. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. Patrizi, Francesco. Della poetica. Edited by Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli. 3 vols. Florence: Instituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1969–71. First published in 1586. Perrault, Charles. Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle avec leurs portraits au naturel. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. First published in 1696–1700. . Parallèle des anciens et des modernes. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979. First published in 1688–96. Poussin, Nicolas. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin. Paris: Fernand de Nobèle, 1968. Preisendanz, Wolfgang. “Mimêsis und Poiesis in der deutschen Dichtungstheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Rezeption und Produktion zwischen 1530 und 1730: Festschrift für G. Weydt, edited by W. Rasch, 537–52. Bern: Francke, 1972. of recognizing visual representations, Gombrich rejects the idea that images representing nature would be no more than conventional signs in the same way as linguistic signs. There exist for him relations of similarity between the visual space of the painting and the nature of the object represented (cf. “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation,” in The Image and the Eye). But such bonds of resemblance exclude all realist reference to the object since the most realistic representation already presupposes an extended apprenticeship and rigorously determined cultural and social frames of reference. One thus ends up, in most such inquiries, with a paradoxical situation, since the devaluation of imitation as the central concept of aesthetics has given rise to numerous theories on what was at the very foundation of that concept, that is, resemblance, reference, and representation. Contrary to reflection on art in the nineteenth century, contemporary aesthetics no longer rejects imitation in the name of creative freedom or a radical autonomy of artistic invention, but by virtue of a foundational conviction according to which every act of reference—by perception and above all by language—to reality eliminates any possible homology or isomorphism between discourse and reality. Determined in relation with logic, thus disposing of new epistemological and metacritical models, aesthetics sees itself as necessarily implicated in the debate over realism and anti-realism. The question of realism thus conditions the determination of values, the objective properties of a work, the beautiful, and colors as much as it does that of representation, reference, and resemblance, that is, a large part of the field of aesthetics. This does not at all mean that the concept of imitation has lost all validity and that it is presently stripped of all expressive value, including in the domains of pure copying and artistic forgery. It is through a more precise analysis of the functions of reference that the idea of imitation can conserve its meaning. Jacqueline Lichtenstein Elisabeth Decultot REFS.: Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De pictura and De statua. Edited, translated, introduction, and notes by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Aristotle. La poétique. Translated, edited, and notes by R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980. Auerbach, Erich. Mimêsis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. 2nd ed. Bern: Francke, 1959. Translation by Willard R. Trask: Mimêsis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. New Introduction by Edward W. Said. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Batteux, Charles. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un seul principe. Principes de la littérature. Vol. 1. Lyon, 1802. First published in 1746. Translation by John Miller: A Course of the Belles Lettres, or the Principles of Literature. London, 1761. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and William R. Newman, eds. The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt on the Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. . “‘Nachahmung der Natur’: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen.” In Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben: Aufsätze und eine Rede. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. 55–103. First published in 1957. Translation by Anna Wertz: “‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being.” Qui Parle 12 (2000): 17–54. MIR 675 I. Mir (World) and Mir (Peace): A Fertile Ambiguity The Russian language inherited from Old Slavonic two masculine nouns mir—one signifying “peace” (and translating regularly the Greek eirênê), the other signifying “world” (and translating regularly the Greek kosmos). The two words are perfect homonyms. Insofar as spelling is concerned, the custom—in printed texts and in nineteenth-century cursive—was to distinguish them through use of a normal Cyrillic i for mir [мир] (peace) and a “dotted” i (theoretically reserved for the notation of an i before a vowel) for mir [мiр] (world). That distinction did not survive the spelling reform of 1917, which eliminated a certain number of letters from the Russian alphabet, including the dotted i: the two versions of mir have since been spelled identically, as they had been written in Old Russian texts until the eighteenth century. It happens that Vladimir Mayakovsky published in 1916, just prior to the reform, his great poem against the war that was then ravaging Europe, “Vojna i mir”: the spelling of mir (with a dotted i) indicated that the title was to be understood as “War and the Universe” (which is how Claude Frioux translates it into French), even though the expression echoes the title of Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace. And in fact, in Mayakovsky’s poem, it is not a matter of contrasting war and peace but of describing the suffering inflicted by war on the world. In editions published during the Soviet era, after the spelling reform, the two titles cannot be distinguished in print. As a rule, context allows one to distinguish between the two mirs: the two homonyms are indeed two different words, and it is entirely appropriate for dictionaries to treat them in two separate entries. The autonomy of each of the terms is notable in their offshoots: only mir (peace) gives rise to a verb, mirit’ [мирить] (to reconcile), whence comes smirit’ [смирить] (to appease, tame). And although it is true that the adjective mirovoj [мирoвοй], which most often means “worldwide,” can also have the meaning of “relative to peace” (in the expression mirovoj sud’ja [мирoвοй cyдьᴙ], “justice of the peace”), and it is also true that the Old Slavonic mrinu and the Old Russian mirni translates tou kosmou [τοῦ ϰόσμου], kosmikos [ϰοσμιϰός], and mundi, as well as tês eirênês [τῆς εἰϱήνης] and pacis, at least the modern Russian form of that adjective, mirnyj [мирньɪй], no longer means anything other than “peaceful.” It is precisely because the two mir nouns can no longer be confused that one can play on their homophony to produce poetic or rhetorical effects, as in the saying V mire žit’, s mirom žit’ [B мᴎре жᴎть, с ᴍᴎроᴍ жᴎть] ([If one wants] to live in the world, [one must] live in [observing the] peace) (RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, s.v. mir 1); or in the poet Yesinin’s line, k miru vsego mira [к ᴍᴎру всеґо ᴍᴎра] (for the peace of the whole universe), an appeal dating from 1917 (see Pascal, Civilisation paysanne en Russie); or even in the Soviet slogan mir miru! [ᴍᴎр ᴍᴎру!] (peace to the world!), which merely takes up the prayer from the Menologion of Novgorod (twelfth century): mir vsemu miru podazd’ [ᴍᴎр всеᴍу мᴎру подаздь] (give peace to the entire world) (RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka, s.v. mir); or even in the translation of the Gospel according to John (14:27): . “Zur Poetik der deutschen Romantik I. Die Abkehr vom Grundsatz der Naturnachahmung.” In Die Deutsche Romantik. Poetik, Formen, Motive, edited by H. Steffen, 54–74. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967. Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostome. Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts. Paris, 1823. Translation by K. C. Kent: An Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. New York: Garland, 1979. . De l’imitation. Introduction by Leon Krier and Demetri Porphyrios. Brussels: Archives d’architectures modernes, 1980. Raffaello. Letter to Castiglione. In Lettere di diverse eccellentissimi huomini. Edited by Lodovico Dolce. Venice: Appresso Gabriel giolito de Ferrari et fratelli, 1554. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit. Vol. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. Santangelo, Giorgio. Le epistole “De imitazione” di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola e di Pietro Bembo. Florence: Nuova Collezione di testi umanistici inediti o rari, 1954. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I (1798–1803). Edited by E. Behler. Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. Vol. 1. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1989. Schlegel, Friedrich, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie. Edited by E. Behler. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol. 1. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958. 217–67. Translation, edited, and critical introduction by Stuart Barnett: On the Study of Greek Poetry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Scott, Izora, ed. and trans. Controversies Over the Imitation of Cicero in the Renaissance: With Translations of Letters Between Pietro Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico, On imitationDavis: Hermagoras, 1991. First published in 1910. Tasso, Torquato. Discorsi dell’arte poetica et del poema eroico. Bari: Laterza, 1964. First published in 1587. Translation by Mariela Cavalchini and Irene Samuel: Discourses on the Heroic Poem. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Tatarkiewicz, Wladislaw. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. Translated by Christopher Kasparek. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. “Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst.” In Kleine Schriften, edited by W. Rehm, 149–56. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. . Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art. Edited, translated, and introduction by Curtis Bowman. 3 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001. . “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst.” In Kleine Schriften, edited by W. Rehm, 27–59. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Translation by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton: Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. La Salle: Open Court, 1987. Zuccaro, Federico. L’idea de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti. In Scritti d’arte di Federico Zuccaro. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1961. First published in 1607. MIR [мир, міp] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH world, peace, peasant commune FRENCH monde, paix, commune paysanne GERMAN Welt, Friede GREEK kosmos [ϰόσμος], eirênê [εἰϱήνη] LATIN mundus, pax v. PEACE, WORLD, and CIVIL SOCIETY, OIKEIÔSIS, PRAVDA, SECULARIZATION, SOBORNOST’, SVET, SVOBODA The presence in Russian of two homonyms, mir [мир] (peace) and mir [мир] (world), raises an etymological problem: Was it a matter of two distinct terms at the outset? Need we imagine one of the two semantic veins as derived from the other, or should we imagine two derivations diverging from a common notion? Moreover, was that homonymy used by writers in order to bring to light or create an intersection between the “peace” field and the “world” field? Finally, how do we situate mir [мир], the name of an institution, the “peasant commune,” in relation to “peace” and “world”? 676 MIR two distinct signifiers. Moreover, the “freedom” denoted by volja is to be understood as the free exercise or unimpeded deployment of the will. It is distinguished from freedom as personal autonomy, which is denoted by svoboda [свобода]; volja translates thelêma [θέλημα], but svoboda translates eleutheria [ἐλευθερία] (RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka). See SVOBODA. . II. The Idea of “Bond”: Mir and Sobornost’ On the linguistic level, however, what requires reflection is not the differentiation of the semantic status of mir (world), but the relation between mir (peace) and mir (world). Although it is true that in the history of Russian (and even in Old Slavonic) we are dealing with two distinct terms, one cannot but wonder whether the two mirs are linked by a common etymology. It is generally believed that in the prehistory of common Slavonic there must have existed a Mir ostavljaju vam, mir moj daju vam, ne tak kak mir daët ja daju vam. [Μᴎр оставляю вам, мᴎр мой даю вам, не так как мᴎр даёт я даю вам.] [Еἰϱνην ἀφίημι ὑμῖν, εἰϱήνην τὴν ἐμὴν δίδωμι ὑμῖν· οὐ χαθὼς ὁ χόσμος δίδωσιν ἐγὼ δίδωμι ὑμῖν.] (I leave you peace; I grant you my peace; I give it to you, not as the world gives it.) The situation of mir, on the linguistic level, is thus entirely different from the one encountered with volja [воля], for example, which at times means “will” and at others “freedom” (as can be seen in the names of two political groups of the late nineteenth century, Zemlja i volja [3емля и воля], “Land and Freedom,” and Volja naroda [Воля народа], “the Will of the People”). In the case of volja, we are not dealing with two homonyms, but with a single word, whose semantic range includes notions that, in other languages, are rendered by 1 War and Peace: The duality of mir and the polysemy of “world” If, in the case of the two versions of mir, the translator-interpreter needed only to decide between “peace” and “world,” his or her task, for the most part, would be easy. There are, however, ambiguous situations. Circumstances and context allow listeners to choose the interpretation best suited to their mood, without it necessarily being that of the speaker. One example (studied by Bočarov in 1980) is offered by Tolstoy in War and Peace (vol. 3, pt. 1, chap. 18). It is the summer of 1812. Napoleon’s armies are invading Russia. Natasha is at services and hears the great ekten’ja [ектенья] (responsive prayer) of the liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. Here is the translation of the passage in the Pléiade edition: Le diacre s’avança sur l’ambon et entonna d’une voix haute et solennelle la prière: — Prions en paix le Seigneur — Oui, songea Natacha, prions tous ensemble, sans distinction de classes, sans inimitié, unis dans un amour fraternel! — Prions le Seigneur pour la paix d’en haut et le salut de nos âmes. Pour le monde des anges et de tous les esprits incorporels qui vivent au-dessus de nous, comprenait Natacha. The deacon came out to the ambo and, began loudly and solemnly to read the words of the prayer: “In peace let us pray to the Lord.” “As one world—all together, without distinction of rank, without enmity, but united in brotherly love—let us pray,” thought Natasha. “For the peace from above and for the salvation of our souls!” “For the world of the angels and the souls of all the bodiless beings who dwell above us,” Natasha prayed. The situation is more complex than is implied by Uspenskij’s analysis (to which Bočarov refers) and the French translation. In the Russian editions published during Tolstoy’s lifetime and, more generally, before the spelling reform, all occurrences of mir are written мір (world). If the French and English translators thus render the deacon’s first exclamation, “mirom gospodu pomolimsja [міром госполу помолимся],” as “let us pray in peace,” it is because they seek in a way to correct Tolstoy so as to make him conform to the Greek text, which says: “en eirênê tou kuriou deêthômen [ἐν εἰρήνη τοῦ χύριου δεηθῶμεν],” thus: “in peace [eirênê], let us pray to the Lord.” But, to judge by the spelling, mirom, an adverbial form of mir, is to be understood as “together, so as to form a world.” The deacon (according to Uspenskij, to whom Bočarov refers) is addressing the praying community insofar as it is a unanimous totality or world. Natasha, for her part, does not transpose “peace” into “world,” as the translations would lead us to believe, but draws out of “world” the idea of love, which orients us toward “peace.” The deacon’s second exclamation (“o svysnem mire I o spasenij dus našix [о свыснем міре и о спасений дус наших]”) is faithful to the Greek—despite the spelling— only if one interprets it as a prayer for peace from on high (anôthen [ἄνωθεν]). But Natasha imagines praying for the spirits who are in the world above. Between the deacon and Natasha, there is not exactly a misunderstanding; one cannot say that she has mistaken the sense of his words, or of the Greek. The homonymy creates an ambiguity here that legitimizes both translations simultaneously, and that consequently can be reconciled. Such a situation is possible only because the semantic fields of the two versions of mir, even though the terms are lexically distinct, intersect, or even because each projects onto the other an aura of connotations. Thinkers on the subject of sobornost’ [ϲоборность] have insisted on this, as we shall see below: the world is not truly a mir unless it is a gathering of unanimous human beings, united by a feeling of mutual belonging, of forming a coherent and harmonious whole based on an agreement between its parts and that whole, as well as on the inner peace of each of its individuals. So strong is the hold of the group, thus constituted, on its members that they have no other horizon than the group itself: the entire world can be nothing other than the projection of the group. A desire for peace inspires agreement, which is both the structure of the world and the necessary condition for its achievement. Such at least is the ideal of the world. But mir in the sense of “world” has taken on, in Russian (as it had even in Old Slavonic), all the values that have become those of Greek kosmos, Latin mundus, French monde, Spanish and Italian mundo, and German Welt. The world is also what is “mundane,” the domain of the secular, profane, and here-below, in MIR 677 may thus be a subject of speculation. It may be a matter of the Indo-European root *mi- (to change) and (to exchange), represented notably by the Sanskrit *mi- (to alter) and mith- (alternate) and the Latin muto (to change), mutuus (reciprocal): the contract on which the friendship denoted by *mitra- is based is itself the formalization of an exchange of benefits. But the existence of other Indo-European *mi- roots—allowing one to trace other semantic lines of transmission for *mitra- (and thus for mir)—have been posited: a *mi- (to attach) would allow us to understand *mitraas a “bond,” originally a material bond, and secondarily a bond understood as the constitutive obligation inherent in a contract. The Greek mitra [μίτρα] (belt) would be a borrowing from an Iranian form that would have retained that concrete sense (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. “Frisk”). Certain etymologists acknowledge as well a root in *mi- that would be at the origin of the Sanskrit mayas (sweetness), and the Old Slavonic milu (likable) (RT: Etudes sur l’étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieuxslave). That last etymology would make the Indo-European *mitra a far more affective form of friendship than one resulting from either a binding obligation or exchanges regulated contractually. ( Jan Gonda rejects the notion that mitra- is a term for “contract.”) These speculations on the ultimate etymology of mitra are not unrelated to the more or less explicit (or more or less refined) analyses of the terms mir (peace) and mir (world) conducted by Russian authors. Florensky (The Pillar and Ground of the Truth) states outright that the two versions mir signifying “peace” that would have split into two terms, one conserving the original sense, the other taking on the sense of “world.” According to Antoine Meillet (RT: Le slave commun), the model for this transition from “peace” to “world” was furnished by the administrative Latin of the Roman Empire: pax romana became an expression designating all the territory ruled by Roman peace. Similarly, Old Slavonic translated the Greek kosmos by (visi) miru, “(all) the peace,” the entire domain of peace, and thus the world. The term mir would have been borrowed from mihr in an Iranian language, perhaps Scythian, a form deriving from ancient Iranian *mithra, represented in Avestan by miqra. The Sanskrit Vedic mitra regularly corresponds to the latter term. We are thus confronted with an Indo-Iranian etymon mitra (RT: Ėtimologicheskiĭ slovarʹ russkogo iazyka, s.v. mir). In Avestan as in Vedic, the noun can be neutral or masculine. In Vedic Sanskrit, mitra, neuter, signifies “friendship,” “alliance” (and also, curiously, “friend”). Mitra is also the name of a major divinity in the Vedic pantheon, the god of friendship, friendship personified. In Avestan, miqra means “contract” and, as a proper noun, designates the god who reigns over all that partakes of the good, of order and light. Meillet (RT: Etudes sur l’étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux slave) and, following him, Benveniste (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes) and Dumézil, maintain that the original meaning of Indo-Iranian *mitra is “agreement, friendship resulting from a contract.” From a morphological point of view, *mitra is the instrument or agent through which the *mi- operation is achieved. The meaning of that verbal root opposition to the spiritual world, the world above. (Thus Pleberio, in Fernando di Rojas’s 1499 Tragedia de Calixto y Melibea (La Celestina): “¡Oh vida de congojas llena, de miserias acompañada! ¡Oh mundo, mundo!” [Oh life, filled with pains, accompanied by miseries! Oh world, world!].) Obmirščenie [обмирщение] is the fact of entering into agreement with the powers of this “world”: old-believers reproach the church for accepting the reforms advocated by the state in the seventeenth century, and for “yielding to the world” (on the attitude of the church toward the “mundane” world, see Bulgakov, Pravoslavie). Here too, Tolstoy’s novel offers an example of the paradoxical advantage a writer can draw on, not only from the homonymic relation of the two versions of mir, but from the polysemous nature of mir as “world.” To go back to Bočarov’s analyses: before the invasion of Napoleon’s armies and the ensuing war, certain of the principal characters led a worldly life (mirskaja žizn’ [мірская жизнь]) in society that seemed to them painful and artificial. Pierre Bezukhov gets mired down and sullies himself “in the world,” reproaching himself for being a “man of the world” (mirskoj čelovek [мірской человек]). Similarly, Nikolai Rostov finds peace only after distancing himself from “worldly life” (in this case, his civilian existence) and rejoining his regiment, which seems a monastery to him, the image of a pure world. What prompts dissatisfaction and discomfort with the mundane world of secular life is that it embodies dispersion, disorder, and incoherence. The social and secular (mirskoj [мірской]) world is opposed to the cosmic (mirovoj) world, whose heroes are open, in moments of total solitude suited to mystical perception, to an intuition—of the unity of the universe. The world as cosmos is opposed to the world of profane society as heaven is opposed to earth, but also as the harmony of the totality is opposed to fragmentation and chaos. In other words, the world is a cosmos to the extent that it is agreement. The remarkable fact—for the structure of the novel War and Peace—is that this world of harmony, based on friendship and thus on peace between the elements that constitute it, is revealed to the characters of the novel when there is war: in order to confront the ordeals of war, society rejects dissension, pettiness, and various forms of selfishness or secular social existence in order to form here below a spiritual community in the image of the cosmic world, one in which individuals come to feel that they belong directly to the cosmic totality; their worldly existence, their social determinations, are abolished. It will be seen how, in the title Vojna i mir (War and Peace), mir does not only mean “peace,” but refers as well to the “world” and the contrasts between the profane or secular world and a cosmic world identified with the spiritual world. REFS.: Bočarov, S. “Le terme mir dans Vojna i mir.” Actes du colloque Tolstoï aujourd’hui. Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1980. Bulgakov, Sergeĭ Nikolaevich. Pravoslavie: Očerki učenija pravoslavnoj Cerkvi. 2nd ed. Paris: YMCA, 1985. Revised translation by Lydia Kesich: The Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. Tolstoy, Leo. La guerre et la paix. Translated by Henri Mongault. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952. Translation from Russian to English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: War and Peace. New York: Knopf, 2007. First published in 1869. Uspenskij, Boris Andreevich. “Vlijanie jazyka na religioznoe soznanie [The influence of language on religious conscience].” Trudy po jazykovym sistemam 4 (1969). 678 MIR and the solidarity organic. But in point of fact, Frank further notes, in the case of a human society, even beneath the external modifications appropriate to Gesellschaft, one detects the presence of an internal solidarity characteristic of Gemeinschaft. Adapting the teaching of Khomyakov on the nature of the unity of the church, Frank, in The Spiritual Foundations of Society, affirms that sobornost’ is based on a relation of love. If the ideal is to act so that the human world might melt into the Church, through the effects of pacification, it must also be recognized that the principle of love or organic solidarity is indispensable, even if it is invisible, for every society. III. Mir, Peasant Commune and Utopia— Slavophiles and Socialists The theme of sobornost’, which implies a reflection on the “peace” component and the “world” component in the unitary notion of mir, also includes considerations about a third sense of the word: mir as the name of a specific institution, the peasant commune, also called obščina [община]. The real institution that corresponded to mir taken in this sense was the object, between 1840 and 1930, of various intellectual battles bearing directly on the characteristics (and thus on the fate) of Russian society, and that ultimately involved the nature of the social bond and the very status of the political. Before indicating briefly the stakes of those debates, we may note that in all dictionaries, mir as “peasant commune” is presented as an aspect of mir as “world,” a circumstance confirmed by the spelling of the word prior to the reform: each “peasant commune” is a world in itself, a whole whose cohesion is ensured by extremely powerful customs of solidarity. It was this mir as “peasant commune” that Toporov had in view in his remarks (in “Iz nabljudenij nad etimologiej slov mifologiceskogo xaraktera”) on the etymology of the term: “The god Mitra is the one who gathers men in a social structure, a mir, it might be said, borrowing a term from Russian social tradition.” This way of defining the group wanted by Mitra takes into account, Toporov says, the “natural [or etymological] bond” between the Indo-Iranian *mitra and the Russian mir. What sort of totality-collectivity are we dealing with in the peasant mir? Intellectuals became truly aware of the importance of this kind of social organization only after the German traveler August von Haxthausen published the results of his investigation of the Russian agrarian regime. The Slavophiles opted to see in the mir described by Haxthausen the mir mentioned in the juridical texts of Kievian Russia (notably the Russkaja pravda of the thirteenth century). By 1856, the Russian political philosopher Boris Chicherin had shown that this was an error: in Kievian Russia, the peasants of a commune (in the sense of a territorial circumscription) formed a mir, that is, they met periodically to designate their magistrates, who were responsible for the police and relations between the commune and the outer world, the prince and the lords of the manor (see Eck, Le Moyen Âge russe). Although the Kievian mir also had to administer lands not yet assigned, the peasant was free to dispose of the lands he worked as he wished. In contrast, the mir Haxthausen observed was the true holder (if not the owner), administrator, and assigner of the land worked by the peasants (Eck, ibid.). According to Klyuchevsky, the characteristic features of this of mir cannot be dissociated, in the sense that “the idea of mir, of the world, is based on the notion of a concordance of parts, harmony, and unity. The world is a coherent whole; it is the mir of the beings, things, and phenomena it contains.” In other words, with peace and agreement being the condition of the world, and the world being the space constituted by peace, it is the sense of “peace” (order, harmony, coherence) that is primary. This idea underlies the doctrines positing that sobornost’ (solidarity) is the foundation of the human world, and that sobornost’ is an expression of love as the realization of an inner principle that is supernatural and prevails over empirical nature: it is the principle of divine truth. And inversely: the principle of truth [pravda (правда)], which is the foundation of society as community [obščestva (обществa)], the principle of the submission of human passions and natural tendencies to the will and force of God, is necessarily achieved as love [ljubov’ (любовь)], total inner unity of the human being, a unity without which the union and coordination that empirically determine the nature of the community are impossible. (Frank, The Spiritual Foundations of Society) For Frank, as is known, this genuine community, “this spiritual organism is what is understood—in the deepest and most general sense—by the word ‘church’ (tserkov’ [церковь]). Thereby, we arrive at the affirmation that at the foundation of all community, as the means and creative principle of that community, there is necessarily the Church.” Thus, the “world is to melt without residue into the Church. The entire world is to become without residue the world in God, but God cannot take his place without residue in the world” (ibid.). He continues: Social life is constituted by a constant struggle between the principle of solidarity and the principle of individual freedom, between the power [vlast’ (власть)] that protects the interests of the whole and anarchical tendencies, between centripetal and centrifugal forces. It is only when those two principles find support in a third principle , the service of God, the service of absolute truth, that they achieve agreement and are lastingly reconciled. The social world becomes a community, the mir of the secular world becomes a church only when that reconciliation, which is a pacification (primirenie [примирение]), has completed its work. It may be noted, in taking up the question of the original meaning of mir anew, that if the harmony of the whole is a form and consequence of the love that the constitutive parts of that whole bring to God, then that social bond cannot be interpreted as a system of exchanges regulated by contract. Thus the ideologues of sobornost’ adopt as their own, and with considerable insistence, Tönnies’s opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (see CIVIL SOCIETY, Box 1). It is clearly in society as Gesellschaft that the parts are reciprocally adjusted through the effect of laws or forces that are imposed on them and remain, in a sense, external in relation to them. In Gemeinschaft, on the contrary, the unity is internal, MIR 679 organized, in accordance with its inner truth, in the community of the mir; the freedom to be defended was not the power for the people to intervene in political affairs, but the right to be free from politics (Walicki, History of Russian Thought). The mir was, like the church whose counterpart it was within society, a form of common life that combined unity and freedom and whose law was love (Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, quoting Khomyakov). The Slavophiles were not alone in exalting the mir. In the camp of the adversaries of autocracy, those who dreamed of a democratic Russia and were inspired in large measure by the revolutionary doctrines and movements of Western Europe, Alexander Herzen, in 1846, was also discovering first the importance, then the positive value of the mir. The mir was not just a remnant from a precapitalist order. It was also the germ and the model of a socialist organization for the whole of Russia. The hope of Herzen and his “populist” disciples that socialism might come to Russia without necessarily passing through a capitalist phase was based on the existence of the mir. Herzen, like the Slavophiles, was horrified by the disasters that the Industrial Revolution, and more generally capitalism, had inflicted on entire populations, but, unlike the Slavophiles, his aim was not to preserve or restore old structures, but to “preserve the commune and render the individual free.” That combination defined his ideal of “Russian socialism” (see Malia, Alexander Herzen and the mir-obscina—obligatory equalization of the lots assigned to each household, complete power of the commune over the peasant, the commune’s vouching (out of solidarity) for the payment of taxes—were not explicitly established until the seventeenth century (Socineniya, vol. 2). . The peasant mir was an extraordinarily persistent and fertile ideological (if not philosophical) theme in Russian thought of the second half of the nineteenth century. The defense and illustration of the mir was one of the principal motifs of the Slavophile trend. Thus I. Kireevskij saw in the mir a society whose cohesion was ensured by a fundamentally moral bond. The Russia of times past, “authentic” Russia, unaltered by reforms imitated from the West, was united by that moral bond “into a single vast mir, a nation in which faith, land, and custom were shared by all” (quoted in Walicki, Slavophile Controversy). The mir was a unity grounded in the intimate adhesion of individuals and the integrating force of religion and of shared moral convictions. As opposed to this, organization imposed by an external law, where social relations result from rational contracts combined with legal guarantees, was, for C. S. Aksakov, artificial and bad. An autonomous sphere of the juridical and the political existed: it was entirely in the hands of the monarch and the state. It was external to the life of the people as 2 History of the mir Whatever its antiquity, and whatever the variations and obscurities of the agrarian codes before and after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the commune appears as the natural form of peasant life. This is a kind of proverb among peasants of the Russian plain: “the land is with the mir” (zemlja mirskaja [земля мирская]) (see Lewin, Making of the Soviet System; and ibid., for an analysis of juridical debates concerning the mir). The principal function of the mir is the periodic redistribution of land among households, in accordance with the manpower provided by each household or the number of mouths to be fed. A scrupulous concern for egalitarian justice brought the mir, in its allocation of plots of land, to take into account quality of soil, configuration of terrain, and distance from the village. In addition, one had to yield to all the constraints inherent in the practice of triennial crop rotation, applied to all the lands in the commune. Each household thus received a lot composed of narrow strips of land, which were dispersed and frequently impractical to till with a harnessed plow, but the resultant distribution was rigorously and minutely egalitarian. The lands associated with each household did not form a single block, but consisted of parcels surrounded by other parcels belonging to other households. Labor was necessarily and at all times collective. The division of lots resulted from decisions, which were always unanimous, taken after tumultuous discussions by family heads convened in general assemblies (sxod [сход]). The mir system was further reinforced after the 1861 reform: it was to the mir that the responsibility fell for buying and administering the lands that large landholders were obliged to cede to the peasants once they were liberated. In the eyes of many economists, however, the mir was an insurmountable impediment to agricultural development and thus to the capitalist modernization of Russia. The Stolypin reforms, after the failure of the revolution of 1905, aimed to break the framework of the commune and to favor the emergence of a class of land-owning peasants, intent, in order to get rich, on taking initiatives, working hard, and employing a salaried workforce. These reforms were largely successful: on the eve of the 1917 revolution, almost half the peasant families of European Russia had left their mir, and the peasants had become individual farmers. But the upheavals of civil war and the changes triggered by the reform of 1918 (“land to the peasants!”) resulted in the mir being reconstituted, and a good number of peasants who had left their communes returned. For more than a decade, the Soviet government allowed the mir to subsist, even as it sought to invigorate the class struggle in the villages and to favor soviets of poor peasants. It was only with generalized collectivization (elimination of the kulaks, establishment of kolkhozes and sovkhozes) at the beginning of the 1930s that the mir disappeared. (Concerning the vitality of the mir during the first years of the Soviet regime, see Pascal, Civilisation paysanne en russe; Lewin, Paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique.) REFS.: Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon, 1985. . La paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique 1918–1930. Paris: Mouton, 1966. Translation by Irene Nove, with John Biggart: Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Pascal, Pierre. Civilisation paysanne en Russie: 6 esquisses. 2 vols. Lausanne: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 1969–73. Translation by Rowan Williams: The Religion of the Russian People. London: Mowbrays, 1976. 680 MITMENSCH Heller, Léonid, and Michel Niqueux. Histoire de l’utopie en Russie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Klyuchevsky, V. O. Socineniya. Vol. 2 of Kurs russkoĭ istorii. Ann Arbor, MI: J. W. Edwards, 1948. Translation by C. J. Hogarth: Vol. 2 of A History of Russia. 5 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1911–31. Kremnev, Ivan (pseudonym of A. V. Chaianov). Puteshestvie moego brata Aleksei. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1920. Translation by Robert E. F. Smith: “The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia.” In The Russian Peasant, 1920 and 1984, edited by Robert E. F. Smith, 63–108. London: Cass, 1977. Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “Vojna i mir.” In Poėmy. Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1974. Translated as: “War and the World.” In vol. 2 of Selected Works in Three Volumes. Moscow: Raduga, 1986. First published in 1916. Pascal, Pierre. Civilisation paysanne en Russie: 6 esquisses. 2 vols. Lausanne, Switz.: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 1969–73. Translation by Rowan Williams: The Religion of the Russian People. London: Mowbrays, 1976. Rubel, Maximilien. Marx, critique du marxisme: Essais. Paris: Payot, 1974. Translation by Joseph O’Malley and Keith Algozin: Rubel on Karl Marx: Five Essays. Edited by Joseph O’Malley and Keith Algozin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Tolstoy, Leo. Vojna i mir. Moscow: Zakharov, 2000. Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: War and Peace. New York: Knopf, 2007. First published in 1869. Toporov, V. N. “Iz nabljudenij nad etimologiej slov mifologiceskogo xaraktera [Observations on the etymology of words of a mythical nature].” Etimologija (1967). Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979. . The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Birth of Russian Socialism; Walicki, History of Russian Thought). It stemmed from a critique, not only of capitalism, but also of the idea that only capitalist society, by engendering the forces that would destroy it, could give birth to socialism and, additionally, that what would follow capitalism would necessarily be socialism. For Herzen, the paths of history were not traced in advance (see Berlin, Russian Thinkers). Among the adversaries of the mir one finds, principally, as of 1861, all the partisans of the transformation of Russia into a modern country: functionaries, economists, entrepreneurs. For them, the mir was one of the principal causes of the economic, social, cultural, and—in a certain sense, moral— backwardness of the Russian peasantry (see Besançon, Être russe au XIXe siècle). But the “populist” or (later) “socialistrevolutionary” vision of the mir (which would be criticized as late as the 1920s by the economist Cajanov, the partisan of a society founded on familial peasant property, see Kremnev, Puteshestvie moego brata Aleksei) was above all attacked by the Marxists. They rejected the utopia of a socialism carried forward by the peasant masses and constructed on the model of the mir; for them, the mission of leading the revolution that would achieve the transition to socialism fell to the industrial proletariat, the product of capitalism. It should be remembered, however, that as of the 1860s, Marx, and then Engels, when questioned by the Russian populists (notably by Danielson, the translator of Capital), on several occasions offered answers less categorical than, and more distant from, what was in the process of becoming Marxist orthodoxy. In their preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1882, they wrote: “If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, so that the two revolutions complement each other, the current model of Russian common property can become the starting point for a communist revolution” (quoted in Rubel, Marx, critique du marxisme). In sum, according to Marx, the enclosed, ahistorical, and specifically Russian “world” that was the Russian peasant mir could be saved and could preserve Russia from capitalism only if it were caught up in the history of a properly “worldwide” revolution. Charles Malamoud REFS.: Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. London: Hogarth, 1978. Besançon, Alain. Être russe au XIXe siècle. Paris: Colin, 1974. Eck, Alexandre. Le Moyen Âge russe. Preface by Henri Pirenne. 1933. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Florensky, Pavel. Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoj teoditsei v dvenadtsati pis’makh. Moscow: Lepta, 2002. Translation by Boris Jakim: The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Introduction by Richard F. Gustafson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. First published in 1914. Frank, Semen L. Duxovnye osnovy obščestva. New York: Posev, 1988. Translation by Boris Jakim: The Spiritual Foundations of Society: An Introduction to Social Philosophy. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987. Frioux, Claude. Maïakovski. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961. Gonda, Jan. “Mitra and Mitra: The Idea of Friendship in Ancient India.” Indologica Taurinensia 1 (1973): 71–107. Haxthausen, August, Freiherr von. Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands. 6 vols. Hanover, 1847–52. Translation by Eleanore L. M. Schmidt: Studies on the Interior of Russia. Edited by S. Frederick Starr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. MITMENSCH (GERMAN) ENGLISH fellow human FRENCH autrui v. AUTRUI, and ACTOR, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, NEIGHBOR, PARDON, SUBJECT, WELT, WORLD Of recent use in philosophy, the Mitmensch (literally, the man-with-me), who is not simply “the other,” but not really “others” per se, is situated at the heart of a complex configuration, where it is caught between an undifferentiated alter ego—an other (alius) who is indeed someone, but not just anyone (that is, the thou or you of the dialogical relation)—and the “neighbor,” in the sense conferred on the term by the Decalogue. The distinct orientations taken by those using the term, and the theological or religious impregnation of the word, have contributed to the difficulty of translation—a difficulty all the more remarkable in that reflection on the Mitmensch has found an echo in France in various debates that oppose diverse conceptions of the functions of autrui (others). Although the term attested to by Adelung in 1777 (RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart) is immediately understandable in common parlance, where it designates simply “any person sharing with me the human condition”—“Meine Glückseligkeit kann ohne Liebe meiner Mitmenschen nicht bestehen” (My happiness cannot exist without the love of those with whom I share existence), wrote Schiller, and similarly MITMENSCH 681 concept of the other. The other is not an other; on the contrary, in his precise correlation, he is in a relation of continuity with the I. The other, the alter ego, is the origin of the ego” (Ethik des reinen Willens, chap. 4). This moral conception would undergo a substantial deepening and transformation when Cohen, in 1918, wrote Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (published in 1919). The initial problem he posed turns on the limits of morality, and it is a matter of showing that there exists, beyond the “it” or “he” that constitutes the exclusive horizon envisaged by the realm of the practical, a “thou” whose singularity escapes the notion of the alter ego. Because it lifts humanity out of all that is empirical and available to the senses, ethics is constrained to look past concrete individuality in order to objectivize the ego at the higher level of abstract humanity. Religion finds the basis of its legitimacy from a systematic point of view, and the basis of its specificity with regard to reason, as soon as it brings to the fore the irreducible singularity of a “thou” that is no longer an alter ego, the Nebenmensch, but rather the Mitmensch. The suffering of others, in its singularity, confronts the “I” with its responsibility for the suffering that it inflicts by sinning, and the particular objectivization of the inflicted harm that is manifested in the suffering of the other is what constitutes self-consciousness—and the source of religion. Moreover, the correlation between man and a God whose uniqueness Cohen emphasizes cannot be sustained logically if that “man” is not understood in his own radical uniqueness—but a uniqueness that is not identical with the absolute unity of the divine. It is thus solely a matter of the individual considered in his or her extreme singularity, that is, of the other (autrui), which is at once like oneself and altogether other: the Mitmensch henceforth opposed to the Nebenmensch. It is thus not by chance that the central chapter of Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism) is devoted to the subject of forgiving, the act that exceeds—par excellence—the limits of morality (a sphere that knows genuine reparation only in the law) and that reveals the singularity of the relation between “I” and “thou” that operates below the relations between Nebenmenschen and that only functions between Mitmenschen as between “I” and God: “The hypothesis that the alter ego and the other (autrui) might be identical is precisely the prejudice of contemporary thought. The alter ego is not at all the other. It is experience itself that rejects that identification.” For Löwith, in his doctoral thesis “Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen” (The individual in the role of Mitmensch), the notion of Mitmensch intervenes in the analysis of the structure of being-together (Miteinandersein), which implies that one makes a distinction between a world, an environment (Umwelt), and a shared world (Mitwelt). “Others do not encounter each other originally as suspended objects whose characteristics would partake of the person, but in a relation of man to the world, thus an ‘intramundane’ relation, a world considered as a ‘shared world,’ in the perspective of the surrounding world” (Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 1, chap. 2, in which the reference to §24 of Heidegger’s Being and Time is explicit). It is because humans are so essentially Voss: “du Frei muß werden sobald zu Vernunft er gelangte der Mitmensch!” (any other man, as soon as he gains access to Reason, must be free!)—it appears in philosophy from the outset as a concept. The two initial orientations given to the word (by Hermann Cohen in 1919, then, ten years later, by Karl Löwith) are different, but it is not their difference that makes for the difficulty of finding an equivalent for the term; the translation of Mitmensch in French as autrui, which is undoubtedly the only reasonable and suitable rendering, in no way allows the term to be shorn of its ambiguities. In addition, there exists, in the historical context in which the concept was formed, a dimension that was from the outset theological, in which the word subsumed simultaneously a “neutral” sense—Mitmensch does indeed signify any other person who shares the same condition as me—and a plainly religious sense. Bultmann, throughout his long career, also employed the word to designate not exactly der Nächste, but the other human being whom my practical behavior must consider not as a Nebenmensch (literally, the man alongside [me]), but, precisely, as a Mitmensch, in such manner that I can as a consequence understand the meaning of the commandment that will make of the Mitmensch (which everyone has the right to be for me) a fellow human. Conversely, Jesus, the eminent fellow human, is in reality, under the figure of Christ, the paradigm of the Mitmensch. Two general axes can be described from a historical, as well as a thematic, point of view: on the one hand, the phenomenological lineage initiated by Löwith, a student of Husserl and then of Heidegger, which leads to the French phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and which is continued by Deleuze; on the other, the ethico-religious orientation of Cohen, adapted by Buber to an extent, which emerged in the idea of the “other” in Lévinas. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s critique of the Sartrean alter ego (see “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui”) was executed against a backdrop of phenomenology, just as Lévinas’s “other” was similarly rooted in a renewal of phenomenology (see “La trace de l’autre”). Thus it is that the notion of autrui, “others,” in French, which confirms, without in any way resolving this foundational semantic duality, can give but an approximate equivalent of Mitmensch, and its principal virtue lies precisely in the ambiguity that is retained in French, even though it remains altogether mute, at least on first hearing, in relation to the religious dimension, which was the initial breeding ground of the notion. I. From Nebenmensch (the Man beside Me) to Mitwelt (a Shared World): A Place for the Mitmensch (Hermann Cohen, Karl Löwith) The systematic origin of the concept comes from an inflection implemented by Cohen toward the end of his life, when he returned to the arguments he originally put forth in Ethik des reinen Willens (1904) in order to show its limits and to acknowledge the specificity of religion, which, until then, had not received an independent status. Cohen had shown that there could be no pure morality without the second person, the Nebenmensch. But the Nebenmensch, if it remains captive to the limits of the concept of plurality, does not satisfy the exigencies of the concept of the nonself, “for which reason one prefers to it the more precise 682 MITMENSCH critique of Sartre is quite present in what lies behind these reflections (ibid.): If access to autrui has entered into a constellation of others it is difficult to argue that the other is nothing other than the absolute negation of myself, for when it comes to absolute negation, there is only one, which absorbs into itself all rival negations. Even if we have a principal other the mere fact that it is not a unique other obliges us to understand it not as absolute negation, but as modalized negation, i.e., ultimately, not as what contests my life, but as what gives it form. [T]he problem of others [is not to be posed] as that of access to a different mode of negativization but as that of initiation to a symbolic and typology of others whose being for itself and being for others are reflexive variants, and not essential forms. Thus autrui would be less related to the Sartrean alter ego, “the gaze of the other that robs me of the world,” and more to a structure. Similarly, Deleuze granted to Sartre—but in order to immediately strip him of it—the merit of having wanted to make of autrui a structure irreducible to subject or object: “but since he defined that structure by the gaze, he lapsed into the categories of object and subject, by making of autrui he who constitutes me as an object when he looks at me.” Autrui is defined from the outset as a “structure of the field of perception” such that “it is not myself, but autrui as a structure that renders perception possible.” And that structure is not one among others since autrui conditions the whole of the field. The fundamental effect of the presence of others “is the distinction of my consciousness and its object,” a distinction that occurs simultaneously in space and in time (all quotations from “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui”). More generally, Deleuze (ibid.) contests the manner in which philosophical dualism correctly articulates the categories of the functioning of the field of perception and the variations of objects within that field and the subjective syntheses exercised on perceptual matter: The true dualism is entirely elsewhere: between the effects of the “structure of autrui” in the perceptual field, and the effects of its absence. In defining autrui as the expression of a possible world, we make of it the a priori principle of the organization of the entire field of perception according to categories; we make of it the structure that permits the functioning as well as the “categorization” of that field. In 1967, in the re-edition of his En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Lévinas included an unpublished text, “Langage et proximité,” which took its place among a series of texts titled “Raccourcis” [Shortcuts], taking up the essential aspects of the theses developed in his Totalité et infini. One finds in that previously unpublished text the famous passage about the caress, which tends to bring to the fore the gaps in our intentional understanding by distinguishing cognitive understanding from the ethical relation to the real: Perception is a proximity with being which intentional analysis does not account for. The sensible is a part of the world that they profoundly determine its nature, and this world that is accessible to me is not only humanly structured in the sense of a world shared by others, it is also my world, and it is first of all with regard to myself that it can be characterized as a world shared, which in turn is oriented as a function of a self for whom other people are others. Thus the shared world, if it is encapsulated in a specific other person, becomes for me a “thou.” Löwith, who examined in particular Feuerbach’s Principles for a Philosophy of the Future, thus sought to account for the equivalence posited by that author: “the world or thou.” And the “thou” does not represent only the shared world, but the entire world. In the conclusion of his thesis, in which Löwith cites Stirner, he reinforces the idea of the uniqueness of every “I” living at the center of its world with its “property,” that is, with what is proper or belonging to it. But he emphasizes still more forcefully that one’s own world is always also a world shared, and that every radical individuality is also, by dint thereof, a personality (in the Latin sense of persona), that is, a “role” for others. It is that role that is also defined by the term Mitmensch. The condition of possibility of that duality between the individual and the other that coexists in every human being rests on the modality of being human: he or she is independently an other because he or she is independent of his or her own nature. From one’s being, no specific obligation to be can be deduced other than the obligation to be a Mitmensch, that is, a personality that results from the relation between each individual and the others, a relation from which one can in no way escape. This necessity of the Mitwelt determines that of the Mitmensch, and what results from this phenomenology of being-together is an individual-person duality that is considered as ultimate, but that remains primarily oriented as a function of the ego. II. Other People between Structure and Transcendence: Legacy of the Mitmensch in France (from Sartre to Ricœur) A deepening of this perspective occurred in Merleau-Ponty (as in Deleuze by way of a critique of the Sartrean theory of the alter ego developed in L’être et le néant), one that develops an abstract mode of the notion of others that no longer designates a particular modality of the other individual and becomes rather a structure of the field of perception. In a working note of November 1959 (Le visible et l’invisible), Merleau-Ponty writes: The self-other relation to be conceived as complementary roles of which neither can be held without the other being held as well: masculinity implies femininity, etc. Fundamental polymorphism in relation to which it is not mine to constitute the other in the face of the Ego: it is already there, and the Ego is conquered from it.” Exactly a year later, one finds—in a note titled “autrui” (others)—these sentences, which seem to be returning to Löwith’s thesis (which Merleau-Ponty had not yet read, although he had promised himself to do so): “Autrui is not so much a freedom seen from without as destiny or fate, a subject competing with a subject, but it is caught in a circuit that binds it to the world, as ourselves, and thereby also into a circuit that binds it to us—And that world is common to us, is an interworld—And there is transitivism through generality” (Le visible et l’invisible). The MOMENT 683 Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Edited by S. Strasser. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by Dorion Cairns: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “La trace de l’autre” and “Langage et proximité.” In En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1967. Translation by Alphonso Lingis: “Language and Proximity” in Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff / Kluwer, 1987. Löwith, Karl. Mensch und Menschenwelt. Edited by Klaus Stichweh and Marc B. de Launay. In vol. 1 of Sämtliche Schriften. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l’invisible: Suivi de notes de travail. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Translation by Alphonso Lingis: The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Translated by Kathleen Blamey: Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Translation by Hazel E. Barnes: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Introduction by Mary Warnock. London: Routledge, 2003. superficial only in its role being cognition. In the ethical relationship with the real, that is, in the relationship of proximity which the sensible establishes, the essential is committed. Life is there. The poetry of the world is inseparable from proximity par excellence, or the proximity of a neighbor par excellence. And it is as though by reference to their origin in the other [Autrui], a reference that would obtain as an a priori structure of the sensible, that certain cold and “mineral” contacts are only privately congealed into pure information or pure reports. Another one of the raccourcis, “Enigme et phénomène” (1965), quite plainly refers to the legacy of Hermann Cohen, where autrui—understood in terms of the infinite as what refers us to an originary anteriority, which never becomes a presence or is incarnate—“solicits by way of a face, the term of my generosity and my sacrifice. A Thou is inserted between the I and the absolute He.” It will be understood that autrui is what regulates an essential asymmetry between oneself and the other, who is always closer to God than oneself is. Lévinas thus represents a radical attempt to bring into coexistence, in the notion of autrui, a profoundly revised version of the phenomenological tradition and the initial ethico-religious dimension. Paul Ricœur, in showing the limits of that perspective, which grants a radical exteriority to autrui, recalls that: the theme of exteriority reaches the end of its trajectory, namely, the awakening of a responsible response to the beckoning of the other, only by presupposing a capacity to receive, discriminate, and acknowledge. In order to mediate the openness of the Same to the Other and the internalization of the voice of the other in the same, must not language contribute its resources of communication, and thus of reciprocity, as is attested to by the exchange of personal pronouns which reflects a more radical exchange, that of the question and the answer, in which the roles are endlessly reversed? (Soi-même comme un autre) Autrui, then, again becomes the other, and there is an end of hypostasizing, on the basis of the category of alterity, at times as a radical and infinite singularity, at others as a general, originary, and abstract structure of the field of perception. The Mitmensch becomes anew das Andere. Marc de Launay REFS.: Bultmann, Rudolf. Glauben und Verstehen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993. Cohen, Hermann. Ethik des reinen Willens. Introduction by Steven S. Schwarzschild. 5th ed. In vol. 7 of Werke. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981. Originally published in 1904. . Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Fock, 1919. Translation and introduction by Simon Kaplan: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. “Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui.” In Logique du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Gibbs, Robert, ed. Hermann Cohen’s Ethics. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2006. MOMENT, MOMENTUM, INSTANT DANISH øjeblik FRENCH moment, instant, occasion GERMAN der Moment, das Moment, Augenblick GREEK kairos [ϰαιϱός], rhopê [ῥοπή] ITALIAN, SPANISH momento LATIN momentum v. AIÔN, AUFHEBEN, DASEIN, DESTINY, FORCE, HISTORY, JETZTZEIT, PRESENT, TIME, WITTICISM “Moment” has two meanings that are derived from one another: a technical (mechanical) meaning and a temporal meaning. The mechanical meaning is the Latin momentum, and refers concretely, via Archimedes, to the small quantity that tips the scales. The temporal meaning is a movement that determines a before and an after that are irreducible the one to the other. This sudden bursting through of time into space is a key to understanding the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός], which is translated, among other things, as “moment.” Modern languages are characterized by their tendency to forget the technical meaning in everyday usage, which focuses on the temporal determination of a small lapse of time (cf. the article “Moment” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers]: “A moment does not last long: an instant is even shorter”). They specify the technical meaning differently and in parallel with the temporal meaning. German has, in addition, differentiated the technical meaning from the temporal meaning by gender: Hegel makes the technical meaning a speculative usage that requires a reorganization of its distinction from the temporal meaning. The philosophical lexicon of the other languages adapts the Hegelian usage (“moment” as instance, or level of reality) through translation. I. Momentum (Lat.), Rhopê (Gr.), and Their Translations The technical meaning of the Latin word momentum is prior to the meaning of a small interval of time. Momentum refers 684 MOMENT conception of mechanical quantities, emphasizing their construction. By analogy, the quantity called in French moment cinétique (kinetic moment), constructed in the same way with the slight difference that the force is replaced by the quantity of movement (defined as the product of mass and velocity, a vectorial quantity), should be called the “moment of the quantity of movement.” This is not the case, however, though the adjective cinétique added to moment is intended to remind one of this link with the velocity of the moving body, and to make the notion of moment a kinetic, even dynamic, one. In English, there are two words derived from the technical meaning of the Latin momentum: “momentum,” which is imported directly, and “moment,” which is a translation of the Latin term. “Momentum” in English refers to what in French is called the “quantity of movement.” This usage comes after Newton, who discusses what he calls the “quantity of motion” and, in Latin, quantitatis motus. The English “moment,” as in French, refers to the vectorial product of the vector position by another vector. So one finds in English the expression “moment of a force”; in the literature of the time, the expression “moment of momentum” designates what in French is called “kinetic moment.” The importation of momentum into English comes in response to a conceptual concern to underscore the dynamic connotation that Newton’s second law confers on the “quantity of motion.” This law is still called the “fundamental principle of dynamics,” and states that the variation of the quantity of motion of a moving body is equal to the force applied to this body. The English “momentum” thus denotes an impulse and retains in part meaning (a) of its Latin homonym, while modifying it, since the English “momentum” is a result of applying an external force and is not inherent in the body (because of its gravity). What is more, the English term introduces a type (c) nuance, in that Newton’s law is a differential law and thus deals with infinitely small quantities. French then makes a distinction between two concepts, one dynamic and the other static, using two clearly different words (quantité de mouvement and moment), and thereby emphasizing the mode of construction of the physical quantities concerned, whereas English, which uses two phonetically adjacent terms, retains some trace of the Latin polysemy. We are dealing not only with two conceptions of the relationship between mathematics and physics, but more profoundly with two different intuitive representations of movement: it is not insignificant that movement is a quantum in French, and an impulse in English. The difficulty this distinction had in becoming established will be confirmed by the fact that in classical French (notably in the aforementioned RT: Encyclopédie), moment sometimes designates the “quantity of movement.” The Encyclopédie article “Mechanics” even reproduces a strange line of argument that attempts to justify, with regard to the set of scales, the use of a single term for two different notions. The German das Moment is used more or less identically to moment in French. The moment of a force is das Kraftmoment. Since the term for quantity of moment, however, is Impuls (previously Bewegungsgrösse, “quantity of movement”), the kinetic moment is, more logically than in French, called Impulsmoment. Yet das Moment has a more dynamic connotation than moment then to a particular magnitude linked to movement. The redefinition of the category of movement by Galileo and Newton led to a linguistic distinction being established in modern languages, different from one language to the next, between a dynamic meaning and a static meaning, which are merged together in Latin. Even in its technical sense, momentum, which is derived from movimentum (from movere, “to move”), does not have an univocal meaning. This polysemy reflects a difficulty encountered from the thirteenth century onward in translating the Greek term rhopê [ῥοπή], a term used in Book 4 of Aristotle’s Physics (216a13–20) and in the Commentary written by Eutocius (sixth century) from the book of Archimedes known in English as On the Equilibrium of Planes (cf. Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis Eutoccii, 264, 13–14). In Aristotle and in Eutocius, rhopê designates the tendency that a body naturally has to move at a speed proportional to its weight (or its lightness in Aristotle). But in the work of Archimedes cited, rhopê has the meaning, when considering a set of scales, of a weight that can tip the scales one way rather than the other. It is still a tendency, but it results then from the combination of the weight and the distance between the fulcrum and the beam of the scales. Some translators who use momentum in order to designate the first meaning of rhopê have to then use another term (for example, pondus) when they want to signify the second meaning. Yet this usage is far from being a general one, since Vitruvius, in Book X of De architectura (1486), describes momentum as the combined effect of the weight and of the distance traveled. What is more, momentum is also used in the Middle Ages to translate the Greek term to kinêma [τὸ ϰίνημα], which is found in Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics (I.232a9–10, and 241a4) and which there designates the indivisible quantum of a movement that has already occurred. At the end of the sixteenth century, the technical meaning of momentum is thus threefold: (a) a natural tendency toward movement as an effect of gravity (dynamic meaning); (b) the product of weight times distance (what we might call the term’s statistical meaning); (c) a small quantity of movement. These three senses make only an implicit reference to the movement of the fulcrum of a set of scales when it tips: momentum contains the contradictory idea of a (static) equilibrium and its (dynamic) rupture as an effect of an infinitesimal cause. These three meanings can be found, mixed and distributed (according to the particular distortions of each language), in the technical usage that many modern European languages make of the derivations of the Latin word momentum, namely the following: moment in French, “momentum” and “moment” in English, momento in Spanish and Italian, and das Moment in German. In modern French, moment refers to the result of a precise mathematical operation, which consists of constructing the vectorial product of the vector position of a material point by a vector having this point as its origin: one calls this the moment of the vector (in relation to the origin chosen in order to identify the position). Since force as Newton defines it is a vector applied to the material point on which it acts, one can define through this operation the moment of a force. Meaning (b) is privileged here, as well as a mathematical MOMENT 685 an auspicious moment that is favorable for a certain kind of action in people’s lives), or that occurs unpredictably, and it is thus expressed as tempus per opportunitatem (G. Fabii Laurentii Victorini explanationum in rhetoricam Ciceronis libri duo, ed. Halm, I.21) or as occasio (ibid., I.27). . The specificity of the Greek word, which accounts for the scope of its application, comes from its originally spatial meaning, referring to a crucial cutting or opening point, as in the adjective kairios [ϰαίϱιος], found only in the Iliad, and which applies to the flaw in a breastplate, hinge, or fitting (IV.185; XI.439; VIII.326), and to the bony suture of a skull (VIII.84), all places where a blow to the body could be fatal and would decide one’s fate. So Euripides speaks of a man “struck in the kairos” (Andromache, 1120). This may perhaps explain how in Latin the skull’s “temple” (tempus, -oris), “time” (tempus, -oris), and the (architectural) “temple” (templum) are related to temnô [τέμνω], “to cut” (cf. temenos [τέμενος], “enclosure, sacred place, altar”). According to the hypothesis put forward by Onians, the usual word kairos ([ϰαιϱός], with an acute accent) and the technical term kairos ([ϰαῖϱος], with a circumflex) are one and the same, with the difference of accents used to mark, as it often does, a semantic specification. Kairos with the circumflex belongs to the vocabulary of weaving and refers to the braid that regulates and separates the threads of a warp, often paired with the mechanism that holds up the top part of the work: kairos determines the spacing between even and odd threads, which allows for the interweaving of warp and weft. In the same way, kairos in the usual sense of the term suggests the opening of something discontinuous in a continuum, the breach of time in space, or of temporal time in spatialized time. In medical vocabulary it is a moment of crisis, and the interlacing or combination of circumstances in French, as can be seen in the expression Drehmoment, literally “moment of rotation,” to refer to the kinetic moment. The present-day usage of the term momento in Italian is closely related to the usage of moment in present-day French. We should, though, note one meaning of momento that is of fundamental historical importance: the meaning Galileo gives to it between 1593 and 1598 when he establishes a link— which had been unthinkable before then, and that no other language borrowed—between meanings (a) and (b) above. This convergence of meanings corresponds to an abortive attempt by Galileo to derive the dynamic from the static without the intermediary of the kinematic, based on a parallel between a set of scales and an inclined plane: Momento e la propensione di andare al basso, cagionata non tanto dalla gravità del mobile, quanto dalla disposizione che abbinno tra di loro i diversi corpi gravi. (Moment is the propensity to go downwards, caused not so much by gravity as by the disposition that the heavy bodies have between them.) (Mechanics, 2nd definition, cited in K. Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton) II. Kairos The Greek word kairos [ϰαιϱός], which can correspond to the French moment, in the sense of bon moment (right moment), moment opportun (appropriate moment), occasion (opportune moment) (cf. the title of the novel by Crébillon fils, The Night and the Moment), refers to a nonmathematizable singularity. Latin rhetoric (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria III.6.26; V.10.43) thus distinguishes between tempus generale or chronos [χρόνος], a time linked to history and likely to be dated, and tempus speciale or kairos, a distinct time that is either periodically repeated (a favorable season in a natural cycle, or 1 Longue durée The concept of longue durée was the centerpiece of Fernand Braudel’s writing, and it is intimately linked to his vision of historical time. Precisely because it is a complex concept, it is usually not translated into other languages, including English. Braudel uses durée to signify “temporalities,” for his principal concern is to establish multiple temporalities in the analysis of social reality. He starts from the assumption that for the past 250 years, at least in history and the social sciences, there were really only two possible temporalities: one espoused by nomothetic social scientists who assert that there exist universal general laws about social behavior that hold true across all of time and space, and the other subscribed to by idiographic historians who reject the notion of universal general laws and insist on particular hermeneutic insights into social reality. Braudel argues that both approaches are false and misleading. There exist in his view other temporalities—neither universal nor particular—that provide a better understanding of the past and the present. He names four of them: structure (or longue durée); conjoncture (or moyenne durée); événement (or courte durée); and très longue durée. For Braudel, l’histoire événementielle (eventual history) corresponds to the particularist time of idiographic historians and très longue durée designates the eternal time of the nomothetic social scientists. His own work takes place in the space of longue durée—long-lasting but not eternal realities—as well as in the time of conjonctures (cyclical process within structures). All of these terms pose translation problems in English, whether as nouns or adjectives. While événement is easily rendered as “event,” there is no English equivalent of événementiel. I have recommended “episodic” as a term that captures the essential element, that of brief, observable phenomena. Conjoncture has cognate equivalents in all European languages, except English. The English term “conjuncture” is primarily used to signal a meetingpoint of two phenomena and is close to an “event.” The French (and other Europeanlanguage) meaning of conjoncture is that of a medium-length curve going either up or down (an A-phase and a B-phase). “Cyclical” time might be the closest in equivalence. As for très longue durée, it is best left in French. After all, Braudel says of it, “If it exists, it must be the time of the wise men (sages).” Immanuel Wallerstein 686 MOMENT speculative philosophy. Der Moment, in the masculine, refers to a more or less long interval of time, and das Moment, in the neuter, originally has the physical meaning of momentum. The German philosophical lexicon from Kant onward produced an additional meaning based on das Moment, that of cause, or factor, or component of a whole, considered or not in terms of its temporal succession. From there, it became a technical term of speculative philosophy, adopted as such by other languages, including French. This term, created and coined by philosophical language, leads to two questions. The first is the question of the relationship between the mechanical and the speculative meanings of das Moment. . This process itself, to refer here only to language and mechanics, is still never thought independently of time (cf. the verbs used by Hegel: “to put an end to” and “to preserve,” as described in Box 2). This is what Marx shows, by contrast, in his attempt after the Grundrisse to no longer think in terms of the “moments” of economic processes that should instead be freed from a surreptitious eschatology, and from the correspondence between temporal succession and the movement of the concept as postulated by Hegel. in politics and history. It expresses timeliness (thus the [appropriate] measure, brevity, tact, convenience) and opportunity (thus advantage, profit, danger), or any decisive moment that is there to be seized, normatively or aesthetically, as it passes by—and seized sometimes even by the hair, since kairos is often figured as a young man who is bald or has the back of his head shaved, but who has a long forelock in front. Thus, in Pindar, kairos is used to characterize words, both expertly fired and well woven, which hit their mark (Nemean Odes, 1.18; Pythian Odes, 1.81, 9.78). The attention given to kairos defines a certain type of rhetoric, that of Alkidamas, or of Isocrates and the Sophists, and characterizes rhetorical improvisation (Greek epi tôi kairôi [ἐπὶ τῷ ϰαιϱῷ], Latin ex tempore), of which Gorgias was, according to Philostratus, the initiator (Vitae Sophistarum, I, 482–83). III. Der Moment / Das Moment German decouples the meanings that are simultaneously present in the Latin momentum, and redistributes them not onto two different words, but onto two genders of the same word, one of which is adapted by the vocabulary of 2 Moment (Ger.) in The Science of Logic The most apposite text here is the commentary on aufheben that concludes the first chapter of The Science of Logic, in other words, the text par excellence in which the generality of a statement feeds on the particularity of an idiom. Its generality is linked first of all to its immediate environment, since this passage concludes the stage of the logic where the most abstract notions intervened, that is to say, being, nothingness, and becoming, and it appears at the moment when becoming both ends and is preserved in its being-there (Dasein). Hegel then proceeds to his own objective, analyzing the phenomenon that has just occurred, the Aufheben, saying his intention is to discuss “one of the most important concepts in philosophy,” of which the movement from becoming to being-there is only an example (see AUFHEBEN). Hegel here offers a sort of note on the terminology, focusing on the verb aufheben (rather than the noun Aufhebung) in its accepted senses and different usages. If aufheben holds our attention, it is because of the “delightful” phenomenon that “speculative thought” observes in a particular language, German: the same verb offers the two opposite meanings of “stop, bring to an end” and “preserve, maintain.” Nevertheless, to be able to think other than “from the lexical point of view,” it is necessary to show how “a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite determinations,” by examining what happens in the thing itself in question. It to this end that Hegel introduces the term Moment: Etwas ist nur insofern aufgehoben, als es in die Einheit mit seinem Entgegengesetzten getreten ist: in dieser näheren Bestimmung als ein Reflektiertes kann es passend Moment genannt werden. Gewicht und Entfernung von einem Punkt heißen beim Hebel dessen mechanische Momente, um der Dieselbigkeit ihrer Wirkung willen bei aller sonstigen Verschiedenheit eines Reellen, wie das ein Gewicht ist, und eines Ideellen, der bloßen räumlichen Bestimmung, der Linie. (Something is sublated only insofar as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this closer determination as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a “moment.” In the case of the lever, “weight” and “distance from a point” are called its mechanical “moments” because of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the difference between something real like weight, and something idealized, such as the merely spatial determination of “line.”) (Wissenschaft der Logik, 114; trans. G. di Giovanni, The Science of Logic, 82) It is clearly a matter of comparing two distinct domains: the speculative domain, within which the Aufheben operates, and the mechanical domain, in which one calculates moments of force. Moment is presented here as a borrowing, a “Latin expression” used by “technical philosophical language.” In the Aufheben of speculation, as in the Moment of mechanics, the opposites—elimination and preservation, the real and the ideal—work together. So Hegel uses a Latin word momentum, Germanized simply as Moment, to explain to German readers how a German word works, and what is more, an everyday German word. This is a rather curious operation. The equivalence proposed at the beginning of his commentary between das Aufgehobene (the substantivized past participle of aufheben) and das Ideelle, mentioned in the passage cited, ought to suggest the existence of a stronger link between the Aufheben and the Momente—the very one that the conclusion establishes when it mentions “the meaning and the more precise expression that being and nothingness acquire when they are moments.” At this point, Momente can be defined as what the process of Aufheben is composed of. REFS.: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Wissenschaft der Logik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1831. Translation by George di Giovanni: The Science of Logic. Edited by di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. MOMENT 687 willkürlich gewählter Moment [any moment, chosen at random]). So the particular translation difficulties of der/das Moment end up revealing the autonomy of the reflection on Augenblick. . IV. Augenblick/Instant German represents an instant not as an immobile point on a line (in-stans) but as an organic movement, the blink of an eye. The German Augen-blick suggests both the quickness of a glance and the light that this look retains (cf. the poem by Schiller, “Die Gunst des Augenblicks” [The favor of the moment]). The word literally means both a “look” and a “closing of the eyes”; it is the blinking of an eye staring at its object, then by extension the “short duration” of this closing, which is generally agreed to be “indivisible” (RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, 1792 edition, in the article “Augenblick,” 1:col. 561). This particular metaphor does not necessarily entail any difference in usage with respect to the French: the pair Moment/Augenblick works much like the French pair moment/ instant, with the second term in each being reserved for the description of a lapse of time so brief that it eludes measurement. However, while French usage requires the addition of an epithet when instant refers to anything other than an objective division of time (see, for example, G. Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant [Intuition of the instant], 36: “un instant In philosophical discussion, das Moment thus goes back to the configuration of the Latin momentum and its multiple mechanical and temporal meanings. The problem then is not so much that das Moment has a temporal meaning. (In French translation one hears this temporal aspect necessarily in moment, even though the translation proves rather awkward in certain contexts in which the speculative meaning prevails, as we can see in this passage from Jaspers: “Der Augenblick hat in sich zum Beispiel ein [neuter] Moment der Angst [the instant contains for example the moment of anxiety]” (116). The problem is rather one of knowing how to translate der Moment differentially, now that a good part of the temporal meaning is contained within das Moment. The second question thus has to do with the translation into French or other languages of der Moment and of the system of nouns that are used in German to express the lapse of time in its unequal durations. Whereas French has only the pair instant/moment, German has three terms to work with: der Moment, das Moment with its temporal connotations, and der Augenblick. The “opposition” (Gegensatz) between Zeitmoment and Augenblick (Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 114) follows a completely different logic than the opposition moment/ instant. Augenblick alone has the sense of “lived instant,” whereas der [Zeit]moment can in some instances refer not to a moment but to an instant as an objective division, a unit of measurement of time (ibid., 111: der objective Zeitmoment [the objective moment of time]; ein beliebiger, 3 An English Hegelianism? “Moment” in John Stuart Mill It is curious to note that John Stuart Mill, in his System of Logic (published in 1843, or about ten years after the text by Hegel cited earlier, The Science of Logic) problematizes the notion of “moment” in more or less the same way that Hegel does. In a chapter discussing the “Conditions of a Philosophical Language,” Mill first of all recalls the dynamic meaning of “moment.” Then, emphasizing the truth it contains and which concerns the conservation of something unknown (since the product of the velocity of a body and its mass does not refer to anything experientially real), he assigns it a role that assumes its full importance in the use of fictions, as he conceives it in Book V. This notion, which Mill begins by critiquing, is now reoriented so that it can be accepted on other conditions than those stipulated previously. The whole play of the theory of fictions used by utilitarians lies in the awareness that a term only apparently intends something in experience, but that it should not be rejected for this reason, provided one is no longer deluded about its illusory transcendence, because it retains an indirect power to determine things. It was already a received doctrine that, when two objects impinge upon one another, the momentum lost by the one is equal to that gained by the other. This proposition it was deemed necessary to preserve, not from the motive (which operates in many other cases) that it was firmly fixed in popular belief; for the proposition in question had never been heard of by any but the scientifically instructed. But it was felt to contain a truth; even a superficial observation of the phenomena left no doubt that in the propagation of motion from one body to another, there was something of which the one body gained precisely what the other lost; and the word momentum had been invented to express this unknown something. The settlement, therefore, of the definition of momentum, involved the determination of the question, What is that of which a body, when it sets another body in motion, loses exactly as much as it communicates? And when experiment had shown that this something was the product of the velocity of the body by its mass, or quantity of matter, this became the definition of momentum. (A System of Logic, vol. 2) Given its logical and philosophical context, this analysis, rooted in physics and part of a theory of fictions, obviously calls to mind the equivalent of the Moment of the Aufheben in Hegel’s Logic. What is strange about this analogy is that it probably occurs without Mill’s being aware of it himself, despite his interest—a mixture of acerbic critique and restrained admiration—in German philosophy. REFS.: Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, ratiocinitive and inductive: Being a connected view of the principles of evidence, and methods of scientific investigation. London: J. W. Parker, 1843. 688 MOMENT 4 Øjeblik in Kierkegaard v. ANXIETY The instant, which is in Søren Kierkegaard the object of a series of original developments in the register of existentiality, cannot be assimilated to any of the points of chronos: past, present, future. Of the two terms in Danish, moment and øjeblik, the first can refer, outside of speculative philosophy, to all of the moments of a whole or of a natural or historic process. It is important, though, to mention one not-insignificant usage, since body and soul are said to be two “moments” of a synthesis, with the mind being the third term. The question of the third, posed when the two “moments” are the temporal and the eternal (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:185), leads precisely to the concept of øjeblik, which is usually preferred to moment in order to connote the existential dimension. After Kierkegaard’s great works in which the instant is a cornerstone of the analysis of the aesthetic and ethical stages, the concept is elaborated philosophically in two books published in 1844: Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, notably in chapter 3. Without the instant, which comes from God himself in time, “everything would have remained Socratic” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:53), and the paradox whereby time and eternity touch one another would have been missed. Or to put it another way, everything would have remained in the hands of “negation, transition, mediation, these three masked, suspect and secret agents which [in Hegel’s Logic] set everything in motion” (ibid., 7:181). The Christian impulse of reflection leads Kierkegaard to base himself, to the contrary, on a number of solid philosophical pillars (Socrates, the Platonic exaiphnês [ἐξαίφνης], the idealist philosophy of religion) to develop the concept of an instant to its fullest extent, at the risk of “a productive misunderstanding” (W. Beierwaltes, “Exaiphnês oder,” 282). The “instant” is a term that produces an image—“Atom and blink of an eye” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:187; 1 Cor. 15:52)—and refers to the end of time while expressing eternity. How should we interpret this “first attempt to suspend time”? For the Greeks, eternity is the past, to which we can only accede by moving backward. For Judaism, history and the future become decisive. But it is Christianity, Kierkegaard maintains, that first introduces both an absolute qualitative difference, and a contact, between time and eternity. The future, far from being conceived as a result of the past, is “a whole of which the past is a part” (cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 471). But for this to obtain, the instant has to be posited concretely, so that an “ambiguity” can appear: the ambiguity “in which time intercepts [tears: afskaere] eternity, and eternity penetrates time” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:188). The instant, as the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4, cited in 7:18, 189), the “making eternal of the historical, and the making historical of the eternal” (7:58), means that the eternal is “the future which returns like the past” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:58, 15:92). Just as Leucippus did for space, Plato posed the question of movement in time. His achievement is to have thereby discovered exaiphnês (RT: LSJ: “on a sudden,” “the moment that”) and its suddenness. However, his “metaphysical” approach can make it only a “mute atomic abstraction” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:183). While doing justice to the Greeks (5:20), Kierkegaard continues, we should define more precisely this “strange [atopon (ἄτοπον)] thing” that has no place, this pure in-betweenness (mellem), or interval between motion and repose, this kat’ exochên [ϰατ ’ ἐξοχήν] transition, “which is in no time.” It could be a matter of “what is happening behind the back of consciousness” (Lectures philosophiques de Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. H.-B. Vergote, 304, 321). Taken out of its physical and metaphysical context, and transferred to the field of existentiality on the basis of what is “dogmatically” given, this transition falls into the realm of possibility (ibid., 300). It conditions the play of categories of leap, decision, repetition, and contemporaneity, where the concept that is being worked is the instant as opposed to reminiscence, disjunction as opposed to mediation. Understood in this way, øjeblik is, in opposing ways, at the center of the analyses of faith and anxiety, where it appears that the primacy of the future and the vertigo of freedom give the dimension of the possible, of pure in-betweenness as power, its full scope. As “the One which both is and is not,” the instant of “the anguishing possibility of power a higher form of non-knowledge in a higher sense, is and is not” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:146, 183). The instant is both temporal (a transition) and “outside of time.” Since the conception of time is decisive in the determination of the stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious), the concept of an instant will become the object of three original variations, marked by a rhythm of increasing potentiality. The aesthetic instant, the beautiful “poetic” moment, is “the eternal instant of joy” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 2:272). It is eternal because, once all concern about external contingencies is eliminated, “it is everything” (3:401; 10:278). But since it is unable to instigate a history, aesthetic passion “runs aground on time” (10:234 ff.). “The aesthetic is in man that by which he is immediately what he is; ethics is that by which he becomes what he becomes” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 4:162). The models of this becoming are conjugal love and social action, which involve duration, continuity, and history. It is through the instant of resolute choice of the self that ethical individuality “uses time for its own ends” (10:235). Different from aesthetic and ethical eternity, as well as from the abstract eternity of the Hegelian Logic, the eternity in question in the Christian religious sphere determines the third application of the concept of øjeblik. If the master is greater than the occasion, it is because the “absolute Fact” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 7:93) has happened, through which is given, in time, the condition that allows the paradoxical instant to be confronted, when thought is summoned to discover “what it cannot think” (7:35). Because the ethics of autonomy is only a “transient sphere” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, 9:438), the paradoxical instant, compared to the immediacy of the aesthetic instant, this “parody of eternity” (7:186), represents a new immediacy. But these two instants share a passion for eternity which, however different they may be from one another, are not the eternity of “the human in general,” of unconditional duty and of the suspended power of the absolute choice of self. When Kierkegaard entitles his last polemical writings against established Christianity The Instant, he is evoking this “category of great importance in that it opposes pagan philosophy, and an equally pagan speculation in Christianity” (7:183ff.). REFS.: Beierwaltes, Walter. “Exaiphnès oder: Die Paradoxie des Augenblicks.” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 74 (1967): 271–83. Colette, Jacques. “Instant paradoxal et historicité.” Pp. 109–34 in Mythes et Représentations du temps. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985. Kangas, David J. Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Kierkegaard, Søren. Lectures philosophiques de Søren Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard chez ses contemporains danois. Edited and translated MOMENT 689 by Henri-Bernard Vergote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. . Skrifter. 26 vols. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad, 1997. Translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong: Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–98. . Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, with Gregor Malantschuk. 7 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–78. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. fécond” [a fertile moment]), it is the other way round in German, where Augenblick alone refers immediately to a lived instant. Jaspers underlines the fact that “the word Augenblick describes something completely heterogeneous in what remains identical in the formal concepts of time, namely the full and the empty [das Erfüllte und Leere].” This leads to the following terminological distinction: “The atom of time [Zeitatom] is of course nothing, but the instant [Augenblick] is everything” (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 108–17). In this phrase Jaspers summarizes the entire process by which Augenblick has come to be endowed with a powerful poetic and aesthetic force. Poetry in particular develops the theme of the small bit of eternity contained within an instant (cf. Goethe, Faust, I.V.73), while for Lessing Augenblick becomes an original aesthetic concept, a timely moment that is distinct from kairos in that it crystallizes a temporal sequence, including the future, instead of disrupting it: “Painting, in its compositions in which several times coexist, can make use of only one single moment [Augenblick], and because of this must choose the fullest one, from which what precedes and what follows will be most easily understood” (G. E. Lessing, Laokoon, in Werke, 2:89). The difficulty comes into sharper focus when a claim is made, so to speak, on all of the particular elements that have been mentioned. In Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, the term first appears in two key paragraphs marking the transition to originary temporality (§65 and §68). Augenblick is then used to determine the characteristics of the “authentic present” insofar as it is maintained in the future and the having-been. In der Entschossenheit wird [die Gegenwart] in der Zukunft und Gewesenheit gehalten. Die in der eigentlichen Zeitlickheit gehaltene, mithin eigentliche Gegenwart nennen wir den Augenblick. (In the decision the present is maintained within the future and the having-been. This present maintained within authentic temporality, thus the authentic present, we name the instant.) (Being and Time, §69, 338) In this respect, Augenblick is explicitly distinguished from the Jetzt, the now of derived temporality that understands time as a receptacle, a milieu within which one instant follows another in succession. Instant, by the sheer weight of its etymology, thus appears as an uneasy translation for Augenblick, which indicates a present that is not itself within time, and a present in which nothing happens, since it alone is what can enable Dasein to open itself to a being “in a time.” We come back, then, to the problem of the metaphoricity proper to Augenblick. The adverbial expression “in the blink of an eye” offers a valid equivalent, but it cannot in any case systematically replace a noun. The meaning of Adelung’s comment that Augenblick should be understood figuratively even though it is never, or hardly ever, used literally, can now be fully appreciated: “instant,” unlike Augenblick, does not translate the metaphor, and designates a different conception of time, while “blink of an eye” translates the metaphor, but does not express time. . Françoise Balibar Philippe Büttgen Barbara Cassin REFS.: Archimedes. Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis Eutoccii [On the equilibrium of planes]. Edited by J. L Heiberg. Leipzig: Teubner, 1972. Teubner edition first published in 1915. Bachelard, Gaston. L’intuition de l’instant: Étude sur la Siloë de Gaston Roupnel. 3rd ed. Paris: Stock, Delamain, & Boutelleau, 1932. Friese, Heidrun, ed. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Gallet, Bernard. Recherches sur kairos et l’ambiguïté dans la poésie de Pindare. Bordeaux, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990. Galluzzi, Paolo. Momento: Studi Galileiani. Rome: Ateneo and Bizzarri, 1979. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. First published in 1927. Translation by John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper Row, 1962. Jaspers, Karl. Psychologie der Weltanschauugen. Berlin: Springer, 1925. Lasswitz, Kurd. Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Voss, 1890. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoön. In vol. 2 of Werke. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1967. Sipiora, Phillip, and James S. Baumlin, eds. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Stephenson, Hunter W. Forecasting Opportunity: Kairos, Production, and Writing. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. Trédé, Monique. Kairos: L’à-propos et l’occasion (le mot et la notion, d’Homère à la fin du IVe siècle avant J.-C.). Paris: Klincksieck, 1992. Victorinus, Q. Fabius Laurentius. Q. Fabii Laurentii Victorini explanationum in rhetoricam Ciceronis libri duo. Edited by Carolus von Halm. Leipzig: Teubner, 1863. Wägenbaur, Thomas. The Moment: A History, Typology, and Theory of the Moment in Philosophy and Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Ward, Koral. Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Wilson J. R. “Kairos as Due Measure.” Glotta 58 (1980): 177–204. 690 MOMENTE MOMENTE (GERMAN) v. MOMENT, STIMMUNG, TIME We say of a musical work that it corresponds to a form made up of Momente, according to the German expression in use since the nineteenth century, whenever the sequence is itself conceived as an accumulation of Momente. This becomes, then, the standard term for a musical unit of time. Stockhausen gave a complex compositional meaning to the term, which has had a determining influence on contemporary music and musical terminology. For the Germans, particularly Schubert, musical Momente referred to those parts (Stücke) that are not composed with the aim of developing a form extended across several different times but that, on the contrary, indicate a brevity that itself constitutes an autonomous unit of time. The notion of Momente in the compositional sense of the term appeared between 1958 and 1960 in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the first case, Momente is translated as “moments,” and the temporal division of the work into moments refers to a distinct musical genre. In the second case, the term Momente is retained as a proper name that is used to conceptualize a unique experience that simultaneously affects melodic structure, timbre, and duration (Momente in Stockhausen are “individual passages of a work regarded as experiential units”; Sadie, New Grove Dictionary). In his work entitled Momente (finished on 21 May 1962 in Köln) for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists and based on the Song of Solomon and songs by Blake and Bauermeister, Stockhausen explains that this notion of Momente slows him to “form” something in music which is as unique, as strong, as immediate and present as possible. Or I experience something. And then I can decide, as a composer or as the person who has this experience, how quickly and with how great a degree of change the next moment is going to occur. (Karlheinz Stockhausen on Music) Stockhausen refers to three clearly distinct types of Momente that, as the work takes form, end up acting upon each other. First of all, in terms of the melody, the Moment has to do with the work on heterophonia, the play that is internal to the arrangement of the pitch of each note. Here, the spoken voice, articulated and not sung, takes precedence. The Moment increases the already equivocal meaning of the voice. Then, in terms of timbre, this reaches its high point in the treatment of the men’s choir and percussion sections so as to produce consonants, hisses, and loud noises; this less discursive Moment is intended to introduce an entropic sequence within a more articulate extension or duration. Finally, there is the Moment that refers to duration as an alternation between polyphonic sequences and silences; the sense of a new Moment is a result of a deliberate break in the musical flow created by the female voices. I would thus understand by Moment any formal unit that has, in a given composition, a personal and strictly assignable characteristic. I could also say: any autonomous thought. The concept is thus qualitatively determined, taking into account a given context (as I said, in a given composition), and the duration of a moment is one of the properties among others of its mode of being. (Stockhausen, “Momentform”) This explains the importance of the plural, Momente, which emphasizes the large number of operations and, at the same time, their singularity and function. It is worth noting that this conception of articulated composition in Momente brings forth variables, permutable elements—in short, what the composer calls a polyvalent form. These are variables of dynamics, statistical divisions of sounds in a global duration: the collective form of the Moment. The procedures are there to reveal the mutable functions of the Momente in all their power as inserts. Three other works by Stockhausen take up the question of Moment and of the Momentform: Kontakte (1958), Carré (1959–60), and Gruppen (1958). Momente in the sense in which Stockhausen uses the term would from that point on become part of contemporary musical terminology. Danielle Cohen-Lévinas REFS.: Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. 29 vols. London: Macmillan, 2001. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Momentform.” Contrechamps 9 (1988): 111–12. . Karlheinz Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews. Collected by Robin Maconie. London: Marion Boyars, 1989. MORAL SENSE FRENCH sens moral GERMAN sittliches Bewusstsein v. MORALS, SENSE, and COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ENGLISH, PERCEPTION, PRAXIS, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, VIRTUE We can date the invention and philosophical usage of the term “moral sense” to Shaftesbury, and more particularly to Hutcheson. The tradition of a philosophy of moral sense is more generally constituted within the Anglo-Scottish philosophy of the eighteenth century. Moral sense associates the understanding of morality with a moral sensibility. It consists of a set of innate dispositions. It is also a look of approval or disapproval of a given action. However, the recourse to the term “sense” allows us to envisage practical reason playing some role, a moral activity that is far more than the faculty of perceiving good or evil. The expression “moral sense” is a relatively recent invention. As a term in the lexicon of philosophical discourse, it is generally attributed to Shaftesbury’s An Enquiry Concerning Virtue (1699). A hotly disputed notion in the eighteenth century, the moral sense is invoked less often in debates on moral philosophy of the times than in everyday language. We say of someone with very firm principles of good and evil that he is “a man with a developed moral sense.” If the philosophical and ordinary meanings of moral sense always suggest a certain presence of morality within a man, they refer more to a set of moral questions than to a simple doctrinal position. MORALS 691 “Moral sense” was established as a term primarily in order to take the side of naturalism in morals; “moral sense” refers to a set of dispositions that are innate to morality, a capacity that preexists all conventions. This relation to the discernment of good and evil takes the form of an ability to perceive the moral quality of actions, a sense. According to Thomas Burnet, man has a natural awareness of good and evil, which can be understood as a moral sense: “I understand by natural conscience a natural sagacity to distinguish moral good and evil, or a different perception and sense of them” (Remarks on Locke). The existence of a natural sensibility in morality is in many ways reinforced in the definition Hutcheson gives of “moral sense.” Moral sense is not used to perform a good deed but rather to be sensitive to the moral qualities of an action and to approve of them. Hutcheson proposes a morality of the spectator and not of the agent: moral sense for him designates a perception that becomes an approval or disapproval of an action: “A Determination of our minds to receive the simple Ideas of Approbation or Condemnation, from Actions observ’d” (An Enquiry Concerning Virtue). It nonetheless remains the case that from these perspectives, moral sense is above all linked to a receptiveness of the human mind in practical matters. Does this expression not also hold out the possibility that one may exercise one’s moral reason by intervening in one’s own actions? Thus, in Shaftesbury, moral sense refers to an ability to form adequate representations of good. Sense is not reduced to the faculty of perceiving; it is to be understood as a “reflected sense” (Characteristics), an instance of the control and examination of moral representations. “Moral sense” and, more often, “sense of right and wrong” constitute a second-order affection, or even the mind’s disposition to examine sensations, actions, or received passions. Man “is capable of having a Sense of Right or Wrong; a Sentiment or Judgment of what is done through just, equal, and good Affection” (Characteristics). Moral sense is reason based on the perceptive naturalness of actions and passions. In our time, Charles Taylor’s critique of moral naturalism barely mentions the place of moral sense. It is directed, rather, toward the role of naturalist epistemology, whose model incites us to seek “criteria” for morality. In contrast to this approach, Taylor asserts the need to have recourse to moral intuitions, to what motivates us morally, without appealing to moral sense, which is instead a means of apprehending morals independently of science (“Explanation and Practical Reason”). Fabienne Brugère REFS.: Burnet, Thomas. Remarks on Locke. Edited by G. Watson. Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1989. First published in 1699. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, in Two Treatises, I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design; II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil. 5th ed. London: 1753. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Vol. 2, An Enquiry Concerning Virtue. Hildesheim: Olms, 1978. First published in 1711. Taylor, Charles. “Explanation and Practical Reason.” In Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. MORALS / ETHICS FRENCH morale, éthique GERMAN Sitten, Sittlichkeit, Moralität GREEK ethos [ἔθοϛ], êthos [ἦθοϛ] LATIN mores, moralitas v. BERUF, DUTY, LAW, LIBERTY, MENSCHHEIT, MORAL SENSE, RELIGION, VIRTUE, WERT “Morals” (from the Latin mores, “customs”) and “ethics” (from the Greek êthos [ἦθοϛ], “character”), like their equivalents in the other modern languages, generally refer to the rules that make up the norms of human behavior. They are distinguished, both within one language and from one language to another, in terms of two types of problem. The first is the problem of the subject and its conduct, whether as an individual or as a community. The second concerns the nature of what “morals” designate: as a simple description, the designation “morals” refers to nature and to history; as a prescription, it dictates laws, and establishes values, whether good or bad. How these four dimensions (individual and collective, descriptive and prescriptive) are linked constitutes the arena in which the differences between languages are played out. One might think that “morals,” of Latin etymology, is the exact equivalent of “ethics,” of Greek etymology, and that these twin terms coexist with the same meaning in the main modern European languages, including English, even if the Greek term is, as usual, more erudite and more technical (like “corporeal” and “somatic,” for example). This is wrong on two counts: on the one hand, however unstable and confused these differences are, “morals” and “ethics” do not nowadays share the same field of application, and their distinction is sometimes even a doctrinal topos; on the other hand (and this is a paradoxical chiasmus that is often not recognized as such), it is often ethics that are invoked with reference to mores, as a reflection on social norms and conduct, whereas “morals” refers primarily to the individual—if not to his “character” (êthos), then at the very least to the question of his freedom of choice. We can find in the organization of the Greek terminology as it was first established by Aristotle, as well as in the way in which Cicero justified his choices of translation, two causes that may to some extent account for the paradox of the modern usage. I. Ethos [` έθοζ] as “Habit” and Êthos [˜ ηθοζ] ` as “Character”: What Are Ethics? Two competing nouns developed in Greek from eiôtha [εἴωθα], “I am in the habit of” (Sanskrit svada-, “character, penchant, habit”; cf. Latin suesco, with probably the same root *swedhas ethnos, a “people”): ethos [ἔθοϛ] and êthos [ἦθοϛ]. Both have the same original meaning, “custom,” but they evolved in different ways. Ethos came to mean “habit, custom, usage” and refers, for example, to “the custom of the city [ethos tês poleôs (ἔθοϛ τῆϛ πόλεωϛ)]” (Thucydides 2.64); ethei [ἔθει] is thus opposed to phusei [φύσει], “by nature” (so Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics 10.9, 1179b20ff., contrasts the doctrines of those who think we are good “by nature, by habit, by teaching,” cf. 1154a33). Êthos, with an eta [η], refers first in the plural to the places where animals and men habitually stay (“The familiar places and the horses’ pasture [ἤθεα ϰαὶ νομόν],” Iliad 6.511), and in the singular, to one’s habitual way of being, or disposition, or nature. The word falls within the category of what we might 692 MORALS Where Aristotle is particularly innovative, however, as the title of his Ethics (en tois Êthikois [ἐν τοῖϛ ’Ηθιϰοῖϛ], Politics 4.1295a36ff.) by itself indicates, is in using the adjective êthikon [ἠθιϰόν] to mark out an entirely separate area of philosophy. This partition, which has become an accepted part of philosophy programs, was institutionalized in the Stoic description of the parts of philosophy (see Diogenes Laertius, Proemium 18). As a way of defining it, Aristotle chose to reinterpret the two terms, and to make êthos (character) a consequence of ethos (habit): Ethical virtue [hê êthikê (ἡ ἠθιϰὴ), sc. aretê (ἀϱετὴ), literally, excellence of character] for its part [that is, as distinct from aretê dianoêtikê, excellence of thought, intellectual virtue] arises as an effect of habit [periginetai (πεϱιγίνεται): is born or comes “around and following from”], which is how its name is formed, as a slight variation of ethos. It is plain from this that none of our ethical virtues arises [egginetai (ἐγγίνεται): is born or comes “within”] within us by nature. (Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a17–19; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1220a39–b3) The stakes here are very high: for Aristotle, it is question of determining as accurately as possible the place of nature in ethics: “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit” (Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a23–26). The interplay between êthos and ethos anchors virtue in practice, both through the political habits that are contracted because of a good constitution, and through individual exercise of virtue; in other words, virtue is a technê [τέχνη], a “know-how”: The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the other arts [technai]. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn therefore call “psychology” (one is, for example, “sweetnatured [praios to êthos (πϱᾷοϛ τὸ ἦθοϛ)],” Plato, Phaedrus 243c3–4; or, like Pandora, “of a deceptive character [epiklopon êthos (ἐπίϰλοπον ἦθοϛ)],” Hesiod, Works and Days 67, 78). . In Aristotle, êthos becomes part of the terminological language of poetics: the “characters” (êthê), which allow us to describe the characters in action, are one of the six elements of tragedy, along with the story, muthos [μῦθος]; expression, lexis [λέξιϛ]; thought, dianoia [διάνοια]; spectacle, opsis [ὄψιϛ]; and song, melopoia [μελοποΐα] (Poetics 6.1450a5–10). It is above all part of the terminology of rhetoric: the “character” (ethos) of the orator, along with the passion (pathos [πάθοϛ]) of the listener and the logos [λόγοϛ] itself in its persuasiveness, constitute the three “technical proofs,” that is, those which depend on art itself, unlike those, like testimonial accounts, which have an external origin (Rhetoric 1.2, 1356a): the good orator indeed not only should study characters (theôrêsai ta êthê [θεωϱῆσαι τὰ ἤθη], 1356a22) as part of his training, as Plato’s Phaedrus had already suggested, so as to adapt his speech to his audience, but also should himself display a character that has been appropriately adapted, and that corresponds to the particular character of the political regime in which he is speaking (“We should ourselves possess the character particular to each constitution [ta êthê tôn politeiôn hekastês (τὰ ἤθη τῶν πολιτειῶν ἑϰάστηϛ)],” Rhetoric 1366a12), so as to inspire confidence (pistis [πίστιϛ]) and to induce persuasion (pistis, again). This explains, then, the connection between rhetoric and “ethics” (proofs—still pistis— come, says Aristotle, “by means of speech that is not only demonstrative, but ‘ethical’ [di’ êthikou (δι’ ἠθιϰοῦ)],” Rhetoric 1366a9ff.), as well as the fact that political science, which determines what constitutes the properly human good, can be an architectonic for both rhetoric and ethics (Nicomachean Ethics 1.1, 1094a26–b7). 1 Heraclitus, êthos anthrôpôi daimôn [˜η`θοζ àνθρώπ` ω δαíμων] v. DAIMÔN, DESTINY The wide range of interpretations proposed for fragment B119 of Heraclitus, êthos antrôpôi daimôn (variously rendered in English as “The character of man in his guardian spirit” [W. S. Graham], “Character for man is destiny” [Kathleen Freeman], “A man’s character is his fate” [Jonathan Barnes]), allows us to understand how strange êthos can seem to us, and daimôn [δαίμων] no less so. It is generally understood that man’s fate is engraved in his personality (sein Eigenart, as Diels-Kranz translates it in German), whether this is seen as reflecting his destiny (Antigone is born Antigone), or indicating his responsibility (the only fate we have is the one we make for ourselves). Jean Bollack, basing his analysis on the twin terms ethos-êthos, “habit”-“character,” notes that these two interpretations rely on an anachronistic representation of “character,” of the kind one would find in the thirteenth century, whereas the Greek does not make “character” something virtual that can be dissociated from a way of being (and he ultimately draws a different conclusion from this, Héraclite, 382ff.). Martin Heidegger, in his Letter on Humanism (trans. Capuzzi, 256), places so much emphasis on the common etymon that he proposes to read it as: Man dwells in the nearness of god. REFS.: Bollack, Jean, and Heinz Wismann. Héraclite ou la séparation. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Darcus, S.M.L. “Daimon as a Force in Shaping Ethos in Heraclitus.” Phoenix 28 (1974): 390–407. Heidegger, Martin. “Brief über den Humanismus.” In Wegmarken, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, 9:313–64. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray: “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 2nd rev. and expanded ed., 217–65. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. MORALS 693 The term as it applies to the characterization of an individual denotes first in the plural all of the habits that define a behavior, what we call someone’s “character,” insofar as it is what this individual’s “morals” are based on. So Latin does not separate exteriority—behavior as objective action—from interiority—the set of dispositions that constitute the motivation for the behavior. This is not to say, however, that Latin authors were unaware of any such distinction. When it is needed, this clarification is generally made by connecting the term mores to other terms that circumscribe the extension of the concept. We might highlight two types of such paired expressions: either mores are considered in terms of the exteriority of the action, and are then associated with terms like vita (life, way of life; cf. Cicero, De republica 1.10, 16; 2.21), instituta (the principles of life; cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.120), or consuetudo (habit; cf. Cicero, De republica 3.17); or “character” is prioritized in the way one understands mores, and in this case the associated terms are ingenium, indolis, and natura, three terms denoting temperament as a natural disposition (cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.107ff., 3.16; Seneca, De ira 1.6.1, 2.15.1). So the Latin reflection on mores constantly brings into play two realms: on the one hand, the realm of habit perceived in terms of its formality, or almost its arbitrariness; on the other, a naturalistic realm prior to any formalization, compared by Seneca (De ira 2.15.1–2) to a land out of which the moral dispositions of a human being emerge. In a philosophical context, such a dual approach tends to overlap with the classical Greek dichotomy of law and nature (nomos/phusis). Two examples of analysis we come across in Cicero will show how the reflection on mores might be structured around these poles. In book 3 of De republica, the character Philus returns to an argument first made by the neoacademician Carnedes asserting that justice does not, in nature, have its foundation in a social instinct. Philus emphasizes in particular that the “morals” of men can in fact be reduced to habits (consuetudines) and to instituted forms of behavior (instituta) that are based on nothing more than the arbitrariness of a custom passing itself off as a law, as is demonstrated by the multiplication of habits and behaviors into an infinite number of forms depending on the number of different peoples, as well as their variability over time. Conversely, the character Lelius in De amicitia (the very same person who in De republica responds to Philus’s speech, and who comes to the defense of justice) continually draws mores and natura closer together, with the primary aim of countering the utilitarian theory of friendship that the Epicureans propose: for Lelius, it is the accord between good natures, manifested by harmony of mores, that founds and sustains the feeling of affection (caritas) from which authentic amicitia develops. The confrontation of these two texts highlights a profound ambiguity in the Latin conception of mores, which is divided between a descriptive approach toward the “morals” noted, and a prescriptive approach aimed at sanctioning “good morals.” The linguistic usage can help us to understand how this division works: one tendency is toward using such terms as consuetudo, usus (usage), and instituta, whenever it is a matter of seeing mores in terms of their objectivity and their potential variability, whereas the term mores itself is more often than not used on its own whenever it is a matter of by doing them, for example, men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre. (Ibid., 1103a31–34) This text is often compared to the one in Plato’s Laws: his Athenian, in making his program of education, already joins together êthos and ethos, character and habit, but in stipulating that it is during infancy, and even in the mother’s womb, that “more than at any other time the character is engrained by habit [emphuetai to pan êthos dia ethos (ἐμφύεται τὸ πᾶν ἦθοϛ διὰ ἔθοϛ)]” (Laws 7.792e; cf., for example, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Tricot, 87 n. 3). This overlooks the fact that what is at stake is deliberately reversed: where Plato comforts the naturalist by arguing that habit is innate, Aristotle neutralizes what is given to us naturally by arguing for a responsible practice. Most of the difficulties and even confusions between customs and morals, between morals and ethics, stem from this initial chiasmus, which anchors ethics in habit more than in character, in culture and practice more than in nature. The proof of this is that most philosophers who have attempted to define the terms in their own languages, like Cicero or G.W.F. Hegel, have tried to find a set of problematics equivalent to the Greek, thus placing the task of translation at the heart of their reflection. II. Mores If the reflection on “ethics” in the Greek language is focused on the close link between êthos and ethos, in Latin the problem of the basis of “morals” is exacerbated by the fact that the same term refers in the singular (mos) to habit, and in the plural (mores) to character. These two domains are all the more closely interrelated because Latin authors would themselves continually question the relationship between mores and mos. So it would be helpful to begin by clarifying the different meanings of the term, both in the singular and in the plural, and to underline how culturally specific the linguistic usage is in our theoretical reflection. Mos (in the singular) refers in its most widely accepted sense to one’s usual manner, to habit insofar as it characterizes the agent of the action, whether this agent is singular (thus Chrysippus proceeds, in one work, “in his usual manner,” more suo: Cicero, De republica 3.12), plural (thus Numa respected “the old way in which Greek kings did things [mos vetus Graeciae regum]” in legal matters: Cicero, De republica 5.3), or even an anonymous collectivity (thus Cicero’s grandfather’s house was small, “in the ancient manner [antiquo more],” Laws 2.3). The latter two examples cited themselves suggest the slippage in meaning from a characteristic habit to that particular form of habit that “tradition” represents, a meaning frequently conveyed when the term is in the singular, but also in the plural. An example of this would be mos, which tolerates the sort of deception that is proscribed by the law of nature, according to Cicero (De officiis 3.69); likewise, what Cicero in Laws (2.23) calls “our traditions,” nostri mores, constitutes, along with Numa’s laws, the frame of reference when he elaborates his code of law in religious matters. “Ancestral tradition” thus constitutes the mos par excellence, and the most complete manifestation of habit elevated to a system of reference. 694 MORALS and inside, singular and collective, and the purpose of the mores is to reproduce within the plurality of experiences the essence of a mos that brings together these opposites. Any conflict is precisely the sign of moral monstrosity embodied by perverse, seditious, or tyrannical figures (for example, Tarquin the Elder, Spurius Maelius, Appius Claudius the decimvir, the emperor Caligula), whose singular “character” has the effect of dissolving the cohesion of the social body by their private or political “morals,” which go against the mos. III. Mœurs, Morals, Ethics: Between Descriptions of Individual or Collective Rules of Behavior, and Prescriptions of Norms In the French language, the division between les mœurs and la morale seems to become accentuated, and to make a hard and fast separation between the descriptive and the normative. Les mœurs are the rules of behavior of a people or of an individual, and a critical judgment is needed to know whether they are good or bad, accepted or prohibited, since they could equally well be both. La morale, on the other hand, only includes rules of good behavior. They determine and codify, more or less systematically, what is good and what is acceptable (so for this reason one does not speak of mauvaise morale, but of mauvaises mœurs [bad moral conduct]). This being the case, the difference between the terms is also part of a broader discursive division, or even a conflict, between disciplines. Mœurs and morale do not only each designate a different content (whether descriptive or prescriptive), but also are opposed to each other as two different approaches to human behavior (anthropological and sociological or theological and confessional): so the choice of the first term could imply the refusal of any theoretical or normative approach, whereas preference given to the second term could be the sign of a claim to universality. The growing fortunes of the notion of ethics need to be understood in the context of this dilemma. This notion seems to be reserved for a normative approach toward human behavior that aims to go beyond its description, and is at the same time not based on any official dogma (particularly religious dogma), or any moral catechism. The different composite terms derived from ethics, what are known as applied ethics (bioethics, environmental ethics, professional ethics), attempt to lend a rational legitimacy to the production of criteria of decisions and rules of conduct in each particular domain. A. Les mœurs: From psychological analysis to anthropological investigation and sociological study The description of mœurs is presented initially as a resistance to moral prescription and prediction. However, in the transition from the language of the moralists to the essays of the Enlightenment, the object itself of this description changes, and the meaning of the term modulates. 1. The knowledge of mœurs still plays a part, in the Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1765) of La Rochefoucauld, in drawing a “portrait of man’s heart” (preface to the 1765 edition, in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 232). Already with La Bruyère’s Les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle (1688), however, this knowledge becomes the defining a moral norm, or of seeing how one measures up to the proposed norm. Because of this tendency, the polemical use of the term mores in Philus’s speech is intended precisely to disqualify the idea that these “morals” are anything more than instituta. Looking at it from the opposite perspective, the term mores is almost always used from a moral point of view to stigmatize any transgression of an ethical rule: the mores that are thereby denounced are thus not perceived in neutral terms, from a descriptive point of view, but as the opposite or negative of what “good morals” should be. The use of the term thus illustrates the imperative of the norm in the very statement of its negation, as in the speech on the tyrant, presented as a figure who is antithetical to all human and civic values—for example, in book 2 of Cicero’s De republica, or again in Seneca’s De clementia. Mores thus pose a problem for the principle of “morals,” which results on the one hand from a confusion of the perspectives of (external) morals and (internal) character, and on the other from the description of what is given, and the prescription of a norm. This confusion can be explained in large part by an ancient conception of the person, the complete philosophical expression of which we find in Cicero (De officiis 1.107–21). This exposition is substantially indebted to the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, but, beyond the particularities of doctrine, reflects an approach to the person that is characteristic of the dominant aristocratic milieux in the Greco-Roman world (see Gill, “Personhood and Personality,” 169–99). The person is thus defined as a synthesis of two pairs of “roles” (the term persona refers to a mask, and later by extension to a theatrical role: it translates prosôpon [πϱόσωπον] in Greek): the first pair comprises the “common” persona of a rational being and the “singular” persona made up of our individual temperament and sensibility; the second pair joins the persona that is imposed on us by fate or birth and the circumstances of our life, with the persona given by the deliberate choice of a career. This schema therefore combines on the one hand, without explicitly analyzing their potential conflict, the objective determinations of a given character and the rational imperatives that prescribe a universal morality, and on the other hand, the internal motives related to the natura of each person, and the external behaviors conditioned by institutions and social functions (see PERSON). The relationship to mos as “tradition” provides a key, though, to understanding the Latin conception of mores, as can be judged by looking at three accounts: the political philosophy of Cicero (De republica, Laws), the historiography of Titus Livius (books 1 to 5, from the founding of Rome by Romulus to its symbolic refounding by Camillus), and the practical morals of Seneca (De ira, De clementia). In all three cases, individual or collective mores (the mores of a people or of a social group) are conceived with reference to a Roman tradition that provides an evaluative norm through concrete models that embody a mind governed by virtue. Mores, in the plural, are thus intended both to exemplify and to consolidate a singular mos, a historic and cultural reality that has gradually been elaborated and unified through the accumulation of acts of behavior, and of examples of character in the course of historical time. For Roman man, there is no real place for any conflict between fact and norm, outside MORALS 695 3. This does not mean, though, that all constraint disappears. In moving from la morale to les mœurs, what is also transformed is the relationship of politics to human behavior. Examining one’s moral conscience and controlling the conformity of practices to the rules that determine beliefs are replaced by a policing of morals that is not content to discipline the bodies of individuals, to organize and pacify society, but goes further and seeks to control and orient the way in which populations evolve. This policing of mœurs accompanies the diversification of those forms of knowledge that participate actively in the normalization of these regulated behaviors. . B. La morale: Between rational foundation, Christian apologetics, and positivist sociology Confronted with the domination of les mœurs, of the forms of knowledge to which this domination gives rise, and of the controls that discipline them, the idea of morale can only appear as a resistance to the diversity and the shifting historicity of the rules of behavior. This resistance is likely to assume two opposing forms. The first form of opposition is that of a rational foundation. We find a conclusive sign of this opposition in the fate that befalls each of these two terms (mœurs and morale) in Descartes’s Discourse on Method. Whereas mœurs (as well as voyages) are eliminated because of the uncertain nature of the knowledge associated with them, la morale is presented as a set of necessary rules by which one should lead one’s life. In principle, these rules should be obtained following a deductive process that does not draw in any way on experience, but in the absence of an immediate rational foundation, a morale par provision is established, a provisional morale whose essential characteristic is precisely that, far from being reduced to a conformity to les mœurs, it has to include other rules. The second form of opposition makes la morale the object of an apologetic discourse. It links the defense of la morale to the existence of a dogma. This is why it refuses to come down on the side of either the rational foundation of la morale, or the acceptance of the diversity of les mœurs. Pascal thus makes the relativity of les mœurs an argument against nature as much as against reason: “The corruption of reason is shown by the existence of so many different and extravagant customs [mœurs]. It was necessary that truth should come, in order that man should no longer dwell within himself” (ed. Lafuma, no. 600, p. 584, trans. Trotter). There is in consequence no legitimate morale beyond one inspired by religion: “It is right that a God so pure should only reveal Himself to those whose hearts are purified. Hence this religion is lovable to me, and I find it now sufficiently justified by so Divine a morality [une si divine morale]. But I find more in it” (ibid., no. 793, p. 600, trans. Trotter). This duality is of major importance, since it means that la morale is always suspected of having the shadow of a Christian God cast over it. This leads to the temptation to lend the term an unprecedented residual and positivist definition, turning la morale simultaneously into a set of social facts, comparable to object of an investigation intended to describe different human types. The more this investigation extends to include the diversity of social classes, and then of peoples, the less possible it becomes to think of this as a prescriptive project. Moral rules and principles are abandoned in favor of the freedom of the reader, who himself draws the lessons from the portrait, the investigation, or the history that are proposed to him. Whereas La Rochefoucauld, in spite of his visible retreat from any Christian moral prediction, presents his maxims as “the summary of a moral code conforming to the thinking of several Church Fathers” (in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 232), La Bruyère emphasizes: “These are moreover not maxims that I wished to write: they are like moral laws [comme des lois dans la morale] and I confess that I have neither the authority nor the genius to be a legislator. Those who write maxims ultimately want to be believed: I am willing to accept, on the contrary, that people say of me that sometimes I have not observed well, provided that as a result people observe better” (preface to Les caractères, in Lafond, Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, 695). So the proliferation of points of view on human behavior, and the recognition of social and geographical diversity, are not just a question of knowledge. Replacing la morale with les mœurs gives the subject back the liberty to constitute himself as a moral subject, allowing him to move freely between description and prescription. For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, this freedom will become an even more important juncture in their approach to the question of human behavior. One of the principles of the Enlightenment was to relate the constitution of a moral subject to its environment (geography); this philosophical principle thus authorized the transition from psychology to anthropology—even if this meant searching for the signs of humanity’s moral unity within the diversity of morals. As Rousseau put it in Émile: Cast your eyes on all the nations of the world, go through all the histories. Among so many inhuman and bizarre cults, among this prodigious diversity of morals and characters [cette prodigieuse diversité de mœurs et de caractère], you will find everywhere the same ideas of justice and decency, everywhere the same notions of good and bad. (Rousseau, Émile, 4:597, trans. Bloom, 288) 2. This search for unity does not preclude, however, understanding morals in their historical context; in fact, quite the opposite. This leads to the second fundamental change that came about as a result of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: moral prescriptions are also derived from a philosophy of history. This is what the link between Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (Essay on the morals and customs [or intelligence] of nations) and his epistemological reflections on history amply demonstrates (see, for example, the article “History” in RT: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers). 696 MORALS today, similar in that point to the natural philosophy of the ancients, discusses purely verbal problems, and overlooks real problems. (Lévy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, trans. Lee, 81) What this two-pronged attack (religious on the one hand, positivist on the other) renders problematic is the prospect of a rational foundation of practical norms. So it traces the path of a third term, which appears later and which, without restricting the discourse on behavior to a moral catechism or an anthropological and sociological investigation (and thus subsuming the normative within the descriptive), does not reject the rational determination of norms for conduct. C. Ethics The appearance of the term “ethics,” at first more technical than the terms formed on mors, emphasizes this division between knowledge of nature (even if it is the second nature of habits) and the systematization of duties, without collapsing the second into the dogmas of religion. What is significant in this respect is the fact that “ethics” was only used initially to refer to (to translate) the philosophical works of antiquity, as opposed to moral catechisms (thus La Bruyère, for example, in the Discours sur Théophraste, refers to Aristotle’s Ethics). But the growing (and recent) fortunes of the term come above all from the impossibility of using the notions of morale and mœurs to designate the imposition of practical norms in domains that one does not imagine to be governed solely by economic or technical imperatives: the environment, business, enterprise. To speak about bioethics, environmental ethics, or business ethics is thus, in theory, to take into account the need to have available determinate norms by which decisions can be taken in circumscribed domains and in precise circumstances. In theory, this normative register should be based neither on an anthropological religious facts, legal facts, and so on; the science of these facts; and the application of this science. This is what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl proposes in a key passage in Ethics and Moral Science (1903): Even if we leave aside the old conception of “theoretical morale,” the word morale still has three senses between which we must carefully distinguish. 1. The term morale is applied to conceptions, judgments, sentiments, usages as a whole, which relate to the respective laws and duties of men among themselves, recognized and generally respected at a given period and in a given civilization. It is in that sense that we speak of a Chinese morale, or a contemporary European morale. The word designates a series of social facts analogous to other series of facts of the same kind, religious, juridical, linguistic, etc. 2. The science dealing with those facts is called “ethics” [morale], just as the science dealing with phenomena of nature is called “physics.” In that way, ethical science is opposed to natural science. But while “physical” is used exclusively to designate the science of which the object is called “nature,” the word morale is used to designate both the science and the object of the science. 3. The applications of the science may be called “ethics” [morale]. By “progress of ethics” [progrès de la morale], a progress of the art of social practice is understood: for instance, a fuller justice realized by men in their relations with each other, more humanity in the relations between the different classes of society, or in those between nations. This third meaning is plainly separated from the two preceding, which differ equally between themselves. Hence there are inextricable confusions, and particularly the result that moral philosophy [la philosophie morale] 2 Biopolitics and the policing of mœurs Replacing moral prescription with the description of mœurs is a prominent feature in the emergence of what Michel Foucault called a “society of normalization.” The biopolitics that organizes this society by controlling hygiene, health, the family, and sexuality is made possible by the fact that it is based less on a system of preestablished rules and moral precepts, or on theological dogma, than on a series of forms of knowledge and of controls that not only regulate the lives of individuals, but also conflate themselves in a global subject: the population. The notion of mœurs—which becomes the object of an actual science (cf. Lévy-Bruhl, La morale et la science des mœurs [Ethics and moral science], 1903)— thus ensures the articulation between the disciplining of the body (the singular) and the normalization or regularization of this population (the collective). It is also what allows a part of this population to be designated and identified as outsiders, and to apply a politics of exclusion to them. So the description or caricature of the different moral codes of behavior (mœurs) of a given population is a systematic component of racist discourses. This is all the more true in that the naturalization of mœurs—unlike la morale, which is used, on the contrary, as a criterion to distinguish man from animals—allows for a blurring of the borders between humanity and animality. As soon as one can refer to the mœurs of animals, and describe a population in terms of its mœurs as differing, or deviating, from the norm, the comparison with such and such an animal species is easily made. Thus Voltaire writes about albinos in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations: “The only human thing about them is their stature, and their faculty of speech and of thought is far removed from our own.” REFS.: Clark, Stephen R. L. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Translation by David Macey: Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador, 2003. MORALS 697 that an individual gives himself, and in which he realizes his freedom abstractly, than to the very interiorization of these rules, their possession by a free will. Moralität is thus wholly on the side of the law that the autonomous subject gives himself, and it says nothing of the effective laws of conduct shared by a community of men. In the process, Moralität involves two kinds of forgetting: (1) the necessarily collective or communitarian dimension of the rules of conduct (the subject of Moralität can only be an abstract individual); and (2) what these rules owe to shared habits whose repeated exercise becomes second nature. The notion of Sittlichkeit reintroduces these two dimensions. Sittlichkeit of course implies morals (die Sitten), insofar as they come from habit and constitute a second nature, though Hegel makes it clear that, contrary to the usage the French moralists might have made of it in the seventeenth century, it cannot be a matter of rules of conduct or of individual virtues. So Sittlichkeit has nothing in common with the naturalization of character invoked in the discourse on mœurs of these moralists. But the division of mœurs is part of Sittlichkeit precisely, and only, to the extent that within it, one can realize a concrete freedom, and in that respect it brings together what until then had been separate: Sitten and Moralität. . It is this forced conjunction (a conceptual and semantic tour de force) that Nietzsche would attack, denouncing in the Sittlichkeit der Sitte the illusion that consists of attributing a new dignity to manners and customs, and of forgetting that at the source of Sitte, one finds in reality nothing other than the sacrifice of the individual for the benefit of the collective whole, and a calculation: the preference for a durable advantage over an ephemeral advantage. So Nietzsche writes in §9 of The Dawn of Day, entitled, precisely, Begriff der Sittlichkeit der Sitte (Conception of the morality of customs): “Morality is nothing else (and, above all, nothing more) than obedience to customs, of whatsoever nature they or sociological description of the rules of behavior specific to a given domain, nor on an external catechism. The difficulty comes from the fact that such independence is never clearly demonstrable. Applied ethics cannot easily prove that they do not ratify the morals and interests of a given milieu (professional or otherwise), or that they do not introduce, in a disguised form, some (religious or political) catechism. We can thus legitimately ask whether “ethics,” used so as to avoid saying mœurs or morale, does not in reality say the same thing as one or the other of the two terms. But “ethics” can also refer to the combination of the two, independent of any religious dogma: the universal and abstract dimension of a moral concern that cannot be easily defined, and the diversity of its fields of application. . IV. Sitte, Sittlichkeit, Moralität The German language distinguishes between the descriptive (nature) and the prescriptive (law), but also between the individual and the communitarian, which are the principles from which philosophy establishes its terms. Thus Kant rigorously separates morals (die Sitten) from morality (Moralität). This disjunction consecrates and completes the one that rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy had established in the French language, and does not essentially displace its opposition, except to clarify under what absolute conditions the prescriptive is freed from the descriptive, and morality from anthropology. It is for this reason that it does not pose any major problem of translation. The same cannot be said of the more radical attempt to rejoin what the different languages had so well taken apart, namely in Hegel’s accomplished efforts to think through the conjunction of nature, history, and the law. In the Philosophy of Right, he sets the notion of Sittlichkeit in opposition to Moralität. Moralität is effectively defined first of all by its failures. The term refers less to the set of rules of conduct 3 La valse des éthiques (The dance of ethics) La valse des éthiques is the title Alain Etchegoyen chose for a work in which he analyzed and lamented the contemporary excess of applied ethics: business ethics, whose aim is to propose to employees a system of values that can help boost performance; and bioethics, and its various offshoots. His book is symptomatic of an interplay between ethics and morals, and in effect expresses a nostalgia for a prescriptive and universal morality, Kantian in nature (die Moralität), that motivates his critique of these different local ethics: La morale [morality] is a categorical imperative: ethics is a hypothetical imperative. This distinction is a telling one. Either the action is determined by an unconditional imperative that is imposed categorically: conscience in this case acts out of duty. This should be considered morale. Or the action is determined by a hypothesis that imposes a behavior on it, which we might also term an imperative of prudence. In this instance we are dealing with ethics. (La valse des éthiques, 78) What “ethics” designates, then, according to Etchegoyen, is a vague moral concern that has trouble masking a whole series of compromises with the interests of the moment. We might wonder, then, how far the criticism he levels at ethics reproduces, almost as a caricature, the opposition between Moralität and Sittlichkeit—especially given, as Jean-Pierre Lefebvre writes in the glossary accompanying his French translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, that “this term [ethics] is currently undergoing an evolution in French that collapses the traditional meaning of ethics and that of Sittlichkeit.” REFS.: Etchegoyen, Alain. La valse des éthiques. Paris: Bourin, 1991. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. 698 MORALS may be. But customs are simply the traditional way of acting, and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition” (Dawn of Day, trans. Kennedy, 14). It is more than likely that Nietzsche’s text is very closely working away at the Hegelian construction, and he in fact rejects precisely what, for the author of the Philosophy of Right, was the specificity of Sittlichkeit, namely freedom. V. Ethik The notion of Sittlichkeit does not allow us, however, to account for the conflicts that can appear in the formation of habits and character (in the sense of ethos), between theological principles or prescriptions concerning action, and practical social or professional imperatives. Thus the need, for Max Weber, for another term: Ethik, which he uses throughout his work to account for the precepts that result from this conflict and that determine this particular ethos, and which he uses as well in the title of his book, Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism). In this work, the notions of “ethics” and ethos are clearly articulated in relation to one another. “Ethics” is the set of prescriptive rules that, precisely, lend to the conduct of Protestant capitalists the character of an ethos. This articulation enables Weber to analyze in these terms the idea that it is everyone’s duty to increase their capital: Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a particular ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us. (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, 51) So what Max Weber understands by Protestant ethics cannot be reduced to a deduction of pure reason, in the sense of Moralität, nor to the rationality of the State, in the sense of Sittlichkeit. Taken in these terms, Ethik only exists as the systematic reconstruction of an ideal type. It is in this sense that there can be a capitalist ethics, a politico-social ethics, 4 Sittlichkeit, das Sittliche: Translating Hegel It should come as no surprise that the translation into French of Sittlichkeit has proved problematic for all who have attempted it, nor that translators have found so many words to convey its absolute singularity. Thus Derathé translates Sittlichkeit as vie éthique (ethical life: Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit). Labarrière and Jarczyck (in Le syllogisme du pouvoir), like Kervergan (in his translation of Principes de la philosophie du droit), use the neologism éthicité (ethicity). Fleischmann speaks (in La philosophie politique de Hegel) about morale réalisée (realized morality). Symptomatically, Lefebvre (translator of Phénoménologie de l’esprit) constructs an entire circumlocution to account for the untranslatability of the term, “souci des bonnes mœurs et de la coutume [concern for good morals and for customs],” while he translates the adjective sittlich as éthique (ethical). This awkwardness in translation immediately brings to mind the chiasmus between ethics and morals described earlier. The choice of éthicité or of vie éthique is intended to make us hear the ethos (habit) in Sittlichkeit that morality, in the Kantian sense of the term, had bracketed off. In the translation of §151 of the Philosophy of Right, which explains the meaning not of Sittlichkeit, but of the ethical element (das Sittliche), with reference to the sharing of these same Sitten (manners and customs), the French translators Pierre Jean Labarrière and Gwendoline Jarczyck put Sitte in quotation marks, and refer it to the Greek ethos. The ethical element of the habit then becomes “une seconde nature qui est posée à la place de la volonté première simplement naturelle et est l’âme, la signification et l’effectivité pénétrant son être-là, l’esprit vivant et présent là—comme un monde dont la substance n’est qu’ainsi comme esprit” (a second nature that is put in place of first, simply natural will, and is the soul, the meaning, and the effectiveness penetrating its being-there, the spirit that is living and present there—like a world whose substance is only as it is insofar as its spirit: Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit). With this second nature, we are well and truly in an Aristotelian register, but with the important difference that the conformity to customs, to manners, to Sitten, is also an entirely conscious act of freedom: it is in terms of this free consciousness that the term Sittlichkeit should be understood. The choice of vie éthique or éthicité to translate Sittlichkeit is thus understandable, even if it is not certain whether these terms are indeed the most appropriate to make us hear the Greek ethos, or whether the Aristotelian meaning is not lost in the adventures and misuses of the term éthique. One would have to pass over and above French and Latin in order to grasp, within the French language, the Greek origin of the term. One would also have to forget about the original confusion between ethos and êthos initiated by Aristotle. It is true that Hegel himself plays around with Aristotle’s categories and gets lost in them, when he translates, in the notes in the margin of his copy of Philosophy of Right—another sign of a complex legacy and of an impossible translation—êthos as Sitte (mœurs), and ethos as Gewohnheit (habit). REFS.: Fleischmann, Eugène. La philosophie politique de Hegel. Paris: Plon, 1964. Hegel, Friedrich. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Translated by J. P. Lefèvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. . Principes de la philosophie du droit. Translated by R. Derathé. Paris: Vrin, 1982. . Principes de la philosophie du droit. Translated by J. F. Kervergan. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Labarrière, Pierre Jean, and Gwendoline Jarczyck. Le syllogisme du pouvoir. Paris: Aubier, 1989. MORALS 699 or a “rational ethics of the profession” (see BERUF). It is in this sense, too, that we can refer to a bourgeois ethos, or an “ethos of the rational bourgeois enterprise.” To speak of Ethik is nevertheless ipso facto, and more generally, to go beyond the descriptive stage and to adopt a purely reflective, even systematic point of view. This is particularly true of Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens (Ethics of pure will), in which Ethik designates the systematization of Sittlichkeit. . Barbara Cassin Marc Crépon François Prost 5 Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will In his Ethik der reinen Willens (Ethics of pure will, 1904), Hermann Cohen explicitly critiques Kant’s division between morality (Moralität) and legality (Gesetzlichkeit): on the one hand, Kant makes law the center of gravity of ethics, but on the other, he makes a distinction between morality and legality. Kant also separated the philosophy of right from ethics: Mann könnte denken wenn die Legalität des Gesetzes so gleichbedeutend wird mit dem Zwange des Rechtes, dass dadurch der Sinn des Gesetzes für die Ethik ausser Zweifel gestellt würde; dass es als das schlechthin allgemeine Gesetz von der Maxime als dem subjektiven Bestimmungsgrunde, unterschieden werde. Indessen wenn sonach das Sittengesetz als das Gesetz der Gemeinschaft und der Menschheit, aller Isoliertheit des Individuums engegentritt, worin unterscheidet es sich alsdann von dem Gesetze des Rechts, bei welchem es sich doch auch um Jedermann handelt? Es entsteht bei dieser Unterscheidung zwischen Recht und Sittlichkeit der schwere Zweifel, dass die reine Sittlichkeit vielmehr leer sei; und dass sie, von der Lehrart abgesehen, in der Hauptsache doch nichts Anderes als die Religion besage und bedeute. We might think that, if the legality of the law becomes synonymous with the constraint exerted by right, the meaning of the law for ethics would thus be guaranteed. However, if the moral law [Sittengesetz], as a law of the community and of humanity, is opposed to any particularity of the individual, how would it be distinct from the law of right, whose competence extends to each and every one of us? Establishing a difference in this way between right and morality [Sittlichkeit] sows a seed of serious doubt: pure morality would then seem to be empty and, in essence , it would be and would mean nothing other than religion. (Cohen, Ethik der reinen Willens, 254) The only other passage in which Cohen uses the Fremdwort (foreign word) Moralität emphasizes the fact that he does not consider legality in opposition to morality, but that morality has to be “recognized as being an immanent force of legality,” and that if this link were removed, ethics would remain deprived of what would be, by analogy, the factum of science; the consequence of such a failure would be that ethics would fall either within the domain of psychology, or into the hands of religious exclusivity. For Cohen, the distinction is thus between ethics and morality (Sittlichkeit), without it being a matter of a fundamental conceptual opposition; rather, it is first and foremost a problem of the logic of the system. Within the system, precedence is given to reason (Vernunft), and thus to logic, since it alone is able to determine the purity needed to clear the principles of thought of all representation, and consequently of ensuring that thought is truly autonomous when dealing with intuition and the data it carries. At the highest level of the system, one could establish an equivalence between reason and rational interest; understanding, which attempts to draw out the rational principles of the natural sciences (the lower level being the experience of nature), corresponds to reason, and ethics, from which right (the analogon of mathematics) and the law (the analogon of experience) are derived, corresponds to the interest of reason. In addition, ethics is the logic of the sciences of the mind (or the moral sciences), since the problems that come under its competence are the individual, totality, the will, and action. This is why Cohen is also opposed to Hegel: because his logic would also encompass ethics. Whereas Hegel does consider as distinct the idea of Sollen (should be), he establishes an equivalence between the concept and the being. So, for him, the idea would be the development of the concept, and would remain a prisoner of being, which would also then encompass that which should be. Cohen opposes to this form of pantheism an equivalence between ideas (ideas are the prescriptions of the practical use of reason) and what should be. Ethics is the science of pure will: the fact that the term comes from the Greek ethos [ἔθοϛ] simply means that this science has not broken free from one of its problems, that of customs and manners (Sitten). But these customs are not the content of morality (that is, Sittlichkeit, as the content of the will, in the same way that nature is the content of thought), and were this not the case, this morality would seem to have as its basis the nature of the subject—something that Cohen rejects. Morality, rather, has right and justice as its objectives. From the point of view of its relationship with religion, ethics requires that religion be demythologized, since it is simply the historical form through which ethics has gradually found its way into general culture. The level of customs (mœurs) thus remains that of particularity and plurality, that is, the level of society; whereas the level of totality—that of the State (that which enables morality to be realized), and, further down the line, that of the confederation of States—is only affected by morality under a particular aspect. This aspect is morality, inasmuch as it is assimilated into an ethics whose ultimate horizon, the level of the unity of humanity, that is, the ideal, can only be thought from the perspective of the “pure” interpretation that ethics gives of Hebraic messianism. Cohen indeed refuses to grant religion any autonomy, as he does thought, will, and feeling (the feeling of the aesthetic): at most, religion has a “specificity” within the system (Marc de Launay). REFS.: Cohen, Hermann. Ethik der reinen Willens. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904. 700 MOTIONLESS . Morgenröthe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 5, vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pascal, Blaise. “Pensées.” In Œuvres complètes, edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: SeuilL’Intégrale, 1963. Translation by W. F. Trotter: Pensées. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. Originally published in 1958. Translation by Roger Ariew: Pensées. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005. Powell, J.G.F., ed. Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile. In Œuvres complètes, vol. 4. Paris: GallimardPléiade, 1969. Translation by Allan Bloom: Emile: or, On Education. Introduction and notes by Allan Bloom. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1991. Rueff, Martin. “Morale et mœurs.” In Dictionnaire européen des Lumières, edited by Michel Delon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Translation by Gwen Wells: Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Edited by Michel Delon and Philip Stewart. 2 vols. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. Striker, Gisela. Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Voelke, André-Jean. L’idée de volonté dans le stoïcisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973. Voltaire. Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. Edited by René Pomeau. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1963. Translation by Anonymous: The General History and State of Europe. 3 vols. London, 1754–57. Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. 6th ed. 2 vols. Gütersloh, Ger.: Mohn, 1981–82. Translation by Talcott Parsons: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Reprint. New York: Dover, 2003. Translation by Stephen Kalberg: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Introduction by Stephen Kalberg. 3rd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2002. REFS.: Aristotle. Organon. Translated by J. Tricot. 6 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1970. Bobzien, Susanne. Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Cohen, Hermann. Ethik des reinen Willens. Introduction by Steven S. Schwarzschild. 5th ed. In Werke, vol. 7. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1981. Ferrary, Jean-Louis. “Le discours de Philus (Cicéron, De republica III, 8–31) et la philosophie de Carnéade.” Revue des Études Latines 55 (1977): 128–56. Gill, Christopher. “Personhood and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De officiis I.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 169–99. Griffin, Miriam T. Seneca: Philosopher in Politics. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Griffin, Miriam T., and Jonathan Barnes, eds. Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. . Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Hahm, David E. “Plato, Carneades, and Cicero’s Philus (Cicero, Rep. 3.8–31).” Classical Quarterly, n.s. 49 (1999): 167–83. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Edited by Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011. Translation by T. M. Knox: Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Edited with introduction by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Irwin, Terence. The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Originally published 1797. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1907. Translation by Mary Gregor: The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Laks, André, and Malcolm Schofield, ed. Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649. Fair Lawn, NJ: Oxford University Press, 1965. Lévy, Carlos. Cicero Academicus: Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la philosophie Cicéronienne. Rome: École française de Rome, 1992. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. La morale et la science des mœurs. Paris: Alcan, 1903. Translation by Elizabeth Lee: Ethics and Moral Science. London: Constable, 1905. Lafond, Jean, ed. Moralistes du XVIIe siècle: De Pibrac à Dufresny. Paris: Laffont, 1992. Moriarty, Michael. Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day. Translated by J. M. Kennedy. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924. MOTIONLESS “Motionless” is, along with “silent,” one of the possible translations of the German still, a topos of classical aesthetics: see STILL, and AESTHETICS, CLASSIC, SUBLIME. Cf. SERENITY, WISDOM. See also, on movement in general and on the immobility of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, ABSTRACTION, II, ACT, DYNAMIC, FORCE, Box 1, MOMENT, STRENGTH. v. GOD, NEGATION, NOTHING 701 II. Natsija, Narod, and Narodnitčestvo Observers of nineteenth-century Russian society repeatedly emphasized that the nobles (dvorjane [дворяне]) and the people (narod) often seemed to be two separate nations: their clothes, their manners, even their language—everything was different. The Russian word natsija [нация] (nation), which comes from the Polish nacja (RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka [Etymological dictionary of the Russian language], vol. 3), was created during the time of Peter the Great, whose reforms produced a sharp division within Russian society between cultivated people and the narod. In its contemporary acceptation natsija signifies “a community of people unified by a language, territory, economy, and a common mentality, developed historically” (RT: Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, vol. 2). As for narod, it means “the population of a state” but also “the lower classes, the common people” (RT: Tolkovyĭ slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka [Explanatory dictionary of the living language of Great Russia], vol. 2). For Slavophiles, narod has an elevated sense, whereas natsija is neutral in value. Slavophilism is essentially an ideological reaction to the modernization of Russia and particularly to the gap between the nobles and the narod. Slavophiles have concentrated on the Russian way of organizing life in the village community (mir) and on the interpretation of the law as truth and justice (pravda [правда]). This way of living was contrasted with Western standards of formal law (cf. Kireevski, Polnoe Sobranie Sočinenii [Complete works], 1: 115–16). The patriarchal Russian village was considered the true origin of the nation’s life and strength, the incarnation of traditional national virtues. Slavophiles regarded themselves as full participants in this patriarchal life and did not want to detach themselves from the narod, which for them expressed the spiritual unity of all Russians. The idealization of peasants is connected with guilt feelings on the part of the intelligentsia, whose privileges depended chiefly on the maintenance of serfdom; the term itself (intelligentsija [интеллигенция]) appeared around 1860 in the work of Piotr Boborykin and passed from Russian into other European languages (RT: Great Soviet Enyclopedia, vol. 10). The idea that intellectuals have a duty to the people found its practical development in the narodničestvo [народничество] movement. Narodničestvo is usually rendered in French, very inexactly, as populisme, and in English by “populism.” An English translator of Berdyayev explains narodničestvo as “the movement that in 19th-century Russia was based on the feeling of an obligatory devotion to the general interests of the common folk” (Berdyayev, Slavery and Freedom). A narodnik [народник] is someone who “believes in the narodničestvo and practices it” (ibid.). During the 1860s and 1870s many narodniks “went to the people.” They took up residence in the countryside in order to devote themselves NAROD [народ] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH people FRENCH peuple ITALIAN popolo LATIN gens v. PEOPLE, and CULTURE, GENRE, MIR, PRAVDA, RUSSIAN, SOBORNOST , SVOBODA The Russian noun narod [народ] is derived from rod [род], “family line, species, genus.” Narod, exactly like “people,” signifies both the population of a country and “the lower classes, the common people.” For Slavophiles, narod has the elevated sense of the “spiritual unity” of the nation, and a large part of the Russian intelligentsia idealizes it as a natural and organic element, the “authentic life” of the people. Although it was a cliché in both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, narod took on a less ideological meaning in the work of Bakhtin, who related it to the notion of narodnaja kul’tura [народная культура], popular culture. I. Narod and Gens The root rod [род], which in Slavic languages has supplanted the Indo-European radical *gen, essentially signifies “birth.” In modern Russian the term has the different senses of “clan, tribe, parents”; “family, line, generation”; “species, genus” (or “gender” in the grammatical sense) (RT: Slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Dictionary of the Russian language]). All these meanings refer to entities (things or individuals) that have been created or put into the world together. In the derived term narod [народ] (people), the prefix na- still connotes more the totality of the individuals (put into the world together or unified). In The Russian Religious Mind, Georgi Fedotov highlights the importance of the continuing veneration of the rod—a veneration that goes back to paganism and more particularly to the “cult of the dead as the ancestors of an eternal kinship community.” “The Latin people and the Celtic clan,” Fedotov writes, “are only pale images of social realities that were once alive. In Russian language and life, the rod is full of vitality and vigor.” A typical linguistic manifestation of this vitality is the use of family names as polite forms of address: “The terms ‘father,’ ‘grandfather,’ ‘uncle,’ and ‘brother,’ as well as the corresponding feminine terms, are used in the language of Russian peasants to address both known and unknown individuals.” In this way “all moral relationships between individuals are raised to the level of blood kinship.” In Russian, family relationship is rendered by rodstvo [родство], an abstract nominalization of rod. This linguistic habit of extending kinship relations to everyone sheds a particular light on the roots of Russian communalism and explains the importance of notions like mir [мир] (village community), sobornost’ [соборность] (conciliarity), obščestvo [общество] (community), etc.: for Slavophiles, the archaic cult of the rod, to which narod clearly refers, is one of the characteristics of Russian civilization. N to bringing civilization to the people and improving their lives, seeking to overcome the gap between the intelligentsia and the narod. The ideals of narodničestvo inspired a few generations of passionate advocates who became physicians and schoolmasters in the villages. Narodničestvo found expression in Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, notably in the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. For Tolstoy, the simple, everyday life of the common people was endowed with a high moral and religious value: only in the common people was there true life, the life that allows the individual to arrive at salvation and “Resurrection” (voskresenie [воскресение]), to borrow the title of one of his well-known novels. Similarly, Dostoyevsky, exploring the nature of the “Russian character” (russkij xarakter [русский характер]), believed, in an almost religious way, in the Russian narod as the ultimate moral value. III. Berdyayev, Narod, and Ličnost Berdyayev, on the contrary, adopts a personalist point of view and disapproves of the excessive cult of the narod, which he considers an obstacle to the development of subjectivity and individuality. Narodničestvo, he writes, “does not exist in the West, it is a specifically Russian phenomenon. Only in Russia can one find this perpetual opposition between the intelligentsia and the people [narod], this idealization of the people that becomes almost a religion, this quest for truth and God in the people” (Berdyayev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo). According to Berdyayev, narodničestvo reveals a weakness rather than a strength among the cultivated Russian elite: [T]he intelligentsia’s tendency to seek its integrity solely in the “organic life” of the narod shows its lack of spiritual autonomy. Russian kollektivizm [коллективизм] and sobornost’ have been considered a great advantage of the Russian people (russkogo naroda [русского народа]), the one that has raised it above European nations (nad narodami Evropy [над народами Εвропы]. But in reality this means that the person (ličnost’ [личность]) and the personal spirit have not yet been awakened in the Russian people (v russkom narode [в русском народе]), and that the person is still too immersed in the natural element of the life of the people. IV. Narod, Carnival, Laughter: The Notion of Narodnaja Kul’tura in Bakhtin It is not surprising that narod plays the role of a major ideological cliché. In Soviet ideology narod was the general term that served to designate the workers, kolkhozians (workers on collective farms), and the “working intelligentsia” (trudovaja intelligensija [трудовая интеллигенция]). Its abstract nominalization, narodnost’ [народность], was inscribed in the two famous trinities of Russian cultural history: along with autocracy (samoderžavie [самодержавие]) and orthodoxy (pravoslavie [православие]), it composed the formula of official nationalism in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, and along with ideological conviction (partijnost’ [партийность]), it constituted the dogmatic definition of “socialist realism” as an artistic genre. The cliché “socialist realism” was created in the USSR in the 1930s to define in an official way the method of Soviet literature. Socialist realism is “an aesthetic expression of the socialist conception of the world and of man” (RT: Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 24/1). In Mikhail Bakhtin we find a counterideological use of the term narod. Bakhtin introduces the notion of “popular culture” (narodnaja kul’tura [народная культура]) or “comic popular culture” (narodnaja smexovaja kul’tura [народная смеховая культура]). Popular culture gives people a specific view of the world that is opposed to official or serious culture. For Bakhtin the twofold, serious/comic view of the world is an intrinsic characteristic of human civilization. The paradigmatic event of popular culture is the popular festival, the carnival. Carnival is a universal event, democratic and egalitarian. During the festival “life is subject only to [carnival’s] laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom [zakony svobody (закοны свободы)]” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World). Carnival “does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators,” Bakhtin writes, “because its very idea embraces all the people [on vsenaroden (он всенароден)]” (ibid.). The adjective vsenarodnyj [всенародный] poses a real problem of translation: it has been rendered in French by the expression “fait pour l’ensemble du peuple,” and also by “qui est le bien de l’ensemble du peuple” (L’Œuvre de François Rabelais). In a sense, both translations are correct; vsenarodnyj, formed on the basis of narod and the prefix vse- (omni-), which expresses universality, means literally “omni-popular, shared by all.” We must understand this term by putting it on the same level as Solovyov’s sobornost’ (uni-totality) and vseedinstvo [всеединство] (omni-unity = uni-totality). However, Bakhtin turns the Slavophile vocabulary away from its ideological aim. As an actor in the carnival, the narod is a natural element, no longer a “mysterious, foreign, and seductive” force, as it is in Berdyayev (Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 169). It is gay and joyous. It is a spontaneous element in which the individuality and subjectivity of the modern period have not yet been separated from each other. It involves neither a person opposed to society nor a difficult shaping of personality that requires a return to the narod, as is the case in the narodničestvo of the nineteenth century. The person is unified with the narod in an organic manner: Bakhtin speaks of the “body of the rod [rodovoe telo (родовое тело)]” in Rabelais (Bakhtin, Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable). The expression rodovoe telo, in which the adjective rodovoe is derived from rod, is in fact another untranslatable expression: the French translator renders it as “corps procréateur” (Bakhtin, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais) and the English translator as “ancestral body” (Rabelais and His World, 19, 322–24). In fact, Bakhtin writes that in Rabelais’s work, Pantagruel is the image of the “people’s body [vsenarodnoe telo (всенародное тело)]” (Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable, 359, Rabelais and His World, 341). Carnivalesque culture is a spontaneous element that undoes all seriousness, including official ideology. As opposed to the official feast, one might say that the carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. (Rabelais and His World, 10) 702 NAROD NATURE 703 that led him to render the Greek phusis as Aufgang, “opening up,” “emergence,” rather than by Natur, “nature.” To gauge the significance of Heidegger’s gesture we must, however, move beyond the pseudo-opposition between a supposedly Greek nature-growth and a supposedly Roman nature-birth. Setting himself the task of determining phusis as the movement of a thing’s coming to be by itself (whence physics), Aristotle turns first to etymology to make this term signify in its original sense: “Nature” [phusis] means (1) the genesis [genesis (γένεσις)] of growing things [tôn phuomenôn (τῶν φυομένων)]— the meaning that would be suggested if one were to pronounce the u in phusis long. (Metaphysics, 5.4. 1014b 17–19) Aristotle explicitly connects phusis with phuô [φύω], phuesthai [φύεσθαι], “to grow, raise, cause to be born, to develop,” the verb coming from the Indo-European root *bhu-, from which also come the Latin fui, the French fus, the English “[to] be,” and the German bin, bist, in the conjugation of the verb sein in the present indicative, which until the fourteenth century included forms that have now disappeared, birn, birt, replaced respectively by sind and seid, which, like the Latin sum, come from a different Indo-European root. This connection of phusis with the idea of “growth” may nonetheless seem as insufficient as it is incontestable, for we must still ask how “growth” is understood. Heidegger proposes to move back from the idea of “grow” to the allegedly more originary idea of “flowering” (Ger. das Aufgehen), which can itself be traced back phenomenologically to an “appearance”: The other Indo-European radical is bhu, bheu. To it belong the Greek phuô [φύω], to emerge [aufgehen], to be powerful [walten], of itself to come to stand and remain standing. Up until now this bhu has been interpreted according to the usual superficial view of physis [φύσις] and phuô [φύω] as nature and “to grow” [wachsen]. A more fundamental exegesis, stemming from preoccupation with the beginning of Greek philosophy, shows the “growing” to be an “emerging,” which in turn is defined by presence [Anwesen] and appearance [Erscheinen]. Recently the root phy- [φυ] has been connected with pha- [φα], phainesthai [φαίνεσθαι]. Physis [φύσις] would then be that which emerges into the light [das ins Licht Aufgehende], phyein [φύειν] would mean to shine, to give light therefore to appear. (Cf. Zeitschrift für vergl. Sprachforschung, vol. 59.) (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 59) Heidegger problematizes, in an unprecedented way, the age-old translation of Greek phusis by Latin natura and its different derivatives in European languages, in contrast, for example, to Husserl, who declared at the beginning of his Vienna lecture that in Greek antiquity nature is “what the ancient Greeks considered nature [was den alten Griechen als Natur galt].” Nonetheless, the Slavic languages constitute a notable exception: while Russian uses natura [натура] in the sense of “the essence of a being,” natura rerum, natural phenomena taken as a whole are designated instead by the term priroda [природа], from rod [род], which is close to the meaning of German Geschlecht: “generation, line, race, species” (see GESCHLECHT). Bakhtin underscores the indissoluble and essential connection between the extra-official laughter of the popular feast and freedom (svoboda) (Rabelais and His World, 71–73). Thus, under the Stalinist regime humanism took the form of an anti-autocratic narodničestvo: Growth and renewal are the dominant motifs in the figure of the people (narod). The people (narod) is the newborn child fed on milk, the newly planted tree, the convalescent and regenerated organism. (Ibid., chap. 6) If we now return to the twofold meaning of “people” (see PEOPLE), both the body of citizens and the mass of the excluded, we see that it is more the second term of this opposition on which thinking about the narod is based. The history of the intelligentsia connects the word with the diverse strategies deployed for getting closer to or distinguishing oneself from the narod (insofar as it has neither the same education nor the same culture)—unless it is, as in Bakhtin, to foil the ideological instrumentalization that these strategies themselves imply. Zulfia Karimova Andriy Vasylchenko REFS.: Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i Renessansa. 2nd ed. Moscow: Khudozh, 1990. Translation by Helene Iswolsky: Rabelais and His World: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Translation by A. Robel: L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la Culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Berdyayev, Nicolai. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo [World of Dostoyevsky]. Moscow: Zakharov, 2001. Translation by Donald Attwater: Dostoievsky. New York: New American Library, 1974. . O rabstve i svobode čelovka. Paris: YMCA, 1972. First published in 1939. Translation by R. M. French: Slavery and Freedom. New York: Scribner, 1944. Fedotov, Georgii. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. Kireevski, Ivan. Polnoe Sobranie Sočinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow: University of Moscow, 1910. Klechenov, Gennadii. “The ‘Narod’ and the Intelligentsia: From Dissociation to ‘Sobornost .’” Russian Studies in Philosophy 31, no. 4 (1993): 54–70. Kovalev, Vitalii. “The ‘Narod,’ the Intelligentsia, and the Individual.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 31, no. 4 (1993): 71–82. NATURE GERMAN Natur, Aufgang GREEK phusis [φύσις] LATIN natura RUSSIAN priroda [природа], natura [натура] SPANISH naturaleza v. ART, CULTURE, ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, ESTI, FORCE, LIGHT, MIMÊSIS, TO BE The Latin translation of the Greek phusis [φύσις] by the Latin natura, from which are derived most of the words designating “nature” in European languages, can be considered an inconsequential event in Western history—or, on the contrary, a major event—with great historical import. Heidegger never ceased to problematize this translation as it had never been problematized before, though 704 NATURE of withdrawing] that unclosing grants its favor.” Or, in Jean Beaufret’s French translation of the German translating the Greek: “Rien n’est plus propre à l’éclosion que le retrait” (Dialogue, 1, 18). Here it is no longer a matter of “nature” but of an internal tension, an “unapparent harmony,” in the Heraclitean sense, between veiling and unveiling, occultation and disoccultation, or between sheltering and unsheltering. That is probably why Heidegger notes that the term phusis is “perhaps untranslatable” (vielleicht unübersetzbar), following this passage: We still leave untranslated the fundamental word: phusis. We do not say natura and Nature, because these names are too equivocal and loaded—and, in short, because they acquire their nominative force only from a very special and very slanted interpretation of phusis. We have in fact no word for conceiving in a single expression the mode of deployment of phusis as it has been clarified up to this point. (We try to say Aufgang— the rise of what rises by opening—but we remain powerless to give to this word, without intermediary, the plenitude and determination it needs.) (Heidegger, Wegmarken, 259; Questions II, 208–9) . Pascal David Breaking with a long tradition, or rather a long obstruction, Heidegger proposes, then, to reinterpret phusis not as “nature” (from Latin nasci, “to be born”), but as Aufgang, an “opening-up” or “emergence.” But contrary to a commonly held view, Heidegger does not oppose a natura-“birth” to a phusis- “growth” that he considers more originary; rather, the line of demarcation runs between phusis on one hand, and natura as birth and growth combined on the other. While nature designates a sector of the existent (in pairs of oppositions in which the other term may be culture—nature/culture—history, art, super-nature [grace], etc.), phusis names instead the “how” (desinence-sis: phu-sis) in accord with which everything appears. It is a name for Being, not for the existent. In short: “nature” is ontically oriented, and phusis is ontological. Reinterpreted in its original acceptation, the term phusis seems to Heidegger to be “das Grundwort des anfänglichen Denkens (the basic word of beginning thought)” (Heraklit, 101). . Rather than Homer, it is Heraclitus who constitutes the source on which Heidegger constantly drew for the meaning of phusis, and notably fragment 123: phusis kruptesthai philei [φύσις ϰϱύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ]. This fragment has often been translated as “Nature likes to hide itself.” Heidegger renders it this way: “Das Aufgehen dem Sichverbergen schenkt’s die Gunst,” or “Das Aufgehen schenkt die Gunst dem Sichverbergen” (Heraklit, 110)—“It is to withdrawal [to the movement 1 Homer, phusis and pharmakon v. LOGOS The first known occurrence of phusis is found in Homer. The word, a hapax, is uttered by Hermes in an enigmatic passage that deals especially with the pharmakon [φάϱμαϰоν] and the language of the gods: So spoke Argeïphontes, and he gave me the medicine (pharmakon), which he picked out of the ground, and he explained the nature of it to me (kai moi phusin autou edeixe [ϰαὶ μоι φύσιν αὐτоῦ ἔδειξε]). It was black at the root (rhizêi [ῥίζῃ]), but with a milky flower (anthos [ἄνθоς]). The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have power to do all things. (Odyssey, 10. 302–306) The word pharmakon (from *pharma, which it is tempting to connect with pherô [φέϱω], “plant that grows in the earth,” RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.) means both “remedy” and “poison” (“medicinal herb, drug, treatment, philter, potion, spell, dye, color, cleaning agent, reagent, tanner,” etc.; the pharmakos [φαϱμαϰός, accent on the omicron] is a scapegoat, an expiatory victim, whereas the pharmakos [φάϱμαϰος, accent on the alpha] is a poisoner, a magician). This ambivalence allows the word to designate in a perfectly appropriate way the logos [λόγος] that causes pain or enchants, produces terror or courage (Gorgias, Eulogy of Helen, 82B 11 DK, §14), and also writing, as a remedy/poison for memory (Plato, Phaedrus, 274e; see Derrida). But in Homer, Hermes’s pharmakon is a pharmakon esthlon [φάϱμαϰоν ἐσθλόν] (v. 286, 292, a “plant of life,” says Bérard, “good,” “courageous,” like a Homeric hero), capable of saving Odysseus from Circé’s pharmakon, which transforms men into swine— but brings Odysseus into her bed. Among the gods this good pharmakon is called môlu [μῶλυ], which sounds like a “loan-word of unknown origin,” but later designates a kind of garlic (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). It is this pharmakon whose phusis Hermes explains to Odysseus. By translating kai moi phusin autou edeixe as “il m’apprit à connaître” (“he taught me to know”), Victor Bérard skillfully uses an elision to avoid the difficulty, whereas Homer says “and he explained the phusin of it to me.” Wolfgang Schadewaldt, on the other hand, renders phusis in this passage by Wuchs, a word from the same family as the verb wachsen, “to grow,” and thus goes back to the idea of growth (Die Odyssee, 176: “und wies mir seinen Wuchs”). In any case, phusis is, like the idea of pharmakon itself, contradictory or ambivalent: the root is black, the flower white. Language of the gods, language of humans, difficult to understand for mortals, but easy for the all-powerful; black but white; remedy and poison: the textual terrain of phusis requires careful attention. Barbara Cassin and Pascal David REFS.: Derrida, Jacques. “La pharmacie de Platon.” In La Dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Translation by Barbara Johnson: “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, 61–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–1974. Translation by Victor Bérard: L’Odyssée, edited by Victor Bérard. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974. First published in 1924. Translation by Wolfgang Schadewalt: Die Odyssee. Zurich: Artemis, 1966. NEGATION 705 REFS.: Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. Heidegger, Martin. “Alétheia (Heraklit, Fragment 16).” In Vortrage und Aufsätze. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe. 7: 249–74. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. Translation by David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16).” In Early Greek Thinking, 102–23. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. . Einführung in die Metaphysik. Edited by Petra Jaeger. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 40. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt: Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. . Heraklit. Edited by M. S. Frings. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 55. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979. . “Logos (Heraklit, Fragment 50).” In Vorträge und Aufsätze. Edited by FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe. 7: 211–34. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. Translation by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi: “Logos (Heraclitus, fragment B 50).” In Early Greek Thinking, 59–78. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975. . “Vom Wesen und Begriff der PHYSIS. Aristoteles, Physik B, 1.” In Wegmarken. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Gesamtausgabe. 9: 239–302. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Thomas Sheehan and William McNeill: “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 183–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. “Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie.” In Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Ein Einleitung in die phänomentologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana. 6: 314–48. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954. Translation by David Carr: “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity.” In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 269–99. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Schoenbohm, Susan. “Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics.” In A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. Edited by Richard Polt, 143–60. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. 2 Supernatural v. GRACE, SVET (Box 1) At the beginning of his commentary on Book II of Aristotle’s Physics (in Questions II), Heidegger mentions, among the antithetical oppositions in which “nature” is one of the terms, “nature/grace,” adding between parentheses: “Über-natur” (super-nature). Although the adjective surnaturel has become common parlance in French, the same is not true of the substantive surnature, and the least one can say is that it is hardly used outside the vocabulary of theologians, so that we are more inclined to nominalize the adjective and speak of the “supernatural,” at the price of an abusive confusion, in ordinary usage, with the “paranormal.” A mystery remains to be explained: why is there this strange absence? To understand it, we have to examine the history of the “supernatural.” This history has been written, from the point of view of the history of dogma, by Henri de Lubac, in his classic study Surnaturel—Études historiques, which forms a trilogy with two other works: Augustinisme et théologie moderne and Le Mystère du surnaturel. According to Augustinisme et théologie moderne (315n2), it was Scheeben who introduced the word Übernatur (“super-nature”) in a technical sense, distinguishing it from the supernatural, but de Lubac adds: “Although this distinction does not appear to have been widely adopted, one cannot, in our view, make Scheeben entirely responsible for the currently widespread usage that incorrectly replaces surnaturel by surnature.” The appearance of the term Übernatur seems to go back, in the German language, to Rhineland mysticism: “Suso once speaks of an ‘übernatur’ (Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit [A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom], Part 2, chap. 24), but it does not seem that this word came into widespread use” in German (Surnaturel, 405). It appears to have been in the ninth century, in “the Carolingian translations of Pseudo-Dionysius by Hilduin and John Scotus Erigena, that supernaturalis made its true entrance into theology,” an entrance that was to be followed by a long eclipse: “Its use, which remained rare until the middle of the thirteenth century, became widespread only after St. Thomas Aquinas” (ibid., 327). The word seems to have been shaped by the Greek huperousios [ὑπεϱоύσιоς] (Didymus the Blind, PseudoDionysius), and thus has a very distant origin in the equation phusis = ousia [оὐσία] mentioned by Aristotle (Metaphysics 5.4, 1015a 12–15). REFS.: Lubac, Henri de. Augustinisme et théologie moderne. Paris: Aubier, 1965. Translation by Lancelot Sheppard: Augustinianism and Modern Theology. London: Chapman, 1969. . Le mystère du surnaturel. Paris: Aubier, 1965. Translation by Rosemary Sheed: The Mystery of the Supernatural. London: Chapman, 1967. . Surnaturel: Études historiques. New ed. Edited by Michel Sales. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991. Milbank, John. The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Suso, Henry. A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. Translated by Walter Hilton. Norwood: Angelus, 1910. NEGATION The word “negation”—like the Latin negatio, from nego, negare (“to say no” and “affirm that [. . .] not [. . .],” “deny,” “reject”)—designates both the term, particle, or negative operator (“not,” “no,” “nothing,” “no one”) and an utterance or proposition that is opposed to assertion, or to a given assertion, and whose truth value is thus the inverse of that of affirmation. I. Negative Words and How to Designate What Is Not the Case 1. See NOTHING (ESTI) for the formation and meaning of negative terms in various languages See also PERSON, II.4. 2. On the relationship to being, see OMNITUDO REALITATIS, REALITY; cf. TO BE (ESTI). 3. On the relationship to the Other, see NEIGHBOR; cf. TO TRANSLATE, Box 1. 4. On the experience of negation and the relationship to nonbeing, see ANXIETY; cf. DASEIN, MALAISE. II. The Operations of Negation 1. On the logical procedure that makes possible the construction of an assertion or a negation, and on their truth value, see PROPOSITION and TRUTH; see also NONSENSE, PRINCIPLE (in particular PRINCIPLE, I.C on the principle of noncontradiction) and SENSE; cf. FALSE, IMPLICATION, LIE, SPEECH ACT. Concerning the fact that 706 NEIGHBOR Second, we can distinguish a more general sociopolitical concept of neighbors, based on propinquity, spatiotemporal proximity, or contiguity. If the Neighbor is the embodiment of a religioethical ideal, neighbors are transient figures who contingently occupy that position. The modern discussion of sociopolitical neighbors and the neighborhood begins with Weber, Tönnies, Durkheim, and Simmel and continues in contemporary sociology, political theory, public policy, and urban planning. In his first inaugural address in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his administration’s Good Neighbor Policy, which was intended to improve relations with Latin America in the reflexive logic of the Levitical commandment. For Roosevelt, the good neighbor “resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” Robert Frost’s famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” with its problematics of the border, could serve as the sociopolitical neighbor’s motto. If the “good neighbor” at minimum is one who observes boundaries and respects obligations, neighbors may also provide mutual assistance or share conviviality—but unlike the religioethical Neighbor, the value of reciprocity here remains paramount. Positive, negative, and ambivalent representations of neighbors can occasionally be found in modern literature (e.g., Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Berger), whereas in popular culture, from Donald Duck to David Lynch, the figure of the “bad neighbor” (whether merely annoying or downright threatening) is much more common. The sociopolitical idea of neighbors implies the existence of a neighborhood, usually a territorial vicinity or social grouping based on shared resources, interests, or problems; the neighborhood is an informal mode of association situated between the intimacy of the family and the public concerns of the polis. A neighborhood may involve no more than a vaguely defined geographical area, or it can organize itself as a quasi-political entity, a “neighborhood association,” for the sake of common issues or goals. Moreover, the rise of the Internet has allowed for the easy development (and even easier dissolution) of virtual “neighborhoods” that fulfill neighborly functions such as the exchange of information, opinions, and phatic gestures. Third, we can identify a mathematical set of meanings of neighboring, which is often associated with the derivative terms “neighborhood” and “nearest neighbor” and is current in topology, set theory, graph theory, systems theory, cellular automata theory, game theory, and various branches of information technology. The mathematical concept of the neighborhood was introduced by David Hilbert in his definition of planes in Foundations of Geometry (app. 4) and developed by Felix Hausdorff in his foundational work on set theoretical topology. Generally speaking, the neighborhood of a given point is defined as a collection of elements or points with certain specific properties in relation to that point, depending on the particular axiomatization. The mathematical notion of the neighborhood describes modes of place and proximity but is not limited to classical Euclidean, or “metric,” models of space. The neighborhood of a point in metric space involves those points that are less than a certain distance from it, whereas in topological space, a neighborhood can be specified without such metrics, allowing for concepts such as “being near” and “infinitesimal closeness” and producing a much more general theory two negations are not necessarily equivalent to an assertion, see PORTUGUESE and ESTI I, IV. 2. On the procedure of extenuation and the passage to the negative, especially in theology, see ABSTRACTION, Box 1. 3. On the dialectical force of the negative and of negativity, see AUFHEBEN; cf. ATTUALITÀ, PLASTICITY, PRAXIS. 4. On the procedure of denial, in which negation leads to an awareness of a content, see VERNEINUNG; cf. DRIVE, ENTSTELLUNG, and more generally ES, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH. 5. On erasure and oblivion, see MEMORY; cf. AIÔN, ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY. v. ABSURD, FICTION, MATTER OF FACT NEIGHBOR ARABIC jar [جار[ FRENCH prochain GERMAN Nächste GREEK plêsion [πλησιον] HEBREW re’a [ַעֵ ר[ ITALIAN prossimo LATIN proximum SPANISH prójimo, vecino v. AUTRUI, and ACTOR, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, MITMENSCH, PARDON, SUBJECT, WELT, WORLD The English word “neighbor,” based on the prefix “nigh-” (denoting proximity in time or space) and the suffix “boor” (a dweller or place of dwelling, as in “bower” or “abode”), brings three distinct but overlapping conceptual clusters into philosophy and critical theory. First, and most important, is the religioethical register of the Neighbor, which derives from the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” (originally found in Lv 19:18, and quoted and referred to elsewhere, e.g., Mt 22:39, Mk 12:31, Lk 10:27, Jas 2:8, Rom 13:9). This Neighbor connotes an unspecified category of fellow human beings (and sometimes animals) whom we are obligated to “love,” usually understood as implying responsibility or care. Islam too refers to “the neighbor” (al-jar) as a figure of special obligation and ambiguous determination (see Qur’an, Surah Al-Nisah 4:36, and the Maariful commentary by Mufti Muhammad Shafi); the Arabic jar [جار [is closely related to the Hebrew gar (to dwell) and thus to ger (a proselyte, resident Gentile, or stranger). The religious figure of the Neighbor passes readily into secular culture and ethics, where it is often presented as the emblem of a universal ideal, and sometimes as equivalent to the “other” of the so-called Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is a weak parallel, however, since the Levitical injunction does not necessarily imply reciprocity, and some interpreters (such as Kierkegaard and Levinas) have insisted on its asymmetry. The figure of the Neighbor as a privileged object remains very active in philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as in vernacular ethics. NEIGHBOR 707 in French the word for a topological neighborhood is voisinage (in German, however, a distinct word is used, Umgebung, meaning “surroundings” or “environment”). In comparison with French and German, the English word “neighbor” may appear promiscuous in its condensation of three distinct semantic fields; but it also suggests the possibility of productive conceptual interimplications among the three ideas. The original formulation “love your neighbor as yourself” (v’ahavtah le’re’akha kamokha [ךָמוָֹכ ּךֲָעֵ רְלָ תְּבַאהְָו ([in the Hebrew Bible (Lv 19:18) has led to a complicated history of interpretations and a polemic between Judaism and Christianity. The verse is lexically and grammatically ambiguous: Who is referred to as “neighbor” (re’a)? What is meant by “love” (ahav)? And what is implied by the reflexive term “as yourself” (kamokha)? The use of the preposition ל here, indicating “love to” rather than “love of” or “for” the neighbor, is unusual; and the particle ו that connects this line to the previous verse can imply equally conjunction (and) or disjunction (or), each involving distinct, even opposed, interpretive consequences. The word re’a [ַעֵ ר—[usually but not invariably translated in this context as “neighbor”—derives from the primitive root ra’ah, which means to “pasture,” “tend,” “graze,” or “feed,” without the connotations of proximity that emerge in European languages. Re’a is used in a variety of senses in the Torah, and its reference in Leviticus 19:18 is unclear—does it apply exclusively to fellow Jews, or are other people included? The dominant strand of Jewish interpretation of the commandment, from Onkelos (second century CE) through Maimonides (twelfth century) up to the Emancipation (1848), has argued that re’a is limited here to other Jews; and indeed, in some of its other biblical appearances, the word seems to refer exclusively to fellow Israelites. But at still other points re’a is not confined in this way: in Exodus 11:2, for example, re’a refers to the Jews’ Egyptian neighbors; elsewhere it seems to figure idolaters or even idols (Jer 3:1), and in Psalm 139 it seems to signify “thought” or “will.” Modern Jewish commentators (cf. Simon) have argued for a broader understanding of Leviticus 19:18, often citing the thirteenth-century French rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri as evidence of a universalist ethics of the neighbor in Judaism, but this may in part be due to pressure from competition with Christianity. It is not surprising that Christianity, in its Pauline mission to the Gentiles, presents an expansive interpretation of the Neighbor. Already in the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke (10:25–37), the question, who is my neighbor? (kai tis estin mou plêsion [και τις εστιν μου πλησιον]) seems controversial: in contrast with the Kohen and the Levite, who pass by without helping a “half dead” man in the road (perhaps due to religious prohibitions against priestly contact with a corpse?), the Samaritan—an Abrahamic sect with heterodox beliefs and practices, hence similar to Christianity—assists the injured man with unlimited generosity, instituting an almost saintly paradigm of the good neighbor, one that is implicitly opposed to Jewish legalism and tribalism. Beyond its polemical function, the parable has significant philosophical implications: first, it poses the neighbor as a question—that is, as a topic for debate, a problem, or idea—moreover, one with political implications, in the suggested politico-theological opposition of Judaism and Christianity as particularist and of abstract spaces. If distance is a key idea in the theory of metric space, the neighborhood has an analogous function in topological space, which can be deformed without altering the structure of its neighborhoods. Several branches of social and biological sciences make use of theories of neighborhoods in their models, including social network analysis, mathematical sociology, and a branch of molecular embryology known as topobiology. And several philosophers, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Manuel DeLanda, have used mathematical neighboring for political, social, and other conceptual functions. In all three of these contexts, the Neighbor and “neighboring” involve a degree of ambiguity or indeterminacy. The question of who is included in the category of the Neighbor is vigorously argued in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In social theory and political discourse, neighbors constitute a zone of indistinction between friends and enemies, the familiar and the strange, where alliances are contingent and hospitality easily slips into hostility. In popular culture, such neighbors are often represented as social irritants or comic foils, symptomatic of the permeability of private and public space, of real and virtual neighborhoods. Religioethical and sociopolitical concepts of the neighbor tend to be nonsystematic and informal in their fundamental concepts, and this is one reason why the neighbor has occasioned such complex and controversial histories of hermeneutical, ethical, and philosophical speculation. Mathematical accounts of neighboring, on the other hand, strive to formalize concepts such as adjacency, connectedness, and approximation by means of such fundamental set theoretical distinctions as that between parts or regions of a set, on the one hand, and groups of particular elements or members of a set, on the other. These three meanings fused (some would say confused) in the English word “neighbor” are distinguished by two or more terms in other European languages. The religioethical Neighbor of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is usually translated as prochain in French—“Tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-même” (Ostervald, Traduction de la Bible, 1724) and Nächste in German—“Du sollst deinen Nächsten lieben wie dich selbst” (Luther, Biblia, das ist, Die gantze Heilige Schrifft, Deudsch, 1545). Prochain derives from proche, meaning “close” or “nearby,” from the vulgar Latin propeanus and the classical prope. In the New Vulgate translation, the neighbor of Leviticus 19:18 is proximum, the “closest” (although in earlier Latin editions amicum, “friend,” was used). The Greek term used already in the Septuagint is plêsion [πλησιον], also signifying nearness. The German Nächste is the substantive of the adverb nächstens, meaning “soon” or “near,” again implying physical proximity or temporal imminence. In German, der Nächste means generally “the next one” (as in Du bist der Nächste, “You’re next”), and specifically the neighbor to whom one is obligated, but it is not used to refer to the sociopolitical neighbor. This next-door neighbor is der Nachbar (masc.) and die Nachbarn (fem.), terms very close to the English “neighbor.” The French equivalents are le voisin (masc.) and la voisine (fem.), which come from the Latin vicinus, meaning “near” and derive from vicus, meaning “a quarter or district of a town.” The mathematical concept of neighboring often borrows the language of sociopolitical usages, so 708 NEIGHBOR another has fulfilled the law. The commandments are summed up [anakephalaioutai (ανακεφαλαιουται)] in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling [plêrôma (πληϱωμα,)] of the law” (Rom 13:8–10). In calling neighborlove the “summation,” or literally, “recapitulation” of the law, Paul is repeating the rabbinic commonplace, associated as well with Jesus, that it represents the moral essence of Judaism, as it will in Christianity. But when Paul calls neighbor-love the “fulfilling” of the law, he is saying something much more radical. This notion of plêrôma has often been taken as a key statement of Christian supersessionism, the assertion that Jewish “law” (and Judaism as such) is replaced by Christian “love,” as the conclusion of an earlier moment and the imminence of a new one. According to Giorgio Agamben, Paul’s account of neighbor-love as plêrôma is a process that leads not to epochal transformation but rather to the fulfillment of the law in each moment, “a messianic recapitulation, something inseparable from the messianic fulfillment of times.” Alain Badiou argues that Paul reduces the multiplicity of the law to the single injunction to love the neighbor insofar as it avoids the law’s dialectics of prohibition and transgression in its pure positivity and because “it will require faith in order to be understood because prior to the Resurrection, the subject, having been given up to death, has no good reason to love himself.” For Badiou, self-love, in its fidelity to the event of the resurrection, instantiates a subject; to love the neighbor “as yourself” thus is the work of a faithful subject whose love enacts the “force of salvation.” In his 1987 lectures on Paul, Jacob Taubes emphasized Paul’s disconnection of the commandments to love God and the neighbor in this passage; Paul’s exclusion of love of God, Taubes argues, must be understood as an “absolutely revolutionary act,” the critique of the function of God the Father, anticipating both Nietzsche and Freud and opening a new political theology of the neighbor. From the eighteenth century, philosophy has taken up the biblical tradition of the Neighbor, often as an emblem of ethical reason as such. In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785; in Practical Philosophy), Kant presents neighbor-love as a paradigm of practical reason based on the will, rather than mere inclination. In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he claims that neighbor-love is not only a particular “law of love” but also the “kernel of all laws,” the expression of the asymptotic goal of “the moral disposition in its complete perfection”—the “love for the law” (5:83–84). And in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), echoing the common complaint that love cannot be commanded, Kant argues that neighbor-love must be understood as a practice of “benevolence (practical love),” not an affective state. Nevertheless, Kant grants the injunction to love the neighbor the status of a metaethical principle and calls it one of the fundamental “subjective conditions” of the concept of duty (6:399). As “the duty to make others’ ends my own (provided only that these are not immoral),” neighbor-love for Kant expresses the duty of Duty itself, beyond any particular religious conviction or ethical objective (6:450)—indeed, Kant barely mentions the neighbor in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), as if the topic rightfully belongs to philosophy. universalist communities. Second, the neighbor here is now a subjective position, which is expressed as the imperative of becoming a neighbor rather than treating others as neighbors—a dialectical inversion of earlier biblical references, where the neighbor was invariably presented as a grammatical and ethical object. If the question at the beginning of the parable is, who is the neighbor (whom I should love)? by the conclusion, the question is implicitly reframed as, who am I (who should love my neighbor)? While Christianity tends to expand the inclusiveness of the category of neighbor, it also limits or focuses the sense of “love” in the Levitical verse by translating it into Greek as agape (caritas in Latin; both words are often translated into English as “charity”), which does not have the sexual implications of eros or the philosophical sense, beginning with Aristotle, of philia. The Hebrew word that appears in the injunction, ahav [בָהְ ַא ,[is used for all kinds of love, from erotic to spiritual, from the most illicit to the most hallowed. The rabbinic tradition has been especially elaborate in its accounts of the vast number of particular duties implied by “love” in Leviticus 19:18, including acts intended to alleviate the suffering of others, to increase other people’s enjoyment, and to minimize the friction of everyday social relations. It is worth noting, too, the unexpected uses made of the commandment as a proof text in a number of Talmudic contexts, including discussions of sexual relations and capital punishment. In Tractate Niddah, for example, it is argued: “A man is forbidden to perform his marital duty in the day-time, for it is said, But thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But what is the proof? He might observe something repulsive in her and she would thereby become loathsome to him” (17a). And the imperative of establishing the least painful methods of execution is asserted in Tractate Kethuboth and elsewhere by citing the commandment: “Scripture said, But thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself—choose for him an easy death” (37b). Although these references to Leviticus 19:18 are not presented as interpretations of the commandment, they suggest that the neighbor can accommodate both the most intimate and the most public interpretations and that ambivalence and even death are by no means foreign to its account of neighbor love. In the Gospels, the injunction to love the neighbor is always paired with that to love God (from Dt 6:5), and the two commandments are frequently linked in later Christian accounts of neighbor-love, as well as in numerous Jewish sources, as the supreme religioethical principle. Saint Augustine argues that the naturally occurring love of self must be transformed or corrected by love of God, and only then can we love our neighbor appropriately. Hannah Arendt points out that for Augustine it is only from the perspective of a self-love that has passed through self-denial that authentic neighbor-love is possible: “It is not really the neighbor who is loved in this love of the neighbor—it is love itself” (Love and Saint Augustine). Arendt argues that for Augustine, neighborlove does not establish the natural community of a neighborhood but instead isolates both the neighbor and the self, who are alone together with God. For philosophy the most important Christian account of neighbor-love, however, is Saint Paul’s: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves NEIGHBOR 709 of the friend or the lover; the neighbor, moreover, is generic, without the particularity that characterizes the object of preferential love. Hence some commentators (including Adorno) have accused Kierkegaard of eliminating the neighbor as a living person altogether, leaving only the abstract idea of “the human”; indeed, Kierkegaard argues that the most unselfish and freest love is for the dead, who have none of the distracting traits of living individuals. In an essay from 1940, Adorno argues that the “impotent mercifulness,” “severed from social insight,” of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of neighborlove reflects the failure of social relations in modernity, “the deadlock which the concept of the neighbor necessarily meets today. The neighbor no longer exists.” In later modernity, we find increasing suspicion of the injunction to love the neighbor—that it is an ideological ruse, the very motto of bad faith. For Nietzsche, neighbor-love is symptomatic of the failure of self-love: “Your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves,” both narcissistic and self-loathing. Rather than love of the neighbor, Nietzsche follows philosophical tradition by urging love of the friend—not, however, because the friend is “closer” to the subject than the neighbor—indeed, if anything the neighbor is too close: “Do I recommend love of the neighbor to you? I prefer instead to recommend flight from the neighbor [Nächsten-Flucht] and love of the farthest [FernstenLiebe]. I wish you were unable to stand all these neighbors and their neighbors [allerlei Nächsten und deren Nachbarn] [T] hose farther away pay for your love of your neighbor; and even when you are together five at a time, always a sixth one must die” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Nietzsche argues that neighborlove is unjust: to love this neighbor is always to sacrifice some other neighbor who happens to be farther away; but even more, neighbor-love gives up on “the farthest”—the possibility of encountering the new, the unknown, the yet to come. As if reformulating the Levitical injunction, Nietzsche writes, “Let the future and the farthest be for you the cause of your today: in your friend you shall love the overman as your cause” (in deinem Freunde sollst du den Übermenschen als deine Ursache lieben). In its distance, the friend is the locus of the coming “overman,” who is not an idealization of the specular “self” but rather the “cause” of what the subject may become. If for Nietzsche the neighbor is too close, for Freud, the neighbor is too distant, not near enough to one and one’s interests, and thus undeserving of love. In his impassioned critique of neighbor-love in Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, “My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him” (Standard Edition, 21:109). Love is narcissistic for Freud, hence one both can and must love only those with whom one can identify, insofar as there is a limited economy of love and to squander it recklessly would be irresponsible and at the expense of those with a rightful claim to it. Moreover, the call to neighborlove conceals the truth of civilization’s “discontents,” the aggressivity in excess of any self-interest or economy: “The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts For Hegel, however, Kant’s account of ethics and neighbor-love, remains, we might say, “too Jewish.” In The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate (1799; in On Christianity), Hegel criticizes “Kant’s profound reduction of what he calls a ‘command’ (love God first of all and thy neighbor as thyself) to his moral imperative.” For Jesus, Hegel argues, neighbor-love is “a command in a sense quite different from that of the ‘shalt’ of a moral imperative.” Kant’s imperative, like the notion of a commandment in Judaism, implies a split between an “is” and an “ought” (as well as “reason” and “inclination”); neighbor-love, however, is purely an is (ein Sein), or what Hegel calls, in a remarkable phrase, “a modification of life” (eine Modifikation des Lebens), and is formulated as a commandment only because life requires form in order to be expressed. In the subsection on “Observing Reason” in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel returns to neighbor-love as an example of reason’s claims for “immediate ethical certainty” (parallel with his earlier discussion of consciousness’s “sense-certainty”): “Another celebrated commandment is ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ It is directed to the individual in his relationship with other individuals and asserts the commandment as a relationship between two individuals, or as a relationship of feeling [Empfindung].” But this “feeling” must involve an act, and this act must be reasoned, in the service of my neighbor’s well-being [Wohl]: “I must love him intelligently” (ich muß ihn mit Verstand lieben). The immediacy and necessity claimed for the commandment are imperiled by the impossibility of knowing the conditions of my neighbor’s well-being with any certainty; indeed, Hegel argues, only the state can determine the nature of “intelligent, substantial beneficence” (verständige wesentliche Wohltun), and the individual’s act of neighbor-love is both trivial in comparison with the state’s and always potentially in conflict with it. Hence, as a commandment, neighbor-love is merely an empty, formal universality; any content given to it is contingent and uncertain. But while the commandment cannot claim concrete universality, Hegel insists that “in its simple absoluteness, it represents immediate ethical being [unmittelbares sittliches Sein],” prior to and in excess of the empty oppositions between subject and object, content and form, as well as individual and state. This tension between formal universality and immediate ethical being is played out in the nineteenth century and later. Of special note is Kierkegaard’s lengthy discussion in Works of Love (1847), which is organized into three inflections of the commandment: “You shall love,” “You shall love the neighbor,” and “You shall love the neighbor.” For Kierkegaard, neighbor-love is the only form of love that is essentially free, paradoxically, because it is commanded. Whereas erotic love and friendship are bound to the compulsions of desire and the vicissitudes of affection, the imperative to love the neighbor liberates the subject, who must make a radical and existential decision, either “preferential love” or neighborlove. This choice, moreover, is the condition of possibility of any authentic form of love, including “self-love,” which is limited by neighbor-love rather than by its foundation. In its uncanny proximity, the neighbor questions the self-identity of both subject and object. The neighbor, Kierkegaard writes, “in itself is a multiplicity,” unlike the necessary individuality 710 NEIGHBOR is the world-historical expression of redemption through the progressive expansion of local congregations into universal empire. In each case, the neighbor is the “anyone” whose proximity is coordinate with the imminence of redemption, which is always “not yet” and ever unfolding “from one neighbor to the next neighbor.” Rosenzweig’s ideas on the neighbor respond to those of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, one of the founders of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. In Religion of Reason (1919), Cohen tried to reconcile Jewish legalism with Kantian ethics. Cohen had already vigorously defended the universalism of the Jewish account of the neighbor in 1888, when he testified in a defamation suit against an anti-Semitic school teacher who had claimed that Judaism authorizes discrimination against Gentiles; this testimony along with three other essays of Cohen’s on the neighbor were collected and published by Martin Buber after Cohen’s death. Buber’s own reflections on the neighbor and the “I–Thou” relationship were in turn influential in Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the neighbor (although Levinas was critical of the reciprocity of Buber’s model). The neighbor is a crucial topic in both Levinas’s “Jewish” and “philosophical” writings, including his major work, Otherwise Than Being (1974), in which it represents an originary proximity that determines the subject as responsible and fundamentally indebted to the other: “Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality. What concretely corresponds to this description is my relationship with my neighbor. [I]t is an assignation of me by another, a responsibility with regard to men we do not even know.” For Levinas, the neighbor figures the preontologically ethical constitution of the subject in its nonreciprocal relationship to the other. According to Levinas, the obligation to love the neighbor is a debt that can never be amortized and for which I am unjustly persecuted: no person can take my place and assume my ethical burden, but I am called to assume the place of all other neighbors. For Levinas, the radical asymmetry of the relationship to the religioethical Neighbor must be distinguished from the equality and interchangeability that define sociopolitical neighbors; in this sense, the injunction to love the neighbor is both descriptive and prescriptive—it is both the condition of subjectivity as such and an imperative to sociopolitical action. Levinas’s account of the neighbor can be understood as a critique of Heidegger’s notion in Being and Time of Mitsein, or “being-with,” which, many critics have argued, is not for Heidegger a social or ethical relation but rather the originary structure of Dasein. In his later work, the proximity of Mitsein develops into a discourse of nearness, the neighbor, and the neighborhood—concepts that do not readily correspond to the ideas of the neighbor we have described so far but which we might call ontological neighboring. As Derrida points out, whereas in Being and Time the “nearness” of Dasein to being is ontic, in Heidegger’s later writings proximity is ontological: “Whence, in Heidegger’s discourse, the dominance of an entire metaphorics of proximity a metaphorics associating the proximity of Being with the values of neighboring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice, and listening” (“The Ends of Man”). In the “Letter on Humanism” (1946), for example, Heidegger writes that “man is the neighbor of being” (Der Mensch ist der Nachbar des Seins; them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him” (Standard Edition, 21:111). For Freud and Nietzsche, the injunction to neighbor-love emblematizes the ethical and social contradictions that fret the project of Enlightenment and hence requires ironic unmasking as ideology. But the intensity of their critical attention and the striking degree of animus that fuels it suggests that the neighbor is not merely one more moral cliché among many but instead a special source of anxiety and trauma, to be returned to as a resource for thinking. For a series of philosophers and psychoanalysts in later modernity, including Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Lacan, this disturbing element in the neighbor and the injunction to neighbor-love exceeds the dialectics of religion and secular reason precisely as the residue of those logics and as something caught up in them but not fully explainable in the terms of either. In his seminar of 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that Freud’s critique of neighbor-love reveals a fundamental truth about jouissance, the traumatic enjoyment that the subject both repudiates and secretly treasures. Lacan connects Freud’s discussion of the Neighbor in Civilization and Its Discontents with his account of the Nebenmensch— literally the “next person,” the first other encountered by the subject—in his early Project for a Scientific Psychology (Standard Edition, vol. 1). At the heart of the Nebenmensch is what Freud calls das Ding, the unsymbolizable “thing” that constitutes the kernel of exteriority, the other’s jouissance, at the heart of subjectivity. Lacan argues that Freud repudiates the commandment to love the neighbor not merely as naïve or impractical but also as a manifestation of the “obscene” demands of the superego for excessive enjoyment. It is this account of the neighbor that allows Lacan to formulate an ethics of psychoanalysis that avoids the problematic (discovered by Saint Paul) that the moral law itself produces desire and transgression in its very attempt to limit them. In this ethics, to love the neighbor’s jouissance as one’s own would be to encounter the strangeness of one’s desire. More recently, Lacan’s account of the neighbor has been a recurrent topic in the work of Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Žižek’s numerous essays, talks, and chapters on the topic express his ambivalence: “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face”; “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!”; “Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself”; and “The Only Good Neighbor is a Dead Neighbor!” For Žižek, as well as for Santner and Reinhard, however, the neighbor persists as a key locus of political theological insight even after its disenchantment and death in modernity. In this work on the political theology of the neighbor, Lacan is supplemented by that of the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. The figure of the neighbor is an exemplary locus for what Rosenzweig calls “the new thinking,” which is in excess of the dialectic of faith and reason. In The Star of Redemption (1919), Rosenzweig sees neighbor-love as the purely human means of enacting redemption according to the two paths represented by Judaism and Christianity. The “Jewish” mode of neighbor-love involves the instantaneous transformation of love of self into love of the neighbor, which thereby immediately realizes eternity; the “Christian” mode NEIGHBOR 711 (such as association or commutativity) in terms of the belonging or membership of elements. Topology, according to Badiou, arises from the need to grasp movement and place in order to specify concepts such as location, approximation, continuum, and differential. Rather than individual elements, topology examines parts or subsets; it aims at “what happens when one investigates the site of a term, its surrounding, that which is more or less ‘near’ to it. If the master concept of algebra is that of the law (of composition), topology is based on the notion of neighborhood.” Whereas algebra is a science of identifying and naming a particular element, topology involves dis-identification or de-particularization: what applies to one point in a topology must also apply to other neighboring points. Topology does not describe individual elements but rather collectives; in a “neighborhood,” Badiou writes, “the element is the point of flight for a series of collectives. The individual has no other name than its multiple adherences” (Theory of the Subject). The notion of locating elements in overlapping clusters as “neighborhoods” tends toward the “expansion of the local” as more and more elements are potentially each other’s “neighbor.” Badiou makes the political implications of this model explicit: “the working class may be the first neighborhood—already very vast—of a factory revolt. You will thus obtain wider neighborhoods. The intersection of these two neighborhoods is nothing less than the form of internationalism immanent to the term ‘revolt’ ” (Theory of the Subject). The topological concept of a neighborhood thus suggests a principle of political collectivization other than citizenship (whose models are paternal and fraternal and based on genealogy and friendship): the neighbor is not a “member” of a state defined by socioeconomic coordinates but is, instead, a part of a loosely aggregated neighborhood. Badiou’s account of the potentially infinite expansion of the neighborhood involves Paul Cohen’s concept of a “generic” set produced by the technique known as “forcing” (ideas that are central in Badiou’s Being and Event.) By “forcing” a “generic extension” of a set, a new set is produced that is nonconstructable, that is without external unifying predicates—thus not a proper set at all under Gödel’s criterion of constructability. As its name suggests, a generic set is only minimally described: “[T]he generic essentially resembles the topological, which disindentifies the element in favor of its neighborhoods” (Theory of the Subject). In political terms, Badiou associates such a “forced” generic neighborhood with the possibility of the proletariat itself. If a generic set is a neighborhood in which individual elements are indiscernible and the limit function is approximate, the authentically political neighborhood is essentially generic, an open collective whose parts are always in excess of its members. In the final chapter of Theory of the Subject, “Topologies of Ethics,” Badiou proposes an ethics of exposure, of openness, where “justice” and “courage” are presented as functions of the neighborhood: justice relativizes the law—it arises from the “topologization of algebra,” in which “the neighborhood subordinates the elementary to itself. Justice is the blurring of places, the opposite, therefore, of the right place.” Courage, on the other hand, interrupts the relativized law for the sake of the excess, the remainder, “thus dividing the prescription of the place by completely investing its neighborhoods. All courage amounts Basic Writings), and in “The Nature of Language” (1957), he writes that “Thinking goes its ways in the neighborhood of poetry. It is well, therefore, to give thought to the neighbor, to him who dwells in the same neighborhood” (On the Way to Language). Derrida criticizes Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s proximity as merely one more version of humanism, the “proper” of man, and asks, “Is not this security of the near what is trembling today?” The theme of the neighbor persists in Derrida’s writings, including his posthumous The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006), where he criticizes the tradition, from Aristotle to Heidegger, of regarding animals as “all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers.” Derrida suggests that animals epitomize the uncanny otherness of the neighbor: “[N]othing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next (-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.” The mathematical concept of the neighborhood is central to a series of key oppositions that run through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, including that between “striated” (or metric) and “smooth” (or nonmetric) spaces in A Thousand Plateaus (Mille plateaux, 1980). These oppositions derive in part from Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot’s distinction between hierarchical “arborescent” societies (which they describe via the so-called friendship theorem, where, for any group of “friends,” there is exactly one “dictator” who coordinates the system and is everyone’s “friend”) and “acentered,” or nonmetric “rhizomatic” systems based on neighbors, “in which,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment.” Unlike the static system of “friends” (which Deleuze and Guattari associate with the classical “philo-sopher”), a neighborhood is a becoming, “a zone of proximity [zone de voisinage] and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity [le voisinage] of the other—and the border-proximity [voisinage-frontière] is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance.” In What Is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari propose a “geophilosophy” of neighbors: if the Greek philosophical society of “friends” leads to the capitalist society of “brothers,” geophilosophy organizes itself in terms of neighbors: “a concept is a heterogenesis—that is to say, an ordering of its components by zones of neighborhood.” If for Deleuze and Guattari a concept as such is a “neighborhood,” a loose assemblage of valences and vectors, for Badiou the neighborhood is a particular concept, with precise mathematical and political implications. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou develops the mathematical idea of the neighborhood into a dialectical materialism through the distinction between algebra and topology (1982; from seminars delivered in 1975–79). For Badiou, materialism involves two types of dialecticity drawn from mathematics: the algebraic disposition, based on identity, belonging, and reflection; and the topological disposition, based on the asymptote, adherence, and the remainder. Algebra, which is a “combinatory materialism,” studies the relations between the elements of a set according to laws of “composition” 712 NEUZEIT Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Lynch, David, director. Blue Velvet. Wilmington, NC: De Laurentis Entertainment Group, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Reinhard, Kenneth. “The Ethics of the Neighbor: Universalism, Particularism, Exceptionalism.” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 4 (November 2005). http://etext.lib. virginia.edu/journals/tr/volume4/TR_04_01_e01.html Ricœur, Paul. “The Socius and the Neighbor.” In History and Truth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910. . Das Stunden-Buch; Geschichten vom lieben Gott. 1900/1904. In Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Vol. 2, Gedichte II. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag 2003. Rosenstiehl, Pierre, and Jean Petitot. “Automate asocial et systèmes acentré.” Communications 22 (1974): 45–62. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. “Assessing ‘Neighborhood’ Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 443–78. Shafi, Maulana Mufti Muhammad. Maariful Qur’an. Translated by Mufti Taqi Usmani. 8 vol. Karachi, Pakistan: Maktaba Darul-Uloom, 1998–2003. Simmel, Georg. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1908. Simon, Ernst. “The Neighbor (Re’a) Whom We Shall Love.” In Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, edited by Marvin Fox, 29–56. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975. Sorkin, Michael, and Joan Copjec. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity. New York: Verso, 1999. Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988. Weber, Max. “The Neighborhood: An Unsentimental Economic Brotherhood.” In Vol. 1 of Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 360–63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Žižek, Slavoj, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. to passing through there where previously it was not visible that anyone could find a passage.” Finally, Badiou’s topological concept of the virtues of the neighborhood provides a precise model for the political idea called communism: the neighbor is the subject of communism, subtracted from the state—the common or generic subject, whose adherences are minimally specified and infinitely expansive. Kenneth Reinhard REFS.: Adorno, Theodor. “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences. 8 (1940): 413–29. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. . The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998. Augustine, Saint. On Christian Doctrine. Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2009. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. . Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009. Berger, Thomas. The Feud. New York: Little Brown, 1989. . Neighbors. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Cohen, Hermann. Der Nächste: Vier Abhandlungen über das Verhalten von Mensch zu Mensch nach der Lehre des Judentums. Saarbrücken, Ger.: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2006. . Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Atlanta: American Academy of Religion, 1995. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 2002. . A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. . What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louis Mallet, translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. . “The Ends of Man.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Edelman, Gerald. Topobiology: An Introduction To Molecular Embryology. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey et al. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. George, Nick, and Milt Schaffer. The New Neighbor (a Donald Duck cartoon). Directed by Jack Hannah. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions, 1953. Hausdorff, Felix. Set Theory (Grundzuge der Mengenlehre). Berlin: Springer, 2002. Hegel, Georg W.F. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961. . Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Modern Classics, 2008. . “The Nature of Language.” In On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper Collins, 1982. Hilbert, David. The Foundations of Geometry. Translated by E. J. Townsend. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1910. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong. Vol. 16 of Kierkegaard’s Writings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. NEUZEIT / MODERNE (GERMAN) ENGLISH modern times, modern age, modernity FRENCH temps modernes, âge moderne, modernité v. BAROQUE, BILDUNG, CLASSIC, HISTORY, PRESENT, ROMANTIC, SECULARIZATION, STATO, TIME In contrast to the antiqui/moderni pair, the German Neuzeit is part of an idea of historical periodization that divides history into three ages: antiquity, Middle Ages, and Neuzeit. Since the nineteenth century the term has designated the period that follows the Middle Ages, a period that is fundamentally open to the present and whose temporal limits seem ill defined. Unlike die Moderne (which French and English translate, as they do Neuzeit, by modernité, “modernity”), which generally refers to the nineteenth century and more NEUZEIT 713 nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this is usually added the transition from feudalism to a capitalist economic model, the development of a new social class—the bourgeoisie— and the formation of modern states. Various concepts have been tried out, associated, and opposed to provide a more complete explanation of this process of turning societies into states: in addition to the well-known processes of absolutism and “disciplinarization” (Zivilisationsprozess, with the different nuances introduced into it by Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias), the pair formed by the concepts of secularization and confessionalization (Säkularisierung, Konfessionalisierung) (see SECULARIZATION) characterizes the whole of historical writing about the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and establishes itself as one of the most remarkable components of thinking about the Frühe Neuzeit. II. Frühe Neuzeit, Neuere Zeit, Neueste Zeit: Problems of Periodization Economic and political historians differentiate Neuzeit into three or four phases. The first, that of the Frühe Neuzeit, goes from about the time of the first Italian citystates to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and led to a new order in Europe (1350–1650). The second phase is described as neuere Zeit or jüngere Neuzeit and is marked by the formation of a modern subject and the ideals of the Enlightenment. It is generally said to extend as far as the French Revolution, emphasizing the advent of the bourgeoisie as a historical actor. Industrialization and its effects constitute the essential trait of the third period, designated as neueste Zeit. This tautological redundancy (neu, Neuzeit, neueste Zeit, etc.) shows that the notion of Neuzeit always implies an awareness of the historical relativity of every period (R. Vierhaus, “Vom Nutzen,” 14). Of these expressions only Frühe Neuzeit, which designates the period between about 1450 and 1650 and is sometimes extended as far as 1800, has been unanimously adopted. The problems of defining and delimiting a Neuzeit period have led to extensive historiographical reflection. Thus, this concept has been connected with the notion of crisis (Aston, Crisis in Europe) and with the suggestion, made by Hans Blumenberg and others, that well-defined historical periods are separated by transitional periods. The idea of a “threshhold between periods” (Aspekte der Epochenschwelle) or even of a “threshold century” (Vierhaus, ibid., 21), allows us to abandon the search for the exact limits of the Neuzeit and conceive it instead as a set of diverse changes and as a plural, open process (ibid., 23). The same can be said of Reinhard Koselleck (in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1: xiv–xv); introducing the idea of a time when modernity was “getting into the saddle” (Vorsattelzeit), in which the “process of translating” “classical topoi” into “modern [neuzeitlich] conceptuality” took place, he makes a differentiation that other historians have adopted in their periodizations of German history) (cf. H. Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise). III. Neuzeit, Nature, and the Divine The historiography of the Neuzeit accords a large place to the transformations of science. For Romano Guardini, the change in the notion of nature and the philosophy of nature particularly to its aesthetics, Neuzeit, which was coined at the same time, indicates first of all the feeling of a profound change in all domains of life such as might have been experienced by the humanists of the “Renaissance” who were made the pioneers of this “modernity” (Burckhardt). The chronological extension of the term ranges, with many variations, from the Italian Renaissance to the century of industrialization, and indeed down to our own time. Since Ranke proposed the historiographic practice and theory known as Historismus, the notion of Neuzeit has undergone additional differentiations (into subperiods such as Frühe Neuzeit, jüngere Neuzeit, neueste Neuzeit); on the other hand, Neuzeit correspondingly has lost its initial connotations and has become simply a term of historical periodization. It is in that form that the notion of Neuzeit was definitively established (in the middle of the twentieth century) in history, sociology, and the history of philosophy. It is also increasingly argued that this historical period should be closed by assigning it an end. Here, however, the debate becomes philosophical, and German then prefers to use the term Moderne, which usually shifts the discussion to the value of modernity. French has no way to render this shift in emphasis. The first use of Neuzeit is found in the Grimm brothers’ dictionary (1884), where it is opposed to the Vorzeit (literally, “the earlier period”) and illustrated by a verse written by the young revolutionary Freiligrath in 1870, in which he describes himself as “a feverish and impassioned child of the Neuzeit who still longs a little for the older [time] (die alte [Zeit]).” Here the word expresses a feeling of renewal (Neu-zeit, literally, “new time”), an upheaval affecting all life and all people, contemporaries’ excitements and fears; it is applied to the present time, but it also situates the individual in the dynamics of history that carries everyone along with its forward thrust, that is, in general progress. In French this is rendered by the expression les temps modernes rather better than by the word modernité. I. Neuzeit: The Historiographical Determinants A series of events traditionally marks the beginning of the Neuzeit: the discovery of America in 1492, that is, the opening up of a closed world to a potentially infinite universe; Luther’s proclamation of his ninety-nine theses and the beginning of the Reformation in 1517; and the invention of the printing press. The interpretation of some of these events has given rise to intense debates, particularly in the case of the Reformation, in which Nietzsche saw a regressive protest against the Italian Renaissance (The Antichrist, §61), and on which Troeltsch offered a more qualified judgment balancing the Reformation’s traditional (that is, for him, Lutheran) elements against the innovative (Calvinist) ones (Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt, 1911). However, a consensus among historians has emerged, defining the Neuzeit on the basis of a certain number of dominant traits inchoately emerging well before 1500, that enables us to discern a long-term historical configuration (longue dureé). Among these traits is the invention of printing and the consequent opening up of a “public space” (Öffentlichkeit): the communication media that were developed starting in the sixteenth century are described in German as neuzeitlich and not modern, the latter word being reserved for the technical innovations of industrialization in the 714 NEUZEIT modernity as “the art of the most advanced consciousness” (Ästhetische Theorie, 57; on Baudelaire’s “beau moderne” and the philosophical interpretation of modernity, see Vincent Descombes, Philosophie, and Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs [1988]). On the other hand, after World War II the word Neuzeit seems to have lost its optimistic connotations and has been reduced to a neutral historical term, whereas the word “modern” still reflects the idea of a positive progress. In the debate over postmodernity and neo-structuralism that flourished in Franco-German philosophical dialogue during the 1980s, it was the term Moderne that was used. The Moderne, setting aside the notions that are associated with it (subjectivity, autonomy, self-foundation) and the criticism that has been directed at them, is conceived fundamentally as a project, and this introduces into it a component of reflexivity that is absent in the notion of Neuzeit, at least in its current usage (cf. Habermas, “Die Moderne,” 1980); this might be the philosophical specificity of Moderne in relation to Neuzeit. At a time when the project of modernity is being challenged, the fate of the notion of Neuzeit thus seems to have dwindled in philosophy and to retain its pertinence only in historiographical debates about the periodization of modernity. However, given the richness of these debates, it could be that the speculative power of the concept of Neuzeit will remain. Moreover, the originality of Blumenberg’s philosophical project can also be gauged by the maintenance of the term Neuzeit, which signals a different periodization of modernity by taking as its starting point the Renaissance rather than the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, unlike thinkers concerned with the Moderne. The difference between Blumenberg and Habermas thus begins with their choice of words. The problem of French modernité would then be that it cannot account for this bifurcation. Gisela Febel is the essential characteristic of the Neuzeit (Das Ende, 35ff.). Drawing on Goethe, he considers modern man a stranger in the midst of nature, which no longer is, of course, in any way divine. Ernst Cassirer went so far as to make central to his thinking about the Neuzeit the idea of a modern individual who has to resituate himself in relation to this unknown universe (Individuum und Kosmos). For Cassirer, the Neuzeit begins somewhere between Nicolas of Cusa’s theory of knowledge and ignorance and Giordano Bruno’s materialism. Bruno is also one of the main figures of the Neuzeit for Hans Blumenberg (Die Legitimität), even though Blumenberg chooses the name of Copernicus to mark the turning point of modern times and the “pathos” of this revolution (Die kopernikanische Wende and Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit, 343). Man is no longer at the center of the world; his “ex-centricity” entails his cosmological and theological deracination (Entwurzelung), compensated by a theoretical “curiosity” (curiositas, theoretische Neugier) that constitutes, as it were, the signature of the Neuzeit. The notion of Neuzeit is thus paired with that of secularization, which Blumenberg, in opposition to Carl Schmitt, seeks to liberate from a long tradition of interpretation that makes of it a “category of historical illegitimacy” (Kategorie geschichtlichen Unrechts). . IV. Neuzeit, Moderne Although in German the adjective modern is replacing Neuzeit with increasing frequency, the substantive Moderne remains uniquely applicable to the historical period that begins around the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition, the concept of the Moderne appears along with the art and literature of this period, and its theorizations are always aesthetic in nature—from Friedrich Vischer, who sees in it “the union of the ancient and the romantic” (Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft, §467), to Theodor Adorno, who describes 1 Vor tid, nutiden (Danish) These terms, which are rendered as “our time,” “the present time,” “the epoch,” and other analogous expressions, appear in almost all the works in which Kierkegaard characterizes his period. The latter is subjected to criticism for having lost the sense of the individual man’s (Enkelte) concrete possibilities because it has not undertaken the task of the “subjective existent thinker.” The “epoch” is dominated philosophically by speculation and socially by mass culture (the press). This also affects Christianity, Denmark’s official religion. Being aware of one’s times to the point of denouncing their vices is to confront the incomprehension of the present generation and abandon all hope of being admired. The tactic to be adopted consists in deceiving one’s surrounding world (“Mundus vult decipi, decipiatur ergo”: 2: 229, 9: 313, 16: 33), making them hear the voice of the isolated man who stigmatizes the failings of the epoch. Kierkegaard might have said, like Hamlet, “The time is out of joint.” But he would have done so without believing that he was called upon to “set it right.” For his “time,” he wants to be only a “corrective” (correctiv) (17: 276, 19: 43). Whether it is a matter of thought, literary mores, or religion, the task of the subjective thinker is simply to describe the stages of existence, their specific temporality, in order to make the reader “attentive” (14: 79, 86) to the dangers of “leveling” (Nivellering) (5: 153) and of jealousy that levels (8: 184, 202, 225). This is not unrelated to Heidegger’s analysis of mediocrity (Durchschnittlichkeit) or of “one” (man) and leveling (Einebnung) (Sein und Zeit, §27). Jacques Colette REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit.Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1963. Kierkegaard, Søren. Skrifter. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. 26 vols. Copenhagen: Gad, 1997–. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. 26 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–1998. NONSENSE 715 Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 1–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. . “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung II).” In Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen 1–4. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (Second Untimely Meditation).” In Untimely Meditations, 57–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Schilling, Heinz. Aufbruch und Krise: Deutschland 1517–1648. Berlin: Siedler, 1988. . Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1992. Troeltsch, Ernst. Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1928. First published in 1911. Translation by W. Montgomery: Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Vierhaus, Rudolf. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Begriffs ‘Frühe Neuzeit.’ Fragen und Thesen.” In Frühe Neuzeit—Frühe Moderne? Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Übergangsprozessen. Edited by Rudolf Vierhaus. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1992. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1975. First published in 1848. REFS.: Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor: Aesthetic Theory. Edited and with introduction by Robert HullotKentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Aston, T. H., ed. Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660. Introduction by Christopher Hill. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Blumenberg, Hans. Aspekte der Epochenschwelle: Cusaner u. Nolaner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. . Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975. Translation by Robert M. Wallace: The Genesis of the Copernican World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. . Die kopernikanische Wende. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965. . Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit. Mainz, Ger.: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1965. . Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. Translation by Robert M. Wallace: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Brentano, Franz. Geschichte der Philosophie der Neuzeit. Edited and with introduction by Klaus Hedwig. Hamburg: Meiner, 1987. Brient, Elizabeth. The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Threshold to Modernity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch. Edited by Konrad Hoffmann. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1985. Translation by S.G.C. Middlemore: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Introduction by Peter Gay. Afterword by Hajo Holborn. New York: Modern Library, 2002. Cassirer, Ernst. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. 5th ed. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977. Translation by Mario Domandi: The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Introduction by Mario Domandi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. Descombes, Vincent. Philosophie par gros temps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989. Translation by Stephen Adam Schwartz: The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Postmoderne und das Ende der Neuzeit.” Vortrag 1992. Heidelberg, 1996. Audiocassette. Guardini, Romano. Das Ende der Neuzeit: Ein Versuch zur Orientierung; Die Macht: Versuch einer Wegweisung. Mainz, Ger.: Matthias-Grünewald, 1989. Translation by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke: The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation. Edited and with introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. Chicago: Regnery, 1968. Habermas, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Translation by Frederick G. Lawrence: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Introduction by Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. . “Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt.” In Kleine politische Schriften 1–4, 444–64. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980. Translation: “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Edited by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, 38–58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. In Werke. Vol. 12. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by John Sibree: The Philosophy of History. Rev. ed. New York: Willey, 1944. Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese des bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. . “Neuzeit.” In Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Translation by Keith Tribe: “Neuzeit.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 222–54. Introduction by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Der Antichrist. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980. Translation by Judith Norman: “The Anti-Christ.” In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and NONSENSE FRENCH non-sens, absurdité GERMAN Unsinn, Sinnlosigkeit SPANISH disparate, sinsentido v. ABSURD, and ENGLISH, INGENIUM, NEGATION, PRINCIPLE, PROPOSITION, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE, SENSUS COMMUNIS], SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPEECH ACT, TRUTH, WITTICISM Why is it generally difficult to translate “nonsense” as the French expression non-sens? Why has it not been possible, until recently, to bring the “positive” dimension of “nonsense” into French or German? To answer these questions we have to examine the development of the expression, particularly in contemporary English, and the gradual explication and even philosophical rehabilitation of nonsense: to determine, so to speak, the different senses of non-sense. For the analytical tradition, it is particularly important to distinguish radical nonsense or the absurd (cf. the German adjective unsinnig) from a nonsense that is the absence of meaning or emptiness (cf. Ger. sinnlos) and which accordingly raises the question of a (normative) definition of the meaningful. But we can also try to move beyond this distinction, as did, in various ways, Wittgenstein’s grammatical philosophy. I. Natural Conception / Philosophical Conception of “Nonsense” We can distinguish, following Cora Diamond in her essay “What Nonsense Might Be,” two conceptions of nonsense. They are defined superficially by what “nonsense” is opposed to: “good sense” and “sense.” The English word “sense” has precisely these two uses (cf. Jane Austen’s title, Sense and Sensibility, which is rendered in French by Raison et Sentiments, but which refers to both sense and the sensible; also recall the adjective “no-nonsense,” which means “solidly reasonable”). “Sense” is thus the exact opposite of “nonsense,” and the identification of these two conceptions of nonsense in a single expression is no doubt characteristic of English. 716 NONSENSE For Hobbes, nonsense is a capacity of the human species (“the privilege of Absurdity”) that is as distinctive as the capacity for laughter (cf. Leviathan, chap. 6); we will see that the two are not unrelated. II. Philosophers and the Natural Conception of Nonsense The natural conception is developed in Annette Baier’s article “Nonsense,” which presents six categories: 1. what is obviously false, and “flies in the face of the facts”; 2. semantic nonsense, that is, the case in which one doesn’t know what one is talking about, in which the utterance is “wildly inapposite”; 3. phrases that imply category mistakes; e.g.: “This stone is thinking about Vienna,” or this passage from Lewis Carroll: “He thought he saw a Garden-Door / That opened with a key; / he looked again, and found it was / A Double Rule of Three”; 4. word sequences that are composed of familiar terms but have an “oddball and unclear syntactical structure.” Thus the expression Carnap cites in the classification of nonsense he offers in his famous essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”: “Caesar is and”; 5. statements that are produced by taking a “respectable” statement and replacing one or more of its words (but not too many) with meaningless words that cannot be translated into the familiar vocabulary, while at the same time retaining a recognizable structure. An example proposed by G. E. Moore: “Scott kept a runcible at Abbotsford”; another, by Carnap, in his Logical Syntax of Language: “Piroten karulieren elatisch”; and by Frege, in his Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie: “Jedes Anej bazet wenigstens zwei Ellah.” We see that these examples of nonsense arouse a certain creativity among philosophers, even those who are the least imaginative. The literary examples of this kind of nonsense are countless: obviously Lewis Carroll, or, in German, Christian Morgenstern (what commentators call “nonsense lyrics” inspired by Mauthner; see Jacques Bouveresse, Dire et ne rien dire); 6. “Mere gibberish.” Obviously it is conception 5, which was broadly exploited by Lewis Carroll, that is the most fascinating one from the translator’s point of view. The translations of Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” no doubt vary more than those of “normal” sentences, but they can be made without difficulty and in accord with well-defined rules, as is shown by the following example: All mimsy were the borogoves. (Tout flivoreux vaguaient les borogoves.) (Parisot) (Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux.) (Warrin, in The Annotated Alice) In reality, this category of nonsense illustrates the independence of meaning from syntax, as is shown by Chomsky’s Among the British empiricists, notably Hume, nonsense is opposed first of all to reason (in the sense of “good sense,” “common sense”); it is associated with the absurd and the ridiculous and sometimes simply with an absence of seriousness. Hume is fond of the expression “talking nonsense,” which he occasionally uses in a critical way: Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of witches or hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew any one that examined and deliberated about nonsense. (Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, no. 188) Or again, in a letter to Strahan: Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular Species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism. (Ibid., vol. 2, no. 455) The “natural” sense of nonsense is thus at first sight something like “absurd” or “contradictory.” In Leviathan, Hobbes identifies absurdity and nonsense: man has not only the privilege of reason, he writes, but also “the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject, but men only. And of men, those are of all most subject to it that profess philosophy” (chap. 5). But Hobbes also develops an initial, quite elaborate linguistic theory of nonsense. He distinguishes between two types of nonsense in expressions: One, when they are new, and yet their meaning not explained by definition; whereof there have been abundance coined by Schoolmen and puzzled philosophers. Another, when men make a name of two names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent. For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together and made one, signifie nothing at all. (Leviathan, chap. 4, §21–24) For example, the expressions “round quadrangle” or “incorporeal substance” are meaningless, “meere sound”; here we are dealing with radical nonsense, since Hobbes does not limit himself to saying that the expression refers to no object, that it has no meaning (it is a “senselesse and insignificant word”); it is empty, it signifies nothing. Here we have a first glimpse of the transition from the natural conception (nonsense = absurdity) to a philosophical or linguistic conception of nonsense, the two conceptions remaining closely linked: And therefore if a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle or of free-Will, I should not say he were in an Errour ; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, Absurd. (Ibid., chap. 5, §22) NONSENSE 717 so-called statements of metaphysics are not so easily recognized to be pseudo-statements. The fact that natural languages allow the formation of meaningless sequences of words without violating the rules of grammar, indicates that grammatical syntax is, from a logical point of view, inadequate. (Ibid.) The nonsense thus obtained is not due to one or another word’s lack of meaning but rather to the meanings themselves that these words have and that fail to combine to “make sense.” The rules of ordinary language are different from the rules of logical or philosophical syntax. Thus for Carnap there are “varieties” of nonsense—not only the absurd or radical nonsense but also the logically impossible. This so-called substantial conception of nonsense, apparently inspired by Wittgenstein and his idea of the “limits of meaning,” is in reality profoundly opposed to his conception of nonsense as sense. B. Sinnlos/unsinnig Frege and Wittgenstein have a conception much closer to the natural one and recognize only one kind of nonsense. This is what is called the austere conception of nonsense, and it can be opposed to Carnap’s substantial conception. Wittgenstein’s conception, particularly in the evolution from his earlier to his later philosophy, provides interesting perspectives. The question of nonsense, including the question of the different kinds into which nonsense may be divided, becomes central in the philosophy of language starting with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his use of Frege’s definition of sense (see SENSE, V). Nonsense understood as an absence of meaning is at the center of the contemporary conception of logic. Frege identifies sense and thought (Gedanke), a thought being a special kind of sense, a propositional sense. The important point for Frege is not to conceive the sense/nonsense distinction on the model of the true/false distinction. There are true or false statements and thoughts: a statement is true (or false) when it expresses a true (or false) thought; but there is no thought without meaning nor a statement that is meaningless because it is supposed to express a meaningless thought. For Frege, there are no logically faulty thoughts: they are not thoughts at all. This idea is picked up by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, where it plays a central role in the definition of nonsense and the illogical: “Thought can never be of anything illogical [wir können nichts Unlogisches denken], since, if it were, we should have to think illogically [unlogisch denken]” (3.03, trans. Pears and McGuinness). Let us recall that the Tractatus’s goal is to determine the limits of language by the limits of nonsense: Die Grenze wird also nur in der Sprache gezogen werden können und was jenseits der Grenze liegt, wird einfach Unsinn sein. (It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.) (Tractatus, preface, trans. Pears and McGuinness) ultrafamous example, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which, though nonsensical, can still be translated. But category 4 is equally central for contemporary philosophical reflection: it is used in the philosophy of language to distinguish two types of nonsense, one radical (category 6), and the other, a syntactical or categorical nonsense, which consists in putting together words that do not go together. III. The Battle over Philosophical Nonsense A. The substantial conception of nonsense Philosophical nonsense is inseparable from the idea of linguistic rules that determine the limits of meaning, of what can be said. Many interpreters think they find such an idea in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. But this is instead a later conception that can be found, for example, in the work of Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell, and it is radically different from the natural conception. It assumes that we have to mark off nonsense, that is, pseudo-propositions (Scheinsätze), from meaning, from what can be said. In “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” Carnap distinguishes two kinds of meaningless pseudo-propositions: i. those that contain one or more words without meaning; ii. those that contain only words that have meaning but are arranged in such a way that no meaning emerges from them. According to Carnap, metaphysical nonsense can sometimes be reduced to nonsense of type (i). But usually a metaphysician knows perfectly well what he means by each of his words, and the critique of metaphysics bears on nonsense of type (ii). Type (i) is pure nonsense; it is literally unintelligible. Type (ii) nonsense is substantial nonsense: we know what each part of the proposition means—the problem is the composite that they form. In saying that the so-called statements [Sätze] of metaphysics are meaningless [unsinnig], we intend the word in its strictest sense a sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement. It may happen that such a sequence of words looks like a statement at first glance; in that case, we call it a pseudo-statement. (“Elimination of Metaphysics”) For Carnap, logical syntax specifies which combinations of words are acceptable and which are not. The syntax of natural language allows the formation of nonsense (ii), in which there is a “violation of logical syntax.” Here we see the emergence of a specific, philosophical conception of nonsense: Let us take as examples the following combinations of words: 1. “Caesar is and” 2. “Caesar is a prime number.” Since (2) looks like a statement yet is not a statement, does not assert anything, expresses neither a true nor a false proposition, we call this word sequence a “pseudo-statement.” This example has been so chosen that the nonsense is easily detectable. Many 718 NONSENSE steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, then he will see the world aright. For Wittgenstein, then, surmounting these propositions means recognizing them to be metaphysical and without meaning (unsinnig). Whence the temptation that long guided the reading of Wittgenstein’s work: it was thought that there was a kind of understanding of nonsense that showed itself instead of saying itself and that metaphysics had its paradoxical place in this “showing.” We cannot ignore the deliberately Kantian side of the Tractatus’s project. The goal is to set a limit (Grenze) to thought, in a project similar to that of a critique of pure reason: a resumption of the Kantian project (drawing a line of demarcation between science and nonscience), expressed here in terms of nonsense: setting the limits of sense (see Strawson’s book on Kant’s first critique, The Bounds of Sense) by delimiting the domain of what can be said. But such an approach falls far short of Wittgenstein’s project and his conception of nonsense, as the preface to the Tractatus shows: [T]he aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thought: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. (Trans. Pears and McGuinness) One cannot set a limit to thinking because in order to do so, one would have to specify what cannot be thought, nonsense, and thus grasp it in some way in thought. But there can be no statements regarding what one cannot speak about, not even meaningless statements that might mean something if they had sense. Hence the limit will be set “within” language (that this can be done is what the book is going to show). Once this limit has been set, what remains beyond directly intelligible statements (beyond scientific propositions) will be pure nonsense. This means that Wittgenstein excludes precisely the idea that certain statements are nonsense but might nonetheless indicate something that cannot be said. There is therefore only one kind of unsinnig nonsense: it is the “austere” conception of nonsense. What is the source of nonsense? Wittgenstein warns us against “the most fundamental confusions of which the whole of philosophy is full” (3.324). The philosopher often allows himself to be hypnotized by the existence of a single sign (Zeichen) for two objects. But the fact of sharing a sign cannot be considered characteristic of the objects themselves (3.322). What matters is not the sign itself, but rather that of which the sign is the perceptible side (3.32), namely, the “symbol” (Symbol), which determines the meaning of the proposition (3.31). Then how can the possibility of access to the symbol be conceived? Wittgenstein’s response is very important and constitutes the connection Scientific propositions alone are meaningful (sinnvoll). Tautologies and contradictions are meaningless (sinnlos) because they do not represent a given state of affairs, but they are not nonsense (Unsinn) because they are part of language and symbolism. Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind sinnlos. (Tautologies and contradictions lack sense.) (Tractatus, 4.461, trans. Pears and McGuinness) Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind aber nicht unsinnig. (Tautologies and contradictions are not, however, nonsensical.) (Ibid., 4.4611) Metaphysical propositions, however, are radically nonsensical (unsinnig): Die meisten Sätze und Fragen, welche über philosophische Dinge geschrieben worden sind, sind nicht falsch, sondern unsinnig. Wir können daher Fragen dieser Art überhaupt nicht beantworten, sonder nur ihre Unsinnigkeit feststellen. (Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.) (Tractatus, 4.003, trans. Ogden and Ramsey) As is shown by the enigmatic passage that (almost) concludes the Tractatus, it is of the utmost importance to understand that these propositions are not nonsensical, which does not mean that we must understand them: precisely, it is radically impossible to understand them. This is Wittgenstein’s text: Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.) Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig. (Ibid., 6.54) Here is the Ogden and Ramsey translation into English: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless [unsinnig], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Compare Pears and McGuinness: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as NONSENSE 719 but in the sense of a factual absence of giving meaning, that nonsense arises. That, as we have seen, is what Tractatus 6.53 (trans. Ogden and Ramsey) underscores: “[W]hen someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions.” Nonsense as such then produces an elucidation: the person who understands the author of the Tractatus understands that his propositions are nonsense, and it is in understanding this that he is illuminated. Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt. Er muss diese Sätze überwinden. (My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless. He must surmount these propositions.) (Ibid., 6.54) We must note here a slight strangeness in expression: we always think we remember this conclusion of Wittgenstein’s as “the person who understands these propositions understands that they are nonsense.” But what Wittgenstein wrote in a last-minute evasion is “he who understands me” (welcher mich versteht) (our emphasis). He thus chooses to draw attention to the difference between understanding someone and understanding what he says. It is a matter not only of understanding that Wittgenstein’s propositions are nonsense, but also of abandoning the idea of understanding them “qua nonsense.” The elucidation provided by this nonsense is the comprehension of their author—Wittgenstein. C. Nonsense and language games In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops his conception of nonsense by concerning himself with another kind of nonsense that is connected with the fitting (treffend) character of an utterance in its context. It is important to situate this conception, as Diamond does, in relation to the earlier one. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy seeks to define “nonsense” by the absence of a “language game” (Sprachspiel) in which the expression can be used. “Nonsense” is thus defined once again but in a new sense, by usage. When a statement is called senseless [ein Satz sinnlos], it is not as it were its sense that is senseless [so ist nicht sein Sinn sinnlos]. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation. (Philosophical Investigations, §500) Or in a 1935 lecture (in English): Though it is nonsense to say “I feel his pain,” this is different from inserting into an English sentence a meaningless word, say “abracadabra,” and from saying a string of nonsense words. (Wittgenstein’s Lectures) And thus we are tempted to see an evolution in Wittgenstein toward a more pragmatic conception of nonsense, defined no longer by rules of logic, but by rules of usage. In reality—and that is what is shown by the predominance and between his earlier and his later philosophies: “In order to recognize the symbol in the [am] sign we must consider the significant use [sinvoller Gebrauch]” (3.326). This “significant use” is the only experience we have of meaning, and it is the criterion of what is and what is not nonsense. Thus, as early as the Tractatus, the borderline between sense and nonsense is determined by neither the “empirical content” of logical positivism nor a kind of transcendent authority that is supposed to set the limit of thought: it is determined by usage. In reality, the theory of usage that characterizes all of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is already present in the theory of nonsense in the Tractatus. An expression without meaning is an expression to which I, myself, do not give meaning. Thus Wittgenstein explains “the correct method in philosophy”: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. (Tractatus, 6.53, trans. Pears and McGuinness) A statement without meaning is not a particular kind of statement: it is a symbol that has the general form of a proposition and that has no meaning because we have not given it one. This reduces the distinctions between sinnlos/bedeutungslos/unsinnig—which is nonetheless philosophically central. Here is Wittgenstein again: “Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht, so ist es bedeutungslos. Das ist der Sinn der Devise Occams” (3.328). The standard French translation of this proposition, by Pierre Klossowski, renders nicht gebraucht as ne pas utilisé (not used). Etienne Balibar’s unpublished, much more careful translation has instead: “Un signe dont on n’a pas l’usage, n’a pas de signification non plus” (A sign whose usage one does not have or know, also has no meaning). Ogden and Ramsey translate Wittgenstein’s proposition this way: “If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam’s razor.” And Pears and McGuinness: “If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim.” In translation, the range of senses covered by “Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht,” extraordinarily, runs from “not used” to “use not known” to “not necessary” to “useless.” We come back once again—both in Wittgenstein’s argument, and in our understanding of the different ways in which the Tractatus has been translated—to meaningful use (sinnvoller Gebrauch). But usage is not prescribed by anything other than usage itself. “We cannot give a sign the wrong sense” (5.4732, trans. Pears and McGuinness). No sense can be illegitimate (unrecht) once it is given, that is, as soon as we give sense to this or that sign. As for metaphysical nonsense, when the sign ceases to be used in conformity with its habitual usage, that does not mean that what has been said has defined a new use for it. It is in this absence of definition, not in the sense of a formal definition 720 NONSENSE conditions of use (Philosophical Investigations). In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, there are no inherently meaningless expressions or ones to which we cannot give meaning, only expressions to which we do not want to give meaning: we can give them one, someday, and include them in a language game. Every combination of words can, if we wish, be “put into circulation.” From this point of view, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy no longer has anything to do with a normativism of meaning and opens the way toward a positivity of nonsense. The new attention Wittgenstein gives to the ordinary facts of grammar and language makes him particularly sensitive to nonsense, to Witz and wordplay, and to their meaning. He notes: “Aptitude for philosophy resides in the ability to receive a strong and lasting impression from a fact of grammar” (Big Typescript). This aptitude also determines the capacity for humor, and more particularly for wit, because it draws our attention to curious properties of language. Wittgenstein cites Lichtenberg in this connection and takes an interest in how we understand Lewis Carroll’s poems. Let us consider the witty meaning [witzige Bedeutung] that we give to Carroll’s grammatical games. I could ask: why do I think a grammatical word-play [Witz] is profound in a certain sense? (And this is naturally philosophical profundity.) (Wiener Ausgabe, vol. 3, quoted in Bouveresse, Dire et ne rien dire) Wittgenstein discerns the proximity between Witz and philosophy in their common ability to appreciate, as it were, the salt of language. He is supposed to have once said that one could imagine a philosophical work consisting entirely of jokes (without, for all that, being facetious). The Witz is another, more amusing way of “knocking one’s head against the barrier of language”—a task that defines philosophy. This is how Jacques Bouveresse puts it: A philosophical proposition and a grammatical Witz both have a direct relation to the question of the limits of meaning, and seem to be opposed to each other a little as the pleasure of nonsense is to what might be called by contrast the pain, impotence, and frustration of nonsense. It has been said that the witticism, as analyzed by Freud, could be considered a successful lapsus. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to suggest that a philosophical proposition might resemble an involuntary witticism. How can Witz draw our attention to language and yet have a profundity of the same kind as that of grammar itself? It is because it is characterized precisely by the impossibility of determining what constitutes the comic—the container or the content, thought or language: We receive from joking remarks a total impression in which we are unable to separate the share taken by the thought-content from the share taken by the jokework. We do not know what pleases us and what we are laughing about. (Freud, Jokes, 8:94) centrality of the idea of nonsense in his later philosophy as well—an expression that is misused, and hence is excluded from language, is nonsense; it is not a sense used in a way that is wrong, absurd, or inadequate. That is what some commentators (like Charles Travis in The Uses of Sense) define in the later Wittgenstein as sensitivity to significance in usage (S-use sensitivity): the meaning of a word is also defined by its later and possible uses. For Wittgenstein, whether in his early or his later philosophy, there is no intermediary between sense and nonsense, even if there are diverse kinds of nonsense, just as there are diverse kinds of meanings or ways of meaning. IV. “Nonsense,” Witz, Philosophical Grammar, and Ordinary Language Up to this point, we have examined nonsense in its “logical” and grammatical sense; it remains to consider poetic and comic nonsense, which we have already touched upon in relation to Lewis Carroll. How can we define the comic quality of nonsense? Specialists in nonsense as a literary genre generally resist the tendency to identify nonsense with an absence of sense: nonsense is instead the absence of a certain sense, for example, common sense or reason, that is subverted in nonsense. In this context we can distinguish, following Wittgenstein, three uses of the notion of sense: (1) the primary notion of sense; (2) the notion of a secondary sense, proposed by Wittgenstein in §11 of the second part of the Philosophical Investigations (e.g., the use of “fat” or “yellow” in the statements “Wednesday is fat” and “the vowel ‘e’ is yellow”) and derived from the primary sense; (3) the complex of Sinnerlebnisse or Bedeutungserlebnisse (experiences of meaning, which are central in the later Wittgenstein) that accompany use and that, despite their name, are seen as nonlinguistic experiences. However, Bedeutungserlebnisse do not play a major role in the definition of poetic or comic nonsense. Thus we can define poetic or comic nonsense in the framework of a sensitivity to meaning and of a lived experience of meaning (“das Erleben der Bedeutung,” that must be distinguished from Bedeutungserlebnisse) (see ERLEBEN)— which Wittgenstein has in mind in speaking of someone who is “meaning-blind,” incapable of feeling (appreciating) the humor of jokes. “If you didn’t experience the meaning of words, then how could you laugh at puns [Wortwitze]?” (Letzte Schriften, vol. 1, §711). The meaning-blind person (Bedeutungsblind; cf. Remarks [Bemerkungen], vol. 1, §202) is indeed blind to nonsense—in any case to the specific type of nonsense that we find in poetry and humor and that thus has more to do with meaning than is commonly thought. Wittgenstein remarks that “even a nonsense-poem [ein Unsinn-Gedicht] is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child” (Philosophical Investigations, §282; Klossowski translates Unsinn-Gedicht into French as “un poème de ‘non-sens’ ”). Wittgenstein compares three statements—“a newborn child has no teeth,” “a goose has no teeth,” and “a rose has no teeth”—and notes that even if the last seems truer or more certain that the other two, it seems less meaningful. However, there is always a way to give it meaning by imagining adequate NONSENSE 721 . The Annotated Alice (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass). Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. New York: Meridian Press, New American Library, 1960. . The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, In Eight Fits. Edited by Barry Moser. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. . Œuvres. Translated by Henri Parisot. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1990. . Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Edited by Selwyn H. Goodacre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Cheung, Leo K. C. “The Disenchantment of Nonsense: Understanding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Philosophical Investigations 31, no. 3 (2008): 197–226. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Diamond, Cora. “Throwing Away the Ladder.” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. . “What Nonsense Might Be?” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. Studienausgabe, vol. 4. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970. Translation by James Strachey: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953–74. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Hume, David. The Letters of David Hume. Edited by J.Y.T. Grieg. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932. Leijenhorst, Cees. “Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” edited by Patricia Springborg, 82–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mulhall, Stephen. Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in “Philosophical Investigations,” Sections 243–315. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. Schulte, Joachim. Wittgenstein: Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989. Translation by William H. Brenner and John F. Holley: Wittgenstein: An Introduction. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Strawson, Peter. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” London: Routledge, 2002. Travis, Charles. The Uses of Sense. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie / Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. . Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung = Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Kritische Edition. Edited by Brian McGuinness and Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Translation by C. K. Ogden and F. P. Ramsey: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Translation by D. F. Pears and B. McGuinness: Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1974. First published in 1961. Translation by Pierre Klossowski: Tractatus logico-philosophicus, suivi de Investigations philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. . Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1968. . “Philosophy.” In The Big Typescript, TS 213, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue, §86–93. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. . Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, and H. Nyman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Vol. 1, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Vol. 2, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. . Wiener Ausgabe. Edited by Michael Nedo. 8 vols. Vienna: Springer, 1993–. . Wittgenstein’s Lectures (1932–1935). Edited by A. Ambrose. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. The Freudian theory of wit maintains that the joke, which begins as simple play, is rapidly put into the service of the inclinations and drives of psychic life that have to overcome obstacles and inhibitions to express themselves. It is clear that this has something in common with philosophy, particularly when it becomes grammatical and shows the inseparability of thought and language. This transition to grammar is inseparable from a certain nonsense or even buffoonery: we find with pleasure in Wittgenstein efforts to transgress the rules of the grammar of language in the broad sense (of its usages), which draw our attention precisely to these rules. “Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest?” (Philosophical Investigations, §250). Another example Wittgenstein gives is that of someone who writes at the top of an official document: “Place: here. Date: now.” Here again this attention to nonsense and the equivocal may remind us of Freud. Freud observes that “Jokes do not, like dreams, create compromises; they do not evade the inhibition, but they insist on maintaining play with words or with nonsense unaltered,” presenting it as meaningful. “Nothing,” he continues, distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech. From this point of view at least the authorities come closest to an understanding of the nature of jokes when they lay stress on “sense in nonsense [Sinn im Unsinn].” (Freud, Jokes) For Freud the “joke-work” (Witzwerk) consists precisely in finding sense in nonsense and thus in giving a meaning, not discovering it. Freud defines Witz as “sense in nonsense” (see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED and INGENIUM, Box 3). Superficial nonsense is used in the Witz to express a thought that is important but that one does not necessarily want to, or cannot, approach. The Witz is thus never radical nonsense (Unsinn as defined above). An explicit contradiction or obvious falsity cannot constitute a witticism: “The scandal begins when the police put an end to it” (Kraus); or, to take a recent example, “In the interest of our relationship, let’s not have one” (Ally McBeal). In taking an interest in the traps set by language, and also in its profoundly and naturally ordinary character, Wittgenstein’s philosophy (and later Austin’s, which is fertile in wit and nonsense) specified an essential relationship that Witz maintains with philosophical grammar: that is, their ability to express both a problem and its solution as already present before our eyes: we simply hadn’t looked or listened carefully enough to recognize them. Sandra Laugier REFS.: Baier, Annette. “Nonsense.” In vol. 5 of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Bouveresse, Jacques. Dire et ne rien dire: L’illogisme, l’impossibilité et le non-sens. Nîmes, Fr.: Chambon, 1997. Carnap, Rudolph. “Die Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” Erkenntnis 2 (1932): 219–41. Translation by Arthur Pap: “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” In Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer, 60–81. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Edited by Selwyn H. Goodacre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 722 NOSTALGIA NOSTALGIA A certain number of terms that serve to designate uneasiness or malaise, experienced as characteristic of a culture or a national genius, find an equivalent in the word “nostalgia”: nostalgie (Fr.), saudade (Port.), dor (Rom.), and Sehnsucht (Ger.). The component of quest and exile, including existential exile outside oneself, displacement in all senses of the word, is in fact predominant in the term “nostalgia,” whether it is linked to solitude (saudade), to the suffering connected with an impossible desire (dor), or to an aspiration to something entirely different (Sehnsucht). See DOR, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, and, more broadly, MALAISE (ACEDIA, ANXIETY, MELANCHOLY). On the Greek model of nostalgia as “suffering of, or for, the return,” see SEHNSUCHT, Box 1. v. HEIMAT, PORTUGUESE, STIMMUNG, STRADANIE term that does not, moreover, designate the same thing, depending on the languages concerned (Gr. ouden/ mêden, Lat. nihil, Fr. néant, Ger. Nichts, Eng. “nothing”; cf. Gr. outis/mêtis, “not someone,” Lat. nemo, “not a man,” Eng. “nobody,” and so forth). Thus in Greek it is hen, “one,” that is negated (see MÊTIS, Box 1); in Latin it is supposed to be the hilum, a minuscule black dot at the end of a broad bean (ni-hil; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine citing Festus); in German, it may be a Wiht (little demon), unless it is Wicht, from Wesen (essence) (cf. ESSENCE); in English, it is “thing.” 3. Further reflection takes into consideration the degree of freedom in certain languages that construct, by means of an erroneous division, a new positive on the basis of the negative compound: that is what happens in Democritus’s Greek (68 B 56 DK [see RT: DK]), which proposes den (a false division of ouden, which is normally divided into oude-hen, “not even one”), an amalgam of the last letter of the negative particle and the negated positive. German can render Democritus’s den in a similar way, reactivating a term used by the Rheinland mystics, das Ichts (“Das Ichts existiert um nicht mehr als das Nichts,” RT: DK translation of Democritus’s fragment whose French equivalent would be “Le éant n’existe pas plus que le néant”). See ESTI, IV.B. II. Derivations and the Combinatory System We find here and there a certain number of remarkable disparities that give rise to major translation problems. 1. In some languages and in some cases, a term (noun, adjective, or verb) may be negated in several ways that stipulate different modes of nonexistence and refer to different paraphrases: this is the case in particular for the difference between negation and privation, which is fundamental in Greek, for example (ouden, mêden; see ESTI, II, IV.A, and MÊTIS, Box 1), and the different ways of indicating presence and the possession implied by privation (absence of something, through lack [“a-logical”], defect [“il-logical”], exteriority [“de-mentia”], extenuation, and so forth). On the way in which a negative or privative term is formed by means of a particle or a prefix, see—in addition to ESTI, and COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION—GERMAN and the study of the LustUnlust pair under PLEASURE, II.C). See also TRUTH (particularly for the Greek alêtheia, which Heidegger renders by Unverborgenheit), UNCONSCIOUS, and cf. MADNESS. 2. The rules of derivation, combination, and syntax related to negative terms produce texts that are characteristic of certain languages and particularly difficult to translate into other languages; this is the case, for example, of the German derivation that moves from the adverb nicht to the substantive Nichts. Regarding this set of problems, particularly illuminating examples will be found under ESTI. See also PORTUGUESE, and cf. ANXIETY, AUFHEBUNG, PRINCIPLE. See also NEGATION and, in particular, VERNEINUNG. v. FALSE, NONSENSE NOTHING, NOTHINGNESS The expressions designating what does not exist are constructed in different ways, both within a single language and from one language to another. French, for example, immediately sets in competition a positive term and a negative term. The positive term, rien, derives from Latin rem, the accusative of res, rei, which originally designated a good, property, or personal effect (see RES and THING). The negative term, néant, also derives from Latin, but it is composed of a negative particle (nec, ne) applied, depending on the hypothesis, to the positive entem (the accusative of ens, “not a being”) or to the positive gentem (the accusative of gens, “not a living being”). I. Positive Nouns / Negative Nouns 1. The main positive nouns designating what does not exist are, in addition to the Iberian nada—derived from Latin (res) nata, the past participle of nasci, meaning “to be born” (see PORTUGUESE and cf. SPANISH)—the French words rien and personne. The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF), which did not fail to have a philosophical impact: see RES; cf. REALITY, TO BE, VORHANDEN. In an analogous way, personne, formed on the basis of the positive persona, or the actor’s mask (which is certainly not an anodyne entity), designates any given human being a “person,” and, in correlation with ne, acquires the negative value of “no one”: see PERSON. Consult MÊTIS, Box 1, “Odysseus: My name is No-One,” for an example of a pun on personne that implies both the difference, which is fundamental in Greek, between negation and privation (ou/mê), and the connection in French between the expression of negation and the so-called ne explétif; on the latter, see ESTI, Box 4. 2. The majority of the terms designating what does not exist are composed of a negation bearing on a positive 723 156b1). The powers of the soul and that of which they are the powers are correlative; but in this correlation, what Plato calls a “power” (dunamis [δύναμις]) has no terminological correlate in the order of things. What our translations call the “object”—anachronistically, but in accord with an interpretation almost inevitable for a modern mind—remains anonymous in Plato. Aristotle, who was more inclined to classify, regroups the powers and what they take as their themes in a larger category, that of opposites. The powers (dunameis) are distinguished according to their specific activities, and the activities, in turn, according to their opposites (antikeimena): “And by opposites, I mean food, what is perceptible, or the intelligible” (De anima 2.4, 415a20). Although the operations are primary, “we might inquire whether the search for their opposites [antikeimena] ought not to precede them, for example, the sensible before the sensitive faculty, and the intelligible before the intellect” (ibid., 1.1, 402b15; the 1982 edition of Tricot’s French translation adds a note: “The word antikeimena thus signifies here the objects of sensation and intelligence”). Antikeimenon is given first a local meaning, that of “opposite,” as is shown in Aristotle’s De caelo, where it designates the lowest place and the highest place, situated at the two extremes of an imaginary axis connecting them: “Fire and earth move not to infinity but to opposite points [antikeimena]” (De caelo 1.8, 277a23; cf. 2.2, 284b22; see Bonitz’s remarks in his Index Aristotelicus of 1870, 64a18). Each faculty is distinguished from another by its particular operations, since the activity precedes the power and constitutes its specificity: “The activity of the sensible object and that of the percipient sense is one and the same activity” (De anima 3.2, 425b25). But beforehand, each activity is determined by its reference to its opposite, that is, by the type of specificity that affects each of the faculties of the mind: they are opposita, as James of Venice correctly rendered the term (ca. 1130). Shall we say, then, that Aristotle has found a name for what remains unnamed in Plato? Should we interpret antikeimenon as signifying the opposition of the object with regard to the power? Here there is a retrospective illusion to which we could easily succumb. But Aristotle’s thought does not prefigure the medieval and modern concept of the object, as if the generality of his language held the rest of history in its secret folds and paved the way for later distinctions, or as if later interpreters succeeded in arriving at the truth of a meaning that was latent but already secretly present, and of which they are the heirs. In the first place, Aristotle does not absorb the Platonic expression into a more precise vocabulary; he limits himself to situating the relationship of correlation observed by Plato in a still more general classificatory concept. The antikeimenon is a very broad class of correlates that are only a particular case: “The term ‘opposite’ is applied to contradictories, and to contraries, and to relative terms, and to privation OBJECT, OBJECTIVE BEING FRENCH objet, être objectif GERMAN Objekt GREEK antikeimenon [ἀντιϰείμενον] LATIN obiici, obiectum; esse obiective v. ERSCHEINUNG, ES GIBT, GEGENSTAND, INTENTION, PERCEPTION, PHÉNOMÈNE, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, SEIN, SUBJECT, TATSACHE, THING, TO BE, TRUTH, VORHANDEN The word “object,” like the concept to which it refers, has not always existed. But we constantly project it into texts to which it is alien. I. The Antikeimenon, or Thought without Object Must it not be admitted that even if the word is lacking, the concept of object is as old as philosophy itself? In reality, Plato and Aristotle did not fail to analyze the faculties’ relationship to their terminus, but they did not have an independent word for doing so. Whereas it is absent in the original Greek, translators introduce it—projecting onto ancient authors, through a retrospective illusion, our Latin vocabulary inherited from medieval philosophy. When Plato speaks of the faculties and of “that to which they are related,” he always uses a clumsy paraphrase. Of course, he mentions the relationship between a capacity for knowledge or desiring and the order of the things that this capacity knows or desires. But he describes them only by manipulating syntax: thirst will never be the desire for “anything other than that of which it is its nature to be, mere drink” (Republic 4.437e, trans. Shorey; Chambry renders this in French as “elle ne saurait être le désir d’autre chose que de son objet naturel” [emphasis supplied]). Plato (or rather Socrates’s interlocutor Glaucon) goes on: “Each desire in itself is of that thing only of which it is its nature to be [the desire]” (ibid.; Chambry renders this as “chaque désir pris en lui-même ne convoite que son objet naturel pris en lui-même” [emphasis supplied]). Similarly, “Science, which is just that, is of knowledge which is just that, or is of whatsoever we must assume the correlate of science to be” (ibid., 4.438c; Chambry translates this as “ou de l’objet, quel qu’il soit, qu’il faut assigner à la science” [emphasis supplied]). To distinguish a faculty, Socrates says, “I look to one thing only—that to which it is related [eph’ hôi] and what it effects” (5.477d; Chambry: “je ne considère que son objet et ses effets”). Here we see how flexible the Platonic connection is, limiting itself to a relative pronoun, and how plodding and awkward a literal translation seems; how much clearer and necessary appears the projection of the term “object” so as to explain the sense of Plato’s text. It remains that this kind of translation introduces into Plato a concept that has no semantic foundation. On the contrary, for Plato, the corresponding terms always come “in pairs of twins” (Theatetus O and possession, and to the extremes from which and into which generation and dissolution take place” (Metaphysics Δ.10, 1018a20–21). And the correlate is itself a genus whose species include the relation of “the measurable to the measure, and the knowable to knowledge, and the perceptible to perception” (ibid., Δ.15, 1020b31–32). Far from containing in embryonic form the distinctions with which the concept of obiectum is charged, the Aristotelian notion of antikeimenon merely allows a regrouping: it places the cognitive correlation in a hierarchy of more general terms. Moreover, a correlative relation is symmetrical: it can be reversed, and knowledge can thus become in turn the opposite of the knowable (Categories 10.11b29–30; cf. 7.6b34–36). The medieval and modern concept of object is asymmetrical: one would never say that knowledge is “the object of the known.” The sense of “opposite” is thus far broader than that of the later term “object”: opposition signifies a general, reciprocal relationship that is larger than the particular case of the powers of the mind and of their theme; it therefore does not define the status of the term in question by the faculty. What a power knows is first of all the thing itself, not an object defined by its pure correspondence with the faculty. The faculty is determined by the being, and it is not the object that defines the faculty (Metaphysics Δ.15, 1021a26–b3; Ι.6, 1057a7–12). II. Obiectum, or the Obstacle before the Eyes The word “object” designates the act of something presenting itself as opposite or standing over against, the Latin obiici. Here again, should we say that the word that designates it, and thus the concept that accompanies it, is already present in Latin antiquity? Classical Latin already has the past participle of obiicio, “to throw or place before, to be opposite, to set against”; and Tacitus, in Germania, refers to women in combat “using their breasts as shields [obiectu pectorum]” (8.1). Latin also uses the masculine substantive obiectus, which is derived from obiicio, to refer to “what is set before” or what “stands before” (an obstant), an “obstacle,” a “spectacle,” and more precisely, an “apparition,” a “phenomenon.” But the invention of the neuter noun obiectum corresponds to a new conceptual requirement. This requirement proceeds first of all from the theory of perception, when it implies an activity of the powers of the mind. For Augustine, who adopts the Platonic theory of vision, the latter is engendered by the encounter between the look, which emanates from our eyes, and color, which emanates from the thing. Our eye emits a ray “by which we touch everything that we see. If you want to see further, and some body interposes itself [interponatur], the ray collides with the body set in front of it [corpus obiectum] and it cannot pass beyond it toward what you want to see. You want to see a column, a man stands in the middle of your field of view, your look is blocked” (Augustine, Sermo 267, 10.10; RT: PL 38, col. 1262). Here the obiectus is the obstant, the body interposed between the eye and the thing to be seen, the obstacle that puts the terminus of my movement, the theme pursued by my operation, out of reach. The obiectus hinders the activity of sight; it is not the latter’s objective. The past participle obiectum does not designate the thing looked at, but that which, thrown before the eyes, breaks the axis of the look, violates the transparency of its seeing. By a paradoxical consequence of this active theory of vision, however, its terminus is always an obstacle that limits by its shadow the ray of pure light emitted by the eye; and reciprocally, the obstacle is an obiectum. Thus Pseudo-Grosseteste, commenting on this passage in Augustine around 1230, substantializes the past participle: “The mental ray that comes out of the eye is not affected by the external object [non immutatur ab obiecto extra]” (Baur, Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, 255.15–19). Here it is no longer an adjective designating a quality but very probably a neuter and a subsistent term. Contraposition is no longer an accident of perception, its inevitable reverse; instead, it indicates a positive property of the visible. The concept of object is constructed when the term obiectum combines two determinations: the older meaning of interposition, and the new one, in conformity with the Aristotelian problematics, of the terminus to which a power is relative. The use of the term is solidified and determined in Pseudo-Grosseteste: But it is further added that, whether for natural appetite, or for the deliberative faculty, there exist different objects and different motors. Thus there also exist different acts and different powers. (Pseudo-Grosseteste, in Baur, ibid., 264.42–44) Even if Pseudo-Grosseteste is the only writer to produce the concept of object in its nascent state, in presenting his sources (Augustinian and Aristotelian), we cannot exclude the possibility that it is a tool that was forged in the Faculty of Arts and anonymously spread by it (several attestations between 1225 and 1230 allow us to suggest this: e.g., the Summa duacensis [ed. Glorieux, 43 and 49] and the De anima et de potenciis eius [ed. Gauthier, 223, 232, 244, and 250]). It appears for the first time in the title of the anonymous De potenciis animae et obiectis (between 1220 and 1230; ed. Callus, 147–48). It is in Philip the Chancellor’s Quaestiones de anima that the concepts of subject and object are related to each other for the first time: Una [potentia] enim simpliciter est quae est una in subiecto et obiecto, duplex quae est una in subiecto, duplicata in obiecto. (For [a power] that is absolutely unique is [the power] that is in the subject and the object, and it reduplicates that which is one in the subject but reduplicated in the object.) (Philip the Chancellor, Quaestiones de anima, ed. Keeler) The object not only is the interposed obstacle, but also is clearly recognized as the theme specific to the act of knowing; it even serves to distinguish the diverse faculties, because it is anterior to them. Thus Grosseteste thinks he is allowed, when citing the text of Aristotle’s De anima, to translate antikeimena not by opposita, as James of Venice had, but by obiecta. This is the translation that became standard in 724 OBJECT OBJECT 725 senses, but as the terminus of an act of seeing: it is present as the object of our representation: “Once this thing is known as it is in nature, it shines objectively within, in the understanding itself” (Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 5, quest. 26, f. 205 N ; cf. 5, quest. 14, f. 175). Objective being refers to the being of the thing as it is targeted by our representation, thus both as immanent (represented) and transcendent (representing). The understanding agent, when it encounters the external thing, produces the object in the understanding as a real accident in the mind. It thus gives it the status of a universal: the form “man” can be attributed to all men. The object is not a being received, but is constituted in the intellect and by the intellect: “For our act of intellection, we have an internal object, even if to feel we need an external object” (Quodlibet 13, art. 2, §[20] 60, ed. Alluntis, 470). And Duns Scotus emphasizes that the being of the thing remains the same, whether its object exists or not: the objective being of Caesar is identical whether he is absent or existent. Objective being is universal, abstract, immanent to the spirit. Thus Duns Scotus constructed the main characteristics of the modern theory of objective being, or of objective reality, as it is developed down to Suárez, Descartes, and Kant: “What is objective is that which constitutes an idea, a representation of the mind, and not a subsistent and independent reality” (RT: Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, s.v. Être objectif ). The invention of the term “object” and its compounds shows how illusory it would be to assume that concepts are eternal, how dangerous and yet stubbornly persistent is the retrospective illusion of interpreters and translators who slip the new concept into ancient texts, and how much the fundamental concepts of metaphysics are connected with the evolution of the vocabulary that makes it possible to name them. . Olivier Boulnois the second half of the thirteenth century, and was adopted in William of Moerbeke’s version of De anima. With the fusion of Aristotle’s psychology and the Augustinian theory of vision, a decisive turning point is reached: the faculties of the mind are no longer open to the driving and multiform manifestation of the being with which they are identified in the act of knowing, but are determined by the prior nature of their specific object. What is known is no longer the face of the thing itself, but the obstacle with which the look collides, that deprives its activity of its own transparency. Knowledge is no longer a simple reception of an actual being by the power moved, but rather the ricochet of a ray emitted by the intellect that is reflected back to it after having bounced off its terminus. It is no longer the direct confrontation of the thing known and the knowing intellect, bound together by a common act, but the reverberation of sight on the “objectness” that has clothed the thing with a characteristic stratum. The thing known emerges as an object; the problem of knowledge is gradually detached from the being of the thing. Truth is henceforth transformed into an adequation between the powers of the mind and the corresponding objects: Some habitus are in the mind qua habitus, and thus they are by themselves in the mind or in man; there are others that are there as objects [in ratione obiectorum], and such is truth and falsity, because they are thrown before [obiiciuntur] the understanding. (Bacon, Questiones supra libros prime philosophie Aristoteles) III. Esse Objective, or the Ontology of Objects in General The concept of esse obiective (objective being) lexicalizes this development: what is present to pure thought is not imprinted there as a perception passively received through the 1 Quine and qualia v. TO TI ÊN EINAI Philosophical debates about qualia cluster around two broad positions: the acknowledgment of irreducible, phenomenal properties of subjective experience on the one hand, and the characterization of such properties as eliminable or epiphenomenal on the other. Of the many problems at issue in these debates, one concerns the accessibility of such private, introspective experiences to public, intersubjective linguistic reports. Because qualia are often treated as nonextensional and nonrepresentational, they trouble both (traditionally analytic) philosophies of language that correlate linguistic meaning with empirical content, and (traditionally continental) philosophies of language that emphasize the irreducibility of discourse. The philosophy of W.V.O. Quine (1908– 2000) can be daunting in its many guises, here resembling Rudolf Carnap’s logical positivism, there anticipating Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, and always recalling a pragmatic tradition running from Charles Sanders Peirce to John Dewey. Strictly speaking, there is no Quine on qualia. His most influential writings largely predate now conventional discussions of inverted color spectra or brilliant neurophysiologists in black-and-white rooms, reflecting instead mid-century behaviorist approaches to psychological considerations and resembling, in this regard, the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument. For Quine, behaviorism constitutes a methodological necessity in the study of language: “In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice” (Quine, Pursuit of Truth, 37–38). Quine’s thought thus appears to resemble more closely the latter of the two positions referred to above, tending more toward the reduction or elimination of phenomenal properties than toward their recognition or affirmation. Given its explicitly extensionalist, physicalist, and behaviorist commitments, it is not surprising that Quine’s philosophy would largely ignore qualia, or at least remain implicitly agnostic regarding the existence of phenomenal properties not subject to linguistic representation or empirical (continued) 726 OBJECT REFS.: Bacon, Roger. Questiones supra libros prime philosophie Aristoteles. In Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Bacon, edited by R. Steele and F. Delorme, vol. 10. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930–32. Baur, Ludwig, ed. Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1912. Bonitz, Herman. Index Aristotelicus. Berlin: G. Reimeri, 1870. Boulnois, Olivier. “Être, luire et concevoir: Note sur la genèse et la structure de la conception scotiste de l’esse objective.” Collectanea Franciscana 60 (1990): 117–35. De potenciis animae et objectis. Edited by D. A. Callus. Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, no. 19 (1952). Dewan, Lawrence. “‘Objectum’: Notes on the Invention of a Word.” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge 48 (1981): 37–96. verification; yet even as Quine’s philosophy of language presents a challenge to the purported ontology of qualia, it preserves the challenge that qualia present to the philosophy of language, although in displaced form. Consider a classic example in expositions of qualia. Seeing a turquoise patch feels a certain way to me that it may not feel to you. This property of “what it is like,” for me, to see turquoise exemplifies the qualitative aspect of a subjective experience. Now, although you and I may undergo different experiences while seeing turquoise, we will likely both be able to produce the word “turquoise” upon being asked the name of the color that we see—likewise for drinking coffee, having a headache, and so on. While on a private, phenomenal level, we might experience very different things, on a public, linguistic level, our behavior coincides. By these lights, verbal behavior is too crude an instrument to detect more subtle differences in subjective properties. However, Quine shows, most notably through his “principle of indeterminacy of translation,” how the language of physical objects itself faces equally significant difficulties (Word and Object, 27). Quine imagines a linguist attempting to produce a handbook for translating a hitherto unknown language. A rabbit appears, and a native speaker utters “Gavagai.” Our field linguist writes “rabbit” in his notebook as the translation of “Gavagai.” Yet in thus correlating what Quine calls “stimulus meaning” with “occasion sentences,” and in accordingly translating “Gavagai” as “rabbit” by virtue of a perceived sameness of stimulus meaning, our linguist assumes the native speaker’s language is similar enough to our own that there is cognitive synonymy between his conception of rabbit and ours. As Quine points out, however, there is no way of knowing, based on observed linguistic behaviors alone, whether the speaker means “rabbit” or “rabbithood” or “stages of rabbits” or even “the rabbit fusion.” This indeterminacy characterizes for Quine all acts of translation, and it applies not only to our translations between languages but also to our simplest referential correlations between words and things: the indeterminacy of translation leads to the inscrutability of reference. Thus the threat that qualia represent for behaviorist, materialist, or functionalist philosophies of language—as when diverging experiences of a color fail to register in the common verbal behavior that those same experiences prompt—remains present in Quine’s work, which relocates the vagaries of mental properties in the world of physical objects. The threat thus emerges from within physicalist discourse itself rather than arriving from the other side of an explanatory gap in the form of phenomenal discourse. If physicalist discourse can be seen as necessarily insufficient for representing phenomenal properties, Quine extends this line of reasoning, demonstrating the indeterminacy of physicalist discourse even in representing physical objects. Radical translation, he notes, “begins at home” (“Ontological Relativity,” 46). For Quine, translational indeterminacy and referential inscrutability necessitate philosophical holism, which stresses the underdetermination of language by reality, or of science by experience. Quine rejects reductionism as an unexamined dogma of empiricism: “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 41–42). Inasmuch as one can translate his statements about the external world into positions on mental properties, one might say that Quine would be skeptical of qualia not because they can be reduced or eliminated, but because they represent in themselves an atomistic, reductionist approach to complex phenomena. Quine’s holism prompts his pragmatism. He describes phenomenal and physicalist conceptual schemes as mutually constitutive and mutually irreducible: for each, the other plays the role of “a convenient myth” (Quine, “On What There Is,” 18). Quine does not seek to eliminate phenomenal properties, but neither does he go so far as to grant them an autonomous existence independent of physicalist conceptions. In choosing which ontological framework to adopt under what circumstances, Quine advocates “tolerance and an experimental spirit,” one that bears in mind “our various interests and purposes” (ibid., 19). Such a spirit allows that science admits, and must admit, of certain conceptual or theoretical posits that are at once irreducible and mythic, and in fact are irreducible because they are mythic: “Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer” (Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 44). This line of reasoning extends not simply to physical objects and Homeric gods, but also to forces, irrational numbers, and classes of classes. And, one imagines, to qualia. Quine does not evade the challenge that putatively intrinsic properties of phenomenal experience pose to physicalist discourse about external objects. His is not a naive physicalism. Instead, he advocates a holist, pragmatist approach to the difference between physicalist and phenomenal ontological commitments and conceptual frameworks. To “quine qualia,” in this regard, amounts less to materialist elimination than to pragmatic tolerance (cf. Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” 42–77). Michael LeMahieu REFS.: Dennett, Daniel C. “Quining Qualia.” In Consciousness in Contemporary Science, edited by A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Quine, W.V.O. “Ontological Relativity.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. . “On What There Is.” In From a Logical Point of View, 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1980. First published in 1948. . Pursuit of Truth. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992. . “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1980. First published in 1951. . Word and Object. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1960. (continued) OIKEIÔSIS 727 Gauthier, René Antoine, ed. “Le traité De anima et de potenciis ejus d’un maître ès arts (c. 1225).” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, no. 66 (1982). Glorieux, Palémon, ed. La ‘Summa duacensis’ (Douai 434): Texte critique avec une introduction et des tables. Paris: Vrin, 1955. Henry of Ghent. Quodlibet. Edited by F. Alluntis. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores cristianos, 1968. Kobusch, Theo. “Objekt.” In RT: Ritter and Gründer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 6:1026–52. Philip the Chancellor. Quaestiones de anima. Edited by L. W. Keeler. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1937. Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vols. 5–6, The Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. . La république. Translated into French by Émile Chambry. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931; 10th ed., 1996. OBLIGATION “Obligation”—from Latin obligo, “to attach” (ligo) “to” or “against” (ob)—has, like the Latin word obligatio, a strong meaning that is juridical (a commitment made by the parties, a guarantee or security deposit) and moral (mental commitment, responsibility, moral bond, constraint). I. Obligation and Legal Bond The legal, social, and religious system connecting obligation, norm, and law is explored in the entries for LEX and PIETAS (the disposition to perform one’s office, or the feeling of duty) and RELIGIO (which “ties together” men and gods), so far as Latin is concerned; for Greek, see THEMIS, Boxes 1, 2 (see also KÊR and the complex vocabulary of destiny, which includes anagkê [ἀνάγϰη], “necessity, constraint”). The other side of the tradition, the Arab and Hebrew one, is explored in the entries for TORAH (see also Hebrew BERĪT, “covenant”). The German Pflicht (from pflegen, “to care for”) translates obligatio and officium: see SOLLEN and cf. BERUF. For English, see FAIR, LAW, and RIGHT/JUST/GOOD. Finally, the Russian SOBORNOST’, which is translated by “conciliarity,” designates the kind of gathering-together that connects people, beyond “catholicity,” in Russian culture (cf. OIKONOMIA, PRAVDA). See DROIT; cf. DESTINY. II. Obligation and Moral Duty The expression of moral obligation is connected with that of duty. Thus it is joined with the expression of debt, and thereby with fault and possibility: see DUTY and cf. PARDON; see also ASPECT and PROBABILITY. The connection between having a duty to be and having a duty to do is explored on the basis of German; see SOLLEN. The terminological network thus rejoins that of will: see WILLKÜR and WILL; and that of value: see WERT and cf. VALUE. On the relationship to the act as a moral act, see MORALS, POSTUPOK; cf. ACT, GOOD/EVIL, and PRUDENCE. v. ALLIANCE, COMMUNITY, CONCILIARITY, SECULARIZATION OIKEIÔSIS [оἰϰείωσις] (GREEK) ENGLISH appropriation FRENCH appropriation GERMAN Zueignung ITALIAN attrazione LATIN conciliatio, commendatio v. APPROPRIATION, and HEIMAT, I/ME/MYSELF, LOVE, OIKONOMIA, PROPERTY, TRUTH “Appropriation” is the literal translation, which has become inevitable, of the Stoic term oikeiôsis, derived from the verb oikeioô [оἰϰειόω], “to make familiar” and later “to make specific to, to appropriate”; “to appropriate to oneself” in the reflexive sense, “related to the family, to the estate; belonging to the family,” whence “proper to.” Oikeiôsis is opposed to allotriôsis [ἀλλоτϱίωσις], “alienation,” and designates what nature has originally “appropriated or attached to us or conciliated with” us. The term also has an affective dimension that is very poorly rendered by “appropriation.” Providing the transition from the physical to the ethical, the notion of oikeiôsis [оἰϰείωσις] is used by the Stoics in two different arguments, which makes understanding and translation even more difficult. This notion suggests that living beings do not seek primarily pleasure, but instead what is “appropriate” to each of them, starting with the preservation of their own constitutions. This entails a certain form of selfesteem and implies that in accordance with this tendency or primary impulsion (prôtê hormê [πϱώτη ὁϱμή]), we can posit for rational beings this double equation: living in accord with nature = living in accord with reason = living in accord with virtue. But oikeiôsis also has the purpose of founding relationships of justice between human beings by ensuring that selfesteem founds love for one’s relatives, a love that must be understood as love for their own good, and which is destined to broaden to encompass all rational beings, thus founding in nature the social bond, or even the cosmopolitanism cherished by the Stoics, whether this is merely a cosmopolitanism of the wise, as in the older Stoicism, or that of all human beings, as in Panetius and later writers. It is informative to compare the most recent French translation of the canonical statement of the thesis, as it is given by Diogenes Laertius, with the presentation offered by Cicero: The living being’s primary impulse is, they say, to preserve itself, because from the outset nature appropriates it [to itself], as Chrysippus says in the first book of his treatise On Ends, when he says that for every living being the chief object that is proper to him is his own constitution and the consciousness he has of it. (L’impulsion première [τὴν πϱώτην ὁϱμήν] que possède l’être vivant vise, disent-ils, à se conserver soi-même [τὸ τηϱεῖν ἑαυτό], du fait que la nature dès l’origine l’approprie (à soi-même) [οἰϰειούσης αὐτὸ τῆς φύσεως ἀπ’ ἀϱχῆς], comme le dit Chrysippe au premier livre de son traité Sur les fins, quand il dit que pour tout être vivant l’objet premier qui lui est propre [πϱῶτον οἰϰεῖον] est sa propre constitution [σύστασιν] et la conscience [συνείδησιν] qu’il a de celle-ci.) (Lives of Eminent Philosophers) OBLIGATION “Obligation”—from Latin obligo, “to attach” (ligo) “to” or “against” (ob)—has, like the Latin word obligatio, a strong meaning that is juridical (a commitment made by the parties, a guarantee or security deposit) and moral (mental commitment, responsibility, moral bond, constraint). I. Obligation and Legal Bond The legal, social, and religious system connecting obligation, norm, and law is explored in the entries for LEX and PIETAS (the disposition to perform one’s office, or the feeling of duty) and RELIGIO (which “ties together” men and gods), so far as Latin is concerned; for Greek, see THEMIS, Boxes 1, 2 (see also KÊR and the complex vocabulary of destiny, which includes anagkê [ἀνάγϰη], “necessity, constraint”). The other side of the tradition, the Arab and Hebrew one, is explored in the entries for TORAH (see also Hebrew BERĪT, “covenant”). The German Pflicht (from pflegen, “to care for”) translates obligatio and officium: see SOLLEN and cf. BERUF. For English, see FAIR, LAW, and RIGHT/JUST/GOOD. Finally, the Russian SOBORNOST’, which is translated by “conciliarity,” designates the kind of gathering-together that connects people, beyond “catholicity,” in Russian culture (cf. OIKONOMIA, PRAVDA). See DROIT; cf. DESTINY. II. Obligation and Moral Duty The expression of moral obligation is connected with that of duty. Thus it is joined with the expression of debt, and thereby with fault and possibility: see DUTY and cf. PARDON; see also ASPECT and PROBABILITY. The connection between having a duty to be and having a duty to do is explored on the basis of German; see SOLLEN. The terminological network thus rejoins that of will: see WILLKÜR and WILL; and that of value: see WERT and cf. VALUE. On the relationship to the act as a moral act, see MORALS, POSTUPOK; cf. ACT, GOOD/EVIL, and PRUDENCE. v. ALLIANCE, COMMUNITY, CONCILIARITY, SECULARIZATION 728 OIKONOMIA Pohlenz, Max. Die Stoa: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. 2 vols. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1948–49. Translation by O. De Gregorio: La Stoa. 2nd ed. Florence: Nuova Italia, 1978. Schofield, Malcolm. “Social and Political Thought.” In The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by Keimpe Algra et al., 739–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Striker, Giserla. “The Role of Oikeiōsis in Stoic Ethics.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983): 145–67. When an animal is born, it is spontaneously appropriated to itself [ipsum sibi conciliari], interested in preserving itself [commendari ad se conservandum], and loving its own constitution, as well as everything that is likely to preserve this constitution [et ad suum statum eaque quae conservantia sunt eius status diligenda]. (Dès que l’animal est né, il est spontanément approprié à lui-même [ipsum sibi conciliari], intéressé à se conserver soi-même [commendari ad se conservandum] et à aimer sa propre constitution ainsi que tout ce qui est propre à conserver cette constitution [et ad suum statum eaque quae conservantia sunt eius status diligenda].) (De finibus) Leaving aside the way in which this argument is presented in our two authors—a priori proof in Chrysippus, proof by effects in Cicero—we can observe that contrary to his usual practice, Cicero does not give the Greek term oikeiôsis, or even its Latin equivalent, but instead leaves it to his interpreters to give priority to conciliatio (literally, “association,” “union”) or commendatio (literally, “recommendation”). Cicero’s exposition regarding the other aspect of this notion, that of justice, underscores what in Christianity would be called “love for one’s neighbor,” and uses only the term commendatio (De finibus, 3.62–63). We can now understand why, perhaps deviating somewhat from the literal meaning of the Greek, French translators have preferred, as did É. Bréhier in his edition of the Stoics for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, to use the verbs attacher and adapter in rendering Diogenes Laertius’s canonical statement, whereas R. D. Hicks, the English translator of the Loeb Classical Library edition, opted for “endear,” because he translated oikeion by “dear.” That also explains why M. Pohlenz’s translation of Oikeiôsis by Zueignung was rendered in Italian by attrazione (trans. O. De Gregorio). These variations obviously show that, to cite two of the most recent and most authoritative editors and translators of Hellenistic literature, A. Long and D. Sedley, “any translation [loses] something of the original.” Jean-Louis Labarrière REFS.: Arnim, Hans Friedrich August von, ed. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta. 4 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1968. First published in 1903–24. Bees, Robert. Die Oikeiosislehre der Stoa. 2 vols. Würzburg, Ger.: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004–5. Bréhier, Émile, trans. Les Stoïciens. Edited by Pierre-Maxime Schuhl. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1962. Brunschwig, Jacques. “The Cradle Argument in Epicureanism and Stoicism.” In The Norms of Nature, edited by Malcolm Schofield and Gisela Striker, 113–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Cicero. De finibus. Translated by F J. Martha. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. Diogenes Laertius. Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres. Translated by R. Goulet. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999. Goldschmidt, Victor. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris: Vrin, 1953. Inwood, Brad, and Pierluigi Donini. “Stoic Ethics.” In The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by Keimpe Algra et al., 675–738. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Long, Anthony A., and David N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pembroke, S. G. “Oikeiōsis.” In Problems in Stoicism, edited by A. A. Long, 114–49. London: Athlone, 1971. OIKONOMIA [οἰϰονομία] (GREEK) ENGLISH economy FRENCH économie v. ECONOMY, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], MIMÊSIS, MOMENT, OIKEIÔSIS, SECULARIZATION, SOBORNOST’, SVET, WORLD The term oikonomia [οἰϰονομία] is a nodal concept in Christian thinking about the image (eikôn [εἰϰών]). To understand it, we have to analyze its semantic history over the nine centuries that preceded its triumph. The Apostle Paul, who inherited the classical notion of oikonomia (Xenophon, Aristotle), chose the term to designate in his Epistles the totality of the level of the Incarnation. Its apparent polysemy is the origin of the disparity in its translations. Thus the profound unity of a regulative concept was veiled, legitimizing any relationship between the spiritual world and the temporal world. Intended to justify the adaptations of the Law to everyday and historical reality, the patristic economy supported all the modalities of management and administration in the visible world. The doctrine of the image sealed this pragmatic unity with an astonishing modernity. I. From Xenophon and Aristotle to Paul Patristic literature owes the introduction of the term “economy” to Paul’s Epistles, in which we find oikonomia [οἰϰονομία] used to designate the economy of the Pleroma, or the divinity taken in the plenitude of its perfection (Eph 1:10), the economy of grace (3:2), and the economy of mystery (3:9). In the Epistle to the Colossians (1:25), Paul speaks of the economy of God (oikonomia theou [οἰϰονομία θεοῦ]). In modern French translations, the word is never rendered literally; instead we sometimes find accomplissement, sometimes plan, dessein, or réalisation (RT: Traduction oecuménique de la Bible). The person entrusted with this accomplishment is the diakonos [διάϰονος] or oikonomos [οἰϰονόμος], translated by intendant or ministre, the Vulgate having opted for actor. For Paul, it is a matter of borrowing from the Greek language a term that up to that point designated the management and administration of goods and services in domestic life and of importing the model of the private economy into the public economy, into the life of the city. That is in fact the sense in which both Xenophon and Aristotle use the word oikonomia. Before them, Hesiod dealt in his Works and Days with the familial economy in a rather poetic way. In the Republic (4 and 5) and in the Laws (4 and 8), Plato used oikonomia to construct philosophically a figure of administration in the ideal city. The Platonic economy is the science of the OIKONOMIA 729 a practice, both strategic and tactical, in the service of power and the accumulation of wealth. Its means are judged by their results. . All this was inherited by the church fathers after Paul’s suggestion that the Incarnation be assimilated to a plan for managing and administering humanity’s secular reality by the divinity. Translations give a very confused picture of the term’s polysemy since the word oikonomia sometimes disappears, and sometimes, put between quotation marks, is the subject of an awkward commentary on an accidental homonymy. However, the systematic unity of the term is essential for anyone who wants to understand the operative efficacy of oikonomia. The disparate translations show the uneasiness felt by Christians when faced with a Christological operator of opportunism. It is true that oikonomia changes meaning every time its use requires an inflection, but what constitutes the founding unity of polysemy itself is precisely its militant resistance to any kind of rigor (akribeia [ἀϰϱίϐεια]) or univocalness in interpretation. II. Patristic Polysemy: Economy and Incarnation The polysemy of oikonomia does not reflect a semantic evolution since all the term’s meanings have coexisted and operated simultaneously since the first centuries of the Christian era. In the eighth century, a crucial turning point linked economy with the debate on the legitimacy of the icon in patristic literature. It was in connection with the crisis provoked by the iconoclastic emperors (724) that the defenders of the image (“iconophiles”) constructed the conceptual unity of the economy. In this way the definition of an operator that provides for uninterrupted management of heaven’s interests and earthly goods is revealed and completed in all its philosophical and political breadth. . A. Divine economy and ecclesiastical institution The term oikonomia is used in patristic literature in its classical sense of the management and administration of goods and people or to designate responsibilities and offices within the ecclesiastical institution. The Incarnation, that is, the divine will to resort to the visible and historical, becomes the model for human management and administration of the secular space by those who are considered its stewards (oikonomoi). Paul is the founder of the system of incarnational economy. The oikonomia opens up the operative space of the new law which, in the image of Christ, is composed of infractions and transgressions that Paul was the first to declare (Rom 2:29; 2 Cor 3:6) to be the realization of the spirit of the law in opposition to its letter (Eusebius, Histoire ecclésiastique, RT: PG, vol. 20, col. 308C; Dio Chrysostom, De sacerdotio, 6.7.40). Consequently, the word oikonomia designated the person of Christ as well as the whole narrative of his life, passion, resurrection, and beyond, as far as the future completion of the providential plan of redemption (Athanasius, RT: PG, vol. 25, col. 461B, and vol. 26, col. 169A; Justinian, RT: PG, vol. 6, col. 753B; Irenaeus, RT: PG, vol. 7, col. 504B; Gregory of Nazianzus, RT: PG, vol. 36, col. 97C; Gregory of Nyssa, RT: PG, vol. 45, col. 137B). management of goods and persons in a state led by a sage endowed with temperance (sôphrosunê [σωφϱοσύνη]) and justice (dikaiosunê [διϰαιοσύνη]). Access to these cardinal virtues passes through education and requires the exercise of dialectic conceived as the art of dialogue that leads to knowledge. The legislating faculty is nothing other than the logos [λόγος], that is, discursive rationality. The objective of Xenophon and Aristotle is entirely different. Both of them deal with practical problems connected with the everyday reality of the family and the city and do not venture into literary or utopian terrain. As a result, in both thinkers oikonomia becomes a crucial notion in the sense that it determines the site of a confrontation between political realism and justice. In The Economist, Xenophon analyzes all the elements of the management of wealth and goods in the context of the family farm. SOCRATES: Tell me, Kritoboulos, is economy [οἰϰονομία] the name of a certain kind of knowledge [ἐπιστήμης], like medicine, the art of forging or carpentry ? Could we say, then, that it is a task [ἔϱγον] of economy? KRITOBOULOS: It seems to me that it is the task of a good economist [οἰϰονόμου] to administer his household well. SOCRATES: And someone else’s household, if it is entrusted to him—couldn’t he administer it as he does his own? A competent carpenter [τέκτων] could work for another person as he does for himself. Thus someone who is familiar with economics [οἰϰονομιϰός] will have the same ability. Hence a person who knows this art [τὴν ταύτην τέχνην ἐπισταμένῳ], even if he has no property of his own, can earn a salary by administering another person’s household [οἰϰονομοῦντα] as he would by building it. (Xenophon, The Economist, 1.1–4) As Leo Strauss puts it, “the administrator of an estate may be good or bad at management. But the economist (oikonomikos), that is, a person who has mastered the art of administering his estate, is ipso facto a good manager” (Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse). In the debate between Socrates and Kritoboulos in Xenophon’s work, the concept of oikonomia is in fact inhabited by the inevitable tension between the calculus of optimization and ethical requirements, an art of acquisition without war coupled with a providential conception of nature. In the rest of the debate, Socrates discusses further the management of wealth and the correct measures to take in order to ensure the prosperity of households and of the city. In Aristotle’s Economica (Oikonomikos), things become clearer: neither providence nor utopia is at issue, but rather a detailed consideration of actual practices and their results. In the private domain, Aristotle remains quite close to Xenophon, but when he moves to the public domain, economic concern is inseparable from political concern. Oikonomikos no longer designates a person but rather a mode of rationalized relations of the real that is closer to a judgment of (dialectical) probability than to a metaphysical concern. The function of judgment is entrusted to the proper usage of the doxa [δόξα]. The analysis of tricks thus finds its place here. Economics is 730 OIKONOMIA either jurisprudence or casuistry, because its foundation remains unshakably Christological; in fact, the person of Christ cannot be considered as a particular case treated as an exemplum. It is thus a kind of eschatologically founded pragmatism. This finalized adaptation is based on organic analogies of which the most foundational is again of Pauline origin: the identification of the body of Christ with the body of the church (1 Cor 12:31). Henceforth, the ecclesiastical institution becomes the oikonomos of the accomplishment From the moment that the Incarnation becomes a longterm design that necessarily includes the most radical test of reality, namely, mortality, oikonomia becomes the model of every adaptation of human management to the providential level, the operating concept that relates spiritual requirements to the exercise of temporal power. In other words, it is the concept of the adaptation of means to ends in virtue of which the “occasion” (kairos [ϰαιϱός]; see MOMENT) is judged in terms of utility or efficacy. It is not a matter of 1 Chrematistics and economy The first question is whether the art of getting wealth [chrêmatistikê (χϱηματιστιϰή)] is the same as the art of managing a household [oikonomikê (οἰϰονομιϰή)] or a part of it, or instrumental to it. Now it is easy to see that the art of household management is not identical with the art of getting wealth, for the one uses [porisasthai (ποϱίσασθαι)] the material which the other provides [chrêsasthai (χϱήσασθαι)]. For the art which uses household stores can be no other than the art of household management. (Aristotle, Politics, 1.8.1256a3–13) Of the art of acquisition [eidos ktêtikês (εἶδος ϰτητιϰῆς)] then, there is one kind which by nature [kata phusin (ϰατὰ φύσιν), sc. war and hunting] is a part of the management of a household, insofar as the art of household management must either find ready to hand, or itself provide, such things necessary to life, and useful for the community of the family or state, as can be stored. And so we see that there is a natural art of acquisition which is practiced by managers of households [oikonomois] and by statesmen [politikois (πολιτιϰοῖς)], and what is the reason of this. (1257b27–38) And thus we have found the answer to our original question, whether the art of getting wealth is the business of the manager of a household and of the statesman or not their business?—viz. that wealth is presupposed by them. For as political science does not make men, but takes them from nature and uses them, so too nature provides them with earth or sea or the like as a source of food. At this stage begins the duty of the manager of the household [oikonomos], who has to order the things which nature supplies. (1258a19–25) In book 1 of the Politics, Aristotle distinguishes two economic systems: one that remains closely connected with nature and undertakes to store up, manage, and make profitable the products necessary to life (economy); the other, unlimited, which seeks only the acquisition of wealth (chrematistics) and requires ethical vigilance because of the substitution of money for goods themselves (commerce). These two systems concern both domestic economy and political economy. The Economics, an Aristotelian treatise, adopts this distinction but chooses to accord its specifically political place to the acquisition and growth of power by appropriation and growth of goods. In the Economics, chrematistics is no more than a set of financial techniques and strategies. We should note that in the Politics (1258b), on the chrematistic side of economy, the profitability of investments produces an interest called tokos [τόϰος], which provides Aristotle with an opportunity to condemn usury as an activity opposed to nature (para phusin [παϱὰ φύσιν]). This may seem surprising, since he observes that this productivity is homonymic with the procreation of children (homoia gar ta tiktomena tois gennôsin auta estin [ὅμοια γὰϱ τὰ τιϰτόμενα τοῖς γεννῶσιν αὐτὰ ἐστιν]). Christianity was, on the contrary, to exploit this homonomy positively in an ecclesial economy that takes as its model engenderment and filiation on the basis of the fecund womb of the mother of God, named Theotokos [Θεοτόϰος]. In classical thought, reflection on economy was often inseparable from an agricultural model, and the fundamental concern always remains that of a rational harmony between oikonomia and phusis [φύσις], between economy and nature. The Christian construction of economy breaks with any natural model in order to define a symbolic system of theologico-political power. 2 The crisis of the image: The iconoclastic period (724–843) For almost a century, the Byzantine Empire was shaken by a theologico-political conflict in which what was at stake was the legitimacy of the image and the monopoly that institutions could have over it. The iconoclastic emperor Leo III decreed (724) the destruction of all religious images, which were to be replaced by imperial figurations and the decorations of profane art. The church entered this conflict in which the foundation of its temporal power was involved, and triumphed in 843, with the “solemn restoration.” It was on the occasion of this historical convulsion that Christian theologians and philosophers produced the first doctrine of the image. This remarkable philosophical innovation, in a world that was heir to Judaism and Greek thought, which were not very favorable to visible things (out of fidelity to the rigor of ontological questioning), was carried out in the name of Economy. It was through the renewal of the uses of this term and through the play of its polysemy that the first Western thinking about the image began, the first iconology. OIKONOMIA 731 with the necessity of his needs [kata ton tês chreias anagkaion (ϰατὰ τὸν τῆς χϱείας ἀναγϰαῖον)]. (Basil of Caesarea, Traité du Saint-Esprit) This dispensation raises, for ecclesiastical management, the question of profitability and balanced accounts in the distribution of benefits and in the distribution of rewards and punishments (cf. Kotsonis, Problèmes de l’économie ecclésiastique). The translation given priority in the Vulgate is dispensatio, which covers both phusis and pronoia [πϱόνοια], that is, nature and providence. Thus it is used by Clement (RT: PG, vol. 8, col. 809B), Origen (RT: PG, vol. 11, col. 277A), Gregory of Nyssa (RT: PG, vol. 45, col. 126C) and Maximus the Abbot (RT: PG, vol. 90, col. 801B). The harmony of the world is open to all ways of adapting means to ends in order to obtain consensus (homologia [ὁμολογία]). Thus the term “economy” designates prudence (phronêsis [φϱόνησις]), as in Origen and Athanasius (RT: PG, vol. 25, col. 488B) or Theodore of Studion (RT: PG, vol. 99, col. 1661C); pedagogical strategy and the manipulation of minds, as in Origen (RT: PG, vol. 13, col. 496B); trickery and all stratagems that make possible the adjustment of silence and rhetorical procedures, as in Gregory Nazianzus (RT: PG, vol. 36, col. 473C) or Basil (RT: PG, vol. 32, col. 669A); and finally lies (apatê [ἀπάτη], kalê apatê [ϰαλὴ ἀπάτη]), as in John Chrysostom (RT: PG, vol. 48, col. 630ff.). C. “Economize the truth” Letter 58 from Gregory Nazianzus to Basil of Caesarea perfectly illustrates the question of the pastoral economy in its management of opportunity. Basil, confronting heretics, cleverly dissimulates, for strategic reasons, the rigor of the Trinitarian dogma in order to avoid a conflict that would threaten the unity of the church in the provinces affected by heresy. Not being in a strong position, Basil keeps partially silent. Accused of cowardice by the more rigorous, he receives this letter of support from his friend. It is better to economize the truth [οἰϰονομηθῆναι τὴν ἀλήθειαν] by yielding a little to the circumstances, as one does to a cloud [ὥσπεϱ νέφει τινὶ τῷ ϰαιϱῷ], rather than compromise it by making a public declaration that reveals everything. The audience did not accept this economy. They cried that it was the result of the managers of cowardice [οἰϰονομούντων δειλίαν] and not of discourse. As for you, divine and holy friend, teach us how far we must go in the Theology of the Spirit, what terms we must use, how far we must be economical [μέχϱι τίνος οἰϰονομητέον] to maintain these truths when confronted by our contradictors. (Gregory of Nazianzus, Lettres) The difficulties raised by putting a theological concept in the service of politics mobilized the church fathers and theologians when Christian charity had to be reconciled with the desire for hegemony and conversion. It was entirely possible to make economy the foundation of an active conception of tolerance. But this did not happen, and strategic accommodation won out, to the point of accepting a certain Machiavellianism. and all the means it uses to lead the oikoumenê [οἰϰουμένη], that is, all inhabited lands, to the triumph of Christianity are justified by the divinity of the ends and the harmony of a natural order. The church has thus made a transition from the domestic oikos [οἶϰος] to the cosmological oikos in order to extend to the whole universe the science of management and administration of the divine patrimony, creation. The divine economy is the natural model of all exchange and all consumption. B. Dispositio and dispensatio In light of the tensions in classical thought, we can understand why the church soon found itself facing the following question: how far can the adaptation of means to ends be taken? How far can trickery and the temporary abandonment of evangelical principles lead us to agree that the ends are more important than the requirement of justice and love? Debates on this subject were frequent, whether it was a question of the strategies to be used for conversion, pedagogical tricks, or pious lies. To better delimit the semantic space of oikonomia, we have to start over from its Christological foundation as it derives from Paul’s use of the word. The Oikonomia of God is Christ, the filial incarnation. From this follows a Trinitarian use (Hippolytus, RT: PG, vol. 10, col. 808A, 816B, 821A), which is rendered in Latin sometimes by dispositio, and sometimes by dispensatio, depending whether the emphasis falls on the system as the structure of divinity (Tertullian) or on its dynamics as productive of meaning and history. Tertullian adds to the Latin terms the transliteration of the Greek (in the form of oeconomia) to designate the Trinitarian dimension of the filial mystery (RT: PL, vol. 2, col. 158A). Dispositio makes it possible to shed light on the naturalistic dimension of oikonomia, which covers the whole of creation, and thus simultaneously phusis [φύσις], kosmos [ϰόσμος], and sustasis [σύστασις]—that is, nature, the universe, and the organic system (Clement of Alexandria, RT: PG, vol. 8, col. 1033A–B). The body is included in this providential, ordered structure of the world, and oikonomia thus inherits the Stoic conception of the cosmos. Dispositio is a structural concept, whereas dispensatio is a functional concept. Dispensatio, a dispensation and a development in the visible, covers the historical effects of the divine will and action in the world and the adaptation of its investments to its creature. The concept of accounting for expenditures, profits, and losses finds here its theological foundation. We shall say immediately what the goods are that are dispensed [chorêgia tôn agathôn (χοϱηγία τῶν ἀγαθῶν)] that come to us from the Father through the Son: in order to continue in existence, every nature in creation, whether it belongs to the visible world or the intelligible world, needs divine solicitude [epimeleias (ἐπιμελείας)]. That is why the demiurge Word, the only begotten God, grants his help in proportion to each one’s needs [hekastou chreias (ἑϰάστου χϱείας)]. In addition, he provides resources [epimetrei tas chorêgias (ἐπιμετϱεῖ τὰς χοϱηγίας)], varied and of all kinds, according to the diversity of his debtors, distributing them proportionately to each one [summetrous hekastôi (συμμέτϱους ἑϰάστῳ)] in accord 732 OIKONOMIA To elaborate the iconic specificity of the oikonomia, the church fathers opposed it to theologia [θεολογία], that is, to the Jews’ literal fidelity to the Mosaic Law. Economy is the mark of the new law, the end of biblical prohibitions and of subjection to the letter (Theodore of Studion, RT: PG, vol. 99, col. 353D). There followed moments of crisis within the church when the oikonomia became, to the indignation of the most rigorous minds, the justification for lies, abuses, and crimes committed in the name of legitimate ends. Economy conflicts with akribeia, that is, with the literal respect for the Law. The “holy economy” inevitably began to feed the polemic directed against the Jews. Enemies of the Incarnation and the image, they are at the same time accused of practicing a diabolical management of goods and profits. Their relationship to money bears the signs of their damnation. We can now understand in a different way the difficulty faced by Christian translators who chose to give priority to the disparate with the entirely economical goal of concealing the “ideological” unity of a term that threatened the spiritual purity of practices. Translating the word oikonomia as “economy” every time it occurred might reveal only too clearly the political goals of a temporal power that no longer felt it was faithful to the ethical requirements of the Gospels. This explains the countless footnotes warning the reader against the deviations of what is presented as an accidental homonymy that could give rise to serious misunderstandings. The anxiety is well founded: it is exactly the same thing at issue in the secular and religious senses of oikonomia, namely, of legitimating all the means necessary for the management and administration of the visible world with a view to salvation while respecting the indestructible unity of an institution. Oikonomia is not a homonym, but a unified concept in the service of unification. . Marie-José Mondzain Pontifical management of human affairs yielded historical examples in which the respect for the Gospels no longer inspired the hierarchy’s decisions. The penitential economy then came to the rescue for sinners. The wealth and ambiguity of the term’s polysemy provide an adequate explanation for the prudent silence of the church, which never produced an overall thematic work on this dangerously ambivalent term. That God and his creature meet on the “economic” terrain of a mutual accommodation clearly emerges from the texts without ever being the object of a conceptual mobilization. The sole testimony to a thematic definition occurs in a lost work of Eulogios that we know through Photius’s review of it. Eulogios seems to have taken into account only the semantic field of accommodation and opportunity. . III. The Iconic Economy Starting in the eighth century, in connection with the crisis of images unleashed by the iconoclastic emperors, the defense of the icon was entirely constructed on the economic interpretation of the Incarnation. The management and administration of visible things became the cornerstone of ecclesiastical politics. An enemy of the icon can be called an iconomachos as well as an economachos, because in Greek the two words are pronounced in the same way, ikonomachos. Thus the enemy of the icon is a tormentor of Christ, the enemy of the church and the universal plan of redemption. The iconic oikonomia thus gathers together the entire semantic field of oikonomia in a unifying doctrine that supports all the productions of images. In fact, the icon celebrates the Incarnation and institutes the production of visible things as mimêsis [μίμησις] of all God’s providential operations. The strategic, pedagogical, and political adaptation of means to ends practiced by the institution is part of the divine adaptation to the system of visibility. 3 Eulogius’s distinctions The lost treatise by Eulogius was probably contemporary with the debates about the Monophysite and Nestorian heresy (fifth century), that is, with an era in which the rigorous defense of dogmatic truths endangered the unity of the church. Therefore, it was necessary constantly to seek the best possible “compromises” between spiritual fidelity and political aims. This “compromise” is “economy” and requires a pragmatic adaptation within a vigilance that remained theoretical. This treatise is the only Byzantine work that seems to have attempted a synthesis of “economic” operations. Eulogius draws a triple distinction within the notion of economy as it is recognized by the church, and he shows that it is only by not aligning themselves with none of the three that they [the heretics] have arrived at a formless mixture of impiety through the alliance they have made between the excesses of their heresies. To begin with, Eulogius says that the principle of economy does not recognize just anyone as a judge and arbiter of its realization, but instead chooses them among the servants of Christ, among the dispensers [oikonomous] of the divine mystery and among those who legislate from episcopal sees. In addition, it is a proper principle that exercises the economy when the dogmas of the faith are not subjected to any attack by it. Often a circumstantial economy [proskairos oikonomia (πϱόσϰαιϱος οἰϰονομία)] is established for a limited time by admitting and retaining a few givens that were not supposed to be in order to allow the true faith to recover its durable power and tranquility. The second economy concerns words. Thus when the church’s dogmas are well established and expressed in different terms, we agree in order to say nothing about certain words, especially if they are not serious reasons for scandal for those whose intention is sufficiently upright. A third mode of economy concerns the frequent case in which people do not take into account a decree that has been promulgated, and promulgated precisely against them, without the authority of the true dogmas being thereby lessened. (Photius, Bibliothèque) REFS.: Photius. Bibliothèque, vol. 4, codex 227. Translated by R. Henry. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965. ‘ŌLĀM 733 REFS.: Basil of Caesarea. Traité du Saint-Esprit. Translated by B. Pruche. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1947. Chrysostom, John. Perí hierōsýnēs = De sacerdotio. Edited by J. Arbuthnot Nairn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906. Translation and introduction by Graham Neville: Six Books on the Priesthood. London: SPCK, 1964. Translation, editing, introduction, and notes by Anne-Marie Malingrey: Sur le sacerdoce: Dialogue et homélie. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1980. Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History. Translated by Kirsopp Lake and J.E.L. Oulton. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–59. Gregory of Nazianzus, Lettres. Vol. 1. Translated by P. Gallay. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964. Kotsonis, J. Problèmes de l’économie ecclésiastique. Translated by P. Dumont. Gembloux, Belg.: Duculot, 1971. Mondzain, Marie-José. Image, icône, économie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Translation by Rico Franses: Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Richter, Gerhard. Oikonomia: Der Gebrauch des Wortes Oikonomia im Neuen Testament, bei den Kirchenvätern und in der theologischen Literatur bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Strauss, Leo. Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. Xenophon. Oeconomicus. Translated by E. C. Marchant. In Xenophon in Seven Volumes. Vol. 4. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. Latin mundus. Others accentuate the presence of the subject, his being-in-life. The world is what one comes into at birth, and what one leaves at death. That is the case for English “world,” German Welt, and Dutch vereld, in which the etymology is easier to discern: the length of life (cf. Eng. “old”) of a man (Lat. vir; Ger. werin Werwolf, “wolfman,” “werewolf”). The Hebrew word for “world” is currently ‘ōlām [םָולֹע .[It is present in the Bible, but probably not in this sense, even in a late text like Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 3:11. There is another, temporal sense, that of indefinite duration, usually in fixed expressions such as ‘ōlām [םָולֹע” ,[to have an indeterminate future,” whence “for all time,” or me-‘ōlām [םָולֹעֵ מ” ,[for a time whose beginning is unknown,” “since a moment which is not known,” whence “forever.” The substantive, used in a constructed state as a quasiadjective, designates the most remote antiquity (Dt 32:7, etc.). Indetermination is the principle that is supposed to explain the word’s probable etymology through a root meaning “to hide”: the distant past and future lie outside our knowledge. The meaning “period, era, eon” evolves from the idea of an eschatological change that will distinguish an era still to come (hā-‘ōlām ha-bā’ [הָבַּה םָולֹעָה ([from the present era (hā-‘ōlām ha-zèh [הֶזַה םָולֹעָה .([Since in this future era, “everything” will have to be changed, the word designating the period takes on the meaning of its content: that of “world,” a meaning that it retained in the later history of the language, and that passed, through the intermediary of Aramaic, into the Arabic (‘ālam [عـالم.([ In the first century CE, the formula “come into the world” is found, with the sense, for humans, of “to be born,” or for things, “to appear.” This is the case in the Greek Old Testament (Wis 2:24; 14:14), the New Testament ( Jn 1:9; 13:1; 16:33), and the Talmud, where the expression “those who come into the world [םָולֹע יֵאַב “[ּdesignates all humans 4 Nikephoros: The iconophile synthesis It was probably through the crisis of the image that the operational unity of the concept of oikonomia was constituted. Explicitly bringing together under a single term the Incarnation, political management of goods and persons, and the stakes involved in iconic figuration made oikonomia the key element in a symbolic construct. Economy synthesizes doctrinally the evangelical message and the life of the institution. Patriarch Nikephoros was a vehement and exemplary spokesman for this view in the ninth century: Even before taking up the question of icons, through the view that he [the iconoclast] expresses publicly, he allows his plan to be divined without waiting to turn it in the famous way that we know. Now see the logical consequence that is maintained between his conception and everything that precedes. In fact, he has first discussed the two natures and hypostases, and then, suddenly carried away by arrogance and passion, he jumps abruptly and without order to icons and prototypes. He could offer no better proof that the whole discussion that he has carried on has had, from start to finish, no goal other than to do violence both to the sacred symbols of our faith and to the whole Economy of our Savior Jesus Christ, and he has merely thrown himself still further into revolt against Christ. (Nikephoros the Patriarch, Discours contre les iconoclastes, [Antirrhétiques 1, 224C–225A]) Nikephoros’s Antirrhetici are the most important of the iconophile works, and they were written in the ninth century. In them, the term “economy” is used thirty-nine times to identify very closely the defense of the Incarnation with that of the image. These polemical treatises responded to the iconoclastic interpretation of economy, which claimed that after the Resurrection, respect for the evangelical message was the only legitimate responsibility of the church’s theology and its hierarchy, whereas the temporal economy fell to the secular political power of the emperor. The interpretation of oikonomia thus became a political stake in which the separation of powers was central. The church triumphed by bringing together under a single term the secular issues of the visible, power, and wealth. REFS.: Nikephoros the Patriarch. Discours contre les iconoclastes. Translated by M. J. Mondzain. Paris: Klincksieck, 1991. (HEBREW] (עֹולָם] ŌLĀM‘ ENGLISH world FRENCH monde v. WORLD [WELT], and AIÔN, HUMANITY, LIFE, PRESENT Among the words that designate the world, some emphasize the order of things, like the Greek kosmos [ϰόσμος] and the 734 OMNITUDO REALITATIS (omnitudo realitatis, Allheit der Realität), which corresponds to the principle of complete determinability: “alles Existierende ist durchgängig bestimmt” (everything which exists is completely determined). “In accordance with this principle, each and every thing is therefore related to a common correlate, the sum [Inbegriff] of all possibilities,” that is, “to the totality (universitas) or sum of all possible predicates” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 573/B 601). Thus, to such a complete determination corresponds a concept we can never represent (darstellen) in concreto and whose proper place is pure reason itself. The latter, through its demand in principle for the complete determination of every thing (Ding), a demand that is itself based on the idea of the “sum-total of all possibility” (Inbegriff aller Möglichkeit), forms the concept of an individual object (einzelner Gegenstand) that is completely determined through the mere idea and must therefore be entitled an ideal of pure reason (ibid., A 574/B 602), which is also the idea of an omnitudo realitatis or an ens realissimum: the unique “thing” (Ding), completely determined by itself, which must be represented as an “individual” (ibid.). The possibility of that which thus contains within itself “all reality” (alle Realität) is to be considered “originary” in relation to the derived character of the “possibility of things” (Möglichkeit der Dinge), whose diversity is directly connected with the specific manner in which they “limit” the supreme reality (höchste Realität) that forms, as it were, its “substrate” (ibid., A 576/B 604). This supreme reality may also bear the more traditional names of ens originarium, ens summum, ens entium (originary being, supreme being, being of beings). Naturally, this is only an Idea—Kant even calls it a “fiction” (Erdichtung) (ibid., A 580/B 608)—that cannot be hypostatized in the concept of a Supreme Being. II. “Reality,” “Possibility,” and “Quiddity” in the Work of Christian Wolff In the Kantian vocabulary the formula omnitudo realitatis goes back beyond Wolff and Leibniz to the Scholastic use of the term. In his Philosophia prima sive ontologia (1730), Christian Wolff defined the “thing” and its “reality” in these terms: Quicquid est vel esse posse concipitur, dicitur res, quatenus est aliquid; ut adeo res definiri possit per id, quod est aliquid. Unde et realitas et quidditas apud scholasticos synonyma sunt. (Everything that is or that we can conceive being is called a thing, insofar as it is something; thus the thing could be defined by the fact that it is something. That is why, among the Scholastics, reality and quiddity are synonymous terms.) (Wolff, Philosophia prima, §243) Wolff had already posited, in his 1729 “German Metaphysics” (Deutsche Metaphysik), that “Alles was seyn kann, es mag würklich seyn oder nicht, nennen wir ein Ding” (Everything that can be, whether it is actually real or not, we call “thing”) (§16). In Wolff’s work, the distinction between realitas and existentia—the one that characterizes the tradition that Duns Scotus inaugurated—is also confirmed by this addition to §243: “E.g., arbor et ens dicitur et res. Ens scil. si existentiam respicis; res vero, si quidditatem” (Of a tree we say, for example, that it is an existent and a thing. An existent if we consider (e.g., Rosh Hashanah, 16a; the targum of Kohelet 1:4). It is also the case in pagan authors (Dio Chrysostom, 12.33); On the Sublime, 35.22). Biblical Greek renders this meaning either by kosmos [ϰόσμος] or by aiôn [αἰών]. This word has the twofold advantage of a certain phonetic proximity and a clear semantic relationship, the Greek word having designated, quite early in its evolution, the span of a life, and the Hebrew word being capable of signifying, for its part, “in perpetuity,” in the sense of “for the whole of life” (Dt 15, 17, etc.). Rémi Brague OMNITUDO REALITATIS ENGLISH the whole of reality FRENCH le tout de la réalité, le tout inclusif de la réalité GERMAN der Inbegriff aller Realität, die Allheit aller möglichen Pradikäte v. REALITY, WHOLE, and DASEIN, ESSENCE, GERMAN, GOD, NEGATION, RES, SEIN, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI, VORHANDEN Omnitudo realitatis, the Kantian formula that defines the ideal of pure reason—the idea of a being that includes within itself the whole of reality, without its being necessary to make a decision regarding “the existence of a being of such an eminent superiority”—is no doubt the best proof of the differentiated sense of the term “reality” in Kant’s critical work. Here, Realität is a simple calque of the Latin realitas, in the sense of the real content (Sachheit), of positive and exhaustive determinability (“total possibility”), against the background of which the determination of each existing thing stands out. The formula finds its meaning only in reference to Christian Wolff and Scholastic uses of the tem realitas, the very ones that were to make possible the first thematic opposition of existence understood as Wirklichkeit (actuality) to reality (Realität). This opposition is the core of Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, insofar as the concept of God as ens originarium, ens summum, ens entium, although it is truly—but only within the bounds of reason—the “concept of supreme reality” that contains within itself “the whole of reality” does not for all that imply existence (Dasein). For Kant, Dasein, like being (Sein) or “positing,” is not a “real” predicate, that is, one that can be “understood” in the set of “realities” through which the ens realissimum (see REALITY, and the distinction Realität/Wirklichkeit) are wholly defined. Through this strange locution (omnitudo realitatis) we see in miniature, as it were, the extent to which Kant’s breakthrough still had to struggle with the late Scholastic terminology of German academic metaphysics. The same can be said about many classic philosophical texts in Latin that require a kind of retroversion to Greek. In translating “German classical philosophy” we must not ignore this historical density of the concepts, even though they are elaborated by contraposition to Fremdwörter. I. The Classical Meaning of the Kantian Formula: The Supremely Real Being Kant introduces, in the framework of the Transcendental Dialectic, and as an ideal of pure reason, the idea of a total reality OMNITUDO REALITATIS 735 realitas in the same sense. Realitas is used in the context of the general analysis of “determinations” (notae et praedicata) and combines all the positive conceptual characteristics that can be attributed to a thing through opposition to negative determinations (negationes) (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §§34, 36; Meier, Metaphysik, §46). Negationes are thus directly opposed to realitates (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §135), and the existent as such, or at least the existent that is conceived as ens perfectum, positivum, reale, is defined by the set of realitates that compose it, among which may figure existence or actuality (actualitas), understood as complementum possibilitatis: Cum in omni ente sit realitatum numerus, omne ens habet certum realitatis gradum. (As there are a certain number of realities in every existent, every existent contains a certain degree of reality.) (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §248) Of course, for Baumgarten as for the Wolff of the Theologia naturalis, existence is to be counted among realities, since it contributes to complete determination (complementum) of what is (Philosophia prima, §172–73) : Existentia non repugnat essentiae, sed est realitas cum ea compossibilis. (Existence does not reject essence, but is instead a reality that is compossible with it.) (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §66) Existentia est realitas cum essentia et reliquis realitatibus compossibilis. (Existence is a reality compossible with essence and with all other realities.) (Ibid., §810.) But existence, thus understood as a “reality,” opens another dimension, that of actuality or Wirklichkeit (we have already seen how the latter term imposed itself on Wolff). Thus, Baumgarten can now write: “Omne actuale est interne possibile, seu posita existentia ponitur interna possibilitas” (everything that is actual is intrinsically possible, which means that existence being posited, internal possibility is as well) (ibid., §8), which Hegel was to “translate” very naturally as “Was wirklich ist, ist möglich” (what is actually real is possible) (Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson, 2: 381). Thus realitates considered as positive determinations, which are themselves susceptible of degrees, constitute so many entia realia, and in principle they can all be applied to a concrete thing (the ens reale in the strict sense) in which they are inherent; then we understand that all realities, as perfections raised to the highest degree (plurimae maximae realitates), may coincide in one and the same being which, containing within itself the omnitudo realitatis, will be the ens realissimum: Omnes realitates sunt vere positivae, nec ulla negatio est realitas. Ergo si vel maxime conjugantur in ente omnes, numquam ex iis orietur contradictio. Ergo omnes its existence; a thing, if we consider its quiddity). However, we must note another, broader use of the term realitas to designate, as in the Theologia naturalis (1736–37), everything that can be understood as truly inherent in any existent whatever (“quicquid enti alicui vere inesse intelligitur,” 2: 5). In conformity with this new meaning, existentia (whether necessary or contingent) can then be itself considered a realitas. But if, as an inherent reality (inesse alicui), existence can be attributed as one property among others, it is nonetheless not identified with actuality or effectivity. III. Existence as a Complement of Possibility, Existentia as Actualitas In his “German Metaphysics” of 1719, Wolff discussed existence (understood as a complement or “fulfilling” of possibility) in terms of actuality (Würklichkeit): Es muß also außer der Möglichkeit noch was mehrers dazu kommen, wenn etwas seyn soll, wodurch das Mögliche seine Erfüllung erhält. Und diese Erfüllung des Möglichen ist eben dasjenige, was wir Würklichkeit nennen. (However, something additional must still be added, if something is supposed to be, whereby the possible receives its fulfillment. And this fulfillment of the possible is precisely what we call actual reality. [That is, actuality or existence.]) (Wolff, Deutsche Metaphysik, §14) Used adverbially, the term wirklich (würklich) determines the mode of being present (being-there) or existent (vorhanden): Weil die Welt nicht würklich da ist die Welt ist würklich außer unserer Seele vorhanden. (Because the world is not “really” present the world really exists outside our minds [that is, it is actually present in front of us].) (Wolff, Vernünftige Gedanken, §942–43) This use of the term Wirklichkeit is in fact merely a translation of the Latin actualitas, understood as a determination of existence. Rudolf Goclenius, in his famous Lexicon philosophicum, observed, in the article “Actualitas”: “Actualitas prima, qua res existit, dicitur Esse; Paul. Scal. ita loquitur cum Barbaris, quorum haec est distinctio” (We call being the primary actuality through which a thing exists; that was what Paul Scaliger called it, repeating this barbarous Scholastic distinction). Wolff says more precisely: “Esse ens dicitur, quatenus est possibile: existere autem, quatenus actu datur” (The existent is called being, insofar as it is possible; but we say that it exists insofar as it is given in the act or “actually given”) (Philosophia prima sive ontologia, §874n). In this primary actuality, we can easily recognize the Aristotelian energeia [ἐνέϱγεια] (see PRAXIS), which is distinct from the essence or the formality that defines this or that being. IV. Realitas, Realities, and Negations Alexander G. Baumgarten and Georg Friedrich Meier, who on this point are quite closely dependent on Wolff, use the term 736 OMNITUDO REALITATIS more than the possible], ibid.). What is entirely lacking here is a common measure or additivity. The remaining, irreducible heterogeneity of being and reality governs Kant’s thesis of being as Position (positing). It is certainly permissible to see in this, as Heidegger does, the distant echo of a Scholastic doctrine transmitted by Suárez: “It suffices to consider this word ‘existence’ to see in the sistere [ex-sistere], in placing, the connection with ponere and positing: existentia is the actus quo res sistitur, ponitur extra statum possibilitatis” (“La thèse de Kant sur l’être,” Questions II, 110; Nietzsche, 2: 417ff.; Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being”). But we can also focus our attention, not on this uniformly continuous history (“From Anaximander to Nietzsche”), but on the Kantian rupture with the Scotist tradition. Jean-François Courtine REFS.: Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. 7th ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1963. First published in 1779. Corr, Charles Anthony. “The Deutsche Metaphysik of Christian Wolff: Text and Transitions.” In History of Philosophy in the Making, edited by Linus J. Thro, 113–20. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. §1-244. In Die Wissenschaft der Logik, edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas. Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 20. Hamburg: Meiner, 1992. First published in 1830. Translation by A. V. Miller: The Science of Logic. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976. Heidegger, Martin. “Kants These über das Sein.” In Wegmarken, edited by FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann. In Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 9: 445–80. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by Thomas Sheehan and William McNeill: “Kant’s Thesis about Being.” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 337–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Nietzsche. Edited by Brigitte Schillbach. 2 vols. In Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 6. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996–97. Translation by David Farrell Krell: Nietzsche. 4 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1979–87. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 3–4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Meier, Georg Friedrich. Metaphysik. 4 vols. Preface by Michael Albrecht. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 2007. First published in 1755–59. Wolff, Christian. Deutsche Metaphysik: Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt. Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 10. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1983. Metafisica Tedesca, con le Annotazione alla Metafisica Tedesca. Edited by Raffaele Ciafardone. Milan: Bompiani, 2003. . Philosophia prima sive ontologia. New ed. Edited by Jean École. Gesammelte Werke. Part 2, vol. 3. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1962. First published in 1736. . Theologia naturalis. Edited, with introduction, notes, and index by Jean École. 3 vols. Gesammelte Werke. Part 2, vols. 7–8. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms 1978–81. First published in 1739–41. realitates sunt in ente compossibiles. Ergo enti perfectissimo convenit omnitudo realitatum, earumque, quae ullo in ente esse possunt, maximarum. (All realities are truly positive, and no negation is a reality. Thus if all realities are combined to the highest degree in the existent, no contradiction will ever result. All realities are therefore compossible in the existent. Hence the complete totality of realities—and the maximal ones that may be in a given existent—is appropriate for the most perfect existent.) (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §807) V. The Kantian Thesis: Being as Positing We see clearly all that is at stake in the thesis that makes existence a “reality.” It is the most economical formulation and, as it were, the core of the ontological argument: we can affirm the existence of God as soon as existence has been established as a real predicate, for otherwise, as Baumgarten once again emphasizes: Deus non actualis esset ens omnibus realitatibus gaudens, cui quaedam tamen deesset. (God would not be the actual [or effective] existent enjoying all realities, since he would lack one of them.) (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §807) Here we find once again the ancient ontological argument, set forth this time in Wolffian concepts, the very conceptual system that Kant was to criticize as early as 1763, refusing both to make existence and being-there (Dasein) a real predicate or to count it among the realities that belong to a thing or constitute it, and to make God the concept including all realities. Saying that being (Sein) is not a real predicate (reales Prädikat) or that it adds no “reality” to the concept of a thing leads Kant to define it as “positing”: “Es ist bloß die Position eines Dinges, oder gewisser Bestimmungen an sich selbst” (It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, in themselves) (Critique of Pure Reason, A 598/B 626). Thus the propositions “God is omnipotent” and “God exists” can no longer be analyzed in terms of predication, as if it sufficed to distinguish (as in Meister Eckhart) between propositions of the third and second adjacents. There is no proposition of the second adjacent, or rather, when we say “God exists,” “we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates” (Critique of Pure Reason). Existence or actuality adds nothing (“Das Wirkliche enthält nichts mehr als das Mögliche” [The real contains no 737 balancing accounts; it is on the contrary a matter of agreeing to clear an account even if it is in deficit, even if it is not clear. A fault is remitted (remittere veniam) just as the International Monetary Fund remits a debt or a judge remits a sentence, to “clear the account.” This is shown in the Lord’s Prayer, in which the verse “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” translates the accountant’s Latin: dimitte nobis debita nostra (forgive us our debts), which is itself modeled literally on the Greek: aphes hêmin ta opheilêmata hêmôn [ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν] (lit. “remit, release our debts”; see Matt 6:12–15). There is, however, an alternative way to proceed. We might consider that with forgiveness, the final reckoning is, in the end, simply extended. New, initially extrinsic elements do come into play here: the request for forgiveness (“Forgiveness? Have they ever asked us for forgiveness?” Jankélévitch, L’imprescriptible), repentance (“If [your brother] sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him,” Luke 17:3). All this evidence of good will, in fact, generates a new but no less exact accounting: one that balances the request for and the granting of forgiveness, which we could describe as “Abrahamic” and which functions even in the great public representations of repentance (Ricœur, La mémoire). What significance should then be assigned to completion, to the surplus constitutive of the “par-don”? Can we still say that forgiveness clears an account in deficit? Yes, and in at least two modes of excess. First, because the Gospel’s hyperbole in commanding us to love our enemies or to turn the other cheek produces an offer of “absolute,” or “mad,” forgiveness that always goes beyond the request and may merge with a structure of renewal analogous to that of the potlatch (this would in any case be worth thinking about). Also, as Jacques Derrida stressed, because there is something “unpardonable” and “imprescriptible”: a pardon is really a pardon—the perfection of the gift—only when it pardons the unpardonable, remits the imprescriptible (the Shoah, which we no longer dare introduce with “for example”); only the impossible pardon is truly nonaccountable and in conformity with its concept. II. Forgiveness and Grace: Theological-Political Verticality To account for the inadequation of every model of exchange, even if it is noncommercial, Paul Ricœur chooses to emphasize the “vertical disparity between the profundity of the offense and the loftiness of the forgiveness” (La mémoire). This vertical disparity, which for him constitutes the authentic singularity of forgiveness, has to do with the possibility of “detaching the agent from his act”: “you are better than your acts,” says this “liberating word” (see Matt 18:18, “Whatever you bind [alligaveritis] on earth shall be bound [ligata] in heaven, and whatever you loose [solveritis] on earth shall be PARDON / FORGIVE FRENCH pardon GERMAN vergeben GREEK suggignôskein [συγγιγνώσϰειν] LATIN ignoscere, remittere SPANISH perdonar v. DUTY, FALSE, MEMORY, THEMIS In most European languages, the verb “to pardon,” or “to forgive,” is a compound of “give” with an intensive preverb and is modeled on late Latin perdonare: thus vergeben (Ger.), pardonner (Fr.), perdonar (Sp.). The pardon, as a supplement to giving, is a way of escaping the rigorous calculus of crime and punishment. However, antiquity expresses “pardon” in terms of knowledge: the Greek suggignôskein [συγγιγνώσϰειν] and Latin ignoscere are compounds of verbs meaning “become acquainted with” (gignôskein [γιγνώσϰειν], noscere); yet the two paradigms are antithetical: the Greek understands the pardon as shared knowledge (sun, “with”), whereas in Latin “pardon” belongs to the register of ignorance and the refusal to know (in-, no doubt privative). The moral and political implications of these two attitudes differ considerably. I. Donation and Pardon In most modern languages, both Romance and Germanic, “to pardon” is a transposition of Late Latin perdonare, which is, moreover, attested only once (in Romulus’s Aesop, around the fourth century). The verb is not a direct compound of the Latin dare (give) but derives, through the noun donum, from donare (“to donate,” and in particular, “to absolve,” “to favor”). A pardon, as the intensive preverb indicates, has the structure of a completion or an excess, of a surplus of donation. It makes an exception in the accountability of debt and justice, which apportions punishment to the crime in accord with a strict retribution derived from the lex talionis. By itself, “giving” or “donating” already implies a movement beyond equality and reciprocity: according to the definition in Le nouveau petit Robert, the French word donner means abandonner, to give something to someone “without receiving anything in return.” Similarly, the archaic economy of the potlatch, brought to light by Marcel Mauss, implies a “gift/counter-gift” circulation that goes beyond commercial exchange: “in the things exchanged in the potlatch, there is a virtue that forces the gifts to circulate, to be given and given back” (Essai sur le don). The munificence of the counter-gift constantly begins a new debt that perpetuates the process of “expense,” to adopt Georges Bataille’s expression. This excess constitutive of the gift and its systematics is, however, not of the same order as that involved in the pardon. Instead of initiating an infinite chain, the pardon is instead a cutting off, or “de-cision,” like a decision handed down by a court. But pardoning is not, like punishing, a matter of P loosed [soluta] in heaven,” where solvere, “to unbind,” “to dissolve,” “to absolve,” translates the Greek luein [λύειν]. This strong conception is without any doubt theologicalpolitical. There is the one who pardons, on high, who possesses the sublime ability to originate anew, to re-create, and there is the one who is pardoned, down below, because he has offended and fallen (although the etymology of culpa is unknown, fallere, from which “fault” and “false” are derived, is generally connected with the Greek sphallô [σφάλλω], “to cause to fall,” or with Old High German fallan, “to fall,” and peccare’s first meaning is “to stumble,” “to make an error”). Clearing every account is a gracious remission. Only grace can in fact settle the account in deficit: first of all, the efficacious grace of God, however it is transmitted (although the state of innocence was lost with Adam, “baptismal grace” is substituted for it, and in the case of mortal sin, “penitential grace”); then, modeled on it or legitimated by it, the ruler’s clemency (from the Latin clemens, “gently sloping”), which is never more than the human transposition of God’s grace. This condescension of grace, which is sometimes unbearable, is in any case exercised in the disparity of a dual relationship. III. To Forgive: Not to Know or to Understand? This vertical disparity is in perfect conformity with the conception of the pardon that is expressed in classical Latin. On the other hand, it is not compatible with the Greek pardon. The verb “to pardon” corresponds to the Latin ignoscere— a verb for which venia (indulgence, favor, grace) serves as a substantive (veniam dare, petere, “to grant,” “to request pardon,” whence our “venial” sin). Latin grammarians saw in ignoscere a compound with a privative prefix, derived from noscere, “become acquainted with,” “recognize” (perfect novi-, “know”), as is shown for example by the gloss ignoscere: non noscere (Loewe, Prodromus, quoted by RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine); but there is also a verb ignorare, which means “not to know,” “to be ignorant of.” There is thus a complex interplay among ignorance, denial, and pardon, as is shown for example by this remark of Seneca’s regarding a slap received by Cato: “He did not get angry, he did not take revenge for the insult, he did not even forgive it [ne remisit quidem], but he denied the fact—there was more magnanimity in not recognizing than in pardoning [majore animo non agnovit quam ignovisset, with the play on the two compounds ad-nosco, ‘recognize,’ ‘admit’ and ignosco]” (“On Constancy,” 14.3). In any case, it is clear that the kind of ignorance involved in the Latin pardon is connected with the sovereign decision not to remember, to forget, to “grant amnesty”; the anecdote reported in “On Anger” (2.32.2) concludes with these words of Cato’s: “I do not recall that I have ever been struck” (non memini me percussum). There is magnanimity and high-mindedness in the wise man who haughtily pardons, and this condescendence is entirely founded on a denial of knowledge. The Greek suggignôskein [συγγιγνώσϰειν] takes us into a completely different world: instead of being connected with ignorance or forgetting, forgiveness has to do with shared knowledge. Suggignôsken means literally “become acquainted with” and thus generally “to share knowledge” (knowledge that may be a mistake [Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 8.24.6] or the secret of a conspiracy [Appian, Civil Wars, 2.6]); and, in the middle voice, when one shares knowledge with oneself, “to be conscious of ” (Lysias, Discourses, 9.11); whence: “to be of the same opinion,” “to consent” (when making a transaction or a treaty), “to recognize,” “to confess” (thus Sophocles’s Antigone says: “Once I suffer I will know that I was wrong”; Antigone, v. 1018); and finally, “to have a fellow feeling with another” (RT: LSJ), “pardon”: this is the most common meaning among the Greek tragedians (e.g., Sophocles, Electra, 257; Euripides, Helen, 1105). Moreover, the noun suggnôme [συγγνώμη] always has this sense of “pardon,” “forgiveness,” “indulgence.” It is by understanding together, that is, by entering into the other person’s reasons, by intellectual action and not by compassion, that a Greek pardons or forgives. . The prefix sun- (with) in the Greek suggignôskein invalidates the essential characteristic of the modern pardon, as well as that of Latin ignorance: it cannot imply any vertical disparity. On the contrary, pardon/comprehension takes place in the horizontality of a “with” that belongs, not to the theological-political domain, but to the political alone. The relationship is no longer dual but plural, implying a “we,” or even a city, that the pardon redefines. Furthermore, the offense is not seen as a fall, but rather as a failure, hamartia [ἀμαϱτία], hamartêma [ἁμάϱτημα] (from hamartanein [ἁμαϱτάνειν], “miss the target”; thus both “make a mistake” and “commit an offense”). Aristotle underlines this with regard to this definition of virtue as mean: [I]t is possible to fail [hamartanein] many ways while to succeed [katorthoun (ϰατοϱθοῦν)] is possible only in one way —to miss the mark [apotuchein tou skopou (ἀποτυχεῖν τοῦ σϰοποῦ)] is easy, to hit it [epituchein (ἐπιτυχεῖν)] is difficult. (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.6.1106b28–33). Thus we are faced with two heterogeneous models clearly reflected in the Latin and Greek words: an exemption when confronted by a failure, which uses the superior’s refusal to recognize to clear an account in deficit and start over from zero; and an intellectual sharing that redefines the space of a “we.” Barbara Cassin REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Revised with an introduction and notes by Lesley Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Zone, 1988. . La part maudite: Essai d’économie générale. La consumation. Paris: Minuit, 1967. First published in 1949. Derrida, Jacques. “Le siècle et le pardon” (interview with Michel Wieviorka). In Foi et savoir: Suivi de “Le siècle et le pardon,” 101–33. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Originally published as “Le siècle et le pardon” in Le Monde des Débats 9 (1999): 10–17. Translation by Michael Hughes: “On Forgiveness.” In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. . L’imprescriptible: Pardonner? Dans l’honneur et la dignité. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. 738 PARDON PARONYM 739 . “Should We Pardon Them?” Translated by Ann Hobart. Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 552–72. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. “Pardon.” Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale. Edited by Monique Canto-Sperber, 1069–75. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Mauss, Marcel. Essai sur le don. In Sociologie et anthropologie. 10th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. First published in 1950. Translation by Ben Brewster: Sociology and Psychology: Essays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Ricœur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Translation by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer: Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Seneca. “On Constancy.” In Seneca: Moral Essays, vol. 1. Edited by T. E. Page et al. Translated by John W. Basore. The Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1928. Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by R. Fagles. In Sophocles: Three Theban Plays. New York: Viking, 1982. 1 Aristotle: Suggnômê as understanding and broad-mindedness In the Nicomachean Ethics (6.11), Aristotle counts suggnômê (“judging with,” “compassion,” “remorse,” “sympathy”) among what are called the “intellectual virtues” (dianoêtikas [διανοητιϰάς]), in contrast to the “moral virtues,” which have to do with character, êthikas [ἠθιϰάς] (on this distinction, see ibid., 1.13). It is connected with sunesis [σύνεσις], “junction” (from the verb suniêmi [συνίημι], “bring or send together,” “approach,” “understand,” with the same preverb sun- as in suggnômê), which is translated by “intelligence”; and it is defined in relation to gnômê [γνώμη], the faculty of knowing (this is obviously gnômê as in suggnômê), which is rendered by “judgment,” “resolution,” and covers “good sense” and “common sense” (the common sense expressed in proverbs, gnômai [γνώμαι]) as well as “intention” and “verdict.” Gnômê and suggnômê both refer not to the just man (to dikaion [τὸ δίϰαιον], who distributes in accord with equality or corrects and equalizes proportionally), but rather to equity (hê epieikeia [ἡ ἐπιείϰεια]), which, being at the heart of justice, corrects the just man according to the law by taking into account singularities and cases (ibid., 5.14). One quotation will suffice to explain how “pardon” is anchored in comprehension, discernment, and broad-mindedness and why it proves difficult to translate into French as well as English. What is called judgment [sens in J. Voilquin’s French translation; bon sens in Gauthier–Jolif’s], in virtue of which men are said to “be sympathetic judges” [some manuscripts read eugnômonas (εὐγνώμονας); qu’ils ont un bon jugement, in J. Tricot’s French translation] and to “have judgment, [echein gnômên (ἔχειν γνώμην)],” is the right discrimination of the equitable [hê tou epieikous krisis orthê (ἡ τοῦ ἐπιειϰοῦς ϰϱίσις ὀϱθή)]. This is shown by the fact that we say that the equitable man is above all others a man of sympathetic judgment [suggnômonikon (συγγνωμονιϰόν), “understanding”; favorablement disposé pour autri in J. Tricot’s French translation; l’homme qui, entrant dans le sense des autres, est porté à leur pardonner in J. Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire’s translation], and identify equity with sympathetic judgment about certain facts [to echein suggnômên (τὸ ἔχειν συγγνώμην); de montrer de la largeur d’esprit in J. Tricot’s translation]. And sympathetic judgment is judgment which discriminates what is equitable [ἡ δὲ συγγνώμη γνώμη ἑστὶ ϰϱιτιϰὴ τοῦ ἐπιειϰοῦς ὀϱθή] and does so correctly; and correct judgment is that which judges what is true. (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ross, 6.11) REFS.: Aristotle. Éthique à Nicomaque. Translated by J. Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire. Revised by A. Gomez-Muller. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992. Translated by R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif. 2nd ed. Louvain, Belg.: Publications Universitaires, 1970. Translated by Jean Tricot. 7th ed. Paris: Vrin, 1990. Translated by J. Voilquin [1940]. Paris: Flammarion, 1965. . The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Revised with an introduction and notes by Lesley Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. PARONYM, DERIVATIVELY NAMED, COGNATE WORD FRENCH paronyme GERMAN Paronym, nachbenannt GREEK parônumos [παϱώνυμος] ITALIAN denominativo LATIN denominativum v. ANALOGY, CONNOTATION, ESSENCE, HOMONYM, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SENSE, SUPPOSITION, WORD “Paronym” is the usual translation of the Greek parônuma [παϱώνυμα], used by Aristotle in the first chapter of the Categories (1a12–15): “Things are said to be named ‘derivatively’ which derive their name from some other name, but differ from it in termination (ptôsis [πτῶσις]). Thus the grammarian derives his name from the word ‘grammar,’ and the courageous man from the word ‘courage’” (trans. E. M. Edghill in Basic Works of Aristotle). The differing translations of the substantive or adjective term in various European languages bear witness to a difficulty that is not merely linguistic. The problem raised by parônumos [παϱώνυμος] for the translator/ interpreter has to do with the fact that while the term does not initially play a metaphysical role in Aristotelian discourse, it acquires a preponderant role in the tradition of interpreting Aristotle, which makes it a kind of hidden source of the history of metaphysics. I. The Status of Paronyms, between Words, Things, and Concepts Boethius translated Categories 1a12–15 this way: Denominativa vero dicuntur quaecumque ab aliquo, solo differentia casu, secundum nomen habent appellationem, ut a grammatica grammaticus et a fortitudine forti. (Finally, we call denominatives all those which, differing from another thing solely by the “case,” receive their appellation in accord with [its] name: thus from grammar grammarian, and from courage, courageous.) (Aristoteles Latinus, 5, 15–17) Denominativa seems to mark a clear difference from sumpta (derived names)—and rightly, because for Aristotle, parônuma [παϱώνυμα] are, like homonyms and synonyms, things, and not terms. The difficulty arises from this parallelism: in modern, 740 PARONYM primarily the accident and secondarily the subject. In fact, it is of the essence of the accident to exist in a subject.” Averroës’s thesis was adopted by most thirteenth-century philosophers: the common opinion was that “white” signifies whiteness in recto and the subject in obliquo (cf., e.g., Dietrich of Freiburg, De accidentibus, chap. 13, p. 72). Avicenna’s doctrine, conveyed through the theory of connotation, established itself thanks to Ockham, with a few lexical differences. Thus Marsilius of Inghen, a follower of Buridan, uses the term “material signified” to refer to the subject (for which alone the term substitutes) and “formal signified” to refer to what the term “connotes” or “signifies connotatively,” whereas Buridan himself used the term appellatio in preference to connotatio. In the seventeenth century, Averroës’s theory became dominant, combined this time with a distinction between “distinct” signification and “vague” signification. Its paradigm is the discussion of “connotation” in the Port-Royal Grammar, which adopts, in this context, the medieval distinction between “direct” (in recto) signification and “oblique” (in obliquo) signification: I have said that adjectives have two significations: one distinct, which is that of the form; and the other vague, which is that of the subject. But it must not be concluded therefrom that they signify more directly the form than the subject, as if the most distinct signification were also the most direct. For on the contrary it is certain that they signify the subject directly, and as grammarians say, in recto, though more vaguely, and they signify the form only indirectly, and grammarians again say, in non-Aristotelian usage, synonymy and homonymy concern linguistic units. Ultimately, this displacement, which began in the Middle Ages, cannot fail to spill over onto the perception of the status of paronymy, its function, and the stakes that it involves within the Aristotelian horizon. Another difficulty has to do with the fact that in classical Latin, appellatio, appellare, and appellatum refer to both “the named” (a man named “Peter”) and to the “calling” or naming (“who is called Peter”), that is to say, to two different facts: the fact of naming (calling someone “Peter”) and the fact of bearing the name “Peter.” Hence the dimension of the derivation of the name (the de-nominative) raised in the determination of the Aristotelian paronym—a thing that takes its name from another thing through a kind of double derivation (real, where the courageous is a declination of courage, and verbal, where the word “courageous” is an inflection, bending, shifting, of “courage”)—is either illegible or redundant in Boethius’s translation (and its French revision by Jules Tricot). . Paronyms being adjectives, and, in logic, concrete accidental terms, the question of the meaning of paronymic terms was the object of lively controversies from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Two main positions opposed each other: that of Avicenna and that of Averroës. Avicenna’s thesis (Logica I, 1508, folio 9va) was summarized and rejected by Averroës in his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics (text 5, comm. 14): “He [Avicenna] says that ‘white’ in ‘Socrates is white’ signifies primarily the subject and secondarily the accident, but quite the contrary is the case: ‘white’ signifies 1 Modern translations Modern translations of Aristotle’s Categories generally adopt the Boethian interpretation. A few English versions use “derivatively named” (H. P. Cooke, trans., Aristotle, The Categories, On Interpretation; E. M. Edghill, trans., The Works of Aristotle, I: Categoriae and De interpretatione). In French, the same goes for R. Bodéüs (Catégories [2001], 3): “In addition, we call ‘derived’ [dérivées] all things that are distinguished from each other by inflection and have the appellation corresponding to their name. Thus from the knowledge of letters derives the literate and from courage the courageous”; others (including K. Oehler, German trans.; J. L. Ackrill, English trans.; and D. Pesce, Italian trans.) prefer, like J. Tricot, to stick to the “Greek” term, as does E. Rolfes, who uses the formula “Paronym (nachbenannt)” (in Aristoteles, Kategorien). However, they all clearly imply that what is “denominated” (nach-benannt) after another thing is indeed a thing, and not a word. Owens justifies the calque of the Greek (The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 330). For him, the distinction made in English between “denominative” and “derivative” is not pertinent, because both apply to words. The best translation of parônuma is thus “paronyms,” according to Owens: “Derivative in this application would refer only to the word, not the thing. Denominative likewise applies only to the words. There is in English no term for this notion.” Modern translations do not interpret the calque of Latin denominativa in the same way. For us, this means that the philosophical ambiguity of the Aristotelian notion of “paronymy,” which is connected with its position intermediary between “homonymy” and “synonymy” (which was to produce its effects at the beginning of the invention of the analogy of being; see ANALOGY), is doubled, indeed covered over, by the ambiguity of the French dénominatif or English “denominative,” which are torn, but in a different way than the Aristotelian paronym, between words and things. REFS.: Aristotle. Aristoteles, Kategorien. Neu übersetzt und mit einer Einleitung und erklärenden Anmerkungen versehen. German translation by E. Rolfes. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920. . Aristotle, The Categories, On Interpretation. 2nd ed. Translated by H. P. Cooke. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1938. . Catégories. French translation by R. Bodéüs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. . Categories, and De interpretatione. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 1963. . Catégories; De l’interprétion. French translation by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1966. . Kategorien. German translation by K. Oehler. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984. . Le Categorie. Italian translation by D. Pesce. Padua: Liviana Ed., 1966. . The Works of Aristotle, I: Categoriae and De interpretatione. Translated by E. M. Edghill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928. Reprinted in 1963. Owens, Joseph. “Aristotle on Categories.” The Review of Metaphysics 14 (1960/61): 73–90. . The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1951. PARONYM 741 is not ens—an existent—but entis, something of an existent), representing the accident (according to Aristotle) as an “inflection of substance.” . II. Paronymy between Analogy and Emanation This interpretation of the accident as an “inflection” must also be kept in mind when stressing the central role played by “paronymy” in the late antique interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. “Paronymy” is involved in the genesis of the theory called “the analogy of being” (analogia entis). The phenomenon can be described as the establishment of the homonyms aph’ henos (ἀφ’ ἑνός] (coming from something unitary, “unity of provenance” [Lat. ab uno]) and the homonyms pros hen [πϱὸς ἕν] (in view of something of one, “focal unit” [ad unum]), or more simply pros hen legomena [πϱὸς ἕν λεγόμενα], placed by Greek commentators on Aristotle in a median position between homonyms and pure synonyms, in the very place concurrently occupied, but for other reasons, by Aristotle’s parônuma. . The appearance of what is called the “theory of analogy” assumes that at a given moment, the “intermediaries” aph’ henos and pros hen (or some of their properties) were collected under the rubric “homonyms by analogy,” and that this occurred either by displacing paronyms or by absorbing them or certain of their properties. Whoever its author, this act—which by its very violence caused to merge or be superimposed in a single place phenomena as different as the focal meaning, paronymy in the strict sense, and the ontological derivation—has had two distinct posterities. The most famous and most studied is the theory of the analogy as being characteristic of the Arabo-Latin age (which began with Avicenna’s and Averroës’s translations of the so-called Arabic Aristotle). Within this horizon, denominatio is gradually marginalized by the notion of analogia or absorbed by it in increasingly complex formulations. But despite all this, we must not purely and simply identify “analogy” and “paronymy,” as some contemporary interpreters have done (cf. Hirschberger, “Paronymie und Analogie bei Aristoteles”). In the Greco-Latin age of metaphysics, when the problem of the unification of the multiple meanings of being does not play a leading role, the notion of denominatio (= “paronymy”) intervenes in an entirely different context. Boethius uses it to resolve a specific problem formulated in the De hebdomadibus: “Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona”—that is, to determine “how, assuming that they are good (since they tend toward the good and are thus like it in some way), things that exist—substances—are good in their very being without however being substantially good.” This question is in no way Aristotelian. In fact, in both his problem and his solution, Boethius inaugurates, through “paronymy,” a radical displacement of Aristotelian ontology: he introduces, through his mediation, the Christian-Platonic idea of a stream, a flow (fluxus, defluere) of existing things, “secondary goods” proceeding from the will of the first Good. Boethius’s thesis was that existing things are good neither in their essence nor through participation, but by olbliquo, though more distinctly. Thus white, candidus, signifies directly something having whiteness; habens candorem; but in a very vague way, not indicating in particular any of the things that can have whiteness; and it signifies whiteness only indirectly; but in a way just as distinct as the word whiteness, candor, itself. (Grammaire de Port-Royal, 3rd ed., II.2 / A. Arnauld, Grammaire générale et raisonnée) The metaphysical issue is first of all the relationship between Plato and Aristotle. Expressing in language (that of “de-nomination”) and in a quasi-Platonic way the relation of a concrete thing to a form that is, so to speak, declined in it, Aristotelian paronymy is also the hollow place marked out within a mechanism—the distinction of homonyms, synonyms, and paronyms—linking words and things, crossing their respective properties. Neither words, nor things, nor concepts, but in a sense all three at once, the entities (parônuma) that, in the Aristotelian tradition, are involved in the definition of paronyms—this grammarian and this grammar, connected by a desinence that does not really pertain to things, but that is not simply an aspect of words—thus appear as the sign of an originary indecision in the Aristotelian system of categories, between a Platonism that is residual but confined to language, and an inchoate Aristotelianism that has not yet found its level of action. The interpretation of the term parônumos requires elucidating the status of the ptôsis [πτῶσις] (case, desinence, inflection) both in Aristotle, and in his commentators taking into account the complex role ptôsis was to play, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, in the constitution of a so-called Aristotelian metaphysics that gradually came to center on the notion of an “analogy of being.” “Paronymy,” the structure to which the term parônumos refers in the Categories, is described this way by C. H. Kahn (The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek): “Paronymy is a four-term relation between two things, A and B, and two corresponding words, ‘A’ and ‘B’ (the ‘names’ of these things), such that ‘A’ differs from ‘B’ by a minor morphological deviation.” We see that a single term can thus cover simultaneously two relations, A/B and ‘A’/‘B,’ as well as their own relation to each other, A/B ≡ ‘A’/‘B.’ The reader of Aristotle’s ancient and medieval interpreters cannot fail to wonder what, in the texts he has before his eyes, founds A/B ≡ ‘A’/‘B,’ and if it is founded, whether this “foundation” is truly “Aristotelian.” From this point of view we must keep in mind that for Aristotle, not every term morphologically derived from another term refers to a “paronymy”: “human” or “the human” is not a paronym of “man” or of “humanity.” As is clearly shown by Categories 8, 10a27–b11, “paronymy” does not concern just any concrete term relative to the corresponding abstract or just any adjective relative to a substantive: paronymy has to do only (1) with concrete accidental terms considered from the point of view of the property that they signify and of the substance that possesses them; and, by that very fact, (2) with the relationship of ontological dependency connecting an accident with a substance. From this point of view, “paronymy” thus cannot be understood independently of the diverse medieval interpretations of Metaphysics ᴢ 1, 1028a10–20 (the accident 742 PARONYM 2 Ptôsis The noun ptôsis is not attested in Greek before Plato. A noun of action based on the radical of piptô [πίπτω], “to fall,” ptôsis means literally “a fall”: the fall of a die (Plato, Republic, X.604c), or of lightning (Aristotle, Meteorology, 339a3). Alongside this basic value (and derived metaphorical values: “decadence,” “death,” and so forth), in Aristotle the word receives a linguistic specification that was to have great influence: retained even in modern Greek [ptôsê (πτώση)], its Latin translation by casus allowed it to designate grammatical “case” in most modern European languages. In fact, however, when it first appears in Aristotle, the term does not initially designate the noun’s case inflection. In the Peri hermeneias (chaps. 2 and 3), it qualifies the modifications, both semantic and formal (casual variation) of the verb and those of the noun: “[he] was well,” “[he] will be well,” in relation to “[he] is well”; “about Philo,” “to Philo,” in relation to “Philo.” As a modification of the noun—that is, in Aristotle, of its basic form, the nominative—the case (ptôsis) differs from the noun insofar as, associated with “is,” “was,” or “will be,” it does not permit the formation of a true or false statement. As a modification of the verb, describing the grammatical tense, it is distinguished from the verb that oversignifies the present: the case of the verb oversignifies the time that surrounds the present. From this we must conclude that to the meaning of a given verb (e.g., “walk”) the case of the verb adds the meaning [prossêmainei (πϱοσσημαίνει)] of its temporal modality (“he will walk”). Thus the primacy of the present over the past and the future is affirmed, since the present of the verb has no case. But the Aristotelian “case” is a still broader, vaguer, and more elastic notion: presented as part of expression in chapter 20 of the Poetics, it qualifies variation in number and modality. It further qualifies the modifications of the noun, depending on the gender (chap. 21 of the Poetics; Topics) as well as adverbs derived from a substantive or an adjective, like “justly,” which is derived from “just.” The notion of case is thus essential for the characterization of paronyms. Aristotle did not yet have specialized names for the different cases of nominal inflection. When he needs to designate them, he does so in a conventional manner, usually by resorting to the inflected form of a pronoun—toutou [τούτου], “of this,” for the genitive, toutôi [τούτῳ], “to this,” for the dative, and so on—and sometimes to that of a substantive or adjective. In the Prior Analytics, Aristotle insists on distinguishing between the terms (horoi [ὅϱοι]) that “ought always to be stated in the nominative [klêseis (ϰλῆσεις)], e.g. man, good, contraries, but the premisses ought to be understood with reference to the cases of each term—either the dative, e.g. ‘equal to this’ [toutôi, dative], or the genitive, e.g. ‘double of this’ [toutou, genitive], or the accusative, e.g. ‘that which strikes or sees this’ [touto (τούτο), accusative], or the nominative, e.g. ‘man is an animal’ [houtos (οὗτος), nominative], or in whatever other way the word falls [piptei (πίπτει)] in the premiss” (trans. A. J. Jenkinson, Analytica posteriora, I.36, 48b, 41). In the latter expression, we may find the origin of the metaphor of the “fall”—which remains controversial. Some commentators relate the distinction between what is “direct” and what is “oblique” [as pertains to grammatical cases, which may be direct (orthê ptôsis) or oblique (plagiai ptôseis), but also to the grand metaphoric and conceptual register that stands on this distinction] to falling in the game of jacks, it being possible that the jack could fall either on a stable side and stand there—the “direct” case—or on three unstable sides— the oblique cases. In an unpublished dissertation on the principles of Stoic grammar, Hans Erich Müller proposes to relate the Stoic theory of cases to the theory of causality, by trying to associate the different cases with the different types of causality. They would thus correspond in the utterance to the different causal postures of the body in the physical field. For the Stoics, predication is a matter not of identifying an essence (ousia [οὖσια]) and its attributes in conformity with the Aristotelian categories, but of reproducing in the utterance the causal relations of action and passion that bodies entertain among themselves. It was in fact with the Stoics that cases were reduced to noun cases—in Dionysius Thrax (TG, 13), the verb is a “word without cases” (lexis aptôton), and although egklisis means “mode,” it sometimes means “inflection,” and then it covers the variations of the verb, both temporal and modal. If Diogenes Laertius (VII.192) is to be believed, Chrysippus wrote a work On the Five Cases. It must have included, as Diogenes (VII.65) tells us, a distinction between the direct case (orthê ptôsis)—the case which, constructed with a predicate, gives rise to a proposition (axiôma, VII.64)—and oblique cases (plagiai ptseis), which now are given names, in this order: genitive (genikê), dative (dôtikê), and accusative (aitiatikê). A classification of predicates is reported by Porphyry, cited in Ammonius (Commentaire du “De Interpretatione” d’Aristote, 44, 19f.). Ammonius (ibid., 42, 30f.) reports a polemic between Aristotle and the Peripatetics, on the one hand, and the Stoics and grammarians associated with them, on the other. For the former, the nominative is not a case, it is the noun itself from which the cases are declined; for the latter, the nominative is a full-fledged case: it is the direct case, and if it is a case, that is because it “falls” from the concept, and if it is direct, that is because it falls directly, just as the stylus can, after falling, remain stable and straight. Although ptôsis is part of the definition of the predicate—the predicate is what allows, when associated with a direct case, the composition of a proposition—and figures in the part of dialectic devoted to signifieds, it is neither defined nor determined as a constituent of the utterance alongside the predicate. In Stoicism, ptôsis seems to signify more than grammatical case alone. Secondary in relation to the predicate that it completes, it is a philosophical concept that refers to the manner in which the Stoics seem to have criticized the Aristotelian notion of substrate [hupokeimenon (ὑποϰειμένον)] as well as the distinction between substance and accidents. Ptôsis is the way in which the body or bodies that our representation [phantasia (φαντασία)] presents to us in a determined manner appear in the utterance, issuing not directly from perception, but indirectly, through the mediation of the concept that makes it possible to name it/them in the form of an appellative (a generic concept, man, horse) or a name (a singular concept, Socrates). Cases thus represent the diverse ways in which the concept of the body “falls” in the utterance (though Stoic nominalism does not admit the existence of this concept—just as here there is no Aristotelian category outside the different enumerated categorial rubrics, there is no body outside a case position). However, caring little for these subtleties, the scholiasts of Technê seem to confirm this idea in their own context when they describe the ptôsis as the fall of the incorporeal and the generic into the specific [ek tou genikou eis to eidikon (ἔϰ τοῦ γενιϰοῦ εἰς τὸ εἰδιϰόν)]. In the work of the grammarians, case is reduced to the grammatical case, that is, to the morphological variation of nouns, pronouns, articles, and participles, which, among the parts of speech, accordingly constitute the subclass of casuels, a “parts of speech subject to case-based inflection” [ptôtika (πτωτιϰά)]. The canonical list of cases places the vocative [klêtikê (ϰλητιϰή)] last, after the direct [eutheia (εὐθεῖα)] case and the three oblique cases, in their “Stoic” order: genitive, dative, accusative. This order of the oblique cases gives rise, in some commentators eager to rationalize (Scholia to the Technê, 549, 22), to a speculation inspired by “localism”: the case of the PARONYM 743 place from which one comes (in Greek, the genitive) is supposed “naturally” to precede that of the place where one is (the dative), which itself “naturally” precedes that of the place where one is going (the accusative). Apollonius’s reflection on syntax is more insightful; in his Syntax (III.158–88) he presents, in this order, the accusative, the genitive, and the dative as expressing three degrees of verbal transitivity: conceived as the distribution of activity and passivity between the prime actant (A in the direct case) and the second actant (B in one of the three oblique cases) in the process expressed by a biactantial verb, the transitivity of the accusative corresponds to the division “A all active—B all passive” (A strikes B); the transitivity of the genitive corresponds to the division “A primarily active/passive to a small degree—B primarily passive/active to a small degree” (A listens to B); and the transitivity of the dative, to the division “A and B equally active-passive” (A fights with B). The direct case, at the head of the list, owes its prmacy to the fact that it is the case of nomination: names are given in the direct case. The verbs of existence and nomination are constructed solely with the direct case, without the function of the attribute being thematized as such. Although Chrysippus wrote about five cases, the fifth case, the vocative, seems to have escaped the division into direct and oblique cases. Literally appelative [prosêgorikon (πϱοσηγοϱιϰόν)], it could refer not only to utterances of address but also more generally to utterances of nomination. In the grammarians, the vocative occupies a marginal place; whereas every sentence necessarily includes a noun and a verb, the vocative constitutes a complete sentence by itself. Frédérique Ildefonse REFS.: Aristotle. Analytica priora. Translated by A. J. Jenkinson. In the Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, edited and translated by W. D. Ross, E. M. Edghill, A. J. Jenkinson, G.R.G. Mure, and A. Wallace Pickford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928. . Poetics. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1995. Delamarre, Alexandre. “La notion de ptōsis chez Aristote et les Stoïciens.” In Concepts et Catégories dans la pensée antique, edited by Pierre Aubenque, 321–45. Paris: Vrin, 1980. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Dionysius Thrax. Technē grammatikē. Book I, vol. 1 of Grammatici Graeci, edited by Gustav Uhlig. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883. English translation by Thomas Davidson: The Grammar. St. Louis, 1874. French translation by Jean Lallot: La grammaire de Denys le Thrace. 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998. Frede, Michael. “The Origins of Traditional Grammar.” In Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by E. H. Butts and J. Hintikka, 51–79. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reiderl, 1977. Reprinted, in M. Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy, 338–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. . “The Stoic Notion of a Grammatical Case.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 39 (1994): 13–24. Hadot, Pierre. “La notion de ‘cas’ dans la logique stoïcienne.” Pp. 109–12 in Actes du XIIIe Congrès des sociétés de philosophie en langue française. Geneva: Baconnière, 1966. Hiersche, Rolf. “Entstehung und Entwicklung des Terminus πτῶσις, ‘Fall.’” Sitzungsberichte der deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst 3 (1955): 5–19. Ildefonse, Frédérique. La naissance de la grammaire dans l’Antiquité grecque. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Imbert, Claude. Phénoménologies et langues formularies. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Pinborg, Jan. “Classical Antiquity: Greece.” In Current Trends in Linguistics, edited by Th. A. Sebeok. Vol. 13 in Historiography of Linguistics series. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1962. 3 The commentators’ arbitrage The transfer of “intermediary” homonyms to the problem of the unification of the multiplicity of the meanings of being, probably begun as early as Alexander of Aphrodisias, was well documented by sixth-century commentators writing in Greek (against Porphyry who, in the Isagoge, declared in favor of a strict homonymy of being). Among these commentators, we may mention especially Elias, who explicitly rejects Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s thesis regarding being (strict homonymy), and clearly declares in favor of the unity of origin and the unity of end: [T]he existent is divided neither into a homonymous vocal sound (as Aristotle says in the Categories and Porphyry says in the Isagoge), nor as a genus into species (as Plato says), but according to the origin and the end. [διαιϱεῖται τοίνυν τὸ ὂν οὐχ ὡς ὁμώνυμος φωνή (ὥσπεϱ ἐν Kατηγοϱίαις ’ Aϱιστοτέλης ϰαὶ νῦν ὁ Ποϱφύϱιος εἴϱηϰεν), οὐδὲ ὡς γένος εἰς εἴδη (ὥσπεϱ ὁ Πλάτων εἶπεν), ἀλλ’ ὡς τὰ ἀφ’ ἑνὸς ϰαὶ πϱὸς ἕν]. (Élias, In Porphyrii Isagogen, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 18.1:70, 18–21) REFS.: Élias. In Porphirii Isagogen. In vol. 18, book 1, of Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca. Edited by A. Busse. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1900. their very origin, because their being has been willed by the Creator and “emanates” or “flows” from his will; it was left for the theologians of the Greco-Latin age to give his thesis a definitive form by drawing more explicitly on the Neoplatonic harmonics of the structure of denominatio. This act was clearly accomplished by Boethius’s commentator Gilbert of Poitiers, when he reformulated the thesis of De hebdomadibus by positing that since they emanate from the will of the primum Bonum, secondary goods can be called good (bona) “according to a denomination” (denominative). The formula is anything but banal. In fact, “to be said denominatively” does not signify here the derivation of the name from a thing qualified on the basis of the corresponding quality—as “white is derived from whiteness, 744 PARONYM that it signifies per aliud and signifies per se an accident that it does not name. Anselm’s theory was developed by the grammarians and logicians of the twelfth century, who substituted for Anselm’s pair per se–per aliud the pair principaliter–secundario (principally–secondarily) (cf. Promisimus, ed. L. M. de Rijk, 2:258; Abelard, Dialectica, ed. L. M. de Rijk, 113 and 596). These authors say that the denominative “signifies principally” the quality or form from which it is derived (sumptum) and only secondarily the subject that it “names” (nominat). This formulation’s goal is to resolve the traditional question arising from the patent disagreement of the two main authorities of the high Middle Ages in matters of semantics: Priscian, for whom every noun “signifies a substance and a quality,” and Aristotle, for whom “a noun like whiteness signifies only the quality.” The Ockhamist theory of the synonymy of abstract and concrete nouns (Summa logicae, I.6) is part of the same horizon. Going back to Avicenna’s distinction between univocal predication and denominative predication, Ockham posits that the synonymy of the concrete and the abstract is valid principally in the category of substance, because in the case of substances there is no real distinction between the subject itself and what makes it what it is (the sole difference residing “in the manner in which nouns signify” [in modo significandi]). On the other hand, this synonym is not valid in the case of denominatives like “white” and “whiteness,” because these terms cannot have the same suppositio, the former necessarily “supposing for” (substituting for, taking the place of) the subject of the accident, and the latter for the accident itself (Summa logicae, I.5). Alain de Libera BIBLIOGRAPY Abelard, Peter. Dialectica: First Complete Edition of the Parisian Manuscript. 2nd rev. ed. Edited and with an introduction by L. M. de Rijk. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1970. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. De grammatico. In vol. 1 of Opera omnia, edited by Franciscus Schmitt. 6 vols. Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag–Bad Cannstatt, 1968–84. . The Major Works. Edited and with an introduction by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. . Promisimus. In The Origin and Early Development of Early Terminist Logic, vol. 2 of Logica modernorum, edited by Lambertus Marie de Rijk. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1967. Aristotle. Basic Works of Aristotle. Translated by E. M. Edghill. Edited by R. Mckeon. New York: Random House, 1941. . The Categories; On Interpretation; Prior Analytics. Translated by Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1973. Arnauld, Antoine. Grammaire générale et raisonnée [Texte imprimé], contenant les fondemens de l’art de parler expliquez d’une manière claire et naturelleet plusieurs remarques nouvelles sur la langue françoise. Paris: P. Le Petit, 1660. Ashworth, E. J. “Language and Logic.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, edited by A. S. McGrade, 73–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Aubenque, Pierre. “Les origines de la doctrine de l’analogie de l’être: Sur l’histoire d’un contresens.” Les Études philosophiques 33, no. 1 (1978): 3–12. Translation by Zeki H. Bilgin: “The Origins of the Doctrine of the Analogy of Being: On the History of a Misunderstanding.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 (1986): 35–45. . “Sur la naissance de la doctrine pseudo-Aristotélicienne de l’analogie de l’être.” Les Études philosophiques 3/4 (1989): 291–304. grammarian from grammar, or just from justice”—any more than the simple formation of a (concrete) noun on the basis of another (abstract) noun. This Boethian real predication expresses a causal relationship close to what Plato called “eponymy.” The first medieval attempt to carry out a metaphysical reorganization of the system formed by Categories 1, 2, 5, and 8, the Porretan theory of denominatio, provided the overall physiognomy of the first age of medieval metaphysics before the arrival of the metaphysics of analogy based on the corpus of writings on nature by Aristotle and his Arab interpreters. According to Gilbert of Poitiers, “denomination” concerns a precise aspect of reality: the dimension of being-caused. That is why most of the examples used to illustrate it are technical. The being concerned is an opus, the result of an action, a factum. Although, as we have pointed out, Aristotelian paronymy did not apply to terms such as “human” or “the human” relative to “man” and “humanity” (but rather to concrete accidental terms like “white”) the Porretan notion of denominatio is, in contrast, illustrated in an exemplary way by the term humanum. For Gilbert and the Porretan logicians the term humanum can indeed be attributed formally to a living being, as in animal humanum, but it is attributed denominatively to a fabricated product, as in opus humanum, because—and here we come back to the notion of denominatio understood as causal emanation—it emanates or has emanated (fluxit) from an agent whose being is human. As we see, what is said to be “according to a denomination” is here opposed above all to what is attributed “formally.” The same distinction is found in all the medieval texts that, in the ArabLatin age of metaphysics, oppose, as does Avicenna (Logica, Venice, 1508, fol. 3 vb), univocal predication and denominative predication (see PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION). III. Paronymy and Suppositio Paronymy, as an instrument for two distinct metaphysical theories, the Boethian theory of “emanation” and the ArabLatin theory of “analogy,” is also crucially involved in the origin of the logical theory of signification and reference, as one of the places where the theory of suppositio developed. The opposition between the noun “man” and the noun “grammarian” has an important place in Anselm of Canterbury’s De grammatico, in which it illustrates the distinction between, on one hand, nouns that, like homo, are both principally (principaliter)—that is, first—significantive and principally appellative of a substance; and on the other hand, nouns like grammaticus, which present a different semantic structure. For Anselm (De grammatico, in Opera omnia, 1:156), what distinguishes “man” from “grammarian” is that in the first case the substance is both signified and named principaliter, that is, directly (per se), whereas in the second case, the case of the “grammarian,” the substance is named but not properly (proprie) signified, that is, per se, and that the quality signified properly is not named (we note that the explanation provided here would be more difficult to give in German, where the same term, Benennung, opposed to Bezeichnung, “signification,” is used to designate appellation in the Aristotelian sense of “denomination” and appelation in the sense of nomination, that is, of “reference” [= Frege’s Bedeutung]). In other words, the noun “grammarian” names the substance PATHOS 745 2. Passion refers to love, on the one hand, and to suffering, on the other: see LOVE, PLEASURE. The Russian word STRADANIE brings into play the relationship between activity and passion along with the redemptive value of suffering (cf. Ger. Leidenschaft [passion], from leiden [suffer]: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers are the sufferings/ passions of the sensitive young man); see also WORK, and cf. BERUF. On the “Passion” of Christ, which is connected with the Incarnation, see also BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, GOD, OIKONOMIA. 3. On the relationship between wisdom and passion, the use and regulation of the passions, the idea of an ability to resist, of a constancy or courage of the soul, see GLÜCK (particularly GLÜCK, Box 1), MORALS, PHRONÊSIS, PIETAS, VIRTÙ, WISDOM. Code, Alan. “Aristotle: Essence and Accident.” In Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, edited by Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner, 411–39. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Dietrich of Freiburg. De accidentibus. In Opera Omnia, Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, Briefe, edited by Maria Rita Pagnoni-Sturlese, Rudolf Rehn, Loris Sturlese, and William A. Wallace. Vol. 4 in Corpus philosophorum teutonicorum medii aevi. Hamburg: Meiner, 1985. Ebbesen, Sten. “Boethius as an Aristotelian Scholar.” In Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung, vol. 2, edited by Jürgen Wiesner, 286–311. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987. Grice, Paul. “Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1988): 175–200. Hirschberger, J. “Paronymie und Analogie bei Aristoteles.” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 58 (1960): 191–203. Kahn, C. H. The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003. Lewis, F. A. Substance and Predication in Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Owen, G.E.L. “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle.” In Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, edited by Ingemar Düring and G.E.L. Owen, 163–90. Gothenburg Swed.: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960. Rijk, Lambertus Marie de. Logica Modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. Vol. 2 Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1962–67. Simplicius of Cilicia. On Aristotle’s “Categories 1-4.” Translated by Michael Chase. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. William of Ockham. Summa logicae. Vol. 1of Opera philosophica, edited by Philotheus Boehner, Gedeon Gál, and Stephanus Brown. St. Bonaventure, NY: Cura Instituti Franciscani, Universitatis S. Bonaventurae, 1974. Translation and introduction by Michael J. Loux: Ockham’s Theory of Terms, Part I of the Summa Logicae. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. PASSION “Passion”—which is derived via the Latin passio from the verb patior (pati, passus sum), “to suffer, endure, resign oneself to, allow”—is one of the possible translations of the Greek pathos [πάθος], from paschein [πάσχειν], “to receive an impression or sensation, to undergo treatment, to be punished.” It emphasizes the passivity of the mind or the subject, which undergoes what comes to it from outside, whereas other translations, such as Latin perturbatio or French émotion, stress mobility and agitation. In the entry PATHOS the systems and stakes connected with this initial difference in emphasis between the passive and the kinetic are discussed. I. Passion and Action We customarily oppose the logical, grammatical, and ontological categories of acting and undergoing, of active and passive, of subject and object. But the vocabulary of philosophy constantly challenges, from one language and period to another, the distinctions it makes: see in particular AGENCY, DRIVE, INTENTION, LIBERTY, NATURE, OBJECT, PERCEPTION, SENSE, I.A, SUBJECT, WILL; cf. ACT, ACTOR. II. Passion and Suffering 1. Passion designates first of all the passions of the soul, the perturbations, or even illnesses that affect, as Descartes said, “the union of the soul and the body” and constitute, as it were, the irrational substance of human life: see DRIVE, FEELING, GEFÜHL, GEMÜT, MADNESS, STIMMUNG; cf. DISPOSITION, ES, MALAISE, REASON, TO SENSE, UNCONSCIOUS.