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

DISINGANNO, Sp. DESENGAÑO (SPANISH) CATALAN desengany ENGLISH disillusionment, disenchantment, disappointment FRENCH désillusion GERMAN Enttäuschung ITALIAN disinganno PORTUGUESE desengano v. DECEPTION, and BAROQUE, FALSE, LIE, MALAISE, PLEASURE, SPREZZATURA, TRUTH, VERGÜENZA The noun desengaño comes from the verb desengañar (composed of the negative prefix des and the verb engañar), which comes, according to RT: Corominas and Pascual, Diccionario critico etimológico castellano e hispánico, from the medieval Latin ingannare (mock, scoff at, deride), which itself comes from the classical onomatopoeia gannire (yap, bark); similarly for the Catalan desengany, the Italian disinganno, and the Portuguese desengano. “Disillusion” in English and Enttäuschung in German represent the two senses between which the different significations of desengaño oscillate: on one hand, knowledge, overcoming blindness, being disabused, all of which correspond to the fact that one has escaped error and illusion; on the other, disappointment at the fact that a hope has not been realized. The word desengaño achieved its full splendor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning in 1492, when the Jews were forced to choose between leaving Spain and converting to Catholicism, the theme of desengaño in picaresque and mystical writing was a way for “new Christians” (children of converted Jews) to imagine pathways and openings in a hostile society that had closed all its doors to them. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in this spirit. A bit later, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Society of Jesus had consolidated its victory and Spain had become a bastion of the Counter-Reformation, Baltasar Gracián responded to the continuing experience of desengaño by dramatizing it and by praising appearance as the only reality. Today desengaño retains traces of its former richness and still has a variety of meanings. I. The Principal Meanings: Knowledge by Which We Are Disabused, Deception, Deceit 1. The first of the senses of desengaño that are currently in use is that of the grasping of a truth that lifts someone out of a state of being deceived or mistaken. In his RT: Tesoro de las dos lenguas española y francesa, César Oudin, the first translator of Don Quixote into French, translates desengañar as “détromper, désabuser quelqu’un, lui ouvrir les yeux.” According to Covarrubias (RT: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española), desengañar also means “to express oneself with full clarity such that one does not conceive something by taking it for something else” (hablar claro, porque no conciban una cosa por otra). The example he chooses confirms the idea that it is the truth itself that disabuses us (“La misma verdad nos desengaña”). Desengaño then takes on a two-part character: first, the revelation of a new truth—a veritable illumination; second, thanks to this acquired knowledge, a slower movement that consists in an “escape” from error (“conocimiento de la verdad con que se sale del engaño [deception] en DESENGAÑO 207 now indicates the horrible object that gives rise to the feeling: “Vida de San Borja: Vióse en su mismo original la cara del desengaño, tan terrible, que bastaba a introducir susto hasta en los mármoles del templo” (The Life of Saint Borgia: He saw in his own model the face of desengaño, so terrible that it alone sufficed to create fear even in the marbles of the temple). In a more satirical vein, but a no less serious one, Francisco Quevedo goes to the point of transforming this desengaño into a refusal of all illusion and all seduction; it becomes the truth— that of books, as opposed to the lies of living beings— truth that traversed the inanity of appearances as well as the vanity of pleasure and existence: Pareciéndome que los muertos pocas veces se burlan, y que gente sin pretensión y desengañada más atienden a enseñar que a entretener. (As it seemed to me that the dead rarely laugh and that, being unpretentious and disillusioned people, they would rather teach than amuse.) Visita de los chistes (cited in RT: Diccionario de construcción y regimen de la lengua castellana) II. Picaresque Contempt for the Law and Mystic Wisdom José Luis Alonso Hernández (RT: Léxico del marginalismo del siglo de oro) notes that the adjective desengañado takes on the sense of “crook, cheat, swindler” when it is turned into a substantive. Desengañado: a picaresque character, crook, or thief, in the sense that he is familiar with all possible forms of deception (engaño)—“he will return to drinking and invite others as disabused as he is” (tornó a beber y a convidar a otros tan desengañados como él; M. de Obregón). . Unlike in the religious sense, according to which desengaño is related to sin and failure, and hence to a sort of surfeit of law, the familiarity with evil in the picaresque novel is identified with contempt for the law bordering on insouciance, either real or fake (it does not matter which); sometimes it even approaches an uncommon degree of anger, as for Mateo Alemán (Life of Guzman). His revolt derives, of course, from being used to hunger and poverty, but especially from a keen sensitivity to the respectable arrogance of the affluent—that is, the “old Christians.” However, in the golden age as well as today, the adjective desengañado also indicates the opposite of pícaro and appears as a synonym for “wise.” It is applied to a man who, retired from the bustle and commerce of the world, lives privately and far away, desiring nothing other than to live in peace away from the tribunals of a society that has no room for nonconformists: Dichoso el que jamás ni ley ni fuero, Ni el alto tribunal de las ciudades; Ni conoció del mundo el trato fiero. (Happy he who has never known laws or statutes, Nor the high court of the cities, Nor the harsh treatment of the world.) (Luis de León, En una esperança que salió vaga) que se establa”), as in the Latin phrase ab errore deductus (RT: Diccionario de autoridades). Desengaño is thus a form of knowledge with practical effects: it deals not with an abstract truth, but with lived truth, one that provokes a change. 2. This change constitutes the second meaning of the word, which is defined by the RT: Diccionario de la lengua española as an “effect of this [new] knowledge on one’s state of mind” (efecto de ese conocimento en el ánimo). The Diccionario suggests a distinction between a neutral meaning and one that is clearly negative and restricted to the plural of desengaño, corresponding to “lessons learned at the cost of bitter experiences.” Manuel Seco et al. (RT: Diccionario del español actual) provide a synthesis of these two strains by characterizing desengaño as a negative impression felt by someone who discovers that a person or thing does not meet their expectations. He offers several examples taken from contemporary literature, notably from the work of Diaz Plaja, El español: “[S]exual intercourse includes a punishment, that of the violent death of Calisto and Melibea, or simply the desengaño that follows climax [el desengaño que sigue al goce]”; from Calvo Sotelo, Resentido: “Lo normal es que quienes sufren ese desengaño terrible se hagan resentidos” (It is normal for those who suffer this terrible desengaño to become full of resentment); from Miguel Delibes, Emigrante: “La chavala se ha llevado un desengaño de órdago, por más que ella diga misa” (The girl suffered a terrible desengaño, even if she claims otherwise)—literally, “even if she recites the Mass”; in informal Spanish “to recite the Mass” means to say things that no one believes, however solemn they appear. These quotations recall the context in which the different senses of desengaño developed from the classical to the contemporary period. When the word is close to disappointment or disillusionment, it deals primarily with disappointment in love, which may entail punishment, especially if there was pleasure (goce) involved. The informal common usage cited in the last passage shows how much desengaño remains secretly linked with a religious notion of lacking or loss, even today. 3. The third sense of desengaño indicates the word or judgment by which one blames someone for something. This meaning is primarily expressed by the familiar and figurative form taken by the adverb and adjective: desengañadamente (malamente, con desaliño y poco acierto [in a negligent and improper way]) and desengañado (despreciable y malo [despicable and bad]). The effect of disappointment is here attributed to the unsteady or poor character of the person who has disappointed; he did what he did without believing in it, that is, poorly: “Cuando se pondera que alguno ha ejeccutado mal alguna cosa, se dice bien desengañadamente lo ha hecho.” In this sense, desengañado translates the Latin perversus, “bad” (RT: Diccionario de autoridades). The adjective can sometimes pass on to the noun this sense of malignance. The RT: Diccionario de autoridades thus attributes to the object of deception a face that has become, in the context of sin, terrible and frightening. Desengaño 208 DESENGAÑO world, which pícaros scorn as useless anyway. Sometimes the distance between desire and reality becomes so great, as in Guzmán de Alfarache, that it is transformed into an immense revolt. For this antihero, desengaño becomes both submission and permanent transgression, which comes up empty, although it has a healthy outlet in writing. In mystical literature, on the other hand, desengaño comes with a flight into the backcountry of subjectivity and inner life in order to recreate another world through prayer and writing, a world that is invisible but truer, that of the El castillo interior, secret and indestructible, a castle of the soul “all of diamond and clear crystal,” as Teresa of Avila put it. She is, indeed, a great desengañada, but one whose desire never steered her wrong: “Dejánla [el alma] no solamente desengañada de lo que la falsa imaginación le ofrecía, sino tan ansiosa del bien, que vuela luego a él con deseo que hierve” (It [the soul] remains not only desengañada with what the false imagination offered it, but so avid for the good that it flies toward it boiling with desire; L. de León, dedication of Obras Sta. Teresa, quoted in RT: Diccionario de construcción y regimen de la lengua castellana). III. Desengaño and Desire to Live in Don Quixote Américo Castro was one of the first to point out the link between the eroticism of mystical texts and that of Renaissance pastoral literature, which is so present in Cervantes’s novel. In Don Quixote (pt. 1, chap. 14), the praise of desengaño belongs first to a woman. The shepherdess Marcela, having chosen, “in order to be able to live free, the solitude of the countryside,” refuses all blame for the suicide of her lover. She claims to have always opposed the hope that sharpens desire with the desengaño that disabuses. On her lips, desengaño becomes knowledge of the absolute freedom of the object of desire; in other words, recognition and acceptance of her independence: “Those whom I have made amorous by my appearance, I have disabused with my words” (A los que he enamorado con la vista he desengañado con las palabras). A tragic knowledge for Marcela’s suitors, blinded by her beauty and their own desire; an unacceptable knowledge to which Grisóstomo prefers death; a knowledge that the pretty shepherdess nonetheless defends until the end, refusing to confuse the truth of her desire—the cruel absence of reciprocity between men and Luis de Léon, an Augustinian monk with a subtle command of Greek and Hebrew, a professor at the University of Salamanca, and one of the greatest poets of his time, also dared to defy the law (which in his case was an Inquisitorial interdiction against translating the Bible into Castilian), offering a beautiful lyric version of the Song of Songs to a Carmelite nun. And yet his poems retain a clear and sharp aggressivity that is in the same vein as Mateo Alemán’s harsh and resounding revolt, despite being in a completely different register. Without actually naming them, the RT: Diccionario de autoridades shows that the adjective desengañado designates precisely these “new Christians,” such as Mateo Alemán, Luis de León, or Teresa of Avila, who endlessly told her charges that true virtue is hidden in works and not in one’s birth: “Los desengañados dicen, que la nobleza no se adquiere naciendo, sino obrando” (The desengañados say that nobility is not acquired by being born but by acting). Some words of classical Castilian, like desengaño, seem to have been forged through a play of violent and almost exaggerated oppositions in an extreme tension between an internal and external aspect with regard to social and religious laws, and sometimes at the edges of their laws’ own fluctuating boundaries. Américo Castro, a historian exiled from Spain after the civil war and a close confidant of Marcel Bataillon, “one of the masters of Cervantism” according to Jean Cassou in his introduction to Don Quichotte, offered constant reminders that all of the spiritual and mystic literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shared a common origin with picaresque novels, with La Celestina, and especially with Don Quixote. This literature is caught between a Christian optimism colored by Erasmism and a picaresque desengaño and was born and developed precisely among the children of the first converted Jews, who became Christians with lives “on the frontier,” psychologically speaking. In the picaresque novel, derision, provocation, and constant games with the law, as in Lazarillo de Tormes, often hide a distance as well as a brutal acceptance bordering on submission. Having become a respectable husband at the end of the novel, Lázaro accepts with philosophic calm that his wife, the servant of the archpriest, should remain the latter’s mistress—Lázaro’s world is too narrow, unlike that of Cervantes, to allow for a dream of freely chosen love or even nostalgia for an inner 1 Pícaro Of uncertain origin, this word means in the first instance “rascal,” “rogue,” or “beggar”; someone without shame in the sense of modesty (vergüenza) or honor (honra), the most Christian of values according to the drama of Lope de Vega, the “official” author of the Spanish Golden Age (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The pícaro is thus first and foremost a mischievous character, malicious (descarado) as well, but above all, an outlaw. In the hands of some authors, such as the writer of Lazarillo de Tormes, the character is a crafty one, sometimes dishonest, but with a genuine awareness both of himself and the boundaries of the world, in particular those that separate his world from that of his masters and those of his own subjectivity. Despite the apparent paradox of such a genealogy, the pícaro may be considered a remote descendant of the mystics. As in Mateo Alemán’s work, pícaros and mystics share an acute and sometimes tragic awareness of the rules of social power and the “falseness” of all worldly authority, which Teresa of Avila called, with “picaresque” contempt, “authorities of junk” (autoridades postizas). But Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache dares to attack God and his creation, which he considers to be an utter failure. The mystic’s rejection of the world as it is remains, for the pícaro, a rejection of all transcendence. DESENGAÑO 209 course of the story—all these words are there to indicate a radical alliance with the elements of life, including the most frightening ones, the most extravagant one, the craziest ones. And so desengaño, rather than taking the form of bitterness or escape, becomes a pure complicity with the adventure of living, painful or happy depending on the course of events. It is as though all these words of life and literature existed only for the sake of giving the most beautiful form possible to the experience of desengaño, one that is found especially in the gap between desire and reality and from which fiction is born—and for Sancho and Don Quixote, the space in which they can breathe. And it allows desire, if it cannot reach its object, at least to come back to itself after its long travels (pt. 2, chap. 72). IV. Gracían and the Strategy of Desengaño The cycle of desengaño was completed at the end of the baroque era in Spain with a triumphant Catholic form that was practically official: the Jesuit Gracián responded to desengaño with a strategy of stagecraft and manipulation, praising appearance as the sole reality. With Gracián, we are practically at the other end of the spectrum from picaresque and mystical desengaño and much closer to a kind of disillusionment that comes from perfect courtly duplicity. The bitter lightness of picaresque desengaño and the mystical audacity that consists in inventing an internal world to respond to the desengaño that comes from the world as it is become in this context the construction of a much weightier kind of staging, where the difference between being and seeming comes only in flashes before disappearing entirely in favor of the idea that being consists in nothing other than seeming—and in obedience to the rules of the court: “Man without illusions, wise Christian. Philosopher courtier: but without appearing so, let alone affecting it.” (Varón desengañado, cristiano sabio. Cortesano filósofo: mas no parecerlo; menos afectarlo; Art of Worldly Wisdom, §100). A rebel in his own bizarre way, Gracián spent half of his time in trouble with the Society of Jesus. Ignoring the interdictions, he went so far as to publish his books at his own expense—in particular the last parts of the Criticón (1653 and 1657), which he had printed without the slightest authorization and only partially hiding his identity—before later returning to the fold, which he had never completely left. For this “Christian” disciple of Machiavelli, a Hobbesian before his time, a defender of the power that comes with secrecy and dissimulation who was convinced of the need to manipulate in order to survive, and an ambitious connoisseur of the social passions that he dared to expose—for him, desengaño became a weapon, a projectile, an explosive destined to trap the naïve and the imprudent. The weapon became invisible, and he practically turned it on himself toward the end of his life by proclaiming his obedience to the law of the double life (which Pascal considered Jesuitical) and by transforming his initial disillusionment into a need for constant calculation, an infinite casuistry, in order to escape the threat of death lurking at all times: A breast without a secret is an open letter. Where there is a solid foundation secrets can be kept profound: there are spacious cellars where things of moment may be hid. Reticence springs from self-control, and to control women; that is, desengaño—with contempt: “Setting someone straight should not be taken for disdain” (Que los desengaños no se han de tomar en cuenta de desdenes). As with Marcela, the desire for life on the part of the knight errant and his squire is all the greater given the extent of the desengaño. Sancho, having been the governor of the imaginary island of Barataria and disappointed to learn that the dream of power was just a lack of freedom, feels a desengaño that is not at all bitter. It resembles, rather, a strong reassurance of feeling truly alive; stripped, Sancho feels his existence: “Desnudo nací, desnudo me hallo, ni pierdo ni gano” (I was born naked, and now find myself naked; I neither lose nor win; pt. 2, chap. 57). This book in which “Spain finds itself ceaselessly mirrored” (Cassou, Introduction) is also the work of a descendant of converted Jews, to whom Philip II twice refused the post in the Indies for which Cervantes pleaded. Only those who could prove their “Christian blood” had the right to such posts. Cervantes, like the majority of mystics and picaresque authors, invented points of reference other than the Church and social power to communicate the brutal conflict between dream and reality. Don Quixote dies of it—we do not know whether he dies “of melancholy [melancolía], of having been defeated, or of the will of Heaven” (pt. 2, chap. 74)—but Cervantes writes his own Don Quixote through to the end, despite the existence of the fake version by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. The term desengaño appears 357 times in the two parts of the novel. As if desengaño had become the bearer of an extraordinary life force, in the dedication of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which was written a few days before his death, Cervantes claims to live only through that desire: “Ayer me dieron la extremaunción y hoy escribo ésta; el tiempo es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan y, con todo esto, llevo la vida sobre el deseo que tengo de vivir” (Yesterday they gave me extreme unction and today I’m writing this. Time is short, my agony waxes while hope wanes, and yet despite all this, my desire to live keeps me alive). In Don Quixote, desengaño leads to a new richness, one that lies beyond good and evil, since dogmas and moral categories have disappeared in favor of writing that seeks neither to prove nor to convince but rather prefers to be a pure art of life. Further, the exceptional and fundamental feature of this art is that it is completely lacking in desire for any kind of religious solution. All that remains is fiction, dreams, nostalgia, anxiety, pleasure, and above all, a great need for true, genuine life—“la verdad adelgaza y no quiebra” (truth can be reduced to a thread but does not break; pt. 2, chap. 10). In the novel, life away from the court and big cities is made up of pleasure in the simplest things—Sancho and Don Quixote, both alone and together, often improvise delicious lunches on the grass by the side of the road, ones that would make the princes of the Earth die of envy. It also contains the most fantastical and unreal elements, like the dream of the cave of Montesinos, which resembles a Platonic myth (pt. 2, chaps. 22 and 23). And then again, life is made up of words as alive as anything: words read in books of chivalry; the words written by the author, Miguel de Cervantes, and by the Arab narrator of the second part, Cide Hamete Benengeli; the words translated by a Christian for the author; and also spoken words, usually reported by a witness of the countless characters who come and go and are transformed over the 210 DÉSINVOLTURE DÉSINVOLTURE Désinvolture is one of the possible translations of the Italian sprezzatura, introduced by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528), where it relates to Italian thinking about civility and politeness. See SPREZZATURA; see also CIVILITY, GRACE, ITALIAN, LEGGIADRIA, STYLE. oneself in this is true triumph. You must pay ransom to each you tell. The security of wisdom consists in temperance in the inner man. The risk that reticence runs lies in the cross-questioning of others, in the use of contradiction to worm out secrets, in the darts of irony: to avoid these, the prudent become more reticent than before. What must be done need not be said, and what must be said need not be done. (Gracián, Art of Worldly Wisdom) Desengaño enjoyed a resurgence with Romanticism, this time characterizing the disappointments and sufferings of love, politics, and history, in the spirit of the times. Originally, however, the underground complexity of desengaño developed on the side of the very ones who, “disabused” and “disenchanted” because of their banishment by a hostile society, often in highly marginalized situations—whether in prison like Luis de Léon or Cervantes or, like Gracián, in the heart of one of the most powerful institutions of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, in relation to which he remained independent and dissident— invented other worlds and alternative pathways, which are still present in the language of today, to communicate this experience and transform it through writing. Mercedes Allendesalazar REFS.: Alemán, Mateo. The Life of Guzman d’Alfarache; or, The Spanish Rogue. To Which Is Added, the Celebrated Tragi-comedy, Celestina. 2 vol. Reprint, London: Constable, 1924. First published in 1707–8. Baruzi, Jean. Luis de León, interprète du livre de Job. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Cassou, Jean. Introduction to L’ingénieux hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, by Miguel Cervantes. Paris: Gallimard, 1934. Castro, Américo. Cervantes y los castisimos españoles. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974. First published in 1966. . De la edad conflictiva. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. First published in 1961. . Hacia Cervantes. Madrid: Taurus, 1967. First published in 1957. . El pensiamiento de Cervantes. Barcelona: Editorial Noguer, 1972. First published in 1925. . Teresa la Santa y otros ensayos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971. First published in 1929. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated and edited by J. Rutherford. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. . The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. Translated by C. R. Weller and C. A. Colahan. Reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009. Criado del Val, Manuel. “Santa Teresa de Jesús en la granpolémica española: Mística frente e picaresca.” Revista de Espiritualidad 22 (1963): 377–84. Gracián, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Translated by Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1991. The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. Translated by T. Roscoe. London: J. C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881. Pelegrín, Benito. Ethique et esthétique du baroque: L’espace jésuitique de Baltasar Gracián. Arles, Fr.: Actes Sud, 1985. Rojas, Fernando de. The Celestina: A Novel in Dialogue. Translated by L. B. Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. Rosales, Luis. El sentimiento del desengaño en la poesía barroca. Madrid: Ediciones de cultura hispánica, 1966. Rosset, Clément. Appendix 2 of Le choix des mots. Paris: Minuit, 1995. Teresa of Avila. The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus. Translated and edited by E. A. Peers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1950. Wardropper, Bruce W. Siglos de oro: Barroco. Historia y crítica de la literatura español, under the direction of Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, Grijalbo, 1983. DESIRE The etymology of “desire” is highly informative. The word comes from the Latin desiderare, composed of the privative de- and sidus, sideris (star). Thought to be an ancient term from divinatory or maritime language, desiderare literally means “to stop seeing the star,” “to condemn the absence of, to miss,” while considerare means “to see the star,” “to examine with care or respect.” The term appears here first insofar as it is relevant to the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, and more precisely, as one of the received translations of the Freudian Wunsch: see WUNSCH and DRIVE (especially DRIVE, Box 2). Cf. ES, UNCONSCIOUS. More widely, it is part of a variety of networks: 1. The network of absence and satisfaction, of lack and plenty: see PLEASURE as well as GLÜCK (cf. HAPPINESS) and MALAISE; cf. ACT. 2. The network of love, including sexual love, and passion: see LOVE, PATHOS (cf. PASSION), TALENT, and cf. GENDER, GESCHLECHT, SEX. 3. The oppositional network of freedom and the will: see LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA], WILL, WILLKÜR. 4. The network of the powers of the soul: see SOUL, GOGO; cf. I/ME/MYSELF, GEMÜT. v. GOÛT, INTENTION, MADNESS DESSEIN Dessein is, along with dessin, one of the received translations of the Italian disegno. Eighteenth-century French broke with Italian tradition and, like German and English, separated the semantic fields of dessein and dessin. See DISEGNO and DESSIN; cf. CONCETTO and LEGGIADRIA. Nevertheless, disegno is to be thought of alongside “design,” which not only means “drawing” (dessin) but also “the ability to grasp patterns”; see STRUCTURE, IV. On the importance of dessein for aesthetics, see also GENIUS, INGENIUM, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, TABLEAU. For the relation between dessein and finality, see DESTINY and especially KÊR, Box 1; for boulê [βоυλή], the design of Zeus, see OIKONOMIA and TALAT. T. UF; HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS; cf. PRINCIPLE. On the relation between design, intelligence, and moral action, see AGENCY, INTENTION, MÊTIS, PHRONÊSIS, POSTUPOK, PRAXIS, WISDOM, VIRTÙ, WILL. v. IDEA, SENSE DEVIL 211 DESSIN Dessin is, along with dessein—from which it diverges around 1750—one of the received translations of the Italian disegno. See DISEGNO and DESSEIN. Cf. CONCETTO and LEGGIADRIA. The term is similar to “design,” which means not only “drawing” (dessin) but also the “ability to grasp patterns”; see STRUCTURE, IV. See also, for the role of dessin in aesthetics, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, TABLEAU. DESTINY The use of “destiny,” from the Latin destinare (to fix, to subject), is in Romance languages one of the ways in which we designate the part of what happens to us that escapes us or is not in our power. The terminological networks of Greek and German are especially well furnished in this regard. I. The Important Constellations A. The fortune of Greek representations The Greek words related to the idea of destiny are numerous, and they carry images and representations along with them that are always present: death, one’s lot, thread, linkage, constraint, completion, suspense. See KÊR [MOIRA, AISA, HEIMARMENÊ, ANAGKÊ, PEPRÔMENÊ, TUCHÊ]. While fortuna translates the occurrences characteristic of tuchê [τύχη] (see KÊR, Box 3, and VIRTÙ, I), the Latin fatum, from fari (to speak) opens up another paradigm (see KÊR, I.C; see also PORTUGUESE, Box 1). See also DAIMÔN, THEMIS. B. Calling, destination, historicity In German, Heidegger brings out the connotations belonging to Schicksal in which determinism and history are interwoven. See SCHICKSAL; cf. EREIGNIS, GESCHICHTLICH. The network includes Verhängnis (suspense, in the Stoïc sense of heimarmenê [εἱμαρμένη]), and Bestimmung, which opens up a new swath of terminology related to call and response (see BERUF, STIMMUNG, VOCATION) and to determinism. See also ES GIBT, HISTORY, TO BE. II. Destiny, Freedom, and Necessity 1. “Destiny” relates to necessity, whatever its nature may be, reasoning or divine decision, the natural or cosmological course of events that controls human life and therefore expresses determinism, finality, and freedom. See LIBERTY [ELEUTHERIA, Box 2; SVOBODA], WILL. 2. For the relationship between God and humans, see especially ALLIANCE [BERĪT, PIETAS, RELIGIO, SOBORNOST’], BELIEF, DAIMÔN, DEVIL, GOD, HUMANITY. 3. For causality, see EPISTEMOLOGY, FORCE, NATURE, PRINCIPLE, THING, WORLD. For probability and chance, see CHANCE and KÊR, Box 2. 4. For human life, see MALAISE, LIFE [AIÔN, ANIMAL, DASEIN, ERLEBEN]. 5. For the relationship between necessity, freedom, and moral action, see GLÜCK, MORALS, POSTUPOK, PRAXIS, PRUDENCE, VIRTÙ. 6. It is also possible to imagine other ways, referring to humans themselves, of theorizing that part of human life that escapes us; see DRIVE, ES, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG; cf. GENDER, GESCHLECHT, MALAISE, PATHOS, SEX. v. LAW, PERFECTIBILITY, PROGRESS, SECULARIZATION DEVIL FRENCH diable GERMAN Teufel GREEK diabolos [διάϐολος], daimôn [δαίμων] HEBREW sāt. [שָׂ טָן] ān ITALIAN diavolo, demonio, demone LATIN diabolus, daemon SPANISH diablo v. DAIMÔN, DUENDE, GOD, GOOD/EVIL, IMAGE [EIDÔLON], INGENIUM, MADNESS, PLEASURE, RUSE Within the theologies and demonologies of the different religious and philosophical systems of the East and the West, we find questions such as that of whether, if they accord individual existence and power to an agent of Evil, that agent is fully autonomous (as in dualist systems) from the principle of Good or, on the contrary, acts only under the power of the latter, the supreme god who alone is eternal, to whom all evil influence in the world is subordinate. There follow questions concerning the relationship between the Prince of Evil and the lesser demons who function as his instruments. Regardless of the possible answers to these questions, the Evil One is designated in most European languages by reference to the daimôn [δαίμων] of Greek or Latin antiquity, as well as to the Semitic (sāt. ān [ןָטָ שׂ [in Hebrew, šayṭān [شيطان [in Arabic, and satanas [Ʃατανᾶς] in Greek), designated by the name of diabolos [διάϐολος] in the Greek Bible. Thus, in French, Satan may be called Diable or Démon indifferently (with a variety of synonyms). In German, on the other hand, the two semantic paths remain distinct. The second, that of daimôn [see DAIMÔN] or “demonic” remains clearly detached from that of diabolos, that is, what we understand by the words “diabolical” or “satanic.” I. From Satan to the Devil The Hebrew name sāṭān is given to the Prince of Demons in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the New Testament and the Qu’ran. The Septuagint translates the name by the Greek noun diabolos [διάϐολος], created from diaballein [διαϐάλλειν] (ballein [βάλλειν], “to throw,” “to push”; dia [δια], “between,” “across,” “from one end to the other”; hence “to divide,” “to separate,” “to accuse,” “to slander”). The biblical Satan (from the root satan, derived from the Akkadian sattânu, which means “to attack,” “to urinate on,” “to fight”) is named as “the adversary” (cf. 2 Sm 19:23; 1 Kgs 5:18; 11:14, 23, 25) or “the accuser [before a tribunal], the slanderer, the denigrator” (cf. Ps 109:6). But in Job 1:6, as well as Zechariah 3:1–2, this name, preceded by an article, is still only a common noun. It does not seem to become a proper noun until the first book of Chronicles, where it is said that “Satan rose” (21:1), behavior arising from pride. In the Qu’ran, “Satan” is not at first a proper noun. It is used sometimes in the singular, šayṭān [شيطان ,[sometimes in the 212 DEVIL plural, šayāṭîn [شياطين ,[and usually with an article. Al Šaytân thus designates the Demon, while al šayâṭîn designates the various demons. Satan is the same word in Arabic and Hebrew, related to a verb meaning “to be separated [from the truth or divine mercy]”. The Qu’ran also mentions this same Satan by the name of Iblis, which is related to the Greek diabolos and designates the rebel angel, head of the revolt against God and of unbelief: “And when we said to the angels ‘Prostrate yourselves before Adam,’ they all prostrated themselves except Satan, who hid his pride, refused and became an unbeliever” (2:32). The six other passages mentioning the name of Iblis in a similar context also describe him as an angel, cursed and fallen because of his disobedience, like the demon of the Jewish and Christian traditions. In effect, the three great monotheistic religions originally viewed the angels as members of a celestial court, then as messengers from the Most High, some of whom revolted against the divine order. The spread of the Greek Septuagint among the early Christian communities led the holy writers and the church fathers to adopt the Greek diabolos and the Latin diabolus to indicate the Satan of the Hebrew texts. The book of Revelation (12:9) designates the evil spirit as “the Diabolos or the Satanas [Ʃατανᾶς]”: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world (of the oikumene [οἰϰουμένη]).” In the Gospel of John (8:44), Jesus tells his coreligionists at the height of a quarrel with them: “Ye are of your father the devil (humeis ek tou patros tou diabolou este [ὑμεις ἐϰ τοῦ πατϱὸς τοῦ διαϐόλου ἐστὲ; in the Vulgate, vos ex patre diabolo estis]).” In the same way, Latin Christian literature, for example, Tertullian (De anima, 35), adopts the term diabolus from the Septuagint to designate Satan, even while giving a number of other names to the principle of evil, such as the Demon, the Adversary, the Tempter, the Father of Lies, the Prince of This World, the Antichrist, the Beast, the Clever One, the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer. In addition, the New Testament, the apocryphal Christian writings, and the church fathers use the term “demon” to designate fallen angels, as well as the pagan gods, which they call “the idols” (eidôla [εἴδωλα]: 1 Cor 12:2; cf. Septuagint, 4 Kgs 17:12). . Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism could not accept the translation of the Bible by the Alexandrian diaspora without reservation, and remained faithful to the name of Satan (or Sammaël, the Angel of Death), mentioned, however, with the definite article. “The Satan” reigns, then, over a certain number of demons (šëdῑm [ים שׁד ׅ ([ ֵdescribed as “pernicious” (mɑzzῑqῑm [קים ׅזיׅמ ([ ַby the Midrash and the Talmud, such as Beelzebub, Azazel (the personification of the desert into which the scapegoat is sent in the ritual of Yom Kippur), Belial (or Beliar), Asmodeus (the demon who kills in succession the first seven husbands of Sara, the future wife of the young Tobias), Behemoth, and Leviathan. We also find female demons in these writings, such as Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to Rabbinic Judaism, or even the consort of Sammaël: according to the Targums and the midrashim, Sammaël was the serpent from Genesis 3 who seduced Eve, fathering Cain, henceforth known as the “son of the Devil.” However, it is the Hellenistic tradition of diabolos that has been taken up in our current languages to name the Evil Angel, as we see with “devil,” diavolo (Ital.), diablo (Sp.), and even with Teufel (Ger.), as well as the Iblis of the Qu’ranic tradition. II. From the Slanderer to the Tempter In the three monotheistic traditions, the Devil commands a legion of demons as his servants or instruments, so that it is difficult to tell from one text to another whether we are dealing with Satan himself or one of his acolytes. With the exception of the aforementioned passage in Chronicles, the Hebrew Bible generally refers indeterminately to a satan (or diabolos). It may be the same with the angel who becomes Job’s accuser in the midst of his trials, before the tribunal of God. And even in the first part of Goethe’s Faust, when the hero meets Mephistopheles (a name whose etymology is uncertain but recalls the Low Latin adjective mephiticus, 1 Lucifer The name Lucifer (Lat. “bringer of light”), which designated the planet Venus among the ancients, was incidentally attributed in the New Testament to Christ himself, who is there referred to, according to Ecclesiastes (50:6), as Stella matutina. The name remains, however, in the early centuries of the church and under the persistent influence of Judaism, one of the names of Satan. Beginning with Saint Jerome and especially in the Middle Ages, the Prince of Demons comes to be assimilated, as in Dante (Inferno, 31, 143; 34, 89; etc.), with the figure of the fallen angel. The source is no doubt the biblical passage in Isaiah on the fall of the king of Babylon, either Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus, or perhaps another Assyrian tyrant, either Sargon or Sennacherib: How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. Isaiah 14:12–15. Thus, for Christianity, Lucifer, the angel of light, becomes Satan through his revolt against God. According to some esoteric traditions, this revolt took place in the framework of a cosmic battle. DEVIL 213 (σύμϐουλος ἀνθϱώπου)] who enjoys ruining what is better than him.” . III. Devil or Demon? While “Devil” and “Demon” seem to function as equivalents in Christian theology or ordinary ways of speaking, the same cannot be said for the German Teufel and Dämon. The latter, which is synonymous with Unhold (malevolent or harmful spirit—antonymous with hold, “gracious,” “charming”), corresponds to the ancient idea of a daimôn [δαίμων] in the sense of a divinity or personal spirit, even a goblin, good or bad. The religious sense of “demon,” on the other hand, can only be adequately rendered by Teufel. Thus, Freud’s work entitled “Eine Teufelneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert” was translated into French in 1933 by M. Bonaparte and E. Marty as “Une névrose démoniaque,” then in 1985, in a new edition by J.-B. Pontalis, as “Une névrose diabolique”—the two translations being semantically identical. In the reverse case, however, the expressions névrose démoniaque and névrose diabolique, when they relate to a pact between a person and the Devil (Teufelsbund or Teufelspakt), as they do in Freud’s work, would both be translated into German as Teufelsneurose rather than Dämonsneurose—the latter could possibly refer to a case of pathological enthusiasm. In English, the Devil is also called the “Evil One” or the “Fiend.” “Fiend,” like “demon,” has rather the same sense as Dämon in German; in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Lancelot calls Shylock “the fiend who is the devil himself.” The different contemporary languages use the terms “devil” and “demon” in derivative senses which seem to downplay or exorcise the malignance retained by these other terms. Thus, in French and English we find various locutions that involve sympathy mixed with indulgence or admiration (petit diable, pauvre diable, bon diable, un diable d’homme, little devil, poor devil, the devil of a time, the devil’s luck), a nuance of rejection or repulsion (envoyer au diable, aller au diable, go to the devil), obsessions or volatile situations (avoir le diable au corps, tirer le diable par la queue, démon de midi, démon de jeu, face one’s demons, needs must when the devil drives). These generally have to do with metaphorical senses whose extreme character is indicative of the personality of the possessed (Ger. besessen) or the “energumen” (energumenos, formed by the early Christian writers from the passive of energein [ἐνέϱγειν] to indicate someone who is “worked on” by an evil spirit, but also, in the first instance, someone who is struck with a physical disability preventing him from being baptized). Along these lines, we find Dostoyevsky’s novel translated into French with the title Les possédés (and in English, The Possessed), even though the novel deals precisely with demons—the book cites a passage from the Gospel of Luke (8:32–36) in which Jesus drives a multitude of tormenting spirits from the body of a victim, and allows them to enter a herd of pigs, which then throw themselves into a nearby lake and drown. In fact, while the French diable, the Latin diabolus, the Italian diavolo, the English “devil,” and the German Teufel may have figurative meanings like those listed above (not to mention interjections like que diantre invented in order “exhaling a pestilential and harmful odor”), he only sees him as “the frozen fist of the Devil [die kalte Teufelsfaust],” that is, one of the many “negating spirits” constituting an anonymous infernal society. However, the texts of the New Testament and the Jewish and Christian apocrypha, as well as the Mishna and the Talmud, designate the Devil more and more frequently by his proper name, presenting him most of all as the Tempter (Lat., temptator; in Gr., ho peirazôn [ὁ πειϱάζων]; in Hebrew, the equivalent would be massâh [הָסַ מ ,[which means “test”; cf. Ex 17:7). In this way, according to Matthew 4:1–3, “was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil [peirasthênai hupo tou diabolou (πειϱασθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ διαϐόλου)]. And when the tempter came to him, he said.” The fact that the Devil goes from being the “accuser” to being the “tempter” or “seducer” may be explained by the emphasis on the notion of envy or jealousy (phthonos [φθόνος] in the Septuagint; invidia in the Vulgate). That notion is in fact not far from some of the recognized meanings of the Hebraic sāṭān, notably that of the denigrator, the malevolent, the divider. It is envy that prompts the Evil One to introduce death into the world (Wis 2:24), and to persuade Eve to disobey and eat the forbidden fruit, as Flavius Joseph (Antiquities of the Jews, 1.1–4) and especially Philo of Alexandria (De opificio mundi, §151–69; De agricultura, §95–110) point out. According to the De opificio mundi, it is because he loves pleasure (philêdonos [φιλήδονος]), especially pleasures of the senses (aisthêsis [αἴσθησις]), that man may be tempted by the serpent, the personification of sensual pleasure and its charms (hêdonê sumbolon [ἡδονἠ σύμϐολον]): “It is said that of old the venomous reptile having one day approached the wife of the first man, reproached her for her slowness of mind since she postponed and delayed gathering the most beautiful fruit to be seen, the most pleasant to taste [hêdiston (ἥδιστον), superlative of hêdus (ἡδύς), pleasant], and besides the most useful, since, thanks to it, she could know good and evil.” For the serpent’s part, it is not a matter of persuading (peirô [πειϱῶ]) his victim, but of tempting, in the sense taken on by the Greek peirazô [πειϱάζω] (derived from peira [πεῖϱα], “test”) in the Bible and the New Testament. Thus, Jesus says in his agony, “Pray, that ye enter not into temptation” (eis peirasmon [εἰς πείϱασμον]) (Lk 22:40), just as the prayer that he teaches his disciples, the Our Father, ends with the phrase “And lead us not into temptation” (eis peirasmon [εἰς πείϱασμον]) (Lk 11:4). Neither Josephus nor Philo identifies the serpent-tempter with the Devil himself. The genre of allegory, however, which, especially in Alexandrian literature, consists of “philosophizing by symbols,” provides the basis for a psychotheology that turns the serpent into a symbol, not for just any demon, but for the Tempter himself. Under the aspect of a serpent, portrayed here in his capacity as a seducer of the feminine soul (by the intervention of sensation or aisthêsis), the Tempter here represents according to the Jewish and Christian traditions the Devil’s role as the “Counselor of Man” with regard to perversity. The role of sumboulos alluded to by Philo in his De agricultura (§97) may be an allusion, though attenuated and unique to Philo, to the diabolos of the Septuagint: “counselor of man [sumboulos anthrôpou 214 DEVIL [Ʃατανᾶς]) and diabolos. The latter term is more common in the Septuagint, but it is found with equal frequency as Satanas in the New Testament. The Alexandrian Bible, however, also gives the name of daimonia (neuter plural of the adjective daimonios [δαιμόνιος]) to the infernal spirits, such as Asmodeus (Tob 3:8). The same term is used in the New Testament (along with pneumata [πνεῦματα]) to designate these harmful beings. The Vulgate and Church Latin translate daimonion by daemonium, but with the unique meaning of malevolent spirit, and with no trace of the ancient sense of divinity, guiding spirit, or inner voice. Considering in addition that the daimôn in Matthew 8:16 is a hapax in the New Testament, we can see that Christian demonology creates a turning point with regard to the Greek and Latin meaning of the term. Thus, in French, demoygne appears in the thirteenth century, and démon in the sixteenth, which corresponds to just such a change, whereas Anglo-Saxon languages, especially German, remain faithful to the primitive meaning of daimôn, as though they held back from fully adhering to this semantic transformation. Moreover, French, like Italian and other Romance languages, furnishes itself with the metonymy assimilating the “Démon” to the “Diable” of the Septuagint Bible. to avoid naming the Unnamable One directly), those terms which, in contemporary languages, are derived from the Greek daimôn or the Latin daemon are not used to refer to the person of the biblical Satan himself, not even to evil spirits when it is a matter of demons in the extended, religious sense. For example, with regard to those among them who wish, according to Luke the Evangelist, to enter the herd of pigs, Luther invariably translates the Greek plural daimonia [δαιμόνια] (or polla daimonia [πολλὰ δαιμόνια]) by Teufee (or viel Teufee). As a result, in Anglo-Saxon languages, the “demonic” (a term known by 1422, and no doubt borrowed from the Greek daimonikos [δαιμονιϰός], an adjective that means “possessed by a god” in Clement of Alexandria) remains distinct from what is called in French the démoniaque (demoniacal). This is still the case in German, where démoniaque would be translated as teuflisch (or satanisch), and démonique as dämonisch. The fact that Satan is known in French, on the other hand, as either “le Démon” or “le Diable,” unlike in other languages (especially Anglo-Saxon ones), seems to be due to the distance these other languages have acquired from ecclesiastical vocabulary. In Jewish and Christian writings, there is no semantic difference between Satan (Hellenized as Satanas 2 Satan the Contradictor as “historical being” according to Schelling v. OIKONOMIA, SUBLIME Schelling develops his conception of the figure of Satan, and particularly “of his eminent place and function” in the history of Christianity, in his Philosophy of Revelation (especially Lesson XXXIII). He contests the standard representation of the Prince of Shadows common to pagan as well as Jewish mythology, according to which he is an angel, originally good, a spirit created as an individual, who wished to rise above God, and was for this reason cast down, bringing the world and humanity down along the way. Schelling clarifies straightaway that this act of opposition, which is peculiar to him, does not diminish Satan’s dignity in any way, but rather ascribes to him a great reality and a more pre-eminent significance, although these are inscribed in determinate moments of the history of salvation. He notes that in the Hebrew Bible, the name of Satan in the first instance refers only to the notion of “contradictor in general,” and then—only with the article—to that of a determinate contradictor, as when, for example, said Satan argues with Yahweh concerning the suffering Job. The Hebrew verb saṭan [ןָטָ שׂ [in effect has the very general meaning of contradicting someone or opposing an undertaking. Thus, in the story of Balaam (Num 22:22), “when the Lord’s Angel places himself in his path in order to ‘resist’ him and hold him back, the Hebrew uses the verb saṭan, which consequently means nothing more than ‘to hold back,’ to thwart or hinder a movement. The Hebrew noun was translated into Greek as diabolos [διάϐολος], from diaballein [διαϐάλλειν], which means nothing more than ‘interjicere se ad obstinendum,’ whence our German word Teufel.” The same Greek word “is also originally used in a completely general way with regard to any contrarium, to anything by which one is led astray” (Philosophy of Revelation). This role of Contradictor, however, is one that Satan exercises most notably with regard to Christ himself. The Scripture informs us that a kingdom belongs to this adversary, just as one belongs to Christ, even if the former’s is “opposed to and resistant to that of Christ.” Thus, Satan “finds himself to a certain extent placed on the same footing as Christ, even if it is as a contradictor, as he whose reign and works Christ has come to destroy.” It follows that a certain sublimity (Erhabenheit) is attributed to him, just as to Christ, in such a way that this elevation entitles him, according to a large part of the New Testament, to be considered the prime author of evil. In his role as master of such a kingdom he “appears as a principle belonging to the divine economy” and is recognized by God as such. Facing God, Satan places himself at determinate moments as the great skeptic and contradictor who casts doubt on all belief, notably in the creation, through the seduction he works on the first man and in his debate with God regarding the tests of Job. As a part of the divine economy, Satan is thus defined, according to Schelling, as a “historical being” who one day sees his work completed. “His mission ends and, with it, his power,” which consisted in “maintaining contradiction, malediction, discord and disunity,” but which needed to be broken by Christ and by the triumph of the cause of God (Sache Gottes). Until that time, “it is a great power, necessary to the final glorification of God, and which for this reason must be neither criticized nor held in contempt.” Such a representation of Satan as a principle of the divine economy that is necessary at a given time thus breaks with the traditional mythological representations, which persist in seeing in this Contradictor an absolutely bad (although created) principle of self, universal and as eternal as God himself. REFS.: Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von. Philosophie der Offenbarung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Translation by V. C. Hayes: Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Armidale, NSW: Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1995. DICHTUNG 215 In these languages, the title of Demon (in the singular) simply reinforces the authority of the leader over his agents and accomplices, the innumerable demons or demonesses and she-devils, among which popular, romantic, and religious imagination places a host of infernal spirits of varying degrees of lewdness: werewolves, incubi, succubi, ghouls (from the Arabic ġūl [غول” ,[demon”), vampires, and so on. In the eighteenth century, these satanic fiends were also called oupires, from the Russian upyr’ [yпьıpь]—and perhaps from the Turkish uber, “witch”—whence the first occurrence of the term in Europe, as the German Vampir. This monarchy of the Devil or the Demon at the head of a kingdom of evil was already present in Iranian dualism, but unknown in the majority of other Eastern cultures; it is explained by the monotheism on which it is based, in the medieval demonology of the religions of the Abrahamic tradition. Satan represents, in effect, the One God’s antagonist, and is characterized in the image of his adversary. Nor is this uniqueness compromised when his medieval mask is removed, and he is transformed into the angelic lord of the revolt by the literary Satanism of the nineteenth century. In reality, the role that Western imagination assigned to the Devil has, according to Freud, the same origin as that which it assigned to God—the antagonism between the two figures both derive from a single source, namely, the figure of the father. In his study of the “diabolical neurosis” of an Austrian painter in the seventeenth century, Freud shows that the Devil of Christian mythology originally constituted, with God, a single figure, that this unitary being was then divided into “two clearly contrasted opposites”—one good, the other bad—and finally, that this antagonism only reflects the ambivalence, in a cultural deployment, which affects the paternal figure himself. Thus the Devil is “the substitute for the father,” according to Freud, and the vocabulary of demonology takes up the tyrannical and cruel aspects of the father figure. What made the troubles of Freud’s Austrian painter so memorable was that he reinforced these aspects of the figure of the Devil in his nostalgia for his dead father, by way of a pact with Satan. Charles Baladier REFS.: The Apocryphal New Testament. Edited by J. K. Elliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Browning, W.R.F. A Dictionary of the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Citati, Pietro. Goethe. Translated by R. Rosenthal. New York: Dial Press, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. “Ein Teufelneurose im Siebzehnten Jarhundert.” Imago 9, 1.34; GW, vol. XIII, 317–53. Translation: “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, edited by J. Strachey, vol. XIX, 72–105. London: Hogarth Press, 1923. Kirschschläger, W. “Satan et demons.” In Dictionnaire de la Bible. Supplément, vol. 12. Paris: Letouzey, 1996. Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Firenza: Sansoni, 1966. Translation by A. Davidson: The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. The Qu’ran. Translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Satan, special issue of Études carmélitaines. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948. Teyssèdre, Bernard. Le Diable et l’enfer au temps de Jésus. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. . Naissance du Diable: De Babylone aux grottes de la mer morte. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. DIALECTIC The history of “dialectic,” of the understandings and reinterpretations, of the appraisals and reappraisals, of the term beginning with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, and continuing through the modern age, would by itself be a good account of the history of philosophy. The word, however, travels across competing senses while itself remaining the same, starting with the Greek and by way of its Latin transliteration, through different European languages. For this reason, we will give only an indirect presentation of it here. 1. The Greek dialektikê [διαλεϰτιϰή] (classified as a technê [τέχνη], and sometimes as epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη], thus, the craft or science of dialectic) derives from logos [λόγоϛ]. It refers to the art of discussion (dia [διά], from “dialogue”) by question and answer, practiced by Socrates, and thus opposed to long discourses and Sophistic epideixis [ἐπίδειξιϛ]; see SPEECH ACT, I. Plato invests the term with great significance; in his hands it designates the practice of philosophy itself, reaching up to the “ideas”; see SPECIES, Box 1, and BEAUTY, MIMÊSIS. For Aristotle it refers to a part of logic, related to the rhetoric of what is probable, in contrast with scientific demonstration; see DOXA. The Stoics bestow upon it the status of a science (and make it a virtue), dealing with language and reasoning, the true and the false, the signifier and the signified; see WORD, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, and BEGRIFF, Box 1. These terminological tensions among Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism determine the complexity of medieval usage, notably visible in Augustine’s De dialectica; see also PROPOSITION. On all of this, obviously, see LOGOS. 2. Beginning with a negative interpretation of Scholastic usage, according to which dialectic is a rhetorical exercise making use of subtleties in formal logic (see SOPHISM), the moderns, from Descartes to Kant, see in dialectic an appearance of logic or a logic of appearance; on “transcendental dialectic,” the logic of transcendental appearance, see ERSCHEINUNG. The positive re-evaluation is related to the Hegelian and Marxist analysis of the processes at work in the history of being and thought; see AUFHEBEN, PLASTICITY, and GERMAN, ATTUALITÀ, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, PRAXIS, RUSSIAN, II; cf. IDENTITY. Dialectic is part of cutting-edge philosophical metadiscourse today; see, for example, CONSCIOUSNESS or CONTINUITET. v. EPISTEMOLOGY, OIKONOMIA, PRINCIPLE, SUBJECT, TERM, WORK DICHTUNG (GERMAN) ENGLISH literature, poetry, fiction FRENCH littérature, poésie, fiction, invention, affabulation v. POETRY, and ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, HISTORY, LOGOS, PRAXIS, SPEECH ACT, WORK The German word Dichtung does not, properly speaking, have an equivalent in other European languages, except for those Scandinavian languages that borrowed it. To translate it, English and French must resort to the words“literature” (littérature), “poetry” (poésie), 216 DICHTUNG in the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General theory of the fine arts), and Adelung cites it as a “new term” in the first edition of his dictionary (see RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 1, s.v. “Dichtung”). Herder gives us what is essentially the introduction of Dichtung to the German language—a paternity that also explains the unique aura that surrounds it. In his 1770 essay on the origin of language, Herder resorts to the hitherto unused word to refer to the faculty of poetic invention that presided over the first language of humanity—this original and natural language that preceded prose. Dichtung is “the natural language of all creatures [Natursprache aller Geschöpfe],” transposed into images according to which, to cite a later variation on the theme, its source lies in nature (Über den Ursprung der Sprache, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5:¶ 56, 1772; Über Bild, Dichtung und Fabel, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 15:535ff., 1787). Beginning with its birth, then, the notion of Dichtung is invested with a triple meaning. It is poetic, original, and natural, to which qualities an ultimate one is added: it is authentic. An idea, in effect, consistently underlies the Herderian usages of the term: the fictional universe to which Dichtung relates is no less real than reality itself. It is not opposed to the sensible world but in fact, rather, is its “distillate”—a principle that is given hidden support by the lucky homophonic proximity of the term to the words Dichte and dicht (density, dense). The idea will be developed in a philosophical mode a little later by Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790, §53) and then by Schlegel. The limit between science and art [Wissenschaft und Kunst], between the true and the beautiful, has at this point become so blurred that the certainty of the fixity of these eternal boundaries has been shaken practically everywhere. Philosophy creates poetry [poetisiert] and poetry [Poesie] philosophizes [philosophiert]: history [Geschichte] is treated as fiction [Dichtung], and the latter is treated as history. (Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie [1795]) . II. Deutsche Dichtung and Französische Literatur Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, Dichtung quickly became loaded with heavy national associations. In a Germany seeking a national identity, it was easy to see how much could be wrought from this specifically German noun, rich in multiple semantic or homophonic connotations and, for these reasons, difficult to translate into other languages. Dichtung allowed the German language to refer to a specific mode of intellectual invention, whose products—literature, language, and poetry—became loaded with singular qualities: unmediated relations with nature, original naïveté, poetic inspiration, brilliance, and so on. The Herderian distinction between Naturpoesie and Kunstpoesie, partially directed against French classicism, was reinterpreted by posterity in the sense of an opposition between a deutsche Dichtung and a französische Literatur, with the Germanic Dichtung designating literary production blessed with originality and or more vaguely, “fiction” (fiction). These words certainly get close to the meaning of the German noun but do not nearly exhaust the multiple notions of semantic unrealities (invention, confabulation, poetry). The German language also has the terms Literatur, Poesie, and Fiktion—but Dichtung, while it participates in all of these, contains and goes beyond them. This German-specificity confers peculiar density upon Dichtung, a sort of closure that was well exploited in German discussions on language, from Herder—who played knowingly on the essentially German character of the word—to Heidegger. Further, in 1973 the Germanist K. Hamburger emphasized that the concept of Dichtung is “superior to that proposed by the terminology of other languages, and in the first instance, to the very concept of literature [Literature].” By Dichtung, the German language tends to define for itself a specific operation of thought and language. The proximity of Dichtung with dicht (dense, sealed) is therefore not the result of purely accidental homophony. Dichtung yields such a dense succession of strata of meaning that the word becomes effectively sealed off from other languages. I. Dichtung and Dichten: The Natural Language of Humanity, between Literature, Poetry, and Fiction Dichtung is derived from the verb dichten, which even in the Old High German period had two principal meanings. In the broad sense, firstly, dichten means to invent, to imagine, to make up—a meaning that may also have negative connotations. Close to erdichten in that regard, dichten thus means to invent in order to delude, or to imagine in order to deceive. In the narrow sense, on the other hand, the word refers to the action of conceiving a poem or text so that it may then be written down and read. According to this meaning, the word has a particular predilection for the domain of poetic creation and thus means to versify, to compose a poem (even if the application to prose is not ruled out). From dichten, Dichtung inherited its semantic substance as well as its difficulties. Like the verb, the noun has at its core the complex relationship between fiction and reality. In a pejorative sense Dichtung relates to the idea of fallacious invention or confabulation, of lying. In a positive sense, however, the term designates the creation of a fictional world, invested with a singular truth. Dichtung evokes the creation of an imaginary universe, self-contained, produced by the power of invention of a single individual—the elaboration of an unreal space, in sum, but for all that no less veridical than concrete reality. In this sense Dichtung is intimately related to the romantic consecration of artworks. This meaning oscillates between the negative and positive kinds of virtuality of Fiktion, but a narrower meaning may be added to it. Dichtung may simply designate literary creation in the precise sense of the term, especially poetic creation, hence merging the terms Literatur and Poesie. Even though Dichtung participates in these three meanings of Literatur, Fiktion, and Poesie, it has nonetheless continuously strived to distinguish itself from them by assimilating unique meanings, born of the historical and philosophical circumstances that created it. The term, in fact, is a recent creation. It is certainly attested from 1561 onward, but only in the 1770s does it make its real and imposing entrance into the German language, even though its verbal template, dichten, had existed for centuries (see RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2, s.v. “dichte” and “Dichtung”). Sulzer completely ignores the noun DICHTUNG 217 1 Verum factum and poetic wisdom in Vico v. ACT, CIVILTÀ, CORSO, FICTION, GOD, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, ITALIAN, RELIGION, TRUTH In De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the very ancient wisdom of the peoples of Italy), 1710, one of his first works, Vico affirms that in Latin, “verum et factum convertuntur” (the true and the fact are convertible), and as a consequence verare (to tell the truth) and facere have the same meaning: “it follows from this that God knows the physical things, and man the mathematical ones” (chap. 1). As early as 1709, in the discourse De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (The method of studies of our time), he had written that “the propositions of physics are merely likely,” because God alone is able to know Nature, insofar as he created it: “we will demonstrate geometrical things, since we create them; if we could demonstrate physical things, we would create them” (chap. 4). Vico has a positive use for this metaphysical and epistemological principle, which initially seems to condemn human knowledge to what is merely likely, reserving the title of “science” for mathematicians alone; he uses the principle as the basis of his Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Principles of the new science concerning the common nature of nations), the first edition of which dates from 1725 and the last, extensively revised, from 1744. In this last text he lays out, in effect, the foundations of the “new science,” which he prides himself on having invented, in the following terms: But in this night of thick shadows that covers early antiquity, so far away from us, appears the eternal light which is never extinguished of this truth that one can in no way call into question: this civil world was certainly created by men, and as a result we may, because we must, find its principles in the modifications of our human mind itself. Whoever thinks about it can only be surprised to see how all the philosophers have spent their best efforts trying to acquire the science of the natural world, of which God alone, since he created it, possesses the science, and how they have neglected to consider the world of nations, or the civil world, of which men, since they created it, may acquire the science. (Principles of the new science, 1744, § 331) What is the meaning of this famous claim, which has been interpreted in a variety of ways and in which Michelet and many others have wished to discover a “Promethean” proclamation? In fact, Vico’s claim is unequivocal: the principles of the world made by man must be sought in the “modifications of [the] human mind.” Classically, these modifications are, according to Vico, the modes of the thinking substance—sensation, imagination, and understanding. Vico’s originality consists in placing these modes in order, both chronological and logical, in the evolution of humanity (Vico speaks rather of “nations”), as they are manifested and developed in the individual. This means that the fully human man, whose reason is “fully developed” and whose umanità is fully realized, has not always existed. He was preceded, rather, and prepared by a man who was practically entirely animal, “immersed in the body,” given only to sensation, only to passion, then by a man dominated by a powerful imagination (fantasia), that is, a function that is still largely dependent on the body. Vico is primarily interested in this “imaginative” moment, which Descartes and his successors refused to accept, and does not rest with merely rehabilitating the imagination; he gives it a primary role, “poetic,” properly speaking—that is, “creative”—in the genesis of the institutions that characterize the humanity of all nations: The first men of the pagan nations, as the children of the nascent human race created things by imagining them, which is why they were called “poets,” which in Greek means “creators.” (Ibid., § 376) Vico devotes Book II of the New Science, entitled On Poetic Wisdom, to this “poetic” creation of things. What does this creation, discussion of which occupies almost half the book, consist in? To analyze what we call the “primitive mentality,” he uses tools provided by classical poetics and rhetoric (he was a professor of rhetoric), in particular the theory of metaphor and of tropes in general. The most sublime work of poetry is to give sensitivity and passion to things that lack sensitivity, and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and, in play, to speak to them as if they were living persons. This philosophico-philological axiom proves that the men of the world were, in their infancy, sublime poets by nature. (Ibid., § 186–87) Men are therefore sublime poets by nature by virtue of the fundamental axiom according to which “man, because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, makes himself the measure of the universe when he falls into ignorance” (ibid., § 120). Another axiom makes it clear that “men who are ignorant of the natural causes that produce things give things their own nature, when they cannot explain them by similar things” (ibid., § 180). It is thus that man, “by himself, made an entire world [di se stesso ha fatto un intiero mondo]”: In the same way in which the metaphysics born of reason teaches that “homo intelligendo fit omnia,” this metaphysics born of the imagination likewise demonstrates that “homo non intelligendo fit omnia”; and this latter claim may be more true than the first, since man, by understanding, spreads his mind and grasps things themselves, while when he does not understand, he makes things from his own self, and by transforming himself into them, he becomes those things. (Ibid. § 405) This “metaphysics born of the imagination” is at work in fables and in pagan mythology, of which Vico has an extremely original reading: he distances it from purely literary analyses and turns it into the testimony of the way in which people from the “dark times” understood the natural world and constructed their human world. Poetic metaphysics, in effect, is nothing other than a “theology”: “Poetry may be considered as a poetic metaphysics, by which the theologian poets imagined that bodies were for the most part divine substances” (ibid., § 400). The “theologian poets” are the first men, not insofar as they speak poetically of the gods, but rather insofar as they “speak gods,” as one speaks a language. Their speech is the “fantastic speech of animate substances, imagined for the most part as divine” (ibid., § 401). These gods are what Vico calls “poetic characters,” or again “fantastic universals,” that is, “marks” or signs, concrete images allowing people without any capacity for abstraction or universalization to escape the infinite diversity of the sensible world, to perceive stabilities, to have a first experience of the world. By creating gods, men began to think in a human way. However, one cannot simply create gods with impunity. Vico cites the dictum of Tacitus: “fingunt simul creduntque [they imagine, and at the same time, they believe].” This is to say that these imagined gods speak to men, give them orders, make themselves feared by them. The lives and actions of men will be determined by these animated substances that were created by their own imagination. This is what is expressed so well by the story in the Scienza nuova of the birth of the first divine “character,” the “first of all the human thoughts of paganism,” of (continued) 218 DICHTUNG and painting). In 1853 G. G. Gervinus reedits a history of German literature, originally published in 1835–42 as Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen, with the new title of Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung. It is under the name of Dichtung rather than that of Literatur or Poesie that German literary production reaches a veritable historical consecration in the nineteenth century. Very often used between 1900 and 1950, from Dilthey to E. Staiger by way of T. Mann or J. Petersen, the word nonetheless seems to undergo a decline in the second half of the twentieth century. The very connotations that had been the basis of its ascent rendered it suspect in postwar Germany. In 1973 the Germanist Rüdiger pleads on that basis for the proscription of the term from scientific usage and suggests replacing it with the wider, more neutral term Literatur (“Was ist Literature?”). Restricted to the henceforth abandoned tradition of belles lettres, Dichtung seems moreover to be too tarnished with romantic holiness and nationalist connotations. This abandonment, clear in usage and sanctioned by dictionaries, did not take place without some resistance, as indicated by Hamburger’s plea (“Das Wort ‘Dichtung’ ”). It is worth noting that the term, though abandoned by literary types, is given a central role by the philosopher Heidegger, even in his last works. . Although Dichtung certainly takes its meaning from a conceptual network peculiar to Heideggerian language, it is authenticity, while the Latin-derived Literatur, on the other hand, evoked artifice and complexity. These diffuse connotations, implicit in use but rarely mentioned in the dictionaries, are what explain the remarkable ascent of the term in the German lexicon between 1770 and 1850. Still largely dominated by its rivals, Poesie and Literatur, at the end of the eighteenth century, Dichtung appears to have completely supplanted them by the middle of the nineteenth century. The process was tentative at first. Thus, only in the second edition of the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in 1800, does Schiller decide to introduce the word Dichtung in the title; the term itself, as it happens, is noticeably rare in the actual work. The publication, starting in 1811, of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (usually translated into French as Poésie et Vérité), marks an important stage in this ascent: the word Dichtung is, according to the author’s repeated declarations, complementary rather than in opposition to the word Wahrheit. “Therein lies all that results from my life, and each of the facts recounted here only serves to support a general observation, a higher truth [eine höhere Wahrheit]” (Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 30 March 1831). Already by 1787, in the poem Zueignung, Goethe had described himself as receiving “the veil of poetry from the hand of truth [der Dichtung Schleier aus der Hand der Wahrheit empfangen]” (v. 96). The growing success of the term is confirmed by Hegel, who, in his Lectures on Aesthetics given between 1818 and 1829, baptizes Dichtung as the third “romantic” art (the others being music the first god, Jupiter, a radical event that will place men on the road to the fulfillment of their destiny. In the “immense forest” that has covered the earth since the flood, barely human beings, bestioni, wander about without end. Suddenly the first thunderclap rings out. Horrified and astonished by this great effect whose reason they do not know, they raise their eyes and pay attention to the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human spirit is led to attribute its own nature to the effect, and since the nature of these beings was that of men who were only the robust forces of body and who expressed their violent passions by screaming and roaring, they imagined that the sky was a big animate body, which, under this aspect, they named Jupiter and who wished to tell them something through the whistling of the lightning bolts and the noise of the thunder. (Ibid., § 377) According to Vico, in effect, Jupiter was first named lous by the Latins, after the noise of thunder, and Zεύς by the Greeks, after the whistling of lightning (ibid., § 447). And he clarifies: The first men, who spoke by signs, believed according to their nature that lightning bolts and thunderclaps were signs made by Jupiter (this is why “divine will” was called numen, from nuo, “to indicate with the head”), that Jupiter gave commands by signs, and that these signs were real words [that is, having the character of “things”], and that nature was the tongue of Jupiter. (Ibid., § 379) Thus was imagined “the first divine fable, the greatest of all that were imagined later, that of Jupiter, king and god of men and gods, casting a lightning bolt: a fable that was so popular, so troubling, and so instructive that even those who invented it believed it, and with dreadful religious practices feared him, revered him, and honored him” (ibid., § 379). The effects of this initial fear are religion, family, property, the law, cities (first aristocratic, then popular, finally monarchical), until such time as “fully developed reason” should rule. Having reached this point, however, nations risk losing the “poetic” force, which Vico also calls “heroic,” and which allowed the birth of the civil world. Cynicism, skepticism, materialism, and atheism thus led to the dissolution of social bonds and to “barbarity of thought.” Thus begins a new corso, a ricorso, which will run through the same stages whose succession constitutes the “eternal ideal history” (see CORSO). Alain Pons REFS.: Vico, Giambattista. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944. . The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. . On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language: Including the Disputation with Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia. Translated by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. . On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated and edited by Elio Gianturco, with a translation of “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” translated by D. P. Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. . Opere, 2 vols. Edited by A. Battistini. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. . Vico: Selected Writings. Edited by L. Pompa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (continued) DICHTUNG 219 REFS.: Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Vol. 2: 1828–1832. Leipzig: Barsdorf, 1895. Translation by J. Oxenford: Conversations of Goethe. Edited by J. K. Moorhead. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Hamburger, Käthe. Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957. Translation by M. J. Rose: The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. . “Das Wort ‘Dichtung.’” In Literatur und Dichtung. Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung. Edited by H. Rüdiger, 33–46. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973. nonetheless worth recalling that it is not to be understood solely within the bounds of that philosophy. The word brings with it a semantic history—of which Heidegger is highly conscious—beginning with Herder in the eighteenth century and still resonating with nationalist sentiments about the genius of the German language expressed in the nineteenth century. Élisabeth Décultot 2 Heidegger’s Dichtung: Poetry and thought The term Dichtung begins to stand out beginning with § 34 of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), in a way that is still discreet, but whose importance should not, according to Hermann (“Poétiser et penser . . .,” 2000, p. 78), be overlooked: Die Mitteilung der existenzialen Möglichkeiten der Befindlichkeit, das heißt das Erschließen von Existenz, kann eigenes Ziel der “dichtenden” Rede sein. (Sein und Zeit) La communication des possibilités existentiales de l’affection, autrement dit l’ouvrir de l’existence, peut devenir le but autonome du parler “poétique.” (The communication of the existential possibilities of affection, in other words the opening of existing, can become the autonomous goal of “poetic” language.) (Être et Temps) La communication des possibilités existentiales de la disposibilité, c’est-à-dire la découverte de l’existence, peut être la fin que se fixe la parole qui “parle en poème.” (The communication of the existential possibilities of arrangeability, that is the discovery of existence, may be the end that is set for itself by the word that “speaks in poems.”) (Fr. trans. F. Vezin) The quotation marks surrounding the term dichtend (poetic, speaking in poetry) are at least the formal indication of a completely new way of approaching poetry, such that it is no longer subordinate to but coordinate with thought: poem and noema. Such a gesture supposes a return to the revelatory character of Dichtung and a distinction between Dichtung in the strict sense (“poetry”) and in a wider sense. The return to the revelatory character of Dichtung can be accomplished, but in fact it is rather rarely the case, in light of the etymology of the term, which suggests a distinction into four stages, as the following text shows: “Dichten”—was meint das Wort eigentlich? Es kommt von ahd. tithôn, und das hängt zusammen mit dem lateinischen dictare, welches eine verstärkte Form von dicere = sagen ist. Dictare: etwas wiederholt sagen, vorsagen, “diktieren,” etwas sprachlich aufsetzen, abfassen, sei es einen Aufsatz, einen Bericht, eine Abhandlung, eine Klage—oder Bittschrift, ein Lied oder was immer. All das heißt “dichten”, sprachlich abfassen. Erst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert ist das Wort “dichten” eingeschränkt auf die Abfassung sprachlicher Gebilde, die wir “poetische” nennen und seitdem “Dichtungen.” Zunächst hat das Dichten zu dem “Poetischen” keinen ausgezeichneten Bezug. Trotzdem können wir uns einen Fingerzeig zunutze machen, der in der ursprünglichen Wortbedeutung von tithôn—dicere liegt. Dieses Wort ist stammesgleich mit dem griechischen deiknumi. Das heißt zeigen, etwas sichtbar, etwas offenbar machen, und zwar nicht überhaupt, sondern auf dem Wege eines eigenen Weisens. (Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen) Dichten—what does that word actually mean? It comes from the Old High German tithôn and is related to the Latin dictare, which is an intensified form of dicere = to say. Dictare: to say something repeatedly, to say out loud, to “dictate,” to set something out in speech, to compose, whether it is an essay, a report, a treatise, a complaint—or a request, a song, or whatever. All of this is called dichten, to express linguistically. It is only in the seventeenth century that dichten was restricted to the composition of pictures in language, which we call “poetic,” and since then Dichtungen (poems). Originally dichten had no privileged relation to the “Poetic.” Nevertheless, we can make use of a quick indication contained in the original meaning of the word tithôn. This word has the same root as the Greek deiknumi. This means: to show, to reveal, to make visible or manifest, and not as a general revelation but as an indication leading up a specific path. (Ibid.) Whence the necessity of distinguishing wide and strict senses of Dichtung. In the strict sense, which thus corresponds to its modern meaning dating from the seventeenth century, Dichtung is equivalent to Poesie (poetry), that is, one art among others, which Heidegger calls “a mode among others of the project of clarifying the truth” (Pathmarks). In the wide sense Dichtung is this very “project of clarifying the truth” in all its fullness—what Heidegger also calls Dichten, to poetize (ibid.): poetry comes from the Poem, as do architecture, sculpture, or music. Every work of art is thus a Poem, insofar as it is rooted in the deployment or the domain of the word, which is only Urpoesie (primordial poetry), in its turn by virtue of being a Poem (ibid., 84). Pascal David REFS.: Froment-Meurice, Marc. That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics. Translated by J. Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Étre et Temps. Translated by E. Martineau. Authentica, 1985. . Étre et Temps. Translated by F. Vezin. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1986. . Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. . Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Translation by J. Young and K. Haynes: Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. . Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Neimeyer, 1976. Hermann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von. Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Warminski, Andrzej. “Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin.” Yale French Studies, no. 77, Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions, 1990. 220 DICTUM of diction-dicibile-res, and the omission of the fourth term, verbum, completely distorts the sense of the original (Metalogicon, 3.5: “Est autem res de quo aliquid, dicibile quod de aliquo, dictio quo dicitur hoc de illo”). II. Abelard and Dictum Whereas Abelard gives dictum a technical sense in the exposition of his theory of propositions, as we will see, the term enuntiabile becomes generalized a bit later, both in logic and in theology. An author from the end of the twelfth century considers it a novelty in his time: In reading and rereading Aristotle and Boethius, I have not found a single passage in which it is written that the true and the false were “statable,” or inversely, and Aristotle has always taken “statable” for “predicable,” saying “statable of something”, i.e., “predicable of something,” and “to be stated” for “to be predicated,” from which it follows that the proposition is the statement of something about something [Aristotle, De interpretatione, 5.17a 25–27, translatio Boethii, Aristoteles latinus II, 1–2]. Later, both terms were perceived as equivalent (cf. Ars Burana). They have distinct histories, however, which are divided into two periods in which different problems are discussed. We should note, first of all, that the discussions of dictum or enuntiabile are related to the existence in Latin of infinitive clauses. “Socrates currit” says that Socrates runs; the infinitive “Socratem currere” (or the completitive “quod Socrates currit”) is the name (appellatio) of what the proposition (dictum) says. The statable is “called” by the “appellatio dicti” (“hominem esse animal”) (just as the individual Socrates is called by the proper name Socrates), and “signified” by the proposition (“homo est animal”). One may speak of modality de dicto, when the modality bears on the dictum, in contrast with modality de re: “Socrates currit est possibile” according to the de dicto interpretation signifies “(that Socrates runs) is possible”; or the de re interpretation, “Socrates can run.” A single phrase may naturally be capable of different truth values depending on the interpretation given to its modality. Thus, to take a Sophistic example, “possibile est stantem sedere” is false de dicto: it is impossible for the proposition “he who is standing is sitting” to be true; on the other hand, the same proposition is true de re: the “thing” that is standing can certainly sit. Classical Latin tended to prefer infinitive clauses, with the subject in the accusative, for the de dicto interpretation—“Dicitur Homerum caecum fuisse”—and the attribute in the nominative, constructed with the infinitive, for the de re interpretation: “Homerus dicitur caecus fuisse.” In medieval Latin, logicians considered the first example to be capable of two interpretations. There are various possibilities for translating the infinitive clause: one may use the complement clause (“it is possible that Socrates runs”), but then we lose the distinction with the Latin complement phrase as well as its status as a nominal phrase, or a gerundive phrase (“Socrates-running is possible”). The introduction in the beginning of the twelfth century of the notion of dictum is motivated by logico-grammatical questions. Abelard is inquiring as to the nature of the declarative proposition, to demonstrate that what characterizes Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language and History. Edited by M. Bunge. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. . Sämtliche Werke. 33 vols. Edited by B. Suphan. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913. . Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Edited and translated by G. Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Rüdiger, Horst, ed. Literatur und Dichtung: Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1973. Schlegel, Friedrich. Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie. In Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 1. 35 vols. Edited by E. Behler. Paderbon: Schöningh, 1958–. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schöen Künste. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 1771–74. DICTUM / ENUNTIABILE (LATIN) ENGLISH stateable FRENCH dictum, dit, énoncé; énonçable; exprimable GREEK lekton [λεϰτόν] v. PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SACHVERHALT, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/ SIGNIFIED, TRUTH, WORD The terms dictum and enuntiabile are used, beginning in the twelfth century, to indicate of a proposition “what it says” or “what it may state.” This begins with a series of questions that are not only semantic in nature (do propositions have a signification, like words, and if so, of what nature—real or in the world or in the mind), but also logical (the problem of truth-bearers), and ontological (the problem of what makes a proposition true). Further, a host of different questions of a theological nature arise as well; when we inquire as to the nature of divine knowledge, which is necessarily eternal (if God knows eternally that P, what is P?) I. Lekton and Dictum Seneca uses the terms effatum, enuntiativum, enuntiatum in a passage from letter 117 (117.13; RT: Die Fragmente zur Dialektik der Stoiker 892), to characterize what is in fact only a subgroup of lekta, (a) those that are complete, and (b) those that are capable of being true or false, that is, assertions or axiômata (see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, PROPOSITION). The term dicibile, as used by Augustine in the De dialectica, cannot be considered a translation of lekton for two reasons: first, Augustine focuses his discussion on the basic unit, the word, dictio, whence the use of a term formed from the same verb dicere, that is, dicibile, whereas the Stoic lekton is not necessarily simple. Second, the lekton is more often than not a thought insofar as it is expressed by words. Augustine, however, defines the dicibile as something that exists in thought before being expressed (ante vocem), that can be expressed, and that is created in the mind of the hearer by the sign (see WORD, Box 3). Dicibile seems rather to translate the Greek ekphorikon [ἐϰφοϱιϰόν], as used by the Stoics (see Nuchelmans, Theories of the Proposition). The claims of equivalence between lekton and dictio or dictum are isolated and derive from Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, 2.22.2: “nam lekton dictio dicitur”), followed by Alcuin, who explains that dialectic deals with dicta, then in the twelfth century, by Jean of Salisbury in the Metalogicon (2.4: “lekton greco eloqui [sicut ait Isidorus] dictum appellatur”). The latter only appeals to Augustine’s De dialectica in order to align the Boethian triad of vox-intellectus-res with a supposedly Augustinian triad DICTUM 221 (cf. “If someone says, for example, Socrates will eat or will die tomorrow, he posits an indeterminate event which the nature of things can in no way make certain for us [indeterminatum eventum proponit de quo scilicet nulla natura rei cujusquam nos certificare potest]; “eventus proprie dicimus dicta propositionum”), and it is in this sense that the dictum is “nothing at all.” Even if the terms dictum and enuntiabile are sometimes seen as equivalents, it is often noted that the second has a nuance of potentiality that the first lacks (whence its translation as “stateable,” correlative with “statement” for enuntiatio, in Lewis, “William of Auvergne’s account of the enuntiabile”): “The stateables, according to the Ars Meliduna (ca. 1170) are what propositions signify; they are thus called in virtue of the fact that they are stated or apt to be stated.” The anonymous author can thus claim that the enuntiabile remains true even if it is not stated, even if there were no longer any expression for stating it, since it would still be possible to “impose” a new vox in order to state it: “the stateable, in effect, is not so-called according to the act, but according to aptitude (non ab actu, sed ab aptitudine).” Thus, whereas Abelard’s dictum resembled a conception of the proposition as an “act” or “statement,” the enuntiabile is better placed alongside the objectified and independently existing propositions of the Fregean tradition. That said, the nature of the enuntiabile varies greatly from theory to theory, but these differences are related to a problem that is not strictly logical. III. The Question of Divine Knowledge The theological implications of the notion of dictum become apparent when we inquire, as Robert de Melun does, as to the eternal nature of dicta: if dicta exist for all eternity, this implies that something other than God himself is eternal. That unfortunate implication was the object of lively debate until the end of the fifteenth century, in the wake of the Parisian condemnations of 1241, when William of Auvergne declared that it was forbidden to teach “quod multae sunt vertates ab aeterno quae non sunt Deus” (that there are a large number of eternal truths distinct from God). In the twelfth century, the notions of dictum and enuntiabile were used more specifically to discuss the problems related to the immutability of divine knowledge, power, and will. Although he does not use the notion of dictum developed in his logic textbooks, Abelard is the first to introduce a thesis often considered characteristic of nominalism, called semel/semper: what God knows once, he knows forever, since “what is true once, is true forever [quidquid semel est verum, semper est verum].” The term dictum designates the object of knowledge among his contemporary theologians, who are also divided as to the nature of the dictum or enuntiabile, its truth, and its changeless character. The Nominales think that stateables are the objects of divine knowledge, that, once true, they are always true, and are thus independent of time. A single stateable-type (e.g., “Christ is born”) uttered at t1 (before the birth of Christ), t2 (at the moment of Christ’s birth), t3 (after Christ’s birth), corresponds to three different stateables (a given stateable associates Christ and his birth at a given time, and so if it is true at a given moment, it will always be true). A single stateable (“Christ is born”) is expressed at different moments in time by three statements, at t1 by “Christ will be born,” at t2 it cannot be its meaning: in effect, “Socrates currit” means the same thing as “Socratem currere” or “Socratem currens,” and we find in each the expression of the inherence of a quality in a subject. All of these expressions involve “complex intellections,” though this point was not unanimously agreed upon at the time. What characterizes the first is that it says (dicit) or “proposes” (proponit) something, that something is the case (“state” in English is a good approximation; see PROPOSITION). These expressions mean the same thing, have the same intellection (intellectus), but only the first has a modus enuntiandi or modus proponendi. A proposition thus signifies a complex intellection, composed of the intellections of its categorematic parts, but beyond this, “says” or “poses” its dictum. For Abelard, the statement of a declarative sentence (such as “Socrates est albus”) corresponds, in effect, to a threefold action of the intellect, consisting in focusing one’s attention on something (Socrates), on a quality (the individual whiteness), and associating the two objects by a further act. For this reason, Abelard maintains that the dictum is “not absolutely anything,” that it is “not a thing”: in effect, if a proposition (understood here as a significant sequence) speaks of things (“agit de rebus”) and not intellections of words, what it says is not a thing, but rather corresponds to the way in which the intellect puts things in relation to one another, or in which it posits their existence. Only as a subsequent step, by confronting what the proposition says with the state of things (“eventus rerum” or rei, “esse rei,” “status rerum” or rei, “natura rerum”; cf. “natura rerum ex qua veritatem vel falsitatem [propositiones] contrahunt [the nature of things from which propositions take their truth or falsity]; Glossae super Peri hermeneias), may the dictum be declared true or false (“Et est profecto ita in re, sicut dicit vera propositio, sed non est res aliqua quod dicit [It is indeed thus with things [or with reality] as the true proposition says, but what the proposition says is not a thing]”; Dialectica). The dictum is thus not the state of things, that is, the truth-maker, but the truth-bearer, which can receive the predicates “true” and “false.” It is not itself a “something” since the intellect may liberally “posit” relations between things, or, in other terms, put forward a hypothesis about things, whether things are as it says or not. I may just as easily say “Socrates est homo” (Socrates is a man) as “Socrates est lignum” (Socrates is wooden): each of these propositions says something—has a dictum—and the “existence of things” said by the proposition are no more a part of reality in the first case than in the second. The proposition is true when what it posits corresponds to what is (“Omnis enim propositio vera dicitur, qui ita est in re, ut proponit”; Glossae super Peri hermeneias). The expression eventus rerum contains a remarkable ambiguity, in fact, as Abelard explains in a discussion of future contingents (Glossae super Peri hermeneias). In one sense, it relates to reality as it exists, to the things as they come about (“res ipsas quae eveniunt”), independently of the way in which they are conceived or spoken of, to the objective “event” (in the sense of what “happens” or “occurs”; evenit), which makes the proposition true or false (“veritas propositionum ex eventu rerum pendet”). In another sense, the expression relates to reality as we speak of it (“id totum quod propositio dicit”) and which in that sense has no reality other than that of being said: it is the event as it is posited by the proposition or eventus propositionis 222 DICTUM truth of any sort (contingent or necessary). But the claim can only be fully understood by noting that Gregory’s goal is not, contrary to what is often said, to build a nominalist theory of the proposition (or, a fortiori, a “realist” one), but only to explicate the notion of notitia judiciaria (judicial knowledge) of God. The difference between “things” and Sachverhalte may be confirmed in Gregory’s thought only insofar as it is fundamentally related to the problem of divine knowledge. That being the case, two incompatible semantic theories confront one another over the “signifiable,” whose “offspring” are still observable at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. One, standard “reductionist” nominalism, distinguishes truth-maker, the individual thing signified by the subject term, and truth-bearer, the token proposition; the other, that of Gregory of Rimini, ultimately identifies truth-maker and truth-bearer in the form of the “complexly signifiable,” called “true” or “false” by an “intrinsic denomination” on the basis of the uncreated Truth. Take, for example, Mark 14:40: “Verily I say unto thee, That this day, [even] in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.” Was the corresponding stateable, that is, “Petrum esse paccaturum in A” (that-Peter-would-sin-at-time A) true for all eternity? Gregory sets aside the hypothesis according to which the “created statement,” the oral proposition reported in Mark 14:30, would have been true for all eternity: since it did not exist for all eternity, it could not have been true for all eternity. As for the stateable that the proposition states, he distinguishes “being for all eternity” from “being true for all eternity.” If the proposition of “created statement” had existed for all eternity (which is not the case), it would be true for all eternity, but contingently so. The complexely signifiable “Petrum esse peccaturum in A” was, on the other hand, true for all eternity, but it was neither eternal nor everlasting. The importance and the meaning of the thesis affirming the non-existence of the significabile complexe here clearly appear. The complexly signifiable “is nothing”: it is not and never was an “entity by itself.” It cannot therefore be or have been for all eternity. On the other hand, the “signified complex” of Mark 14:30 was true for all eternity, not necessarily, but contingently, “by an extrinsic denomination coming from the uncreated Truth and from the eternal judgment of God judging that ‘Peter-would-sin-at-time A.’ ” The expression “extrinsic denomination” derives from a widely used medieval distinction between two types of denomination, that is, paronymic attribution (see PARONYM): (a) formal denomination in which what gives the name is in what is named “as in a subject”—this is the case with the whiteness that denominates x in “x is white,” and (b) causal denomination, in which what gives the name is in the agent or efficient cause, not in the patient—this is the case with the thought or intellection that the thinking mind has of it in “x is [a] thought” or “x is thought.” The thought is “as in a subject” with respect to the thinking mind, not what is thought. This second type of denomination is what Gregory calls “extrinsic denomination.” The truth of the stateable relative to Peter’s sin is thus in the first instance, and causally speaking, in God, who makes the judgment—in his judgment or act of judging; it is only an attribute of the stateable in an external, “paronymic” way. It by “Christ is born,” and at t3 by “Christ has been born.” On the other hand, the Reales think that the objects of divine knowledge are the res, and that the stateables vary in their truth conditions. Subsequently, the analysis of propositions expressing divine knowledge (e.g., “Deus praescivit Antichristum esse”) is expanded to include propositions containing a belief-verb, and thus return to the domain of logic. There are multiple opinions as to the nature of an enuntiabile: several are mentioned by the Ars Meliduna (see De Rijk, Logica modernorum; Iwakuma, “Enuntiabilia”). The differences turn on (a) the simplicity or complexity of their nature, (b) the nature of what is composite: terms (mental, spoken, or written), or the things signified by these terms; (c) their eternal or temporally bound character; (d) their mode of existence: some posit that they do not exist (cf. Abelard), others that they do; for the latter, they are therefore things (res), but some consider them to be substances, others accidents, and still others consider them “extracategorial” (extrapredicamentale) entities, enjoying their own distinct mode of existence, as universals do. While there is no clear path from the Stoic lekton to the medieval dictum or enuntiabile, the doctrinal relations between these notions are not evident either. We may note, however, that when Seneca associates the lekton with quod nunc loquor (what I say now), he is close to Abelardian formulations of dictum as “what the proposition says.” There is nothing mental about Abelard’s dictum, however: it is precisely by explaining that the predicates “true” and “false” cannot apply to either words or intellections that he is able to show that they apply to dicta. These dicta are more on the side of things, even if they are not existent things: just as names have a signification in thought (a simple intellection) and a signification in things, propositions have a signification in thought (a complex intellection) and a dictum. As for subsequent theories, we have seen that at the ontological level, the dictum or enuntiabile may be of different natures, real or mental, depending on the theory. IV. The “Complexly Signifiable” In the fourthteenth century, dictum and enuntiabile are replaced by the notion of the “complexly signifiable,” significabile complexe (Gregory of Rimini) or “signifiable by complex,” significabile per complexum (Adam Wodeham), that is, what is signifiable only by a linguistic complexum (an infinitive clause, or what English-speaking logicians call a “that-clause,” in German, Daß-Satz). Since Hubert Élie, the “complexly signifiable” has been considered a medieval formulation of the notion of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt), interpreted more or less in a realist sense, making it related to Meinong’s Objektiv (see SACHVERHALT). That is how its medieval adversaries understood it; using the support of the condemnation of 1241, they accused those who accepted the significabile complexe of maintaining that mundum fore ([the fact] that the world would exist) and Deum esse ([the fact] that God exists) have been throughout eternity, “without being God.” This interpretation does not take account of all aspects of the theory, however. Gregory of Rimini affirms, as Abelard sometimes does, that the significabile complexe is “nothing”—that it does not exist. This claim suggests that the “signifiable by complex” cannot be something in the world that would make true a DISCOURSE 223 Marty, Anton. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Vol. 1. Halle: Niemeyer, 1908. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1973. . Late-scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1980. Rosier-Catach, Irène. “Abelard and the Meaning of Propositions.” In Signification in Language and Culture, edited by H. S. Gill, 23–48. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002. Smith, Barry. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago: Open Court, 1994. is insofar as it is judged by the primary Truth that the stateable is called “true” and hence also “true for all eternity.” The structure of “extrinsic denomination” expresses a central thesis of Gregory’s ontology: the alethic modality “true” is an attribute of the Judge and his eternal act of judging, not of the object of judgment or its content, which are all called true by causal denomination (Gregory of Rimini, Lectura, I, d. 38, q. 2). In other words: a stateable is called “true” paronymically by extrinsic denomination on the basis of the primary uncreated Truth and its eternal judgment, and, in turn, this stateable, which is not itself an “entity,” is what verifies our own judgment, our own propositions. There are thus two stages of correspondence, or “rightness,” for a true stateable according to Gregory: a stateable is true insofar as it corresponds to the act of divine judgment, and it is that to which thought makes itself correspond (“consents,” “acquiesces,” or “assents”) when it judges—what makes judgment and proposition true. The second correspondence brings the Gregorian theory close to the phenomenological theory popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century by Anton Marty, who redefines truth (see TRUTH)—in Latin—as “adaequatio cogitantis et cogitatum” (correspondence of the thinker with the content of thought), instead of “adaequatio rei et intellectus” (correspondence between the thing and the intellect). The “complexly signifiable” is, as we can see, an important element in the genealogy of the theory of Sachverhalte. Alain de Libera Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Abelard, Peter. Glossae super Peri hermeneias. Edited by Bernhard Geyer. Munster: Aschendorff, 1927. Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. “Theories of the Proposition: Some Early Sixteenth Century Discussions.” In Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics. London: Variorum Reprints, 1985. De Rijk, L. M. “La signification de la proposition (dictum propositionis) chez Abelard.” Studia Mediewistyczne 16 (1975): 155–61. . Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. 2 vols. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962–67. Élie, Hubert. Le signifiable par complexe. La proposition et son objet: Grégoire de Rimini, Meinong, Russell. Paris: Vrin, 2000. First published in 1936. Gregory of Rimini. Lectura. Vol. 3 in Spätmittelalter und Reformation Texte und Untersuchungen. Edited by D. Trapp and V. Marcolino. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1978–87. Iwakuma, Yukio. “Enuntiabilia in Twelfth-century Logic and Theology.” In Vestigia, imagines, verba, edited by C. Marmo, 20–35. Brepols, 1997. Jacobi, Klaus, Christian Strub, and Peter King. “From intellectus verus/falsus to the dictum propositionis: The Semantics of Peter Abelard and His Circle.” Vivarium 34, no. 1 (1996): 15–40. Jolivet, Jean. Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard. 2nd ed. Études de philosophie médiévale, 57. Paris: Vrin, 1982. Kneepkens, Cornelius H. “Please don’t call me Peter: I am an enuntiable, not a thing. A note on the enuntiable and the proper noun.” In Vestigia, imagines, verba, edited by C. Marmo, 82–98. Brepols, 1997. Lewis, Neil. “William of Auvergne’s Account of the enuntiable: Its Relations to Nominalism and the Doctrine of the Eternal Truths.” Vivarium 33 (1995): 113–36. Libera, Alain de. “Abélard et le dictisme.” In Abélard. Le “Dialogue.” La philosophie de la logique, Cahiers de la revue de théologie et philosophie 6 (1986): 59–97. . La référence vide. Théories de la proposition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Maierù, Alfonso. Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica. Rome: Edizione dell’Ateneo, 1972. Marenbon, John. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. DISCOURSE “Discourse” is a transposition of discursus, from the Latin discurrere (to run here and there, run through in all directions). Discursus acquires the sense of “conversation, dialogue” rather late, following a metaphor that highlights the hazardous nature of verbal exchange (RT: Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française). Philosophers, however, focus on the order and method with which propositions and thoughts succeed one another: “discursiveness” implies entailment and correct reasoning, and practically becomes a synonym for “rationality.” It is thus that “discourse” is one of the received translations for the Greek logos [λόγоϛ], which is just as well translated by “reason,” although logos refers as well to each of the elements that compose language: see LOGOS. I. Discursiveness, Rationality, and Humanity Discursiveness, as a faculty and exercise of language and reason, is conceived (explicitly by Aristotle) as peculiar to man: see, besides LOGOS (under which, notably, the Hebrew dāḇār [רָבָ ּד [and the German Sprache, Rede, are also discussed), CONSCIOUSNESS, DIALECTIC, DICHTUNG, HOMONYM, II.B, HUMANITY, REASON [CONCEPTUS, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING], TRUTH; cf. BILDUNG, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, PLASTICITY, SUBJECT. II. Discourse, Language, and Languages 1. On the relation between discourse and multiple languages, see EUROPE, TO TRANSLATE. 2. On the possible divisions (or lack thereof) among what the French language refers to, after Saussure, as langue, langage, and parole, see LANGUAGE. 3. On the relationship between discursiveness and linguistic performance, see SPEECH ACT; cf. ÉNONCÉ, PERFORMANCE, PRAXIS, VOICE. III. Discourse, Internal and External 1. On the parts of discourse, see PROPOSITION, TERM, VERB, WORD; cf. PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SUPPOSITION, UNIVERSALS. 2. On the kinds of discourse, see GENRE, I/ME/MYSELF [ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY]. 3. On the relationship between discourse and external reality, see NONSENSE, OBJECT, REALITY, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, THING, TRUTH, as well as PRAVDA, ISTINA; see the following more specifically for its logical content: MATTER OF FACT, PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT, 224 DISEGNO evokes a necessary relation between the drawing and the thought. The loss of a letter thus does not simply lead to a loss of meaning. Rather, it corresponds to a genuine semantic mutation that implies a completely different conception of drawing than that which the French took over from the Italians. Since dessein became dessin, French no longer has an equivalent to disegno. Several words are henceforth required to say in French what a single word, faithful to its Italian roots, said in the seventeenth century through several meanings. This is why the modernization of spelling in the publication of French texts on the art of the seventeenth century actually leads to serious confusions of meaning. The same is true for English and German, which borrow from different lexica in order to say either drawing or intention. English thus distinguishes “drawing,” in the sense of an outline, from “design,” which corresponds to the French dessein and thus retains a part of the semantic field that the Italian disegno covered. In fact, it was starting with the Italian word that Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, constructed the concept of design, which he is the first to have introduced into English (Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design, 1812). Faithful to the double meaning of the Italian and French words, Shaftesbury constantly plays on the senses of “design” as the unity of a project and as a drawing. In this sense, “design” is a pure translation of disegno and dessein. As in French, however, the two meanings come apart very quickly in English, and the separation arises from the same transformations in the theory of art. The double meaning of conception and execution nevertheless reappears in the modern and worldwide usage of “design” today, as referring in all languages to a certain kind of industrial art coming out of the Bauhaus tradition. In German, Zeichnung (drawing) is not related to the terms for intention or intellectual projects either, terms such as Abzicht or Entwurf. Like disegno, which comes from signum, Zeichnen derives from Zeichen, which means sign. It can mean a plan or project, but only in a material sense (for example, an architectural plan), not in a purely speculative sense like disegno and dessein. The fact that Zeichnen is derived from Zeichen (sign), that it is related to bezeichen (designate), indeed to zeigen (to show), may justify the strongly logocentric presuppositions of some contemporary research on the nature of pictorial images. Thus, Walter Benjamin, in a text entitled “Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal,” builds his definition of painting using Zeichen as the source from which Zeichnen is a sort of derivative product, akin to a stain or spatter (das Mal). This means that all figurability would in the end be predetermined by a Zeichen, that is, an act of naming (Benennung or Benennbarkeit), such that the end of all figuration would be referred implicitly and necessarily to the word as such (Ästhetische Fragmente, in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:603f.). The lexical distinctions that exist in English and German thus make a mockery of any attempt to translate disegno in the sense intended by the Renaissance writers. Conscious of this difficulty, historians and art theorists tend more and more to keep the Italian word without attempting to translate it into their own language, and speak of Raphael’s disegno or Vasari’s definition of disegno. REPRÉSENTATION, STATE OF AFFAIRS. See also DECEPTION, DOXA, and FALSE. 4. On the relation between discursiveness and invention, at the intersection of the ontological relationship with things in the world and the literary relationship with genres of discourse, see especially, besides DICHTUNG and GENRE, I, CONCETTO, FICTION, IMAGINATION, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, WITTICISM. DISEGNO (ITALIAN) ENGLISH design, drawing FRENCH dessein, dessin GERMAN Zeichnung LATIN designo v. DESSEIN, DESSIN, and ART, BAROQUE, CONCETTO, IDEA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, INTENTION, SIGN Disegno is one of the major concepts of the Renaissance theory of art. It means both design and project, outline and intention, idea in the speculative sense as well as in the sense of invention. It thus refers to a thoroughly intellectual activity. The French word dessein, as used by theorists of art in the seventeenth century, is an adequate translation of the Italian meaning of disegno as used in the preceding century, and preserves its double meaning, but the distinction between dessin and dessein (design and drawing), which comes into use around the 1750s, yields a fundamental break with the Italian tradition. In the eighteenth century, Racine may still write, “le dessein en est pris, je pars cher Théramène” (the plan is made, I am leaving, dear Theramenes), but from that time on at the Académie Royale of Painting and Sculpture, the arts of “dessin” were taught, but not of “dessein.” The two semantic fields that were unified in disegno are separated from then on in French, as in English and German. I. From Disegno to Dessein and Dessin, to “Design,” to Zeichnen In the seventeenth century, what the French now call dessin, that is, the part of painting that is distinct from color, was always written dessein, sometimes even desseing. It is derived from the Italian disegno, and it kept all the richness of the Italian word. Antoine Furetière defines it thus in his RT: Dictionnaire universel: “Project, enterprise, intention. Also, the thought one has in the imagination of order, of the distribution and construction of a painting, a poem, a book, a building. Also said in painting of images or paintings that are without color.” There is no homonymy here, however. When used about painting, dessein means something more but not something different. Though it has a specialized usage, it continues to signify the project or intention. The word expresses here in the most explicit way what the thing is for the artist, an art theorist, or an expert on the seventeenth century. It implies a certain way of thinking about drawing, as the realization of a design—that is, an intellectual project. The word dessin, which would be substituted for it a century later has a much narrower meaning, restricted to the last sense given by Furetière. It no longer DISEGNO 225 As, therefore, in mere bodily shape and figure there is a kind of perfection, to whose ideal appearance every production which falls under the notice of the eye is referred by imitation; so the semblance of what is perfect in Oratory may become visible to the mind, and the ear may labour to catch a likeness. These primary forms of thing are by Plato (the father of science and good language) called Ideas. (trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, De oratore [On the orator]) Giovanni Pietro Bellori, indeed, defines “idea” in the following way, just before citing the same passage from Cicero: “The idea of the painter or the sculptor is this perfect and excellent model in the mind which things before our eyes resemble, since they imitate the imagined form” (Idea del Pittore et scultore é quel perfetto ed eccellente esempio della mente, all cui immaginata forma imitando si rassomigliano le cose, che dadono sotto la vista) (trans. A. Sedgwick, “Idea of the Painter,” in The Lives of the Modern Painters). Disegno is not just “idea,” however; it is also, as Vasari says, the perceptible expression of the idea. The difficulty we may have in grasping the problem of disegno in its full complexity derives from the fact that it is both a pure act of thought as well as its visible result, in which the physical work of the artist participates as well. As the act of the painter’s mind, disegno corresponds to invention, in the rhetorical sense of the term—that is, to the choice of subject. As the action of the painter’s hand, it presupposes a technical skill. “Disegno,” writes Vasari, “when it has extracted the invention of something from thought, requires the hand, practiced through years of study, to be able to render exactly what nature has created, with the pen or the point, the pencil, the stone, or any other means” (The Lives of the Artists). Material disegno, which we call drawing, is thus always the realization of a mental disegno. This is why disegno is, according to its theoreticians, superior to color. Unlike drawing, they say, whose quality demonstrates not only the skill of the painter but also the beauty of the idea that animates and directs the hand, color owes its luster entirely to the materials that compose it. Several decades later, Federico Zuccaro systematizes his theory of disegno by distinguishing disegno interno from disegno esterno: Per questo nome di disegno interno io non intendo solamente il concetto interno formato nella mente del pittore, ma anco quel concetto che forma qual si voglia intelletto. (By the word disegno interno I mean not only the internal concept formed in the mind of the painter, but also the concept which any intellect forms.) (Zuccaro, Idea de’pittori, in P. Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 2065; Eng. trans. based on Fr. trans. by C. Alunni in La Peinture, ed. J. Lichtenstein, 147) The definition of disegno interno thus extends well beyond the domain of art: “e il concetto e l’idea che per conoscere et operare forma chi sia” (the concept or the idea formed by anyone in order to know and to work) (ibid.). Zuccaro, II. Disegno in the Renaissance Disegno certainly has the sense of “drawing” in the Renaissance, as in Benvenuto Cellini, who distinguishes between several types of disegni, each corresponding to a modo di disegnare (Barocchi, Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno, 8:1929). Like disegnare however, which means both to draw and to formulate a plan, disegno embeds the notion of drawing in a special configuration, made up of a twofold network of meanings that overlap with one another. Disegno is in a way a topical term that refers to the spread of this entanglement. To indicate drawing in the sense of line, outline, or contour, the theorists use other terms, notably circonscrizione, which we find, for example, in Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (It., Della Pittura; Eng., On Painting). In the first version of the treatise, published in Latin, Alberti writes, “Nam est circumscriptio aliud nihil quam fimbriarum notatio” (Circumscription is nothing other than the notation of contours) (trans. C. Grayson, De pictura / On Painting). When he adapts his text into the vernacular a short time later, Alberti translates notatio as disegnamento—“la circonscrizione é non altro che disegnamento dell’orio”—which goes into English as “Circumscription is nothing but the drawing of the outline” (trans. J. R. Spencer, Della Pittura Della Pittura / On Painting, 68). Disegno is thus not circonscrizione, nor linea, nor orlo, even if it implies all of these. It is not drawing. Disegno brings drawing into a completely different semantic field from that to which its properly physical characteristics belong. It means drawing as an expression of a mental representation, of a form present to the mind or imagination of the artist. Giorgio Vasari defines it thus: This is like the form (forma) or idea (idea) of all the objects of nature, always original in its proportions. Whether it is a matter of the human body or those of animals, plants or buildings, sculpture or painting, one grasps the relation of the whole to its parts, the parts amongst each other and with the whole. From this grasping (cognizione) a concept (concetto) is formed, a reason (giudizio) engendered in the mind (mente) by the object, the manual expression of which is called drawing (disegno). The latter is thus the perceptible expression, the explicit formulation of a notion internal to the mind or mentally imagined by others and developed as an idea [si pu conchiudere che esso disegno altro non sia che una apparente espressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’animo, e di quello che altri si è nella mente imaginato e fabricato nell’idea]. (trans. L Bondanella and P. Bondanella, The Lives of the Artists) By linking disegno to forma, concetto, and especially to idea, this text illustrates the way in which the Renaissance used the categories inherited from the rhetorical tradition, and, through it, Aristotle’s philosophy, in order to develop a new theory of art. As Panofsky showed, the meaning of “idea” among art theorists results from a transformation of the idea into an ideal, which derives from the passage in Cicero’s De oratore in which he defines the Platonic Idea as a form, an interior model existing prior to and informing its realization: 226 DISEGNO proportion, and imitates all the visible things, going so far as to express the passions. (Lecture of 9 January 1672, in A. Mérot, Les Conférences de l’Académie, 219) It is precisely this distinction that calls the colorist doctrine, as formulated by its exponent, Roger de Piles, into question. Upending a hierarchy that was believed to be solidly established by tradition, the latter in effect reduces drawing to its purely practical dimension. For him, drawing constitutes the “mechanical” part of painting, though he means this word in a very different sense from that given to it in the Middle Ages, and which bears witness to a new way of understanding technique. Drawing comes from training based on the imitation of ancient work, the study of perspective and anatomy, all indispensible knowledge for the acquisition of “accuracy of the eyes and facility of the hand” (Cours de peinture par principes, 194). This part, common to painting and sculpting, is certainly necessary to the work of the painter, but is insufficient to define the particularity of his or her art. Obeying the rules of accuracy of proportion and correction of contours, drawing is no longer the expression of an intellectual design, for Piles, but a manual dexterity that is based on a technical kind of knowledge, in which theory is entirely subordinated to practice. All the characteristics that gave disegno its intellectual and metaphysical, even theological, significance—genius, fire, invention, idea, form—are stripped from drawing and attributed to color. There is thus no longer any reason to use dessein for dessin. With the victory of colorist ideas at the dawn of the eighteenth century, a profound change was thus produced in the theory of art, which its language takes into account several decades later. Jacqueline Lichtenstein REFS.: Alberti, Leon Battista. De Pictura / Della Pittura. Bilingual Latin/Italian edition. Edited by Cecil Grayson. Rome: Laterza, 1975. De Pictura was first published in 1435, Della Pittura in 1436. Translation by Cecil Grayson: De Pictura /On Painting. Bilingual Latin/English edition. Edited by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin, 1991. Translation by J. R. Spencer: Della Pittura / On Painting. Bilingual Italian/English edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966. Barocchi, Paola, ed. Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. 3 vols. Milan: Ricciardi, 1971–77. . Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings. Edited by B. Dooley. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. “L’Idea del Pittore, della scultore e dell’architetto,” introduction to Le vite de’pittori, scultore e architetti moderni. Rome, 1672. Translation by S. Sedgwick: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Ästhetische Fragmente. In vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Cellini, Benvenuto. Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno. In vol. 2 of P. Barrochi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. Discorso was first published in 1568. Cicero. De oratore [On the orator]. 2 vols. Translated by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. Letter Concerning the Art or Science of Design. In vol. 3 of Characteristicks. London, 1733. Written in 1712. Mérot, Alain. Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVII siècle. Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996. . French Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by C. Beamish. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. in fact, recognizes that he could just as well have used the terms intenzione, essemplare, or idea, but he preferred to leave those to the philosophers and theologians, as he was writing as a painter, addressing artists. Thus, though it comes out of a usage peculiar to the domain of art, the concept of disegno has a theological underpinning according to Zuccaro. It allows for an analogy between artistic creation and divine creation: “To work externally, God necessarily looks at and contemplates the internal disegno in which he knows all the things that he has accomplished, that he is accomplishing and that he will accomplish, or that he could accomplish at a single glance” (ibid.). In forming his internal disegno, the painter thus resembles God. The operation by which he conceives it in his mind is a pure act, a spark of the divine within him, which makes disegno a veritable segno di dio, Zuccaro writes, playing on the word to get the meaning across. As for disegno esterno, “It is nothing other than disegno delimited as to its form and denuded of any material substance: pure line, delimitation, proportion and shape of anything imagined or real” (altro non é che quello che appare circonscritto di forma senza sonstanza di corpo. Simplice lineamento, circonscrizzione, misurazione e figura di qual si voglia cosa imaginata e reale) (in Barocchi, 2084; in Lichtenstein, 150). By defining painting as an arte del disegno, Italian theorists thus do not rest with affirming the superiority of drawing over color. They proclaim the intellectual nature of pictorial activity, which they raise up to the nobility and dignity of a liberal art. It is disegno that makes painting una cosa mentale, to take over Leonardo’s expression. This explains why the concept of disegno often takes on a polemical function, and why it could be used against all pictorial forms that seemed to endanger the newly acquired status of painting as a liberal art, from the “Gothic” manner of drawing to the practices of the colorists. III. From Dessein to Dessin The French adopt more or less the same use of dessein, though they add a slightly more polemical touch. This is, first, in order to defend a certain style of drawing—the grand manner—whose grandeur comes from the fact that it is the expression of a grand design, as Michel Anguier states in the lecture he gave on 2 October 1677, at the Académie Royale of Painting and Sculpture, “Sur le grand goût de dessein”: “Great design [dessein] is a fire that illuminates the understanding, [inspires] the will, strengthens memory, purifies the mind, in order to penetrate the imagination. One would have to be Prometheus to steal the fire from heaven in order to illuminate this beautiful intelligence for us.” A second reason is to respond to Rubenists who, starting in 1670, increased their attacks against the prestige of drawing. Thus, Le Brun praises drawing by adopting Zuccaro’s distinction: One ought to know that there are two sorts of drawing: one which is intellectual or theoretical, the other practical. That the first depends purely on the imagination. That practical drawing is produced by the intellectual and thus depends on the imagination as well as the hand. The latter, by means of the pencil, gives the form and the DOR 227 More generally, for the network of terms that detail the strict relation between agency and passivity, objectivity and subjectivity, with respect to being affected as well as to action, see AGENCY, PATHOS; cf. DRIVE, GEMÜT, LOVE, PLEASURE. The neologism “affordance” picks out in particular the intersection between perception and the possibility of acting; see AFFORDANCE; cf. LEIB, REPRÉSENTATION. v. UTILITY Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Berlin: V. Spiess, 1985. Translation by J. S. Peake: Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. Piles, Roger de. Cours de peinture par principes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. First published in 1709. Translation: The Principles of Painting. London: J. Osborn, 1743. Vasari, Giorgio. La vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. Florence, 1568. Translation by Linda Bondella and Peter Bondanella: The Lives of the Artists. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Zuccaro, Federico. L’Idea de pittori, scultori et architetti. In vol. 2 of P. Barrochi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento. L’Idea was first published in 1607 in Turin. DISPOSITION “Disposition,” from the Latin disponere, refers to an arrangement, an organization, in particular in the rhetorical (dispositio/inventio, cf. COMMONPLACE and COMPARISON) and religious (dispositio/dispensatio, see OIKONOMIA) traditions. But a related group of words in French, such as disponible and dispositif, is enjoying a resurgence, notably by way of Gilles Deleuze and his translations of Heidegger. I.“Disposition,” Disponible, Dispositif, “Utility” Disponible is not a technical philosophical term, but rather a translators’ expedient for rendering Heidegger’s distinction between vorhanden and zuhanden (adj.), or Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit (n.). Zuhandenheit is the mode of being of what is manipulable, at hand, or within reach (procheira [πρόχειρα]), while Vorhandenheit is the more neutral or indifferent mode of being of what is present, what is there (for example, books on the shelves of a library), what is subsistent. See VORHANDEN. Similarly, dispositif is a possible translation of Gestell (frame, mount; a shelf, in fact), which for Heidegger characterizes the essence of modern technique. See COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION; cf. DASEIN, ES GIBT, IL Y A. This mode of being intersects with the ways of saying and understanding what a thing is: see RES, Box 1, on the Greek chrêma [χρῆμα], pragma [πρᾶγμα], and cf. GEGENSTAND, OBJECT, REALITY. Finally, English confers a special value on utility, through the neologism “utilitarian” invented by Bentham: see UTILITY, and cf. ECONOMY, FAIR, VALUE. On the arrangement that constitutes a dispositif, especially in the Deleuzian sense, cf. STRUCTURE and FRENCH. II. Subjective Disposition “Disposition” is one of the possible translations of Stimmung, although it lacks the musical resonance emphasized by Heidegger to designate a certain “harmony” of the subject: see STIMMUNG (with the term Befindlichkeit, sometimes translated into French as disposibilité); cf. ANXIETY, DASEIN, GESCHICHTLICH, HEIMAT, MALAISE, SERENITY, SORGE, SUBLIME. On the disposition of the soul, particularly in ethics (diathesis [διάθεσιϛ]), related to one’s habitual way of being (hexis [ἕξιϛ]), see MORALS, I, PHRONÊSIS, VIRTÙ; for Stoic “diathesis” and the relation between physics, ethics, and grammar, see I/ME/MYSELF, Box 1. On the relation to naturalness implied by “disposition,” and its link with aesthetics, see also GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM; cf. GEMÜT. DOMINATION Etymologically, “domination” suggests the power of the master (dominus) over things (dominium, “property rights”), and even more, the power of the master over the slave (potestas dominica); cf. OIKONOMIA and ECONOMY, PROPERTY. “Domination” is, according to the RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française, an “authority which, accepted or not, exercises itself fully”; the language of law and political theory is faithful to this idea, since it uses “domination” to refer to an asymmetric relation, which may be legitimate, but which exists prior to the consent of which it may be the object; compare the significant hesitation of Max Weber’s translators over the German Herrschaft, which they render in French not only by domination but also by autorité; see HERRSCHAFT and MACHT; cf. AUTHORITY, POWER. v. DROIT, DUTY, LAW, LIBERTY, PRINCIPLE, RIGHT DUOLO, DOR (ROMANIAN) ENGLISH melancholy, homesickness, spleen, loneliness FRENCH désir, douloureux, deuil, tristesse, nostalgie GERMAN Sehnsucht ITALIAN duolo LATIN dolus PORTUGUESE saudade SPANISH duelo v. NOSTALGIA, and ACEDIA, DASEIN, MALAISE, MELANCHOLY, PATHOS, PLEASURE, SAUDADE, SEHNSUCHT, WUNSCH The Romanian word dor, like “spleen,” acedia, Sehnsucht, or saudade, is related to the notion of malaise, but gives it a particular meaning by turning it toward an object or toward being. It is a lyrical expression of the feeling of finitude, between folk metaphysics and philosophical reflection, and is self-consciously Romanian. It does not have an equivalent in French, where it is related to painful desire, mourning, sadness, melancholy, nostalgia, languor, the feeling of erotic desire, of internal malaise. The word is related to dol in Catalan, Provençal, and Old French (from the last of these come the expressions dolent, faire dol, avoir dol). The Romanian dor comes from dolus, a vernacular Latin noun referring to pain, suffering, mourning (from the classical Latin doleo, dolere, from which derive deuil in French, duelo in Spanish, and duolo in Italian). Two verbal and semantic branches come into Romanian from the single Latin root dolus: a dori (noun dorinţà), which means“to desire”; and a durea (noun durere), which means “to be in pain,” “to feel a physical pain.” 228 DOXA sort of personification, both basic and subtle, “hypostasis,” a term borrowed from Neoplatonism and the theology of the first Christian councils. This leads him to define dor as an impersonal force, almost malevolent and invincible, which comes to take over the soul, to subordinate it and, having joined with it, to become a sort of cosmic illness, a second nature or a material and spiritual alter ego for the individual. Dor as a hypostasis would thus be the equivalent of existence as the unrealization of being and would represent a sort of plea that gets lost, a hope to pierce the horizon and to make being dissolve into something unnamable and indefinite. For Noica, preoccupied with building up a Romanian philosophy beginning with certain terms and certain specific expressions, dor practically has the value of a key word, and all philosophical research in Romanian should, according to him, begin with “an introduction to dor” (see Noica, “Introducere la dor”). The term represents, in effect, the prototype of a fusion of contraries that does not take place through composition; it is a sort of organic fusion, or a whole that does not admit of being distinguished into parts. Thus, in dor, pain meets pleasure and pleasure is born without knowledge of pain. The translation of dor should therefore be “pleasure of pain,” as the translation of the German Sehnsucht should be, according to Noica, “the search for the unfindable.” If every word has a share of pain—the pain of not being able to say anything without an inexpressible part remaining, the pain at the fact that no word is genuine speech—then dor, with its straining after the infinite, belongs to the common and archaic basis from which thought has extracted both its means of expression and its reason for being. Anca Vasilu REFS.: Blaga, Lucian. “Despre dor” [On dor]. In Spaţiul mioritic [“Mioritic” space], 289–94. Bucarest: Minerva, 1985. First published in 1936. Bucur, Marin. Lucian Blaga, dor şi eternitate [Lucian Blaga, dor and eternity]. Bucarest: Albatros, 1971. Noica, Constantin. “Introducere la dor” [Introduction to dor]. In Creaţie şi frumos în rostirea româneascā [Creation and beauty in Romanian speech], 13–17. Bucarest: Eminescu, 1973. I. The Asymptotic Experience of Dor The word dor is at the center of a constellation of meanings related to the experience of a specific pain: that which one feels as a result of missing something or someone (a person or a cherished place), or as a result of an intimate hope (a desire for what one considers to be a deep fulfillment, for example, the return of a lost relative or friend, a return home, and so on). This experience may have physical manifestations and be made apparent by visible signs (expressions or clothing related to mourning, for example), but the origin of the pain and related feelings is not physical in nature. Dor is an affect of the soul, but it is not the expression of a vague feeling; it is always directed at an object, even if the latter is not always identified or definable, and it never expresses a state of passivity, of submission, of withdrawal into oneself or acceptance of one’s fate (as is the case with the Portuguese saudade, where the presumed solitude is also felt). It refers, on the contrary, to a straining after something, a mobilization of being that seeks actively to acquire or recover a missing object. The frustration felt as pain yields to the quest for a return (like the Greek nostos [νóστος]), a search that perpetually feeds itself. The closest term to dor is probably the German Sehnsucht. For both terms, the pain is a consequence of absence and is expressed as an impulse, impatience, hope, an internal need, a burning desire to overcome this absence or imperfection. Further, even though it refers to a hope or a despondence aimed at a more or less precise and discrete object, dor suggests the impossibility of attaining that object in this life. The tension is positive, but the desire remains unsatisfied and fulfillment impossible. The geometrical figure that best illustrates this tension is the asymptote. Dor thus feeds a feeling promising only failure, the impression of desire and the painful experience of the impossibility of attaining fullness. As a lyrical expression of the metaphysical sentiment of being, dor is the primeval witness in contemporary language of being qua being, that is, of finite being hoping to go beyond its limits. II. Dor in Romanian Philosophy The notion of dor is widespread in popular poetry and arises in many idiomatic expressions, such as dor de ducà (the desire to leave without a particular destination—to go wandering) and în dorul lelii (to accomplish something without a precise objective, and reluctantly). Dor has been lexicalized and has numerous variations and diminutives (doruleţ, doruţ), but it is, in fact, ahistorical, and is mainly discussed in the field of literary studies. However, because of its frequency, popularity, and connection with a sort of folk metaphysics, practically untranslatable and indefinable given its diversity of nuance, it has inspired philosophical reflection. Thus, in the poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga and the philosopher Constantin Noica, both very close in their thought to Martin Heidegger, we find developments of dor as an expression of the constitution of a self-consciousness and as a characterization of a peculiarly Romanian type of metaphysical research. Blaga, in “Despre dor,” determines the philosophical content of dor starting from the personifications given to the term in popular poetry and Romanian folklore. He calls this DOXA [δóξα] (GREEK) ENGLISH appearance, false appearances, reputation, expectation, glory, opinion, esteem, hallucination, received idea, prejudice v. APPEARANCE, BELIEF, PHÉNOMÈNE, and EIDÔLON, EPISTEMOLOGY, BOX 3, ERSCHEINUNG, GLAUBE, LOGOS, PHANTASIA, TO BE, TRUTH Doxa, from dokeô [δοϰέω], “to appear” (from the same family as dechomai [δέχομαι], “to receive, to welcome, to accept”; cf. Lat. decet), is one of the most polysemic Greek words. To understand the breadth of its meaning, we must combine what we call the objective and the subjective with a spectrum of values ranging from the most positive to the most negative: we can thus range, across different times and doctrines, from the opinion of mortals (subjective negative) to the glory of God (objective positive). Since the term has never ceased to be the subject of DOXA 229 gültig sein musste” (Parmenides). The problem is that talk with and about doxa is always double-sided: from the point of view of Truth and the One Being, it is ontologically contradictory (“they have chosen to name two forms, thinking that one might not be, in which they are mistaken. They have divided the structure into contraries”; 8.53–55); from the point of view of doxa and the kosmos [ϰόσμος], it is phenomenologically splendid and physically dominant, a vector of the beauty of the world captured in poems, myths, and forms of wisdom (cf. Cassin, Parménide). B. Doxa as metaxu, “intermediate” In developing an ontological and epistemological system in the Republic, Plato elaborates the distinction between “science” (epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη]), a faculty or capacity (dunamis [δύναμις]) that deals with being and knows it as it is (“to on gnônai hôs echei” [τὸ ὂν γνῶναι ὡς ἔχει]; 6.478a), and “opinion,” an intermediate (metaxu) faculty between knowledge and ignorance, which deals “neither with being nor with non-being” (478c), but grasps “what wanders in between” (to metaxu planêton [τὸ μεταξὺ πλανητόν]; 479d). Doxa thus constitutes a middle way between the way of non-being (that which is not an object at all, neither an object of science nor an object of opinion) and the way of being or the science of “ideas”: thus, “philosophers” look at auto to kalon [αὐτὸ τὸ ϰαλόν], “the beautiful itself ” (479e), while the mass of “philodoxes” (philodoxous [φιλοδόξους]) prefers only to look at “beautiful colors” (480a). The distinction is structured as a separation between the intelligible world and the sensible world, with the image of the line on which epistêmê and dianoia [διάνοια] jointly constitute noêsis [νόησις], which deals with ousia [οὐσία] (let us allow, in E. Chambry’s terms—it is a nest of untranslatables, however—that “science” and “discursive thought,” brought under the head of “intelligence,” aim at “essence”), while pistis [πίστις] and eikasia [εἰϰασία], brought under the head of doxa, deal with genesis [γένεσις] (“faith” and “conjecture,” forming “opinion,” aimed at “becoming”; 7.533e–534b; cf. 6, end). The Platonic phrase orthê doxa [ὀϱθὴ δόξα], “right opinion,” signals this intermediate status: “right opinion is intermediate between intelligence and ignorance” (metxu phronêseôs kai amathias [μεταξὺ φϱονήσεως ϰαὶ ἀμαθίας]; Symposium, 202a); unlike false opinion, it brings together good sensation with good thought (“en têi sunapsei aisthêseôs pros dianoian” [ἐν τῇ συνάψει αἰσθήσεως πϱὸς διάνοιαν]; Theaetetus, 195d), and is enough that it should be meta logou [μετὰ λόγου] (201c, accompanied by reason; but see LOGOS, Box 3) to become science. But, as doxa, it can only achieve a lesser truth and a lesser being. C. The endoxic The Aristotelian reworking of doxa proceeds by way of a re-evaluation of this world, the individual, the contingent, the probably, the persuasive, the common. There can be science, with definition and demonstration, only of the universal and necessary, agreed; but that is then to say, more positively, that there is doxa of the individual, which is at the level of “each” (to kath’hekaston [τὸ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστον]). There is doxa of what can be other than it is (“doxa esti tou endechomenou allôs echein” [δόξα ἐστὶ τοῦ ἐνδεχομένου ἄλλως philosophical working and reworking, the history of the senses of doxa is bound up with a good portion of the history of philosophy. I. Breadth of Meaning Doxa combines what a distinction between subjective and objective separates: the former being what one expects, what one believes, what one judges to be good (in Homer we find only apo doxês [ἀπὸ δόξης], “against expectation”; Iliad, 10.324, and Odyssey, 11.344), the latter being what appears, what seems to be the case. The range of meanings on each side covers the full range of values as well, from the most negative to the most positive: from hallucination (false opinion, imagination, conjecture) to the normative rightness of the accepted idea (expectation, esteem, conjecture, belief, dogma, reputation), and from deceptive appearance (illusion, false appearances) to appearance in all its splendor (phenomena, glory). The common translation of “opinion” obviously does not get all that across. II. Philosophical Elaborations Doxa has been constantly reworked and reappropriated from system to system. It constitutes, in fact, a sort of indicator for the history of philosophy. A. The alêtheia/doxa distinction Parmenides gets things started (see TRUTH). The goddess of the poem, for one thing, deploys a distinction between alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] and doxa, truth and opinion, to structure her revelation: “You must be instructed in everything, both of the untrembling heart of the persuasive truth [hêmen alêtheiês êtor (ἡμὲν ἀληθείης ἦτοϱ)], and of what appears to mortals [hêde brotôn doxas (ἡδὲ βϱοτῶν δόξας)], where there is no true belief [pistis alêthes (πίστις ἀληθής)]” (1.28–30); this is picked up again in 8.50–52: “I stop there the faithful speech [piston logon (πιστὸν λόγον)] for you and the thought about truth [êde noêma amphis alêtheiês (ἡδὲ νόημα ἀμφὶς ἀληθείης)]. Learn henceforth the opinions of mortals [doxas broteias (δόξας βϱοτείας)], by listening to the deceptive ordering [apatêlon (ἀπατηλὸν); see TRUTH, Box 7] of my words.” Furthermore, she makes all of the ambiguity of doxa manifest, both negative and positive: “You will also learn this: how the things which appear [ta dokounta (τὰ δοϰοῦντα)—neuter plural participle of dokein (δοϰεῖν)] must be in their appearing [chrên dokimôs—adverb derived from dokein, “as is fitting, honestly” according to RT: Dictionnaire grec-français, “really, genuinely” for the RT: LSJ—einai (χϱὴν δοϰίμως εἶναι)], those which through all penetrate all things” (1.31–32). We can gauge the adventurous despair of Parmenides’s translators by comparing the translations, all accurate and inaccurate at the same time. Thus, in French, Jean Beaufret gives us, “Apprends aussi comment la diversité qui fait montre d’ellemême devait déployer une présence digne d’être reçue” (Parménide: Le Poème); and Marcel Conche, “Tu n’en apprendras pas moins encore ceci: comment il était inévitable que les semblances aient semblance d’être” (Parménide: Le Poème; cf. Cassin, Parménide). German has more of an even match, but no less diverse. RT: DK gives us, “wie das ihnen Scheinende auf eine probehafte, wahrscheinlich Weise sein müsste”; Ernst Heitsch gives us, “wie das Geltende notwendigerwise 230 DRIVE which corresponds to the Hebrew kabod (though it is not found in the Bible), is often the personification of the “Presence of God” and evokes the mysticism of the celestial light. Barbara Cassin Charles Baladier (II, D) REFS.: Aristotle. Topics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, edited by J. Barnes, 167–277. Bollingen Series, 71. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Beaufret, Jean. Parménide: Le Poème. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Bringhurst, Robert, et al. Carving the Elements: A Companion to “The Fragments of Parmenides.” Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2004. Cassin, Barbara. Parménide, sur la nature ou sur l’étant: La langue de l’être? Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Conche, Marcel. Parménide: Le Poème: Fragments. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Heitsch, Ernst. Parmenides. Munich: Heimeran, 1974. Plato. The Republic. In Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Parmenides of Elea. Fragments: A Text and Translation. Edited by D. Gallop. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Translation by L. Tarán: Parmenides. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. ἔχειν]; Metaphysics Z, 15, 1039b34–1040a1). The object of doxa (to doxaston [τὸ δοξαστόν]) may be true and existing (“tina alêthê men kai onta” [τινὰ ἀληθῆ μὲν ϰαὶ ὄντα]), but it remains contingent (Posterior Analytics, 1.33.88b30–33). This is why opinion is defined as a grasping of immediate and nonnecessary premises (“hupolêpsis tês amesou protaseôs kai mê anagkaias” [ὑπόληψις τῆς ἀμέσου πϱοτάσεως ϰαὶ μὴ ἀναγϰαίας]; 89a3–4). These “premises in accordance with opinion” (ek ton kata doxan protaseôn [ἐϰ τῶν ϰατὰ δόξαν πϱοτάσεων]) serve for the construction of “dialectical syllogisms,” as opposed to scientific or demonstrative syllogisms (Prior Analytics, 1.46a8–10). Aristotle’s use of the word endoxon [ἔνδοξον] (literally, that which is “in doxa”) as a term for this type of premise is an innovation: “A syllogism is dialectical if it proceeds from probable premises [in Brunschwig’s translation; ‘from accepted ideas’ in Tricot’s translation]” (dialektikos de sullogismos ho ex endoxôn sullogizomenos [διαλεϰτιϰὸς δὲ συλλογισμὸς ὁ ἐξ ἐνδόξων συλλογιζόμενος]) Topics, 1.100a29–30; and he defines endoxa [ἔνδοξα] as distinct from “true and primary” propositions as “that which is accepted [ta dokounta] by all or by the greatest number, or by the wise [sophois (σοφοῖς)], and among the latter, either by all or the greatest number, or by the best known [gnôrimois (γνωϱίμοις)] and most respected [endoxois (ἐνδόξοις)]” (100b21–23). We see how ta endoxa, likely premises and received ideas, imply the doxa of the endoxoi, the opinions of illustrious thinkers. We may thus understand why Aristotle’s treatises should begin by the structured review of these opinions, which make up the history of the different disciplines: physics (Physics, 1), metaphysics (Metaphysics A), and so on; and how “doxography,” literally “the writing of opinions,” should become a genre of its own beginning with Theophrastus’s Phusikôn doxai (the Placita in Latin). D. The rays of divine glory The semantic high-point for doxa is in the biblical tradition, where the “glory” (kabod [בּוֹדָכּ [in Hebrew) of God is pronounced as soon to be manifested by the crushing of the Egyptians once the Hebrews have crossed the Red Sea: “In the morning, you will see the glory of God” (kai prôi opsesthe tên doxan tou Kuriou [ϰαὶ πϱωΐ ὄψεσθε τὴν δόξαν τοῦ Kυϱίου]) (Exod. 16:7). In the same book (33:18), Moses addresses this prayer to God: “Let me see your glory.” The New Testament mentions the spreading of God’s glory in the great events of the life of Jesus, especially his baptism (Luke 4:21) and his transfiguration (9:28f.). The disciples see in it the advance signs of “the arrival of the Son of Man in his glory” (Matt. 24:30; Mark 8:38). The glory or splendor of God is often mentioned in the passages of the New Testament or the patristics, especially the Eastern ones, which deal with the blessed vision of the divine essence. The Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas considers this vision to be inaccessible to created beings, however, and substitutes an understanding of the vision of divine glory as a simple radiance of the energies by which God communicates in his works (see SVET, Box 1). The bursting forth of the “Presence of God” in the world also occupies an important place in Rabbinic literature, where it is called Shekhinah. This Shekhinah, the name of DRIVE, INSTINCT, IMPULSE FRENCH pulsion GERMAN Trieb LATIN pulsio v. ANXIETY, ENTSTELLUNG, ES, FORCE, GENDER, GESCHLECHT, LEIB, LOVE, PATHOS, PLEASURE, SOUL, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG, WUNSCH The translation of the German psychoanalytic concept Trieb into French gave new life to the French word pulsion, derived from the Latin pulsus or pulsio and previously reserved for the physical domain, as the equivalent of force or thrust. Drawing on the romantic tradition (the life-force), on psychophysiology (measurable strength), and on biology (where Trieb designates instinct), Sigmund Freud’s Trieb made it possible to understand the physical transcription of the major somatic forces. Though the translation of Trieb as instinct was long standard in France, that was chiefly because the specificity of the Freudian notion had not been clearly defined: the object of a Trieb is not predetermined. The translation as pulsion was established in order to indicate that specificity. On the other hand, the various English translations (“instinct,” “drive,” and “instinctual drive”) remain independent of a precise theoretical choice: the choice of “drive,” a term that derives from the same proto-Germanic root as Trieb, may very well be accompanied by a biological reading of Freudian theory. I. The Old Use of the French Term Pulsion Despite a period of fluctuations and hesitations arising from the notion’s complexity, French adopted the term pulsion rather than instinct to translate the German word Trieb in Freud’s work. Pulsion, a technical term in the Freudian vocabulary, has become part of ordinary language, which may be explained by the popularization of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, it was not necessary to create a neologism to translate Trieb into French, because pulsion was already present in the language, DRIVE 231 interchangeably. However, he moves toward his own later concept of Trieb, first regarding the great needs of psychic activity, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (Entwurf einer Wissenschaftlicher Psychologie), a study dating from 1895 that was published after his death, and then in the Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung, 1900), where he mentions desire as a “driving force” (Triebkraft) necessary to the formation of dreams. Not until 1915 do we find precise definitions of Trieb in his work, in the metapsychological article “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (“Triebe und Triebschicksale”) and in a reworked paragraph of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie), whose first edition goes back to 1905. In this later version he writes: By an “instinct” is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a “stimulus,” which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of instinct is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of the instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus. (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie 1.5, in Gesammelte Werke, 5:67–68; trans. Strachey, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 34) The article “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” adds two elements to the definition of the Trieb, one relating to its source and the other to its end. First, it gives a name to the quantitative element in a drive, to its “motive factor, the sum total of force or the measure of the demand for work that it represents” (in Gesammelte Werke, 10:211; trans. Strachey, 14:110): this is der Drang, rendered in the first French translations as poussée. Here we have the action of impelling in its quantitative form, which Voltaire called pulsion. Freud explains, in the French version, that “ce caractère de poussée est l’essence même de la pulsion” (This driving-character is the very essence of the drive: Les pulsions et leurs destins, 32–33). The redundant nature of the formula is peculiar to the translation. In German, Trieb is an extension of Drang to the mind-body as a whole; in French, pulsion is initially used as a learned, technical form of poussée. Second, the same article indicates that the drive has an object. And the definition of the relation between the drive and its object has strongly influenced the choice of a term other than instinct to translate Trieb: “The object of the drive is that in which or by which the drive can attain its goal. It is what is most variable in the drive, but is assigned to it only by virtue of its ability to make satisfaction possible” (Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, trans. Strachey). although rarely used before the twentieth century. It is not found, for instance, in Jean-François Féraud’s Dictionnaire in 1788 (RT: Dictionnaire critique de la langue française), or in the 1890 RT: Dictionnaire général de la langue française du commencement du dix-septième siècle jusqu’à nos jours. On the other hand, it does appear in Jacob Stoer’s Grand dictionnaire français-latin (1625), in the sense of “action of impelling.” We find an occurrence in Voltaire with the same meaning: “La substance du feu, en entrant dans l’intérieur d’un corps quelconque le dilate en poussant en tout sens ses parties; or cette ‘pulsion’ . . .” (The substance of fire, entering the interior of any body, dilates it by impelling its parts in all directions. Now, this pulsion : Voltaire, Essai sur la nature du feu). Pulsion was thus used as a scientific doublet of poussée, probably because of its proximity to Latin. The term pulsion is in fact directly derived from Latin pulsum, the supine of pellere, which means “to put in motion, to impel, to repel.” Note that the substantive of pellere is pulsus. Pulsio, which means precisely “action of repelling,” is a late and rare usage (fourth century CE). Moreover, according to W. von Wartburg’s Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1959), pulsion does not come from pulsio but from a “scholarly derivation from the radical of pulsare, pulsare being an intensive form of pellere and meaning strike, impel violently.” II. The Meaning of Trieb We find this sense of “impel” in the meaning of the German Trieb, which derives from the verb treiben, whose general meaning is “to put in motion.” But why did the requirements of translating Freud’s works lead to reviving a disused term? As is often the case in German, we are dealing with a Germano-Latin doublet: Trieb is a word derived from a Germanic root that forms a doublet with the word of Latin origin, Instinkt, whose use began to spread in scientific literature only in the nineteenth century (in 1760, H. S. Reimarus entitled his book on animal instincts Triebe der Thiere). But as is also often the case, the two terms are not equivalent. Trieb is an old word in common use, whereas Instinkt is a learned word that has the precise meaning of “instinct” in biology, namely, “the innate tendency to determinate acts (depending on the species), executed perfectly without previous experience, and subject to the conditions of the environment” (RT: Le nouveau petit Robert, s.v.). Trieb has more senses that offer variations on a common theme, the action of driving or impelling: (1) a mechanical impulsion; (2) starting in the late eighteenth century, an internal impulse, exercised either on the organism (particularly the force that makes a plant “grow”) or on the mind, on the psychic apparatus. According to the 1984 edition of the Grimms’ German dictionary (RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch), the main meaning given for Trieb is “an internal force that impels, that puts in motion [innere treibende Kraft].” Very roughly, we can thus already say that German Instinkt contains the idea of a determinate object or action, whereas Trieb emphasizes the motive force that puts the organism or the psyche in motion. . III. Trieb in Freud’s Work In his translations of a few texts by Hippolyte Bernheim (1888, 1892), Freud uses Instinct (or Instinkt) and Trieb 232 DRIVE German romantic psychiatrists (notably J.C.A. Heinroth): “In founding a psychology incorporating the concept of the unconscious, the romantics used the word Trieb in the sense of a psychic life force” (Vermorel, “La pulsion de Goethe à Freud”). 3. The psychophysical dimension: the Project for a Scientific Psychology testifies to the importance of an energetic schema of physical origin applied to psychic functioning. Freud, through his teacher E. W. von Brücke, was connected with the psychophysical trend of the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially with Hermann von Helmholtz, who used the term Triebkraft to designate mechanical force (Vermorel). We can note, however, that Helmholtz’s school, beneath its apparently strict positivism, remained closely dependent on the Naturphilosophie that came out of F.W.J. Schelling in particular: the romantic inspiration thus seems central, and allows us to understand, for instance, Freud’s speculations on the death drive and his constant references to Goethe’s Faust. It is the precise meaning that Trieb acquires in Freud starting in 1915 that will enable us to follow the avatars of the sexual “drive,” especially in the form of “partial drives” (Partialtriebe). References to biology are not, of course, eliminated, but Freud no longer speaks of the drive’s determinate relation to an object. And the connection with biology seems still more problematic when Freud forms the hypothesis of a “death drive” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Thus Freud’s Trieb combines several dimensions: 1. The biological dimension: the reference to the body’s major needs, which indicates the biological nature of the drive, is constantly present. This is shown in the opening lines of the first edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which were never changed: “The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a ‘sexual instinct,’ on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition [Trieb nach Nahrungsaufnahme], that is, of hunger” (in Gesammelte Werke 5:33; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. Strachey). In his preface to the fourth edition, Freud speaks of a “part of the theory which lies on the frontiers of biology” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. Strachey). We can assume that he is alluding to the drive. 2. The romantic dimension: in the late eighteenth century, when Trieb acquired its meaning of “natural internal force acting on the mind and the body,” this term became a key concept in German romanticism. The relation to a determinate object was less important than the idea of multiple activities. In Goethe, who identifies multiple Triebe (Goethes Werke, vol. 47), we find Äußerungstrieb (drive to externalize), Lusttrieb (drive to pleasure), Nachahmungstrieb (drive to imitate), and Bildungstrieb (drive to education). Henri Vermorel emphasizes the importance of the term in the poets and naturalists (starting with Goethe), the philosophers (e.g., Johann Gottlieb Fichte), and the 1 TRIEB in Kant and Goethe v. ANIMAL, BILDUNG We find a trace of the distinction between Trieb and Instinkt in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In §83, Trieb is used to designate animal desire in man: “the despotism of desires [Begierden]. By these, tied as we are to certain natural things, we are rendered incapable even of choosing, while we allow those impulses [Triebe] to serve as fetters which nature has given us as guiding threads, that we should not neglect or injure the destination of our animal nature” (trans. Bernard). In a note to §90, Instinkt signifies the determined activity of the animal: “We then try at the same time to show that the ground of the artisan faculty of beasts [des tierischen Kunstvermögens], which we call instinct [Instinkt], specifically different as it is in fact from reason, has yet a similar relation to its effect (the buildings of the beaver as compared with those of men)” (trans. Bernard). But the distinction is not actually so sharp: in the nineteenth century, Trieb could be used in the precise sense of instinct as “innate tendency to specific acts,” and Instinkt could have the more general sense of “natural internal force” (Goethe to Schiller: “Last week I fell under the sway of a strange instinct [Vorige Woche bin ich von einem sonderbaren Instincte befallen worden]”). But the meanings remain distinct, and Trieb is not a simple doublet of Instinkt. In addition to its common meaning, in the eighteenth century, Trieb was used to Germanize a Latin expression, nisus formativus (the formative impulse), which designates living matter’s organizing principle, or, more precisely, the activity of organized matter in its formative operation. In §81 of the Critique of Judgment, which is about epigenesis and preformation, Kant cites the work of the epigeneticist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb (1781). He notes that Blumenbach distinguishes this “formative impulse” as “faculty of matter [Vermögen der Materie]” from the “merely mechanical formative power [bloß mechanische Bildungskraft]” (trans. Bernard). Bildungstrieb is rendered in A. Philonenko’s French translation (1986) as tendance formatrice and in A. J.-J. Delamarre’s translation (1985) as pulsion de formation. In his work on morphology, Goethe adopts this distinction: “The word ‘force’ [Kraft] refers first of all to something purely physical, or even mechanical, and what is to be organized on the basis of this matter remains for us obscure and incomprehensible. It was Blumenbach who invented the definitive and perfect expression by giving an anthropomorphic twist to the solution to the riddle and calling the subject of debate a nisus formativus, an impulse [Trieb], an intense activity that was supposed to be the actual principle of formation” (Goethe, Zur Morphologie). REFS.: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Zur Morphologie. In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Hans J. Becker, Gerhard H. Müller, John Neubauer, and Peter Schmidt, vol. 12. Munich: Hanser, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. A Critique of Judgment. Translated by John Henry Bernard. London: Macmillan, 1914. DRIVE 233 equivalent name in ordinary language. However, this kind of drive is to be postulated, and that is why the psychoanalytic science created by Freud has given the generic name of libido to the biological force that manifests itself in all the phenomena of sexuality. Freud’s originality seems to come down to having granted a preponderant place to the “sex drive,” and not to having given the concept of Trieb a meaning that is irreducible to its common biological meaning. We see that with the term pulsion being interpreted in a biological sense, instinct can be used in the rest of this text, and particularly in the title. Thus it was the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse that determined the use of pulsion to translate Trieb, a usage reaffirmed in the Œuvres complètes de Freud/Psychanalyse. Laplanche and Pontalis stress the difference between Trieb and the Freudian use of Instinkt, which designates “a behavior determined by heredity and appearing in an almost identical form in all individuals of a single species” (RT: Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, s.v. Pulsion). According to them, translating Trieb by instinct or tendance would be tantamount to “blurring the originality of the Freudian conception, notably the thesis of the relatively indeterminate character of the motivating impulse, the notions of the contingency of the object, and the variability of the goals” (RT: Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, s.v. Instinct). . V. English Translations: “Instinct” and “Drive” Regarding English translations of Trieb, we must once again distinguish several questions. From a strictly terminological point of view, “drive” is the equivalent of Trieb: the two words come from the Gothic dreiban. Although “drive” well expresses the idea of movement (“to drive” retains mainly the first, physical meaning of treiben: “to set in motion”), the meaning of “natural internal force,” which was established by German romanticism, appears very late in English: it is still absent from the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The 1980 edition mentions a psychological meaning that amounts to making “drive” a synonym of “instinct,” a word that has long been used to designate an innate tendency of living beings to perform certain acts: “What instinct hadst thou for it?” (Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4.299). “Instinct” is the term adopted by James Strachey, the main translator of the English version of Freud’s complete works (1953–66). He explains the reasons for this choice in his “Notes on Some Technical Terms Whose Translation Calls for Comment” (Standard Edition, 1:xxiv–xxv). (His justification is itself, once again, an interpretation: “There seems little doubt that, from the standpoint of modern biology, Freud used the word ‘Trieb’ to cover a variety of different concepts” [ibid.]). But is this point of view the only pertinent one? Didn’t Freud give a precise definition of what he meant by Trieb? We must note that, unlike the French pulsion, “drive” is a very common word (especially in American English), but one whose psychobiological use is recent. It is not rigorously distinguished from “instinct.” We can observe an odd effect of intersection: Strachey’s note is contemporary with the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, but its meaning and its effect were inverse. The Vocabulaire definitively established the IV. French Translations of Freud’s Trieb The complexity of Freud’s notion explains the hesitations of French translators. We can say of Freud what Charles Du Bos said of Goethe: “To render all the essential connotations of the word Trieb in Goethe, we would need our three words instinct, besoin, and propulsion, not to mention impulsion” (cited in Vermorel, “La pulsion de Goethe à Freud”). The task is to render the idea of motive force and tendency without prejudging the question of the innate or acquired nature of the process (for Freud, while partial sexual drives are innate, their vicissitudes are largely connected with the individual’s history, but only in part, because Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality emphasizes the hereditary character of the psychic dikes—disgust, shame, and so on—erected against partial pulsions during the so-called latency period). Besoin is reserved for Bedürfnis, and impulsion for Impuls. But how has the term Trieb itself been translated into French? Although translations of Freud into French began very late—with one exception, not before 1920—the problems of standardizing their vocabulary were raised quite early. Shortly after the creation of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (1926), a linguistic committee was set up to standardize the French psychoanalytic vocabulary. In the review of the meeting held on 31 May 1927, we read: “At M. Hesnard’s suggestion, the term pulsion is unanimously adopted to translate Trieb” (Revue Française de Psychanalyse, no. 1 [1927]). But before the 1967 publication of RT: Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, which established this terminological choice, the committee’s decision had little effect. The discussion here will be limited to the translation of two major texts. The 1934 French edition of Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, translated by Blanche Reverchon (1923), ignores the committee’s decision to use pulsion. Trieb is rendered as instinct (in the most “biological” expressions) or tendance (notably when Freud gives a rigorous definition of the concept); sometimes the word is not translated at all (thus sexuelle Triebkräfte is rendered as forces sexuelles). In 1936, Marie Bonaparte and Anne Berman translated Triebe und Triebschicksale as Les pulsions et leurs destins. But the title is misleading. There are some surprising hesitations: “Comment l’instinct se comporte-t-il par rapport à l’excitation? Rien ne nous empêche d’intégrer le concept de la pulsion dans celui de l’excitation, ni de dire que l’instinct est une excitation au sens psychique” (How does instinct behave in relation to excitation? Nothing prevents us from including the concept of drive within that of excitation, nor from saying that instinct is an excitation in the psychic sense: Les pulsions, 30). But the term instinct was later used almost exclusively. We can see which interpretation of the notion of Trieb prevailed in France by following a theoretical study by Bonaparte that appeared in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse in 1934, entitled “Introduction à la théorie des instincts.” Although it paraphrases the text of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, it interprets it in a clearly biological way: People have long said that the two great instincts that motivate living beings are hunger and love. But whereas the term “hunger” itself already implies the dynamic notion of a biological drive [pulsion], the drive [pulsion] that is the source of amorous tendencies does not have an 234 DRIVE 2 The libido as the driving force of sex life Whereas the adjective libidineux (from Lat. libidinosus, frequent in Cicero and Seneca) appeared in French in the eighteenth century (in the Roman des sept sages) and was adopted by the French Academy in 1762, the substantive libido appeared in French, as in other European languages, only in the nineteenth century, as a term in the vocabulary of medical psychology and sexology, especially in German. In the early twentieth century, it took its place as one of the untranslatable terms in psychoanalysis, with the sense of “the driving force of sex life” that Freud gave it, for example, in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). It was around this notion that Freud developed the stages of his theories of the drives and of the role of sexuality in the psyche. In 1905, in the first of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he explained the choice of this word by analogy with the instinct of nutrition that is called hunger. “Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word ‘hunger,’ but science makes use of the word ‘libido’ for that purpose” (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, trans. Strachey). In a note added to this study in 1910, Freud remarks: “The only appropriate word in the German language, Lust, is unfortunately ambiguous, and is used to denote the experience both of a need and of a gratification” (ibid.; see PLEASURE). The Latin libido (or lubido), which derives from the impersonal libet (or lubet), with the meaning of “it pleases,” and which signifies “desire, craving, and particularly sensual and erotic desire” (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. lubet), comes from an “Indo-European root that was probably popular in nature,” notably from the Sanskrit lubh (lúbhyati, “he desires”), and is found in German Liebe and English “love.” Present particularly in Cicero, who prefers it to cupiditas as a translation of the Greek epithumia [ἐπιθυμíα] (desire), in Ovid the term libido seems to suggest the idea that such a form of desire is in some way a prerogative of feminine sexuality. That is an idea that reappears in German Sexualwissenschaft when it makes the clitoris the sedes libidinus (cf. P. Kaufmann, in Encyclopædia Universalis, s.v. Libido), whereas Freud combats it by writing that “there is only one libido that is put in the service of both the masculine and the feminine sexual function,” and that although the connection conventionally made between virility and activity inclines us to describe it as virile, it is nonetheless not without passive goals (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, in Standard Edition, trans. Strachey, vol. 22). The libido occupies a major place in Christian moral theology, especially in Saint Augustine, that deeply influenced later periods on this point. Of the three terms cupiditas, concupiscentia, and libido, which are not, moreover, univocal, Augustine makes the latter a synonym of concupiscentia carnis, that is, of sexual desire, except when it is specified that the libido has an object other than a sexual one (such as drink, money, or power). But the principal characteristic of this Augustinian libido is that it is a desire morally unbalanced by a vehemence that perverts the will. It becomes a pleasure in evil that proceeds from the first pleasure that humanity experienced in original sin and that arouses the appetite for new sins, the personal sins of every descendent of Adam through which “the obscene areas of the body are excited.” Despite his insistence on the moral disorder of the will that the libido represents in his view, in connecting it essentially with the sex drive, which has its own dynamism, Augustine nonetheless appears to be closer to Freud than are the sexologists of the late nineteenth century, and especially than Carl Jung. The former—figures such as Albert Moll, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing—used the Latin expression libido sexualis, which was considered more “scientific,” to designate the subject of a new discipline that sought to describe the characters, classified as either normal or pathological, of an “instinct” connected with biology or with culture in general. As for Jung, whereas Freud’s libido is the desire for an object whose enjoyment constitutes the goal of the sex drive, in his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), he makes it a completely desexualized tendency turned toward the world and not toward an object of erotic satisfaction, open to the future rather than determined by the subject’s past, assimilated to a kind of élan vital, and reduced to a simple “interest” of an existential nature. In Freud, the libido, which is identified with the energy of the sex drive, is cathected on objects in whose investment it can change at will, just as it can also change its goal, as in sublimation. In reality, it is through this libido understood in the sense of an appetite for an object throughout a series whose initial moment goes back to the “first helping presence,” that of the nursing mother, that Freud, despite the importance—secondary, in fact—that he accords to the “libido of the self,” opposes most radically Jung’s theory, which is based on “introversion,” that is, the withdrawal of the libido toward the subject’s inner world. And even when he posits a new dualism between the life-force and the death-drive and assimilates the libido to the Eros of the poets and philosophers, the author of Beyond the Pleasure Principle retains all of the life-force’s power in its Latin form, which renders the universality of the concept of sexuality and therefore does not require transcription into other languages. In this respect, by retaining the Latin term, Freud subverted the old jargon of the specialists. He made the libido the focus of a scandal that began in 1910 with the multiple forms of resistance with which psychoanalysis met in each country, where it was always and everywhere described as a pansexualist doctrine: “Too ‘Germanic’ in the eyes of the French, too ‘Jewish’ for Nazism, too ‘bourgeois’ for communism—that is, as for Jung, always too ‘sexual’” (RT: Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, s.v.). Charles Baladier REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940–52. Translation by James Strachey: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66. choice of an unusual word to translate a complex concept, on the borderline between the biological, the psychological, and the physical. All subsequent French translations have adopted this choice. Strachey’s choice was immediately criticized. Before the Standard Edition, English translations rendered Trieb by “drive,” “instinct,” or “impulse” (E. Jones, A. A. Brill, H. W. Chase, J. Rivière). If we examine the Psychoanalytic Quarterly over an extended period, from the 1940s to the 1980s, we find three terms used to translate (or to refuse to translate) Freud’s Trieb: “instinct,” “instinctual drive,” and “drive.” We should not conclude from this that Freud’s definition and the distinction between Instinkt and Trieb are not taken into account, as is shown by the following: DROIT 235 Ornston, Darius Gray, Jr. “Freud, ‘l’école de Helmholtz’ et la médecine romantique.” In Freud: Judéité, lumières et romantismes, edited by Henri Vermorel, Anne Clancier, and Madeleine Vermorel. Lausanne, Switz.: Delachaux-Niestlé, 1995. Solms, Mark. “Controversies in Freud Translation.” Psychoanalysis and History 1 (1999): 28–43. Steiner, Riccardo. “A World Wide International Trade Mark of Genuineness?—Some Observations on the History of the English Translation of the Work of Sigmund Freud, Focusing Mainly on His Technical Terms.” International Review of Psychoanalysis 14 (1987): 33–102. Vermorel, Henri. “Dossier: Freud traduit et traducteur.” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 50 (July 1986): 1231–96. . “La pulsion de Goethe à Freud.” Bulletin du Groupe Lyonnais 16 (1989): 13–27. Voltaire. Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation. In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, vol. 22, Mélanges 1. Paris: Garnier, 1879. Wartburg, Walther von. Franzözisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Basel, Switz.: Zbindinden, 1959. Every attempt to apply the idea of instinct to human beings was made difficult by the fact that since Antiquity, it has been thought that animals in particular are guided in their actions by instincts. So that in the nineteenth century instinct was generally conceived not only in its physiological and hereditary dimension, but also as more specifically animal than human. In English, the term was ambiguous. But scientists writing in German, like Freud, were capable of distinguishing Instinkt, the instinct of animals, from Trieb, the drive in humans, the latter term referring to the idea of impulse and implying, up to a certain point, thought processes: its nature is thus not purely automatic or reflex. (Burnham, “Medical Origins,” 196–97) The theoretical recognition of Freud’s Trieb thus does not necessarily affect language (e.g., a work that appeared in 1970 has the title Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts of the Theory of Instincts). The situation is comparable to that in France before Laplanche and Pontalis, under Jacques Lacan’s influence, emphasized the specificity of Freud’s concept and the necessity of a translation that does it justice. It is striking that in the articles published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, the terminological variation is accompanied by an interpretation of Trieb in the most diverse senses: ego-psychology, behaviorism, and even Pavlovian conditioning. Alexandre Abensour REFS.: Bonaparte, Marie. “Introduction à la théorie des instincts.” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 7, no. 3 (1934): 417–52. Burnham, John C. “The Medical Origins and Cultural Use of Freud’s Instinctual Drive Theory.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1974): 193–217. Frank, George. “Triebe and Their Vicissitudes: Freud’s Theory of Motivation Reconsidered.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 20 (2003): 691–97. Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers. Edited by Ernest Jones. Translated by Joan Rivière. 5 vols. London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1924–50. . Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940–52. Translation by James Strachey: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66. . The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A. A. Brill. London: W. H. Allen, 1913. . Œuvres complètes de Freud/Psychanalyse. Translated by A. Bourguignon, P. Cotet, and J. LaPlanche. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. . “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.” Translated by H. W. Chase. American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910): 180–225. . Les pulsions et leurs destins. Translated by Marie Bonaparte and Anne Berman. Revue Française de Psychanalyse 9, no. 1 (1936). . Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses. Translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1910. . Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory. Translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1910. . Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000. . Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité. Translated by B. Reverchon. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1934. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1828–42. Mijola, Alain de, ed. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. Mills, Jon. “Clarifications on Trieb: Freud’s Theory of Motivation Reinstated.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 21 (2004): 673–77. DROIT Droit comes from directus, “in a straight line, without deviation,” from dirigere, “to trace paths,” then “to trace the path,” from the root *reg’-, which indicates movement in a straight line, and which is also the source of règle (regula) and roi (rex). This metaphor of rectitude is found in most European languages (Eng. “right,” Ger. Recht). Droit today refers to a body of rules considered to be just or legitimate that link the legal domain to the moral domain, as is especially visible in the English “right”; see RIGHT/JUST/GOOD. I. Droit and Law In Greek, the originally geometrical concept orthotês [ὀρθότηϛ], “straightness,” is strictly logical or moral in its extension; see TRUTH and THEMIS. Even though dikê [δίϰη] can be used to refer to the same thing as jus (what one applies when rendering a judgment), the network of law, justice, and right is only established later, in Latin—lex, jus, and directum—a crucial component of the Roman Empire, which considers itself to have a proprietary claim over jus; see LEX, and LAW, TORAH. See also AUTHORITY, JUSTICE [FAIR, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD]. II. Droit, Droits, État de Droit Topics of interest include the relationship between law (droit naturel, droit positif), rights (droits de l’homme, droit des minorités), and the rule of law (l’Etat de droit, Rechtsstaat), as reflected in different histories and national traditions; see, besides LEX, which provides the matrix of principal distinctions, CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVIL SOCIETY, JUSTICE, RULE OF LAW; cf. CIVILTÀ, STATE [POLIS, STATO]. III. Droit, Duty, Fact 1. Droit arises in morality as related to permission and promising, in counterpoint to duty and debt; see DUTY, SOLLEN, WILLKÜR; cf. ALLIANCE, DESTINY, OBLIGATION, PARDON. 2. The legal question “Quid facti/quid juris?” (What is the matter of fact, what is the matter of law?) is echoed in the moral distinction between being and how one ought to be, which cuts across a grasping and an appreciation of the real, and of the requirements that demand satisfaction; see CLAIM, MATTER OF FACT, REALITY, RES, TATSACHE; cf. ES GIBT, FACT, IL Y A, SACHVERHALT, TO BE. v. MORALS, SOCIETY 236 DRUGOJ DRUGOJ [другой] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH the other, others v. AUTRUI, MITMENSCH and I/ME/MYSELF, LOVE, POSTUPOK, RUSSIAN, SAMOST’, SOBORNOST’, STRADANIE, SVOBODA, TRUTH In Russian, the numerical distinction between odin [один] (the one) and drugoj [другой] (the other) implies proximity: drugoj, “other, second,” is formed from the root drug, “friend, comrade.” Thus, in philosophy, in Florensky and Bakhtin, drugoj has the connotation of “friend, loved one, philos [φίλоϛ].” I. The Semantic Constellation The Old Slavic root drug is still found in most Slavic languages: in the Russian drug [друг], the Polish druh, “friend,” the Serbo-Croatian drug, “companion, comrade,” the Czech druh, “species, kind.” It has in addition a number of derived forms that express, in one way or another, the idea of association: Russian družba [дружба], “friendship,” Serbo-Croation družba, “organization, group, coterie,” Czech družice, “satellite,” Polish družyna, “team, detachment,” Ukranian družyna [дружuнa], “spouse,” etc. (see RT: A Dictionary of Slavic Word Families, 109–11). Most etymological dictionaries link the Old Slavic drug with the Indo-European root *dhrugh, “to be firm, solid,” and *dhreu, “firm, faithful” (see, for example, RT: Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language, 198; Etymologičny, 2: 134). Among the terms with the same origin, we find the German trauen, the English “trust” and “truth,” the Greek drus [δρῦϛ], “tree, oak” (cf. “tree,” Slavonic drevo [древо], “tree,” dryad, etc.—see RT: Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1). The secondary sense of drug, as a numerical pronoun and adjective, was developed by way of the expression “drug druga” (one another). This kind of development, from a primary sense of the root, “friend” (amicus), toward the sense of “other” (alius) and of “second” (secundus) by inversion, is a widespread phenomenon in Slavic languages (see RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka, 543; Etymologičny, vol. 2). The word drug in modern Russian refers to “a person related to another by mutual trust, devotion, friendship” (see RT: Ètimologičeskij slovar’slavianskykh jazykov, vol. 5). In fact, the simple numerical distinction between odin [один] (the one) and drugoj (the other) implies in Russian proximity rather than externality or difference. That is why in philosophy drugoj connotes not only difference but also intimacy and friendship. II. Drugoj as a Personalist Term Philosophy has often taken advantage of this unique linguistic feature. Thus, Paul Florensky, in The Pillar and the Ground of Truth, claims that in družba (friendship) a person goes beyond his own limits and discovers another (drugoj)—a friend, drug. Florensky compares the Russian drug and the Greek philos [φίλοϛ]; he writes that družba is based on “the love of friendship” or “friendly love” (družeskaja ljubov’ [дружеская любовь]). According to Florensky, the love of friendship is “the love that includes a part of erôs [ἔρωϛ], of philia [φιλία] and agapê [ἀγάπη], which the Ancients attempted to indicate by the compound philophrosunê, [φιλοφροσύνη] (ibid.). Philophrosunê, translated by “benevolence” or “good mood,” is formed from philophroneô [φιλοφρονέω], “to think, to feel philia (“love/friendship”; see LOVE).” A common life of friendship “means that joy (radost’ [радость]) and suffering (stradanie [страдание]; see STRADANIE) are common” (ibid.); the soul (duša [душа]) itself is shared between friends. For Florensky, družba is the discovery of another I (drugogo ja [другого я]) in a friend (v druge [в друге]) (ibid.). Similarly, Bakhtin, in his early work, puts the relationship between ja [я] (I) and drugoj (another) at the center of his personalist aesthetics. “To contemplate aesthetically means to refer an object to the valuative plane of the other” (Bakhtin, “K folosofii postupka”). The task of the author (avtor [автор]) consists in finding “an essential approach to life from outside” (izvne [извне])” (Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroj”). To do this, he must see in his drugoj (in the heroic character of the novel) what the drugoj is incapable of seeing in himself. The author must complete and perfect the life of the hero until it forms a totality. He only succeeds, however, if he approves with a love (ljubov’ [любовь]) that accepts all (priemlet vsü [приемлет всё]), the drugoj as a living and mortal [смертный] human being. The aesthetic vision of Bakhtin is a sort of creator’s love, “loving contemplation,” a compound of philia and theôria [θεωρία]. “Only love is capable of being aesthetically productive; only in correlation with the loved is fullness of the manifold possible.” In this way the relationship of philophrosunê to drugoj, which makes no judgment, can achieve the meaning of a universal aesthetic principle. Andrij Vasylchenko REFS.: Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Avtor i geroj èstetičeskoj deiatel’nosti.” In Èstetika slovesnogo tvorčestva. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979. Written in the 1920s. Translation by V. Liapunov and K. Brostrom: “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, edited by M. Holquist and V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. . “K folosofii postupka.” In Filosofija i sociologija nauki i texniki [Philosophy and sociology of science and technology]. Moscow: Nauka, 1986. Written at the beginning of the 1920s. Translation by V. Liapunov: Towards a Philosophy of the Act, edited by V. Liapunov and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Florensky, Paul. The Pillar and the Ground of Truth. Translated by B. Jakim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. DUENDE (SPANISH) ENGLISH spirit, wit, charm, spell, cunning v. DEMON [DAIMÔN], and DEVIL, GOD, GRACE, INGENIUM, LEGGIADRIA, MÊTIS, OIKONOMIA, PIETAS, RELIGIO The Spanish word duende, marked by folklore and by its regional origins, does not have a stable definition, although more and more it becomes clearly related to the demonic and to poetic creativity. For approximations, we need to use two different registers, one more archaic, which is related to the will o’ the wisp, goblins, and sprites; the other more figurative, which is related to notions of charm, enchantment, and spells but also to grace. The noun duende appears in Leonese in the thirteenth century with the meaning “master [of the house],” from DUENDE 237 become somewhat frozen in the dictionaries, but it nevertheless flourished in a region of Spain with which it had a deep affinity: Andalusia. In his famous lecture entitled Play and Theory of the Duende, given in Havana in 1933, Federico García Lorca, himself possessed by a duende, that is, by the pure genius of speech, song, and music or dance that is expressed in the cante jondo or cante flamenco, declared: “Throughout Andalusia, people constantly speak of duende and detect it as soon as it is manifested with an accurate instinct.” And, taking up Goethe’s and Eckermann’s idea according to which “the demonic is what is insoluble by intelligence and reason,” the poet defined duende as a “mysterious power which everyone feels and no philosopher can explain.” He added: The duende, then, is a power, not a work; it is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, “The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.” Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation. The duende I am talking about is the dark, shuddering descendant of the sprightly marble-and-salt demon of Socrates, the one who angrily scratched him on the day he swallowed the hemlock, and of that melancholy demon of Descartes, a demon who was small as a green almond and who sickened of circles and lines and escaped down the canals to listen to the songs of blurry sailors. After evoking the awakening of the duende, under several forms, “in the furthest reaches of blood,” and after distinguishing it from the muse or the angel, García Lorca concluded his talk with these words: Where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things. With that, in the duende’s going from the home, of which, according to its initial meaning, it is the master, over to the “furthest reaches of blood,” which it inhabits in secret, it merely, so to speak, changes location; it remains the master of the domain, always present, always absent— the ungraspable genius of all creation. Bernard Sesé REFS.: Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. La dama duende. Madrid: Maria de Quiñones, 1636. First published in 1629. . The Phantom Lady. Translated by J. Nelson. Edited by D. Beecher. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2002. García Lorca, Federico. Play and Theory of the Duende. Translated by Christopher Maurer. In In Search of Duende. New York: New Directions, 1998. Mercadal, Juan Antonio. El duende especulativ, sobre la vida civil. Madrid, 1761. Pérez Galdós, Benito. Los duendes de la camarilla. Episodios nacionales 4. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007. duen (de casa), derived from dueño (master, owner), which itself comes from the Latin dominus (master, lord). In fifteenth-century Castilian, it sometimes has the meaning of “mischievous spirit,” but more commonly that of a “spirit which haunts the house.” It became widespread in this popular sense, as shown by RT: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611): “Duende: one of the spirits who fell with Lucifer , of whom some stayed at the surface of the Earth. They have a habit of frightening people by appearing in houses, mountains, and caves, taking on a fantastical body.” A variety of legends appeared concerning these evil spirits: they guard mysteriously buried treasures; they fight greedy men; they have a possibility of becoming all-powerful. It was even claimed, for revenge, for gain, or as a joke, that certain houses were indeed haunted by a duende. An evil spirit of this sort is related to local genii, lemures, larvae, lares, and penates of Roman mythology. In RT: Tesoro de las dos lenguas española y francesa (1607), Oudin, the interpreter for King Henry IV of France, defines it thus: “Goblin, sprite, wisp, spirit which travels through houses at night. In jargon, the rounds [that is, the rounds of argousins who burst in without warning].” RT: Diccionario de autoridades (1726) gives an unexpected etymology for the word (the Ar. douar [ُّدوار” ,[ house,” is given as the source) but nonetheless offers a precise report of the meaning that was accepted from then on: “Species of goblin or demon who is so called because it usually infects houses.” This meaning is indeed the one that Calderón de la Barca uses, with humor, in his comedy entitled La dama duende (1620), in which the heroine plays a dazzling game of amorous hide-and-seek. In the eighteenth century, with the rise of the press, the word became the title of an eclectic publication by a certain Juan Antonio Mercadal, whose identity is unknown: El duende especulativo, sobre la vida civil (The speculative spirit, on civil life; 1761). In the nineteenth century, no doubt inspired by this example, the romantic writer José Mariano de Larra founded the short-lived magazine Duende satìrico del día (Feb.–Dec. 1828), to which he was in fact the only contributor. RT: Diccionario nacional ó gran diccionario clásico de la lengua española, by R. J. Dominguez, notes the following sense, henceforth established: “Spirit that, according to the common people, resides in certain houses, worrying the inhabitants and causing a great amount of noise and destruction at night.” He adds two expressions that are still in use today: tener duende (to be preoccupied by something), and parecer un duende, andar como un duende (to spring up like a devil). Later, the word acquires a more and more figurative sense. The satirical meaning takes a virulent turn in one of B. Pérez Galdós’s historical novels, Los duendes de la camarilla, which describes the corruption of the regime and the wild political intrigues under Isabella’s reign on the eve of the Revolution of 1868. The 1956 edition of the dictionary of the Real Academia Española takes over the definition of R. J. Domínguez word for word but adds a new meaning, which is fundamental: that of “mysterious and ineffable charm.” This last one is a regional meaning, but it became firmly established. The meaning of duende had 238 DUTY DUTY, DEBT FRENCH devoir, dette GERMAN Schuld, schuldig sein, fallen, müssen, sollen ITALIAN debito, dovere LATIN debitum, debere, fallere SPANISH deuda, deber v. DESTINY, DROIT, ENTSTELLUNG, JUSTICE, OBLIGATION, PARDON, SOLLEN, TRUTH, VALUE, WILLKÜR In many European languages, both Romance and Germanic, the verbs or nouns that evoke the idea of duty (for example, dovere and debito in Italian, deber and deuda in Spanish, “debt” in English [det and dette in Middle English]), coming from the Latin verb debere and the noun debitum, give rise to ambiguity that connects three distinct meanings: debt, that is, the fact of being “indebted” to someone, obligation (“I must [legally or in good conscience]”), and finally evaluation, presupposition, or reckoning (“He ought to have received it by now”). In some languages this equivocity becomes more complicated. In German for example, while müssen is an auxiliary verb (related to the English “must”) that indicates the fact of being subject to necessity or an unavoidable obligation, a different verb—sollen—is used to express moral obligation or eventuality, probability, or approximation. The latter does not, however, directly express the meaning of being in debt, even though it is literally present in the phrase ein Soll haben, which means “to have a debt.” Additionally, the idea of debt is combined in German with the idea of fault, such that the two notions are both expressed by the same noun, Schuld, just as the adjective schuldig means both guilty and indebted—even though, among the words derived from Schuld, some relate almost exclusively to the notion of debt (like schulden, “to be indebted”; Entschuldung, “repayment of debts”), and others exclusively to the notion of fault (Entschuldigung, “to excuse, demand pardon”; Schuldhaftigkeit, guilt; entschuldbar, excusable, pardonable), and others like Schuldigkeit, to the idea of obligation or duty in the strict sense. I. The Combined Notions of Obligation, Probability, and Debt For languages in which the word for duty covers not only obligation or simple possibility but also the notion of debt, it is possible to translate wordplay that turns on these meanings from one to another. Charles Malamoud opens one of his remarkable studies on the notion of debt with a brief exchange between Sancho and Tosillos in Don Quixote. Tosillos says to Sancho: “Sin duda, este tu amo, Sancho amigo, debe de ser un loco [No doubt, friend Sancho, your master must be crazy].” Sancho replies, “Como debe? No debe nada a nadie. [What do you mean must? He owes nothing to no one.].” Malamoud notes that this ambiguity exists in English as much as in Romance languages (but by playing with the neighboring verbal forms ought and to owe), as well as in German and even Russian. In most of our languages, this is explained by the semantic evolution of the Latin verb habeo, which comes from de-habeo and which means “to have [something] that has been received from someone.” Whence debitum (what is “due”), then debitor, which is opposed to creditor. And as the Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine by Ernout and Meillet points out, “in the later period, the sense of obligation had a tendency to weaken such as to form only a sort of future periphrastic or introduce a hypothesis.” These different meanings of the Latin verb debere thus found their way into French, but appeared in what was in a way a reverse sequence, the stages of which are given by RT: DHLF: “[T]he idea of obligation, necessity (842), its weakening into the future (around 1050) indicating probability, wish or intention (1080), as well as the idea of owing something to someone (before 1188).” We should note, however, that there are some ways of expressing the idea of “must-ness” in the sense of probability that do not relate to debere. In Italian, for example, the future tense is used: in “Sarà felice [He must be happy].” It is in German, however, that the vocabulary related to the notion of “duty” is especially interesting. The fact that different senses of the notion of necessity are expressed by two distinct verbs, sollen and müssen, can lead to difficulties of translation. There was a question, for example, as to how to translate into French the title of one of Arnold Schönberg’s A capella choruses opus 27 (1926): Du sollst nicht, du musst. Illustrating the composer’s return to the Jewish faith, the work defines that faith as forbidding all representation in the following way: “You must not [Du sollst nicht] make images of the Divinity; it is necessary for you [du musst] to cleave to the Spirit.” In reality, ich soll, which comes from sollen (“must” in the sense of “must be”), functions in the mode of giving positive or prohibitive orders, and means “I have an obligation to.” This obligation may itself derive from an understood Schuld or from a debt to be repaid, or from a mistake to be rectified. On the other hand, ich muss comes from müssen, which also means “must,” but implies a duty understood as a necessity deriving the idea of requirement, that is, to stay within the same etymological domain, from an idea of a defect to be repaired or a lack to be filled (see WILLKÜR). Further, when Kant asks the second question of his philosophical program (“What must I do?”), he uses the verb sollen: Was soll ich tun? Similarly, when he gives himself a moral imperative that escapes from the “pathology” of human interests and so derives only from the law of “respect” (and in which Nietzsche will see, like Sade, an “imperative of cruelty”), he takes care to formulate it in the mode of sollen: Du sollst, and not Du musst (which would appeal to a constraint belonging to the order of necessity or need). In addition, the idea of debt combined with that of obligation presents an interesting peculiarity in German, as Malamoud points out: “[T]here is an echo to the verb sollen, ‘devoir’ (here expression of the modality of probability), in order to express the notion of ‘being in debt,’ not from another construction or another form of the same verb, but from the expression ein Soll haben, ‘to owe, to have a debit’; in accounting, in effect, Soll is the amount owed as opposed to the amount possessed” (“Dette [Anthropologie]”). We may also note, to return to Kant, that the idea of obligation may be rendered in German by the abstract noun Schuldigkeit, corresponding to Schuld, which means both “transgression” and “debt.” In effect, while we generally translate Kant’s Verbindlichkeit (from binden, to bind), by “obligation” (from Lat. ligare, “to bind,” see RELIGIO), some Germanists suggest using “obligation” to translate Schuldigkeit, which literally contains the idea of a fundamental guilt, which itself becomes a source of obligation (see Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Muller and M. Weigelt; for the relationship between the formulations of debt, transgression, and obligation, see R. B. Onians, Origins of European Thought). DUTY 239 duty and some of which express the future.” He adds that “we can therefore suppose that the three names [of the Norns] appeal respectively to the past, the present, and the future” (“The Uncanny”). The fact that Schuld in German has the double meaning of “debt” and “transgression” means that we must look to the context in order to know which meaning is at issue in a given occurrence. Still, we may note that Nietzsche, attacking the “genealogists of morals” for their ignorance of philology, distinguishes the two meanings while explaining that “the concept of Schuld [transgression], for example, the fundamental concept of morality, derives from the very material concept of Schulden [debts],” where this plural had at the time a very concrete force (On the Genealogy of Morality). However, this link between the idea of debt and that of transgression leads to another terminological configuration that includes, in French, for example, the verbs faillir and falloir, the expression il faut (one must, it is necessary), and the nouns faute (fault) or défaut (default, defect). This collection of notions forms a skein that sometimes gets tangled through the evolution of language—to the point where RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine declares their etymology to be confusing The French “faute comes from the vernacular Latin fallire, which is a modification of the classical verb fallere (from the Gr. sphallein [σφάλλειν] and meaning “to deceive, to fail, throw off balance”) and which yields faillir and falloir in French. Within the field of derivation we find the following to be notable, starting with Old French: faille (error, lie), faillement (fall, annihilation, defect), faillance (fault, weakness), faut (lack, starting in the sixteenth century), faute (in the sense of faute de [for lack of]; lack, sin), defaillir (to default, to be extinguished), mesfaillir (to commit an error, from the sixteenth century). The impersonal il faut (which is translated by the Ger. es muss, es ist nötig, or by ich soll, du sollst, and so forth, with the infinitive) therefore contains either the idea of obligation or that of necessity. In German the same etymology yielded the verbs fehlen (to fail, to sin) and fallen (intransitive, which means “to fall, to sink”), the nouns der Fehler and das Fehlen (fault, error, lack), the adjectives fehlerfrei and fehlerlos (perfect, without defect). The verb fallen has as a derivative the noun Einfall, which may be translated by “fall” but also by “intuition,” and even by “eruption.” It is for this reason that, as Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt notes, “[T]he entirety of Freud’s oeuvre was perhaps a constant modulation on the verb fallen. Failed actions, the celebrated Fehlleistungen, which have such pride of place in Freud’s work, are what we notice, what arises suddenly in speech; they are that which fällt auf, es fällt auf; it is striking, we notice it, even if it comes about only by chance, by Zufall, by “what happens to fall in front of you” (G.-A. Goldschmidt, Quand Freud voit la mer). In English, while “duty” (dewe in Middle English) and “due” seem to derive from the Latin debere, the configuration that comes from fallere includes notably the verbs “to fall” and “to fail,” the nouns “fault” and “failure.” In Romance, Anglo-Saxon, and Germanic languages, the idea of lacking and defect or failure is joined with that of falsehood, falsification, the fallacious, and so on: “false” in English and falsch in German come from falsus, the past participle of fallere, a verb whose principal meanings of “to deceive” and “to escape” would seem to go back to a single earlier meaning of “to hide, to be hidden,” or “to elude” (cf. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, s.v. fallō). The same combination of the three meanings that we have just described is found in English, in which the ideas of obligation and of possibility are expressed by “ought,” which is none other than the past tense of “to owe,” meaning “to be in debt” or “to have an obligation to someone”—as is the case in The Merchant of Venice and the bound (or the bond) that binds Antonio to Shylock. Nietzsche could have been thinking of this example of a pact and a “conscientization” of debt when he wrote the following: The debtor (Der Schuldner), in order to inspire confidence that the promise of payment will be honoured (Um Vertrauen für sein Verspreche der Zurückbezahlung einzuflössen), in order to give a guarantee of the solemnity and sanctity of his promise, and in order to etch a duty and obligation of repayment into his conscience (um bei sich die Zurückbezahlung als Pflicht, Verpflichtung seinem Gewissen einzuschärfen), pawns something to the creditor by means of the contract in case he does not pay, something that he still “possesses” and controls, for example, his body, his wife, or his freedom or his life. (trans. Carol Diethe, On the Genealogy of Morality) The allusion to the “pound of flesh” to be taken by Shylock from the body of his debtor Antonio seems even more plausible when Nietzsche, even though he is only mentioning the Egyptians, continues in these terms: [T]he creditor (Der Gläubiger) could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up (zu Recht bestehende) estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. (Ibid.) II. Error and Falsehood; Failure and Requirement There is, thus, in most modern European languages a close relationship between on one hand, the senses of “must” as in “I must forgive him” and “That must happen to me” and, on the other, the idea of owing something to someone. But within the notion of debt, that of duty is also combined with that of error, as we see in German, where the same word Schuld means both “debt” and “error”: Schuld comes from a Gothic form skuld which itself belongs to a verb, skulan, “to be obliged,” “to be in debt” (it translates the Greek verb opheilô, which has both meanings), as well as “to be in error.” Further, from the same Germanic root *skal, but with a different treatment of the first letter, descends the German verb sollen, “ought (to do),” and the English shall, which, though today restricted to the expression of the future tense, meant “ought” in the full sense of the word at an earlier stage of the language. (C. Malamoud, “Dette [Anthropologie]”) Referring to Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, Freud points out in this regard that the name Skuld, that of the third Norn from Scandinavian folklore, “recalls the English words shall, should, and the German soll, Schuld, which connote the idea of 240 DUTY dictated by a condemnation, and there is no occasion for the feeling of guilt. Not that the Vedic religion does not contain the notions of sin and stain; on the contrary. (C. Malamoud, in L’Apport freudien, ed. P. Kaufmann) Nevertheless, even though Vedic theology is unclear as to the origin of the congenital debt affecting every man, it remains open to connotations of the term ṛṇa in which “the notions of ‘fault’ and ‘debt’ (the two senses of the German word Schuld) are conjoined.” This explains how individuals may end up questioning themselves in fear of any past mistakes, as though they could allow for an understanding of their current misfortunes and the “unpaid debt that they have down here” toward Yama, the god of death and the controller of all debts. . At the very least, in languages where the equivalent of devoir belongs to the same family as the Latin debere, and perhaps as well in Vedic India, the “symbolic debt” seems to delimit a lexical field in which the obligation involves a deeper sense than that which comes from the legal or financial context in which one must return a thing or a borrowed sum. The first of these two registers, in effect, “deals with obligation in the sense of reciprocity (one would therefore be in the domain of gifts and counter-gifts),” in a sphere governed by the exchange of gifts— this gift calls for one in return (cf. M. Hénaff, Le prix de la vérité, 274). On the other hand, in the pecuniary relationship established between creditor and debtor, the latter is, in virtue of his contractual obligation, exposed to punishment that can be without mercy if the debt is not repaid. It is on this model that Nietzsche seems to base his entire conception of a debt that cannot fail to create in the debtor a state of dependency and humiliation with its train of fear, bad conscience, and the feelings of guilt or worthlessness characteristic of shame (cf. F. Tricaud, L’Accusation). Charles Baladier REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McClintock. London: Penguin, 2003. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. Freud et la langue allemande: 1, Quand Freud voit la mer. Paris: Buchet Chastel, 2006. Hénaff, Marcel. Le prix de la verité: Le don, l’argent, la philosophie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. Kaufmann, Pierre, ed. L’Apport Freudien: Éléments pour un encylopédie de la psychanalyse. Paris: Bordas, 1993. Malamoud, Charles. “Dette (Anthropologie).” In Encyclopœdia universalis, 7:294–300. Paris: Encylopœdia Universalis, 1990. Kant, Immanuel. Critique de la raison pratique. Translated by L. Ferry and H. Wismann. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1985. . Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Max Muller and Marcus Weigelt. London: Penguin, 2008. German text first published in 1788. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. 2nd ed. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. First edition published in 1994. German text first published in 1887. Oninans, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence also of Some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Tricaud, François. L’Accusation. Paris: Dalloz, 1977. III. Vedic Debt: Debt Which Does Not Arise from Fault, and Exists Prior to Responsibility We can then measure what was lost from the idea of debt in this network centered around the notion of transgression and deriving from the root faill-. On this topic, taking up the subject of the institution of loaning money on interest, Malamoud shows in effect that if debt is close to duty, this is because [D]uty is debt when there is an obligation not to do but to return something. There is debt when the task or expense or sacrifice demanded by duty is presented or thought of as restitution, a return, compensation. “To have to pay a hundred francs” is not the same thing as “to owe a hundred francs.” More precisely, “to owe a hundred francs” is a special case of “having to pay a hundred francs.” As a model of duty, having-to-return is the guise taken up by other duties . We go astray from duty pure and simple when debt becomes a relation that makes not just the debtor and the creditor present, but the borrower and the lender, when debt becomes a regulated institution, when it deals with material and measurable goods, and especially when interest must be paid. (“Dette [Anthropologie]”) The link between duty, debt, and transgression does not exist in all languages, even if we come across it in many IndoEuropean languages and others such as Hebrew. Thus, the Sanskrit term corresponding to “debt,” ṛṇa, “is without any etymological relation of any sort to a verbal root that means devoir nor with the nouns that designate the different forms of obligation.” In reality, what characterizes Indian thought is the idea that every man, simply in virtue of being born, is from the beginning loaded with debts to such an extent that he is defined as being himself a “debt” by origin and constitution: “Debt to death, on one hand: his very existence is a deposit that the god of death, Yama, will necessarily reclaim; and on the other hand, debt to a fourfold group of creditors: the gods, ancestors, the seers who transmitted the sacred texts of the Veda , and finally other people” (ibid., 297–98). In this way a man who has a son will be freed from this essential debt, or who fulfills the prescribed sacrificial rites, or who leads a life of Brahmanic study. But Vedic theology does not offer an answer to the question of what makes man thus indebted or of the nature of the loan by which he became a debtor. This forces the exegete to come back to problems of vocabulary: [T]he term ṛṇa, debt, has a precise technical sense; it belongs to the vocabulary of economics, and refers to the obligation to return borrowed goods, or their equivalent, and cannot be a synonym for “duty” or “obligation” in general. We are thus in the presence of the following paradox: a debt without prior borrowing, or at least without awareness of the event of the borrowing, a consequence without a cause, a present without a past. The current constraint therefore cannot be perceived as the result of a fault which has been committed; if the congenital debt is a failure (to be overcome by the execution of a program of rites), it is not a defect, even less a sign of sin, the endpoint of a fall; and the restitutive obligations that are demanded of man are not an expiation, are not DYNAMIC 241 1 “Symbolic debt” in Lacan v. SIGN One might wonder whether it is possible to find an echo of this Vedic theology regarding man as an indebted creature in what Jacques Lacan calls “the implacable game of debt,” referring to the cosmic metaphor (Écrits) that Rabelais puts thus by way of Panurge, in the Tiers Livre: You ask me when I will be out of debt. Well, to go yet further on, and possibly worse in your conceit, may Saint Bablin, the good saint, snatch me, if I have not all my lifetime held debt to be as a union or conjunction of the heavens with the earth, and the whole cement whereby the race of mankind is kept together; yea, of such virtue and efficacy that, I say, the whole progeny of Adam would very suddenly perish without it. Therefore, perhaps, I do not think amiss, when I repute it to be the great soul of the universe, which, according to the opinion of the Academics, vivifieth all manner of things. Throughout his Séminaire, in fact, Lacan makes this idea of a fundamental debt an important key to his theory of the symbolic: The commandment of death is there [in ancient tragedy]. And to be there in a veiled form, it may be formulated and received as coming from this debt which accumulates without a guilty party and is discharged on a victim without his deserving any punishment. (Lacan, Le transfert [Transference]) The Word [of the Gospel] is for us not at all only the law where we insert ourselves in order to carry, each of us, the debt which is our destiny. It opens for us the possibility, the temptation whence it is possible for us to curse ourselves, not only as a particular destiny, as life, but as the very way where the Word engages us and as a meeting with Truth, as the hour of truth. We are no longer simply within range of being made guilty by symbolic debt. It is having the debt on our account for which we can be, as closely as this word can indicate, reproached. In sum, it is the debt itself where we had our place which may be stolen from us, and it is there that we may feel completely alienated from ourselves. (Ibid., 354) In reality, before he considered this theme in relation to death and to the law given by the Word, Lacan made debt the pillar of a system that he defined, inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss, as the “symbolic chain,” as opposed to the “chain of experience” in which nothing is articulated or built up. Lived experience, in effect, is not ordered, does not take on meaning, and cannot be analyzed “except beginning with the moment when the subject enters into an order which is the order of symbols, the legal order, symbolic order, symbolic chain, order of symbolic debt” (La relation d’objet). Such an order exists prior to anything which, in experience, happens to the subject, its events, its satisfactions, its disappointments. REFS.: Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by Bruce Fink: Écrits. New York: Norton, 2007. . La relation d’object. Le Séminaire, Book IV. Paris. Éditions du Seuil, 1994. . L’Éthique de la psychanalyse. Le Séminaire, Book VII. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. Translation by Dennis Porter: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1997. . Le transfert. Le Séminaire, Book VIII. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Translation by Cormac Gallagher: Transference. London: Karmac Books, 2002. Rabelais, François. The Works of Rabelais. Translated by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux. Derby, UK: Moray Press, 1894. DYNAMIC “Dynamic” is formed from the Greek dunamis [δύναμιϛ], “force” (cf. dunasthai [δύνασθαι], to be capable of, to be able, to have a power; in speaking of a word or currency: to be worth, to signify; in mathematics: the square [i.e., second power]), and it refers to the study of force, from the physical-mathematical perspective as well as the ontological one, notably in Leibniz, who introduced the term. The Greek dunamis, like the Latin potentia, and “power,” contains an essential ambiguity: it is power in the sense of “in potentiality,” potentia, potential, as opposed to the actualization and the act; but it is also “the power to X,” potestas, capacity, ability. I. Dynamics, Potentiality, Actuality The collection of physical and ontological networks, and the difference between “force” and “energy,” are explored in the entry on FORCE. See also MOMENT and STRENGTH (as opposed to “force”). Cf. EPISTEMOLOGY. For more on the Greek, see FORCE, Box 1, PRAXIS, TO TI ÊN EINAI; cf. ESSENCE. See also ACT and VIRTÙ. For the logical relation between potentiality and possibility, see POWER, PROBABILITY. II. Dynamics and Power See POWER, and especially for the German distinction Macht/Gewalt, which partially reworks the Latin distinction potestas/potentia; see MACHT. III. Dynamics and Movement 1. For the dynamic as a force and movement in history and the course of events in the world, see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, PERFECTIBILITY, TIME; cf. RUSE. 2. On the relation between dynamics and the psyche, especially with respect to the Freudian dynamic, see DRIVE; cf. ES, PLEASURE, SVOBODA, UNCONSCIOUS, WILL, WUNSCH. v. SENSE ÇA The French demonstrative pronoun ça, a contraction of cela, is the widely accepted translation of the German es, a thirdperson singular neuter pronoun that Freud uses, in his second topology, to designate the third construct (id) of the psychic apparatus alongside the Ich (ego) and the Über-Ich (superego): see ES, and DRIVE, I/ME/MYSELF, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf. ANXIETY, ENTSTELLUNG, LOVE, PLEASURE, VERNEINUNG. Es is also used in the German expression es gibt, which French renders as il y a. See ES GIBT, ESTI, IL Y A. v. CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, IDENTITY, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SELF, SUBJECT CARE FRENCH souci, soin, sollicitude GERMAN Sorge, Fürsorge, Besorgen v. SOUCI and ANXIETY, AUTRUI, DASEIN, GENDER, LAW, LOVE, MALAISE, MORALS, SECURITAS, SEX, SORGE, VERGÜENZA The word “care” has recently been used with increasing frequency in English philosophy, but its translation into other languages raises a problem for two reasons in particular. First, it is used to translate the Heideggerian term Sorge (Sein und Zeit), and second, it appears in the expression “the ethics of care,” which feminists oppose to the impartiality of “masculine justice” (Gilligan, Different Voice; Young, Justice). In both cases, it is impossible to translate “care” into French. I. The Translation of Sorge by “Care” We must note first that “care” does not derive from Latin cura but rather from Old High German or Gothic Kara, which means “care,” “lament,” “sorrow.” The word initially designated a painful mental state such as concern or anxiety, and it was indeed appropriate to use “care” to render the German Sorge as it is used by Heidegger. For Heidegger the very Being of Dasein is “care” (Sorge) (Sein und Zeit), so that the latter is in the world in the form of Besorgen (concern). Cares, tribulations, and melancholias are distinct states, but they are part of the ontological structure of Sorge: “Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue” (Being and Time, 274). The word “care” also designates the effort to anticipate a danger or to protect oneself from the uncertainties of the future by acting responsibly. That is the most common meaning of the term in English, and here again we see how well the importance of temporality in “care” corresponds to Heideggerian concerns: “The ontological meaning of care is temporality” (ibid.). But the deficiencies of the English translation of Sorge by “care” rapidly make themselves felt because the element of nothingness is absent in “care”: “Death, conscience, and guilt are anchored in the phenomenon of care.” Finally, Heidegger connects Sorge with curiosity, which leads him to retranslate Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to see” (pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei) (ibid.)— taking eidenai in the original sense of “to see” and connecting oregontai (lit., “seek”) with Sorge, “care.” And he translates Aristotle in these terms: “The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being.” Thus he makes an association between “seeing” and “thinking” in Western metaphysics that the English translation as “care” cannot render. There is no possibility of making the connotations specific to the German Sorge flow into the English “care,” and the current development of the meaning of “care” that is drawing this word in the direction of interpersonal relations and concern about others makes the translation of Heidegger given here in English rather enigmatic. II. “Care” and “Solicitude” German distinguishes more clearly than English or French between care for oneself or Selbstsorge (which, Heidegger says, is “tautological,” Being and Time, 366), on the one hand, and on the other Fürsorge or “care for the other,” which Macquarrie and Robinson translate not by “care” but by “solicitude” and which the French translator renders as assistance. Solicitude, which is “an affectionate care for others,” has a meaning different from “care” and must be attached to a different register, that of action in matters of help and social aid. “Care” designates the whole set of public arrangements necessary for the welfare of the population in a welfare state. That is a meaning for which there is no French equivalent. For example, the expressions “prenatal care” and “postnatal care” refer particularly to the responsibilities of public health agencies with regard to pregnant women and infants. Caregivers are people who, whether as volunteers or not, take care of the elderly or anyone in need. Since in many countries the great majority of caregivers are women, feminists have offered a critique of the ethics of justice in the name of the virtues attributed to these disinterested, noncompetitive, nonquantifiable, nonpossessive behaviors that constitute most of women’s nonremunerated work: caring for children and the elderly, efforts to keep the family group intact, etc. Thus these militants seek to oppose to the “masculine” ideal of an ethics of impartiality and justice an “ethics of care.” Without taking a position regarding the “feminine” character of the values in question, we can say that these feminists’ reflections have led to a genuine “deconstruction” of universalist morality and the principle of identity, in accord with a trajectory that merges with the Heideggerian heritage of Sorge, though we cannot say that the common use of the word “care” has played a role in this matter. Catherine Audard REFS.: Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1953. First Published in 1927. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. it is applied to water, to grain; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque), with the moral or religious purity of the soul—thus Empedocles’s Purifications contains both a project of perpetual peace, constructed around metempsychosis, and alimentary prohibitions. Katharsis [ϰάθαϱσις] is an action noun corresponding to the verb kathairô [ϰαθαίϱω] (clean, purify, purge). Initially it had the religious sense of “purification,” and referred particularly to the ritual of expulsion practiced in Athens on the eve of the Thargelia. During these festivals traditionally dedicated to Artemis and Apollo, a loaf of bread, the thargêlos [θάϱγηλος], made from the first grain harvested that year, was offered; but beforehand the city had to be purified by expelling criminals from it (cf. Harpocration’s lexicon: “The Athenians, during the Thargelia, drove two men, as purifying exorcisms, out of the city, one for the men, the other for the women,” and then scapegoats, according to the ritual of the pharmakos [φαϱμαϰός]). Apollo himself is called katharsios [ϰαθάϱσιος], “purifier,” and moreover is forced to purify himself after killing Python in Delphi. According to Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus, he is fittingly named apolouôn [ἀπολούων], “the washer,” insofar as the music, medicine, and divination that characterize him are so many katharseis [ϰαθάϱσεις] and katharmoi [ϰαθαϱμοί], practices of purification (405a–c). According to the kathairontes [ϰαθαίϱοντες], the “purgers,” “the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles [ta empodizonta tis ekbalêi [τὰ ἐμποδίζοντα τις ἐϰϐάλῃ] have been removed” (Plato, Sophist, 230c). The purgative method that works for the body also works for the soul, which cannot assimilate knowledge before it has been purged of its opinions by elegchos [ἔλεγχος], “refutation”; the patient “must be purged of his prejudices and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more” (230d). But there is a still more radical purification that Plato transposes from the religious domain, Orphic and Pythagorean, to philosophy (cf. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, chaps. 3 and 5): “purification consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body” (Phaedo, 67c); if only the pure, purified thought can take possession of the pure, the unmixed (to eilikrines [τὸ εἰλιϰϱινές]) that is truth, mustn’t the soul leave the body? Katharsis connects purification with separation and purging, not only in the religious, but also in the political (Plato, in the Laws [5.735b–736a], describes painful purges as the only efficacious ones) and the medical domains. In Hippocratic medicine, katharsis was connected with the theory of the humors and names the process of physical purgation through which harmful secretions are expelled, naturally or artificially, through the upper or the lower orifices: the term can designate not only purging as such, but also defecation, diarrhea, vomiting, and menstruation (Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 5.36; 5.60; cf. De mulierum affectibus). This Hippocratic meaning is valid in Aristotle’s whole naturalist corpus (in the Historia animialium, 7.10.587b, for example, the term designates the rupture of the amniotic sac, various bodily discharges, etc.; cf. RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v.). However, as a remedy—Greek to pharmakon [τὸ φάϱμαϰον], the same word, in the neuter gender, as the one designating the scapegoat— katharsis implies more precisely the idea of a homeopathic medicine: purgation is a way of curing harm by harm, the 126 CATEGORY CATEGORY “Category” is derived, via Vulgar Latin, from the Greek katêgoria [ϰατηγορία], (kata [ϰατά], against, on, and agoreuô [ἀγορεύω], speak in public), which designates both the prosecution in a trial and the attribution in a logical proposition—that is, the questions that must be asked with regard to a subject and the answers that can be given. From Aristotle to Kant and beyond, logic has therefore determined a list of “categories” that are as well operations of judgment (cf. JUSTICE); see ESTI (esp. Box 1) and HOMONYM. On the lexical networks implied by this ontological systematics, see BEGRIFF, MERKMAL, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SUBJECT, and cf. ESSENCE, PROPERTY, TO BE, TRUTH, UNIVERSALS. v. AUFHEBEN, GENRE, OBJECT, PRINCIPLE, WHOLE CATHARSIS, KATHARSIS [ϰάθαϱσις] (GREEK) FRENCH purgation, purification v. ART, MELANCOLY, MIMÊSIS, MITMENSCH, BOX 1, NATURE, BOX 1, NEIGHBOR, PATHOS, PLEASURE, PROPERTY, SUBLIME The word katharsis initially was connected with rituals of purification before becoming a Hippocratic term in the theory of humors. Aristotle’s Poetics inflected its meaning by maintaining, in opposition to Plato, that tragedy and theater can care for the soul by giving it pleasure. In the traditional translation as “purgation,” it was part of French classical discourse on tragedy (Corneille, 1660) before reappearing in its Greek form in Lessing’s works criticizing Corneille’s criticism of Aristotle (the Greek word, which was already present in English, then returned in nineteenth-century discussions of Lessing; see RT: DHLF, s.v. “Catharsis”). In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the “cathartic method” that Freud gradually disengaged from its association with hypnosis is connected with abreaction, the emotional discharge that makes it possible, through language, to eliminate the affect bound up with a traumatic event. The word’s oscillation between the meanings “purification” and “purgation” while remaining constant through various languages has continually provided material for polemics and reinterpretations. I. From Scapegoat to Tragic Pleasure The adjective katharos [ϰαθαϱός] associates material cleanliness, that of the body (Homer calls it an “uncovered place”; CATHARSIS 127 in relation to new concerns connected with a profoundly different conception of the passions. From a Christian point of view, it is the passions themselves, and not merely their excesses, that are considered bad. It is no longer a matter of purifying the passions but of purifying oneself of passions, that is, of purifying morals. What seventeenth-century authors meant by “purgation of the passions” thus does not have quite the sense that katharsis had in Aristotle. The French emphasize the moral and especially the pedagogical aspect attached to the idea of theatrical katharsis. “The main goal of poetry is to benefit by purifying morals,” Father Rapin wrote (Réflexions sur la Poétique, 9). “Poetry is an art that was invented for the instruction of men. The ill are treated, and tragedy is the only remedy from which they are able to benefit, for it is the only amusement in which they can find the pleasant and the useful,” Dacier wrote in the preface to his French translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (1692). Although it appeals to Aristotle’s authority on this point, this way of conceiving the purgation of the passions in the theater has little to do with Aristotelian katharsis. Corneille makes the same error when he criticizes Aristotle on this point, rejecting the idea that tragedy can purify the spectators’ passions: he thinks he is deviating from Aristotle, whereas he is merely opposing the interpretation his contemporaries gave of him. Racine is one of the few writers to remain faithful to Aristotle: “Tragedy,” he wrote, “exciting pity and terror, purges and tempers these sorts of passions, that is, by arousing these passions, it deprives them of what is excessive and vicious in them, and returns them to a state that is moderate and in conformity with reason” (Œuvres complètes, quoted by J. Tricot in his translation of Aristotle’s Politics). It is true that unlike Corneille, Racine understood Greek, and translated and annotated whole passages of the Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics. . Relying on Corneille’s criticism, but at the same time respecting convention and what he thought was Aristotle’s thought, Du Bos developed a rather confused reflection on this subject that concludes as follows: “Thus tragedy purges the passions rather as remedies cure, and as defensive weapons protect against offensive ones. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does!” (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture [1719], §44, “Que les poèmes dramatiques purgent les passions”). III. The “Carthartic Method” in Psychoanalysis The “cathartic method” is part of the prehistory of psychoanalysis. It was developed by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud on the basis of their research on the etiology of symptoms of hysteria, as they explain in their work Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, 1895). In seeking the causes of the pathological phenomena of hysteria, the two Viennese physicians noticed that their patients’ symptoms were causally connected with a traumatic situation that the patient could not consciously remember (cf. “Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene” [“On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,” 1893], in Studien über Hysterie). The affect involved in this “psychic trauma [psychische Trauma],” “blocked” (eingeklemmte) and same by the same, and it is also why every pharmakon is a “poison” as much as a “remedy,” the dosage of the harmful thing alone producing a good result (see NATURE, Box 1). Here we have one of the possible keys to the rhetorical, poetic, and aesthetic meaning of katharsis, which Lausberg characterizes as “a homeopathic hygiene for the soul” (RT: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, §1222). This kind of cure is connected with the katharsis produced by sacred melodies, mentioned in Aristotle’s Politics. There are enthusiastic, possessed individuals who “fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a result of the sacred melodies—when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy (tois exorgiazousi melesi [τοῖς ἐξοϱγιάζουσι μέλεσι])—restored as though they had found healing and purgation (iatreias kai katharseôs [ἰατϱείας ϰαὶ ϰαθάϱσεως])” (7.1342a 7–11). More generally, for Aristotle (who here goes beyond a Plato, whom he salutes but subverts; cf. Republic, 3, starting at 398) katharsis is one of the functions of music, along with education and a good way of life, and with leisure and a relaxation of tension: for all those in the grip of passion “are in a manner purged and their souls lightened and delighted (kouphizesthai meth’ hêdonês [ϰουφίζεσθαι μεθ ήδονῆς]).” The purgative melodies likewise give humans an innocent pleasure (charan ablabê [χαϱὰν ἀϐλαϐῆ]) (Politics, 7.1342a 14–16). This homeopathic meaning is maintained in the Poetics: tragedy includes “incidents of pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis (katharsin [ϰάθαϱσιν]) of such emotions” (6.1449b 27–28). This is a purgation of the same by the same, or rather by the representation of the same. But unlike participants in Corybantic rites that seek to cure the soul of a furious madness, the spectator of tragedy is in full command of his faculties; he has no need to be cured. Whence a second meaning, which is in a way allopathic: the passions are purified by the spectator’s seeing them, to the extent to which the poet shows him things that have themselves been purified and transformed by mimêsis [μίμησις]: “The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear, and the poet has to produce it by a work of imitation” (14.1453b 4–13). Purgation, that is, the representation of diagrams by means of a musical or poetic work, substitutes pleasure for pain. Ultimately it is pleasure that purifies the passions, lightens them, relieves them of their excessive, invasive character, and resituates them in a point of equilibrium. Finally, to radicalize catharsis, we have to follow the skeptical physician Sextus Empiricus in choosing for the soul as for the body a remedy capable of “eliminating itself at the same time that it eliminates the humors” or dogmas: the skeptical modes of expression are thus in their very form, which includes doubt, relativity, relationship, and questioning, self-purging (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.206; cf. 2.188; cf. Voelke, “Soigner par le logos”). II. Purgation of the Passions and Purification of Morals in the Classical Theater This twofold meaning connecting the remedy with pleasure is the basis for the ambiguity and at the same time the richness of later interpretations. The influence exercised by Aristotle’s Poetics on the French theory of the dramatic poem was accompanied by a reworking of the ancient problematics 128 CATHARSIS Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasure: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Bernays, Jacob. Zwei Abhandlungen über die aristotelische Theorie des Drama. Berlin: W. Herz, 1880 ; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. . Chief Plays. Translated by L. Lockert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Dacier, André. La poétique d’Aristote. Barbin, 1692. . The Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1959. First published in 1705. Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1994. First published in 1719. Translation by T. Nugent: Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music: With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients. London: Printed for J. Nourse, 1748. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie.” Vol. 13 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922. . Selbstdarstellung. Vol. 14 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922. . The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press–Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74. . Studien über Hysterie. Vol. 1 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1895. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published in 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. Papanoutsos, Evangelios P. La catharsis des passions d’après Aristote. Athens: Collection de l’Institut français d’Athènes, 1953. Plato. Sophist. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Racine, Jean. Complete Plays. Translated by S. Solomon. New York: Random House, 1967. . Œuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952. Rapin, René. Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote, et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes. Edited by E. T. Dubois. Geneva: Droz, 1970. First published in 1674. Translation by M. Rymer: Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie. London, 1694. Voelke, André Jean. “Soigner par le logos: la thérapeuthique de Sextus Empiricus.” In Le Scepticisme antique. Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 15. Geneva, 1990. not discharged through the normal channels, is transformed into a hysterical conversion. “Catharsis” is produced when under treatment the path leading to consciousness and the normal discharge of the affect [normale Entladung des Affekts] is opened up (“Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie” [Psychoanalysis and Theory of the Libido] [1922]). The “cathartic procedure,” as Breuer called it, consists in using hypnosis to treat the patient through catharsis. The narrative of the “psychic trauma” is in fact usually followed by a discharge of affect (abreaction) that constitutes “catharsis” proper (cf. Selbstdarstellung [Self-representation], 1924). After the publication of Studien über Hysterie, the two collaborators’ positions regarding the etiology of hysteria diverged: “Breuer gave priority to what might be called a physiological theory,” whereas Freud confirmed the sexual content at the origin of hysterical phenomena, also pointing out the importance of “the differentiation between unconscious and conscious mental acts” (Selbstdarstellung). Later on, Freud abandoned hypnosis and suggestion in favor of free association, thus creating “psychoanalysis.” However, the effectiveness of catharsis allowed him to confirm two fundamental results, which were subsequently confirmed, as he says himself: First, hysterical systems have meaning and significance because they are substitutes for normal mental acts; and second, the disclosure of this unknown meaning coincides with the suppression of the symptoms, and thus here scientific research and therapeutic effort coincide. Studien über Hysterie Barbara Cassin Jacqueline Lichtenstein Elisabete Thamer REFS.: Aristotle. Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by J. Barnes, vol. 2, 2316–3240. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. . Politics. Translated by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1970. 1 From Aristotle to Corneille and back Corneille’s criticism of the idea of theatrical catharsis illustrates the way his contemporaries transformed this problem. The purgation of the passions in the sense in which Corneille thought Aristotle understood it is for him purely “imaginary”: tragedy, he wrote, has the particular “utility” that by means of pity and fear it purges such passions. These are the terms Aristotle uses in his definition, and they tell us two things: first, that it [catharsis] excites pity and fear, and second, that by means of them, it purges similar passions. He explains the first at some length, but he says not a word about the latter, and of all the conditions he uses in this definition, this is the only one he does not explain. If the purgation of the passions happens in tragedy, I hold that it must happen in the manner that I say; but I doubt that it ever happens, even in those that meet the conditions set by Aristotle. They are met in Le Cid and caused its great success: Rodrigue and Chimène have the probity subject to passions and these passions cause their misfortune because they are as unhappy as they are passionate for one another their misfortune elicits pity, that is certain, and it cost the audience enough tears to make that incontestable. This pity must make us fear that we will fall into a similar misfortune and purge the excessive love that causes their misfortune and make us feel sorry for them, but I do not know whether pity gives it to us or if it purges it, and I fear that Aristotle’s reasoning on this point is just a fine idea that has never actually produced its effect. I leave this up to those who have seen the performances: they can examine it in the secrecy of their hearts and go over what moved them in the theater, in order to see if in this way they arrived at reflective fear, and whether it rectified in them the passion that caused the disgrace that they so lamented. Discours de la tragédie, 1660 CHANCE 129 In his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–68), Lessing reproached Corneille precisely for not having understood the sentence in chapter 6 of the Poetics and of having unfairly criticized Aristotle: Finally, as for the moral goal that Aristotle assigns to tragedy, and that he thought he had to include in his definition, we know how many debates about it have arisen, particularly recently. I feel sure that I can show that those who have blamed Aristotle on this point have not understood him. They have lent him their own thoughts before finding out what his were. They are battling chimeras with which they are themselves obsessed, and flatter themselves that they victoriously refute the philosopher when they defeat the phantoms of their own brains. 48th Evening REFS.: Corneille, Pierre. Discours de la tragédie. In Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published by 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. CERTITUDE “Certitude,” from ecclesiastical medieval Latin certitudo, designating in particular “Christian conviction,” is heir to two meanings of the adjective certus, one “objective” and the other “subjective”: “beyond doubt, fixed, positive, real,” regarding a thing or knowledge, or “firm in his resolutions, decided, sure, authentic,” regarding an individual. Although certitudo has no Greek equivalent, the Latin verb cerno, cernere, from which certus is derived, has the concrete meaning of “pass through a sieve, discern,” like the Greek krinein [ϰρίνειν] (select, sieve, judge), which comes from the same root. Thus begins the relationship between certitude, judgment, and truth, which since Descartes has been connected with the problematics of the subject and of self-certainty. The whole terminological system of truth is thus involved, from unveiling and adequation to certitude and obviousness: see TRUTH, and ISTINA, PRAVDA. I. Certainty, Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Linguistic Systems 1. The objective aspect manifests itself first, certitudo translating for example the “determined nature” of objects or known properties (as in Arab commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics translated into Latin), or the incontestably true nature of principles: see TRUTH, Box 6; cf. RES (and THING), PRINCIPLE. 2. With the revolution of the subject inaugurated by Cartesian philosophy, the second aspect comes to the fore: some “reasons,” “ideas,” or “propositions” are “true and certain,” or “true and evident,” but the most certain and the most evident of all, and thus in a sense the truest, is the certitude of my own existence, a certainty that the subject attributes to itself: see SUBJECT and I/ME/ MYSELF, SELBST. The thematics of certainty precedes that of consciousness both historically and logically, but it ends up being incorporated and subordinated by it: see CONSCIOUSNESS; cf. ES and UNCONSCIOUS. 3. Certainty thus becomes a quality or disposition of the subject that reproduces, in the field of rational knowledge, the security or assurance that the believer finds in religious faith, and that shields him from the wavering of the soul, see CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE]; cf. DASEIN, MALAISE, and esp. LIFE/LEBEN, SEHNSUCHT. 4. It will be noted that French retains the possibility of reversing the perspective by exploiting the Latin etymology, as Descartes does in the Principles of Philosophy when he transforms the certitudo probabilis of the Scholastics (Aquinas) into “moral certainty.” On the other hand, English tends to objectify certainty to the maximum in opposition to belief (see BELIEF), whereas German hears in the term Gewissheit the root wissen (to know, to have learned) and situates it in a series with Bewusstsein and Gewissen (see CONSCIOUSNESS), clearly marking the constitutive relationship to the subject in opposition to Glaube on the one hand, and to Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit (lit., “appearance of truth,” i.e., “probability”) on the other (see TRUTH, II.B). II. Knots of Problems 1. On the relations between certainty and belief, the modalities of subjective experience, see CROYANCE. 2. On the relation between individual certainty and the wise man’s constancy, see PHRONÊSIS and PIETAS; cf. MORALS, VIRTÙ, WISDOM. 3. On the relations between certainty and truth, the confrontation between subjectivity and objectivity in the development of knowledge, see—in addition to TRUTH— ANSCHAULICHKEIT, EXPERIENCE, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION. 4. On the relations between certainty and probability, the modalities of objective knowledge insofar as it is related to a subject’s experience, see—in addition to PROBABILITY— CHANCE, DUTY, DOXA, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE, SENSUS COMMUNIS], MATTER OF FACT. v. SOUL, TO BE, UNDERSTANDING CHANCE / PROBABILITY FRENCH chance, probabilité, avantage v. PROBABILITY, and DESTINY, ENGLISH, HISTORY, UTILITY The English notions of chance and probability, which were long confused with each other, each took on a specific meaning with their entry into the field of mathematical calculation, which made it necessary to distinguish them as early as the second half of the eighteenth century and to distinguish them even more clearly in the nineteenth century. No doubt there were some cases in the eighteenth century where “chance” had exactly the same meaning as “probability.” For example, in his Essay towards Solving a Problem 130 CHANCE and constitutes a genuine epistemological obstacle to its evaluation. II. Subjective Probability (Chance) and Objective Probability (Probability) Cutting across this first opposition between the “probability of chances” and the “probability of causes” and contradicting it to some extent, there is another opposition that has been even more influential not only in mathematics, but also in the domains of religion, economics, jurisprudence, and society: the one that distinguishes subjective probability (generally called chance) and objective probability (generally called probability). Price is correct in saying that Bayes (An Essay) deviated from common usage on this point. If I roll a mathematician’s six-sided die that is well balanced and not loaded and that clearly shows one of its faces when it has finished rolling, the probability of obtaining an ace, or indeed any other face, is one in six. Probability seems here to apply directly to the event, even if that is not the case and if it is a pure fiction connected with the discourse that allows us to make a prediction. But if I am in a situation where I am drawing winning and losing lots from an urn, I calculate the value of the relation between the number of losing lots and the number of winning lots that it contains on the basis of the drawings I have already made, and I attribute a probability to the outcome of the drawing I am about to make with a chance of being right or wrong. Bayes’s rule relates the probability that an event will occur to the chance of being mistaken when I calculate it. His rule calculates, as Price puts it, borrowing Bayes’s own expression: the chance that the probability for the happening of an event perfectly unknown should be between any two named degrees of probability, antecedently to any experiments made about it. Chance no longer bears directly on the event but, rather, indirectly on my estimate of its probability. In a given initial situation, I can decide as I wish to situate between two degrees the probability that an event will occur; the “chance of being right” changes, of course, as this situation develops, that is, as I collect new information regarding the event in question. The degree of chance is calculated by an understanding that measures the value of a decision in relation to the probability of a given event in a given situation or at various stages of that situation. Curiously, since in this new function it is difficult to use the term “chance” in the plural, an author like Price substitutes the word “odds” for it and speaks of the “odds of chance” or the “odds of probability” (An Essay). The point is all the more remarkable because for a long time the English word “odds” was used only in the singular. Although “odds” clearly takes on the meaning of the French word cote in a wager that can receive a cardinal number, “odds” initially designated the strangeness of an event, the unexpected characteristic that made it an unusual, even unparalleled, event; but this does not mean that the word has no relation to arithmetic, since we commonly speak of odd numbers. In its singularity, the event is incommensurable, but in a contradictory fashion it thereby acquires the status of a unit constitutive of a number that preserves its character of being imperfect, odd, and difficult to divide. in the Doctrine of Chances (1763), Thomas Bayes declares that “[b]y chance I mean the same as probability,” even though his work brilliantly demonstrated that they are not the same. Chance clearly retains the “subjective” spirit of arbitrary randomness, since we speak of the “chance of being right” (in assigning a degree of probability between two selected degrees); thus it represents, in the tradition of J. Bernoulli’s Ars conjectandi, a fraction of certainty. On the other hand, probability is clearly “objective” in that it seems to apply more directly to events. In dice, the probability of rolling an ace is one in six; it seems to be a property of the situation. Nonetheless, the preceding proposition can also be interpreted and formulated as follows: the chance of being right when one says that an ace will be rolled is one in six. I. Probability of Chances and Probability of Causes Between the 1650s, when Pascal, along with Fermat, invented the “geometry of chance” (géométrie du hasard) and tried to enumerate the chances and to calculate odds (calculer le parti), and the end of the eighteenth century, “chance” and “probability” had time to change meaning. The last chapter of La logique de Port-Royal—of which Pascal was at least the inspiration, if not the author—determines probability by calculating the odds (of winning if a given event occurs). At each step in the complex gaming situation he is analyzing, Pascal calculates the players’ odds, that is, the amount each would have to be paid if the game were to stop before chance determined the winner in accord with the rules. Nonetheless, “calculating the odds” is taken as a verb, whereas “probability” is usually taken by Pascal and in the La logique de Port-Royal as the equivalent of “chance.” In 1739, Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, grasped the two major axes along which the two notions are divided when they are not considered synonyms. The first opposes the “probability of chances” to the “probability of causes.” When in a given situation we can draw up a table of all the possible outcomes and calculate that a given situation will occur rather than another, we speak of the “probability of chances.” Thus, in calculating the odds in a game, we tend to speak of the “probability of chances” because the mind can make a concise inventory of all the situation’s possible outcomes. The Pascalian term hasard is perfectly rendered by the English word “chance” (Maistrov, Probability Theory). We speak of the “probability of causes” in very different circumstances, which Hume clearly distinguishes: if a sequence of similar events A1 B1 , A2 B2 , A3 B3 An Bn has been witnessed by one or more persons and an event of type A occurs, we can use Newton’s binomial to calculate the probability that an event B will occur; in this case we will speak of the “probability of causes.” Note that on the basis of an event of the type B, we could have calculated in the same way the probability that an event A preceded it. It is clear that, borrowing Hume’s image, the probability of causes is assessed not by making a complete count in a system of cases that have to be inventoried in every direction, but more linearly, in the way that one plows a furrow in a single direction. Although the weight of past cases bears on the determination of the probability of a cause or an effect in a present situation, taking into account past situations in the situation of a game (of chance) has nothing at all to do with the probability of chances CHÔRA 131 This is the place to note that the idea of subjective probability arose in a language that allowed this complicated formation by means of gerunds that cannot really be translated into French (see ENGLISH)—even if, a few years later, Continental mathematicians dealt with this idea with the same ease as mathematicians working in English. Jean-Pierre Cléro REFS.: Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. La logique de Port-Royal. 1662. Translation by James Dickoff and Patricia James: The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Bayes, Thomas. An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. New York, Hafner: 1963. First published in 1763. Bernoulli, Jakob. Ars conjectandi (opus posthumum). “Pars Quarta (tradens usum & applicationem praecedentis Doctrinae Civilibus, Moralibus Oeconomicus).” Basel: Thurnisiorum fratrum, 1713. Translation by E. Dudley Sylla: The Art of Conjecturing, Together with Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1779. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Laplace, Pierre-Simon de. Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements. In vol. 8 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891. . Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Translated by A. I. Dale. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995. . Théorie analytique des probabilités. Paris: Courcier, 1814. Maistrov, Leonid E. Probability Theory. A Historical Sketch. Translated and edited by S. Kotz. New York: Academic Press, 1974. First published in 1967. Moivre, Abraham de. The Doctrine of Chances. Guilford: Frank Cass, 1967. First published in 1718. Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. . Pensées and Other Writing. Translated by H. Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Poisson, Siméon-Denis. Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile précédées des règles générales du calcul des probabilités. Paris: Bachelier, 1837. Todhunter, Isaac. A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to That of Laplace. New York: Chelsea, 1965. First published in 1865. III. The Importance of the Distinction between Chance and Probability in Religious and Juridical Debates We can now see why the reversal of a “subjective” interpretation of the arguments of natural religion, which had been previously based on analogies (e.g., God is to the universe as an architect is to a building) turned out to be particularly devastating. The “chance of being right” evaluates various competing hypotheses; it does not limit itself to the examination of a single analogy whose terms are considered without showing any imagination. This technique of argumentation, which does not always adopt Bayes’s terminology, is that of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The shift from a perspective that is allegedly de re (bearing directly on things) to one that is de dicto (by chance) proved to be very efficacious in the juridical domain, especially in criminal law. Jacques Bernoulli, who in his Ars conjectandi defined probability as a fraction of certainty, saw very early on the interest of probabilities for economic, juridical, political, and social calculations; but it was the Bayesian perspective, which was to be that of Bentham’s utilitarianism down to our own time, and also that of Laplace and Poisson, that gave these calculations their true value. If society, not only as the guardian of the laws, of order, and of security but also of justice, has an interest in such and such a crime or offense being punished, we can calculate our chances of being right in attributing this crime or offense to such and such a person whom we are preparing to punish, and at the same time evaluate, on that basis, whether it is just to proceed with this punishment (see EIDÔLON, Box 1). IV. Probability, Chance, Expectation Our difficulty in translating the terms “probability” and “chance” can thus proceed from certain contradictions in the use of “chance”: in the first opposition between chances and causes, it has an essentially objective meaning connected with counting up situations, whereas in the second opposition, it has the subjective meaning of a relationship of values; the context will always indicate which type of opposition is concerned. Nevertheless, the notion of expectation, which is very close to those of probability and chance, adds to the difficulty. Although it is usually appropriate to avoid translating “expectation” by the French word attente in contexts where it clearly refers to an evaluation of probability and to prefer the term espérance, we have to acknowledge that the latter term lacks clarity. Pascal, whom we have presented as the author par excellence of the “probability of chances,” reasons less on probability than on expectation; however, it is a question of calculations that belong precisely to the domain of objective probabilities. Subjective probabilities, on the other hand, were later to be characterized by a fundamental use of expectation on the basis of which probability alone is defined, as we see in Bayes (An Essay), who posits the probability of an event as the relation between the expectation attached to this event and the benefit one hopes to realize if it occurs: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. CHÔRA [χώϱα] (GREEK) v. DESCRIPTION, FORM, GREEK, LIEU, POLIS, REASON, TO TRANSLATE, WORLD Inasmuch as chôra has no meaning—at least not in this classical sense—it is intrinsically untranslatable. It is such as to disrupt the very operation of translation. —Sallis, Chorology In general, where it is used in Plato’s Dialogues, the word chôra [χώϱα] has, according to the context, the commonplace meaning of “land,” “place,” “space,” or “room” (Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought). As Casey points out, its primary connotation is “occupied space,” as in “a field full of crops or a room replete with things” (Casey, The Fate of 132 CHÔRA “unable to render an account at all points entirely consistent with itself and exact (or) furnish accounts no less likely than any other” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶29c). And, as Derrida will note, the problem extends not only to reasonable stories, but also to naming. Even the “Heaven,” “world,” or “cosmos” may take different names: “let us call it,” says Timaeus, “by whatsoever name may be most acceptable to it” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28b). This, then, is the procedure of the “demiurge,” compared by Plato to a craftsman (dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός]), who as “intelligence” itself, “framed the universe,” fashioning “reason within soul, and soul within body,” as a living creature. Not a god, or “God,” the demiurge operates like a craftsman on materials he did not himself create, with reason guiding his design. Out of the four primary bodies—fire, air, water, and earth—he fashions a universe bound together by proportion and thereby “visible and tangible” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶32b). The aesthetics of this work, “a living being whole and complete, of complete parts single, nothing being left over,” “a single whole consisting of all these wholes” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33a), has had a long history in Neoplatonism and neoclassicism: this “shape rounded and spherical, equidistant every way from center to periphery—a figure the most perfect and uniform of all perfectly smooth” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33b) has held a privileged position in the theory of ideal forms. Endowed with a centrally positioned world-soul, itself the embodiment of reason and harmony, and incorporating, like some perfect armillary, the motions of the seven planetary rings, this world incorporates time within its circularity, marked by the differential motions of the planets. Such was the world constructed as Plato recounts “by the craftsmanship of Reason” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶47e); but it failed to take note of a second equally powerful cause, that of Necessity (anankê [ἀνάνϰη]). Here Plato makes it clear that his “demiurge” is by no means the omnipotent creator of everything out of nothing construed by later religions. Rather his craftsman works with materials already at hand—fire, water, air, and earth “before the generation of the Heaven” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48b), materials whose prior existence has not been explained by Reason’s work, and that demand what Plato terms an “errant cause” as “origin.” But this origin is immediately subject to question, for as Plato states, “‘first principle or ‘principles’—or whatever name men choose to employ” are exceedingly difficult to explain. Indeed, Timaeus affirms that the explanation should not be demanded of him, as it poses too “great a task”; rather he promises to give “the worth of a probable account,” one “no less probable than any other, but more so” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48d). In beginning again, then, “once more” and in moving toward “the conclusion that probability dictates,” in starting over with his account of creation, Plato acknowledges the impossibility of certainty for the first time. If one can be certain about the forms of Reason, those of Necessity demand a more speculative approach. The need for this fresh beginning, principle, or starting-point arises from this intrusion of the irrational, that which can be controlled by Reason, but that Reason did not bring into being. Place). This is the signification of the first appearance of the word in the Timaeus, where Socrates is characterizing the country outside the city proper (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶19). Such a sense of extraterritoriality and extension certainly anticipates the way in which it is used later in the dialogue. But in the following creation story, narrated by Timaeus, Plato endows chôra with a special significance, and a corresponding ambiguity, which has been debated ever since, from Aristotle to Derrida. The Timaeus as a whole is concerned with foundation of the just city, and with the corresponding idea of beginning, starting with the creation of the cosmos itself. The dialogue purportedly takes place following a conversation the day before concerning the perfect city—a summary of the conversation by Socrates makes a clear reference to the central aspects of the city outlined in the Republic; but Socrates professes to be dissatisfied with the static and abstract nature of the picture drawn so far. He demands a livelier image, one that sets the city in motion so to speak, and Critias suggests that the heroic story of the war between ancient Athens and Atlantis would supply the requisite action. But before a narrative of city foundation, Timaeus, with his astronomical knowledge, proposes to establish the story of cosmic becoming. This then is the context for the elaboration of the concept of chôra. The word chôra itself first appears in its newly ambiguous, but philosophical, form in paragraph 52b of the Timaeus. But its appearance has been prepared for by Plato some paragraphs before. In brief, the argument up to the introduction of chôra goes something like this: Timaeus has, in the first part of the dialogue, given an account of how the universe “came into being” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶27), distinguishing between two states: “that which is always real and has no becoming” and “that which is always becoming but is never real.” The former is “apprehensible by the intelligence with the aid of reasoning,” the latter is an “object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28). Thus separating out the unchanging (rational) reality, from the changing (sensible), lived, reality, Timaeus uses this well-known Platonic distinction between the ideal primary reality and the physical secondary reality to sketch out the steps taken by the demiurge (dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός], “maker,” “father,” “constructor”) as he “keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product.” This is so that he can ensure a “good” result, for whenever he looks to “something which has come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28). Timaeus uses the word kalos [ϰαλός], which can mean “good,” but also “satisfactory,” “desirable,” and, of course, “beautiful.” In this way, as Francis Cornford notes, “the visible world is a changing image or likeness (eikon) of an eternal model” (Plato’s Cosmology). A postulate that raises as many questions as it answers: if something is in a state of becoming, does it begin at any one point? Or, what might be the “cause” of such becoming, as opposed to the state of being, or the same? Or, finally, is the “real,” as copy, really real, or simply a dream or shadow of the real? Plato compounds these difficulties by having Timaeus state that what he is describing is no more than a “likely story,” for mortals are in the end CHÔRA 133 which now gains a name: chôra (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52). Chôra is now finally “defined” as “everlasting, not admitting destruction,” somewhat like the Form, but different in that it can be apprehended. Its apprehension, however, is not by reason or the senses, but by what Plato calls “a sort of bastard reasoning” with a status somewhere between the two; you have to think about it, but nevertheless it is in the visible world, invisibly (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b). We apprehend chôra then as “in a dream” forcing ourselves to acknowledge that “anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room, and that which is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b). This very act of recognizing that all objects demand situation, Plato argues, leads to the “hybrid” or “bastard” reasoning that in turn forces recognition of chôra. The ambiguity of chôra’s nature is further complicated by Plato’s next analogy, advanced to explain the emergence of chaos, a chaos readying itself for the reasoning work of the demiurge. Chôra once again becomes the “nurse of becoming,” but a nurse immediately transformed into a winnowing basket that is shaken by its contents and in turn shakes them: “just when things are shaken and winnowed by means of winnowing-baskets and other instruments for cleaning corn, the dense and heavy things go one way, while the rare and light are carried to another place” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52d). In this way were like and unlike things separated, and made ready for the demiurge. At this point in his attempt to characterize the invisible chôra, Plato has assembled a number of apparently contradictory “images” or what were later to be called “metaphors,” drawn from the arts of fabrication (technê [τέχνη]) as if to underline the action of the demiurge. Yet the chôra anticipates the arrival of this grand artisan—chôra is, so to speak, always already there. It is at once all-receiving, a receptacle, and something that harbors, shelters, nurtures, and gives birth. It is infinitely malleable like gold, and it is a matrix for all things. As things shake, it winnows like a basket, separating out the chaff from the grain. What is clear, as Cornford points out, is that the chôra, while not a void, is not “matter” in itself, as subsequent interpreters will have it. (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology). When resituated in the context of the city narratives of the Timaeus and Critias, it becomes clear that Plato’s use of the word’s ambiguities is consistent with the need to provide a firm and original foundation, one that originally emerged out of the earth and the cosmos, not only for ancient Athens but for a renewed city that could be projected as emerging out of and within a chôra that was ever-ready to receive and nurture, and that in all its connotations was connected to a content-filled and cultivated land, with room for the polis. In subsequent rereadings and reinterpretations, the Platonic chôra was subjected to oversimplification (Aristotle) and overinterpretation (Chrysippus, Proclus). In Aristotle, place (topos [τόπος]) takes precedence over Plato’s semi-mystical creation fables—as Casey remarks, “Chôra yields to Topos, the bountiful to the bounded” (Casey, The Fate of Space; and Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought). Indeed, Aristotle’s reading of the Timaeus explicitly (and perhaps deliberately) identifies the receptacle with the chôra, and thence the chôra with Here then is the already uncertain context into which chôra is introduced. For in starting again to describe the universe, Plato now joins to his two principal orders of existence—the unchanging intelligible model and the changing and visible copy—a third, a medium of sorts that supports the two. This medium is of a “form difficult and obscure” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶49) but its nature can be stated as that of the “receptacle (hupodochê [ὑποδόχη])—as it were, the nurse—of all Becoming.” Such a “receptacle” unlike its contents—fire, water, air, and earth that are in a perpetual state of change—is unchanging and permanent. Plato, as Cornford notes, somewhat misleadingly, compares it to the gold out of which one makes all kinds of figures. The receptacle “must be called always the same; for it never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50b). It is, Plato explains, a kind of “matrix” for everything, that, although it is changed by the things that enter it, and may appear to have different qualities at different times, is in itself always the same. In a passage that much later had implications for feminist readings, Plato, always trying to explain that “which is hard to express,” seeks another comparison through gender: “the (intelligible) model in whose likeness that which becomes is born,” is compared to a father; “that which becomes (the copy)” is like an offspring, and “that in which it becomes” (the receptacle) inevitably takes on the characteristics of a mother (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50 c–d). This apparently simple simile, one that gives the character of generation to the receptacle, is, however, immediately contradicted in what follows: for Plato insists that the receptacle, whatever else it is, is “invisible and characterless, all receiving,” a “nature” that, precisely because it is free of all the characters that come from elsewhere, enter into it, and pass out of it, cannot be endowed with a specific gender. Plato compares this lack of character to the liquid base used by the makers of perfumes that is as odorless as possible: “Thus it is, in the first place, for the perfumes that one prepares artistically, in order to give them a good odor. The perfume makers avoid first of all as much as possible all odor in the liquid base which must receive them” (Timaeus, 50e). It should be noted here, as Derrida will observe in his essay “La Pharmacie de Platon,” that “the pharmakon also means perfume. Perfume without essence, as we said above, drug without substance. It transforms order into ornament, the cosmos into cosmetic.” Would this mean that, by the same token, Plato is comparing the “receptacle,” not yet named chôra, to a pharmakon [φάϱμαϰον], a drug that, without smell, receives all smells that pass into, through, and out of it, with the implication that such smells are transformed into dangerous perfumes? At this point we are better taking Plato at his word when, even as he struggles for comparisons and mixes his metaphors, he states baldly that this receptacle partakes “in some very puzzling way of the intelligible” and is “very hard to apprehend” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶51b). What is certain is that Plato has determined the need for three things: the unchanging “Form,” “ungenerated and indestructible”; that which “bears the same name and is sensible”; and a third, previously called the receptacle, but 134 CHÔRA of passing from one language to another, or even from one philosophical language to another, and more of a question within the Greek language itself, of that “violent” tradition whereby a non-philosophical language is transferred into a philosophical one. “With this problem of translation,” Derrida notes, “we will be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage to philosophy.” And later he concludes: “La khôra est grosse de tout ce qui se dissémine ici” (chôra is pregnant with everything that is disseminated here). For Derrida, indeed, chôra was “grosse,” a word that indicated the difficulty of naming, categorizing, or even writing the “origin,” or at least that “origin” posited by Plato, before the entry of the demiurge in order to shape the world. Derrida was already engaged in writing his essay “Khôra” in homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant. Here he takes on the apparent confusion of “metaphors”—he prefers not to call them metaphors for reasons he will later divulge—used by Plato to describe, characterize, or define chôra, or the “receptacle,” in order to demonstrate that these turns of phrase are irreducible questions of writing. In a long citation from Albert Rivaud’s edition of the Timaeus, Derrida demonstrates the confusion surrounding the word and question of “place,” or chôra (citing Rivaud, Platon). Rivaud had noted the proliferation of what he called “metaphors for chôra, metaphors for the ‘place,’ the ‘site,’ ‘this in which’ things appear, ‘this on which’ they manifest themselves, the ‘receptacle,’ the ‘matrix,’ the ‘mother,’ the ‘nurse’—it is container and contained at the same time, ‘the space that contains the things.’ ” Rivaud himself translates chôra as a “porte-empreinte,” literally “carrier of the imprints” (as in porte-parole, “carrier of the word”), the “excipient,” or, “the entirely de-odorized substance, or the gold with which the jeweller can impress a quantity of different figures.” Derrida exposes the ambiguity of Plato’s introduction of the “third genre” of being. Derrida, however, was inevitably dissatisfied with the notion of “metaphor,” and “comparison,” working rather to identify the aporias in Plato’s own discourse. The paradox is clear: what is named “chôra” or “place” cannot itself be situated or “assigned a home”; “it is more situator than situated.” Indeed, Derrida resists all attempts to define the word, translate the word, or supply additional metaphors or comparisons for the word. Indeed, the “interminable theory of exegeses” (Derrida, Khôra) that surrounds chôra “seems to reproduce that which, following the discourse of the Timaeus, would happen not with Plato’s text, but with khôra herself.” All translations, he writes, remain “on the level of interpretation” and thereby subject to anachronism. There is, therefore, no question of proposing “le mot juste” for chôra; rather than reducing it falsely to a name or essence, it has to be understood as a structure. As Derrida concludes, “one cannot even say of it that it is neither this, nor that, or that it is at the same time this and that.” Marking the continuing ambiguity, Derrida and Sallis engaged in a friendly debate as to whether the word should be written without an article (khôra) as Derrida insisted, or with an article (the chôra) as Sallis preferred. For Derrida the article “presupposes the essence of the thing,” which had no such essence in Plato’s usage; for Sallis omitting the article “would risk effacing all difference between the word and that of which the word would speak” (Sallis, Verge of Philosophy). Chôra, indeed, remained elusive matter, going on to conflate chôra with topos (Aristotle, Physics, 4.209b; cited in Sallis, Verge of Philosophy). For Epicurus, however, chôra retains a certain Platonic energy; the root verb is chôrein, “to go” or “to roam.” As Sextus Empiricus explains, Epicurus distinguished among “void” (kenon [ϰενόν]), “place” (topos), and “room” (chôra), where “room” affords the space for the constant motion of the atoms, the “spielraum of atomic bodies,” as Casey calls it. The Stoic Chrysippus goes further, characterizing such a “room” or chôra as space for both roaming and also extension, a connotation followed by the Neoplatonist Syrianus (Casey, The Fate of Space), and thence by Proclus in his exhaustive commentary on the Timaeus. Since Proclus’s commentary, and throughout the myriad subsequent textual analyses that have ranged in their emphasis from Pythagorean geometry, cosmological symbolism, and biological geneticism, to the form of the ideal polis, the search for the lost Atlantis, and the mythologies of ancient Athens, little or nothing indicated chôra as a keyword, beyond the indices accompanying the translation of many such terms in Plato. Indeed, John Sallis, in his attempt to describe or found a “chorology” after Plato is hard pressed to find, save by omission and post-Derridean inference, a problematic role for, or even a mention of, the word. Nevertheless, the word chôra gained ground as a keyword in philosophy in the 1970s. Its status as a term to be confronted by and for deconstruction was tagged by Derrida in 1968, adopted within semiotics by Kristeva in 1974, and taken by Irigaray and others as a point of departure for a questioning of gender categories. In 1985 it was presented by Derrida as a problem for (Peter Eisenman’s) architecture, thence to become a moment for reflection on architecture’s gender in the work of Anne Bergren, on deconstruction and architecture in Jeffrey Kipnis, and on the grounding of architecture itself in Eisenman and Derrida’s project for a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s La Villette. Taken back into philosophy by Derrida in 1987 and 1993, chôra was re-inscribed within Neoplatonic interpretation by John Sallis in 1999. It was Derrida, who, in a sideways glance at the word in his discussion of “La Pharmacie de Platon” (“Plato’s Pharmacy”) first opened up a question that has since developed into a critical field of inquiry of its own. The context is significant. The essay is concerned with another word whose meaning is obscured by multiple uses, significations, and (mis) translations, but which nevertheless, when identified as a sign, stands out as a mark of Plato’s deep ambiguity toward writing, a pharmakon that might be at once a “drug” or “remedy,” dangerous or helpful. Speaking of the untranslatability of the word pharmakon in the Phaedo (but also everywhere that it appears in Plato), Derrida writes of “this regulated polysemy which has allowed, by ineptness, indetermination or over determination, but without contradiction, the translation of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ philter,’ etc.” Such errancy in definition and translation has indeed undermined “the plastic unity of this concept, its very rule, and the strange logic which links it to its signifier” in such a way that it has “been dispersed, masked, obliterated, struck with a relative unreadability, by the imprudence or empiricism of the translators, certainly, but first and foremost by the redoubtable and irreducible difficulty of translation.” But this is the result, Derrida argues, less of the difficulties CIVIL RIGHTS 135 the customary classifications of rights that distinguish civil rights (such as property) from political rights or social rights. In the second case, the reference is to the meaning acquired by “civil rights” in the context of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, whose main goal was to put an end to racial segregation and, more generally, to the discrimination of which minorities were the victims. If we want to understand why English speaks of “civil rights” (including the right to vote) and even of “civic rights” (i.e., citizens’ rights), where we might think the “rights of man” or “human rights” ought to be in play, we have to refer to American constitutional history. After the Civil War, the United States adopted three amendments to the Constitution that should have put an end to slavery and its aftereffects. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment states that [a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens’ right to vote against any restriction based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But the juridical and political development of the United States led to these amendments being deprived of much of their substance by racial segregation and various artifices designed to deprive blacks of their right to vote on various pretexts (e.g., literacy tests); moreover, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to prohibit racial discrimination in public rights, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in deciding a set of civil rights cases in 1883. To the extent that the fight against discrimination, relying on the new liberal orientation of the 1960s Supreme Court, sought to restore the full scope to the rights of American citizens, and not simply to guarantee the rights of individuals, it was natural that it would present itself as a movement for civic rights. Its goal was not only to guarantee human rights, but also to see to it that black Americans would be recognized as full-fledged citizens. Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Balkin, Jack, ed. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Boxill, Bernard. Blacks and Social Justice. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Holmes, Stephen, and Cass Sunstein. The Cost of Rights. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Kersch, Kenneth. Constructing Civil Liberties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Waldron, Jeremy. Liberal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. to the end and still, as a recent commentator notes, the question remains “multilayered” and “incoherent” (Sayre, “Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle”). But perhaps the problem of chôra would not have surfaced in so poignant a form if, as he recounts, Derrida had not been introduced by the architect Bernard Tschumi to the architect Peter Eisenman in 1985, and suggested that a concept on which he was writing a paper would perhaps serve to open a discussion that would launch their collaboration in the design of a garden for Parc La Villette. The concept was named “chôra”; in common translation, the special nature of this term, taken from Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, was rendered “place” or “space.” Apparently an innocent enough suggestion, the debates over the “meaning” of the word extended into seven taped discussions, seemingly replicating the Socratic model of the original, and eventually a book of transcriptions, drawings, and the translation of a version of Derrida’s own essay on chôra appeared. In this way, a word, long-forgotten in the footnotes of Plato translation and exegesis was launched into a veritable, architectural discourse, not perhaps as a solution to any “space of deconstruction,” but rather as an insoluble conundrum set by the philosopher for the architect, to test the capacity of architecture to signify its own origins, its groundings in chôra. Anthony Vidler REFS.: Algra, Keimpe. Concepts of Space in Greek Thought. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Bergren, Anne. “Architecture Gender Philosophy.” In Strategies in Architectural Thinking. Edited by J. Whiteman, J. Kipnis, and R. Burdett. Chicago: The Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism and MIT Press, 1992. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Cornford, Francis. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. London: Routledge, 1935. Derrida, Jacques. “La Pharmacie de Platon.” Tel Quel 32–33 (1968); repr. in La dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. . “Khôra.” In Poikilia. Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1987. . Khôra. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. Translation by J. Kipnis and T. Lesser: Chora L. Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1974. Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. Plato. ŒUvres completes. Timée, Critias. Edited by Albert Rivaud. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. . The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sayre, Kenneth. “The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle.” In Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, edited by Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.