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

PERSONATUM, Personal pronouns I / ME / MYSELF FRENCH je, moi, soi GERMAN Ich; Selbst GREEK egô [ἐγώ] ITALIAN io; se, si, si-mismo LATIN ego; ipse v. ACTOR, AGENCY, AUTRUI [DRUGOJ, MITMENSCH], CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ES, IDENTITY, OIKEIÔSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SELF [SAMOST’, SELBST], SOUL, STAND, SUBJECT, TATSACHE It is striking to note that certain dominant traditions in European philosophy (in particular transcendental philosophy, from Immanuel Kant to Edmund Husserl), and a tradition of grammatical analysis with its origins in antiquity that prevailed in structural linguistics (Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste), were united in closely associating the possibility of reflexive thought with the use of personal pronouns, taken as indicators of “subjectivity within language.” The Cartesian “ego cogito, ego sum” has thus had its philosophical privilege justified and firmly established. We should qualify this representation in two ways: the linguistic forms that it presupposes are not in any sense universal, and other grammatical analyses are possible; and it is just as important to examine closely the shared linguisticism of Europe and to compare the theoretical effects of the expressions of the so-called sujet de l’énonciation (the utterer of the speech-event, the “speaking subject”) and the sujet de l’énoncé (the “spoken-of” subject, the subject of the utterance), in order to understand how language predisposes thought to reflexivity within different speculative problematics. Within this perspective, what is sketched out here is a description of the cycle of the “first person” in modern philosophy—going from the German dialectics of the Ich and the Selbst (Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his equation Ich = Ich, then his opposition of the Ich to the Nicht-Ich; Friedrich Hegel and his problematizing of self-consciousness as the reciprocity of Ich and Wir), to the English invention of “self” and “own” (at the core of John Locke’s self-consciousness), and finally to the European recognition of the ontological primacy of the ego and the alter ego (in Husserl’s phenomenology)—so as to then introduce within this thinking the limits envisaged by Arthur Rimbaud’s paradoxical expression “Je est un autre” (I is another). This could serve as a common epigraph to the ways thinkers have gone beyond “first-person” subjectivity toward transcendence, impersonal corporeality, or transindividual anonymity, for which Michel Foucault invented the term pensée du dehors (thinking of the outside). I. Having an “I”; Being “a Person” At the beginning of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (lectures published in 1797), Kant writes: The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other I correspond exceptionally well to this definition (as do demonstratives, adverbs of time and place, verb tenses, and so on). We can thus, following Benveniste’s famous analyses, characterize the individual act of appropriating language as a problem of subjectivity in language—“Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I” (Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek, 226)—thereby creating a short-circuit between the instance of utterance (énonciation) and the statement (énoncé). But the fact of using the word “subjectivity” is an indication of the circularity of such definitions, since it takes as given (as was the case in Kant’s text cited above) that the “normal” or “implicit” form is one in which the agent, the support of any attribution in a statement, and the “instance of discourse” (ibid.) or what carries the word, that is, the generic speaking being (“man”), can all be subsumed under one and the same concept. This situation is only characteristic of some languages, however, or even some of their usages. The “simplicity” of the Indo-European system of personal pronouns is not a “linguistic universal.” In Japanese, for example, we observe two correlative phenomena (Takao Suzuki) that contrast with the usages of modern European languages (or only occupy a place in European languages deemed to be residual, infantile, artificial, or pathological). On the one hand, the terms we would call personal pronouns (above all, the equivalents of “I” and “you”) have no etymological stability: historically, they are substituted for one another, following a continual process of devaluation and replacement, linked to the transformation of marks of respect into marks of familiarity or condescension. On the other hand, the normal form by which speakers are designated in a statement consists of marking their respective position or role in the social relationships (which are almost always asymmetrical) within which communication is initiated. Particularly important in this regard are the terms of kinship that, by a characteristic fiction, can be extended to other types of relationship. It seems that European languages by contrast are made up, over a very long period of time, of a kind of specific universalism, which neutralizes the qualities and the roles of speakers (or, by contrast, allows them to be emphasized: “The king wishes it to be so,” “Grandfather is going to get angry!” “Madame is served”), so as to bring out the abstract, and virtually reciprocal, positions of sender and receiver of spoken language: the one who has spoken will then listen, and vice versa. Jakobson is therefore right when he criticizes Husserl’s interpretation of this point in his Logical Investigations, where he says that “the word ‘I’ refers to different persons depending on the situation, and for this reason takes on a new meaning each time.” To the contrary, the meaning of “I” is the same every time; it is what speakers—subjects—possess in common, that by which they individually appropriate for themselves the instrument of communication. It would of course be important to study the interaction of linguistic usages, of institutional transformations (the emergence of an increasingly broad sphere of formal equality that encroaches on both the public and the private), and finally of various logico-grammatical theorizations, all of which have made possible the recognition of this norm, its standardization in scholarly as much as in popular language, and its interiorization and conceptualization in notions such as “person,” “subject,” “agency,” “individuality,” “ecceity,” and so on. Even though it is falsely universal, this thesis has been a determining one for the history of European philosophy. We can return to it, but critically, particularly by situating it within the horizon of the problem of translation. In elaborating a philosophical discourse concerned with subjectivity, we would have to then pay attention to the reciprocal action between concepts and linguistic forms as they differ from one language to another, against a background of shared characteristics. This is indeed one of the keys to the untranslatable “translatability” that characterizes the sharing or colinguisticity (colinguisme) of European philosophy, and it is surprising that there have been no major attempts to use the question of personal pronouns as a basis for developing the same kind of philological and philosophical analyses that have been brought to bear on the syntactical and semantic effects of the verb être (to be) in the constitution of classical ontology, from Benveniste to Barbara Cassin. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Jaakko Hintikka’s analyses of the performative nature of the Cartesian cogito, or, more recently, Marco Baschera’s analyses of the Kantian Ich denke as a linguistic act, and also to some extent Ernst Tugendhat’s analyses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Hegel. The ground had been laid, however, on the one hand by the tradition of the critique of the metaphysics of the subject as a “grammatical convention,” which goes from David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche to the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, and on the other hand by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reflections on the originary nature of reference to the subject in different languages, developed by Ernst Cassirer in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms into a summary of the forms of expression of the Ich-Beziehung (I-relation). We will focus our comments on four groups of problems, which will naturally spill over into one another: the naming of the first person, with the possibilities of mention and negation that this allows (in particular in German); the connotations of the first- and third-person reflexives (in English “self”; in French moi, soi; in German Selbst); the reasons for the recourse to foreign nouns for the subject (above all, the Latin ego in modern languages); and finally, the problems posed by the use of the indefinite and the neuter in philosophy (“one” in English, ça and on in French, for example). But we have to begin by discussing several difficulties concerning the very notions of person and personal pronoun. . II. Vom Ich The theory of the subject in German Idealism, from Kant to Fichte and Hegel (we could gather all of these Vom Ich under the heading of Schelling’s first essay, titled, precisely, “Vom Ich . . .”) depends on a certain flexibility of the Ich, which can be partially transposed to English, but which has no equivalent in French. French does not nominalize the main subject, but instead offers a reflexive form, le moi, which produces the effect of objectivation, whereas Ich is immediately perceived as an autonym. As a consequence, 464 I / ME / MYSELF I / ME / MYSELF 465 1 True and false persons v. ACTOR, Box 1; SUBJECT, Box 6 In his article “The Nature of Pronouns,” Émile Benveniste explains that only the first and second persons are “real persons,” and the corresponding pronouns “real personal pronouns,” since they alone refer to interlocutors, that is, they imply the utterance within the statement itself: The third person is not a “person”: it is really the verbal form whose function is to represent the non-person. One should be fully aware that the “third person” is the only one by which a thing is predicated verbally. The “third person” must not, therefore, be imagined as a person suited to depersonalization. There is no apheresis of the person; it is exactly the non-person, which possesses as its sign the absence of that which specifically qualifies the “I” and the “you.” Because it does not imply any person, it can take any subject whatsoever or no subject, and this subject, expressed or not, is never posited as a “person.” The third person has, with respect to the form itself, the constant characteristic and function of representing a non-personal invariant, and nothing but that. But if “I” and “you” are both characterized by the sign of person, one really feels that in their turn they are opposed to one another within the category they constitute by a feature whose linguistic nature should be defined. A special correlation which we call, for want of a better term, the correlation of subjectivity, belongs to the I-you pair in its own right. One could thus define “you” as the non-subjective person, in contrast to the subjective person that “I” represents; and these two “persons” are together opposed to the “non-person” form (= he). It would seem that all the relations established among the three forms of the singular should remain the same when they are transposed to the plural. The ordinary distinction of the singular and plural should be, if not replaced, at least interpreted in the order of persons by a distinction between strict person (= “singular”) and amplified person (= “plural”). Only the “third person,” being a non-person, admits of a true plural. (Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek) This famous analysis is justified both by its recourse to a contemporary formalism of communication that builds reference into language itself, and by a modern metaphysics opposing persons to things. Indeed, it represents their point of fusion. It is thus contrasted to an older tradition, originating with Aristotelianism and perfected by the time of the Renaissance, according to which (and in a manner one could call realist or objective) it was rather the “third person” that properly characterized what was understood by person. The notion of a person (prosôpon [πϱόσωπоν], persona) was conceived on the basis of the notion of a name, signifying the suppositum (subject) of an attribution that the statement translates, represents, or expresses: The person is the mode of signification via which the verb consignifies the property of speaking not insofar as it is something innate, but insofar as the thing of the verb is applicable to the thing of the suppositum subsisting by itself according to the properties of speech. The person thereby affects the verb [inest verbo] by virtue of its attributive aptitude with regard to the suppositum, according to a varied mode of attribution. (Thomas d’Erfurt, Grammatica speculativa, quoted by Jacques Julien) The “names” ipse, ego, or tu, which “consignify” the person speaking, or to whom one is speaking, must then be interpreted both as abstractions and as targeting the individual being within a situation: singular universals of a kind. One might be tempted to think that this tradition still informs certain reductionist attempts of contemporary analytical philosophy, notably those inspired by Russell (“egocentric particulars”) and by Strawson (“individual occurrences”). But this tradition is also opposed to the point of view developed by the logic of the Stoics, and transmitted from there to the grammarians of the same school. Instead of being focused on a determinate person (and, in a sense, then being appropriated by this person), the “subjective” link here between énonciation and énoncé is by contrast generalized and anticipated in a theory of meaning. Persons are defined equivocally, both in relation to the action described in itself (as agent or patient) and in relation to speech (insofar as they can sustain a discourse about themselves, and more generally they can “attest to” their actions or those of another). To quote Apollonius Dyscolus: “Persons who take part in an act are divided up into grammatical persons but the act itself remains external to the person and to the number, and can thus be combined with all persons and numbers . . .; the term person is appropriate in that it demonstrates a corporeal deixis and a mental disposition.” Frédérique Ildefonse claims that the coincidence “between the agent of the physical world and the grammatical person,” inseparably linked to the way in which “the same term diathesis [= disposition] within the realm of signifieds is common to a physical diathesis and mood, that is, to a diathesis of the soul,” is essential to the Stoic notion of a person. In other words, a person is projected onto different individualities not on the basis of an intrinsic relation between thought and language, but on the basis of events in the world where actions meet words, producing meaning-effects. This is the point of departure for Gilles Deleuze when he conceives the “play of persons” on the basis of a “neutral, pre-individual and impersonal field in which it is deployed” (The Logic of Sense, trans. Lester). But alternatively, one can find an echo in the syntactical theory of Jean-Claude Milner, who takes up the question of personal pronouns on the basis of “reflexivity” (in French, me, moi, se, soi), and of the way in which, in certain languages, this interferes with the expression of reciprocity and collectivity (the general notion of “coreference”). These irreconcilable perspectives create a tension that is constantly present in modern philosophical theories of the “subject” and the “person.” But it is not always resolved in the same way, since each language has its own way of quoting, of being reflexive, of denying, and so on, and philosophical thought suffers the effects of this linguistic particularity (or, if one prefers, exploits its possibilities). Hence the untranslatabilities that also foster the renewal of theories of subjectivity. REFS.: Bardzell, Jeffrey. Speculative Grammar and Stoic Language Theory in Medieval Allegorical Narrative, from Prudentius to Alan of Lille. New York: Routledge, 2009. Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971, 1973. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Translation by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale: The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Ildefonse, Frédérique. “La théorie stoïcienne de la phrase (énoncé, proposition) et son influence (continued) 466 I / ME / MYSELF form of an intellectual intuition (in this sense, it cancels out the effects of Kant’s critique). French can do no better than to translate this as Moi = Moi, even occasionally risking Je suis Je. A sentence that sought to render Fichte’s prose into French might offer the following: “Je suis absolument parce que je suis; et je suis absolument ce que je suis; ces deux affirmations étant pour le Moi [Ich]. Le Moi [Ich] pose originairement son propre être” (I am absolutely because I am; and I am absolutely what I am; these two statements for the Self. The Self originarily posits its own being: Œuvres choisies de philosophie première, French trans. Philonenko, 22). Here, however, the French translation is incapable of conveying the symmetry of the German text. It thus fails to translate (unless it glosses it in a commentary) the movement proper to subjective idealism, which goes further back than the logical principle of identity, to the transcendental identity of the Ich, perceiving itself and uttering itself in its own immediacy. 2. This failure of translation is even more apparent in the following stage of the Fichtean dialectic, when it is stated that in its movement of self-positing, Ich “posits itself immediately both as Ich and as Nicht-Ich,” contradicting this time the form of the principle of identity in its traditional development (A is not non-A). Indeed, Nicht-Ich—the negation not of a predicate, but of a singular term, which for this reason Tugendhat considers an absurdity, ein Unding, and which literally also means a “non-thing”—is not (le) Non-Moi (Non-Self) but it is, in the simplicity of one and the same negation, both “[all] that which I am not” and the “nothingness of the I,” even its annihilation, that is, its being deprived of any substantial determination. A formulation such as “in the self [Fr.: le Moi] I oppose a divisible not-self to the divisible self,” about which Fichte tells us that “the resources of the absolutely and unconditionally certain are now exhausted” (Science of Knowledge, trans. Heath and Lachs, 110), does not allow us—in French, by means of the expression Non-Moi—to understand that Nicht-Ich still contains within it the form of the subject, but modified by a negation (or that Nicht-Ich is an Ich that negates itself as such). French masks, therefore, the linguistic roots of the elaboration that led Fichte to overcome the interpretation of the opposition between Ich and Nicht-Ich as an antagonism between subject and object (or between consciousness and the world, or freedom and nature), and to make it the expression of an intersubjectivity or “constituent interpersonality,” an originary unity of the “I” and the “You” (or of the person of the subject and the person of others). the Kantian formulation das Ich (which is closely associated with das Ich denke, often written as das: Ich denke, suggesting by homophony with the conjunction dass, “that,” a near equivalence between nomination and proposition: “the I think,” “[the fact] that I think”) works both as a reference to a subjective being and as a reference to the linguistic form, to the act of speech in which it is said. Writing le Je (the I) only works in French if a grammarian is making a mention of the subject pronoun, or as a Germanism in a philosophical translation, which even then is of fairly recent usage (Italian, by contrast, uses the Io without any problem, as we see, for example, with Giovanni Gentile, and Spanish philosophy uses Yo—in José Ortega y Gasset or Xavier Zubiri, for instance). One could not imagine Blaise Pascal writing “Le Je est haïssable” instead of “Le Moi est haïssable” (The self is detestable; we will return later on to the problem of “Je est un autre” [I is another]). Consequently, it is practically impossible for a French ear to hear the nominal form of Ich without assuming the reflexive le moi. The ambivalence specific to Kant’s analysis of “self-consciousness” as a reciprocal folding together of appearance and truth, of recognition and misrecognition (see SUBJECT), falls back onto the psychological or moral doctrine of the illusions everyone entertains about him- or herself (and particularly the way one over- or underestimates oneself). The absolute “simplicity” of the word Ich, with its particular flexibility, accounts in part for the dialectical power that is deployed in the field of the Ichheit, whose literal transposition into French always presents insurmountable difficulties. One understands why it is in the German language that the speculative philosophy of modern Europe has developed the antithesis of the paths of “being” and of “the I,” an antithesis that seems to repeat very ancient theological alternatives concerning the “name of God” (Cassirer, “Sprache und Mythos,” 139: “Der Weg über das Sein und der Weg über das Ich”). Here are three examples: 1. In the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, Fichte gave an interpretation of the Kantian transcendental apperception that is based on the homology between the logical principle of identity (A = A) and a proposition that can also be written algebraically Ich = Ich (“Ich gleich Ich”). This proposition, which can be understood to mean “Ich bin Ich,” is ontological in the strict sense, since it expresses what is proper to Ich as being, its internal reflexivity and its self-identity, and the way in which Ich poses itself as self-consciousness (Fichte’s expression for Selbstbewusstsein is “Das Ich setzt sich schlechthin als sich setzend” [The Ich posits itself as a pure self-positing]). It is thus a subjective absolute that brings to philosophy a new foundation in the chez les grammariens.” In Théories de la phrase et de la proposition de Platon à Averroès, edited by Philippe Büttgen, Stéphane Diebler, and Marwan Rashed, 151–70. Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 1999. Julien, Jacques. “Personne grammaticale et sujet parlant dans le De causis de J. C. Scaliger.” DRLAV (Documentation et Recherche en Linguistique Allemande Contemporaine, Vincennes), Revue de Linguistique (University of Paris 8), no. 30 (1984). Milner, Jean-Claude. Ordres et raisons de langue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982. Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. London: Allen and Unwin, 1940. Strawson, Peter F. Individuals. London: Methuen, 1959. (continued) I / ME / MYSELF 467 means of presenting the tension between the two terms as a sort of conflictual reflection inherent in the constitution of the subject, which is the decisive moment in the transformation of the individual spirit into a universal spirit that knows itself (Geist as an absolute form of the Selbst). III. From the Moi to the “Self,” from the “Self” to the Soi Leaving aside the semantics of the German Selbst, which is remarkable by virtue of the possibilities of forming compound words from it (for example, Selbstbewusstsein, Selbstbestimmung, Selbstständigkeit, Sebsterfahrung, Selbstbildung, Selbstverständigung, etc.) (see SELBST), we will now look more closely at the double displacement that occurs between French and English: from moi to “self,” from “self” to soi. What we have is a minor drama of betrayal. Played out initially within a very short space of time, it has continuously informed the conflictual relationship between the psychologies and philosophies of personal identity that are particular to these two languages (from the opposition between Hume and Rousseau in the eighteenth century, to the difference of approach between the American pragmatists such as William James or George Herbert Mead, and the French phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre or Paul Ricœur). In his An Essay concerning Human Understanding (2.27, Of Identity and Diversity), Locke invented two major concepts of modern philosophy: “consciousness” and “the self ” (see CONSCIOUSNESS). His immediate context and background was the invention of the expression le moi in French philosophy and literature (Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche). It was Pascal, as we know, who popularized the moi: “Je sens que je puis n’avoir point été, car le moi consiste dans ma pensée” (I feel that I might not have been, since the moi consists of my thought [Pensées, B469/L135]); “Qu’est-ce que le moi? Où est donc ce moi, s’il n’est ni dans le corps ni dans l’âme? Et comment aimer le corps ou l’âme, sinon pour ces qualités, qui ne sont point ce qui fait le moi, puisqu’elles sont périssables?” (What is the moi? Where then is this moi, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And how is one to love the body or the soul if not for those qualities which are not what makes up the moi, since they are perishable? [ibid., B323/L688]). But Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (fourth part), had already written: “Ce moi, c’est-à-dire mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis” (This moi, that is to say my soul, by which I am what I am). And this striking formulation had already been interpolated by the French translator in the course of the Fourth Meditation (Descartes, Œuvres, 9:62). The substantivization of the self-reference (ce moi, Ego ille) is at the heart of the Cartesian interrogation of identity. It imposes a very strong grammatical constraint on any translations: to go from the expression le moi to “the self ” is to enact a profound transformation, such that it is no longer possible to go back the other way. This is why Pierre Coste, the French translator of Locke, had to create, in turn, le soi, an innovation whose effects are still felt today. (Coste’s note to his translation of Locke’s Essay says: “Pascal’s moi in a sense authorizes me to use soi, soimême, in order to express the feeling, which everyone has within himself, that he is the one and the same [ce sentiment que chacun a en lui-même qu’il est le même]; or, 3. Hegel, for his part, incessantly criticized what he considered to be the “formalism,” the “motionless tautology [bewegungslose Tautologie],” of the equation Ich = Ich. This is one of the central threads of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which begins with the analysis of the emptiness of sense certainty, described as suspended in a purely verbal self-referentiality (“Das Bewusstsein ist Ich, weiter nichts, ein reiner Dieser; der Einzelne weiss reines Dieses, oder das Einzelne,” an almost untranslatable sentence because of the equivocality of Ich and the alternation of masculine and neuter: “Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure ‘I’; or I am in it only as a pure ‘This,’ and the object similarly only as a pure ‘This’ ”; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, 58). In the same text, however (the chapter “Die Wahrheit der Gewissheit seiner selbst” [The Truth of Self-Certainty]), Hegel introduces in turn an expression based on the syntax of personal pronouns in order to set in motion the dialectics of self-consciousness: “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich, ist” (ed. Hoffmeister, 140). This expression is immediately followed by the famous discussion of “autonomy and non-autonomy of self-consciousness: lordship and bondage.” The extant translations—“I that is We” and “We that is I” (Fr.: “Un Moi qui est un Nous, et un Nous qui est un Moi,” or “Un je qui est un Nous, et un Nous qui est un Je”)—do not adequately render the movement of identification that passes through the other, which Hegel makes the active force of the progression of Spirit (Geist). In order to mark the appropriation of alterity in the interiority of the same subject, through the negation of negation, we would need to translate by forcing the syntax: “I that We are, We that I am” (Fr.: “Moi que Nous sommes, Nous que Je suis”). For once, the detour via the French terminology of the moi is useful, since this Hegelian formula transposes an idea originally expressed by Rousseau: À l’instant, au lieu de la personne particulière de chaque contractant, cet acte d’association produit un corps moral et collectif composé d’autant de membres que l’assemblée a de voix, lequel reçoit de ce même acte son unité, son moi commun, sa vie et sa volonté. (At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will.) (Contrat social, 1.6, trans. Cress, 24) But where Rousseau described in a naturalistic manner how an individual was formed from individuals, even if he is attributed the interiority of a consciousness after the fact, as a way of interpreting the enigma of an alienation that is at the same time a liberation, Hegel places us from the outset in the immanence of the subject, which he connotes by the use of the first-person singular and plural. He uses what Benveniste calls the difference between a “person in the strict sense” and an “amplified person” (in other words, the fact that “I” is both opposed to “We” and included in it to make a person) as a 468 I / ME / MYSELF usage (corresponding sometimes to the Latin ipse, and sometimes to the Latin idem; thus “myself ” and “oneself,” or “the same,” “the selfsame”). There are early nominal uses, both with and without the article (“self,” “the self ”). Finally, there are different combinations: “self ” compounded with pronouns and possessives, written either as a single word to emphasize its pronominal function (itself, himself, myself, oneself), or as two separate words, introducing a noun tending to substitute for the pronoun itself as a form of intensification (itself, himself, myself, oneself); or compounded with nouns or adjectives, to form notions of an action being applied to the subject itself, such as “self-conscious” and “self-consciousness” (as in the Greek terms formed with auto- and heauto-, where Romance languages would use a genitive construction: causa sui, compos sui, cause de soi, maîtrise de soi, conscience de soi). . No less decisive is the reciprocity, bordering on equivalence, that is established between “myself” and “my own” when the subject, addressing himself, is referring to that which belongs most closely or properly to him. “My own, confirm me!” the poet Robert Browning will write (“By the to put it more clearly, I am thus obliged to translate it out of an indispensable necessity; for I could not express in any other way the meaning it has for my Author, who has taken the same liberty with his own Language. The circumlocutions I could use in this instance would get in the way of what he is saying, and would render it perhaps completely unintelligible.”) But present-day usages of the English “self ” and the French soi do not really correspond to one another. One cannot write in French mon soi (as in the English “myself ” or “My Self ”), much less use this noun in the plural (unlike the English “ourselves”). Rather than establishing a universal concept, translation opens out onto a drifting-apart of meaning. The way in which Locke takes advantage of the particularities of one language to transform the problematics that originated in another is quite remarkable. Indeed, although English has not developed any expression equivalent to the form das Ich or le moi, it does have at its disposal a great variety of usages for “self,” which incline the English-language conceptualization of the subject to imagine it as a disposition or property of oneself. The term “self ” (whose etymology remains obscure) encompasses both a pronominal usage (corresponding to the Latin ipse) and an adjectival 2 To, auto, h(e)auto, to auto: The construction of identity in Greek v. IDENTITY, SELF [SELBST, SAMOST’], TO TI ÊN EINAI We have retained a large number of composite terms calqued from the Greek, often via Latin, and constructed using the pronoun autos, -ê, -o [αὐτός, -ή, -ό], such as “autograph, autodidact, automaton, autonomous”, to refer to the action that the subject carries out personally and most often on himself (written in one’s own hand, someone who teaches himself, that which moves by itself, that which establishes its own laws). This formation was virtually as extendable and generalizable in ancient Greek as the compound words in Selbst- are in present-day German (see SELBST); in French it has also brought several recent inventions in which the second term is French (for example, auto-allumage [self-lighting, 1904], RT: DHLF, s.v. auto). Autos is itself made up of the particle au [αὖ], which indicates succession (then), repetition (again), or opposition (on the other hand); and of ho, hê, to [ὁ, ἡ, τό], a deictic (this one, that one) that in classical Greek becomes the definite article “the” (although ho men, ho de [ὁ μέν, ὁ δέ], for example, continue to mean “this one, that one”). The first and literal sense of autos is thus something like “on the other hand, and then this one here, in contrast to that other one” (cf. RT: Dictionnaire grec français, s.v.). Autos grammatically has three essential uses: 1. In cases other than the nominative, it acts as a reminder pronoun in the third person, with an anaphoric usage (auton horô [αὐτόν ὁϱῶ], “I see him”; ho patêr autou [ὁ πατήϱ αὐτоῦ], “the father of him,” “his father,” as in the Latin eius, eorum). 2. It is used as an emphatic pronoun or adjective (Lat. ipse, Fr. même), either on its own (as in the Pythagorean Autos epha [Aὐτὸς ἔφα], “The Master says”), or apposed to a personal pronoun (egô autos [ἐγώ αὐτός], “it is me in person who,” “myself”) or to a noun (auto to pragma [αὐτὸ τὸ πϱᾶγμα], “the thing itself”; dikaion auto [δίϰαιоν αὐτό], “what is just in itself”). It is often used in this way at the same time as the reflexive pronoun, heautos, -ê, -o [ἑαυτός, -ή, -ό], which is itself a combination of two pronouns: he [ἕ], a third-person personal pronoun, which we find in Homer, followed by autos; when the reflexive is contracted into hautou, -ês, -ou [αὑτоῦ, -ῆς, -оῦ], the two are only distinguished in terms of breath (rough breathing for the reflexive, transliterated by an aspirate h); thus the Delphic formula given in the Charmides (165b), “to gignôskein auton heauton [τὸ γιγνώσϰειν αὐτὸν ἑαυτόν], “to know oneself in oneself,” and the fact of being “auto kath’ auto” [αὐτὸ ϰαθ’ αὐτό] indicates the separate ontological status, “in oneself and by oneself,” or perhaps “in oneself and for oneself,” of the Platonic idea. 3. Finally, when it is immediately preceded by the article ho autos, hê autê, to auto [ὁ αὐτός, ἡ αὐτή, τό αὐτό], it has the same meaning as the Latin idem, “the same.” The Greek makes a very clear distinction by its word order between “ho autos theos [ὁ αὐτὸς θεός],” “the same god,” and “hautos ho theos [αὑτὸς ὁ θεός],” “the god himself.” In Greek, then, a constellation of terms tightly binds together the two aspects of identity: ipseity, or the constitution of a self, and “sameness,” the construction of an identity-to-oneself or to another-than-oneself. A number of languages have analogous procedures, such that the presence of an article makes the difference in meaning: French (soi) même / le même (que), German Selbst/ dasselbe, in contrast to Latin ipse/idem, and English “self”/“same.” But in Greek, the article is primarily a constituent of the term itself, au-t-os. There follows from this a quite I / ME / MYSELF 469 the different senses of the term, separately or in different combinations (as in: “owns all the actions of that thing, as its own”: An Essay, 2.27.17). The result of these constructions is an amalgamation of the paradigms of being and having, which is typical of what has been termed, from the point of view of political philosophy, a “possessive individualism.” Basically, “me” is (“I am”) “mine,” and what is “most properly mine” is “myself” (just as what is most properly “yours” is “yourself,” “his” is “himself,” etc.). Even though this amalgamation goes as far back as the Greek discourses on oikeios and idios describing the particularity of the self (cf. Vernant), it is only with Locke that it occupies the center ground of modern philosophy. It finds its way through to us, continually reinforced, up until the Fire Side”). This reciprocity enables Locke to fuse a modern problematic of identity and diversity with an ancient problematic of appropriation (oikeiôsis, convenientia; see OIKEIÔSIS), terms at either end of a spectrum between which notions concerning recognition, consciousness, memory, imputation, responsibility for oneself and one’s own actions, all insinuate themselves. In English, “own” is both an adjective and a verb. As an adjective, it is combined with the possessives “my,” “his,” and so on, as an intensifier (“my own house,” “I am my own master”) and separately (“I am on my own”). As a verb (“to own”), it has a wide range of meanings, including “to possess,” “to admit,” “to confess,” “to recognize,” “to declare,” and “to claim”: these all have the sense of saying something is “one’s own.” Locke draws together all singular and informative series of linguistic gestures that one could characterize, along with Friedrich Schleiermacher, as constituting a kind of schema of how the Greeks conceived of identity. This series is, de facto, philosophically determining. Let us start with the article. Greek only has a definite article (unlike Latin, which has none, or French, for example, which distinguishes between le, definite, and un, indefinite). In archaic Greek, what will become the article, ho, hê, to, manifestly has a strong, demonstrative meaning, which is why it functions referentially, or as a liaison, close to a relative pronoun (see RT: Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque, 188, 192ff.). When, after Homer, it becomes an article, this little word remains remarkably consistent. Its presence alone next to a noun confers upon it a presumption or a presupposition of existence, so we find it regularly next to proper names (in Greek, one says ho Sokratês [ὁ Σоϰϱάτης], “the Socrates,” and not “Socrates”). It is used even more clearly to differentiate the subject from the predicate in a sentence in which word order alone is not sufficient: one would not say in Greek “a is a,” but rather “the a is a (or “a the a is,” or “is the a a,” etc.). Someone like Gorgias, for example, uses this as an argument against the identity of the subject and the predicate, in the form in which a statement of identity is made. Thus, for instance, with “to mê on esti mê on [τὸ μὴ ὂν ἐστὶ μὴ ὂν],” “the nonbeing is a nonbeing,” one says, whether one likes it or not, that the subject “to mê on [τὸ μὴ ὂν],” “the nonbeing,” has another type of consistency and existence than the predicate “mê on [μὴ ὂν],” “a nonbeing” (De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia, 978a25b = G.3–4, in Cassin, Si Parménide, 636). This is also why the article can be used so easily to “substantivize” not only adjectives (to kalon [τὸ ϰαλόν], “the beautiful one” in Plato’s Symposium), participles, and infinitives (to on [τὸ ὄν ] and to einai [τὸ εἶναι], “the being” and “Being”), but all sorts of expressions (see, for example, TO TI ÊN EINAI, the “essence of what being was,” the “quiddity” of Aristotle in Latin), as well as words or whole sentences, which go from being used to being mentioned, as if put into quotation marks (in Aristotle, for example, cf. Metaphysics, Γ.4, 1006b13–15). The first and strongest testimony to this organization of identity as a function of the constellation to, auto, to auto is the way in which Parmenides’s Poem constructs the identity of being. Following what he calls “the road of [it is]” (which, moreover, is referred to as hê men [ἡ μὲν], “this one,” in opposition to hê de [ἡ δὲ], “that one,” 2.3 and 5), Parmenides discusses the whole range of forms and possibilities, syntactical as well as semantic, of the verb esti [ἔστι], “is” (thirdperson singular, 2.3; see TO BE), ending with to eon [τὸ ἐὸν], “the being” (substantivized participle, 8.32), that is, the subject identified as such only at the end of the road (and a demonstrative article, emphasized with a particle, will thereafter be sufficient to refer to it: to ge [τό γε], 8.37, “the/that in any case,” or to gar [τὸ γὰϱ], 8.44, “the/that indeed”). One of the crucial points of the operation occurs in fragment 3, whose meaning has been so controversial, but acclaimed by Heidegger as the guiding principle of Western philosophy: “to gar auto noein estin te kai einai [τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ νоεῖν ἐστίν τε ϰαὶ εἶναι],” which could be translated literally as “a same indeed is both thinking and being.” One might interpret this phrase as meaning that thinking and being are one and the same, and understand it along with Heidegger not as a declaration of subjectivism and idealism avant la lettre— being is only ever what we think it is—but as a “belonging together” of being and thinking, and thus as a determination of man himself (An Introduction to Metaphysics). But one could also interpret it in terms of how this to auto is formed: to, “the”/“this”; au, “again, once more”; to, “the”/”this.” The particle joins together the same element two times; “the same” in Greek is articulated as “the re-the,” “this re-this.” In other words, the consistency of identity (to auto, “the same” in the sense of a same thing, something identifiable as being the same as itself) is nothing other than the conjunction (te kai) of thinking and being. Indeed, this is where being itself, properly articulated, will find in te eon the name of a subsisting and knowable subject, or ipseity par excellence. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Cassin, Barbara, ed. Si Parménide: Le traité anonyme. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaire de Lille, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Edited by Petra Jaeger. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt: Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Loveday, T., and E. S. Forster, eds. and trans. De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia. In The Works of Aristotle, vol. 7 of 12. Loeb Classical Library. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913. Parmenides. The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary. Edited by A. H. Coxon. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1986. . Parménide: Sur la nature ou sur l’Étant. La langue de l’étre. Edited, translated, and commentary by Barbara Cassin. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Edited and introduction by Manfred Frank. 7th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999. Translation by James Duke and Jack Forstman: Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Heinz Kimmerle. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977. Translation by Andrew Bowie: Hermeneutics and Criticism. Edited by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 470 I / ME / MYSELF its self beyond present existence whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, own and impute to itself past actions. (Ibid., §26) From the perspective of inner judgment (which anticipates the Final Judgment), Locke translates into the language of the “self” the expression of Descartes, substituting “consciousness” for “my soul” in the process of identifying that by which “I am what I am,” and playing once again on the possessive: “that consciousness, whereby I am my self to my self.” This idea of being oneself for one’s person obviously suggests an element of reflection, or internal distance. There is thus an uncertainty about the question of knowing whether the identical and identity are “myself,” or rather are “in me” as an object, an image, or a verbal simulacrum. But the “self” for Locke is nothing more than an “appearing to oneself” or “perceiving oneself” that is identical through time. It could not, therefore, in fact split in two, whether the split is imagined to occur between a real self and an apparent one (as in Leibniz), or between an actor and a spectator (Hume, Smith), or between subject and object, or between I and Me (in the way that G. H. Mead decomposes the Self into an “I” and a “Me,” which continuously switch places: it would be interesting to explore what Mead’s model perhaps owes to an oblique relation to French). This vanishing distance is ultimately the pure differential of the subject. It corresponds remarkably to the idea that Locke’s theorization of consciousness attempts to found, marked by a tension between the representation of a fixed point to which the entire temporal succession of ideas would be connected, and that of the flux of representation, the continuity of which would itself produce identity. It appears to us primarily, though, as the effect of a play on words—an ironic state of affairs, when we consider the extent to which Locke tried to separate a theory of knowledge based on pure associations of ideas, from the linguistic “garments” of these ideas. . IV. Returns of the Ego French, then, has the duality of the je and the moi, which allows it to problematize identity, and later introspection, from the perspective of both an affirmation of certainty and a passion for existence (but also for disappearance); German has the flexibility of the Ich, which encompasses a dialectics of position, of reflection, and of negation; and English has a synthetic expression of moral responsibility and mental appropriation: the “self.” We might then assume that the rules of the game are set, so to speak (unless and until we take into account other, different languages, of course), and that it is all a matter, precisely, of translation. A few enigmas remain, however, of which the most striking is the way in which philosophy in the twentieth century has set about reviving the Latin ego, like a Fremdwort that is nonetheless, by definition, absolutely familiar. A. “Ego-psychology” It is by no means certain that this “return of ego” poses exactly the same problems in all contexts, first of all because liminal thesis of Sein und Zeit (§9), in which Martin Heidegger identifies the existential particularity of human Dasein with Jemeinigkeit, another neologism (this time a German one, literally “being each time mine”) that is just as difficult to translate as the English “self.” In a sense, then, Heidegger’s neologism “self” turns back into its opposite, since the content of the English “own” (in German das Eigene) is merely the imminence of death, the only “thing” that “properly” belongs to each one of us. We will see how Heidegger’s reversal of the Lockean tradition is accompanied by a new revolution in the naming of the subject. In the passages in Locke’s Essay where the doctrine of personal identity is elaborated (above all, 2.27), all of these virtual senses are brought into play through the slippery movement of the writing. In a first stage we go from the idea of identity as simple “sameness” to that of reflexive identity, or “ipseity”: the word “self” at that point becomes a noun. From comparative expressions (“the same with itself”), we move easily to “that is self to itself” (equivalent to the idea of consciousness): Consider what person stands for. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so and by this every one is to himself, that which he calls self it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done. (An Essay, 2.27.9) Locke provides two equivalent expressions, which could be exchanged for one another: “to be one (identical) Person” and “to be one self.” In a second stage, “self ” sometimes serves as a substitute for the first person, and sometimes as its double, entering into dialogue with it, and showing concern for it: Had I the same consciousness I could no more doubt that I, that write this now was the same self, place that self in what Substance you please, than that I that write this am the same my self now whilst I write. That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join its self, makes the same person, and is one self with its, and with nothing else; and so attributes to its self, and owns all the actions of that thing. (Ibid., §§16–17) “Self” as a common noun slips to “self” as an almost proper noun (without an article), while retaining the possibility of being understood as a possessive. In equating expressions such as “I am my self,” “I am the same self,” and “I am the same my self,” Locke turns “self” into the representation of oneself for oneself, the term to whom (or to which) I attribute what I attribute to myself, what I care for when I care for myself. Finally, Locke gives the name “Person” (which he defines not as a grammatical or theological term, but as a “forensic term”) to the “self” that had itself been used to clarify the singularity of “personal identity”: Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same person. This personality extends I / ME / MYSELF 471 “ego-satisfaction,” and so on, leading to all sorts of astonishing redundancies, such as “ego-identity,” all attested by the Oxford English Dictionary [RT] of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). This influence even extends to certain texts by Lacan, who was notoriously hostile to “ego-psychology,” whence his lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society on 2 May 1951, “Quelques réflexions sur l’Ego” (Some reflections on the ego, quoted in Ogilvie, Lacan, 52), a title that was not lacking in irony. But the fact that Lacan had in mind a theorization of “paranoiac knowledge” suggests another direction: that of the usages, scientific or parodic, of the word “ego” (including the expression “my ego”) to refer to the narcissistic image that the subject forms of itself (“the ego of the Prime Minister is highly developed”). the fact of writing ego or “the ego” in the middle of an ordinary sentence does not produce the same effect of strangeness in all languages. We should reserve a special place for the (by now universal) consequences of the generalization of an English psychoanalytic terminology, in which the Ich of Freud’s second topological theory was translated as “the ego,” whereas Es was translated as “the id” (see ES). These effects are easier to understand when we explain not only, following Alexandre Abensour, that the term “ego” in English comes out of a psychological and medical vocabulary, but also that it thereby prematurely gave rise to all sorts of composite words referring to the fact of relating ideas and behaviors “to the self,” or even of putting them in “the service of the self” (“ego-attitude,” “ego-complex,” “ego-consciousness” [sic], 3 The “self” in psychoanalysis It was in the English-speaking world, around 1960, and mainly through the influence of Donald W. Winnicott that the term “self” truly began to appear in psychoanalytical literature. Since then, it has become firmly established in psychoanalysis in its English form, even though there have been occasional attempts to translate it as soi in French, as Selbst in German, or as an equivalent term in other European languages. What seems to hamper these translations is, on the one hand, a cultural particularity implying that the English “self” refers to an aspect of one’s personality that is hidden, or liable to be misunderstood or neglected (as suggested, for example, by the expression “Take care of yourself”), and on the other hand, the epistemological difficulty for contemporary psychoanalysts that an unreserved mobilization around this concept has caused. Indeed, when Winnicott defines the “self” as different from the “I,” saying that for him, “the self, which is not me, is the person within me” (see ES), some authors see in this new concept a useful complement to the three psychic terms introduced by Freud in his second topology (the Ich [Ego], the Es [Id], and the Über-Ich [Superego]), whereas others consider it as bastardization that would bring us back to a pre-Freudian, personalist, even Bergsonian phenomenology of autonomy and of a unified I. In fact, as Jean-Bertrand Pontalis has shown in an excellent analysis of the epistemological aspects of the problem (“Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi’”), the self according to Winnicott and several other English-speaking psychoanalysts should not be interpreted exclusively from a theoretical point of view, in relation to the conceptual apparatus elaborated by Freud. When they introduce the “self,” these authors are in fact concerned about “responding to problems posed by the analysis of their patients, and not about demonstrating the inadequacy or the deficiencies of the Freudian metapsychology.” What was at stake for them, then, was “more the determination of a domain of experience, than the theoretical critique of the validity of a concept.” The “self” was actually first used in 1950 by the New York psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann, who was originally from Vienna, in the context of the “Ego-Psychology” movement. Hartmann set out to dissociate an “I” that is defined by its functions (motor control, perception, experience of reality, anticipation, thought, and so on), from a “self” that represented the person as such, as distinct from external objects and other people. This bipartition in effect isolates narcissism, which is exalted in the feeling of plenitude and the self-sufficiency of one’s entire being, whereas, as Pontalis puts it, “the constitution of a self [moi] is linked to the recognition of the other, for whom it serves as a model.” As for the problematic elaborated by Winnicott in the context of what he calls the “transitional object” and the “potential space,” this leads to a distinction between the “true self” and the “false self,” which has often been popularized in a trivial and normative sense. The first is formed in a relation that the subject has with its subjective objects, which takes on a solipsistic character corresponding to the “right to not be discovered, if need be, to not communicate, insofar as any such needs, if they are recognized, reveal that the individual feels he is real in the secret communication that he has with that which is most subjective within him” (Pontalis, “Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi,’” 180). The “false self” corresponds, for its part, to the need the subject has to adapt to external objects as they are presented to him by the environment. According to Pontalis, this would be close to what Helen Deutsch in 1942 called the “as if” personality, in the sense that it is characterized by a developed behavior and psychological ease that is apparently well adapted, but that functions in a void, notwithstanding a constant oscillation between an extreme submission to the external world and exposure to its misfortunes, and a readiness to react to these misfortunes to one’s own advantage. But this bipolarity of the “true self” and the “false self” has nothing to do with a dichotomy between two personality types, where one, the “true self,” would be the only authentic one, whereas the other, the “false self,” would be more or less alienated by environmental constraints. According to Winnicott, these two “selves” in effect form a pair in which the second protects the first, even if it appears to do nothing more than hide or cross-dress it. For it is important that the “true self,” in its position of noncommunication, should need to be protected. There would, then, only be a genuine pathology in cases where there was a clear split between these two aspects of the personality. Then again, however, concepts of this kind are only relevant, in Winnicott’s eyes, if they prove to be useful at a given moment in a clinical situation, and they do not compromise the Freudian problematic of the self (moi). Charles Baladier REFS.: Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. “Naissance et reconnaissance du ‘soi.’” In Entre le rêve et la douleur. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1977. 472 I / ME / MYSELF between ancient Latin and classical French (“Ce moi, c’est-àdire mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis” [This self, that is to say my soul, by which I am what I am]). Kant’s reading of Descartes, however, in which Je and Je pense, even Je me pense (I think myself), are taken as names for the subject, is tacitly assumed. A circle is thus traced, which we will have to follow back to its origins in order to reinterpret its meaning. Two themes, respectively opening and closing the arguments developed in the Cartesian Meditations, seem to us to be worthy of attention here. We suggest that bringing them together offers a key to Husserl’s linguistic artifice. First of all, Husserl describes what he calls a “transzendentale Selbsterfahrung” (translated into French by Levinas and Peiffer as “expérience interne transcendentale” [transcendental inner experience], and by Marc de Launay as “auto-expérience transcendentale”; compare Dorion Cairns’s English “transcendental self-experience”), by virtue of which we can gain access to “a universal and apodictic structure of the experience of the I [des Ich] which extends across all of the particular domains of affective and possible self-experience [Selbsterfahrung again]” (§12). This Selbsterfahrung has a specific kind of manifestation, in which consciousness “is given” in the mode of “itself” (“im Modus Er selbst”) or of “oneself” (“Es Selbst”) (§24). It is then described as Selbstkonstitution (“constitution de soi-même,” “auto-constitution”), which is tantamount to saying that the consciousness that is named ego also appears to itself as sufficient, as the origin of its own meanings or qualities. This is what Husserl calls a “transcendental solipsism.” Unlike Kant, however, Husserl does not offer this experience in which the “I” (Ich) perceives itself as the “identical pole of lived experiences,” “the substratum of habitus,” and so on, as an illusion constitutive of subjectivity. Nor does he see within it, like Heidegger (writing at approximately the same moment in Sein und Zeit), the risk of “missing the sense of the being of sum.” But he makes it the point of departure and the horizon of a “self-interpretation” (Selbstauslegung) in which the ego will discover progressively what gives it its meaning, which had not been immediately noticed, except partially. Now, the essential content of this “discovering of the transcendental sphere of being [Enthüllung der transzendentalen Seinssphäre]” is the constitutive function that intersubjectivity has for the ego itself—what Husserl called, in an analysis that has since become well known, a constitution of the ego as an alter ego, or an “original pairing” (Paarung) of the ego: In this intentionality a new meaning of being is constituted, which transcends the limits of my monadic ego in my self-specificity [der neue Seinssinn, der mein monadisches ego in seiner Selbsteigenheit überschreitet; Levinas and Peiffer translated this as: “un sens existentiel nouveau qui transgresse l’être propre de mon ego monadique”], and it constitutes an ego for itself not as my-self [nicht als Ich-selbst], but insofar as it is reflected in my own I [in meinem eigenen Ich], my monad. But the second ego is not purely and simply there, properly given to us itself [uns eigentlich selbst gegeben; Levinas and Peiffer: “donné en personne”], it is constituted on the contrary as an alter ego, and I am myself this ego [Ich selbst in meiner Eigenheit bin; Levinas and Peiffer: “c’est B. Das transzendentale Ego More directly linked to our discussion is the introduction of “egological” terminology in Husserl’s phenomenology, and the very profound effects it produces there. Although Husserl had only used classical terminology in the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) of 1900–1901 and in the Ideen of 1913—the terminology of transcendental Idealism, posing the usual problems of translation (thus in Ideen, 1.57: “Die Frage nach der Ausschaltung des reinen Ich,” which Paul Ricœur translated into French as “Le Moi pur est-il mis hors circuit?” [Is the pure self (Husserl: “the pure ‘I’ ”) put out of circulation?])—the texts from his late period, starting with the Cartesianische Meditationen (the Cartesian Meditations were originally delivered as lectures in German at the Sorbonne in 1929, and were translated into French by E. Levinas and G. Peiffer before they were even published in the original German) begin to introduce another terminology, that of the “transcendental ego [das transzendentale Ego].” How should we understand this retranslation into Latin, which could seem merely pedantic? We might look for the reason in the context and the intentions of the text, without going into the complexity of the problems raised by the way in which Husserl’s conception of subjectivity evolved. These have provided an endless source of debate for contemporary philosophy, from Sartre’s major article on “La transcendance de l’ego” (The transcendence of the ego, 1936), in which he problematizes the relationship between consciousness, the Je, and the Moi (self), to the controversy between Jacques Derrida (La voix et le phénomène [Speech and phenomena], 1967) and Michel Henry (L’essence de la manifestation [The essence of manifestation], 1963) in the 1960s around the question of the auto-affection of the subject. The first and simplest reason resides in the fact that Husserl cites Descartes, whose philosophical gesture he hopes to repeat: If we examine the content of the Meditations, we note that we are effectuating a return [Rückgang] to the philosophical ego a return to the ego of the pure cogitationes. (Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns, Introduction, §1) The text of Descartes that Husserl invokes is the original Latin text, thus at same time continuing a German university tradition, and marking the persistence of a linguistic universitas common to spiritual Europe, a teleological horizon in which Husserl situates, precisely, the primacy of transcendental subjectivity. We might say that with Husserl’s reprise of Descartes, the ego is immediately perceived as absolutely translatable (unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, for example, which ends up being perceived as untranslatable into other languages). The Latin Descartes, whose thought (re)inaugurates philosophy, symbolically summarized in the use he makes of the noun ego and of the expression “ego cogito, ego sum,” is not so much French as European, and thus universal in the sense of European universality, whose crisis Husserl then undertakes to interpret. Husserl was no doubt unaware of the fact that the turns of phrase used by Descartes in the Meditationes de prima philosophia (Metaphysical meditations) to problematize ipseity, in particular the “ille ego, qui iam necessario sum” of the Second Meditation, would not have been possible without a constant back-and-forth movement I / ME / MYSELF 473 1871), where this expression first appears, since there it is a question for the poet of discovering within himself a disproportionate creative power for which he is not responsible: J’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute. Si les vieux imbéciles n’avaient pas trouvé du Moi que la signification fausse, nous n’aurion pas balayé ces millions de squelettes qui ont accumulé les produits de leur intelligence borgnesse, en s’en proclamant les auteurs! (I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it. If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the author of them!) (Trans. Oliver Bernard, in Kwasny, Towards the Open Field, 146) At issue for Rimbaud, too, is how to recover the meaning of an ancient kind of delirium, in which madness communicates with enthusiasm: En Grèce, ai-je dit, vers et lyres rythment l’Action. L’intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées, naturellement. Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. (In Greece, I say, verses and lyres take their rhythm from Action. Universal Mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.) (Ibid., 147) What suddenly bursts forth here (in certain limit-conditions where the “I” escapes from the “Self” [Moi]) is the paradox of the equivalence between the personal and the impersonal, or better still, borrowing Benveniste’s categories, between a “person” and a “non-person,” in all of its different modalities. There are basically three types of these modalities, which philosophy has always designated as being on the horizon of the “I,” as its other side, or its limit, or its truth. “Das Wesen, welches in uns denkt,” Kant wrote in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (374), in which he sketched out a surprisingly tripartite personification: “Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding)”— “What thinks in us,” then, could be “Him” or “Her” (God, Being, Truth, Nature); it could be “that” (the body, desires or impulses, the unconscious); it could be “one” (the impersonal of a common thought, what circulates as speech between all subjects). Let us conclude by summarizing these three translations. “Je est un autre” (I is an other) is to say it is God, the only one capable of using absolutely the Ich-Prädikation (Cassirer) in order to name himself. We know that the Bible (perhaps inspired by other models, notably Egyptian, but this is not the place to get into the disputes about which came first) was originally theophanic in its formulation (“Éyéh asher éhyéh,” that is, “I am who I am,” or “I am who I will be,” Ex 3:14; ). It gives rise in the mystical tradition to moi-même, dans mon être propre”], designated as a moment by the expression alter ego. (Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation, §44) Solipsism is thus reversed from the inside, or, to be more exact, it opens out onto a new transcendental problem that is deeply enigmatic by Husserl’s own admission. This relates to the fact that constitutive intersubjectivity (since the ego would not be the subject of a thinking of the world of objects, if this world were not in its origin common to a reciprocal multiplicity of subjectivities) has as its condition the representation of “itself as an other,” an alter ego that is both generic and concrete, irreducible to (the) ego and yet indiscernible from it (that is, from the “I”) in its constitution. Husserl calls this elsewhere (§56) “eine objektivierende Gleichstellung meines Daseins und des aller Anderen” (an objectifying placing of my being and that of all others on the same level), which is experienced from the inside (Levinas and Peiffer translate this as: “une assimilation objectivante qui place mon être et celui de tous les autres sur le même plan”; de Launay proposes the following: “une équivalence objectivante de mon existence et de celle de tous les autres”). Through this verbal association, Husserl manages to account for the meaning of his initial choices, but he can only do it by going beyond Descartes and returning to an earlier layer of the humanist tradition. The term alter ego, which became commonplace and even banal in the different European languages during the nineteenth century, in the sense of a close friend, a personal representative, someone in whom you can confide, and so on (it first appears in French in Honoré de Balzac), is usually traced back to Cicero’s De amicitia (Laelius), where we actually only find the expressions “tamquam alter idem” and “alterum similem sui” to denote a true friend. The fact is, however, that the expression goes much farther back (Pythagoras: ti esti philos [τι ἔστι φίλоς]; allos egô [ἄλλоς ἐγώ], according to Hermias, In Phaedrus, 199A). It casts over our entire culture the question of the possibility of experiencing intellectually or affectively something beyond the alternative of self and stranger/other (Fremd, in Husserl’s text). This is the question Michel de Montaigne asked in an ethical register, for example, about his unique friendship with La Boétie (“Because it was he; because it was I”). Husserl also uses it to inform his reshaping of ontology, at the same time illuminating how we should understand that Descartes had indicated to philosophy the way toward a radical questioning, and yet had missed its transcendental meaning. We might perhaps suggest, then, that from the first, the return to the ego and the return of the ego (as a universal word) had been overdetermined by the possibility of saying the alter ego authentically (see MITMENSCH, NEIGHBOR, and LOVE). V. Je Est un Autre: It Thinks (Me) Let us immediately articulate this dialectic with another ontologico-linguistic problem, the one indicated by Rimbaud’s expression: “Je est un autre” (I is an other). This could be just another way of translating alter (est) ego, or even ille ego. However, the uncertainty in French between the masculine and the neuter, and the way in which Rimbaud forces the syntax, points toward other interpretations. These are, moreover, in part suggested by Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny (15 May 474 I / ME / MYSELF Many authors, particularly German-language ones, from Georg Lichtenberg up to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, have for their part emphasized the idea that the subject’s selfreference, and the irreplaceable identity of which it is meant to be sign, are of no use when it comes to imagining the essence of thought: so one should not write Ich denke, except as a derivative effect, but rather es denkt, “it thinks” or “there is thought,” as one says es regnet, “it is raining.” The most interesting consequences of these two points of view occur when they are fused together in a doctrine of the unconscious, as is the case with Freud. In his second topology, the “reservoir of drives” is named Es, which has been translated into French as (the) ça, as opposed to the moi (das Ich) and the surmoi (das Über-Ich) (which in some ways is the Il, Ille that surmount the ego, a divine or paternal model of authority). The meaning of these strange grammatical designations for the “instances of the psychic personality” is no doubt to reestablish the ancient idea of the conflict between the different parts of the soul, but in the modern horizon of thought reflecting upon its faculties of expression. This only comes out clearly once they give rise to a reciprocal formulation: the “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” of the New Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932), where Es should indeed be conceived as a subject (or at least “of the subject”), since Ich is by definition a subject. Subjectivity only arises in a process in which the personal and the impersonal can switch places, the places occupied by a thought that reflects upon itself in the at least apparent unity of a first person, and by a thought that undoes itself and misrecognizes itself in the conflict of representations attached to the body (life drives, death drives). some surprising reversals, such as in Meister Eckhart, where we find the exclusive appropriation of the “I” and the “I am” by the “base of the base” of the soul (Urgrund), itself conceived as a creative nothingness that precedes the existence of God. If we accept that the secularization of the divine name in philosophy truly begins with the “ego sum, ego existo,” or “I am, I exist,” of Descartes, we see that this statement, modern by definition, serves in its turn as a point of departure for a series of displacements and reversals. This is the case when Spinoza in the Ethics sets down the factual axiom “homo cogitat” (since this undefined “man” is very close to an impersonal “one,” he simply expresses one of the ways in which substance or nature thinks itself, and thus produces itself). It is the case in an entirely different way when the romantic and theosophist Franz von Baader “inverts” the Cartesian cogito: “cogitor [a Deo], ergo Deus est” (God thinks me, therefore he is, cited by Baumgardt, Franz von Baader). Without these precedents, Hegel would not have been able to attribute the Self to the Spirit as universal rationality, that is, to overcome the Cartesian formulation asserting the absolute subjectivity of a “thought of thought.” . But “Je est un autre” should also be understood as referring to the power of the individual body, or, as Locke said, to its “uneasiness,” that is, its perpetual motion and desire, of which it is confusedly perceived to be the seat. Parodying Descartes, Voltaire had written (Philosophical Letters, 13): “I am body and I think: I know nothing more than that” (or “That’s all I know about that [je n’en sais pas d’advantage]”). 4 Exodus 3:14 The only theophany of the divine Name transmitted by the Old Testament is to be found in the book of Exodus. This happens in two stages. Once he has been “given the mission” by Yahweh to “bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt” (Ex 3:11), Moses asks God by what name he should be called by them: “Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?’” Exodus 3:14 gives the double answer: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you.”’” So in theory, Exodus 3:14 contains two names: “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex 3:14a), and “I AM” (Ex 3:14b), the first generally considered by ancient and medieval exegesis as a mystical name, revealed to Moses alone in its fullness, and the second as an exoteric name, intended for “the people of Israel.” In relation to the other names used to refer to God in various traditions—Yahweh in the “Yahwist” tradition, El Shaddaï [The Lord] in the “sacerdotal” tradition—the name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14 (a passage belonging to the “Elohistic” tradition) has had a particular, even extraordinary, fate. A feature of the original formulation as it is recorded in the holy writ, “Éhyéh asher éhyéh,” is that it does not contain any immediate metaphysical connotation. The natural meaning on which exegetes agree is “I am the Living One who lives,” “The absolute Living One” (it being understood that the Living One is also a living being, and that the name Yahweh, corresponding to à éhyéh in the third person, is commonly understood as “he is”). However, if, as Gilson noted, there is no metaphysics in Exodus, there is a “metaphysics of Exodus,” an apprehension of God as Being or as The Being, based upon a certain understanding of the revealed Name. This understanding relies on a fact of translation—in this case, on the translation of the passage in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament written in order to transmit the biblical message to the Jews of the Hellenic diaspora, which introduced the word on [ὄν]. It is with the transposition by the JudeoHellenistic translators of the Septuagint that “Éhyéh asher éhyéh” becomes “I am the Being,” the on [ὄν], an “ontological” transposition that reaches its peak in Jewish thought with Philo of Alexandria (cf. StarobinskiSafran, “Exode 3, 14,” 47–56). This transfer was decisively established in the Latin Vulgate, when Exodus 3:14a was translated as “Ego sum qui sum,” and Exodus 3:14b as “Qui est (misit me ad vos),” with the French “Je suis celui qui est” (I am the one who is), prevalent in the seventeenth century, being the product of a collage of 14a and 14b that was dictated by the concern for elegance. (Compare the King James version: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”) It would be pointless—and impossible—to examine here all of the exegeses that have been proposed of the theophany of Exodus. We shall I / ME / MYSELF 475 (uneigentlich) being, the “one,” or “any man” (das Man), who is essentially the man of public conversation, of the noisy exchange of opinions (as opposed to the silent figure, “absolutely my own,” of care). Fleeing the anxiety felt at the possibility of its own death, Dasein or the existent can only respond to the question “Who am I?” by assuming a “public identity,” expressed in language through common meanings (Being and Time, pt. 1, chap. 4). The precise meaning of the French pronoun on ([das] man) is certainly not easy to understand because of the interrelation between the phenomenological analysis and the value judgment, but its translations are instructive. English has recourse to no less than three correlative terms—“anyone,” “one,” and “they” (a term originally used in discussing Heidegger’s text by the philosopher William Richardson, and retained in the standard English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)—which thus shift the anonymity of the one to the many, in a way that allegorically invokes the masses. In Italian, they privilege the impersonal turn of phrase: si dice, As Abensour notes (see ES), the very simple and yet improbable translation of “Wo Es war soll Ich werden” proposed by Lacan (“Là où c’était, là comme sujet dois-je advenir” [Where it was, I must come into being], Écrits, 864, trans. Fink) allows us to speak again the “language of ontology.” Should we be surprised that in this respect, Lacan’s translation involves, under the name of grand Autre (big Other), a kind of short-circuiting of two previous interpretations of “Je est un autre”? If He is not the unconscious, at the very least we should say, with François Regnault, that “God is unconscious.” But with this Lacanian reference, we come to the third possible way of understanding the “non-person” and of transforming the “I” into its other: this other appears, then, as the order of language itself, the symbolic. As we know, Lacan is not alone in proposing such an interpretation, in which “ça pense” (it thinks) is always already preceded by “ça parle” (it speaks). It was also prevalent in Heidegger, for whom the impersonality of language as constitutive was initially presented pejoratively, as a characteristic of improper content ourselves with noting the extremes at either end of their spectrum. At one end, there is the refusal to respond, the “true God not able to put himself at the mercy of men by giving them a name that would express his essence”—a refusal translated by the elliptical nature of a formulation understood as “I am who I am,” “I am what I am.” At the other end, there is the affirmation of God as Being itself—in the sense of “I am: the one who am/is”—or at least the affirmation of his “existence” (as opposed to nothingness or evil). This would be a guarantee of his truthfulness, with Jesus also referring to himself in this sense by using the expression “I am” in John 8:24: “For you will die in your sins unless you believe I am,” which contains a transparent allusion to the Name of Exodus, but which translators generally prefer (for reasons having to do with the awkwardness of the original expression) to render as: “You will die in your sins unless you believe what I am.” What interests us here is more limited in scope, and assumes that one accepts the horizon of the “metaphysical” reading: the play between the I and being, between the ego and the sum. This play reaches its maximum intensity in Eckhart’s interpretation of the Name of Exodus, particularly in his rewriting of Exodus 3:14 as “Deus est ipsum suum esse,” which gives rise to all sorts of variations, wavering between “God is himself his being” and “God is the being-oneself.” The ultimate expression chosen by Eckhart was “Ipse est ‘Qui est’” (“Himself is ‘Who is,’” understood in the sense of “it is Himself, this ipse”—the Ich [= ego, “I”] of the German Sermons—“who is”). It is an Ipse, or more exactly a Solus Ipse (Him alone), hidden in the words of Moses, that Meister Eckhart seeks to uncover in his reading: “Deus est ipsum esse et essentia ipsius est ipsum esse. Ipse est id quod est et is qui est, Exodi 3: Sum qui sum, Qui est misit me. Per ipsum et in ipso est omen quod est, ipsa sufficientia, in quo et per quem et a quo sufficit omnibus” (God is being himself and the essence of himself is being himself. Himself is what is and the one who is, Exodus 3: I am who I am, Who is has sent me. By himself and in himself is all that is, sufficiency itself, in whom and for whom and by whom he is sufficient for all [In Exodum, no. 158, in Lateinischen Werke, 2:140.5–9]). In Eckhart, the “metaphysics of Exodus” thus tends toward a theology of the Ipse, and this is why, basing his commentary of Exodus 3:14 mainly on the testimony of Maimonides, Eckhart is principally interested in showing that in the divine statement, the copula (sum) and the attribute (sum) are identified with the subject, with this Ego that God alone is in reality (In Exodum, nos. 14–21, in Die lateinischen Werke, 2:20.1–28, 10). The play between I and being is explicitly thematized in the German sermon 77 by comparing two passages in the Bible: “Ego mitto angelum meum” (Luke 7:27): “I send my messenger,” which contains the word “I” (Ego); and “Ecce, mitto angelum meum” (Mal 3:1): “Behold, I send my messenger,” which does not. The absence of the word ego signifies the ineffable nature of God: the fact that the soul cannot be expressed or put into words, “when it apprehends itself in its own content,” and the fact that “God and the soul are one, to the extent that God can have no property by which he would be distinguished from the soul, or would be anything other than it, such that he cannot say: Ego mitto angelum meum.” The presence of the word ego signifies, by contrast, “the isness [isticheit] of God,” that is, “the fact that God alone is” and the fact that he is “indistinct from all things,” “for God is in all things and he is closer to them than they are to themselves.” REFS.: Albrektson, Beril. “On the Syntax of ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh in Exodus 3:14.” In Words and Meanings: Essays Presented to David Winton Thomas, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and Barnabas Lindars, 15–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Centre d’étude des religions du Livre. Dieu et l’Être: Exégèses d’Exode 3, 14 et de Coran 20, 11–24. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1978. Eckhart, Meister. German Sermons and Treatises. Edited and translated by M. O’C. Walshe. 3 vols. London: Watkins, 1979–87. . Die lateinischen Werke. Edited by Konrad Weiss and Loris Sturlese. Berlin: Kohlhammer/ Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1936. Gilson, Étienne. “L’Être et Dieu.” Revue thomiste 62, no. 2 (1962): 181–202; 62, no. 3 (1962): 398–416. Libera, Alain de, and Émilie Zum Brunn, eds. Celui qui est: Interprétations juives et chrétiennes d’Exode 3, 14. Paris: Centre d’Études des religions du livre, Cerf, 1986. McCarthy, D. J. “Exod. 3:14: History, Philology and Theology.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978): 311–22. Starobinski-Safran, Esther. “Exode 3, 14 dans l’œuvre de Philon d’Alexandrie.” In Dieu et l’être. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1978. 476 I / ME / MYSELF REFS.: Balibar, Étienne. “Ego sum, ego existo: Descartes au point d’hérésie.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, no. 3 (1992). Baschera, Marco. Das dramatische Denken: Studien zur Beziehung von Theorie und Theater anhand von I. Kants “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” und D. Diderots “Paradoxe sur le comédien.” Heidelberg: Carl Winter,1989. Baumgardt, David. Franz von Baader und die philosophische Romantik. Halle, Ger.: Niemeyer, 1927. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966–74. Translation by Mary Elizabeth Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1997. Bodei, Remo. “Migrazioni di identità: Transformazioni della coscienza nella filosofia contemporanea.” Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 8, no. 16 (1995). Cassirer, Ernst. “Sprache und Mythos—Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen.” In Wesen und Wirkrung des Symbolbegriffs. Darmstadt, Ger: Wissenschaftliche Buchges, 1956. First published in 1925. French translation by O. Hansen-Love and J. Lacoste: La philosophie des formes symboliques. 3 vols. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1972. English translation by Ralph Manheim et al.: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965–98. Derrida, Jacques. La voix et le phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Descartes, René. Œuvres. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. 11 vols. Rev. ed. Paris: Vrin, 1996. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Œuvres choisies de philosophie première: Doctrine de la science. Translated into French by A. Philonenko. Paris: Vrin, 1980. First published in 1794–97. . Science of Knowledge. Translated by P. Heath and J. Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. La pensée du dehors. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1986. Translation by Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. In Foucault/Blanchot. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Gentile, Giovanni. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro. Florence: Sansoni, 1959. First published in 1916. Guillaume, Paul. L’Imitation chez l’enfant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Edited by J. Hoffmeister. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1971. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Henrich, Dieter. “Fichte’s Ich.” In Selbstverhältnisse. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982. Henry, Michel. L’essence de la manifestation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Hintikka, Jaakko. “Cogito ergo sum: Inférence ou performance?” Philosophie, no. 6 (May 1985). First published in 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950. French translation by Emmanuel Levinas and Gabrielle Peiffer: Méditations cartésiennes. Paris: Armand Colin, 1931. French translation by M. de Launay: Méditations cartésiennes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. English translation by Dorion Cairns: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. . Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie. Translated into French by P. Ricœur. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1950. English translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Allen and Unwin, 1931. Jakobson, Roman. “Les embrayeurs, les catégories verbales et le verbe russe.” Chap. 9 in Essais de linguistique générale, translated into French by N. Ruwet. Paris: Minuit, 1963. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique. Translated into French by Michel Foucault. Paris: Vrin, 1984. English translation by Robert B. Louden: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Edited by Robert B. Louden and Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. . Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1976. Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kwasny, Melissa, ed. Towards the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. which represents “tutti e nessuno, il medium in cui l’esserci o Dasein, si dissipa nella chiacchiera” (Everyone and no-one, the medium in which Dasein dissolves into chatter: Bodei, “Migrazioni di identità,” 646). Spanish has dicen and se dice; gossip and hearsay are el qué dirán, the “what-will-they-say.” But such combinations of private identity and public expression (whose counterpart is the tireless quest for the voices of silence, in mystical experience or in poetry, a non-speech where being preferentially expresses itself, and which would in a sense be situated this side of the “I” as well as of the “one”) are not strictly necessary. Beyond the alternative of the Lacanian “subject of the unconscious,” speaking or signifying like the truth in the “place of the Other,” and of Heidegger’s anonymous subject-as-multitude of daily chatter, the most persuasive determination has without doubt been proposed by Michel Foucault in his commentary of the neutral in Blanchot. “The other” is thought turning back to its constitutive exteriority, which is essentially the infinite dispersion of the effects of language: The “I” who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space. If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of “I speak” then in principle nothing can limit it—not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer discourse and the communications of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues. (Foucault, Thought from Outside, trans. Massumi and Mehlman, 11) We have covered (at the cost of certain simplifications) the cycle of expressions of the subject in the European code of persons. Two hypotheses have emerged, which call for further investigation. The first is that no one language is absolutely sufficient to complete this cycle, but the unveiling of the relationship between language and thought that the subject “consignifies” (as the Scholastics would say) can only occur by transferring the question from one language into another language, that is, by reformulating it within this other language according its own syntax. The second is that this cycle clearly reproduces the cycle of the statements at the origin of the metaphysical principle: tautology or identity, conflict or contradiction, repetition or reflection, difference or alienation. These ontological figures are not engendered; even less are they predetermined by language. But what is certain is that without a linguistic formulation (disposition), and without the culture of this formulation, they would not be thinkable, and therefore would not have been thought. Étienne Balibar IDENTITY 477 See ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, ESTI, REALITY, RES, TO TI ÊN EINAI, UNIVERSALS; and CONSCIOUSNESS, SOUL; cf. CONCEPTUS, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION. II. Idea and Aesthetics In Aesthetics, of particular importance is the relationship between the surface or image, and the underlying reality or model. See BEAUTY, CONCETTO, Box 1, DISEGNO, IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], MIMÊSIS; cf. ART, PLASTICITY. v. FORM, TO BE Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by Bruce Fink: Ecrits. New York: Norton, 2007. Libera, Alain de. La mystique rhénane d’Albert le Grand à Maître Eckhart. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. McDowell, John. “Reductionism and the First Person.” In Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Mead, George H. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by C. W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. First published in 1934. French translation by J. Cazeneuve, E. Kaelin, and G. Thibault: L’Esprit, le soi et la société. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Ogilvie, Bertrand. Lacan, la formation du concept de sujet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. Pariente, Jean-Claude. Le langage et l’individuel. Paris: Armand Colin, 1973. . “La premiere personne et sa fonction dans le Cogito.” In Descartes et la question du sujet, edited by Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Regnault, François. Dieu est inconscient: Études lacaniennes autour de saint Thomas d’Aquin. Paris: Navarin/Éditions du Seuil, 1985. Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Translated by D. A. Cress. Cambridge: Hackett, 1987. Sartre, Jean-Paul. La transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique. Paris: Vrin, 1988. First published in 1936. Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von. Vom Ich. In Sämliche Werke, vol. 1. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856. First published in 1795. Suzuki, Takao. Words in Context: A Japanese Perspective on Language and Culture. Translated by Akira Miura. Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha International, 1978. Tugendhat, Ernst. Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. French translation by R. Rochlitz: Conscience de soi et autodétermination. Paris: Armand Colin, 1995. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen. In Schriften, vol. 1. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980. Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe: Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. IDEA I. Idea and Ontology 1. The word “idea” comes from the philosophical Latin idea (from videre, “to see”), used notably by Seneca (Letters 58.18) in translating Plato’s Greek idea [ἰδέα] (from idein [ἰδεῖν], the aorist of horaô [ὁϱάω], “to see”), which—in a running set of exchanges and cross-references with the closely related term eidos [εἶδος]—means “visible form, aspect,” and later “distinctive form, essence.” See SPECIES for analysis of the respective networks of the Latin and the Greek (cf. FORM). 2. The word has since Plato been one of the key terms of ontology, constantly invested with different meanings in different languages (idée in French, Idee in German, and so on), and by different philosophies, at the junction between objectivity (the “Idea” in Plato and Hegel) and subjectivity (“Ideas” in Locke and Kant), a crossing point that is expressed, for example, by the notion of the “objective reality of the idea” in Descartes (see REALITY, III). IDENTITY “Identity” is derived from identitas, which is from the pronoun idem, “the same” (no doubt a composite of the demonstrative and of an emphatic particle), which is one of a cluster of late inventions that are untraceable in classical Latin. Even the English and French terms are polysemic, weaving together the notions of “sameness” and of “ipseity”: it thus encompasses two distinct terminologies in Latin, which open up particular sets of problems. I. Identity, Sameness, Ipseity 1. In accordance with its Latin etymology, “identity” denotes first of all something that is indiscernible, the “same,” in the sense of “the same as,” or “identical to,” idem. The Greek expresses this identity-indiscernibility with the term ho autos [ὁ αὐτός], to auto [τὸ αὐτό], with the article placed in front of the demonstrative. 2. “Identity” also refers to a person, to personal identity: even in the sense of “oneself,” ipseity, from the Latin ipse, which means “itself,” “in person” (ego ipse, myself, moi-même in French, etc.). The Greek expresses this identity-ipseity using the same demonstrative, autos [αὐτός], but without an article, which is sometimes attached to the pronoun: egô autos [ἐγὼ αὐτός], like ego ipse, “myself in person.” This is the meaning of “identity” in “identity card” and “identification procedure.” See I/ME/MYSELF (for the Greek, ), PERSON, SAMOST’, SELBST; cf. ES. 3. On the transition from the ontological register to the transcendental register, in which “reflexive” identity is conceived as the condition of possibility of speaking, see I/ME/MYSELF, SUBJECT, and cf. CONSCIOUSNESS, PERSON, SPEECH ACT. II. The Inextricable Link between the Different Sets of Problems: Essence, Resemblance Sameness and ipseity are inextricably linked in several essentially philosophical ways: 1. The first way to be oneself is to be verified as being identical to oneself, just as the subject and predicate are in the principle of identity “a is a,” which requires a comparison between two elements that are said ultimately to be one and the same, and indicated either by their 478 IL Y A IMAGE The English “image” is a calque of the Latin imago, which literally denotes a material imitation, particularly effigies of the dead, and which psychoanalysis invests with its own meaning (see EIDÔLON, Box 2). We begin with the Greek, because of the multiplicity of non-synonymous words denoting the image in the language, and with the German, because of the large number of terms that are derived from Bild. I. Eidôlon: The Complexity of the Greek Vocabulary of the Image The Greek names for image always privilege one of its defining or functional characteristics: eikôn [εἰϰών], “similitude,” phantasma [φάντασμα], “appearance in light” (see PHANTASIA, IMAGINATION, from phôs [φῶς], “light,” and LIGHT), tupos [τύπоς], “imprint, impression,” and so on. The entry EIDÔLON, the most general term derived from the verb meaning “to see,” and that denotes the image as something visible by which we can see another thing, discusses at greater length the main difficulties of interpretation and translation that have arisen in ontology and optics, via the Arabic (ma’nā [المعنى ;[see also INTENTION). Many other Latin terms than imago can be translated as “image” (simulacrum, figura, forma, effigies, pictura, species). These respond, but do not correspond, to the Greek terms: “species,” for example, is the translation that Cicero favors for the Platonic eidos [εἶδоς], “idea, essence”; but in other philosophical contexts, the word can denote eidôlon [εἴδωλоν], “image” and “simulacrum.” The Latin entry SPECIES discusses the Latin translations of eidos, in its pairing with eidôlon (see ESSENCE, IDEA). II. Bild: The Large Number of German Derivations The entry for the German BILD discusses a network of terms that are systematically connected to each other, and that allow us to articulate the relationship of the image to its model: Urbild/Abbild (model/copy), Gleichbild (a copy that is a good likeness), Nachbild (ectype), which can be considered in light of the Hebrew terms in Genesis (s.èlèm [םֶלֶצ ,[demūt [מוּתְד .([ This exceptionally broad constellation includes Einbildungskraft, the imagination as the faculty by which one forms images (see IMAGINATION), and Bildung, education (see BILDUNG, CIVILIZATION, CULTURE). III. The Complexity of the Problems 1. The aesthetic dimension of the image is discussed in the entry MIMÊSIS, “imitation/representation” (see IMITATION); see also DESCRIPTION, TABLEAU. 2. On the literary and rhetorical dimension of the image, see EIDÔLON, Box 1, and COMMONPLACE, COMPARISON; see also ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, INGENIUM. 3. On the possibility of a theology and a politics based on the image as the visible trace of the invisible, see OIKONOMIA (and ECONOMY). 4. On the ontology of being and appearing, see APPEARANCE, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG. 5. On the logic of truth as resemblance and similitude, see FICTION, TRUTH. 6. On the cognitive dimension of the image, see REPRÉSENTATION; see also PERCEPTION, SENSE. position in the order of the words (see WORD ORDER), or by the presence or absence of an article (see I/ME/ MYSELF, Box 2; see also PRINCIPLE, and cf. SUBJECT and PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION ). 2. Ipseity refers to the definition, to the essence, to the idea whereby a thing is what it is. Plato links the question of ipseity and intelligibility together with the question of the resemblance to the model and to the idea: the two senses of identity are thus joined dialectically; see EIDÔLON, MIMÊSIS, SPECIES: cf. BEAUTY. For a broader perspective, see ESSENCE, ESTI, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI. One could compare this to the French, which makes a distinction in word order between “l’homme même” (the very man) and “le même homme” (the same man). 3. In terms of the question of the image, the expression of identity is directly linked to the question of resemblance, and of similitude, sameness, similis (Lat.), homos [ὁμός] and homoios [ὅμоιоς] (Gr.), from the IndoEuropean root *sem, “one,” allowing for attention to be focused on the common points between two entities that remain distinct; in addition to MIMÊSIS and IMAGE, see ANALOGY. The distinction between sameness and ipseity has been particularly rigorous and inventive in English since Locke (sameness/identity): see in particular STAND, where we see the beginning of a new expression of identity in metaphorical terms (the metaphor of “holding oneself up,” of “taking a stand,” or even the juridical concept of “having standing”), which is shared by English and German, but not French (se tenir debout); cf. STANDARD. 4. Finally, we might consider the problematic extension of self-identity as a question of the individual to a question of collective identity, which leads to varying connotations in names of peoples from one language to another; see NAROD and PEOPLE; cf. FATHERLAND, HEIMAT. v. ACTOR, OBJECT IL Y A Il y a expresses the presence of something, or the way in which the world is given. The French turn of phrase is quite idiomatic, especially because of the adverb y, which indicates place (but, according to the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, the y in the expression il y a “has no meaning that can be analyzed”; RT: DHLF, s.v. ). Other languages use simple or complex expressions that contain either the verb “to have” (há in Portuguese, hay in Castilian Spanish), “to be” (esti [ἐστι] in Greek, est in Latin, “there is” in English), “to give” (es gibt in German, dá-se in Portuguese, se da in Castilian), or “to hold” (tem in Portuguese, and analogously in Castilian). See ES GIBT, ESTI, HÁ, and SEIN, Box 1. More generally, on the relationship between being and presence, see also TO BE [SPANISH], and ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, NATURE, PRESENT, TO TI ÊN EINAI, WELT. v. ASPECT, LIGHT, MEMORY. IMPLICATION 479 IMAGINATION The English “imagination” comes from the relatively obscure imperial Latin word imaginatio (itself derived from imago, whose principal meaning is “effigy, portrait”; see IMAGE), whereas the Greek root, phantasia [φαντασία] (from phôs [φῶς], “light”), evolved in the sense of “fantasy, phantasm” (see PHANTASIA, Box 3, for the psychoanalytic lexicon). I. The Tension between Production and Reproduction The difference between phantasia and imaginatio, as shown by the difficulties experienced in translating the Greek into Latin, is the difference between the creative force of apparitions (PHANTASIA, see DOXA and ERSCHEINUNG) and the reproductive faculty of images (see EIDÔLON, MIMÊSIS, and REPRÉSENTATION), each of these terms also itself being internally distressed by this tension and the value judgments that come with it. On the Scholastic tradition, based on Avicenna’s translations of Arabic philosophy, see SENSUS COMMUNIS [COMMON SENSE and SENS COMMUN]; cf. INTENTION. The pair phantasia and imaginatio is put to work in different ways in the German tradition (Phantasie/Einbildungskraft, see BILD and BILDUNG; here we must take into account the extraordinary richness of the family of words that places the image and the imagination on the side of education and culture), and in the English tradition, which tends in contrast to differentiate the power to produce fictions depending upon the extent to which it is arbitrary or necessary (FANCY, see also FICTION). II. The Imagination as a Faculty: Aesthetics and Epistemology This same tension determines the place of the imagination in the play of faculties and the modalities of being in the world. Is the imagination a faculty that is necessary for the exercise of the other faculties, operating somewhere between passivity (see AESTHETICS, FEELING, PATHOS; cf. SENSE) and activity (see REASON; cf. INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, INTUITION, MEMORY, SOUL, UNDERSTANDING)? Or is it rather, as Blaise Pascal puts it, a “mistress of error and falsity” (Pensées, frag. 41; see TRUTH)? 1. BILD discusses the difference that Immanuel Kant places at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason, between a “reproductive” empirical imagination and a transcendental imagination that “produces” the schemata, and is thus the condition of possibility of our representations. 2. Prior to and beyond the critical distinctions between concept and intuition, image and idea, the Italian tradition insists on the metaphorical capacity of images and of the imagination in art and in thought (see ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, DISEGNO; cf. BEAUTY, INGENIUM). since Plato and Aristotle, is in fact understood sometimes as resemblance, in terms of a pictorial model (and is in that sense associated with image; see IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON] and IMAGINATION), and sometimes as representation, drawing most proximately on theatrical models (see ACTOR). I. Imitation and Reproduction See ART, MANIERA, TABLEAU. Cf. BEAUTY, DISEGNO, GOÛT. II. Imitation, Logic, Rhetoric See ANALOGY, COMPARISON, DESCRIPTION, ERZÄHLEN. Cf. FICTION, POETRY, TRUTH. v. ARGUTEZZA, GENIUS, INGENIUM IMITATION “Imitation” is borrowed from the derived Latin term imitatio (imitation, copy, faculty of imitating). It is one of the major possible translations of the Greek mimêsis [μίμησις] (see MIMÊSIS), besides representation (see REPRÉSENTATION). Mimêsis, which endured as the key term of aesthetic questions IMPLICATION ENGLISH entailment, implicature FRENCH implication GERMAN nachsichziehen, zurfolgehaben, Folge(-rung), Schluß, Konsequenz, Implikation, Implikatur GREEK sumpeplegmenon [συμπεπλεγμένον], sumperasma [συμπέϱασμα], sunêmmenon [συνημμένον], akolouthia [ἀϰολουθία], antakolouthia [ἀνταϰολουθία] LATIN illatio, inferentia, consequentia v. ANALOGY, PROPOSITION, SENSE, SUPPOSITION, TRUTH Implication denotes, in modern logic, a relation between propositions and statements such that, from the truth-value of the antecedent (true or false), one can derive the truth of the consequent. More broadly, “we can say that one idea implies another if the first idea cannot be thoughtwithout the second one” (RT: Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie). Common usage makes no strict differentiation between “to imply,” “to infer,” and “to lead to.” The verb “to infer,” meaning “to draw a consequence, to deduce” (a use dating to 1372), and the noun “inference,” meaning “consequence” (from 1606), do not on the face of it seem to be manifestly different from “to imply” and “implication.” Indeed, nothing originally distinguished “implication” as Lalande defines it—“a logical relation by which one thing implies another”—from “inference” as it is defined in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1765): “A logical operation by which one accepts a proposition because of its connection to other propositions held to be true.” The same phenomenon can be seen in German, in which the terms corresponding to “implication” (Nachsichziehen, Zurfolgehaben), “inference” ([Schluß]-Folgerung, Schluß), “to infer” (schließen), “consequence” (Folge[-rung], Schluß, Konsequenz), “reasoning” ([Schluß-]Folgerung), and “to reason” (schließen, Schlußfolgerungen ziehen) intersect or overlap to a large extent. The history of the French verb impliquer, however, reveals several characteristics that the term does not share with “to infer” or “to lead to.” First of all, it was originally (1663) connected to the notion of contradiction, as shown in the use of impliquer in impliquer contradiction, in the sense of “to be contradictory.” This connection does not, however, explain how impliquer has passed into its most commonly accepted meaning—“implicitly entail”—in the logical sense of “to lead to a consequence.” Indeed, these two senses constantly interfere with one another in European philosophical languages, which 480 IMPLICATION terms from the implicatio family. In short, implicatio does not originally refer to implication. In the twelfth century, a number of treatises were developed on the “implicits” (tractatus implicitarum) that studied the logico-semantic properties of propositions said to be implicationes, or relative propositions. The term implicitus, the past participle of the verb implico, was used in classical Latin in the sense of “to be joined, mixed, enveloped,” and the verb implico adds to these senses the idea of “unforeseen difficulty” (impedire) and even of “deceit” (fallere). The source of the logical usage of the term is a passage from De interpretatione on the contrariety of propositions (14.23b25–27), in which implicitus renders the Greek sumpeplegmenê [συμπεπλεγμένη], a term formed from sumplekô [συμπλέϰω], “to bind together,” from the same family as sumplokê [συμπλοϰή], which since Plato (Politics 278b; Sophist 262c) has referred to the combination of letters that make up a word, and the interrelation of noun and verb that makes up a proposition: Aristotle: hê de tou hoti kakon to agathon sumpeplegmenê estin; kai gar hoti ouk agathon anagkê isôs hupolambanein ton auton [ἡ δὲ τοῦ ὅτι ϰαϰὸν τὸ ἀγαθὸν συμπεπλεγμένη ἐστίν· ϰαὶ γὰϱ ὅτι οὐϰ ἀγαθὸν ἀνάγϰη ἴσως ὑπολαμϐάνειν τὸν αὐτόν]. (De interpretatione [Peri hermêneias] 23b25–27) Boethius: Illa vero quae est “quoniam malum est quod est bonum” implicata est: et enim quoniam non bonum est necesse est idem ipsum opinari. (Aristoteles latinus, 2.1–2, p. 36, 4–6) Jules Tricot: Quant au jugement “le bon est mal,” ce n’est en réalité qu’une combinaison de jugements, cars sans doute est-il nécessaire de sous-entendre en même temps “le bon n’est pas le bon.” (Trans. Tricot, 141) J. L. Ackrill: The belief that the good is bad is complex, for the same person must perhaps suppose also that it is not good. (Trans. Ackrill, 66; cf. his perplexed commentary, 154–55) Aristotle wishes here to define the contrariety between two statements or opinions. Starting from the principle that a maximally false proposition set in opposition to a maximally true proposition deserves the name “contrary,” Aristotle demonstrates in successive stages that “the good is good” is a maximally true proposition, since it applies to the essence of good, and predicates the same of the same (which the proposition “the good is the not-bad” does not do, since it is only true by accident); and that the maximally false proposition is one that entails the negation of the same attribute, namely, “the good is not good.” The question then is one of knowing whether “the good is bad” also deserves to be called contrary. Aristotle replies that this proposition is not the maximally false proposition opposed to the maximally true proposition. Indeed, “the good is certainly poses a number of difficult problems for translators. The same phenomenon can be found in the case of the English verb “to import,” commonly given as a synonym for “to mean” or “to imply,” but often wavering instead, in certain cases, between “to entail” and “to imply.” In French, the noun itself is generally left as it is(import existentiel, see SENSE, Box 4). The French importer (as used by Rabelais, 1536), “to necessitate, to entail,” formed via the Italian importare (as used by Dante), from the Old French emporter, “to entail, to have as a consequence,” dropped out of usage, and was brought back through English. The nature of the connection between the two primary meanings of impliquer (or of implicare in Italian), “to entail implicitly” and “to lead to a consequence,” nonetheless remains obscure. Another difficulty is understanding how the transition occurs from impliquer, “to lead to a consequence,” to “implication,” “a logical relation in which one statement necessarily supposes another one,” and how we can determine what in this precise case distinguishes “implication” from “presupposition.” We therefore need to be attentive to what is implicit in impliquer and “implication,” to the dimension of the pli (pleat or fold), of the repli (folding back), and of the pliure (folding), in order to separate out “imply,” “infer,” “lead to,” or “implication,” “inference,” “consequence”—which requires us to go back to Latin, and especially to medieval Latin. Once we have clarified the relationship between the modern sense of “implication” and the medieval sense of implicatio, we will be able to examine certain derivations (implicature) or substitutes (“entailment”) of terms related to the field of implicatio, assuming that it is difficulties with the concept of implication (the paradoxes of material implication) that have given rise to newly coined words corresponding to the original logical attempts. Finally, this whole set of difficulties becomes clearer as we go further upstream, using the same vocabulary of implication, through the conflation of several heterogeneous logical gestures that come from an entirely different systematics in Aristotle and the Stoics. I. The Vocabulary of Implication and the Implicatio A number of different terms in medieval Latin can express in a more or less equivalent manner the relationship between propositions and statements such that, from the truth-value of the antecedent (true or false), one can derive the truth-value of the consequent: illatio, inferentia, consequentia. Peter Abelard makes no distinction in using the terms consequentia for the hypothetical “si est homo est animal” (Dialectica, 473) and inferentia for “si non est iustus homo, est non-iustus homo” (ibid., 414). It is certainly true that: (1) illatio appears above all in the context of the Topics, and denotes more specifically a reasoning (argumentum in Boethius), allowing for a consequence to be drawn from a given place (for example, “illatio a causa, illatio a simili, illatio a pari, illatio a partibus”); (2) consequentia sometimes has a very general sense, as in “consequentia est quaedam habitudo inter antecedens et consequens” (De Rijk, Logica modernorum, 2.1:38), and is in any case present in the expressions sequitur and consequitur (to follow, to ensue, to result in); (3) inferentia frequently appears, by contrast, in the context of the Peri hermêneias, whether it is as part of the square of oppositions, in order to explain the “law” of opposite, subcontrary, contradictory, or subalternate propositions (Logica modernorum, 2.1:115), or whether it is in order to determine the rules for converting propositions (ibid., 131–39). Nevertheless, it is one of these three terms (or other related terms) that in the Middle Ages expresses the logical relationship of implication, and not the IMPLICATION 481 huic copulativae constanti ex explicitis: Socrates est aliquid est illud est homo, haec est vera, quare et implicita vera. Every “implicit” has two “explicits.” For example: “Socrates is that which is a man,” this “implicit” is equivalent to the following conjunctive proposition made up of two “explicits”: “Socrates is something and that is a man”; this latter proposition is true, so the “implicit” is also true. (Tractatus implicitarum, in Giusberti, “Materials for a Study,” 43) The “contained” propositions are usually relative propositions, which are called implicationes, and this term remains, even though the name propositio implicita becomes increasingly rare, perhaps because they are subsequently classified within the larger category of “exponible” propositions, which need precisely to be “exposed” or paraphrased for their logical structure to be highlighted. In the treatises of Terminist logic, one chapter is devoted to the phenomenon of restrictio, a restriction in the denotation or the suppositio of the noun (see SUPPOSITION). Relative expressions (implicationes), along with others, have a restrictive function (vis, officium implicandi), just like adjectives and participles: in “a man who argues runs,” the term “man,” because of the relative expression “who runs,” is restricted to denoting the present—moreover, according to grammarians, there is an equivalence between the relative expression “qui currit” and the participle currens (Summe metenses, ed. De Rijk, in Logica modernorum, 2.1:464). In the case in which a relative expression is restrictive, its function is to “leave something that is constant [aliquid pro constanti relinquere],” that is, to produce, in modern terms, a preassertion that conditions the truth of the main assertion without being its primary object. This is expressed very clearly in the following passage from a thirteenth-century logical treatise: Implicare est pro constanti et involute aliquid significare. Ut cum dicitur homo qui est albus currit. “Pro constanti” dico, quia praeter hoc quod assertitur ibi cursus de homine, aliquid datur intelligi, scilicet hominem album; “involute” dico quia praeter hoc quod ibi proprie et principaliter significatur hominem currere, aliquid intus intelligitur, scilicet hominem esse album. Per hoc patet quod implicare est intus plicare. Id enim quod intus plicamus sive ponimus, pro constanti relinquimus. Unde implicare nil aliud est quam subiectum sub aliqua dispositione pro constanti relinquere et de illo sic disposito aliquid affirmare. “To imply” is to signify something by stating it as constant, and in a hidden manner. For example, when we say “the man who is white runs.” I say “stating it as constant” because, beyond the assertion that predicates the running of the man, we are given to understand something else, namely that the man is white; I say “in a hidden manner” because, beyond what is signified primarily and literally, namely that the man is running, we are given to understand something else within (intus), namely that the man is white. It follows from this that implicare is nothing other than intus plicare bad” is sumpeplegmenê. This term condenses all of the moments of the transition from the simple idea of a container, to the “modern” idea of implication or of presupposition. For Boethius, the proposition is duplex, or equivocal: it has a double meaning, “because it contains within itself [continet in se, intra se]: bonum non est”; and Boethius concludes that only two “simple” propositions can be said to be contrary (Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermêneais, 1st ed., 219). This latter thesis is consistent with Aristotle’s, for whom only “the good is not good” (simple proposition) is the opposite of “the good is good” (simple proposition). However, the respective analyses of “the good is bad,” a proposition that Boethius calls implicita, are manifestly not the same: indeed, for Aristotle, the “doxa hoti kakon to agathon [δόξα ὅτι ϰαϰὸν τὸ ἀγαθόν],” the opinion according to which the good is bad, is only contrary to “the good is good” to the extent that it “contains” (in Boethius’s terms) “the good is not good”; whereas for Boethius, it is to the extent that it contains bonum non est—a remarkably ambiguous expression in Latin (it can mean “the good is not,” “there is nothing good,” and even, in the appropriate context, “the good is not good”). Abelard goes in the same direction as Aristotle: “the good is bad” is “implicit” with respect to “the good is not good.” He explains clearly the meaning of the term implicita: “That is to say, implying ‘the good is not good’ within itself, and in a certain sense containing it [implicans eam in se, et quodammodo continens]” (Glossa super Periermeneias, 99–100). But he adds, as Aristotle did not: “Because whoever thinks that ‘the good is bad’ also thinks that ‘the good is not good,’ whereas the reverse does not hold true [sed non convertitur].” This explanation is decisive for the history of implication, since one can certainly express in terms of “implication” in the modern sense what Abelard expresses when he notes the nonreciprocity of the two propositions (one can say that “the good is bad” implies or presupposes “the good is not good,” whereas “the good is not good” does not imply “the good is bad”). Modern translations of Aristotle inherit these difficulties. Boethius and Abelard bequeath to posterity an interpretation of the passage in Aristotle according to which “the good is bad” can only be considered the opposite of “the good is good” insofar as, an “implicit” proposition, it contains the contradictory meaning of “the good is good,” namely, “the good is not good.” It is the meaning of “to contain a contradiction” that, in a still rather obscure way, takes up this analysis by specifying the meaning of impliquer. In any case, the first attested use in French of the verb is in 1377 in Oresme, in the syntagm impliquer contradiction (RT: DHLF, 1793). These same texts give rise to another analysis in the second half of the twelfth century: a propositio implicita is a proposition that “implies,” that is, that contains two propositions called explicitae, and that are its equivalent when paraphrased. Thus, “homo qui est albus est animal quod currit” (A man who is white is an animal who runs) contains the two explicits, “homo est albus” and “animal currit.” Only by “exposing” or “resolving” (expositio, resolutio) such an implicita proposition can one assign it a truth-value: Omnis implicito habet duas explicitas. Verbi gratia: Socrates est id quod est homo, haec implicita aequivalet 482 IMPLICATION logical use, the meaning of “entailment” is “restriction,” “tail” having the sense of “limitation.” An entailment was originally a limitation on the transfer or handing down of a property or an inheritance. The two senses of entailment have two elements in common: (a) the handing down of a property; and (b) the limitation on one of the poles of this transfer. In logical “entailment,” a property is transferred from the antecedent to the consequent, and normally in semantics, the limitation on the antecedent is stressed. One might thus advance the hypothesis that the mutation from the juridical sense to the logical sense occurred by analogy on the basis of these common elements. In logic, one makes a distinction between material implication and formal implication. Material implication (“if then ,” symbolized by ⊃), also called Philonian implication (because it was formalized by Philo of Megara), is only false when the antecedent is true and the consequent false. In terms of a formalization of communication, this has the flaw of bringing with it a counterintuitive semantics, since a false proposition implies materially any proposition: “If the moon is made of green cheese, then 2 + 2 = 4!” The “ex falso quodlibet sequitur,” which is how this fact is expressed, has a long history going back to antiquity (for the Stoics and the Megarian philosophers, it is the difference between Philonian implication and Diodorean implication): it traverses the theory of consequences in the Middle Ages, and is one of the paradoxes of material implication that is perfectly summed up in these two rules of Jean Buridan: (1) if P is false, Q follows from P; (2) if P is true, P follows from Q (Bochenski, History of Formal Logic, 208). Formal implication (see Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 36–41) is a universal conditional implication: {Ɐx (Ax ⊃ Bx)} (for any x, if Ax, then Bx). Different means of resolving the paradoxes of implication have been used. Lewis’s “strict implication” (Lewis and Langford, Symbolic Logic) is defined as an implication that is reinforced such that it is impossible for the antecedent to be true and the consequent false, yet it has the same flaw as material implication (an impossible—that is, necessarily false—proposition strictly implies any proposition). The relation of entailment introduced by Moore in 1923 is a relation that avoids these paradoxes by requiring a logical derivation of the antecedent from the consequent (in this case, “if 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 3 = 5” is false, since the consequent cannot be logically derived from the antecedent). Occasionally, one has to call upon the pair “entailment”/“implication” in order to distinguish between an implication in the sense of material implication and an implication in George Moore’s sense, which is also sometimes called “relevant implication” (Anderson and Belnap, Entailment), to ensure that the entire network of terms is covered. Along with this first series of terms in which “entailment” and “implication” alternate with one another, there is a second series of terms that contrasts two kinds of “implicature.” The word “implicature” (French implicature, German Implikatur) is formed from “implication” and the suffix –ture, which expresses a resultant aspect (for example, “signature”; cf. Latin temperatura, from temperare). “Implication” is derived from “to imply” and “implicature” from “to implicate” (from the Latin in + plicare, from plex; cf. the Indo-European plek), which has the same meaning. (“folded within”). What we fold or state within, we leave as a constant. It follows from this that “to imply” is nothing other than leaving something as a constant in the subject, such that the subject is under a certain disposition, and that it is under this disposition that something about it is affirmed. (De implicationibus, ed. De Rijk, in “Some Notes,” 100) N.B. Giusberti (“Materials for a Study,” 31) always reads pro constanti, whereas the manuscript edited by De Rijk sometimes has pro contenti, and sometimes precontenti, this latter term attested nowhere else. This is truly an example of what the 1662 Logic of Port-Royal will describe as an “incidental assertion.” The situation is even more complex, however, insofar as this operation only relates to one usage of a relative proposition, when it is restrictive. A restriction can sometimes be blocked, and the logical reinscriptions are then different for restrictive and nonrestrictive relative propositions. One such case of a blockage is that of “false implications,” as in “a [or the] man who is a donkey runs,” where there is a conflict (repugnantia) between what the determinate term itself denotes (man) and the determination (donkey). The truth-values of the propositions containing relatives thus differ according to whether they are restrictive, and of composite meaning—(a) “homo qui est albus currit” (A man who is white runs)—or nonrestrictive, and of divided meaning—(b) “homo currit qui est albus” (A man, who is white, is running). When the relative is restrictive, as in (a), the implicit only produces one single assertion, as we saw (since the relative corresponds to a preassertion), and is thus the equivalent of a hypothetical. Only in the second case can there be a “resolution” of the implicit into two explicits—(c) “homo currit,” (d) “homo est albus”—and a logical equivalence between the implicit and the conjunction of the two explicits—(e) “homo currit et ille est albus”; so it is only in this instance that one can say, in the modern sense, that (b) implies (c) and (d), and therefore (e). . II. “Implication”/“Implicature” The term “implicature” was introduced in 1967 by H. P. Grice in the William James Lectures (Harvard), which he delivered under the title “Logic and Conversation.” These lectures set out the basis of a logical approach to communication, that is, logical relations in conversational contexts. The need was felt for a term that is distinct from “implication,” insofar as “implication” is a relation between propositions (in the logical sense), whereas “implicature” is a relation between statements, within a given context. “Implication” is a relation bearing on the truth or falsity of propositions, whereas “implicature” brings an extra meaning to the statements it governs. Whenever “implicature” is determined according to its context, it enters the field of pragmatics, and therefore has to be distinguished from presupposition. Logical implication is a relation between two propositions, one of which is the logical consequence of the other. The English equivalent of “logical implication” is “entailment.” This word is derived from “tail” (Old French taille; Middle English entaill or entailen = en + tail), and prior to its IMPLICATION 483 two kinds of implicature, conventional and conversational. Conventional implicature is practically equivalent to presupposition, since it refers to the presuppositions attached by linguistic convention to lexical items or expressions. For example, “Mary even loves Peter” has a relation of conventional implicature to “Mary loves other entities than Peter.” This is equivalent to: “ ‘Mary even loves Peter’ presupposes The Gricean concept of “implicature” is an extension and modification of the concept of presupposition, which differs from material implication in that the negation of the antecedent implies the consequent (the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?” presupposes the existence of a wife in both cases). In this sense, implicature escapes the paradoxes of material implication from the outset. Grice distinguishes 1 The Greek vocabulary of implication: Disparity and systematicity The word implication in French covers and translates an extremely varied Greek vocabulary that bears the mark of heterogeneous logical and systematic operations, depending on whether one is dealing with Aristotle or the Stoics. The passage through medieval Latin allows us to understand retrospectively the connection in Aristotelian logic between the implicatio of the implicits (sumpeplegmenê, as an interweaving or interlacing) and conclusive or consequential implication, sumperasma [συμπέϱασμα] in Greek (or sumpeperasmenon [συμπεπεϱασμένον], sumpeperasmenê [συμπεπεϱασμένη], from perainô [πεϱαίνω], “to limit”), which is the terminology used in the Organon to denote the conclusion of a syllogism (Prior Analytics 1.15.34a21–24: if one designates as A the premise [tas protaseis (τὰς πϱοτάσεις)] and as B the conclusion [to sumperasma (συμπέϱασμα)]). When Tricot translates Aristotle’s famous definition of the syllogism at Prior Analytics 1.1.24b18–21, he chooses to render as the French noun consequence Aristotle’s verbal form sumbainei [συμϐαίνει], that which “goes with” the premise and results from it. A syllogism is a discourse [logos (λόγος)] in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated necessarily results simply from the fact of what is stated. Simply from the fact of what is stated, I mean that it is because of this that the consequence is obtained [legô de tôi tauta einai to dia tauta sumbainei (λέγω δὲ τῷ ταῦτα εἶναι τὸ διὰ ταῦτα συμϐαίνει)]. (Ibid., 1.1, 24b18–21; italics J. Tricot, bold B. Cassin) To make the connection with the modern sense of implication, though, we also have to take into account, as is most often the case, the Stoics’ use of the same terms. What the Stoics call sumpeplegmenon [συμπεπλεγμένον] is a “conjunctive” proposition; for example: “And it is daytime, and it is light” (it is true both that A and that B). The conjunctive is the third type of nonsimple proposition, after the “conditional” (sunêmmenon [συνημμένον]; for example: “If it is daytime, then it is light”) and the “subconditional” (parasunêmmenon [παϱασυνημμένον]; for example: “Since it is daytime, it is light”), and before the “disjunctive” (diezeugmenon [διεζευγμένον]; for example: “Either it is daytime, or it is night”) (Diogenes Laertius 7.71–72; cf. RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, A35, 2:209 and 1:208). One can see that there is no implication in the conjunctive, whereas there is one in the sunêmmenon in “if then ,” which constitutes the Stoic expression par excellence (and as distinct from the Aristotelian syllogism). Indeed, it is around the conditional that the question and the vocabulary of implication opens out again. The Aristotelian sumbainein [συμϐαίνειν], which denotes the accidental nature of a result, however clearly it has been demonstrated (and we should not forget that sumbebêkos [συμϐεϐηϰός] denotes accident; see SUBJECT, I), is replaced by akolouthein [ἀϰολουθεῖν] (from the copulative a- and keleuthos [ϰέλευθος], “path” [RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v. ἀϰόλουθος]), which denotes instead being accompanied by a consequent conformity: This connector (that is, the “if”) indicates that the second proposition (“it is light”) follows (akolouthei [ἀϰολουθεῖ]) from the first (“it is daytime”) (Diogenes Laertius, 7.71). Attempts, beginning with Philo or Diodorus Cronus and continuing to the present day, to determine the criteria of a “valid” conditional (to hugies sunêmmenon [τὸ ὑγιὲς συνημμένον] offer, among other possibilities, the notion of emphasis [ἔμφασις], which Long and Sedley translate as “entailment” and Brunschwig and Pellegrin as “implication” (Sextus Empiricus, The Skeptic Way, in RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 35B, 2:211 and 1:209), a term that is normally used to refer to a reflected image and to the force, including rhetorical force, of an impression. Elsewhere, “emphasis” is explained in terms of dunamis [δύναμις], of “virtual” content (“When we have the premise which results in a certain conclusion, we also have this conclusion virtually [dunamei (δυνάμει)] in the premise, even if it is not explicitly indicated [kan kat’ ekphoran mê legetai (ϰἂν ϰατ̕ ἐϰφοϱὰν μὴ λέγεται)], Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians 8.229ff., trans. D. L. Blank, 49 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, G36 (4), 2:219 and 1:209)—where connecting the different meanings of “implication” creates new problems. One has to understand that the type of logical implication represented by the conditional implies, in the double sense of “contains implicitly” and “has as its consequence,” the entire logical, physical, and moral Stoic system. It is a matter of to akolouthon en zôêi [τὸ ἀϰόλουθον ἐν ζωῇ], “consequentiality in life,” as Long and Sedley translate it (Stobeus 2.85.13 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 59B, 2:356; Cicero prefers congruere, De finibus 3.17 = RT: Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 59D, 2:356). It is the same word, akolouthia [ἀϰολουθία], that refers to the conduct consequent upon itself that is the conduct of the wise man, the chain of causes defining will or fate, and finally the relationship that joins the antecedent to the consequent in a true proposition. Victor Goldschmidt, having cited Émile Bréhier (in Le système stoïcien, 53 n. 6), puts the emphasis on antakolouthia [ἀνταϰολουθία], the neologism coined by the Stoics that one could translate as “reciprocal implication,” and that refers specifically to the solidarity of virtues (antakolouthia tôn aretôn [ἀνταϰολουθία τῶν ἀϱετῶν], Diogenes Laertius 7.125; Goldschmidt, Le système stoïcien, 65–66) as a group that would be encompassed by dialectical virtue, immobilizing akolouthia in the absolute present of the wise man. “Implication” is, in the final analysis, from then on, the most literal name of the system as such. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. Prior Analytics. Translated by H. Tredennick. Vol. 1 in Organon. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938. Goldschmidt, Victor. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris: Vrin, 1953. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Grammarians. Translated with a commentary by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 484 IN SITU ‘Mary loves other entities than Peter.’ ” With this kind of implicature, we remain within the lexical, and thus the semantic, field. Conventional implicature, however, is different from material implication, since it is relative to a language (in the example, the English for the word “even”). With conversational implicature, we are no longer dependent on a linguistic expression, but move into pragmatics (the theory of the relation between statements and contexts). Grice gives the following example: If, in answer to someone’s question about how X is getting on in his new job, I reply, “Well, he likes his colleagues, and he’s not in prison yet,” what is implied pragmatically by this assertion depends on the context (and not on a linguistic expression). It is, for example, compatible with two very different contexts: one in which X has been trapped by unscrupulous colleagues in some shady deal, and one in which X is dishonest and well known for his irascible nature. Alain de Libera Irène Rosier-Catach (I) Frédéric Nef (II) REFS.: Abelard, Peter. Dialectica. Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1956. 2nd rev. ed., 1970. . Glossae super Periermeneias. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. In TwelfthCentury Logic: Texts and Studies, vol. 2, Abelaerdiana inedita. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1958. Anderson, Allan Ross, and Nuel Belnap. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Aristotle. De interpretatione. English translation by J. L. Ackrill: Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione. Notes by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. French translation by J. Tricot: Organon. Paris: Vrin, 1966. Auroux, Sylvain, and Irène Rosier. “Les sources historiques de la conception des deux types de relatives.” Langages 88 (1987): 9–29. Bochenski, Joseph M. A History of Formal Logic. Translated by Ivo Thomas. New York: Chelsea, 1961. Boethius. Aristoteles latinus. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Paris: Descleé de Brouwer, 1965. Translation by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello: The Latin Aristotle. Toronto: Hakkert, 1972. . Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermêneias. Edited by K. Meiser. Leipzig: Teubner, 1877. 2nd ed., 1880. De Rijk, Lambertus Marie. Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. 2 vols. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1962–67. . “Some Notes on the Mediaeval Tract De insolubilibus, with the Edition of a Tract Dating from the End of the Twelfth-Century.” Vivarium 4 (1966): 100–103. Giusberti, Franco. Materials for a Study on Twelfth-Century Scholasticism. Naples, It.: Bibliopolis, 1982. Grice, Henry Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press, 1975. (Also in The Logic of Grammar, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman, 64–74. Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975.) Lewis, Clarence Irving, and Cooper Harold Langford. Symbolic Logic. New York: New York Century, 1932. Meggle, Georg. Grundbegriffe der Kommunikation. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997. Meggle, Georg, and Christian Plunze, eds. Saying, Meaning, Implicating. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003. Moore, George Edward. Philosophical Studies. London: Kegan Paul, 1923. Rosier, Irène. “Relatifs et relatives dans les traits terministes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: (2) Propositions relatives (implicationes), distinction entre restrictives et non restrictives.” Vivarium 24: 1 (1986): 1–21. Russell, Bertrand. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. Strawson, Peter Frederick. “On Referring.” Mind 59 (1950): 320–44. IN SITU (LATIN) ENGLISH site-specific, in place FRENCH sur place, dans son site, in situ v. LIEU and ART, CONCETTO, MOMENT, WORK In common usage in archeology, the Latin phrase in situ was adopted at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s by critics and artists to refer to a basic trait of a large number of works that were not only produced for a particular site but also designed with the physical, institutional, and symbolic characteristics of the place in mind—galleries, museums, public spaces, or even natural spaces, sometimes very remote, as was often the case for the American earthworks(the creators of which also used the expression “sitespecific”), or in the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Understood in this sense, in situ has since become part of the vocabulary of aesthetics and criticism. For archeologists, in situ applies to two distinct levels of reality: (1) To an object when it is discovered in the supposed site of its original use. If this is the case, its situation, especially the object’s physical relation to the other traces of the past that accompany it, is crucial in clarifying its function and its meaning. (2) To the mode of presentation of the vestiges of the past on the very site of their discovery, in other words, a museographical organization that facilitates the visitors’ understanding. In its aesthetic sense, in situ combines the two meanings of its use in archeology. The work in situ, constructed in function of the place, has to be viewed on site, and it acquires its full significance in the dialectical relation that it enters into with the place where it is installed. Thus the notion of in situ is an assault on one of the fundamental principles of traditional aesthetics, the notion of the autonomy of the work of art. This autonomy, once considered as a sign of freedom that allowed the cultural object or the commemorative monument, for example, to acquire a properly aesthetic dignity, legitimated the existence of the museum as a place where a miscellany of objects torn from their original context were gathered together. It is no coincidence, then, that the term in situ became more widely used in the 1970s, when many artists developed a range of strategies for contesting the logic of the museum. Ever since Daniel Buren’s projects and those of Land Art popularized the term, it has been used by artists of all kinds. Denys Riout REFS.: Buren, Daniel. Au sujet de : Entretien avec Jérôme Sans. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. . The Eye of the Storm: Works In Situ by Daniel Buren. 8 vols. New York: Guggenheim Museum-D.A.P., 2005. Poinsot, Jean-Marc. “L’ in situ et la circonstance de sa mise en oeuvre.” In Quand l’oeuvre a lieu: L’art exposé et ses récits autorisés. Geneva: MAMCO, 1999. Watson, Stephen H. “In Situ: Beyond the Architectonics of the Modern.” In Postmodernism-Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, 83–100. New York: Routledge, 1990. INGENIUM 485 One can see that ingenium is assimilated here to its primary quality, acumen, a word that designates the acute (acutus), penetrating, fine character of something (acutezza in Italian and agudeza in Spanish are derived from acutus, the French equivalent of which is pointe, see ARGUTEZZA). What does the action of ingenium consist of? Of “leaping over what is at our feet” (ingenii specimen est quodam transilire ente pedes positum) in order to grasp the relations, the similarities between things that may be very far from one another. One can understand why the ability to form metaphors, that is, to work with transfers of meanings of words to bring them closer together, is for Cicero one of the privileged manifestations of ingenium in the field of persuasive oratory and of poetry. On this point he is only repeating what Aristotle says about euphuia [εὐφυΐα], the “good natural disposition,” close to the first meaning of ingenium, that is, necessary for finding resemblances and making metaphors: But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius [εὐφυΐα], since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar: for to make good metaphors is to be good at perceiving resemblances. (Aristotle, Poetics, 22, 1459a 7 ) See COMPARISON, Box 1. . II. The Humanistic and Baroque Ingenio and Ingegno The technical significance that the term ingenium took on in the field of rhetoric and poetics continues on down the centuries, to the detriment of the richness and depth of the philosophical meaning of this word. Renaissance humanism, however, still attributes to ingenium a specific faculty an incomparable power in the field of knowledge and action. The Spaniard Juan Luis Vives wrote, in his Introductio ad sapientiam (1524), that ingenium, a prerogative of humans, is the “force of intelligence by which our mind examines things one by one, knows what is good to do and what is not.” It “is cultivated and refined by means of many arts: it is taught through a broad and admirable knowledge of things, by which it grasps more precisely the natures and values of things one by one.” It has been said that ingenium, at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth century, had become a mannerist or baroque concept par excellence, with specific reference to authors such as Huarte de San Juan, with his Examen de ingenios, para las sciencias (1575); Pellegrini, with Delle acutezza, che altrimenti spirite, vivezze e concetti, volparmente si appellano (1630) and I fonti dell’ingegno ridotti ad arte (1650); Tesauro, with Il Canocchiale aristotelico, o sia Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione, che serve a tutta l’arte oratoria, lapidaria et simbolica (1648). For a long time these texts were studied from a purely aesthetic point of view, in relation to the literary trends of Gongorism, Marinism, Concettism, or Preciosity. Looking at them more closely, one can see that the ingegno of the Italians and the ingenio of the Spanish not only have stylistic and ornamental effects, but also have, INGENIUM (LATIN) ARABIC h. ads [الحدس[ ENGLISH wit, humor FRENCH esprit GERMAN Witz GREEK euphuia [εὐφυΐα] ITALIAN ingegno SPANISH ingenio v. REASON, SOUL, WITTICISM, and ARGUTEZZA, BAROQUE, COMPARISON, CONCETTO, GEMÜT, GENIUS, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, NONSENSE, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SOPHISM, TALENT The word ingenium, commonly used in Latin during antiquity and in philosophical Latin up to the early modern period, is rich in meaning. Of the Romance languages, only the words ingegno in Italian and ingenio in Spanish have preserved the essence of this richness. In French the numerous derivations of ingenium have retained only a partial or more or less distant relation to its source word, and the term esprit, often used as an equivalent, has very particular connotations. The English “wit,” and the German Witz, both have different etymologies and reproduce only in a rather restricted way the semantic constellation expressed by the Latin word, which thus presents modern translators with literally insurmountable difficulties. I. Ingenium, Euphuia Ingenium (in-geno, gigno) is associated with a large IndoEuropean family of words relating to procreation and birth. Its usage in Latin is spread around four distinct but nonetheless clearly interlinked semantic themes, which are enumerated in Egidio Forcellini’s Totius latinitatis lexicon (1865). Ingenium designates first of all the innate qualities of a thing (vis, natura, indoles, insita facultas). Secondly, it is applied to human beings and their natural dispositions, their temperament, the way they are (natura, indoles, mores). Then it expresses, among man’s natural dispositions, intelligence, skill, inventiveness (vis animi, facultas insita excogitandi, percipiendi, sloertia, inventio). Finally it designates, metonymically, persons who are particularly endowed with this faculty (ingenia is a synonym for homines ingeniosi). In all of these different uses, ingenium expresses, whenever it refers to humans, the innate element within human beings of productivity, of creativity, of the capacity of going beyond and transforming the given, whether it is a matter of intellectual speculation, poetic and artistic creation, persuasive speech, technical innovations, or social and political practices. “It calls,” writes Cicero, “for great intelligence [ingenium] to separate the mind [mentem] from the senses [a sensibus] and to sever thought [cogitationem] from mere habit” (Tusculan Disputations 1: XVI, 41). He elsewhere talks about the divinum ingenium that allies men with the gods, but it is in the field of rhetoric that he is most careful to show the importance of ingenium as a factor in oratorical invention: Since, then, in speaking, three things are requisite for finding argument; genius [acumen], method, (which, if we please, we may call art,) and diligence, I cannot but assign the chief place to ingenium. (Cicero, On Oratory and Orators, II, 35, 147–48) 486 INGENIUM first stages of their development, when men are “poetically” creating their world. III. The French Esprit In De ratione, Vico remarks that “the French, when they wish to give a name to the faculty of the mind that allows one to join together quickly, appropriately and felicitously separate things, which we call ingegno, use the word esprit (spiritus), and they turn this power of the mind that is manifest in synthesis into something quite simple, because their excessively subtle intelligence excels in the finer points of reasoning rather than in synthesis.” Whatever the value of this explanation may be, the fact is that the French language, however rich its vocabulary is in words derived from ingenium (ingénieux, ingéniosité, engin, ingénieur, s’ingénier, génie), has no equivalent of the Latin word, unlike Italian and Spanish. The term esprit, whose range of meanings is vast, was used quite early on to translate it, at the cost of a great deal of equivocation, given the vagueness of the French word. The chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de l’esprit (1677), for example, writes, “It seems to me that esprit consists of understanding things, in being able to consider them from all sorts of perspectives, in judging clearly what they are, and their precise value, in discerning what one thing has in common with, and what distinguishes it from, another, and in knowing the right paths to take in order to discover those that are hidden.” He adds that “it is a first and foremost, a richness in terms of the order of knowledge and of moral and social existence. Cervantes’s titles are characteristically subtle: in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) and El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (1615), ingenio is attributed ironically, as if it were an absurd characterization, to the mad knight, who is nevertheless revealed to embody many of the most prized characteristics of humanist intelligence. Gracián, in El discreto (1646), which paints a portrait of the “man of discernment,” emphasizes the fact that ingenio belongs to the “domain of understanding,” and he defines it precisely as the “courage of understanding,” his work being the concepto that immediately establishes a correlation between phenomena that are distant from one another. Because it spreads a “divine light,” ingenio thus permits man to “decipher the world,” which would otherwise remain mute and unknown. The last and no doubt greatest representative of the ancient humanist tradition for whom ingenium is the human faculty par excellence is Vico, who in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) revives the Ciceronian theory of ingenium, contrasting its “topical” fertility to the sterility of Descartes’s analytic and deductive method. Finally, in Scienza nuova (1725, 1730, 1744), Vico notes first that ingegno as a power of the imagination rich in metaphors is what characterizes youth; he then proceeds to give it a central place in the life of nations, especially in the 1 Intuition, Arabic h. ads (ARABIC [الحدس([ v. TERM Aristotle, in discussing scientific knowledge, mentions a capacity he calls “readiness of mind” (agchinoia [ἀγχίνοια]), to which he also devotes several lines in his discussion of intellectual virtues (dianoétiques) (Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 10, 1142b 5; ed., Barnes, vol.2). He defines it as “a talent for hitting upon (eustokia [εὐστοχία]) the middle term in an imperceptible time” (Posterior Analytics, I, 34, 89b 10ff; ed., Barnes, vol 1). The first Latin translation mistakenly reads eustochia, which Thomas Aquinas paraphrases as bona conjecturatio (Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 8, § 1219). Arabic translators of the Analytics have translated this term as dakā [الذكاء”) [finesse, intelligence”), but explain εὐστοχία by “goodness of the h. ads [الحدس “[ (Mantiq Aristu [أرسطو منطق ,[ed. Badawi, p. 426, 5). The passage in the Nicomachean Ethics is translated as “wisdom of the intellect” (lawda’īya ’l’aql [العقل لوذعية] [Aristu, al-Akhlaq, 222, 15]). Avicenna discusses h. ads on several occasions (cf. Goichon, Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sina, § 140, p. 65ff) and gives it a major place in his epistemology (cf. Gutas, Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works, 161–66). He gives a precise definition of the term: all scientific knowledge is acquired by syllogisms, whose pivot is the middle term. This term can be arrived at through teaching or through “the h. ads, [which] is an action of the mind by which [the mind] deduces for itself the middle term.” Its teaching, moreover, is itself based in the final analysis on intuitions (alŠifā, Avicenna’s De Anima, Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al-Shifa, (vol. 1, part 6). The h. ads is thus, on the one hand, the intuition of principles, but it is also the capacity of taking in simultaneously all of the stages of a discursive argumentation. Avicenna thus offers the concept of a knowledge that is neither simply intuitive nor simply discursive but like a discursiveness condensed into a single act of intuition, thereby anticipating Descartes’s program (Regulae, VII: AT, 10: 387ff)—except that what for Descartes is acquired methodically is for Avicenna an innate gift. For him, whoever possesses h. ads has no need of a master and can reinvent all the sciences for himself—which, in fact, is what Avicenna in his autobiography boasts that he has done. This allows him among other things to offer a philosophical theory of prophetic knowledge. The Latin translators render the term h. ads on occasion as subtilitas but in most cases as ingenium (Avicenna Latinus, Liber sextus de naturalibus, 152 ff). To describe someone who is very intelligent as a “genius,” and to say that a “genius” is like a prophet, is to place oneself within the tradition of Avicenna. REFS.: al-Šifā, Avicenna’s De Anima, Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al-Shifa. Translated by F. Rohman. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Series 71.2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Aristu [Aristotle]. al-Akhlaq. Edited by A. Badawi. Kuwait City: Wakâlat al-Matbû’ât, 1979. Avicenna Latinus. Liber sextus de naturalibus. Edited by S. Van Riet. Louvain, Belg.: Brill, 1968. Badawi, A. Man .tiq Aris.tū, 3 vols. Cairo: 1948–1952. Golchon, A.-M. Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sina. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1938. Gutas, Dimitri. Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1988. INGENIUM 487 2 “Wit and/or humor” “Wit” generally designates a cognitive power that is different from “mind” and is an activity of thought (esprit) in which the imagination allows for the enjoyment of ideas, and for a sense of the beauty of ideas. “Wit” thus incorporates “humor,” which permits a pleasurable, even eloquent, relationship to thought. Thus, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, Shaftesbury analyses a critical operation of the mind (esprit) that manifests itself in good humor and on the occasion of pleasant conversation among friends. The difficulty of translating into other languages the terms “wit” and “humor,” and of understanding them, and understanding how they are connected, flows not from an aversion to joining together that which is funny and that which has to do with intelligence, but also from the polysemy of the terms: what do the French, for example, make of “humor” when it becomes for them humour and refers to what they customarily call l’humour anglais (the English sense of humor). a. “Wit” and “mind” “Wit” is not “mind.” “Mind” refers to the nature of the mind, or intelligence (esprit), whereas “wit” refers to a cognitive activity and experience. In Hobbes (Leviathan, 134–35), “wit” has the sense of the mind as a power of understanding similarities between things that might seem very distant from one another. “Natural wit” is close to ingenium; it is an ability to see resemblances that are rarely noticed. According to Hobbes, “to have a good wit” is different from “to have a good judgment,” since judgment consists of identifying differences and dissimilarities, of using discernment. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke makes a distinction quite close to Hobbes’s distinction between “mind,” “wit,” and “judgment” (Essay, 156). Whereas judgment has an analytic function whose aim is to separate out different ideas, the mind or intelligence (esprit) as “wit” quickly and pleasantly joins ideas together: “that entertainment and pleasantry of Wit, which strikes so lively on the Fancy, and therefore so acceptable to all People” (ibid.). b. “Wit” and Witz “Wit” thus resembles the German Witz. The two terms refer to a kind of knowledge (the common root is wissen) that is not an analytic discursiveness but demonstrates a creative mind that creates resemblances while being aware of the possibility of the sociability of thought (Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Lang, L’Absolu littéraire, 2; The Literary Absolute, 53). “Wit” denotes an individual burst of brilliance that, in addition to its value as entertainment, can produce puns and jokes, which are the singular forms by which wit is expressed. c. The pleasure of using language In Hume the effect produced by wit may be said to be the same as that produced by eloquence; both bring pleasure to the use of language (Treatise of Human Nature, 611). But the pleasure one takes in “wit” or in eloquence is not of the same type as the pleasure taken in “good humor.” “Good humor” is only immediately pleasant to the person speaking and is only then communicated to others through sympathy. “Wit,” by contrast, has an immediate social value that is deployed especially in the pleasures of conversation: “As wisdom and good sense are valued, because they are useful to the person possess’d of them; so wit and eloquence are valued, because they are immediately agreeable to others” (ibid.). Finally, “wit” and “humor” are distinguished from “wisdom” and “good sense,” which are only of value to the person who possesses them. In the eighteenth century, “humor” is often associated with “wit” to express a way of relating to others in a mode of gaiety, or even through jokes and puns. But “humour,” before being translated into French as humour, signifies humor understood as temperament [humeur in French]: “Indeed, what is that you call wit or humour?” (Shaftesbury, “Exercises,” 99). However, according to Samuel Johnson’s RT: Dictionary of the English Language, “humor” means a “general turn or temper of mind” but also “jocularity, merriment,” and he includes in his understanding repartee, happiness, even hilarity. Humor already contains something of what the French call l’humour anglais, that is to say, something more than a simple disposition of the mind: a singular way of laughing that is very English, and the translation of which into French merely refers one back to the English word “humor,” which remains quite indeterminate for a French person. great sign of esprit to invent Arts and Sciences.” And it is clear that the esprit de finesse that Pascal, a friend of Méré, contrasts to the Cartesian esprit de géométrie has many points in common with the baroque ingenium. In the eighteenth century ingenium again crops up in the definition that Voltaire gives of esprit in the article “Esprit” of the RT: Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert: Ce mot, en tant qu’il signifie une qualité de l’âme, est un de ces termes vagues, auxquels tous ceux qui les prononcent attachent presque toujours des sens différents. Il exprime autre chose que jugement, génie, goût, talent, pénétration, étendue, grâce, finesse; et il doit tenir de tous ces mérites: on pourrait le définir, raison ingénieuse. (This word, insofar as it signifies a quality of the soul, is one of those vague terms to which everyone who uses it almost always attaches different meanings. It expresses something other than judgment, genius, taste, talent, penetration, expanse, grace, finesse; and it has all of these merits: one could define it as ingenious reason.) IV. “Wit” and Witz In English “wit” is generally considered to be the closest equivalent of the Latin ingenium (it is important to remember, however, that “wit,” like Witz in German, comes from a different root than ingenium and refers to the notion of knowledge and not “natural talent”). Shaftesbury, writing in a tradition different from rationalist intellectualism, understands “wit” to preserve something of the power of metaphorical invention that the ingenium so dear to humanist rhetoric contains. . In fact, there can be no real equivalence of meaning between “wit” and ingenium, as demonstrated by the difficulties experienced by Vico’s English translators, who propose (continued) 488 INGENIUM Another translation, in order to mark the relationship to ingenium that Kant himself indicates, prefers ingéniosité (Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by A. Renault, 1993, 149), while a third gives combinaison spirituelle (Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by P. Jalabert, 1986, 1019). . Ingenium is thus a notion that in itself is clear, in spite of its complexity and richness, but that certain national languages—and not minor ones from a philosophical point of view—do not succeed in translating satisfactorily. Alain Pons REFS.: Aristotle. Poetics. Edited and translated by Ingram Bywater, notes by Gilbert Murray. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920. Cicero. De Oratore. In Cicero, On Oratory and Orators; with His Letters to Quintus and Brutus. Translated by J. S. Watson. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855. . De Oratore. Translated by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. . Tusculan Disputations. Edited and translated by A. E. Douglas. Warminster, Eng.: Aris and Phillips, 1985. Gracián, Baltasar. Agudeza y arte de ingenio. Edited and with notes by Ceferino Peralta, Jorge M. Ayala, and José Ma. Andreu. 2 vols. Zaragoza, Sp.: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004. First published in 1648. . El Discreto. Edited by Miguel Romera-Navarro and Jorge M. Furt. Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de Letras, 1960. Translation by T. Saldkeld: The Compleat Gentleman. London, 1730. the terms “ingenuity,” “invention,” “inventiveness,” “genius,” “perception,” and “wit” to try to get close to the semantic richness of ingegno in Vico’s texts. The situation is identical in German. It is interesting to see how Kant, in two different contexts, gives two different equivalent terms for the same word, ingenium. In the Critique of Judgment (“Analytic of the Sublime”), he defines genius (Genie) as the “talent (natural gift) [of the mind: Gemüt, ingenium] that gives the rule to art” (Critique of Judgment, § 46). In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, after having said that “the faculty of discovering the particular for the universal (the rule) is the power of judgment,” he adds that, in the same way, “the faculty of thinking up the universal for the particular is wit (Witz [ingenium]). The outstanding talent in both is noticing even the smallest similarity or dissimilarity. The faculty to do this is acumen (Scharfsinn [acumen])” (§ 44). In order to define what he means by Witz, Kant therefore has recourse to the vocabulary of classical rhetoric—ingenium and its acumen. At the same time, while he acknowledges the “richness” of Witz, he limits its scope to the anthropological realm of worldly life and assimilates it to “a sort of intellectual luxury,” which he contrasts to “the common and healthy form of understanding.” French translations of Kant reflect the difficulty of rendering the word Witz in this text. Among the recent editions of the Anthropology, Michel Foucault’s translation of the passage just cited proposes the classic word esprit (Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Fr. trans. by M. Foucault, 1970, 71). d. The tradition of “wit and/or humor” is split into two moments “Humor” originally referred to humor as temperament. Good humor is when humor as temperament is converted into a joyful disposition. In his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, Shaftesbury proposed subjecting the realm of truth to laughter: Truth, ’tis suppos’d, may bear all Lights: and one of those principal Lights or natural Mediums, by which Things are to be view’d, in order to a thorow recognition, is Ridicule it-self. (Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1: 61) In this theory of the critical use of laughter, “wit” consists in an operation of the mind (esprit) in which the commerce of joyful passions depends on a regulated play between wit and humor, on the model of an exchange of ideas that is at once playful, pleasant, and polite: Wit will mend upon our hands, and Humour will refine it-self; if we take care not to tamper with it. (Ibid., 1: 64) A humor that is not “tampered with” is a humor that does not allow itself to be distorted by melancholy or excessive laughter. “Humor,” then, becomes synonymous with other terms often used by Shaftesbury (“raillery,” “irony,” and “ridicule”) but only inasmuch as these words are associated with the possibility of measured and benevolent laughter. “Wit” and “humor” could never include the outrageous comedy of buffoonery and of the burlesque (Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 72) that are associated with carnival and cabaret in having entertainment as their sole purpose. “Humor” in its connection to a physiological disposition comes to mean humor in the second, non-humoral sense. From then on, wit and humor come together to emphasize a remarkable activity of the mind. Humor now forms the basis of the permanent disposition of an individual— we might refer to “a man of great humor.” Furthermore, humor produces ambiguous and contradictory figures, as if it never had one single meaning. Alice, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, is constantly growing bigger and smaller, without ever knowing as she goes through her adventures what it is that makes her bigger or smaller. Could we say that English humor, so difficult to translate in all its figures, is in some sense defined by Lewis Carroll’s attempts to show the real world in all of its possibilities simultaneously, creating comic effects by superimposing elements that are logically necessary onto elements that are logically incompatible—and for that reason, unmasterable? REFS.: Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Edited by Selwyn H. Goodacre. Illustrated by Barry Moser. Preface and notes by James R. Kincaid. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin, 1968. First published in 1651. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. First published in 1739–1740. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., J.-L. Nancy, and A. M. Lang, L’Absolu littéraire, Seuil, 1978. Translation by Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester: The Literary Absolute. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. “Sensus communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour.” In Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. 2 vols. Edited by Philip Ayres. 1: 35–81. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. (continued) INGENIUM 489 Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Robert B. Louden: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, edited by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. . Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews: Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vico, Giambattista. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language: Including the Disputation with the Giornale 3 Witz according to Freud and his translators The importance that Freud accorded to the psychic mechanisms of Witz belongs manifestly to the semantic field of the ingenium of antiquity, organized by the ideas of creativity, acuity, and convention. But since the appearance of the work entitled Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905)—which Lacan considered, along with the Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychology of Everyday Life, as one of the three “canonical” texts of Freud—the translation of Witz has caused no end of problems for psychoanalysts. The most recent translation into Castilian Spanish renders Witz as chiste, “joke.” The first French translators of Freud’s work, Marie Bonaparte and Marcel Nathan, opted for mot d’esprit (Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, 1930); Italian similarly translates Witz as motto di spirito (Il motto di spirito e la sua relazione con l’inconscio, trans. S. Daniele and E. Sagittario, 1975). Bonaparte and Nathan’s choice was retained by Denis Messier in an excellent new edition in 1988 (Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, with a prefatory note by Jean-Bernard Pontalis, in which he discusses the term). This gave rise, it seems, to good deal of hesitation, since Lacan for his part proposed translating Witz as trait d’esprit (Écrits, 1966; see also Le Séminaire, bk. 5 (1957–1958), Les Formations de l’inconscient, 1998), bringing it closer to another German term, Blitz, which refers to a flash of lightning. Moreover, in 1989 the editors of the Oeuvres complètes de Freud (Presses Universitaires de France) published the translation of the work on Witz in their volume 7 under the title Le Trait d’esprit, arguing from the premise that there is supposedly a “Freudian language” that different foreign-language versions have to take into account, especially where Witz is concerned. The meaning of Witz, they claim, is not mot d’esprit but “a characteristic trait of the ‘esprit freudien’ [Freudian Witz].” Confronted by these oppositions and perplexities, certain psychoanalysts have even asked whether it would not be better to give up trying to translate Freud’s Witz altogether, just as some have become resigned to doing for the typically British term nonsense (see J.-B. Pontalis, foreword to Freud, Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports avec l’inconscient, 34). The question of Witz also arose among English-language Freudians, occasionally generating a degree of controversy. In 1916 the Austro-Hungarian–born American psychoanalyst Abraham A. Brill published, along with several other projects of this kind, all adjudged to be equally bad, the first translation of Freud’s work on Witz, a term Brill chose to translate as “wit,” without seeing that this would privilege the meaning of “intellectual witticism,” as when one says of someone that he is a “man of wit.” James Strachey, who set about revising Brill’s translations, made clear at the outset his preference for “joke,” which by contrast risked extending the intellectual meaning of the Freudian Witz to the entire range of comic expressions (plays on words, witticisms, puns, all kinds of jokes, funny stories—particularly Jewish—sallies in the manner of the Italian scherzo, etc.). In a preface to his English translation, (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works [1960], 8: 7) Strachey explains as follows why he decided to choose “joke” (and even “jokes,” in the plural): To translate it “Wit” opens the door to unfortunate misapprehensions. In ordinary English usage “wit” and “witty” have a highly restricted meaning and are applied only to the most refined and intellectual kind of jokes. The briefest inspection of the examples in these pages will show that “Witz” and “witzig” have a far wider connotation. “Joke,” on the other hand seems itself to be too wide and to cover the German “Scherz” as well. The only solution in this and similar dilemmas has seemed to be to adopt one English word for some corresponding German one, and to keep to it quite consistently and invariably even if in some particular context it seems the wrong one. In this debate one needs to understand moreover that “wit” (which has the same etymology as Witz, that of knowing—wissen) can mean both witticisms (mots d’esprit), as well as the faculty of inventing them, in the same way that the German Phantasie means both a particular fantasy and the general power of the imagination (see PHANTASIA, Box 3). The dilemmas surrounding these different ways of translating the Freudian Witz are in part due to the fact that it is considered in its relation to the unconscious. Like the “Freudianslip,” the failed act, or condensation in a dream, it has the sense of something jutting out, of a sudden idea (Einfall in German), that is, an idea that suddenly appears without one’s expecting it to, and that can surprise even the person uttering it. According to Freud, the Witz is a successful slip that comes unexpectedly from the unconscious, like the term famillionaire—a kind of crasis between “familiar” [as an attitude] and “millionaire”— which so interested Lacan (and Freud himself, more than anyone), and by means of which some poor devil accidentally let it be known that he had been treated kindly by the nonetheless very wealthy Baron de Rothschild. Freud explains and glosses as follows the thought contained in this Witz, or this “joke” of the mind (gestreicher Einfall): “we had to add to the sentence ‘Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal—quite “famillionairely”’ a supplementary proposition that, abbreviated to its maximum degree, was expressed as: ‘as much as a millionaire is capable of treating anyone’” (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Strachey, 12–13). The source of the pleasure deriving from these games of the mind (jeux de l’esprit), or more precisely, of the unconscious, is just such a mechanism of condensation. de’ letterati d’Italia [De antiquissima Italorum sapientia]. Translated, with introduction and notes by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. . On the Study Methods of Our Time [De nostri temporis studiorum ratione]. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Elio Gianturco. Preface by Donald Phillip Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. . Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Napoli, 1744. Translation by David Marsh: New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Introduction by Anthony Grafton. London: Penguin, 2001. 490 INSTANT INSTANT “Instant,” from the Latin in-stare, “to stand on, hold close,” is one of the possible designations of the atom of time: it is the commonly accepted translation of the Aristotelian to nun [τὸ νῦν], literally, “the now,” of which physical time is made up; see AIÔN. It is also, this time paying attention to the insistence (which one can hear in “instant”) of that which is presently going to happen, a way of naming the pressure of the present at the heart of subjective duration; see MOMENT for a discussion of the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός] (opportunity), the German Augenblick (blink of an eye), and Kierkegaard’s Danish øjeblik (to be complemented by PLUDSELIGHED, “suddenness,” which emphasizes the discontinuity of irruption); JETZTZEIT, which in Benjamin’s vocabulary refers to the messianic effectiveness of an “at-present” in history. See, more generally, PRESENT and TIME. On the way in which an instant can bring together or condense time, see ETERNITY [AIÔN], INTUITION [ANSCHAULICHKEIT, UNDERSTANDING]; cf. ACT, GOD, WISDOM. On the way in which instantaneity is expressed verbally, see ASPECT. v. EVENT, GLÜCK, HISTORY, MEMORY, PROGRESS time when instinct was more prevalent, Trieb is now normally translated as pulsion (impulse), in the sense of an instinctual movement toward an object that is not predetermined. English translators render Trieb as “instinct,” or more judiciously as “drive,” a term that does not have the same origin as Trieb, but that nonetheless has some of the biological connotations of Freud’s theory. See DRIVE, WUNSCH; see also ES, UNCONSCIOUS. v. ERLEBEN, INGENIUM, INTUITION, NATURE INSTINCT Derived from the classical Latin instinctus, which means “instigation, impulse, excitation” (from the Indo-European root *stig-, “to prick”), the French word instinct nowadays means “an innate and powerful tendency, common to all living beings and all individuals of the same species,” and in the sciences “an innate tendency of actions that are determined according to species, performed perfectly without any prior experience, and subordinated to the conditions of the environment” (RT: Le nouveau petit Robert, s.v.). One finds the word in German as Instinkt, in English as “instinct,” and in Italian as istinto. The difference between animal and man traditionally overlaps with the difference between instinct and intelligence: see ANIMAL, and DISPOSITION, UNDERSTANDING, Box 1 (on the Greek nous [νоῦς], the meaning of which ranges from the inbred tenacity or the “sense of smell” of a dog, to the divine spirit, to divine intuition); cf. LOGOS, REASON. A particular, major problem regarding the translation of instinct has taken shape around the use of the German term Instinkt in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, with some authors assimilating it to Trieb, a term of German origin that is the biological equivalent of instinct, and that one also finds in Freud, but with a very different meaning. Indeed, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, “When Freud does use the word Instinkt it is in the classical sense: he speaks of Instinkt in animals confronted by danger when Freud asks whether ‘inherited mental formations exist in the human being—something analogous to instinct in animals’ he does not look for such a counterpart in what he calls Trieb, but instead in that ‘hereditary, genetically acquired factor in mental life’ ” (RT: Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, trans. Nicholson-Smith, 214). This is why in France, after a period of INTELLECT, INTELLIGER (FRENCH) LATIN intellectus, intelligere; concipere, comprehendere ITALIAN intelletto v. INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING, and CONCETTO, CONSCIOUSNESS, GEMÜT, I/ME/MYSELF, INTUITION, REASON, SOUL In the seventeenth century, a period of translation of Latin philosophical language into French philosophical language, most notably through the translation of the major works of Descartes (Meditationes, Principia philosophiae), the Latin word intellectus appears to be almost untranslatable, at least insofar as it is practically never translated into French by the word that corresponds to it, intellect, but by a word belonging to an entirely different semantic field, entendement (understanding). Yet the word intellect has been part of the French language for centuries. In fact, as early as the thirteenth century we can find it in the Livres dou Trésor, by Brunetto Latini (1260), even though it seems that it remains a technical term that has not really passed into common use. The French language has lacked an author comparable to Dante, who contributed greatly to popularizing the word intelletto in Italian from the fourteenth century onward. The word entendement, by contrast, which first appeared in the Oxford Psalter (1120), very soon came into common use. We find it especially in the fourteenth century when Nicole Oresme, associating entendement with the word raison, uses it in his French translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (to render the Greek nous [νοῦς]), and in the sixteenth century the term is used frequently by Montaigne in his Essays, but to refer to a quality rather than a faculty—the quality of the gens d’entendement (men of understanding). Furthermore, while Montaigne uses the word intelligence, he never uses the word intellect. The term intellect did not really become widespread in French until the nineteenth century, following Renan, and in the context of the translation of the Averroist lexicon. The influence of Italian on French also perhaps played some role. In any case, it is striking to see that the term that the otherwise very “Cartesian” Valéry most often uses in his Notebooks is not entendement but intellect. I. Intellectus in the Renaissance: The Example of Bovelles The key question is knowing whether—aside from a few rare occurrences, most notably in Guez de Balzac or in Malebranche—the near-impossibility of translating intellectus into French literally as intellect, or even of using the word intellect in an original text in the Renaissance and into the early eighteenth century, simply reflects the limits of the vocabulary in use at the time, or whether there is not, linked to this semantic displacement toward entendement, a INTELLECT 491 and they often translate intelligere as “’to conceive.” Yet, as Jean-Marie Beyssade suggests, following Descartes’s detailed analysis, the gap between intelligere and concipere is the very gap between the idea and the concept. As for the difference between intelligere and comprehendere, this is a distinction of principle for the entirety of Cartesian metaphysics. The distinction is drawn in relation to our knowledge of the infinite being: we are capable of “knowing” it (intelligere)—or of apprehending it with our intellect (intelliger in French, even though this word was not yet in current usage at the time)— without for all that “understanding” it (comprehendere). Descartes was not the first to apply this distinction or these terms to our knowledge of God. The distinction between mente attingere and comprehendere formulated by Descartes in a letter to Mersenne (January 21, 1641, in Œuvres [AT], 3:284), referring to a passage in Saint Augustine, turns out to follow precisely this distinction, as presented in Augustine’s text: Attingere aliquantum mente Deum, magna beatitudo est: comprehendere autem, omnino impossibile. (To reach God in some way with our mind is a great happiness, but to understand Him is impossible.) (Sermo 117, chap. 3, 5, PL, vol. 38, col. 663; Sermons, trans. E. Hill) It is therefore plausible that Descartes knew of this text by Augustine, which is not however, cited by Zbigniew Janowski in his Index augustino-cartésien (83–85). On the other hand, and since the focus of this entry is the transition from the Renaissance to the classical age, we should mention Nicholas of Cusa, who, two centuries before Descartes, had written in book 1 of his Docte ignorance that God is intelligé de manière incompréhensible (incomprehensibiliter intelligitur, “apprehended or ‘intellected’ without comprehension”). Cusanus’s near-oxymoron has not been rendered faithfully by the French translators of the twentieth-century: Abel Rey in 1930 translated it the other way around as compris sans être saisi (understood without being grasped), while Maurice de Gandillac in 1942 translated the two words using the same term: compris de façon incompréhensible (comprehended incomprehensibly), thereby eliding the distinction between intelligere and comprehendere, possibly with a view to making the effect of the contrast more radical. The differentiated usage of the two terms is equally present in Cusanus’s Latin. Does Cartesian metaphysics, then, simply take up Cusanus’s distinction? This is certainly not the case. The Meditations do not adapt Cusanus’s docte ignorance (learned ignorance) for the classical age. Book 1 of the Docte ignorance ended by stating the primacy of negative theology; Descartes, by contrast, emphasizes the fact that man is naturally capable of a “positive” knowledge or intellection of the infinite being. It is this capacity itself that characterizes the metaphysical way of thinking. A tradition of interpretation that emerged in France in the second half of the twentieth century, however, has downplayed the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere. To take an example: when Ferdinand Alquié wanted to justify the absence of the “Conversation with Burman” from his edition of Descartes’s Œuvres philosophiques, he translated as nous comprenons philosophical transformation that is every bit as determining. For at the beginning of the Renaissance, to talk about intellectus was not simply to study the workings of human entendement, but was above all to invoke the mode of existence and of knowledge of a separate intellectus, that of the angels. The 1511 Liber de intellectu of Charles de Bovelles is a good example: Bovelles treats human intellectus entirely by contrasting it to the pure intellectus of angels. According to Renaissance philosophy, human thought could be studied only by comparison with the pure intellectus of a separate intelligence. There was a vertical hierarchy of modes of thought: sensus, ratio, intellectus, mens, which were prefigured in the De conjecturis of Nicolas of Cusa (1440). Sensus was a mode of apprehension belonging to the body, ratio belonging to humans, intellectus to a pure intelligence (intelligentia), and mens to God. A manuscript note written by Beatus Rhenanus, an Alsatian student of Lefèvre d’Étaples and of Bovelles, identifies four distinct modes of philosophizing, according to these four modes of knowing, with intellectual philosophy thus falling halfway between rational philosophy and the philosophy of the mind. How we can or should conceive of the capacity of knowing proper to humans is played out across this spectrum. If humans are distinguished by reason alone, their knowledge is limited to the abstractive mode of knowing on the basis of sensible types, whereas the intuitive mode is reserved for the pure intellectus of angels. As far as humans are concerned, however, Bovelles rejects precisely this originally Scotist separation between abstractive knowledge and intuitive knowledge, the former being the only knowledge available to humans in their life. For Bovelles, by contrast, man is not only reason, but also intellectus: he is able to reach a state of fulfillment that raises him to the level of the intellectus of angels when his knowledge, originally abstractive, is capable of an intuitive force. Bovelles then talks of a vis intuitiva for the intellectus of man himself. For Bovelles, the spectrum of ratio, intellectus, mens is no longer a limiting principle, but a dynamic schema. II. The Cartesian Distinction of the Different Modes of Thought: Intelligere, Concipere, Comprehendere A radical shift in the world of the mind obviously occurs between Bovelles and Descartes. The vertical gradation of intellectual beings is no longer the measure of the capacity of fulfillment of the human mind. The enumeration in the “Second Meditation” is well known, in which the terms that are carefully differentiated by medieval and Renaissance Noetics are presented by Descartes as equivalent: “res cogitans, id est, mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio” (Meditationes de Prima Philosophia in Œuvres [AT], 7:27). Now, there is a direct, immediate contrast between man’s finite intellectus and God’s infinite one. The distinctions that Descartes’s philosophy sets in place no longer operate among nouns—ratio, intellectus, mens—designating both distinct faculties and ontologically different beings; rather, they work among verbal forms that signal the different ways of thinking and knowing proper to man: intelligere, concipere, comprehendere (the distinction is made particularly clear in Descartes’s Entretien avec Burman, in Œuvres [AT] 5:154). Contemporary translators of Descartes, such as the duc de Luynes, seem curiously unaware of the distinction between intelligere and concipere, 492 INTELLECTUS . Meditationes de prima philosophia. Volume 7 of Œuvres de Descartes (AT), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1983. Volume 7 first published in 1904. Translation by John Cottingham: Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited by J. Cottingham. Rev. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. . Œuvres de Descartes. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. 12 volumes. Paris: Vrin, 1983–. First published 1896–1913. . Œuvres philosophiques. 3 vols. Edited by Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Garnier: 1963–73. Translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. . “Responsiones Renati Des Cartes ad quasdam diffultates ex Meditationibus ejus, etc., ab ipso haustae.” Pp. 146–79 in volume 5 of Œuvres de Descartes (AT), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1983. Volume 5 first published in 1903. Faye, Emmanuel. “Beatus Rhenanus lecteur et étudiant de Charles de Bovelles.” Annuaire des Amis de la Bibliothéque humaniste de Sélestat (1995): 115–36. Gouhier, Henri Gaston. “Intelligere et comprehendere.” Pp. 208–14 in La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes. 4th. ed. Paris: Vrin, 2000. . Philosophie et perfection de l’homme: De la Renaissance à Descartes. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Janowski, Zbigniew. Index augustino-cartésien. Paris: Vrin, 2000. Marion, Jean-Luc. Questions cartésiennes. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Renan, Ernest. Averroès et l’averroïsme [1852]. Edited by Alain de Libera. Paris: Maisonneuve et Laros - Dédale, 1997. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1973–74. Translation by Paul Gifford et al.: Notebooks. 3 vols. Edited by Brian Stimpson et al. New York: Peter Lang, 2000–2007. (we understand) the verb intelligimus used by the philosopher in relation to our knowledge of God’s perfections (see Œuvres philosophiques, 3:766). What is more, in his concern to promote the image of a pre-Kantian Descartes, he spoke in 1950 of an “unknowable transcendence” and of a “metaphysics of an inaccessible being” in relation to the God of the Meditations (La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes, 113 [p. 109 in 1987 ed.]). More recently, Jean-Luc Marion has developed a similar interpretation by invoking the “unknowability” of an “inaccessible” God in Descartes (Questions cartésiennes 2:233, 240). Both conclude by referring to the presence of a “negative theology,” or via negativa in Descartes (Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique, 88; Marion, Questions cartésiennes, 246). These interpretations tend toward replacing the Cartesian metaphysics of the positively known infinite with a theology of an incomprehensible omnipotence. Descartes, however, tells us something very different: in the “Third Meditation” (in Œuvres [AT], 7:45), the supremely knowing character (summe intelligentem) of the divine substance is affirmed before its omnipotence. From this one may then conclude that the name of the supremely “intelligent” being is intelligible to us only to the degree that the supreme being is indeed understood (intelligo) to be “supremely intelligent”: “Dei nomine intelligo ,” writes Descartes in the same sentence. One cannot emphasize enough, then, the importance of the Cartesian distinction between intelligere and comprehendere. At stake here, no doubt, is our perception of modern metaphysics, since we find in the Meditations a metaphysical thinking that does not subscribe to the Scholastic thesis (taken up by Kant in the modern age) of the impossibility for man to have any “intellectual intuition.” An attentive rereading of Descartes’s Latin texts might then contribute to a reevaluation of the intellective capacities of man, which should continue to inform our use of the word “intellect.” Emmanuel Faye REFS.: Alquié, Ferdinand. La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. 1st reprint, 1987; 2nd reprint, 2000. Augustine. Sermo CXVII: De Verbis Evangelii Joannis. Patrologia Latina. Vol. 38. Col. 661–71. Translation by Edmund Hill: “Sermon 117: On the Words of the Gospel of John.” Pp. 209–33 in Sermons. Vol. 4. Edited by John E. Rotelle. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990. Bovelles, Charles de. Quae hoc volumine continentur: Liber de intellectu; Liber de sensu; Liber de nihilo; Ars oppositorum; Liber de generatione; Liber de sapiente; Liber de duodecim numeris; Epistolae complures. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Ger.: Friedrich Fromann, 1970. First published in 1511. Cusanus, Nicolas [Nicolas of Cusa]. “De Coniecturis.” In Mutmaßungen. Edited and translated by Josef Koch and Winfried Happ. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988. English translation by Jasper Hopkins: “On Surmises.” Pp. 163–297 in Metaphysical Speculations, vol. 2. Minneapolis: Banning, 2000. . De docta ignorantia [Die belehrte Unwissenheit]. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Edited by Hans Gerhard Senger and Paul Wilpert. Translated by Paul Wilpert. Hamburg: Meiner, 1970–77. English translation by Germain Heron: Of Learned Ignorance. Introduction by D.J.B. Hawkins. 1954. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1979. Heron’s translation first published in 1954. Descartes, René. L’Entretien avec Burman. Edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981. Latin version (AT) edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery: pp. 154–79 in Correspondance, volume 5 of Œuvres de Descartes (AT). Paris: Vrin 1983. Volume 5 first published in 1903. English translation by John Cottingham: Descartes’ Conversation with Burman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. INTELLECTUS (LATIN) ARABIC ‘aql [العقل[ ENGLISH mind, intellect, understanding, meaning, thought FRENCH intellect, entendement, sens, signification, pensée GERMAN Vernunft, Intellekt, Verstand, Sinn GREEK nous [νοῦς], epinoia [ἐπίνοια], logistikon [λογιστιϰόν] ITALIAN intelletto, significato v. INTELLECT, INTUITION, REASON, UNDERSTANDING and CONSCIOUSNESS, GEMÜT, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SENSE, SOUL Intellectus is one of the most polysemic terms in medieval Latin. It applies as much to “the meaning of” something (we talk about the intellectus of a sentence or of a judgment, Ger. Sinn, Fr. sens, It. significato), as to the verb “to mean” (in the sense of vouloir-dire in French, that is, a speaker or writer’s intention or “meaning-to-say”), or to the “meaning understood” (that is, the “meaning,” “intentional” or not, as it is “received” in the mind of the listener), and more broadly to “signification” or “significance,” in the sense of “full of meaning,” as is the case in the programmatic expression of theology and of exegesis: intellectus fideli, the “intellection” or “understanding” of faith. To mean, to understand, to comprehend: these different meanings do not pose a problem for the translator since vernacular language has often separated them out into terms that have evolved in different ways, to the exclusion of other uses. The word intellectus covers, in addition to the spheres of meaning and of understanding, almost all of the notions relating to thought, its activity, and its conditions of possibility. This is where the difficulties lie. As a fundamental term of ancient and medieval psychology, intellectus and the series of terms that are derived from or related to it (intelligere, intellectualis, intelligibilis) pose particular, if not insoluble, problems for the translator. INTELLECTUS 493 one pre-Socratic, when it is synonymous with opinio, and the other Scholastic, when it refers to the intellect-nous of De anima 3.4–5, distinguishing it from ratio. We will focus in this entry on the Peripatetic usages, which are the most poorly served by modern translations. I. The Intellectus between Nous and Epinoia In the Scholastic vocabulary, intellectus has at least ten meanings that are more or less interconnected: (1) the Peripatetic nous, understood in the sense of “substance”; (2) the same, in the sense of “faculty” (Ger. Vermögen) or “faculty of knowledge” (Ger. Erkenntnisvermögen); (3) the nonsensible or suprasensible faculty of knowledge, but not distinct from ratio (that is, without taking into account the distinction between intuitive knowledge and discursive knowledge); (4) a cognitive activity, an act of knowledge, intellection or intelligence (synonym: intellegentia); (5) the nonsensible intuitive faculty of knowledge, which penetrates the intimate essence of things (according to the medieval etymology bringing together intelligere and legere intus, ); (6) the “habitus of principles,” as distinct from prudentia, sapientia, and scientia, but also from ratio and synteresis (see CONSCIOUSNESS), the Greek nous tôn archôn [νοῦς τῶν ἀϱχῶν], and the Latin habitus principiorum (for example, “intellectus dicitur habitus primum principiorum,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I, q. 58, 3c, “quendam specialem habitum, qui dicitur intellectus principiorum, ibid., q. 799, 12c); (7) intellectual inspection (Ger. Einsicht), synonymous with intellegentia, and the antonym of which is ratio; (8) conception, comprehension, interpretation, understanding, or meaning (Ger. Verständnis, intellektuelle Auffassung, for example “verbum illud Philosophi universaliter verum est in omni intellectu [this sentence of Aristotle’s is absolutely true, whichever way one takes it],” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1, q. 87, 1 ad 3m, “secundum intellectum Augustini [according to the sense in which St. Augustine understands it],” ibid. q. 58, 7 ad 1m); (9) a nonsensible representation (Vernunftsvorstellung) or a notion, synomous with ratio, in the sense of a definitional formula (for example, “voces sunt signa intellectuum,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, q. 13, 1c, “composito intellectum est in intellectu,” ibid., q. 17, 3a); (10) significance or meaning (Ger. Bedeutung, Sinn), synonymous with ratio (in the sense of the definitional formula, logos-formula, sensus, significatio, virtus, vis [“expressive force or impact”] of a word). . The most delicate problem comes from the fact that words such as the English “understanding,” or the French entendement, or the German Verstand, which, at various times, have become accepted equivalents of the Latin intellectus, do not correspond to the field that it covers in the Peripatetic and Scholastic lexicon. The transformation of intellectus into “understanding” (entendement) marks a break in the history of theories of the soul. Indeed, the post-Lockean notion of “understanding” used by Leibniz to discuss the Averroist theory of the “unity of the intellect” no more overlaps with that of intellectus than the pair of terms intellectus/ratio overlaps with the pair Verstand/Vernunft that are Kant’s legacy to modernity. Neither an empiricist psychology of understanding nor a theory of the transcendental are possible frameworks within which the Aristotelian nous [νοῦς] can be accommodated. The medieval intellectus, like the nous it harbors, is pulled not only between understanding and reason but also between different meanings of a (supposedly) identical faculty named entendement, Verstand, “understanding,” assigned to it by different philosophers of language, theories, and often incommensurable assumptions. It is, then, an example of an untranslatable term, whose untranslatability flows from a certain undertranslation (its original dimension is only apparent in expressions like “intellectual intuition,” the intellektuelle Anschauung that Kant rejected for understanding), as well as from a certain overtranslation. This latter has no better example than the case of Ernest Renan, who, because he interpreted intellectus as “reason” in the Kantian sense of the term, denounced in the noetics of Averroës an obscure and inadequate affirmation of the “universality of the principles of pure reason” and the no less confused affirmation of a “unity of psychological constitution in all of humankind” (Cf. E. Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme, Maisonneuve et Larose, “Dédale,” 1997, 109). Similarly, modern interpretations of the medieval theory of the intellect that replace the concepts of poietic intellect (or agent) and material (or possible) intellect with those of productive and of receptive mind bring to bear on the theory of intellectus models of reading that are as foreign to it as they are to the Peripatetic theory of nous, which is its source. To understand clearly why the intellectus-nous is neither Lockean understanding nor Kantian reason (Vernunft), one has to be clear about the inaugural distinction between nous and dianoia [διανοία] and to distinguish between the Peripatetic and non-Peripatetic uses of the term intellectus. Before the Latin translations of De anima, intellectus did not in fact refer to the nous of Aristotle and his Greek commentators but usually to the deeply Stoicist notion of color: epinoia [ἐπίνοια]. These two oppositions—nous vs dianoia and nous vs epinoia—mark two historical periods of intellectus: the 1 On the etymology of intellectus The word intellectus is formed by joining together inter and legere, where legere has the meaning of “to bind,” “to bring together,” “to collect,” which is one of the meanings of the Greek legô [λέγω], and of the German lesen (see LOGOS). In the Middle Ages intelligere, sometimes attested as intellegere, is sometimes associated with intra- or intus- legere, legere here having the banal sense of “to read,” and not to bind. Several good examples of this “etymology” are provided by Thomas Aquinas: “Nomen intellectus sumitur ex hoc, quod intima rei cognoscit, est enim intellegere quasi intus legere [The name ‘intellect’ is derived from the fact that it knows the intimate nature of a thing: indeed, intelliger is tantamount to saying ‘to read inside’],” Quaestiones disputate De veritate, q. 1, 12c); “Dicitur autem intellectus ex eo quo intus legit intuendo essentiam rei; intellectus et ratio differunt quantum ad modum cognoscendi, quia scilicet intellectus cognoscit simplici intuitu, ratio vero discurrendo de uno in aliud [it is called ‘intellect’ because it reads inside, that is, has an intuition of the essence of a thing; intellect and reason differ as to the mode of knowledge, since intellect is an act of simple intuition, whereas reason moves discursively from one thing to another],” Summa theologica, I, q. 59, a. 1, ad. 1m) 494 INTELLECTUS logic: “si enim sunt universalia sive intellectu solo esse habeant, alterius utique erit negotii inquirere [to know if universals exist or only have their existence in thought, would in fact be an entirely different kind of study]” (cf. Simplicius, In praedicamenta Aristotelis, trans. William of Moerbeke, ed. A. Pattin, Louvain: Publications universitaires–Paris; Béatrice Nauwelaerts, Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum, V/1, 1971, 71, 44–45. The use of intellectus to translate epinoia, interpreted this time in the sense of a concept that is “posterior in the order of being,” is also attested in Moerbeke’s translation of Simplicius’s Commentary: aut quia aliqui perimebant universalia et intellectualia et ea quae qualitercumque intelliguntur aut quia etsi haec essent in natura, intellectus ipsorum posterius accepimus (either because some reject universals, intelligibles, and everything that is the object of some form of intellection, or because, even though they actually exist [in nature], we only get their concept [thought] afterwards) (Ibid., 261, 83–86) We might also note in this passage the use of the word intellectualia in the sense of “intelligibles.” We might finally point out that, in its pre-Socratic usage, intellectus is often contrasted both to “reason” and to “intelligence.” This distinction, probably borrowed from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, disappears after the reception of Aristotle. . As we can see, certain Scholastic usages of intellectus refer to the nóêsis [νόησις] of Aristotle, understood at times as thought in general, and at other times as so-called “intuitive” thinking (contrasted to dianoia [διανοία] or “discursive” thinking). Other usages refer to the nous properly speaking, or the intellect, itself understood by some interpreters as “intuitive reason” and contrasted in this sense to to dianoètikon [τὸ διανοητιϰόν] or “discursive reason.” Still others, finally, refer to that which is intelligible or thinkable (= noêton [νοητόν]), or even to the concept or the notion of something (= noêma [νόημα]). This polysemy, which means that the same term refers at once to a faculty, its operation, and its object, is one of the main difficulties in reading medieval texts, as well as Greek texts (see aisthêsis under the entry SENSE). If in the Scholastic and “Arabo-Latin” tradition intellectus has the primary meaning of intellect, in the original “Greco-Latin” tradition (that of Boethius) it sometimes has the meaning of epinoia [ἐπίνοια] (“that which comes to mind,” “reflection,” “imagination,” “thought,” rather than, by extension, “intelligence” in general, or even “common sense”), which is usually translated as opinio. This usage is still attested in the thirteenth century, mainly in William of Moerbeke’s translations (De Anima, in the Version of William of Moerbeke: and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated into English by Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). It is the word intellectus, and not opinio, that appears in the translation of the mute citation of Isagoge, through which Simplicius, in his Commentary on the Categories, dismisses the problem of universals from the field of 2 Intellectus vs intellegentia, ratio vs rationalitas Given the etymology they provide for intellectus, the medievals have a tendency to use intelligentia and intellegentia (where the form legô, “to read,” is more immediately transparent) as equivalent terms. Authors in the twelfth century generally go along with Boethius in distinguishing between sensus, imaginatio, ratio, intellectus and intelligentia/ intellegentia—mens staying, as it does for Saint Augustine, in a generic position, in the sense of “soul.” This is the case, for example, with Isaac of Stella, Epistula de anima, PL 194, 1884C–1885B; Sermo, 4, PL 194, 1701C– 1702C), with Alcher of Clairvaux (De spiritu et anima, chap. 4, PL 40, 782 and 7, PL 40, 787) and with Alain de Lille (PL 210, 673D). At that time ratio, intellectus, and intelligentia/intellegentia form a real triad of terms. For Isaac (a) “reason,” ratio, is the “faculty of the soul that perceives the incorporeal forms of corporeal things,” (b) “intellect,” intellectus, is the “faculty of the soul that perceives the forms of truly incorporeal things,” (c) and intelligentia/intellegentia, “intelligence,” is the “faculty of the soul that has God as its immediate object.” In his De anima, written between 1126 and 1150, Dominique Gondissalvi developed the distinction by contrasting intellectus as a purveyor of science (scientia), which separates the intelligible from the sensible (by abstraction), with intelligentia/intellegentia, which generates wisdom (sapientia), “the superior eye” of the soul, devoted exclusively to contemplating pure intelligibles. This type of knowledge, the “intelligence” that surpasses “science,” allows the soul to “contemplate itself” and to “reflect while contemplating them, as in a mirror, both God and the eternal intelligibles.” It is assimilated to “rapture,” the prototype of which is the ascension to the “third heaven” that the apostle Paul speaks of. The terms rationalitas and ratio are often used in the Middle Ages in the obvious sense of “rational” or “discursive faculty” ( = dianoia). In the treatise De intellectibus (whose title means “the intellections” and not “the intellects”), Abelard distinguishes rationality, imparted to all “rational” creatures, from the accomplished reason of those who are capable of exercising it fully. Rationalitas and ratio are thus more or less distinguished as “reasoning” (capable of reason) and “rational” (as a positive predicate, referring to the fullness of reasoning in action, rationality as it is exercised). Cf. Abelard, De intellectibus: Rationality is not the same thing as reason: in fact, rationality belongs to all angelic and human minds, which is why one calls them rational; but reason only belongs to a few, as we have said, namely, only to the minds that are distinct. This is why I think that there is as much difference between rationality and reason, as there is between the power to run, and the power to run easily, according to which Aristotle calls runners “those who possess” the ease of movement of supple limbs. Thus, any mind that can discern using its own nature possesses rationality. But the only person to “possess” reason is the one who is in a state of being capable of exercising it easily, without being hindered by any weakness of his age, or by any bodily handicap, which would cause INTELLECTUS 495 Averroës based his Long Commenary of De anima incorporated Alexander’s division into Aristotle’s text itself. . In fact, not only does Aristotle not talk of nous kath’ hexin, but the very distinction between agent intellect and hylic or possible intellect is far from being as clearly formulated in De anima as Alexander leads us to think. Besides the few lines in De anima 3.4 and 5, devoted to the intellect as “analogous to matter,” similar to a “tabula rasa,” which also mention the “possible” intellect, and besides the extremely enigmatic passage in 3.5, referring to the intellect that “produces” intelligibles, one would be hard pressed to cite any text by Aristotle that offered an actual “theory of the intellect.” We have to turn instead to the noetic works of Alexander that have come down to us, that is, the Peri psuchês [Πεϱὶ ψυχῆς] (De anima), edited by I. Bruns in 1887 (Supplementum Aristotelicum, II, 1, Berlin, 1892, 1–100) and the De anima liber alter, also called Mantissa (Bruns, ibid., 101–86), which is a collection of twenty-five treatises comprising notably, in number one, a second and short version of Peri psuchês (Bruns, 101, 1–106, 17) and in number two (Bruns, ibid., 106, 18–113, 24) the famous Peri nou [Πεϱὶ νοῦ] (On the intellect), in order to look for an exposition of the Peripatetic theory of the intellect, which, through its Greek and Arabic commentators, has permeated medieval Scholastics. B. Speculative intellect, theoretical intellect Scholastic philosophers often used the expression intellectus speculativus, which modern translations often render with a calque (“speculative intellect,” Fr. intellect spéculatif, It. intelletto speculativo, etc.). While this is not wrong, the literal II. Intellectus and the Vocabulary of the Peripatetic Noetics The difficulty of the medieval lexicon of intellect derives first and foremost from the difficulty of Aristotle’s vocabulary in De anima, and because of the continuous superimposition of translations and commentaries, from Greek to Latin, or from Greek to Arabic. As we read in De anima 3.5, the distinction between the different sorts of intellect is quite obscure. It merely touches on the ideas of dynamic intellect (through the phrase touto de ho panta dunamei eikeina [τοῦτο δὲ ὅ πάντα δυνάμει ἐϰεῖνα]), of poietic intellect or intellect as agent (of the kind, τὸ αἴτιον ϰαὶ ποιητιϰόν), and of passive intellect (ho de pathêtikos nous [ὁ δὲ παθητιϰὸς νοῦς])”, without proposing any systematic construction between them. Indeed, it was the commentators of Aristotle, first among them being Alexander of Aphrodisias, who provided in advance the medieval notions of intellectus. A. Agent intellect, hylic (material, possible) intellect In De intellectu, Alexander of Aphrodisias attributes to Aristotle a distinction among three sorts of intellect: material intellect (nous hulikos [νοῦς ὑλιϰός]), the intellect “according to the habitus” (nous kath’hexin [νοῦς ϰαθ’ ἕξιν]), and the poietic intellect (nous poiêtikos [νοῦς ποιητϰός]—“nous esti kata Aristotelê trittos [νοῦς ἐστι ϰατὰ ’Aϱιστοτέλη τϱιττός]” (the intellect is threefold according to Aristotle) (cf. P. Moraux, Alexandre exégète de la noétique d’Aristote, Liège, Faculté de philosophie-Paris, E. Droz, “Bibliothèque de la faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’Université de Liège,” Fasc. XCIX, 1942, 185; ed. Bruns, 106, 19). This tripartite distinction was adopted by all of the commentators and became so widely accepted as Aristotelian that the Arabic translation on which him some disturbance, and make him mad or stupid. (Abelard, De intellectibus, §8–9) If we move on to the vernacular, it is Middle High German that offers the most interesting series of terms for considering the complex relations that developed subsequently in modern languages between Vernunft and Verstand, “understanding” and “reason.” It is essentially a question of the pairs vernünficheit/vernünftecheit; vernunft; verstentenisse/ verstantnisse, attested in German mysticism, particularly but not exclusively in Meister Eckhart. On the face of it, the law of correspondence seems easy enough to establish: vernunft is understood as the equivalent of ratio; verstentenisse/verstantnisse as the equivalent of intellectus; and venünfticheit/ vernünftecheit hovering somewhere between intellectualitas and ratio. This system of equivalences is, however, too schematic. In fact, the distinction ratio/intellectus continues into Scholastic vocabulary with the division of intellectus into intellectus agens and intellectus possibilis, inherited from the GrecoArabic exegesis of De anima 3.4–5. This basic distinction is also expressed in German medieval literature. One important witness here is the opuscule known as Ein schoene ler von der selikeyt (A beautiful theory of happiness), attributed to a certain Eckhart of Gründig, who expounds and discusses the theses of Meister Eckhart and of Dietrich of Freiburg on the nature of the beatitudes. In this treatise the “agent” intellect and the “possible” intellect clearly have their German equivalents: for the former, diu würkendiu vernunft, and for the latter, diu müglichiu vernunft. Cf. W. Preger, “Der altdeutsche Tractat von der wirkenden und möglichen Vernunft” [Sitzb. Ak. Wiss. München, philos.-philol. hist Classe, 1], 1871, 189, 1–16, for the agent intellect, and 188, 14–25, for the possible intellect. It does not appear possible then to consider that the opposition between rationalitas and ratio is the same as the German vernünfticheit/vernünftecheit vs. vernunft. All of these terms correspond more to intellectus than to the modern Vernunft. Moreover, in Meister Eckhart vernunftekeit translates equally as intellectualitas, intellegentia, and intellectus [ = nous]. REFS.: Abelard. Des intellections–Tractatus de intellectibus. Edited and translated by Patrick Morin. Paris: Vrin, 1994. Translation by Peter King: Tractatus de intellectibus, in Peter King, “Peter Abailard and the Problem of Universals in the Twelfth Century.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1982. Vol. 2 contains a complete translation of Abelard’s Tractatus de intellectibus. Guilfoy, Kevin. “Abelard on Mind and Cognition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, edited by Jeffrey Brower and Kevin Guilfoy, 200–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Libera, Alain de. “Sermo mysticus: La transposition du vocabulaire scolastique dans la mystique allemande du XIVe siècle.” Rue Descartes 14 (1995): 41–73. Urbani Ulivi, Lucia. La psicologia di Abelardo e il Tractatus de intellectibus. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1976. 496 INTELLECTUS is an entirely different type of soul, and that on its own it can be separated, as the eternal, from the corruptible” (cf. Themistius, in III De anima, ad 430a 20–25; Verbeke, 232, 44–46 and 233, 80–82). These three senses obviously cannot work concurrently. The immediate context allows one in theory to determine the meaning. The Latin res speculativae generally refers to the objects of the activity of the theoretical intellect in the second sense of the term, that is, first and foremost, the indivisibles invoked in De anima 3.6, 430a26–31. It is worth pointing out that this activity in Averroës is called “representation” (taṣawwur [التصور ,[ ّ Latin formatio, “forming,” which survives in “to form a plan,” in the sense of “to conceive of a plan”), in that it applies to intelligibles envisaged in themselves, outside of any predication, while the consideration of the “noêmes” (ma‘nā [المعنى” ,[intention”), the combination of which in predications “contains truth or falsity,” is called “consent” (taṣdīq [التصديق ,[Lat. fides, “faith”). In the Arabo-Latin translations of Aristotle (as well as in those of Avicenna and of Averrroës), the expression corresponding most often to noein [νοεῖν] is formare per intellectum (the substantive being translation masks its homonymy. The expression derives from the Latin translation of the Long Commentary of Averroës on De anima; the analysis of different passages of the Aristotelian De anima and its adoption by Averroës demonstrate that the “speculative” intellect in fact refers to three sorts of entities: (1) the faculty referred to by Aristotle as “theoretical intellect” in De anima 3.6, 42925ff. (Arabic ‘aql naẓarī [النظري العقل ,([as opposed to the “practical intellect” of De anima 3.7, 421a1ff. (Arabic ‘aql ‘amali [العملي العقل ;([ (2) the “composite” of the material intellect and the agent intellect, which Averroës calls “produced intellect” (factus), in other words, not a faculty, but an act or activity (that is, the “intellection of indivisibles,” according to Aristotle, ta adiaireta [τὰ ἀδιαίϱετα], ta hapla [τὰ ἁπλᾶ], and the intellection of the “composites,” or objects of judgment); (3) the agent intellect insofar as it is joined to the material intellect and is for man the essential “form.” This is a meaning that originated with Themistius and which he extrapolated from a passage in De anima 2. 2, 413b24–25 (Tricot, 76-77), where in speaking of the “intellect and of the theoretical faculty,” Aristotle indicates that “it seems indeed that this 3 A translation by Alexander incorporated into Aristotle’s original text The Textus 17 = De anima 3.5, 430a10–14 on which Averroës comments is the following: Et quia, quemadmodum in Natura, est aliquid in unoquoque genere quod est materia (et est illud quod est illa omnia in potentia), et aliud quod est causa et agens (et hoc est illud propter quod agit quidlibet, sicut dispositio artificii apud materiam), necesse est ut in anima existant hee differentie. (And since, just as in Nature, there is in each kind something that is matter [and is that which is potential in all of these things], and another thing that is cause and agent [and is that by virtue of which everything acts, as is the case with art in relation to matter], these differences also necessarily exist in the soul too.) (Crawford ed., 436, 1–7) The original in Tricot’s French translation, is as follows: Mais puisque, dans la nature toute entière, on distingue d’abord quelque chose qui sert de matière à chaque genre (et c’est ce qui est en puissance tous les êtres du genre), et ensuite une autre chose qui est la cause et l’agent parce qu’elle les produit tous, situation dont celle de l’art par rapport à sa matière est un exemple, il est nécessaire que, dans l’âme aussi, on retrouve ces différences. (Vrin, 1992, p. 181) (But since, in all of nature, we distinguish first of all something that is matter in each genus [and it is that which is potential in all of the beings of a genus], and then another thing which is that cause and agent because it produces them all, a situation of which the relationship of art to its matter is an example, we also necessarily find these differences in the soul.) The decisive change (Alexander’s incorporation) occurs in the Textus 18 = De anima 3.5, 430a14–17, where three differences are mentioned, contrary to the binary division maintained in Textus 17: Oportet igitur ut in ea sit intellectus qui est intellectus secundum quod efficitur omne, et intellectus qui est intellectus secundum quod facit ipsum intelligere omne, et intellectus secundum quod intelligit omne, quasi habitus, qui est quasi lux. Lux enimquoquo modo etiam facit colores qui sunt in potentia colores in actu. (So within it there is also necessarily [1] an intellect that is intellect to the extent that it becomes all, and [2] an intellect that is an intellect to the extent that it allows it to conceive of all, and [3] an intellect to the extent that it conceives of everything as a habitus does—that is, in a manner resembling the action of light. For in a certain way, light also makes potential colors into actual colors.) (Crawford ed., 437, 1–7) To be compared with Tricot’s French: Et, en fait, on y distingue, d’une part, l’intellect qui est analogue à la matière, par le fait qu’il devient tous les intelligibles, et d’autre part, l’intellect [qui est analogue à la cause efficiente], parce qu’il les produit tous, attendu qu’il est une sorte d’état analogue à la lumière: car, en un certain sens, la lumière, elle aussi, convertit les couleurs en puissance, en couleurs en acte. (Vrin, 1992, 181–82) (And indeed, we can distinguish in it, on the one hand, the intellect that is analogous to matter, by the fact that it becomes all of the intelligibles, and on the other hand, the intellect [that is analogous to the efficient cause], because it produces all, considering that it is in a sort of analogous state to light: for, in a certain sense, light too converts potential colors into actual colors.) INTELLECTUS 497 fact that underneath apparently similar Latin expressions we find notions that are sometimes Greek, sometimes Arabic, and sometimes Greco-Arabic in origin, whose meaning varies from the union or “conjunction” (Lat. conjunctio, copulatio, connexio, Ar. ittiṣāl [االتصال ([of the human soul and the separate agent intellect, to the simple acquisition, through teaching or through reason, of a stock of intelligibles. . The notions of intellectus adeptus (Ar. al-‘ aql mustafād [المستفاد العقل [and of intellectus adeptus agens (“acquired intellect agent,” Ar. al-‘aql al-mustafād al-fā‘il [الفاعل المستفاد العقل ,([expressing the state of connexio, are among the most obscure in medieval psychology. While he may not be able to determine the exact meaning of the doctrines he is confronted with (and which vary considerably from one author to the next, from Alexander to al-Fārābī, and from Avicenna to Averroës), the reader of the noetic texts must always, going back to the Greek, and following Alexander, distinguish between at least two incompatible meanings of the “acquired” intellect: (1) the agent intellect acquired “from outside,” that is the nous ho thurathen [νοῦς ὁ θύϱαθεν] (Lat. adeptus), and (2) scientific knowledge acquired from the first intelligibles, with or without the help of a master, that is nous epiktêtos [νοῦς ἐπίϰτητος] (Lat. acquisitus, possessus, possessivus]. Although the notion of “common intellect” is sometimes seen as identical to that of the “habitual” intellect, it has an original content. Grafted on to the Aristotelian doctrine of the patient (passivus, passibilis) intellect, this creation by Themistius in fact carries a clearly Platonic content, bearing no relation to the pair in habitu vs in effectu. . D. Intellectus passibilis vs. intellectus possibilis De anima 3.5, 430a20–25 alludes to a so-called “patient” or “passive” intellect (nous pathêtikos [νοῦς παθητιϰός]), which is often confused with the “hylic” or material intellect (nous hulikos [νοῦς ὑλιϰός]) of Alexander, that is, the “possible” intellect of the Scholastics. Because it was easy to confuse formatio per intellectum = “representation by the intellect,” Arabic al-taṣawwur bi-al-‘aql [بالعقل التصور.([ ّ C. Habitual intellect, acquired intellect, common intellect The expression “intellect in habitus” or “habitual intellect” (intellectus in habitu) corresponds to the nous kath’ hexin of Alexander of Aphrodisias. The notion of habitus as the power of the intellect to accomplish its own action—intellection—is illustrated in Alexander by the metaphor of the artisan: “The intellect has another degree, namely when it thinks and possesses the habitus to conceive, and is able to assume the forms of the intelligibles through its own power, a power one might compare to the power of those who have the habitus within them to make things, and who are capable of producing their own works” (cf. Théry, 76). The expression intellectus in habitu appears frequently in Avicenna’s Latin texts, in the Latin translation of al-Ghazālī, and from there in most of the Scholastics. Generally speaking, what we call “acquired intellect” or “actual intellect” (in effectu) is the intellect that “considers, in act, the conclusions drawn from propositions which are self-evident,” while “habitual intellect” refers to those same conclusions insofar as the intellect “possesses them without actually thinking of them.” The intellectus in habitu, however, is often assimilated to the habitus principiorum discussed in the Second Analytics. It is in this sense that it appears, for example, in Albert the Great, when, in the Summa de creaturis, IIa paragraphs, q. 54, he contrasts the “habitual” intellect, in the sense of the “possession of principles that have not been received from a master,” which we know “by simply knowing the terms that compose it,” with the “acquired” (acquisitus) intellect, meaning the possession of “principles that one acquires in contact with a master through teaching and studying.” Since the “acquired” intellect can also refer to the intellect “acquired externally” (adeptus, Greek thurathen [θύϱαθεν]), in the more or less mystical sense, extrapolated by Alexander () from a passage in the Parva naturalia (De generatione animalium, 736b20–29), there is a considerable amount of terminological confusion. The main source of confusion comes from the 4 The “acquired” intellect: A misinterpretation that became a technical term Alexander interpreted the Aristotelian notion of intellect “from outside” in a very particular sense: for him, it was a question of the agent intellect, acquired by the soul at each contemplation of the separate intelligible. Cf. Alexander of Aphrodisia, De anima: When the intelligible is by its own nature exactly as it is thought [ = intelligible] it remains incorruptible when it ceases to be thought; so the intellect which thought it is also incorruptible: not the material intellect which serves as its support (for it is corrupted at the same time as the soul is corrupted, since it is a power of the soul, and at the same time as it is corrupted, its habitus, its capacity and its perfection are also corrupted), but the intellect which, when it was thinking it, had become identical to it in its act (for, given that it becomes similar to each content of thought when this content is thought, what it thinks becomes exactly what it is thinking. And this intellect is the one that comes to us from outside and which is incorruptible. So all those who are intent on having something of the divine within themselves will have to endeavor to succeed in thinking something of this kind. (Bruns ed., 90, 11–91, 7) It is worth noting that in the fragments of Theophrastus that have survived we find, by contrast, the question of knowing in what sense the intellect that is “from outside” (exôthen [ἔξωθεν]) or “added on” (epithetos [ἐπίθετος]) can be said to be “congenital” (sumphuês [συμφυής]). 498 INTELLECTUS passibilis and possibilis in medieval manuscripts, a theory of the corruptibility of the passive (possible) part of the intellective soul was often attributed to Aristotle, when there was nothing to really justify this. Cf. Aristotle, De anima: Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but absolutely it is not prior even in time. It does not sometimes think and sometimes not think. When separated it is alone just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not remember because, while this is impossible, passive thought is perishable); and without this nothing thinks. (Aristotle, De anima, 3.5, 430a, Barnes, On the Soul, 1: 684) For ancient and medieval interpreters the intellect that Tricot’s French translation presents as “patient intellect” is not the possible or material intellect but either (1) the “speculative” or “theoretical” intellect (Ar. ‘aql naẓarī [النظري العقل ,([which, as we saw, refers both to an actual theoretical intelligible (what Alexander calls “habitual intellect” or the intellect in habitus) and to the very act of “speculating” (Lat. considerare), which, like any physical act or act of the mind, can be engendered and corrupted; or (2) the intellect that Themistius calls “common intellect” (); or (3) as Averroës maintains, “the forms of the imagination as the cogitative faculty proper to man acts upon them.” In none of these three cases is it the material or possible intellect itself. The confusion between possible intellect and passible intellect has determined the modern interpretation of Averroism. This is well testified by Leibniz’s summary of the noetics of Averroës, in the course of which the transformation of intellectus into “understanding” (entendement) takes place, and which attests to the paradigm shift between medieval psychology and modern psychology mentioned earlier (see UNDERSTANDING). . III. “Intellectus” and Its Derived Terms Several adjectives are formed from intellectus. The adjective intellectivus, -a, -um (antonym: sensitivus, sensibilis) is the most widespread. It is used in the most diverse contexts: one talks of cognitio, of apprehensio, of operatio, of potentia, of intentio, and of visio i., but also of memoria i., and of habitus i., as well as of anima and of substantia i. If the ancient German translations render intellectivus by übersinnlich, “suprasensible,” nowadays one talks more readily of “intellective,” or “intellectual,” and even “noetic” knowledge. The term “intellectual” is normally reserved for intellectualis, -e, the semantic spectrum of which is almost identical to that of intellectivus: one talks of conceptio, cognitio, apprehensio, existimatio, operatio, intentio, visio i., but also of desiderium, appetitus, amor, delectatio i. and even of species i. (synonymous with intelligibilis). Understood broadly, intellectualis, -e, characterizes the cognitive function of the intellect, whether it is intuitive or discursive (synonym: intellectivus, rationalis); strictly speaking, intellectualis applies only to the intuitive cognitive function of the intellect, as distinct from reason (antonym: rationalis). It is in this sense that Thomas Aquinas describes angels as “intellectual beings”: Therefore they [angels] are called intellectual beings (intellectuales), because even with ourselves the things which are instantly [statim = nondiscursive, sudden, in a single act of intuition] apprehended are said to be “intellected” (intelligi); hence intellect is defined as the habit of first principles (habitus primorum principiorum). But human souls which acquire knowledge of truth by the discursive method are called rational (animae ver humane, quae veritatis notitiam per quendam discursum adquirunt, dicuntur rationales). (The Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. Daniel J. Sullivan, 2 vol., London: William Benton, 1952. Vol. 1, q. 58, Art. 3, [Thomas Aquinas’s Answer], 302) The noun intellectualitas (antonym: sensibilitas) usually refers to the state of being intelligible—intellectualitas thus has the meaning more of intelligibility than of intellectuality (Summa theologica III, q. 23, 2c: “no autem secundum intellectualitatem, quia forma domus in materia non est intelligibilis,” where intellectualitas refers to a 5 The common intellect according to Themistius The expression “common intellect,” coined by Themistius and widely adopted in medieval literature under the name intellectus communis, was the source of a great deal of confusion. Despite what the Latin suggests, the intellectus communis was not a “common” or “general” concept, as opposed to a “singular” or “particular” concept. The “common intellect” (koinos nous [ϰοινὸς νοῦς]) was the name Themistius gave to Aristotle’s passible intellect. Cf. Themistius, In III De anima, ad 430a 25, and Verbeke, 239, 1–241, 34, who discusses the “so-called ‘common’ intellect in the way that man is composed of a soul and a body in which anger and desire (Latin concupiscentia) reside, which Plato considers corruptible.” The “common” or “passible” intellect of Themistius illustrates the Platonic thesis according to which “the intellect alone is immortal, whereas the passions, and the ‘reason inherent in them,’ which Aristotle calls the passive intellect, are corruptible.” Themistius also supports the thesis according to which “human passions are not entirely irrational, since they listen to reason, and are susceptible to education and instruction.” REFS.: Verbeke, Gérard. Moral Education in Aristotle. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990. INTELLECTUS 499 mode of cognizability, Ger. Erkennbarkeit). The word can however also refer to the fact of being endowed with thought (for example “intellectualitas consequitur immaterialitatem,” Summa theologica I, q. 105, 3c). The neuter plural noun intellectualia denotes either the universals (intelligibles) or the separate substances, as objects of philosophical theology (intelligent intelligibles). The context generally allows one to determine the meaning. The verb intelligere/intellegere, whose meaning is apparent ( = Gr. noein [νοεῖν]), remains difficult to translate. The main translations suggested range from “conceptualize” or “think (noetically)” in English, to penser, concevoir par l’intellect, or intelliger in French (the latter a neologism enabling the series intellect, intelligible, intelliger to be preserved). None of these is entirely satisfactory. Alain de Libera REFS.: Adamson, Peter, and P. E. Pormann, trans. The Philosophical Works of al-Kindi. Karachi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Averroës. Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros. Edited by F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. Translation, introduction, and notes by Richard C. Taylor with Thérèse-Anne Druart: Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Translation, introduction, and notes by Alain de Libera: L’intelligence et la pensée: Grand commentaire du De anima: Livre 3 (429 a 10–435 b 25). Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Avicenna. Liber De anima, seu Sextus De Naturalibus: Édition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Edited by S. van Riet. 2 vols. Louvain, Belg.: Éditions orientalistes, 1968. Avicenna’s De anima (Arabic text): Being the Psychological part of Kitāb al-Shifā’. Edited by F. Rahman. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Translation by Edward Abbott Van Dyck: A Compendium on the Soul. Verona, It.: Paderno, 1906. “Avicenna on Common Nature.” In Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, edited by Gyula Klima, with Fritz Allhoff and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 6 Leibniz and Averroës: Medieval psychology and modern psychology By analogy to the theological expression “monophysite,” referring to the thesis of the one nature of Christ (and not Christ’s double nature, as divine and human), Leibniz coins the word “monopsychite” to refer to the Averroist thesis of the one intellect, which he presents as a return to the pristine nature of the Soul of the Stoic world: Plato’s soul of the world has been taken in this sense by some, but there is more indication that the Stoics succumbed to the universal soul which swallows all the rest. Those who are of this opinion might be called “Monopsychites,” since according to them there is in reality only one soul that subsists. (G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard, LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985, 79) This single intellectus is, however, baptized “Mind,” and even then not so much “single” as “universal.” Leibniz sometimes coordinates “Mind” with intellectus, translated as “understanding” (entendement), with intellectus agens becoming “active understanding,” as opposed to “passive understanding,” an expression translating an intellectus patiens that has no real equivalent in medieval texts, which talk of either intellectus possibilis (possible or “material” intellect), or intellectus passibilis (imagination), thereby giving rise to much confusion: Some discerning people have believed and still believe today, that there is only one single spirit, which is universal and animates the whole universe and all its parts, each according to its structure and the organs which it finds there, just as the same wind current causes different organ pipes to give off different sounds. Thus they also hold that when an animal has sound organs, the spirit produces the effect of a particular soul in it but that when the organs are corrupted, this particular soul reduces to nothing or returns, so to speak, to the ocean of the universal spirit. Aristotle has seemed to some to have had an opinion approaching this, which was later revived by Averroës, a celebrated Arabian philosopher. He believed that there is an intellectus agens, or “active understanding,” and that the former, coming from without, is eternal and universal for all, while the passive understanding, being particular for each, disappears at man’s death. This was the doctrine of certain Peripatetics two or three centuries ago, such as Pomponatius, Contarini, and others, and one recognizes traces of it in the late Mr. Naudé. (Leibniz’s “Considérations sur la doctrine d’un Espirit universal unique” [1702], in Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances et autres textes (1690–1703), Eng. trans. Leroy E. Loemker, “Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit” [1702], in Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 2, Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1989, 554) Leibniz’s interpretation of De anima 3.5, 430a20–25, and his reading of Averroës’s interpretation of Aristotle, are without foundation. For Averroës, the intellectus passibilis is nothing but the images that are subject to the activity of the vis cogitativa, a condition sine qua non of the activity of the material or possible intellect (see INTENTION, Box 2): Now [Aristotle] understands here by passible intellect the forms of the imagination as the cogitative faculty proper to man acts upon them. Indeed, this faculty has a rational character, and its activity consists either in leaving the “intention” of the imagined form with the individual, in his memory, or in distinguishing it from him in the “formative” faculty [ = al-mus. awwira (المصورة [( ّ and the imagination. Now, it is clear that the intellect we call “material” receives the imagined entities after this distinction. Consequently, the passible intellect is necessary for the conception by the [material] intellect. Aristotle thus said quite rightly: And we do not remember, for it is not passible, while the passible intellect is corruptible: and without that, it conceives nothing. That is to say: without the imaginative and cogitative faculty, the intellect we call “material” conceives nothing. (Averroës, In III De anima, commentary 20) 500