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

GEGENSTAND (GERMAN) v. OBJECT, and EPOCHÊ, ERSCHEINUNG, ESSENCE, GEFÜHL, INTENTION, PERCEPTION, REALITY, REPRÉSENTATION, RES, SACHVERHALT, SENSE, SUBJECT, THING, TRUTH, WERT Difficulties of translation with regard to objectivity arise most of all in so-called transcendental philosophies, which treat objective sense or objects as acts of the subject. They insist for the most part on the distinction of levels of objectification, that is, on the distinction of stages in the production of objective meaning, which leads to a veritable lexical proliferation, difficult to translate into any language. We may nonetheless note two distinctions within this approach: on one hand, Kant’s splitting of the object into “phenomenon” (Erscheinung) and “thing in itself” (Ding an sich) divides the vocabulary of objectivity in two, whereas Husserl’s rejection of the notion of a thing in itself makes this duality disappear. On the other hand, the levels of objectification are, for Kant, relative to the doctrine of faculties and of synthetic functions (the table of categories), hence to the structure of the subject, whereas Husserl, rejecting the Copernican revolution and the doctrine of faculties, makes them relative only to the stratification of objective sense revealed by the intuition of essence (Wesenschau). I. Kant: Objekt and Gegenstand, between Phenomenon (Erscheinung) and Thing in Itself (Ding an Sich) The shift to Critical idealism, with regard to the theme of objectivity, was an etymological awakening. Gegenstand and Objekt were introduced to translate the Latin objectum, which comes from objicio, “to throw forward,” “to expose.” The German gegen adds to this idea of manifestation that of direction-toward and that of resistance (entgegenstehen, the noun corresponding to which is Gegestand, which initially meant oppositum esse, and in Old High German gaganstentida had the sense of obstacula), and Stand (=stans), “that which stands,” then “that which persists, lasts.” The philosophical term Gegenstand is thus the product of three registers: das Gegenüberstehende, “that which stands in front of me,” “that which is op-posed to me”; the terminus ad quem of a faculty (“Gegenstand der Empfindung, der Wahrnehmung”: object of perception); and subsistence or substantiality. In the pre-Critical period, Kant, in the wake of classical thought, covers the register of op-position (phenomenality) by that of subsistence (reality in itself). The turn to transcendental idealism consists in bringing the first two senses of the term Gegenstand on this side of the sense of “object subsisting in itself” and to think of them within the bounds of a unified system: the object is the “vis-à-vis” constituted by acts of GEGENSTAND 361 Objectivity thus recovers the etymological sense of “a manifestation to,” as the appearance to perception by way of the affections: Objectum=Gegen-stand=phaenomenon= ob-jectum=Dawider=vis-à-vis for the “intuitus derivatus.” . B. The different concepts of objectivity in itself Is this to say that the phenomenon seizes all senses of objectivity for itself? No, since the concept of the thing in itself, even though it does not refer to any knowable object, retains several essential functions in transcendental idealism. The concept is in fact a deceptive one, since the “in itself” of “concept of the thing in itself” suggests the exclusion of all relation, whereas Kant, far from thinking of it only as ontological subsistence, defines “thing in itself” as a “terminus ad quem” of faculties (infinite intuition, understanding, pure reason, practical reason) whose eventual “correlation” is made possible by the Copernican revolution that Kant envisions for philosophy—and this definition as a result multiplies the concept’s meanings. — The first concept of an object in itself corresponds to the positive sense of noumenon, understood as a pure object of understanding, given to an intellectual intuition or an intuitus originarius that creates its object: Wenn ich aber Dinge annehme, die bloß Gegenstände des Verstandes sind, und gleichwohl, als solche, einer appearing thing”) and of phenomenon (referred to as Objekt, Gegestand, Erscheinung). But the shift to transcendental idealism gives rise to a crucial displacement: things in themselves are unknowable for the finite subject, even for his understanding. The object in itself thus no longer indicates purely intellectual reality in contrast with sensible reality; rather, it refers now to what is relative neither to perception nor to understanding. In Critical idealism, the phenomenon confiscates the meaning of objectivity for any finite subject, and sensible intuition, by becoming the minimal condition of possibility of experience, becomes as well the minimal condition of possibility of all objective validity and all denotation: Also beziehen sich alle Begriffe und mit ihnen alle Grundsätze auf empirische Anschauungen, d. i. auf Data zur möglichen Erfahrung. Ohne dieses haben sie gar keine objektive Gültigkeit. (Thus all concepts and with them all principles are nevertheless related to empirical intuitions, i.e., to data for possible experience. Without this they have no objective validity at all. [Objective validity is here the equivalent to meaning, signification, or relation to the object; that is, in Fregean language, to denotation (see SENSE)].) (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 239, B 298) 1 Translating Gegenstand/Objekt in Kant A famous difficulty encountered by Kant’s translators concerns his use of the terminological couple Gegenstand/Objekt. Existing translations fold the two terms onto each other by translating them both uniformly as “object.” Would it be preferable—even necessary—to underscore terminologically the distinction between the apparent object and the thing in itself? And does this distinction line up with the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt in Kant’s text? Martineau brings the problem to the fore in his preface to the French translation of Heidegger’s course on the Critique of Pure Reason. Here Martineau suggests adopting ob-jet as a translation for the phenomenon (the embedded dash rendering the hint of a separation from intuition by separating the prefix ob-), and objet as a translation for the thing in itself. The difficulty, noted by the French translators of Eisler’s Kant-Lexikon (under objet), is that Kant frequently uses the two terms interchangeably, making both of them designate either the phenomenon or the thing in itself. One thus finds, manifestly employed synonymously, the expressions tranzendentaler Gegenstand and tranzendentales Objekt, Gegenstand in sich and Objekt in sich, and so on. And yet Kant also commonly employs the two terms simultaneously to produce a contrast—as when, in section 19 of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, he writes: “Das Objekt bleibt an sich selbst immer unbekannt [The object in itself remains forever unknown],” but when the relation of sensible representations is determined by the categories, “so wird der Gegenstand durch dieses Verhältnis bestimmt [then the ob-ject is determined by this relation].” The pair ob-ject/object would then have to be used without forcing it into a strict correspondence with the pair Gegenstand/Objekt, but rather according to the context. In general, the difficulty posed by the pair derives from the fact that Kant at times uses Gegenstand to designate the genus covering the two species “phenomenon” and “thing in itself,” as signally in the passage that Martineau uses to exemplify the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt: Die Transzendentalphilosophie betrachtet nur den Verstand, und Vernunft selbst in einem System aller Begriffe und Grundsätze, die sich auf Gegenstände überhaupt beziehen, ohne Objekte anzunehmen, die gegeben wären (Ontologia); die Physiologie der reinen Vernunft betrachtet die Natur, d. i. den Inbegriff gegebener Gegenstände (sie mögen nun den Sinnen, oder, wenn man will, einer anderen Art von Anschauung gegeben sein). (Metaphysics in this narrower meaning of the term consists of transcendental philosophy and the physiology of pure reason. Transcendental philosophy (ontologia) contemplates only our understanding and reason themselves in a system of all concepts and principles referring to objects as such, without assuming objects that are given. The physiology of pure reason contemplates nature, i.e., the sum of given objects (whether given to the senses or, for that matter, to some other kind of intuition). (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 845, B 873) 362 GEGENSTAND [der Begriff eines Gegenstandes überhaupt]” (ibid., A 251), “the completely undetermined thought of something in general [der gänzlich unbestimmte Gedanke von Etwas überhaupt]” (ibid., A 253). It is the ob- in the object that guarantees the unitary denotation of our representations, which is correlative to transcendental apperception as the formal unity of self-consciousness. — The third concept is that of the idea of reason: the “purely intelligible object” or “object of pure thought” (“bloß intelligibler Gegenstand,” “Gegenstand des reinen Denkens,” ibid., A 286–87f., B 342–43), that is, the suprasensible object of “metaphysica specialis” (the soul, the world, God) as reason claims to determine it using the categories alone, in the absence of any sensible data. As sensibility is the condition of the relation to an object, the categories as pure forms of thought therefore define only “entia rationis,” “leere Begriffe ohne Gegenstand” (“empty concepts without objects,” ibid., A 292, B 348), “hyperbolische Objekte,” “reine Verstandeswesen (besser: Gedankenwesen))” (“hyperbolic objects,” “pure beings of understanding (or better, thought),” Prolegomena § 45), that is, suprasensible objects without objective reality, without denotation. — The last concept of the object in itself is correlative to practical reason. Suprasensible ideas have no denotation for speculative reason but do for practical reason, as necessary conditions for following the moral law. The immortality of the soul, freedom, and the existence of God are thus an “objective reality”; they are “objects” in the sense of necessary correlates of rational faith, even though no intuition ensures this objective reality: Nun bekommen sie durch ein apodiktisches praktisches Gesetz als notwendige Bedingungen der Möglichkeit dessen, was dieses sich zum Objekte zu machen gebietet, objektive Realität, d. i. wir werden durch jenes angewiesen, daß sie Objekte haben, ohne doch, wie sich ihr Begriff auf ein Objekt bezieht, anzeigen zu können. (Now, through an apodeictic practical law, as necessary conditions of the possibility of what this law commands one to make one’s object, they acquire objective reality; i.e., we are instructed by this law that they have objects, yet without being able to indicate how their concept refers to an object.) (Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 135; Critique of Practical Reason, 171) “Objectivity” and “objective reality” signify, of course, the independent subsistence of our knowledge but as necessary correlates of practical reason, which postulates them. C. The degrees of phenomenal objectivity The object as phenomenon is thought of as a correlate of the objectivizing functions of thought. In a general way the central problem of critical philosophy is that of the objective validity of our knowledge, that is, the movement from simple subjective representations, valid only for me (bloß subjektive), to a representation having both a relation to an object (Gegeständlichkeit, Beziehung auf ein Objekt) and objective validity for everyone (Objektivität). The uniform translation of all three stages by “objectivity” masks this distinction, as Anschauung, obgleich nicht der sinnlichen (als coram intuitu intellectuali), gegeben werden können; so würden dergleichen Dinge Noumena (Intelligibilia) heißen. (If, however, I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition (as coram intuitu intellectuali), then such things would be called noumena (Intelligibilia).) (Ibid., A 249) Noumenon and phenomenon are thus defined according to each concept’s relation to intuition, inasmuch as this intuition is infinite (noumenon) rather than finite (phenomenon), creative (again, noumenon) rather than receptive (phenomenon), primitive rather than derived. Heidegger, playing on the opposition between the particles ent- and gegen-, characterizes the two terms as Entstand (existentarising-from-originary-intuition) and Gegen-stand or Dawider (existent opposed to derived intuition) (cf. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, § 16). As we have only sensible intuition and cannot show the possibility of an intellectual intuition, such a concept has no objective reality, that is, neither denotation nor content. — The second is the negative conception of the noumenon, to which the terms “transcendental object (tranzendentales Objekt), “object in general” (Gegenstand überhaupt), and “something in general” (Etwas überhaupt) correspond. We cannot know the noumenon in any way; but if we wish to avoid Berkleyan idealism, we must attribute to phenomena, as simple representations, the relation to something that is not representation but an ontological cause of intuitions. This “object” has the twofold function of limiting the claims of perception to give us objects in themselves (thus to ensure the transcendental ideality of phenomena) and to guarantee the denotation or empirical reality of the latter: Da Erscheinungen nichts als Vorstellungen sind, so bezieht sie der Verstand auf ein Etwas, als den Gegenstand der sinnlichen Anschauung: aber dieses Etwas ist insofern nur das transzendentale Objekt. Dieses bedeutet aber ein Etwas = x, wovon wir gar nichts wissen. (Since appearances are nothing but representations, the understanding relates them to a something, as the object of sensible intuition; but this something is to that extent only the transcendental object. This signifies, however, a something = X, of which we know nothing at all.) (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 250) This object is defined elsewhere as “die bloß intelligible Ursache der Erscheinungen überhaupt [the merely intelligible cause of appearances in general]” (ibid., A 494, B 522), and “das, was in allen unseren empirischen Begriffen überhaupt Beziehung auf einen Gegenstand, d. i. objektive Realität verschaffen kann [that which in all our empirical concepts in general can provide relations to an object, i.e., objective reality].” Insofar as no category can be applied to it in order to determine it, this transcendental object is precisely not a defined “object.” It is a pure X, “the concept of an object in general GEGENSTAND 363 gehen auf mögliche Dinge, weil sie die Form der Erfahrung überhaupt a priori enthalten. ([The] conditions of space and of its determinations have their objective reality, i.e., they pertain to possible things, because they contain in themselves a priori the form of experience in general.) (Ibid., A 221, B 268) Realitas actualis existentia, at the dynamic level, is actuality (Wirklichkeit), the perceptually given object with a perceptible matter that guarantees its empirical reality or denotation (Gegenständlichkeit, Beziehung auf einen Gegenstand), which is contrasted with ens rationis and ens imaginarium, intuitions or concepts empty without objects (ibid., A 292): [Wir müssen] immer eine Anschauung bei der Hand haben, um . . . die objektive Realität des reinen Verstandesbegriff darzulegen. ([We must] always have available an intuition for it to display the objective reality of the pure concept of the understanding.) (Ibid., B 288) Finally the ens creatum sive causatum, purged of all theological content, corresponds to the “material necessity in existence” (materiale Notwendigkeit im Dasein), that is, submission to the principle of causality and to the rule of understanding necessary in the apprehension of phenomena: Dasjenige an der Erscheinung, was die Bedingung dieser notwendigen Regel der Apprehension enthält, ist das Objekt. (That in the appearance which contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension is the object.) (Ibid., A 191, B 236) The idea of a causal order of time prescribes a rule to the subjective succession of apprehension and makes it possible to move from the subjective succession of representations to the representation of an objective succession, from Erscheinung to Objekt. The object in this sense does not simply denote the existing object but that which has universal and necessary validity. Objectivity as objective validity is thus not completely identical with denotation but adds a further requirement to it, that of the principle of reason or causality, which inserts every object in the necessary order of causation of phenomena and makes it possible for the natural sciences to construct reality, nature being identical for every subject (allgemeingültig). We should not confuse this intersubjective validity with the simple claim to subjective universality that characterizes the judgment of taste (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 8, 5:213–16), since that is only the idea of a universal assent lacking a concept, and hence also lacking objectivity. — A final concept of objectivity appears on the practical level, where the critical question concerning the objectivity of our principles of action is posed. There are indeed phenomenal objects of practice, namely objects of desire constituted as realizations of the will. But if the principle of well as the Kantian solution, which is to assimilate Gegenständlichkeit (which we might translate as “objectuality”) with Objektivität (for which we would reserve “objectivity”), understood as necessary (notwendige Gültigkeit) and universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit): Es sind daher objektive Gültigkeit und notwendige Allgemeingültigkeit (für jedermann) Wechselbegriffe, und ob wir gleich das Objekt an sich nicht kennen, so ist doch, wenn wir ein Urteil als gemeingültig und mithin notwendig ansehen, eben darunter die objektive Gültigkeit verstanden. (Objective validity and necessary universal validity (for everyone) are therefore interchangeable concepts, and although we do not know the object in itself, nonetheless, if we regard a judgment as universally valid and hence necessary, objective validity is understood to be included.) (Kant, Prolegomena, § 19) Objectivity thus no longer contrasts with subjectivity but only with the “simple subjectivity” (bloße Subjektivität), the “purely subjective validity” (bloß subjektive Gültigkeit) of sensible modifications of the subject. It is identified with that which is a priori in the subject, namely pure intuitions and categories, which provide the relationship to the ob-ject: Daß es a priori erkannt werden kann, bedeutet: daß es ein Objekt habe und nicht bloß subjektive Modifikation sei. (That it can be cognized a priori means: that it has an objectand is not merely a subjective modification.) (Kant, Reflexionen, 5216, trans. Guyer, 111) However, the concept of object is a generic one whose meaning multiplies as a function of the levels of objectivization that ensure the denotation, universality, and necessity of the phenomenon. It follows that the concept of “objective reality” (objektive Realität) is multivocal, and may be divided into levels related to the transcendental conditions (formal, material, general) defining the modalities (possible, actual, necessary) and corresponding to the different scholastic-Cartesian concepts of “reality” (quidditas or realitas objectiva, quodditas or realitas actualis, necessitas or ens causatum). Each level achieves a successive elimination of that which is simply subjective (bloß subjektiv): the quality of pertaining to the senses; ens imaginarium; and contingency. — Realitas objectiva (essentia, possibilitas) at the mathematical level is not, however, the possible object, that is, the object simply present in front of us (da-seiendes), stripped of its secondary qualities and constituted by primary qualities alone (magnitudes), the conditions of construction in space and time. Rather, realitas objectiva is the sense of the object (gegeständlicher Sinn), which is contrasted with the nihil negativum, the empty object without a concept (leerer Gegestand ohne Begriff) (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 292, B 348): [Die] Bedingungen des Raumes und der Bestimmung desselben . . . haben ihre objektive Realität, d. i. sie 364 GEGENSTAND (S. Bachelard, Élie-Kelkek-Schérer) than as “objectivity” (Ricoeur), to avoid confusion with the character of what has objective validity (Objektivität, see below): Ich wähle öfters den unbestimmteren Ausdruck Gegenständlichkeit, weil es sich hier überall nicht bloß um Gegenstände im engeren Sinn, sondern auch um Sachverhalte, Merkmale, um unselbständige reale oder kategoriale Formen u. dgl. handelt. (I often make use of the vaguer expression “objective correlate” [Gegenständlichkeit] since we are here never limited to objects in the narrower sense but have also to do with states of affairs, properties, and nonindependent forms, etc., whether real or categorial.) (Husserl, Logical Investigations, First Investigation, § 9, 1:281) Thus, a number, a value, a nation are “objectities” in the same way a tree is. Let us analyze these complexities in the vocabulary of objects. 1. Things of nature and grounded “objectities” Objectities may be forms of object that are grounded on the infrastructure of material nature and possess layers of superstructural meaning. They are “new types of objectity of a higher order [neuartige Gegenständlichkeiten höherer Ordnung]” (Ideen, I, § 152, Hua III/1, p. 354), which Husserl refers to by the terms Gegenstand, Objekt, Gegeständlichkeit, Objektität (ibid., § 95, Hua III/1, p. 221): animate beings (Animalien), objects of value (Wertobjekte or Wertobjektitäten, see WERT), objects of use (praktische Objekte or Gebrauchsobjekte), cultural formations (konkrete Kulturgebilde: state, law, morality, etc.). The difficulty derives from the distinction between natural infrastructure (that which has value, werter Gegenstand), the abstract layer grounded in it (das Wert, value as the correlate of an evaluation, objectified value), and the concrete objectity resulting from their fusion (Wertgegenstand, where the Naturobjekt and Wert are combined, the object with value): Wir sprechen von der bloßen “Sache,” die werte ist, die Wertcharakter, Wertheit hat; demgegenüber vom konkreten Werte selbst oder der Wertobjektität. (We shall speak of the mere “thing” that is valuable, that has a value-characteristic, that has value-quality; in contradistinction, we speak of concrete value itself or the value-Objectiveness.) (Husserl, Ideen, Volume I, § 95, Hua III/1, 221; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 232) Let us take an example. In a museum, I perceive a primitive object first as simply a thing; then, understanding its practical value (Gebrauchssinn), I incorporate that to it and perceive the object as an object of use (Gebrauchsobjekt). French does not have the ease of German, with its compound words, of rendering the nature of this fusion: “objet-valeur” risks introducing a confusion with objectified (that is, abstract) value, “object having value” (Ricoeur), and thus of suggesting a split between object and value; the expression “choseévaluée” better suggests the sort of fusion Husserl describes. determination of an action is an empirical object, namely the feeling of pleasure or pain or the distinction between good and bad, then the action is deprived of its objective validity since its object is an a posteriori matter (Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 5:21, Object=Materie), and thus simply subjective. For it to have objective validity, the practical object must be a necessary object of the faculty of desire, whose intersubjective validity is ensured by its formal, a priori character, namely the form of the law, the principle of distinction between good and evil (Gut and Böse). As in the case of pure reason, we must therefore distinguish between Gegenständlichkeit and Objektivität, objectuality and objectivity, the latter being guaranteed by its a prioricity, that is, its necessity and universality: Unter einem Begriffe eines Gegenstandes der praktischen Vernunft verstehe ich die Vorstellung eines Objekts als einer möglichen Wirkung durch Freiheit. (By a concept of an object of practical reason, I mean the presentation of an object as an effect possible through freedom.) (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 77) Die alleinigen Objekte einer praktischen Vernunft sind also die vom Guten und Bösen. Denn durch das erstere versteht man einen notwendigen Gegenstand des Begehrungs, durch das zweite des Verabscheuungsvermögens, beides aber nach einem Prinzip der Vernunft. (The sole objects of a practical reason are, therefore, those of the good and the evil. For by the first one means a necessary object of our power of desire, by the second, of our power of loathing, but both according to a principle of reason.) (Ibid., 78) II. Husserl: From the Object to Gegeständlichkeit The terminology of objectivity in Husserl presents the same kind of difficulties that we find in Kant, insofar as it is technically extended and complicated by the distinction of types of object and objectification. However, Husserl’s deployment of the concept of epochê [ἐποχή] also serves to simplify the treatment of objectivity (in comparison to Kant’s treatment), for epochê serves to remove the dissociation of the object into phenomenon and thing in itself, and brings the object back to the phenomenon alone. A. Multiplying the kinds of object The key phrase for Husserl is the “Rückgang auf die Sache selbst,” translated as “return to things themselves.” However, “Sachen sind nicht ohne weiteres Natursachen” [things are not simply mere things belonging to Nature] (Ideen I, § 19, Hua III/1, p. 42; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 36); they are, rather, everything that may be ascribed to intuitive self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit) in contrast with what is simply indicated (bloß vermeint). There is, as a consequence, a proliferation of types of thematic objects. These Husserl designates by the term Gegenständlichkeit, which is better translated into French as “objectity” GEGENSTAND 365 like proto-objecticities (Urgegenständlichkeiten) or ultimate substrates (“letzte Substrate”), but contain “syntactic or categorial objectities [syntaktische oder kategoriale Gegenständlichkeiten]” (ibid., I, § 11, Hua III/1, 28–29) derived from these by syntaxtic construction: “Gegenstand” ist ein Titel für mancherlei, aber zusammengehörige Gestaltungen, z. B. “Ding,” “Eigenschaft,” “Relation,” “Sachverhalt,” “Menge,” “Ordnung” usw., die auf eine Art Gegenständlichkeit, die sozusagen den Vorzug der Urgegenständlichkeit hat, zurückweisen. (“Object” is a name for various formations which nonetheless belong together—for example, “physical thing,” “property,” “relationship,” “predicatively formed affaircomplex,” “aggregate,” “ordered set.” Obviously they are not on a par with one another but rather in every case point back to one kind of objectivity that, so to speak, takes precedence as the primal objectivity.) (Ibid., I, § 10, Hua III/1, 25; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 20) “Objects” of this sort are purely logical, fundamental concepts; the formal determination of the object as a “something in general” (“ein irgend Etwas”) taken as the substrate of a statement; objects of a higher order inasmuch as they are derived from the ultimate substrates, the perceptual objects. Thus the state-of-affairs or state-of-things, the Sachverhalt “the snow is white,” is an object just as much as the snow is, but of a higher order, since it implies the consciousness of the substrate, of the property, and of their combination all at once: it is a compound object of polythetic consciousness (“Gesamt-Gegenstand polythetischer Bewußtseins”). The French translation of Sachverhalt (see SACHVERHALT) by état-des-choses is inaccurate, since the thing is not a thing of nature (Naturding) but rather any logical subject of any level; the English “predicatively formed affair-complex,” even better than the more common “state of affairs,” renders its predicative origin and its much broader reach and common character. B. Elimination of the object in itself and layers of meaning of the intentional object The Kantian amphibology of the object (Erscheinung and “Ding an sich”) is eliminated by epochê, since placing the natural thesis on the sidelines (ausschalten) means bracketing (einklammern) any object posited by it, hence any existent in itself, and making the object appear as “intentional object” or Noema, terms that refer to the objectival sense sought and constituted by consciousness: Ähnlich wie die Wahrnehmung hat jedes intentionale Erlebnis sein “intentionales Objekt,” d. i. seinen gegenständlichen Sinn. (Like perception, every intentive mental process has its “intentional Object,” i.e., its objective sense.) (Ibid., I, § 90, Hua III/1, 206; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 217) The intentional object is an object not in the sense of being self-subsistent but in the sense in which one speaks of an object of attention, that is, as a correlate or “terminus Generally speaking, the different levels of objectification and the distinction between abstract and concrete objectities create problems for French. 2. Singular objects and essence Husserl also widens the domain of objectities by admitting, alongside singular objects, essences as objects of specific intuition: Das Wesen (Eidos) ist ein neuartiger Gegenstand. . . . Auch Wesenerschauung ist eben Anschauung, wie eidetischer Gegenstand eben Gegenstand ist. (The essence [Eidos] is a new sort of object. Seeing an essence is also precisely intuition, just as an eidetic object is precisely an object.) (Ibid., § 3, Hua III/1, 14; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 9) The difficulty here is not one of translation but of understanding the term Gegenstand. If we render it by “object,” we must keep in mind “the generalization of the concepts of intuition and of object” (“Verallgemeinerung der Begriffe ‘Anschauung’ und ‘Gegenstand’ ”). In Husserl this “generalization” is not an analogy taking essences on the model of perceptual objects but the understanding of singular objects and essences as species of the genus “any object whatever,” of the “universal concept of object, of object as any something whatever [des allgemeinen Gegenstandsbegriffs, des Gegenstands als irgend etwas]” (Ideen I, § 22, Hua III/1, p. 47). Husserl generalizes the fact of being an object (Objektheit) to fields other than singularities, even while denouncing any confusion between real and ideal objectities: Besagt Gegenstand und Reales, Wirklichkeit und reale Wirklichkeit ein und dasselbe, dann ist die Auffassung von Ideen als Gegenständen und Wirklichkeiten allerdings verkehrte “platonische Hypostasierung.” (If object and something real, actuality and real actuality, have one and the same sense, then the conception of ideas as objects and actualities is indeed a perverse “Platonic hypostatization.”) (Ibid., § 22, Hua III/1, 47; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 41) The term Wirklichkeiten, corresponding to the generalized concept of object, does not refer to “realities” (as Ricoeur argues) in the sense of “natural realities” but to anything that has the characteristic of actuality (Wirklichsein) and contains different types of ideality (vielerlei Ideales: the spectrum of sounds, the number 2, the circle, a proposition, etc.). 3. Syntactic objectities In the domain of essences, the idea of formal ontology extends the notion of objectivity to the syntactic domain. Material ontologies consider the genera of concrete objects (thing, animal, man, etc.); formal ontology considers the “formal region” (formale Region) of any object whatever, “the empty form of region in general” (“die leere Form von Region überhaupt,” ibid., I, § 10, Hua III/1, 26). Taken in the logical sense, as designating any possible subject of predication, “objects” are not restricted to concrete individuals 366 GEGENSTAND in ihm immerfort dasselbe Gegenständliche dar: derselbe Ton. (The mental process which we are now undergoing becomes objective to us in immediate reflection, and thenceforth it displays in reflection the same objectivity: the self-same tone which has just existed as an actual “now” remains henceforth the same tone.) (Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, 67; Idea of Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Alston and Nakhnikian, 52) This sound is, of course, an “object” in the sense of a unit apprehended by consciousness, but not an object of nature (Reales, Naturgegenstand). Whence the difficulty we encounter in translating the expressions for these immanent “objects,” like Zeitobjekt: In der Wahrnehmung mit ihrer Retention konstituiert sich das ursprüngliche Zeitobjekt. (The primary temporal object is constituted in perception, along with the retention of consciousness of what is perceived.) (Ibid., Hua II, 71; Idea of Phenomenology, Lecture 5, Eng. trans. Alston and Nakhnikian, 56) In French Zeitobjekt must therefore be translated by “tempoobject” (Granel) or objet de temps, “object of time,” and not objet temporel or “temporal object” (as Dussort and Lowit do) since, although any object of nature is “temporal” insofar as it is situated in objective time, a melody as an immanent given of consciousness is a “tempo-object,” a pure thing-of-duration without spatial or causal character. The same holds for the abstract layer of spatiality, which defines “objects” that are concrete relative to itself but abstract relative to the natural thing: res extensae. Here again, we must translate res extensa by spatio-object or spatial-thing (with a hyphen) rather than by “extended thing” or “spatial thing,” since while every Naturding is extended, res extensa is only extension, its materiality having been abstracted away, as well as its placement in the causal order of nature: a ghost, a rainbow as pure apparitions. These layers separate out again into new, more abstract layers, such as the res extensa in “things” relative to each sense modality (Sinnendinge: Sehdinge, Tastdinge, etc.), which are not choses sensibles or choses sensorielles (Ricoeur), “sensory things” or “things of sense” (Boyce Gibson, Eng. tr. of Ideen I)—since every Naturding is sensible—but “things pertaining to the senses” (Cairns), things-of-the-senses or things relating to each sense (chosesdes-sens in French), which we might translate by the Latin sensualia (Escoubas, Fr. tr. of Ideen II). Thus Sehding could be rendered with the help of Latin as visuale (Escoubas), or again “visual-thing” or “thing-of-sight,” but not by “visual thing” or “visible thing” (Ricoeur), since every Naturding is visible (but also tangible, audible, and so on), whereas a Sehding is a pure thing-of-sight having only visual properties (e.g., a patch of red color that I see when closing my eyes). 3. Object “pure and simple” and complete object The analysis of intentional objects and the ways in which they are given allows us to distinguish between a narrow ad quem” (Worauf, toward-which, Heidegger will say) of an activity. Not the existing thing (“das wirkliche Ding”), but the being-sense (Seinsinn) constituted by the giving of meaning by consciousness—noematic trees do not burn! The term gegenständlich refers to the relationship to an object and is translated by “objectival” or “objectual” to distinguish it from the term objektiv, which refers to what has intersubjective validity. In this way any object being reducible to a being-sense correlative to a target of consciousness, a noema correlative to a noesis, we can—in the same way that a noema may be decomposed into a series of partial goals or intentions—distinguish in the noema different layers of objectival sense corresponding to different degrees of objectification. Thus we come, as in Kant, to a stratification of meanings of the object and objectivity that return us to the constitutive operations of the transcendental subject. 1. The twofold sense of the concept of reality: “reell” and “real” This reduction of objectivity to the intentional object should not hide the division of the concept of “reality” into two senses: the “reality” of being is referred to by the adjectives reelle and real, or immanent and transzendent. What is reell refers to what has the mode of being of consciousness and is absolutely given, while what is real is what has a material nature (Naturding) given by its outlines. The perceived tree is real, but my perception of the tree is reell, not included in material nature but included in consciousness and in this way ir-real. Indifferently translating real and reell by “real” would gloss over this essential distinction of the modes of being and consciousness of the object, of experience (Erlebnis) and the thing (Ding), “des reellen Bestands der Wahrnehmung” (“the concrete, really inherent composition of perception itself ”) and “des transzendenten Objekts” (“utterly transcendent object”) (ibid., I, § 41, Hua III/1, p. 83; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Kersten, 86). The translation of irreal by “unreal” would be inaccurate as well, suggesting that experiences are fictions when in fact they are the absolute given; irreal refers to whatever does not have the mode of being of a worldly thing. Husserl thus takes up terminology inherited from German idealism, in which Realphilosophie referred to the philosophy of work, nature, and family (cf. Hegel, Realphilosophie of Jena), and in which real contrasts with whatever is metaphysical and deals with the philosophy of mind. He extends the concept of real to whatever belongs to the world, contrasting it only with ideal and syntactic objectities (see TRUTH). 2. Immanent objectities While terminology for objects becomes complicated at the top end by the admission of objects of a higher order, it is also complicated at the bottom, when we examine the abstract component of concrete objects. These are “immanent objectities,” that is, units identified by consciousness and not objects situated in the world. The time of consciousness is not, therefore, unformed or Heraclitean, but already shaped by permanent units: Das Erlebnis, die wir jetzt erleben, wird uns in der unmittelbaren Reflexion gegenständlich, und es stellt sich GEGENSTAND 367 daß der charakterisierte Kern ein wandelbarer und der “Gegenstand,” das pure Subjekt der Prädikate, eben ein identisches ist. Kein “Sinn” ohne das “etwas” und wieder ohne “bestimmenden Inhalt.” (The identical intentional “object” becomes evidently distinguished from the changing and alterable “predicates.” It becomes separated as central noematic moment: the “object,” the “Object,” the “Identical,” the “determinable subject of its possible predicates”—the pure X in abstraction from all predicates—and it becomes separated from these predicates or, more precisely, from the predicate-noemas . . . such that the characterized core is a changeable one and the “object,” the pure subject of the predicating, is precisely an identical one. No “sense” without the “something” and, again, without “determining content.”) (Ibid., I, § 131, Hua III/1, 302-3; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 313–15) What may we say about this sense of the concept of object, manifested in general by the quotation marks? How is it different from the standard concept of intentional object, as well as the concepts of object “pure and simple” and of the noematic core? The noetico-noematic parallelism allows us to understand it: just as at the analytic level any grasp of an object may be decomposed into partial intentions, the noematic sense is broken down into layers of partial senses, the fundamental one being the sense of the noematic core (e.g., a church, abstracted away from knowing whether it is perceived, remembered, etc.) and, more profoundly, the object “pure and simple” (the same church as a material thing, abstracted away from its spiritual predicates). Inversely, however, any directed act, at the synthetic level, no matter what changes affect the object, is not limited to aiming at such or such a state of the object but remains directed at the same object (if the church is destroyed or the tree burns, the rubble or ash are indeed the remains of that very object, even though it is unrecognizable). As a result, any grasping of a concrete object involves, at its foundation, the minimal grasp of a pure permanent substrate, the guarantor of the identity of the object. This is the concept of “object”: pure hupokeimenon [ὑποϰειμένον], pure “that-there” or “something,” prior to any determination, defined only by permanence and determinability. We find here the function of the Kantian concepts of a transcendental object or Objekt überhaupt, or of the category of substance: in the absence of the transcendent existence of the object, grounding the identity of the objective correlate in the permanence of an empty grasping. That there is no sense without the “something” means that the indeterminate relation to the object X (indeed that is the title of the first chapter of the fourth section of the Ideen I: “The noematic sense and the relation to the object”) precedes any relationship to a determined object, and hence that formal ontology, the theory of the pure “something,” has a foundational status for material ontologies. Thus one should, strictly speaking, as in Kant, translate this occurrence of the concept of “object” by “ob-ject,” to distinguish it from the object provided with a determined noematic sense, meaning by this the permanence of a correlate for consciousness. and a wide sense of noema: the central core or pure objectival sense, or the central noematic moment (“zentraler Kern,” “purer gegeständlicher Sinn,” “zentrales noematisches Moment”) is contrasted with the complete intentional object in the manner of its modes of being given (“volles intentionales Objekt,” “Gegenstand im Wie seiner Gegebenheitsweisen”). The same tree may be perceived from different angles, at different seasons, and change predicates (color, shape) while remaining identical; it may be perceived, remembered, imagined, named: this “same” is the minimal objectival sense (“gegenständlicher Sinn”). From this “same” of the tree have been eliminated, by abstraction, the acts of apprehension (perception, memory, etc.) that give the tree its Aktcharaktere (characters of act) of “perceived,” “remembered,” etc.; this minimal objectival sense is contrasted with the “Objekt im Wie,” which is the perceived-tree, the remembered-tree, and so on: Daß verschiedene Begriffe von unmodifizierten Objektivitäten unterscheidbar sein müssen, von denen der “Gegenstand schlechthin,” nämlich das Identische, das einmal wahrgenommen, das andere Mal direkt vergegenwärtigt, das dritte Mal in einem Gemälde bildlich dargestellt ist u. dgl., nur einen zentralen Begriff andeutet. (We must distinguish different concepts of unmodified objectivities, of which the “object simpliciter,” namely the something identical which is perceived at one time, another time directly presentiated, a third time presented pictorially in a painting, and the like, only indicates one central concept.) (Ibid., I, § 91, Hua III/1, 211; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. F. Kersten, 222) The expressions “pure objectival sense” (“purer gegenständlicher Sinn”), “noematic core” (“noematischer Kern”), and “of central core” (“zentraler Kern”) thus refer to a layer of meaning of the complete object, namely that which we obtain by abstraction of the determinations inherent to the “how” of subjective directedness. The concept of “objectivity” thus has here the sense of the absence of subjective modification, and that of “pure object,” the sense of a correlate prior to any changes of meaning related to the character of acts. 4. The distinction between noematic sense and determinable “object” We said earlier that the Husserlian sense of objectivity reduces to the intentional or noematic sense, at the expense of the thing in itself, and that in this noematic sense the specifically “objective” moment was the core, obtained by eliminating the characters that inhere in the how of subjective directedness (remembered, imagined, and so on). However, the truly foundational sense of object in Husserl does not reduce either to the noematic sense or the noematic core, but to a final noematic layer, that of the “object” as a pure X, a pure “something,” pure identical substrate of variable determinations: Es scheidet sich als zentrales noematisches Moment aus: der “Gegenstand,” das “Objekt,” das “Identische,” das “bestimmbare Subjekt seiner möglichen Prädikate”— das pure X in Abstraktion von allen Prädikaten—und es scheidet sich von den Prädikatnoemen. derart, 368 GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN the Sensible and the Intelligible World.” In Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, edited by David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. . Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1788. Translation by Werner S. Pluhar: Critique of Practical Reason, edited by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. . Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 4 and 3. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1781, 1787. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Kritik der Urteilskraft. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1792. 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. . Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. First published in 1783. Translation by Gary Hatfield: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science; Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Gary Hatfield. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 5. The twofold sense of “objectivity”: Objektivität and Gegenständlichkeit Finally the concept of Objektivität, which we translate by “objectivity,” does not refer like Gegenständlichkeit to the relation to an objectity, but to the highest level of objectification, namely intersubjective validity. The objective thing (“objectives Ding”) is the “intersubjectively identical physical thing” (“das intersubjektiv identische Ding,” Ideen I §151, Hua III/1, 352; Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. trans. Kersten, 363), which is a unit constitutive of a higher order (“eine konstitutive Einheit höherer Ordnung”) insofar as it derives from an intersubjective constitution, related to an indefinite plurality of subjects linked by a reciprocal comprehension “for which one physical thing is to be intersubjectively given and identified as the same objective actuality [für welche ein Ding als dasselbe objektiv Wirkliche intersubjektiv zu geben und zu identifizieren ist]” (ibid., § 135, Hua III/1, 310–11; Eng. trans. Kersten, 323). In this regard the highest-level objectivity, related to an indefinitely open community, is the “true thing” (das wahre Ding), which Husserl calls das physikalische Ding, and which is not simply the “chose physique” (ibid., § 41, Hua III/1, 83—Ricoeur, or “physical thing,” Boyce Gibson), but the thing-of-physical-thought (i.e., as conceived in physics), just as das physikalische Wahre refers not to “physical truth” but to the truth sought by physical science, which strips nature of its subjective-relative qualities. The “true thing” is not the thing in itself as intelligible cause of all apprehension but the superstructure built up by mathematical thought on the world of appearing objects. Dominique Pradelle REFS.: Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Heidegger, Martin. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Edited by FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975. Translation by Albert Hofstadter: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. . Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991. Translation by Richard Taft: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 5th ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. . Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by Ingtraud Görland. In Gesamtausgabe, vol. 25. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translation by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Husserl, Edmund. Formal und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Edited by Paul Janssen. Husserliana 27. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974. . Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen. Edited by Walter Biemel. Husserliana 2. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Translation by W. Alston and G. Nakhnikian: The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. . Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. 2 vols. Vol. 1 edited by Karl Schuhmann; vol. 2 edited by Marly Biemel. Husserliana 3.1 and 4. (HUA) The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976, 1952. Translation by F. Kersten: Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1989. . Logische Untersuchungen. Part 2. Edited by Ursula Panzer. Husserliana 19. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984. Translation by J. N. Findlay: Logical Investigations. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Dissertatio de 1770. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. Edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote: “On the Form and Principles of GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN (GERMAN) ENGLISH human sciences, moral sciences, social sciences, humanities, human studies FRENCH sciences humaines, sciences de l’esprit ITALIAN scienze umane, scienze morali, scienze dello spirito POLISH nauki humanistyczne v. BILDUNG, EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HUMANITY, LIGHT, MORALS, SOUL The expression Geisteswissenschaften refers to an object or constellation of objects of experience: man and his actions in the world, by contrast with Naturwissenschaften, sciences of nature. This distinction is accompanied by a difference in method summed up by Wilhelm Dilthey in the distinction between “to explain” (erklären) and “to understand” (verstehen). The translation of Geisteswissenschaft gave rise to the formulation of a number of terms that intersect one or the other German meanings, without, however, completely exhausting its sense. Thus one is confronted each time with at least a pair of terms: in English, humanities / moral (social) sciences; in French sciences de l’esprit / sciences humaines; in Italian scienze umane / scienze morali. As a result, the choice of translation must come from a more or less clearly embraced decision as to what is understood by the very idea of science. I. Dividing Science: Geisteswissenschaften and Its Translations A. Emergence: Germany-England Geisteswissenschaft, in the singular, appears toward the end of the eighteenth century in relation to a Pneumatologie oder GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN 369 illegitimate to defend this claim even as a translation of Dilthey, who, after all, judges it necessary to give as the subtitle of his Introduction, “Versuch einer Grundlegung der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte”—“An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History,” in Betanzos’s translation. Nevertheless, the concept of Geisteswissenschaften remains irreducible to Mill’s project, for, far from wishing to establish the autonomy of the sciences of mind, Mill wishes on the contrary to widen the field of application of the inductive method to the “sciences of Ethics and Politics” or “moral and social sciences,” or again to the “sciences of human nature and society.” Book VI of Mill’s System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, devoted to the moral sciences, is thus only a “kind of supplement or appendix” (2:478) to the rest of the system. It is thus significant that the epigraph of Mill’s book is a quotation from Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1793). Why Condorcet, rather than someone like Hume? The goal of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature; being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects (1793) is in fact literally identical with Mill’s, especially since this “science of man” must be completed by the “examination of morals, politics, and criticism.” However, Condorcet, though using the expressions sciences humaines, sciences morales et politiques, and sciences métaphysiques et sociales indifferently, deploys social mathematics in an explicit and systematic way, of which Fourierist calculus is a kind of caricature and in relation to which Auguste Comte remains far in the background. Despite the idea of a science of human “nature” and the ambiguity of the normative connotation of “moral sciences,” the way in which Mill conceives of these sciences, whose certainty is uncontestable insofar as they concern “the character and collective conduct of masses” (System of Logic, 2:495), explains in advance the future decline of this expression in favor of “social sciences,” that is, of “behavioral sciences” (see BEHAVIOR). Whereas the political, cultural, and national sense of Dilthey’s project is to restore the “unity of the German vision of the world,” the social aim of these sciences is to rationalize society, and, for Condorcet, to reduce inequalities by conceiving of, for example, a system of retirement and life insurance. To compensate, the subjects that are most resistant to such a treatment—for example, art history as compared to economics—seem doomed to subsist under the name “humanities,” with the term “moral” withdrawing of its own accord in deference to the new division between the natural and social sciences. In this context, “humanities” hardly corresponds to what social sciences covers, in particular because of the connotation of the word “science,” whose extension is much narrower than that of Wissenschaft. Its choice in 1961 as the translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Logik der Kulturwissenschaft (cf. also Rudolf Makkreel, who devotes a work to Dilthey in 1975: Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies), is in fact much closer in spirit to what Dilthey means. Unlike “humanities” and like the Polish nauki haumanistyczne, in which the term means both human and humanist, Geisteslehre (doctrine of the mind), a study of the intellectual and moral faculties of man. The plural Geisteswissenschaften, today firmly established, is used by Johann Gustav Droysen in his Geschichte des Hellenismus (1843, vol. 2, preface). The irony, however, is that the term starts spreading only in 1849—as a translation of the English “moral sciences.” Dilthey is the one who, in 1883 (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften), gives it its canonical usage and its conceptual dimension to refer to hermeneutic knowledge of cultural works and of mental objects throughout history. . B. “Moral sciences,” “social sciences,” “humanities”—France-Germany-England The original expression “moral sciences” is used by John Stuart Mill in the sixth and last book of his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843). But the new sense given to the word by Dilthey to its German translation, Geisteswissenschaften, explains, in reverse, the problems faced by the English translators of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Yet these latter difficulties are especially significant when one sets about defining and translating Geisteswissenschaften. The translation of Geist by “mind” does not seem wholly right, inasmuch as “mind” appears to refer primarily to the mental life of the individual; but “mind” may nonetheless also refer to a collection: thus the title of Dilthey’s Geschichte des deutschen Geistes was translated as Studies concerning the History of the German Mind, such that R. G. Collingwood translated Geisteswissenschaften as Sciences of Mind. However, even though Dilthey refers explicitly to the Hegelian concept of Geist, neither “mind” nor “spirit,” the two most likely candidates as translations for Geisteswissenschaften, prevailed when Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes was rendered into English. Two other terms were used instead: “moral sciences” and “social sciences.” 1. “Moral sciences” and Geisteswissenschaften In French and English, the expressions “moral sciences” and “moral and political sciences,” which for a long time were used to translate Geisteswissenschaften (see B. Groethuysen, “Dilthey and His School” of 1912, as well as André Lalande’s RT: Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie of 1938 and its entry for “science,” or Raymond Aron’s use of these expressions interchangeably with sciences de l’esprit in 1935), fell out of use, and were progressively replaced by “human sciences,” scienze umane, and sciences humaines (see the English and French translations of Dilthey’s Einleitung, in 1988 and 1942 respectively). With their indeterminate connotations, these more recent expressions blur the line between two conceptions of science—the first inductive or mathematized, like economics and some sectors of sociology, the second comprehensive, such as history. This is clearly seen by looking, in contrast, at what Mill means by “moral sciences,” namely, essentially political science, sociology, and political economy, underwritten by a science of the laws of mental life. 2. Geisteswissenschaften and “social sciences” In fact, the phrase “social sciences” has an equally valid claim as does “moral sciences” to serve as the description for these pursuits. At first glance, it does not seem 370 GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN 1 The structuring of a term: Dilthey’s antitheses With Dilthey, the science of Geist (mind) is no longer the knowledge of man in general, his faculties, his critical or moral reason, but rather a bundle of disciplines and empirical sciences whose objects are determined by the different historical manifestations of Geist. At the same time, the differences in method within the sciences of nature are no longer limited to a simple partition between two groups of disciplines within the universe of science. The same year (1883) in which Dilthey published his essay on Geisteswissenschaften, Wilhelm Windelband introduced a distinction between what he termed monothetic (monothetisch) and idiographic (idiographisch) sciences, and applied the distinction to the domains that Dilthey had sought to characterize. The first, monothetic sciences, are those, like the natural sciences, that aim to give order to diverse phenomena by building a system of concepts or laws having the most general possible validity. The second, idiographic sciences, are those that, like the historical sciences, deal with events in their concrete singularity and their individual becoming. In reality, as concerns Dilthey, this distinction is relative not to the object of study but to the method. If the object itself were at issue, it would not be Geist but Kultur, in the sense understood by Heinrich Rickert, who, in the wake of Windelband, criticizes the concept of Geist. This situation yields two major consequences: 1. On the one hand, Geisteswissenschaften become, with their plurality, empirical disciplines, which leads to the translation into French not as sciences morales but as sciences humaines. By this transformation, the term Geisteswissenschaften no longer covers the rigorously scientific sense of a moral or philosophical reflection; rather, it leads to a separation with philosophy, which is thenceforth placed on a higher level of abstraction. 2. On the other hand, and in consequence, this situation yields a definitive fusion of the determinations of method and content in a single term, Geisteswissenschaften, which does not take place in other languages. To the contrary: in other languages this situation provokes a proliferation of terminology that the synthetic character of the German term prevents. These phenomena are perfectly summed up by Dilthey in the following lines: Besides the natural sciences, a group of conceptual cognitive results emerged naturally from the tasks of life itself. These results are linked to one another by their common object. [Neben den Naturwissenschaften hat sich eine Gruppe von Erkenntnissen entwickelt, naturwüchsig, aus den Aufgaben des Lebens selbst, welche durch die Gemeinsamkeit des Gegenstandes miteinander verbunden sind.] History, political economy, the sciences of law and of the state, the study of religion, literature, poetry, architecture, music, of philosophical world-views and systems, and finally, psychology are such sciences. All these sciences refer to the same grand fact: the human race [Alle diese Wissenschaften beziehen sich auf dieselbe große Tatsache : das Menschengeschlecht] which they describe, narrate, and judge, and about which they form concepts and theories. What one customarily separates as physical and psychical is undivided in this fact of the human sciences. It contains the living nexus of both. We ourselves belong to nature, and nature is at work in us, unconsciously, in dark drives. States of consciousness are constantly expressed in gestures, looks, and words; and they have their objectivity in institutions, states, churches, and scientific institutes. History operates in these very contexts. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that the human sciences employ the distinction between the physical and the psychical whenever their purposes require it. But then they must remain conscious that they are working with abstractions, not with entities, and that these abstractions are valid only within the limits of the point of view within which they are projected. For it is clear that the human sciences and natural sciences cannot be logically divided into two classes by means of two spheres of facts formed by them. Physiology also deals with an aspect of man, and it is a natural science. Consequently, the basis for distinguishing the two classes cannot be found in the facts taken on their own. The human sciences must be related differently to the physical and to the psychical aspects of man. And that is in fact the case [Denn es ist klar, daß die Geisteswissenschaften und die Naturwissenschaften nicht logisch korrekt als zwei Klassen gesondert werden können durch zwei Tatsachenkreise, die sie bilden. Die Geisteswissenschaften müssen sich zu der physischen Seite der Menschen anders verhalten als zur psychischen. Und so ist es in der Tat]. (The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 101–2; Die Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7:91–92) There is a measurable difference between these later theses and Dilthey’s earlier suggestions, in the Einleitung of 1883, which still attached the Geisteswissenschaften to the domain of particular objects: All the disciplines that have sociohistorical reality as their subject matter [welche die geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit zu ihren Gegenstände haben] are encompassed in this work under the name “human sciences” [Geisteswissenschaften]. (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1:56; Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:4) Nonetheless, the plurality of sciences referred to as Geistwissenschaften seem capable of being brought under a certain unity, that of Geist. While the nature of this unity is made increasingly difficult to grasp by Dilthey’s evolution, its effects make themselves felt nonetheless. The plasticity of the notion of Geist, its semantic richness, meant that German did not feel the need to vary its expressions and add to its lexicon in this regard. Thus, a plurality of terms in other languages is required to correspond to the multivocal German word. Luca M. Scarantino REFS.: Dilthey, Wilhelm. Die Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Abgrenzung der Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1927. Translation by Rudolf A. Makkreel and William H. Oman: “Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,” in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Vol. 3 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. . Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1923. Translation by Michael Neville et al.: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Vol. 1 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN 371 “German spirit of historiography.” The “sciences of mind” are, he argues, the result of the process by which philology and the literary humanities of the Renaissance humanists transform themselves into a comparative study of the productions of the mind. In still other words, two factors are decisive for the birth or acceptance of the idea of Geisteswissenschaften: a philological tradition and the appearance of historical consciousness. In this respect, Dilthey is partially anticipated in both the theses and the terminology of Ernest Renan’s L’Avenir de la science (chap. 8, written in 1848–49, published in 1890). Educated in the German tradition, Renan contrasts the sciences of nature with the “sciences of humanity,” that is, the philological and historical sciences, even while anticipating “human studies,” used from the nineteenth century on, has the particularity of incorporating the social sciences. . II. Conceiving the Science of Man: The Philological and Historical Model At bottom what determines the gap between Geisteswissenschaften and the social sciences is the way in which each conceives of history and the knowledge it is possible to have of it. Already in 1876, Dilthey considered the isolation in which the science of history was confined as responsible for the inability of Geisteswissenschaften to constitute themselves as autonomous, and he countered Comte and Mill with the 2 Geisteswissenschaften: French and Italian solutions When the expression sciences de l’esprit is adopted in France after the publication in 1883 of Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, it does not appear to take root except in this technical sense, and its use remains limited to it. And even though Renan speaks of sciences des faits de l’esprit (sciences of the activities of mind), founded essentially on philology, the French philosophical tradition remains faithful to the expression sciences morales, used in the wide sense of the study of human intellectual faculties. This meaning was already to be found in the names of pedagogical institutions, and, since 1795, in that of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. The integration into French usage of the constellation of disciplines that Dilthey addresses takes place by way of the notion of sciences humaines. These disciplines are distinguished, especially in ordinary usage, from the sciences sociales, which often rely on formal methods. In addition, the twofold character of sociological studies, which deal with human problems but in a quantified form, often resisted various attempts to classify this discipline with the human sciences. In order to truly encompass all the disciplines corresponding to Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften, whose work was translated only in 1942 under the title Introduction à l'étude des sciences humaines (before the Faculties of Letters became, in 1958, the facultés des lettres et sciences humaines), French today tends to use the expression sciences de l’homme, which covers the range of studies concerning the human condition, as well as our individual and collective actions, but thoroughly independently of the methods of investigation used. Thus, before taking up his post at the Collège de France, in 1952, Maurice MerleauPonty devoted his course at the Sorbonne to the “Sciences de l’homme dans leur rapport à la phénoménologie,” grouping together psychology, sociology, and history. Regarding this question of the field’s name and its content, Fernand Braudel points out in Les Ambitions de l’histoire that the commonalities and the differences between a human science, history, and the sciences du social. These, he writes, are more scientific than history, more articulated than it with regard to the mass of social facts. [T]hey are—another difference—deliberately focused on the actual, that is, on life, and they all work on what can be seen, measured, touched . Our methods are not the same as theirs, but our problems [certainly] are . And though there is dependency, and enriching dependency, of the historian with regard to the social sciences, he maintains a position outside them. (On History [translation modified]) We may note, finally, that a new edition of the French translation of Dilthey’s Einleitung was published in 1992 under the title Introduction aux sciences de l’esprit, as though it was judged preferable to return to a literal translation rather than use the various equivalents that had previously been offered. Parallel to the moral sciences, which betrays an aspiration of submitting the study of the human mind (moral philosophy) to rules of analysis as precise as those governing the study of nature, we must also mention the notion of Moralwissenschaft introduced by Georg Simmel (Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, 1892) to distinguish it from Geisteswissenschaften understood in Dilthey’s sense, which Italian rationalism develops under the name of scienza della morale, a variation on filosofia della morale, whose meaning is different from filosofia morale (cf. Banfi, “Rendiconti del Regio Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere”) The distinction becomes less trivial once Italian begins widely using the notion of scienze morali in the same sense as the French sciences morales, and the expression scienze dello spirito to translate the idealist connotation of Geisteswissenschaften. Italian thus appeals to a lexical plurality very much like that of French to satisfy the different connotations of the German expression. Though we may gather together under the notion of scienze umane the collection of disciplines defined by Dilthey, they are not all included in scienze morali. Antonio Banfi thus points out in his polemic against Benedetto Croce that, “for the rest, in Germany they continue to speak of Geisteswissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaften in a sense that is comparable to, but wider than, that which the scienze morali had for us, and they remember that the position and function of philosophy with regard to these disciplines are still of some interest” (“Discussioni”). Luca M. Scarantino REFS.: Banfi, Antonio. “Discussioni.” Studi filosofici 2 (1941). . “Rendiconti del Regio Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere.” Sui principi di una filosofia della morale. 67 (1933–34). Braudel, Fernand. Les Ambitions de l’histoire. Edited by Roselyne de Ayala and Paule Braudel. Vol. 2 of Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel. Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1997. Translation by Sarah Matthews: On History. Part 2 of History and the Other Human Sciences. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. 372 GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN of the Renaissance humanists. The expression of “human sciences,” a clear calque of studia humanitatis, which the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, a disciple of Petrarch, distinguished from studia divinitatis, appears in French in the seventeenth century with the same meaning (Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 11:308), that is, before acquiring its modern meaning. But the idea of the thing had in fact existed before the imposition of the current nomenclature: Vico studies institutions, myths, and language relying on the philology of Lorenzo Valla, and defends the specificity of the philological method and the certainty of its sorts of knowledge relative to the mondo civile. We can understand why Renan and Dilthey refer to him, as their respective projects of an “embryogeny” of the human mind and of comparative psychology are inscribed in the tradition of La Scienza nuova (1744). The translations of Geisteswissenschaften thus fall on one side or the other of a fault line between two conceptions of the “human sciences,” which correspond more or less to the division separating Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophies. The expression “social sciences,” replacing sciences morales, refers to a rationality that implies quantification and prediction: the “humanities” are then merely what remains after the social sciences have gone about the tasks of quantification and prediction. By contrast, expressions like sciences de l’esprit, “human studies,” and Geisteswissenschaften have as their background the philological and historical, that is, the interpretive conception of the human sciences. . Jean-Claude Gens REFS.: Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975. Banfi, Antonio. Principi di una teoria della ragione. Vol. 1 of Opere. Milan: Parenti, 1960. First published in 1926. the reasons for the limited character of his own reception. Clearly inspired by the use of the term “philology” in Germany, at a time when it was used to describe German studies and the studies of literature, art, and religion, which are structured on the model of studies of antiquity, Renan emphasizes philology as an “exact science of the things of the mind” or “science of the products of the human mind,” and thus defines the general orientation of the sciences of humanity, rather closely in line with the future Diltheyan conception of Geisteswissenschaften (chap. 8). If we inquire, not what is particularly German about Geisteswissenschaften, but rather what in French resists the literal translation of “sciences of the mind,” Renan indicates first the absence of philology, which would explain the simplicity and the violence of Auguste Comte’s apprehension of history. Renan thinks that the latter’s conception of it is “the narrowest” and his method “the coarsest.” The model is no longer Comte’s (“Comte understands nothing of the sciences of humanity, since he is not a philologist,” Renan writes to Mill, 21 October 1844), but rather that of Vico: the history of humanity is deciphered in the history of language. And Condorcet’s project of setting up “a universal language” is just as much at the opposite extreme from the philologist’s love of language. Deploring the “withering of the scientific spirit” due to the system “of public instruction which makes science a simple means of education and not an end in itself,” Renan is in the end targeting what he calls a typical characteristic of the French mind: “a whole petty manner of saying ‘bah’ to the qualities of the scientist in order to raise oneself up by those of the man of sense and the man of wit and which Mme de Staël so rightly called the ‘pedantry of trifling [pédantisme de la légèreté]’ ” (1995, chap. 6). The Italian reception of Dilthey’s project and the acceptance of scienze dello spirito is by contrast much easier, given that Benedetto Croce contributes to a revival of interest in Vico, in whom he saw a precursor of Hegel. This reception also, however, has as a background the philological tradition 3 Between Sciences Humaines and the “Human Sciences” v. BEHAVIOR, EPISTEMOLOGY, LIGHT, MORALS, PRAXIS, STRUCTURE The expression sciences humaines (human sciences) is specific to French culture, situated in a philosophical discourse (which claims to engage in an “epistemology of the human sciences”) and in institutional arrangements (the Département des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société at the CNRS, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme). It originated in the reversal of a theological opposition: after contrasting “science of man” with “science of God” (which means that human capacity for knowledge of the world is finite compared with an infinite divine capacity), “science of man” was contrasted with “science of nature.” The origins of this reversal can be found particularly in Malebranche (préface to La Recherche de la Vérité, 1674). What is fundamentally involved is the articulation of the biological, psychological, and sociological dimensions of the “human phenomenon.” The term “anthropology” (until recently always accompanied in French by an adjective: anthropologie physique, culturelle, sociale, philosophique, and so on) thus acquired an architectonic function only in the titles of individual works, as a doctrinal position taken and not as an institutional norm. See HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS; cf. CULTURE, HUMANITY. Things are indeed different in German, where the term Geisteswissenschaften bears the stamp of a philosophical conception of the “objective spirit,” with or without the methodological opposition between “understanding” (Verstehen) and “explanation” (Erklären). They also differ in British and American usage, where “anthropology” is common and universal, “social science” is oriented toward practical applications of sociological and economic knowledge, and “human sciences” (by contrast with the humanities, a set of “literary” disciplines) is clearly oriented toward the study of living human beings in their medical and environmental aspects; or in Italian, where scienze umanese are distinguished from the scienze morali. See also SECULARIZATION. GEMÜT 373 anima. But W. T. Krug notes precisely that “since the French do not have a special word for Gemüth, they translate it by âme [Seele],” which in turn has repercussions for Gemüt (RT: Allgemeines Handwörterbuch, 2:185–87). In the strict sense, Gemüt is most often an internal principle that animates the mind and its affections. Its purview is sometimes limited to the affective part when it is in competition with Geist, but not always—especially in its Kantian use. From the heights of mysticism, the word moves progressively, starting in the nineteenth century, into the bourgeois register of comfort and well-being through its adjectivization into gemütlich, which, in common language, took on the sense of“nice”—the French colloquial sympa is in the end a rather faithful translation. But this banalization cannot completely hide the exploitation of Gemüt and of the associated register of terms referring to irrational powers in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, the 1920s and 1930s, going hand in hand with the exploitation of a tradition of “Germanic” profundity that invoked Eckhart, Cusanus, and Paracelsus: the term Gemüt itself was sufficient to call up the superiority of the German language, rooted in archaic depths. I. The Mystic Soul The first conceptual determination of Gemüt comes from German mysticism, where it refers to the whole of a man’s internal world, the interior of representations and ideas: “There is a force in the soul which is called gemüete” (Ein kraft ist in der sêle, diu heizet daz gemüete). A “free spirit” is “ein ledic gemüete” (Die rede der unterscheidunge, in Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke, 5:190.9), but gemüete refers to something deeper than the mind, as suggested by the expression “your depth and your mind” (dînen grunt und dîn gemüete, ibid., 5:255.8). Sermon 83 (ibid., 3:437.4–8) establishes the coherence between geiste, mens, and gemüete, referring both to Saint Paul (Eph. 4:34) and to Augustine, which makes it possible to specify that mens or gemüete refers to the superior part of the soul, selen (“caput animae”: Enarratio in Psalmum, 3.3; RT: PL 36:73). In the sixteenth century, Grund and Gemüth are still narrowly associated with Paracelsus, where Gemüth refers to the “very depths of ourselves,” the place “where we find ourselves entirely reunited” (Braun, Paracelse, 187): The Gemüth of men is something so considerable that no one can express it. And like God himself, Prima Materia, and heaven, which are all three eternal and immovable, such is the Gemüth of man. It is thus that man is happy by and with his Gemüth, that is, he lives eternally and no longer dies. (Paracelsus, Liber de imaginibus) It goes without saying that the investment of the notion of Gemüth in this tradition is significant, and also includes Jakob Böhme (Of the Three Principles, 10.37), who leaves his own mark on the nascent philosophical vocabulary, as we can see in Gottfried Leibniz. This determination is massively reaffirmed in German romanticism, in particular in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion (twenty-four occurrences), where he defends the idea that the seat of religiosity is “a province in the soul [eine Provinz im Gemüt]” (from the “Apologie,” Reden), and in Novalis, in particular Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1.6). Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. “Discours de réception à l’Académie française.” Vol. 1 of Œuvres, edited by Arthur O’Connor and François Arago. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–49. First published in 1782. Translation: “Reception Speech at the French Academy.” In Selected Writings, edited by Keith Michael Baker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. . Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progress de l’esprit humain. Vol. 6 of Œuvres, edited by Arthur O’Connor and François Arago. Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–49. Translation by June Barraclough: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979. Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1923. First published in 1883. Translation, with an introductory essay, by Ramon J. Batanzos: Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History. Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Translation by Michael Neville, Jeffrey Barnouw, Franz Schreiner, and Rudolf A. Makkreel: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Vol. 1 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. French translation by L. Sauzin: Introduction à l’étude des sciences humaines. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942. Goldmann, Lucien. The Human Sciences and Philosophy. Translated by Hayden V. White and Robert Anchor. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. Granger, Gilles-Gaston. Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man. Translated by Alexander Rosenberg. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1983. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739. Lécuyer, Bernard-Pierre. “Sciences sociales (Préhistoire des).” In Encyclopaedia Universalis. Paris: Encylopaedia Universalis, 1984. Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Edited by J. M. Robson. Vols. 7–8 in Collected Works. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973–74. Renan, Ernest. L’Avenir de la science. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. First published in 1890. Translation by Albert D. Vandam and C. B. Pitman: The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848. London: Chapman and Hall, 1891. Vico, Giambattista. La Scienza Nuova. 2 vols. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Rome: Laterza, 1974. First published in 1744. Translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Wartburg, Walther von. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Verlag B. G. Teubner, 1934–98. GEMÜT (GERMAN) ENGLISH mind, mood FRENCH âme, cœur, sentiments, affectivité, esprit GREEK thumos [θυμός] LATIN mens, animus v. HEART, SOUL, TO SENSE, and CONSCIOUSNESS, FEELING, GEFÜHL, GENIUS, GOGO, INGENIUM, PATHOS Gemüth (today written Gemüt) is one of those terms that has no substitute, that refers to the register of the soul/mind without any of these equivalents being satisfactory. At the same time, it is one of the oldest philosophical terms in the German language, present from Eckhart to phenomenology. In Gemüth, the prefix ge- indicates a gathering, a unity. The word is formed from Muth, the mind of the man, the state of the soul, courage, humor—its meanings cover the range from the Greek thumos [θυμός] to the English “mood,” but it also acquires some highly specific senses, such as Anmuth (grace) and Demuth (humility). Because of its difference from the soul, Seele, it is perceived as the equivalent of the Latin animus in relation to 374 GEMÜT In the Critique of Judgment, Gemüt functions as the framework within which the faculties work reciprocally, without being at any moment positively determined, transcendentally or anthropologically. In §49, Kant even defines the Geist (mind) at the heart of Gemüt as “its vivifying power.” This does not make him a mystic, but rather inscribes him in a search for the formulation of a vocabulary of feeling, one of the decisive issues of moral and aesthetic thought in the eighteenth century. In the continuity of the neutral space between passivity and activity linked by sentiment, Kant dissociates Gemüt from the practical meaning that the term commonly held before him, in the tradition of Leibnizianism, in works by Christian Wolff, Friedrich Meier, and Moses Mendelssohn. In his 1808 dictionary, Adelung gives a standard account of the word’s eighteenth-century meaning, as expressing “the soul” (Seele) related to desires and will, by contrast with the theorizing “mind” (Geist) (RT: Versuch eines vollständingen, s.v.). The term, which thus means for Kant “the set of the transcendental faculties,” drifts progressively into the domains of psychology and ordinary language, whereas German Idealism, in its theological inspiration, gives primacy to the term Geist. The Geistesgeschichte of the beginning of the twentieth century, a sort of history of ideas in a metaphysical mode, reintroduces Gemüt forcefully among the irreducibly “Germanic” notions of the mind, opening the way for Nazi exploitation of the term. A characteristic of a certain literary romanticism, Gemüt retains, even in its ambiguity, a II. The Transcendental Faculty One of the most spectacular deletions in the translation of Kant’s works into other languages is the systematic disappearance of the term Gemüt in favor of “spirit” or “mind.” Yet Kant, unlike the idealist philosophers who follow him, does not, in the Critique of Pure Reason, use Geist, and he uses it in alternation with Gemüt in the Critique of Judgment. Vittorio Mathieu, the Italian “reviser” (1974) of Giovanni Gentile’s translation (1909) of the Critique of Pure Reason, sees Gentile’s use of spirito for Gemüth as a “traduzione tipicamente gentiliana”—in other words, an idealist corruption of Kant’s sense, which he corrects by substituting for it the word animo. . For Kant, Gemüt is presented from the start as a collection of transcendental powers, their foundation and their source at the same time. The Transcendental Logic invokes it at the beginning: Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts). (Critique of Pure Reason, A50/B74, trans. Guyer and Wood) 1 Gemüt in the Critique of Pure Reason The term Gemüt is especially frequent in Transcendental Aesthetic. In section 1.A.19, intuition is only possible if the object is given to us. That, in turn, necessarily presupposes “dadurch daß er das Gemüt auf gewisse Weise affiziere”: in various translations, “if it affects the mind [das Gemüth] in a certain way” (Guyer and Wood); “à la condition que si l’objet affecte d’une certaine manière notre esprit [das Gemüth]” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, French translation by Tremesaygues and Pacaud); “si l’objet affecte d’une certaine manière notre esprit” (Barni and Marty); “parce que l’objet affecte l’esprit sur un certain mode” (Renaut, with a note); “in quanto modifichi, in certo modo, lo spirito” (Gentile and Mathieu). The translation of Gemüth by esprit and spirito continues with the word’s second occurrence in A.20: “la forme pure des intuitions sensibles en général se trouvera a priori dans l’esprit” (Tremesaygues and Pacaud); “la forme pure des intuitions sensibles en général se trouvera a priori dans l’esprit” (Barni and Marty); “laquelle réside a priori dans l’esprit” (Renaut); “la forma pura delle intuizioni sensibili in generale si troverà a priori nello spirito [Gemüth]” (Gentile and Mathieu). Section 2 of the Critique of Pure Reason makes manifest the implications of translating the term when these difficulties are not taken into account. Thus we read A.22/B.37, “Der innere Sinn, vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst, oder seinen inneren Zustand anschauet, gibt zwar keine Anschauung von der Seele selbst, als einem Objekt.” For “vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst,” Guyer and Wood translate “the mind intuits itself.” Barni and Marty render Kant’s phrase as, “Le sens interne, par le moyen duquel l’esprit s’intuitionne lui-même, ou intuitionne son état intérieur, ne nous donne aucune intuition de l’âme elle-même comme d’un objet.” In Renaut, we find, “Le sens interne, par l’intermédiaire duquel l’esprit s’intuitionne lui-même, intuitionne son état intérieur, ne fournit certes pas d’intuition de l’âme elle-même comme objet.” Gentile and Mathieu give, “Il senso interno, mediante il quale lo spirito intuisce se stesso, o un suo stato interno, non ci dà invero nessuna intuizione dell’anima stessa, come di oggetto.” Only Tremesaygues and Pacaud even call our attention to the specificity of Kant’s use of Gemüt, thus: “Le sens interne, au moyen duquel l’esprit [das Gemüth] s’intuitionne lui-même ou intuitionne aussi son état interne, ne donne pas, sans doute, d’intuition de l’âme elle-même comme d’un objet [Objekt].” All of these translations, even the one by Tremesaygues and Pacaud, have the defect of collapsing Gemüt into “mind,” losing the contrast between mens, spiritus, and animus, and leading to a backward projection of the German-idealist Geist or the spiritualist mind into the Kantian text. Even when it is a matter of translating a passage in which Kant explicitly distinguishes Gemüt from Seele as animus and anima (see again A.22/B.37, “Der innere Sinn, vermittelst dessen das Gemüt sich selbst, oder seinen inneren Zustand anschauet, gibt zwar keine Anschauung von der Seele selbst, als einem Objekt,” where a distinction is drawn in Kant’s German between Gemüt and Seele; or the note to “Concerning Sömmering’s Work on the Soul,” AA.13.33), the French translator of the Pléiade edition, Luc Ferry, renders Gemüt by esprit. Such translations thus integrate Kant into German Idealism, separating him by the same stroke from the tradition of empirical psychology. GENDER 375 Italian, género in Spanish, or Geschlecht in German, as translations of gender. This sort of dodge is explained by the meaning AngloSaxon authors, in particular American feminists, gave to “gender” with regard to what goes by the name “sex” in English and sexualité in French. The debate on the differences of the sexes (male and female) began with Robert Stoller’s book Sex and Gender (1968). In the preface to the 1978 French edition, Stoller defines “the aspects of sexuality which we call gender” as being “essentially determined by culture, that is, learned after birth,” whereas what is properly called “sexual” is characterized by anatomical and physiological factors, insofar as they determine “whether one is male or female.” If “gender” is a term considered untranslatable, this is because it does not have the same extension as sexuality, sexualité. Indeed, sexuality, as understood by psychoanalysis, disappears in the distinction established by these American authors between biological sex and the social construction of masculine and feminine identities. This is a distinction that many adherents are beginning to reinterpret, and that contemporary psychoanalysis can only, and more radically, call into question. I. The Distinction between “Sex” and “Gender” and Its Reinterpretations The English term “sex” can reasonably be translated by sexe in French, as both languages define sexuality as “the collection of psychological and physiological notions” that characterize it. However, it is sometimes inaccurate to translate “sex” by sexe, given that in English “sex” is in many circumstances contrasted with “gender,” which is not the case in French. The distinction between “sex” and “gender,” which was laid out by Stoller in 1968 and adopted by feminist thought in the early 1970s (see, in particular, Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society), represents for this movement a political and sociological argument in the name of which we must distinguish the physiological and the psychological aspects of sex, without which we would land in a biological essentialism with normative import regarding sexual identity. The specific attempts to separate the respective contributions of nature and culture in this regard proliferated in the last third of the twentieth century. However, the reliance on a distinction between sex and gender remained unique to English terminology. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions, regarding “gender,” Oakley’s usage (“Sex differences may be ‘natural,’ but gender differences have their source in culture”). It also refers to feminist usage of the term as representing one of its major uses. The OED second edition (1989) defines the term in this way: “[i]n mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.” The most recent online version (June 2011), however, updates the entry to read: The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way. In this context, psychoanalysis, and the meaning it gives to the difference between the sexes, did not have as decisive descriptive virtue that Husserl’s and above all Scheler’s phenomenology would turn to advantage. Denis Thouard REFS.: Ball, Philip. The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Böhme, Jakob. De Tribus Principiis oder Beschreibung der Drey Principien Göttlichen Wesens. Originally published in 1619. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by K. W. Schiebler, vol. 3. Leipzig: Barth, 1841. Translation by John Sparrow: Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence. London: Watkins, 1910. Braun, Lucien. Paracelse. Geneva: Slatikine, 1995. Eckhart, Meister. Die deutschen Werke. Edited and translated by Josef Quint. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958–. Translation by M. O’C. Walshe: German Sermons and Treatises. 3 vols. London: Watkins, 1979–87. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In RT: Ak., vols. 3–4. English translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. French translation by Luc Ferry: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1980. French translation by Alexandre J.-L. Delamarre and François Marty, from the translation by Jules Barni: Critique de la raison pure. Edited by Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1990. French translation by André Tremesaygues and Bernard Pacaud: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. French translation by Alain Renaut: Critique de la raison pure. Paris: Flammarion, 2006. Italian translation by G. Gentile (1909) and V. Mathieu (1974): Critica della ragion pura. Bari, It.: Laterza, 1987. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” In Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 1:181–358. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–. Translation by Palmer Hilty: Henry von Ofterdingen: A Novel. New York: F. Ungar, 1964. Paracelsus. Essential Theoretical Writings. Edited and translated by Andrew Weeks. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2008. . Liber de imaginibus. In Sämtliche Werke I. Abteilung: Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und philosophische Schriften, vol. 4. Edited by Karl Sudhoff. 14 vols. Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1922–33. Scheler, Max. Wesen und Form der Sympathie. Originally published in 1923. In Gesammelte Werke, edited by Manfred S. Frings, vol. 7. 6th ed. Bern: Francke, 1973. Translation by Peter Heath: The Nature of Sympathy. Introduction by Graham McAleer. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008. Originally published in 1954. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Über die Religion [Discourses on religion]. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997. Originally published in 1799. Edited and translation by Richard Crouter: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. GENDER FRENCH différence des sexes, identité sexuelle, genre GERMAN Geschlecht ITALIAN genere SPANISH género v. GENRE, GESCHLECHT, SEX, and BEHAVIOR, DRIVE, NATURE, PEOPLE, PLEASURE After the end of the 1960s, when biologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers studying sexuality began to take into account what Anglo-Saxon authors refer to as “gender,” the debate reached the fields of other European languages, without there being a decision to use, for example, genre in French, genere in 376 GENDER Thomas Laqueur’s argument has had a profound effect in this regard. . II. The Notion of “Gender” through the Lens of Psychoanalysis If “gender” is untranslatable in many languages, it is because the term is related to a history of two different problems that were developed in parallel, encroaching on one another without ever meeting. Yet, with regard to Stoller’s distinction between biological sex and the social construction of male and female identities, psychoanalysis sees in sexuality a combination of psychological and physiological factors. However, when the problems raised by Stoller and the American feminists reached France, the reevaluation there of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis showed that it was necessary to give up the dualism of psychology and physiology to arrive at an understanding of drives and fantasies, as the terrain on which sexual identity is formed. When Freud defines the erogenous body in 1905 (in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) and in 1915 (in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes) clarifies out of which heterogeneous elements the drives are constituted—impetus, aim, source, and object—he introduces the idea that these drives have a destiny, which makes them rather different from psychological or physiological givens. The terrain on which it is decided whether a given person identifies as male or female concerns the destinies of these drives, the links they have with scenarios of sexual climax in which the subject is in relation to figures of otherness, taken in part from the details of early interaction with adults. Sexuation thus takes place in the domain of the formation of pleasure, displeasure, and anxiety, from which are woven the experiences and thoughts of infants immersed in an adult world that supports them, threatens them, carries them, even while also being intrusive and alien. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the social determinations of gender are one of the materials by which fantasies and drives are created. The physiological givens of sex are one of the other materials in this affair, but they are not on the same level as the others: societies always give a content to the difference of the sexes. This difference, as anthropologists have shown, structures all the activities of exchange, rituals, divisions of space, subsistence, circuits of permitted and forbidden marriages, and so on. Since gender is nothing but the system of the division of social activities, it acquires, depending on the society, different contents. The common point among anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and some theorists of gender is that human sexuation is anything but natural, that it has no content that is commanded by an essence or by nature, even if that nature is determined by the different roles of men and women in procreation. But the agreement between these different approaches stops at this negative point. To give an account of sexuation, psychoanalysis uses other notions besides the physiological and the psychological. This is why Robert Stoller, like many other psychoanalysts, contributed to a confusion regarding the sexual in the psychoanalytic sense. And gender theories have inherited this confusion. Sexuality is neither physiological an influence in the English-speaking world as it did in France. In the Anglo-Saxon world, behaviorism was dominant during the period in which the distinction between sex and gender was established, a dominance that was especially maintained by British psychology and philosophy. This distinction was thus in line with a climate of confidence regarding the possibilities of modifying behavior relative to the sexual roles previously subordinate to normative criteria. Suddenly, it appeared unnecessary that female behavior should be in step with female sex, biologically understood. After the 1990s, the term “gender” became more and more common, and passed into general use where “sex” had been used previously. It follows that the psychologists or feminists who currently refer to gender are not assumed to be following strictly the distinction between sex and gender. In addition, feminist theory has in large part rejected the distinction for the following reasons: 1. It is difficult to distinguish what derives from “sex” and what from “gender.” 2. The idea that “ ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex” has been rejected (Butler, Bodies That Matter). This rejection is based on the argument that sex cannot be considered a neutral tabula rasa (see Gatens, “A Critic of the Sex/Gender Distinction”). 3. The American feminist Judith Butler often maintains that sex is retrospectively materialized as “primary,” as a result of the fact that our approach to gender sees culture as “secondary.” She describes “the ritualized repetition by which [gender] norms produce and stabilize not only the effects of gender but the materiality of sex.” Her work presupposes that “the construal of ‘sex’ [is framed] no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (Butler, Bodies That Matter). 4. Some theorists interpret sex itself as a cultural construction. This is the perspective adopted by Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex, when he declares: It seems perfectly obvious that biology defines the sexes: what else could sex mean? [N]o particular understanding of sexual difference historically follows from undisputed facts about bodies. Organs that had been seen as interior versions of what the male had outside—the vagina as penis, the uterus as scrotum—were by the eighteenth century construed as of an entirely different nature. The author explains that he is attempting, in this work, to retrace “a history of the way in which sex, as well as gender, is created.” 5. Feminists and other theorists who rely on the term “gender” today do not necessarily adhere to the primitive distinction between sex and gender, especially since the term “gender” has become a euphemism for “sex.” Similarly, when a theorist uses “sex,” the word is not understood as referring to a notion that, unlike “gender,” is universal, abstracted away from history and culture. GENDER 377 1 Gender and gender trouble v. GESCHLECHT, SEX The term “gender” first assumed its meaning as part of a narrative sequence in feminist theory. First there was “sex” understood as a biological given, and then came “gender,” which interpreted or constructed that biological given into a social category. This story was, at least, the one that held sway as feminist anthropologists (Ortner, Rubin) sought to distinguish between an order of nature and an order of culture. Nature was understood to come first, even though no one thought one could identify the scene of nature apart from its cultural articulation. Its “firstness” was then ambiguously temporal and logical. The formulation helped to make sense of important feminist propositions such as the one made by Beauvoir in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” If one is not born a woman, then one is born something else, and “sex” is the name for that something else we are prior to what we become. For “gender” to name a mode of becoming had theoretical consequences, since it meant that regardless of what gender is assigned at birth, gender still has to be culturally assumed, embodied, articulated, and made. Moreover, if sex names what is biologically given, and if gender belongs to another order, then there is nothing in one’s sex that destines one for any particular kind of position in life; there are no social tasks or cultural meanings that can be derived exclusively or causally from one’s sex. One can, for instance, be born with reproductive organs but never give birth. And even if certain forms of heterosexual intercourse are physically possible, that does not mean that it is psychically possible or desirable. In other words, sex does not operate a causal effect on behavior, social role, or task, and so, with the sex/gender distinction in place, feminists actively argued against the formulation that “biology is destiny.” It became clear, though, that if one only understood gender as the cultural meanings that sex acquires in any given social context, then gender was still linked with sex, and could not be conceptualized without it. Some feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz argued that if gender is the cultural interpretation of sex, then sex is treated as a given, and there is no way then to ask how “sex” is made or what various cultural forms “sex” may assume in different contexts. Indeed, if one started to talk about the cultural meanings of “sex,” it appeared that one was talking rather about gender. This position became even more difficult to maintain as feminist scholars of science insisted not only that nature has a history (Haraway), but that even the definition of “sex” is a contested zone in the history of science (Laqueur, Longino). If “sex” has a history, and a conflicted one at that, then how do we understand “gender”? Is it then necessary to take gender out of the narrative sequence in which first there is “sex,” which belongs to a putatively ahistorical nature, and only after there is “gender,” understood as endowing that natural fact with meaning? Upending the sex/gender distinction involved taking distance from both structural linguistics and cultural anthropology. But it became all the more important once it was conceded that both sex and gender have histories, and that these histories differ, depending on the linguistic contexts in which they operate. So, for example, the very term “gender” was throughout the 1980s and 1990s nearly impossible to translate into any romance language. There was le genre in French and el género in Spanish, but these were considered to be grammatical categories and to have no bearing on the concrete bodily existence of those who were alternately referred to as “he” or “she.” But experimental writers such as Monique Wittig and Jeannette Winterson contested the idea that grammar was actually separable from bodily experience. Wittig’s Les guérillères and Winterson’s Written on the Body became provocative texts that never allowed their readers to settle on the gender of the figures and characters being described. Moreover, they suggested that the way we see and feel gender is directly related to the kinds of grammatical constructions that pose as ordinary or inevitable. By either combining, confusing, or erasing grammatical gender, they sought to loosen the hold that binary gender systems have on how we read, feel, think, and know ourselves and others. Their grammatical idealism proved to be exciting as experimental fiction. And yet, the institutions of gender seemed to march along, even when brave souls refused to give their infants genders at birth, with the idea that such acts might bring to a halt the institution of gender difference. The translation of “gender” into German was more difficult, since the word Geschlecht operates as both biological sex and social gender. This term enforced a strong cultural presumption that the various cultural expressions of gender not only followed causally and necessarily from an original sex, but that gender was in some ways mired in sex, indissociable from it, bound up with it as a single unity. The term for gender in Chinese carries many of these meanings that are variously expressed by the conjunction of phonemes and numbers: “gender” is xing(4) bie(2). The numbers denote “tones,” and there are four of them for each of the two terms. Thus, xing(2) means something different from xing(4). Indeed, this roman system is already a translation of Chinese characters, so makes something of a grid out of a graphic sign. Xing(4) is a term meaning “category or kind,” but it also means “sex” and so sustains a relation with those languages that link sex to species. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the term begin to mean “gender,” so in order to distinguish gender from sex, some feminist scholars in China put the expression meaning “social”—she(4) hui(4)—before the term xing(4)bie(2). Bie(2) means “difference,” and thus links with those formulations of gender as sexual difference. Like genus in Swedish, which implies species-being, so Geschlecht in German implied not only a natural kind, but a mode of natural ordering that served the purposes of the reproduction of the species. That the first German translators of Gender Trouble chose to translate “gender” as Geschlechtsidentität (sexual identity) may have been an effort to move away from species discourse, or perhaps it was a way of responding to those emerging queer arguments that claimed that binary sex was understood to serve the purposes of reproducing compulsory heterosexuality (Rubin, Butler). The problem with that choice, however, was that it confused gender with sexual orientation or disposition. And part of the analytic work of understanding gender apart from biological causality and functionalism was precisely to hold open for the possibility that gender appearance may not correspond to sexual disposition or orientation in predictable ways. Thus, if the biologically mired conception of sex implies that women and men desire only one another, and that the end result of that attraction is biological reproduction, the queer critique relied on analytic distinctions between morphology, biology, psychology, cultural assignment and interpretation, social function, and possibility. If “gender” named this very constellation of problems, then it sought, in Foucault’s language, to undo the “fictitious unity of sex” (History of Sexuality, vol. 1) in which drive, desire, and expression formed a single object that became the condition and object for sexual regulation. (continued) 378 GENDER For the French, the term “gender” was at first incomprehensible, since genre clearly referred exclusively to grammar and literary form. When Gender Trouble was first proposed to a French press, the publisher proclaimed that it was inassimilable, suggesting that it was a kind of foreign substance or unwanted immigrant that must be kept outside the French borders. Clearly, it was considered an American term, possibly the intellectual equivalent of McDonald’s. Although the term did enter the language through conferences, seminars, the titles of books, and even a newly established field (études de genre), its culturalism was somehow associated with its Americanism, and some French intellectuals feared that it was a term meant to deny sexual difference, the body, seduction, and Frenchness itself. For some feminist historians who worked between French and Anglo-American frameworks, gender became importantly bound up with the question of sexual difference. Joan Scott argued that one should not only consider gender as an attribute of a body, or as a way of endowing biological bodies with cultural meaning. In her view, gender is a “category of analysis” which helps us understand how the basic terms by which we describe social life are themselves internally differentiated. For instance, Scott can analyze terms such as “labor,” “equality,” or even “universality” using gender as a critical category. As a result, we can criticize how the public sphere and labor are often conceptualized as masculine spheres. The very way in which the sphere is delimited not only valorizes certain modes of labor, and laborers of the masculine gender, but it also reproduces the categories of gender. In Scott’s work, those categories do not always adhere to a set of bodies, though sometimes they do. They also provide the implicit scheme by which valuable and nonvaluable work is described, forms of political participation are differentially valorized, and versions of universality are articulated with a masculine presumption and bias. Scott is one of many feminist theorists who would dispute the absolute difference between sexual difference and gender (cf. Braidotti, Irigaray, and Schor and Weed). “Sexual difference” is not a term that marks an exclusively biological beginning and then becomes transformed in the course of a subsequent and separable cultural and historical articulation. Rather, sexual difference is precisely that which, whether in the biological or the cultural sciences, occasions a set of shifting articulations. Following Lacan, one might say that sexual difference is precisely the site where biology and culture converge, although not in any causal way (thus, eluding from another direction the “biology is destiny” formulation). For Scott, no one cultural articulation of sexual difference exhausts its meaning, because even though we never find this difference outside of a specific articulation, it eludes any capture or seizure that would fix its meaning for all time. Moreover, sexual difference is as much articulated by forms of power as it is a matrix for actively articulating such modes of power. We are not only talking about sexual difference as a “constructed” difference (though some do that), but in Scott’s work, sexual difference is a matrix through which and by which certain kinds of articulation take place. If that seems like a conundrum, it probably is; it is what Scott refers to as one of the paradoxes she has to offer. Although some feminists sharply contrasted the discourse on “gender” with that of “sexual difference,” they usually associated gender with a theory of cultural construction, though that no longer seems to be the case. “Gender” is now the name for a set of debates on how to think about the biological, chromosomal, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic dimensions of a lived bodily reality. Consider, for instance, the international athletic debate about Caster Semenya, an athlete who was suspected of being more male than female, but who ran as a qualified woman in international athletic competitions. The International Association of Athletics Federations finally adjudicated the case and confirmed that she qualified to run as a woman, without saying whether she “really” was one. For this organization, gender was established by a set of measures and norms that required the expertise of lawyers, biologists, psychologists, geneticists, and endocrinologists. In other words, Semenya’s “gender qualifications” were decided by an interdisciplinary committee, and not by a single standard imposed by a single science. Those experts not only had to learn each other’s languages, but they had to translate each field into their own to come to an understanding of how best to name gender in this instance. Her gender qualifications were the result of a negotiated conclusion. Those who debate matters of sexual difference and gender tend to conjecture what happens at the very beginning of life, how infants are perceived and named, and how sexual difference is discovered or installed. The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche argued that it was not possible to reduce the question of gender to an expression of biological drives, understood as separable from cultural content. To understand gender, we must first understand drives (see Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale”). For Laplanche, gender assignment happens at the very beginning of life, but like all powerful words of interpellation, it is first encountered as so much “noise” to an infant who does not yet have linguistic competence to discern what is being said. In this way, gender assignment arrives on the scene of infantile helplessness. To be called a gender is to be given an enigmatic and overwhelming signifier; it is also to be incited in ways that remain in part fully unconscious. To be called a gender is to be subject to a certain demand, a certain impingement and seduction, and not to know fully what the terms of that demand might be. Indeed, in being gendered, the infant is put in a situation of having to make a translation. Laplanche’s first point follows from a correction of a translation error. The “instinct” (a term that Strachey uses too often to translate Trieb) makes the drive possible, but the drive institutes a life of fantasy that is qualitatively new, and that is not constrained by the teleologies of biological life. What is endogenous and exogenous converge at the drive, but when something new emerges, it is a sign that the drive has veered away from its instinctual basis. This only happens once biological processes have been intervened upon by the adult world, by forms of address, words, and forms of physical proximity and dependency. Something enigmatic is communicated from that adult world, and it enters into the life of the drive. It is precisely because of this interruption that the infant’s emerging sense of his or her body (or a body outside of clear gender categories) is not the result of a biological teleology or necessity. The literary critic John Fletcher asks, in “The Letter in the Unconscious,” how are we to rethink “the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image (the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers?) [as] the ground or, at least, terrain for the formation of gendered identities.” In other words, Fletcher, drawing on Laplanche, asks whether the most fundamental sense of our bodies, what Merleau-Ponty would call a “body-image” is in some ways the result of having to translate and negotiate enigmatic and overwhelming adult “signifiers”—terms that relay the psychic demands of the adult to the child. As we have seen, the term “gender” in English-language contexts usually refers to a cultural meaning assumed by a body in the context of its socialization or acculturation, and so it often makes use of a distinction between a natural and cultural body in order to secure a definition for gender as an emphatically cultural production. But these last positions lead us to ask another question: what is the mechanism of that production? If we start with the naming of the infant, we start to understand gender as a social assignment, (continued) GENDER 379 but how precisely does that assignment work? To answer this question, we have to move away from the notion that gender is simply an attribute of a person (Scott has already shown us that). Or, rather, if it is an attribute, we have to consider that it is attributed, and we have yet to understand the means and mechanism of that attribution or more generalized assignment. For Laplanche, gender is resituated as part of the terrain of the enigmatic signifier itself. In other words, gender is not so much a singular message, but a surrounding and impinging discourse, already circulating, and mobilized for the purposes of address prior to the formation of any speaking and desiring subject. In this sense, gender is a problem of translating the drive of the other into one’s own bodily schema. In other words, one is not born into the world only then to happen upon a set of gender options; rather, gender operates as part of the generalized discursive conditions that are “addressed” enigmatically and overwhelmingly to an infant and child and that continue to be addressed throughout the embodied life of the person. Laplanche argues that gender precedes sex and so suggests that gender—understood as that bundle of enigmatic meanings that is addressed to the infant and so imposed as part of a discursive intervention in the life of the infant—precedes the emergence of the “sexually and genitally differentiated body image.” This last view is counterintuitive to the extent that we might want to argue that sexual differentiation is, for the most part, there from the start (although recent research on intersex has called this presumption into question throughout the biological and social sciences). But are there conditions under which “sex,” understood as sexually differentiated morphology, comes to appear as a “given” of experience, something we might take for granted, a material point of departure for any further investigation and for any further understanding of gender acquisition? Consider that the sequence that we use to describe how gender emerges only after sex, or gender is something superadded to sex, fails to see that gender is, as it were, already operating, seizing upon, and infiltrating somatic life prior to any conscious or reflexive determination of gender. And if gender is relayed, traumatically, through the generalized scene of seduction, then gender is part of the very assignment that forms and incites the life of the drive, sexuality itself, that makes us scramble for words to translate a set of effects that emerge from one domain only to be relayed into another. We might ask, which gender? Or gender in what sense? But that is already to move ahead too quickly. If gender is relayed through the overwhelming language and gestures of the adult, then it arrives first as a kind of noise, indecipherable, and in demand of translation. For now, it is most important to note that the assignment of gender arrives through the enigmatic desire of the other, a desire by which somatic life is infiltrated and that, in turn, or simultaneously, incites a set of displacements and translations that constitute the specific life of the drive or, sexual desire. Is somatic life determinable outside this scene of assignment? To the extent that bodily “sex” appears as primary, this very primariness is achieved as a consequence of a repression (refoulement) of gender itself. Indeed, gender is in part constituted by unconscious wishes conveyed through the enigmatic assignment of gender, so that one might say that gender emerges, from early on, as an enigma for the child. And the question may well not be, “what gender am I?” but rather, “what does gender want of me?” or even, “whose desire is being carried through the assignment of gender that I have received and how can I possibly respond? Quick—give me a way to translate!” Judith Butler REFS.: Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Clarey, Christopher. “Gender Test after a GoldMedal Finish.” New York Times, 19 August 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/ sports/20runner.html. Fletcher, John. “The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic Signifier in Jean Laplanche.” In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. ICA Documents, no. 11. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 111–40. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. . “Triebe und Triebschicksale.” In vol. 10 of Gesammelte Werke, Chronologish Geordnet, edited by Anna Freud et al., 210–32. London: Imago Publishing Co., 1913–17. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. . “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964.” In vol. 11 of The Seminar, edited by Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977. Laplanche, Jean. “The Drive and the ObjectSource: Its Fate in the Transference.” In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton. ICA Documents, no. 11. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992. Laplanche, Jean, and Susan Fairfield. “Gender, Sex and the Sexual.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8, no. 2 (2007): 201–19. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Longino, Helen E. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002. Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974. Rubin, Gayle S. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Schor, Naomi, and Elizabeth Weed, eds. The Essential Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In Gender and the Politics of History, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller, 28–50. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. . Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Shepherdson, Charles. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Wittig, Monique. Les guérillères. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969. 380 GENIUS from common aesthetic terminology. He is the first to rescue the term from the confusion and ambiguity that had previously attached to it and to give it a fruitful and specifically philosophical meaning.” Although this analysis is correct, and Shaftesbury was indeed the author of this philosophical “stroke of genius,” it remains the case that the history of the word “genius,” like that of any word (but in this case especially), will help us clarify what Cassirer calls “confusion” and “ambiguity,” which may only be inexhaustible semantic richness. The word “genius,” in its various romance forms, is related to Latin, and hence shares an Indo-European origin common to several languages (*gn, “to be born,” “to engender”). Gigno, gignere, thus means “to engender,” “to produce,” “to cause.” Several nouns are derived from it. Genus is birth, race, and, in an abstract way, class (see PEOPLE). Genius is initially the divinity presiding over an individual’s birth, and then each person’s guardian divinity, with which the first becomes confused, so much so that genius comes to mean one’s natural inclinations, appetites, the intellectual and moral qualities peculiar to each individual. In this last sense, the word duplicates the compound word ingenium, another derivative of gigno (see INGENIUM). II. From Ingenium to Génie When the word génie, a calque of genius, appears in French in the sixteenth century (François Rabelais, 1532), it manifests the richness of meaning derived from its Latin origins. It refers in general to natural tendencies, character, an innate disposition for an activity or art. It becomes more specific later, referring to a superior mental aptitude (before 1674), and finally, by metonymy, to a superior individual, a génie (1686). Concurrently, however, in the sixteenth century, génie takes up the Latin sense of “divinity” and thus comes to mean a “spirit,” good or bad, which influences our destiny (hence, eventually, René Descartes’s “evil genius,” the malin génie we find in his Meditations of 1641), then, by extension, an allegorical being personifying an abstract idea and its representation, and finally, in fantastical writings, a supernatural being endowed with magical powers (definitions taken from RT: DHLF). These two series of meanings, seemingly very distinct, are in fact intimately related. To be a genius is to have a part of the creative faculty of a god, thus to participate in something external and superior to oneself. To be a genius is to be considered, or to consider oneself to be, a creative source like a god. A certain hubris thus underlies this notion, which is clearly confirmed in the romantic conception of genius (on hubris, cf. VERGÜENZA, II). It is a peculiarity of French that it did not create a word directly calqued on ingenium (except ingénieur, “engineer”). However, this Latin word, which we find in the Italian ingegno and the Spanish ingenio, and which is commonly used in philosophical terminology in the classical period (cf. Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind of ca. 1622), refers both to a certain penetration of the mind and to a synthetic faculty for comparing ideas that are distant from one another, and thus to “find” in the sense of “invent.” In this sense we may contrast, as Giambattista Vico does in particular, the creativity and inventiveness of “ingenious” thought with nor psychological. It is related to drives and fantasies. The biological and social givens are only taken into account by fantasies and drives, with their specific organization. Given this conceptual modification, the question of knowing whether Freud was wrong to affirm that there is, during the “phallic phase,” a single libido and that it is male in nature may be asked against a different background. Monique David-Ménard Penelope Deutscher REFS.: Browne, June, ed. The Future of Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of the Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. David-Ménard, Monique. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. . “Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought.” Translated by Diane Morgan. Angelaki 8, no. 2 (2003): 137–50. Deutscher, Penelope. Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997. Fraisse, Geneviève. Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Gatens, Moira. “A Critic of the Sex/Gender Distinction.” In Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1995. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender, and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972. Stoller, Robert. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House, 1968. GENIUS FRENCH génie GERMAN Genie, Geist, Naturell, natürlich Fähigkeit, Witz LATIN genus, genius v. AESTHETICS, ART, CONCETTO, DAIMÔN, DUENDE, GEMÜT, GOÛT, IMAGINATION, INGENIUM, MADNESS, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, PLASTICITY, SOUL, SUBLIME, TALENT Toward the end of the eighteenth century, La Harpe writes in the introduction to his work Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne: “But what may be surprising is that these two words, genius and taste, taken abstractly, are never found in Boileau’s verses, nor in Racine’s prose, nor in Corneille’s dissertations, nor in Molière’s plays. This manner of speaking is from our century.” How did an old word, as rich in diverse and vague meanings as the word “genius” is, come to occupy the center of aesthetic and philosophical discussion in the Enlightenment, in England, France, and Germany? What remains of these debates today? I. Confusion or Semantic Richness Concerning the word genius, Ernst Cassirer warns in his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in the chapter concerning “the fundamental problem of aesthetics,” against “attempting to interpret the developments of thoughts and ideas simply on the basis of the history of a word.” Thus, he adds, Shaftesbury “did not coin the word ‘genius’; he adopted it GENIUS 381 sur la poésie et la peinture (1719) (Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting): On appelle génie l’aptitude qu’un homme a reçue de la nature pour faire bien et facilement certaines choses que les autres ne sauraient faire que très mal, même en prenant beaucoup de peine. (We call genius the aptitude that a man receives from nature to do certain things well and easily, that others can only do badly, even with great effort.) In this sense, genius, which concerns all human activity, does not differ much from talent, and Dubos seeks its natural causes in “a happy arrangement of the organs of the brain,” the influence of the land and climate, education, and the frequent company of artists and philosophers. No matter what, the natural gift must be developed by training and work: “The happiest genius can only be perfected by long study.” Charles Batteux, in the first part of his highly influential treatise Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (The BeauxArts reduced to a single principle [1746]), himself defines genius as une raison active qui s’exerce avec art, qui en recherche industrieusement toutes les faces réelles, tous les possibles, qui en dissèque minutieusement les parties les plus fines, en mesure les rapports les plus éloignés; c’est un instrument éclairé qui fouille, qui creuse, qui perce sourdement. (an active reason that is exercised with art, that industriously seeks out all its real aspects, all the possible ones, that meticulously dissects its smallest parts, measuring its most distant relations; it is an enlightened instrument that digs, delves, and dully penetrates.) Genius is thus assimilated into a higher reason, and not into a mysterious power granted to certain men. The imitation of nature remains the supreme law of all arts, but the artist may discover things that have escaped others. Poetic enthusiasm is explained by Batteux in purely psychological terms: Ils [les poètes] excitent eux-mêmes leur imagination jusqu’à ce qu’ils se sentent émus, saisis, effrayés; alors Deus ecce Deus, qu’ils chantent, qu’ils peignent, c’est un Dieu qui les inspire. (They [the poets] excite their imaginations themselves until they feel moved, seized, frightened; then Deus ecce Deus, they sing, they paint, it is a God that inspires them.) It may be Helvetius, in book 5 of his De l’esprit, who does the most to reduce the share of mystery and originality of genius. According to him, genius in artists, but also in philosophers and scientists, consists in “inventing,” but invention is only possible thanks to favorable conditions, and is facilitated by the environment, the tendencies of the period, and sometimes luck. There is a diffuse mass of genius in the world that only a few lucky people manage to express. We thus see a typically French resistance (the origin of which we might find in Cartesian mistrust of imagination) to an exaltation of the creative genius that would make the artist a rival of God. Voltaire, in the article “Génie” in Questions the sterility of analytic thought, which remains content with mechanically deriving consequences from premises given at the start. It is admitted, however, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that ingenium, translated into French as génie, is at work (to different degrees, to be sure) in all individuals and in all spheres of activity, although the manifestations are especially visible in the cases of poets and artists. It is in the eighteenth century that the notion of genius takes on a new meaning and becomes throughout Europe an object of reflection in the domain of aesthetics and, more widely, of philosophy (hence claims for the “birth of genius” in the eighteenth century). In earlier centuries it was admitted that a work of art was born on the one hand from the conjunction of knowledge and craft proper to a given art and capable of being acquired, and on the other hand from a quality peculiar to the individual, a natural gift called “genius.” During and after the eighteenth century, however, the latter quality acquires a greater importance, even an overblown one, almost to the point of causing the other factors to be forgotten. Genius becomes a power of creation ex nihilo, irreducible to any rule and impossible to analyze rationally. At the same time, whereas classical aesthetics rested on the notion of imitation, genius would come to be characterized by the absolute originality of its productions, by their inimitable character. Although this new meaning given to the notion of genius is a European phenomenon, it is interesting to note that it is not uniform—there are national differences in the definition of what is given by “genius,” in the importance accorded to it, in the interpretation to which it is subject. In this sense, we may speak of an “untranslatability” between the notions of genius that appeared in the literature devoted to it in England, Germany, and France. III. English “Enthusiasm” and French “Rationalism” It is generally agreed that Shaftesbury had a decisive influence on the way in which the question of genius was posed in the eighteenth century, by popularizing the notion of “enthusiasm” (Letter concerning Enthusiasm [1708]). Enthusiasm comes from the artist’s agreement with nature, where the latter is considered the “sovereign artist,” “universal plastic nature.” The enthusiasm of the artist is a “disinterested pleasure,” provoked by the presence within him of a divine inspiration, “genius,” which makes him the near kin to, and the equal of, the genius of the world. The artist feels living within him his consubstantiality with the creative act, and Shaftesbury writes that “such a poet is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove” (“Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” [1710], in Characteristics of Men, 111). The artist is not content with imitating the products of nature, but rather participates in the act of production itself. His work, which is the giving of form, creation from an internal model, only makes manifest the presence of the infinite in the finite. Shaftesbury’s “enthusiastic” conception of genius was not taken up immediately or without hesitation in France. In fact, most French authors who discuss genius in the first half of the eighteenth century do so in a much more traditional, “rationalist” manner. Their approach to genius is less metaphysical, and more a search for its “natural” and “moral” causes. Thus for Jean-Baptiste Dubos, in his Réflexions critiques 382 GENIUS Dramatic Poetry [1758], in Diderot, Œuvres complètes, 3:483). The manifestions of the creative power of nature in the artist of genius can only be on the order of the bodily, the perceptual, the affective, the imaginative, and the words fureur, ivresse, mouvements du cœur (“furor,” “intoxication,” “movements of the heart”) are used again and again by Diderot and those who follow him, especially in the Encyclopédie (RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire). Thus, in the article “Génie” in the Encyclopédie (RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire), written by Jean-François de SaintLambert, but to which Diderot seems to have contributed (as suggested by Voltaire in his own article “Génie” in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie), the natural state of genius is movement: “More often than not, this movement produces storms,” and genius is “carried away by a torrent of ideas.” Thus understood, genius is not the special province of artists; philosophy, too, has its geniuses, “whose systems we admire as we would poems, and who construct daring edifices that reason alone does not know how to inhabit.” In philosophy, as in art, “the true and the false are not at all the distinctive features of genius,” and thus “there are very few errors in Locke and too few truths in Lord Shaftesbury: the former, however, is nothing but an extended mind, penetrating and accurate, and the latter is a genius of the first rank.” Like Diderot in his “Encyclopédie” and his Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, Saint-Lambert in “Génie” insists on the contrast between taste (goût) and genius (génie), a question that remains at the center of the problem of genius through Immanuel Kant and even later. “Taste is often distinguished from genius. Genius is a pure gift of nature; what it produces is the work of a moment; taste is the work of study and time. Genius and the sublime shine in Shakespeare like lightning in a long night.” (Throughout the eighteenth century, Shakespeare is the paradigm of genius, insofar as he is irreducible to reason, rules, or taste.) Saint-Lambert adds that the rules of taste are constantly transgressed in works of genius, since “strength, abundance, a certain rudeness, irregularity, sublimity, pathos—these are the characteristics of genius in art.” Though the nature of genius remains impenetrable in the final analysis, it is nonetheless possible to study the conditions that favor or disfavor its manifestation. In this regard, what Diderot says about poetic genius in Discourse on Dramatic Poetry is of general value. There are times, mores, circumstances that are more poetic, more appropriate for creation than others: “In general, the more civilized and polite a people is, the less their habits are poetic: everything is weakened by becoming gentler.” (Vico had already said the same thing in his Scienza nuova [1725–44], while giving the notion of poetry a much wider sense, since for him primitive peoples “create” their own world by means of poetry.) Diderot also calls into question the particular conditions—social, political, economic—that may prevent the genius of an individual from manifesting itself, and he shows in the article “Éclectism” in the Encyclopédie how men can frustrate the designs of nature. This marks the appearance of the romantic theme of the misunderstood genius, the exceptional man condemned to die of hunger, with the concomitant call that the government should subsidize unknown artists. At the same time, interest begins to shift sur l’Encyclopédie (1772), asks: “But fundamentally is genius anything other than talent? What is talent, except the disposition to succeed at an art?” And for Buffon, genius, if it must imitate nature, must follow its slow, laborious, and obstinate step. It must exhibit more reason than heat, since for Buffon, genius is essentially, according to the remark loaned to him by Hérault de Séchelles, “nothing but a greater aptitude for patience” (“qu’une plus grande aptitude à la patience,” Séchelles, Voyages, 11). It is this mistrust, this critical and reductive will that aims to submit genius to the laws of reason, even if they are the laws of “sublime reason,” that those influenced by Shaftesbury oppose. For them, the presence of genius in a work of art is manifested with brutal clarity; it can only be felt, not analyzed, since indeed it deprives the witness of his critical faculties. This is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses, in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768), in the article “Génie”: Ne cherche point, jeune artiste, ce que c’est que le génie. En as-tu: tu le sens en toi-même. N’en as-tu pas: tu ne le connaîtras jamais. Veux-tu savoir si quelque étincelle de ce feu dévorant t’anime ? Cours, vole à Naples écouter les chefs-d’œuvre de Leo, de Durante, de Jommelli, de Pergolèse. Si tes yeux s’emplissent de larmes, si tu sens ton cœur palpiter, si des tressaillements t’agitent, si l’oppression te suffoque dans tes transports, prend le Métastase et travaille. Mais si les charmes de ce grand art te laissent tranquille, si tu n’as ni délire, ni ravissement, si tu ne trouves que beau ce qui transporte, oses-tu demander ce qu’est le génie ? Homme vulgaire, ne profane point ce nom sublime. (Young artist, do not seek out what genius is. If you have it: you feel it in yourself. If you do not have it: you will never know it. Do you wish to know whether some spark of this consuming fire animates you? Run, fly to Naples and listen to the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jommelli, Pergolese. If your eyes fill with tears, if you feel your heart palpitate, if you are overcome with trembling, if you feel suffocated in your raptures, take hold of your collected Metastasio, and get to work. But if the charms of this grand art leave you peaceful, if you have neither delirium nor ravishment, if you find merely beautiful that which is transporting, do you dare to ask what genius is? Vulgar man, do not profane this sublime name.) (Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 5:837–38) IV. Diderot and Genius as “Release of Nature” Denis Diderot, Shaftesbury’s translator, goes the farthest in France in deepening the analysis of genius in Shaftesbury’s direction. He takes up the idea that the mystery of genius is that of creation, but he makes the source of creative genius not God or gods, but rather nature as a general power. For him, genius is a release or expression of nature (“ressort de la nature”), and thus has a biological foundation. As such, it is infallible, like the instincts of animals. This is why, in poetry, it tends to be manifested among those who remain close to nature, like children, women, or primitives (“Poetry wants something enormous, barbarian and savage,” Discourse on GENIUS 383 It is with genius as with other delicate and complex concepts: we may, in individual cases, grasp them by intuition, but they are nowhere exactly delimited and without mixture. They give as much trouble to philosophers seeking a general, clear and precise idea, as Proteus gave Ulysses when he tried to pin him. (Cited by Grappin, La théorie du génie, 224–25) However, Herder insists above all on the idea that the genius of an artist is not a purely individual phenomenon, but only expresses the “mind” or, if you like, the “genius” of a people, and is only manifested when the time is right to receive it. Its forms also vary with the times; from this comes the interest in the study of chants and popular traditions that modern poets must nevertheless not simply parrot, pretending to be “Germanic bards,” but whose authentic inspiration they must recover, as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did. VI. Genius According to Kant We cannot understand the famous pages Kant devotes to the subject of genius in the Critique of Judgment (1790) without taking into account the discussions in Germany since the middle of the eighteenth century, of which we have just seen a few examples. Kant effects a balanced synthesis of these writings and gives them in addition the proper philosophical foundation that was lacking. He thus escapes the reductive rationalism of the French tradition and the mysticism of the Schwärmerei. This balance is shown in the definition Kant gives of genius (§46): Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to Nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude [ingenium] through which Nature gives the rule to Art. (Critique of Judgment, trans. Meredith, 168) Kant thus does not fear using two terms repudiated by the apologists of genius, but for him, nevertheless, the rules (“the beautiful pleases without concepts”) are given in works of art not by reason but by nature. We find here the idea that dominates the thought of the eighteenth century since Shaftesbury. For Shaftesbury, nature “gives the rule to art in the subject” by the “agreement of the faculties.” Imagination and understanding constitute, by their union, genius, which consists in a “happy relation, which science cannot teach nor industry learn, enabling one to find out ideas for a given concept, and, besides, to hit upon the expression for them—the expression by means of which the subjective mental condition induced by the ideas as the concomitant of a concept may be to others” (Critique of Judgment, §49, trans. Meredith, 179–80). The proportion and the disposition of these faculties cannot be produced by the rules of science or imitation; those who have the natural gift by which they manage to do so are “favored by nature,” and their works have an absolutely original character. One of the most important characteristics of this definition is Kant’s limitation of the notion of genius to artistic creation: from the abstract notion of genius to the concrete one, obtained by metonymy, of the “man of genius,” who takes up a place in ideal human typology, alongside the saint and the hero. V. How Germany Takes over the French Word, in Order to Make Genius Its Own The word Genie, borrowed from French, appears in the German vocabulary with Johann Adolf Schlegel’s translation in 1751 of Batteux’s treatise on the Beaux-Arts. (Batteux’s other translators had translated génie by Geist, Naturell, natürliche Fähigkeit, and above all Witz.) Beginning in the eighteenth century, the notion of genius acquires more and more importance in Germany in discussions of art, language, and the history of peoples, especially when the Sturm und Drang literary movement (with political overtones) appears in the 1770s. These discussions obviously reach their full significance in the period in which Germany begins vigorously to affirm itself in literature, philosophy, and politics. The first German authors of treatises on genius recognized that “the French prompted [them] to think about this concept with care,” but very early on their reflection distances itself from its French sources (except Diderot and Rousseau), leading them in new directions. This process happens in stages. Johann Georg Sulzer, with his idea of the “reasonable genius,” Moses Mendelssohn, and even Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, so opposed to French influence, attempt to preserve what they can of the “rationalist” critique, notably in the demands of rules and taste, while recognizing that genius, as an expression of nature and creative originality, had its own inalienable rights. With Johann Georg Hamann, the break becomes radical and violent, and the superior rights of genius in art and life are imperiously demanded. Influenced by Rousseau, but especially by the English poet Edward Young—author of the celebrated Night Thoughts (1742–45), in which he insists on the absolutely “original” and inimitable character of works of genius, which cannot be discussed but only admired—Hamann adds mystical overtones to these thoughts on genius. Faith has nothing to do with reason, and what faith is in life, genius is in art. His Socratic Memorabilia (1760) applies the Socratic method to the notion of genius, which we may see or feel, but never understand. Genius embraces the past and future, and only poetry is capable of capturing its visions. For Hamann, who goes farther in this sense than Diderot, genius cannot be known by contemporaries. The man who has it is above the crowd, misunderstood and mocked by it, since he is often close to madness, and sometimes there are “incidents at the border between genius and madness.” It is not Apollo but Bacchus who governs the arts. Genius has two faces: one denies and holds reason in contempt, the other affirms, creates, and produces: “My crude imagination has always forbade me from imagining a creative genius deprived of genitalia” (letter to Herder, 1760). Johann Gottfried Herder extends Hamann’s ideas in the direction of literary nationalism, a notion that flourishes in Germany, and then in the whole of Europe. In many writings, he comes back to the theme of genius, which, for him as well, is indefinable: 384 GENRE Dubos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture. Edited by Pierre Jean Mariette. 2 vols. First published 1719. New ed., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967. Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Fleck, Christina Juliane. Genie und Wahrheit: Der Geniegedanke im Sturm und Drang. Marburg, Ger.: Tectum, 2006. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen, Ger.: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960. Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall: Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. London: Continuum, 2004. Grappin, Pierre. La théorie du génie dans le préclassicisme allemand. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by M. J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nihjoff, 1974. . The Critique of Judgment. Edited by Nicholas Walker. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. First published in 1790. Klein, Jürgen. “Genius, Ingenium, Imagination: Aesthetic Theories of Production from the Renaissance to Romanticism.” In The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, edited by Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein, 19–62. Amsterdam, Neth.: Rodopi, 1996. La Harpe, Jean-François de. Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne. Paris: Didier, 1834. Mathore, Georges, and Algirdas Julien Greimas. “La naissance du génie au XVIIIe siècle: Étude lexicologique.” Le Français Moderne 25 (1957): 256–72. Murray, Bradley. “Kant on Genius and Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 2 (2007): 199–214. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dictionnaire de musique. First published in 1768. In Œuvres complètes, vol. 5. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1995. Translation by William Waring: A Dictionary of Music. London, 1779. Séchelles, Hérault de. Voyages à Montbard. Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1890. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wang, Orrin N. C. “Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius.” Diacritics 30, no. 4 (2000): 15–37. Nature prescribes the rule through genius not to science but to art, and this also only in so far as it is to be fine art. (Critique of Judgment, §46, trans. Meredith, 168) We must not confuse genius with “powerful brain”: Newton can clarify and teach his methods; Homer or Wieland cannot. In his Anthropology (1798), Kant returns to the question of genius, “this mystical name,” and seems to widen the term to spheres other than the fine arts, identifying it as the “exemplary originality of talent [Talent]”: thus Leonardo da Vinci is “a vast genius [Genie] in many domains,” but we may consider that these “many domains” relate to the “arts” in general, not science, so that there is no real contradiction with what is said in the Critique of Judgment. We also find, in Anthropology, a remark at the linguistic level whose “nationalist” character is revealing about German sensibilities of the time regarding genius: “We Germans let ourselves be persuaded that the French have a word for this in their own language, while we have no word in ours but must borrow one from the French. But the French have themselves borrowed it from Latin (genius), where it means nothing other than an ‘individual spirit’ [eigentümlicher Geist]” (Kant, Anthropology, §57, trans. Gregor, 93–94). Finally, Kant asks whether the world profits from great geniuses because they often cut new paths and open up new perspectives, or whether “mechanical minds” that lean on “canes and crutches to the understanding” have not contributed more to the growth of sciences and the arts. He does not answer the question, saying only that we must be careful of “men called geniuses,” who are often only charlatans. VII. The Twilight of Genius With romanticism, we witness an apotheosis of genius, corresponding to a veritable “sacralization of art in bourgeois society,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method. Today, we still speak of the “genius” of an artist, but the notion is hardly an object of theoretical reflection, and we may say, again with Gadamer, that we are witnessing the “twilight of genius.” Paul Valéry, in Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, reacts against the idea that a sleepwalking unconsciousness, quasi divine, mysteriously inspiring, presides over artistic creation. That is, in effect, the “observer’s” point of view. If we ask the artist, he is much more down-to-earth about it; he speaks of his technique, not his genius. Alain Pons REFS.: Batteux, Charles. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe. Critical ed. by J. R. Mantion. Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1989. Bruno, Paul William. “The Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in Kant’s Third Critique.” Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1999. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Diderot, Denis. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Roger Lewinter. Paris: Club français du livre, 1969–73. Dieckmann, Herbert. “Diderot’s Conception of Genius.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 (1941): 151–82. GENRE “Genre” is caught up in several different networks, all derived from the Greek genos [γένος] (from gignesthai [γίγνεσθαι], “to be born, become”) and its Latin calque genus. These networks are constantly interfering with one another. I. Biology and Classification The biological network is the starting point, as witnessed by the Homeric sense of genos: “race, line.” It is discussed by Aristotle, in particular in his zoological classifications, in contraposition to eidos [εἶδος], “genus/species.” See PEOPLE. This network of classifications, in which “genre” takes the meaning of “category, type, species,” is notably used in the theory of literature, with the question of “literary genres” (Ger. Gattung). See ERZÄHLEN and HISTORY. Cf. FICTION, RÉCIT, STYLE. II. Ontological and Logical Networks The more philosophically pertinent network is nonetheless that of ontology, as in the case of eidos: see IDEA and, in particular, SPECIES. Genos may thus designate kinds, that is to say also the senses, of being. See PEOPLE / RACE / NATION, Box 5; see also ANALOGY, HOMONYM, TO BE, and the explanation of the notion of “category” in ESTI, Box 1. GERMAN 385 French, Italian, Spanish, etc. This late attempt at devising a properly philosophical discourse from within the language of others bore fruit massively and quickly. Philosophical German takes shape over the course of about three decades, with an explosive force that was to last more than a century, and is in certain respects still not finished: many concepts of today’s universal philosophical discourse are rooted in (and sometimes even make direct use of) the philosophical German of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This historical peculiarity was also manifested in philosophical literature in German. There are, for instance, only a few incursions of German into Leibniz’s French (his use of the comma, for instance), but traces of Latin abound in the German of philosophers: not only a general rhetoric and a syntax dominated by centuries of scholastic training, but also a lexicon that is often directly transposed—though sometimes varying from author to author—into the new theoretical idiom. Latin phantoms often continue to haunt new German semantic developments, in parentheses, in italics, etc. A tenacious habit is formed, an embarrassing academic tic that is no longer mocked by the laughter of great comedians: a mania for the concept cited in a foreign language, first in Latin, notably in German texts, and now in German, quoted, for example, in French texts. Thus the reception of German philosophers, in France preponderantly but elsewhere as well, has been marked by a pathology (in the Kantian sense of the term) that goes hand in hand with defeatism and renunciations in the work of translation: a typical (often magical) response to alterity, which we see less among the English, Italians, and others than among the French translators of German philosophy, and still less in French translations of texts in English, Italian, and so on. The respectful, even timid approach to which this has led ends up constructing jetties or breakwaters concentrating difficulties in interpretation around specific notions, usually in the substantival form, and the constant practice in German of nominalization has encouraged this fetishism. We owe to this attitude particular linguistic gestures: a contrite resort to neologisms, a mortified preservation of the German term in French, and to an extent in other languages as well (e.g., Dasein). These fixations on the paradigm revive in philosophy the Byzantine debates about words conceived as markers composed of piled-up stones to which everything can be attached: ex-votos, scrolls full of glosses, tresses of exegeses. These fixed points, veritable intersections of glosses, are so many occasions to depart from the continuous flow of another’s discourse to sing the praises of one’s own text. But this almost structural reflex long remained blind to the risks it involved: the notions in question are semantic tumuli in which political, ideological, and in general conflictual stakes are constantly appearing and overlapping, thus dividing readers in their own country. One philosopher concentrates several dimensions of this spreading syndrome: Hegel. On the one hand, he seems to have a vague awareness of it and to try to escape it by practicing an autonomous, relatively new, and innovative language, at the risk of being accused of obscurity. But on the other hand, the very success of his attempt, along with the difficulty of translating and commenting on his discourse, The ontological network is thus related to the logical network, as we may see in the terms “generic” and “general,” as opposed to the singular and the universal: see PROPERTY, UNIVERSALS. III. The Contemporary Debate over “Gender” and “Sex” The biological sense of “engenderment” cuts across debates on sexual identity (male or female), which take up the grammatical debates about the “gender” of nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter): see SEX, Box 1. The English “gender” is an example; its translation into French as genre understood in the sense of sexuation is clumsy, whereas the German Geschlecht easily refers not only to line, generation, people, nation, race, but also to sexual difference: see, besides GENDER and GESCHLECHT, SEX, and HUMANITY (esp. MENSCHHEIT). GERMAN Syntax and Semantics in Modern Philosophical German: Hegel and Kant v. AUFHEBEN, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, DASEIN, ERSCHEINUNG, LOGOS, SEIN, WORD ORDER Philosophical German appears comparatively late, alongside a persistent and influential Latin idiom. This double circumstance informs the history of efforts to translate into and from philosophy written in German, and in particular it explains the fetishism that attaches to substantives that are supposed to be “untranslatable” (and are in fact largely left untranslated: Dasein, Aufhebung, etc.), to the detriment of syntax and context. Hegel’s German, which was very early criticized for being unreadable, illustrates the problem in a concentrated form. Confronted by the regular architectonics of Kant’s prose, Hegel advocates a different syntax characterized by its economy, by its expansion of the philosophical lexicon, and by transitions and entailments wrought through by negations—and disconcerting for this reason to the translator. However, a detailed study of Hegel’s texts, in which a return to ordinary languages is associated with a rigorous effort of conceptualization, shows that these features provide a major point of entry into the Hegelian universe. At the same time the peculiarity and flexibility of Hegelian syntax influence a philosophical terminology that forces the translator to engage in a difficult process of arbitration in order to follow its movement. I. Semantic Phantoms and Syntactical Energy: What Kind of Esotericism? Until the end of the eighteenth century, there was little German philosophy in the German language. With a few exceptions—which are not, moreover, particularly noteworthy (Plouquet, Knutzen, Thomasins)—German philosophers wrote in Latin or in French: thus, up to 1770, Althusius, Weigel, Kepler, Agrippa, Sebastian Franck, Paracelsus, Leibniz, and Kant. At the same time, since the beginning of the sixteenth century, religious discourse had been establishing itself in the language of the people (that is the meaning of the adjective deutsch), and from the twelfth century forward there had been a literature in German that had assimilated foreign traditions—Latin, 386 GERMAN Today, we can adopt this scheme for reading Hegel at the outset (moreover, in the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel analyzes this “advantage” enjoyed by the later reader), but Hegel’s contemporaries and first readers did not see things that way. Schelling complained explicitly of the headaches that reading the Phenomenology gave him (though these might also have been caused by the book’s anti-Schelling polemics). Goethe and Schiller concocted a pedagogical plan that was supposed to allow Hegel, by assiduously consulting a mentor in clarity, to achieve transparency in his discourse (this did not work). As for contemporary reviews, they all deplore “the repetition of formulas and the monotone aspect.” In other words everyone at least acted as if the difficulty of Hegel’s work had to do with his manner (people fell back on his Swabian origins, his religious training, and the influence of the esotericism of the mystics) and not with the very essence of his philosophy, even though in several places Hegel himself takes up the question of legibility and denounces the esotericism of philosophies of the intuition of the absolute, their obscurity and their elitism. This paradox frames the whole question of Hegel’s language. Heine, followed in this by the left-wing Hegelians, proposed a practico-rational response to this paradox: Hegel did not want to be understood “immediately”; he was working for the long term and had first to overcome the barrier of censorship. That, Heine says, is why Hegel’s language is verklausuliert, hard to understand, en-claused or perhaps “claused-off”—it is not a pathological “manner” from which his prose suffers, imposed and ultimately external, but the objective, strategic effect of a political decision: a mode of the freedom of thought. The question seems not to have been treated in itself. For instance, Koyré’s study, which in theory deals with it, drifts into fragmentary expositions of the system and ultimately proves disappointing. Inversely, Hegel’s language is often discussed in more general books, notably in connection with a gloss on this or that term—which is a way of not entering into Hegel’s way of expressing himself. However, we can mention a work in recent French philosophical literature that is very interesting from this point of view: Cathérine Malabou’s L’Avenir de Hegel, which investigates the notion of plasticity in connection with Hegel’s way of expressing himself and studies in depth the relationship between the predicative proposition and the speculative proposition. II. Modern Philosophical Language: The Kantian Model and Its Hegelian Critique We must first return briefly to the origin of this difficult language and look into Hegel’s linguistic culture. The allusion to Hegel’s “Swabian speech” (in contrast to that of Berlin, the Rhineland, etc.) connotes a general practice of discourse oriented toward the inner and a weakness of dialogic effort (which Swabian poets compensated by the power of an affective movement toward the other), in short, a kind of regional psychology that is redolent of the Pietist stable and that is supposed to manifest itself also in Hölderlin, Hegel’s friend and interlocutor. Robert Minder’s study of the Swabian Fathers goes in this direction by emphasizing the influence of religious training and the practice of using a secret code. But there is no lack of counterexamples, beginning with other Swabians like Schelling and Schiller. has encouraged the reproduction and return of the very behavior he was opposing. This was also a way of confining his philosophy to his own field and protecting his successors against it: the most Hegelian of these successors, Marx, also played the card of criticizing Hegelian discourse qua discourse. Today, this philosophical language seems to have had its day. Only Heidegger followed its tradition of adopting the linguistic backdrop and foundation of human experience, with consequences that are at once related and very different. Philosophical German seems to have fallen back on an ordinary, translatable, clear discourse that can be put into English. But the subterranean influence of Hegel’s philosophical language on modern theoretical discourses in history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology in the broad sense remains considerable and deserves close examination insofar as it has created a new relationship between the totality of the elements of discourse and thought about what is. It exhibits a kind of general relativity that disturbs the previously accepted space-time of speech: the relationship between void and plenitude in discourse is inverted, and syntactical energy alone deploys the conceptual formations that are inconceivable outside this movement of positing and negating. The ordinary, iconic base-10 numeral system collapses and along with it the pantheon of neo-theological concepts: accounting is carried out on the binary basis of what is and what is not; language tends toward the base 2 of identity and difference or, to put it another way, toward the logic (the speech) of being. This inversion has cast Hegel’s writings into a kind of dark night. Hegel is one of the philosophers about whom the question of readability is almost immediately raised: and since this question is practically never posed in connection with other German philosophers of the period, including Fichte and Schelling, who can also sometimes be “hard to follow,” it seems that this difficulty constitutes the peculiarity of Hegel without necessarily being conceived as an effect of the singularity of his thought. To it we can oppose (and this opposition also has to do with him and constitutes the essence of his problem) the great clarity of Jacobi, Reinhold, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and other writers and pose the question the other way around: Is it not, according to Hegel, precisely the clarity of a philosopher’s writing that reveals that the truth is not displayed, but simulated, play-acted—or even outmoded, old, familiar? Not only are Hegel’s works—if we set aside the notes on his lectures made by students and posthumous publishers—all difficult to read, but they seem to say that it cannot be otherwise. The difficulty of reading them is part of the experience of the truth, of the pain and effort of work. The dressing gown of the do-nothing philosopher mentioned at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Mind includes, a contrario, an allusion to the “clarity and distinctness” of Dutch windows and the comfort of the familiarity of the Cartesian “stove-heated room.” Finally, the very form of some of his texts shows them to be based on the necessity of an initial obscurity: the paragraphs dictated in their rigorous form are then commented upon in the author’s explanatory Remarks, and then re-commented upon and elucidated in clearer language by the editors, in the form of additions. GERMAN 387 Not only did Kantian discourse translate rather well, but it was good for certain philosophical temperaments: Kant’s general ground plan, the reliability of his definitions, the modesty of the critical ambition, all exhibit a set of reassuring reference points. This quality strongly contributed, for example, to the consolidation of the Kantian moment in the pair of thinkers that provided the foundation for teaching philosophy in French schools: Descartes and Kant. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kant’s language established itself: everyone spoke it, reworked it, adapted it. Everyone except Hegel, who was very familiar with it, but rejected most of it, while at the same time benefiting from the reworking that Fichte was the first to subject it to. Confronted by this language, Hegel developed, mainly during his stay in Jena, an apparently obscure, even oneiric idiom whose functioning is completely different and presents, among other characteristics, two symptoms. The first of these is the nonexistence, indeed the impossibility, of a Hegel-Lexikon comparable to the Kant-Lexikon. In this case there are only lists of the occurrences of terms, heavily overloaded by the proliferation of the latter, detailed in the order of the volumes of Hegel’s complete works. The notions and concepts of Hegel’s philosophy cannot be detailed. They exist meaningfully only in the totality of the text; dictionary classifications break down precisely the moment they are found. Or again: Hegel’s notions and concepts exist practically only in syntagmatic expressions. The philosophical reader used to rigorous codes is frustrated: the lack of this tool elicits a malaise that was sufficiently foreseeable for Hegel to warn the reader about it in his preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, for instance. The second symptom—which is no doubt connected with the first, butnot for practical reasons—is the Hegelian corpus’s resistance to translation. Historically (so far as French is concerned), translation began with a work that was not written by Hegel, the Aesthetics, translated by Charles Bénard in the early 1840s, and finished with what was the most “completely his,” the Phenomenology of Mind and the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, with translations appearing almost into the second half of the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia, translated by Vera in the second half of the nineteenth century, represents an intermediate linguistic state insofar as it was published with Hegel’s explanatory remarks and additions written by the editor after Hegel’s death. We might add to these symptoms a comparative analysis of the different “Hegelian idioms” constructed in French to translate Hegel. While Hegel did not have an opportunity to really consider these symptoms (even though he was the first philosopher to practice what Althusser would call a “symptomatic reading,” or lecture symptomale, to psychoanalyze his time and to conceive moments and figures as situations), he did think about his difference from other philosophical languages. His is a language that knows it is different, that wishes to be different, that shapes and elaborates its difference, and if necessary exhibits it brutally: Hegel writes against Kant, against Kant’s “barbarous” lingo and his dogmatism of subjectivity, which overthrew, to be sure, the dogmatism of objectivity (roughly speaking, eighteenth-century rationalism) but which in a way still speaks the latter’s language, insofar Nonetheless, this idiosyncrasy plays a role in a general philosophical language that had been created not long before and had already imposed itself: that of Wolff, Kant, and Fichte, revised by Bardili and Reinhold. But if Kant was quite early on considered the creator of the German (indeed, European) philosophical language, it was especially as the founder of a technical vocabulary that some contemporary commentators already judged to be unfamiliar, esoteric, and obscure. What characterizes this modern philosophical language? In the first place the abundance of vocabulary and its specialization, running counter to its ordinary meanings and its ordinary forms: in their great dictionary, the Grimm brothers expressed their astonishment at the philosophical meaning that Kant gave to the word Anschauung, which goes back to the traditional intuitio with all its ambiguities. Then the extreme length of the sentences and the production of heavily loaded phrases, to which, however, the reader quickly grows accustomed and which are explained in a way by the recourse to an unproblematic syntax, persistent rhetorical procedures, and regular reference points, which are themselves situated in the ground plan of an architecture that is already self-explanatory. Kant’s language can thus be approached in an “optical” manner, through geographical intuition: the massiveness of the load implies the simplicity of the articulations. The critical continents each have their own vocabulary, their axes. Only a little practice is required to get one’s bearings, and in the end one also discovers many of the characteristics of Latin style. It is thus a kind of writing that translates well, provided that an effort is made not to forget anything, that one places the commas correctly, and that one has correctly understood the order of modifiers in the German sentence—in order to avoid, for example, making the traditional and in fact rather stupefying error made by French translators who render reine praktische Vernunft as raison pure pratique (practical pure reason), which is a kind of contradiction, whereas the German phrase means “pure practical reason,” as opposed to impure practical reason, that is, to technical reason. This constitutes a double, ongoing offense against the German language and against Kant’s thought. If there is somewhere in his work the hypothesis of a practical pure reason (as opposed to what? Certainly not to a pure pure reason!), it could be called, hypothetically, nothing other than praktische reine Vernunft. The reason for this error has to do with the conditions under which the first translators were working: they were not true speakers of the original language; they translated German as if it were Latin and thus reproduced the modifiers in the order in which they occur in the German phrase. In addition, this writing justifies the recourse to lexicons: even during Kant’s lifetime, as early as 1786, lexicalization had begun. Carl Christian Ehrhart Schmid had undertaken to redistribute the Kantian system alphabetically by listing in order the meanings of technical expressions. Kant himself, moreover, did not hesitate to engage in operations of self-lexicalization and definition for which he often provided the Latin equivalent, an attitude virtually nonexistent in Hegel, who was fundamentally hostile to specialized onomastics. 388 GERMAN in a single work of his whole pages that are not stricto sensu “Hegelian,” particularly in the prefaces and introductions. But precisely these “protected” pages are also the site of a struggle between discourses: even in the phases of presentation, ordinary language is rapidly enveloped and invested by phenomenological or speculative discourse, and this is shown by the ruptures, anacolutha, and other anomalies that rapidly increase, to the confusion of the reader. In sum, what characterizes Hegel’s language is superficially a certain vocabulary but more profoundly a mutation of the economy of the syntagma and the paradigm in three major aspects. 1. The invasion of the lexical by the syntagmatic: early on, and in a massive way, Hegelian discourse reassembles, from the array of syntactic material before him, what we may call “empty words.” By “empty words” we mean those that are now excluded by computer applications, such as articles, personal pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, common verbal forms—auxiliaries: not only does their mass threaten to saturate research procedures, but the very interest of these words is considered to be nil. In Hegel this procedure of gathering “empty words” has the effect of producing notions that are not fixed in an iconic representation or a traditional semantic content but instead express moments of process or pure relationships. For example, Sein für anderes, Anderssein, An sich and Ansich, Für sich and Fürsich, an und für sich, das an und fürsich seiende, bei sich sein, in sich sein, etc. It is very difficult to make isolated iconic uses of these terms, which can exist only in the movement of sentences in which they slip one into another and divide. In Hegel there are even phases of explicit interest in less common empty words, which he uses in major ways, even as concepts: also, auch, daher, dieses, eins, etwas, hier, ist, insofern, etc. The bulk of these terms easily absorbs the few elements of ordinary philosophical discourse that were already constituted in the same way and which we encounter in other philosophers writing in German: das Ich, das Sein, das Wesen. In the same way this mass absorbs substantivized infinitives (das Erkennen, das Denken, etc.), that is, it inserts process, the in-finite, the active verbal element into frameworks usually reserved for nominal substance. We might say the same about the numerous substantivized adjectives: das Wahre takes precedence over die Wahrheit. In the works’ first printed editions, where the first letter of a substantivized adjective is not systematically capitalized, this slippage leads to another difficulty in reading, forcing the reader to choose between this form (e.g., “the True”) and the other possibility, namely the elision of a substantive later picked up again, and which must then be found correctly in everything that precedes (e.g., “true knowledge”). Finally, as a result of a sort of “general syntactical preference,” Hegel often does not repeat, when he recalls it, a substantive that has been elided but instead substitutes for it a pronoun that is identifiable only by its gender, whereas the reflex of the reader (for instance, the translator) is to repeat this substantive, adding a deictic. The effect of this procedure is to as it dogmatically mimes—even in the arrangement of the table of contents—objectivity. In the same way but more politically, Hegel repeatedly declares his opposition to special languages like “the language spoken by Molière’s physicians”: that of German jurists and Kantian philosophers. To explain, he uses a democratic argument that may now seem comic when we realize how narrow his own informed readership is. But his criticism of the esotericism of Schelling’s absolute knowledge is not based on a criticism of Schelling’s discourse (which he long spoke—and created—with Schelling, to the point that we cannot always tell who wrote some of the articles in their Kritisches Journal der Philosophie). Hegel’s hostility to Kantian discourse ends up taking an extremely aggressive form. A good illustration of this is found in the chapter on Kant in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Werke, 20:330ff.). At the beginning of the paragraph devoted to the term “transcendental,” Hegel calls such expressions “barbarous.” A little later, commenting on the expression “transcendental aesthetics,” he almost criticizes Kant’s recourse to the etymological meaning of “aesthetic” by contrasting it with the modern sense: “Nowadays aesthetics means the knowledge of the beautiful.” A few lines further on, he quotes Kant’s statement regarding space: “Space is no empirical Notion which has been derived from outward experiences,” and he comments, “But the Notion is never really anything empiric: it is in barbarous forms like this that Kant, however, always expresses himself.” A whole series of such annoyed asides might be collected in Hegel’s works. Here is one more, which occurs not long after the ones already cited: “The ego is therefore the empty, transcendental subject of our thoughts, that moreover becomes known only through its thoughts; but of what it is in itself we cannot gather the least idea. (A horrible distinction! For thought is nothing more or less than the ‘in-itself.’)” This criticism does not bear solely on Kant’s language. Basically, it is aimed at Kant’s way of doing philosophy, presenting it as a simple translation of the metaphysics of the Understanding (the Enlightenment) into subjective dogmatism. Kant describes Reason, all right, but in an unreflected, empirical way. His philosophy lacks concept (Begriff), and he uses only “thoughts of the Understanding” (Gedanken). As a result, and contrary to appearances, Kantianism lacks philosophical abstraction, it “threshes out” ordinary logic: its abstraction is no more than the dead abstraction of already existing concepts; it is not work, effectiveness, creation. Which explains why in other circumstances Hegel is capable, paradoxically, of reproaching Kant for his abstract discourse. III. Hegel’s Language: A Mutation of the Economy of the Syntagma and the Paradigm Confronted by this situation, Hegel writes a philosophical prose that he considers nondogmatic (neither formal nor mythical), nonabstract, substantial, and well expressed, but which we, on the other hand, often find very abstract, confusing, cryptic, coded, and poorly expressed. How should we describe this language? Before characterizing it in any way, we must repeat that the specifically Hegelian language is not uniformly distributed. Not only have we seen that his work has several strata, but also we find GERMAN 389 soi, etc. but loses the strong correlation with the paradigm of identity (dasselbe, selber, etc.). In comparison with the Kantian sentence, the Hegelian procedure of arranging-and-loading is completely original. We can intuitively perceive the content of the great, relatively symmetrical Kantian sentences, but in Hegel symmetrical periods are immediately destroyed, bent, and rendered unilateral, or else they twist themselves into ropes because the reversals of symmetries are not rhetorical aspects (specular reminders) of the external exposition but always the movement of the thing itself. Negativity is constantly at work and requires a strong and persistent effort on the part of anyone who wants to recollect the whole. This aspect is connected with Hegel’s hostility to “pictures,” whose apprehension through reading is never truly free of representation (the concept’s being outside itself) and finally emerges in a consciousness that is more religious than philosophical. In Hegel, “picture-like” is clearly pejorative and connotes an address to a weak sort of thought. The necessity of attentive memory, of reading step by step, and of rereading constitutes the difficulty of philosophical work, as opposed to approaches to the true that do not plunge into the thing itself. IV. The Beginning of the Phenomenology of Mind This verbal strategy excludes direct dialogue with the discourse of others at the same time that Hegel’s philosophy presents itself as a pure and simple dialectical collection of what is already there in contemporary philosophical discourse. Thus the question of the beginning is raised. How can one begin without proceeding like traditional authors, for example, by referring to differences with others, or by definitions? It might be interesting to examine the beginning of the beginning: for example, the first sentences of the first paragraph of the introduction to the Phenomenology, which is itself a kind of prolegomenon, an initiation. The introduction is formally distinct from the content of the experience of consciousness, of which phenomenology is the science, the knowledge, and in a way already the system. It corresponds to the chapter on Absolute Knowledge, in which all the moments intersect and overlap, and therefore in which there are no longer any moments, where knowledge is complete (and can begin to be set forth as the true). It is thus not a moment but the empty concept of knowledge whose possibility is postulated as knowledge of what is, of the in-itself, of the Absolute, and as a knowledge that cannot be immediate and can attain truth (science as system, the pure logos of being) only by fulfilling and abolishing this difference in a history that is at the same time a demonstration, a succession of verifications in the thing itself. The person who begins this history is also the one who rejects the last philosopher to have conceived this difference between knowledge and being in itself, that is, Kant. And thus, the first moment in the Phenomenology is devoted to Kant. But it is also devoted to another negation, another difference: the one that the philosophy of identity situates between absolute knowledge and natural consciousness. And Hegel’s point of departure consists in thinking simultaneously of the unity of the Kantian procedure and the philosophy force the reader to memorize, a historicization of the act of reading at the expense of habits of spatial orientation on the material surface of words, the presence of a capital letter on substantives, etc. The result is a great frequency of identical or quasiidentical forms, which creates an impression of rhapsodic repetition and monotony, sometimes elevated by flights of rhetoric that are polemical or almost lyrical and that break all the more strongly with the whole: suddenly there is a whiff of cultural substance, images or concrete references, a proverb, a quotation of another author that plunges the reader into a second state. In the Phenomenology this often happens at the end of chapters, and in the last chapter, but in general Hegel does not use quotation marks to set off quotations, nor does he use proper names, references, and footnotes, just as he avoids examples, metaphors, and comparisons—the substantial baggage that cannot be unpacked without leaving the movement of the dialectical development. 2. This effect of monotony is made stronger by the simplification of the specifically syntactical material. For example, we find in Hegel a near monopoly of the present tense. Heidegger calls that his “vulgarity” and reproaches him for it. Similarly, connectives and modals are reduced to a few that assume identical logicalrhetorical functions: wenn, dann (inverted clause), so, hiermit, somit, indem, erst, nur, oder, überhaupt, bloß, rein, allein, nun. This relative sobriety seems to be induced by the phenomenon we have just described, the invasion of the lexical by the syntagmatic in Hegel’s prose: from a strictly stylistic point of view, by combining with the richness of Schelling’s syntactical vocabulary, for example, or by practicing through variation a pseudosemanticization of syntactical words, the Hegelian text seems to have arrived at a complete disequilibrium, a sort of monster. Nevertheless, the deepest reason for the extreme syntactical austerity in Hegel’s prose goes to the heart of his project: what applies to the conceptual lexicon applies also to the syntactical one. 3. The result (and partly the cause) of all this is a prose that makes connections and transitions into so many “decisive” moments. Much is at stake in the emergence and abolition of correlations, which constitutes a major difficulty for French translations that seek to depart from the spatial successiveness of the movement (by reorganizing the order of words in the French manner: that is more or less the tendency of Jean Hyppolite, and we can say that it is encouraged by the tradition of Kant translations that have no difficulty with transitions and displacements within vast wholes whose interior is in some sense open), or to escape the linguistic continuum of semantic networks by recourse to neologisms (or quasi-neologisms: Anschauung, anschauen: intuitionner; Einsicht: intellection; Gleichheit, gleich, systematically rendered as égalité or égal to the detriment of the much more frequent meaning of qualitative identity, or even resemblance), or by setting up new networks; for example, by translating Selbst as soi, one establishes a false network with the reflexive pronomial soi of en soi, pour 390 GERMAN The expression “es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß” has a quasi-trivial status (which the French translator assumes by adding “tout à fait” (“entirely”), as one might say “mais naturellement” (of course). Similarly, the expressions “die Sache selbst,” “das wirkliche Erkennen,” “was in Wahrheit ist,” “das Absolute,” “sich zu verständigen,” are all in the ordinary register: the thing itself with which we are concerned, true knowledge, the true, the absolute, coming to agreement, etc. And at the same time Hegel delivers a first packet of rigorous conceptualization, made more precise and stabilized by more than a year of labor on the text of the whole of the Phenomenology of Mind: the Vorstellung, représentation in the French translation, “supposition” and “assumption” in the English, also has the precise sense that Hegel assigns to it in the Phenomenology as a whole, in its definitive hierarchy. The statement is already virtually turned around: to say what follows the word daß is nothing but, is only, Vorstellung, representation, and furthermore merely natural representation, because representation is the concept’s being outside itself. Sache selbst (the thing itself) will be the principal marching order for the whole dialectical procedure (insofar as it is not external); wirklich already connotes the effectiveness that is not a pure and simple thingly or abstract “reality”; was in Wahrheit ist can also be read in an ontological sense as what, in truth, is; and verständigen, which designates agreement, also connotes the universality of the understanding, Verstand. But it is not solely a matter of intertextual echoes. The words natürliche Vorstellung, with which the Phenomenology begins, also refer to the current state of philosophical reflection. This moment in the history of philosophy, Hegel’s text proposes, has become a “nature,” an immediate given whose aporias (here, the richest knowledge is at the same time the poorest: aiming at the truth, one ends up in the clouds of error) necessarily imply that the way of dialectical doubt that the opening of the preface describes is indeed commencing. If Kant is in fact the subject here, then it is Kant insofar as he was the last to pose the question of knowledge and thus to walk off with the philosophical jackpot. Thus it is a strange Kant, fairly “Lockified” and revised by Fichte. And still, the critique of the organon “with which one grasps oneself” and of the milieu “through which one perceives” also refers to the very beginnings of philosophy. And thus we are already in the thing itself in the Hegelian sense, apparently devoting ourselves to avoiding a particular way of missing it. This will be the schema for the writing of the whole Phenomenology of Mind; Hegel’s opening sentences describe, capture, and instantiate the effect on his writing of a procedure that consists in designating moments that already contain other moments and are already no longer themselves. Or, to put it another way, Hegel’s language cannot not be a mere figure, simply a figure, of common language, of the language common to the greatest number of philosophers, and finally of common language as such, insofar as this common language always tends to test once again its “economic” essence, its aptitude for elementary reduction, that is, it tends to reinvest always once again in the word’s pure time, leaving it to mute indices to designate images with a gesture, even if of identity. To that end Hegel explains that Kant merely reflects common sense, that he simply follows Locke’s thought to its logical outcomes. Kant cannot, in fact, know, because he does not move beyond the understanding and does not subject the critique to a dialectical verification. Critical thought is a delusion. Idealism, on the other hand, remains contingent and arbitrary: it does not demonstrate the indifference of the subject and the object but studies each of them in itself, compares and identifies them: identity is constructed, it is not an autogenous result. The Phenomenology continues: Kant’s philosophy and the philosophy of identity are abstract and based on presuppositions. Kant simply conceives and posits the abstract difference between Being and Knowledge, whereas Fichte and Schelling conceive the abstract identity of being and knowledge. But all of them, under this identity, developed all the forms of the totality, which can now be recuperated: this is the Hegelian windfall. This recuperation is that of the modern, atomized subject whom it is also a question of reconciling with himself, with his culture, with the organic, with religion, the state, ethics, etc., in an adequate language. It is in this context that the beginning of the Phenomenology of Mind should be read. The first sentence is both a stasis in the discourse of common sense and a switching-on of Hegelian discourse: Es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß, eh in der Philosophie an die Sache selbst, nemlich an das wirkliche Erkennen dessen, was in Wahrheit ist, gegangen wird, es nothwendig sey, vorher über das Erkennen sich zu verständigen, als das Werkzeug, wodurch man des Absoluten sich bemächtige, oder als das Mittel, durch welches hindurch man es erblicke, betrachtet wird. (C’est une représentation tout à fait naturelle de penser qu’en philosophie, avant d’aborder la chose elle-même, savoir, la connaissance effective de ce qui est en vérité, il est nécessaire de s’accorder préalablement sur la connaissance que l’on considère comme l’outil qui permettra de s’emparer de l’absolu, ou comme le moyen au travers duquel on l’aperçoit.) (Trans. J.-P. Lefebvre, Paris: Aubier, 1991, 79) (It is natural to suppose that, before philosophy enters upon its subject proper—namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is—it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it.) (Trans. J. B. Baillie, 1910; New York, Harper, 1967, 131) (It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it.) (Trans. A. V. Miller, 1977; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 46) GESCHICHTLICH 391 prepositions (an, ab, aus, auf, durch, etc.) each by the same French preposition? The statements would be jammed. In Hegel, no doubt more than in other philosophers, semantic units, semantemes, are themselves subject to movement. If iconic immobility eventually seizes them, it will be because Hegel has lost the game. It is not impossible that he himself may have sometimes contributed to this sclerosis. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre REFS.: Glockner, Hermann, ed. Hegel-Lexikon. Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1957. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Koyré, Alexandre. Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1971. Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Translated by L. During. New York: Routledge, 2005. Minder, Robert. “Herrlichkeit chez Hegel, ou le Monde des Pères Souabes.” Etudes germaniques (1951): 275–302. O’Neill Surber, Jere. Hegel and Language. Albany: State University of New York, 2006. Warminski, Andrzej. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Züfle, Manfred. Prosa der Welt. Einsiedeln, Switz.: Johannes, 1992. these images are complicated concepts that are supposed to be heavy with history. V. The Dynamicization of Semantemes What is at issue should not, however, be understood under cover of a cluster of cliches regarding the contradictory meaning of certain terms that can designate a thing and its contrary: Hegelian concepts themselves, considered in their apparent semantic autonomy, are part of these mutations and redistributions. Here we think, of course, of the famous Aufhebung, which has become a test of strength for heavy lifters since Hegel himself pointed out that the term could signify both “abolish” and “preserve.” He mentioned this precisely because this curiosity did not appear in his statements, because of the elementary law that holds that a term is never alone but is caught up in a general context and a particular syntagma, which guide the term’s meaning without there being any need for long additional glosses. And thus, when Hegel says nothing, the term has the sense dominant in the language (“abolish”), which itself explains, by an explicit context, the cases (which are statistically in the minority) in which the term means, on the basis of a primary negative sense, to withdraw something from circulation, from presence hic et nunc, and to put this thing aside, to protect it, and to intend it for later. It is precisely because there is no possible iconic use of his concepts but only contextualized uses that this word has the meaning that Hyppolite very calmly translated by supprimer (abolish, cancel). Apart from this negative meaning, what does the expression Aufhebung der Aufhebung mean in Hegel’s work? Only a pure knickknack of semantic inanity would remain. Another consequence of the dynamics of Hegelian language is the necessity the French translator encounters of sometimes varying, more or less lightly, the translation of terms identical in the German text: thus gleich occupies a spectrum ranging from “identical” (dominant) to “equal” (much rarer), by way of “similar” or even “same”; Anschauung ranges from “contemplation” to “intuition,” by way of “vision” pure and simple, or even “spectacle.” These variations cannot but collide with the fetishistic relationship to isolated words. But that relation is precisely what is unfaithful because it obscures the effects of context, which are always semantically decisive. Conversely, certain terms, which are different in German, will be found in context always translated by the same French terms: the French word intelligence can translate Klugheit, Verstand, Einsicht, Intelligenz. Recourse to translator’s notes makes it possible to respect the desire for verification that the reader may feel. Finally, the reading contract between the translator and his reader also commits the former not to play in an arbitrary manner with these necessary variations and to give the reader the benefit of his knowledge of the contexts: on this contractual basis we see that the same expressions are usually translated in the same way, when the author of the original text supervises the play of meaning in these expressions. We might list such cases: allgemein (general, universal), erscheinen (appear, in the trivial sense; be manifested phenomenally), bestimmen (determine, intend), darstellen (exhibit, represent), dasein (be there, exist), etc. What would one say about a translation that always translated Hegel’s different GESCHICHTLICH (GERMAN) FRENCH historique/historial, historicité/historialité v. DESTINY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, and AUFHEBEN, DASEIN, EREIGNIS, ES GIBT, PRESENT, TATSACHE, TIME, TO BE The German term geschichtlich is translated into English as “historical” but into French as historique when it appears in Hegel and as historial in Heidegger (the distinction is not drawn in English translations), and similarly for the noun Geschichtlichkeit, historicité or historialité. This is not a matter of secondary variation or translator’s caprice. What the shift from the historique to the historial shows in French is the profound debate that took place in German philosophy, from Hegel to Heidegger, on the nature of what is truly historical, in other words, what makes a sequence of events history. The resources of the language are here invoked in a complex network that superimposes a famous pair of contraries(Geschichte/Historie, geschichlich/historisch) and a strange etymology, das Geschehen, in English “happening, event, becoming,” a sort of lexical matrix in which the relation between history and what happens is put into general question. I. Geschichte, Historie, Geschehen The examination of Geschichte, geschichtlich in Heideggerian terminology may begin with this remark of Heidegger in Gesamtausgabe: The country that can claim R. Descartes among its great thinkers, the founder of the doctrine of humanity understood as subjectivity, does not have a word for Geschichte in its language, by which it could distinguish the term from Historie. (Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79) 392 GESCHICHTLICH has happened. It gets its meaning only from reappropriation or interiorization, from a way of knowing things not by rote (auswendig), but by the heart (inwendig), as Hegel says (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 35; Phenomenology of Spirit, 23–24). Speculatively, the lexical relation between Geschehenes and Geschichte is thus an index less of the proximity of two concepts or fields, than of the distance, even the abyss, that separates them. II. Geschichtlich and Historisch: Heidegger, the Historial, and the Historic If we move from the lines by Aron cited above to Heideggerian thought, it appears that the attenuation of the ambiguity that obtains between the nouns Geschichte and Historie becomes a radical differentiation at the level of the corresponding adjectives, geschichtlich versus historisch. Historie having been rejected as the mere chronological listing of events, and thus as the expression of a “calculating thought,” Geschichte endows itself with a completely different relationship to temporality, proper to a “meditative thought.” We must nevertheless begin by recalling, in François Fédier’s words, that “in the first period of his teaching at Freiburg, before 1923, Heidegger means by historisch what he will later call geschichtlich, that is, what is fully historical—in that any human being can only live in view of a dimension of being in the midst of which, having one day transmitted something which will be historical, he becomes fully in his turn the inheritor of a history” (Fédier, “Phénoménologie”). In French, then, Heidegger’s adjective geschichtlich has been rendered historial, and the term historique has been used for historisch. Historial in French is not a neologism but an archaicism. We find it in Vincent de Beauvais, Le Miroir historial du monde, French translation of the Speculum historiale printed in Paris in 1495, but also in Montaigne. Henry Corbin, one of Heidegger’s French translators, declared that “I coined the term historialité, and I think the term is worth keeping. There is the same relationship between historialité and historicité as between existential and existentiel” (see DASEIN and ESSENCE). This translation was nevertheless contested by J. A. Barash, who maintains historique and historicité, notably on the grounds that the terms geschichtlich and Geschichtlichkeit are not neologisms for Heidegger, and the aforementioned translation would amount to distancing him from the debates of his immediate predecessors and his contemporaries “in his age.” Without having to settle this debate here, we can restrict ourselves to the following two remarks: (1) Corbin’s initiative, which we think a happy one, is also related to his vision of “hiero-history,” notably in Iranian Islamic spirituality; (2) the reliance on a single term, from Hegel to Heidegger in this case, does respect an existing lexicographical continuity, but the same term may take on entirely different overtones and thereby be newer than a neologism: thus divertissement is not a neologism in Pascal, nor is Dasein in Heidegger. In short, translation also takes place within a single language. Does Corbin’s translation of geschichtlich (in Heidegger) by historial stand up to Barash’s criticism? Yes, and we should even be grateful to Corbin, who simply ran into these problems about the meaning of geschichtlich in Heidegger first, and brought them to our attention, and in addition found The first difficulty is thus to gain access to what the term Geschichte covers. The term is always understood by Heidegger to contrast with Historie, in the sense of historical science, historical studies, historiography. Hegel had noted it: In our language, the term History [Geschichte] unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae themselves; on the other hand it comprehends not less what has happened [das Geschehene], than the narration of what has happened [Geschichtserzählung]. (Hegel, Vorlesungen, 83; Philosophy of History, 60) Raymond Aron comments: The same word in French, English, and German applies to historical reality and the knowledge we have of it. Histoire, history, Geschichte refer at the same time to the becoming of humanity and to the science that men attempt to build to understand their becoming (even if the equivocation is attenuated, in German, by the existence of words, Geschehen, Historie, which only have one of the two senses). (Aron, Dimensions de la conscience historique) The decisive difference does not rest on the fact that German has two words where French has only one: the twofold meaning of histoire is also found in Geschichte. The important point is that German has, for Geschichte, a properly etymological resource in the verb geschehen, “to happen, to occur,” which yields the noun das Geschehen, “becoming,” and the substantivized adjective Geschehene, “what has become.” It is this resource that is continuously exploited by the philosophers of German Idealism. For Schelling, das Geschehene, that which has happened or has become (according to Ranke’s expression: was geschehen ist)—for instance, Caesar having crossed the Rubicon, the Battle of Marignano in 1515, that is, so-called “factual” history (or “treaties and battles” history, in contrast with the problem-history dear to the Annales school)—is still not at the level of “history properly speaking” (die eigentliche Geschichte) or the level of what is “properly historical” (eigentlich geschichtlich), as Hegel says (Vorlesungen, 83). Schelling writes: Was wäre alle Historie, wenn ihr nicht ein innrer Sinn zu Hilfe käme? Was sie bei so vielen ist, die zwar das meiste von allem Geschehenen wissen, aber von eigentlicher Geschichte nicht das geringste verstehen. (What would all history be if an inner sense did not come to assist it? It would be what it is for so many who indeed know most all that has happened, but who know not the least thing about actual history.) (Schelling, Weltalter, Einleitung; The Ages of the World, Eng. tr. Bolman) The distinction is twofold: between Historie (science of history, historical studies) and Geschichte (history, res gestae), but also between “everything that has happened” (das Geschehene) and “history properly speaking” (die eigentliche Geschichte). History properly speaking is irreducible to what GESCHICHTLICH 393 Geschichtlichkeit-as-historiality, the world of the Spirit and the “self-world” (Selbstwelt). Heidegger seems indeed to have established a link between the “metaphysics of subjectivity,” which Descartes supposedly founded, and the fact that the French language does not have access to this dimension of history referred to by the German term Geschichte, or, even worse, collapses the historial and the historique. No doubt we must understand that Geschichte indicates a dimension of history that is not captured by a subjectivity, the action of a subject (even a collective one), understood such that it would be capable of “making history” (cf. Pasternak: “No one makes history”). Geschichte indicates a dimension of history that is all the more essential for being incapable of being “made” by man as an actor or agent and does not derive from what Heidegger called Machenschaft in the 1930s. Machenschaft is, in the common sense of the term, a warped machination, a tissue of dark actings. For Heidegger the term has a stronger sense: Machenschaft is what comes out of a doing/machen, from the effectivity of an efficient cause, for example, of an “operational” subject and thus derives from an implicit ontology of beings as “doable” or “makeable,” that is, an implicit ontology that falls already within the rule or the spirit of modern technique conceived as a Gestell, whose counterpoints are Gelassenheit and Ereignis (cf. F. W. von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis; see COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, II). “What hells must the human being still cross, before he learns that he does not make himself?” Heidegger asks in a letter of 12 April 1968, to Hannah Arendt. The aspect of “history” designated by the German term Geschichte is one that man cannot, then, “make,” but which he is able to allow to geschehen (become), or not. Geschichte thus indicates what comes to man, but not from man. IV. Geschichte, Geschehen, Geschick: From the Historial to the History of Being Hegel and Schelling, as we have seen, attempted in a way to separate Geschichte, history, from Geschehen, what happens or becomes in itself. Heidegger seems, on the contrary, to link them back together. Geschichte indicates a Geschehen, “becoming” or “happening,” whose original meaning Heidegger sometimes traces back to Luther, in whom we find the word in the feminine as die Geschichte or die Geschicht, but much more frequently in the neuter, das Geschicht. In this sense Geschicht is göttliche Schickung, divine dispensation; Heidegger hears Geschicht as Luther does: as if deriving, if not from God, at least from a Geschick, a “dispatch” of which man is at best the recipient, and of which he must acknowledge receipt—of which he is even a Schicksal, a fate or a destination. What is truly geschichtlich, historial, is by that fact geschicklick, “destinal” or “epochal.” In sum, Geschichte should be understood: 1. on the basis of Geschehen, “des Geschehens dessen, was wir Geschichte nennen, d. h. des Seins dieses Seienden [the happening-occurring of what we call Geschichte, that is, of the Being of this being]” (Gesamtausgabe, 34: 82), as arrival or advent, and future, to come (Ger. Zu-kunft, irreducible to the future; cf. Péguy’s French neologism: évenir; see PRESENT). Geschichte is only accessible as resources in French to solve them. To study this question is to ask: how does Geschichtlichkeit—a word that seems to have been created by Hegel, taken over by Schelling and then Heine—take on a different meaning in Heidegger that radically differs from that which it had in Hegel? III. Geschichte and Geschichtlichkeit: From Hegel and Schelling to Heidegger The historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) described by German Idealists comes from a metaphysical conception—indeed this is the first time that history is conceived metaphysically—in which it refers to the dimension proper to the Spirit in its path toward itself, the concept of historicity being at bottom only the conceptualization of the necessity of this “toward.” This path or ordeal (which is no doubt indissociable from a Christology) is thought of by Hegel as “negativity,” with all that entails in terms of seriousness, pain, and patience; it is “the enormous labour of world-history” (Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, Fr. trans. J.-P. Lefebvre mod., 38, 46; Eng. trans. Miller, 8, 17). History is a way for Spirit to come to itself, the work of its coming to itself; history accomplishes and reveals (ironically, Schelling would add) what is proper to the Spirit, in a mobility that is essential to it, as Marcuse emphasized in 1932: “Historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) indicates the sense of what we aim at when we say of something: it is historical (geschichtlich). What is historical becomes in a certain way (geschieht). History as becoming (Geschehen), as mobility, that is the problem posed” (Hegel’s Ontology). The problem Marcuse identifies is also, in a way, the start of German Idealism. There is indeed a “history of self-consciousness,” a decidedly transcendental history, as established by Schelling in the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, translating in his own way the genetic preoccupation of Fichte’s philosophy. This history becomes legible in mythology understood as theogony, that is, as history rather than as a doctrine of the gods, Göttergeschichte rather than Götterlehre: it is the theogonic process of human consciousness. For Heidegger, on the other hand, historicity is not anchored in the Spirit (the very term “spirit,” Geist, is “avoided” in Being and Time, as made explicit in his § 10), but “in” Dasein (if we can say that, since Dasein has no inside) and its facticity, the investigation of which is the purview of the existential analytic. Remarkably, it is in Heidegger’s critical encounter with Aristotle (following the so-called “Natorp report,” translated into French as Interprétation phénoménologique d’Aristote of 1922) rather than Hegel that historiality (as distinct from historicity) comes to be conceived as mobility inherent to any human life. In the compressed study of the links between Aristotelian ethics and physics, the ethical aspect of the ontological mobility of human life is made apparent. The clarification of the ethics foreshadowed in 1922 is reserved for the existential analytic of Being and Time, in the perspective of a “hermeneutics of facticity.” Faktizität (facticity) constitutes, as Gadamer points out (in “Heidegger und die Griechen”), a sort of counterproof of everything that, in German Idealism, bears the mark of the Absolute (Spirit, self-consciousness, etc.), and as such indicates the difference of the appeal to historicity in absolute idealism and in the existential analytic: whence the abyss that separates Geschichtlichkeit-as-historicity from 394 GESCHLECHT . Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Vol. 61. Edited by Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by Richard Rojcewicz: Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. . “Was ist Metaphysik?”; “Vom Wesen des Grundes”; “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”; “Zur Seinsfrage.” In Wegmarken. Vol. 9. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by David Farrell Krell, William McNeill, et al.: “What is Metaphysics?”; ”On the Essence of Ground”; “On the Essence of Truth”; “On the Question of Being.” In Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kisiel, Theodore, and Thomas Sheehan, eds. Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Le Goff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Marcuse, Herbert. Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Translated by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Parvis, Emad. On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Péguy, Charles. Œuvres Complètes en prose. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1988. Polt, Richard. The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Renthe-Fink, L. von. Geschichtlichkeit: Ihr terminologischer und begrifflicher Ursprung bei Hegel, Haym, Dilthey und Yorck. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1964. Schelling, Friedrich von. Weltalter-Fragmente. Edited by Klaus Grotsch. Vol. 13. In Schellingiana. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2002. Translation by Jason M. Wirth: The Ages of the World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. such to a meditating, noncalculating thought, whence Heidegger’s frequent homages to Jacob Burckhardt; 2. in the direction of a Geschichtlichkeit (according to the term that first appears in Hegel, Schelling, and Heine), historicité or historialité, in English “non-historiographical historicality,” itself rooted in the temporality of Dasein. The specific mobility of Dasein, whose time is given on the basis of the future, throws it on an adventure (Geschehen) in which its historiality is rooted, related to the finitude of temporality in the being-toward-death taken on as such. Heidegger expresses this way of understanding Geschichtlichkeit in this manner: “Die Zeit nicht haben, sondern sich von ihr haben lassen, ist das Geschichtliche (Not having time in our possession, but being such that it takes possession of us, that is the historial).” The possibility of a Geschichte contains the possibility of an Ungeschichte (non-history), of a Geschichtsverlust (loss of history) or a Geschichtslosigkeit (absence of history), when the historial dimension comes to be lacking. In 1927 historiality is the epic of Dasein. But Geschichte becomes important to the thinking about fundamental ontology when the latter comes to be inscribed in the perspective of a Seinsgeschichte (histoire de l’être), or even a Seynsgeschichte (histoire de l’estre). “Historial” indicates that what concerns us may come to us without coming from us, unlike the “historical,” even though the latter term refers both to a chronological account based on a vulgäres Zeitverständnis (a “vulgar conception” or “common understanding” of time) and to the idea that history, since it is capable of being made by man, would fall within the domain of the “doable,” becoming thus a non-history in which nothing more can happen to us. Pascal David REFS.: Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe 1925–1975. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998. Translation by Andrew Shields: Letters, 1925–1975, edited by Ursula Ludz. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004. Aron, Raymond. Dimensions de la conscience historique. Paris: Plon, 1985. First published in 1961. . Politics and History: Selected Essays. Edited and translated by Miriam Bernheim Conant. New York: Free Press, 1978. Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Fédier, François. “Phénoménologie de la vie religieuse.” Heidegger Studies 13 (1997): 145–61. Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Heidegger und die Griechen.” Vol. 3. In Gesammelte Werke. 10 vols. Tübingen: Mohr, 1985–95. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Vol. 3. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. In Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. . Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Vol. 12. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. In Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by John Sibree: The Philosophy of History. Rev. ed. New York: Wiley, 1944. Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). Vol. 65. Edited by FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. Translation by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly: Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. . Identität und Differenz. Vol. 11. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006. Translation by Joan Stambaugh: Identity and Difference. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. GESCHLECHT (GERMAN) ENGLISH race, kinship, lineage, community, generation, gender, sex v. AUTRUI, DASEIN, GENDER, GENRE, HUMANITY, LEIB, MENSCHHEIT, PEOPLE, SEX As Heidegger reminds us, in a text that Derrida has commented upon at length, Geschlecht is impressively multivocal. It refers to race but also to kinship, generation, and gender, as well as the notion of sex, which divides all of the former: “The word equally means the human species [das Menschengeschlecht], in the sense of humanity [Menschheit], and species in the sense of tribe, stock, or family [Stamme, Sippen, und Familien], all of which is further intersected by the generic duality of the sexes[das Zeifache der Geschlechter].” This is why Geschlecht lends itself to a serious task of intralinguistic translation, which consists in finding equivalents for its various significations, in order to better circumscribe its meaning. The stakes of such a task are twofold: it must remove confusion about the different orders of belonging but also question the constitution and destination of human diversity. I. The Multivocity of Geschlect Four meanings of Geschlecht must be distinguished: 1. Paternal or maternal lineage (Geschlecht vom Vater / von der Mutter). It serves in this sense to assign identity. Thus, in Gotthold E. Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise [Nathan der Weise], Nathan reveals that of his adopted daughter: “Do you not even know of what lineage the mother was [was für Geschlechts die Mutter war]?” (IV, 7). But once this GESCHLECHT 395 Thus the concept of a race [der Begriff einer Rasse] contains first the concept of a common phylum [der Begriff eines gemeinschaftlichen Stammes], second necessarily hereditary characters of the classificatory difference among the latter’s descendants. Through the latter, reliable grounds of distinction are established according to which we can divide the species [die Gattung] into classes [in Klassen], which then, because of the first point, namely the unity of the phylum [die Einheit des Stammes], may only be called races [Rassen] and by no means kinds [Arten]. (Kant, Bestimmung des Begriffs) Races (Rassen) are thus different classes of a genus whose unity of origin remains intact. This implies, however, that peoples and nations are no longer the primary natural divisions of humankind. Rasse intervenes between Volk and Geschlecht. This is why, in the same year in which Kant’s essay is published, Herder argues in the second part of Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1785) against the idea that we might use Rasse (for which he writes “Race”) as an operative concept to determine such a primary division: Some for instance have thought fit, to employ the term of races for four or five divisions, originally made in consequence of country or complexion: but I see no reason for this appellation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist, or in each of these countries, and under each of these complexions, comprises the most different races. For every nation is one people. (Herder, Reflections) However, it is above all in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1797) that Kant attempts to fix the meanings of the term, by way of the characteristics that differentiate four types: those of the person (der Person), the people (des Volks), race (der Rasse), and the human species (der Menschengattung). Geschlecht and Rasse are essentially distinguished, then, by their finality. The first term, Geschlecht, is reserved for sexual difference, which has a twofold end in nature—the preservation of the species and, thanks to femininity, the culture and refinement of society. The second, Rasse, applies to a difference whose only end is assimilation, the mixing that gives the human its unity (die Zusammenschmelzung verschiedener Rassen). Geschlecht, Stamm, Rasse: the issue of the choice of terms is thus twofold. It relates both to considerations of the unity of humankind and of its finality. Another sign of difficulty raised by Geschlecht comes from the possibility of using the word to refer to both horizontal solidarity (a generation) and vertical solidarity (the succession of generations). Such is, in effect, the reorientation of meaning that Luther declares, in a text that illustrates the difficulties of the word: And his mercy extends from one generation [Geschlecht] to another. We must become accustomed to the usage in the Scripture which calls the succession of begettings and natural births Geschlechter. This is why the German word Geschlecht is not sufficient, but I do not know of a better. We call Geschlechter the stocks and the identity is specified in the sense of belonging to a lineage, it may become a sign of distinction. This is why Geschlecht also refers, in a more restrictive way, to nobility. To belong to a Geschlecht also refers, more narrowly, to nobility, as is shown in the same play (ibid., II, 6) by the exchange between Nathan and the Templar regarding von Stauffen’s family: “NATHAN: Von Stauffen, there must be more members of this noble family [des Geschlechts]. TEMPLAR: Oh, yes, they were, there are yet many members of this noble family [des Geschlechts] rotting here.” 2. Geschlecht also refers to a larger community, whose extension varies from tribe to humanity in general, by way of a people or a race. Humanity as a whole is thus referred to as das Menschengeschlecht, das sterbliche Geschlecht, or das Geschlecht der Sterblichen (the race of mortals). In a significant displacement of meaning from vertical to horizontal solidarity, Geschlecht may also mean a collection of individuals born at the same time: a generation. 3. In a different register Geschlecht refers to sexual difference (der Geschlechtsunterschied). Geschlecht is both sex in general and each sex in particular, male (das männliche Geschlecht) and female (das weibliche Geschlecht). 4. Finally, in a more abstract register, Geschlecht refers to the genus, in the sense of logical category, in the widest sense. It thus refers to the different genera of natural history as well as all sorts of objects and abstractions. This multivocity, which owes much to the Greek genos (see PEOPLE), is problematic when we must translate Geschlecht into other languages. While the last two senses are easily identifiable and do not lead to confusion as long as context reveals when we must think of a sex or genus in a logical sense, translation becomes infinitely more complex once the term refers to a lineage, a generation, or a community or when it intersects with terms referring to people, nation, or race. In such cases the polysemy of Geschlecht is compounded by the polysemy of terms like “people,” “race,” and “nation” that must nonetheless be kept distinct from one another and from Geschlecht. What is more, this polysemy turns out to be problematical even in German itself, where Geschlecht competes with terms that share aspects of its sense, and which, whenever they are introduced or used, raises a theoretical difficulty and entails a polemic. II. The Disambiguation of Geschlect and Its Difficulties Between Kant and Herder a whole enterprise of terminological distinction may be said to be undertaken that aims at restricting the uncontrollable breadth of meanings of Geschlecht and substituting for it new, univocal concepts: Stamm and Rasse. In the essay Determination of the Concept of Human Race [Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse, 1785], Kant attempts to give Rasse a restrictive sense that preserves the unity of human kind, removing all equivocal use of the term. The goal is to avoid all confusion between species or kind and the races and to block attempts to think of the diversity of the “races” as grounded in an original diversity of distinct generations: 396 GLAUBE GLAUBE (GERMAN) ENGLISH faith, belief FRENCH foi, croyance v. BELIEF, CROYANCE, and FAITH, FEELING, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, TRUTH German vocabulary does not mark the distinction between faith and belief. It has a single word, Glaube, where English, French, and most Romance languages have two, which refer respectively to the (more or less deeply held) adherence to the dogmas of a religion and the (more or less perceptible) assent to all manner of representation or propositional content. This does not mean that German speakers do not have an idea of the distinction, but they nonetheless have difficulties giving it an expression in language. I. The Difficulty of Translating Hume into German A good example of these difficulties is found in German translations of English-language philosophical works that rely particularly on the notion of belief. Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding may be seen as a test case. The second part of section 5 aims to give, on the basis of the notion of belief, a “solution” to the “sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding” raised in section 4. The conclusions we derive from experience rest on a belief that derives from sentiment or feeling, or even some instinct or mechanical tendency, and that may be described as a union of perception (direct or indirect, by way of memory) of an object and a certain link discerned between this object and another by habit. The German translations of this text—whether modern ones such as Richter’s or older ones such as that by W. G. Tennemann, which contains Reinhold’s essay On Philosophical Scepticism and in which German Idealism read Hume—systematically rendered “belief ” by Glaube. However, for the same reason, as remarked by Richter in the English-German glossary accompanying his edition, these translations cannot capture the difference with “faith” as discussed in section 10, on miracles; for “faith” “in the religious sense,” they still rely on Glaube. II. Luther’s Work on Language: Glauben / Der Glaube The difficulty is also felt within German texts themselves, as the example of Luther shows. It is no doubt in his work, as the theologian of salvation by “faith alone [sola fide]” (as opposed to works) that Glaube takes on the status of a concept: his emphatic use of the word leaves a lasting mark on philosophy, most of all German Idealism. What is more, we find in Luther linguistically oriented remarks regarding the construction of the verb glauben (for instance, whether it should take the preposition an, rather than in). In a sermon from 1544 transcribed by Veit Dietrich, Luther draws the distinction between faith and belief: A rich man, possessing great wealth and money, if he believes [glaubt] that he will not die of hunger this year, this is not faith [Glaube]. He who, by contrast, is destitute and yet still holds to the Word of God, according to which God will as his father procure him subsistence , he does believe [glaubt] correctly. (Luther, Hauspostille, WA, vol. 52) union of blood brotherhoods [geblüter Freundschaften], but the word here must mean the natural succession between father and the child of his children, such that each of the members of this succession has the name Geschlecht. (Grimm, art. “Geschlecht,” 1984) This confusion is found in the translation of the Hebrew term tōledōṯ [ת ֹדְ ולֹת ,[ּin Genesis 10, where, describing Noah’s descendants, a shared humanity that Luther describes as “the table of peoples [die Völkertafel]” is laid out: These are the families [die Nachkommen] of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations [in ihren Geschlechtern und Leuten]: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood. (Gn 10:32, Luther’s terms in brackets) The retranslation of the same passage by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig is thus significant (Die fünf Bücher der Weisung). They use Sippe (kinship) rather than Nachkommen, and the phrase nach ihren Zeugungen, in ihren Stämmen (according to their generations, in their tribes) instead of in ihren Geschlechtern und Leuten, thus distinguishing between vertical begetting (Zeugungen) and differentiated horizontal division (Stämmen). Geschlecht disappears, as though it were loaded with too much ambiguity to still refer to generation in the strict sense of begetting. Geschlecht thus concentrates, even more than “people,” “nation,” or “race,” the risks involved with any designation of community: that of being led back to an order of belonging deriving primarily from generation and ascendancy (thus from sexuality as well)—that is, the risk of a contamination of politics by genealogy. Marc Crépon REFS.: Derrida, Jacques. “Geschlecht I and II.” In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 395–453. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Translation by Ruben Berezdivin and Elizabeth Rottenberg: “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.” Translation by John P. Leavey, Jr.: “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II).” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other. 2 vols. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 2:7–62. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–8. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. In Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. Translation by Peter D. Hertz: On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Vol. 13. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by B. Suphan. 33 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913. Translation by Frank E. Manuel: Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. 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. . Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschen Rasse. In Gesamtsausgabe. Vol. 8. Determination of the Concept of a Human Race. §6 in Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by R. Louden and G. Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Krell, David Farrell. “One, Two, Four—Yet Where Is the Third? A Note on Derrida’s Series.” Epoché 10 (2006): 341–57. GLÜCK 397 As in French and other Romance languages, the verb glauben may refer both to what we call “faith” and to “belief,” depending on their objects (in this case, believing in one’s fortune and in the generosity of God). But in the first phase, the verb is in a strange way opposed to the noun of the same family, Glaube: there are ways of believing, glauben, that do not manifest Glaube. The problem is that Luther has a single family of words, glauben/Glaube, to describe the terms he is contrasting. This is not strictly speaking a problem of translation: French and other Romance languages have always drawn the distinction in this in advance. But the distinction that these languages have at their disposal does not make it possible to render Luther’s work on his own language, except by violating its usage. III. Glaubensphilosophie A problem of translation does arise later, with the controversy started by Jacobi and what was called Glaubensphilosophie. Its origin lies in Kant’s expression: “I was obliged therefore to abolish knowledge [Wissen] to make room for belief [Glauben]” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft). The translation of Glauben here is difficult. The objects that Kant attributes to it—God, liberty, immortality—are suggestive of faith, but the jurisdiction to which it belongs, practical reason, blocks any translation that would refer too directly to a religious reality. Croyance (belief) is in fact the translation adopted by all the French translators of the Critique of Pure Reason, from J. Barni, revised by P. Archambault, to A. Renault; in English, Kemp-Smith gives “to make room for faith,” as do Paton and (more recently) Guyer and Wood. Glauben here has a suppleness that French and English, always forced to choose between foi and croyance or “faith” and “belief,” between religious and epistemological usages, do not. A grammatical phenomenon arises in addition. In the problem raised by Kant, it is a question not of a Glaube, but of a Glauben, that is, of a nominal infinitive, the “to believe,” against which another nominal infinitive is contrasted, the “to know.” In addition, the difference of form between der Glaube and das Glauben is tenuous: Glaube, a weak masculine, becomes Glauben in the accusative and the dative. The title of Hegel’s response to Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi in 1802, Glauben und Wissen, should thus be translated as To Believe and To Know, except that this is also misleading: the work’s concern is not just with an investigation, à la Hume, of the degrees of certainty and of assent in human understanding. When Jacobi claims that all Wissen must “rise up” to a Glauben, he has God in mind above all, which—here Jacobi follows Kant—cannot be known, only believed. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, and Hegel all have the same object in view in the controversy: God, or the absolute. The title Faith and Knowledge—Foi et savoir in French—as a translation of Hegel’s work would thus allow us to get around the difficulty, but it immediately gives rise to another one. A francophone reader may in effect be tempted unilaterally to lay down a familiar distinction between faith and reason, whereas for Kant, whom Hegel is discussing, Glauben is not distinguished from reason but rather results from the transfer of competencies of theoretical reason to practical reason. In fact, the question of Glauben und Wissen, which is prevalent throughout the beginning of German Idealism, brings together two questions that French habits tend to separate: that of the relationship between faith and reason on one hand, and that of the certainty to which human knowledge may lay claim on the other (and we may see in this a continuation of the debate between Kant and Hume: cf. Jacobi, “David Hume”). The characteristic use of Glaube in German makes it possible to intertwine these questions so as to make them inseparable, whereas the separation of faith and belief encourages the French- and Romance-language reader to distinguish two different orders of problems. Philippe Büttgen REFS.: Di Giovanni, George. Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. . “Hume, Jacobi, and Common Sense: An Episode in the Reception of Hume in Germany at the Time of Kant.” Kant-Studien 88 (1997): 44–58. Fries, Jakob Friedrich. Wissen, Glauben und Ahndung. Edited by L. Nelson. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1905. First published in 1805. Translation by Kent Richter: Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense. Edited by Frederick Gregory. Köln: J. Dinter, 1989. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Glauben und Wissen. Edited by H. Glockner. In Jubiläumsausgabe. Vol. 1. 4th ed. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Translation by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris: Faith and Knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Edited by Stephen Buckle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Translation by Raoul Richter: Eine Untersuchung über den menschlichen Verstand. Edited by Raoul Richter. 12th ed. Hamburg: Meiner, 1993. Translation by M.W.G. Tennemann: Untersuchung über den menschlichen Verstand. Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1793. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus: Ein Gespräch.” 1787. In Werke. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Fleischer and Jüng, 1815. Translation by George di Giovanni: “David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue.” In The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, edited by George di Giovanni, 253–338. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. . “Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung.” In Werke. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Fleischer and Jüng, 1816. Kant, Immanuel. “Vorrede zur zweiten Ausgabe.” In Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 4:7–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: “Preface to the Second Edition.” In Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood, 106–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimar 1883–1929 (Weimarer Ausgabe—WA). Online at http://www.lutherdansk.dk/WA/D.%20Martin%20Luthers%20Werke,%20 Weimarer%20Ausgabe%20-%20WA.htm. . Luther’s Works. Edited by Helmut T. Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan. 55 vols. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955. . Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar: Böhlar, 1883–. Tavoillot, Pierre-Henri. Le Crépuscule des Lumières: Les documents de la “querelle du panthéisme” (1780–1789). Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995. GLÜCK, GLÜCKSELIGKEIT, SELIGKEIT, WOHLFAHRT (GERMAN) ENGLISH happiness, luck, welfare FRENCH bonheur, félicité, béatitude, chance, fortune, prospérité GREEK eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία], eutuchia [εὐτυχία], makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης] LATIN felicitas, beatitudo v. HAPPINESS, and DAIMÔN, DESTINY, LIBERTY, MORAL SENSE, MORALS, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, VIRTUE The difficulty of the German Glück comes from its double meaning of “happiness” and “luck.” Among German-speakers themselves, 398 GLÜCK However, through the Aristotelian conception, the term acquires a practical and ethical specificity: eudaimonia is decidedly distinguished from good luck (eutuchia [εὐτυχία], from tuchê [τύχη], “fate, fortune”): “For many declare happiness (eudaimonia) to be identical with good luck (eutuchia),” Aristotle writes in the Eudemian Ethics (1.1.1214a25f; Barnes trans.). Euripides, however, is able to play with the three terms: “No man can count on his happiness (eudaimôn anêr [εὐδαίμων ἀνήϱ]). Some have luck (eutuchesteros [εὐτυχέστεϱος]) and fortune (olbou epirruentos [ὄλϐου ἐπιϱϱυέντος]) on their side but never happiness (eudaimôn d’an ou [εὐδαίμων δ’ ἂν οὔ])” (Medea, 1228–30; Collier and Machemer trans.). The question of the permanence of the elements that compose happiness, hence the problem of time, plays an essential role here. Contrary to the extreme volatility of fortune and external goods, virtuous activities guarantee happiness by their stability (bebaiotês [βεϐαιότης]; Nicomachean Ethics, 1.10.1100b12): Success or failure in life (en tautais sc. tais tuchais [ἐν ταύταις sc. ταῖς τύχαις]) does not depend on these, but human life, as we said, needs these as well (prosdeitai [πϱοσδεῖται]), while excellent activities or their opposites are what determine happiness or the reverse (kuriai d’ eisin hai kat’ aretên energeiai tês eudaimonias [ϰύϱιαι δ’ εἰσὶν αἱ ϰατ’ ἀϱετὴν ἐνέϱγειαι τῆς εὐδαιμονίας]). (1100b ll. 8–11; Barnes trans.) The Aristotelian definition of happiness may seem like a moral one in the modern sense, insofar as it refers to the virtuous activity of the subject (to the point where Tricot, for example, consistently translates to ariston [τὸ ἄϱιστον], the best, the most excellent, by the French Souverain Bien [Sovereign Good], 1.8.1098b32, for example). However, the supplement eutuchia once again relates this definition of the happiness of a man to the share granted to him by the gods. B. Eudaimonia and makariotês The temporal perspective that plays an important role in determining the difference between eutuchia and eudaimonia also comes into play for the term makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης]. Hoi makares [οἱ μάϰαϱες], the blessed ones, is the expression that designates the gods (Iliad, 1.329). This happiness proper to the gods can only be tasted by mortals after death. This is why makarios [μαϰάϱιος] often refers to the deceased (the Ger. selig, “blessed,” has the same use: die Seligen)—unless the vocative in familiar speech is just equivalent to “my good man” (Plato, Protagoras, 309c). Thus when Aristotle, putting the final touches on his definition of eudaimonia, adds to virtuous activity the fact of being sufficiently provided with external goods, and not simply living but also dying in this state, he also expresses the maximum and the limit of this conception: We shall call blessed (makarious [μαϰαϱίους]) those among living men in whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—but blessed men (makarious d’anthropous [μαϰαϱίους δ’ ἀνθϱώπους]). (Nicomachean Ethics, 1.10.1101a ll. 20–21) The divide between happiness and blessedness is that between profane and sacred, immanence and transcendence. the criticisms of eudaimonism, beginning with Kant, focus on an unhealthy closeness between merit and chance. This explains in particular the addition of the compound Glückseligkeit (from selig, “blessed”), awkwardly translated into French as félicité, whereas the term usually only aims to express—with varying degrees of success—the conception of happiness dissociated from the accidents of chance. However, the difficulties of the users of Glück also relate to the power of the Aristotelian tradition in the moral thought of the German Enlightenment, and leads to the European or supranational dimension of the problem. The pair Glück-Glückseligkeit is consciously related to the distinction drawn in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics between eutuchia [εὐτυχία] (good fortune) and eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] (happiness), to which the difficulties of the third term makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης], which refers to the happiness of the gods, must also be added. The translation of the last term by Seligkeit and the intensive use of the word in religious contexts is reflected in Glückseligkeit, whose spiritual dimension resists attempts at translation. In English, at the same time, it is on the contrary the absence of this internalized dimension that explains how “happiness” could have opened the way to a philosophy of the common good and political happiness, for which other European countries do not have an equivalent. I. The Greek Roots of the Debate A. Eudaimonia and eutuchia The question of happiness is a central problem of Greek thought. In the first pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle summarizes the tradition: Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact that all knowledge and choice aims at some good, what it is that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action (tôn praktôn agathôn [τῶν πϱαϰτῶν ἀγαθῶν]). Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, (tên eudaimonian [τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν]) and identify living well and faring well with being happy (to d’eu zên kai to eu prattein [τὸ δ’ εὖ ζῆν ϰαὶ τὸ εὖ πϱάττειν]) σοντ λα μἄμε ψηοσε Ϙυᾤἄτϱε ηευϱευχ (τᾀιευδαιμονειν [τῷ εὐδαιμονεῖν]). (1.4, 1095a ll. 14–20; Barnes trans.) The term eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] used by Aristotle is not found in archaic texts; it does not appear in Homer, and is rare in Pindar. Olbos [ὄλϐος], the Homeric term usually translated as “happiness,” designates prosperity given by the gods to men, the enjoyment of that material happiness (and not just wealth, ploutos [πλοῦτος]) which, in a well-ordered cosmos, is the sign of a good life. Olbos is progressively replaced by eudaimonia, a term coming from the family of daiomai [δαίομαι], “to share”: eu-daimôn [εὐ-δαίμων] is literally he “who has a good daimôn,” a good distributive divinity (a good spirit), and hence “a good share.” Eudaimonia, like olbos, refers in the first instance to the prosperity and happiness of the man favored by the gods (thus, Hesiod, Works, 824: eudaimôn te kai olbios [εὐδαίμων τε ϰαὶ ὄλϐιος]). It would be difficult to speak, regarding eudaimonia, of an internalization of the idea of happiness; someone is eudaimôn who knows how to take advantage of the external conditions of existence. GLÜCK 399 of a heart fully absorbed by love, that of the sage or monk, may demand the use of the term Seligkeit. However, despite its relative desacralization, Seligkeit still designates a happiness that can do without the external world, a religious happiness, or at least, a highly spiritualized one. By contrast, the most commonly used word in German for expressing immanent or profane happiness does raise some difficulties. Glück reunites what the Greek disjunction between eutuchia and eudaimonia tried to separate. On one side, Glück refers to chance. It lies on the side of luck, or “favorable accident.” In ancient texts, the word Glück is often used in a neutral way, without any positive connotation. We find some examples in Goethe: Das Glück ist eigensinnig, oft das Gemeine, das Nichtswürdige zu adeln und wohlüberlegte Taten mit einem gemeinen Ausgang zu entehren. (Fortune is capricious; she often ennobles the common, the worthless, while she dishonors well considered actions with an ignoble outcome.) (Egmont, act IV, scene 2) Here, the French and English equivalents of the word Glück would be “fortune.” In this sense, Glück seems like an inappropriate word for philosophers: it is too inconstant, independent of the will of men, and associated with the unpredictable wheel of fortune (das Glücksrad). In French, the word for “happiness,” bonheur, also, originally, has the sense of good fortune (the word comes from bon and heur). But today it only seems to have this meaning in a secondary way, and in rare fixed expressions (porter bonheur à quelqu’un, au petit bonheur, par bonheur, etc.). Voltaire’s article on “Félicité” in the RT: Dictionnaire philosophique clarifies the difference between un bonheur and le bonheur: “Un bonheur is a happy event. Le bonheur, taken indefinitely, means a succession of such events.” It is of course made much of in religious texts, and is found discussed in almost all languages. In Saint Thomas Aquinas, this important Aristotelian concession is immediately emphasized: “[Aristotle] maintained that man does not achieve perfect felicity, but only a limited kind” (Posuit hominem non consequi felicitatem perfectam, sed suo modo) (Summa contra gentiles, III, 48). Aquinas reaffirms this distinction in the Summa theologica in a systematic way, contrasting imperfecta beatitudo (accessible to men on earth) to celestial beatitudo perfecta (which is inaccessible to them): Final perfection for men in their present life is their cleaving to God by activity which, however, cannot be continuous or consequently single, for activity becomes multiple when interrupted. That is why we cannot possess perfect happiness now, as Aristotle admits. Aquinas, Summa theologica, prima secundae, q. 3, a. 2, reply 4; T. Gilby trans. In Latin, the original distinction between a profane felicitas (= eudaimonia) and a sacred beatitudo (= makariotês) is lost. Seneca’s vita beata is not peculiar to the gods. The Latin words felicitas and beatitudo are practically synonymous; for Aquinas, it is thus the adjective that introduces the necessary distinctions. . II. Glückseligkeit: Internal Happiness In German, the distinction between blessedness and happiness does not pose a problem. The adjective selig and the corresponding noun Seligkeit clearly contrast with Glück and glücklich. The division, however, is not always so strict: we must emphasize the importance, in the eighteenth century, of the movement that leads the German language to use sacred vocabulary in profane contexts, under the influence especially of the sacralization of the world in Pietist language. Thus, without being celestial, the extreme happiness 1 From happiness to apathy and ataraxia The independence of eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία] with regard to external goods is already invoked by Democritus (B 40, 170, 171 DK), who, like Heraclitus (B 119 DK), reinterprets the daimôn [δαίμων] psychologically and ethically, and is solidly established with Plato (Laws, 664c). However, it remains a paradoxical idea; when Xenophon relates the dialogue between Euthydemus and Socrates, this paradox is clearly still fresh: “But, granting this to be as you say,” added Euthydemus, “you will certainly allow good fortune to be a good?” “I will,” said Socrates, “provided this good fortune consists in things that are undoubtedly good.” —“And how can it be that the things which compose good fortune should not be infallibly good?” —“They are,” answered Socrates, “unless you reckon among them beauty and strength of body, riches, honours, and other things of that nature.” —“And how can a man be happy without them?” —“Rather,” said Socrates, “how can a man be happy with things that are the causes of so many misfortunes?” (The Memorable Things of Socrates, Bysshe trans.) Aristotle, in turn, conceptualizes eudaimonia contrary to what the word says: minimizing the share of chance and external goods (eutuchia [εὐτυχία]), he makes happiness depend on the highest excellence, that is, not on politics but on theôria [θεωϱία], which makes man similar to god (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7; see PRAXIS). But the Stoics and Epicureans, who push the selfsufficiency of the sage to the extreme in different ways, are in the end forced to make real terminological inventions. For the two schools, happiness, far from being the good share that we enjoy until the end, is essentially characterized by its privative aspect, a point on which Stoic a-patheia [ἀ-πάθεια] (absence of passion, passivity; Plutarch, Dion, 32) and Epicurean a-ponia [ἀ-πόνια] and a-taraxia [ἀ-ταϱαξία] (absence of bodily suffering and absence of disturbance in the soul; Diogenes Laertius, 10.96; see PLEASURE) converge. REFS.: Xenophon. The Memorable Things of Socrates. Bk. 4, chap. 2. Translated by E. Bysshe. London: Cassell, 1888. 400 GLÜCK Diderot between what he calls “circumscribed happiness” and “expansive happiness”: There is a circumscribed happiness which remains in me and which does not extend beyond. There is an expansive happiness which propagates itself, which throws itself on the present, which embraces the future and which revels in moral and physical enjoyments, in reality and fantasy, hoarding money, honors, paintings and kisses pell-mell. (“Man”) By contrast, the definition proposed by Christian Wolff places happiness decidedly on the side of the sentiments; Glückseligkeit is both more internal and more spiritualized than the Greek word. This tendency is again emphasized by the erroneous but widespread etymology of the eighteenth century, according to which selig and glückselig (indeed often written seelig, glückseelig) are descended from Seele, soul. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, glückselig/Glückseligkeit undergo a certain evolution. Today, they refer to little more than a very spiritualized happiness. The severe critique of eudaimonism by Kant and his successors seems thus to be accompanied by certain lexical modifications. Glückseligkeit, though it has not entirely disappeared, has fallen into disuse. In contemporary texts, we find Glück (or glücklich) where an eighteenth-century author would have used Glückseligkeit (or glückselig) without fail. Thus, if the eighteenth century in Europe is the one in which happiness is most discussed, it is one in which happiness is not discussed with the same terms as those in common use today. Kant had already shown the way by using the adjective glücklich rather than glückselig with Glückseligkeit, most of the time. For in everyday language, Glück was always the more frequently used word for referring to happiness. III. The Inconstancy of Fortune: Glückseligkeit, Nature, and Freedom in Kant Whereas contemporary usage draws a rather clear line between Glück and Glückseligkeit and places the latter term on the side of a notion of felicity that seems to be definitively outmoded, the Kantian critique tends, in contrast, to devalue happiness-Glückseligkeit because of its compromising association with Glück. It is impossible, first, to give an objective definition of happiness: It is unfortunate that the concept of happiness is one which is so vague [Es ist ein Unglück, daß der Begriff der Glückseligkeit ein so unbestimmter Begriff ist], such that even though all men wish to achieve happiness, they are never able to say in a clear and univocal fashion what they truly wish for and desire. (“Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” in Kants Gesammelte Schriften) By playing on the German words Unglück and Glückseligkeit, Kant shows that the philosophical question of happiness and eudaimonism is also a problem of vocabulary. Glückseligkeit is a feeling; the search for happiness is a desire. Yet, a feeling, wherever it may come from, is always physical (cf. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). It is this point that explains the Kantian refusal to make happiness the final end The second meaning of Glück is indeed that of happiness strictly speaking: the fully satisfied consciousness, as the RT: Le nouveau petit Robert French dictionary has it. Standard German uses the two senses of Glück and its antonym Unglück (bad luck or unhappiness). The union within a single German word of the idea of a happy accident, luck, and that of happiness strictly speaking, is to some extent inconvenient for philosophers. For it is impossible to speak of happiness in the absence of a certain duration or stability: “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7.1098a 18–20; Barnes trans.). The extremely strong influence of Aristotelian reflection on happiness, beginning with the Renaissance, clearly explains the efforts at lexical differentiation, and especially the introduction of the compound Glückseligkeit, related to the attempts at definition made throughout the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff and his successors. In Wolff’s German Ethics, joy (Freude) is defined as a sort of permanent pleasure (Vergnügen), and happiness (Glückseligkeit) as a “state of permanent joy.” The stability of Glückseligkeit is thus vigorously championed. Lexically, happinessGlückseligkeit seems to escape the instability characterizing Glück. The adjective glückselig, formed from Glück and selig, initially means “marked by happiness, rich in happiness.” Happiness-Glückseligkeit is not an accident. While the word is not a neologism, it acquires an important role in philosophical and theological texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a certain way, behind Glückseligkeit, it is usually appropriate to read eudaimonia. This is also what is suggested by the philosophical dictionary of synonyms published at the end of the Enlightenment by Johann August Eberhard, RT: Versuch einer allgemeinen deutschen Synonymik: Glückseligkeit includes physical and moral good. The Greek word eudaimonia, which in the most widespread philosophical schools refers to the quintessence of all sorts of good, has thus been translated by it. For the texts of the eighteenth century in Germany, the translation of Glückseligkeit by “happiness” or bonheur seems in this sense more appropriate than “felicity,” which in French (félicité) is of a more limited usage. Philosophical German appeared to have recovered the Greek triad eutuchia/eudaimonia/makariotês in the form of Glück/Glückseligkeit/Seligkeit. In fact, however, the philosophical and lexical status of Glückseligkeit remains rather precarious. On one hand, the influence of Seligkeit confers a passive connotation onto Glückseligkeit, which becomes as a result “apathetic” or “quietist,” and in this way clearly different from the eudaimonia that Aristotle had defined as a kind of “activity.” Aristotle had compared happiness-eudaimonia with “living well and faring well” (to eu zên kai to eu prattein [τὸ εὖ ζῆν ϰαὶ τὸ εὖ πϱάττειν]), but eu prattein also means “to succeed” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1.2.1095a19). The modern era did not really take over this dynamic conception of happiness inherent to Aristotle’s position; whether defined as freedom from worry, in the Epicurean manner, or as a moment of satisfaction, modern happiness remains relatively static. A notable exception is the distinction established by GLÜCK 401 instead a problem imposed upon him by his finite nature itself, because he is needy and this need is directed to the matter of his faculty of desire, that is, something related to a subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure underlying it by which is determined what he needs in order to be satisfied with his condition. (Critique of Practical Reason, §3) Kant thus destroys the efforts made in Germany to differentiate Glückseligkeit and Glück. Happiness-Glückseligkeit suffers from the inconstancy of fortune (Glück). For Kant, happiness remains fundamentally within the sphere of nature. Human freedom has no part of it. . IV. Political Happiness: The Anglo-American Path The English translation of eudaimonia, “happiness,” does not have the spiritualist aura and connotation of Glückseligkeit. The dividing line between “happiness” and “bliss,” “happy” and “blessed” or “blissful” is clearly marked. “Happiness” has a much more immanent ring than the German Glückseligkeit; its etymological connection to chance and “happening” (happenstance, happily) remains strong. This no doubt explains why the English word is able, in the eighteenth century, to raise the political possibilites implicit in the Aristotelian understanding of happiness, notably in the of human activity. To construct a practical philosophy on the idea of happiness would be, for Kant, to accept the contamination of morality by the pleasure principle. Moreover (and this would be the second moment of Kant’s critique of the misuse of Glückseligkeit), the concept of Glückseligkeit is related to external circumstances and thus to the happy accidents referred to by Glück. The subject is incapable of determining the conditions that make it possible for him to achieve happiness: The problem of determining reliably and universally which action would advance the happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and hencethere can be no imperative with regard to it that would in the strict sense command to do what makes us happy because happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of the imagination. (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) Kant emphasizes the fundamentally empirical element of the definition of happiness: To be happy (glücklich zu sein) is necessarily the demand of every rational but finite being and therefore an unavoidable determining ground of its faculty of desire. For satisfaction (die Zufriedenheit) with one’s whole existence is not, as it were, an original possession and a beatitude (Seligkeit), which would presuppose a consciousness of one’s independent self-sufficiency, but is 2 Glückseligkeit in Hegel Hegel takes up the Kantian criticism of eudaimonism: To estimate rightly what we owe to Kant in the matter, we ought to set before our minds the form of practical philosophy and in particular of “moral philosophy” which prevailed in his time. It may be generally described as a system of Eudaemonism, which, when asked what man’s chief end ought to be, replied Happiness (Glückseligkeit). And by happiness Eudaemonism understood the satisfaction of the private appetites, wishes, and wants of the man: thus raising the contingent and particular into a principle for the will and its actualization. To this Eudaemonism, which was destitute of stability and consistency, and which left the “door and gate” wide open for every whim and caprice, Kant opposed the practical reason, and thus emphasized the need for a principle of will which should be universal and lay the same obligation on all. (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences I, addition to §54) In the Philosophical Propaedeutic from the years 1808 to 1811, Hegel had strongly emphasized the necessary terminological distinctions: Well-being (Wohlsein), as the adaptation of the external to our internal being, we call Pleasure (Vergnügen). Happiness (Glückseligkeit) is not a mere individual pleasure but an enduring condition [which is] in part the actual Pleasure itself [and], in part also, the circumstances and means through which one always has, at will, the ability to create a state of comfort and pleasure for himself. The latter form is the pleasure of the mind. In Happiness, however, as in Pleasure, there lies the idea of good fortune [good luck] (Glück): that it is an accidental matter (zufällig) whether or not the external circumstances agree with the internal determinations of the desires. Blessedness (Seligkeit), on the contrary, consists in this: that no fortune [luck] pertains to it: that is, that in it the agreement of the external existence with the internal desire is not accidental. Blessedness can be predicated only of God. The opposition to the principles of eudaimonism is especially virulent in Hegel’s early works. Thus, in the article “Faith and Knowledge” of 1802, Hegel even accuses Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte of unconscious eudaimonism: What is the relation of this basic character to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte? So little do these philosophies step out of this basic character that, on the contrary, they have merely perfected it to the highest degree. Their conscious direction is flatly opposed to the principle of Eudaemonism. However, because they are nothing but this direction, their positive character is just this principle itself. Nevertheless, one has the impression that, without rejecting the fundamental criticism of eudaimonism, Hegel later seeks to attenuate Kant’s critiques of the concept of happiness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (§602), he notes: The moral consciousness cannot renounce happiness and drop this element out of its absolute purpose. The harmony of morality and nature, or—seeing that nature is taken account of merely so far as consciousness finds out nature’s unity with it—the harmony of morality (continued) 402 GLÜCK Scottish school of the philosophy of moral sense. Thus, in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Francis Hutcheson finds the touchstone of the morality of our actions in the statement “that Action is best, which accomplishes the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” (cf. also the expression of “happiness of mankind”). This possibility is expressed especially clearly in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In this text, happiness does not refer only to an individual good, but to a collective one as well, that is, in the proper sense of the term, a civil or political good. It concerns, for example, the right to determine the type of government suited to the city (cf., on this point, D. Sternberger’s article “Das Menschenrecht, nach Glück zu streben”). In this sense, the term “happiness” approaches the idea of welfare (in Ger. Wohlfahrt, “salvation,” “prosperity”) of which the French Revolutionaries will give a rather exact translation when they speak of the salut public. “Welfare” (and Wohlfahrt) refers to the image of the traveler who, having escaped the obstacles and dangers of the journey, arrives in a safe harbor. Where “happiness” (or Glück) refers only to the sphere of immanence, “welfare” or Wohlfahrt often have a religious connotation, though it is barely perceptible today. We may note, in this regard, that the French translation of “welfare state” or Wohlfahrtstaat by État providence accentuates this aspect that has become attenuated in English and German; the Spanish for welfare state, Estado de bienestar, embeds the immanent aspect of the term by compounding bien, “well” or “good,” with the stative estar rather than existential ser (see SPANISH). Alongside Wohlfahrt, which refers to a public or private salvation, German also has a word reserved for the public sphere: das Gemeinwohl, the common good. Christian Helmreich REFS.: Aquinas, Thomas. Summa contra gentiles. Edited by V. Bourke. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. . Summa theologica. Vol. 16. Translated by T. Gilby. London: Blackfriars, 1969. Bien, Günther, ed. Die Frage nach dem Glück. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978. Blumenberg, Hans. “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?” Studium Generale 6 (1953): 174–84. Diderot, Denis. “Man.” In vol. 2 of Œuvres completes. Edited by J. Assézat. Paris: Garnier, 1875. First published in 1773–74. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Egmont. Edited by Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1992. Guyer, Paul. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe), 4:387–463. Edited by Paul Menzer. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. First published in 1785. Translation by Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant’s Foundations of Ethic. Baltimore: Agora, 2007. . Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Edited by O. Höffe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Translation and edited by Mary Gregory: Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kraut, Richard. “Two Conceptions of Happiness.” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 167–97. Lännström, Anna. Loving the Fine: Virtue and Happiness in Aristotle’s Ethics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Spaemann, Robert. Happiness and Benevolence. Translated by Jeremiah Alberg. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Sternberger, D. D. “Das Menschenrecht, nach Glück zu streben.” In Gesammelte Schriften, 4:93–114. Frankfurt: Insel, 1990. Warner, Richard. Freedom, Enjoyment and Happiness: An Essay on Moral Psychology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. White, Stephen A. Sovereign Virtue: Aristotle on the Relation Between Happiness and Prosperity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. and happiness, is thought of as necessarily existing; it is postulated. Hegel confers a certain dignity upon happiness-Glückseligkeit in this manner. The first version of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences explained that the idea of happiness conditioned a choice that must be made from among one’s various present desires: Happiness is the confused representation of the satisfaction of all drives, which, however, are either entirely or partly sacrificed to each other, preferred and presupposed. Hegel no longer rejects the superior form of the concept of happiness (Glückseligkeit) on the side of nature, as Kant had done. Similarly, in the additions to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right due to his student Gans, we read: In happiness, thought already has some power over the natural force, of the drives, for it is not content with the instantaneous force of the drives, for it is not content with the instantaneous, but requires a whole of happiness (eni Ganzes von Glück). In this passage, the coexistence of the terms Glückseligkeit and Glück nevertheless poses problems for the translator. In his translation of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Robert Derathé translates the two terms respectively as félicité and bonheur. Here, Glückseligkeit does indeed refer to a superior form of happiness, a stable and spiritualized happiness, and Glück a temporally more limited happiness—good fortune. However, the Hegelian passage also refers to the whole of pre-Kantian thinking on Glückseligkeit, very visible especially in popular philosophy of the eighteenth century, and Aristotelian and Leibniz-Wolffian in inspiration (see, for example, the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christian Garve, one of the protagonists of popular philosophy). The translation of Glückseligkeit by “happiness” in the Hegelian text would enable us to emphasize this intertextual link, but would to some extent smooth over the distinction between Glückseligkeit and Glück. REFS.: Hegel, G.W.F. G.W.F. Hegel: Faith and Knowledge. Translated and edited by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. . Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. . Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace with a foreword by Andy Blunden. Marxists Internet Archive, 2009. First published in 1830. . Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. . Philosophical Propaedeutic, by GWF Hegel. Edited by Michael George and Andrew Vincent. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. First published in 1860. (continued) GOD 403 GOD ARABIC Allah [هللا[ BASQUE jainko / jinko, Jaungoikoa FINNISH jumala FRENCH dieu GERMAN Gott GREEK theos [θεός] [אֱ לֺהִ ים] Èlohïm], אֱ לוֹהַ] Èloah], אֵ ל] Ël HEBREW HUNGARIAN isten ITALIAN dio LATIN deus PORTUGUESE deus RUSSIAN bog [бог] SPANISH dios v. ANALOGY, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, DAIMÔN, DESTINY, DEVIL, DUENDE, OIKONOMIA, OMNITUDO REALITATIS, RELIGION, SVET, THEMIS, TO BE, WELT All European languages contain words for designating the divine. This comes from the Judeo-Christian beliefs of the populations that speak them and also from the prebiblical foundations of the European region. The presence of this vocabulary is not a trivial matter, since Christian missionaries did meet certain peoples for whom it was necessary to borrow a word—the Latin deus, for example, used as a proper name—for lack of a native equivalent. I. European Languages Today The French dieu comes from the Latin deus, as does the Spanish dios, the Portuguese deus, and the Italian dio. Germanic languages use words like the German Gott and the English “god.” The etymology of these terms is unclear. Two Indo-European roots have been suggested. One means “to invoke,” the other “to pour, to offer a libation” (see Gr. cheô [χέω]). God would thus be whatever is invoked or that to which a libation is offered. There is a temptation to hear a link, etymologically unfounded however, between “god” and “good.” Whence certain euphemisms such as the exclamation “My goodness!” The vernacular French le bon Dieu thus sounds mildly pleonastic to the Germanic ear. The word bog [бог], common to Slavic languages with slight variations, may be related to the Sanskrit bhaga, “lord.” The latter term may come from a root meaning “to distribute,” evoking the Greek daimôn [δαίμων] (demon) from daiomai (δαίоμαι) (see DAIMÔN). The Hungarian isten is borrowed from the Persia ištán, identical to the Pehlevi yazdan (cf. Rédei, “Über die Herkunft”). Jumala in Finnish may originally be a proper name, that of the supreme God, lord of the sky. The Basque jainko/jinko designates both a god in general and the Christian God, also called Jaungoikoa, “the Lord on high.” II. Classical Languages and Holy Writings The Greek theos [θεός] exists already in Mycenean as teo. Its true etymology remains obscure (see RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). It may be from *thesos [*θεσоς], from tithêmi [τίθημι] (cf. also RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européenes; see THEMIS). The Greeks offered various fictional etymologies related to different ways of representing the divine. The first of these etymologies derived theos from the verb tithêmi, “to place” (Herodotus, II, 52, 1: “they placed [thentes (θέντες)] all things”), which suggests the idea of a setting-up of the world, rather than a creation ex nihilo. The verb theô [θέω], “to run,” was also suggested (Plato, Cratylus, 397c; Cornutus, De die natali, 1). This is based on the identification of the gods with the celestial bodies, found in late Plato (Timaeus, 40a–d) and his school (Epinomis, 984d), and it plays with the fact that ether (aithêr [αἰθήϱ]), the clarity of the sky in which the gods reside, is itself interpreted as that which “is always running” (aei-thein [ἀεὶ-θεῖν]). The Church Fathers (cf. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought) took up both hypotheses and added a third by way of the noun thea [θέα], “spectacle”—the gods having made the world visible (Eusebius of Caesaria, Preparatio Evangelica, V, 3, 182D). The ancient form of the Latin deus is deiuos. The word, paradoxically, has nothing to do with the Greek theos but is in fact related to the Sanskrit devas. Ju-, in Ju-piter, designates the clarity of the sky, related to dies, “the day”; the sense survives in the expression sub Dio, “under the open sky.” The association of the sky with divinity is old and widespread. If we believe Suetonius (Life of Augustus, 97, 2), the Etruscan word for “god” was aesar, perhaps related to the Germanic word for iron (Ger. Eisen), the metal that falls to earth in meteorites (cf. Lat. sidus and Gr. sidêros [σίδηϱоς]). There is a late echo of this “celestial” etymology when Hölderlin claims to believe that God is “manifest like the sky [offenbar wie der Himmel]” (“In lieblicher Bläue,” Sämmtliche Werke). The sacred books of Judaism, and then of Christianity, of course, speak often of God. In them the Greek translates Hebrew terms. Thus the word present in all Semitic languages, Ël [לֵ א ,[which no doubt expressed the idea of power. There is also an elongated form, Èloah [ַלוֹהֱ א .[As for Èlohim [היםֺלֱ א ,[ ׅ more frequent in Hebrew, the plural ending (-īm) probably indicates majesty. Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, give God the name of Allah [هللا .[He is already known as the supreme God and creator of everything before the advent of Islam (Qur’an, XXIX, 61; XXXI, 25; XLIII, 87). The word is the contraction of al-ilā [� �ا [which pairs a form of the common noun El with the article. The word thus oscillates between its linguistic status as a common noun and its usage, which makes it a proper name. III. Modern Forms The scholarly register of European languages has kept the Greek root theo- and uses it in several dozen technical terms, some more common than others. Some of them are old, such as “theology.” Plato coins theologia [θεоλоγία] to refer to the way in which the gods should be spoken of, one more dignified than what is later called “mythology” (Republic II, 379a). The word “theology” keeps that meaning for a long time, as found in Pascal: “The poets made a hundred different theologies” (Pensées, Br. 613). In Latin Augustine uses the word in his polemic with Varro to mean a philosophical doctrine concerning the divine, and he explains it as ratio sive sermo de divinitate, “reasoning or discourse concerning divinity” (City of God, VIII, 1). (or[h]oi), they are in reality often associated and juxtaposed with gogo as a generic term. By way of several derivative terms belonging to its semantic field (the RT: Diccionario retana de autoridades de la lengua vasca lists about 180), we may thus even express “sympathy,” “ennui,” and “disgust,” among other feelings. I. Gogo as a Principle Arima has always been the translation of the Christian concept of the soul (anima), notably when the latter has a theological sense. In Dechepare, for example, arima is understood in relation to the themes of the resurrection: “arima et gorpucetan or vertan pizturic” (souls and bodies, all will be immediately resuscitated; RT: Linguae vasconum primitiae, 1.323); of creation: “arima creatu” (ibid., 1.3); of salvation: “arimaren saluacera” (ibid., 1.52: “to save the soul”); or of the soul in pain: “arima gaixoa” (ibid., 1.95: “poor soul”). However, in the first half of the twentieth century, we find several attempts, part of a purist linguistic movement, to replace the term arima by gogo. We thus read in a dictionary from 1916: “Arima (anima), alma, voz erdérica sustituible por ‘gogo’ ” (Arima [anima], “soul,” foreign term replaceable by gogo; López Mendizábal, Diccionario Castellano-Euskera). Altube argues against this tendency (Erderismos). The basis of his argument was the fear of a “lexicographical poverty,” since the substitution represented a linguistic step backward. In addition, gogo never expresses the concept of the soul in the theological sense, namely, the created soul, which may be resuscitated or saved, since it refers rather to soul understood as a power. We might therefore think that gogo would be an equivalent for the Latin anima conceived in a more philosophical sense, like the collection of powers of memory, will, or understanding in Augustine, or again as an equivalent to Aquinas’s mens, which groups together intelligence, memory, and will. Pierre de Axular, however, along with all the other authors or translators of Christian texts in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, translates this division of faculties of the soul by using arima: “Arimac bere penac beçala, arimaren potenciec eta botheréc ere, cein baitira adimendua, vorondatea, eta memoria, içanen dituzte bere pena moldeac” ( Just as the soul has its pains, the powers and capacities of the soul, which are understanding, will, and memory, also have their own pains; Gero, 57:586). Nor is gogo generally used to express this division of the soul, since we only find one occurrence of this use in Perez de Betolaça (sixteenth century): “Arimako potenziak dira iru: lelengoa, zenzuna. Bigarrena, gogoa. Irugarrena, borondatea” (The powers of the soul are three: the first, understanding. The second, gogo. The third, will; Doctrina christiana en romance y basquenze). The same impossibility of replacing the calque of the Latin word with gogo is confronted by the term espiritu (or izpiritu), even though we may find a few texts from the seventeenth century in which gogo is substituted for espiritu in a remarkable way (thus, in Oihenart: “Glori’ Aitari, Semeari / Eta Gogo Sainduari” [Glory to the Father, to the Son / and to the Holy Gogo]). When Axular, for example, attempts to find equivalents for the Latin spiritus, he chooses, in his translation of Augustine, the term hats (breath): “in ultimo vitae spiritu . . . axquen hatsaren aurthiquitcean” (in giving the 404 GOGO For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the word also refers to the essence of God in himself, in his tripartite nature, as opposed to the benevolent action of God in human history (oikonomia [оἰϰονομία], see OIKONOMIA). John Scotus Erigena translates Dionysius’s Greek into Latin in Divine names, I, 15 (PL, v. 122, col. 463 b): theologia becomes divinae essentiae investigatio; II, 30 (col. 599b): divinae naturae speculatio; then III, 29 (col. 705b): “[investigat] quid de una omnium causa, quae Deus est, pie debeat aestimari [it seeks what should piously be conjectured of the unique cause of everything, which is God].” The word appears in its modern sense in Abelard around 1120, as the title of his Theology, named after its opening words, Summi boni. It finally becomes established in Thomas Aquinas, as referring to a science. “Theocracy,” most often understood today in the sense of a “clerical regime,” did not originally refer to the power of the human administrators of the sacred but rather the opposite: Flavius Josephus coined theokratia [θεоϰϱατία] in a defense of Judaism. He indicates by it the fact that the divine Law is what has power in Judaism, rather than any particular person. Other technical uses of the root theo- are found in the sort of words whose construction gives them an air of antiquity but that are in fact the result of the modern thirst to come up with ancient titles. The most well-known case is that of “theodicy,” coined by Leibniz as the title of his book published in 1710, in which he aims to show the justice (dikê [δίϰη]) of God (see THEMIS). Rémi Brague REFS.: Hölderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters. Edited by J. Adler and C. Louth. London: Penguin, 2009. . Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated and edited by T. Pfau. Albany: State University of New York, 1988. . Poems and Fragments. Translated by M. Hamburger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1967. . Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6. Edited by F. Beissner. Stuttgart: Cotta, “Kleiner Stuttgarter Ausgabe,” 1946–1962. Prestige, George Leonard. God in Patristic Thought. London: Heinemann, 1936. Rédei, Karoly. “Über die Herkunft des ungarischen Wortes isten, ‘Gott.’” Linguistica uraclica [Tallinn] 32 (1996): 238–88. GOGO (BASQUE) ENGLISH power of the soul, mind, spirit FRENCH puissance de l’âme, esprit LATIN anima, spiritus, mens In Basque, gogo expresses all the processes of interiority and subjectivity. Despite the efforts of some writers to use the term to replace the neologisms arima and espiritu from the Latin tradition (transpositions of the Latin anima and spiritus) in the translations of Christian texts, gogo never takes on the sense of “soul” or “spirit.” It refers without exception to the power of the soul (memory or will) or to the psychological experience of the subject (desire, wish, thought, consciousness) rather than to the soul as such. While there are terms in Basque for “will” (nahi), “desire” (gura), “thought” (asmo) or “memory” GOOD 405 last breath; Gero, chap. 15). The only context in which gogo seems truly close to what we mean by “spirit” or “mind” is that of the subjective sphere of affectivity and thought, of the “mental”: “orazione mentala, edo izpirituaz eta gogoz egiten dena” (mental prayer, or that which is done by the spirit and by gogo; St. Francis of Sales, Philotea). Similarly, Joanes Leizarraga used gogo to render what is meant in French by the term esprit: “perplexités d’esprit gogo-arràguretaric” [perplexities of the spirit] (Testamentu berria). Gogo is thus always relative to the subject, and its use cannot extend to something else. In this regard, it is not synonymous with the Greek nous, which, according to some, governed the processes of the universe. But we might then think that it is very close to the Latin animus, which evokes will, memory, thought, desire, intention, and mood (RT: Thesaurus linguae latinae). We should recall in this context what Leizarraga says of the term arima in the lexicon that follows his translation of the New Testament (the first ever in Basque): even though he uses arima several times in the theological sense, there is nonetheless a meaning of the term that is translatable for him by gogo, when the latter is synonymous with “affection”: “Arimá, hartzen da Batzutan, gogoagatic edo affectioneagatic” (Arimá is taken sometimes for gogo or for affection; Testamentu berria, 1202). And indeed, the frequent association of gogo with another term referring to a precise feeling or a better defined faculty shows the entirely subjective character of gogo. II. Gogo: Different Faculties Although the powers of the soul are most often referred to by their Latin calques (zenzuna, memoria, borondate [sense or understanding, memory, will]), we have seen that Betolaça used gogo to translate “memory.” Axular, for his part, made gogo an equivalent for borondate, or “will.” Hartcen dugu gogo, hartcen dugu vorondate, obra onac eguin behar ditugula ordea han beharrenean faltatcen dugu. Ceren hartcen dugun gogo eta vorondate hura, ezpaita fina, ezpaita cinezcoa eta ez deliberatuqui deliberatua; nahicundea baita eta ez nahia. (We take from gogo, we take from will [borondate], that from which we do good works and yet we miss the most necessary. Because gogo and this will [borondate] which we have taken is not authentic, it is not likely and it is not deliberately deliberated; because it concerns bad will [“weak will,” nahikunde] and not will [nahi].) (Gero, chap. 3) In this text the three terms Axular used to refer to the will all appear: gogo, borondate (or vorondate), and nahi. Although borondate is almost always associated in Axular’s work with gogo, there are other places where borondate is equivalent to nahi: “gure nahia, eta vorondatea” (Gero, chap. 15). Nahi in Basque means either “will” or “desire,” and the intertwining of these terms allows this author to associate gogo with desire: “Eta desira hautan, gueroco gogoan eta vorondatean, dembora guztia iragaiten çaicu” (And in these desires, in gogo and the will of the future, all of our time passes; Gero, chap. 3). A collection of Basque proverbs from 1596 provides us with another example of the usage of these terms. The author translates nay into Castilian by voluntad (will) or by deseo (desire): “Galdu çe eguic aldia, / ta idoro dayc naya. No pierdas la sazon/ y hallaras el desseo” (Do not miss the opportunity, / and you will find the desire; Urquijo, Refranero vasco). However, even though gogo may be substituted for borondate, for nahi, for desir, or even for gura (another Basque term closer to “desire”), these terms are not entirely equivalent to it. This is why Dechepare could write: “gogo honez nahi dicit çure eguina laudatu” (I want [nahi] to praise what you do in good gogo; RT: Linguae vasconum primitiae, 13). The equivalence between gogo and the other terms is not reciprocal: gogo may no doubt replace any other term in its vast conceptual field, but the reverse is not true. Gogo acts in effect as a power that collects together the semantic fields of the will, desire, and memory (“[cócientcia(k)] orhoitcen çaitu, guztiac [falta] gogora eccartcen derauzquitçu” [(it, conscience) reminds you of them (your faults), it brings them all to gogo; Axular, Gero, 45]) and of thought (“eguin çuen, Piramide batcuen eguiteco gogoeta, asmua eta pensua” [He had the gogoeta, the asmo and the thought of making several Pyramids; Gero, 1:26]). Gogoeta, formed by adding the suffix -eta, means the action that gogo produces and can thus serve to translate the Latin cogitatio. Axular thus writes (Gero, 36): “Gure gogoa ecin dagoque gogoeta gabe; ecin gauteque, cerbaitetan pensatu gabe” (Our gogo cannot be without gogoeta; we cannot be without thinking about something). Axular here nevertheless remains ambiguous: by preserving the multivocity of gogoeta, he keeps within the orbit of the Latin cogitatio, but by relating the term to thought alone, he comes close to the reduction that has just been made by Descartes. Isabel Balza REFS.: Altube, Seber. Erderismos. Euskera 10, no. 1–4 (1929). Axular [Pedro Agerre]. Gero. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language), 1988. First published in 1643. Translation into Spanish by Luis Villasante: Gero. Barcelona: Flors, 1964. Betolaça, Juan Pérez de. Doctrina Christiana y Basquence, hecha por mandado de D. Pedro Manso, obispo de Calahorra. Bilbao: 1596. Republished by J. A. Arana Martija as “Betolazaren ‘Doctrina Christiana’.” Euskera 31, no. 1 (1986): 505–26. Francis of Sales, Saint. Philotea. Translated into Basque by Joanes Haraneder. Tolosa: 1749. Originally published as Introduction à la vie devoté. Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1609. Translation: Introduction to the Devout Life. New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 2002. Leizarraga, Joanes. Testamentu berria. In Baskische Bücher von 1571 (Neues Testament, Kalender und ABC), edited by T. Linschmann and H. Schuchardt. Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1900. López Mendizábal, Isaac. Diccionario Castellano-Euskera. Tolosa: 1916. Oihenart, Arnauld de. Atsotizac Refravac [Proverbs]. In Gastroa Nevrthizetan. Paris: 1657. Urquijo e Ibarra, Julio de, ed. Refranero vasco: Los refranes y sentencias de 1596. San Sebastián, Sp.: Auñamendi, 1967 GOOD / EVIL This dichotomy, fundamental in the fields of ethics and moral inquiry, flows from the Latin: bonum and malum are the neuter nominalization of the adjectives bonus (good, well behaved) and malus (bad, evil). The etymology of both Latin adjectives, which combine a physical and an ethical sense, is uncertain. 406 GOÛT The real break with the tradition of the theory of art takes place with the Kantian definition of taste, which leads to denying judgments concerning taste any possible objectivity. The loss of this minimal objectivity of judgments of taste, proper to aesthetic intersubjectivity as conceived in the classical period, paved the way for a henceforth dominant conception of taste according to which there is no possible correlation between taste as a faculty of evaluation and the aesthetic properties of the work of art (this last understood in the philosophically realist sense given to the term “property,” that is, a given that exists independently of consciousness). Still, the question raised by the multivocity of the concept as the tradition transmits it to us, that of the plurality of its functions and its finalities, remains untouched. The same goes for the question of the translatability of what was really thought in these conceptions, which amply exceed the relation to art. I. The Continent of Taste before the Age of Aesthetics Gusto in Italian and in Spanish, like goût in French, derives from the Latin gustus, which means the fact of tasting, the taste of a thing, and the tasting sample (the Indo-European root, which we find in the Greek geuomai [γεύομαι], means “to feel,” “to taste,” “to appreciate, to like” [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine]). Gustus is in competition with sapor, “savor, taste,” and “sense of taste,” physical and moral; sapere, which means “to have taste,” with regard to savory things, is also said of people of taste, discernment, relating the qualities of the palate to those of the mind, whence sapientia, “wisdom” (Cicero, De finibus, 2.24: “non sequitur ut cui cor sapiat, ei non sapiat palatus” [having taste with the mind does not entail lacking taste with the palate]; similarly, and more generally, sentio and sensus link the senses and judgment; see SENSE). Though the Italian definition of gusto in terms of judgment does not really retain the idea of savor, the French and Spanish definitions do. In his RT: Thresor de la langue française tant ancienne que moderne, published in 1606, Jean Nicod, who always explains the meaning of each French word by its corresponding Latin, thus defines taste as intellectus saporum, which he himself translates by “judgment of flavors.” We also find this sense of flavor present in the definition Baltasar Gracián gives of good taste: “un buen gusto sazona toda la vida” (a good taste adds spice to life). A. Gusto as habitus, disposition and judgment in Italian theories The word gusto early on acquired a metaphorical sense very distant from its gustatory origins: it indicates moods, desires, and drives. It may express, as in Dante, a “bold desire” (ardito gusto) (Paradise, 32.v.122) or a “disdainful indignation” (disdegnoso gusto) (Inferno, 13.v.70). However, the importance of gusto, its influence and its diffusion in European languages, appear in regard to problems about the experience of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, when Vasari says that Michelangelo had judgment and taste in everything: giudizio e gusto in tutte cose (Le Vite,* VII), the word gusto does not refer to a perceptual receptivity; it indicates, of course, an ability to discern properly artistic qualities, the acuity of the “judgment of the eyes,” as in Leonardo da Vinci, but equally and sometimes exclusively it means the dispositions proper, the idiosyncracy inherent to an individual (an artist or an art-lover). 1. On the relationship between diverse kinds of excellence, nobility, courage, and moral quality, see VIRTÙ, Box 1); cf. VIRTUE. On the particularly sensitive relationship in Greek between the good or inner kindness and outward beauty, see BEAUTY, Box 1; cf. DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, PHÉNOMÈNE. On the relationship between the true and the good—or more precisely, the “better,” which is fundamental to relativism, see TRUTH, Box 2. 2. The Latinate “good/evil” dichotomy quickly proves unable to render all the nuances of the corresponding Germanic terminological complex, with which it does not coincide. In French, juxtaposing bien/mal and bon/mauvais or bon/ méchant, as is commonly done in translating Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, will not suffice to exhaust the more complex play of oppositions in German: Gut/Böse, Wohl/ Übel, (Weh)-Gut/Schlecht. 3. Another constellation that is difficult to translate appears in English in the opposition between “right” and “just,” which is almost impossible to render in French, and in the relationship between each of these two terms and “good”: see RIGHT/JUST/GOOD; cf. FAIR. 4. On the Russian diglossia dobro/blago, see RUSSIAN. v. DUTY, HAPPINESS, MORALS, VALUE GOÛT ENGLISH taste GERMAN Geschmack ITALIAN gusto LATIN gustus SPANISH gusto v. AESTHETICS, ARGUTEZZA, BEAUTY, CLASSIC, GENIUS, INGENIUM, MANIERA, SENSE, STANDARD, VALUE Gusto in Italian and Spanish, goût in French, Geschmack in German, and “taste” in English all have a twofold sense, one gustatory and one aesthetic. European languages borrowed the word for referring to what we now call aesthetic judgment from the vocabulary of the five senses. Though it is important, this semantic ambiguity is not the real source of the constant difficulties presented by the concept of taste in the field of aesthetics. These come rather from specific misunderstandings arising out of the division between aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and ancient theories of art. Related to giudizio, the word gusto as used by Italians in the Renaissance refers to sharpness of judgment, the capacity for discernment, the specific disposition of an artist. It may have an ethical, psychological, even a political meaning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gusto in Spanish and goût in French retain the senses of sharpness and discernment. Though they are increasingly used in the sense of aesthetic judgment over the course of the seventeenth century, especially in France, their usage does not display a normative character at the start. It is only in the eighteenth century that goût is assimilated to bon goût, at the same time as it takes on a more and more subjective sense, notably under the influence of new philosophical trends. The conceptual development of taste in Englishlanguage philosophies of aesthetic experience gives a new direction to thinking about taste, while still preserving for the term the range of meanings attached to gusto and goût. GOÛT 407 this style, manner, or taste, comes from nature and the mind.) (“Osservazioni di Nicolo Pussino,” in Bellori, Le Vite; trans. A. Sedgwick Wohl) A different definition by Filippo Baldinucci can in a sense be said to complete this one, by making a fundamental determination, one that in fact dominates artistic activity until the beginning of the nineteenth century: gusto is the exercise of judgment in the adequate application of the rules of art: Gusto e Buon gusto, si applicano anche alle opere d’arte, nelle quali l’autore abbia seguite le regole del bello, ed abbiano grazia, eleganza, garbo, e simile. (Taste and good taste also apply to works of art, those in which the author has followed the rules of the beautiful and which possess grace, elegance, delicacy, and other similar things.) (Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno) In this alliance with systems of rules for the arts, gusto can resolve the tension that existed between its original, idiosyncratic, and individual sense, and the demand for universality proper to art and the classical theory of art. B. Predominance and exemplarity of gusto: Baltasar Gracián In Spanish in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gusto rarely implies a judgment of taste in the properly aesthetic or artistic sense. Indeed, it appears rather more like a mode of implicit evaluation, a value judgment that is exercised in well-determined circumstances, namely in the world of the court and the political sphere. It refers to the idea of skill, the faculty of adapting oneself with ingenuity to the behavior of others, and knowing how to extract the greatest profit from it. In Baltasar Gracián, who develops the most precise theory of taste, gusto does not have the creative fertility of ingenio (spirit) or genio (genius), both of which, however, imply el ejercicio y cultura del gusto (the exercise and cultivation of taste) (Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio). When it is exclusively a capacity and a mode of judgment, gusto is not distinct from genio. However, it is distinguished from it insofar as gusto is exercised over a period of long maturation; it is the fruit of the study of books, works, and men, even though it reveals itself in an immediate mode. Like ingenio, gusto is an act that can take place only at the right moment, when the mind is truly absorbed and when matters have arrived at their highest degree of perfection. Whence the difficulty in clearly defining gusto, which, like the subtlety of agudeza and the dazzling inventiveness of ingenio, can capture the characteristic feature within a plurality of relations and sensible qualities, thus attesting to the superiority of someone who is capable of such just and perspicacious judgment. If ingenio is the art of spiritual invention, gusto is the most perfect acuity in the art of discernment. In this sense, true gusto obeys a teleology of perfecting itself as buen gusto, as correct evaluation. Ingenio, agudeza, and gusto have a common trait: they occur in a unique, privileged mind, one in which the genio reaches its peak of excellence and ephemeral glory, in conformity, in this aspect, with the vision of the world of many Jesuit theorists. Insofar as it is manifest in rare moments of This idiosyncracy is often less the mark of artistic sensibility than an expression of temperament, as understood by the then very widespread theory of temperaments, of the specific complezione of the personality of an artist. In the relations between masters and students, the first problem is thus to find affinities, a harmony between each person’s taste and temperament, so that the teaching may be as productive as possible. This is why Antonio Francesco Doni insists in his treatise, regarding the art of drapery, that the disciple should take care in choosing his master: Questi panni sono tutta gratia e maniera che s’acquista per studiare una materia fatta d’altro maestro che piu t’é ito a gusto che alcuno altro. (These draperies are all grace and style [maniera], which one acquires by studying a matter created by a master who is better suited to your taste than any other.) (Il Disegno) What is decisive here is not gusto as a capacity of judgment, but rather the disposition or temperament as the expression of a unique individuality, insofar as these determine the artist’s maniera, or his style. Taste is not just the principle of identity of a maniera or an artist: it can also refer to a group, an artistic school, even a nation (for Vasari, for example, the Germans have a gusto gotico, which is essentially suited to their dispositions and temperament). Gusto also takes the meaning of a certain faculty of judging and evaluating aesthetic or artistic qualities and tends progressively to replace giudizio, which is often reduced to an act of perception, a way of discerning and distinguishing that calls upon both sensibility and intellect. In the sixteenth century, a text by Paolo Pino shows the orientation of gusto in relation to giudizio, despite their obvious multivocity: Sono varii li giudicii umani, diverse le complessioni, abbiamo medesmamente l’uno dall’altro estratto l’intelletto nel gusto, la qual differenzia causa che non a tutti aggradano equalmente le cose. (The judgments of men are varied and their temperaments different, we have in the same way extracted one from the other the intellect from taste, and this difference is why things do not please everyone in the same way.) (Dialogo di pittura; trans. M. Pardo) In the seventeenth century, a theorist as careful as Bellori in fixing the clarity and precision of artistic concepts cites Nicolas Poussin’s definition of painting (written in Italian) with deference. Yet Poussin considers gusto to be a synonym for maniera and stile (a relatively new word at the time): Lo stile è una maniera particolare ed industria di dipingere e disegnare nata dal particolare genio di ciascuno nell’applicazione e nell’uso dell’idea, il quale stile, maniera o gusto si tienne dalla parte della natura e dell’ingegno. (Style is an individual manner and ingenuity in painting and drawing born of a genius which is the individual’s alone, in the application and the use of the idea; 408 GOÛT The idea that taste as specific judgment is known by its extreme rarity, that is to say, by a faculty that only a few can exercise adequately, is thus radicalized. It appears in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in France, in Germany with Schopenhauer, who is inspired by de Houssaie’s translation for his own translation of Gracián into German, and, more indirectly, in Nietzsche. C. Taste and rules The French meaning of goût borrows relatively little from the dominant Italian or Spanish models. One of the characteristics of the word and its uses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is to imply, openly or tacitly, a denial of the logical categories inherited by Scholasticism, and to oppose what was then called “the language of pedants.” We do not find this desire for autonomy, and sometimes provocation, in Italian or Spanish texts. Narrowly related to tact, fine discernment, the spirit of opportunity, French goût is considered more in terms of relations, cleverly mastered situations, or the act of judgment than in terms of judgment of idiosyncratic properties or dispositions as in Italy. The ancient sense of enjoyment and fine discernment takes on a new value in Bossuet, especially when he cites the phrase of the dying Grand Condé: “‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we shall see God as he is, face to face.’ He repeated in Latin, with marvelous taste, these great words” (Oraison funèbre du Grand Condé, 1687). The word expresses the idea of an extraordinary pleasure, an exceptional acuity of mind, that is a mixture of sympathy in the most affective sense and clairvoyant intelligence. . It is precisely this conception of an adjudicating activity whose basis seems to lack any justification that will later become the object of all the misunderstandings and ambiguities surrounding the use of the term “taste.” This remark holds true as well for the notion of a rule (the taste that cleaves to the rules described by La Rochefoucauld), indissociable from the power of “good judgment.” The rule was never, for the theorists of the seventeenth century, a rigid the life of the mind, gusto is inaccessible to youth (too uneducated) and impossible in old age (too feeble). It is a form of knowledge (gustar implies saber, to know). As to its origins, Gracián writes, “Si la admiracion es hija de la ignorancia, también es madre del gusto” (If admiration is the daughter of ignorance, it is also the mother of taste) (El Criticón). This admiration, however, which also applies to the circumstances of life, to the most exceptional qualities of things, and to art, requires a superior form of discernment, necessary for the wise man to carry out his task, such that taste in the end encompasses the whole of life, whether practical or contemplative. With Gracián, the denial of any possible universality to taste appears for the first time with striking clarity, couched in multiple repetitions of the claim that it is a rare capacity. Thus in the Oráculo manual (Pocket Oracle), maxim 28: “How truly wise the man who was unhappy at the thought he might please the masses! An excess of applause from the vulgar never satisfies the discreet”; or maxim 39: “Recognize things at their peak, at their best, and know how to take advantage of them. Not everyone can, and not all those who can know how to” (trans. J. Robbins). This power of selection (elección), this faculty of judging in both moral and aesthetic matters, goes hand in hand with ingenio, since mind and taste are “twin brothers.” Only buen gusto is able to grasp the imperceptible grace of something, a being or a work, all the nuances of this despejo, which Amelot de la Houssaie translates into French as the je ne sais quoi, and which represents the vida de toda perfección (the life of all perfection). Only buen gusto can discern in the despejo the superior quality that is the perfection of perfection without which all beauty is dead. Thus, Es eminencia de buen gusto gozar de cada cosa en su complemento. (It’s the height of good taste to enjoy things at their most perfect.) (Oráculo manual, §39; trans. J. Robbins) 1 La Rochefoucauld’s definition of taste For La Rochefoucauld, taste refers to a faculty of “judging soundly,” which comes close to wit without really being assimilated to it. Like Dominique Bouhours, Antoine Gombauld Chevalier de Méré, and many others among his contemporaries, La Rochefoucauld makes taste a specific form of judgment that does not consist in a purely intellectual act, but that is not reducible to affects either, nor, most importantly, to a feeling like aesthetic pleasure, in the sense used in the eighteenth century. More precise than Pascal’s esprit de finesse, it is central in the relations to others or toward artworks, even though the logic constituting this mode of evaluation cannot be analyzed except by a description. La Rochefoucauld’s definition of taste is in a way paradigmatic: This term “taste” has many meanings, and it is easy to make mistakes with it. There is a difference between the taste which carries us towards things and the taste which makes us know and discern their qualities by applying rules to them: one may like comedy without having taste which is fine and delicate enough to judge it well, and one may have taste which is good enough to judge comedy well without liking it. (“Du goût,” in Maximes et Réflexions diverses, §10; trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère) If it is possible to “judge comedy well without liking it,” this is because there is a faculty of evaluation that can distinguish the artistic or aesthetic qualities of a work with greater clarity than that of most people. That presupposes then that there are unique and exceptional qualities inherent in works and an especially clearsighted power of evaluation that we call taste. GOÛT 409 we see the alliance of good sense, imagination, and respect for the rules. This is why Voltaire considers Addison to be a “perfected Rabelais,” that is, like a Rabelais who had shown taste. His conception of taste, unlike that of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos or Diderot, constitutes a final movement of resistance against English influence insofar as, for him, the power of aesthetic judgment precisely does not derive from sentiment or the intellect: what is most important is the correct fit between the creative act and the system of rules of the theory of classical art. And it is, above all, this somewhat dogmatic position that was widely spread throughout Europe, much more so than the writings of Charles Batteux or Rousseau, to the point where French taste became synonymous with normativity and arbitrary objectivism about aesthetic criteria. This usage and meaning of the word have survived down to the present as a counterexample and a concept to be avoided in any aesthetic theory. They are not, however, especially representative of the thought of the eighteenth century, since we find very different conceptions in Du Bos, the abbé Trublet, Montesquieu, and Batteux. Thus, the abbé Trublet gives an active role to the sentiment of beauty only to those who are genuinely cultivated: Since arguments require instruction, it appears that the appreciation of the beautiful belongs in the first instance to people of cultivated taste; the dilemma is resolved in their favor. (Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality) However, the original claim in his book is that the more taste, that is, cultivated taste, is developed, the more feeling and reason are destined to blend with one another. This is the final attempt to surmount the growing antinomy between aesthetic feeling and rational thought in the Enlightenment. But Rousseau prevents this possible synthesis for a long time, by effecting a decisive reversal. The word “taste” now becomes an indefinable notion: Of all the natural gifts Taste is the one which is felt the most and explained the least; it would not be what it is, if we could define it: for it judges objects on which judgment has no purchase, and serves, so to speak, as glasses for reason. (“Goût” in Dictionnaire de musique) In reality, goût is an instinct for Rousseau (as it is for Leibniz), and the feeling of the beautiful cannot be a judgment in the sense of an expression relating concepts and empirical data. The judgment of taste is thus not truly a judgment, as understood in logical thought—that is, a statement that may lead to an objective proposition—just as an evaluative proposition for Frege, Wittenstein, and logicians cannot be a true proposition, since its truth-value cannot be determined. Inexpressible sentiment and mental activity irreducible to any objectification—this is how taste, as conceived by Rousseau, appears in the Kantian problem of reflective judgment and in contemporary aesthetics. II. The Properly Aesthetic Genesis of “Taste” The aesthetic construction of the English “taste” plays a central role in the eighteenth century, as we are reminded by and more or less arbitrary norm imposed by groups of dominant art-lovers, but rather an essential mediation in relation to a work of art. It is the exemplification of the exceptional achievement of a work (that of a Raphael or a Carracci), to which it is not appropriate to conform, strictly speaking, but which is to be imitated in an act that is itself freely creative. If the translation of the notions of taste and rules rested on so many misunderstandings, it is because aesthetic criticism, especially since Lessing, deliberately referred to the more normative sense that was given to the terms “taste” and “rules” in the eighteenth century by Charles Batteux and, above all, Voltaire. Taste in the eighteenth century in France takes two different shapes. One tends to affirm the rarity of a faculty that is truly able to discern the unique properties of a work of art. The other is part of the birth of aesthetics, and aims to respond to specifically philosophical demands. In cultivated circles, to write about, interpret, and evaluate a painting or a sculpture requires something other than the general faculty of judgment: above all, “an exquisite taste” is required, that is an aptitude for grasping the rarest nuances and the most delicate aesthetic properties that escape the perception of most viewers. There are a thousand men of good sense for one man of taste, and a thousand people of taste for one of exquisite taste. (Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” trans. Margaret Jourdain) This belief, though foreign to any elitism in the nineteenth-century sense, certainly runs the risk of being inconsistent with a line of thought primarily concerned with determining the conditions of a universal judgment. The question of the universality of aesthetic judgment tends indeed to arise with the influence of English theorists. Voltaire attempted to resolve this inconsistency in a way that, while not always original, was considerably influential. The importance of his writings on the subject is that they take advantage of the multivocity of goût, appealing sometimes to the meaning inherited from the seventeenth century, and sometimes giving the concept an explicitly normative inflection. What distinguishes him from the authors of the previous century is that he defines taste as a necessary reference to the rules of classicism. The rule, which was productive insofar as it had the value of an example, becomes a norm, which is a rule that is henceforth fixed, unchangeable and more or less incontestable. Thus, he writes, “[T]here was no longer any taste in Italy” (The Age of Louis XIV). The phrase means that Italian artists no longer conformed to the system of rules proper to the classical ideal, and that they produced extravagant works like those of Bernini and Borromini. Taste is based less on an aesthetic subjectivity than a sort of legislation that is immanent to the works produced, as in this phrase: “The real reason is that, among people who cultivate the fine arts, many years are required to purify language and taste” (ibid.). “Taste” here refers to a sort of ideality in the union of the rules applied correctly and the genius of the artist. Hence, for example, regarding Addison, “Addison’s words breathe taste” (ibid.), that is, they are works in which 410 GOÛT received the prize given by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts for the best essay on the subject. According to the essay, which consists of a summary of different theses on taste being discussed in Scotland at the time, taste structures the perception of “works of art and genius” and may be related to the principles by which the mind receives pleasure or pain. These principles are the internal senses: those of novelty, grandeur or sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. The union of the internal senses shapes and perfects taste insofar as it makes it possible to excite the most exquisite pleasures. To discover the deepest qualities of taste, the internal senses are aided by judgment, the faculty that distinguishes different things, separates truth and falsehood, compares objects and their qualities. Judgment introduces the possibility of not only perceiving but also of assessing the meaning of a work. It operates after the powerful exercise of feelings by the internal senses, which allow one to experience pleasure or displeasure; judgment then brings to taste the depth of penetration. “Taste” now refers to a compound operation, both perceptual and intellectual, immediate and mediated, perceptive and evaluative. Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste, also takes account of the composite character of taste. “Taste” cannot be defined only by the internal correctness of sentiments, even if the philosopher must accept the variety of tastes, proof of the vital and ordinary attraction that all individuals have for their own sentiments. At the same time, taste presumes agreement, a process of evaluation that assesses the relations of works to beauty. The delicacy of taste by which the mind refines emotions makes correct expressions of artistic judgment possible. This aesthetic capacity requires an exercise by which the real qualities of a work are identified. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, offers a similar figure of the “man of taste” who distinguishes slight, often imperceptible differences of beauty or ugliness. The tension expressed by “taste” between perception and evaluation continues to enrich aesthetic reflection. The work of the English art critic Clive Bell, Art (1914), for instance, interestingly extends the construction of aesthetic emotion in terms of “sense” and “taste” by suggesting a return to personal experience in art on the basis of an “aesthetic emotion” that is not reducible to a simple subjective representation of the contemplated object. On the side of the value of art, Malcolm Budd in Values of Art (1995), focusing on the determination of the artistic value of a work, posits the experience of the work of art as an act of intelligence and discusses Hume’s standard of taste. III. Taste Put to the Test of Philosophical Reflection: From Transcendental Subjectivity to Taste as a Method of Determining Value A. The transcendental revolution: Geschmack as reflective judgment Though English philosophers draw attention to the productivity and autonomy of aesthetic subjectivity, they nevertheless remain faithful to traditional conceptions of taste as a faculty of discernment of a certain type. The real break with all previous theories of taste comes with Kant’s critical philosophy, which attempts to destroy the idea dear to the author of the entry “Taste” in A Companion to Aesthetics (Cooper 1992). The English term inherits a considerable history that began, as we have seen, in the Renaissance. According to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, in conformity with Italian and French traditions, “taste” is the instrument of a reflection on the perfection of art in England: Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau idéal of the French, and the great style, genius, and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. (“The Great Leading Principles of the Grand Style ,” Third Discourse in Discourses) “Taste” is thus part of the European history of the concept. But it is in England that this history is reworked by philosophers and thenceforth is part of a context that is proper to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The usage of “taste” makes it at first a term that rationalizes social distinctions. The word refers to a rule and justification for developing a discourse on civilization, the mores whose danger is always a division between civilized and barbarous tastes. When good taste is exercised, pleasure develops in society. “Taste” is here very close to “relish,” or “delectation.” But the meaning of the term shifts, coming to refer also to an operation of the subject that begins in feeling. The word thus means aesthetic experience as, and the experience of, contemplation, which presumes both a theory of perception and of evaluation. The fragility and the ambiguities of this concept must then be emphasized, as it attempts to delineate a unique mode of judgment while at the same time recognizing that which is immanent in the emotions. “Taste” thus appears in the first instance as a prescriptive concept in which art and society are intertwined. The rules of taste do not have an absolute value, but are rather aimed at raising individuals up to a state of being civilized. Taste becomes noticed as part of polite society with Addison and Steele’s Spectator, which, from 1711 to 1714, offers chronicles of customs, arts, and social behaviors in order to observe and spread the rules of life and British politeness of gentlemen and their culture. The intent is “[t]o discover, how we may, to best Advantage, form within our-selves what in the polite World is call’d a Relish, or Good TASTE,” writes Shaftesbury in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Making oneself a subject of taste has as a necessary correlate the correction and daily adjustments that politeness requires as a set of collective rules of propriety that yield the improvement of society. Beyond its application to the production of pleasure in society, the word “taste” is associated with the presence in humans of a natural sense that functions as an immediate possible evaluation. Taste can thus be compared with having a gift or a talent whose innate or acquired nature is debated. Etymologically, “taste” comes from the Latin tangere; it is initially a matter of touching, tact, in the proper and the figurative senses. It evokes a delicate and spontaneous appreciation. The use of “taste” presupposes reflection about the notion of sense, understood as sensory device. In 1759 Alexander Gerard published “An Essay on Taste,” which GOÛT 411 a faculty of judgment that deals less with an object than with a mode of representation: Geschmack ist das Beurteilungsvermögen eines Gegenstandes oder einer Vorstellungsart durch ein Wohlgefallen oder Missgefallen ohne alles Interesse. Der Gegenstand eines solchen Wohlgefallens heisst schön. (Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful.) (“Analytic of the Beautiful,” §5; trans. J. C. Meredith) Kant’s desire to conform above all to his project of a transcendental philosophy is clear from this first definition on. For his judgment of taste does not deal with the object as such, nor with its properties, nor with a rule of art, nor even with the aesthetic sensation that the object incites, but with the mode of representation born from the sensation. And this mode of representation in its turn causes a specific sentiment that is none other than the sentiment of pleasure conceived of as the Bestimmungsgrund (basis) of the aesthetic experience. Insofar as it is manifested by a sentiment, taste is a form of reflective judgment referring to the structures of aesthetic subjectivity as it is understood from within the project of a transcendental philosophy. This is why the only predicate Kant allows definitively for the beautiful is the feeling of pleasure. One of the great difficulties encountered in making judgments of taste as described in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” is to want to reconcile the self-referential character of taste with the requirement of universal communicability, subjectively grounded—that is, with the claim to subjective universality. B. Geschmack on trial If Hegel gives a relatively restricted role to the problem of taste in his Lectures on Aesthetics, it is because he disqualifies the latter as a criterion for the understanding of a work of art. As a manifestation of aesthetic subjectivity, taste is for him an essential obstacle to the genuinely philosophical analysis of art. A large swathe of aesthetic thought in the twentieth century (especially that of Lukács and Adorno) is influenced by this condemnation, and actively embraces its theoretical consequences. Taste henceforth ceased to be a constitutive element of interpretation; it is no longer anything more than a parasitic form of subjectivism. In Hegel, Geschmack is used without any reference to the problem of reflective judgment that exercised Kant. When he analyzes it, it is exclusively in a polemical way, to attack eighteenth-century theories of art: Another kind of interest consisted not in the express aim of producing genuine works of art directly but in the intention of developing through such theories a judgement on works of art, in short, of developing taste. As examples, Home’s Elements of Criticism, the works of Batteux, and Ramler’s Einleitung in die schönen Wissenschaften were books much read in their day. Taste in this sense concerns the arrangement and treatment, the aptness and perfection of what belongs to the external Baumgarten of a cognitive aesthetics, founded on rational and normative principles. It is in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica and Aesthetica that we find one of the first properly philosophical definitions of taste, insofar as it attempts to renew the problem of relations between the sensible and the intelligible. This means that the concept does indeed now fall within the specific domain of philosophy. Baumgarten, however, who writes and thinks in Latin, is keen to preserve the rhetorical and humanist heritage by reconciling it with the demands of Leibnizian metaphysics, here represented especially by Wolff’s school. For Baumgarten, gustus is, like the other faculties, a form of knowledge (cognitio inferior), a sensible experience of reality: Gustus significatu latiori de sensualibus, i.e. quae sentiuntur, est judicium sensuum. (In the widest sense, taste in the domain of the sensible, that is, what is felt, is the judgment of the senses.) (Metaphysica, §608) It is thanks to this sensory organ that the object of judgment is felt. Gustus is thus determined as a sensible faculty of judgment, but one that presupposes some training to reach full maturity (maturitas), a bit as in Gracián: “Talis gustus est sapor non publicus (purior, eruditus)” (The taste that corresponds is an uncommon flavor [purer and more cultivated]) (ibid.). Insofar as this faculty is effectively cognitive, since it accounts for certain experiences of reality, it may commit errors of judgment, as in the case of perceptual illusions. It is thus central as a facultas diiudicandi, as a faculty of judging aesthetically. Kant’s aesthetic thought rests in part on the rejection of this perspective, which still makes it possible to intellectualize the forms of sensory judgments, or rather, of judgments, which would imply both a sort of virtual intelligibility and a minimal objectivity. The original meaning of Geschmack, as the word is used beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason, in the famous note (to §1) on the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” is based on a radical rejection of gustus as conceived by Baumgarten: The Germans are the only ones who now employ the word “aesthetics” to designate that which others call the critique of taste. The ground for this is a failed hope, held by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science. But this effort is futile. For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their most prominent sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as determinate a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed; rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former. (trans. Guyer and Wood, 173) This note explicitly condemns the project of the Aesthetica, and no further allusion is made to it, even in the third Critique, where its claims are indirectly refuted. Indeed, in the Critique of Judgement (1.1), the first definition of taste makes it 412 GOÛT With Schopenhauer, taste regains its philosophical dignity, since it is an expression of the will to live (Wille zum Leben). This metaphysical notion of the will to live is based, according to Schopenhauer, on the life sciences. Thenceforth, it is possible to form a physiology of taste, of theories of the specific activity of the sense organs having a positive cognitive value. The aisthêsis [αἴσθησις] of taste thus conceived, determined by physiology, optics, and the medical sciences, necessarily escapes transcendental subjectivity and Hegelian critique, becoming itself a major interpretive form, not only of art but also of reality and culture. The meaning of the word is still implicit in Schopenhauer’s demonstrations (for example, those regarding the important question of style, and especially philosophical style) and it is never conceptualized as such: Geschmack refers most often to taste in the Spanish sense (remember that Schopenhauer translated Gracián), and especially the French sense as transmitted by the eighteenth century. If he thinks of Geschmack in the sense of gusto and goût, it is in order to produce new criteria of a mode of philosophical reasoning of which Nietzsche is the main beneficiary. When Nietzsche uses Geschmack, it is most often as a constitutive element of evaluation and to make it central to a determination of any possible value. Und ihr sagt mir, Freunde, dass nicht zu streiten sei über Geschmack und Schmecken? Aber alles Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken! Geschmack: das ist Gewicht zugleich und Wagschale und Wägender; und wehe allem Lebendigen, das ohne Streit um Gewicht und Wagschale und Wägende leben wollte! (And you say to me, friends, there is no disputing over taste and tasting? But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting! Taste: that is weight and at the same time scales and weigher; and woe to anything living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!) (“Von den Erhabenen,” in Also sprach Zarathoustra, of Werke, 2:373; “On Those Who Are Sublime,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of Complete Works, trans. G. Parkes) We note that in the translation of the Latin adage “de gustibus coloribusque non disputandum” the German retains only the gustatory part: Geschmack and Schmecken, taste and what has flavor. Among the many uses Nietzsche makes of the concept of taste, these lines from Zarathustra have the particular interest relying on the three emblematic figures of the scale, weight, and the weigher. The triple relation clearly shows an effort to overcome the purely subjective dimension of the evaluation by positing correlates and constitutive criteria of axiological experience. Balance and weight do not refer to the principle of subjectivity of evaluation, any more than they would be mere metaphors intended to communicate that taste is a value judgment. In reality, the emblematic definition of “taste” is already axiological: it presupposes that any thought is an interpretation, evaluation, and conflict at the same time. This does not mean exactly that taste is a sufficient condition for deciding the value or nonvalue of something, but that it must be rehabilitated insofar as it appearance of a work of art (Geschmack in diesem Sinne betrifft die Anordnung und Behandlung, das Schickliche und Ausgebildete dessen, was zur äusseren Erscheinung eines Kunstwerks gehört). Moreover they drew into the principles of taste views which were taken from the old psychology and had been derived from empirical observations of mental capacities and activities, passions and their probable intensification, sequence, etc. But it remains ever the case that every man apprehends works of art or characters, actions, and events according to the measure of his insight and his feelings; and since the development of taste only touched on what was external and meagre, and besides took its prescriptions likewise from only a narrow range of works of art and a limited training of the intellect and the feelings, its scope was unsatisfactory and incapable of grasping the inner [meaning] and truth [of art] and sharpening the eye for detecting these things. (Introduction to Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 1:27) The concept of taste thus no longer has anything but a negative meaning, for the purpose of showing the weakness of earlier theories; it refers more to frankly erroneous conceptions than to a precise function. Art lovers and connoisseurs have, according to Hegel, been focusing on technical details, secondary and contingent understandings. This excessive attention to the “external manifestation” of a work of art is the sign, according to Hegel, of an aesthetics that gives a dominant role to sensation, sensory perception, and even sentiment. Taste thus becomes synonymous with immediate sensation, subjectivity that is exclusively attached to the least essential aspects of a work of art. It has not only lost all critical fertility but also turns out to be a secondary activity, screening off the deeper meaning of art, since it refers to the perceptible as such, that is, to what is inadequate for spirit. This contrast between “taste” as sensible knowledge relying on rules external to its object, and “spirit” as true knowledge of art may be surprising, precisely because it remains a pure opposition, ending in a condemnation and a radical rejection of taste. It is thus not as a “moment” that taste is eliminated, but as a false path, noxious and contrary to spirit as interiority. The difficulty of determining a precise meaning, some kind of use for taste comes from the fact that Hegel has subjected it to a trial that is strongly conditioned by an opposition to any form of sensualism or subjectivism. Through this concept, Hegel takes aim above all at the primacy of sensation, at feeling as a positing of subjectivity, at the recognition of appearance as such—in other words, at the eighteenth century. C. The positivity of Geschmack as a fundamental mode of evaluation Nineteenth-century thought inquires increasingly into the nature and functions of value judgments. This reactivation of value judgments, however—implicit in Schopenhauer, central in Nietzsche, and then problematic in Max Weber and Rickert—brings with it a rehabilitation of taste as a mode of evaluation. GOÛT 413 of good taste has passed) (Aesthetische Korrespondenzen). This type of claim, returned to over and over again in aesthetic criticism, tends to eliminate the notion of taste as a capacity of discerning aesthetic and artistic properties at one blow, without ever analyzing what it implies. For this critique is directed at a semantic content that was never the one transmitted by the tradition; it relies on the erroneous and anachronistic idea of taste as conformity to a system of more or less arbitrary norms. With few exceptions, defining this concept no longer consists in determining a precise sense for it, but rather in producing ideologically based arguments that are hostile to any idea of any aptitude for discerning aesthetic qualities in a work of art and determining them according to a hierarchy. In the twentieth century, the aesthetic thought that develops in the field of analytic philosophy is the only one that attempts to restore a precise semantic content to the notion of taste. Taste is not simply assimilated to an arbitrary form of value judgment or an idiosyncratic fact. It is with regard to the question of the definition of aesthetic concepts and the determination of aesthetic properties of a work—hence of acts of predication—that the notion has been rehabilitated, in particular by Frank Sibley. His article “Aesthetic Concepts” (Philosophical Review) provoked a number of reactions and polemics, precisely because it claims to affirm the positivity of taste, its productive and effective activity in the determination of an aesthetic property of an object. For Sibley, a statement about specifically aesthetic qualities cannot be distinguished from one about sensible qualities unless we appeal to a type of activity that is different from that of simple perception, namely the exercise of taste: “Therefore, when a word or expression is such that its application requires taste or perceptivity, I will call it an aesthetic term or expression, and similarly, I will speak of aesthetic concepts or concepts of taste.” Sibley’s whole problem, and especially that of his is constitutive of any evaluation, thus as one of the means of resolving certain ethical and aesthetic questions. “What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons” (The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff and A. del Caro, §132), or “It is we thinkers who first have to determine the palatableness of things and, if necessary, decree it” (Daybreak, §505; trans. M. Clark et al.). If any sensation or perception already contains an evaluation, taste must be constitutive of value judgment and evaluation. . IV. Crisis and Reevaluation of the Functions of Taste in Contemporary Aesthetics The refusal to grant cognitive content to judgments of taste and evaluation is characteristic of a philosophical attitude that is widely shared today. The question of the meaning and the function of “taste” is thus endlessly deferred, or even ruled out a priori, including in the domain of aesthetics. The rather general argument that disqualifies aesthetic judgment founded on taste is that one can never, on the basis of a perception of the artistic and aesthetic properties of a work of art, derive or infer a judgment, or rather a proposition with any sort of objectivity or validity. Taste thus seems fated to refer almost always to the structures of subjectivity, thus to the Kantian problem of reflective judgment. The growing disqualification of value judgment in aesthetic reflection since the nineteenth century only confirmed the discredit cast upon taste. In contemporary aesthetics, taste is a concept that most often has only a negative meaning, or presents an evident lack of content. Deprived of any possibility of reference (for example, to the work of art as such or to the activity of the subject of aesthetic experience), its definitions are for the most part purely negative. Thus, Reinhard Knodt claims, “Das Zeitalter des guten Geschmacks ist vorbei” (The time 2 “The Yes and No of the palate” It is precisely this primacy of the evaluative that is most often the object of misinterpretation, incomprehension, and principled opposition by commentators. The way in which Habermas cites the phrase “the Yes and No of the palate,” which Nietzsche uses in §224 of Beyond Good and Evil, is in this regard especially significant. In this paragraph, Nietzsche contrasts the “historical sense” (der historische Sinn) that “we other Europeans claim as our peculiarity,” this faculty that “the moderns” have for understanding all the forms of evaluation and of tasting all things, with the capacity for rejecting and excluding that “the men of an aristocratic civilization” had toward anything that did not agree with their own value system. It is thus that the French of the seventeenth century, he says, were incapable of appreciating Homer: The very definite Yes and No of their palate, their easy nausea, their hesitant reserve toward everything foreign, their horror of the poor taste even of a lively curiosity, and altogether the reluctance of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign—all this inclines and disposes them unfavorably even against the best things in the world which are not theirs or could not become their prey. (Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann) Habermas thus interprets Nietzsche’s way of proceeding: “Nietzsche enthrones taste, ‘the Yes and No of the palate,’ as the organ of a ‘knowledge’ beyond true and the false, beyond good and evil” (“The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 96). 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Hume, David. “Essay of the Standard of Taste.” Pp. 133–53 in Selected Essays, edited by Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. First published in 1757. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Vol. 3–4 of Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Akademieausgabe: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–22. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Kritik der Urteilskraft. Vol. 5 of Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Akademieausgabe: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–22. Translation by J. C. Meredith: Critique of Judgement. Edited by J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen, eds. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. La Rochefoucauld, François de. Maximes et Réflexions diverses. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1957. First published in 1678. Translation, with introduction and notes, by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère: Collected Maxims and Other Reflections. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967. Translation, with introduction and notes, by Edward Allen McCormick: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Méré, Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier de. Œuvres. 3 vols. Edited by Charles Henri Boudhors. Paris: Roches, 1930. . Conversations of the Mareschal of Clerambault and the Chevalier de Meré: A Treatise of Great Esteem Amongst the Principal Wits of France. Translated by Archibald. Lovell. London, 1677. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brède. Essai sur le goût. Introduction and notes by Charles-Jacques Beyer. Geneva: Droz, 1967. First published in 1757. Anonymous translation: “Essay on Taste.” Pp. 257–314 in An Essay on Taste: With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, Mr. De Montesquieu, edited by Alexander Gerard. London, 1759. Moriarty, Michael. Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1989. . Complete Works. 18 vols. Edited by Oscar Levy. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. . Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Edited and translated by Maudemarie Clark et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams et al. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. successors, is to break out of this somewhat circular reasoning contained in the definition: taste is a necessary condition for the production of aesthetic concepts, and these concepts presuppose the exercise of taste as a specific capacity for discerning the qualities or properties proper to art. Without going further here into this problem, which has the merit of raising again the question of the logic of aesthetic predicates and aesthetic criteria, we may see here a rehabilitation of taste, not as a transcendental faculty but as a necessary condition of the validation of aesthetic concepts. The appeal to ordinary language, or rather the desire to accept it as such, or as the possibility of resolving certain logico-semantic aporias, are proper to analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein, considering the semantic content of aesthetic concepts just as problematic as that of other philosophical notions, uses the term Geschmack several times. In the Vermischte Bemerkungen, he writes, “Feilen ist manchmal Tätigkeit des Geschmacks, manchmal nicht. Ich habe Geschmack” (Sometimes polishing is a function of taste, but sometimes not. I have taste)” (Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch). In every case, the word Geschmack is curiously used in a noncritical, that is, nonphilosophical way. Even though the Bemerkungen belong to Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought, Geschmack here preserves all the density and the clarity of words of ordinary language. This leaves intact the possibility of using the word without losing the useful irresponsibility that allows one to say that, after all, taste is taste. Jean-François Groulier Fabienne Brugère REFS.: Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated, with commentary, by Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. 2nd. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Baldinucci, Filippo. Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno. Vols. 2–3 of Opere. Milan, 1809. First published in 1681, in Florence. Batteux, Charles. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un seul principe. In vol. 1 of Principes de la littérature. Lyon, 1802. Les Beaux-Arts was first published in 1746. Translation by John Miller: A Course of the Belles Lettres, or the Principles of Literature. London, 1761. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. 7th ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1963. First published in 1779. . Aesthetica. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1970. First published in 1750–58. Bell, Clive. Art. Edited by J. B. Bullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. First published in 1914. Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le Vite de pittori scultori e architettori moderni. Rome, 1672. Translation by Alice Sedgwick Wohl: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bouhours, Dominique. La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit. Paris, 1687. Translated anonymously: The Art of Criticism: or, the Method of Making a Right Judgment upon Subjects of Wit and Learning. Introduction by Philip Smallwood. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1981. English translation first published in 1705. Budd, Malcolm. Values of Art. London: Penguin, 1995. Cooper, David, ed. A Companion to Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les sourds-muets à l’usage de ceuz qui entendent et qui parlent.” 1751. Translation by Margaret Jourdain: “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak.” Pp. 158–218 in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works. Edited by M. Jourdain. Chicago: Open Court, 1916. Doni, Anton Francesco. Il Disegno. Venice, 1549. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. With preface by Dominique Désirat. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993. GREEK 415 GRACE The Latin gratia (from gratus, “pleasant, charming, dear, grateful”) refers to a way of being agreeable to others or vice versa. It suggests “favor, gratitude, good relations,” including at the physical level: “charm, attractiveness.” Church language has made special use of it to render the Greek charis [χάϱις] (e.g., gratificus, benevolent = charistêrios [χαϱιστήϱιος])—when, for example, the Virgin Mary is addressed as “full of grace,” we hear that she is dear, benevolent, and charming. The term thus hovers at the boundaries of the aesthetic and the religious. I. Aesthetics of Grace 1. For the Greek charis, and the way in which chairein [χαίϱειν] refers to the pleasure of being, the joy of existing in the beauty of the world, see PLEASURE, I.A. Cf., for an entirely different connotation, the German Gelassenheit (see SERENITY). See also WELT, Box 1, on kosmos [ϰόσμος]; and BEAUTY, Box 1, on the study of the syntagma kalos kagathos [ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός]. 2. On the terminological network put in place in the Italian aesthetic of the Renaissance, see LEGGIADRIA, “grace, lightness.” See also SPREZZATURA; cf. ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, DISEGNO. 3. On the relation between grace and beauty, and the je ne sais quoi, see BEAUTY, Box 4, GOÛT; cf. BAROQUE, INGENIUM, STILL. II. Grace and the Divine On divine grace as related to the organization of the world, besides charis and WELT, Box 1 (see above, I.1), see the Russian SVET, “light, world”; see also BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, “divinehumanity.” For the relation between grace and cunning, or divine machination, see OIKONOMIA, TALAT. T. UF; cf. RUSE; between grace and pardon, see PARDON. For Anmut and the German terminological network, see GEMÜT. See also, related to grace as a calling, BERUF; cf. PIETAS, SECULARIZATION. v. DESTINY, GOD, LOVE, RELIGIO . Werke. 3 vols. Edited by K. Schlechta. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Pino, Paolo. Dialogo di pittura. Critical edition. Introduction and notes by Rodolfo and Anna Pallicchini. Venice: Daria Guarnati, 1946. First published in 1548. Translation by Mary Pardo: “Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura: A Translation with Commentary.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1984. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. First published in 1790. Saisselin, Rémy G. Taste in Eighteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections of the Origins of Aesthetics; or, An Apology for Amateurs. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Translated by Steven Randall. Foreword by Arthur C. Danto. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987. Translation by Richard E. Aquila and David Carus: The World as Will and Presentation. 2 vols. Longman Library. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008–10. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Hildesheim, Ger.: G. Olms, 1978. First published in 1711. Sibley, Frank. “Aesthetic Concepts.” Philosophical Review 68 (1959). . Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. Edited by John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. First published in 1759. Trublet, Nicolas-Charles-Joseph. Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968. First published in 1735. Anonymous translation: Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality Translated from the French of the Abbot Trublet. London: Printed for J. Osborn, 1744. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccelenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani. 9 vols. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni: 1878–85. First published in 1568. Translation by Gaston du C. de Vere: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 10 vols. New York: AMS, 1976. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Le Siècle de Louis XIV. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1929–30. Translation by Martyn P. Pollack: The Age of Louis XIV. Everyman’s Library no. 780. London: Dent, 1961. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains. 2nd rev. ed. Edited by Alois Pichler. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. GOVERNMENT “Government” comes from the Latin gubernare, which, like the Greek kubernaô [ϰυϐεϱνάω], refers to being at the helm of a ship, hence to direct, to command. The term initially refers to governing or directing a collectivity or any kind of institution, before coming to be applied more specifically to political communities. It is applied at once to the way in which a collectivity is directed (good or bad government, or what is today called “governance”), to the regime by which this mode of directing is instantiated (the types of government), and finally to the actual authority exercising “executive” power, which has the power of constraint distinct from “legislative” and “judiciary” powers. We may focus here on the difference between the English and French networks, with English often speaking of “government” where continental traditions speak of the powers of the “State” instead. See STATE/GOVERNMENT, and LAW. See also HERRSCHAFT, POLIS, POLITICS, STATE. v. AUTHORITY, DOMINATION, DROIT, LEX, MIR, POWER GREEK Constancy and Change in the Greek Language v. AIÔN, EPOCHÊ, ESSENCE, ESTI, EUROPE, LOGOS, RUSSIAN, SUBJECT, TO TRANSLATE, UNDERSTANDING We know that it is difficult to translate ancient Greek, the “mother tongue” of philosophy, into any vernacular language, and that it has been thus since it was first translated into Latin. Less well known is the difficulty of translating it into modern Greek, which can be attributed in particular—despite the exceptional longevity of the language—to the vagaries of the diglossia that constitutes its historical evolution. 416 GREEK Greece is considerable, to the point of making it difficult, or even impossible, to translate certain terms from ancient and medieval Greek. The unity of Greek was acquired piecemeal: first, through the shift from a syllabic linguistic system (the writing called Linear B) to an alphabetical system (inherited from the Phoenicians, who may themselves have gotten it from the Greeks); then, in agreement with a variety of related dialects that clearly did not impede communication; and finally, thanks to the political evolution of archaic Greece, which contributed to the arrival of Hellenic wisdom. From the philosophical point of view, it is this last stage that is essential, since a terminology was built on it that made the progressive creation of a philosophical language possible. The distribution of cities around cultural and ritual centers such as Delphi and Delos may explain why this first unitary structure of the language had such historical dynamism. These centers radiated in a sphere that was delimited by the colonial extension of the different cities, promoting the constitution of a common world. This type of topology guaranteed Greek a kind of unity, contrasting with the dispersion described in the biblical episode of Babel. In the Hellenic space, even when political actions involve mobility (as in the Trojan War or Ulysses’s adventures), the center of reference remains circumscribed by the contours of a fixed territoriality. The Homeric epics and the Hesiodic genealogies constitute a mythical testimony of the formation of a topological unity that assigns Greek its historical rootedness, and attest as well to Greek’s status as a lasting reference point for education and culture (see BILDUNG, Box 1), as factors unifying a common world. These breaks become more pronounced in the classical period. The Attic language, symbol of the Athenian city, animated by democratic structures and a dominant politicoeconomic will, is the product of a break with dialectal practice. The expansion of philosophy owes much to Attic, which consolidated philosophical terminology according to the norms imposed by Athenian philosophy—the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden, and so on. The adoption of Attic by the Macedonian court, when it concludes the political unification of Greece, is not unrelated to the rapid evolution of Greek into a “common” (koinê) language. This language spread throughout Alexander’s empire, beyond the Hellenic space. Cosmopolitanism thus favors the banalization of koinê, which contributes to the persistence of Greek in the Roman Empire before the domination of Latin (starting in the second century BCE in administration and after the fourth century CE in the cultural sphere). Having become a lingua franca, Greek achieved a communicational proximity and produced a civilizing impact without precedence in Europe, imposing Hellenic culture on the whole Mediterranean region. . B. The vagaries of diglossia The synchronic unity of diverse dialects, to which were added, first, the diachronic unity of Attic, then the more active unity of koinê, did not prevent linguistic crises. These concern the deliberate choice of the type of language that could best express Greek in its historical authenticity. It is in Theophilos Voreas, professor of philosophy at the University of Athens toward the end of the nineteenth century, is generally recognized as the father of a rigorous policy in the creation of philosophical terminology in modern Greek. Despite his attempt, there is still major variation in the translations into modern from ancient Greek. The teaching of the latter in schools and the domination into the 1970s of an archaist language, Katharevousa, which literally means “purified,” hid these difficulties for a long time. Despite the upheaval of syntax between ancient and modern Greek, it seemed that it was enough to use the ancient terms to believe one had a clear idea of what was in question. Intuition and translation are not the same thing, however; the increasing use of the demotic language, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, made manifest the imprecision in modern uses of ancient philosophical terms and the modifications these had suffered owing to successive translations, as well as to the mediation of other European languages. While it is true that a translator can always resolve difficulties by simply going back to the ancient terms (which is often done), this practice only defers the problem of meaning. The proliferation of translations into modern Greek of the ancient texts written in Greek or Latin, as well as that of modern texts written in other languages, makes it possible to gain a better understanding of the scope of the shifts and the misunderstandings they may cause. NOTE: For convenience, I have chosen the Erasmian pronunciation for ancient Greek (including for koinê), and I have opted for iotacism (generally, the use of “i” for ι, η, ει, οι, υι) for modern Greek—though I have relied on “y” for υ and on “o” for ο and ω. For the accents, I have adopted the varied usage of the authors themselves, some adopting ancient accentuation, others simplifying, and still others suppressing the breathings and accents on the monosyllables, but accepting a tonic accent for the rest. Finally, the simplification of current grammar replaces the ancient third declension with the first, which is accepted in Katharevousa; thus, for σϰέψις, we write σϰέψη. Furthermore, even though current grammar has suppressed the ancient infinitive, it is nevertheless preserved in an idiomatic fashion: we speak of becoming (to gignesthai [το γίγνεσθαι]), thinking (to noein, to phronein, to skepsasthai [το νοείν, το φϱονείν, το σϰέπτεσθαι]), and so on. Finally, I have constantly relied on Babiniotis’s RT: Lexiko tês neas Hellênikês glôssas (Dictionary of the modern Greek language) as a guide. I. The Historical Context A. The evolution of Greek The unity of Greek, since the archaic world, is a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze those who examine it. Recent studies show that this unity goes back to the Mycenean period and has adapted to the specific changes of the evolution of any language. However, Greek has undergone serious crises, especially when attempts have been made to restore an older language or establish a nobler one, with claims that the current language, produced by an evolution marked by cultural integration, has become impoverished. We find this phenomenon in Russian, for example—where Ferguson distinguishes “diglossia” (the same language containing a vulgar and a noble language) from “bilingualism” or “multilingualism” (the copresence of two or more national languages in the same country). “Diglossia” in modern GREEK 417 both of class and culture. During Ottoman domination, new transformations came up against the need to preserve the ecclesiastical language, since the only organized institution was that of the church. During this period, then, not only Atticism but also koinê became incomprehensible to people under the pressure of the evolution of the spoken language in a more popular direction, slowly forming what was called the “demotic” language. Knowing all of these languages at once was considered a feat and indicated a higher level of culture. However, it is not in the regions occupied by the Ottomans, covering the multiethnic collection of the Balkans, that Greek’s diglossia displayed its perverse effects, since the clergy spreading the language and the faith was generally little educated and sided with spoken and popular speech. It is rather in the Hellenic schools of Italy, where an archaist language was being taught, that we see the source of the purified language (Katharevousa). By disturbing the natural evolution of the language, the purists initiated a proliferation of debates that were only solved in the second half of the twentieth century (1976), when the Greek government, faced with the excesses of the purified language imposed by the regime of the colonels (1967), decided to install the spoken language as the only official one by a unanimous vote in the parliament. . C. The philosophical context of Hellenic modernity Philosophy was born speaking Greek, which for at least a millennium was its only language. We may add to this another millennium, for while in the West, the hegemony of Greek disappeared in the Roman period, Latin-speaking philosophers continued to use it until the beginning of the Middle Ages. This is a unique phenomenon, implying that there is a “historical” link between a particular language, Greek, and the birth and development of philosophy. Indeed, it is said, this context that we may speak of linguistic conflicts peculiar to diglossia. The first conflict took place, in antiquity, in the name of the defense of Attic against the universalization of Greek, which was interpreted as implying the language’s banalization and its integration into different cultural contexts. In this turbulent history, the most significant event is the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, in Alexandria around the third century BCE. By adapting to the “common” language, the Judaic message was spread more easily. . Inversely, the reactions in response to the hegemony of koinê Greek based their arguments on history itself, endowing the language with an ideological background. In the Hellenistic period, resistance animated by nostalgia gave rise to “Atticism”—a purified and quasi-artificial language, practiced by erudite people and philosophers. Atticism was imposed at the expense of the natural evolution of the language and its dialects, thenceforth establishing two languages, one for intellectuals and one for the people. Thus the problem of diglossia was born in antiquity, and its ideological background has been at work unceasingly within Greek culture ever since. Much later, in the ninth century, a second major conflict arose over the status of modern Greek. It is likely that the substitution of Latin for Greek in the West and the pressure of the multilingualism of the empire, arising from Roman conquests, led to the fragmentation of koinê into several dialects. The Hellenization of the Eastern Empire, which preserves Atticism with few modifications until the Byzantine Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, undoubtedly served to slow down the pace of this fragmentation, but it never managed to weaken Greek’s diglossia, which was encouraged by the increasingly hierarchical shape the state and the church acquired beginning in the fourth century. Written and administrative language reveals a difference 1 Athens, or the homophony of the world Aelius Aristides (117–189 CE), a Greek from Mysia and a Roman citizen living in the empire, wrote a praise of Rome (Roman Oration) and a praise of Athens (Panathenaicos), which together are the most extreme praise of the Greek language and a testament to its role in the empire. For Rome, the world is no longer divided into “Greeks” and “barbarians,” since “Roman” became “the name of a sort of common race” (Roman Oration, paragraph 63), and the whole ecumene is spatially accessible and “tamed” (101). But while Rome is allpowerful, it is monodic. “Like a well-cleaned enclosure, the inhabited world pronounces a single sound, more precise than that of a chorus” (30); we should even say that it is mute: on the model of the army, an “eternal chorus” (87), “everything obeys in silence” (31). Athens presents the reverse model: rather than extending, it is the “center of the center” (Panathenaicos, paragraph 15), which offers “an unmixed, pure language [elikrinê de kai katharan phônên, as the Katharevousa aims to be], without anything disturbing it, a paradigm of any Greek conversation” (14). Here, the universality is no longer territorial but logical; in Attic, idiom, language, and speech all merge: “All without exception speak the single common language of the race [tou genous; see PEOPLE], and through you [i.e., the Athenians] the whole universe has become homophone” (226). Greek, the “definition and criterion of education and culture [horos tina paideias; see BILDUNG]” (227), is the language of sharing, appropriate for public life—to the extent that there can still be one, under Rome. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristides, Aelius. Panathenaicos and Roman Oration. In Aristides in Four Volumes, translated by Charles Allison Behr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Oliver, James H. “The Civilizing Power.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 58, no. 1 (1968). . “The Ruling Power.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 43, no. 4 (1953). 418 GREEK 2 Greek, the sacred language v. TO TRANSLATE The Jews of Alexandria, organized in a politeuma, spoke Greek and undertook the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek beginning in the third century BCE. It is by way of a piece of propaganda coming out of this milieu of Hellenized Jews in Alexandria, the Letter of Aristeas, that the legend of the so-called Septuagint translation was disseminated. According to the letter, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–247 BCE) commissioned seventy-two (or seventy) Jewish scholars, sent to Alexandria for the purpose by the high priest of Jerusalem, to translate the Pentateuch into Greek, for the needs of Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt. Each of the translators supposedly worked separately, and they all produced miraculously identical versions. This was the first translation of the sacred Hebrew texts into a Western language and in all likelihood the first collective translation known. The legend of these uniform translations, attributed to divine inspiration, leads paradoxically to the negation of the Septuagint as a product of translation and to the authentication of the translated text as completely homologous to the original. The audience for the translation, encouraged by the legend, came to obscure the Hebrew origins of the translated books and played a decisive role in the process of Hellenization of Jewish monotheism. Further, while rabbinical Judaism, especially beginning with the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, was hostile to the translation, it was adopted by the authors of the Christian scriptures, and until Saint Jerome, by almost all Christian communities. Thus the Greek version of the Septuagint became the Mediterranean Bible for the more and more Hellenized Jews, and then of the early church, which made it its Old Testament in all the regions of the empire where it spread, until Western Europe opted for Latin. Cécile Margellos 3 Demotiki and Katharevousa To understand the contrast between demotiki and Katharevousa, we must give some of the cultural context that laid the foundations for the 1821 Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Several intellectuals, including Adamantios Koraïs, who lived in France, promoted the idea of a return to the past and felt the need for a new language that was adapted to teaching and more authentic than the vulgar language. Was it necessary to return to ancient Greek, or create a purified language, called, for this reason, Katharevousa? The first option was received unenthusiastically, so that although classical antiquity was still idealized, the second option was the one adopted. Koraïs had insisted on the role of language in the formation of a new Greece, affirming that the character of a nation is recognized by its language. For him, ancient Greece had joined liberty and pure language, whereas Ottoman domination favored an impure language. Henceforth, only the knowledge of ancestral texts would be capable of purifying the language of foreign elements. Paradoxically, this partisan of the Enlightenment initiated an ideology of pure language that would have negative effects on philosophy in Greece, thenceforth tributary to the discourse of others, whether modern or European, creators of new thoughts at the time when the Greeks remained under the Ottomans. Once officially recognized, this language was adopted in the universities, especially for the teaching of philosophy. The defense of a demotic language in science came rather late. It can be attributed to Greeks living in the diaspora in the nineteenth century—in Paris (Psicharis), in England and the Indies (Pallis, Emphaliotis), as well as in Istanbul (Vlastos) and Bucharest (Photiadis). The result of this struggle was the formation of an educational association, in 1910, that fought for the adoption of the demotic as the official language. Meanwhile, however, the translation of the Bible and some ancient tragedies into demotic provoked an outcry and a political debate. The project failed under the pressure of partisans of Katharevousa, led by G. Mistriotis, professor at the University of Athens, who spoke of the need to save the “national language.” A vote in the parliament in 1911 provisionally closed debate, despite a liberal government directed by E. Vénizelos, who was sympathetic to the innovators. An article of the Greek constitution forbade the official use of the demotic language, ignoring its place in daily life. But when, in 1945, Charálampos Theodoridis wrote his Introduction to Philosophy in demotic, the book was highly successful. Philosophers continued to hesitate about the choice of language, until the government established demotic as the only official language of the Greek republic in 1976. Six years later, an association for the Greek language published a manifesto signed by seven well-known personalities— including Odysseas Elytis, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, and Georgios Babiniotis, the most gifted linguist of the time—criticizing the legal establishment of the language, seeing in it a linguistic and expressive constraint likely to destroy “the foundations of the freedom of thought” in the name of an “artificial” demotic established by self-described “modernists.” Reactions followed, reopening a debate that was believed closed, and whose tangible result was the retention by some writers of “breathing marks” and accents suppressed by the most recent version of demotic, and the use of a language that avoids what some consider the “mistakes” of modern Greek. REFS.: Browning, Robert. Medieval and Modern Greek. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Christidis, A. F. [Anastasios Phoebus], ed. “Strong” and “Weak” Languages in the European Union: Aspects of Linguistic Hegemonism. 2 vols. Thessaloniki: Center for the Greek Language, 1999. Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 15 (1959): 325–40. Fishman, Joshua. “Bilingualism with and without Diglossia; Diglossia with and without Bilingualism.” Journal of Social Issues 32 (1976): 29–38. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, and Michael Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Kopidakês, M. Z. Historia tês hellênikês glôssas [History of the Greek language]. Athens: Greek Literature and History Archive, 1999. Lamprakê-Paganou, Alexandra, and Giōrgos D. Paganos. O ekpaideutikos demotikismos kai o Kostis Palamas. [Teaching the demotic language and Kostis Palamas]. Athens: Pataki, 1994. Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Moleas, Wendy. The Development of the Greek Language. 2nd ed. Bristol, UK: Bristol Classical Press, 2004. Theodoridis, Charálampos. Introduction to Philosophy (in Greek). Athens: Éditions du Jardin, 1945. GREEK 419 Aristotle’s presence in the Balkans became a major element of the renewal of ancient philosophy in Greek-speaking space, linking up with the beginning of the Ottoman period when Gennadius II Scholarios, the first patriarch after the fall of Constantinople, established Aristotelianism over against Gemistus Plethon’s Platonism. In the following period, Neohellenic philosophy—essentially that practiced in universities—spoke Katharevousa: a language that brought it closer to its prestigious past, even though that past was read in the light of the European philosophies in fashion at the time. A friend of Adamantios Koraïs, Neophytos Vamvas (d. 1855), took up both the “ideology” of Destutt de Tracy and of F. Thurot, and the rhetoric of H. Blair, which dominated the British landscape of the eighteenth century. He was the first to occupy the chair of philosophy at the University of Athens (1837). T. Reid and D. Steward, through their translations, also had their hour of glory among French-speaking Greek philosophers, alongside the spiritualists V. Cousin and T. Jouffroy, who were ascendant for a time. In another domain of thought, C. Koumas (d. 1836) defended critical philosophy, initiating the more and more active presence of German philosophy in Greece, which in turn intensified the introduction of ancient philosophy in teaching. Thus, the cult of antiquity, illuminated by the lights of European philosophy, became the motive element of the intellectual renewal of modern Greece. In contrast, Greek-Christian ideology remained the permanent point of reference for conservative philosophers in Greece. At the same time, the social crises opened the way for socialist thought, with Platon Drakoulis and Georgios Skliros (d. 1919). The latter’s claims were taken up in turn by J. Kordatos and Dimitrios Glenos, another philosopher trained in Germany, where he participated in debates in favor of the demotic language. On the philosophical level, Glenos opposed to the dynamic idealism of the Hegelian school what he called “dynamic under Heidegger’s influence, that Greek (with which German is associated) is the philosophical language par excellence. . Without rejecting this rather dated view, now shaken up by the worldwide expansion of Anglo-American philosophy, we must admit that Greek, though it has persevered, has not managed to preserve the fertility of the philosophical past that it helped shape, even in the space it rules. The program begun several decades ago in Greece of promoting modern and contemporary Greek philosophers is revealing: their fame can rarely, in current conditions, extend beyond the boundaries of Hellenism. To explain this shortcoming, it is common to invoke the fall of Byzantium and the rule of Greek-speaking lands by the Ottoman Empire. According to this explanation, the Ottoman Empire comprised four hundred years during which, in the extensive territory populated by people of Greek origin (stretching from Moldova to current Greece and from Asia Minor to the coast of the Black Sea), a complete intellectual desert supposedly lay. The local populations, thanks to the Church and some teachers attempting to preserve Greek, were most often reduced to speaking the popular language. On the other hand, the intellectuals who sought refuge on the Ionian islands that had escaped the Ottomans, or in Italy, were perceived as a source of hope for the future of an independent Greece. During this period, philosophical texts were sometimes written in Latin and often in an archaist form of Greek, more rarely in simple Greek. They are mostly commentaries on ancient thought, especially Aristotle, who was in fashion in Padua and Venice. Theophilos Korydaleus (d. 1646), who reorganized the patriarchal School of Constantinople, may be considered with Gerasimos Vlachos (d. 1685) to be the pioneer of modern Greek commentary on the works of Aristotle. 4 Heidegger: “The prephilosophical language of the Greeks was already philosophical” Let us agree with Jean-Pierre Lefebvre: the way in which Heidegger thinks about the complex historical relationship between Greek, German, and philosophy constitutes “ontological nationalism.” Ousia tou ontos means in translation: The beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden]. We say, on the other hand: The being of beings [Sein des Seienden]. “Beingness” is a very unusual and artificial linguistic form that occurs only in the sphere of philosophical reflection. We cannot say this, however, of the corresponding Greek word. Ousia is not an artificial expression which first occurs in philosophy, but belongs to the everyday language and speech of the Greeks. Philosophy took up the word from its pre-philosophical usage. If this could happen so easily, and with no artificiality, then we must conclude that the pre-philosophical language of the Greeks was already philosophical. This is actually the case. The history of the basic word of Greek philosophy is an exemplary demonstration of the fact that the Greek language is philosophical, i.e., not that Greek is loaded with philosophical terminology, but that it philosophizes in its basic structure and formation. The same applies to every genuine language, in different degrees to be sure. The extent to which this is so depends on the depth and power of the people who speak the language and exist within it. Only our German language has a deep and creative philosophical character to compare with the Greek. (Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom) Barbara Cassin REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Ted Sadler. New York: Continuum, 2002. Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre. “Philosophie et philologie: Les traductions des philosophes allemands.” In Encyclopædia universalis. Vol. 1, Symposium: Les enjeux. Paris: Encyclopaedia universalis France, 1990. 420 GREEK word logos and place the corresponding French term in parentheses.” In sum, even when he preserves the term logos, a Greek today must clarify in parentheses which sense he is using. Moreover, the sense of “reason” is exceptional and is identified with “cause,” or, when referring to something “rational,” paired with orthos: orthos logos. This transgression of the modern dictionary is found in other translators, who use logos to refer to the Stoic divine (Reason), to the second person of the Christian Trinity (Word), to seminal reason— these are therefore calques rather than translations—as well as to Kant’s pure reason. The confusion of these translators is such that they sometimes use logos while adding, in parentheses, logikos [λογιϰός] (rational), or, inversely, that they use logos for all contentious cases that concern thought (cf. Y. Tzavaras in Plotinus, Enneads, 30–33). As a result: either we keep logos without translating it, or we translate it by “reasoning,” “constitutive power,” “logical capacity,” “notion,” “rationality,” “discussion,” and so forth, but leaving a fringe of untranslatability. To get a grip on this situation, Babiniotis draws up, in his Dictionary, a table for the word logikos [λογιϰός] (rational, logical), considering how best to express logos in the sense of “reason.” He explains that “the λογιϰός (rational) refers to what is related to λόγος, in the sense of the functioning of the intellect (νου), the discursive thought (διάνοιας), the logical thought (λογιϰής νόησης) of man.” Then, having articulated the word’s sense by means of contrasts with the irrational, the insane, and so on, Babiniotis appeals to the semantic range attached to the faculty of thinking in the sense of phrenes [φϱένες], to place in relief the proper character of someone who acts rationally (emphron) [έμφϱων] or irrationally (aphron [άφϱων], paraphron [παϱάφϱων]). These clarifications confirm that the notion of logos [λόγος], “reason,” is manifested above all by a derived form, logikos, itself clarified by the varied semantics of thinking and thought. In the face of the texts of ancient philosophy, a Greekspeaker is just as helpless as a French- or English-speaker. Even more so, perhaps, since he or she is tempted to set aside the difficulty by not translating at all, rather than to admit the limits of his or her language. B. Skepsis and the field of thought To translate “think” and “thought” in ancient Greek, we use, on the one hand, the semantics of the “intellect” (noos [νόος], noys [νοῦς], nous)—to apprehend (noein [νοεῖν]), intellection (noisis [νόησις]), to think discursively (διανοεῖσθαι), discursive thought (dianoia [διάνοια])—and, on the other, that of the “mind” (phrin [φϱήν])—to think sensibly, in conformity with good sense (phrono [φϱονῶ]), practical intelligence (phronisis [φϱόνησις]), and so forth. Later, the notion of “spirit” (pneuma [πνεῦμα]) is added, introduced by Stoicism in the sense of “breath” (wind and breath of life); Christianity dematerializes pneuma and thus ensures for the term an impressive promotion into more transcendental realms. Although this evolution complicates the project of translation, current confusions are due less to language than to choices that, rather than retaining the usual sense of “intellect,” confuse nous with “spirit,” “wit,” “intelligence,” as Pierre Hadot does in his translations of Plotinus (cf. his justification in Enneads, 38). Such hesitations are also found among realism,” that is, dialectical materialism interpreted by means of a synthesis between Democritus and Heraclitus. For him, any reference to the Greek philosophical past entailed a creative historicity that is able to appropriate it in the context of the concrete givens of contemporary life. Glenos was a subtle analyst of social divisions, which he interprets as the result of diglossia. After him, we must wait until the reform that was urged, between 1950 and 1960, by another German-trained philosopher, E. P. Papanoutsos, to witness the modernization of philosophy in education. Finally, philosophy is expressed above all in literature, where several authors had already written in demotic. The great poet Kostis Palamas (1859–1943) brought literature and philosophy together in the light of Nietzsche. In his wake, but also in those of Bergson (whose student he was) and Marx, Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) was a fervent defender of demotiki, which he enriched with powerful and original work. The real philosophical revolution in modern Greece is thus found, not in pure philosophy, but in literature. Greek literature, a generator of thought, uses new forms to rehearse the origins of Greek thought, when, with Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato, literature and philosophy were not distinguished from one another. Writers are thus the ones who defended the demotic language against the Katharevousa of academic philosophers. II. Translating Greek into Greek? A. Logos and orthologiko Since ancient times, the multivocity of the term logos is the most spectacular sign of the permanence of the Greek language. Its ambivalence, which mainly conjoins the senses of “speech” and “reason,” requires a constant reliance on context, which is sometimes still insufficient to clarify the word’s meaning. Yet, while the understanding of logos as “word” or “speech” remains intact in modern Greek, it is not so with the senses of “gathering together” and “reason.” (We will not pause to consider the first of these, since, occluded in most dictionaries though used by some philosophers inspired by Heidegger, it would require a lengthy study in its own right.) To say “reason,” modern Greek relies, much more than on logos, on the semantics of thought (noisi [νόηση], skepsi [σϰέψη]). There are nevertheless vestiges of what may have been the term’s ancient semantic core: “what is the reason for your position ” (ποιος ο λόγος ), “I have no reason to ” (δεν έχω λόγο να ). However, instead of using logos to say “reason” in the sense of ratio, modern Greek speaks rather, by inflection, of “what is rational” or of “the logical” (logiko [λογιϰό]). It is from the expression orthos logos [οϱθός λόγος], “right or straight reason,” that we take “rational” and “rationalism,” forming the portmanteau words orthologiko [οϱθολογιϰό] and orthologismos [οϱθολογισμός], respectively. We can understand why, given this situation of deficiency and complementation, philosophers prefer to keep the old word, even if the dictionary avoids it. In his translation into modern Greek of Jacques Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Lazos writes that “Derrida mainly uses the words discours, parole, raison, or logos to translate λόγος. In Greek, logos has all these meanings. Thus I translate all these words with the GREEK 421 think (να σϰέπτεται), to produce logical thoughts (σϰέψεις), to create in a spiritual way; to judge according to the circumstances,” and so forth. This predominance of the semantics of skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι] and skepsis/skepsi [σϰέψις/ σϰέψη] is the more troubling in not always having been the case: thus, in his Philosophy of the Renaissance, Logothetis, a defender of Katharevousa in philosophy, limits the semantics of skepsis to specifically Skeptical schools of thought (Montaigne, Charron), associated with skepsis and amphivolia (doubt), and uses the semantics of nous to refer to “thought” and that of logos to mean “reason.” With regard to σϰέψη, Babiniotis speaks of the “collection of points of view and positions someone holds regarding a social phenomenon, a way of analyzing it and interpreting it; theory,” preceding this sense by others such as “process during which we manipulate certain data in our brains, to end up with a result”; or again, “what someone thinks (σϰέπτεται) of an affair; idea, reasoning.” The duality of the general sense, which brings in both social action and theory (understood as “vision of the world”), widens the domain of action of skepsis. If we add to skeptomai the sense of reasoning and meditating, we realize that the term has become untranslatable. We should observe that the semantics of nous [νοῦς] has never, since Parmenides’s time, replaced fully the semantics of skepsis, used since Homer—well before the Skeptics gave the term its philosophical destiny and well before it conquered modern Greek in claiming for itself the sense of “thought.” In Homer, skeptomai means to look in all directions in order to observe. Ulysses says: “I happened to glance aft (skepsamenos [σϰεψάμενος]) at ship and oarsmen and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling high overhead. Voices came down to me in anguish, calling my name for the last time” (Odyssey, 12.244–49). This sense of looking attentively in several directions leads to a sense of what one might call “looking at by means of thought,” of thinking on the basis of at least two possibilities. For example, in Sophocles, the verb sometimes means “to look at” or “to see” (Ajax, 1028) and sometimes “to reflect” or “to think through” (Oedipus Rex, 584). In the second case, Creon responds to Oedipus’s accusations: “Think [skepsai (σϰέψαι)] first about this: other things being equal, do you find the cares of power preferable to a rest which nothing disturbs?” We find the same ambivalence in Plato’s texts. In the Protagoras, Socrates says that the examination of health requires observation of the parts of the body and adds that he desires, in the interest of reflection [pros tên skepsin (πϱòς τὴν σϰέψιν)], to do the same thing for the pleasant and the good, in order to reveal the thought [tês dianoias (τῆς διανοίας)] of his interlocutor and see if his conception is similar to or different from that of most men (352a–b). This last specification isolates the pre-Skeptical sense of skepsis: it is a reflection that presents a choice between two or more positions. The Skeptics reject this choice, giving the same weight to each position and suspending all judgment as a result (see EPOCHÊ). Skepsis differs from dianoia [διάνοια] (discursive thought), analyzed as identical to “intention.” In modern Greek, when we clarify the sense of dianoia—which is used most often to mean inventiveness or genius, however—we speak of the “functioning of thought (σϰέψης) which codifies sense data in concepts and representations” (Babiniotis). Greeks, when they refer to Le Seene and Lavelle’s philosophy of mind by the expression “philosophy of νοῦς” and not pneuma [πνεῦμα] (cf. Charálampos Theodoridis, Introduction to Philosophy). But the fact that in modern Greek the ancient terminologies of thought (noêsis [νόησις]) and reflection (skepsis [σϰέψις]) have been fused together leads to more palpable difficulties. Skepsis, a concept discussed by the Skeptical school, leads to paradoxes in modern texts, when we speak, for example, of “the thought of the Skeptics”(η σϰέψη των σϰεπτιϰών) or the “thinkers of reflection” (ή των στοχαστών της σϰέψης). An analogous fusion took place with the semantics of the activity of contemplating (stochazomai [στοχάζομαι]). Whereas in antiquity, stochazomai means “to aim,” “tend toward,” or even “to seek” and “to conjecture,” in modern Greek it means both the common activity of reflecting as well as the more elevating one of thinking, “meditation” (stochasmos [στοχασμός]). In the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Solomos [1798–1857] to Palamas [1859–1943]), stochazomai is used to indicate thought—whence the use of stochastis [στοχαστής] to mean “thinker.” In addition, the activity of reasoning and calculating (logizomai [λογίζομαι], ypologizo [υπολογίζω], logariazo [λογαϱιάζω]) is often confused with the activity of thinking (skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι]) as well. Although contemporary Greek translators and philosophers are trammeled by these different inflections of key philosophical terms, they do not confront them as problems. To avoid semantic confusion, they often prefer to keep the ancient terms, although, in common language, the semantics of skeptesthai and skepsis (for instance) have dominated since the middle of the twentieth century. The junction between ancient and modern Greek occurs at nous [νοῦς] (or νους), which expresses the seat of thought, while giving the impression of preserving the ancient sense of “intellect.” Although the term was most often used in compound expressions meaning “to have in mind,” “to keep one’s head,” “to be sensible,” and so on, it has a general and encompassing sense that goes beyond the archaic one of the noun “project” and the classical one of the highest faculty of thinking, “intuition.” Babiniotis speaks of the “collection of spiritual faculties [πνευματιϰών δυνάμεων] of man, allowing him to apprehend reality and articulate its data.” This generalization reveals that we may associate nous [νους] with other activities, such as judging [krino [ϰϱίνω]), imagining (phantazomai [φαντάζομαι]), reasoning (sullogizomai [συλλογίζομαι]), reflecting (skeptomai [σϰέπτομαι]), or meditating (stochazomai [στοχάζομαι]). In the latter case, Solomos writes in his dialogue on language: “Come to your [faculty] of thought [τòνοῦ], contemplate [στοχάσου] the evil produced by written language.” Matters become complicated once we get to the semantics of the word skepsis, which is used to clarify the senses of the other terms meaning “to think” and “thought.” For stochazomai [στοχάζομαι], the Dictionary mentions: (1) “I think deeply” (skeptomai vathia [σϰέπτομαι βαθιά]), “I think discursively” (dianooumai [διανοούμαι]); (2) “I think well” (skeptomai kala [σϰέπτομαι ϰαλά]), with as synonyms “I calculate” (ypologizo [υπολογίζω], logariazo [λογαϱιάζω]). The same goes for the other sense of νους: “capacity for someone to 422 GREEK good as gods, insofar as they do not think (δενσϰέπτονται) sometimes correctly and sometimes wrongly, but think (σϰέπτονται) always what is correct in their intellect (μέσα στο νου τους)” (5.8.3.23–25: ϰαλοὶ δὲ ᾗθεοί. οὐ γὰϱ δὴ ποτὲ μὲν φϱονοῦσι, ποτὲ δὲ ἀφϱαίνουσιν, ἀλλ’ ἀεὶ φρονοῦσιν ἐν ἀπαθεῖ τῷ νῷ). Further, even though he has a tendency to preserve the terms dianoia and noêsis, he sometimes translates “the thoughts” (hai noêseis [αἱ νοήσεις]) by “the thoughts of the intellect” (skepsis tou nou [σϰέψεις του νου]) (5.5.1.24). Additionally, although he translates νοῦς νοῶν by νοώνν ους, he suddenly changes direction and translates: “however, when you think it (όταν όμως τον σϰέπ τεσαι) , think (σϰέψου) that it is a matter of the good, for as the productive cause of the reasonable (έλλογης) and intellective (νοητιϰής) life, it is a power of life and the intellect (νου)” (5.5.10.9–12: ὅταν δὲ νοῇς , νόει τἀγαθόν—ζωῆς γάϱ ἔμφϱονος ϰαὶ νοεϱᾶς αἴτιος δύναμις ὢν [ἀφ’ οὗ] ζωῆς ϰαὶ νοῦ). Given this situation, would not a reverse attitude, reducing all the semantics expressing “to think” and “thought” to that of skepsis and skeptesthai, have a better chance of expressing what is at issue? This option was taken up by Vayenas to translate some of Heidegger’s texts from the Wegmarken, using skepsis for “thought” most of the time, regardless of the philosopher in question (Parmenides, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel). Parmenides’s fragment 3, where it is said that “thinking and being are the same,” now becomes: τὸ ἴδιο εἶναι σϰέψη ϰαὶ εἶναι. Regarding Kant, he specifies that “I think” (skephtomai [σϰέφτομαι]) means: “I link up a given variety of representations” (which corresponds to “judge”). Further, he translates tranzendentale Überlegung or Reflexion by “reflection/transcendental thought” (huperbatiki skepsi [ὑπερβατιϰὴ σϰέψη]), Reflexion-begriffe by “apprehensions of thought/reflection” (antilipsis tis skepsis [αντιλήψεις τῆς σϰέψης]), and Sein und Denken by “to be and to think” or “Being and thinking” or “Being and Thought” (εἶναι ϰαὶ σϰέψη). The Hegelian usage of the Cartesian ego cogito sum is rendered as “I think, I am” (σϰέπτομαι, εἶμαι)—which we also find in many other works, including high school philosophy manuals. Finally, the Heideggerian formula of “Western thought” is rendered by dytiki skepsi [δυτιϰὴ σϰέψη], which resembles common expressions like “modern Greek thought,” “socialist thought,” whereas one could use dianoisi [διανόηση] and stochasmos [στοχασμός]. The massive presence in Vayenas’s work of the semantics of skepsis, no doubt owing to his desire to conform to contemporary linguistic usage, accentuates the confusion and justifies the position of those who wish to return to a pre-Skeptical semantics. These vagaries show how difficult “thought” and its cognates are to translate into modern Greek, if only because the dominant translation by skepsis at bottom tends to mean “reflection” rather than “thought.” C. Ousia, huparxis, hupostasis: Essence and existence At first sight, ousia [οὐσία] should not pose a problem in modern Greek, since it is commonly used today to indicate the essence and nature of something. However, the evolution of the sense of the term, beginning in antiquity, has greatly complicated the task of modern Greek philosophers. The meaning already shifted importantly between Plato and Aristotle, as the first conceives ousia in the common sense of Everything works as though in modern Greek, skepsis and skeptomai were the genus of which noetic and discursive thought were the species. This extensive character of skepsis is explained by the fact that the process of reflection may intervene in action, alongside “deliberation.” The Skeptics exploited this perspective, whereas Plato avoided combining these elements. To the question “what is scepticism (skepsis)?,” Sextus Empiricus responds: it is “an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of (ta nooumena) in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment and afterwards to tranquility” (Outlines of Scepticism, 1.8). If the Skeptic supposes that, as a result of the equality of the two sides of an argument, no reasoning may be more persuasive than its opposite or any other, he envisages, thanks to the suspension of judgment, the arrest of discursive thought (dianoia), thus also of seeking and deliberation. This approach entangles theory with action, inasmuch as it must take account of all possible directions—with a consequent modification of the semantic landscape of the ancient language. As a result, another path is opened, from which modern Greek derives its own concepts, requiring us to negotiate an intralinguistic translation for a whole collection of past philosophical notions. The semantic modifications of modern Greek also concern other uses, for example, the use of “brain” or “brains” to refer to the collection of mental faculties, as a synonym of “spirit” (pneuma) and “thought.” Even more than in French, the metaphor of the brain expresses “human thought” (anthroponi skepsi [ανθϱώπινη σϰέψη]) in Greek—so much so that E. Roussos, translator of the fragments of Heraclitus (Peri physeos), renders tis autôn noos [τίς αὐτῶν νόος] (fr. 104 DK) first by “what is their brain/thought [το μυαλό]?” and then by “thought” [ὁ νοῦς], whereas K. P. Mihailidis (Philosophes archaïques), more prudently, translates noos by nous. In agreement with other translators, the latter acts with the same prudence when he translates nous [νοῦς] and noein [νοεῖν] in Parmenides, whereas Roussos once again innovates by translating noein by to na to ennois [τό νά τό ἐννοεῖς], that is, “I apprehend the meaning” [έχω στο νου μον, or again, συλλ αμβάνω στη σϰέψη μου]. Further, in his philosophy manual for students, P. Roulia observes that Parmenides “found in thought (σϰέψη) the stability necessary for knowledge. However, he was led to identify thought (σϰέψη) and reality.” And his celebrated statement (fr. 3 DK, τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ νοεῖν τεϰαὶ εῖναι) means: “When we think (σϰεφτόμαστε), we determine things (νου) with our intellect. Our thought (νόηση) thus is identified with reality. Reality is as a consequence intelligible (νοητή).” Roulia worries at this point whether students will clearly understand what is at issue here, where three processes may be confused: reflecting, thinking, and apprehending—but many philosophers are in the same position. Tzavaras, who is currently the most inventive translator working in the field of ancient Greek philosophy, often reserves the ancient Greek for the pre-Socratics, but he takes more chances when translating Plotinus and the German thinkers. As to the first, in his anthology of several texts of the Enneads (30–33), he opts in favor of skeptomai to translate phronô, noô, and dianooûmai. For example, “They are as GREEK 423 as a mode of belonging may be understood as “that which contributes to something,” near the common usage “to be at the disposal of something or someone.” It is in this sense that we use the expression ta huparchonta [τὰ ὑπάϱχοντα]: ta huparchonta designates the present situation, existing things. This sense of the expression thus opens onto the question of existence. While in antiquity, the expression’s ambivalence is the order of the day, the evolution of the language went in favor of simplification, to the advantage of the sense of “to exist.” This modern usage of huparchein, to mean the existence of something or other, had to confront in our own time the problem of translating existence as used in existentialism, which assigns existence only to humans. The very name of this school of thought already sets in contrast two terminologies: huparxismos [ὑπαϱξισμός] and existentialismos [ἐξιστενσιαλισμός]. Today, the first expression is generally preferred to the calque. The name of a philosophical school is of course no more than a matter of convention, but the translation of the concept of existence itself reveals more tenacious difficulties. Thus, when Malevitsis translates, in 1970, Jean Wahl’s book Les philosophes de l’existence, he chooses hupostasis [ὑπόστασις], and not huparxis [ὕπαϱξις], to render existence. Malevitsis bases his decision on Heidegger’s and Jasper’s refusal to be identified as existentialists, and seeks to avoid the confusion between the ontic existence of beings and the existence proper to humankind. This is why he avoids the traditional translation by huparxis. The idea is important, for since antiquity, the semantics of huparchein has lost its secret complicity with the subtleties of the semantics of archê/archô/archomai (principle and beginning, foundation/I command/I begin). The term hupostasis, however, also has a long history, which is rooted in Neoplatonism and in Christology, reaching its culmination with the formation of the term substantia (substance). The interference with the question of “being” increased the opacity of its meaning to such an extent that even Malevitsis is forced to add the term huparxis in brackets to avoid confusion. Thus, the analysis of the most important words in ancient philosophy can give no comfort to translators who believe in the transparency of meaning, even though they are Greek-speakers. Lambros Couloubaritsis REFS.: Alexiou, Margaret. After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Andriopoulos, Dêmêtrios Z. Neo-Hellenic Aesthetic Theories. Athens: Kabanas, 1975. Apostolopoulos, Ntimês. Syntomê historia tês neoellênikês philosophias [Concise history of Neohellenic philosophy]. Athens: Hellêno-Gallike Enôsis Neôn, 1949. Argyropoulou, Rôxanê, Athanasia Glykophrydi-Leontsini, Anna Kelesidou, and George Vlachos. Hê ennoia tês eleutherias ston neoellêniko stochasmo [The notion of liberty in Neohellenic thought]. Athens: Academy of Athens, 1996. Beaton, Roderick, and David Ricks, eds. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896). Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Boudouris, Konstantine, ed. Conceptions of Philosophy: Ancient and Modern. Athens: Ionia, 2004. Cassin, Barbara. “Le statut théorique de l’intraduisible.” In Encyclopédie philosophique universelle: Le discours philosophique, edited by J.-F. Mattéi, 998–1013. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Couloubaritsis, Lambros. Aux origines de la philosophie européenne: De la pensée archaïque au néoplatonisme. 3rd ed. Brussels: De Boeck University, 2000. “property” (material goods) and in the philosophical sense as the essence of something, whereas the latter adds other meanings, available and obligatory as a result of identifying ousia and hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον] (this identification requires him to designate by ousia sometimes the eidos [εἶδος], “form, species, or specificity”; sometimes the composite of matter and eidos; and sometimes matter itself). The Stoics in turn envisage ousia as an indeterminate substrate, whereas Medioplatonist and Neoplatonist thinkers return to the sense of “essence,” and Christology assimilates ousia and hupostasis [ὑπόστασις], enriching ousia with other values, which modern Greek no longer commands. In addition, the Latin translation of ousia by substantia creates problems for Greek translators, thenceforth confronted with new philosophies, coming from the Renaissance and modernity, where the notion of substance becomes central. Although they take this mediation more and more seriously, and translate “substance” not by ousia but by hupostasi, they are usually satisfied with standardizing ousia for antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages—by not translating it. The problem arising from the pair “essence”/“existence” is thenceforth rendered very complex. Let us take Vikentios Damodos (d. 1752) as a guide. Trained in Aristotelianism in the Flaginian school in Venice and Padua, he was an adept of nominalism and was influenced by Descartes and Gassendi. He associates ousia and huparxis [ὕπαϱξις] (existence), starting with the Thomist notion of “composite substance” constituted by essence (essentia) and being as existence (esse)—even though this is for him a conceptual and not, as it was for Aquinas, a real distinction. Damodos knows that in Thomism, the individual substance is not to be confused with the essence, since the latter must combine with being or existence to form substance. However, this distinction was constantly obscured by modern translators when they dealt with philosophies that give accounts of substance, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the modern era. Logothetis, for example, translates substantia and essentia by ousia. He even magnifies the confusion by specifying that Nizzoli considers that ousia signifies particular things (ta kath’ hekaston [τὰ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστον]). Tzavaras, aware of the difficulties, is the only one to have taken a different path, choosing in his anthology of texts of Plotinus to translate ousia by “to be” (einai [εἶναι]). These confusions in the use of a term as important as ousia reveal that the word is not only untranslatable in French or English (where it is rendered by “essence,” “substance,” “reality,” “being”), but is equally so in Greek. Moreover, once medieval and modern mediation comes in, associating with ousia the notion of “substance” conceived by Thomism according to the unity of essentia and esse (and existentia), things get out of hand entirely. Let us then start over, beginning this time from the verb huparchein [ὑπάϱχειν]. It initially meant “to begin,” “to be at the origin of,” “to take the initiative”; then, “to exist prior to”; and then, “to be at the disposal of”; and finally, “to belong to.” The latter sense is used in logic to express “attribution.” Aristotle writes, for example, “If A is not attributed to any B, B will not be attributed to any A,” or “If A is not an attribute of any B, then B will not be an attribute of any A” (εἰ μηδενὶ τῷ B τὸ A ὑπάϱχειν, οὐδὲ τῷ A οὐδενὶ ὑπάϱξει τὸ B; Prior Analytics 1.2). The sense of “attribute” conceived 424 GUT philosophers have in common the splitting up of the objects of reflection, adding to the initial pair of “good” (gut) and “evil” (böse) a second pair, wohl/übel or gut/schlecht. This in turn requires studying not only the contrast each pair presents, but also the contrast between the pairs. I. The Kantian Split: Sensibility and Pure Reason The second section of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason of the Critique of Practical Reason is distinguished by unusual attention on Kant’s part to the singularity and power of languages. Good and evil are studied there as “the sole objects of a practical reason” (Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:57, trans. Pluhar, 78)—the only two objects possible, according to Kant, since any other object “taken as a principle determining the faculty of desire” makes the will lose its autonomy. Further, these two objects themselves, good and evil, must have a secondary status: they are determined by the moral law, which precedes them as it precedes all content in pure practical reason. This is what Kant calls the “paradox of method in a Critique of practical reason” (218). The demonstration begins by appealing to the “use of language [Sprachgebrauch],” which distinguishes the good (das Gute) from the pleasant (das Angenehme) and excludes the grounding of good and evil on objects of experience, that is, on the feeling of pleasure and pain. Kant can then deplore the “limitation of the language” (80), visible, according to him, in the Scholastic uses of the notions of bonum and malum, which do not permit a distinction on this point. Latin’s ambiguity is best seen in its contrast to German, which, Kant notes, does not countenance it—for which, Kant says, praise is due to the language: The German language is fortunate to possess the expressions that keep this difference from being overlooked. It has two very different concepts and also equally different expressions for what the Latins designate by a single word, bonum [or malum]: for bonum it has das Gute and das Wohl; it has das Böse and das Übel (or Weh), so that there are two quite different judgments according to whether in an action we take into consideration its good and evil or our well-being and woe (bad). (Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:59–60, trans. Pluhar, 80–81) German thus divides in two the single opposition bonum/ malum: into wohl/übel, which relates to the agreeable or disagreeable state in which the subject finds himself; and gut/ böse, which always “signifies a reference to the will insofar as the will is determined by the law of reason to make something its object” (Gesammelte Schriften, 5:60, trans. Pluhar, 81). Here, the French translator, Francis Picavet, can do nothing but preserve the original terms in italics. This is Picavet’s version of Kant’s comment: La langue allemande a le bonheur de posséder des expressions qui ne laissent pas échapper cette difference. Pour designer ce que les Latins appellent d’un mot unique bonum, elle a deux concepts très distincts et deux expressions moins distinctes. Pour bonum, elle a les deux mots Gute et Wohl, pour malum, Böse et Übel (ou Weh), de sorte que nous exprimons deux jugements tout à fait différents lorsque nous considerons dans une action [ce] . “Problématique sceptique d’un impensé: Hè skepsis.” In Le scepticisme antique: Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Lausanne, Switz.: Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 1990. Demos, Raphael. “The Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment (1750–1821): A General Survey.” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 523–41. Derrida, Jacques. Platōnos pharmakeia / Jacques Derrida: Eisagōgē, metaphrasē, sēmeiōseis [Plato’s pharmacy / Jacques Derrida: Introduction, translation, notes]. Translated to Greek by Ch. G. Lazos. Athens: Agra, 1990. Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word 15 (1959): 325–40. Glykophrydi-Leontsini, Athanasia. Neoellênikê aisthêtikê kai eurôpaikos diaphôtismos [Neohellenic aesthetics and the European Enlightenment]. Athens: International Center of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Wegmarken. Translated to Greek by A. A. Vayenas. Athens: Anagnostidi, n.d. Henderson, G. P. The Revival of Greek Thought, 1620–1830. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970. Heraclitus. Peri physeos. Translated to modern Greek by E. Roussos. Athens: Ekdoseis D. N. Papadêma, 1987. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Lexicon of Presocratic Philosophy. 2 vols. Athens: Academy of Athens, 1994. Logothetis, Constantine I. Hê philosophia tês anagennêseôs kai hê themeliôsis tês neôteras physikês [The philosophy of the Renaissance and the foundation of modern physics]. Athens: Organization for the Publication of Textbooks, 1955. Mihailidis, K. P. Archaic Philosophers: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary (in Greek). Nicosia, 1971. Noutsos, Panagiôtês, ed. Hê sosialistikê skepsê stên Hellada: Apo to 1875 hôs to 1974 [Socialist thought in Greece: From 1875 to 1974]. 5 vols. Athens: Gnosis, 1990–. . The Origins of Greek Marxism: An Introduction. Ioannina: University of Ioannina, 1987. Papanoutsos, Evangelos P. Neoellênikê philosophia [Neohellenic philosophy]. 2 vols. Athens: Vasiki Vivliothiki, 1954–56. Plotinus. Enneads. Translated by Pierre Hadot. Paris: Éditons du Cerf, 1988. . Enneadôn biblia 30–33. [Enneads]. Translated to modern Greek by Yannis Tzavaras. Athens: Editions Dodoni, 1995. Psêmmenos, Nikos, ed. Hê hellênikê philosophia, 1453–1821 [Greek philosophy, 1453– 1821]. 2 vols. Athens: Gnosis, 1988–89. Roulia, P. Ch. Principles of Philosophy (in Greek). Athens: Metaichmio, 1999. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Solomos, Dhionísios. I gynaika tis Zakynthos, Dialogos [The Woman of Zakynthos: Dialogue]. Athens: Editions Patakis, 1997. Spanos, William V. “Heidegger’s Parmenides: Greek Modernity and the Classical Legacy.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001): 89–115. Stavropoulos, D. N., ed. Oxford Greek-English Learner’s Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Theodoridis, Charálampos. Introduction to Philosophy (in Greek). Athens: Éditions du Jardin, 1945. Wahl, Jean. Les philosophes de l’existence. Paris: Éditions Armand Colin, 1954. Translated to Greek by Christos Malevitsis. Athens: Dodoni, 1970. GUT / BÖSE, WOHL / ÜBEL (WEH), GUT / SCHLECHT (GERMAN) ENGLISH good/evil, good/bad FRENCH bien/mal, bon/méchant, bon/mauvais LATIN bonum, malum v. GOOD/EVIL, and BEAUTY, FAIR, GLÜCK, MORALS, PLEASURE, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, WERT, WILL Two examples, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, reveal the link formed in Germany between reflection about good and evil and reflection on the powers of language. Formally, the two GUT 425 and “frightful combat” between “two opposite values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil’ ” (“die beiden entgegengesetzten Werte ‘gut und schlecht,’ ‘gut und böse,’ ” §16, in Werke, 6.2:299, trans. Diethe, 52)—insofar as it does not (as in Kant) contrast two human faculties (sensibility and pure reason), but rather different and unequal men. It is precisely on reaching the work’s conclusion that the French translation reveals its limits: Grund genug für mich, selbst zu Ende zu kommen, vorausgesetzt, daß es längst zur Genüge klar geworden ist, was ich will, was ich gerade mit jener gefährlichen Losung will, welche meinem letzten Buche auf den Leib geschrieben ist: “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Dies heißt zum mindesten nicht “Jenseits von Gut und Schlecht.” Car on aura compris depuis longtemps ce que c’est que je veux, ce que je veux justement avec ce mot d’ordre dangereux qui donne son titre à mon dernier livre: Pardelà bien et mal ( Jenseits von Gut und Böse). Ce qui du moins ne veut pas dire: “Par-delà bon et mauvais” (Dies heisst zum mindesten nicht: “Jenseits von Gut und Schlecht”). Assuming that it has been sufficiently clear for some time what I want, what I actually want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the spine of my last book, Beyond Good and Evil. At least this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.” (§16, in Werke, 6.2:302, trans. Diethe, 36) Here, suddenly, the translation of “Gut und Böse” by “bon et méchant” disappears, pushed off the page by the pair “bien et mal.” This is not a small detail, since On the Genealogy of Morality is intended, as its subtitle reminds its readers, “to complete and clarify the recently published Beyond Good and Evil.” The translation “bon et méchant,” “good and bad,” is not at all imprecise, and it works for everything that has gone thus far; the problem is simply that “Gut und Böse” is both adjectival and adverbial, and means both “bon et méchant” and “bien et mal,” that is, both the psychological qualifications associated with the adjectives and the more strictly moral qualifications associated with the adverbs. With the adjective bon, French can render the indeterminacy of Nietzsche’s Gut, which appears in both pairs of words, and whose meaning varies precisely depending on whether it is inserted in one or the other; on the other hand, for Gut and its antonym, French finds itself required to choose between an adjective (“bon et méchant”) and an adverb (“bien et mal”), that is, between a psychological style and a moral style, which Nietzsche’s method distinctively refuses to separate. With respect to what we saw in Kant, the problem is thus reversed. It is not that French does not have enough distinctions, but that it has too many: bien and mal crowd onto bon and méchant and bon and mauvais. We should note that Nietzsche’s method aims from the start to be linguistic as well, from its reflections on “the right of the masters to give names” (§2, in Werke, 6.2:273, trans. Diethe, 13), through to the final question on the contribution of “linguistics, and especially the science of etymology,” to “the history of the evolution of moral sentiments” (§16, in Werke, 6.2:303, trans. Diethe, 37). It is furthermore tempting qui en constitue ou ce qu’on appelle Gute et Böse ou ce qu’on appelle Wohl et Weh (Übel). Picavet’s discomfort is well expressed by his note to this passage: “By replacing the German words that Kant is attempting to define with French words, we could only give a false expression of the thought: their meaning is made clear by their context” (61 n. 2). The context here is a doubled contrast that French cannot denote: although French does have the pairs of synonyms that Kant adds to clarify what he means by wohl and übel (Annehmlichkeit and Unannehmlichkeit; agrément and désagrément, namely “agreement” in the sense of “agreeableness,” and “disagreement” in the sense of “what disagrees with one”; Vergnügen and Schmerze; contentement and douleur; “pleasure” and “pain” [Gesammelte Schriften, 5:58–59; trans. Picavet, 60]), it has no words other than bien and mal to render Gut and Bóse, notions of good and evil that, according to Kant, do not belong to morality. Kant’s praise of German is a delicate interpretive matter. The first French translator of the Critique of Practical Reason, Jules Barni (1848), applies the criticism addressed to Latin to French as well, but for Kant it is no doubt less a matter of exalting his mother tongue than, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, of criticizing Scholasticism and its language. II. Psychological Qualifications or Moral Values? French is not, in fact, limited to the pair bien/mal; it also has the pair bon/mauvais, “good”/“bad,” on which Picavet sometimes relies for translating matters related to sensation (cf. 60: “le concept de ce qui est tout simplement mauvais,” “the concept of what is simply bad,” for “schlechthin Böse,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:58). There is nevertheless a reason why this new pair does not allow us to resolve the difficulty. The two pairs bien and mal and bon and mauvais are not of the same grammatical nature. German, however, is able to retain the pairs’ grammatical parallelism, since the (somewhat antiquated) pair of adverbs wohl/übel may be replaced by gut/schlecht; both are adverbial and adjectival, and thus grammatically parallel to gut/böse. New difficulties then appear, however, as witnessed by the translation of the first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. The title given to this essay, “Gut und Böse, Gut und Schlecht,” was translated into French as “Bon et méchant, bon et mauvais.” A new split takes place: this time that of two “evaluations” (cf., e.g., §2 and §7, in Werke, 6.2:273 and 280; trans. Hildenbrand and Gratien, 21 and 30; trans. Diethe, 12 and 21), of two ways to impose value judgments on reality, namely that of slaves and that of the noble or powerful. Their relations have two main characteristics. First, the splitting of these evaluations reveals that there is a more fundamental division than that of good and evil, that which contrasts the high and the “low” (einem “Unten”), the superior and the inferior (§2). Second, and above all, the conflict does not just run through both pairs, but rather opposes them to one another, the bad according to the slaves being “precisely the ‘good’ of the other morality” (§11, in Werke, 6.2:288, trans. Diethe, 24). According to Nietzsche, the two oppositions form a system, and this system has a history—the age-old beast”—which Nietzsche says, however, might be “Roman, Arabic, Germanic, or Japanese” (§11). Philippe Büttgen REFS.: Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1908. First published in 1788. Translation by Werner S. Pluhar: Critique of Practical Reason. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002. French translation by F. Picavet: Critique de la raison pratique. 9th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. First published in 1943. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.2. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Translation by Marion Faber: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Marion Faber. Introduction by Robert C. Holub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. . Zur Genealogie der Moral. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.2. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Translation by Carol Diethe: On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Rev. student ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. French translation by I. Hildenbrand and J. Gratien: La généalogie de la morale. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. 426 GUT to search out the Greek in Nietzsche’s German, especially in the pair gut/schlecht, which is, so to speak, retranslated from the pair agathos/kakos [ἀγαθός/ϰαϰός] (§5). Nietzsche’s “good” thus makes us hear the Greek untranslatables kalos kagathos [ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός] (see BEAUTY) and eu prattein [εὖ πϱάττειν] (see PRAXIS) (§10), which make his gut appear in its two primary dimensions, distinction and activity. Despite the link of German with Greek, affirmed several times in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche, unlike Kant, does not grant any privilege to the German language. German, for him, does certainly provide exemplary confirmation of the genealogy of evaluations, deriving schlecht (bad) from schlicht (the senses of “simple,” then “base,” “of low birth,” are listed in the Grimms’ dictionary [RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v.], flowing from the senses of “right,” “flat or straight”), but it remains the case that “the expressions of the ‘good’ in the different languages all refer to the same transformation of the concepts” (§4, in Werke, 6.2:275, trans. Diethe, 14). Here again, the interpretation will differ, depending on whether we stress the progress of the sciences of language or the alleged origin of the “beautiful blond 427 does not pose any grammatical problems in Portuguese; for personal verbs, it is even stylistically desirable insofar as the personal endings are, as in Latin, clearly distinct (amo, amas, ama, amamos, amais, amam), unlike in English or French, where they cannot be distinguished phonetically without a subject pronoun ([I] love; [you] love; [he] loves; [they] love). The word once functioned as an adverb of place, as in this sentence by a sixteenth-century grammarian: “E por não ficar confusão em este nome próprio, pois i há muitos homens que têm um mesmo nome” (And so there should be no confusion in this proper name, for there are many men who have the same name; J. de Barros, Gramãtica da língua portuguesa), but that usage gradually disappeared from the verbal expression. There remains only the direct object of the verb: what is projected toward existence. The direct object of há cannot be confused with a subject; há, like any impersonal verb, is invariant and of course never agrees with its complement in gender or number: há flores no prado (there are flowers in the prairie). Indeed, if we needed to find a “real subject,” we would rather have to look to the now-vanished adverb of place, which had the logical role of a whole containing the objects, as explained by Mattoso Câmara: We may understand it from the usage of habere in existential phrases of vulgar Latin, when a noun of place stood first as a subject, for example “Africa has lions.” The shift towards an impersonal construction took place when we perceived the place as a “décor” rather than as a “possessor.” This yields its presentation with the preposition in or its expression by the adverb ibi (Arch. Port. hi, Fr. y, etc.): “in arca Noe habuit homines I” (Bourciez, 1930). Everyday Brazilian shows that this is a natural inclination of the mind, as it reproduces the change, this time with the verb ter [to have, to possess], in the same conditions: “in Africa [there are] lions (na Africa tem leões).” We may say that the place name, which was first a subject, was integrated into the fact or the predicate considered in itself, without reference to a possessor external to it. (Princípios de ligüística geral) Haver and ter, in their existential usage, are constructed in exactly the same way, even though there is always a difference of nuance. Ter, even as an auxiliary or existential, retains the reassuring and solid aspect of possession. The poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade uses ter to refer to a stone encountered on the road: “Tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho” (very roughly, “was a stone in the middle of the road” or “had a stone in the middle of the road” [Reunião]; note the absence of “there” or a pronoun, personal or impersonal, such as “one,” “he,” or “we” in the translations). The verb haver could replace ter, but the verse would lose HÁ /HAVER (PORTUGUESE) ENGLISH there is, to have FRENCH il y a, avoir GERMAN es gibt GREEK esti [ἔστι] SPANISH hay, haber v. IL Y A [ES GIBT, ESTI], and ASPECT, FICAR, PRESENT, REALITY, SPANISH, TO BE The French il y a and the German es gibt may be translated into Portuguese (and analogously into Castilian Spanish) by three distinct impersonal verbs: (1) há, from the verb haver (derived from the Latin habere), constructed with neither subject nor adverb but taking an object; (2) tem, from the verb ter (from the Latin tenere), which absorbed all the possessive meaning of haver; and finally, in a more elevated, literary, and philosophical register, (3) the pronominal form dá-se, analogous to es gibt, whose origin is the passive form of the Latin, datur. Their usage is not always interchangeable, which emphasizes the semantic differences of the three verbs (in addition to the etymological ones) and may help us see the difference between il y a and es gibt. I. The Meaning of Há, without a Subject The Portuguese verb haver (haber in Spanish) has the same origin as the verb avoir (French) “to have”: the Latin habere. However, it is the Portuguese verb ter, much more often than haver, that is most often translated into French by avoir. Haver lost its possessive sense and was replaced by ter for such purposes. It has retained auxiliary functions, both aspectual and modal; some rare uses as a main verb with very specific meanings; and above all, the impersonal existential function. This limitation created its meaning and makes it one of the most important verbs in Portuguese, alongside the verb ser, “to be,” for any fundamental ontological questioning. In a note to her translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time, for example, Marcia Cavalcante appeals to the sense of the verb haver to explain the specific usage of the German verb geben in the expression es gibt, even though she chooses to translate it by the Portuguese form equivalent to the German, dá-se: To distinguish the ontological level of the establishment of structures from the ontic level of derivations, Being and Time reserves the verb to give [dar-se] (geben), and thus inserts [incutindo] the active and transitive meaning in the process referred to by the verb haver. As a consequence, to give [dar-se] always refers to the movements of being and to its truth in presence, in existence, in temporality, in history. (Ser e tempo) In its standard meaning, há requires neither a subject, real or apparent, nor an adverb of place. The lack of a subject H its gravity. In contrast, the idea of flourishing, escape, and suppleness of this other verse would completely disappear without haver: “Minha alma é uma lembrana que há em mim” (My soul is a memory which is in me; Pessoa, Poemas inéditos). In this case, more than being an object which I solidly own, the soul, Pessoa tells his readers, is the eruption of an object, “a memory” in the region of the “I.” The absence of the subject and the adverb of place in Portuguese yields an idea of presence in the world, instantaneous, without any other support than its arrival itself, a starting point neither substantial nor subjective, for anything that exists—like a satori, the zen event, which Barthes defines as “a more or less powerful (though in no way formal) seism that causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language [un vide de parole]” (L’empire des signes). We may almost always translate haver by way of a phrase based on the verb “to have,” but we cannot translate this lack of subject, which marks its existential meaning. We cannot render the effect of suspension that it produces in its object by projecting it from nowhere into presence: “Há um azul em abuso de beleza” (There is some blue as the height [or trespass or misuse] of beauty; M. Barros, O livro das ignorãcas). II. Haver, the Future, and the Expression of the Future Neither can we render haver’s projective aspect, which anticipates and both outstrips and shoots forth existing objects and the pure event of the future. According to the syntax of the verb haver, everything that is posited as real (isto que há, lit., what [there] is) gets its existence in an élan that is open in the present. Presence becomes the opening of the future, which, reigning in the power of the possible, anticipates and supports what exists. Thus, “the future” is called o que haverá (lit., what will have) by António Quadros, where determination is disclosed by a difference from, and even a surpassing of, the possessive sense of ter (to have / to possess): The future [o que haverá] is not yet what is eternally [não é ainda o que é] but nor is it already what one is in space time [não é já o que se é], it is rather the open and endless horizon of freedom. The future [o que haverá] is not what one will have [o que se terá] either, but precisely what will transcend having and being had [o ter e o sermos tidos—sermos tidos is the past personal infinitive of the verb ter, to have, in the first person plural; see PORTUGUESE, Box 2], a participation in movement, which never is fulfilled in possession. (O espírito da cultura portuguesa) It is significant that the idea of a “future” should be framed by a Portuguese philosopher based on the meaning of the verb haver. The verb haver keeps alive expressions in Portuguese from which flow the future forms in neo-Latin tongues. Benveniste notes a similar phenomenon regarding the origin of the future in Romance languages, coming from a progressive extension of predictions and prophecies, a shift that is “born among Christian writers and theologians beginning with Tertullian (at the beginning of the third century BCE)” (Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2:131). This event in the history of languages is comparable to what happened synchronically in contemporary Portuguese (2:132): The syntagm habere + infinitive coexisted for a long time with the old future, without crossing it, since it conveyed a distinct notion. There were thus two expressions for the future: one as intention (this is the simple form with -bo, -am), the other has predestination (this is the syntagm: “what is to happen” > “what will happen.” In Portuguese, this ancient verbal syntagm, haver, followed by the infinitive of the main verb, no longer coexists with the earlier Latin future but rather with the future from Romance languages in which the verb habeo, reduced to a suffix, becomes a simple verbal ending. This recent simple future takes over the intentional meaning of the old Latin future. Thus the two expressions for the future coexist in this sentence from a contemporary writer: . . . os ímanes que, na sua aldeia, hão-de fazer voar a passarola, cujos, ainda por cima, terão de vir do estrangeiro (the magnets which in his village must make the aerostat fly, which furthermore must come from abroad ) (Saramago, Memorial do convento) The mesoclitic pronoun (the unstressed pronoun object, lhes in the example below, is inserted between the radical— the infinitive of the verb—and the ending of the conjugated verb in the simple future of the pronominal voice) highlights this formation of the future in Portuguese: Aos que têm seara em casa, pagar-lhes-ão a semeadura; aos que vão buscar a seara tão longe, hão-lhes de medir a semeadura e hão-lhes de contar os passos. (To those who have fields at home, we will pay for the seeds; to those who go far to find fields, we will measure the seeds and count the steps.) (Vieira, Sermão da sexagésima) This notion of projection, of blooming forth, cuts across most contemporary uses of haver, as a future auxiliary as well as an impersonal verb referring to existence. Thus, inasmuch as it refers to this bursting forth into presence, há is similar to the Greek esti [ἔστι], or in the plural eisi [εἰσί], put at the head of a sentence, which is usually followed by a subject with which it agrees. The difference is that in Portuguese what would be the “real” subject is not at all understood nor analyzed as a subject, but really as an object, thrown in front. The future projects itself as an object, and the real anticipates itself—since, from the very start, há what is. Fernando Santoro REFS.: Barros, João de. Gramãtica da língua portuguesa. 3rd ed. Edited by José Pedro Machado. Lisbon: Sociedade Astória, 1957. First published in 1540. Barros, Manoel de. O livro das ignorāças. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1994. Barthes, Roland. L’empire des signs. Paris: Flammarion, 1970. Translation by Richard Howard: The Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. 428 HÁ HEART 429 (in the tradition of Aristotle’s distinction between eutuchia and eudaimonia) an opposition between the moral goal (“happiness” that pertains to the innermost spiritual life) and favorable contingency. The problems raised by these different terms are discussed in the entry GLÜCK. v. DUTY, GOOD / EVIL, MORALS, VALUE Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Translation by Mary Elizabeth Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Câmara, Joaquim Mattoso, Jr. Princípios de lingüística geral, como introdução aos estudos superiores da língua portuguêsa. 4th and expanded ed. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Acadêmica, 1967. Translation by Anthony J. Naro: The Portuguese Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Drummond de Andrade, Carlos. Reunião. Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1969. . The Minus Sign: A Selection from the Poetic Anthology. Translated by Virginia de Araujo. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1981. . Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Edited by Thomas Colchie and Mark Strand, with additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop and Gregory Rabassa. New York: Random House, 1986. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 13th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976. Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Translation by Marcia Sá Cavalcante: Ser e tempo. Vol. 1. Petropolis: Vozes, 1988. Pessoa, Fernando. Poemas inéditos 1919–1930. Lisbon: Ática, 1990. Quadros, António. O espirito da cultura portuguesa. Lisbon: Soc. Expansão Cultural, 1967. Saramago, José. Baltasar and Blimunda. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. . Memorial do convento. 2nd ed. Lisbon: Caminho, 1995. Vieira, Antônio. Sermão da sexagésima. Edited, introduction, and commentary by Gladstone Chaves de Melo. Niterói-RJ: Núcleo Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1985. . Sermoˇ es. Edited by Alcir Pécora. 2 vols. Saˇo Paulo: Hedra, 2000. HAPPINESS The difficulty of the notion of happiness (luck, good fortune, prosperity, joy, felicity) has to do with the fact that it is located in a double register: the moral and even religious horizon of the goals of life (see VIRTUE, and in particular VIRTÙ), but also the entirely contingent register of the chance aspects of life (see DAIMÔN, DESTINY, and particularly KÊR). The English term “happiness” thus preserves an etymological connection to a sense of “coming or happening by chance; fortuitous; chance” (RT: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.). In the French term bonheur, these different perspectives are now collected in the problematics of satisfaction: see PLEASURE. The group of terms created in German on the basis of Glück and Seligkeit has the advantage of reflecting the initial complexity of the Greek words that it seeks to translate (eutuchia [εὐτυχία], eudaimonia [εὐδαιμονία], olbos [ὄλϐος], makariotês [μαϰαϱιότης]), as well as that of the Latin (felicitas, beatitudo), of which French retains only the religious connotations. Compare the English, however—as in Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.2). In addition, German has created the term Wohlfahrt, from the adjective wohl (good), borrowed by the English “welfare” to designate material prosperity; it is remarkable that French persists in the religious lexicon by translating “welfare state” as État-providence; cf. BIEN-ÊTRE. In almost all European languages, then, happiness is synonymous with luck or good fortune, the advantages we receive by chance. German, however, with the difference between Glück and Glückseligkeit, seeks to strengthen HEART I. An Essential Organ The French word cœur (like the Eng. “cardiac”) derives from the Latin cor, cordis, which itself derives from the Greek kardia [ϰαϱδία], a word that is connected with the Indo-European root [*k΄ ērd-] (whence the Ger. Herz, the Russ. serdtse [cepдцe]), which designates an essential organ. But when we compare Greek, Latin, or the Semitic languages, we see that the organs and their functions are far from coinciding in all these languages or at different historical stages so that the word “heart” can serve to translate more than one organ (in Greek, for example, kêr [ϰῆϱ], kardia or thumos [θυμός]), and yet each time “heart” is only one of the possible translations: see in particular CONSCIOUSNESS (esp. Box 1), GEMÜT, GOGO, LËV, SAMOST’, SOUL (esp. Boxes 3 and 4). II. Metaphors and Oppositions “Heart,” which names the central organ in the circulation of the blood and is used by extension for the chest or stomach, comes to designate the seat of the humors and feelings, for example, love but also courage (derived from cor). This latter can be located in other cultures and especially in antiquity in the liver, the lungs, or breath (Gr. thumos, Lat. animus). See, in addition to SOUL and CONSCIOUSNESS, the Italian VIRTÙ; see also ACEDIA, LOVE, MELANCHOLY, PATHOS, and, more generally, MALAISE. As the seat of the feelings and affections, the heart can represent either another source of knowledge—for example, when Pascal declares that “in reality, we know truth not only through reason, but also through the heart” (Pensées, 110)—or even the antonym of reason, as when Pascal writes, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know” (ibid., 423): see LOGOS, MADNESS, REASON [INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING], TO SENSE. In certain spiritual traditions the heart is considered to be the innermost core of the personality. Thus the Bible, also taking into account other internal organs, declares that God is a “searcher of heart and soul” (literally, kidneys and hearts) (Ps. 7:10). Many other passages in the Hebrew text, which are taken over and completed by the Christian scriptures, accord this metaphor a major role: “I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will take the stony heart out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 11:19); see LEIB and LËV. Thus the heart designates what is essential in each thing, its essence. See LËV and cf. ESSENCE, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI. v. GENIUS, INGENIUM, WILL 430 HEIMAT HEIMAT (GERMAN) ENGLISH homeland FRENCH terre natale v. FATHERLAND and CIVIL SOCIETY, DESTINY, OIKEIÔSIS, PEOPLE, PROPERTY, WORLD Heimat, which is often translated as “homeland,” refers, like Vaterland (fatherland), if not to one’s explicit place of birth, at least to one’s place of origin. However, whereas the latter refers explicitly to a genealogy (the Vaterland is the Land des Väters, the country of one’s father), the belonging that is implied by Heimat is more complex. Heimat, which comes from Heim (home, domicile), is in effect the land where one stays and is settled and where the dimensions of the homeland and the home become mixed. It is the place that is ours (or the one that has become it) since it is either destined for or appropriated by us. Unlike Vaterland, it thus refers to the proper place, in a sense that is more ontological than genealogical. Different uses, including political ones, result for both terms. Ι. Vaterland: Belonging through Birth and Political Community In addition to its first meaning, Vaterland acquires a political meaning starting in the eighteenth century. To have a Vaterland, a fatherland, is to belong to a public community, which gives (or at least ought to give) a right to citizenship. It is public, insofar as it is clearly identifiable, for everyone, by birth. Thus, Kant writes in his Rechtslehre (Doctrine of Right) in §50: A country (territorium) [das Land] whose inhabitants [Einsassen] are citizens [Mitbürger] of it [gemeinen Wesens] simply by its constitution, without their having to perform any special act to establish the right (and so are citizens by birth [mithin durch die Geburt]), is called their native land [Vaterland]. (Kant, Doctrine of Right, Metaphysics of Morals, 110) The Vaterland is thus a community to which one belongs de facto. It does not require any particular appropriation. At the same time it is that which naturally gives the right to citizenship. It constitutes a sort of precitizenship. This is shown by the fact that citizenship requires, in return, an attachment to the Vaterland, a debt that is manifested notably in an obligation with regard to defense, or even sacrifice. The whole problem of politics is thus to know how to acquire citizenship without having a prior identification of this public community, how to become a citizen of a country when the latter is not one’s Vaterland by birth, the Land (country) of one’s fathers. II. Heimat: Ontological Rootedness Heimat directs the question of belonging in an entirely different way. In general, Heimat may refer simply to the place where something has occurred—an invention or a work—the place of birth attributed to it. However, this very generality lends itself to an ontological inflection. Heimat is less the place that someone or other recognizes as his own, like a place of birth, than the place where one is and becomes what one was destined to be and become, one’s proper place. As a place of destination (or even mission), Heimat then becomes what allows a being to manifest itself and develop, to reveal its essence. That kind of inflection is already noticeable in Hegel’s philosophy of history, including that which undergirds his own history of philosophy. Thus, he may write, regarding the Greeks, But what makes us specially at home [bei ihnen ist es uns heimatlich zu Mute] with the Greeks is that they made their world their home [sich selbst ihre Welt zur Heimat gemacht haben]; the common spirit of homeliness unites us both. (Hegel, History of Philosophy, 150) However, making one’s world a Heimat means nothing other than welcoming the Weltgeist. Heimat is thus the place where the Weltgeist (the spirit or mind of the world) is manifested: This region, which was long the theatre of world history, does not have a clearly defined nucleus of its own, but is oriented outwards, looking towards the Mediterranean. While the middle and north of Europe were still uncultivated, the world spirit [Weltgeist] had its residence [Heimat] there. (Hegel, Philosophy of World History, 195) It is in Heidegger’s work above all that this ontologicization of Heimat is most fully developed. For it is defined first with regard to its loss and absence (Heimatlosigkeit). Heimat is in effect the birthplace in which a man finds himself rooted, the closest place. And this rootedness means first of all that he may develop there, in conformity with his being. In the proximity and familiarity of this place, understood as a gift, he finds the source of a meditative thought and a work. Thus the address Gelassenheit (“Serenity”) begins in these terms: I thank my homeland [Heimat] for all that it has given me along the path of my life. (Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: Translation of Gelassenheit) From this flows the three-fold questioning that governs Heidegger’s thought with respect to Heimat: 1. Is the rootedness of the work (beginning with the work of thinking) not necessary to its production? We grow thoughtful and ask: does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil [die verwurzelung im Boden einer Heimat]? (Ibid.) What Heimat connotes is thus the idea of a proper basis (Grund) understood as a ground (Boden) or a land, “the depth of the native soil [die Tiefe des heimatlichen Boden]” (ibid.). 2. The appropriation of Heimat is thus the object of a summons that, if it is not directly political in itself, leads all politics to this demand for rootedness in a land (die Bodenständigkeit). In this way, after the war Heidegger considers the problem of Germans who have become HEIMAT 431 estranged from their country more troubling than that of refugees: Many Germans have lost their homeland [haben ihre Heimat verloren]. They are strangers now to their former homeland [sie sind der alten Heimat entfremdet]. And those who have stayed on in their homeland [die in der Heimat Gebliebenen]? Often they are still more homeless [heimatloser] than those who have been driven from their homeland [die Heimatvertriebenen]. (Ibid., 48) The first effect of the ontologicization of Heimat is thus to make the question of citizenship (that which concerns the Vaterland, in the Kantian sense of the term) a secondary problem in relation to the generalized character of this rootlessness that threatens man “in his most intimate being” (ibid.). 3. As a further result, there is a new task for thought, in which its political responsibility would be exhausted: to think and find a new Heimat in which human works can again take root: Thus we ask now: even if the old rootedness [die alte Bodenständigkeit] is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation [ein neuer Grund und Boden] be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man’s nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age? What could the ground and foundation be for the new rootedness [welches wäre der Grund und Boden für eine künftige Bodenständigkeit]? (Ibid.) . III. Can There Be Heimat without Vaterland? Nevertheless, the term Heimat does not lose all political significance. Can there be Heimat without Vaterland? Can someone who is deprived of rights in a given place make it his own place and home? Is not a depoliticized notion of Heimat in reality highly political? This is the question raised by Jean Améry in Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, which raises the question of the status of Jews in Nazi Germany. It is, he explains, because Jews were forbidden to recognize Germany as their Heimat that they were able to be deprived of their rights— and thus find themselves without a Vaterland. However, it is also because they were deprived of rights that no Heimat was possible for them. Heimat is therefore not only a proper place but also one that furnishes at least a minimum of security. What the depoliticization of Heimat forgets, in falling back on a traditional familiarity, is that for an individual deprived of rights, someone without a country, no Heimat is possible: [F]irst, with all due brevity, the relationship between homeland [Heimat] and fatherland [Vaterland] must be clarified, because a widespread attitude claims to accept the idea of homeland in its regional, folkloristic limits at least as something of picturesque value, while fatherland is extremely suspicious to it as a demagogic catch-word and a characteristic of reactionary obstinacy. [S]ince I am a qualified homeless person [Heimatlos] I dare to stand up for the value that homeland signifies, and I also reject the sharp-witted differentiation between homeland and fatherland, and in the end believe that a person of my generation can get along only poorly without both, which are one and the same. Whoever has no fatherland—that is to say, no shelter in an autonomous social body representing an independent governmental entity—has, so I believe, no homeland either. (Améry, Mind’s Limits) It is thus when one is deprived that the difference between Vaterland and Heimat is best discussed, but it is also then that it becomes obscured. The loss of Vaterland refers to a very precise political situation. It is the fact of stateless people, and it refers to the difficulty (even impossibility) of acquiring 1 The Heimatlosen of the “Gay Science” Being rooted in a Heimat may also suggest diametrically opposed demands in philosophy. For Nietzsche, in the voice of Zarathustra, it refers to the collection of attachments (to a land, a countryside, a family) from which one must extricate oneself in order for a new thought or writing to be possible. Heimat is not the proper place in which a work is rooted but a place that one must know how to leave, on pain of repeating what was already thought and said. It is both a Vater-land and a Mutterland, not in the sense of a political community, but a collection of dependencies (a tradition, an authority, insofar as they presuppose and even demand affective links): But nowhere did I find home [Heimat]; I am unsettled [unstätt bin ich] in every settlement, and a departure at every gate. Foreign [fremd] to me and a mockery are these people of the present to whom my heart recently drove me; and I am driven out of father- and motherlands [vertrieben bin ich aus Vater- und Mutterländern]. (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Land of Education”) In The Gay Science, Nietzsche refers to “the children of the future,” to whom his gaya scienza is addressed, as “stateless” (Heimatlosen). REFS.: Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also Sprach Zarathustra. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Translation by Adrian Del Caro: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 432 HEIMAT to a Heimat is what gives one the right to a Vaterland—the uprootedness is no longer ontological but rather refers to the lack of a familiar and safe home, a permanent threat to one’s own security. . Marc Crépon rights without an identification and a prior belonging to the type of community that the term designates. It affects those who were forced or chose to leave their country. In contrast, the lack of Heimat does not necessarily imply displacement or exile. It refers rather to being uprooted, the loss of a place where one can be fully oneself. Except when one or the other is exploited and the two become confused—when belonging 2 Das Unheimliche v. ANXIETY, ENTSTELLUNG, MALAISE, SUBJECT, THEMIS, UNCONSCIOUS, VERNEINUNG The substantivized antonym of heimlich, das Unheimliche, refers to anxiety, which has belonged to the vocabulary of psychoanalysis since Freud. “Worrying strangeness”: the German term is “untranslatable,” notes Bertrand Féron, who retains Marie Bonaparte’s translation but allows that the French glosses it, eliminating the Heim of the home, suppressing the un of disapproval (L’Inquietante Étrangeté et autres essais). James Strachey chooses “uncanny”: unable to mobilize an equivalent formed from home, he relies on the privative of “canny,” from can, “to be able, to be capable,” from the same family as to know. Freud, in his eponymous essay (1919) is more attentive than ever to his language and to other languages: “The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich (homely), heimisch (native)—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (“The Uncanny,” 17:220). Yet this is false: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (ibid.). And Freud, dictionaries in hand, states that “this particular shade of what is frightening” is lacking “in many languages”—perhaps precisely because they are “foreign” to us (ibid., 17:221). What is remarkable is that in a nuance of German, heimlich can coincide with its opposite and mean not only “familiar, comfortable” but also “hidden,” the “secret [geheim],” even though we can understand that, as the brothers Grimm say, from “domestic” comes the concept of what is “withdrawn from the eyes of strangers” (ibid., 17: 225). Freud’s attention is drawn there by a remark of Schelling: “We notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (ibid.—Freud cites Schelling via Daniel Sanders [see RT: Sanders, Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 1860]; here is Schelling’s text, Philosophie der Mythologie, 2.2:649: unheimlich nennet man alles, was in Geheimnis, im Verborgennen, in der Latenz bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist, with the difference that, as David Stimilli notes, Sanders omits in der Latenz!). The context of Schelling’s definition, which Freud perhaps did not know, is the status of Nemesis: this “strangely worrying” principle above the law (nomos [νόμος]), which the Olympian religion tries to hide (die Gewalt jenes unheimlichen Princips, das in der früheren Religionen herrschte [the power of the strangely worrying principle that dominated in earlier religions] [Einleitung in Philosophie der Mythologie, 649]). Nemesis is in effect nothing other than “the very power of this supreme law of the world which throws everything into motion, which allows nothing to remain hidden, which requires everything hidden to appear, and forces it, in a way, morally to show itself [das alles Verborgen zum Hervortreten antreibt und gleichsam moralisch zwingt sich zu zeigen]” (HistoricalCritical Introduction, 146–47). Nemesis, the hidden power, by definition brings what is hidden out into the light; Pindar calls her “more just than justice,” huperdikon [ὑπέϱδιϰον] (Pythiques, 10:45; Olympian Odes, 8:86). The Unheimlich thus refers to the hidden that is suddenly forced to show itself; in Freudian language, “something repressed which recurs [etwas wiedekehrendes Verdrängtes]” (“The Uncanny,” 17:241). We may understand, Freud says, why “linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche (homely) into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression [nur durch den Prozess der Verdrängung entfremdet worden ist]” (ibid.). It thus constitutes a special kind of anxiety, “when infantile complexes which have been repressed [verdrängte infantile Komplexe] are once more revived by some impression,” as in Hoffman’s “Sandman,” or when “something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs [überwundene primitive Überzeugungen]” (ibid., 247–49), as in the unintentional repetition that mimics fatality so well. Realizing that one is not even at home in oneself is the anxiety of the modern subject in the face of the Unheimliches. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Beach, Edward A. The Potencies of the God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche.” FreudStudienausgabe 4: Psychologische Schriften. 9th ed. Edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 241–74. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1997. Translation by James Strachey et al.: “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–56. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Philosophie der Mythologie. Edited by Karl Friedrich August von Schelling. In Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 2.2. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1857. . Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie. Edited by Karl Friedrich August von Schelling. In Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 2.1. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856. Translation by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger: HistoricalCritical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Foreword by Jason M. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Stimilli, Davide. The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. HERRSCHAFT 433 Latin senior and the Greek presbuteros [πϱεσϐύτεϱος], was used to make the noun herre, in the seventh century, which was more or less equivalent to dominus (cf. RT: Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 4.2:1124f.; G. Ehrismann, “Die Wörter für ‘Herr’ im Althochdeutschen”). Whereas in the Middle Ages the distinction between potestas (royal power) and auctoritas (papal authority) was constantly being refined, leading to a clear opposition (cf. W. Ensslin, “Auctorita und Potestas”; Habermas, Structural Transformation, chap. I, §2)—whose extreme consequences were the establishment of an independent legal system in France (Cujas’s reform under Philippe Auguste) and the Anglican schism—the term Herrschaft remained, in the Germanic era, relatively indeterminate and referred to the power of the father over a family and servants, in the same way as the relationship to property and serfs. However, it also had the sense of dignity and (moral) superiority, and beginning in the thirteenth century it referred to an official function. The contrast between Herr/Knecht is already present in the form of the difference of status between the landowner and someone who only has tenure of it, but this contrast remains, from a terminological point of view, indistinct from that between lord and vassal and that between a king and the royal domain. These two meanings rest on a single translation of the term dominus, which is still in the background as the means of expressing the specific power of the emperor—dominus mundi. The power of the pope, the king, and the princes is expressed by Gewalt or Macht, translating potestas, imperium, regnum, or regimen, whereas Herrschaft remains, it seems, linked to a relation that is fundamentally based in the register of property (over the members of the extended family as well as material goods and land). However, at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Louis IV of Bavaria openly opposed Pope John XXII, Marsilius of Padua in his Defensor pacis (ca. 1324) and William of Ockham in his Breviloquium de potestate papae (ca. 1341) distinguish between property and power, with the goal of contesting papal pretensions to temporal power and property, denying that Herrschaft can subsume the two aspects or combine them. The Constitutio in favorem principium of 1232 establishes the notion of dominus terrae, translated as lantherr, but we must wait until the fourteenth century for the power of the Herr im Land to be associated with the term Herrschaft, even though the word’s meaning can refer to a function as well as a property (cf. RT: Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Landesherrschaft”) on which, most often, the exercise of power rests. Between “property” and “power” (Gewalt, power exercised over persons), Herrschaft remains both multivalent and abstract. It is difficult to specify it by way of other notions, whether through its French equivalents—autorité, domination, pouvoir, seigneurie; its German ones—Herrschung, Regiment, Obrigkeit, Oberherrschaft; or English ones—“command,” “dominion,” “lordship,” “reign,” “rule.” Adelung’s dictionary (1775, 2:1133f.) defines Herrschaft as a concrete term—unlike Gewalt—that refers either to persons exercising authority over land, a place, or a family, or to the domain (abstract or concrete) over which they exercise it. Nicolas of Cusa is one of the first to contrast, on the basis of natural law, the sovereignty of the people with a domination that does not have the power it exercises (De concordantia REFS.: Améry, Jean. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigen. Stuttgart: Klette Kotta, 1977. Translation by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. London: Granta, 1999. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Edited by Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke. 4 vols. In Vorlesungen. Vols. 6–9. Hamburg: Meiner, 1986–1996. Translation by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson: Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. . Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte: Berlin 1822/1823. Edited by Karl Heinz Ilting, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann. In Vorlesungen. Vol. 12. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996. Translation by H. B. Nisbet: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister. Introduction by Duncan Forbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Translation by John Sibree: The Philosophy of History. Introduction by C. J. Friedrich; prefaces by Karl Hegel and John Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Heidegger, Martin. Gelassenheit. Pfüllingen, Ger.: Neske, 1959. Translation by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund: Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit. Introduction by John M. Anderson. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Kant, Immanuel. Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1907. First published 1797. Translation by Mary Gregor: The Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Klemperer, Victor. LTI—Notizbuch eines Philologen: An Annotated Edition. Englishnotes and commentary by Roderick H. Watt. Lewiston, ME: Mellen, 1997. Translation by Martin Brady: The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. London: Continuum, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also Sprach Zarathustra. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988. Translation by Adrian Del Caro: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. HERRSCHAFT (GERMAN) ENGLISH domination v. AUTHORITY, DOMINATION, LIBERTY, POWER and ECONOMY, MACHT, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, PROPERTY, SECULARIZATION, STATE The term, which is omnipresent in the German medieval tradition and in both legal and political reflection, never really became defined as a concept. It was used from the beginning to refer not only to the dignity of someone who is assumed to be venerable and wise because old but also to the authority exercised by the father of a family considered the head of a clan and to the relation of property exercised by the head of a clan over territory. However, it was never established as a stable equivalent in German for translating Latin notions such as dominium, dominatio, potestas, etc. For Kant, and then Marx, the use of the term does not always lead to its conceptualization. In contemporary thought the term still has a wide extension at the cost of definitional rigor; this is the case with the use made by the Frankfurt school, and only Max Weber attempted to make it precise, though more from a functional than thematic perspective. I. Semantic Evolution The term herscaft or hertoum, in Old High German, doubtless comes from the adjective her, which means “gray-haired,” “dignified.” The comparative heriro, which translated the 434 HERRSCHAFT development nor reduce it to a psychological interpretation. Vico did attempt to give a pseudo-historical date to this process by referring it to the “domination of the Cyclops” (La Scienza nuova 1:324). The difficulty comes, here again, from the indeterminacy that affects the possibility of filling out these two notions: the master is at bottom not defined except by the fact that he is ready to sacrifice his life, whereas the slave prefers submission to death. It is rather the definition of work, refused by the master and accepted by the slave, that is at issue in this distinction, as well as the introduction of negativity as a source of historical evolution. It is clearly difficult to understand the transformation of this distinction into the consciousness of liberty as either an attested fact or a utopia—we would be tempted rather to conceive it as an anticipation by Hegel of the general flow of history after the French Revolution, and more generally as the confirmation that the modern era is crossed by the critique of the established order, a criticism that is justified by the fact that negativity cannot be removed from any social position or any instance of power. At the strictly lexicographical level, the distinction between Herrschaft/Knechtschaft refers first exclusively to a legal semantic domain. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Aristotelian-Christian tradition, which justified the relation of domination by one man of another, is questioned bit by bit, and the emergent semantic tendency, which seems to reinforce itself in the nineteenth century, gradually removes the legal content from the terms in favor of a wider meaning, of a politico-philosophical order, where what is more and more in dispute is the legal foundation of the nonnatural relation of domination. The influence of the French Revolution was felt across the Rhine, though this did not really lead to a more rigorous, conceptual definition of Herrschaft. III. A Kantian Pause: The Notion of Hausherrschaft It is significant that Kant in his treatise “Towards Perpetual Peace,” in which he examines and contrasts different forms of government, does not use the term Herrschaft, not even when referring to despotism, the regime he opposes with republicanism, which in Kant’s view is the only form of government that seems capable of allowing an evolution toward a constitution founded on law. The term appears, however, in the domain of private law, in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (6:283, §30), where it refers to the power of the master of the house (Hausherrschaft), recalling the ancient notion of the oikodespotês [οἰϰοδεσπότης]. This is indeed a kind of power related to the person (ibid., §30, Gregor, tr., Metaphysics of Morals, 66) from within a “society of unequals (one party being in command or being its head [Herrschaft], the other obeying, i.e., serving) (imperantis et subiecti domestici).” Kant shows himself to be thoroughly attuned to the erosion of this domestic power, undermined in the eighteenth century by the emergence of the notion of contracts, which in its weakened, contractual form now both justifies the dependence and recognizes the personhood of the one who obeys: this is why the relation of inequality thus described has its limits (ibid.). It nevertheless remains difficult, both in the letter and in the spirit of the categorical imperative, to grant—as Kant also does—the possibility to make “direct catholica [1433], p. 152f.), according to Pliny’s adage (Panegyric to Trajan, 55, 7): Principis sedem obtines, non sit domino locus (you have a prince so as not to have a master). It is only then that domination relates to an abusive use of power understood as an exercise overseen by the law and subordinate in one way or another to a relatively independent control. Similarly, Erasmus goes so far as to deny that the term Herrschaft (translating dominium) is a “Christian term,” and contrasts this pagan term with administratio (Institutio principis christiani [1517], in Ein nützliche underwisung eines Christlichen fürstur wol zu regieren, Zurich, 1521, p. 23). These two thinkers thus lay the basis for a semantic tradition whose effects are visible throughout the eighteenth century, where some encyclopedias and dictionaries (RT: Scheidemantel, Repertorium reale pragmaticum juris publici et feudalis imperii romano-germanici, vol. 2, 1793, and the Deutsche Encyclopädie oder allgemeines Real Wörterbuch aller Kunste und Wissenschaften von einer Gesellschaft Gelehrten, 1790, 15:285f.) register the evolution of the term: the antonyms we find then—Freiheit, Knechtschaft—are the focus of a critique of domination understood in this way. Luther offers a more ambiguous account of the situation, since he oscillates between a more critical conception of domination, contrasting Herrschaft with Obrigkeit and Regiment—“Now, whoever wants to be a Christian prince must abandon any intention of lording it over people and using force” (Von weltlicher Obrigkeit 11:271f.; On Secular Authority, 34)—but also yields to the temptation of justifying power in general: Since God gave temporal domination to the pagans and the understanding, he certainly must have created people who, with wisdom and courage, had the desire to dedicate themselves to, who were destined to it, and who knew how to maintain it. (Luther, Interpretation of Psalm 101, in Werke, 51:243) On one hand he radicalizes the Augustinian doctrine of the two reigns—sometimes considering power to be purely profane (cf. “Wochenpredigten über Matthias” [Weekly sermons on Matthew 5–7] [1530–32], in Werke, 32:440)—but he also tries, on the other hand, to legitimate his biases by all theological means available, of which Thomas Münzer accuses him during the peasant uprisings, since Luther was on the side of the nobility. Similarly, he ignores all the contemporary legal constructions, which tended to limit or control power in general. This is what distinguishes him from Calvin, who not only took account of these legal and constitutional innovations but is careful not to give domination any kind of divine origin. II. Herrschaft/Knechtschaft Hegel first introduced this distinction, the inspiration of which is Pauline, in a theological context (The Spirit of Christianity [1798–99], 1907, p. 374): it concerns a split that prevents any free union between individuals, but this distinction is overturned, outmoded by the Christian vision. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the distinction describes a stage of self-consciousness. However, we can neither rigorously determine it from the point of view of a dated historical HERRSCHAFT 435 second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third party—money. (Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie [The German Ideology], in Marx-Engels Werke, 3:65; Marx-Engels Reader) Nevertheless, and even in developed societies where the most advanced form of modern capitalism reigns—hence, the most anonymous form of domination—we may still interpret “the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state” as a “master-slave” relation: “the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers” (Capital, 3:555, which is nothing less than the appropriation of extra unpaid work (the presupposition of surplus value). However depersonalized, the relation between the dominant and the dominated retains a “personal” dimension, that of the concrete and immediate experience of domination. Marx does not further clarify the nature of this “personal” dimension—though he does claim that it is essential and that all the rest of the social edifice flows from it. Marxist reflection on the progressive depersonalization of the relations of production, which goes as far as their reification, nevertheless remains silent on what the initial and historical “success” of domination is. In the 1960s–1970s this anonymity of domination becomes caricatured, and a radicalized version is at times set to use in denunciations of a mysterious “system”: If man eats, drinks, is housed, reproduces, it is because the system needs him to reproduce to reproduce itself: it needs men. If it could function with slaves, there would be no “free” workers. If it could function with asexual mechanical slaves, there would be no sexual reproduction. The system can only produce and reproduce individuals as elements of the system. There can be no exception. (Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe) What the state was for Hegel, the “effective reality of the moral idea,” as well as the “effective reality of concrete freedom” (Philosophy of Right, §§257, 260), is, for Marx, society without class, emancipation realized, the negation of the liberal distinction between state and society and the identity between economic content and political form. It is, in short, the identity between the material and the formal principles: concrete isonomia, history beyond what was hitherto recognized as the sole engine, beyond the class struggle, humanity freed from domination—from any form of domination. The Communist Revolution “abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present society” (Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie). Yet Marx was just as discreet about this radiant future as he was about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and refrained in both cases from prophecy. Nor did he see that any critique of this order had a precisely Kantian basis, in the fact that idea and reality rarely coincide, and in morality, politics, and social matters, never. Or that the use of a person as of a thing, as a means to my end,” even if this use is limited to the “usufruct” of the other’s person and consequently does not genuinely attack his status as a person nor “[infringe] upon his personality” (ibid., 126–27, §2 and §3, explanatory remarks on Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right). The Critique of Practical Reason leaves no doubt on that score: In all of creation everything one wants and over which one has any power can also be used merely as a means; only the human being, and with him every rational creature, is a purpose in itself. (Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 5:87; Critique of Practical Reason, 112) The gap signaled by Kant’s contradictory treatment of Herrschaft is foundational to the subsequent critique of domination, especially in Marx. On one hand the exploitation of the person is condemned—and the arguments appeal to this condemnation, which is morally based on the absolute value of the person—while on the other hand the emancipation of the human race in conformity with the spirit of the categorical imperative has not yet been realized in nature (the only solution seems to be revolution, which must be a “radical revolution which can only be that of radical needs,” Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie [Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right], introduction, in Marx-Engels Werke, 387). The contemporary critique of domination, of whatever nature (racial, sexual, etc.) is also based in the same source: the impossibility of reducing domination, even by a proliferation of regulations and jurisprudence, whether in the private domain or the public one. IV. Anonymous Domination Marx effects a remarkable shift in the sense of Herrschaft by depersonalizing its content, without, nevertheless, giving it a properly conceptual definition: The proletariat will use its political supremacy [politische Herrschaft] to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. (Marx, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei [The Communist Manifesto], in Marx-Engels Werke, 4:481; Marx-Engels Reader) This depersonalization takes place, however, essentially in the domain that determines all other political and social conflicts, namely the economic one: “Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power (ibid., 476; Marx-Engels Reader, 485).” The main difference between the archaic, “natural” forms of production and those that develop in the framework of a civilization is revealed in the personal or anonymous form of the relation between owner and producer: In the first case, the domination [Herrschaft] of the proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community; in the 436 HERRSCHAFT motive resulting from a value judgment. The result is the reappearance of the technical difficulty proper to any critique of domination that aims to proceed by generalized induction. For Weber, the demand of axiological neutrality can only also neutralize the notion of domination: the result is the weakening of the conceptual possibilities of the effective critique of domination. This demand in a way blocks, in equal measure, both the apologia of domination (A. Gehlen, 1993) and the general critique of domination which, as developed by the Frankfurt School (T. W. Adorno et al., 1950, and especially, with M. Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944]), leads (without lifting the veil that seems to enshroud domination) to this desperate admission: “In the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the sway of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to popular paranoia, and in all uncomprehended absurdity, the weakness of the modern theoretical faculty is apparent” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, Eng. trans. J. Cumming (Continuum), xiii). These are the same notes resounding in the famous pamphlet by La Boétie: The weakness among us men is such: we must often obey force. It is an extreme misfortune to be subjected to a master of whom one can never be certain if he is good, since it is always in his power to be bad when he wishes. (De la servitude volontaire ou Contr’un [1574]) Marc de Launay REFS.: Adorno, Theodor W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper, 1950. Baudrillard, Jean. Pour une critique de l’économie du signe. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Cusanus, Nicolaus [Nicolas of Cusa]. De concordantia catholica. Edited by Gerhard Kallen. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 14.1. Hamburg: Meiner, 1968. First published in 1433. Translation by Paul E. Sigmung: The Catholic Concordance, edited by Paul E. Sigmund. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ehrismann, Gustav. “Die Wörter für ‘Herr’ im Althochdeutschen.” Zeitschrift für neuenglische Wortforschung 1 (1905–6): 173 ff. Ensslin, Wilhelm. “Auctoritas und Potestas.” Historisches Jahrbuch 74 (1995): 661 ff. Gehlen, Arnold. Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Edited by Lothar Samson. In Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 3. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993. First published in 1940. Translation by Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer: Man, His Nature and Place in the World. Introduction by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Darmstadt, Ger.: Luchterhand, 1962. Translation by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal.” In Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften, edited by Herman Nohl, 241–342. Tübingen: Mohr, 1907. First published in 1798–1799. Translation by T. M. Knox with Richard Kroner: “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.” In On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, 182–301. Introduction by Richard Kroner. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948. Reprinted 2011, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kant, Immanuel. Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Vol. 6 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902. First published in 1797. Translation by Mary Gregor: The Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Vol. 6 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902. First published in 1785. Translation by Mary Gregor: Groundwork critique cannot work against the material state of affairs without constantly appealing, even if only implicitly, to the formal level. And it is no accident that the reduction of politics to economics, a recurrent theme of Marxism (more than in Marx, in fact), goes hand in hand with a fundamental neglect of law and right (droit). In the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right and The German Ideology, then, Marx describes functions that, in the prospective society that has been freed from all form of domination, are related to that very domination in earlier societies, by turning to a vocabulary that allows him to avoid the contemptible term Herrschaft—without, however, giving a conceptual solution to the problem that Herrschaft presents: Oberaufsicht (superior control), Leitung (direction), kommandierender Wille (directing will), etc. Related to this situation is the fact that, less than forty years after Marx’s death, Georg Simmel also tried to avoid the notion in his Soziologie: “Man wants to be dominated [beherrscht], the majority of men cannot exist without being guided [Führung]” (109). And we know the result of substituting Führung or Führerschaft for Herrschaft in sociological and political terminology. V. Attempt at Clarification: Max Weber Max Weber distinguishes three types of domination: rational domination (whose purest form is the domination exercised by means of an administration obeying rigorous criteria, like arithmetical accounting), traditional domination, and charismatic domination (Economy and Society, 215). Domination is thus a phenomenon that is common to all the historical forms it takes on—whether it is close to one of the types described or strays from it, following all the possible gradations resulting from mixture and compromise among all three types—and we may see in this a sort of psycho-social anthropological constant. Despite Marianne Weber’s efforts to hide the importance of Nietzschean sources in her husband’s thought, it must be recognized—in this case as a barely veiled reemergence of the notion of the will to power. Whereas power (Macht) means “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (ibid., chap. 1), domination (Herrschaft) refers to “the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (ibid.). To impose one’s will or to obey an order seem to be the two necessarily complementary components that describe a relation of forces in the framework of power relations. However, we immediately see that this definition clearly ignores the reasons that make it the case that an order is followed: “But a certain minimum of assured power to issue commands, thus of domination, must be provided for in nearly every conceivable case” (ibid.). While he invokes discipline in this context, Weber does not indicate what makes it the case that this discipline is consented to. Insofar, however, as he recognizes that obedience may equally be based on loyalty or fidelity, and that it therefore no longer functions according to a formal relationship between the one who gives an order and the one who takes it (ibid.), it is no longer possible to think that the notion of domination he offers could remain neutral from an axiological point of view, since we would be logically required to include in its definition an impulse or HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS 437 exhaustiveness of simple “collections of individual histories,” the second describes Catholic universality as practiced by Bossuet in his Discours of 1681, in which he traced “everything back to a few famous people”(Mably, De la manière d’écrire l’histoire). The distinction clearly shows a real equivocity. We could illustrate the first sense by the Introduction à l’histoire, générale et politique, de l’univers; où l’on voit l’origine, les révolutions et la situation présente des différents États de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique et de l’Amérique (Introduction to the general and political history of the universe; in which we see the origin, the revolutions, and the present situation of the various States of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) (Amsterdam, 1721), by which A.-A Bruzen de La Martinière “completed” the work of Samuel von Pufendorf, Einleitung zur Geschichte der europäischen Staaten (Frankfurt, 1682), translated by C. Rouxel in 1710. La Martinière’s concern is to juxtapose dynastic and military histories, thus above all political ones, from all known nations to the extent that this is possible. In cases such as for the “Negroes of Africa,” says La Martinière, their “common customs” will have to do.” In 1756, Voltaire rejects both empirical historiography and the sorts of universal history found in Boussuet and La Martinière. His work of 1756, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mæurs et l’esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours (Essay on general history and on the morals and spirits of nations from Charlemagne to the present), rejects any Augustinianism by offering a history that claimed to be truly universal inasmuch as it was exclusively profane, and thus extended to all peoples of the earth (with the disappearance of the Catholic telos all retroactive selection disappears as well). It was also a rejection of political history, a history of princes and battles, in favor of a truly universal history as extended to the “morals and spirits of nations,” that is, to anything by which nations had their own substance, independently of those who governed them and their conflicts. The result for Voltaire is “a chaos of events, factions, revolutions, and crimes” but the consequence of this “chaos” is the universalization of the task of thinking of universal history as an essentially worldly and pan-institutional process (it henceforth wins out over all human moral and legal institutions). In France, this new way of thinking about “universal history” leads to the abandonment of the phrase “histoire universelle,” and when Condorcet abstains from following Voltaire and writing “the history of governments, laws, morals, manners, opinions, among the different peoples who have successively occupied the globe,” he replaces it with a “historical tableau of the progress of the human spirit.” The following century will bring a desire to reconcile Catholic universality with “Progress,” and in this context it becomes possible to write works such as J. F. A. Boulland’s Essai d’histoire universelle ou exposé comparatif des traditions de tous les peuples depuis les temps primitifs jusqu’à nos jours (Essay in universal history or comparative presentation of the traditions of all peoples from primitive times to the present day) (Paris, 1836). II. The “Natural History of Mankind” as Histoire Raisonnée In 1767, Adam Ferguson carefully avoids using the expression “history of the world,” which had been the title of a work by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1614, or the expression “universal of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor. Introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Vol. 5 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902. First published in 1788. Translation by Mary Gregor: Critique of Practical Reason, edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . “Zum ewigen Frieden.” In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 8: 341–86. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902. First published in 1795. Translation, introduction, commentary, and postscript by Wolfgang Schwarz: Principles of Lawful Politics: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophic Draft toward Eternal Peace: A New Faithful Translation. Aalen: Scientia, 1988. Luther, Martin. “Von weltlicher Obrigkeit.” In Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 11: 229– 81. 73 vols. Weimar, Ger.: Böhlaus, 1900. First published in 1523. Translation by Harro Höpfl: “On Secular Authority.” In Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, edited by Harro Höpfl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. See also “Temporal Authority.” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, edited by Timothy F. Lull, 429–59. Foreword by Jaroslav Pelikan. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Marx, Karl. Karl Marx–Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Translated by Richard Dixon et al. 50 vols. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004. . Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. . Marx-Engels Werke. 43 vols. Berlin: Dietz, 1957–1968. . Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Edited by Friedrich Engels. New York: International Publishers, [n.d.]. Simmel, Georg. Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 2. 4th ed. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1958. Translation by Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal: Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, edited by A. J. Blasi, A. K. Jacobs, and M. Kanjirathinkal. Introduction by Horst J. Helle. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Vico, Giambattista. La Scienza Nuova. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. 2 vols. Vol. 1. Rome: Laterza, 1974. First published in 1744. Translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Siebeck, 1922. Translation by Ephraim Fischoff et al.: Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS (LATIN) ENGLISH world history, general history, universal history FRENCH histoire universelle, histoire générale, histoire mondiale GERMAN Universalhistorie, Weltgeschichte, Welthistorie, allgemeine (Welt)Geschichte v. CORSO, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, GESCHICHTLICH, HISTORY, PEOPLE, SECULARIZATION, WELT The concept is of Latin origin—the first historia universalis appears in 1304—and in fact covers two distinct practices: the exhaustive juxtaposition of political histories on one hand, and the link between profane history (restricted to a few choice peoples) with Catholic history on the other. In the second half of the eighteenth century, having collectively rejected both of these methods, French, German, and British thinkers attempted to develop new historical universalities, which make use of terminological choices that do not strictly align. It is not surprising, then, that they all more or less simultaneously, though in different ways, rediscover Vico, whose project had no doubt “anticipated” their own. I. Catholic Universality, Empirical Universality, Universality of Progress In 1783 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably distinguishes two concepts of “universal history”: the first covers the empirical 438 HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS Jena in 1789 demonstrates (“Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?”). At a pinch, a translator could get by with “general history,” “universal history,” or “world history” (but “history of the world” would be less anachronistic). However, the translator would then be at a loss when she comes up against Welthistorie, for example, in Ernesti’s preface to the German translation of A General History of the World, from the Creation to the Present Time (London, 1764–67), under the direction of W. Guthrie and J. Gray, also published under the title Allgemeine Weltgeschichte von der Schöpfung an bis auf gegenwärtige Zeit (Leipzig, 1765–1808). She will also be troubled, and much more frequently, by Universalhistorie, still commonly used in the 1770s: J. C. Gatterer publishes an Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie in 1771, but in 1785 a Weltgeschichte in ihren ganzen Umfange. Similarly, A. L. Schlözer publishes a Vorstellung einer Universalhistorie in 1772, and in 1779, a Vorbereitung zur Weltgeschichte für Kinder. It is essentially during these years that Weltgeschichte wins out over Universalhistorie, which is why Kant spontaneously adopts it for rethinking Leibniz’s “universal history.” Why the substitution, however? The answer lies in Kant, in the last paragraph of the Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte, but also in Schlözer, writing a year later: §1: Universalhistorie war weiland nichts als ein “Gemengsel von einigen historischen Datis, die der Theolog zum Verständnis der Bibel, und der Philolog zur Erklärung der alten grieschischen und römischen Schriftsteller und Denkmäler, nötig hatte”: war nichts als eine Hilfswissenschaft der biblischen und Profanphilologie. §2: Weltgeschichte ist eine systematische Sammlung von Tatsätzen, vermittelst deren der gegenwärtige Zustand der Erde und des Menschengeschlechts, aus Gründen verstehen lässt. (§1: Universalhistorie was at the time only a “mix of some historical data which were needed by the theologian for the understanding of the Bible and the philologist for the explication of ancient writers and Greek and Roman artists”: it was nothing but an auxiliary science for biblical and profane philology. §2: Weltgeschichte is a systematic collection of facts by means of which the current state of the Earth and the human race become comprehensible on the basis of its principles.) At bottom, choosing Weltgeschichte was choosing Welt and Geschichte. Welt to refer to what is weltlich (worldly), and not just to Welt as universality. Geschichte to refer to what is “systematic,” in contrast with Greek historia, and to distinguish a process from a simple scholarly inventory. Weltgeschichte is the evolution of the human race considered in its past, present, even future totality—but always in earthly terms—and it pushes the aggregate of Universalhistorie back into the prehistory of history, as a metaphysical substrate. We can thus understand how the precise nature of this systematicity, understood as Zusammenhang (teleological connection? a priori? etc.) was what defined the stakes in the debates among German philosophers of history. Bertrand Binoche history,” which he might have come across in Henry Bolingbroke (Letters on the Study and Use of History). He prefers to refer to his undertaking as “the general history of nations” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, I, 10), by which he clearly means “of all nations”(II, 1; III, 6; II, 8). It is surprising to see Ferguson translate the plural from the preface of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois—“les histoires de toutes les nations”—by a collective singular (“the general history”), but it provides evidence for a new universality under construction—a bit in the way that in Vico, “le storie di tutto le nazioni” could be subsumed under “una storia ideal eterna” (Scienza nuova, 1744, §145). Indeed, while Ferguson’s phrase echoes Voltaire’s—Claude-François Bergier translates it correctly into French as “l’histoire générale des nations” (Essai sur l’histoire de la société civile)—and while this echo of Voltaire is significant (as Ferguson’s work concerns a process that is essentially worldly, worldwide, and civil)—it remains the case that its “generality” is nevertheless different from the sort one finds in Voltaire. Ferguson’s results from the empiricist overlay of the trajectories followed by the observable nations; or rather, his “generality” is the abstract process that any nation must follow to the extent that circumstances permit. In this sense, what is abstract is also “natural,” and John Millar suggests the expression “natural history of mankind” to describe this way of proceeding (The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks). Matters soon get more complicated. When Dugald Stewart suggests in 1793 a French translation of “natural history” thus understood, he does not propose histoire naturelle or histoire générale, but rather histoire raisonée (Smith, Works and Correspondence); he has in mind d’Alembert, who in the Essai sur les éléments de philosophie in 1759 had invoked “l’histoire générale et raisonnée des sciences et des arts”(chap. 2). The translation is surprising, but not absurd at all: Stewart could evoke, for his Englishspeaking reader, David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757), but he had to avoid the French phrase “histoire naturelle de l’humanité,” which would have necessarily called Buffon to mind for a French readership and entailed an entirely different sort of inquiry. Moreover, the word raisonnée contrasted with révélée (revealed), as “natural” with “supernatural,” which allowed Stewart to preserve what was essential in the original title. III. Weltgeschichte vs. Universalhistorie The German translation of Voltaire’s Essai sur l’histoire générale, published in 1762, suggests the compound allgemeine Weltgeschichte (a “general history of the world”). The expression is Kant’s, but the use has changed. Kant uses the compound term in 1784 in stating the ninth proposition of the Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte, in which he is concerned, contrary to the later translation of Voltaire’s essay, to justify a historical teleology that Voltaire would have rejected. What is this teleology (it is a novel—but we should excuse it for that), if not the realization of what Leibniz had reserved for God, namely, “this novel of human life which tells the universal history of humankind” (Essai de Théodicée, II), and which Leibniz contrasts with the “sort of universal history” assigned to man, aimed simply at gathering all the “useful” facts (Nouveaux essais, IV)? Allgemeine Weltgeschichte is no doubt something like a theodicy of history, and we can just as well say, here in the 1700s, allgemeine Geschichte, Universalgeschichte, or Weltgeschichte, as Schiller’s inaugural lecture at HISTORY 439 should put us on guard: why did German end up distinguishing Historie (a clear translation of the Latin historia) from Geschichte (referring to what has happened but also the recounting we give of it, the study of the past—“History” with a capital H)? What, then, was the ancient path? From historiê [ἱστοϱίη] (the Ionian form of historia [ἱστοϱία]), from the Herodotean inquiry to Roman historia, and from the universal history of the Greek Polybius, a hostage in Rome for seventeen years, to the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and to the sacred history of Augustine, the word has not covered the same field—far from it. We seem to have moved from historia by itself, claimed to be a new practice, to historia furnished with all sorts of qualifications (universal, ecclesiastical, and so on). Definitions of history during the Middle Ages were largely inspired by those inherited from antiquity. In the modern era, we have witnessed a progressive differentiation, both semantic and linguistic. The first consequence is a clearer distinction between facts and their narrative. The second is the progressive construction of a reflective dimension. In parallel, while the derivatives from the Latin historia were taken up by most languages, German (followed by Dutch) substituted in the place of Historie the notion of Geschichte, which reunites what has taken place with the narrative report of it. At the same time, German moved from the plural Geschichten to the collective singular Geschichte. This transformation illustrates in turn the introduction of a totalizing perspective that brings a reflective eye to bear upon the collection of individual histories. Languages that remained in the tradition of the term historia effected the same change in perspective, although without giving it formal expression. The development of a historical science, one echoing the elaboration of a philosophy of history that attempts to reconfigure the relation between past, present, and future, took place within scholarly traditions that became progressively marked by national concerns. Despite the often intense contacts between the respective communities, these evolutions helped fix specific semantic usages. However, the questions that animate the debates among historians are largely held in common: the historicization of the field of knowledge (associated in German with the term Historismus), the relation between relativism and universalism, the relation between the historical object and its exposition by the historian, and the emergence of a history of history (storia della storiografia, as it is known in its most prominent, Italian form) gave rise to further developments that inflect and renew the uses of the notion of history and its equivalents. I. Historia: From Greek Inquiry to Latin Histories A. The histôr and the bard The epic features a character known as the histôr. Is he a witness or a judge? For Émile Benveniste, histôr refers to the witness. Etymologically, histôr [ἵστωϱ] (like historein [ἱστοϱεῖν] and historia [ἱστοϱία]) goes back to idein [ἰδεῖν], “to see,” and to (w)oida [οἶδα], “I know.” “I see,” “I know”: already the intertwining of seeing and knowing is laid down. The histôr would thus be a witness “insofar as he knows, but in the first instance because he has seen” (RT: Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes). However, in the two scenes of the Iliad where a histôr is required, it is clear that we are not in the presence of a witness in the sense of one who knows from having seen. During Patroclus’s REFS.: Alonso-Nuñez, José Miguel. The Idea of Universal History in Greece: From Herodotus to the Age of Augustus. Amsterdam: Gieben, 2002. Bergier, Claude-François. Essai sur l’histoire de la société civile. Desaint, 1783. Bolingbroke, Henry. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966. . Letters on the Study and Use of History. Basil, 1788. First published in 1735. Borst, Arno. “Weltgeschichten im Mittelalter?” In Geschichte, Ereignis und Erzählung, edited by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, 452–55. Munich: Fink, 1973. Condorcet. Œuvres completes. Firmin-Didot, 1847–49. Hopfl, Harro M. “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment.” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 19–40. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Von der ‘historia universalis’ zur ‘Weltgeschichte.’” In vol. 2 of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 685ff. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Klett, 1975. Laudin, Gérard. “Changements de paradigme dans l’historiographie allemande: Les origins de l’humanité dans les ‘Histoires universelles’ des années 1760–1829.” Pratiques et concepts de l’histoire en Europe, XVI–XVIII siècles, edited by C. Grell and J. M. Dufays. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 1990. . “La cohérence de l’histoire: aspects de la reception de Voltaire dans l’Allemagne des années 1760–1770.” In Voltaire et ses combats, edited by Ulla Kölving and Christiane Mervaud, 1435–47. 2 vols. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997. Link, Anne-Marie. “Engraved Images, the Visualization of the Past, and EighteenthCentury Universal History.” In Lumen, edited by Servanne Woodward, 175–95. Kelowna: Academic, for the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2006. Mably, Gabriel de. De la manière d’écrire l’histoire. Edited and revised by B. de Negroni. Fayard, 1988. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. “Universal History: Vico’s New Science between Antiquarians and Ethnographers.” In Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain and the New World, edited by David R. Castillo and Massimo Lollini, 316–30. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Millar, John. The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. Basil: Tourneisen, 1793. First published in 1771. Pons, Alain. “Vico et la ‘barbarie de la réflexion.’” La Pensée politique 2 (1994). Translation by Daniel H. Fernald: “Vico and the ‘Barbarism of Reflection.’” New Vico Studies 16 (1998): 1–24. Schiller, Friedrich. “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” In Werke, Nationalausgabe. Weimar: Böhlau, 1970. Schlozer, August Ludwig. Weltgeschichte nach ihren Haupteilen im Auszug und Zusammenhange. Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 1785. Smith, Adam. Works and Correspondence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Söder, Hans-Peter. “From Universal History to Globalism: What Are and for What Purposes Do We Study European Ideas?” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 72–86. Truyol y Serra, Antonio. “The Idea of Man and World History from Seneca to Orosius and Saint Isidore de Seville.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 6 (1960). HISTORY / STORY DUTCH Geschiedenis GERMAN Historie, Historik, Geschichten, Geschichte GREEK historia [ἱστοϱία], historiê [ἱστοϱίη] ITALIAN storia, storiografia LATIN historia, gesta, res gestae v. DICHTUNG, ERLEBEN, ERZÄHLEN, FICTION, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, GESCHICHTLICH, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, LOGOS, MEMORY, MIMÊSIS, MOMENT, PRESENT The path from the Greek historia to the Latin historia to the French histoire (It. storia, Sp. historia, Eng. “history,” Ger. Historie) seems simple and direct. History was always history! One clue, however, 440 HISTORY B. Historiê and historein: Inquiry and inquirer “Inquiry” in all senses of the term, historiê refers more to a state of mind (the fact of one who historei [ἱστοϱεῖ], “inquires into”) and a way of proceeding than to a particular domain in which it is specifically exercised. It is a word belonging to intellectual history at this time (the first half of the fifth century BCE), possibly a fashionable word: it means what it means, and each writer bends it to his needs. Without entirely forgetting the histôr / judge or guarantor of epic poetry, the word has several layers of meaning and must have functioned as a lexical crossroads. We can use it to describe the activity of a “travelinginquirer” like Democritus, a judicial inquiry (seeking to know something, inquiring, certifying something). The tragic poets were aware of it—Oedipus, addressing his daughters, says of himself: “Seeing [horôn (ὁϱῶν)] nothing, children, knowing [historôn (ἱστοϱῶν)] nothing, I became your father, I fathered you in the soil that gave me life” (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 1624–6). And the medical writers used it as well. . Borrowing it or otherwise making it his own, Herodotus gives it as the key word for his whole enterprise: “From [of, pertaining to, belonging to] Herodotus of Halicarnassus, here is the account of his historiê ” (1.1). Given in the genitive, these first words are like an inaugural signature of someone who comes to present, in public and in his own name, the fruits of his research. He is someone who historei (he never calls himself a “historian”), coming to claim a position of knowledge that is as yet entirely unconstructed. Beyond the opening sentence, Herodotus uses the verb historein to refer to the type of work he has done. Thus, when he attempts to resolve the difficult question of the sources of the Nile, he clarifies: I myself travelled as far as Elephantine and saw things with my very own eyes [autoptês (αὐτόπτης)], and subsequently made enquiries of others [akoêi historeôn (ἀϰοῇ ἱστοϱέων)]. (Herodotus, Histories, 2.29) Several times (2.19, 34, 118), historein is used in a context of oral inquiry, but the traveler has nonetheless first gone to the location in question. In 2.44, seeking to understand who Heracles is, Herodotus specifies that he went as far as Tyre in Phoenicia. There, he saw the sanctuaries that were devoted to the demigod, and he questioned the priests. An “inquiry” (ta historêmata [τὰ ἱστοϱήματα]) is thus the combination of these procedures, the eye and the ear, eyewitness and hearsay: “These enquiries of mine, then, clearly show that ” (2.113). To see henceforth, he must make sacrifices (go and see) and learn to see (gather testimony, collect different versions, report them, classify them according to what he knows from elsewhere and according to their degree of likelihood). From an epistemological point of view, historiê functions as a substitute (a sort of ersatz) for original, divine vision, although providing only a limited and nevercomplete vision. The concern now is only with men and their great accomplishments (the bard, in contrast, sang of both men and gods), in a time that is also that of men alone. funeral, Ajax and Idomeneus are in disagreement with regard to knowing who is in front after passing the marker in the chariot race organized by Achilles; Ajax suggests taking Agamemnon as histôr (Iliad, 23.482–87). Whatever Agamemnon’s exact role may be, it is certain that he has not seen the scene at all. Similarly, the extraordinary shield forged by Hephaistos for Achilles contains a representation of a scene in which two men with a serious disagreement (reparations for a murder) decide to call a histôr (Iliad, 18.497–502). The histôr is clearly not a witness to the murder. In both cases, stepping into a dispute (neikos [νεῖϰος]), the histôr is not one who, by his intervention alone, can put an end to the differences by adjudicating between conflicting versions, but is, rather, the guarantor (for the present or indeed for the future) of what will have been agreed upon by the two parties (cf. Scheid-Tissinier, “À propos du rôler”). This first entry into the lexical field of historia reveals a broader view of the epic as a sort of prehistory of history. What, in fact, is the mechanism of epic speech, and what is the configuration of knowledge that bears it? The bard, inspired by the muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory (Mnêmosunê), is a seer, whereas the omniscience of the muses is based on the fact that they are always there: they see everything. “You are at hand, and you know all things,” says the poet in the Iliad (2.485). When Odysseus addresses the bard of the Phaeacians, he praises him thus: I respect you, Demodocus, more than any man alive— / surely the muse has taught you, Zeus’s daughter, / or god Apollo himself. How true to life, / all too true you sing the Achaeans’ fate, / all they did and suffered, all they soldiered through, / as if you were there yourself [autos pareôn (αὐτὸς παϱεὼν)] or heard from one who was [akousas (ἀϰούσας)]. (Odyssey, 8.546–51) This scene has symbolic value. For what will the bard sing at the request of Odysseus? Of the sacking of Troy. It is the first narration of the event, even while the presence of Odysseus certifies that that really did happen. Demodocus, in sum, would be the first historian, and his narrative, the birth of history—although with the following difference, which in fact changes everything: Demodocus was not there and did not see anything (he is blind), whereas Odysseus is both an actor and a witness. Whence the astonishing (false) question of Odysseus: is your account not too precise not to come from direct observation? Human vision (a historian before its time, in the sense of seeing with one’s own eyes or learning from someone who has seen) becomes, with these two verses, the benchmark of divine vision. It is precisely as if there were a strange and brief juxtaposition of two Demodocuses: one (still) a bard and the other (already) a historian. What happens there is like a lightning bolt cast over a different possible configuration of knowledge: precisely the one that the first historiography will come to occupy, the one to which, it turns out, Herodotus will give both form and name two or three centuries later: historiê. Of course, this juxtaposition in the Homeric work neither makes such historiê necessary nor even likely—simply possible. HISTORY 441 Thucydides declined to inquire—quite the contrary; but he put his work in the category of “setting in writing” (suggraphein [συγγϱάφειν]): “Thucydides, an Athenian, recorded the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, writing how they waged it against each other ” (1.1). The verb means “to take note,” “put into writing,” or in a more technical sense, “to write out a legal document, a contract.” Later, when history will be a genre, suggraphein and suggrapheus [συγγϱαφεύς] (scriptor in Latin) will come to mean historical writing and the historian. However, neither suggrapheus nor scriptor ever refers to historians alone (that is to say, as a distinct vocation): the historian is, rather, a writer practicing a certain kind of writing. But for Thucydides, a historian of the present, to say that he suggraphei is to say that he reports what has just happened from up close, what is in fact still going on. He does not write the history of the war but rather puts the war into writing, baptizing forever these thirty years of hostilities as the Peloponnesian War. To do so, he decisively gives priority to the first of the two means of knowledge available to the historian, the eye (opsis [ὄψις]) and the ear (akoê [ἀϰοή]): the eye is the only Against time, which erases everything, the historian creates a work of memory, and since instability is the rule, he must give a parallel, balanced account, like a fair judge, of the great and small cities: he will be their guarantor. The muse as unique announcer having gone silent, a narrative with a twofold structure is put in place: on one hand, the I, the inquirer and narrator, who comes and goes, gauging and judging; on the other, the profusion of logoi [λόγοι], accounts, maintained by all and sundry (including the anonymous legetai [λέγεται], “it is said that”), which he inventories and reports. Between these two, in the movement from one side to the other, is established a process of “interlocution,” which is always being renegotiated, that forms the deep texture and that is the purpose of the historical narrative. C. Suggraphein: Transcribing what the eye witnesses With Thucydides, who is commonly held to be the other, if not the true, founder of history, what is initially striking is the intention to break from Herodotus. The Peloponnesian War is at no point put under the heading of historia: the noun never appears, nor does the verb historein. It is not that 1 The history of doctors The Hippocratic corpus presents several very interesting examples, beginning with the oath itself, which calls upon the gods as witnesses, that is, as guarantors: I swear by Apollo the healer, by Aesculapius, by Health and all the powers of healing, and call to witness [historas poieumenos (ἵστοϱας ποιεύμενος)] all the gods and goddesses that I may keep this Oath and Promise to the best of my ability and judgment. (Hippocrates, Ancient Medicine) The gods are called upon to hear (not to see) and to be guarantors of the oath made by the applicant. We are again in the presence of the epic histôr. Historion as proof. In Diseases, IV, the author lists “proofs” (he has seven of them) that drink does not go into the lungs, before concluding: Indeed I would not have advanced any of these proofs in support of my argument, were it not for the fact that it is a very generally held opinion [dokeousi (δοϰέουσι)] that drink goes into the lung, and against an opinion strongly held one is obliged to advance many proofs [polla historia (πολλὰ ἱστόϱια)], if one is going to turn the hearer from his former opinion and persuade him by what one says. (Diseases IV, 56.7, in Hippocratic Treatises) Historein A physician does not violate etiquette even if, being in difficulties on occasion over a patient and in the dark through inexperience, he should urge the calling in of others, in order to learn by consultation the truth about the case, and in order that there may be fellow-workers to afford abundant help. (Hippocrates, Hippocratic Treatises) The investigation of what is related to the sick person and his disease proceeds from the common basis established by group consultations. Historiê as inquiry or the knowledge resulting. The treatise Ancient Medicine (or, Tradition in Medicine; chap. 20), claiming that only medicine can give us precise knowledge of the nature of man, invokes an inquiry (historiê) into “what man is and how he exists because it seems to me indispensable for a doctor to have made such studies and to be fully acquainted with Nature.” We may follow the relationship between historia and autopsy or eyewitnessing (the fact that the doctor has seen with his own eyes and has direct knowledge) into the second century CE: historia presenting itself as a narrative of autopsy. Thus, in “An Outline of Empiricism,” Galen presents and critiques the position of doctors of the empiricist school: The first and foremost criterion of true history, the empiricists have said, is what the person who makes the judgment has perceived for himself. For, if we find one of those things written down in a book by somebody which we have perceived for ourselves, we will say that the history is true. But this criterion is of no use if we want to learn something new. For we do not need to learn from a book any of those things which we already know on the basis of our own perception. Most useful and at the same time more truly a criterion of history is agreement [sumphônia (συμφωνία)]. Galen then presents an example: imagine a medication that one does not know. Everyone writing about it says that it has a certain effect. Should one believe them? Yes, says Galen, from the very fact of the sumphônia. REFS.: Galen. “An Outline of Empiricism” [Subfiguratio empirica]. In Three Treatises on the Nature of Science. Translated by Richard Walzer and Michael Frede. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985. Hippocrates. Ancient Medicine. In Vol. 1 of Hippocrates, translated by W.H.S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. . The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV.” Translated by Iain M. Lonie. New York: de Gruyter, 1981. 442 HISTORY “mistress of life.” Faced with a crisis of the present, one may become more concerned with establishing continuities: with recounting the events of the history of the city or the history of the world from the beginning to the present day. The historian, in these circumstances, acquired a greater need for books and headed down the path of libraries. The role of inquiry (historiê) diminished, and that of compilation increased: the historian became a reader. Everyone agrees in reckoning that the facts are given, that the facts are there; the important part is to put them together—not what to say, but how to say it. . E. Narrative history: Narratio As Lucian of Samosata reminded us in the second century CE, the historian’s “business” is “to superinduce upon events the charm of order, and set them forth in the most lucid fashion he can manage” (How to Write History, 51). The historian is like the sculptors Phidias and Praxiteles: we put the primary material at his disposal, and he comes afterward to fashion it and give it form. There are stylistic models from this point on: they are catalogued and studied; students in schools of rhetoric learn to imitate them. Historia has become a literary genre, and when Cicero asks about the beginnings of history, he gives a literary history of history, running from the annals of ancient Rome (organized by year) to a narratio that is more and more elaborate and self-conscious. History, to say it in Latin, will be henceforth—maybe even only—narratio. History is useful for the training of orators; as Quintilian emphasizes, however, its goal and expression are different from those that pertain to the eloquence of the forum. History [historia], also, may provide the orator with a nutriment which we may compare to some rich and pleasant juice. But when we read it, we must remember that many of the excellences of the historian require to be shunned by the orator. For history has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind of prose poem [carmen solutum], while it is written for the purposes of narrative [ad narrandum], not of proof [ad probandum], and designed from beginning to end not for immediate effect or the instant necessities of forensic strife, but to record events for the benefit of posterity and to win glory for its author [ad memoriam posteritatis et ingenii famam]. (Institutio oratoria, 10.1.31–34) Historia is a narration of res gestae, of what has been accomplished, and especially of the grand deeds of the Roman people: recalling the “high deeds of the greatest people of the world” (1.3): this is Livy’s project. Historia romana henceforth becomes the past of the city, which “Augustus watches over” (Probus, Life of Virgil, 28)—Augustus was himself the author of a monument testament, rightly entitled Res gestae, in which he recounted both his actions and those of the Roman Empire. . Whatever debates this genre of narratio might have entailed did not have a great influence on historical productions in Rome at the time. (Lucian, for instance, is clearly one of the two allowing for a clear and distinct vision (saphôs eidenai [σαφῶς εἰδέναι]). Historiê and historein, too closely related to oral forms of inquiry, no longer have their place in his epistemology. The ear is never trustworthy: what is said is trafficked, spread, transmitted—everything that comes from memory is subject to deformation and yields, deliberately or insidiously, to the law of pleasure that rules word of mouth. This is why there is no other scientific history but that of the present. And there still remains a need for the eye and the fact of seeing oneself to be sifted through a critique of testimony. Writing history is the transcription of an eyewitnessing, or better, of an autopsy. The goal being sought must be what is useful. D. History as a genre: A historia without historein Neither historia nor historein reappear immediately. Xenophon made no use of them either. Accounts of so-called Greek matters, Hellenika, were written by now-lost chroniclers, and Xenophon wrote his own Hellenika, picking up exactly where Thucydides left off. In the fourth century BCE, Ephorus, whom Polybius recognized as his only predecessor in the project of composing universal history (see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS), did publish Historiai, which were a way of linking up with the Herodotean project; however, it is only in the preface to Polybius’s Histories that we gain a clear confirmation that historia has become a genre on its own: “Had previous chroniclers neglected to speak in praise of History in general ” (1.1); “if this had been the case,” Polybius seems to argue, “then I would have to make the sacrifice, but since this is not the case, I can spare myself.” There follows immediately a series of variations on the theme of history as paideia [παιδεία] (education), gumnasia [γυμνασία] (training), and didaskalos [διδάσϰαλος] (teacher) in order to face the vicissitudes of life. A century later, Cicero’s expression of historia as magistra vitae (mistress or directress of life; De oratore, 2.9, 36) will simply take up this program again and resume the project— and so too will Dionysius of Halicarnassus (a contemporary of Augustus) who defined, or is said to have defined, history as “philosophy on the basis of examples” (Ars rhetorica, 11.2): moral philosophy, of course. However, we are now in Rome, or somewhere between Greece and Rome. Henceforth, we have a historia without historein. What happened between the fourth and second centuries BCE, when indeed many histories were being written (almost all lost)? What happened to the curious inquirer, emulator, and rival to the bard of the past? Or to the one who, with a different ambition, wished to make his history the political science, giving the men of the future a way of understanding their own present? They disappeared, whereas historia settled in. However—or so the moderns tell us—in the process, historia was caught by rhetoric: it became (as in Isocrates) a branch of eulogy. Aristotle, for his part, relegated it to the domain of particulars. As for Athens, the experience of defeat at the hands of Sparta and its consequences led to a lasting reversal of the situation: to face (or indeed, to avoid) the difficulties of the present, they turned wholeheartedly toward the past with the idea of imitating it. Here is where the theme of history as a provider of examples (paradeigmata [παϱαδείγματα], exempla) arises, becoming rapidly and for a long time a topos of the historical genre: history as a HISTORY 443 II. From Particular Histories to History— Geschichte—and to the Science of History A. Historia and gesta Throughout the Middle Ages, the meanings of the term “history” were marked by Latin references and hence evolved little. Isidore of Seville refered to the three essential characteristics laid out by Cicero: “history is first a narrative of past facts, through which these events are known” (historia est narratio rei gestae , per quam ea, quae in praeterito facta sunt, dignoscuntur; Etymologiae, 1.41). Though it rests first on playing with these traditional classifications of historia in his True History.) Eloquence and the orator lost their importance, and historia continued to claim, with varying degrees of looseness, to be historia magistra—history as educator. Christians took it over. However, the primary shift was when the Bible became historia (as reporting true facts that really happened), since it is certain that whatever contradicts it is false. As a result, with Augustine, there is henceforth a historia divina and a historia gentium. The former, which is found in the Holy Scripture must be decoded, since it is a bearer of hidden meaning. 2 History between rhetoric and philosophy Rhetoric and history: Isocrates Defining philosophy as what is useful “to words and to action,” Isocrates never directly dealt with history and never legislated as to what a historical narrative should look like. However, he is taken for a master (a harmful one), whose influence shattered the development of history. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen reckoned that Isocrates “drew history into paths from which Polybius vainly exerted himself to bring it back” (Outline of the Principles of History). In our day, Arnaldo Momigliano (“History in an Age of Ideologies”) compared the position of the American historian Hayden White and that of Isocrates: Nor are we entirely on new ground when we hear from Hayden White that history is a form of rhetoric to be treated according to methods of rhetorical research. As I have already implied, some of us still remember that a problematic relationship between history and rhetoric already existed in the school of Isocrates in the fourth century b.c.: then, as now, the problem for history was to avoid being absorbed by rhetoric, whatever the contacts between the two. While Isocrates does not speak about history, he is clear that he puts the burden of presentation and the deployment of past facts on the logos: But since discourses [logoi (λόγοι)] can naturally be set out in many ways about the same matters, and one can make great things small and give greatness to small things, or set out old issues in a new way and speak in a traditional way about things that have happened recently, we must not avoid issues about which others have spoken before, but rather, we must try to speak better than they have. What happened in the past is available to all of us [koinai (ϰοιναὶ)], but it is the mark of a wise person to use these events at an appropriate time [en kairôi (ἐν ϰαιϱῷ)], conceive fitting arguments about each of them, and set them out in good style. (Panegyricus, 8–9) Aristotle and historia Aristotle was in part a determined practitioner of empirical inquiries (historiai)—the History of Animals (Hai peri tôn zôôn historiai) is the most well-known example—but he never uses the verb historein. On the other hand, he assigns history—this time as the narration of past events—only to the domain of the particular, not granting it access to the universal and hence science (epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη]): From what we have said it will be seen that the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been [τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν], and the other a kind of thing that might be [οἷα ἂν γένοιτο]. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals [μᾶλλον τὰ ϰαθόλου], whereas those of history (historia) are singulars [τὰ ϰαθ’ ἕϰαστον]. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do—which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters; by a singular statement, one as to what, say, Alcibiades did or had done to him. (Poetics, 9.1451a36–b11) Thus, caught between the orator and the philosopher, the historian does not have his own land and has no choice but to borrow from both while claiming that he can satisfy everyone, as Polybius does, at the risk of pleasing no one but the lovers of stories— with pleasure having replaced both usefulness and truth, which are nevertheless still claimed as the true goals of history. REFS.: Aristotle. Poetics. In vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2322–23. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Droysen, Johann Gustav. Outline of the Principles of History (Grundriss der Historik). Translated by E. Benjamin Andrews. Boston: Ginn, 1893. First published in 1858. Isocrates. Panegyricus. In Isocrates II, translated by Terry L. Papillon. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Louis, Pierre. “Le mot historia chez Aristote.” Revue de Philologie 21 (1955): 39–44. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “History between Medicine and Rhetoric .” In vol. 8 of Contributo alla storia degli studi classic e del mondo antico, Arnaldo Momigliano,13–25. Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1987. . “History in an Age of Ideologies.” American Scholar 51 (1982): 495–507. Ste. Croix, Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de. “Aristotle on History and Poetry (Poetics, 9, 1451a36–b11).” In Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amélie Rorty, 23–32. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 444 HISTORY time and that of the ancients, they did not, for all that, develop a new concept of history. Lorenzo Valla (Historia Ferdinandii regis Aragoniae, 1528) praised history in relation to poetry but insisted above all, like Politian and Budé, on the methodological objective of precision, of fides historica. To reach this objective, the humanists added to the knowledge of antiquity, cultivating the technical subtleties of auxiliary sciences, of philology, geography, chronology, genealogy, and numismatics and maximized the methodological gains, but they did not discuss the field of history insofar as it is related to knowledge. Machiavelli stayed with the idea of exempla taken from istorie, the works of history, which must serve the actor in the present. It is the immutable character of human nature that guarantees, in a way, the comparability of situations and allows us to jump between antiquity and the present. If we can imitate the examples of the past, this is because fundamentally neither the times nor people have changed. Francesco Guicciardini, for his part, attempted to describe the limits of rational political action. However, neither he nor Machiavelli suggested a new definition of history. They remained entirely oriented toward objects and events whose causal connections they attempted, each in his own way, to discern. The concept of history became inflected in the sixteenth century by two French authors. In his work dealing with the link between universal history and a jurisprudence directed at the problems of action (De institutione historiae universae et ejus cum jurisprudentia conjuntione, 1561), François Baudouin called into action a comparative vision, direct testimony, it also includes earlier times. On that basis, it thus covers, second, the testimonies of the past to the extent they are thought to be a reliable source of knowledge. Third, the term “history” also refers to the object of historical knowledge, whether it is a single event or a collection of them. Subsequently, the term gesta, the neuter plural of gestum, referring to facts that have occurred, is grammatically transformed into a feminine singular and becomes synonymous with historia (the narration of facts that have occurred; cf. geste in Old French) and then comes to refer to one of the four historiographical subgenres: chronicles, which relate to a historical theme, usually developed from its origins down to the present time; annals, which record facts year by year; the vita, biography, especially of the hagiographical sort; and the gesta, which relates the actions of a series of dignitaries, and through them, the history of an institution (the papacy, the empire, etc.). In addition, derived from the chronicle, we find histories of particular peoples, such as Cassiodorus’s history of the Goths. It is only around the twelfth century that the boundary between res gestae and historia is reclarified: the latter is more reserved for the veridical recounting of the past, whereas the other terms have looser meanings, loosely covering the senses of “actions” or “events.” In the system of artes liberales, historia was attached, within the trivium, to grammar and rhetoric. As magistra vitae, in Cicero’s phrase, it provides examples that may be used in argument to win the assent of the interlocutor or the reader. While the humanists rediscovered antiquity and posited at the same time a special relationship between their own 3 Historia [ίστορία], muthos [μ˜νθος] / fabula, plasma [πλάσμα] / argumentum If history does belong to the narrative genre, what precisely is its place? How should we locate it in such a vast field—vast inasmuch as a narrative element may be found in every literary work? Once the distinction between a narrative of the facts (ergon [ἔϱγον]) and speech (logos [λόγος]) was first established, as in Thucydides, history as a whole was henceforth implicated in narration. It was at this point that both Greek and Latin rhetoricians and grammarians began to suggest different classifications. It is not a question of epistemology, but rather of characterization based on content. The Rhetoric to Herennius (86–83 BCE; anonymous) distinguishes three types of narrative. The third is divided in two—one concerning persons, the other actions: That which consists in describing actions has three forms: fable [fabula], history [historia], fiction [argumentum]. Fable contains elements which are neither true nor likely, like those found in the tragedies. History contains events which have taken place, but at a time distant from ours. Fiction is an invented narrative which could have taken place, like the subjects of comedy. (Rhetoric to Herennius, 1.12) The grammarian Asclepiades of Myrleia (second to first centuries BCE), also a historian of Bithynia, distinguished three parts part of the latter. In general, history is an amethodos hulê [ἀμέθοδος ὕλη], an unformed matter, coming from no particular technical skill (ibid., 1.266). We may, in any case, retain here his adoption of the threefold categorization: “One of the subjects of history is history [historia], another is myth [muthos], and the third is fiction [plasma].” History, in the restricted sense, “is an exposition of true things which actually happened, such as that Alexander died in Babylon poisoned by plotters, and fiction is when things which did not happen are told like those that did, such as comic plots and mimes, while a myth is an exposition of things which have not happened and are false, such as when ‘they sing that’ the race of venomous spiders and snakes was born ‘from the blood of the Titans’ [Nicander, Poisonous Creatures 8–10]” (ibid., 1.263–64). History is not technique. There is no method for distinguishing what is historical (in the restricted sense) from what is not. On Sextus’s description, history can escape Aristotelian particulars (kat’hekaston [ϰατ’ ἕϰαστον]) less than ever. As for historian-grammarians, their judgment (krisis [ϰϱίσις]) does not allow them to distinguish between true and false narrative. REFS.: Anonymous. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Translated by Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Braet, Antoine. “The Oldest Extant Rhetorical Contribution to the Study of Fallacies (Cicero On Invention, 1.78–96, and Rhetoric to Herennius, 2.31–46: Reducible to Hermagoras?).” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40 (2007): 416–33. Cassin, Barbara. “L’histoire chez Sextus Empiricus.” Le scepticisme antique: Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 15 (1990): 123–38. Sextus, Empiricus. Against the Grammarians [Adversus Mathematicos I]. Translated by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. HISTORY 445 eighteenth century, however, it was mostly used with regard to singular facts, relating to the multiple forms of a Geschehen, a chain of events in the past. The plural usage emphasizes precisely the multitude of particular facts. The singular, which was progressively adopted, not only captures the totality of these individual histories but also their abstraction, their generality. As a result, some authors introduced a reflective dimension, and history entered the field of consciousness. Adelung’s dictionary (RT: Versuch eines vollständingen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches) of 1775 marks the shift while maintaining the two meanings side by side. According to Adelung, Geschichte means [w]hat has happened, a thing which has occurred, as well as, in another meaning, any modification either active or passive which happens to something. In a more narrow and customary sense, the word picks out various modifications related to one another which, taken together, constitute a certain whole. In this meaning we often use it as a collective and without a plural form, for several past events of a single species. It is true that the shift took place slowly. In 1857, for instance, Droysen still contrasted the singular and the plural forms of historia, specifying: “Above histories lies History (Historik).” By this time, however, the hierarchy was clearly established. We may also describe this change—this is the second part of the shift discussed by Koselleck—as the progressive absorption of the term Historie, taken from the Latin (and Greek), by Geschichte. Winckelmann provided a striking example in 1764. In the title of his work Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, we can no longer distinguish whether the stress is placed on artistic objects or on the tableau of the whole that comes from the narrative. In his preface, Winckelmann clarifies: encompassing ancient and biblical history, sacred and profane history, Eastern and Western history—a history whose underlying unity is the question of the agreement (or disagreement) between human action and the law. He established in this way a fundamental distinction between natural history and the history of man while also bringing into play the stock of new knowledge acquired by the modern era. Some years later, Jean Bodin, formulated the principles of historical knowledge and pushed the degree of methodological rigor further than ever before. He thus took an important step toward the foundation of an empirical science of history (Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566). Finally, the new turning point for history was announced at the same time by a learned Italian, Francesco Patrizi. He proclaimed that “la historia è memoria delle cose humane” (history is the record of human affairs) and thus indicated that historians should move away from the direct observation of things to open up a new, distinct, and proper space of experience (Della historia: Dieci dialoghi). . B. The descendants of historia versus Geschichte The new turning point in the history of historia can be observed in great detail starting in the second half of the eighteenth century with Vico, who constructed a general vision of human history. While distinguishing its stages, he drew attention to the diversity of legal structures, languages, and cultures. In Germany especially, a semantic shift took place: the progressive substitution of the term Geschichte for that of Historie. Reinhart Koselleck has shown that this change came in two parts. The first of these is the shift from a plurality of individual histories (Geschichte as a feminine plural, another form of Geschichten) to the collective singular Geschichte. The term Geschichte refers, from the Middle Ages onward, both to the event and to its recounting. Until the end of the 4 Historia, history, Geschichte At the linguistic level, the use of terms began to stabilize in the major European languages in the sixteenth century. On one hand, the Romance languages more or less took over the meanings created on the basis of Latin and Greek that focus on the narrative presentation of events, as opposed to the events themselves. Histoire, istoria (which became storia), historia, etc., are direct translations. English introduced a distinction between “history” and “story,” the first being reserved for scholarly use, whereas the second singularizes particular histories and, if necessary, their literary presentation. In German, Historie replaced the Latin term but from the beginning of the eighteenth century onward was rivaled by the originally Germanic word Geschichte. The Dutch Geschiedenis followed the evolution of Geschichte, whereas Scandinavian languages stayed with the semantic group of historia. The peculiarity of the semantic family Geschichte is that the word means both the narrative of the event and the event itself. The spread of the term Geschichte marked a deep transformation in the very conception of history, including in historiographical traditions that remain in the family of history / histoire. In Zur Philosophie der Geschichte, Hegel himself tried to generalize on the basis of the peculiarities of the semantic evolution of German: In our language, the term History [Geschichte] unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae themselves. This union of the two meanings we must regard as of a higher order than mere outward accident. The association of the individual and the state is what, according to him, constitutes the very condition of history. It produces history at the same time as the vision that is turned toward it. Hegel leaves aside, however, the fact that his demonstration is based on a linguistic peculiarity restricted to German. REFS.: Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books, 1997. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Zur Philosophie der Geschichte. Edited by Hermann Glöckner. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1928. Translation by John Sibree: The Philosophy of History. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004. 446 HISTORY We may observe that a similar internal reform movement arose in France and in England, but in the two historiographical traditions at issue, it rests on different bases. In France the foundational role is often assigned to Voltaire, who, on the theoretical level (Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours, 1756) as well as the practical historical one (Le siècle de Louis XIV, 1751), introduced a general vision of the historical process. In place of a universal Christian history in the style of Bossuet, Voltaire substituted a history of another type, just as universal, that describes the history of humanity as a long process of civilization leading up to the victory of the human spirit over the forces of obscurantism. In so doing, he put man at the center of history. Although Voltaire was later reproached for the overly “philosophical” character of his approach, it remains the case that he became the model, in his turn, both intellectual and stylistic for at least two generations of French historians. François Guizot, though attempting to establish a new type of history at the methodological level, remains tributary in his Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828–30) to the conception of a “macro” intellectual history that places the process of civilization center stage, following a teleological schema (see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS). In Great Britain, a comparable role was played by William Robertson, with History of Scotland (1759), and by David Hume, with History of Great Britain (1754–62). The two works became reference points for the new historiography, presenting the high subjects of a nascent national history in a newly revitalized style. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), which follows the same theoretical principles and deploys comparable literary qualities, had considerable influence throughout Europe. The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of the central role that in the new order fell to history. Here again we may discern two levels: first, the progressive penetration of the whole field of knowledge by a historical vision. This movement affected all disciplines, from philology to linguistics and economics to the new life sciences and the social sciences, even theology. In large part, the scientization of these domains is equivalent to the historicization of their objects. Scientific progress could be measured according to the degree of pertinence of historical schemas of explanation. At a second level, however, the set of histories proper to a specific domain had to become something more than a simple aggregate or accumulation. Rather, they now constituted a specific means of production of knowledge, which lay down as a principle that the intelligibility of human action is always a function of examining it within the dimension of time. The historian’s eye is supposed to penetrate the dimension of time and holds the key to it. As a result, history became, in a way, the queen of disciplines in the nineteenth century. It incarnated, more specifically, the idea of progress, in the sense that it alone is able to integrate the sum of knowledge produced by these diverse disciplines. As a science of evolution, it is at the root of any vision of becoming in the world; as a science of explanation, it looks at human action in all its aspects. On the two levels, it was from then on supposed to give accounts of both continuities and discontinuities. [T]he history [Geschichte] of the art of Antiquity which I have undertaken to write is not a simple narration of its sequence and its transformations; rather I take the word history [Geschichte] in another sense, that which it has in the Greek language, and my intention is to deliver an attempt at a system which is capable of being taught. By referring to historia, Winckelmann formally took over the definitions transmitted from antiquity. These definitions, beginning with Cicero’s, had from the beginning allowed individual histories to coexist with a “generic” history that did not require particular objects. At the same time, however, Cicero opened up a new, abstract dimension, which permits the intellectual construction of a totality, a system. Writing just after Vico, Johann Christoph Gatterer used the phrase “system of events” (System von Begebenheiten), to which he attributed a temporality different from that which normally regulates the citizen’s daily perception of time (Vom historischen Plan und der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen, 1767). For his part, Kant reserved the term Historie for empirical history, which simply lines up the facts, whereas Geschichte, especially in reference to the conception of an a priori Geschichte, that is, as a construction of reason, opens up the possibility of presenting an “aggregation” of human actions in the form of a system, organized according to a logic of the whole. Hegel, by drawing a distinction between a primitive history (ursprüngliche Geschichte, history written by witnesses), reflective history (reflektierende Geschichte, the history of historians, who construct a special relationship to their object), and a philosophical history (philosophische Geschichte), pushed the concept of a systematic history further, which in its most abstract variation takes the form of a Welt-Geschichte, a world history. As such, philosophical history deals with the evolution of logical substance, the activity and the work of the spirit as it makes itself the object of its own consciousness and makes effective, by the same stroke, the principle of freedom. All of these reformulations are the indication of a profound change that paved the way for the “historical science” of the nineteenth century. However, they coincided, in particular, with changes in the perception of time that preceded and accompanied the experience of revolution. C. Change of experience and the mutation of history: Historisierung, historicization of the field of knowledge The simultaneity of the experience of revolution (in the wide sense) with the changes that occurred in the conception of history suggests a clear break—or at least novelty. It indicates, in effect, a twofold link that was decisive in what followed: first, between the experience of the present and the definition of history, and second, between models of temporality and representations of historicity. On both levels, the violent and massive intrusion of manifestations of the revolutionary break produced chain reactions that modified the self-perception of contemporary European cultures. From this point of view, the changes to the notion of history / Geschichte led to the heart of the problem of the link between experience and the attempts to rationalize it as a collective phenomenon. HISTORY 447 paint “local color,” so-called romantic French historians attempted to include the virtues of the novel, especially those of Walter Scott, in their historical tableaus. Augustin Thierry praised the “prodigious intelligence of the past” deployed by the novelist, at the expense of the simple, blinkered erudition of the traditional historian (preface to Dix ans d’études historiques, 1835). According to him, this is because novels, by putting forward clear and coherent principles of intelligibility, come closer to the truth than dusty history, which just gathers facts. In England, Macaulay’s History of England was strongly inspired by Walter Scott. Ranke, for his part, opposed the novel, establishing a strict distinction between science and fiction. According to him, Walter Scott sins by deforming the facts. The only criteria of historical science must be the historical truth, which can be uncovered by the detailed critique of sources. Ranke constructed his whole historical science both against earlier historiography and against the pretensions of fiction; however, it is easy to see that at the level of the narrative, he nevertheless deployed the formal principles of the novel, aiming for both Anschaulichkeit (which relates at the same time to perceptible character, accessible to the senses, and to demonstration by example; see ANSCHAULICHKEIT) and the effect of a whole produced by narration. By insisting on irreducible individuality, by describing even the life of institutions and collectivities as individual evolutions, and by deploying varied stylistic registers, he placed many of the essential ingredients of fiction at the service of history. In doing so, he integrated the two elements of narration and argumentation, whose mixture characterizes historical discourse. In the German historiographical tradition, which emphasizes the scientization of the domain of history, the role of literary techniques has often been underestimated, whereas Michelet in France is widely appreciated for having managed a synthesis of literature and history. Such national distinctions prove misleading if they are too absolutely applied: we may recall that Theodor Mommsen himself saw the imagination not only as “the mother of all poetry, but also of all history” (Die Phantasie ist, wie aller Poesie so auch aller Historie Mutter; Römische Geschichte). . E. Historical knowledge, the crisis of history, and historicism By the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of the terms “history,” histoire, storia, historia on one hand and Geschichte (to which the Dutch Geschiedenes corresponds) on the other had more or less stabilized. They follow, of course, the small evolutions of historiography and the movements of the philosophy of history, but they remain in the framework of the semantic fields we have been sketching. While some particular kinds of history emerge from it (social history, cultural history, history of mentalities, intellectual history, microhistory, world history, and so on), these can generally be attributed to small rearrangements of the relations between these semantic fields and to the discovery of new approaches or new objects. Even though they most often form within national historiographical traditions, the trends they refer to in general go beyond the frameworks of these traditions, and their terms enter into the process of translation of the international scientific community. D. The work of history: Poetry, novel, Anschaulichkeit This all-encompassing aspiration gives history a role comparable to that of philosophy on one hand and religion on the other: it becomes in its turn a sort of secular religion. That said, the relations it has with religion remain ambiguous. On one hand, it substitutes its own capacity for explanation for divine providence, which earlier had been the basis for the unfolding of things. In this sense, Gatterer could posit that the goal of history is to restore the nexus rerum universalis (a universal connection of things in the world), a term that anticipates Humboldt and Ranke’s Zusammenhang (interrelation). On the other hand, it does not eliminate references to providence either. For Ranke, it is in fact its relationship to the divine that gives history its unity. The historian must reconstruct the past while recognizing that insofar as each period is directly related to God (unmittelbar zu Gott), a part of history always remains hidden, inaccessible to rationality and historical reconstruction. Unity is thus a quality both internal and external to history. We may add Hegel’s version, also an all-encompassing one, which emphasizes the work that spirit performs in history, work that gives spirit its progressive knowledge of what it is: Dieser Prozeß, dem Geiste zu seinem Selbst, zu seinem Begriffe zu verhelfen, ist die Geschichte. (History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept.) (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte) These three variations have in common the fact that they all aim at a global level, beyond events and particulars, and thus give comfort to the universalizing aspirations of history. At the practical level of historiography, we can observe the same universalizing movement. In his article on the task of the historian, Humboldt established a clear distinction between the materials of history (“events,” Begebenheiten) and history itself (Geschichte selbst) that cannot be obtained according to the precepts of the critique of sources. Rather, history itself is revealed to the historian only insofar as he manages to uncover the “internal connection” (innerer Zusammenhang) of the facts, the general idea that structures the whole (“Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers”). In the search for this structure, he must exhibit gifts analogous to those of the poet, and more generally, of the artist. In a letter of 7 May 1821 (Briefwechsel) to the jurist F. G. Welcker, Humboldt commented on his text: There I compared history to art, which does not so much consist in imitating forms as in rendering perceptible the idea which lies in these forms. (Ich habe darin die Geschichte mit der Kunst verglichen, die auch nicht sowohl Nachahmung der Gestalt, als Versinnlichung der in der Gestalt ruhenden Idee ist.) Humboldt thus reopened the great debate, which cuts across a wide swath of historiography, on the relationship between history and poetry, history and novels. Diderot had already, with regard to Richardson, contrasted a history that would be a “bad novel” with the novel that would be a “good story [histoire]” (Éloge de Richardson). In trying to 448 HISTORY producer of historical knowledge was himself a historical being (“The primary condition for the possibility of historical science is contained in the fact that I am myself a historical being and that the one who investigates history is the same as the one who makes history [daß der, welcher Geschichte erforscht, derselbe ist, der die Geschichte macht]”, “Plan for Continuation”). It is not thanks to reason that man manages to understand the past, but to Erlebnis, of his capacity as a living being to live and understand situations from the inside. Furthermore, theorists of history such as Croce claimed to represent the Hegelian school of thought by insisting on the constructed character of historical knowledge. The truth is not in the facts but instead is the result of a fusion between a philological critique and a philosophical attempt at systematization. As a result, Croce emphasized the fact that through the historian’s act of thinking, history is anchored in the present: the spirit is both a productive factor in history and the result of the past that precedes it. As a consequence, Croce said, “all history is contemporary history” (Theory and History of Historiography). Collingwood (The Idea of History, 1946) emphasized in turn the specificity of historical knowledge, which always deals with intellectual materials and never with facts of nature. If Toynbee (A Study of History, 1934–61) explored the limits between natural and historical sciences, constructing a world history of societies and cultures, existentialist philosophy placed emphasis back onto the individual. It reconstrues the historicity of being, of Dasein, as a fundamental given of existence. Neither Husserl nor Heidegger, however, had much of an impact on historiography or on the conception of history used by historians themselves. In France, the positivist tradition played a decisive role both before and after Raymond Aron considered the theoretical problem of history by discussing the developments of German philosophy of history and Henri Marrou suggested integrating the question of the varied relationships between historians and their subjects into the discussion of historical knowledge. Even while criticizing it, historians inspired directly by Durkheim’s sociology, as well as the historians of politics or, again, the specialists of economic and social history, cleaved to the objectivist ideal of history. That goes for the first Annales school as well, to a certain extent. Through his critique of the “historicizing” history or the “positivist In contrast, controversies occasionally arise about the role of history in human experience as well as the different ways of thinking about this experience. Beginning in 1874, Nietzsche led the first attack against the all-encompassing ambitions of history by contrasting the imperatives of life (Leben) with a relativist logic of historical method, which pushes the knowledge of detail so far as to lose sight of the whole. According to him, generalized historicism (“das überschwemmende, betäubende und gewaltsame Historisieren”) threatened the foundations of culture: “To be so overwhelmed and bewildered by history is, as the ancients demonstrate, not at all necessary for youth” (Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil). Against what he considered to be the harmful grip of the past, Nietzsche advanced the logic and the necessities of the present, as well as the action that life calls for. In so doing, he set off the crisis of historicism. Taking Ranke’s principle to the extreme, which would prevent the historian from taking on the double role of judge of the past and master of the present, the historical school is alleged to have lost sight of the values that must guide political action. The neo-Kantians of the school of Baden, problematizing the production of sociohistorical knowledge, attempted to get out of this historicist dilemma. They insisted, on one hand, on the difference between the knowledge produced by the sciences of nature, which is organized into rules and laws, and that belonging to the “ideographical” sciences, like history, which describe perceptible (anschaulich) configurations. On the other hand, they distinguished between the sciences of nature (Naturwissenschaften) and those of culture (Kulturwissenschaften), the latter being defined as those that bring historical material into the sphere of values recognized within groups. The neo-Kantians gave Max Weber the tools for a theory of values thanks to which he hoped to reconstruct a form of objectivity required for giving a scientific grounding to the social sciences. Ernst Troeltsch, who was one of the most accomplished thinkers about the crisis of history, used the same theoretical premises to compare the social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) with the problems of action. In parallel with the neo-Kantians, Dilthey, in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften), which sketches the project of a “critique of historical reason,” attempted to move beyond Kantian critical philosophy by positing that man as a 5 Historiography, history of history, Historik The term historiographie refers in French to the history of history, historical work that takes historical discourse as its object, the ways of writing history from its beginnings. In German, Historiographie retains only a weakened sense and is often taken to be synonymous with “history” (Geschichte): “historiography” in the French sense is rendered by Historiographiegeschichte, whereas histoire de l’historiographie would seem tautologous in French. In Italian, on the other hand, storiografia is similar to the German Historiographie, as indicated, for example, by the title of the journal Storia della storiografia. In English, “historiography” is used in the sense of “history writing,” which more or less intersects with the Italian and German meanings. These examples show that we in fact have a continuum, where at one end history is assimilated to any investigation of facts of the past, and at the other, we insist on the reflexive character of any historical operation. To refer to the theory and methodology of history, German uses the term Historik, which does not have an equivalent in the other languages. It gives this reflexion a special status, which German historians, in particular Droysen, wished to keep out of the hands of philosophy, especially the philosophy of history. Historik refers both to reflection and presentation, especially to the goals of teaching. HISTORY 449 more receptive than England or France, where empiricist and positivist trends have maintained strong positions. However, it would be misguided to make a simple parallel between, on one hand, the hermeneutical point of view and postmodern relativism, which attempt to reduce history to the creation of a story, and analytical, or objectivist, traditions on the other. The interpenetration of these two dimensions—the abstract construction of the “fact” from a collection of data that are analytic as well as hermeneutic and its presentation in the form of a more or less sophisticated narrative, producing meaning by its organization—is what has always been one of the most essential features of historical activity. . François Hartog Michael Werner history” of someone like Charles Seignobos, Lucien Febvre sketched a science of history whose all-encompassing ambition, taking in all of the human sciences, is analogous to that of the exact sciences (Combats pour l’histoire). It is true that the problem of the form in which the results of research were to be presented was always considered to be a domain separate from that of historiographical activity proper (this distinction is driven perhaps by French literary and rhetorical culture). However, for the majority of historians, this was precisely and merely a question of presentation, one without any direct theoretical implications. It is only in the wake of the “linguistic turn” that, for the last twenty or so years, earlier debates about the twofold quality of Geschichte as historia rerum gestarum and res gestae were to some extent realized. Begun in the United States, this debate is now international, although with “national” variations. Countries with a hermeneutical tradition, like Germany or Italy, were initially 6 Rhetoric of history and “metahistory” The debates unleashed by Hayden White’s book Metahistory pick up a discussion of the questions of historical presentation that had busied historians in France, Germany, and England in the nineteenth century. Although Ranke had attempted to establish the greatest distance possible between fiction and historical science, he nevertheless used a great variety of narrative artifices to present the results of his investigations. Relying on the ideal of a world history whose unity is based on its divine inspiration, he aimed to achieve objectivity thanks to historiographical procedures that precede the writing and hence are independent of it. Droysen, for his part, was aware of the interactions between the construction of historical knowledge and the mode of presentation. For him, presentation is directly related to the other operations constituting history. The historian must choose, from among a variety of possible modes, that which corresponds to the question he wishes to ask of his documents. In his “Topik,” Droysen, abandoning the idea that past reality only corresponds to a single presentation, attempted to think of a plurality of forms of presentation that relate to different ways of constructing a relationship between the past and the present. Analytic presentation (untersuchende Darstellung), narrative presentation (erzählende Darstellung), didactic presentation (didaktische Darstellung), and discussive presentation (diskussive or erörternde Darstellung) are all genres that link the object of empirical research with the present of the historian and that are all aimed at specific audiences. The discussion provoked by White’s book links up with the positions defended by his predecessors and radicalizes them. Reversing the position of objectivist history, White saw in historical discourse only one form among others of producing statements about the past. As a production of knowledge about it, nothing distinguishes history from novels or myths. The historian is caught between discursive constraints and implicit structures analogous to those of the novelist. His freedom is limited to being able to choose between different modes of exposition, but he remains a prisoner of the structural presuppositions of each. By calling into question the notion of a “historical fact” and insisting on the implications proper to the “metahistorical” level, White wished to reunite history and story, bringing the historiographical operation and the invention of a story closer together. Far from contrasting rhetoric and truth, the linguistic turn, by stipulating that every historical discourse produces its own truth, confuses the two elements. The responses to White hardly go beyond the positions advanced by Droysen. Between the objectivism of the partisans of facts and the relativism of the protagonists of postmodern fiction, Droysen, and later Max Weber, posited that historical knowledge does remain possible, as long as we accept its provisional status, due to the fundamental historicity of the categories of perception and analysis used by the historian. It is precisely this account of the perspectivism of knowledge and its anchor in an ever-moving present that gives specificity to the knowledge of a historian. The result is a plurality of forms of presentation that correspond to the variability of the questions posed and the transformations of the historical gaze. REFS.: Droysen, Johann Gustav. “Topik.” In Grundriss der Historik. Leipzig: Verlag Von Veit, 1868. First published in 1858. Weber, Max. Critique of Stammler. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: New Press, 1977. . Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. . Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr, 1951. . Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949. . Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press, 1975. . “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology.” Translated by Edith Graber. Sociological Quarterly 22 (1981): 151–80. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. 450 HOMONYM . Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Isidore of Seville, Saint. Etymologiae. Translation by Stephen A. Barney, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, and W. J. Lewis: The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Isocrates. Panegyricus. In vol. 1 of Isocrates, translated by George Norlin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated and introduction by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. . The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Translated by Todd Samuel Presner, Kerstin Behnke, and Jobst Welge. Foreword by Hayden White. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Lucian. “The Way to Write History.” In The Works of Lucian of Samosata. Translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905. Momigliano, Arnaldo. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Foreword by Riccardo Di Donato. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Mommsen, Theodor. Römische Geschichte. Vol. 1. Reprint, Wien: Phaidon-Verlag, 1932. First published in 1852. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben. In Vol. 1 of Sämtliche Schriften, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Translation by R. J. Hollingdale: “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Patrizi, Francesco. Della historia: Dieci dialoghi. Venice: Appresso Andrea Arrivabene, 1560. Polybius. The Histories. Book 1. Translated by W. R. Paton. 6 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Press, Gerald Alan. The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982. Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Translated by H. E. Butler. London: Heinemann, 1922. Ricœur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Translation by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer: Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Scheid-Tissinier, Évelyne. “À propos du rôle et de la fonction de l’histôr.” Revue de Philologie 68 (1994): 187–208. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Translated by R. Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984. Thierry, Augustin. Preface to Dix ans d’études historiques. Paris: Garnier, 1867. Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Steven Lattimore. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Dresden: Walther, 1764. Translation by Harry F. Mallgrave: History of the Art of Antiquity. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006. REFS.: Arendt, Hannah. “The Concept of Ancient and Modern History.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. 3rd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Castelli, Enrico Gattinara. Epistemologia e storia: Un pensiero all’apertura nella Francia fra le due guerre mondiali. Milano: Angeli, 1996. Certeau, Michel de. L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Translation by Tom Conley: The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Chartier, Roger. Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude. Paris: Michel, 1998. Translation by Lydia G. Cochrane: On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De oratore. Translation by J. S. Watson: On Oratory and Orators. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875. Croce, Benedetto. Theory and History of Historiography. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Harrap, 1921. Deliyannis, Deborah Mauskopf, ed. Historiography in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Diderot, Denis. Éloge de Richardson. 1761. In vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, edited by J. Assézat. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. 26 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1914–2006. . Hermeneutics and the Study of History, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Vol. 4 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. . “Plan for Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.” In The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Vol. 3 of Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Droysen, Johann Gustav. Historik. Edited by P. Leyh. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977. First published in 1857. . Outline of the Principles of History [Grundriss der Historik]. Translated by E. Benjamin Andrews. New York: Fertig, 1967. Febvre, Lucien. Combats pour l’histoire. 2nd ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 1965. Fornara, C.W. The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Gentili, Bruno, and Giovanni Cerri. History and Biography in Ancient Thought. Amsterdam: Gieben, 1988. Haskell, Francis. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hartog, François. L’histoire d’Homère à Augustin. With Greek and Latin translations by Michel Casevitz. Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Points Essais, 1999. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Vol. 1 of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955. Translation by H. B. Nisbet: “The Realisation of Spirit in History.” In Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Herodotus. Herodotus. Translated by A. D. Godley. 4 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981–82. . Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield and edited by Carolyn Dewald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hölscher, Lucian. Die Entdeckung der Zukunft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. Homer. The Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976–78. . The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1997. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Briefwechsel an F. G. Welcker. Edited by R. Haym. Berlin: Gaertner, 1859. . “Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers.” In vol. 1 of Werke, edited by A. Flitner and K. Giel, 585–606. 5th ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966. First published in 1821. Translation by Linda DeMichiel: “On the Task of the Historian.” In The Hermeneutics Reader, edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, 102–119. New York: Continuum, 2000. Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Rev. ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. HOMONYM / SYNONYM GREEK homônuma [ὁμώνυμα] / sunônuma [συνώνυμα] LATIN homonyma, aequivoca/synonyma, univoca v. ANALOGY, CONNOTATION, INTENTION, LOGOS, MIMÊSIS, PARONYM, SENSE, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SOPHISM, SUPPOSITION, TO BE, TO TRANSLATE, WORD The words “homonymy” and “synonymy,” modeled on the Greek in most modern languages, do not in and of themselves present translation difficulties. But the similarity of the words hides a number of shifts in meaning that are all the more complex, and therefore less often thematized, because they are linked to an ontological landscape that changes according to different doctrines and times, and in particular the avatars of the Aristotelian critique of Platonism. This has led to recurrent difficulties in the understanding HOMONYM 451 Nowadays, homonyms and synonyms are words. In antiquity, they could be things or words. Thus the Iliad says that the two Ajaxes, the son of Telamon and the son of Oileus, and not their names, are homonyms (Iliad, 18.720, trans. Murray, 283), but the Odyssey says that the name “Odysseus” is an eponym (literally “named after,” epi [έπί], in order to indicate a particularly significant etymology), well suited to the man Odysseus, who has “wounded” (odussamenos [όδυσσάμενος]) his grandfather’s heart (Odyssey, 19.407–10, trans. Murray, 257–59). Plato uses homonyms (Phaedo, 78e; Timaeus, 52a) to describe things that are sensible with respect to the intelligible models that confer upon them both being and eponymy (Parmenides, 133d, trans. Gill and Ryan, 136); the art of language, insofar as it claims to fabricate everything, according to the Sophist, is a mimetic art like painting that fabricates copies of copies, “images and homonyms of beings (mimêmata kai homônuma tôn ontôn [μιμήματα ϰαὶ ὁμώνυμα τῶν ὄντων],” Sophist, 234b, trans. White, 21; see MIMÊSIS): the relationship of homonymy thus connects Ideas, sensible things, and their simulacra, particularly words (eidôla legomena [εἴδωλα λεγόμενα], 234c), so things and words. Aristotle in turn sometimes explicitly considers things (Categories 1), sometimes words, as if this were self-evident (Sophistical Refutations). The idea according to which homonymy in ancient times had to do with things is a result of the historical preeminence of its definition in the Categories, which indeed contains the first definition of homonyms, and to which one always refers. It has become the normative meaning of homonym, even if one disagrees with it. This explains the term’s subsequent fortunes, and the glosses that displace its meaning. If we are to believe Simplicius (Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, 38.19–24), it was Speusippe, Plato’s nephew and successor at the head of the Academy, who first introduced the terminological pair homônumos-sunônumos, in the context of a systematic classification of “words” (onomata [όνοματα]) alone. Greek commentators partially adopted this system, but applied it once again to things. They were followed in this respect by Latin commentators, who used a double set of terms, based on a double set of oppositions—name: identical/different, definition: identical/different (cf. Boethius [In Categorias Aristotelis commentaria, 163C–164A, in RT: PL 64], who uses the Latin terms; see Desbordes, “Homonymie et synonymie,” 61, for the other Latin texts). The apparent symmetry is obviously an illusion: if different things are univoca, aequivoca, or diversivoca, it is the same thing that is multivoca. A multivocal thing is one that is literally designated by several expressions, voces, these voces being what we nowadays term “synonyms.” In this respect, we are following the usage that Simplicius was already calling “modern” (36.30), putting his finger on the motif of an oscillation between the ancient and modern meanings of synonymy: when we study types, we call synonyms several “things” represented by the same word with the same meaning (a man and an ox, when they are both represented as having the same meaning “animal,” are synonyms)—this is “the most literal meaning,” as Aristotle would say in the Categories. But when we are interested in the plurality and variety of words, we call synonyms several “words” that represent the same thing, and that for Speusippe would be termed polyonyms (in the same way that, for Aristotle of ancient texts, manifested through a certain number of mistranslations, that make them unintelligible nowadays. Indeed, why could we not say there is a relationship of pure and simple “homonymy” between what we today commonly call “homonyms,” as in the case of homophones like the English “all” and “awl,” or the French vert (green) and verre (glass), as well as the classic example in Aristotle’s Categories, which describes a man and his portrait as “homonyms”? More generally, the question regarding homonymy and synonymy is the question of the conditions, or criteria, of identity of meaning: indeed, since Aristotle, the possibility of a noncontradictory discourse and communication between men is founded on the univocality of words and sentences: “For not to have one meaning is to have no meaning” (Metaphysics, Г.4, 1006b7–8, trans. Barnes). Questioning these criteria of identity of meaning led medieval philosophers to redefine the notions of equivocatio and univocatio, in order to distinguish between different types of semantic variation. Semantic identity is disrupted as soon as an expression “means” or “stands in for” a number of things, or in a proposition, as soon as it is multiplex. But it is not necessarily ambiguous, since it is possible for it to signify clearly several different things at the same time. We are thus confronted by a network of terms—equivocatio, univocatio, multiplicitas, ambiguitas—that coexist alongside the terms modeled on the Greek: homônuma [ὁμώνυμα], sunônuma [συνώνυμα], and the corresponding derivations. The search for homonymy, intentional or not, is thus the first prerequisite of logic, or even of a certain ethics of language. 1. Disentangling the Problems A. Things or words: The referent-name derivation The commonly accepted contemporary definitions of homonymy are rather vague. Homonymy is most often defined as the symmetrical opposite of synonymy: broadly speaking, homonymy exists whenever one word has several meanings (“eine Name mit mehreren Bedeutungen”), and synonymy whenever several words have a single meaning (“eine Bedeutung mit mehreren Namen,” quoted by Ritter in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, s.v.). This definition is inherited from a long tradition that was already well established among Latin grammarians—for example, in the collection of Differentiae, which appeared under the name of Fronton: “Hononymia una voca multa significat, synonymia multis vocibus idem testatur” (Homonymy means several things with the help of one word, synonymy shows one thing with the help of several words, RT: Grammatici Latini, 7:525). We can, however, already see an indication of an initial problem between these apparently congruent definitions: Ιs it a matter of the relationship between words and their meanings (Ritter) or of the relationship between words and things (Fronton)? One answer to the question of whether homonyms and synonyms refer to things or words was the following: “A specific difficulty of the history of composite words ending in -onym comes from the fact that they are applied successively—and also more seriously, simultaneously—to the referent and to the name itself. History subsequently continued to use this derivation” (Lallot, La grammaire de Denys le Thrace, 152), one of the key elements of this history being the Aristotelian critique of the doctrine of Ideas. 452 HOMONYM that synonyme is borrowed from the Latin synonymus, which itself is derived from “the Greek sunônumos, ‘having the same name as,’ from sun [σύν] ‘with, together,’ and onoma.” Paradoxically, the two Greek adjectives homônumos and sunônumos end up having the same definition: “bearing the same name,” “having the same name as.” This confusion is all the more troubling since this definition of synonymy is incompatible with the one that follows, but that is nonetheless also related to its Greek etymology: “[Synonymy] refers in the sixteenth century to a word that has an analogous meaning to another word (a common type), but whose meaning has two different values, etymological and Aristotelian.” How can we understand this confusion? The RT: DHLF is certainly not wrong: synonyme and homonyme start out, in the most ancient attestations, as what we would today call “synonyms,” since both describe something different bearing the same name. We come across “homonyms” (homônumoi [όμώνυμοι]) once in Homer, applied to the two Ajaxes (Iliad, 17.720). But Euripides uses “synonym” with exactly the same meaning: Menelaus has just learned that a woman with the same name as Helen is living in the palace, and consoles himself in wondering whether “some other land [can] share the name of Lacedaemon or of Troy” (Helen, 495, trans. Burian, 93), pointing out that it is not unusual “for many men to have the same name [onomata taut’ echousin (όνόματα ταὔτ’ ἔχουσιν)], and for one city to share a name with another city, one woman with another woman” (497–99). This no doubt explains the belated appearance, and the extreme rarity before Aristotle, of the second term, which was merely a doublet of the first. (Plato, who uses homônumos sixteen times, never once uses sunônumos.) Later on, one of the favorite games of the commentators of the Categories will be to show the sense in which homonyms, such as the two Ajaxes, are also synonyms, by virtue of the constant use of “insofar as”: even if “insofar as he is Ajax,” the son of Telamon and the son of Oileus are homonyms, “insofar as they are men,” they are synonyms (see Pophyry, 62.30 and 64.10–20; Dexippe, 19.20 and 22.15; Simplicius, 29–31 and 35.9–36.6). . II. The Definition of the Categories A. The text and its translation Aristotle proposed the first known definition of homonyms and synonyms (as well as paronyms; see PARONYM) at the beginning of the Categories: this text is the matrix of all commentaries and all subsequent transformations. However, its most common understanding is based on a mistranslation, or at least on a shift that is linked to the misplaced fecundity of a more modern conception of homonymy. . B. Ontological causes and consequences of the Aristotelian definition 1. Nature/culture: The Aristotelian classifications So the species (man, ox) of a same genus (animal)—or, if one prefers, the species and their genus (man, animal; see, for example, Topics, 3.123a 28ff., trans. Barnes,1:206–7) —will always be synonyms of one another—this would be the paradigm in his Rhetoric [3.2, 1404b37–1405a2, trans. Barnes, 2:2240], “to proceed” and “to advance,” poreuesthai [πορεύεσθαι] and badizein [βαδίζειν], are synonyms): this is the modern meaning that prevailed with the Stoics (for example, Alexander and Paris: see Simplicius, 36.7–32). Generally speaking, Aristotle’s commentators, while asserting that homonyms are things, also apply the adjective “homonymous” to words. Simplicius is particularly aware of this shift (“In its literal sense, it is realities and not words that produce homonymy,” RT: CAG 8:24.20ff. / “It is clear, then, that a noun is homonymous,” 25.5). It becomes the locus itself of a distinction between a conceptualist interpretation of homonymy that has a Stoic nuance to it (one single word, with several ennoiai [έννοιαι], “mental representations”), and a participatory interpretation that is Neoplatonic in nature (74.28–75.5; see Luna’s commentary on Simplicius’s Commentaire sur les “Catégories” d’Aristote, especially part 3, pp. 88–90). More recently—with Luna, for example—“homonymy” is used to describe things, and “equivocality” to describe words (e.g., ibid., 11 n. 26). The definition of the Grammarians, close to the Stoics, opts for words, and within words, their phônê [φωνή]: for Denys of Thrace (2–1 BCE), as well as for Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, homonyms are essentially homophones. But this definition is in opposition to that of the philosophers, namely Aristotle and the commentators of the Categories. Boethius makes a clear distinction between the adjective aequivoca, which describes not things, but the manner in which they are expressed, and the substantive aequivocatio, which describes a phenomenon that has to do with words— not only nouns, but also verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions: AEQUIVOCA, inquit, dicitur res scilicet, quae per se ipsas aequivocae non sunt, nisi uno nomine praedicentur: Quare quoniam ut aequivoca sint, ex communi vocabulo trahunt, recte ait, aequivoca dicuntur. Non enim sunt aequivoca sed dicuntur. Fit autem non solum in nominibus sed etiam in verbis aequivocatio. (Equivocal, he says [Aristotle, Categories, chap. 1], that is to say things, which are not in themselves equivocal, unless a common noun is predicated upon them. This is why, since the fact that they are equivocal is because they share a common term, Aristotle rightly says: “They are equivocal in their expression.” Indeed, they are not equivocal, but are expressed equivocally. Equivocation happens not just with nouns, but also with verbs.) (In Categorias Aristotelis commentaria, 164C, in RT: PL 64) B. The symmetry/asymmetry between homonymy and synonymy A second knot of problems that needs to be disentangled is the symmetrical or asymmetrical relationship between homonymy and synonymy. The RT: DHLF gives some indication of this confusion. In it we read that “homonyme is a borrowing from the Latin homonymus,” “the same pronunciation but with a different meaning,” which is itself borrowed from the Greek homônumos: “bearing the same name, and using the same denomination,” made up of homos (from which we get homo-) and onoma, “name.” But we also read HOMONYM 453 homophones (see, for example, Box 1, with Jaako Hintikka’s forceful critique). 2. The critique of Platonism We would not be able to understand the choice of this paradigm without reference to the critique of the Platonic doctrine of ideas: Aristotle is keen to emphasize that, by Plato’s own admission (see above, I.A), the relationship between model and image (eidos [εἶδος] and eidôlon [εἴδοωλον]), intelligible and sensible, is merely a relationship of homonymy. Now homonymy can only appear, in the Aristotelian system, as a contingent artifact that reveals either the malice of the Sophist or the poverty of language. So, in place of the Platonism of participation, we have to substitute the itself of synonymy—as would also singular copies, or the “parts” of one and the same species (see Categories, 3a33–b9, trans. Barnes, 1:6): one might say that phusis [φύσις], nature as a process of engendering, like natural science as a genealogical classification, proceeds by synonymy (see Of the Generation of Animals, 2.1.735a2ff.: “Generation happens by synonymy”). On the other hand, all of those phenomena having to do with technê [τέχνη], with art, mimêsis [μίμησις], imitation, and with resemblance more generally, will be homonyms: for Aristotle, resemblance is the very paradigm of homonymy. We are no doubt here as far as we could be from our modern conception, according to which a good homonymy is a purely accidental homonymy, as is the case, precisely, with 1 The modern asymmetry between homonymy and synonymy: Homonyms and homophones (the case of French) The asymmetry between homonymy and synonymy often surfaces within modern definitions, as testified by Ducrot and Schaeffer’s Nouveau dictionnaire des sciences du langage. Indeed, according to them, synonymy takes into account two or more “expressions” (words, groups of words, utterances), whereas homonymy takes into account not the word or expression, but the “phonic reality” (RT: Nouveau dictionnaire des sciences du langage, 398–99): homonyms are nowadays essentially homophones, such as the French vair, verre, vert, vers, and vert, to the extent that we would term “homonym” both several distinct words, as well as one word, or at least one unique spelling of a word (rame de papier [ream of paper] and rame de navire [ship’s oar]). This definition, particularly in its emphasis on the phônê, is very close to that of the ancient grammarians (Denys le Thrace, Technê grammatikê, 12.6 and 7; Scholies, 554.31–32; see Lallot, La grammaire de Denys le Thrace, 152). What is more, the criteria we use for homonymy seem particularly difficult to hold on to. In fact, if it is not easy to decide with synonymy whether two meanings are identical (in terms of connotation, expressive value, and so on), how do we determine whether two meanings are “radically different”? Homonymy, unlike synonymy, is caught within a network of phenomena that are “similar, but of a different nature” (RT: Nouveau dictionnaire des sciences du langage, 399), such as “contextual determination” (“This shop is open on Monday”: only on Monday / even on Monday?), “polysemy” (“le bureau Louis XIV” [Louis XIV desk] and “le bureau de poste” [post office]), “extension” (to love one’s father, and to love jam), “indetermination” (what speakers of English call “vagueness”: “Am I ‘rich’?”), “oppositional meaning” (small microbes and small elephants). At the level of syntax and semantics, some linguistics researchers, such as Antoine Culioli, have been interested in the phenomenon of paraphrase: this was a matter of considering formal variations, even very minimal ones, within a family of paraphrastic utterances, so as to go back to the enunciative or predicative operations from which they are derived, and to understand the semantic differences they conceal (for example, in French, to say “Peter eats the apple,” one could say: “Pierre, la pomme il la mange” / “La pomme, Pierre il la mange” / “C’est la pomme que mange Pierre,” etc.). The criterion Ducrot and Schaeffer adopt to distinguish between what is a homonym and what is not a homonym is the impossibility of finding any point in common between the different meanings of a word: “no common core, nor even any continuity,” no explanation nor any derivation. This corresponds exactly to the Aristotelian criterion used for homonyms that are apo tuchês [άπό τύχης], “coincidental” (the classic example being kleis [κλείς], meaning both “key” and “collarbone”). Yet the arbitrary nature of the distinctions proposed still remains: thus Ducrot and Schaeffer choose not to differentiate between “homonymy” and “ambiguity” (“the phenomena of ambiguity or of homonymy,” RT: Nouveau dictionnaire des sciences du langage, 399). One might object that the term “ambiguous” (and it is certainly not obvious that it should be contrasted with “equivocal”) can in no way be applied to homophones, or to a much broader semantic field than “homonym” (an ambiguous attitude). One might compare this above all to the way Quine or Hintikka (“Aristotle and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity,” 138) use the term: they both, by contrast, distinguish between ambiguity and homonymy on the basis of etymology. The criterion of pure coincidence is only truly met in the case of words that have emerged out of different etymologies (the rame [oar] of a ship, from the Sanskrit aritra, “which moves,” as opposed to the Arabic rizma [الرزمة” ,[packet of clothes,” for a rame [ream] of paper, according to Littré [RT: Le Littré: Dictionnaire de la langue française en un volume]), which Aristotle does not talk about, but for which we might reserve the term “homonyms.” All of these categories are part of a long heritage going back to the different, and sometimes contradictory, distinctions first articulated in antiquity, to precise ontological ends. The apparently arbitrary nature of these differences and these criteria is no doubt due to the fact that we no longer question what is at stake nor what is intended by the concept. Whatever the case may be, the essential characteristic of modern homonymy is that it is applied exclusively to words, and is even reduced to the phenomena of homophony. It is presented consequently as a marginal phenomenon, linked to the signifier, likely to be of interest mainly to psychoanalysis, or to lovers of witticisms and puns, but of secondary importance for the analysis of language (see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). REFS.: Hintikka, Jaako. “Aristotle and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity.” In Time and Necessity, 1–26. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. 454 HOMONYM 2 How to translate the definitions of the Categories? When things have only a name in common and the definition of the being which corresponds to the name is different, they are called homonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and a picture are animals. These have only a name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is different; for if one is to say what being an animal is for each of them, one will give two distinct definitions. When things have the name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called synonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals. Each of these is called, by a common name, an animal, and the definition of being is also the same; for if one is to give the definition of each—what being an animal is for each of them—one will give the same definition. (῾Ομώνυμα λέγεται ὧν ὄνομα μόνον ϰοινόν, ὁ δὲ ϰατὰ τοὔνομα λόγος τῆς οὐσίας ἕτερος, οἷον ζῷον ὅ τε ἄνθρωπος ϰαὶ τὸ γεγραμμένον· τούτων γὰρ ὄνομα μόνον ϰοινόν, ὁ δὲ ϰατά τοὔνομα λόγος τῆς οὐσίας ἕτερος· ἐὰν γὰρ ἀποδιδῷ τις τί ἐστιν αὐτῶν ἑϰατέρῳ τὸ ζῲῳ εἶναι, ἴδιον ἑϰατέρου λόγον ἀποδώσει. συνώνυμα δὲ λέγεται ὧν τό τε ὄνομα ϰοινὸν ϰαὶ ὁ ϰατὰ τοὔνομα λόγος τῆς οὐσίας ὁ αὐτός, οἷον ζῷον ὅ τε ἄνθρωπος ϰαὶ ὁ βοῦς· τούτων γὰρ ἑϰάτερον ϰοινῷ ὀνόματι προσαγορεύεται ζῷον, ϰαὶ ὁ λόγος δὲ τῆς οὐσίας ὁ αὐτός· ἐὰν γὰρ ἀποδιδῷ τις τὸν ἑϰατέρου λόγον τί ἐστιν αὐτῶν ἑϰατέρῳ τὸ ζῷῳ εἶναι, τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ἀποδώσει.) (Aristotle, Categories, 1.1a1–12, trans. Barnes, 1:3) We will not translate zôion [ζῷον]; the Greek word, from zôê [ζωή], “life,” means “animate, living being” (see ANIMAL). But it also means “character or figure (man or animal) represented in a painting” (the painted image of an animate being, Herodotus, 3.88, or Plato, Republic, 7.515a). Lastly, it has this meaning of a “painted image,” even when the model being represented is not living (Herodotus, 4.88, “having represented faithfully according to nature [zôia grapsamenos (ζῷα γϱαψάμενος)], the crossing of the Bosphorus,” or Plato, Laws, 769a). In other words, zôion, referring to any work of a zôgraphos [ζωγϱάφος], a painter, can also denote what we would call a “still life.” The difference between languages here comes fully into play: the classic definition of homonymy and synonymy originates in and around a homonym. At play at this juncture in the Categories, in fact, is not just the difference between languages, but also Aristotle’s characteristic irony, which consists in exploiting the paradoxical economy of the Platonic doctrine, according to which a living being is never anything more than the response to an idea, without having even to acknowledge that this paradox is inscribed within the Greek. There is an error that we have to avoid in translation. We may think that with onoma [ὄνομα] we are dealing not with a word, or a name, that can be attributed to two homonyms (in this case, the word zôion), but with a name that would name homonyms themselves (in this case, the word “man”). This is an error that Tricot commits unfailingly in his translations of Aristotle into French, on the one hand by translating onoma by “the name,” le nom (Zanatta does the same: “il nome”), on the other hand by translating to gegrammenon [τὸ γεγϱαμμένον] as “the painting of a man,” which then becomes “man.” “We call homonyms the things that only have a name in common, whereas the notion referred to by this name is varied. For example, animal is equally a real man and a painted man. These two things indeed only have in common their name” (emphasis added). The example in Tricot’s footnote adds to this impression: “Things that are homonyms which only share a name for example kleis [ϰλεὶς] means a key and a collarbone.” But this example is particularly ill-chosen for the case of a man and his portrait, since kleis (according to Aristotle, for whom a key and a collarbone are completely unlike one another) is a homonymy where “the difference is considerable, because it bears upon the outer form [kata tên idean (ϰατὰ τὴν ἰδέαν)]” (Nicomachean Ethics, 5.2, 1129a26–32; commentators, moreover, use this passage to illustrate “coincidental homonymies”). The example of kleis, which precisely does not imply any third term like zôion, adds to the belief that for Aristotle, as for us nowadays, homonyms always have the same name and a different definition. We come across the same misinterpretation with synonyms. Here again: “When things have the name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called synonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals.” which Tricot glosses as: “Synonymous things are identical in nature and in name” (trans. Tricot, 25 n. 2 , emphasis added). It is nevertheless important to understand that neither homonyms nor synonyms must have “the” same name in common, in the sense of “their” name: they have “a” name in common (onoma, 1a1 and 9), what Ackrill, in contrast to Tricot, translates carefully as “a name in common,” “a common name.” It is this single common name, zôion, that we sometimes use as a homonym, when its definition has to change from one application to another (a man is endowed with life, but his portrait is not), and sometimes use as a synonym, when the same definition can be given for each occurrence (a man and an ox are each one an animal). Happily, the most recent French translations (of Bodéüs, and of Lallot and Ildefonse) have at last corrected Tricot’s misinterpretation. It should be said, in defense of the mistranslations of the Categories, that numerous examples of Aristotelian homonyms work without any third term, that is, directly from the names of the homonyms themselves— for example, the “hand” or the “eye” of both a living being and a dead body (De anima, 2.1, 412b14ff., 21, trans. Barnes, 1:657). In each of these cases we find that the word in common is indeed their name, which obviously does not have the same essential definition. Whatever the case, these are simply a subset of the homonyms as previously defined, and do not contradict this definition. It is worth pointing out, finally, that the commentators’ lemmata and Tricot’s are translated in the same way, even in English (including those commentators who, like Evangeliou, even quote Ackrill’s correct translation): “their name in common.” However, in the commentary itself, we find, when it is impossible to do otherwise, and as if compelled by the truth, “a name”: thus in Ammonius, lemma, 1a1, 18.18: “that have only their name in common”; but ibid., 20.3: “[Ajaxes] have a name in common.” Boethius’s Latin translation of Aristotle is as follows: Aequivoca dicuntur quorum nomen solum commune est, secundum nomen vero substantiae ratio diversa, ut animal homo et quod pingitur. Univoca dicuntur quorum et nomen commune est et secundum nomen eadem substantiae ratio, ut animal homo atque bos. (Aristotle, Categories, 1a1, trans. Boethius) But his commentary makes apparent the reading we have just described: we can only talk about things being equivocal if we predicate upon them a name, or a word, in common. Latin, however, encounters another HOMONYM 455 of noncontradiction is thus proved and actualized only because it is impossible for the same (word) simultaneously to have and not to have the same (meaning). Univocality is well and truly the necessary condition of the entire logic (Cassin and Narcy, La décision du sens, 9–40; see SENSE). So Aristotle tracks down homonymy by proposing to distinguish between the different meanings of the same word, so as to be able to put, if need be, a different word alongside each definition (“tetheiê idion onoma kath’ hekaston ton logon [τεθείη ἴδιον ὄνομα καθ’ ἕκαστον τὸν λόγον],” Metaphysics, Г.3, 1006b5; cf. 18–20), for “the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can in fact [to auto einai kai mê einai anthrôpon to onoma, alla to pragma (τὸ αὐτὸ εἶναι ϰαὶ μὴ εἶναι ἄνθϱωπον τὸ ὄνομα, ἀλλὰ τὸ πϱᾶγμα)]” (1006b20–22, trans. Barnes, 2:1589; and Cassin and Narcy, La décision du sens, 195–97). Whenever Aristotle’s interest is focused on language as such, no longer on its ontological basis, but as a discursive technique, as is the case in the Sophistical Refutations, then it is words and words alone, and no longer things, that are said to be homonyms. The cause of homonymy, a deeprooted linguistic disease, is that there are more things than there are words, and we therefore have to use the same words for several things (Sophistical Refutations, 1.164a4–19). Aristotle, in order to make up for the linguistic deficit that the adversaries of the principle use to their advantage, attempts therefore to remedy the arguments by diagnosing Aristotelianism of predication, which the categories established in the Categories allow us to found. . 3. What it means to speak: Looking for homonymy The entire Aristotelian logic (meaning of words, predicative syntax, syllogism) depends on “the most stable principle of all,” the onto-logical principle that establishes a link between the order of being and the order of discourse, which has come down to posterity as the principle of noncontradiction: “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect [to gar auto hama huparchein te kai mê huparchein adunaton tôi autôi kai kata to auto (τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάϱχειν τε ϰαὶ μὴ ὑπάϱχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ ϰαὶ ϰατὰ τὸ αὐτό)],” Metaphysics, Г.3, 1005b19–20, trans. Barnes, 2:1588). In fact, the refutation of his adversaries—which constitutes the only possible demonstration—is based entirely on the demand for univocality. Aristotle indeed proposes the following series of equivalences as if it were self-evident: “to speak” (legein [λέγειν], or what is proper to man, who otherwise would be nothing but a plant, Г.3, 1006a13–15); “to say something” (legein ti [λέγειν τι], 1006a13, 22); “to say something that is significant both for himself and for another [sêmainein ti kai autôi kai allôi (σημαίνειν τι ϰαὶ αὐτῷ ϰαὶ ἄλλῳ)]”; “to mean something unique,” “for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning [to gar mê hen sêmainein outhen sêmainein estin (τὸ γὰϱ μὴ ἓν σημαίνειν οὐθὲν σημαίνειν ἐστίν)]” (1006b7–8). The principle problem that Greek did not have: whereas zôion in Greek denotes any representation (not necessarily of a subject), this is not the case with the term “animal.” Boethius, who considers the composite expressions “living man” and “painted man” (homo vivus, homo pictus), maintains nevertheless that one could apply to them not only the word “animal” (animate being: “Indeed, whether it is a matter of a painted man or a living man, the word animal being is used equally for one and the other”), but also the word “animal” and the word “man” considered together (“one or the other could both in fact be called man or animate being”). Later, he only takes into account the name homo, which produces a major change: we in fact move from the perspective of a predication genusspecies to the semantic perspective of the “transfer of the name” of one reality to another: “ut ex homine vivo ad picturam nomen hominis dictum est” (From living man, we apply the name of man to a painting; see translatio, in TO TRANSLATE). We see, thus, that this change of perspective is partially induced by a problem of translation and of language: the fact that zôion and “animal” are not superimposed, and the argument about complex expressions sharing a common name, homo vivus, homo pictus, which is maintained even when the latter expression is replaced by pictura. REFS.: Ammonius Alexandrinus Hermias. On Aristotle’s Categories. Translated by S. Marc Cohen and Gareth B. Matthews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Aristotle. The Categories; On Interpretation; Prior Analytics. Translated by Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. English translation and notes by J. L. Ackrill: Categories and De interpretatione. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. English translation by Hippocrates G. Apostle: Aristotle’s Categories and Propositions (De interpretatione). Commentary by Hippocrates G. Apostle. Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic, 1980. Italian translation and notes by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello: Aristoteles Categoriae et liber De interpretatione. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949. Italian translation and notes by Marcello Zanatta, Le categorie. Milan: Rizzoli, 1989. French translation and commentary by J. Lallot and F. Ildefonse: Les catégories. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. French translation by R. Bodéüs: Catégories. Edited by R. Bodéüs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. French translation and notes by J. Tricot : Aristote: Organon I, Catégories et Sur l’interpretation. Paris: Vrin, 1989. . The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. Commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. Edited by Karl Meiser. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1987. . Liber Aristotelis de decem praedicamentis. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961. Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard La Pléiade, 1995. Cassin, Barbara, and Michel Narcy. La décision du sens. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Desbordes, Françoise. “Homonymie et synonymie d’après les texts théoriques latins.” In L’Ambiguïté: Cinq études historiques, edited by Irène Rosier, 51–102. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaires, 1988. Dexippus. On Aristotle’s Categories. Edited and translated by John Dillon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Evangeliou, Christos. Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1996. Weigelt, Charlotta. The Logic of Life: Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of Logos. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002. 456 HOMONYM [pollachôs men all’ hapan pros mian archên (πολλαχῶς μὲν ἀλλ’ ἅπαν πϱὸς μίαν ἀϱχήν)].” How can we satisfactorily account for this shifting status, and where can we place “being”? The difficulty leads to a hardening of homonymies themselves; thus Porphyry chooses to place aph’ henos and pros hen in the category of homonymy, which will lead to a reinterpretation of analogy (see ANALOGY and PARONYM). III. The Taxonomy of Porphyry and Its Posterity Porphyry systematizes the various scattered references in Aristotle and proposes a taxonomy of homonyms (65.18–68.1). This will be subsequently taken up and modified by commentators (see Ammonius, 21.15–22.2; Simplicius, 31.23–33.21; on the relationship of the commentators to each other, see, for example, Luna’s commentaries on Simplicius, Commentaire sur les “Catégories” d’Aristote, 128 and 146; and on the classification, see ibid., 46, schemas pp. 98 and 100), and then taken up again by Boethius (In Categorias Aristotelis, 166 B–C, in RT: PL, 64), thereby passing into the medieval Latin tradition (see Libera, “Les sources gréco-arabes,” and see ANALOGY). In the schema below, P indicates the terms used by Porphyry, B those used by Boethius (trans. Desbordes, 166B–C, in Desbordes, “Homonymie et synonymie”), and T those in the Paraphrasis Themistiana whenever they differ from B (Anonymi Paraphrasis Themistiana, ed. Minio-Paluello [Aristoteles latinus, 1.15], 136–37). In Porphyry, we note that: The on [ὄν], and everything that is pollachôs, comes under the heading of homonymy, contrary to the indications in book Γ, for example (see Porphyry, Isagoge, 2.10: “Let us simply posit, as in the Categories, the voluntary confusions that attempt to derive some benefit from the different sorts of homonymy, which he identifies in terms of lexis. Here we come closest of all to the modern conception of homonymy as homophony. 4. The case of being, pollachôs legomenon Is being a genus (which is thus linked to synonymy), or is it not? Is being a homonym, or is it not? Aristotle’s most consistent answer to these two questions, which have become epochal, is “no.” Indeed, he repeats that being is expressed multiply: it is a pollachôs legemenon [πολλαχῶς λεγομένον]— neither homonymy nor analogy but, to borrow Gwilym E. L. Owen’s expression, which has become an established term, “focal meaning.” Aristotle puts being, like the good or the one, as one of the “homonyms deriving from unity, or which have unity as their aim” (“aph’ henos, pros hen [ἀφ ’ ἑνὸς πϱὸς ἕν]”), which he therefore distinguishes from “coincidental” homonyms (or rather, those occurring “by chance,” apo tuchês [ἀπὸ τύχης]), and from homonyms “by analogy” (to be understood as proportion: as sight is in the body, so reason is in the soul; Nicomachean Ethics, 1.4, 1096b25–30, trans. Barnes, 2:1733; Eudemian Ethics, 7.2, 1236a17 and b25). But for being, and specifically in book Γ of the Metaphysics, this case is very explicitly distinguished from a case of homonymy: “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be,’ but they are related to one central point, one definite kind of thing, and are not homonymous [pros hen kai mian tina phusin kai ouch homônumôs (πϱὸς ἓν ϰαὶ μίαν τινὰ φύσιν ϰαὶ οὐχ ὁμωνύμως)],” Metaphysics, Г.2, 1003a34; cf. 1003b5–6); “So, too, there are many senses in which a thing is said to be, but all refer to one starting-point 3 Aristotle, or, Against the homonymy of ideas Socrates, or so Aristotle maintains, did not grant that either universals or definitions had a separate existence. Philosophers who came after Socrates, Aristotle says, gave them separate existence [echôrisan (ἐχώρισαν)], and this was the kind of thing they called Ideas [ἰδέας]. Therefore it followed for them, almost by the same argument, that there must be Ideas of all things that are spoken of universally [πάντων ἰδέας εἶναι τῶν καθόλου λεγομένων], and it was almost as if a man wished to count certain things, and while they were few thought he would not be able to count them, but made them more and then counted them; for the Forms are almost more numerous than the groups of sensible things [τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστα αἰσθητῶν], yet it was in seeking the causes of sensible things that they proceeded from these to the Forms. For to each set of substances there answers a Form which has the same name and exists apart from the substances [καθ’ ἕκαστόν τε γὰρ ὁμώνυμόν ἔστι καὶ παρὰ τὰς οὐσίας], and so also in the other categories there is one character common to many individuals, whether these be sensible or eternal. (Metaphysics, M.4, 1078b30–1079a3, trans. Barnes, 2:1705–6) (Note that we follow Tredennick’s reading of this passage, rather than Jaeger’s.) Commentators note that one would expect to find “synonym” where the Greek reads “homonym.” (Indeed, H. Tredennick translates “synonym” in place of “homonym.”) Did Aristotle mistake the two concepts? Or should we understand there to be a certain fuzziness in the terminology, as Léon Robin did? Neither alternative is satisfactory; rather, Aristotle’s use of “homonym” signals the virulence of his critique of Platonic “participation,” which does not even acknowledge that items that participate in the same idea may have a common definition. This is clearly expressed in Metaphysics A: And if the Ideas and the particulars that share them [τῶν ἰδεῶν καὶ τῶν μετεχόντων] have the same Form [ταὐτο εἶδος], there will be something common to these; for why should [the numeral] 2 be one and the same in the perishable 2s or in those which are many but eternal, and not the same in the 2 itself as in the particular 2 [αὐτῆς καὶ τῆς τινός]? But if they have not the same Form, they must have only the name in common [ὁμώνυμα ἄν εἴη], and it is as if one were to call both Callias and a wooden image a man, without observing any community between them. (Metaphysics, A.9, 991a2–8; cf. Γ.4, 1008a34–b3, trans. Barnes) The choice then lies between the so-called third man argument (cf. Plato’s Parmenides) and homonymy. Barbara Cassin Frédérique Ildefonse HOMONYM 457 “Aristotle and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity,” and Cassin, L’Effet sophistique, 348–53). All of the other homonyms come from intentional homonyms. And the Categories defines one precisely determined kind, and one alone: homonyms by resemblance. This congruent delocalization allows us to ask again the question of the senses of being. IV. Ambiguity and the Major New Latin Terms The notion of equivocatio, because of the need to harmonize the different sources, whether Aristotelian (the Categories, the Sophistical Refutations, the Topics) or not (the Stoic sources, beginning with Augustine’s De dialectica), will become clearer and more divided. As far as the notion of univocatio is concerned, it takes on a specific meaning that describes any acceptable variant of a term that does not derive from a new “institution,” and thus becomes the key notion of the Terminist theory of suppositio, or reference (see SUPPOSITION). Terminologically, these conflicts and reconfigurations led to a specialized understanding, and two distinct usages, of the terms univoca and synonyma, even though the former served originally as a translation of the latter. A. Homonymy and ambiguity Besides the terms already mentioned, Boethius talks in De divisione of utterances that are ambigua, in relation to the syntactical ambiguity caused by the double accusative (for example, “audio Graecos vicisse Troianos” [I hear that the Greeks have conquered the Trojans / that the Trojans have conquered the Greeks]), which corresponds to amphibolia or amphibologia in the taxonomy of the Sophistical Refutations. the ten first types as playing the role of so many first principles: assuming we call them all beings, he says, we will do this homonymously, and not synonymously”). The only example of coincidental homonyms is associated with proper names: there is more than one man named Alexander. Yet this is not an Aristotelian example, whereas other examples from the corpus are for their part sometimes presented under this heading: in particular, the example of kleis, or key/clavichord, which is given as a homonymy that is easy to identify because it brings into play homonymous things that are visibly different (Nicomachean Ethics, 5.2, 1129a27–31). Or elsewhere, the examples of kuôn [κύων], dog as a barking animal / Dog as a constellation of stars, and of aetos [άετός], eagle/pediment, given as “literal tropes” of homonymy, insofar as “the word or expression has several meanings” (as distinct from “tropes of usage,” “each time habit makes us speaks thus,” Sophistical Refutations, 4.166a.15–17). This is perhaps one way of indicating the inherent difficulty of Aristotelian examples: even according to most dictionary definitions, kleis implies a resemblance (the collarbone locks together the chest, and has the shape of a hook, like a key; cf. RT: LSJ, on this entry), just as the star constellation resembles a dog, and the pediment spreads its wings over the column. In fact, this resemblance reveals the difficulty of finding unmotivated homonymies, which thus conform to Aristotle’s definitions. The only choice is therefore between homophones and specimens (see Hintikka, Homonyms P homônumai B aequivoca 1. Coincidental P apo tuchês B casu T fortuitu Alexander (son of Priam) / Alexander (king of Macedonia) 2. Intentional, deliberate P apo dianoias B consilio T hominum voluntate 2.1. By resemblance P kath’ homoiotêta B secundum similitudinem ex. Man / real portrait, a portrait of a man 2.2. By analogy P kat’ analogian [sc. by proportion] B secundum proportionem T pro parte 2.3. single source 2.4. single goal P. aph’ henos kai pros hen, pollachôs legomenon [together, 2.3 and 2.4 designate what comes to be called the analogy of attribution, that is, the case of being] ex. A “principle” —understood (by analogy) as the origin in a series of numbers, or as the point in a line ab uno ex. “Medical,” as in a “medical scalpel” or a “medical potion” ad unum ex. A healthy walk, healthy food, because they furnish or give or lead to health 458 HOMONYM the name “man,” allowing for the same definition “mortal animal having the ability to reason” (which poses a further problem in the case of a fool, or a child), and additionally having a name and a definition that belong to each of these on its own: the multiplicity of species understood as a single genus is considered here as an endless source of ambiguity in the lexicon. The set of aequivoca clearly demonstrates that Augustine has now turned his attention to names. The first example testifies to this: “Tullius is a name, a dactyl foot, and an equivocation.” “Equivocations” are divided into three groups, depending on whether the ambiguity is due to technical, especially grammatical, uses (ab arte), which include all those that are metalinguistic and autonymous; whether it is due to usage (ab usu); or whether it is due to both of these together. Augustine distinguishes in particular aequivoca that have the same origin (including where there is a transfer of meaning—for example, Tullius applied to the prince of eloquence or to his statue, as well as other transfers of meaning borrowed from rhetoric, from the whole to the part, from the type to the species, and so on) from those that have a different origin (when a same form, such as nepos, has two different meanings). Augustine pays a remarkable degree of attention to metalinguistic ambiguity, to the distinction between a word insofar as it is “used,” and a word insofar as it is “mentioned,” not only in the De dialectica, but also in the De magistro (on the opposition verbum-dictio, see WORD; this ambiguity also appears independently, it seems, in the term suppositio materialis from the twelfth century on; see SUPPOSITION). The terms amphibolia and amphibologia are reserved for syntactical ambiguity. In Greek, the terms referring to the idea of ambiguity have been formed from the prefix amphi- (on two sides), producing the verb amphiballesthai [ἀμφιϐάλλεσθαι], “to give rise to ambiguity,” and the adjective amphibolos [ἀμφίϐολος], with its opposite anamphibolos [ἀναμφίϐολος] (Lallot, “Apollonius Dyscole et l’ambiguïté linguistique”). The term has a generic meaning and encompasses different kinds, including homonymy, homophony, and syntactical ambiguity; but it also refers in a more limited way to ambiguity of syntax or of construction, the second type of paralogism in the Sophistical Refutations, and distinct from the first type, homonymy, which is confined to the word. The Sophistical Refutations distinguish between two types of syntactical ambiguity. Amphibolia is to a sentence what equivocation is to a simple noun, that is, following Galen’s terminology, an “actual” multiplicity: indeed, a construction with a double accusative, such as “video lupum comedere canem” (“I see the wolf eating the dog” or “I see the dog eating the wolf ”), “in actuality” conveys two meanings, so that grammarians since antiquity have justifiably classed it as one of the “flaws” (vitia) of discourse. Conversely, composition (and division) is a “potential” multiplicity, in the same way that an incorrect “accent” is for a simple noun: “vidisti baculo hunc percussum” can mean either, in its divided meaning, “with a stick, you saw this person struck” (false: you did not employ the stick to see the person being struck), or, in its composite meaning, “you saw this person struck with a stick” (true). The two possible meanings do not exist simultaneously, but we can have one or the other, and the problem lies in knowing what it is that Referring to the Topics (1.15) and the Sophistical Refutations, he makes a distinction between an expression (vox) that is simplex, which means one thing only, and a multiplex expression, which means several things (“multiplex idest multa significans”). An utterance can be multiplex or polysemic if only one of its parts is equivocal, or if it is wholly equivocal: it is a matter of an amphibola oratio, a phrase with two senses. Boethius is interested in the different ways of disambiguating (“dividing”) a polysemic utterance, by adding a determination, for example, or producing a paraphrase (to use the example cited earlier: “audio quod Graeci vicerint Troianos”; RT: PL, 64.889–90). It is the word multiplex, along with duplex, that is used as the generic term in the medieval tradition. Thus the classification of the first six paralogisms of the Sophistical Refutations, those which deal with discourse, established by Galen on the basis of the distinction between effective / potential / apparent, is always given as a classification of the types of multiplicitates. (On the difficulty of knowing which Greek term the Latin multiplicitas refers to, and on the Greek ditton [διττόν], see Ebbesen, Commentators and Commentaries, 3:174.) A proposition that is multiplex (or duplex) means several things, without necessarily being ambiguous. Thus “Socrates calvus philosophus ambulat” is multiplex because “from the point of view of baldness, of philosophy, and of walking, there is nothing unique that can be attached [to the subject].” The case is different for “animal rationale mortale homo est,” which is a proposition that is unique (una, simplex, singular) because the different elements of the predicate, spoken continuously, “make something that is one,” and thus constitute a unique predicate. “Canis animal est” is both multiplex and ambiguous: the predicate canis is a term that, because it is equivocal, contains multiple things that cannot be reduced to a unique thing, so it cannot be used to make a unique affirmation: “There is one single vox but a multiple affirmation” (Boethius, In Librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias, 2nd ed., 352–56; cf. Aristotle, Peri hermêneias, 11). This is why, whenever the question is multiplex (if its subject or its predicate are not simple), we also need to reply with a multiplex answer (Boethius, In Librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias, 358). Augustine, in the De dialectica, is interested in the sign and its value (vis; see SENSE), which is in direct proportion to its capacity to “move the listener.” The obstacles preventing this value from being realized, and thereby preventing the sign from attaining truth, are obscurity (obscuritas) and ambiguity (ambiguitas). Augustine accepts the position of the “dialecticians,” that every word is ambiguous, rejecting Cicero’s mocking remarks (“How, then, can they explain ambiguities with ambiguities?” from a lost fragment of the Hortensius), and adding that this affirmation is valid for words considered in isolation: ambigua are dispelled within a line of argument whenever they are joined to other ambigua (De dialectica, 9). Augustine proposes a classification of “ambiguities,” and begins by dividing them into those that are spoken and those that are written. Among the first set are two main types, the univoca and the aequivoca, defined as “things” (ea, neutral pronoun) possessing the same name (whether this name is construed as a proper or a common noun) with an identical/different definition. A child, an old man, a fool, a wise man, a big man, a small man, can all be referred to using HOMONYM 459 of names” (still understood to cover proper as well as common nouns): a name belonging to a thing is therefore transferred to another thing that does not have one, so it becomes the name for two different things, and thus an equivocal name. Abelard groups under the heading univocatio all transfers of meaning that do not come about because of a “lack of names,” that is, both poetic transfers and those that Boethius mentioned with regard to contradiction (for example, the generic or specific meanings of homo). These different cases can be grouped together into the same category because they share two essential characteristics: they are variations of meaning that do not come from a new, imposed meaning, and they only appear in a given context. 3. The rediscovery of the Sophistical Refutations around 1130 allows for a comparison of these conditions with those given by Aristotle as the conditions for a true refutation (167a20ff.). The term “synonym,” which appears in the Latin translation of the Sophistical Refutations (167a20), is preserved in this form (“Elenchus est contradictio eiusdem et unius, non nominis sed rei, et nominis non sinonimi sed eiusdem” [Refutation is a contradiction that is of one and the same thing, according to a oneness that is not only of the name but of the thing, and of a name that is not only a synonym, but that is one and the same name]), illustrated by the example of the “synonyms” (in the modern sense of the term) Marcus/Tullius, Cicero’s two names: sinonimus is thus not to be confused with Boethius’s univocus. The framework provided by the Refutations proves to be problematic, since equivocatio can cover either the entire range of paralogisms in discourse, or the first of these, “equivocation,” or the first kind of equivocation itself. Indeed, we know that equivocation, like amphibolia, is divided into three kinds: the first kind is produced when a noun is imposed on different things, which it signifies in an equivalent manner, which is the “coincidental” equivocation that Porphyry or Boethius distinguish in the Categories (for example, canis), or equivocation strictly speaking. The second kind occurs when the different things that the word signifies are ordered according to a hierarchy “secundum prius et posterius” (according to before and after), which happens in cases of metaphorical usage (and here the example found in the Categories, of a living man and the painting of a man, reappears): so this is the case with translatio, but also with univocatio (if one considers that a name refers per prius to individuals, and per posterius, for example, to one’s one name; see translatio in TO TRANSLATE). The third kind originates in the particular meaning a word has in a given context: for example, it is only in the expression monachus albus (white monk) that “white” has the meaning of “Cistercian.” The different phenomena related to univocatio are classified first and foremost under the second kind of equivocation (“All the sophisms that Boethius calls univocal sophisms come under this second kind of equivocation. Aristotle discussed equivocation in a broad sense, since he included univocal meaning”: “conveys ambiguity” (the graphic sequence, without its intonation or punctuation?). Composition/division proves itself to be an extremely powerful logical tool, allowing us to deal especially with problems of the extent of the logical operators: for example, “omnis homo qui currit movetur” (Any man who runs is in motion), in which omnis could refer simply to homo (divided meaning) or to homo qui currit (composite meaning), which leads to unrestricted or restricted interpretations of the relative pronoun. The same opposition is also used to distinguish the modalities de dicto and de res: for example, “possibile est sedentem ambulare” (It is possible for someone who is sitting down to walk), which is false according to the divided interpretation (“It is possible—that someone who is sitting down is walking,” just as it is false that someone who is sitting down is walking), but true according to the composite interpretation (someone who is sitting down may be able to walk). B. The difference or juxtaposition of synonyms and univocals The notion of univocatio has a complex history. Throughout the Middle Ages, it characterizes any semantic variation of a word that does not derive from a “new imposition.” So the fact that in an expression like “homo currit,” homo can mean “a man” or “man” (generically), is not a case of equivocation in the same way as the use of the noun canis, which is a unique signifier “imposed” on three different things: a dog, a dogfish, and the star constellation. The reflection on univocatio is linked, at the beginning of the twelfth century, to the passage on contradiction in Peri hermêneias (6.17a34–37). There are three distinct historical moments. 1. Boethius, commenting on this passage, and alluding explicitly to the Sophistical Refutations, defines the six conditions of a true opposition (contradiction and contrariness): the terms, in both the affirmative and the negative, must be neither (1) equivocal nor (2) univocal, which is the case for “homo ambulat”: “Man as a species and man as someone in particular are univocal” (specialis homo et particularis homo univocas sunt); nor must they be (3) considered in terms of different parts (which corresponds to the fallacia secundum quid and simpliciter of the Refutations, with the example “the eye is white” / “is not white,” depending on whether one is referring to the white of the eye or the pupil); nor (4) considered in terms of different relations (“ten is double” / “is not double”); nor (5) considered in terms of different times (“Socrates is sitting down” / “is not sitting down”); nor (6) considered in terms of different verbal moods (“Catullus sees” / “does not see,” referring on the one hand to the act of seeing, on the other to the power of sight) (In Librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias, 132–34). 2. Abelard compares this passage on contradiction to Boethius’s commentary on the first chapter of the Categories. Following Porphyry, Boethius distinguishes first of all, as we saw, between coincidental equivocation and deliberate equivocation. Then, in discussing the different transfers of meaning, he distinguishes between those that are produced for reasons of ornamentation, and are not to be considered as equivocation, and those that are produced “because of the lack 460 HOMONYM univocal word was a word that was “one,” behind or in spite of its many varieties of usage; today, in contrast, a univocal word is a word that has only one meaning. In both cases, however, a word such as this is not equivocal in the strict sense, initially because its multiplicity did not affect its original and immutable semantic being, which is defined by imposition, and today because it does not have several meanings. But although univocation in the Middle Ages is “polysemic,” modern univocation, by contrast, is not. Barbara Cassin Irène Rosier-Catach REFS.: Ammonius Alexandrinus Hermias. On Aristotle’s Categories. Translated by S. Marc Cohen and Gareth B. Matthews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Aristoteles Latinus. Vol. 2, books 1–5: Categoriae. Edited by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. “Analogy and Equivocation in Thirteenth-Century Logic: Aquinas in Context.” Mediaeval Studies 54 (1992): 94–135. Atherton, Catherine. “Apollonius Dyscolus and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity.” Classical Quarterly 45 (1995): 441–73. . The Stoics on Ambiguity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Blank, David L. Ancient Philosophy and Grammar: The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982. Bobzien, Susanne. “The Stoics on Fallacies of Equivocation.” In Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age, edited by Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood, 239–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Boethius. Commentarium in Librum Aristotelis Peri Hermeneias, Pars Posterior. Edited by C. Meiser. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1880. Cassin, Barbara. L’Effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard La Pléiade, 1995. . “Who’s Afraid of the Sophists? Against Ethical Correctness.” Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Hypatia 15, no. 4 (2000): 102–20. Cassin, Barbara, and Michel Narcy, eds. and trans. La décision du sens: Le livre Gamma de la Métaphysique d’Aristote. Paris: Vrin, 1989. De Rijk, Lambertus Marie. Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. 2 vols. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1962–67. Desbordes, Françoise. “Homonymie et synonymie d’après les textes théoriques latins.” In L’Ambiguïté: Cinq études historiques, edited by Irène Rosier, 51–102. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Franca, 1988. Dexippus. On Aristotle’s Categories. Edited and translated by John Dillon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Dionysius Thrax. Technê grammatikê. Edited by Gustav Uhlig. Grammatici Graeci 1.1. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883. English translation by Thomas Davidson: The Grammar. St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1874. French translation by Jean Lallot: La grammaire de Denys le Thrace. 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998. Ebbesen, Sten. Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi: A Study of Post-Aristotelian Ancient and Medieval Writings on Fallacies. 3 vols. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1981. Gallet, Bernard. Recherches sur kairos et l’ambiguïté dans la poésie de Pindare. [Bordeaux, Fr.]: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990. Heitsch, Ernst. Die Entdeckung der Homonymie. Mainz, Ger.: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1972. Hintikka, Jaako. “Aristotle and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity.” In Time and Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Homer. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. . Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. London: Heinemann, 1969. Lallot, Jean. “Apollonius Dyscole et l’ambiguïté linguistique.” In L’ambiguïté: Cinq études historiques, edited by Irène Rosier, 33–49. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Franca, 1988. commentary on the Sophistical Refutations, in De Rijk, Logica modernorum, 1:302), but equally considered along with other types of paralogism. So, for example, the ambiguity of homo in “homo est species” / “Socrates est homo” can be thought of as equivocatio (if one considers that it is a transfer of meaning), as figura dictionis (while it has the same “form,” homo has several meanings), or as accidens (the type of predication is different) (De Rijk, ibid.; Rosier, “Évolution des notions d’univocatio et equivocatio”). The phenonemon of univocality will be at the heart of Terminist logic and, insofar as it is applied to things, stays with the translation and commentaries on the first chapter of the Categories (cf. Petrus Hispanus, Tractatus, ed. De Rijk). All of the different meanings of a “same” term, in a given context, will fall under or be derived from this univocality, and these different meanings will be subject to classification according to the kinds of “supposition” proper to the terms (see SUPPOSITION). The notions of equivocation and univocation will find a new use in theology when it comes to analyzing “divine predications”: in the expressions “God is just” / “man is just,” the predicate will be, depending on the author, considered as the expression of its subject equivocally (it is the same signifier, but it signifies absolutely different things), univocally (there is something common in the two predications, and something different, which are analyzed particularly in terms of different connotation; see CONNOTATION), or analogically (see ANALOGY; cf. particularly Ashworth, “Analogy and Equivocation”). The following points will help us measure the evolution of the meaning of homonymy, and to chart the gap between the ancient concept and the modern one—which is the primary source of misunderstandings today. 1. In antiquity, homonyms and synonyms are not employed primarily with respect to words, but mainly, and in any case also, in relation to things: the two Ajaxes, the eidos and the eidôlon, a man and the drawing of a man, a man and an ox. 2. In antiquity, homonyms and synonyms are not in a position of reverse symmetry (one word–several meanings / one meaning–several words): if we follow the canonical definitions in the Categories, it is a matter in every case of several things, and one word naming or defining them— though this word can itself have one or several meanings. 3. Univocatio is introduced in the Middle Ages, in contrast to equivocatio, to describe a multiplicity of meanings of a word that does not derive from a new, imposed meaning, whether it is a matter of metaphorical usages, or of contextually determined meanings of a “same” word. “Univocation” is when one and the same word is being considered, whereas “equivocation” (cf. canis: “dog,” “constellation”) is when there are several words. The notion of univocation plays an important role in the genesis of the theory of supposition, which is concerned precisely with identifying the referential variants of a “same” term. Whereas in the Middle Ages, the emphasis falls on the oneness of a word underlying its multiple meanings, univocation will come to describe the oneness of the meaning of a word: in the Middle Ages, a HUMANITY 461 HUMANITY “Humanity” designates at once the ensemble of humankind, and, as in the classic Latin humanitas, the ensemble of characteristics that define human nature as being separate from animal life, particularly the value of philanthropy— benevolence, culture, politeness, savoir-vivre. The German doublet Menschheit/Humanität provides a good entry point into this complex network of meaning. I. Menschheit/Humanität 1. German terminology distinguishes between belonging to the human race (Menschheit), which relates to nature, and the sentiment of humanity (Humanität, directly connected to the Latin humanitas), which relates to culture and opens onto the idea of the “humanities” and “humanism”: see MENSCHHEIT, and cf. BILDUNG, GESCHLECHT. 2. The link between this community of nature and relations with the other is explored in MITMENSCH (cf. AUTRUI). II. Man/Animal/God: Nature and Culture 1. On the nature of man and the distinction man/ animal, see ANIMAL, BEHAVIOR, GESCHLECHT; related to language and reason, see LOGOS, REASON; cf. HOMONYM; related to politics and the political, see CIVILTÀ, CIVILITY, CIVILIZATION, CIVIL SOCIETY, COMMUNITY, POLIS; related to art, see AESTHETICS, ART, MIMÊSIS; related to ways of being in the world, see DASEIN, ERLEBEN, LEIB, MALAISE; cf. NATURE, PATHOS. For the Greek definition of “man,” one should consult LIGHT, Box 1, and TO TRANSLATE, Box 1, The Latin derivations of “man” are covered in MENSCHHEIT; see also PIETAS and RELIGIO. 2. On culture as a natural property of humankind, see CULTURE, and in particular BILDUNG, Boxes 1, 3, and LIGHT (with an explanation of the meaning of the German Aufklärung and the Hebrew haśkālāh [הָלָקְ ֹשַה [in LIGHT, Box 3), PERFECTIBILITY; cf. GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, MORALS. 3. On the difference between man and god/the gods, one should consult GRACE, RELIGION, and, in particular, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO. v. COMMON SENSE, GENDER, SEX Law, Vivien, and Ineke Sluiter, eds. Dionysius Thrax and the Technê Grammatikê. Münster, Ger.: Nodus, 1995. Leszl, Walter. Logic and Metaphysics in Aristotle: Aristotle’s Treatment of Types of Equivocity and Its Relevance to His Metaphysical Theories. Padua: Antenore, 1970. Libera, Alain de. “Référence et champs: Genèse et structure des theories médiévales de l’ambiguïté (XIIe–XIIIe siècles).” Medioevo 10 (1984): 155–208. , ed. “Les sources gréco-arabes de la théorie médiévale de l’analogie de l’être.” Les Études Philosophiques 3/4 (1989): 319–45. Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane. “Aristotle on the Snares of Ontology.” In New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, edited by R. Bambrough, 69–95. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Reprinted in Logic, Science and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy, edited by Martha Nussbaum, 259–78. London: Duckworth, 1986. . “Tithenai ta phainomena.” In Aristote et les problèmes de méthode, edited by S. Mansion, 83–103. Louvain, Belg.: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1961. Reprinted in Articles on Aristotle I: Science, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji, 113–26. London: Duckworth, 1975. Peter of Spain (Petrus Hispanus Portugalensis). Tractatus (Summule Logicales). Edited by Lambertus Marie De Rijk. Vol. 22. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1972. Plato. Parmenides. Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996. . Sophist. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993. Rosier, Irène. “Évolution des notions d’univocatio et equivocatio au XIIe siècle.” In L’ambiguïté: Cinq études historiques, edited by Irène Rosier, 103–62. Lille, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Franca, 1988. Shields, Christopher John. Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. Simplicius of Cilicia. Commentaire sur les “Catégories” d’Aristote: Chapitres 2–4. Translated by Philippe Hoffmann, with Ilsetraut Hadot and Pierre Hadot. Notes by Concetta Luna. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001. . On Aristotle’s Categories 1–4. Translated by Michael Chase. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. . On Aristotle’s Categories 5–6. Translated by Frans A. J. de Haas and Barrie Fleet. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. London: Duckworth, 2001. . On Aristotle’s Categories 7–8. Translated by Barrie Fleet. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. London: Duckworth, 2002. . On Aristotle’s Categories 9–15. Translated by Richard Gaskin. Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. London: Duckworth, 2000. Taràn, Leonardo. “Speusippus and Aristotle on Homonymy and Synonymy.” Hermes 106 (1978): 73–99. Ward, Julie K. Aristotle on Homonymy: Dialectic and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 463 living beings on earth [Dass der Mensch in seiner Vorstellung das Ich haben kann, erhebt ihn unendlich über alle alleren auf Erden lebenden Wesen]. Because of this he is a person [Dadurch ist er eine Person]; and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e., through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I” [selbst wenn er das Ich nicht sprechen kann], because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I” [ob sie zwar diese Ichheit nicht durch ein besonderes Wort ausdrücken]. For this faculty (namely, to think) is understanding. (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Louden, 15) The text goes on—150 years before Paul Guillaume— to discuss the age when small children stop talking about themselves in the third person and start saying “I”: “durch Ich zu sprechen.” The translator of the French edition of this text, Michel Foucault, renders Kant’s das Ich by le Je. He clearly did not want to adopt the French term—moïté—often used for the technical neologism of the German word Ichheit, invented at the start of the thirteenth century by Meister Eckhart, not only because he considered this a linguistic barbarism, but also because he clearly saw that Kant’s object is the Je (the possibility of saying “I”), and not the Moi (“Me” or “Myself,” that is, the possibility of describing or judging the Self). At the same time, following the main thread of the text, Foucault had to simplify the doubleness hidden within its opening sentence: to be “a person” (who is “one”) is to be able to use the word Ich, but it also means including (the) Ich—this “something” that is not a thing—within its representation. In a sense, this is to represent the unrepresentable that the Ich names “for itself [für sich Selbst].” This formulation is connected to the decisive developments of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the “transcendental subject” is theorized for the first time (see SUBJECT). A thesis is here being put forward that is both extremely debatable and determining for the development of Western philosophy. It is debatable because it is Eurocentric, and consequently idealist, and only apparently attentive to the materiality of language. Let us admit with Jakobson that every language contains a complete system of references of the code to itself, from the code to the message, from the message to itself, and from the message to the code—and notably that there is necessarily a class of specific units of meaning (shifters, or embrayeurs in French) whose function is to refer to the singularity of an actual message.