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

ESSENCE, SUBSTANCE, SUBSISTANCE, EXISTENCE GREEK ousia [οὐσία], hupostasis [ὑπόστασις], ousiôsis [οὐσίωσις], huparxis [ὕπαϱξις] LATIN essentia, substantia, subsistentia, existentia; esse essentiae, esse existentiae v. ACT, CATEGORY, ESTI, EUROPE, IL Y A, PERSON, RES, SPECIES, SUBJECT, Box 4, TO BE, TO TI ÊN EINAI, TO TRANSLATE The most scholarly and most technical vocabulary with regard to being, now as in the past, does not usually give rise to problems of translation since it often consists in artificial forms that may easily be transposed, with equal violence to the language. It is thus that the Greek ontotês [ὀντότης] is immediately translated as essentitas (Marius Victorinus), and that from it is derived the series entity, Seiendheit, even étantité, without difficulty. However, things are not the same when what we take to be the fundamental ontological vocabulary derives in reality from multiple sedimentations, reappropriations, and reinterpretations of the most common words of the language. Plato did not “invent” ousia [οὐσία] any more than Seneca or Quintilian did substantia. Encroachment from other domains is added to this depth of certain key terms of ontology, related to their prephilosophical history—which justifies reappropriations, reversals, new hierarchies: as, notably, when the translation of the Septuagint, or Jerome’s translation, the Vulgate, reintroduces terms that are already philosophically charged (this is notably the case with hupostasis [ὑπόστασις] in the Scripture, which progressively imposes its own exegetical methods, or in conciliar dogma). The model of transposing verbum e verbo or the use of a calque, even if it initially seems obvious (hupo-stasis, sub-stantia), immediately shows itself to be inadequate. To pursue the geological metaphor for a moment: the sedimentation of layers, which we must attempt to analyze stratigraphically (on a prephilosophical base level, we discover successively Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Philonian, Plotinian, and Neoplatonist usages), is itself profoundly altered by a series of landslides or powerful geographic constraints, especially when we move from an Aristotelian or Stoic ontology to Neoplatonic theology or that of the church fathers, when the laborious formulations of Trinitarian dogma are superimposed on philosophical distinctions. The twofold hypothesis that we will illustrate below concerns (1) the anchoring of fundamental ontological concepts in language, and the additional translational constraint that demands that we ESSENCE 299 primarily in order to apprehend, though in many cases blindly, essences—which are positive capacities of existence. The other is the aspect existence, the esse in the strict sense, which is the end in which things attain their achievement, their act, their “energy” par excellence, the supreme actuality of whatever is. Étienne Gilson echoes this in L’être et l’essence, also emphasizing this “existence aspect” of being that Thomas Aquinas clarified for the first time and without ambiguity: Whether we say it is, it exists, or there is, the meaning remains the same. All of these phrases signify the primary action that a subject can exercise. It is primary, in effect, because without it there would be no subject. It is there as a fact of language (Gilson refers here to Brunot, La pensée et le langage), from which he cleverly extracts the logical and metaphysical grammar: the verb est is not a copula, but signifies “the primary act in virtue of which a being exists, and the principal function of verbs is thus to signify, not attributes, but actions.” By this, Gilson recovers Priscian’s canonical definition: Verbum est pars orationis cum temporibus et modis, sine casu, agendi vel patienti significativum. (The verb is that part of speech which signifies, with times and modes, but without cases of declension, action or passion.) (Institutiones grammaticae, 8.1.1) However, Gilson also recovers an old piece of Scholastic terminology, which perhaps secretly served as a guide for him from the beginning. Being understood as an “action verb,” of “this primary action that a subject can exercise,” signifies existence as an “act”—actus exercitus: “we must admit,” he notes, “the presence, at the very heart of the real, of what were once called ‘primary acts,’ that is, these acts of existing in virtue of which each being is, and from which each one unfurls in a more or less rich multiplicity of ‘secondary acts,’ which are its operations” (L’être et l’essence) (see ACT, and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], under FORCE, Box 1, and under PRAXIS, Box 1). Thus existence, in the full sense, is always existence “ut exercita, that is, as actualized by a subject” (Maritain, Preface to Metaphysics; cf. also: “To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the final perfection, a splendid flower in which objects affirm themselves”). Thus understood as an “act,” or better, as an “exercised act,” being is actus essendi (act of being): the deepest and most intimate aspect of anything (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Ia, qu. 8, a. 1, ad 4m: “esse autem est illud quod est magis intimum, et quod profundius omnibus est, cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt” (being is what is the most intimate and profound thing in every thing, since it is the formal element in relation to all things which really are). On the other hand, what neither Maritain nor Gilson grasped in the least was that this “existentialist” interpretation of being for which they generously credited Thomism derives from a long history, woven from translations, transpositions, and reversals, in which Neoplatonism played a decisive role. “A is”; (2) the sense of identity; (3) the sense of predication, in “A is human”; (4) the sense of “A is a man” which is very like identity. In addition to these there are less common uses, as “to be good is to be happy,” where a relation of assertions is meant, that relation, in fact, which, where it exists, gives rise to formal implication. No one would deny this “terrible” ambiguity of being or “is” in European philosophical languages; however, we may: 1. with Charles Kahn, ask whether this ambiguity, through the various conceptual analyses, assisted by attempts at translation, did not in fact constitute one of the driving forces of the logical, ontological, and theological development of Western philosophy: I do not intend to do battle here against a general thesis of linguistic relativism, and I shall certainly not deny that the union of predicative, locative, existential and veridical functions in a single verb is a striking peculiarity of Indo-European. On the contrary, I want to suggest that the absence of a separate verb “to exist” and the expression of existence and truth (plus reality) by a verb whose primary function is predicative will have provided an unusually favorable and fruitful starting-point for philosophical reflection on the concept of truth and the nature of reality as an object for knowledge. (“Retrospect on the Verb ‘To Be’ ”) 2. with Jaakko Hintikka, question the dominance of the Fregean and Russellian distinctions, and denounce not only the anachronistic character of the retrospective application of them to classical authors (starting with Plato and Aristotle), but again, more seriously, the vagueness it introduces into both the analyses of those notions and their summaries and translations, whether intra- or interlinguistic. Hintikka goes so far as to denounce “the modern myth that there is a distinction between the is of identity, the is of predication, the is of existence, and the is of generic implication” (Logic of Being). We may also note that, if it is a matter of uncovering and clarifying the grammars (philosophical, logical, theological) of the word “to be,” etymology is of no help, for the simple reason that no philosophical European language contains a single, unitary, homogeneous verb “to be.” And what goes for being, taken grammatically as a “verb,” also goes for the rest of the ontological vocabulary, which—as we can see with terms like “essence,” “substance,” “existence,” “subsistence,” and so on—are not developed in the first instance on the basis of some “etymon” (*es, *bhû, *wes), but rather on the basis of the resources of the language, in its multiple uses (see ESTI). C. Being-essence and act of being—actus essendi Jacques Maritain, in his Preface to Metaphysics, calls attention to a different “ambiguity”: Observe that being presents two aspects. One of these is its aspect as essence which corresponds particularly to the first operation of the mind. For we form concepts 300 ESSENCE from where it derives its being. The word “existence” comes from the [Latin] verb existere. We observe that the term sistere refers to the first consideration. Equally, we can notice that by adding the preposition ex [the word] refers [in meaning] to the second consideration. When we say that something exists—(in the meaning of sistere)—those realities, which do not derive their being from themselves but have it from someone [else], are immediately excluded. [These realities] do not really “ex-ist”—so to speak—but they rather “in-sist,” that is, they are joined to some [other] subject. The term sistere, however, seems to be appropriate to both of them: both to that which subsists in some way, [and] to that which cannot subsist in any way; both to that which is necessarily subordinated and to that which cannot be [subordinated] in any way. In effect, the first condition is proper to the created nature, the second to the uncreated nature, since that which is not created subsists in itself in such a way that nothing in it can be found, as [if it were its own operating] subject. For this reason, the word sistere can refer to both the created and uncreated nature. The term ex-sistere, on its part, not only expresses the possession of being, but also the [being’s] coming from outside. [It expresses] the fact that one possesses its being because of someone [else]. Indeed, this is shown in the compounded verb, by the preposition that is added to it. What does existere mean, in fact, if not sistere “from” (= ex) someone? That is, [what does it mean if not] receiving one’s own substantial being from someone [else]? Consequently, with this single verb existere—or with the single noun “existence”—we can intend both that which has to do with the object’s nature and that which refers to its own origin.) B. Existentia, existentialitas We must obviously wait for Candidus the Arian (known by Marius Victorinus, ca. 281/291–361) for the appearance of the feminine singular existentia, along with the abstract existentialitas, whereas in Chalcidius, in his translation and commentary of the Timaeus, existentia is still a neuter plural that refers to onta [ὄντα]: “tria auta onta [τϱία αὐτὰ ὄντα].” It is thus only rather late (the second half of the fourth century), and after a series of translations, that the term acquires its status of philosophical nobility, in the Latin context of Trinitarian theology: in Marius Victorinus, the term is used in effect as a translation of huparxis [ὕπαϱξις], unlike substantia, which translates ousia [οὐσία], while subsistentia is reserved for the translation of hupostasis [ὑπόστασις]. The fundamental difference in the meanings for being is thus that which is drawn, echoing the Greek huparxis-ousia, between existentia and substantia: Multo magis autem differt existentia a substantia, quoniam existentia ipsum esse est, et solum est, et non in alio non esse, sed ipsum unum et solum esse; substantia vero non solum habet esse, sed et quale et aliquid esse. (Much more, however, does existence differ from substance, since existence is “to be” itself, “to be” which is neither in another nor subject of another but solely “to II. “To Be,” “To Exist,” Existo Existo is one of several compounds of sisto, “to stop, to arrest; to present oneself, to appear, to subpoena (before a court),” such as absisto, “to distance oneself,” desisto, “to abandon, to cease,” obsisto, “to stop in front of, to oppose,” insisto, “to lean on, to press.” Exsisto (existo), in its classic meaning, thus signifies “to stand up out of, to rise up, come out of the earth, to spring up.” Cicero uses it in this sense in On Duties (1.30.107): “Ut in corporibus magnae dissimilitudines sunt, sic in animis existunt majores etiam varietates” (even greater differences are found [are met with] in minds). Or again Lucretius, in De rerum natura (2.871): “Quippe videre licet vivos existere vermes/stercore de taetro” (Why, you may see worms arise all alive from stinking dung). A. Existentia as ex-sistere In the twelfth century, in Richard of Saint-Victor’s canonical distinction (De Trinitate [1148], 4.12.937C–983) we find the echo, amplified and transposed onto a metaphysical and theological level, of this first concrete meaning of the Latin verb exsisto: Possumus autem sub nomine exsistentiae utramque considerationem subintelligere, tam illam scilicet quae pertinet ad rationem essentiae, quam scilicet illam quae pertinet ad rationem obtinentiae. Tam illam, inquam, in qua quaeritur quale sit de quolibet exsistenti, quam illam in quae quaeritur unde habeat esse. Nomen exsistentiae trahitur verbo quod est exsistere. In verbo sistere notari potest quod pertinent ad considerationem unam; similiter per adjunctam praepositionem ex notari potest quod pertinet ad aliam. Per id quod dicitur aliquid sistere, primum removentur ea quae non tam habent in se esse quam alicui inesse, non tam sistere, ut sic dicam, quam insistere, hoc est alicui subjecto inhaerere. Quod autem sistere dicitur, ad utrumque se habere videtur et ad id quod aliquo modo et ad id quod nullo modo habet subsistere; tam ad id videlicet quod oportet quam ad id quod omnino non oportet subjectum esse. Unum enim est creatae, alterum increatae naturae. Nam quod increatum est sic consistit in seipso ut nihil ei insit velut in subjecto. Quod igitur dicitur sistere tam se habet ad rationem creatae quam increatae essentiae. Quod autem dicitur exsistere, subintelligitur non solum quod habeat esse, sed etiam aliunde, hoc est ex aliquo habet esse. Hoc enim intelligi datur in verbo composito ex adjuncta sibi praepositione. Quid est enim exsistere nisi ex aliquo sistere, hoc est substantialiter ex aliquo esse. In uno itaque hoc verbo exsistere, vel sub uno nomine exsistentiae, datur subintelligi posse et illam considerationem, quae pertinet ad rei qualitatem et illam quae pertinent ad rei originem. (Now, with the term “existence” we can refer to both [of these] considerations: one concerning the essence’s nature and another concerning the nature of obtaining [it]. I mean, [we can refer to] both [the consideration] in which [every being] seeks that which it is in itself and [the consideration] in which every being tries to know ESSENCE 301 Neoplatonist distinction since, in addition, that is the one that directs the principal translational decisions at issue here: the distinction between huparxis, “existence,” associated with being purely and simply (to einai monon [τὸ εἶναι μόνον]), on one hand, and ousia-substantia (to on [τὸ ὄν]) on the other. E. Existence as “ipsum et solum esse” It is in this context that, for Marius Victorinus, existencia as a translation of huparxis designates being without determination, which is still neither subject nor predicate, unlike determined being (Adversus Arium, 1.30.21–26; Candidi Epistola I, 2.19–24). As Pierre Hadot rightly notes (Porphyre et Victorinus): “For Victorinus and in the letter of Candidus, existence is the still undetermined being, pure being, taken without qualification, without a subject and without a predicate; substance, on the contrary, is qualified and determined being, the being of something and which is something.” Exsistentiam quidem et exsistentialitatem, praeexsistentem subsistentiam sine accidentibus, puris et solis ipsis quae sunt in eo quod est solum esse, quod subsistunt; substantiam autem, subjectum cum his omnibus quae sunt accidentia in ipsa inseparabiliter existentibus. ([The sages and ancients] define existence and existentiality as preexisting subsistence without accidents because they subsist purely and only in that which is only “to be”; but they define substance as a subject with all its accidents inseparably existing within it.) (Marius Victorinus, Adversus Arium, 1A.30.21, in Theological Treatises on the Trinity, trans. Clark) Exsistentia ipsum esse est et solum esse, et non in alio esse aut subjectum alterius, sed unum et solum ipsum esse, substantia autem non esse solum habet, sed et quale aliquid esse. Subjacet enim in se positis qualitatibus et idcirco dicitur subjectum. (Existence differ[s] from substance, since existence is “to be” itself, “to be” which is neither in another nor subject of another but solely “to be” itself, whereas substance has not only “to be” but also has a “to be” something qualified. For it is subject to the qualities within it and on that account is called subject.) (Marius Victorinus, Candidi epistola, 1.2.19–23, in Theological Treatises on the Trinity, trans. Clark) F. The “bare entity” It should be noted that the author (Scipio Dupleix [1569–1661]) who apparently first introduced the word existence in its technical usage into French also referred, if not to esse solum (to einai monon), at least to “naked entity”: It is thus certain that there is a notable difference between the existence and the essence of things. But in order to hear it best we must observe that in our French language we do not have a term which responds energetically to the Latin existentia, which signifies the bare be” itself, whereas substance has not only “to be” but also has a “to be” something qualified.) (Marius Victorinus, Candidi epistola, 1.2.18–22, in Theological Treatises on the Trinity, trans. Clark) C. Quid—Quod (was—daß) We would be wrong to see this as a simple translation, capable of opening a possibility of “retroversion,” such as the “wellknown” distinction between essence and existence, and we must refrain, pace Suzanne Mansion (“Le rôle de la connaissance de l’existence dans la science aristotélicienne”), from unreflectively projecting the “well-known distinction” onto the Aristotelian questions “ti esti? ei esti?” [τί ἐστι ? εἰ ἐστι ?]. In effect, it is one thing to know of something “to ti esti” [τὸ τί ἐστι], the “what it is,” or better, “to ti ên einai” [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], the “what it is to be for x,” the “quiddity” (see TO TI ÊN EINAI), but it is something else to know that it is (“hoti estin” [ὅτι ἔστιν]), that it is the case (daß), the “quoddity”: ’Aυάγϰη γὰϱ τὸ εἰδότα τὸ τί ἐστιν ἄνθϱωπος ἢ ἄλλο ὁτιοῦν, εἰδέναι ϰαὶ ὅτι ἔστι (τὸ γὰϱ μὴ ὂν οὐδεὶς οἶδεν ὅ τι ἐστίν, ἀλλὰ τί μὲν σημαίνει ᾳ; λόγος ἢ τὸ ὄνομα, ὅταν εἴπω τϱαγέλαφος, τί δ’ ἐστὶ τϱαγέλαφος ἀδύνατον εἰδέναι) τὸ δὲ τί ἐστιν ἄνθϱωπος ϰαὶ τὸ εἶναι ἄνθϱωπον ἄλλο. (It is necessary for someone who is to know, whether it is of a man or something else, what it is, which he knows in addition to knowing that it is (in effect, of what is not, no one can know that it is—at most we may know what the definition or the word means, when I say “goat-stag,” but what a goat-stag is, is impossible to know) the “what it is, a man,” and the human being are different.) (Posterior Analytics, 2.7.92b4–11) D. Huparxis-ousia The first author, it seems, to use the noun huparxis, attested in the Septuagint, is Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–41 CE): after having noted in De opificio mundi (§170–71) that Moses, by his account of the creation, taught us “that the divinity is and exists” (hoti esti to theion kai huparchei [ὅτι ἔστι τὸ θεῖον ϰαὶ ὑπάϱχει]), Philo clarifies the importance of this teaching, which was transmitted to us “on account of the godless, some of whom are in doubt and incline in two directions concerning his existence.” As John Glucker rightly points out (“Origin of ὑπάϱχω and ὕπαϱξις”), Philo’s invention presupposes a firm distinction between ousia, the essence of something, what it is—or better, “what it is to be x”—and huparxis. In terms of God or the divine, it is clear that his “essence” is inaccessible to man (akatalêptos anthrôpôi [ἀϰατάληπτος ἀνθϱώπῳ]): the latter can only, at best, recognize his might or his “powers” (dunameis [δυνάμεις]), which reveal his providence and his “existence” (huparxis). Leaving aside the dense discussions that concern the interpretations of the terms huparxis-huparchein [ὑπάϱχειν], or better, the distinction between the two modes of being defined respectively by huparchein and huphestêkenai [ὑφεστηϰέναι] (cf. Hadot, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Begriffs ‘Existenz’ ”), we will restrict ourselves to the well-established 302 ESSENCE (1548–1617) will repeat at every opportunity, exists “extra suas causas et extra nihilum [beyond its causes and beyond nothingness]” (“id quod realiter existit extra causas suas est ens reale [what exists really beyond its causes is a real being]”; Cajetan, De ente et essentia; Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae). This is why we may also say with Leibniz, who invents the term, that God is existentificans, and of the possible essences, we will say that they comprise an existurire, an existence that is to come and will be confirmed. The possible contains its own futurity: Est ergo causa cur Existentia praevalet Non-Existentiae, seu Ens necessarium est EXISTENTIFICANS. — Sed quae causa facit ut aliquid existat, seu ut possibilitas exigat existentiam, facit etiam ut omne possibile habeat conatum ad Existentiam, cum ratio restrictionis ad certa possibilia in universali reperiri non possit. — Itaque dici potest Omne possibile EXISTITURIRE, prout scilicet fundatur in Ente necessario actu existente, sine quo nulla est via qua possibile perveniret ad actum. (There is, therefore, a cause for which existence prevails over non-existence; in other words, God [the necessary Being] is existencing. — But this cause which brings about the existence of things, or in whose possibility existence is demanded, is also such that everything possible has a tendency towards existence, since we cannot find, generally speaking, a reason to restrain this tendency to only certain possibles. — This is why we can say that each and every possible is a future “existing,” naturally insofar as all existings are founded within God [the necessary Being] existing indeed, without which there would be no means of realizing any possibles.) (Leibniz, Vingt-quatre thèses métaphysiques, in Recherches générales sur l’analyse des notions et des verities) III. Essentia, Ousia-Essentia-Substantiva: “Essence,” “Entity,” Entitas, Entité, Seiendheit, Étance, E(s)tance, Étantité A. An ousia-essentia calque? Charles Kahn has established, from rich documentary sources, that the term ousia, attested from the time of Herodotus, always refers to parousia-apousia [παϱουσία-ἀπουσία]—“presenceabsence”—compounds. We may add that it is this fundamentally temporal meaning that constitutes the unity of the term, to designate, in its standard meaning, “goods,” “property,” “wealth” (cf. Ger. Anwesen), and, in its philosophical meaning, the “essence” of something, that is, “what-the-thing-is” and “the-thing-which-is.” Compare this with Phaedo, 78c–d, where ousia is clearly that of which there is a logos, that of which we must give an account as such, but also being (to on), or even the class of beings (pasê ousia; Republic, 486a), and that which is a thing really is (auto hekaston ho esti [αὐτὸ ἕϰαστον ὅ ἐστι]), each thing that is, in itself, beyond its multiple aspects and appearances—beyond the different affections (pathê [πάθη]) that it may undergo, as from outside. 1. Aristotle distinguishes, as is well known, at the beginning of the Categories, two meanings of ousia: primary entity, the simple and bare being of things, without considering any order or rank which they hold among others. But the word essentia, for which we might well use essence, marks the nature of the thing, and by it the order or rank it must hold among the other things. For example, when I say that man is, this is as much to say that he has his act, that he is, I say, actually: and in this I do not mark anything other than his bare entity and simple existence. But when I say that man is a rational animal, I deploy and manifest his whole essence and nature, and attributing to him his whole kind and his difference it is easy to see that his is in the order of the category of substance under the genus animal. (Scipio Dupleix, La métaphysique) . G. “To exist”: To be outside one’s causes and from nothing—to be created Rigorously speaking, existence is never referred back to God— even if Anselm (1033–1109) has the idea of concluding chapter 2 of his Proslogion this way: “Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo magis cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re” (Therefore there is absolutely no doubt that something-than-whicha-greater-cannot-be-thought exists both in the mind and in reality)—but rather to the creature, of which it is more or less redundant to affirm that it exists. Before existing, it only has an essential being (esse essentiae), which derives from the possible and betrays, more or less, an aptitudo ad existendum, a “demand for existence.” The latter is thus clearly, as Giles of Rome (1247–1316) pointed out well before Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the very same thing that, after Aquinas, introduces for the first time the deliberate distinction between essence and existence—a “complement” of essence (cf. on this point the “dossier” by Alain de Libera and Cyrille Michon in L’être et l’essence: Le vocabulaire médiéval de l’ontologie). Quaelibet res est ens per essentiam suam; tamen quia essentia rei creatae non dicit actum completum sed est in potentia ad esse, ideo non sufficit essentia ad hoc quod res actu existat nisi ei superaddatur aliquod esse quod est essentiae actus et complementum. Existunt ergo res per esse superadditum essentiae vel naturae. Patet itaque quomodo differat ens per se acceptum et existens. (Every thing is being by reason of its essence, nevertheless, because a created essence is not a completed act but is in potency to existence, it is, therefore, not enough that a thing has essence to be actually existing, but existence, which is the act and the completion of an essence, must be added to it. Therefore, things exist by reason of an existence which is added to the essence or nature. From this it is clear how being and existence differ.) (Theoremata de esse et essentia, 13) What exists therefore ex-sists, referred back to an origin as indicated by Richard of Saint-Victor, to an ex. What exists, as Thomas of Vio (Cajetan) (1469–1534) and Suárez ESSENCE 303 1 Porphyry’s “metaphysics”: Being-acting without a subject v. PRINCIPLE This same huparxis-ousia distinction also corresponds to Damascius’s (462–538) usage. Damascius understands huparxis [ὕπαϱξις], playing on the etymology, as “first beginning, presupposition, foundation of substance”: ἡ ὕπαϱξις, ὡς δηλοῖ τὸ ὄνομα, τὴν πϱώτην ἀϱχὴν δηλοῖ τῆς ὑποστάσεως ἑϰάστης, οἷόν τινα θεμέλιον ἢ οἷον ἔδαφος πϱοὑποτιθέμενον τῆς ὅλης ϰαὶ πάσης οἰϰοδομήσεως. (Huparxis, as its name indicates, refers to the first principle of each hupostasis; it is like a seat or foundation laid down beforehand under the whole of the superstructure and under any superstructure.) (Dubitationes et solutiones, §121) As clearly noted by Pierre Hadot, we should speak here of “pre-existence” rather than huparxis or “existence.” Huparxis, in its simplicity, refers to the One, prior to the composition of the “substance.” Such is the claim indeed that clarifies the definition of existence given by Victorinus: praeexistens subsistentia (Adversus Arium, 1.30.22)—what Pierre Hadot translates by “fondement initial préexistant à la chose ellemême” (initial foundation existing before the thing itself). Retroversion is called for here: prouparchousa hupostasis [πϱοὑπάϱχουσα ὑπόσασις] (Dubitationes et solutiones, §34). Hadot comments: “It is the ‘one’ of each thing, its existence, the state according to which substance is still pure being, undetermined and undeployed” (Porphyre et Victorinus). “We may say that substance pre-exists itself in existence, which is its state of unity and transcendental simplicity.” To understand the emergence and the success of the translations that have become standard—existence/ essence-substance—we must thus hypothesize a complete reversal, brought about by Neoplatonism in general, and more particularly by Porphyry’s “metaphysics,” of the Stoic distinction and hierarchy: for the Stoics, being, to on [τὸ ὄν], to einai [τὸ εἶναι] (conventionally translated “existence,” “to exist”), refers to the ontological plenitude of what is really present, like a body, while huparxis, huphistanai [ὑφιστάναι] (conventionally translated “subsistence,” “to subsist”) only designates a secondary reality, which comes from the incorporeal, characteristic of predicates, of temporality, of events (cf. Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus). Thus Porphyry’s originality, not so much with respect to Plotinus as with respect to Stoicism, consists on the ontological level of eliminating the distinction between einai and huphistanai, and of identifying huparxis with “being pure and simple [εἶναι μόνον]”; which also comes, against Aristotle this time, to treating the verb “to be” as a fully signifying verb—not just “co-signifying,” in its function as a copula but as an essentially active verb, which purely and properly expresses the activity of “being,” ousia-energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], that of pure essence, taken at its most indeterminate. The reversal is complete with regard to the Aristotelian claim from De interpretatione: οὐ γὰϱ τὸ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι σημεῖόν ἐστι τοῦ πϱάγματος, οὐδ’ ἐὰν τὸ ὄν εἴπῃς ψιλόν. αὐτὸ μὲν γὰϱ οὐδέν ἐστιν, πϱοσσημαίνει σύνθεσίν τινα. (Indeed “to be” and “not to be” are not signs of anything, and no more so when one utters the term “being” by itself; for in itself, it is nothing, but it co-signifies a certain synthesis.) (16b22–24) Compare also Posterior Analytics, B 7.92b13– 14: “τὸ δ’ εἶναι οὐϰ οὐσία οὐδενί” (being is not the property, the essence, of anything; our translation). Notice—and this point is instructive concerning the changes of meaning in Greek terms—that Michael Psellos (eleventh century) paraphrases the first passage cited thus: “οὐδὲ γὰϱ σημεῖά ἐστι τοῦ πϱάγματος τὰ ῥηματα τοῦ ὑπάϱχειν, ἢ μὴ ὑπάϱχειν” (indeed, the verbs “to be/to exist,” “not-to-be/ not-to-exist” are not signs for a thing) (Paraphrasis, fol. M. IIV , 13, cited in Aristotle, Peri hermeneias). This is why Hadot can still note by way of synthesis: “There is not, in the Porphyrian ontology, a distinction between existence and essence. Being is indissolubly action and idea. The fundamental contrast is here that which is established between being, to act without a subject, and existence, which is the primary subject, the primary form resulting from being” (Porphyre et Victorinus). If we accept, as here, the attribution to Porphyry (232–301) of the “Turin fragment” edited for the first time by Kroll in 1892 and considered by Hadot to be a commentary on the Parmenides (cf. “Fragments d’un commentaire de Porphyre sur le Parménide,” in Hadot, Plotin, Porphyre: Études néoplatoniciennes), we must indeed emphasize the boldness of the author, who clearly takes a non-Plotinian position in identifying the One purely One with being. This identification is surely inadmissible for Plotinus (204–70), but also entails a profound redefinition of being (to einai [τὸ εἶναι] = to energein [τὸ ἐνεϱγεῖν]), taken in an active sense, and rigorously distinguished from what exists. Recall the key passage of the fragment: ῞Oϱα δὲ μὴ ϰαὶ αἰνισσομένῳ ἔοιϰεν ὁ Пλάτων, ὅτι τὸ ἓν τὸ ἐπέϰεινα οὐσίας ϰαὶ ὄντος ὂν μὲν οὐϰ ἔστιν οὐδὲ οὐσία οὐδὲ ἐνέϱγεια, ἐνεϱγεῖ δὲ μᾶλλον ϰαὶ αὐτὸ τὸ ἐνεϱγεῖν ϰαθαϱόν, ὥστε ϰαὶ ἀυτὸ τὸ εἶναι τὸ πϱὸ τοῦ ὄντος· οὗ μετασχὸν τὸ ἓν ἄλλο ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔχει ἐϰϰλινόμενον τὸ εἶναι, ὅπεϱ ἐστὶ μετέχειν ὄντος. ῞Ωστε διττὸν τὸ εἶναι, τὸ μὲν πϱοὑπάϱχει τοῦ ὄντος, τὸ δὲ ὃ ἐπάγεται ἐϰ τοῦ ὄντος τοῦ ἐπέϰεινα ἑνὸς τοῦ εἶναι ὄντος τὸ ἀπόλυτον ϰαὶ ὥσπεϱ ἰδέα τοῦ ὄντος, οὗ μετασχὸν ἄλλο τι ἓν γέγονεν, ᾧ σύζυγον τὸ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ ἐπιφεϱόμενον εἶναι· ὡς εἰ νοήσειας λευϰὸν εἶναι. (Look then whether Plato does not also seem like someone who intimates a hidden teaching: for the One, which is beyond substance and Existence, is neither Existence, nor substance, nor act, but rather it acts and is itself pure action, such that he is himself Being who is before Existence. It is in participating in this Being that the second One receives a derived being from this Being: that is “participating in Existence.” Thus being is twofold: the first pre-exists existence, the second is that which is produced by the One, who is beyond Existence, and who is himself Being, in the absolute sense, and in a way the idea of Existence. It is by participating in this Being that another One was engendered to which the being produced by this Being is paired. It is as though one were thinking “being-white.”) (Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus) REFS.: Aristotle. Peri hermeneias. Translated by H. Weidemann. Berlin: Weingartner, 1978. Hadot, Pierre. “Fragments d’un commentaire de Porphyre sur le Parménide.” In Plotin, Porphyre: Études néoplatoniciennes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. . Porphyre et Victorinus. 2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1999. 304 ESSENCE to follow the correction given in one manuscript: atque entia. Compare also De institutione oratoria (3.6.23): “Ac primum Aristoteles elementa decem constituit οὐσίαν quam Plautus ‘essentiam’ vocat” (Aristotle lays down that there are ten categories. First there is ousia, which Plautus calls essentia). b. Saint Augustine, who definitively introduces the term essentia into Latin usage at the end of the fourth century, never fails to remind us that it is a new term (novo quidem nomine), still unknown in older authors (cf. De moribus Manichaeorum, 2.2.2; De civitate Dei, 12.2). We may certainly find a few occurrences in the texts that have been preserved between Quintilian and Saint Augustine. In any case, however, the meaning of the term remains largely indeterminate in them, which is shown by the more or less constant shifting between substantia and essentia, though sometimes indicating more or less clearly a tendency toward the specifically Augustinian sense of the term, to which we will return. B. Essentia and/or substantia? The body of substance 1. A complex vocabulary (Apuleius) The word essentia appears notably with Apuleius (second half of the second century), in whom we find essentia and substantia used, interchangeably it seems, to translate the Platonic ousia. In reality, however, things are more complex: in his De Platone, for example, Apuleius explicitly asks the question of the equivalence between ousia and essentia: “οὐσίας, quas essentias dicimus”; but this is in order to substitute substantia for it beginning with the following paragraph. Apuleius proposes his translation of ousiai [οὐσίαι] by essentiae in a development where, following the most classic Platonist distinction, he contrasts two types of different reality and two corresponding modes of being: “two aspects of beings” (duo eidê tôn ontôn [δύο εἴδη τῶν ὄντων]) (Phaedo, 79a6)—essence strictly speaking, as it presents itself to the pure vision of the mind and may be conceived by cogitatio alone, and the sensible reality that is only its shadow and image (umbra et imago). Oὐσίας, quas essentias dicimus, duas esse ait, per quas cuncta gignantur mundusque ipse; quarum una cogitatione sola concipitur, altera sensibus subjici potest. Sed illa, quae mentis oculis conprehenditur, semper et eodem modo et sui par ac similis invenitur, ut quae vere sit; at enim altera opinione sensibili et irrationabili aestimanda est, quam nasci et interire ait. Et sicut superior vere esse memoratur, hanc non esse vere possumus dicere. (According to Plato there are two ousiai—we call them essences—which create all things and the world itself. One is conceived by thought alone; the other may be grasped by the senses. The first, however, which is only grasped by the eyes of the mind, is always and in the same way equal to itself, as what truly is; the other, on the contrary, of which he says that it is generated and destroyed, must be evaluated by sensible and irrational opinions. And just as he reminds us that the first is truly, we may also affirm that the second is not truly.) (De Platone et ejus dogmate) essence as “individual” (tode ti [τόδε τι]) (“essence said in the most fundamental, primary, and principal sense, is what is neither said of nor in a subject, for example, a certain man or a certain horse”) and secondary essence such as “species” or “genera” (“we call secondary essences the species to which the essences said in the primary sense belong, these species as well as the genera of these species”; on the definition of ousia prôte, see SUBJECT, Box 1). One of the classic difficulties of Aristotelian exegesis, which will not delay us here, comes from the fact that in the other parts of the corpus, and in particular in book Z of the Metaphysics, chapter 3, Aristotle eliminates as “insufficient” the identification of ousia with the substrate (hupokeimenon: “that of which all the other [determinations] are said”), and that he defines primary essence in terms of form (morphê [μοϱφή], eidos [εἶδος]): “εἶδος δὲ λέγω τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι ϰαὶ τὴν πϱώτην οὐσίαν” (I call eidos [species, form] the “quiddity,” that is, the primary essence)” (see QUIDDITY, SPECIES). 2. If the Romans were to look for a scholarly calque to render the Greek ousia, one would think that essentia or entia (not attested) would have spontaneously come to mind. This hypothesis is confirmed in fact by a letter of Seneca’s (2–66 CE) (Letters, 58.6), crediting Cicero (106–43 BCE) as the source of the term. This attribution creates problems, however, not only because the term is nowhere to be found in extant texts by Cicero—not even in the fragments of his translation of the Timaeus, where the Platonic ousia is rendered in multiple ways, but never by essentia—but especially because it is contradicted by two other important sources, Quintilian (35–100 CE) and Augustine (354–430). a. Quintilian in effect attributes the creation of the term to Sergius Plautus, a relatively unknown author from the Stoic school, around the first century CE (De institutione oratoria, 2.14.1–2). Quintilian refers in this passage to the different translations that were suggested for the Greek rhêtorikê [ῥητοϱιϰή] (oratoria, oratrix), then follows up with a more general remark: Quos equidem non fraudaverim debita laude quod copiam Romani sermonis augere temptarint. Sed non omina nos ducentes ex Graeco secuntur, sicut ne illos quidem quotiens utique suis verbis signare nostra voluerunt. Et haec interpretatio non minus dura est quam illa Plauti essentia et queentia, sed ne propria quidem. (I would not for the world deprive the translators of the praise which is their due for attempting to increase the vocabulary of our native tongue; but translations from Greek into Latin are not always satisfactory, just as the attempt to represent Latin words in a Greek dress is sometimes equally unsuccessful. And the translations in question are fully as harsh as the essentia and queentia of Plautus, and have not even the merit of being exact.) With regard to this last term, the relatively obscure queentia, we note that one may be tempted ESSENCE 305 substantiam non habent corporum). The connection between substantia and corpus is of capital importance here. Thus, when Apuleius wishes to emphasize the relations between ousia and einai, he speaks of essentia—what really is—but when he understands the Greek term as referring to the mode of being (privileged in a different sense) of what is corporeal or sensible, the concept of substance naturally comes into play. To be, in this case, can only be understood univocally as substantiam habere, “to have substance,” that is, to have a body, to be solid and stable. It is in this same perspective that Apuleius can suggest the thesis that remains in place as guiding the rest: “Quod nullam substantiam habet, non est” (What is lacking in all substance is not) (De philosophia liber). We can compare this passage from the De Platone, dedicated to matter, with the distinction established by Cicero in his Topics between the things that are and those that are only cognized (“earum rerum quae sunt earum quae intelliguntur”): Esse ea dico quae cerni tangive possunt, ut fundum, aedes, parietem, stillicidium, mancipium, pecudem, suppellectilem, penus et cetera. Non esse rursus ea dico quae tangi demonstrarive non possunt, cerni tamen animo atque intelligi possunt, ut si ususcapionem, si tutelam, si gentem, si agnationem definias, quarum rerum nullum subest corpus, est tamen quaedam conformatio insita et impressa intelligentia, quam notionem voco. (The things which I call existing are those which can be seen or touched; as a farm, a house, a wall, a gutter, a slave, an ox, furniture, provisions, and so on; of which kind of things some require at times to be defined by us. Those things, again, I say have no existence, which are incapable of being touched or proved, but which can be perceived by the mind and understood; as if you were to define usucaption, guardianship, nationality, or relationship; all, things which have no body, but which nevertheless have a certain conformation plainly marked out and impressed upon the mind, which I call the notion of them.) (Topics, 5.27) “Real” being is clearly defined here as “substantial” being, in the manner of one’s land, property or “residence,” “means of subsistence”—in contrast with what lacks such a corporeal substrate, that is, a subesse proper to the body, in contrast therefore with those things “quae substantiam non habent corporum” (which do not have the substance of bodies), as Apuleius puts it, fully developing the logic of the expression. 2. “Substantia a substare” (Seneca) The Latin substantia, created from substare (a well-attested verb), appears for the first time in the writings of Seneca. This relatively late appearance is in itself surprising, if we think, for example, about the plurality of compounds using –antia created from stare (circumstantia, constantia, distantia, instantia, praestantia, etc.). We cannot, however, argue on the basis of this silence that it is a creation of Seneca, and in fact, when he uses the word, unlike essentia, it never requires explications or particular justifications. The term is clearly part of everyday usage, even if it appears in very determinate contexts in Seneca, where it is generally easy to uncover an underlying The central contrast is here that between a vere esse and a non esse vere, and only intelligible “essence” fully deserves the title essentia because of its identity and its permanence: “semper et eodem modo et sui par ac similis ut quae vere sit” (like what is properly speaking). In such a context, the translation of ousia by essentia was obvious and practically necessary. Translating by substantia would require saying in effect that what cannot offer itself to the senses as a subject (sensibue subjici potest) is not properly or truly a substance, which would manifestly go against the very spirit of the language. Apuleius, however, does not hesitate to fall back on the vocabulary of substantiality once he attempts to clarify exactly what the “essentiality” of this intelligible essence really is. The slide takes place first in the examination of the second type of ousia. When Apuleius approaches this “essence” that is not really—the reality that may be offered to the senses—the term of substantia in effect comes to complete essentia, and then to replace it: Et primae substantiae vel essentiae primum deum esse et mentem formasque rerum et animam; secundas substantias, omnia quae ab substantiae superioris exemplo originem ducunt, quae mutari et converti possunt, labentia et ad instar fluminum profuga. (Of the primary essence or substance, is the primary God, the mind, the “forms” of things, and the soul; of the second, whatever is enformed, whatever is born and has its origin in the model of the superior substance, whatever may change and be transformed, slipping and flowing like running water.) (Ibid.) Several paragraphs earlier, Apuleius had summarized the teaching of the Timaeus concerning matter: it is what precedes the first principles and the simplest elements (water, fire, etc.) for the title of prime matter: Materiam vero inprocreabilem incorruptamque commemorat, non ignem neque aquam nec aliud de principiis et absolutis elementis esse, sed ex omnibus primam, figurarum capacem, fictionique subjectam. (For matter, he points out that it can be neither created nor destroyed, that it is neither fire nor water, nor any of the other principles or simple elements; but the first of all the realities capable of receiving forms, and able to be fashioned as a subject.) (Ibid.) Matter precedes all the rest, insofar as it is capable, paradigmatically, of receiving shapes. It is practically nothing, not even a body, but nor is it incorporeal: “sine corpore vero esse non potest dicere, quod nihil incorporale corpus exhibeat” (nor does [Plato] wish to say that it is without body, since nothing of what is incorporeal exhibits a body [= can make a body manifest]). The status of matter is thus essentially ambiguous since, while it does not have the identifying evidence of the body and is not at all evident, nor is it among the number of things that are only grasped by thought (ea cogitationibus videri), that is, among the things that do not have the subsistence, solidity, or stability proper to bodies (quae 306 ESSENCE divisions emanate, which contains the universality of things.) (Ibid., 58.8) This primary genus (“genus primum et antiquissimum”; 58.12) is first defined as “being” (to on = quod est—that which is). “Being” thus construed lies beyond the body (“aliquid superius quam corpus”); the quod est—that which is—is thus able to appear as either corporeal or incorporeal. This is why, Seneca adds, the Stoics wished to apply another supreme genus to the quod est (RT: SVF, III, s.v. genikôtaton genos [γενιϰώτατον γένος]; cf. also Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Topica, 4), one that is prior or more of a principle (“aliud genus magis principale”), the quid (= ti [τι]). Then Seneca clarifies the ultimate reasons for the Stoic decision thus: In rerum, inquiunt, natura quaedam sunt, quaedam non sunt, et haec autem, quae non sunt, rerum natura complectitur, quae animo succurunt, tanquam Centauri, Gigantes, et quicquid aliud falsa cogitatione formatum habere aliquid imaginem coepit, quamvis non habet substantiam. (In nature, they say, there are the things which are, and things which are not. Yet nature embraces the very things which are not and come to mind, like centaurs, giants; products of false concepts, already feigning an image, and yet lacking substance.) (Ibid., 58.15) We may conclude from this brief passage that the “things which are” (to on vs. to huphestos [τὸ ὑφεστός]) are precisely because they “have substance.” “To have substance” (substantiam habere) may and without any doubt must be understood here as a translation or explication of what is meant by “to be” (esse). To be implies truth, not only of being a substance, of being substantially or in the manner of substance, but in fact “to have substance” or “to take substance” (“substantiam capere”; Boethius), that is, to be able to be based in a corporal reality defined by its stability and solidity. 3. Substantiam habere—substantiam capere (“to have,” “to take substance”) We may remark straightaway, taking account of the stereotypical character of the unitary Latin expression substantiam habere, that it refers, at least in the passage cited, more probably to the Greek verb huphistanai than to the strict concept of hupostasis. Nonetheless, it is clear that Seneca means substantiality, proper to what exists in the full sense, as the fact of having a support, a substrate, or a basis guaranteeing consistency and stability. In this way, “having-substance” always requires or presupposes a body; the body here refers in general to the foundation on which everything must rest in order to be. If being implies having-substance, it is because the fact of having-substance implies the possession of a solid substrate, whose property is precisely the guarantee of consistency and permanence. After having taken up, as we have seen, the classical contrast between hupostasis and emphasis in the passage Stoic conception. We read, for example, in the Quaestiones naturales, regarding the rainbow: Non est propria in ista nube substantia nec corpus est, sed mendacium sine re similitudo. (There is neither proper substance nor body in this cloud, but illusion and appearance lacking reality.) (Quaestiones naturales, 1.6.4) We can easily recognize, through the contrast initiated by Seneca between propria substantia and mendacium, or again between res and similituo, the two terms of hupostasis and emphasis [ἔμφασις] (reality/appearance), which we find in an exactly parallel context in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De mundo, for example, and which become standard in this opposition beginning especially with Posidonius. There we read: [Tῶν ἐν ἀέϱι φαντασμάτων τὰ μὲν ἐστι ϰατ’ ἔμφασιν, τὰ δὲ ϰαθ’ ὑπόστασιν.] (Among celestial phenomena, some are only apparent, others real.) (De mundo, 395a28) We must, however, put aside the question of whether the contrast established by Seneca takes up the underlying Stoic distinction in an exact way, or whether the word substantia by itself bears a more specifically Latin meaning, allowing it to correspond in the present case to the Stoic construction. Let us examine in this vein another passage from Seneca, where we again seem to find the contrast “simple” and “received”: substantia/imago. This is the famous letter 58 to Lucilius, already cited, since it is in the same text that Seneca suggested, relying on Cicero’s authority, the neologism essentia to translate ousia, with the latter term in addition being, unusually, clarified as follows: Quomodo dicetur οὐσία—res necessaria, natura continens fundamentum omnium? (How shall we render the concept of ousia, necessary reality, substance where the foundation of all things resides?) (Letters, 58.6, in Sénèque, entretiens, lettres à Lucilius, translated by H. Noblot) (N.B.: we cannot resist this translation, which reintroduces at its core the term “substance” which Seneca avoids!) After this first attempt at translation, to which in fact Seneca does not feel tied down, he attempts an exposition that is in fact rather muddled since he mixes Platonic diairesis [διαίϱεσις], Aristotle’s categorial analysis, and the scrutiny of the Stoic categories. His goal in any case is to go in search of the primary, of the supreme genus under which lie all the other species: Nunc autem primum illud genus quaerimus, ex quo ceterae species suspensae sunt, a quo nascitur omnis divisio, quo universa conprensa sunt. (For the moment, we are seeking this primary genus to which all the species are subordinate, from which all ESSENCE 307 word. We must note again, against the “calque” hypothesis, the numerous uses of substantia in very modest, concrete, and material senses among jurists of the second and third centuries, where the term retains its ancient meaning of owned property, inheritance, resources, means of subsistence. In the De institutione oratoria, Quintilian suggests for the first time, in a thematic way, that ousia be translated by substantia. The subject is the figures and the ornaments that they provide for speeches, as well as the dangers of their overuse; he writes: There are some who pay no consideration to the weight of their matter or the force of their thoughts and think themselves supreme artists, if only they succeed in forcing even the emptiest of words into figurative form, with the result that they are never tired of stringing figures together, despite the fact that it is as ridiculous to hunt for figures without reference to the matter as it is to discuss dress and gesture without reference to the body. (De institutione oratoria, 9.3.100) Quintilian mentions elsewhere the questions that can arise in certain trials, not as to the reality of an alleged fact at all, but as to the actual identity of an individual, otherwise well-known: ut est quaesitum contra Urbiniae heredes, is quis tanquam filius petebat bona, Figulus esset an Sosipater. Nam et substantiaeius sub oculos venit, ut non possit quaeri, an sit nee quid sit nee quale sit. ([It] may be illustrated by the action brought against the heirs of Urbinia, where the question was whether the man who claimed the property as being the son of the deceased, was Figulus or Sosipater. In this case the actual person was before the eyes of the court [nam et substantia ejus sub oculos venit], so that there could be no question whether he existed [ut non possit quaeri an sit] nor what he was nor of what kind.) (Ibid., 7.2.5) To be manifest (sub oculos venire) is precisely what is proper to “substance,” proper to that to which a body underlies, proper to that which “has substance” (substantiam habere). We may then demand whether substantia would have ever “translated” the Greek ousia, hupostasis, or rather if, thanks to some overdetermined translations, it laid the groundwork for new ontological determinations—the very ones that would be inherited by all of Romania, without quite knowing it. 5. The notion of substance in Marius Victorinus In his Liber de definitionibus, Marius Victorinus presents a critical summary of the Ciceronian doctrine of the two kinds of definition. Cicero’s distinction rests on the Stoic contrast between corporeals and incorporeals (Topics, 5.26–27), and it tends to declare unreal anything that does not derive ultimately from a corporeal foundation (“subesse corpus—ta ontôs huphestôta” [τὰ ὄντως ὑφεστῶτα], according to Stoic terminology). To overturn—and to confirm—Cicero’s account, Victorinus need only introduce the term substantia, foreign to Cicero’s text, and to expand relation that grounds cited above, taken from the Quaestiones naturales, Seneca adds: Nobis non placet in arcu aut corona subesse aliquid corporis certi. (We are not of the opinion that there is at bottom, in the rainbow or luminous halo, anything corporeal.) (Quaestiones naturales, 1.6.4) 4. Substantia—corpus One might think that an expression like subesse corpus (a body that is at the basis, at the foundation) must have played a determining role in the appearance of the term substantia in philosophical contexts. To clarify this convergence, we must quickly go back: we have seen how Cicero, in De oratore (5.27), distinguished two types of “things” (res) in his analysis of definition: things that are, things that are cognized (res quae sunt, res quae intelliguntur). Only concrete beings really are, Cicero affirms, unlike abstract entities that lack material reality: “quibus nullum subest corpus.” In the same way, in the De natura deorum (1.38), concerning the thesis according to which the “form of god” can only be grasped in thought and not in sensation, and is lacking in all consistency (“speciem dei percipi coginatione non sensu, nec esse in ea ullam soliditatem”), Cicero asks: Nam si tantum modo ad cogitationem valent nec habent ullam soliditatem nec eminentiam, quid interest utrum de hippocentauro an de deo cogitemus ? (For if [deities] exist only in thought, and have no solidity nor substance, what difference can there be between thinking of a hippocentaur, and thinking of a deity?) Not having solidity, not having body (we naturally expect a substantiam habere here), means not being, in the sense in which the hippocentaur is the very example of inexistence or irreality (anuparxias paradeigma [ἀνυπαϱξίας παϱάδειγμα]) (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, 1.162). It thus looks as though the term substantia, whose meaning comes out most fully in composite expressions like substantiam habere, was designed to express an immediate understanding of being as corporeity, solidity, ground(s). Substantia is thus properly speaking what is at the foundation—id quod substat—the reality that stands beneath and that one may use as a foundation, the basis that guarantees being with its subsistence by giving it ontological support. Seneca repeats, clarifying substantiality in the sense of “having substance,” which still implies the having of a proper and determinate body (proprium, certum): Aliquid per se numerabitur cum per se stabit. (Only what stands by itself is counted by itself.) (Letters, 113.5) From its first “philosophical” uses, the Latin term thus seems to have a specific understanding, its own coloring, which by itself is sufficient to cast doubt on the hypothesis of a pure and simple scholarly calque from hupostasis. The pretheoretical notions implied by substantia appear even more clearly if we examine the nontechnical uses of the 308 ESSENCE may gloss in the sense of “to procure a subject for everything else considered as accidents, so that they may be,” to “support” their “being in a subject” (cf. Libera, L’art des généralités): “Substance” [substat] is that which gathers as underpinning [subministrat] for other accidents [i.e. to all the rest considered as accidents] some subject [subjectum], so that they may exist [ut esse valeant]; indeed it supports them [sub illis enim stat], since it is subjected to accidents [subjectum est accidentibus]. Suárez doubtless remembers these formulations when he notes, referring to the “etymology” of substantia: “Substare enim idem est quod aliis subesse tanquam eorum sustentaculum et fundamentum, vel subjectum” (to be substance is in effect the same thing as to underlie other things as a support, foundation, or subject) (Disputationes metaphysicae 33, §1). . C. Essentia ab esse: Essence The term essentia only becomes established with Augustine, even though we may find some occurrences, beginning with Apuleius, in other authors influenced by Neoplatonism, like Macrobius or Chalcidius. As we have seen, in its first occurrences, the sense of the word remains unstable and almost inevitably slips onto the side of “substance.” The term is, we might say, so unclear that it constantly requires explication in terms of substantia. Augustine’s work marks a signal reversal in this regard. In his eyes, as we have already noted, essentia appears as a recently created term, still rarely used but destined to replace substantia, at least in some of the latter’s previous senses. Augustine writes, for example, in this early text, the De moribus manichaeorum: Nam et ipsa natura nihil est aliud quam id quod intelligitur in suo genere aliquid esse. Itaque, ut nos jam novo nomine ab eo quod est esse vocamus essentiam, quam plerumque substantiam etiam nominamus, ita veteres qui haec nomina non habebant pro essentia et substantia naturam vocabant. (Indeed nature itself is nothing other than what one cognizes that it is something of this kind. This is why, just as we name it “essence,” using a neologism based on “to be,” so the ancients, lacking these terms, used “nature” for “essence” and “substance.”) (De moribus manichaeorum, 2.2) Or again: Essentiam dico quae οὐσία graece dicitur, quam usitatius substantiam vocamus. (I call essentia what is called ousia in Greek, and what we more commonly call substantia.) (De Trinitate, 5.8.9–10) We might even go so far as to suppose that over the course of Augustine’s life, and certainly thanks to him, the term must have spread so as to become standard, since in a late work like City of God he can write: substantiality beyond pure and simple corporeity. From that point on, the body is only a special case, even if it is empirically privileged, of what can provide a foundation in the manner of a subject or substrate: Quamquam Tullius aliter in eodem libro Topicorum ait esse duo genera definitionum: primum, cum enim id quod est definitur; secundo, cum id quod sui substantiam non habet, hoc est quod non est; et hoc partitionis genus in his quae supra dixi clausit et extenuavit. Sed alia esse voluit quae esse dicebat, alia quae non esse. Esse enim dicit ea quorum subest corpus, ut cum definimus quid sit aqua, quid ignis; non autem esse illa intelligi voluit quibus nulla corporalis videtur esse substantia, ut sunt pietas, virtus, libertas. Sed non omnia ista, vel quae sunt cum corpore vel quae sunt sine corpore, si in eo accipiuntur ut aut per se esse aut in alio esse videantur in uno genere numeranda dicimus: ut ista omnia esse intelligantur quibus omnibus sua potest esse substantia, sive illae corporales sive, ut certissimum est et recto nomine appellari possunt, qualitates. (In book V of the Topics Cicero suggests that there are two kinds of definition: the first in which one defines what is; the second when one defines what does not have proper substance, in other words what is not; and he attempts to circumscribe this kind of definition a partibus, and to limit its extension. He wishes to distinguish between the things which he says exist, and those which he says do not exist. He posits that the things to which a body is subjacent are; when we define for example what water is or fire; on the other hand, he wishes us to consider as not being the things which seem to have no bodily substance, like piety, virtue, liberty. We say on the contrary that all these things, whether with or without body, should be classed under the single generic head [that of being, i.e., substantiality], as long as we grasp them insofar as they appear to be by themselves or in another. We must therefore understand that all these things which may always have a proper substance are, either because they are body, or because they are qualities, since that is certainly determined, fully authorizing that determination.) (Marius Victorinus, Liber de definitionibus) After having introduced the term substantia as needing no further explanation in his account of the Ciceronian analysis, Victorinus’s efforts focus entirely on dissociating corporeity and substantiality. For us, he states, as we consider all things “insofar as they appear to be by themselves or to be in another,” we must place them under a single head, namely, substance. These are properly speaking all the things for which there may be substance, or better, “proper substance.” It does not matter that substance relates from the start to substare and the subesse of the body, or secondarily the substrate on which a “quality” always comes to belong. “Being-by-itself” is being substance, “being-in-another” is being quality in a substance, which then becomes for the quality in question like its body, its proper substance. This is the usage of substare that we find in Boethius (480–524), in Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, chapter 3, which we ESSENCE 309 term essentia in Augustine’s writing, but he also proposes a Platonizing reinterpretation of Aristotle. The central Augustinian thesis is formulated thus: Illa omnia quae quoquo modo sunt ab ea Essentia sunt, quae summe maximeque est. (Everything which exists in any way derives from that being which is the highest and greatest.) (De immortalitate animae, 11.18) We must surely read here, we believe, Essentia (capitalized). Essence as such, Essence pure and simple, must be understood as a Divine Name. It even names God properly speaking, as the Essence par excellence, that is, as causa essendi (De diversis quaestionibus, 83, q. 21): the being in virtue of which exist all things that are in one manner or another. The Aristotelian “definition” of ousia prôtê is clearly indicated, but in order to be entirely theologized. “Ousia in the fundamental, primary, and principal sense” (hê kuriôtata te kai prôtôs kai malista legomenê [ἡ ϰυϱιώτατά τε ϰαὶ πϱώτως ϰαὶ μάλιστα λεγομένη]) is henceforth understood as Essentia quae summe maxime que est, that is, God. Nothing is, nothing is existent except through being in him, by his essentia (“omnis essentia non ob aliud essentia est, nisi quia est”). . The term “essence,” we believe, can thus only be established in Latin if it contains the echo of what esse (to einai) expresses verbally. Thus, essentia does not simply replace substantia, but rather opens up a new understanding of being. It is thus no accident that the term is only fully deployed when it comes to refer primarily to the one who summe est, he who, Augustine goes so far as to say, est est: “Est enim est sicut bonorum bonum est” (he is indeed “is,” as [he] is the good of goods) (Enarrationes en Psalmos, 134, RT: PL, vol. 37, col. 1741; cf. also In evangelium Johannis tractatus, 39.8.9: Est quod est [he is what is]; Confessions, 12.31.46: “quidquid aliquo modo est, sed est est” [everything which is in some way anything is in virtue of he who is not in just any way but is is]). ab eo quod est esse vocatur essentia, novo quidem nomine quo usi veteres non sunt latini sermonis auctores, sed jam nostris temporibus usitato, ne deesset etiam linguae nostrae, quod Graeci appellant οὐσίαν. (so from “to be” [esse] comes “being” [essentia]: a new word, indeed, which was not used in the Latin speech of old, but which has come into use in our own day so that our language should not lack a word for what the Greeks call ousia; for this is expressed very exactly by essentia.) (De civitate Dei, 12.2) The term would thus be recently created in order to respond literally (“hoc enim verbum e verbo expressum est, ut diceretur essential”) to the Greek ousia. Clearly, the term essentia is designed, by its very formation, to “translate” ousia, but can only appear as such with a new comprehension of being different from that which guided it (esse in the sense of “having body,” “having substance”). In other words, again, essentia can only establish itself as a “translation” of ousia when the latter is resolutely interpreted on the basis of the verb einai, reinterpreted in the perspective of Porphyrean Neoplatonism. Saint Augustine is perfectly explicit as to the meaning of this derivation, to which he returns again and again: Sicut enim ab eo quod est sapere dicta est sapientia et ab eo quod est scire dicta est scientia, sic ab eo quod est esse vocatur essential. (For just as wisdom is so called from being wise, and knowledge is so called from knowing, so essence is so called from being [esse].) (De Trinitate, 5.2.3) Essence must first be understood ab esse, or better ab eo quod est esse—on the basis of what the verb “to be” expresses, or the act of being. We can follow rather precisely the upheavals wrought by this new “translation” in a remarkable passage of De immortalitate animae: it provides, it seems, the first occurrence of the 2 “Existence” and “subsistence”: The Stoic strategy v. HOMONYM, SEIN, SENSE, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WORD Following the Stoics, Cicero contrasts in his Topics the true (substantial) being of bodies with the “fictive” being (“to huphestos, kat’ epinoian psilên huphistasthai” [τὸ ὑφεστός, ϰατ’ ἐπίνοιαν ψιλὴν ὑφίστασθαι]) of notions (ennoêmata [ἐννοήματα]): “ἐννοήμα δέ ἐστι φάντασμα διανοίας, οὔτε τι ὄν οὔτε ποιόν, ὡσανεὶ δέ τι ϰαὶ ὡσανεὶ ποιόν (a concept is a phantasm of thought, which is neither something, nor something qualified, but quasi-something and quasi-something qualified) (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.61; RT: SVF, vol. 1, n. 65, p. 19; Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers; and equally the specification by Libera in Porphyre, Isagoge). Against this doctrine, Marius Victorinus thinks it necessary to appeal to Aristotle, but on the basis of an interpretation of the ousia of the Categories, and of the distinction between ousia prôtê [οὐσία πϱώτη] and ousia deutera [οὐσία δεύτεϱα], which has already conceded the only decisive point: the substantial implications of ousia. Even when ousia is not present strictly speaking, as is paradigmatically the case in corporeal beings, it may at least be apprehended as a subject of accidents or qualities, which thus find their substantia propria. REFS.: Diogenes Laertes. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Long, Anthony A., and David N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Porphyry. Isagoge. Translated by A. de Libera and A. P. Segonds, introduction and notes by A. de Libera. Paris: Vrin, 1998. 310 ESSENCE attributes: “But it is wrong to assert that God subsists and is the subject of His own goodness [ut sub-sistat et sub-sit Deus bonitati suae], and that goodness is not a substance, or rather not an essence, that God Himself is not His own goodness, and that it inheres in Him as in its subject” (De Trinitate, 7.5.10). Jean-François Courtine In other words, again, it is first as a Divine Name that essentia can be established to express properly the being of he who says of himself: “sic sum quod sum, sic sum epsum esse” (as I am what is, so I am Being itself) (Sermones, 7.7). It is because he is apprehended as the one who “primarily and pre-eminently” is that God become ousia prôtê, that is, now and necessarily: Essentia. God does not have attributes, but above all he could not be the subject of 3 The Augustinian reinterpretation of Aristotle v. I/ME/MYSELF It is this fundamental thesis that leads Augustine to adopt the Aristotelian doctrine according to which ousiai do not have contraries—at the cost of a complete reversal of the hierarchy of ousia prôté–ousia deutera since “primary essence” is no longer the singular thing as here (tode ti), but rather God. The Augustinian transposition of this doctrine singularly clarifies the new understanding of being that is expressed through the translation of essentia. Here is the canonical passage from Aristotle: ‘Yπάϱχει δὲ ταῖς οὐσίαις ϰαὶ τὸ μηδὲν αὐταῖς ἐναντίον εἶναι. Tῇ γὰϱ πϱώτῃ οὐσίᾳ τί ἂν εἴη ἐναντίον ; οἶον τῷ τινι ἀνθϱώπῳ οὐδέν ἐστι ἐναντίον, οὐδέ γε τῷ ἀνθϱώπῳ ἤ τῷ ζῴῳ οὐδέν ἐστι ἐναντίον. (Another characteristic of substances is that there is nothing contrary to them. For what would be contrary to a primary substance? For example, there is nothing contrary to an individual man, nor yet is there anything contrary to man or to animal.) (Categories, 5.3b24f.) Aristotle’s aim is not here to contrast being and non-being as principles. Rather, it is simply to show, taking account of the determined “essence” as such or such, that it is dektikê tôn enantiôn [δεϰτιϰὴ τῷν ἐναντίων] (such as to receive contraries), making room that contraries can occupy and respond to one another, developing in this way a single configuration (“kai gar tôn enantiôn tropon tina to auto eidos” [ϰαὶ γὰϱ τῷν ἐναντίων τϱόπον τινα τὸ αὐτὸ εἶδος]; Metaphysics Z7, 1032b2–3). In the rather different framework of a demonstration of the immortality of the soul Augustine is led to rely on this passage from Aristotle, attributing to it a new ontological meaning. In the course of his demonstration, and on the basis of an identification of being and truth, Augustine must respond to the objection according to which the soul, turning away from truth, would accordingly lose its very being. The Augustinian response rests on the distinction between the conversio and the aversio, and especially—and this is the point that interests us—on the claim that the soul, having its being from the very thing that has no contrary, and which is paradigmatically—Essentia—could not lose it. The Aristotelian doctrine according to which ousia does not have a contrary thus acquires a peculiar illustration, when it becomes a matter of the Essentia by which all things exist that are of such or such a sort (“illa omnia quae quodmodo sunt”): Nam si nulla essentia in quantum essentia est, aliquid habet contrarium, multo minus habet contrarium prima illa essentia, quae dicitur veritas, in quantum essentia est. (If no independent reality has a contrary, insofar as it is an independent reality, much less does that first reality which is called truth have a contrary insofar as it is an independent reality.) (De immortalitate animae, 12.19) Essence as such (“essentia in quantum essentia est”) does not have a contrary because it is said ab eo quod est esse: from that which is being. But being (esse) has no contrary, except precisely non-being, or nothing. Being has nothing as a contrary; being does not have anything as a contrary: “Esse autem non habet contrarium, nisi non esse; unde nihil est essentiae contrarium” (De immortalitate animae, 12.19; cf. also De moribus manichaeorum, 2.1.1). Thus the Aristotelian doctrine comes paradoxically to the aid of the thesis of the primacy of the “Essentia quae summe maximeque est,” and the treatise of the Categories is henceforth pressed into the service of a Porphyrean metaphysics of einai. And Augustine can even go so far as to conclude the movement of thought we are examining in this way: Nullo modo igitur res ulla potest esse contrario illi substantiae, quae maxime ac primitus est. (In no way, then, can anything be contrary to that reality which exists in the greatest and most fundamental way.) (De immortalitate animae, 12.19; Fr. transl. mod.) Augustine can reintroduce the term “substance” here (to accentuate the reference to Categories, 5): we can see clearly that the word no longer has a guiding role, and it is to be understood only on the basis of the prior determination of essentiality. It is a diametrically opposed gesture to that of Apuleius in his De Platone. No doubt the Neoplatonic reference does not suffice on its own to clarify this new Augustinian understanding of being (which is precisely not “essentialist”), establishing a career for essentia. Without engaging in questions raised by the so-called metaphysics of the Exodus, we must nevertheless note that the interpretation of the mystical Name of God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai constitutes the focal point of Augustinian meditation. Essentia can be understood as a Divine Name, since it expresses that which brings into existence everything that is. Essence can even be properly predicated of God: “Quis magis est [essentia] quam ille qui dixit famulo suo Moysi: ego sum qui sum, et: dices filiis Israel: Qui est misit me ad vos?” (And who possesses being in a higher degree than he, who said to his servant Moses: “I am who am,” and to the sons of Israel, “He who is, has sent me to you”?) (De Trinitate, 5.2.3). God is properly called essence, he has the Name Essentia, since only he is ipsum esse (“cui profecto ipsum esse maxime ac verissime competit”). REFS.: Aristotle. Categories. In The Complete Works, edited by J. Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. ESSENCE 311 . Porphyre et Victorinus. 2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1999. . “Zur Vorgeschichte des Begriffs “Existenz”, YПAPXEIN bei den Stoikern.” Archiv für Begriffgeschichte 13 (1969): 115–27. 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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 312 ESTI ESTI [ἐστι], EINAI [εἶναι] ENGLISH there is, there exists, it is possible that, it is the case that, it is, exists, is; to be, to exist, to be identical to, to be the case v. IL Y A [ES GIBT, HÁ, SEIN, TO BE], and ANALOGY, CATEGORY, DASEIN, ESSENCE, HOMONYM, NATURE, NEGATION, NOTHING, OBJECT, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, REALITY, SPECIES, SUBJECT, THING [RES], TO TI ÊN EINAI, TRUTH Even the verb “to be,” which Schleiermacher calls “the original verb,” is “illuminated and colored by language” (“Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens”). The Greek einai [εἶναι] has or may have a number of semantic and and syntactic characteristics capable of giving rise to philosophy as the thought of being, in particular, the collusion among the function of the copula, the existential meaning, and the veridical meaning. It is thus, Heidegger emphasizes, 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 (Sprachgestaltung)” (Essence of Human Freedom, §7). Yet, this dictionary’s project is in part to attempt to make distinctions among linguistic realities, the idiomatic impact of fundamental philosophical works, and what Jean-Pierre Lefebvre calls “ontological nationalism”—in this case, the projection of a sort of Germany onto a sort of Greece. Parmenides’s Poem is fundamental both for Greek thought and for the Greek language. The form esti [ἐστι], “is,” third-person singular indicative present, which is the name of the route of investigation of the Poem, is even more remarkable since at the beginning of a sentence it can mean not only “there is” (see ES GIBT, HÁ), but also “it is possible.” Finally, a series of key words and expressions for ontology arise over the course of the works of Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle simply as derivatives of einai: to on [τὸ ὄν], “what is”; to ontôs on [τὸ ὄντως ὄν], “what really is, that is, true, authentic being”; ousia [οὐσία], “being-hood,” “essence,” “substance”; to on hêi on [τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν], “being insofar as it is being”; to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], the “what it was to be,” “quiddity,” the “essential of the essence.” Finally, the question of the “is not” and of “what” is not is related to the question of being from Parmenides on. It requires taking account of two possible expressions of negation, prohibitive and subjective (particle mê), or factual and objective (particle ou), mirroring the difference between “negation” in the strict sense (Gr. mê; to mê on, “what cannot be,” “nothingness”) and “privation” (Gr. ou; to ouk on, “that which as it happens is not [such]”), as well as the various combinations of the negations, which can complement or reinforce each other. These peculiarities of Greek, which Sophists and philosophers take advantage of, in turn shed light on the specific features of the vernaculars that are used to translate them. I. Greek, the Language of Being? “Tout ce qu’on veut montrer ici est que la structure linguistique du Grec prédisposait la notion ‘d’être’ à une vocation philosophique” (all we wish to show here is that the linguistic structure of Greek predisposed the notion of “being” to a philosophic vocation) (Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics). “The fact that the development of Western grammar began with Greek meditation on the Greek language gives this process its whole meaning. For along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, ¶43). The normally contrary views of Heidegger the philosopher and Benveniste the linguist are in agreement for once, in describing the privilege of einai [εἶναι], “to be,” in Greek, which is otherwise reckoned to be the source of meaning (Heidegger) or of confusions and mistakes (Benveniste), whether inevitable or accidental. Like any verb, “to be” has a “syntactic function” (Benveniste) related to its “grammar” (Heidegger) and a “lexical sense” (Benveniste) related to its “etymology” (Heidegger). Jacques Derrida analyzes this peculiarity of Greek in terms of the function between the grammatical and lexical functions of the verb “to be”: “Although always uneasy and worked upon from within, the fusion of the grammatical and the lexical functions of ‘to be’ surely has an essential link with the history of metaphysics and everything that is coordinated with it in the West” (“The Supplement of Copula”). A. Lexical function: The semantics of einai Benveniste, in order to measure the semantic peculiarity of the verb “to be” in Greek and in our “philosophical” languages, takes as the counter-example the Ewe language, where, except for the strict identity of subject and predicate marked by nye, which is “curiously” transitive, what we indicate by “to be” is expressed on the one hand by le (God exists, he is here) or no (he remains there), on the other hand by wo (it is sandy), du (he is king), or di (he is thin), with verbs whose only relations to one another are the ones that we, starting from our own mother tongues, project onto them (Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics). Heidegger suggests something analogous in an etymological mode, when he brings up the three IndoEuropean and Germanic roots at work in the uses of the verb “to be”: es, in Sanskrit asus, “life, the living” (which yields the Gr. esti [ἐστι], Fr. est, Ger. ist, Eng. “is”); bhû, bheu, “to grow, to flourish,” perhaps “to appear” like phusis [φύσις], “nature,” in Greek, and perhaps the Gr. phaineshtai [φαίνεσθαι], “to seem,” which yields the Lat. fui, Fr. il fut, Ger. bin); finally wes, Sanskrit wasami, “to live, to reside, to remain” (like the Gr. astu [ἄστυ], “the city,” and Vesta, vestibule, which yields the Ger. war, wesen, or Eng. “was” and “were”). “From the three stems we derive three initial and vividly definite meanings: living, emerging, abiding,” meanings that we place at the level of the “existential” sense of “to be” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics; Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics) (see NATURE, Box 1 for phusis; LIGHT, Box 1 for phainesthei). B. Grammatical function: The syntax of einai Alongside this exceptionally syncretic semantics, the verb einai possesses a grammatical function that is no less peculiar. 1. Cohesive function and copula Every verb has a cohesive function, allowing it to structure the relation between members of a proposition (“Socrates drinks the hemlock”). But “to be” has this function pre-eminently. It has it first as the copula, guaranteeing the link between subject and predicate, whether as a matter of identity (“Socrates is Socrates”) or inclusion (“Socrates is mortal”). It has it a second time—whence its pre-eminence—since this copulative liaison may be substituted for any other one: the copula, as long as we use an ESTI 313 appropriate predicate, can replace any verb (“Socrates is drinking-the-hemlock” is equivalent to “Socrates drinks the hemlock”). From Aristotle to Port-Royal, this analysis structures predicate logic (see PREDICATION, WORD): [The verb, including even to be and not to be] is nothing by itself (ouden esti [οὐδὲν ἐστι]), but signifies in an additional way a putting into relation (prossêmainei, which the medievals translate by “co-signify,” sunthesin tina [πϱοσσημαίνει σύνθεσίν τινα]), which cannot be conceived without its components. (De interpretatione, 4.16b23–25) The verb itself should not have uses other than to mark the link which we make in our minds between the two terms of a proposition; but only the verb to be, which we call a substantive, kept this simplicity. (Grammar) 2. Assertive function and veridical sense “A la relation grammaticale qui unit les membres de l’énoncé s’ajoute implicitement un ‘cela est’ qui relie l’agencement linguistique au système de la réalité” (to the grammatical relation that links the members of the utterance an implicit “that is” is added that connects the linguistic arrangement to the system of reality) (Problems in General Linguistics). A “that is” would accompany all of our sentences, at least the declarative ones, just as a Kantian “I think” would accompany all of our representations. Once again, “to be” has this function pre-eminently. For on the one hand, “Socrates is mortal” asserts that Socrates is mortal, just as “Socrates drinks” asserts that Socrates drinks. But on the other hand, “is,” as attested by the “that is” written by Benveniste, or the English “isn’t it?”—the French n’est-ce pas? but the German nicht wahr?—is equivalent to a declaration of this declarative force, a doubling-up or a second degree, while it also functions as a substitute for any affirmation, hence a general equivalent that is as universal with regard to assertion as the copula is with regard to cohesion. This second function, called the “veridical usage,” was recently foregrounded by Charles Kahn as characteristic par excellence of the Greek einai: thus, legein ta onta [λέγειν τὰ ὄντα] standardly means “to call things as they are,” “to say the truth” (cf. Thucydides, 7.8.2, cited by Kahn, Logic of Being). As such, it was able to provide the groundwork for the Parmenidean starting point all by itself. Thus, for Pierre Aubenque, Parmenides “confuses” the veridical, universal function (“to be” means “it is the case, it is true,” and is contrasted with opinion) and the lexical, particular meaning (“to be” means “to be permanent” and is contrasted with becoming). With the “paralogism” that consists in universalizing the lexical particular meaning in the name of the universality of the syntactic function, thus making the two opposites, “becoming” and “seeming,” coincide, we arrive at the prôton pseudos (first lie/first error), “foundational to metaphysics” (“Syntaxe et sémantique de l’être”; cf. “Onto-logique”). This assertoric function, which leads to the veridical meaning, is surely intertwined with the existential meaning (to name ta onta is to name existent reality, Wirklichkeit), as well as the copulative function (“Socrates is mortal” claims that Socrates is indeed mortal). It is in fact nothing other than a symptom of the “pretension of being outside of language” (the expression is Derrida’s, “Le supplément de copule”), or, in other terms, the specifically ontological transference of logos. The grammatical characteristic of einai, so rightly called a substantive, is thus to be able to take the place of all the others to link them and to declare, in language, in the world or toward the world, and in our thought. “To be” is, alone, the matrix or grammatical projection of this “trinitary unity” be-think-speak of which Parmenides’s Poem is the first manifestation (Hoffmann, Die Sprache und die archaische Logik). To evaluate this fusion or confusion between the function and characteristic meaning of einai, we of course have two possibilities: we may declare it an accidental homonymy and a linguistic obstacle to rational intelligibility, or a historic feat and a mark of “the Greek conception of the essence of being [Wesen des Seins, the being-hood of being]” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. ¶70) as opening. Either way, no one denies that it is a fact of language. (See ESSENCE, I, where Mill’s comparatist position may be, mutatis mutandis, placed alongside Benveniste’s, and Hintikka’s historicizing, or even “historializing,” position alongside that of Heidegger.) . II. Esti: The Third-Person Singular A. The route “que esti” Parmenides’s Poem, On Nature or on Being, is always referred to as a foundational text of ontology. “These few words stand there like archaic Greek statues. What we still possess of Parmenides’ didactic poem fits into one slim volume, one that discredits the presumed necessity of entire libraries of philosophical literature. Anyone today who is acquainted with the standards of such a thinking discourse must lose all desire to write books” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, ¶74). It is the paradigmatic text where this fusion may be deciphered. This is what the divinity says to the young man: Eἰ δ’ ἄγ’ ἐγὼν ἐϱέω, ϰόμισαι δὲ σὺ μῦθον ἀϰούσας, αἵπεϱ ὁδοὶ μοῦναι διζήσιός εἰσι νοῆσαι· ἡ μὲν ὅπως ἔστιν τε ϰαὶ ὡς οὐϰ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι, πειθοῦς ἐστι ϰέλευθος, ἀληθείῃ γὰϱ ὀπηδεῖ, [5] ἡ δ’ ὡς οὐϰ ἔστιν τε ϰαὶ ὡς χϱεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι, τὴν δή τοι φϱάζω παναπευθέα ἔμμεν ἀταϱπόν· οὔτε γὰϱ ἂν γνοίης τό γε μὴ ἐὸν, οὐ γὰϱ ἀνυστόν, οὔτε φϱάσαις. (Come now, and I will tell you (and you must carry my account away with you when you have heard it) the only ways of enquiry that are to be thought of. The one, that [it] is and that it is impossible for [it] not to be, is the path of Persuasion (for she attends upon Truth); [5] the other, that [it] is not and that it is needful that [it] not be, that I declare to you is an altogether indiscernible track: for you could not know what is not—that cannot be done—nor indicate it.) (II.1–8; Presocratic Philosophers, §291) 314 ESTI the route itself, or a name or pronoun contained in the Greek (“being,” “reality,” “something,” “he,” “it”), which was then loaded with a more or less heavy metaphysical, physical, or epistemological sense (reality, the true, the object of knowledge). Thus, J. Barnes translates lines 3 and 5 by both “that it is” and “that it is not”— “it” being the object of inquiry (Presocratic Philosophers; “Let us take a student, a, and an object of study, O; and suppose that a is studying O”). G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield do the same, and comment: “What is the ‘[it]’ which our translation has supplied as grammatical subject to Parmenides’ verb estin? Presumably, any subject of enquiry whatever—in any enquiry you must assume either that your subject is or that it is not” (Presocratic Philosophers). b. Those that understand in the verb only the verb. It is here that the possibility of esti’s being an “impersonal” arises (see on this point the different classifications in RT: Dictionnaire grec française and LSJ). In Greek, the relation between so-called personal and impersonal forms is all the more noticeable since esti (or the pl. eisi [εἰσί]) at the beginning of a sentence commonly means “there is.” It can even take a modal sense when followed by an infinitive, “it is possible that”: thus, in verse 3 of fragment 2, “kai hôs ouk esti mê einai” may be translated “and that it is not possible not to be” (cf. 6.1, esti gar einai [ἔστι γὰϱ εἶναι], “it is possible to be”). We must note that all of our languages, unlike Greek, require an apparent or grammatical subject, whereas esti in Greek, or the plural eisi, at the beginning of a sentence, is often followed by the “real” subject (not, as in the poem by Rimbaud, which Heidegger liked to cite to explicate the giving of es gibt: “au bois, il y a un nid de bêtes blanches [in the woods, there is a nest of white animals], but “esti Between the two routes of inquiry capable of being conceived, the only one that we may know and express, that of the persuasion that accompanies truth, is called: esti, “it is,” third-person singular of the present of the verb “to be” (hê men [hodos] hopôs estin, the first [route], that it is, 2.3, repeated in 8.1, muthos odoio hôs estin [μῦθος ὀδοῖο ὡς ἔστιν],“the word of the path/the account of the route, that it is”). If einai is not just any verb, esti is not just any form of it. “The definite and particular verb form ‘is,’ the third person singular of the present indicative, has a priority here. We do not understand ‘Being’ with regard to the ‘thou art,’ ‘you are,’ ‘I am,’ or ‘they would be’ ” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics). Esti implies its own mode (the “indicative”: it is there, it is the case, it is true—or always already there), a time (the “present”: it is now, simultaneous with the utterance—or outside of time), a number (a “singular”: it is one, unique—or without number), and a person (the “third”: it is the other, exteriority—or impersonal, open). Of course, as in Latin and unlike in French or English, the indication of a person (third-person singular) is sufficient in Greek for the expression of the subject: “is” just means “is,” but esti, without a pronoun, may be “is,” but also “he (or “she” in the feminine, or “it” in the neuter) is.” Normally, of course, when the subject is not expressed, this is because it just was or it is easy to deduce (“Socrates arrives; [he, not expressed in Greek] is ugly”). There are thus two types of translation for esti: a. Those that presuppose a subject (“to suppose” and “subject” would be expressed by the same word if we took up that theme, hupokeisthai [ὑποϰεῖσθαι], hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον]; see SUBJECT). The subjects envisioned have been either the closest noun, namely, 1 The status of the Aristotelian distinctions v. ANALOGY, CATEGORY, HOMONYM, SOPHISM Aristotle uses, like any Greek speaker, the verb einai in the full range of its meanings. As a philosopher, however, in the Metaphysics, he discusses the variety of senses of being and stigmatizes, in the Sophistical Refutations, for example, the errors of reasoning and the sophisms that can be attributed to confusion with regard to them. Whether or not he is aware, as Benveniste is, of the relations between categories of thought and of language (Problems in General Linguistics), Aristotle proposes ontologically foundational distinctions and constantly makes use of modern distinctions, sometimes “unconsciously,” including those that constitute, by way of the “ontologies” of computer science, the structure of the semantic web. Being (to einai), or reality (to on [τό ὂν]), is pollachôs legomenon [πολλαχῶς λεγόμενον]: it is said in many ways, very precisely differentiated from homonymy (the multiplicity of senses is stated several times in the Metaphysics, Δ 7; E2; Θ 10). In one sense, which covers and even defines the copulative function, it is said “according to accident” (to kata sumbebêkos [τὸ ϰατὰ συμϐεϐηϰός]): “when one says ‘this is that,’ it means that ‘that is an accident of this’” (Δ 7.1017a12–13). In a second sense, which covers the veridical sense, being is said “as true (hôs alêthes [ὡς ἀληθές]), and non-being as false” (E2.1026a34–35). Further, there are the “figures of the categories” or “heads of predication” (schêmata tês katêgorias [σχήματα τῆς ϰατηγοϱίας], 36; see WORD, Box 2), a finite and practically invariant list of angles of attack, of imputations (what is may be: “essence, quantity, quality, relative, in a place, at a time”; it may “be in a position, having, acting, suffering,” to take the canonical list of chap. 4 of the Categories). The first category, however, ousia [οὐσία], a noun derived from the participle on and translated by “essence” or “substance” (see ESSENCE and SUBJECT, I), is the one that determines the consistency and the subsistence of the subject of predication: it thus picks out the existential sense of einai, and unifies the other categories that are only said with regard to the “unique principle” that it constitutes (Γ 2.1003b5–10; see HOMONYM, II). There remains a final sense: that of “in potentiality and in actuality” (dunamei kai energeiai [δυνάμει ϰαὶ ἐνεϱγείᾳ]) (E 2.1026b1–2), which modern linguistics has not taken advantage of (see ASPECT), unlike modern ontology (see ACT). This is the most enigmatic one for us, as we do not really distinguish physics (see FORCE, Box 1), praxis (see PRAXIS), and semantics. ESTI 315 Schofield), we find “it is the case” (Kahn’s veridical use), — is— (A. Mourelatos’s provisional copula), il y a (M. Conche’s givenness). But no one offers the complete freedom of translation by est (is), which would allow the poem to take advantage of the combined “is,” and to thus establish philosophy as a fact of language. . B. From esti (is) to to eon (reality) The reason we should not assume a subject for this first esti is that, in a way, the whole poem consists in an effort to construct it. And the reason it is essential to translate esti by “is” is that we must be able to perform the nominal development un nid de bêtes blanches”). Further, neither French nor German is as fortunate as English in this matter since they (“il y a,” “es gibt”) cannot reproduce the same as the same (“there is” in English) (see ES GIBT, HÁ). To understand and translate the esti of this route, we must start with the characteristic fusion in Greek of assertion, copula, existence, givenness, and not restrict it to one part or dimension of itself, and hence reject any partial translations, especially those that presuppose or invent a subject, thus blocking a whole series of possible meanings. They have all, however, been proposed or embraced, their proponents sometimes venturing that their choice contains all the others: besides “it is” (Barnes; Kirk, Raven, and 2 The accentuation of esti The Greek texts are initially given to us in the form of scriptio continua, in uncial script (letters resembling uppercase), without separations between words, without punctuation, without accents. Their progression to the form in which we publish them, which requires among other things expanding a variety of abbreviations and knowing different forms of ligatures between letters, is obviously a source of mistakes. To “emend” a text, to judge the plausibility of a confusion and hence a correction, we must always pay attention to the conditions of the transmission of manuscripts. Accentuation was codified not only late, but according to different criteria. As regards esti, accents distinguish the type of use being made of the verb: most modern authors write enclitic esti as (ἐστι) to indicate the copulative, predicative, or identity uses, and orthotonic esti (ἔστι) to indicate existential and potential uses. This rule completes the oldest rule of simple position, with esti (ἔστι) accentuated when it is at the beginning (or after words like alla, ei, kai, hopôs, ouk, hôs)— actually the two rules overlap each other since an esti at the beginning of the sentence or verse is likely to be a strong, “accentuated” esti, with the sense of “there is,” “there exists,” “it is possible.” This late codification, which governs the distinction between the existential and copulative senses, nevertheless is in danger of impeding the free play of the breadth of esti, irreducibly semantic and functional, a complete fact of language, and of requiring overdetermined choices with regard to a state of the language, and the work on the language that is being done. This is the case especially in Parmenides’s Poem and Gorgias’s Treatise on Non-being. In any case, it marks choices in the Greek of the interpreters. Thus, in Parmenides, 7.34, with the same accentuation, we may understand esti as a verb of existence (Simplicius, Beaufret), or as autonymous (Aubenque, O’Brien, Conche, or Cassin; see Aubenque, “Syntaxe et sémantique de l’être”). But depending on how we accent verse 35, we will understand it as autonymous or as a simple copula. There are thus two possible accentuations, and three types of translation: ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε ϰαὶ οὕνεϰεν ἔστι νόημα οὐ γὰϱ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν εὑϱήσεις τὸ νοεῖν· (Or c’est le même, penser et ce à dessein de quoi il y a pensée [Yet thinking and that about which there is thought are the same].) (Car sans l’être où il est devenu parole, tu ne trouveras le penser [For without the being in which it has become word, you will not find the thought].) (Beaufret, Parménide) ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε ϰαὶ οὕνεϰεν ἔστι νόημα οὐ γὰϱ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν εὑϱήσεις τὸ νοεῖν· (C’est une même chose que penser et la pensée < affirmant > : « est », car tu ne trouveras pas le penser sans l’être, dans lequel < le penser > est exprimé [Thinking and the thought are the same thing: “is,” for you will not find the thinking without the being, in which is expressed].) (O’Brien, Le Poème de Parménide) ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε ϰαὶ οὕνεϰεν ἔστι νόημα οὐ γὰϱ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν, εὑϱήσεις τὸ νοεῖν· (C’est la même chose penser et la pensée que « est » [Thinking and the thought that “is” are the same thing] car sans l’étant dans lequel « est » se trouve formulé, tu ne trouveras pas le penser [for without the being in which “is” is formulated, you will not find the thinking].) (Cassin, Parménide) REFS.: Aubenque, Pierre. “Syntaxe et sémantique de l’être.” In Etudes sur Parménide. Vol. 2. Paris: Vrin, 1987. Beaufret, Jean. Parménide. Le Poème. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955. Cassin, Barbara. Parménide. Sur la nature ou sur l’étant. La langue de l’être? Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. O’Brien, D., and J. Frère. Le Poème de Parménide. Paris: Vrin, 1987. 316 ESTI their own level, we may compare the ontological sections of Plato’s Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with a narrative section from Thucydides; we can then see the altogether unprecedented character of those formulations that were imposed upon the Greeks by their philosophers” (Heidegger, Being and Time, §7). As it happens, philosophers have never stopped creating technical terms, ever more expressions to express more and more intimately the par excellence nature of to on as it arises here, exploiting the semantic resources offered by the most common Greek, thus revealing the play of these resources as a possibility for thought. Thus, the adverb ontôs [ὄντως] (made from the participle on), which means “really, truly, authentically,” confirming the link between the existential and veridical senses. It is used in this sense by Euripides (Héraclès, 610: “Did you truly [ontôs] go to Hades?” and Aristophanes (The Clouds, 86: “If you really [ontôs] love me”). Plato uses it in turn like everyone else, correlated with alêthos [ἀληθῶς], for example, despite emphasizing its literalness in context (“then it definitely seems that false speech really and truly arises from that kind of putting together of verbs and names”; ontôs te kai alêthos gignesthai logos pseudês [ὄντως τε ϰαὶ ἀληθῶς γίγνεσθαι λόγος ψευδής]; Sophist, 263d). The Stranger can then play with Sophistical panache on the fact that non-being, as an image or seeming (eidôlon [εἴδωλον]), is not “really/authentically” (see REALITY) non-being. STRANGER: Meaning by true, really being (ontôs on [ὄντως ὄν]) ? THEAETETUS: —Yes. S.: So you’re saying that that which is like is not really that which is, if you speak of it as not true (ouk ontôs ouk on [οὐϰ ὄντως οὐϰ ὄν]). T.: But it is, in a way (esti pôs [ἔστι πως]). S.: But not truly (oukoun alêthôs [οὔϰουν ἀληθῶς]), you say. T.: No, except that it really is a likeness (eikôn ontôs [εἰϰὼν ὄντως]). S.: So it’s not really what is, but it really is what we call a likeness (ouk on ara ouk ontôs estin ontôs hên legomen eikona [οὐϰ ὄν ἄϱα οὐϰ ὄντως ἐστὶν ὄντως ἣν λέγομεν εἰϰόνα])? (Sophist, 240b3–13; see MIMÊSIS, I) Simply put, an image is not really non-being, but the reader is supposed to lose his footing in these matters, and cannot count on the translator (thus Cordero: “That which we say is really a copy does not really exist”). In any case, it is clear that Plato makes the adverb ontôs into a technical term by nominalizing the phrase to ontôs on [τὸ ὄντως ὄν], which is often translated as “authentic being.” For the “friends of the forms” (tous tôn eidôn philous [44]), ontôs on and ontôs ousia [ὄντως οὐσία] refer to real being and real, unchanging, existence, which is the province of reasoning and the soul, in contrast with becoming, which is the province of perception and the body: it refers to the eidê themselves (Sophist, 248a11; cf. Phaedrus, 247c7, e3; cf. also Republic, 10.597d1–2, where the god, unlike the carpenter and the painter, wishes “to be really the creator of of to eon [τὸ ἔον], “being,” from or on the basis of this “is”—to create the first subject from the first verb. The different stages all correspond to grammatical forms: from esti, “is,” comes the participle eon, “being,” in its verbal form, that is, without an article. This is made possible by a prior transformation, whose priority is indicated by an “indeed”: from “is,” we first see the infinitive “to be” come to the fore: Xϱὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ’ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰϱ εἶναι (Chrê to legein te noein t’ eon emmenai; esti gar einai).> (It is necessary to say this and think this: [it is] in being [that] is; is in effect to be.) (6.1) (Regarding the variety of constructions and possible translations of this sentence, see Cassin, Parménides; to get an idea of the breadth of the variations, consider: “What is for saying and for thinking of must be; for it is for being” [Barnes, Presocratic Philosophers]; “What is there to be said and thought must needs be: for it is there for being”[Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers].) Finally, in 8.32, the nominalization of the participle yields its definitive fullness of a subject: to eon, “being.” We must emphasize the role of the article, ho, hê, to, descended from the Homeric demonstrative, which confers the consistency of a proper noun (in Greek: ho Sôkratês [ὁ Σωϰϱάτης], “the Socrates”; see WORD, II.A), of a subject-substance (the difference between subject and predicate is marked in Greek not by the order of the words but by the presence or absence of the article). The deictic article enters thus into the formation of the third-person personal pronoun, autos [αὐτός], “himself,” ipse, which becomes Platonic terminology for the status of the idea kath’ auto [ϰαθ’ αὑτό], “in itself.” Preceded by the article, ho autos, it means idem and marks in the Poem the expression of the self-identity of being (see I/ME/MYSELF, Box 2): Tαὐτόν τ’ ἐν ταὐτῷ τε μένον ϰαθ’ ἑαυτό τε ϰεῖται χοὔτως ἔμπεον αὖθι μένει·ϰϱατεϱὴ γὰϱ’ Aνάγϰη πείϱατος ἐν δεσμοῖσιν ἔχει, τό μιν ἀμφὶς ἐέϱγει, οὕνεϰεν οὐϰ ἀτελεύτητον τὸ ἐὸν θέμις εἶναι. (Remaining the same and in the same place it lies on its own and thus fixed it will remain. For strong Necessity holds it within the bonds of a limit, which keeps it in on every side. Therefore it is right that what is should not be imperfect.) (8.29–32) Thus, at the end of the route of esti lies the sphere of to eon, with the very words used to name Ulysses in his heroic identity when he is sung to by the Sirens (Homer, Odyssey, 12.158–64; see Cassin, Parménide). III. Greek Ontological Terminology: to ontôs on, ousia, to on hê on, to ti ên einai “We may remark that it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar.’ If we may allude to some earlier researches on the analysis of Being, incomparable on ESTI 317 But the expression of negation adds another kind of problem since Greek has two ways of negating. One is by ou (ouk, ouch) [οὐ]: it is a factual, “objective” negation, which is applied to a real fact or one that is presented as such. The other is by mê [μή]: this covers both “subjective” and “prohibitive” negation, which implies a will and a supposition of the mind (see, e.g., Meillet and Mendryes, Traité de grammaire comparé des langues classiques, §882–83). We find the latter mainly in modes other than the indicative, related in fact to “modality” (subjunctive, optative), to express all the nuances of prohibition, deliberation, wish and regret, eventuality, or virtuality. Similarly, one may distinguish ouk on [οὐϰ ὄν] and mê on [μὴ ὄν], “not being,” distributing all the nuances that can come with a participle, whether more factual and causal ones (ouk on [x], “insofar as, because, it is not [x]”) or more adversative, concessive, hypothetical (mê on [y], “although, given that, even though, it is not [y]”). The contrast is maintained, of course, when the participle is nominalized. Thus, ho ouk on, hoi ouk ontes, in the masculine, is Thucydides’s way of referring to the dead (2.44 and 45). Similarly, to ouk on is used to refer to a possible passage between being and non-being; for example, Melissus, a student of Parmenides, denies becoming in these terms: “for it would be in pain in virtue of something’s passing from it or being added to it, and it would no longer be alike. Nor could what is healthy be in pain, for then what is (to eon) would perish and what is not (to de ouk eon) would come into being” (30 B 7, §533). In contrast, to mê on is what is not, not because it is not, but because it cannot or must not be. To ouk on and to mê on are thus two distinctive ways of signifying “non-being,” contrasting with the unitary to on. In the Poem, however, once we advance along the route of “is not,” ouk esti, we come upon the mê rather than the ouk, so much so that on this route, unlike that of “is,” the verb does not give rise to any subject. To mê on, a nominalized participle, refers to non-being insofar as it is not simply non-existent, but prohibited, impossible (2.6–7: “for you could not know what is not—that cannot be done [to ge mê on, literally, “the in any case non-being”]—nor indicate it”). The choice of this negation implies that there is neither passage nor commensurability between being and non-being, and that the route of “is not” is a dead end. However, if we stick to the logic of prohibitive negation, as the Stranger emphasizes in Plato’s Sophist, there can be no “right speaking about non-being” (239b): to utter to mê on is already, from the fact of uttering it, to confer a kind of existence on non-being (the non-being); in addition, it grants it, by way of the form of the utterance, a kind of unity (the nonbeing)—two ways of going against the proper meaning of the prohibitive expression whether we like it or not (237a–239b). Whence the philosophical choice of reinterpreting this negation and making it only the mark of otherness, a distinction, a difference, rather than of a contradiction or a prohibition. “Each time we say to mê on, it seems, we say not the opposite of on, but simply another” (ouk enantion ti all’ heteron monon, 257b). In this case, against the background of the participation of Ideas in each other, the negation mê is brought back to the negation ou, and both are brought back to affirmation—not that every determination is negation, as Spinoza would say, but every negation is determination: the bed which really is”; einai ontôn klinês poiêtês ontôs ousês [εἶναι ὄντως ϰλίνης ποιητὴς ὄντως οὔσης],” that is, the idea, to eidos [τὸ εἶδος], of “what bed is”; ho esti klinê [ὃ ἔστι ϰλίνη] [597a1]). These constructions become even more and differently complex, with Neoplatonism, which intermingles the expressions of the Sophist and Parmenides with Aristotelian and especially Stoic distinctions to yield, by way of ontôs onta and mê ontôs mê onta, “truly/really existents” and “not-truly/notreally non-existents” a mê on huper to on [μὴ ὄν ὑπὲϱ τὸ ὄν], a “non-being above being,” which contrasts with an “absolute non-being,” “pure and simple,” haplôs mê on [ἁπλῶς μὴ ὄν], and allows us to solve the problem of the definition of God (Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus). The same philosophical investment of common language is found at the purely semantic level. We know that ousia has its standard meaning, coming from the law, of “property, fortune,” which implies belonging and possession as well as actual and visible presence (we thus read in Euripides’s Helen the following dialogue: “Theoclymenus: Tell me, how do you bury those who have been drowned at sea? —Menelaus: As lavishly as a man’s substance lets him do (hôs an parousês ousias [ὡς ἂν παϱούσης οὐσίας]),” ll. 1252–53, Eng. trans. R. Lattimore; see ESSENCE, III). This is the word, however, that Aristotle subsequently uses to refer “chiefly and primarily and almost exclusively” to his object of inquiry: “And indeed the question which, both now and of old, has always been raised, and always been the subject of doubt, viz. what being is, is just the question, what is substance?” (ti to on, touto esti tis hê ousia [τί τὸ ὄν, τοῦτο ἐστὶ τίς ἡ οὐσία]) (Metaphysics Z.1.1028b1–7). Later, with Epicurus and Plotinus, we find ousiotês [οὐσιότης] to mean “substantiality” (Corpus hermeticum, 12.1), and the adjective ousiôdes [οὐσιώδης] to indicate an aggregate (Epicurus, De rerum natura, 14.1). The nominalization linked to repetition remains the key for philosophical technique. It is thus with to on hêi on [τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν], “being insofar as it is being,” or “being qua being,” “and not qua numbers, lines or fire,” of which the beginning of book Gamma of the Metaphysics claims there is a science, the inquiry into which is the work of the philosopher (1.1003a21; 2.1003b15–19 and 1004b5–6). Similarly for the enigmatic to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], which duplicates the question, also nominalized, of to ti esti [τὸ τί ἔστι] (the “what it is,” the “essence,” as it is translated), to refer to something like the heart of the heart of being—“the essential of the essence” (see TO TI ÊN EINAI). IV. Ouk Esti: Non-Being, Void, Nothing A. The two kinds of negation, ou and mê 1. Esti, ouk esti and to on, to ouk on, to mê on Parmenides’s Poem offers two routes of inquiry, which, since they are contradictory, are apparently symmetrical: esti and ouk esti, “is” and “is not” (2.3 and 5). The complexity of the meaning of esti indeed goes both for its use in affirmation as well as negation: “is,” “it is,” “there exists,” “it is possible that,” “it is the case”/“is not,” “it is not,” “there is no,” “it is not possible that, it is not the case” (see above, I and II.A). 318 ESTI others” (Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction) subtly realigns the difference between negation and privation. Aristotle discusses this difference between “negation” and “privation.” They are two of the four ways of “being opposite” (antikeisthai [ἀντιϰεῖσθαι]): Things are said to be opposed to one another in four ways: as relatives [ta pros ti] or as contraries [ta enantia] or as privation and possession [sterêsis kai hexis] or as affirmation and negation [kataphasis kai apophasis]. Examples of things thus opposed (to give a rough idea) are: as relatives, the double and the half; as contraries, the good and the bad; as privation and possession, blindness and sight [tuphlotês kai opsis]; as affirmation and negation, he is sitting—he is not sitting [kathêtai-ou kathêtai]. (Categories, 10.11b17–23; trans. Barnes) Two kinds of phenomenon, often badly distinguished, arise here. Negation (apophasis [ἀπόϕασις], from apo-, “far from,” and phainô, “to show”), like affirmation (kataphasis [ϰατάϕασις], where kata, “on,” “about,” refers to “saying,” i.e., predication), is in the first instance a fact of syntax (see SUBJECT, I). Affirmation and negation are contradictory So we won’t agree with somebody who says that denial signifies a contrary. We’ll only admit this much: when “not” (mê) and “non-” (ou) are prefixed to names that follow them, they indicate something other than the names, or rather, other than the things to which the names following the negation are applied. (Sophist, 257b–c) Plato, following Gorgias, can catch Parmenides in his own trap by stating that to utter non-being is already to make it be. The Parmenidean orthodoxy, on the other hand, would be justified in reducing the move in the Sophist, assimilating non-being and otherness, to a pure and simple engagement in the way of doxa, this too human way of mortals who do not know how to distinguish “is” and “is not” (“race which does not distinguish, for which to exist and not to be (to pelein— archaic form of einai—te kai ouk einai [τὸ πέλειν τε ϰαὶ οὐϰ εἶναι]) are reckoned same and not-same”; 6.9–10; see DOXA). . 2. Negation and privation The difference between “these two particles of negation which the Greek language likely understood before all the 3 The “Treatises on non-being,” or how non-being is non-being There is no correct expression of non-being. That means that to utter non-being, to mê on, contradicts its existence, once we suppose with Parmenides that being, thinking, and saying all belong to one another. The statement contradicts the proposition (see SPEECH ACT). This also implies that any proposition about it, first and foremost the one asserting its identity, “non-being is non-being,” is self-contradictory. As for “to be,” semantics is inseparable from syntax. This is Gorgias’s position in any case, and it initiates a long series—Peri tou mê ontos [Пεϱὶ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος], De nihilo, Elogio del nulla, and Glorie del niente (see Ossola, Le antiche Memorie del Nulla), showing for the first time how nonbeing in a language, Greek in this case, is an exception analogous to that of being—but much more interesting as only it can reveal the exceptional surreptitiousness of being and the proposition asserting the identity of being, without which there would be no ontology. Εἰ μὲν γὰϱ τὸ μὴ εἶναι ἔστι μὴ εἶναι, οὐδὲν ἂν ἧττον τὸ μὴ ὂν τοῦ ὄντος εἴη. Τό τε γὰϱ μὴ ὄν ἐστι μὴ ὄν, ϰαὶ τὸ ὂν ὄν, ὥστε οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἢ εἶναι ἢ οὐϰ εἶναι τὰ πϱάγματα. Εἰ δ’ ὅμως τὸ μὴ εἶναι ἔστι, τὸ εἶναι, φησίν, οὐϰ ἔστι, τὸ ἀντιϰείμενον. Εἰ γὰϱ τὸ μὴ εἶναί ἐστι, τὸ εἶναι μὴ εἶναι πϱοσήϰει. ῞Ωστε οὐϰ ἂν οὕτως οὐδὲν ἂν εἴη, εἰ μὴ ταὐτόν ἐστιν εἶναί τε ϰαὶ μὴ εἶναι. Εἰ δὲ ταὐτό, ϰαὶ οὕτως οὐϰ ἂν εἴη οὐδέν· τό τε γὰϱ μὴ ὂν οὐϰ ἔστι ϰαὶ τὸ ὄν, ἐπείπεϱ γε ταὐτὸ τῷ μὴ ὄντι. (For if not to be is not to be, non-being would be no less than being: indeed, non-being is non-being just as being is being; such that these things are no less than they are not. But if, however, not to be is, it follows that to be is not. Such that in this case nothing would be, as long as to be and not to be are not the same thing. But if they are the same thing, in this case nothing would be: indeed nonbeing is not, just as being, if indeed it is the same thing as non-being.) (Gorgias, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias, 979a25–34) If we follow the argument, what is genuinely impossible is to make a distinction (the krisis of Parmenides’s Poem) between the series “not to be, non-being, non-existence” (to mê einai, mê einai, to mê on, mê on) and “to be, being, existence” (to einai, einai, to on, on). As Hegel notes at the beginning of the Theorie Werkausgabe, “Those who insist on the difference between being and nothingness must say what that difference consists in.” Indeed, in order to make a distinction we must be able to identify, and that is precisely what does not work with non-being. In the identity statement “non-being is non-being” (to mê einai esti mê einai), non-being is not self-identical since everything has changed from one occurrence to the next (“it is as though there were two beings”; Gorgias, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias, 979a39). This is especially true in Greek: since the order of the words is not rule-bound, the predicate is only known by the absence of an article. The required article before the subject is the mark of its consistency or substantiality. It indicates that any assertion of a subject in an identity statement presupposes existence, or again that to say that “non-being is non-being” we must already have admitted that “non-being is” (see I and Box 2, and cf. WORD ORDER). Far from refusing to distinguish between the different meanings of the pollachôs legomenon “to be,” as Aristotle asserts, Gorgias in fact makes it clear that the problem, the equivocity, in a word the sophism are the philosopher’s fault, since they cleave to “is” and its ontological understanding. With “being is being” the difference between subject and predicate remains imperceptible since the two sequences “being is” and “being is being” confirm one another and even become intertwined, just like the existential and copulative meanings of “is.” The traditional identity ESTI 319 The difference between negation and privation is, in any case, a question of perspective. A stone, which has no eyes, is obviously “lacking sight,” “not seeing” (mê negation, as it lies outside the sphere of the predicate). But for a mole, it depends: if we consider it as an animal with eyes, thus by its kind, it is “deprived of sight,” “badly seeing” (tuphlos: Greek here says affirmatively what French says privatively: a-veugle, ou negation), since in general animals see. On the other hand, if we consider a mole with regard to the mole species, it is “nonseeing” just like the stone, since no moles see (Metaphysics, 4.2.1004a10–16 and 5.22; cf. Cassin and Narcy’s commentary in La décision du sens). In any case, the characteristic of privation is to be, according to the phrase of the Physics (2.1.193b19–20), eidos pôs [εἶδος πώς]: “in a way form.” And Heidegger comments in the following way on this “negation,” this privation (sterêsis zur Anwesung, absencing for presencing), which may be linked with the great privation that is alêtheia (see TRUTH, I.B): Sterêsis as absencing is not simply absentness; rather, it is a presencing, namely, that kind in which the absencing but not the absent thing) is present. (Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1) propositions that cannot be simultaneously true (see PRINCIPLE, I.B). From this point of view, ou and mê are on the same level: they are both adverbs of negation that may affect the whole proposition, most often by way of the verb (ouk esti leukon could be translated “it is not white,” or “it is not true that”—in contemporary jargon, “it is not the case that—it is white”), even though the choice of one negation or the other, as we have seen, is not insignificant. On the other hand, privation (sterêsis [στέϱησις], from steromai, “to lack, to lose,” from the same family as the German stehlen, “to steal”), which is often expressed by the aptly named alpha privative, affects only the predicate, and is thus entirely different grammatically. However, insofar as it “deprives” something of a predicate, it implies that the subject is concerned with this predicate at least as a possibility, and thus contains a certain sort of affirmation: akinêton esti means that something is immobile, but capable of movement—this is why it is strictly speaking said of man, but not plants (which by definition grow but do not move). Here, then, the alpha privative and factual negation by ou are on the same side with regard to negation in terms of impossibility or prohibition as mê: what is akinêton, im-mobile, can move (even though it is not moving actually, ou kineitai), and it is not true to say of it the mê kinêton einai, that it is “non-mobile.” statement exploits and hides the equivocity of “is” and turns it into a rule. Only the case of non-being makes it possible to become aware of the difference usually written into the statement of identity: the “is not” must become the rule of “is.” And it is speech all by itself that, in its constitutive linearity related to its temporality, cannot help producing this catastrophe, which the Sophist aims to make heard. These statements about the identity of non-being are of course difficult to translate and sources of error. In every treatise on nonbeing, whether Sophistical and/or apologetic in its aims, pure and simple non-being or non-being beyond being, the difficulties are idiomatic and inventive, related to the syntax of negation, to the grammatical possibilities of moving from a verb to a noun and the other way around (Il niente annientato is, for example, the name of a treatise by Raimondo Vidal [1634]) and to the names of non-being. A good example is Charles de Bovelles’s De nihilo (1509), which attempts to deal with the problems of the Creator, the creature, and creation. It begins with the statement of identity “Nihil nihil est,” “Le Néant n’est rien” (Nothingness is nothing), and then extracts two lessons from it: hujusque orationis que insit nichil esse nichil, gemina sit intelligentia, negativa una, altera assertiva et positiva. (from this proposition “Nothingness is nothing” there are two readings, one negative and one affirmative and positive.) (Le livre du néant) One cannot help but notice the distance between the incipit “Nihil nihil est” and its translation “Le néant n’est rien,” which, besides the inevitable word order, makes the statement of identity invisible. Perhaps French requires something like a “portmanteau translation” to retain the affirmative character of the sentence: “le néant est néant” and the negative extenuation “le rien n’est rien”—each an equally acceptable translation of the attempted identification. The most recent treatise on non-being is no doubt the one written by Heidegger in German, over the course of his work, from Was ist Metaphysik? and Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929) where Nothingness appears as the origin of negation, and not the reverse. No doubt this is the inheritance passed down along a “me-ontological” tradition, which mixes with mysticism and deploys the “annihilating” activity of nothingness, the “nichtende Nicht des Nichts” in which we hear under the aegis of the verb, first the adverb nicht, then its nominalization Nicht, then the noun das Nichts; see Taubes, “Von Adverb ‘Nichts’”). Non-being thus becomes, as Gorgias wished, though against his critical intentions, the measure of being—that is, the being of existence: Jenes nichtende Nicht des Nichts und dieses nichtende Nicht der Differenz sind zwar nicht einerlei, aber das Selbe im Sinne dessen, was im Wesenden des Seins des Seienden zusammen gehört. (That nihilative “not” of the nothing and this nihilative “not” of the difference are indeed not identical, yet they are the Same in the sense of belonging together in the essential prevailing of the being of beings.) (Preface to the 3rd ed. of Vom Wesen des Grundes) REFS.: Bovelles, Charles de. Le livre du néant. Translated by P. Magnard. Paris: Vrin, 1983. Breton, Stanislas. La pensée du rien. Kampen: Pharos, 1992. Cassin, Barbara. Si Parménide. Le traité anonyme De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgia. Presses Universitaires de Lille, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 1980. Hegel, G.W.F. Theorie Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1965. Ossola, Carlo. Le antiche memorie del nulla. Rome: Edizioni di Storia et letteratura, 1997. Taubes, Jacob. “Vom Adverb ‘Nichts’ zum Substantiv ‘das Nichts.’ Überlegungen zu Heideggers Frage nach dem Nichts.” In Vom Kult zur Kultur. Fink Verlag, 1996. Translation in: From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (Cultural Memory in the Present). Edited by C. E. Fonrobert and A. J. Assmann. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 320 ESTI sentence of Greek physics such as mêden ek mêdenos [μηδὲν ἐϰ μηδενός], source of the Latin adage nihil ex nihilo, since the evolution of his language allows him to hear something like “rien (ne) provient de rien,” that is, “everything comes from something/nothingness comes from nothingness” (see Boxes 3 and 4). As a side note, we should also forgive translators of Jean-Paul Sartre for not finding the words, in German, for example—even though Sartre does work “like” Heidegger and reformulates his German—to render the difference between rien, or le rien, and néant, or le néant (Hans Schöneberg and Traugott König are reduced to distinguishing them by lowercase nichts and uppercase Nichts [Das Sein und das Nichts]; cf. NOTHING). . Let us take up again the difference between mê on/mêden. Two consequences of very different kinds follow. 1. A syntactic blurring: Mêden is a composite negation, unlike simple negations such as mê (similarly, ouden differs from ou). We then face the question of the meaning of the successive negations. We cannot say that in Greek two negations are simply worth one affirmation. Indeed, everything changes depending on whether we are dealing with simple or composite negations, and according to their order in the sentence. The grammatical rule is all the more tentative as it must take account of the subject of the negation, whether it is a whole phrase or a word, which cannot be precisely determined by applying a rule. Here is how a well-known grammar book treats the question: Greek had at its disposal, besides simple negations (ou and mê), composite forms (oute/mête, oude/mêde, oudeis/ mêdeis, etc.): following the order according to which they are placed, the negative value of the phrase is either reinforced or destroyed. We gladly teach that a simple negation, followed by one or more composite negations, yields a negative reinforcement, whereas a composite negation, followed by a simple negation yields the unreserved destruction of the negation, that is, a total affirmation. This rule works only very broadly: in particular, it takes no account of the following consideration: is the first negation, whether simple or composite, applied really to the whole sentence, or only to a word? (Humbert, Syntaxe grecque; the bold and italics are in the text) We may understand the Greek vacillation with regard to such simple successions as: mêden ouk esti (composite + simple) and ouk esti mêden (simple + composite), which would mean things as different as “there is certainly being” and “certainly, there is absolutely nothing at all.” On its own authority, it would rather mean in both cases: “nothing is,” “no, nothing is,” that is, something analogous to the simple propositions mêden esti and ouk esti, “nothing is,” which only a Gorgias, coming after Parmenides, could varyingly decipher as “no subject for is” and “not even the verb is.” 2. A new semantic adventure: Mêden is, we have seen, a negative characterization by design. But it becomes a positive entity capable of “Remarks like this may seem subtle,” notes Schelling with regard to negation and privation, “but since they relate to effective nuances of thought, they cannot be dispensed with.” Different languages, of course, use different marks for them: The German language has difficulty distinguishing them and can only rely on the accent—if it refuses to make do with Latin expressions. Indeed, it is impossible to be confused as to the difference between est indoctus, est non-doctus, and non est doctus. We can say of a newborn neither the first, indoctus, since he has not yet had the possibility, nor the second, est non-doctus, since he does not find himself in an altogether impossible condition, but we will concede the third, non est doctus, indeed, since it only denies the actuality, but poses the possibility. (Historical-Critical Introduction) B. The names of non-being: from mêden, “nothing,” to den, “less than nothing” What does not exist has several names (see NOTHING). We find, starting with Parmenides’s Poem, two ways of referring to it: to mê on, negative symmetric of on, “being” (for you will not be able to know to ge mê on, the [in any case and certainly] non-being [2.7]), and mêden, which is usually translated by “nothing,” rien, nichts, nada (mêden d’ouk esti [6.2]: nothing is not; see Cassin, Parménide). This second designation, and its translations, deserve some attention. Mêden [μηδέν] is in the first instance a negative term, constituted like mê on: a mê negation (mêde [μηδέ], in this case, “not at all”) followed by a positive term, hen [ἕν], “one” (which would not surprise a Parmenidean, for whom being and one are one, convertuntur). The etymology is obvious: the Plato of the Sophist, for example, makes it clear to drive home the point about performative self-contradiction; when one says mêden, “nothing,” one says mê ti [μή τι], “not something,” that is, hen ge ti [ἕν γε τι], “something one” (237e1–2 and 237d7); mêden thus means mêd’hen, “not even one.” However, unlike to mê on, here we have a single word, and not a composite expression: mêden, like ouden, in a single word, is the neuter pronoun we find even in Homer. With mêden, negation becomes an affirmed, even a positive entity, like “nothing” or “no one.” In this regard, the difference between Greek and French is enlightening: in French, rien, like personne, is positive from the start. Rien comes indeed from the Latin accusative rem, “thing,” and Littré explains that: “1) The etymological and proper meaning of rien is thing. 2) With the negation ne, rien by negating any thing is equivalent to the Latin nihil.” From the twelfth century on, as shown by expressions such as “pour rien,” “de rien,” “mieux que rien,” or “moins que rien” (RT: DHLF), the indefinite pronoun is used in the negative sense with the ne dropped out. We may then attempt to taxonomize the names of what does not exist according to whether they are in the first instance negations (mêden, nihil, néant, niente, “nothing,” Nichts) or affirmations: the French rien, but also the Spanish nada (from the Lat. [res] nata, “[thing] born”). Above all, we may excuse the wavering mind of a French translator or reader faced with a basic ESTI 321 invented the word den to say neither mêden (against a “pure function of negativity”), nor hen (“to avoid speaking of the one” [Le séminaire]). “Given which, den was indeed the clandestine passenger whose silence is now our destiny. In this he is no more materialist than any reasonable person” (“L’Étourdit”). Nothing is harder than to translate a witticism. Dumont (RT: Les Présocratiques) suggests: “Den [being] is nothing more than Mêden [the void],” and the meaning of the invention is immediately lost. Diels and Kranz are lucky enough to be able to rely on a similar invention, a mis-cut on Nichts made by Meister Eckhart, where we hear the iht, invented to be opposed to niht (sermons 57 and 58), and thus translate: “Das Nichts existiert ebenso sehr wie das Ichts.” It is not unfitting that the paths of “Is” and “Is not” leave us with this kind of impasse, alternative, and invention. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Arnauld, Antoine, and Claude Lancelot, with Christian Duclos. Grammaire générale et raisonnée. Introduction by M. Foucault. Republications Paulet, 1969. First published in 1660. Translation: A General and Rational Grammar. Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. First published in 1753. Aubenque, Pierre. “Onto-logique.” In Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, vol. 1, L’Univers philosophique, edited by André Jacob, 5–16. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. . “Syntaxe et sémantique de l’être.” In Etudes sur Parménide. Vol. 2. Paris: Vrin, 1987. Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd rev. ed. London: Routledge 1982. Beaufret, Jean. Parménide. Le Poème. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955. Benveniste, Émile. “Catégorie de pensée et catégorie de langue,” “‘Être’ et ‘Avoir,’ dans leurs fonctions linguistiques,” and “La phrase nominale.” In Problèmes de linguistique générale, 63–74, 187–207, and 151–57. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Translation by M. E. Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Cassin, Barbara. Parménide. Sur la nature ou sur l’étant. La langue de l’être? Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. nominalization, “the mêden, the nothing.” Mêden as a positive term (and no doubt also as a word or signifier) is involved in a different history than mê on. Democritus indeed creates on its basis a word that does not exist, den [δέν] and which the RT: LSJ describes as “abstracted from oudeis” (we find it once in Alcaeus, 320 L. P “in a doubtful and obscure text,” Chantraine clarifies, “where we translate denos by ‘nothing’ or rather by ‘something’ (sic), and there is “no relationship to the modern Greek den, ‘nothing’ ”; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). Democritus affirms, according to Plutarch, that: μὴ ᾶλλον τὸ δὲν ἤ τὸ μῆδεν εἶναι. (den is nothing other than mêden.) (Fragment 68 B 156 DK) The doxographers who transmitted the phrase all offer an intra-linguistic translation. For Plutarch, the source of the fragment, den names the “body” (Galen says specifically the “atoms”; A 49 DK; see also Simplicius, A 37 DK, tangled up with the Aristotelian translations), and mêden, the “void.” We can understand the intent: Democritus needs something that is not an on, a “being,” which is not even a ti, a “something” (a term the Stoics fall back on to avoid Platonic-Aristotelian ousia): a “less than nothing,” therefore, to define this body conceived of as not resembling any body in nature, conceived even to escape the physical, that is, atoms, indivisible. Den is a pure signifier, created from a mistaken cut (a manifestation of indivisibility?) on mêden or ouden, mistaken since the etymology, which can still be heard (med’hen or oud’hen, not even one), implies that we cut at hen, “one.” Den suits the atoms since like them it is a pure artifact. It is not even a word in the language, it is an ad hoc invention, a meaningful play. Lacan sees this very clearly, and returns several times to this joke by Democritus, “who somehow required a clinamen,” and who thus 4 The French ne expletive, a vestige of mê v. MÊTIS, Box 1, VERNEINUNG Unlike Old French, which used simple negation with ne, modern French uses compound negation. With few exceptions, (je ne puis . . ., je ne samurais . . .), the absence of “forclusifs” (pas, mie, goutte, point, plus, rien, which originally denoted positive entities— including rien, from the Latin accusative rem, something) gives the sentence a positive value. Thus, in the statement “Je crains que Pierre ne vienne,” the omission of ne does not change the meaning of the sentence, which expresses fear at the idea that Pierre should come. This statement is distinguished from the statement “Je crains que Pierre ne vienne pas,” which expresses the idea that Pierre might not come. In the first, the ne has no negating force. Whence the use of the term “expletive,” which, according to Littré (RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française), describes a word “which does not contribute to the meaning of the sentence and is not required by syntax.” The expletive ne would thus be an empty sign. Grévisse (RT: Le bon usage. Grammaire française) looks forward to the imminent disappearance of this “parasitic particle” (ed. 1969, §877b), also called “redundant” or “abusive” (ed. 1993, §983). However, the use of the expletive ne is governed by strict grammatical rules. In subordinate phrases, it appears after verbs of fearing, prevention, or doubt, or after conjunctions like à moins que (unless), avant que (before), and sans que (without) and in comparisons of inequality. French usage is thus continuous with the Latin usage “timeo ne, timeo ne non,” and the Greek “dedoika mê, dedoika mê ouk” “je crains que ne,” “je crains que ne pas,” where, to borrow an expression from Humbert, “there is an obstacle in the principal phrase which so to speak sends out its negative reflection” onto the subordinate phrase (RT: Syntaxe grecque, §654). In other words, the expletive ne in the completive retains or accentuates the negative idea expressed by the main verb (je crains qu’il ne vienne) and the positive content of the subordinate phrase (je pense qu’il viendra); this is precisely what the inventive Damourette and Pichon, later taken up by Jacques Lacan, call the “discordantiel” (RT: Des mots à la pensée, vol. VI, chap. 4), a nuance that only French can still express. Marco Basachera Barbara Cassin 322 ETERNITY Cassin, B., and M. Narcy. La décision du sens. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Conche, Marcel. Parménide. Le Poème: Fragments. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “Le supplément de copule.” In Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972. Translation by A. Bass: “The Supplement of Copula.” In Margins of Philosophy, 175–206. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Eckhart, Meister. Die deutschen Werke. Edited by J. Quint. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963. . Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises. Edited and translated by M. O’C. Walshe. Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1987. . Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Translated and introduced by E. Colledge and B. McGinn. New York: Paulist Press, 1981. Euripides. Helen. In The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 3, Euripides, translated by R. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Hadot, Pierre. Porphyre et Victorinus. Vol. 1. Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. Die Physis bei Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967. First published in 1958. . Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1952. Translation by G. Fried and R. Polt: Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. . The Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Ted Sadler. London: Continuum, 2002. . “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1. In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 226–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Sein und Zeit. In GA, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977. First published in 1927. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. . “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Phusis.” In GA, vol. 1. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982. Translation: “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics В, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . “Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit; Einleitung in die Philosophie.” In GA, vol. 31. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982. Translation: The Essence of Truth. On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theatetus. New York: Continuum, 2002. Hoffmann, Ernst. Die Sprache und die archaische Logik. Tübingen: Mohr, 1925. Humbert, J. Syntaxe grecque. 3rd rev. ed. Klincksieck, 1997. Kahn, Charles. “Retrospect on the Verb ‘To Be’ and the Concept of Being.” In The Logic of Being, edited by S. Knuuttila and J. Hintikka, 1–28. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986. . The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek. Edited by J.W.M. Verhaar. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973. Kirk, Geoffrey Stephen, John Earle Raven, and Malcolm Schofield. The Presocratic Philosopher, a Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lacan, Jacques. “L’Étourdit.” Scilicet 4 (1973): 51. . Le séminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre. “Philosophie et philologie: Les traductions des philosophes allemands.” In Encyclopaedia Universalis. Symposium, Les Enjeux, 1, 1990. Meillet, A., and J. Mendryes. Traité de grammaire comparé des langues classiques. 4th rev. ed. Paris: Champion, 1953. Mourelatos, Alexander P. D. The Route to Parmenides. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Parmenides, of Elea. Fragments: A Text and Translation. Edited by D. Gallop. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. . Parmenides. Edited by L. Tarán. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Plato. Platon Le Sophiste. Translated by N. L. Cordero. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. . Sophist. Translated by N. White. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” (On the Different Methods of Translation). In F. Schleiermachers sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, Zur Philosophie. Berlin: Reimer, 1838. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Translated by M. Richey and M. Zisselsberger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. First published in 1856 as Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie. Schöneberg, Hans, and Traugott König. Das Sein und das Nichts. Edited by T. König. Rowohlt Verlag: Reinbek, 1993. ETERNITY Eternity is generally defined as what escapes becoming and time, whether it is a matter of indefinite duration or of being entirely outside of time. However, the very word “eternity” indicates that it is first a question of the duration of a life (Lat. aevum, Gr. aiôn [αἰών]). Between these two poles, across languages and doctrines, the modulations can be considerable. I. Eternity: Duration/Time “Eternity” comes from the Latin aeternitas, and was perhaps created by Cicero to refer to a duration with neither beginning nor end. The term goes back to aevum, aiôn in Greek, which refers, like aetas (cf. age), to the duration of a life, and implies an “animated” conception of duration (RT: Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine). This grouping is distinct from another way of thinking and speaking about time, tempus in Latin, chronos [χρόνος] in Greek, that considers it as determined (a cut, a fraction, a period—the Latin tempus has been compared to the Greek temnô [τέμνω], “to cut”), and thus capable of being quantified, in particular, as “the number of motion according to before and after” (Aquinas). See AIÔN for the main difficulties derived from this distinction, the history of which notably intersects with that of the translations of the Bible (saeculum, not aevum, is used to render aiôn, which yields very subtle distinctions and terminological inventions). On the relationship between time and lifetime, cf. DASEIN, ERLEBEN, LIFE. For the relation between time and movement, see FORCE; cf. FORCE, Box 1, on the Aristotelian definition of movement, and NATURE, WORLD. The linguistic and grammatical expression of duration, in its relation to the aspect of verbs and their tenses, is examined under ASPECT. More generally, see PRESENT and TIME. II. Eternity and Instant Eternity outside of time is related to the instant (from the Latin instans, “present,” and “pressing, menacing”), conceived not as a unit of time but, on the contrary, as an exception to the counting, something impossible to measure. The Greeks termed it kairos [ϰαιρός], the possibility of an occasion distinct from duration and time: see MOMENT (esp. II), as well as AIÔN. Christian theology uses the instant as tota simul, “everything at once,” to conceive of divine eternity: see AIÔN II and GOD. For the relationship between divine eternity and ethical subjectivity, and its expression in Kierkegaard’s Danish, see EVIGHED; cf. CONTINUITET, PLUDSELIGHED. More generally, see INSTANT. III. Procedures of Eternity Regarding the way in which people attempt to escape from the order of time and enter that of eternity, see BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, HISTORY, JETZTZEIT, MEMORY; cf. LOGOS, LIGHT, Box 1, SVET, WISDOM. v. DESTINY, GLÜCK, NOSTALGIA, PROGRESS EUROPE 323 EUROPE The Languages and Traditions That Constitute Philosophy v. ESSENCE, GERMAN, GREEK, LOGOS, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, TO TRANSLATE, WISDOM Philosophy came from Greece, as both its partisans and detractors remind us. Among the former, the Muslim philosopher al-Fārābī reminds us that true philosophy came from Plato and Aristotle (Attainment of Happiness). And the rabbi, who is one of the characters in the Kuzari by Judah ha-Levi, explains that since the philosophers were Greeks, they were not able to benefit from any divine illumination: “There is an excuse for the Philosophers. Being Grecians, science and religion did not come to them as inheritances. They belong to the descendants of Japheth, who inhabited the north, whilst that knowledge coming from Adam, and supported by the divine influence, is only to be found among the progeny of Shem, who represented the successors of Noah and constituted, as it were, his essence. This knowledge has always been connected with this essence, and will always remain so. The Greeks only received it when they became powerful, from Persia. The Persians had it from the Chaldaeans. It was only then that the famous [Greek] Philosophers arose, but as soon as Rome assumed political leadership they produced no philosopher worthy of the name” (Kuzari, pt. 1, question/ response 63). I. Translations Everyone inherited something from the Greeks, but not everyone inherited the same thing, and not everyone inherited it in the same way. The legacy was transmitted differently according to the geographical region of inheritance: the Arab world embraced almost all of the “philosophy” (including science), but not the “literature.” The Byzantine Christians of Syria did not translate Greek literature either. In Arabic, Homer is to be found in only a few anthologies of moral sayings. The Greek tragedies were unknown, which helps explain the absence of the drama in classical Arabic literature. Europe alone inherited works in Latin, and in particular its poetry (Virgil, Ovid, etc.). Nothing was translated from Latin into Arabic, with the exception of Paulus Orosius’s history. Roman law continued to be studied in Latin for a long time in the Christian Middle East, before giving way to the legal traditions of the “barbarians,” and then it resurfaced in the eleventh century, notably in Bologna. It was long believed that some part of Roman law passed into Muslim law (fiqh); in fact, it now seems that this was only a provincial (foreign) version of Muslim law. Medieval Europe, on the other hand, was acquainted with only a few texts of Greek philosophy: for example, the start of Plato’s Timaeus, translated by Cicero, and the start of Aristotle’s Organon, translated by Boethius. The Arab world knew almost all of Aristotle’s work by the ninth century, and knew Plato through summaries, but Europe had to wait until the thirteenth century to have the complete works of Aristotle available. Plato’s Meno and Phaedo were translated into Latin in the thirteenth century but not widely disseminated. Europe had to wait for the other dialogues until Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century. The transmission of knowledge was often understood as a translatio studiorum, a purely local displacement, rather like moving house. In reality it never happened that way. Figuratively speaking, as if in accordance with a sort of hydraulic law of connecting vessels, culture tended to level itself out through the transmission of the most advanced civilization toward others that were less well-off culturally. Translations presume a potential public, and that public demand precedes its satisfaction. In Europe, the movement of translations responded to a growing need for a set of intellectual tools set in train by the Papal Revolution at the end of the eleventh century, following the Investiture Controversy, and the revival of juridical studies that accompanied it. However, works that could not really be used were either not translated at all or were translated but not widely disseminated. So the Arab world knew all of Aristotle, except the Politics, which indeed seemed like a set of instructions for an elite political machine. Likewise, Aristotle’s Poetics was translated but remained almost incomprehensible during the Arab Middle Ages, just as it did during the Latin Middle Ages. The problem posed by the different linguistic levels was not formulated in the same way in the northern and in the southern Mediterranean. The Arab world did not have the problem of the transition from a scholarly language to a vulgar tongue, as was the case in Europe. This transition simply did not happen, or if it did, it was unconscious: classical Arabic, supposedly the language of the Book of God, was set in an immutable form. In practice, Christians and Jews wrote a form of Arabic freed from its Qur’ānic constraints, known as Middle Arabic, which contained certain simplifications of morphology of syntax. In Europe, Latin was the language of the Roman Empire and of the Vulgate. In the Middle Ages, it remained the language of liturgy and the means of communication between intellectuals, but it was not a holy language, a “language of God.” II. Europe Europe was conscious of having received its share of the inheritance from people who spoke in other languages. So the Franciscan Roger Bacon appealed to the pope in 1265 to support his plan to set up schools of Greek and Oriental language: “[T]he wisdom of the Latins is drawn from foreign languages: in fact, the entire sacred text and all of philosophy come from outside languages” (Letter to Clement IV). The Bible is really itself only in Hebrew (the hebraica veritas of Saint Jerome, and before him, Origen): Aristotle’s philosophy is really itself only in Greek. Translation involves the sense of a loss with respect to the original. Bacon lamented this situation and compared a text read through several levels of translation to a wine decanted several times losing its flavor (Moralis philosophia, 6.4). Translation is necessary, and there is a lot of it. But it is only a last resort in relation to reading the original. So this is how the problem of translation is posed. In the West it was made necessary by the almost total eradication of knowledge of Greek after Boethius. Greek was forgotten fairly quickly, except in Ireland, whose geographical distance had protected it from barbarian invasions. Among 324 EUROPE Perplexed, which was finished in 1204, Judah Ibn Tibbon still wrote: “pilosofia, Greek word.” The continuity of the word did not, however, prevent a semantic evolution that took it far away from its original meaning. This was true even within the Greek language. Since late antiquity, philosophia had referred to a way of living as much as to a way of knowing. This fact, which Nietzsche had already discerned, was extensively documented by Pierre Hadot. In Christianity, philosophia usually referred to the monastic life, and in Byzantium, as well as in the meaning it normally has for us, the word “philosopher” also referred to a monk. In the eleventh century, in an extraordinary text, Michael Constantine Psellus defined philosophy in a way that was the exact opposite of its “pagan” self-definition: “I call ‘philosophers’ not those who contemplate the nature of beings, nor those who, seeking the principles of the world, neglect the principles of their own salvation, but rather those whose who scorn the world, and live with supra-worldly ‘beings’ ” (Chronographia, bk. 4 [“Michael IV”], chap. 34). The word came to refer to a cultivated man, with a social connotation of belonging to the dominant class, which was not well looked upon by ordinary people. Thus, in animal epics, in the style of the “Roman de Renart,” it was the fox who was described as philosophos. The content of European philosophical vocabulary was marked most decisively by Latin, either directly for the Romance languages that emerged out of it, or indirectly for the other languages that had to translate from Latin; so the fact of Latin is fairly pervasive. But Latin itself went through a process that would enable it to translate Greek, which is the native language of philosophy. If we use a Greek word to refer to it, it is because the thing itself was invented by the Greeks. IV. Greek The Greek language thus presents us with a unique case: it was in Greek, and only in Greek, that the language had to work on itself, and solely within itself, in order to produce the necessary technical terms. Most of the time these were obtained by modifying the meaning of words already present within the lexicon. So, for example, ousia [οὐσία], “fundamental property,” took on the meaning of “substance”; dunamis [δύναμις], “force,” took on the meaning of “potentiality”; eidos [εἶδος], “aspect,” referred to the Platonic “idea”; katêgoria [ϰατηγοϱία], “accusation,” was used by Aristotle for his “categories,” or families of predicates; aretê [ἀϱετή], the “excellence” of a thing or an animal, denoted moral or intellectual virtue. Other words made a noun from an idiomatic usage of a verb. So, from the verb echein [ἔχειν] + adverb, “to be in a determinate state,” the noun hexis [ἕξις], “habitus,” was formed. We might also note a small number of words that were simply invented, such as the two terms Aristotle had to coin to express the full development of a reality: energeia [ἐνέϱγεια] and entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια]. This created a certain amount of unease for the man in the street and led Aristophanes, for example, to make fun of all the technical terms ending in -ikos (The Knights, 1375–81). It was indispensable for the Greek language to work on itself. It was not enough simply to go with what was already in the language. One might have thought that metaphysics was almost preformed within the structure of the Greek the exceptions, it is worth noting Hilduin, a noble from Lorraine who became a Benedictine monk and abbot of Saint-Denis. He knew enough Greek to be entrusted with the translation of the corpus of works by Pseudo-Dionysius presented to Louis the Pious by Michael III, the Amorian. John Scotus Erigena was able to translate Gregory of Nyssa, Nemesius, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Yet not many philosophers took the trouble of learning languages other than the language of the dominant culture. In the medieval West, Erigena and the Englishman Robert Grosseteste, the translator of the Nicomachean Ethics, are the exceptions rather than the rule. Roger Bacon himself had only a superficial knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. Ramon Llull learned Arabic mainly in order to write and preach in the language rather than to read the works of Muslim philosophers. In Islamic lands, those who learned the language of a nonMuslim people were extremely rare. Al-Bīrūnī, who learned Sanskrit to undertake an impartial study of Indian religions, was the one brilliant exception. No Muslim seems to have learned Greek and, even less so, Latin. Translators were Christians whose mother tongue or culture was Syriac and for whom Greek was sometimes a family tradition. III. The Central Untranslated Term: Philosophia In this history of translations, one paradox awaits us at the outset: the word itself that designates philosophy was never translated, literally speaking, into European languages. It is the untranslatable par excellence, or at any rate, an untranslated term. “Philosophy” remained transcribed rather than translated into languages other than Greek. Only the Dutch language coined a word, Wijsbegeerde, which was a calque of the etymology of philosophia [φιλοσοφία]. In the eighteenth century, the German language had ventured Weltweisheit, “wisdom of the world,” in the sense of profane wisdom. The word had the honor of being used by Kant in his 1763 text on negative greatness, but it was unable to establish itself in current usage. Fichte remarked on the word Philosophie in a text that admittedly was intended to arouse nationalist sentiments (1805): “We have to refer to it by its foreign name, since Germans have not accepted the German name that was proposed a long time ago” (Address to the German Nation). In Islam, falsafa [الفلسفة [was perceived as a Greek word from the beginning and has continued to be. The word was broken down and explicated by al-Fārābī, correctly as it turns out, in a fragment devoted to the origin of philosophy, which was cited by the medical biographer Ibn Abī Uṣeybīa in his note on al-Fārābī. This was still true of the historian Ibn Khaldūn in the fifteenth century. The choice of the most authentically Semitic word, ḥikma [الحكمة) [wisdom), bears witness to a desire to assume a certain distance with respect to foreign sciences. It was preferred whenever there was a concern to ensure continuity between the disciplines native to Islam and their intellectual elaboration in a synthesis in which Aristotelian elements were juxtaposed with apologetics (Kalām) [الكالم [and/or mysticism. We can find the same sense of strangeness in Jewish authors who wrote in Arabic. So in the glossary of difficult terms that he added as an appendix around 1213 to his translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the EUROPE 325 The attempt to make philosophy speak Latin was at first not a success, and even Greek philosophers who were settled in Rome, like Epictetus or Plotinus, wrote in their mother tongue. The first of the Romans, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, wrote a very intimate work, his spiritual exercises, in Greek. On the other hand, Apuleius and Aulus Gellius wrote in Latin. A second attempt was more successful, both with Christian writers likes Tertullian and Saint Augustine, who seems to have only known a few words of Greek. Thereafter, for negative rather than positive reasons—the retreat of Greek in the West—Latin was used almost exclusively. This was true of the pagans Macrobius and Martianus Capella (early fifth century) as well as of the Christian Chalcidius. The Latins did not so much translate, strictly speaking, as adapt. The first true translations are those of Gaius Marius Victorinus, who rendered passages by Plotinus into Latin. Saint Augustine may possibly have read some of these. Boethius, who was from a cultured family of patricians, had planned to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin but was prevented from doing so because of his execution in 524 CE. He was nonetheless able to translate into Latin the start of the Organon, Porphyry’s Isagoge, the Categories, and On interpretation. We are indebted to him for the equivalents of the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian logic: genus, species, differentia, proprium, individuum. He was also the one who took the profoundly influential decision to translate ousia by substantia, thereby reducing it to one of its dimensions, that of the subjacent (hupokeimenon [ὑποϰείμενον]), which Aristotle, however, said was insufficient (Metaphysics, 7.3). The Latin of the church fathers needed to be able to express the subtle nuances of the terminology that had been developed by the Greeks in relation to the doctrines of the Trinity or of Christology. Latin often lagged behind Greek. To the question, in the Trinity there are three what? Greek replies with hupostasis [ὑπόστασις] and Latin with persona (Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 11). Medieval Latin was enriched by the addition of technical terms made necessary by the constant refinement of different problematics. In order to do this, it borrowed words from Greek, such as categorematicus, or produced others by working upon the language, such as compossibilitas, actuositas, immutatio, suppositio, conceptus. Certain Greek texts were retranslated into Latin after the Scholastic period and often in reaction to its language, which was judged to be grating to a Ciceronian ear. So, Leonardo Bruni, for example, retranslated the Nicomachean Ethics, and Bessarion retranslated the remainder of Aristotle. Latin stayed creative right to the end. The Italian humanist Ermolao Barbaro proposed perfectihabia to translate, for better or for worse, Aristotle’s enthelecheia. Leibniz had no hesitation in fabricating existentificans and existiturire. Latin often creates words composed of Greek roots, rendering terms that appear to hark to Greek usages but are, in fact, modern. This is the true of cosmologia, adopted as a title by Christian Wolff (1731), and then in French by Maupertuis (1750); of ontologia, catalogued in the philosophical dictionary of Rudolph Goclenius (1613); and of psychologia (Johannes Thomas Freigius, 1579). It is amusing that certain technical terms of the Scholastics have unwittingly entered into everyday language. So, for language. Some of its particularities indeed lend themselves to the expression of abstract thought, such as the ease with which it can substantivize whatever it likes with the help of an article. Adolf Trendelenburg argued that the doctrine of the categories was modeled on the grammatical structure of Greek, as did Émile Benveniste. We of course need to nuance this: the impeccable form of the question ti to kalon [τί τὸ ϰαλόν], for example, did not stop Hippias from not understanding it (Plato, Hippias Major, 287d). Greek has evolved from Linear B to the present day. In the Byzantine world, there was no recognized continuity between the Greek of the Neoplatonic commentators and that of the Byzantines, which, moreover, was artificial. The Greek of Plethon (fifteenth century), for example, was largely the same as that of the great philosophers of the fourth century BCE, but we might well ask who understood him. Written Greek grew further and further apart from spoken Greek, which corresponds to the increasing isolation of a small layer of intellectuals from the people. It is worth noting, in this respect, the paradox of the translations that were intended explicitly not to be disseminated, such as those of Simeon Metaphrastes (ninth century), who rewrote the popular lives of saints in a more elevated language. The problem is still very much alive in modern-day Greece in the split between popular language (dhimotiki) and refined language (katharevousa), with their social and political overdeterminations. Byzantine philosophers invented several technical words by using the suffixes -ikos or -otès, such as ontotês, “beingness.” In the main, though, the vocabulary has remained the same. V. Latin The first attempts to write in Latin about philosophy go back to the first centuries BCE and CE, with Lucretius, Cicero, then Seneca. All lament the poverty of Latin (Lucretius, De natura rerum, 1.139 and 1.832; Cicero, De finibus, 3.2.5; Seneca, Ad Lucilium, 58.1; Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, 4.18). Cicero, being the lawyer he was, says in the same place that Latin has no reason to be envious of Greek, but did he believe it for a moment? In any event, when he adapted Stoic treatises, Cicero proposed Latin equivalents for Greek technical terms. Most often, a single Latin word translates a single Greek word, but sometimes they have to be broken down: euthumia [εὐθυμία] is translated as animi tranquillitas (De finibus, 5.5.23). The words thereby coined very often remain our own. One can see certain inflections in these translations. First of all, a shift from the objective to the subjective. Thus telos [τέλος], “the end point of a reality,” becomes ultimum, “the furthest point (that one can reach)” (ibid., 1.12.42 and 2.7.26). An emblematic translation is that of axian echon [ἀξίαν ἔχον], “that which has weight,” by aestimabilis, “worthy of being valued as expensive” (ibid., 2.6.20); paradoxos [παϱάδοξος], “contrary to expectation,” becomes admirabilis, “worthy of contemplation” (ibid., 4.27.74). One notices a certain psychologization of tendencies: hormê [ὁϱμή], “impulse,” becomes appetitus, “effort to look for” (ibid., 2.7.23, for example). Elsewhere, one can observe a shift from the inner to the outer: êthikos [ἠθιϰός], “having to do with character,” becomes moralis, “having to do with behavior” (Cicero, On fate, 1.1, followed by Seneca, Ad Lucilium, 14.89.9, and Quintilian, Instituto oratoria, 12.2.15 ). 326 EUROPE medieval and modern Europe: in mathematics (algebra), astronomy (azimuth), chemistry (ammonia). The title of Ptolemy’s works on astronomy kept the Greek preceded by the Arabic article: Almagest, from al-Megistè. Terms that came from philosophy, however, in the narrow sense this word has assumed in modern times, are for the most part Latin or Greek in origin. At best we can cite the famous helyatin, which gave commentators of the Liber de causis (chap. 9) such a hard time and which is the Arabic kulliyya [كلية ,[translating holotês [ὁλότης] from the Greek of Proclus. A problematic that was developed in the falsafa, such as that of the possible “conjunction” of the human intellect and the agent intellect, imported the word conjunctio itself, a calque of the Arabic iṭṭisāl [االتصال ,[into Latin Scholastics, something Schelling was still aware of (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 20th lesson). One might also note that the Latin intentio was influenced by the Arabic ma‘nā [المعنى” ,[meaning” (see INTENTION). VII. Hebrew In the Middle Ages, Jews living in Islamic lands used Hebrew for religious purposes. This included the liturgy, but also religious “law,” such as the literature of the responsa. For everyday life and also for philosophy, they used Arabic. So Maimonides wrote the Mishneh Torah in Hebrew but the Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic. The first to write philosophy in Hebrew was Abraham bar Hiyya Savasorda, a Spanish philosopher and astronomer, with the Hégyon ha-Nefesh (the full title of which is “Contemplation of the saddened soul which knocks at the door of repentance”). He invented a whole vocabulary, of which certain elements have survived. In the first book of the Mishneh Torah, the Book of Knowledge, written around 1180, Maimonides presented a summary of the vision of the world of Arabic Aristotelian philosophy for which he needed new words. He gave to the word dë’āh [הָעֵד ,[ “thought,” the new meaning of “intellect,” including the intellect of the soul of the spheres. Philosophical Hebrew, however, developed only to the point where it attained its classical form after the translations from the Arabic by the Ibn Tibbon family. Three generations of this family, driven out of Spain by the Almohads (1148), successively translated texts of Jewish spirituality, then Jewish philosophy, then simply philosophy (Aristotle, Averroës). They modeled Hebrew sentences on the syntax of Arabic to such an extent that they appeared quite strange, even barbaric, so it is hardly surprising that these translations were not immediately accepted. The poet Judah ben Solomon Harizi therefore undertook to write a countertranslation of the Guide for the Perplexed in order to give the second Ibn Tibbon a lesson in “beautiful language.” But Harizi’s philosophical competence was rather limited, and he mistranslated a number of terms, which Ibn Tibbon took satisfaction in enumerating in the preface that he added to the reedition of his own translation. We still have Harizi’s translation, but only a single manuscript, whereas Ibn Tibbon’s has been very widely disseminated. Medieval Jewish thinkers had no direct access to Greek and knew only Aristotle and his commentators through Arabic translations. The new words they coined were often borrowed directly from Arabic. Thus Abraham bar Hiyya example, the common English word “contraption” comes directly from the noun for the logical operation of contraposito. VI. Arabic The Greek scientific legacy was translated into Arabic beginning in the ninth century. This was the work of generations of Christian translators, who had to create a language designed to translate philosophical concepts. Unlike the translations into Syriac, words are truly translated; there are very few transliterations. One might cite usṭuqus [األسطقس [for stoicheion [στοιχεῖον], “element,” and hayūlā [الهيولى [for hulê [ὕλη], “matter.” Even then, these words are in competition with terms that are more in keeping with the genius of the language, like ‘unṣur [العنصر [or mādda [مادۃ ,[ ّthe substantivized feminine participle of the verb “to extend,” which corresponds quite well to Descartes’s “extended substance.” Translators often feel their way before finding an equivalent that becomes established, which is why there are several terms for translating the same original. When two terms coexist, they each tend to take on a specialized meaning. So hayūlā tends to refer rather to primary matter, and mādda to the matter of a concrete compound. Or, in the register of causality, sabab [السبب ,[which originally meant the circumstances of an event, refers, rather, to the immediate cause; ‘illa [العلة ,[ which originally meant an illness that excused one’s absence in combat (analogous to the Lat. causa), refers instead to a distant cause. Arabic sometimes has had recourse to Persian. So the word for “substance” is the Persian ğawhar [الجوھر ,[ which originally meant “jewel”: the most precious aspect of a thing is its “substance,” in the same way that in French the word essence is used to designate the refined state of a chemical body, for both perfumes and gasoline. Vocabulary choices slightly inflect the meaning of a concept. So the Arabic-Persian translation jawhar loses the association with the verb “to be,” which is immediately apparent in the Greek ousia. The Greek verb einai [εἶναι], both in its existential sense and as a copula, has no equivalent in Arabic. For the existential meaning, translators have chosen the verb “find” in the passive: what exists is indeed what “is found” (mawğūd [موجود .([This choice was reflected by alFārābī (Book of Letters, vol. 1, letter 80). Curiously, the same form is sometimes used as a substitute for the copula in examples of syllogisms. For “nature,” ṭab’ [طبح [or ṭabīa [طبيح [ removes the idea of plant growth that the Greeks perceived (no doubt wrongly) in the word phusis [φύσις], replacing it with that of “imprint,” “mark left by a seal.” The language of philosophy seemed “barbaric” in the eyes of grammarians. This can be seen in the celebrated controversy between the Christian philosopher and translator Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yunūs and the Muslim grammarian Abū Sa’īd al-Sirāfī, which took place in 932 and was reported by Abū Hayyān al-Tawḥīdī in the eighth night of his al-Imtā’ wa ‘l-mu’ānasa [المؤانسة و الإمتاع .[There is still an echo of this in al-Fārābī (Book of Letters, vol. 2, pt. 25, letter 156), where he reminds us that some people would rather that philosophy be expressed in purely Arabic terms. For grammarians, logic was nothing more than the grammar of a particular language, the Greek language. There is no longer any need to be reminded of the importance of Arabic in the development of the scientific vocabulary of Latin or vernacular-speaking EUROPE 327 against . . .” (Regenzeug, for example, is “something to use in case it rains,” an umbrella, a raincoat, etc.), becomes in French, outil, “tool” (Emmanuel Martineau), and even util (François Vezin). What is more, the Germanic languages (German, and especially English) often have two parallel terms for one single idea, a learned word borrowed from Latin or from a Romance language, and a native word. The originally synonymous terms tend to diverge in meaning and to support two nuances that can become mutually exclusive. In German, words of Latin origin often have a pejorative nuance, such as räsonnieren, and they are rejected by purists. Such purists are often accused of associating the pursuit of linguistic purity with the xenophobic pursuit of racial purity. Conversely, authors such as Adorno take a malicious pleasure in replacing worn-out German words with forced germanizations of non-German words, and for saying, for example, camouflieren where the German has tarnen or vertuschen. It is only recently that fundamental German terms have appeared that are not translations or transpositions of Latin or Greek terms. Heidegger remarked that it was only with the central word of the late period of his thinking, Ereignis, that philosophy truly stopped speaking Greek: “It would be impossible to think Ereignis with the help of Greek (which we are concerned precisely to ‘go beyond’). Ereignis is no longer Greek at all; and the most fantastic thing here is that Greek continues to retain its essential meaning and at the same time can no longer manage to speak as a language at all” (Four Seminars; see EREIGNIS). The other Romance languages have found it harder to disengage from Latin because of their very proximity to it. Italian became a medium for philosophy with Dante. His Convivio, written around 1304–7, contains a summary of Scholastic philosophy. After this, the two languages continued to intertwine, combine, and be apportioned differently depending not only on the works of the writers concerned, but also on the milieu in which they were originally written. Dante justified the poetic use of the vernacular, but he did this in Latin, in De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1305). Leonardo da Vinci used Italian because he did not know Latin. Machiavelli wrote only in Italian but gave Latin titles to the chapter of The Prince. Petrarch and Vico wrote in both languages. Giacomo Leopardi, whose training was philological, wrote in an archaic Italian that was close to Latin. French was used by Nicole Oresme in his translations of Aristotle and by Christine de Pizan in passages of the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V. The vernacular languages have constantly interacted with each other, and still do. Translations from one to the other constrain the target languages to give completely new meanings to certain words. The dominance of French in Europe during the classical age led to other languages borrowing terms from it. German, for example, transposed progrès (progress) as Fortschritt, and point de vue (point of view) as Gesichtspunkt. The present dominance of American English, when it does not involve pure and simple loan words, produces new meanings in other languages. Thus in French, the term équité, selected—for want of a better term—to translate the untranslatable “fairness” of John Rawls, has added this meaning to that of epieikeia (see FAIR; THEMIS, IV). Certain ideas make a full Savasorda hebraicizes the Arabic markaz [مركز [as mèrkāz ,[(صورة] ṣūra from], צּורָ ה] ṣūrā borrows and,” center], “מֶרְ כָּז] “form.” Other words are modeled on Arabic, such as when mawğūd is translated as nimṣā [הָצְמִנ .[But other words are obtained by working on the Hebrew itself. So for “substance,” Hebrew reuses the biblical word ’èṣèm [םֶצֶע ,[which usually means “bone.” For “accident” in the philosophical sense of sumbebêkos [συμϐεϐηϰός], he uses miqrèh [הֶ רְקִמ ,[which has the meaning, as does the Latin accidens, of “what happens,” “incident.” VIII. Modern Languages It is only fairly recently that the vernacular languages of modern Europe have been used as a medium for philosophy. Latin was still the language of Descartes and Leibniz. Kant often explained his still hesitant German terminology with a Latin word in parentheses, and his Critique of Pure Reason was also translated into Latin. Hegel and Schilling wrote their theses, and Bergson his complementary thesis (1888), in Latin. Several scattered philosophical concepts began to appear in the second part of the Roman de la rose (Jean de Meun), where there is a translated passage from the Timaeus (vs. 19083–19110 = 41a 7b 6), and in Chaucer. But the first philosophical works in the vernacular date from the thirteenth century. The first “modern” language used in philosophy was Catalan, by Ramon Llull, which was because of Llull’s personal history. Originally secular, he was torn from his worldly life in 1263 following an illumination. He became a Franciscan monk, received his university training much later than normal, and thus never knew Latin very well. The Libre de contemplació en Déu (1273–74?) was perhaps the first philosophical work in the vernacular in Europe. German followed soon after. When the Dominican Meister Eckhart preached to nuns who did not know Latin but who were learned enough to be able to write down sermons, he had to transpose Latin concepts into the dialect of the time. He had to translate Scholastic terms quite literally, and the other mystics from the Rhineland did likewise. So Wesen for essentia, Zufall for accidens, and so on, explained terms that functioned, in Latin (or English), as ideograms. This practice continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the word Einbildungskraft (vis imaginationis) was created for “imagination,” Gegenstand (objectum) for “object,” Vorurteil (praejudicium) (seventeenth century) for “prejudice,” and Begriff (conceptus) for “concept” (Christian Wolff). These transpositions give philosophical German a particular style. The words do not sound strange and even have popular meanings that their equivalents in other languages rarely have. After having said the name of the street he is looking for, a German will ask, “Ist das für Sie ein Begriff?”— literally, “Is that a concept for you?”—where English would say, “Does that mean anything to you?” and the French would ask, “Ça vous dit quelque chose?” The convoluted French expressions en soi (in itself) and pour soi (for itself), considered rather pedantic, come from a single German expression an und für sich, meaning “basically.” Before the 1930s, Heidegger liked to use as conceptual terms expressions that were very idiomatic, even commonplace (Ein Bewandtnis haben, bewenden lassen, vorhanden sein, etc.), which translators are forced to turn into gibberish. So Zeug, “thing for . . .” or “thing 328 EVENT EVIGHED (DANISH) ENGLISH eternity GERMAN Ewigkeit v. ETERNITY and AIÔN, CONSCIOUSNESS, CONTINUITET, I/ME/MYSELF, MOMENT, PERSON, PLUDSELIGHED, PRESENT, TIME, TRUTH The majestic eternal moment freezes movement, in contrast with the eternality of the ethical Self. The abstract eternity of the idea, the object of recollection, contrasts with the concrete eternity passionately lived by the existing being stretched toward the eternal as if to the future. The central concept of Christianity, what St. Paul in Galatians 4.4 calls “the fulness of time,” /AA requires the idea of an eternity that continuously penetrates into time and of a time that constantly reaches out to grasp eternity for itself. In this everpresent tension—equivalent to that which, without Aufhebung, joins the finite and the infinite—the eternal operates in the present both as past and as future (see MOMENT, Box 4). The multiple senses that Kierkegaard attributes to the concept of Evighed correspond to the variations of those of Continuitet-Continuerlighed. 1. In the immediacy of the moment of pleasure, the person (the aesthetic self) is as though diffused in affective tonality (Personligheden doemrer i Stemningen, vol. 4). The power of the soul to dive completely into “such an instant” allows it to suspend time in a way, to be rescued from the essential fleetingness of the ephemeral, thus to ascend to a kind of eternity. 2. At the other extreme, the choice of self gives the person “his eternal value.” Echoing Fichte’s formulation (The Vocation of Man, in Popular Works, ed. William Smith, Nabu Press, 2010, 172), Kierkegaard has the ethical self say: “I cannot become conscious of myself in an ethical way without becoming conscious of my eternal I” (4: 242). This “eternity” is becoming oneself in one’s permanence, which comes from progress. By means of ethics, man “becomes what he becomes” (4: 162; see a similar phrase in Fichte, op. cit., 209). 3. “Eternity is the continuity of consciousness, which makes for the depth and the thinking of the Socratic” (7: 91). “For thought, the eternal is the present” (7: 186). The function of reminiscence is “to maintain eternal continuity in the life of man” (9: 10). Despite what separates Socrates from Plato, this thesis (and thus the appeal to abstract eternity) “belongs to both” (10: 192). Kierkegaard situates Christianity with regard to these three types of eternity. Because of its historical beginning, it is an event that is thus different from Socratism. It posits the instant of access to truth as absolutely decisive. This punctum concerns neither pure thought, nor mythology, nor history alone. It essentially affects the existent and thus the existing subjective thinker. If the eternal arises in any ethical decision, continuity is nevertheless always interrupted by new decisions (see PLUDSELIGHED). “For the existent, decision and repetition are the goal of movement. The eternal is the continuity of movement, but an abstract eternity is outside of movement, and a concrete eternity in the existent is the height of passion” (11: 12). “The passionate anticipation of circle, enriching themselves with new connotations along the way. So, for example, the English “moral sciences,” chosen by John Stuart Mill to translate the French sciences morales, produced Geisteswissenschaften in the German translation, which was retranslated into French as sciences humaines (see GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN). The Arabic for “dictionary” is qāmūs [قاموس ,[which comes from the Greek Ôkeanos [’Ωϰεανός], in the original sense of the liquid expanse covering all of the lands that have emerged, enabling their circumnavigation. Languages are in the same way the locus of a constant movement of exchange in time and place. But words only rarely retain the exotic flavor of their origin. Most of the time they are so well accommodated that we forget the work that was needed to bring them into a new language, to create them, or to adapt them to their new context. So we need a second context in order to restore the murmured sounds of the distances crossed. Rémi Brague REFS.: Fichte, Johann. Address to the German Nation. Translated by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars. Translated by A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Schelling, Friedrich. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Translated by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. EVENT The word “event,” from the Latin evenire (to come out of, to have a result, to arrive, to come due, to happen; whence eventus [issue, success] and eventum, especially in the plural eventa [events, accidents]), refers to a fact or phenomenon insofar as it corresponds to a change or makes a mark. I. Event and Being “Event” is the most frequently used word for translating the German Ereignis, which Heidegger relates to appropriation (Ereignung, see PROPERTY) and revelation (Eräugnis): see EREIGNIS and cf. APPROPRIATION. See also ES GIBT, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, Box 1, GESCHICHTLICH, and TATSACHE, Box 1; cf. VORHANDEN. More generally, on the ontology of events, the relationship between event and accident, and the difference with being, see CHANCE, DESTINY, ESSENCE, SUBJECT, TO BE. On the “event” of the Incarnation, see BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, LOGOS, III.B, OIKONOMIA. II. Event, Temporality, and Works of Art On the temporality of events, see ASPECT, HISTORY, INSTANT, JETZTZEIT, MOMENT (esp. MOMENT, II). On putting events into words, see ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY; cf. RÉCIT. More precisely, for the relation of “event” to works of art, see IN SITU. EXPERIMENT 329 the eternal is nevertheless not, for an existent, an absolute continuity, [it is] the possibility of approaching the unique truth which there may be for an existent” (11: 12–13). Eternity, as the telos given in every instant, is only able to be infinitely approximated. Concrete eternity thus has the form of a future. “The future is this incognito where the eternal, insofar as it is incommensurable with time, nevertheless wishes to preserve its commerce with it” (7: 189). Every existent has its time, receives it rather, for “the eternal wishes to make time its own” (13: 15). Dissolving into abstract existence is the person for whom “existential decisions are only a shadow play floating on the background of what is eternally decided” (10: 210). Jacques Colette REFS.: Kierkegaard, Søren. Writings. Edited by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. 25 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. 2. More generally, on the experience of self, see CONSCIOUSNESS, I/ME/MYSELF, SUBJECT; on the difficulties between affect and history or the history of being, see ANXIETY, MALAISE, PATHOS (cf. PASSION). 3. On the relation between this experience and wisdom or morality, see PHRONÊSIS, WISDOM; cf. GLÜCK, OIKEIÔSIS; more generally, for moral experience, including that of moral law, see MORALS, WILLKÜR. II. Experience and Objective Knowledge The recurrent philosophical problem is that of the impact of a subject on the object or the phenomenon observed in experience, through the conditions of experience in experimentation as well as the a priori forms of experience in Kantian Erfahrung. 1. We have followed the pair experiment/experience, in play in Anglo-Saxon empiricism, which does not precisely track the difference between the French expérience/ expérimentation: see EXPERIMENT; cf. ENGLISH and UTILITY. 2. More generally, on experience as knowledge, and the procedures of constructing its objects, see ABSTRACTION, EPISTEMOLOGY, EPOCHÊ, INTUITION, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION; cf. AFFORDANCE. On the object itself, see GEGENSTAND, ERSCHEINUNG, OBJECT, and cf. PHÉNOMÈNE. III. Experience and Practice 1. On the manner in which empeiria is related to technê [τέχνη], to craft, which is defined as being between experience and science, see AESTHETICS, ART, MIMÊSIS. 2. On the relation between practice and conduct, see AGENCY, BEHAVIOR, MORALS, PLEASURE, PRAXIS, WORK; cf. above, I.3. v. NATURE, REASON, SECULARIZATION, TATSACHE, WORLD EXIGENCY “Exigency” comes from the Latin exigere, literally “to push (agere) outside (ex),” which means “lead to its end,” and “to claim, demand.” The term is given here such as one of the possible translations of the English “claim”: it does not have a pejorative tone (unlike prétention), but, unlike the German Anspruch, it struggles to express a demand (with its linguistic and spoken dimension of expression) with its (moral or legal) justification, such that the demand itself constitutes the justification. See CLAIM, and cf. VOICE. The English notion of “claim” is inseparable from the distinction, also a difficult one for translators, between droitlaw and droit-right, which relates to the legitimacy of the demand: see LAW, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, and more generally DROIT, DUTY, SOLLEN; cf. OBLIGATION. On the relation between this “exigency,” which is more specifically a claim of knowledge, and Anglo-Saxon ordinary language philosophy, see ENGLISH, cf. COMMON SENSE, LANGUAGE, MATTER OF FACT, SENSE, SPEECH ACT. v. EPISTEMOLOGY, REASON EXPERIENCE “Experience” comes from the Latin experientia, “attempt, test, practice, experiment,” the same family as periculum, “test, risk,” or peritus, “clever, expert,” and from the same vast root *per- (which means something like “go forward, penetrate”) as the Greek empeiria [ἐμπειρία], “experience,” peira [πεῖρα], “attempt, experience,” or peras [πέρας], “limit” (cf. in French pore, port, and porte). The word thus connotes both a breakingthrough and an advancement into the world, a gain of knowledge and acquired expertise. The semantic complex yields terminological distinctions peculiar to various languages. I. Internal Experience 1. The German term Erleben refers precisely to the experience and the ordeal of life. See ERLEBEN, and cf. DASEIN, LEIB, LIFE. EXPERIMENT / EXPERIENCE v. CHANCE, ERLEBEN, PATHOS, PERCEPTION The French translator is tempted to render automatically the English words “experience” and “experiment” as expérience and expérimentation, conferring a larger share of passivity on “experience” and of activity on “experiment.” However, things do not allow such a simplification, especially not in eighteenth-century English. Furthermore, English preserves at the level of the verbs the same distinction as at the level of the nouns (even when completing the words with the ending “-ing”: “experiencing,” “experimenting”), whereas French has only expérimenter, and the verb unites what the nouns keep separate; if one decides therefore to render “to experiment” as expérimenter and “to experience” as éprouver (to experience in the sense of “feel” or “perceive”), éprouver connotes a difficulty that does not exist in “to experience” (cf. the French noun épreuve, “proof” or “test”). This asymmetry between French and English makes impossible a shared approach to the distinction, one more notional than real, between empiricism and rationalism. In French, which has only expérimenter, empiricism can only be rationalism in hiding, because, after all, there is no experience except that which is active. The English “experiencing” is from the start less framed by rational activity; 330 EXPERIMENT II. The Ambiguity of “Experience” “Experience” presents an impressive range of meanings. One of them is very close to “experiment,” when a more or less regular set of experiments may give rise to a more or less perfect experience (A Treatise of Human Nature), or conversely when “experience” becomes essentialized and autonomous in order to form a past experience or an element of past experience likely to enter into an experiment. Another meaning, in contrast, is very far removed from “experiment,” even opposed to it: “experience” can in effect designate that which irreducibly resists explication; discussing the complications of sympathy Hume writes, just before the conclusion of the Treatise of Human Nature: “There is something very inexplicable in this variation of our impressions; but it is what we have the experience of with regard to all our passions and sentiments.” Generally, “experience” for Hume is rather that which one finds, which one encounters as a limit, which permits a discovery, which teaches, which permits an inference or a derivation, which proves, which returns, which is repeated (Price speaks of the “returns of an event” or of the “recurrency of events” [Bayes, An Essay]), or which can be stored or accumulated, either in the habits of life or by particular observation, in order to lead us to draw conclusions (A Treatise of Human Nature). But if it may be false (ibid.), if it may regulate our judgment (ibid.), it is not possible for it to think in our place or to substitute for an explanation, which can be obtained only by, from, on experience. Whether we create experience through repetition or leave it to itself, whether we consult experience, infer existence through it, or put pressure on it, one way or another it is linked to the making of decisions: the decision to validate ideas, for example, only insofar as they are connected to experience, or the decision not to go beyond the limits of experience (as when Hume recommends that we should not extend the influence of relation beyond experience). It is up to us to render experience “undoubted” (ibid.), so that experience is always invoked in an unavoidable ambiguity: it is convincing on condition that it is not forced, yet it has meaning only when it is provoked and tends toward experiment: “We have happily attained experiments in the artificial virtues,” Hume says in conclusion to the second part of the third book on morals of the Treatise. However interwoven it may be with experience, the basic idea of the experiment rests on an artificial simplification of the phenomenon or sequence of events that one seeks to isolate, at least symbolically, in order to maintain greater control of its articulation with other phenomena or its combination with other sequences. Thus, experience is the taking into account of phenomena that cannot be grasped in the simplifying play of the experiment and of events in skeins of sequences or caught up in open systems subject to indefinite complication. The traditional opposition between rationalism and empiricism no longer appears so clear-cut once one examines in detail the linguistic operations that constitute the dialectical play of experience, experiment, and their authority (ibid). That ideas derive from experience is a principle only if it is understood solely as a methodological rule. Empiricism, in one can use the verb “to experience” when this framing is difficult or even impossible. Furthermore, these nouns are used in close proximity to the terms “case” and “instance,” which we must be careful not to render as cas and exemple. An “instance” is very often the singular fact, the particular occurrence, to which one accedes only by an expérience in the French sense; the “instance” becomes a “case” only when the idea of “experiment” is “transferred” to it (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature). The English “case” supposes that a common ground, “a common footing,” allows us to refer a registered event to other events judged to be similar or differing only by a decisive element in similar circumstances, so that one can say that it has appeared or has not appeared when one makes a “trial” of it, when one tries it out. I. The Classical “Experiment”: A Phantasm of Activity One may have the impression that the word “experiment” implies an intervention on the part of the person who observes the phenomena and who works with them to understand or modify the mechanisms: “we make experiments” (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature); while “experience” would be more passive and would concern objects or events that it would be difficult, even impossible, to change directly: “Relation is frequently experienced to have no effect” (ibid.). However, this impression—which is well founded when one reads The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper, where “experiment” is synonymous with theory testing or falsifying—is much less reliable when one consults eighteenth-century authors. As an instrument of analysis, the experiment gives rise to phantasms of activity not realizable within the realm of facts. When Hume reread the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in order, through a play on the constitutive parameters of passional structures, to review the limits of the passions in relation to each other and to their functions, his mode of action was purely linguistic: we could not make or complete the experimentsthat he prescribes, and that have the air of descriptions, in any other way than by working, by means of writing, on the imagination of the reader. It is on the basis of this symbolic game and its imaginary practices that the experiment can give rise to an inventory of contrary cases and of balanced cases (A Treatise of Human Nature). The experiment is real only when, and because, it is first of all symbolically devised. Whether or not it gives rise to a feeling, it remains deprived of sense unless it is read, written, or made “singular” in a way that allows it to enter a calculation as a unit. Thus the question of knowing whether we can make experiments in the domain of passions, economics, and history is settled: it is obvious that we can (even though it is no easier to modify feelings than movements in the heavens), because the experiment is essentially symbolic, even when it allows for, as is often the case in physics, material manipulation. Price, reflecting on Bayes’s rule and taking his examples equally from physics or the study of human nature, speaks of our possibility of determining “what conclusion to draw from a given number of experiments that are not countered by contrary experiments” (Bayes, An Essay). The experiment has the currency of chance: “chance or experiment,” Hume says (A Treatise of Human Nature). EXPERIMENT 331 REFS.: Bayes, Thomas. An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Forword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. New York: Hafner, 1963. First published in 1763. Bentham, Jeremy. Chrestomathia. Edited by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. First published in 1816. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1980. First published 1935. the end, is a philosophy of decision-making, even if it always presents the will as a sentiment or denounces it as a fiction: one has to decide to accept as valid only a proposition that has, in one form or another, the guarantee of experience, and this decision is no less a priori than the categories and principles of rationalism. One passes therefore from empiricism to rationalism by a simple displacement, and the confrontation of these two doctrines is merely imaginary. Jean-Pierre Cléro 333 things, a maker of musical instruments. We have focused on the Russian term faktura [ϕактура], which acquires remarkable importance in the early twentieth century (see FAKTURA). On its relations to material, see ART (esp. Box 2), DISEGNO, FORM, PLASTICITY. On artistic style, see MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, STYLE. v. AESTHETICS, DESSEIN, DESSIN, DICHTUNG FACT “Fact” derives from the Latin factum, the neuter nominalized participle of facere, “to make, to do” (from the same root as the Greek tithêmi [τίθημι], “to put, to place”). Facts are distinguished by their positive character, independent of fiction or norms. I. Fact/Fiction The term “fact” refers first to what is given, especially in experience as a phenomenon, or in history as an event, and is thus distinguished from the illusory or fictional. We have chosen to study and compare two particular networks: the English network, which we look at on the basis of its idiomatic expressions—see MATTER OF FACT, cf. ENGLISH; and German terminology, which is built up in translation of and in counterpoint to English empiricism: see TATSACHE. TATSACHE, Box 1, examines the study of existential reinvestment of the Kantian Faktum, by way of Kierkegaard’s Danish. More generally, on the objective status of facts, see APPEARANCE, PHÉNOMÈNE, [ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND, OBJECT, REALITY, RES], THING. On the language to which it gives rise, see FALSE, FICTION [ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY], TRUTH. On facts as statements of a present (infectum) by contrast with a “perfect” (perfectum), see ASPECT; cf. PRESENT. II. Fact/Law The order of facts is contrasted with the order of law. Facts deal with the empirical and the contingent, in accordance with nature or culture, in contrast with logico-mathematical necessity and the norms of practice and law. The intricate relations between the truth of facts and practical and legal norms is especially salient in Russian: see PRAVDA. The relations between truth value (validity) and moral value (value) are especially visible in German: see WERT. On the relationship to knowledge, see, besides ISTINA and TRUTH, EPISTEMOLOGY, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN. On the notion of experience, and experience of self, see CONSCIOUSNESS, EPOCHÊ, EXPERIMENT, and cf. CULTURE, EXPERIENCE. On the relation to ethics, see DUTY, MORALS, SOLLEN. On the question quid facti / quid iuris? see DROIT, LAW [RIGHT, LEX, TORAH, THEMIS], cf. DESTINY, FAIR. v. ACT, DISPOSITION, EVENT F FACTURE From the Latin factura (fabrication), derived from facere (to make), the word refers to the way in which a work of art is made, and the French word facteur refers to, among other FAIR / FAIRNESS / EQUITY v. JUSTICE, LAW [LEX], PHRONÊSIS, PRUDENTIAL, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, UTILITY, VERGÜENZA The untranslatable “fairness” is of renewed contemporary interest thanks to the original use made of it by the American philosopher John Rawls. In the French translation of his work A Theory of Justice, “fairness” was translated as équité. Rawls seeks to establish a contrast between a moral “deontological” conception, like his own, in which respect for individual rights and fair treatment are of primary importance, and a teleological conception, in which rights and justice may be sacrificed for the realization of the supreme Good, the ultimate telos, as in utilitarian philosophy. Above all, he makes justice the result of an agreement between the parties to a social contract on the model of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. He completely rejects the idea that justice may be the object of an intellectual intuition as held by intuitionist doctrines. This is why the expression “procedural justice” is often associated with this representation of justice as fairness. But the English term “fairness” combines several semantic fields in such a peculiar way that some languages, like German, have opted to take over the term as such without translating it. French, indeed, has adopted the expression “fair play” but must otherwise be content with near equivalents, none of which articulates the central ideas of honesty, impartiality, justice, and equity in the same way as “fairness.” I. Common Uses In nonphilosophical language, “fair” intersects with several distinct fields. The oldest is that of color, in which “fair” refers to whatever is light, agreeable, or bodes well, as opposed to “foul,” which refers to the dark, ugly, and what bodes ill. Thus, in Shakespeare, the “fair maiden” is a pretty girl with blond hair and a light complexion. Similarly, today, “fair weather” is pleasant. In a second semantic field, “fair” refers to what is morally untarnished, honest and without stain, and irreproachable, as when we speak of a clear conscience. Third, a more recent sense, which goes beyond the individual, his character, or his consciousness, characterizes action, conduct, and the general rules of action; “fair” thus lays the emphasis on the absence of fraud and dishonesty, whence the expression “fair play,” which refers to a respect for the rules of the game. It is at this level that the notions of honesty and impartiality meet. An action, a method, or a kind of reasoning is fair if it rejects arbitrary preferences, undue favor, or partiality and if it does not aim to win out by dishonest means or by force. Thus, in a fourth sense, the term “fairness” becomes an essential component of the idea of justice: the result of its procedures, methods, reasoning, or decisions is itself fair, that is, justified and deserved, when we take its conditions into account. It is just in the sense that it satisfies the formula “to each his due.” The final sense of “fairness” is one according to which, alongside the impartiality of a procedure, a treatment, a decision, and the conformity of their results with justice, we find the idea of measure, of a quantity that is moderate but sufficient. II. “Fairness” and “Equity” In philosophical language, the translation of “fairness” by a cognate of “equity” is problematic since in English the term “equity” already exists, coming from the Latin aequitas as a translation for Aristotelian “equity,” and has been preserved in technical language, kept relatively apart from the semantic field of fairness. Indeed, the term used by Aristotle refers to a different idea—that of a conflict between the letter and the spirit of the law: “the equitable is just but not the legally just but a correction of legal justice” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.10.1137b; see THEMIS, IV). There is thus a jurisdiction in English law (the equity jurisdiction) whose task is to justify exceptions where the law is faulty or too rigid—what legal vocabulary calls “cases of equity” (cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, §38). This worry about equity in the Aristotelian sense lies behind the tradition of common law and the latitude it gives to judges in their interpretation of laws. We thus see how Aristotelian “equity” and Rawlsian “fairness” could come to be opposed to one another. III. “Fairness” and Impartiality: The Duty of Fair Play While equity may correct justice, fairness is at the heart of it insofar as it requires impartial treatment of people. This contemporary philosophical meaning goes back to Henry Sidgwick and his attempt to synthesize Kant and utilitarianism, and it stipulates that it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are two different individuals, and without there being any differences between the natures or the circumstances of the two which can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment. The principle just discussed, which seems to be more or less clearly implied in the common notion of “fairness” or “equity,” is obtained by considering the similarity of the individuals that make up a Logical Whole or Genus. (Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. 3, chap. 13, §3) What is original is Sidgwick’s extension of the term, which prefigures Rawls’s account of fairness. He interprets it in an intersubjective sense as the principle that consists in treating equally “all parts of our conscious life”: “I ought not prefer a present lesser good to a future greater good” (ibid.). By the same reasoning, he extends it intersubjectively to the principle of universal benevolence (ibid.), the utilitarian principle that demands that we maximize the general happiness by considering the relation of the integrant parts to the whole and to each other, I obtain the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other. And it is evident to me that as a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally,—so far as it is attainable by my efforts. IV. “Fairness” and Justice For Sidgwick, the term “fairness” comes to encapsulate a general theory not only of justice but also of rightness, of moral duty. This development reaches maturity in Rawls’s account, in which “justice” is defined as fairness in the sense of an equal respect to which all rational beings have a right, that is, in the sense of the Kantian categorical imperative: “the principles of justice are analogous to the categorical imperative” (Rawls, Theory of Justice, §40). As with Kant, but for other reasons, this conception of justice is procedural—it applies first to processes, not to an atemporal order. First, it characterizes a certain way of acting toward other humans and living beings in general. Second, it is itself a result of procedures; it does not exist “in itself” or by conformity with an external criterion: One must give up the conception of justice as an executive decision altogether and refer to the notion of justice as fairness: that participants in a common practice be regarded as having an original and equal liberty and that their common practices be considered unjust unless they accord with principles which persons so circumscribed and related could freely acknowledge before one another, and so could accept as fair. Once the emphasis is put upon the concept of the mutual recognition of principles by participants in a common practice the rules of which are to define their several relations and give form to their claims on one another, then it is clear that the granting of a claim the principle of which could not be acknowledged by each in the general position (that is, in the position in which the parties propose and acknowledge principles before one another) is not a reason for adopting a practice. (Rawls, “Justice as Fairness”) Thus, when we examine distributive justice or social justice in the economic domain of exchanges, contracts, salaries, and prices of the market, the term “fairness” takes its meaning as justice in distribution, in pricing, in salaries; these are not just “in themselves” as Aristotle says, but the most just in relation to the special conditions of competition: [I]ncome and wages will be just once a (workably) competitive price system is properly organized and embedded in a just basic structure. The distribution that 334 FAIR FAKTURA 335 thus makes it possible to construct a theory of justice that is purely procedural. Catherine Audard REFS.: Aristole. Nicomachean Ethics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1984. Barry, Brian. Theories of Justice. London: Harvester, 1989. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published 1739–40. Rawls, John. “Justice as Fairness.” Philosophical Review 67 (1958): 164–94. . A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 6th ed. London: MacMillan, 1901; 7th ed., preface, J. Rawls. London: Hackett Publishing, 1981. First published in 1874. results is a case of background justice on the analogy with the outcome of a fair game. (Rawls, Theory of Justice, §47) Thus, when philosophers wish to think about justice, they have two registers in which they may work: the first is that of fairness and procedural justice, that is, impartiality and honesty, as well as equity in decisions, procedures, exchanges, distributions, contracts, and so on, without independent criteria for evaluating the results. The other is that of just and right, which imply conformity with an external and independent criterion, obligation, and moral and legal duty, with reference to an ideal of objectivity and truth. In philosophical usage, “justice” tends to be applied more to the results of procedural fairness (Barry, Theories of Justice). But the differences are often simply a question of use. We can thus understand why, if we wish to construct an entirely conventional account of justice, as in Hume, which would nevertheless not be arbitrary, the term “fairness” and its anthropocentric aspects may be a legitimate choice. By way of the associated theory, the philosophical meaning retains the reference to human situations in which rational partners attempt to resolve their differences, as in the signature of a contract, without appealing to independent criteria. Rawls’s theory is especially interesting from this point of view, since it attempts to achieve equality and social justice on the basis of a procedure rather than imposing them as independent criteria, as is almost always the case. Rawls often uses the terms “just” and “fair” interchangeably, which we may see as resulting from a desire to dispense with all moral realism and to discover principles of justice in the dialectic of interests and passions alone. Indeed, Rawls compares the theory of justice with the pure theory of prices or market equilibrium in such a way that his conception of the first is fully contractualist, in the same sense as for Rousseau— namely, that the just is a result of universal suffrage, that is, from the contract each person has with everyone else. The equitable and the just do not exist in themselves; they result, rather, from an agreement on the conditions of liberty, equality, and impartiality collected under the metaphor of the “veil of ignorance.” Any intervention inspired by an external criterion, whether from the threat of force or from an ideology such as equality, would make the decision come out wrong. V. “Fairness” and Equality We see, then, that unlike in the second register of just and right, “fairness” does refer to justice, but without the idea of equality playing a role as an independent criterion. In a theory of justice that is itself egalitarian, inequalities may be justified or fair if and only if they are the result of conditions or principles which are themselves fair (Rawls’s second principle). Equality is thus indeed a component of justice, but as a result of the procedure rather than as a condition imposed a priori. In his use of “fairness,” Rawls announces that it is no longer possible to speak of justice independently of human judgment and procedure. “Fairness” combines impartiality of the conditions of choice, honesty of procedure, and equity with regard to those entering contracts and FAITH Faith comes from the Latin fides, which refers to the confidence one inspires (the “credit” or “credibility” of a speech) and that which one grants, taking its entire extension from the language of law: “solemn engagement, guarantee, oath” (cf. foedus, “treaty”), “good faith, fidelity.” The same IndoEuropean root *bheidh-, “to rely upon, persuade,” is found in the Greek peithomai [πείθομαι], “to obey,” and in the active peithô [πείθω], “to persuade.” Christian Latin makes the term more specialized, using it as a noun for credo, “to believe,” in the sense of trust in God. Different modern languages do not all separate in the same way the legal, rhetorical, and logical network on the one hand—credit and credibility, confidence and belief—and the religious network of “faith,” properly speaking, on the other. German, in particular, with der Glaube, translated by “faith” or “belief,” does not offer this distinction: see BELIEF, GLAUBE, CROYANCE. More generally, for the relationships to the logical network, see ISTINA and TRUTH, PRAVDA, but also CERTITUDE, DUTY, EIDÔLON, Box 1, FICTION, INTENTION, PROBABILITY. For the religious network, see especially PIETAS, RELIGION; cf. ALLIANCE, DESTINY, LEX. v. SECULARIZATION FAKTURA [ϕактура] (RUSSIAN) ENGLISH workmanship, texture LATIN factura v. FACTURE, and ART, MANIERA, PLASTICITY, STYLE In the traditional sense of the term—which is derived from the Latin factura (manufacture)—faktura is the combination of characteristics of paintings or sculptures that relate to the ways in which the material has been worked by the artist and that constitutes the concrete element of style. It is thus a nonnegligible result, but one whose value remains secondary. Nevertheless, in the 1910s and 1920s in Russia, the term faktura [ϕактура], which is normally translated as “facture” or “texture,” acquired unprecedented conceptual and ideological importance. 336 FALSE the two leads into ethics. The reader will find under TRUTH, IV a note on the evolution of the antonyms of “true,” by way of Greek (pseudês [ψευδής], “false” and “deceptive”) to Latin (fallax, “false”/mendax, “lying”). In a general way, each characterization of the truth comprises a characterization of its antonym: see ISTINA, PRAVDA. I. Logic: False, Proposition, Speech 1. To speak falsely is to say things as they are not. From the point of view of traditional logic, an isolated word cannot be true or false as such, but rather requires “composition”: see under PROPOSITION the exploration of the terminology for what is capable of being true and false. See also DICTUM, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, and SUBJECT. For a comparison with the minimal unit, which is the correlate of meaning but not of the true or the false, see SIGN, WORD, and cf. SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED. And with the all-encompassing unit of speech, see LANGUAGE, LOGOS. 2. On the content of propositions, their “import” and the object of judgment, see SACHVERHALT; cf. TATSACHE; on what makes a proposition true or false, see SPEECH ACT. 3. The difference between what is false and what lacks meaning altogether is discussed in the context of the English word NONSENSE; see also SENSE. 4. On the logical principles, especially the principle of noncontradiction, which govern truth and error, see PRINCIPLE; cf. HOMONYM. 5. On the validity of demonstrations and their value, see IMPLICATION. II. Ontology: The False and the Real 1. To speak falsely is also, more radically, to say things that are not. The false is not just a logical issue, but an ontological one as well. The problem of the false thus cuts across that of appearances, as opposed to reality and its objects: see APPEARANCE [DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG], PHÉNOMÈNE, NOTHING. Some languages combine the veridical with the perceptual, thus the German Wahrnehmung (PERCEPTION, Box 3); cf. REPRÉSENTATION. 2. We are thus referred to the objectivity of the object, to the reality of the real; see especially ESSENCE, GEGENSTAND, IL Y A, OBJECT, REALITY, THING, TO BE. 3. We are also led to the problems of images and imagination, and the ambiguous value of aesthetic illusion: see IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MIMÊSIS. III. Ethics: The False and Fault 1. The direct relationship in some languages between the “false” and “fault” is studied under DUTY, III. 2. The difference between “being deceived” and “deceiving” comes, not in what is said, but in the use made of what is said and the intentions behind it. The Greek pseudês does not distinguish them, unlike the nonfixed Latin pair fallax/mendax (see TRUTH, IV). On the complexity of intention, see INTENTION, and WILL, WILLKÜR; cf. DESTINY, LIBERTY, MORALS. See also LIE. 3. Further, we may speak of things that do not exist without the intention of deceiving, see SENSE; cf. HOMONYM. Zaoum (Russ. zaum [ᴈаум])—a poetic form that refuses submission to meaning in order to give priority to the qualities of the verbal material itself—and the possibilities opened up by pictorial abstraction prompted intense reflection on the role of the components of a work. Thus, different typologies of the “plastic elements” appeared. In the Russian context, especially among the constructivists, adepts of a substantial materialism, the “culture of materials” took on a decisive importance. Vladimir Markov was one of the pioneers of this new attention being given to workmanship (faktura [ϕактура]) with reference to the material: “The love of material is an incitement for man. To ornament it and work it yields the possibility of obtaining all the forms that belong to it, the ‘resonances’ that we call faktura” (“Principes de la création”). Several years later, Nicolas Tarabukin made faktura autonomous, and hence a plastic element in its own right: All of the originality of the textural aspect of contemporary painting comes from what has been detached from the ensemble of pictorial problems and transformed into a particular problem, thus creating a whole school of texturalists. (“Pour une théorie de la peinture”) Plastic experimentation with various materials in effect led Tatlin and some other Russian artists to create pictorial reliefs or three-dimensional constructions, such as counterreliefs, which prompt the viewer to dissociate the “texture” (faktura) from the other elements with which it is presented, especially, in the case of painting, color. If, as Tarabukin claims, “it is the material that dictates the form to the artist and not the reverse” (ibid.), the study of the material being put to work—that is, the study of texture—opens up new possibilities: when the material and the form remain fixed entities, the texture creates a dynamic link between them. Coming from the flow, it displays and records the enlivening energy of a dialectic in action. Denys Riout REFS.: Gan, Aleksei. Konstruktivizm. Tverï: Tverskoe izd-vo, 1922. Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. Reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Markov, Vladimir. “Principes de la création dans les arts plastiques. La Facture.” 1914. In Le constructivisme dans les arts plastiques. Vol. 1 of Le constructivisme Russe, edited by G. Conio. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1987. Tarabukin, Nicolas. “Pour une théorie de la peinture.” 1923. In Le constructivisme dans les arts plastiques. Vol. 1 of Le constructivisme Russe, edited by G. Conio. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1987. FALSE “False,” like “fault,” comes from the Latin fallo, which means “to deceive” and, in the passive, “to be deceived” (falsus [false, deceptive, someone deceived], probably from the same etymology as the Greek sphallô [σφάλλω], meaning “I cause to fall”; see PARDON, II). The false, like the true, involves two registers, linguistic and ontological, and the distinction between FANCY 337 We then find the problem for speech of aesthetic illusion (see section II.3 above), which deals with the network of fiction: see DECEPTION, TRUTH, Box 3, and DESENGAÑO, FICTION, HISTORY, SPEECH ACT. 4. Finally, it is possible not to speak while speaking; see in particular VERNEINUNG, cf. NEGATION; and, for German words that indicate privation or failure, see COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION. FANCY / IMAGINATION v. IMAGINATION[PHANTASIA], and BILDUNG, ERSCHEINUNG, FEELING, GENIUS, IMAGE[BILD], MADNESS, MIMÊSIS, SUBLIME At the beginning of chapter 4 of the Salon of 1859, “Le gouvernement de l’imagination,” Baudelaire cites in English and immediately translates into French a text by Catherine Crow that he sees as confirming one of his own ideas but in which it is also possible to discern a distinction already long at work in English theoretical texts: “By imagination, I do not simply mean to convey the common notion implied by that much abused word, which is only fancy, but the constructive imagination, which is a much higher function, and which, in as much as man is made in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by which the Creator projects, creates and upholds his universe” (Œuvres complètes, 2:623–24). Though he does not specify which edition he looked at—it may be that of 1848 or 1853—Baudelaire explicitly refers to The Night Side of Nature, which was first published in London. This distinction appealed to by Baudelaire goes back to the middle of the fifteenth century, when “fancy” was formed as a contraction of “fantasy” (see RT: Dictionarium Britanicum, 1730). It was thus in use for a long time among those English-speaking authors who were sensitive to their language and careful about thinking. It corresponds to two etymologies, one Greek and one Latin “fancy,” from phantasia [φαντασία] and “imagination” (imaginatio), the former referring to the creative force of appearance and the latter to reproduction and images. We thus find in English the same kind of pair as in German (see BILD). The words “imagination” and “fancy” thus only appear to cover the same idea, and we can see their difference by looking at some important texts of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, this awareness of an imperfect synonymy, which may go as far as complete opposition, does not at all help us to resolve problems of translation. . The distinction between “fancy” and “imagination” is often rendered in French by the contrast between fantaisie and imagination. It is not always wrong to translate “fancy” as fantaisie. We find in Bentham, for example, the expression “principle of caprice or groundless fancy” (principe du caprice ou de la chimère sans fondement; this translation by chimère could equally well be given by fantaisie; Deontology, §304). However, even if we wish to relate fantaisie with its Greek sense and set aside the more peculiar sense of “more or less unhinged improvisation,” which it has acquired, we must note that this distinction almost never captures the sense of the English pair. I. Imagination and Fancy: The Commonalities Whether we call the process “imagination” or “fancy,” the commonalities are clear once we understand imagination not so much as a faculty but instead as the ideological resolution of conflicts that are naturally or socially impossible to live with or feel. “Imagination,” like “fancy,” seems to suggest a solution, but this suggestion is already, in a way, a solution. Thus Hume often sprinkles his remarks about the origins of an institution or power with a phrase like “This is founded on a very singular quality of our thought and imagination” (A Treatise of Human Nature). Imagination is thus indeed a “mistress of error”—as long as we note, as Pascal did with great subtlety, that this is “all the more deceitful as it is not always so.” Imagination is accused of “error” (ibid.) as often as fancy. When Hume writes: “ ’Tis natural for one, that does not examine objects with a strict philosophical eye, to imagine that those objects of the mind are entirely the same, which produce not a different sensation, and are not immediately distinguishable to the feeling and perception” (A Treatise of Human Nature); “to imagine” has the clear sense of “conceive falsely.” The same is the case when he writes, concerning the symbolic import of a key, a stone, a handful of earth or wheat, that “the suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of this sensible delivery, deceive the mind and make it fancy that it conceives the mysterious transition of the property” (ibid.). On both sides, the relation with the passions is treated symmetrically. Something may “satisfy the fancy,” just—and just as often—as it may be “agreeable to the imagination” (ibid.). If imagination and fancy conceive wrongly, however, this implies that they are both capable of conceiving: Hume speaks of the conception of fancy and offers as equivalent “imagination or understanding, call it which you please” (ibid.). II. The Game of Alliances: The Topics of “Imagination” and the Dynamics of “Fancy” Where, then, are the differences, when they exist? The words “and” and “or” have the philosophical function of weaving alliances between notions into a shifting whole, since an alliance at one point and from one perspective will not necessarily be the same at another point and perspective. The game of alliances is the following. Statistically—although the argument cannot be ignored in a philosophy whose method consists more in enumerating and weighing cases than in the use of the critical scalpel— “fancy” tends to involve the more fantastical aspects of the imagination. Je me figure telle chose would be rendered by “I fancy” rather than by “I imagine.” The chimerical and system-building philosophers are the ones who, attacking the feminine virtues of modesty and chastity with great vehemence, “fancy that they have gone very far in detecting popular errors” (A Treatise of Human Nature). Alexander, wherever he saw men “fancied he had found subjects” (ibid.). This should not lead us to underestimate the “frivolous” dimension of the imagination: “imagination of the more frivolous properties of our thought” (ibid.). However, we would certainly have more difficulty in assimilating “fancy” to “judgment” than to “imagination,” as Hume does. The less intellectual connotation of “fancy” relative to “imagination” 338 FANCY for Hume, of the “force” of the imagination, of the effect of events on it, of the flow that carries imagination and fancy both; no doubt “imagination moves” (ibid.). However, “imagination” is more phoronomic than dynamic. By contrast, “fancy” more readily and more consciously calls psychic forces to mind; it implies that a furrow has been dug in a given direction: “ ’Tis certain that the tendency of bodies, continually operating upon our senses, must produce, from custom, a like tendency in the fancy” (ibid.). Further, the contrast between “imagination” and “fancy” is clear and distinct when Hume writes in the Treatise: [E]very thing, which invigorates and inlivens the soul, whether by touching the passions or imagination, naturally conveys to the fancy this inclination for ascent, and determines it to run against the natural stream of its thoughts and conceptions. In conformity with their etymologies, we may thus prefer to speak of imagination when we are concerned with images and their reciprocal relations in space and time, and of fancy with regard to dynamic imagination, which is the springing up of images rather than the images themselves. Fancy does not stop at any particular image; that is precisely where we find its whimsical and “fantastical” aspect, which misleads us if we use it as a starting point. However, it borrows from belief and reality a sort of vividness that imagination does is also seen in the comparison of “fancy” with “taste,” which we often find in the Treatise. Finally, there is a second statistical means of distinguishing the two terms, which becomes fixed in philosophical English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the joint effects of the development of probability theory and dynamic conceptions of mind. “Imagination” refers to the act by which, from a present situation that we are to consider either with respect to its eventual effects or as the result of concurrent causes, we make a list of situations, in the direction of either the past or the future. Imagination performs a sort of abstraction of the dimensions of time, considered as objective points of reference. Imagination thus takes on a topical sense and refers to the ability of our mind to recognize its current situation among others of a greater or lesser number. Imagination implies a kind of tracking that is often as systematic as that of the understanding, even though it may be cursory, less reliable, and less rapid: imagination “conceives” (ibid.). “Fancy” is less systematic and refers rather to the particular act of referring to a situation in which one does not actually find oneself. This is why we speak of laws or of “principles of the imagination” (ibid.), which may be said almost without irony to govern men rather than the “laws of fancy,” an expression whose unbearable contradiction is immediately obvious. No doubt it is often a question, 1 Fancy Before Samuel Taylor Coleridge intervened, aesthetic theory tended to synonymize “fancy” and “imagination” to denote either a residual image from the decay of sense (Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 2) or, more positively, the mind’s inventive play. Appealing to the Greek phantasia, in distinction to the Latin imaginatio, Coleridge delimited “fancy” to productions shaped by accidents and contingencies of sense data. In Biographia Literaria (1817, chap. 4), he cites Lear’s exclamation to a bedraggled beggar on the stormy heath as “Imagination”: “What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?” (King Lear, 3.4). This is a totalized traumatic psychology—misery can have no other cause for Lear. What may be “contra-distinguished as fancy” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria) is a delirium from Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved: “[l]utes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber”—a disarray of sense-data and normal referents. Coleridge returns to his distinction at the end of chapter 13. Where Imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create, to idealize and unify,” fancy plays with the ready-made “fixities and definites” of memory “emancipated from the order of time and space.” Coleridge focuses on the process; Wordsworth ponders the affective impression. If imagination is “the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements,” fancy is “the power by which pleasure and surprize are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery” (note in Lyrical Ballads, 1800). Leigh Hunt’s Imagination and Fancy (1845) preferred an affective scale: fancy is “a lighter play of imagination, or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with fairy ornament.” With his painter’s eye, John Ruskin distinguished in terms of detail: fancy renders “a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail. The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in outer detail” (Modern Painters, vol. 2, 1851). John Keats’s last lifetime volume (Poems) joins the traditions of fancy as superficial play to charged feminine personifications: Fancy, the charming cheat. While his iconic poem Fancy exhorts, “Ever let the Fancy roam, / Pleasure never is at home” (1–2), the poet of Lamia speaks of unlocking “Fancy’s casket” for “rich gifts” (1.19–20)—a store with a hint of Pandoran peril. In The Eve of St. Agnes, superstitious Madeline is “hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort” to the dangerous world around her (8). In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats bid a determined, if wistful, adieu to the charm: “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” (8). In his copy of Paradise Lost, he underscored the verse in which Adam explains this she-trickery to a dream-disturbed Eve. While in daylight, “Fansie” may serve “Reason” by forming “Imaginations Aerie shapes” into “knowledge or opinion,” in dream-retreat from nature, she merely mimics, while subverting, Reason: ”misjoyning shapes, / Wilde work produces / Ill matching words and deeds” (5.102–13). Susan J. Wolfson REFS.: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. Hunt, Leigh. Imagination and Fancy. London: Routledge, 1995. Keats, John. Poems Published in 1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. London: Smith, Elder, 1851. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman, 1992. FEELING 339 sensation, impression, affection, or sens. The untranslatability of “feeling” in French reveals the peculiarities of a philosophy of affectivity or, at the least, a way of philosophizing, in English. I. The Distribution of the English Terms The definitions that seem to fix the meanings of terms do not refer to stable objects. Thus, Hume contrasts “impressions of sensation” with “impressions of reflection.” The former, or original impressions “are such as without any antecedent perception arise in the soul, from the constitution of the body, from the animal spirits, or from the application of objects to the external organs.” The latter, or secondary impressions, “are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of an idea” (A Treatise of Human Nature). But no sooner has Hume made these distinctions than he calls, without compunction, “sensation” what he has just picked out as “reflexion” and seems to enter into a relativist spiral that gives no term a chance to stand still. In addition, the connotation of the English terms does not coincide at all in this domain with the French terms. The situation thus contains a twofold discrepancy, one between the signs and their referents, and the other between the system of signs in French and that in English. The place of “feeling” in the company of “sensation,” “sentiment,” “passion,” “emotion,” “affection,” and “sense” causes problems precisely because French has no analogue for it and thus requires a different delimitation of the homologous terms. The gap that separates “feeling” from the other words clearly derives from its etymology, which owes nothing to Latin but is derived from the Old Saxon folian and Old High German, which gives us fühlen. The Old English felan initially meant “to perceive,” “to touch,” “to grasp.” It is clear that its meaning derived much from “touch” by way of the affective domain. However, we would be wrong to believe that “feeling” took its place among the other terms of affect by filling in an empty space alongside them. We would be equally wrong to expect, moving from English to French, a simply different distribution of the territory of affect, as though affect could be considered a homogenous object with sensations on one side and sentiments on the other, as well as emotions, passions, and sense, the last of which is more normative than any of the others. The words display different attitudes in the understanding of affect rather than different territories. Hence, nothing in itself is referred to by “sensation,” any more than by “sentiment,” “feeling,” or “sense.” The main divisions in English-language philosophies of the passions that make use of them as of a code are along the following lines: structural meanings versus those that come from an instantaneous and event-related affect; normative meanings versus factual ones; finally, meanings that imply a cognitive grasping versus those that do not. II. Structure and Event A. “Sensation” and “feeling” / “passion” and “sentiment” We may speak, in English or in French, with regard to the sense organs, of sensation (sensation) of red or green, of heat or dryness, of hunger or sexual desire. However, English also allows for speaking, especially in Hume’s idiom, of the “sensation” of one or another passion, to refer to the not have. Curiously, imagination, supposedly less fantastical than fancy, is the less credible of the two, precisely because, being closer to understanding, it is also more easily scrutinized in relation to the true and hence appears more false than fancy, which deals with a logic of fiction escaping the domain of both truth and falsity. Jean-Pierre Cléro REFS.: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976. Bentham, Jeremy. Deontology, Together with a Table of the Springs of Action, and an Article on Utilitarianism. Edited by A. Goldworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Crowe, Catherine. The Night Side of Nature, or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers. London: T. C. Newby, 1848; New York: Redfield, 1853. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1954. . Pensées and Other Writings. Translated by H. Levi. Introduction by A. Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. FATHERLAND The Latin patria, like the Greek hê patris [ἡ πατϱίς], means “the land of the father”; cf. PIETAS and RELIGIO. More broadly, see PEOPLE, with the terminological networks that imply soil and blood in contradistinction to those that imply language, culture, politics, and cf. COMMUNITY, STATE. The German doublet of Vaterland, Heimat, has other connotations, particularly as used by Heidegger; see HEIMAT. On the way the political community in ancient Greece is designated, see POLIS. On the relationship to oikos [οἶϰος], the “specific,” the “familiar,” see, on the one hand, ECONOMY, OIKONOMIA, and on the other, OIKEIÔSIS, a moral conception characteristic of Stoicism, which is rendered by “appropriation” (cf. APPROPRIATION). v. ANXIETY, GENDER, LIBERTY, LOVE, PROPERTY FEELING / PASSION / EMOTION / SENTIMENT / SENSATION / AFFECTION / SENSE FRENCH sentir, passion, émotion, sentiment, sensation, impression, affection, sens v. COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ENGLISH, GEFÜHL, IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MORAL SENSE, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, SENSE, STIMMUNG There is a very complex relationship between the English term “feeling,” a word of Saxon origin, and its counterparts in Romance languages. In French, the substantival infinitive le sentir is sometimes used, but with little conviction that it can be a consistently used equivalent. For French translators, moreover, the whole cluster of terms around feeling—“passion,” “emotion,” “sentiment,” “sensation,” “affection,” “sense”—has posed such serious challenges that they sometimes prefer either to leave the English words in parentheses or to create verbal overlays like passion, émotion, sentiment, 340 FEELING and event-like—so much so that “to feel” is often expressed in the passive, without indicating what is doing the feeling. “Something felt” is said in English, instead of quelque chose de senti, as it must be said in French. Hume goes so far as to say that “[a]n idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea” (ibid.). The impossibility for “feeling” to have an object in the same way that “sensation” has is not without consequences. “Feeling” cannot have truth like “sensation,” if only because sensations can still be felt. If it has truth, it cannot be a truth in conformity with an object, but rather the rightness of an internal relation, which Hume calls “reflexion.” The objects of “feeling” do not necessarily have reality and are usually fictions such as what we call our self, a force, a passage, an inclination, a propensity, a virtuality (“I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure”; ibid.), a probability, a difference (of social condition), and so on, and one must learn to be on guard against their apparent reality. I feel an inclination in the way I say I feel my mind (“I feel my mind and am naturally inclin’d”; ibid.); that is, as I feel something happening inside it, where the expression “in it” does not have a direct representational value. III. The Normative Aspect: “Sense” However, when it does not mean a sense organ, it is the word “sense” that attracts the collection of normative characteristics of an internal impression (A Treatise of Human Nature). One speaks of a sense of beauty, a sense of sympathy, or a moral sense, even at the cost of showing at the same time that there is no moral sense (see MORAL SENSE). We even sometimes use “sense” with the meaning of “good sense” or “reason” (see COMMON SENSE). The term “sense” implies a dimension of appreciation that does not necessarily fit with feeling or sensation. When Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste, gives the floor to the skeptic, the latter’s argument maintains that sentiment, sensation, or feeling are always true as long as they are really felt; Hume’s response consists in distinguishing truth from reality and emphasizing that “sense” implies an internal normativity: “Though this axiom [there is no arguing with taste], by passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction of common sense; there is certainly a species of common sense which opposes it, at least serves to modify and restrain it.” IV. The Cognitive Aspect: “Sentiment,” “Sense”/“Feeling,” “Sensation” There remains a final semantic gap with regard to affect in English. In relation to cognition, “sentiment” is clearly close to “sense,” unlike “feeling,” and certainly unlike “sensation.” Sensations are what they are; they are real but not necessarily true for all that: “All sensations are felt by the mind, such as they really are” (A Treatise of Human Nature). To attribute truth to them solely by virtue of their existence is to commit an error, confusing truth with reality. On the other hand, “sentiment” is often equivalent to “opinion” and “judgment” (ibid.). At least, in the combination of the two concepts that Hume advances so often in his philosophy, “sentiment” frequently shows up near words that impute cognitive character to it. And while “sentiment” is not always equivalent to “opinion,” it is in any case latter not by its structure but as a felt event, by its own particular experienced quality of pleasure and/or pain. The sensation of a passion is distinguished from sentiment, which is the systematic framework of passion, composed of an object, a subject, qualities, causes, a context, of a trajectory of development and a sort of destiny. This structural or structuring character is clearly seen in phrases like: “These are the sentiments of my spleen and indolence” (A Treatise of Human Nature), where we understand that “spleen” and “indolence” are less sentiments than something under which sentiments lie (the sentence should probably be translated: “Tels sont les sentiments qui sous-tendent ma mélancolie et mon indolence”). We may conceive and even establish, according to Hume’s turn of phrase, a system of sentiment or of passion (“constant and established passion”; ibid.); there could not be one for sensation or feeling. One sentiment can oppose another, be contrary to another, but a sensation is only indirectly contrary to another sensation, by the contrariety of the sentiment of which it is the momentary and intermittent experience. So much so that sentiment may well remain unconscious, insensate, and only become experienced at certain phases which make its presence known. Hume notes, for example, that “the passage from one moment to another is scarce felt” (ibid.). Similarly, while passion is structured by the twofold association of impressions and ideas, it is not always obvious that we are “sensible of it” (ibid.), even if the passion is violent. In this sense, the noun “sensation” remains close in English to the adjective “sensible,” which is often correctly rendered into French as conscient. While the terms “sentiment,” “affection,” and “passion” clearly have a structural connotation, the word “feeling” on the other hand is, along with “sensation,” no less clearly on the side of lived experience (“feeling or experience” and “feeling and experience”; ibid.). Thus Hume can speak in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, without any redundancy, though to the despair of translators, of “feelings of sentiment.” M. Malherbe speaks of “ce qui s’éprouve par sentiment”; R. Bouveresse, of “impressions du sentiment”; G. Robel of “émotions du sentiment.” None of these solutions is convincing, but is there any way to solve the problem? B. “Sensation” and “feeling” distinguished by the status of their object “Sensation” and “feeling” cannot however be substituted for one another indifferently. Unlike Latin or French, English has no verb that, like sentir, corresponds to “sensation.” Thus the word effects a sort of transcendence of lived experience much more fully than does “feeling,” whose proximity to “feel” gives us a simple verbal mode. “Sensation” detaches its object, like a conclusion is detached from its reasoning— which allows Hume to treat “probable reasoning” as “a species of sensation” (A Treatise of Human Nature). “Feeling” does not posit its object the way “sensation” does. We can even “feel a reverse sensation from the happiness and misery of others” (ibid.). “Feeling” barely has any consistency independent of what it feels, since it has no means of conceiving, imagining, or representing. “To feel” marks a collaboration in a process; it plays along either in an immanent or an adherent way, unlike sensation, which is more instantaneous FICAR 341 that tend to hide it or place it in the role of a simple articulation, even though the metaphysical consequences may be considerable. For the Portuguese verb ficar this concrete sense is easier to see. This is in part because of its rather clear etymology and the coexistence alongside it of a non-copulative meaning. Ficar comes from the Latin figicare or fixicare, frequentative of figere, “to drive down,” “to implant,” “to fix,” as in this expression of the irrevocability of speech: “Fixum et statutum est” (It is fixed and stabilized) (Cicero, Pro L. Murena, 62). In this sense it appears as a suffix in some French or English words, such as “crucifix,” crucifier, “crucify.” The use of ficar, which is translated as “to remain,” more or less retains this sense of a verb of state: “There, well beyond the mouth of the river, she remained (ficou), full of fear” (Guimarães Rosa, Magma). When the sense of remaining or fixing is transposed from the subject to the relation between the subject and its qualities, we have an attributive phrase. In the preceding example, we may simply remove the comma between the verb “remained” (ficou) and the complement “full of fear” to perform the transformation. The referent changes, obviously, since the attribute becomes the more important element of the predication: “ela ficou cheia de medo [elle était remplie de crainte]” (she remained full of fear). It is as though the attributes were affixed to the subject in a very concrete movement of being hooked onto it. Or rather, as though the subject froze momentarily in certain conditions, qualities, etc. We thus can understand the perfective aspect of the attribution, which results from this fixing. II. The Aspectual Differences between Ser, Estar, and Ficar H. Santos Dias da Silva speaks of the “concretizing necessity possessed by the Portuguese mind” (Expressão linguística da realidade e da potencialidade; cited in Quadros, “Da lingua portuguesa”): Deus é bom [God is good]: this is the only admissible phrase since God is an eternal subject independent of space and time, that is, non-limited; if we change the subject, and pick a limitable one or one in space or time, with a conditioned existence, the copula may be expressed by verbs other than ser [to be]: a) o homem é bom; b) o homem está bom; c) o homem fica bom. By comparing the different ways of attributing the adjective “good” to the subject “man,” we may see how the different verbs used for the copula transform the meaning of the sentence by their aspectual modulation: A. Ser: “O homem é bom” There is no problem translating it as “the man is good.” This means that he is morally good, that he acts honestly, or that his flesh is tasty. His essence, his soul, or his consistency, his flesh—whatever pertains to him specifically, or universally if we speak of man as such—that is good. The verb ser in Portuguese expresses this idea of essential attribution. B. Estar: “O homem está bom” The verb estar, by contrast, denotes an instantaneous and momentary aspect, or an imperfect (infectum) one, especially an intellectual posture or attitude, an inclination to opine. The essay Of the Standard of Taste, which distinguishes sentiment from opinion, nevertheless points out that sentiment is capable of being right, while distinguishing, as against “a species of philosophy, which represents the impossibility of ever attaining any standard of taste,” its rightness from its reality, as though it were enough for it to be right (see GOÛT and RIGHT/JUST/GOOD). Some notions that strongly resemble one another when looked at in one perspective can differ dramatically when looked at from another, no less pertinent one with regard to affect. Hume, who gladly joins notions together, comes up with every possible grouping (“feeling or sentiment” [A Treatise of Human Nature]; “impression or feeling” [ibid.]), not to mark their equivalence, but rather to show in each case what they contrast with as a pair. Such a system could never be ontologically stable. Notions are distributed differently depending on the perspective adopted. Thus Hume can write “imagination feels that ,” or “fancy feels that ,” “judgement feels that ,” or “the spirit feels that ” (A Treatise of Human Nature). He thinks he can express laws with ontological weight concerning affect by emphasizing, like Bowlby in Attachment and Loss, that “being felt is a phase of the process itself” (S. Langer, quoted by Bowlby; italics in original), whereas in fact he only manages to make the semantic tricks of his language work properly, or, at most, to explain them. Jean-Pierre Cléro REFS.: Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1, Attachment. London: Hogarth, 1969. Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1779. . Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. Vol. 3 of The Philosophical Works of David Hume, edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985. First published in 1777. . Of the Standard of Taste. Vol. 3 of Philosophical Works of David Hume, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. London: Longmans, 1874–75. Translation by M. Malherbe: De la règle du goût, in Essais et traités sur plusieurs sujets: Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires. Paris: Vrin, 1999. Translation by R. Bouveresse: Les essais esthétiques. Paris: Vrin, 1974. Translation by G. Robel: Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires et autres essais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. FICAR ENGLISH to stay, to be, to become The Iberian verbs ser and estar have important nuances in their copulative use with respect to the condition of the relation between subject and attribute, whether permanent or transitory, essential or accidental, abstract or concrete, etc. Portuguese adds yet another difference since it has an additional verb for expressing the relation of subject and attribute: the verb ficar, which implants and fixes the attributes onto the subject. I. The Concrete Origin of the Copula in Ficar We rarely feel the concrete verbal meaning of a copulative verb, no doubt because of the semantic force of the attributes 342 FICTION “durante o verão” (in the summer). We may see even more clearly the circumstantial and perfective aspect in the common expression “ficar com alguém,” literally, “to have been with someone,” which indicates a quick sexual affair, usually consisting of a single meeting. Fernando Santoro REFS.: Cicero. Selected Political Speeches. Penguin Classics, 1977. Guimarães Rosa, João. Magma. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1997. Pessoa, Fernando. Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. 10th ed. Lisbon: Ática, 1993. Quadros, António. O espírito da cultura portuguesa. Lisbon: Soc. De Expansão Cultural, 1967. . “Da lingua portuguesa para a filosofia portuguesa.” In Seminário de literatura e filosofia portuguesa (actas). Lisbon: Fundação Lusíada, 2001. Santos Dias da Silva, Hernani. Expressão linguística da realidade e da potencialidade. Braga: Ed. Fac de Filosofia, 1955. if we add gerundives to make verbal phrases that are common and very concrete, such as estar sendo, “to be in the course of being.” Translation requires a context in order to reconstruct the aspectual information. If the man in question was sick or convalescent, for example, we would translate está bom by “he is well.” If we used “the man is good” for “o homem está bom” or “o homem está sendo bom,” this would be because he is doing an action well, such as his work. If we wish to specify that he is good now, but that no one knows how he will be tomorrow, we may translate “he is keeping well” or “he is holding up.” But this translation is not always accurate, as in the famous case of the minister and philosopher E. Portela, who, asked about his selection as the Brazilian minister of culture, declared: “Eu nãu sou minstro, estou ministro.” The concision of the reply is untranslatable since to specify the aspect we would have to add two adverbial phrases: “I am not a minister eternally, I am only the minister at the moment,” where this expression does not connote any political weakness. With estar, it is rare to have a universal attribute. The verb estar can only speak of universals if it is a matter of conditions, with circumstantial complements, or adjectives determining dispositions, as if they were the circumstances of mind: “O homem é um vivente que está sempre atento à própria morte” (Man is a living being whose condition is to be constantly attentive to his own death). This does not prevent the verb, then, from paradoxically expressing the universal condition of the completion of each particularity, the existential condition of a being that is never completed as long as it is there—está—of a being at the moment of circumstance. Whence the importance of the verb estar in discussing the problems of existence in Iberian languages. C. Ficar: “O homem fica bom” Here the attribution has a perfective aspect. If the verb were in the perfect, ficou bom (he has been good), we would be back at the previous case: the verb ficar replaces the verb estar in the perfect without a problem. There would in addition be an idea of completed transformation, of becoming, which in French would either require a noncopulative verb: “O homem ficou bom,” “L’homme a recouvré la santé” (The man regained his health); or a present perfect: “Et moi, de penser à tout cela, j’ai été [fiquei] encore une fois moins heureux. J’ai été [fiquei] sombre et malade et saturnien comme un jour où toute la journée le tonnerre se prépare mais n’arrive même pas le soir” (And I, thinking about all that, I have been [fiquei] again less happy. I have been [fiquei] somber and sick and saturnine like a day where thunder is being readied all day but never arrives even at night” ( Pessoa, Poemas). But in Portuguese, if the sentence with ficar is in the present, it still seems incomplete—it requires circumstantial complements as mentioned above: Portuguese requires that the circumstances be precise since ficar can only perform its copulative task in a precise, definite, and concrete environment. Where, when, how? The categories of time, place, cause, manner, and so on must structure the circumstance of the attribution: “O homem fica bom” (the man is good) “quando educado” (when he is well brought-up), “se está só” (if he is alone) FICTION “Fiction” comes from fingo (in the supine, fictum), whose proper meaning is “to model in clay,” like the Greek plassô [πλάσσω], which also refers to the activity of inventing fiction, as opposed to writing history. Fiction and plasticity are thus semantically linked: see ART, Box 2, HISTORY, Box 3, and PLASTICITY. In addition, the proximity of factum, “fact” (from the Latin facere, “to make,” Indo-European root *dhē-, like the Greek tithêmi [τίθημι], “to place,” which yields, for example, faktura [ϕактура]; see FAKTURA), and fictum (from the Latin fingo, Indo-European root *dheig’h-, which yields, for example, figura), consistently evokes the relation between fact and fiction, human fabrication (on the relation to Vico, see DICHTUNG, Box 1; Lacan, for example, in L’étourdit [in Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001)], suggests the portmanteau spelling fixion). See also the Portuguese FICAR, which fixes predicates onto subjects. I. Fiction, Language, and Truth On the discursive status of fiction, see DECEPTION, DESCRIPTION, DICHTUNG (and as a complement, PRAXIS, on the singularity of Greek poiêsis [ποίησις] as the poet’s “fabrication”; see POETRY), ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY. See also RÉCIT and STYLE. More generally, for the relation to human practice, see ACT, PRAXIS, SPEECH ACT. For the relation to truth and the real, see DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, REALITY, RES, TRUTH; cf. FALSE, INTENTION, LIE, THING. II. Fiction, Image, and Art Fiction is related to images and the faculty of imagination; see IMAGE [BILD, BILDUNG, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MIMÊSIS. For its relationships to artistic activity, see ART, BEAUTY; and regarding its invention, see ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, GENIUS, INGENIUM. v. GENDER, PEOPLE, SEX FLESH “Flesh” translates the French word chair, which comes from the Latin caro, carnis, which is connected with the IndoEuropean root *(s)ker-, “to cut or share” (cf. Gr. sarx [σάϱξ], “flesh,” and keirô [ϰείϱω], “I cut”) and originally meant “piece of meat.” “Flesh” is one of the possible translations of German Leib, insofar as it is coupled not only with Seele (soul) but also with Körper (inert body). But unlike Fleisch, whose literal meaning is “flesh” in the sense of “meat,” Leib is connected with Leben, “life.” In the entry LEIB is found a study of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew systems that constitute the matrices of this set and the meaning of their phenomenological reinvestment. To complete the German system, see ERLEBEN and GESCHLECHT. For the phenomenological and existentialist side, see DASEIN, EPOCHÊ, INTENTION. See also, on incarnation, BILD, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, and OIKONOMIA. v. ANIMAL, GOD, HUMANITY, LIFE, SOUL FORCE / ENERGY FRENCH force, énergie GERMAN Kraft, Energie, Wirkung GREEK dunamis [δύναμις], energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια] LATIN vis, virtus v. ACT, EPISTEMOLOGY, MACHT, MOMENT, POWER, REALITY, STRENGTH, VIRTUE In every European language, the word “force” (English) / force (French) / Kraft (German) underwent an abrupt transformation with the publication in 1847 of the dissertation “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft” [On the conservation of force] by Hermann von Helmholtz. More precisely, whereas in its vernacular usage, the word remained synonymous with power in the vague sense of the term (as in the expressions “having the force of law,” “la forza del destino”), its conceptual usage, which until then had been just as vague, was suddenly, “by the force of mathematics,” radicalized. After 1847 the word may have two translations: “force”/force/Kraft (directed action producing or tending to produce movement, in conformity with the laws of Newtonian dynamics), and “energy”/énergie/Energie (scalar, that is, nondirected, magnitude obeying a metaphysical principle of conservation, just like “matter”). The different manners of referring in German to the conservation of energy (“die Erhaltung der Kraft” / “die Konstanz der Energie” / “Energiesatz”) are traces left by the difficult development of this notion. I. “Force,” “Energy,” and “Conservation” in German-Language Physics The word “energy” followed an evolution that was the reverse of the evolution of “force.” It is derived from the Greek energeia [ἐνέϱγεια]; we know that Aristotle, in his study of movement, contrasts energy with potentiality and that this duality deeply marked the development of European philosophy and science until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the word “energy” came to be used only in literature, “force” having supplanted it in discussions of the natural world. . Nevertheless, this eclipse was of short duration: a century later, “energy” makes a noticeable comeback, in the precise physico-mathematical context of rational mechanics. In 1807, Thomas Young writes: “The term energy may be applied, with great propriety, to the product of the mass or weight of a body, into the square of the numbers expressing its velocity” (A Course of Lectures,1:59). The word acquires its definitive theoretical status with Helmholtz’s 1847 essay “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft,” in which it did not appear, but which nevertheless established its current definition. For an isolated system, it is the quantity that maintains a constant value throughout the physical processes taking place within. The meaning of the word in vernacular speech then expands, and it acquires a vague technical sense—even, in the last thirty years, a technocratic one. It is amusing to note that in this register of language that claims scientific exactitude, the sense of the word is completely denatured— as in the expression “energy economizing,” which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction, since a quantity that by definition is “conserved” cannot be “economized.” This failure to abide by the basic rules of logic has the virtue of revealing a theoretical difficulty: the idea of conservation is one that is just as erudite as, if not more than, that of energy, and as such, it is inevitably misused by common language. The idea that energy might (and indeed must) be economized in the same way as water, money, or food, as though there were a risk of one day running out of it, is much more natural (and in agreement with the economic morality of the day) than that of a magnitude that is conserved, come what may. The comparison with commonly used French expressions such as “être à bout de force” (to have run out of strength) or “économiser ses forces” (to save up one’s strength) shows that the interplay between force and énergie is actually a three-word game, the rules of which are set by conservation. It would not be possible to study the pair of force/énergie (or Kraft/Energie) independent of each word’s constitutive relation to the word conservation (Erhaltung). Once this is established, a significant difference immediately appears between English and French on the one hand (along with the other Latin-based languages), and German on the other: although the word conservation was not affected by Helmholtz’s 1847 article, the word Erhaltung, usually translated in French and English as “conservation,” fell out of use (as a scientific term), replaced by Konstanz by Helmholtz himself in 1881, in the edition of his Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen. The completely German expression “die Erhaltung der Kraft” was changed by its own author into one that he judged to be better upon reflection. We may assess the difficulty presented by the idea of conservation/constancy in German by the fact that today, what the other languages call “conservation of energy” is simply called Energiesatz or Energieprinzip (law or principle of energy), a surgical way of resolving the question. We may hypothesize, then, that the difficulties faced by the German language in speaking of “conservation of energy” come from the fact that the historical development of this notion was effected by German-speaking physicists: basically Gottfried Leibniz, who laid the foundation, and Helmholtz, who brought it to a conclusion that today seems as though it must be definitive. Because the conceptual difficulties posed by this notion were first expressed by Germans in their own 344 FORCE 1 Dunamis, energeia, entelecheia, and the Aristotelian definition of motion v. ART, GOD, NATURE, PRAXIS, PRINCIPLE, TO TI ÊN EINAI, VIRTÙ We find a common translation in dictionaries for dunamis [δύναμις] and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], namely, “force”: dunamis is rendered by “power, force” and energeia by “force in action, action, act” (both may be said, for example, of the force of a speech; cf. RT: Bailly, Dictionnaire grec français, s.v. dunamis, III, and s.v. energeia, II.2). The difference between these two “forces” is nevertheless a cornerstone of Aristotle’s physical (Physics, esp. book 3) and metaphysical (Metaphysics Θ) terminology: The object of his inquiry is dynamis and energeia, potentia and actus in the Latin translation, Vermögen and Verwirklichung (power and realization) in the German, or also Möglichkeit and Wirklichkeit (possibility and reality). (Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3, trans. Brogan and Warnek, 13) Aristotle bases the study of physics as a science (epistêmê theôrêtikê [ἐπιστήμη θεωϱητιϰή], “theoretical science,” Metaphysics E.1, 1025b18–28) on a few fundamental principles and definitions. Strangely, some remain obvious for us, whereas others, even canonical ones such as that of movement, have become literally unintelligible. Nature, phusis [φύσις], with which the Physics is concerned, is defined by movement. All natural beings (ta phusei onta panta [τὰ φύσει ὄντα πάντα]), says Aristotle, have in themselves immediately and essentially a principle of movement and fixity (archên kinêseôs kai staseôs [ἀϱχὴν ϰινήσεως ϰαὶ στάσεως], Physics 2.1, 192b13–14): a tree grows, unlike the products of crafts like a bed or a coat (see ART)—it is a “self-mover.” Self-motion in the Aristotelian sense does not necessarily imply, as it does for us, locomotion: kinêsis, namely, kata topon [ϰατὰ τόπον], according to the pou [ποῦ], the “where,” is only for Aristotle a species of the genus kinêsis [ϰίνησις], movement in the wide sense (a genus that, in a very Aristotelian way, is named after the most important species). This movement (kinêsis) he also calls change, metabolê [μεταϐολή], formed from ballô [βάλλω], “to throw,” and meta, indicating a further place or time. Thus, as Heidegger says, “Umschlag von etwas zu etwas” (a change from something into something, in “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις,” trans. Sheehan, 191), movement or change includes, besides displacement: —generation and destruction, genesis kai phthora [γένεσις ϰαὶ φθοϱά], or movement according to ousia [οὐσία], the “essence”; —alteration, alloiôsis [ἀλλοίωσις], movement according to poion [ποῖον], the “what”; —growth or diminution, auxêsis kai phthisis [αὔξησις ϰαὶ φθίσις], movement according to poson [ποσόν], the “how much” (Physics 2, 192b14–16; 7.7, 261a27–36). It is with the general definition of movement, given at the beginning of book 3, that we come across energy and potentiality, or, more literally, entelechy, entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια], and power, dunamis. Here is the celebrated definition, subject to so many glosses and such close scrutiny: hê tou dunamei ontοs entelecheia hêi toiouton kinêsis estin [ἡ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος ἐντελέχεια ᾗ τοιοῦτον κίνησίς ἐστιν]. We have distinguished in respect of each class between what is in fulfillment and what is potentially; thus the fulfillment of what is potentially, as such, is motion. (Physics 3.1, 201a10–11, ed. Barnes, 1:343) We must weigh the ontological freight of this pair, potency and act. It constitutes in effect one of the four senses of being: “Being” has several meanings, of which one was seen to be the accidental, and another the true (“nonbeing” being the false), while besides these there are the figures of predication (e.g., the “what,” quality, quantity, place, time, and any similar meanings which “being” may have), and again besides all these there is that which “is” potentially or actually. (Metaphysics E.2, 1026a32–b2, trans. Barnes) Aristotle’s physics is thus from the start metaphysical through and through. The first example of movement makes it possible to measure the distance with our kinetics: When what is buildable, insofar as we call it such, is in fulfillment, it is being built, and that is building. (Physics 3.1, 201a16–18) It is the transition from power to act, the energy of the potency that deploys itself throughout the time of the actualization (“neither before nor after,” 201b7), that constitutes motion, thus neither pure and inactive potentiality, nor the uncompleted result (“When there is a house [οἰϰία], there is no longer the buildable [οὐϰέτ’ οἰϰοδομητόν],” 201b11). Movement is thus energeia atelês [ἐνέϱγεια ἀτελής], a putting to work that has not achieved its goal (“an act, but incomplete” or “imperfect,” Physics 3.2, 201b32; cf. Metaphysics Θ.6, 1048b29) or entelecheia atelês [ἐντελέχεια ἀτελής], an incomplete fulfillment (Physics 8.5, 257b8–9). Aristotle thus uses the terms energeia (from ergon [ἔϱγον], “work,” and its product, a faculty and its exercise; see PRAXIS) and entelecheia (from telos [τέλος], the “end” and goal; see PRINCIPLE) to refer to this progressive attainment of the end, the realization of self, which leads to rest. As noted at Metaphysics Θ.8, 1050a21–23: The ergon is the telos, and the energeia is the ergon; this is why the word energeia is made from ergon and tends to mean entelecheia. J. Tricot translates: L’œuvre est la fin, et l’acte est l’œuvre; de ce fait aussi le mot acte, qui est dérivé d’œuvre, tend vers le sens d’entéléchie. And Bonitz comments (RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v. entelecheia): Whereas energeia is the action by which something is led from possibility to the full and perfect essence, entelecheia refers to this perfection itself. By contrast with physical substances (hai phusikai ousiai [αἱ φυσιϰαὶ οὐσίαι]), God, whose substance is only act or energy (hê ousia energeia [ἡ οὐσία ἐνέϱγεια]) (Metaphysics Λ.6, 1071b20)—more precisely, “energy of mind (hê nou energeia [ἡ νοῦ ἐνέϱγεια])” and hence “the best and eternal life” (b26–28; see UNDERSTANDING, Box 1)—is necessarily immobile: as the prime mover, he is “that which moves without being moved [ho ou kinoumenon kinei (ὃ οὐ ϰινούμενον ϰινεῖ)]” (1072a25). For the same reason, in our sublunary world, dunamis is a sovereign and complex notion. It refers first, as early as Homer, to potestas, physical or moral force, the power of men or gods, political power. The term can also apply to the value of a word, the power of a number that is squared, armed forces, and then refers to what we could call an effective reality. But dunamis also means potentia, that is, a “not yet,” a pure virtuality, this “potential Hermes that the FORCE 345 which is greater or lesser depending on whether they are themselves larger or smaller. Le soleil et toutes les planètes sont doués d’une semblable vertu d’attraction par laquelle tous les corps sont attirés. Si le corps de la terre était plus grand ou plus petit, la gravité ou la pesanteur des corps serait aussi plus grande ou plus petite. D’où l’on comprend que tous les autres grands corps de l’univers, comme le soleil, les planètes et la lune, sont doués d’une force attractive semblable, mais plus ou moins grande suivant qu’ils sont eux-mêmes plus ou moins grands. (Letters 53 and 55, trans. Hunter [emphasis added]) Force is thus a virtue, a property of bodies, a power that they possess because of their bodily nature itself. Force is thus a property of matter. The question therefore arises of what the nature of this power possessed by matter is, how it is exercised, how it is manifested, what its effect is, how it is expressed. Note first of all the confusion of the French language, which stutters and is at a loss for words on this point. It would not be the same in German, where the word Kraft is unmistakably associated with wirken, Wirkung (simply look at the corresponding entries in any German dictionary: Kraft defines Wirkung and Wirkung defines Kraft). In other words, the German language has a word for referring to the actualization of a power, a force, and this word is lacking in Latin-based languages. The response given by Euler to the question of the determination of the power that must be associated with the word “force” (“a term in common use, although many by whom it is employed have but a very imperfect idea of it”) is simple (Letter 76, trans. Hunter): “We understand by the word force whatever is capable of changing the state of a body.” (Euler is not clear in this passage, but the state at language, in words that necessarily were not scientific in origin, but borrowed from everyday language, they only remained truly meaningful in that language. The other European languages had to be satisfied with conventional translations— to which they were all the more entitled, as the mathematical formulation of the law of “conservation of energy” is itself utterly unambiguous. We may try to verify this hypothesis by showing that the focus on Kraft and Erhaltung gives rise, from the words’ very usage in ordinary German, to peculiarities that the confrontation between “force” and “conservation” cannot suggest in English, let alone French. Thus, the ambiguities of the word Kraft are not, and never will be, rigorously the same as those pertaining to the French and English word “force.” II. The Indeterminacies of Physical Definitions of Force in the Mechanistic Tradition: Internal/External Conservation/Change In the mechanistic tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the meaning of the word “force” was subject to an indeterminacy of which physicists before 1847 were fully aware without being able to specify its exact nature (unlike us who were brought up under a strict distinction between the concepts of force and energy). It is particularly flagrant in the 1760 Letters to a German Princess, which Leonhard Euler devotes to the question of force (note that the author is a German writing in French, the language of scientific communication at the time): The sun and all the planets are endowed with a similar virtue of attraction by which all bodies are attracted. If the body of the Earth were larger or smaller, the gravity or weight of bodies would also be greater or smaller. From which we understand that all the other large bodies in the Universe, like the sun, the planets, and the moon, are endowed with a similar attractive force, but one sculptor perceives in the wood” (Metaphysics Θ.6, 1048a32–33), and virtus, a faculty (“when we call scientific even one who does not speculate if he has the faculty of speculation [kai ton mê theôrounta an dunatos êi theôrêsai (ϰαὶ τὸν μὴ θεωϱοῦντα ἂν δυνατὸς ᾖ θεωϱῆσαι)],” 1048a34–35), which Aristotle discusses by way of its pairing with activity. Potentia thus touches possibilitas, the logical concept opposed to adunaton [ἀδύνατον], to impossibility in the sense of contradictory. That which is in actuality capable, however, is that for which nothing more is unattainable once it sets itself to work as that for which it is claimed to be well equipped. (Metaphysics Θ.3, 1047a24–26; see also, for analysis of the senses of dunamis, Metaphysics Δ.12) The connection between physics, metaphysics, and logic at work in all aspects of human life, from politics to art, rests on this dynamic. But this dynamic is only itself dynamic, in motion, because energeia or entelecheia is proteron [πϱότεϱον], “prior” to potentiality, or “first” with respect to it (Metaphysics Θ.8, 1049b5): in Aristotle, as Heidegger points out, we do not move from potentia to actualitas; according to the proposition that becomes possible with Latinization, “in order for something to be real it must first be possible” (Die Physis bei Aristoteles). On the contrary, the energy or the act must be already present to attract the power or the force; energy is more ousia than potentiality, just as God is with regard to the other beings—or the morphê [μοϱφή], “form,” with regard to hulê [ὕλη], “matter,” within the composite substance (Physics 2.1, 193b7–9). This complex terminology, so subtly developed, related to a cosmology destroyed by modernity, nevertheless continues to evolve, notably through Leibnizian dynamics, coming to encode our new universe as well. Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vols. 1–2. Edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. Aristoteles Metaphysik Θ 1–3: Vom Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft, Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 33: 1931 lecture course. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981. Translation by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. . Die Physis bei Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967. . “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics В, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 346 FORCE Je dis donc ce qui paraîtra bien étrange, que la même faculté des corps par laquelle ils s’efforcent de se conserver dans le même état est capable de fournir des forces qui changent l’état des autres. (Letter 76, trans. Hunter) The question is thus twofold, or repeated, dealing with two pairs of opposites: internal/external and conservation/change. Should we, then, like Euler, suppose that the causes of changes of states in bodies are external to them, and thus consider only forces that are necessarily external? (Newton also does so to some extent; though he does not hesitate to speak of vis insita with regard to inertia, he nevertheless specifies that a body only exercises this internal force if another external force, vis impressa, attempts to make it change its state of motion.) This conception held sway for two centuries, despite the logical difficulties that Euler modestly characterizes as strange, and that are the source of its demise. We know that the strangeness in question disappears once we admit that, as in general relativity, inertia and gravitation are two aspects of a single phenomenon: the interaction of bodies in a space that is itself considered a physical entity. For a modern physicist, after 1916, “force” is synonymous with “correlation.” As Hermann Weyl writes, “Force is the expression of an independent power that connects the bodies according to their inner nature and their relative position and motion” (Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, trans. Helmer, 149). Or, should we think with Leibniz that bodies can change their state as the effect of an internal cause, to which it would also be fitting to apply the concept of “force”? The fact that this conception, that of monads, is closer to the modern notion of force—insofar as it implies that a body only exists to the extent that it is related to others, and that it does not exempt itself from space—does not make it superior with regard to what concerns us here, namely the evolution of the word “force”/force/Kraft. It is interesting rather because it leads naturally to the question of conservation, which we said earlier was intrinsically related to that of force. Indeed, in a conception where the change by which the effect of force is measured affects the state of all bodies, it becomes crucial to look for what remains constant in all this change. Before going further into the examination of what meaning must be given to the word “conservation,” we should note that it does not appear explicitly in Newton. The question of whether the idea is there implicitly, hidden in the consequences of the “third law of motion,” which states that to every action there corresponds an opposite reaction, is still debated today. We shall stick here, for once, to the “facts”: the word does not appear in Newton. We shall restrict ourselves then to examining its meaning where it does appear, namely in the Leibnizian tradition. III. The Leibnizian Metaphysics of Force: Force and Substance A. Vis or virtus and act “Force” is not subject in Leibniz to the same type of definition as that given by Newton or Euler. The word does not refer to a physical phenomenon characterizing “bodies,” but issue is that of motion, in conformity with the Newtonian doctrine he is promulgating.) We need not seek far: the important word here is “change.” “Change,” which is the opposite of conservation. However, to conserve, “conserve itself in the same state, whether rest or motion,” is another quality of bodies (unless it is the same one, a question that is only dealt with in 1916 with the theory of general relativity), also related to their bodily natures, which is called “inertia,” but which, for Euler, cannot be identified with force without violating language, since it is “rather the contrary,” by virtue of the earlier definition of force. Moreover, inertia exists in the body itself (it is insita, according to Isaac Newton’s adjective), whereas force, as Euler understands it (what Newton calls vis impressa), is necessarily external to the body whose state it changes: Each time a state of a body is changed, we must never seek the cause in the body itself; it always exists outside the body, and that is the correct idea we must have of a force. Toutes les fois que l’état d’un corps est changé, il n’en faut jamais chercher la cause dans le corps même; elle existe toujours hors du corps, et c’est la juste idée qu’on doit se former d’une force. (Letter 74, trans. Hunter) It is plain that the concept of force described by Euler, a defender of Newtonian ideas, is much more complex than what the simplified teaching of Newtonian mechanics suggests: it is first and foremost a power of bodies, which they exercise on other bodies. It is certainly important that this power is directional, and thus that force in this case is mathematically represented by a vector, but this is secondary, in the sense that this is not part of the definition—it results from Newton’s second law, which establishes that the power in question has the effect of modifying the quantity of movement, a directed magnitude. Let us return to Euler and the “correct idea” that must be formed of a force, in virtue of which he is against Leibniz and the system of monads: It is false that the elements of matter, or monads, if there are any, are endowed with a force for changing their state. It is rather the opposite which is true, that they have the quality of conserving themselves in the same state. Il est faux que les éléments de matière, ou les monades, s’il y en a, soient pourvues d’une force de changer leur état. Le contraire est plutôt vrai, qu’elles ont la qualité de se conserver dans le même état. (Letter 76, trans. Hunter) The controversy between Newtonians and Leibnizians is thus over the effect of “force,” not its existence as a power of bodies. The question is whether a force is capable of changing the state of the body possessing it, or only that of other bodies to which it is external. I say therefore something which will seem strange, that the same faculty of bodies by which they attempt to conserve themselves in the same state is capable of providing forces which change the states of others. FORCE 347 why action (appearing in technical expressions such as the principle of least action, quantum of action, and so on) bears this name, and accepted it as a convention. This lack of obviousness of the link between action and force (being strong, fort, is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting) is probably due to the fact that French has only one word, force, where German—and English, thanks to its joint Latin and Saxon origins—has Kraft and Stärke (“force” and “strength”), which allows it to distinguish between power and vigor (see STRENGTH). Nevertheless, action (or moving action) is defined by Leibniz as a double product: product of the “formal [or essential] effect” of movement—which itself “consists in what is changed that is, in the quantity of mass that has been displaced and in the space, or the length by which this mass was transferred”—and the speed with which the change takes place. Leibniz has no trouble justifying the fact that the formal effect is not by itself sufficient for characterizing the action (in the sense of Wirkung) of the absolute force on the basis of everyday language (French this time, however): “It is clear that that which produces the same formal effect in less time acts more.” As to why the action is what gives the measure of absolute force, bringing in speed and even dynamics, rather than the formal effect, which is outside of time, purely static, Leibniz, appealing to the argument he has used countless times according to which matter is not reducible to its extension, explains it thus: “The formal effect consists in the body in motion, taken by itself, and does not consume the force at all.” Without entering into the details of this argument, which would require saying more about Leibnizian dynamics, let us simply note the verb used here: consumer, to consume—the force is consumed. And Leibniz continues: the action, unlike the formal effect, consumes force—in perfect conformity with the association suggested in German between Kraft and Wirkung. C. Maintaining force Here is where an “axiom of higher philosophy” comes in, which “cannot be geometrically demonstrated,” and which, for this reason, would today naturally be described as “metaphysical”: “The effect is always equal in force to its cause, or, what is the same thing, the same force is always conserved” (Leibniz, Theodicy [1710], 3.346). This is an expression of the principle of congruity, “that is, the choice of wisdom.” Let us make this choice, and remember that force is consumed. In order for it to be preserved, it must, like a flame, be maintained. It must be watched over (as in the ritual expression “Gott erhält die Welt”), as an obligation (“Die Selbsterhaltung als Pflicht” [Schiller]), and we must contribute to its maintenance, as we would a dancer or a gigolo; we must conserve it in the same sense as museum curators; in sum, we must act, be active, inject enough action into it. In order for force to be conserved, there must, as Leibniz says, “be during this hour as much motive action in the universe or in given bodies, acting only on each other, as there would be during any other hour we might choose.” Passing by way of action thus makes it possible to specify what we must understand by conservation in Leibniz; it is simply the translation of Erhaltung in French; entretien (maintenance) would probably have been better. to a metaphysical concept, aimed at clarifying the metaphysical notion of “substance”: I will say for the present that the concept of forces or powers [vis or virtus], which the Germans call Kraft and the French la force, and for whose explanation I have set up a distinct science of Dynamics, brings the strongest light to bear upon our understanding of the true concept of substance. Je dirai que la notion de vis ou virtus (que les Allemands appellent Kraft, les Français la force), à laquelle je destine pour l’expliquer la science particulière de la Dynamique, apporte beaucoup de lumière à la vraie notion de substance. (“De la réforme de la philosophie première et de la notion de substance” [1694], trans. Loemker) Because it is so intimately related to “substance” (etymologically, what lies beneath, what is preserved), force is related to the notion of conservation from the start. However, nothing proves that this conservation is of the same sort as that which, according to Newton, characterizes the state of motion of a body in which no external force is being exercised. In any case, this conservation is not static at all; it is not an inertia, a passive resistance (which is only active if a vis impressa is opposed to it). Force, for Leibniz, is above all and essentially active: “It contains a certain act or entelechy and is intermediate between the faculty of acting and action itself.” It is a “power of acting,” inherent to any substance, such that “some act is always coming from it.” This is where, as already noted, an essential difference with force in the Newtonian sense lies (besides the fact that force is related to “bodies” for Newton, but to “substances” for Leibniz). B. Force and action, Wirkung The word “act” appears in Leibniz as indissociable from the notion of force. It is clearly borrowed from the scholastic tradition. However, it is noticeable that, in this text as in others, Leibniz makes a free use of it, playing with its cognates: action, agir, terms borrowed from ordinary language. It is thus not surprising to see a notion (destined for great things in mathematical physics) appear under the name of action over the course of the development of Leibnizian dynamics—as, for example, in the title of an opuscule in 1692: “Essai de dynamique sur les lois du mouvement, où il est montré qu’il ne se conserve pas la même quantité du mouvement, mais la même force absolue, ou bien la même quantité de l’action motrice” [Essay in dynamics on the laws of motion, in which it is shown that the same quantity of motion is not conserved, but rather the same absolute force, or the same quantity of moving action]. Action, however, is the translation of Wirkung. The translation is necessarily imperfect, since there is no strict equivalent of Wirkung in French, but it does have the merit, for a German-speaking philosopher writing in French, of introducing the concept of action as “naturally” related to that of force. It goes without saying that this link between the words Kraft and Wirkung, insofar as it rests on an implication, a translation of undertones, is not in the least obvious for a French-speaking reader. Subsequent generations of French-speaking mathematical physicists wondered 348 FORCE possible to establish an equivalence between the variation of what we call today its kinetic energy (product of the mass by the square of the velocity) and another magnitude Helmholtz calls “the sum of the forces of tension [Spannkräfte] between these two positions.” More precisely, the variation of kinetic energy is equal to the opposite of the sum of the forces of tension, where that “sum” (today we would say “the definite integral”) can itself be expressed differentially, and hence as a change in a certain magnitude. It goes without saying that this “force” of tension does not have the dimension of a Newtonian force, since it has the status of what we would now call “work,” which is itself the product of a Newtonian force by a displacement. This hardly bothers Helmholtz, as, like his contemporaries, he is used to giving the word Kraft, in a general context, the sense of power, a quantity that is poorly defined but scalar in nature, and in a Newtonian context, the sense of a directed action, hence vectorial in nature. The important point here is that the equation derived does not deal with two magnitudes but with their variations between a certain initial state and a certain final state; and these variations have opposite signs. Yet, if two magnitudes undergo in a certain process equal changes of opposite sign, this is because their sum does not vary; it remains constant. Helmholtz gives this sum the name Kraft, which is fully justified by the procedure of generalization from lebendige Kraft, to which he has just appealed. However, can we call this second section Erhaltung der Kraft, as he does, without twisting the meaning of Erhaltung? The entity that he has just identified as Kraft is not conserved, in the sense of being maintained; it is or remains constant, in the sense that it undergoes no variation, which is not the same. Helmholtz’s force, from this point of view, is closer to matter, which remains self-identical even when it undergoes transformations, than it is to Leibnizian living force, for which the word Erhaltung was perfectly adequate. This comparison with matter that takes various forms (solid, liquid, gas) while remaining basically constant is in fact pursued by Helmholtz in the last four sections of his essay, where he studies in succession the “force-equivalent” of heat, electrical processes, magnetism, and electromagnetism, before concluding with a few words concerning physiological processes. Throughout this part of the 1847 essay, the governing idea is that of conversion—conversion of one form of energy into another—which the word Erhaltung does not convey at all. It is thus appropriate that in 1881, Helmholtz replaces it with Konstanz, doubtless more exact. We might think that, on the other hand, the simultaneous transformation of Kraft into Energie does not correspond to any correction of meaning, and that it is purely conventional. After all, Helmholtz is only giving a different name to the magnitude whose conservation he had demonstrated in 1847 in order to avoid the confusion of two different magnitudes: the scalar magnitude updated by Helmholtz, and Newtonian force, a vectorial magnitude. It is not certain that this name change only follows considerations of convenience. Perhaps we might think that the peculiar construction of the German language in fact plays an essential role. This construction is indeed such that in Erhaltung we clearly hear halten, which is why Helmholtz could not keep it to refer to the process by which a certain magnitude keeps the same value. However, IV. Die Erhaltung der Kraft: From Conservation to Constancy and from Force to Energy When the young Helmholtz (he was 26, not long finished with his studies) uses the word Erhaltung in 1847, he places himself, knowingly or not, willingly or not, directly in line with the Leibnizian tradition. Not that he was Leibnizian: like all of his contemporaries, he was firmly convinced of the validity of the Newtonian conception of movement and the operational character of Newton’s laws. However, according to Max Planck (Das Prinzip der Erhaltung der Energie), the idea—Cartesian in origin but amply used and illustrated by Leibniz—that there is a fundamental entity preserved in all physical processes, from which all movement may be derived, was a commonplace in the German mechanistic tradition: As long as there was no clear notion connected with the word “Kraft” any dispute over the quantity of this “Kraft” was without a proper theme. Yet it must be admitted that this dispute had a much deeper content at its foundation; for, the parties to the dispute were to some extent united, even if they did not express this very clearly and often, as to what they wanted to understand under the word “Kraft.” Descartes as well as Leibniz, had certainly some, even if not very precise, notion about a principle, which expresses the unchangeability and indestructibility of that from which all motion and action in the world emanates. (Cited by Elkana, Discovery of the Conservation of Energy, 98) In sum, the idea of conservation (in the sense of Erhaltung) was tucked away in everyone’s minds, even when the reference to Leibniz (or René Descartes) had been forgotten. In these conditions, it is not surprising that Helmholtz titled his dissertation “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft”—especially since, despite his young age, Helmholtz had already worked for seven years in the domain of physiology, where the idea of an entity from which the mechanical powers of a living organism are derived, as well as what we may call its vital heat, was defended, among others, by Justus von Liebig. The even vaster idea that the phenomena of nature could all be reduced to a single “force,” an idea developed by Kant in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, though not rigorously synonymous with that of conservation, is nevertheless close to it, insofar as both presuppose a unity of the physical world that would be confirmed by the existence of a conserved quantity. Helmholtz, whose ambition was thus to show that the phenomena known at his time could be unified under the aegis of a conserved entity, proceeds in order from the simplest to the most complex. It is therefore utterly natural that he titles the first section (of six) of his essay “Conservation of Living Force [lebendige Kraft].” This magnitude, as everyone knew indeed since Leibniz, is conserved in elastic collisions between bodies, which may be considered the simplest case of a physical phenomenon. Helmholtz then proceeds, in section 2, to a generalization of the first section and shows that, in the more complicated case of a body that moves from one position to another in the course of its movement, it is FRENCH 349 appears under ESTI and TO TI ÊN EINAI, regarding the more Aristotelian terminology of ontology (see also FORCE, Box 1). On the relation between form, substance, and subject, see SUBJECT. On “formal ontology,” see INTENTION, REALITY, RES, and SACHVERHALT; cf. MERKMAL. On the relation between form and phenomenon, see ERSCHEINUNG, cf. AESTHETICS, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SUBLIME. II. Aesthetic Aspects For the relation, essential to Platonic ontology, between form-model and image-copy, see EIDÔLON (see IMAGE) and MIMÊSIS. Besides SPECIES, see also CONCETTO, Box 1, DISEGNO, PLASTICITY; cf. ART. III. Forms and Formalism For the notion of “form” in grammar, see WORD, II.B and Box 2); for “form” in rhetoric, see STYLE, I. On logical formalism, see especially IMPLICATION. On legal formalism, see especially LAW and RULE OF LAW. On moral formalism, see SOLLEN; cf. MORALS, WILLKÜR. IV. Form and Gestalt Theory For the study of psychological theory centered on the notion of “form,” see STRUCTURE. v. DEFORMATION it is just as impossible, given the almost cliché expression of Erhaltung der Kraft, to reserve Kraft to refer to this new magnitude that remains constant. Kraft is inevitably associated in Helmholtz’s mind, and in those of his contemporaries, with Erhaltung, and it was impossible for him to speak of the constancy of force (Konstanz der Kraft). Kraft had to disappear along with Erhaltung. Françoise Balibar REFS.: Elkana, Y. The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Euler, Leonhard. Letters of Euler to a German Princess, on Different Subjects in Physics and Philosophy. Translated by H. Hunter. 2nd ed. London: Murray and Highley, 1802. Helmholtz, Hermann von. Epistemological Writings: The Paul Hertz / Moritz Schlick Centenary Edition of 1921, with Notes and Commentary by the Editors. Translated by M. F. Lowe. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1977. . “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft.” In Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, 1:12–85. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1895. First published in 1847. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “De la réforme de la philosophie première et de la notion de la substance.” First published in 1694. In Œuvres choisies, edited by L. Prenant. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1939. Translation by Leroy Loemker: “On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance.” In Philosophical Papers and Letters. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1970. . Essay on Dynamics. In Leibniz and Dynamics: The Texts of 1692. Edited by P. Costabel. Translated by R.E.W. Maddison. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. . Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Edited with an introduction by Austin Farrer. Translated by E. M. Huggard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. Planck, Max. Das Prinzip der Erhaltung der Energie. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1913. Weyl, Hermann. Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft. 4th ed. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1976. First published in 1927. Translation by O. Helmer: Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949. Young, Thomas. A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts. 2 vols. London: Taylor and Walton, 1845. FORM “Form” comes from the Latin forma, itself possibly borrowed, by way of Etruscan, from the Greek morphê [μορφή], which means “form, beautiful form” and concretely refers both to the mold and to the shape of the resulting object, whether the word concerns arts and techniques (the form of a shoe, the plan of a house, the frame of a painting), norms (a legal formula, the imprint on a coin), or speech (a grammatical form, a stylistic device). The term is especially plastic in French, as in Latin, since it was able to serve to translate the Greek words eidos [εἶδος], “idea” (in contrast to eidôlon [εἴδωλον], “image”) or “form” (in contrast to hulê [ὕλη], “matter”); morphê [μορφή], “aspect, contour”; schêma [σχῆμα], “shape, manner of being”; ousia [οὐσία], “essence”; to ti esti [τὸ τί ἔστι] and even to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], “quiddity”; paradeigma [παράδειγμα], “model”; or charaktêr [χαραϰτήϱ], “mark, distinctive sign.” I. Physical and Metaphysical Aspects The article SPECIES compares the collection of Latin and Greek networks related to “form.” Complementary consideration FRENCH Language Stripped Bare by Its Philosophers v. CIVIL SOCIETY, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, COMMON SENSE, ENGLISH, ERZÄHLEN, EUROPE, GERMAN, GREEK, ITALIAN, LOGOS, PEOPLE, POLITICS, PORTUGUESE, REASON, RUSSIAN, SEX, TO BE, WORD ORDER The establishment of thought in the French language took on a political meaning from the start: the privilege given to French does not derive from any intrinsic character of the language, but instead from the possibility of a universal and democratic philosophical communication. A language of women and the working class rather than of scientists, philosophical French relies on the belief that the act of thinking is open to everyone; its intimate relation with literary writing has no other reason behind it. Against a fascination with words and etymology, that is, with origin and substance, French sets the primacy of syntax, that is, of relation and assertion. This is why, once again, philosophy in French is political: between axioms and sentences, against consensus and ambiguity, French plants its certainty and its authority, which are also the source of its persuasive beauty. In 1637 Descartes published Discours de la méthode in French anonymously. This was four years earlier than the publication of Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations), which was in Latin. Descartes never translated the Discours into Latin (that was done by Étienne de Courcelles in 1644), but neither did he persist in defending the Latin of the Meditations. He consistently said that the French translation by the Duke of Luynes, followed by that of the Objections and 350 FRENCH consequence. But internal thinking, which is the intuition of immanent ideas, is nonlinguistic. 3. Clear and intelligible transcription, which, if criteria 1 and 2 are satisfied, may proceed in any dialect (Low Breton, for example) and persuade any mind. This last item is of great importance. One of the reasons why, in Descartes’s eyes, it would be disastrous to have to scrutinize the singularities of language reflects a principled universalism. No linguistic condition may be attached to the formation of true thoughts, nor to their transmission, nor to their reception. This is one of the meanings of the famous axiom about good sense, that it is “the most equitably shared thing in the world.” This is in effect a universalist egalitarian axiom, as Descartes was careful to make clear: “[T]he power of judging well and distinguishing the true from the false is naturally equal in all men,” and as for reason, it is “whole in each person” (Discourse on Method). The desire to express philosophy in French is thus related not to a consideration of an appropriation by French of the adequate expression of thoughts, let alone a speculative national doctrine concerning the coincidence of Being and language (German, Greek), but rather to a conclusion that is democratic in origin and concerns the formation and destination of thought. It is a matter of speaking the same language as “everyone”—in France, French—not that it will have special benefits either for concepts (which are themselves indifferent to language) or for the language itself (since French would not acquire any special privileges). What is more, a point that seems empirical, though we have reasons to believe that it is not at all so, beginning with Descartes and linked to the choice of French, the conviction arose that philosophical discourse must be addressed to women, that the conversation of intelligent women is a means of approval or validation that is much more important that all the decrees of the learned. As Descartes marveled, “Such a varied and complete knowledge of all is to be found not in some aged pedant who has spent many years in contemplation but in a young princess whose beauty and youth call to mind one of the Graces rather than gray-eyed Minerva or any of the Muses” (Dedication to Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1). This moment of princesses is in reality a basic democratic intention that turns philosophical discourse toward discussion and seduction, toward Venus rather than Minerva, moving it as far away as possible from academic or scientific entrenchment. This intention will be repeated by all the notable French philosophers, who comprise a significant anthology: Rousseau, and also in his own way Auguste Comte, and then Sartre, as well as Lacan. All of them wished to be heard and admired by women and knew that they must be courted neither in Latin nor in the language of pedants. We may say that, once philosophy in France became linguistically “nationalized,” it followed the path of sociability, ease, and immediate universalism, rather than considering the materiality or the history of languages. It was neither a matter of their being rooted in some mode of original speech that had more or less been forgotten (traditional logic), nor of what rhetoric had imposed in terms of cadence or forms necessary for the deployment of thought (sophistic logic). Responses by Clerselier, which he thoroughly reviewed, could serve as a reference, or as Baillet said later, that it gave un grand relief of his thought (made it stand out clearly) and that it was extremely important to support reading by those who, “lacking the use of scientific language, would not fail to have a love and a disposition for philosophy” (Vie de Monsieur Descartes). Descartes’ linguistic strategy is unambiguous. It gives primacy to French, while nonetheless demonstrating to “Messieurs the deans and doctors of the sacred faculty of theology of Paris,” the addressees of the prudent and defensive preface of the Meditations, that he knows his way around the official scientific language and that he can, like everyone else, praise the authority of the “name of Sorbonne” in decadent Latin. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the major creative figures in philosophy in French—Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, Lacan—all claimed the right to write in their native language, in sum the right to freedom of language, despite seeking at the same time to show the academy their technical competence. It says much about the strength of this initial intention, which established philosophy in accordance with an undisguised desire to write freely in the mother tongue without seeking an anarchistic break with scholarly institutions. The problem is understanding what, for Descartes and his successors, the properly philosophical stake of this initiation of thought in the French language was, which was also the beginning of an openly declared equivocation, at the risk of being cursed and cast out by the learned, between the status of philosopher and that of a writer. I. The Politics of French: The Democratic Communication of Philosophy The whole point, however, whose consequences are still with us today, is that the privilege given to French had nothing to do with the language as such. Unlike what happened little by little—much later—with German and what had taken place in antiquity with Greek, the connection between philosophical technicality and the French language was not accompanied by any speculation about the philosophical characteristics of French. Even better: Descartes was profoundly convinced that the force of thought has nothing to do either with language or with rhetoric: Those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton. (Discourse on Method, part 1, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1) In other words, the transmission of thought is indifferent to language. It had, for Descartes, three extralinguistic criteria: 1. Reasoning—the ability to string together thoughts on the basis of indubitable axioms, the paradigm of which is geometrical writing, travels across languages universally. 2. The internalization (the “digestion”) of ideas, which is their intimate clarification (Boileau’s “that which is well-conceived”) and whose utterance is only a FRENCH 351 Its pride does not take it in the direction of believing that French is philosophically evoked by its origins, but rather toward the idea, also in a way a national one though very different, that a language in the hands of a writer can say exactly what it wishes and, in addition, by its charm seduce and rally those to whom it is addressed. It is true—and even the most tortured French prose (Mallarmé, Lacan, the drugged Sartre of the Critique de la raison dialectique) is no exception (on the contrary)—that what is at stake is a transparency to the Idea, and not depth, or a complicity between the thickness of the language and its content. This is because the latent universalism of any use of French, from Descartes to the present, rests entirely on the belief that the essence of language is syntax. Classical French, as it developed after Montaigne or Rabelais and was smoothed out and “compacted” by the joint efforts of policing by the precious salons and the centralized state, is a language that leaves little room for semantic ambiguity, since it subordinates everything to the most energetic, shortest, and most cadenced syntactic placement. This language—whose heart is in La Rochefoucauld’s or Pascal’s aphorisms, on one hand, and Racine’s alexandrines on the other—presents itself to the philosopher as incredibly concentrated around verbs and liaisons, or successions. Unlike English, it is not a language of the phenomenon, of nuance, of descriptive subtlety. Its semantic field is narrow; abstraction is natural to it. Accordingly, neither empiricism nor even phenomenology suit it. It is a language of decision, of principle and consequence. Neither is it a language of hesitation, repentance, of the slow questioning ascent toward the dark and saturated point of origins. In truth, it is a language made impatient by questions that hastens toward affirmation, solution, the end of the analysis. The perfect order that the (French) adherents of intuition, the perceptual life of creative disorder, imposed on their writings is notable. When Bergson rails against the discontinuous and abstract side of linguistic or scientific intelligence (but accurately; in fact, he is speaking about characteristics of French—its discretion, its abstraction), when he praises immediate data, the continuous élan, or unseparated intuition, he does so in a language exemplary in its transparency and order, where well-defined phrases abound and where all the distinctions, all the binary oppositions, are displayed with unique clarity. And conversely, when Lacan or Mallarmé seem to bring logical rationalism toward a staccato language that is violently discontinuous and whose meaning must be reconstructed, it is decisively the spirit of the maxim that wins out when it concentrates (“la Femme n’existe pas” [Woman does not exist; Lacan] or “toute pensée émet un coup de dés” [every thought sends out a throw of the dice; Mallarmé]) what was first submitted to the test of allusive syntax. In the end, whether one accepts the vital continuum or semantic discretion, French imposes the syntactic primacy of relations over substances, of composite phrases over terms. No one escapes the order of reasons, since language itself conforms to it. Or at least that is the natural tendency, such that one who wishes to descend into vital intuition must persuade us in the opposite element of symmetrical constructions and grammatical subordinations. The thesis may be put simply: the reason philosophers, starting with Descartes, began writing in French is one that was in their eyes political in nature. It is only a matter of answering two questions: Where does philosophy come from? and Who is it for? The answer to the first is that philosophy has no particular single source and may come from anywhere by a free act of which any mind is capable; and to the second, that philosophy is aimed at everyone, which in the end means, as Comte says “systematically” (faithful here to Descartes and Rousseau and anticipating Sartre and Deleuze), at women and the working class. To whom, further, is philosophy not addressed? To the learned, to the Sorbonne. Just writing in French is not enough to prove this. One must write this “modern” French, this writer’s French, this literary French, which is distinguished from the “academized,” or “correct,” French transmitted in universities. Even a philosopher as calm as Bergson established himself with a style that, while certainly fluid and relaxed, was also loaded with comparisons, caught up in an imperious movement, and in the end resonant with the “artistic” language of the end of the nineteenth century. Nor did the learned fail to make fun of the beautiful ladies in furs hurrying to hear his lectures at the Collège de France. Compare more modern work: Lacan’s Mallarméan prose, Sartre’s novels, Deleuze’s scintillation. And earlier, Diderot’s dynamic force and Rousseau’s invention of the Romantic sentence. And even earlier, Pascal’s aphorisms. This is proof that fulfilling the democratic calling of philosophy requires placing thought into literary French, even into the written language “of the day.” This carries a risk as well: that by a dialectical reversal familiar to French democracy, philosophy could become an especially aristocratic discipline, or at least snobbish. This is a risk to which the learned have always said that French philosophy would absolutely succumb, even if it meant, in order to excommunicate the “jargon” of a Derrida or a Lacan, claiming for oneself a Cartesian clarity—which is in reality only the foundation of a national link between philosophical exposition and literary writing, one to which Lacan and Derrida are attempting to be faithful as well. II. Syntax versus Substance: French as a Thin Language The real question concerns the consequences for philosophy of its being placed in the language of writers, which is itself a paradoxical effect of a choice that was democratic in spirit. We have already said that a result of this choice was a sort of royal indifference to the philosophical particularities of the national dialect. Despite the most vehement importunities, nothing managed to impel philosophy in France toward the hard German labor of opening words up, deriving their Indo-European roots, entreating them to mean “being” or “community.” Nothing ever destined the language to anything other than its immediate savor on the tongue and finally, to the bewitching ease, even when sophisticated, of its style. The principal rule, as Corneille said of the theater, is to please and not to ensure, with a slightly priestly gravity, that one’s language is indeed the transcendent of thought’s promise or the chosen medium of a shattering truth. France always laughed at what Paulhan called “proof by etymology.” 352 FRENCH conflict much more than of attentive descriptions, sophistical refutations, or infinite speculations. This is why Comte flanks every noun with an adjective that consolidates it, which is like its subjective bodyguard, just as he rigs out the sentence with robust adverbial padding (expressément, sincèrement, réellement), which is to the verbal edifice what the Doric columns are to a temple. We would be wrong to believe that these are singularities exclusive to the half-mad Comte. When Sartre attempts, in the Critique de la raison dialectique, to explore the category of dynamic totality, and thus the apprehension of the movement of totalization and detotalization—when he must, in sum, return to the language what he calls “detotalized totality”—he spontaneously picks up the long, didactic, manyjointed sentences of positivism, given his need, he says, to express the dialectical components of the process all at once. Syntactic heaviness comes to unify semantic contraries at the risk of losing sight of the substantial or empirical singularity and of imposing a uniform rhythm on dialectic that bit by bit drains the historicity of the examples of their color and prosodic amplitude, leaving only, at a distance, the recognizable stamp of verbs and their sequences. To take a phrase from among a thousand (one concerning the workers’ riots against Réveillon in April 1789): Even if, from the depths of the initial and contagional march, negative unity as a future totality was already occasioning being-together [être-ensemble] (that is to say, everyone’s non-serial relation to the group as a milieu of freedom) as a possibility which was perceived in seriality and which presented itself as the negation of seriality, the objective of the march was still indeterminate: it appeared both as seriality itself as a reaction to the situation, and as an equally serial attempt at display. (Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1) There is in the language an almost heroic effort to make the trumpet of history sound again in the very midst of the conceptual tangle. And the pathos Comte gives for this purpose to adverbs and adjectives, as much as to the syntactic riveting, is here clearly accomplished by a vertiginous stretching of the verbal “dough,” in the midst of which we hope that the reader will notice the illicit punctuation provided in the form of the italicized words. However, it is not true that this phrasing—bizarrely similar to continuous Wagnerian melody—pursues different goals from those to which Descartes assigned the philosophical use of French at the beginning. The point here is, again, an instrumental (and not a thematic) use of the language, whose unique purpose is to extract agreement from the readers as a result of their having seen the thought create and expose itself completely, according to its proper declarative force. What is more contrary in appearance to Sartrian totalization than Althusser’s grand style, the militant chivalry of the pure concept placed under the ideal of science? And yet: To speak plainly, it was only possible to pose to the practical political analyses Lenin gives us of the conditions for the revolutionary explosion of 1917 the question of the specificity of the Marxist dialectic on the basis of an answer which lacked the proximity of its question, an French leads to the hollowing out of all substantiality. For, even if it pauses over the density of a noun (as may be the case for morceau de cire [piece of wax], or racine de marronnier [root of a chestnut tree], or prolétaire [proletarian]), it is in each case only to reduce, bit by bit, its visible singularity in a predicational and relational network so invasive that in the end the initial noun is only an example, easily replaceable, of a conceptual place. Thus Descartes reduces the piece of wax to geometrical extension; Sartre turns the root of the chestnut into the pure surging of a being-in-itself without qualities; and Comte’s proletarian may just as well, if accompanied by the epithet “systematic,” refer to any philosopher. Even for a thinker oriented toward singularity as much as Deleuze is, the pack of hounds is only a rhizome in motion, and the rhizome is a conceptual placeholder for any multiple, “horizontal” agency removed from the form of binary arborescence. The rule of syntax in French does not really authorize descriptive delectation or the unsoundable becoming of the Absolute. It is a thin language whose saturation requires a long range of phrases supported by powerful propositional connections. None perceived and practiced this better than Auguste Comte, no doubt because he wrote an extremely articulated and somewhat pompous language that schoolteachers later imposed on country folk for decades: a precise language no doubt, but one so brutishly declarative that it is always, like an acceptance speech for an awards ceremony, at the edges of ridicule. It is moving, as well, since it attempts (as is already Descartes’s goal) to do literary justice to the speaker as well as to what is said. It is a language, in sum, that juxtaposes in philosophemes the speech of the flesh and that of the confession, an improbable bastard of Bossuet and Fénelon; for example, Comte writes: Il serait certes superflu d’indiquer ici expressément que je ne devrai jamais attendre que d’actives persécutions, d’ailleurs patentes ou secrètes, de la part du parti théologique, avec lequel, quelque complète justice que j’aie sincèrement rendu à son antique prépondérance, ma philosophie ne comporte réellement aucune conciliation essentielle, à moins d’une entière transformation sacerdotale, sur laquelle il ne faut pas compter. (It would no doubt be superfluous to indicate expressly here that I should never expect anything but active persecutions, obvious or secret, from the theological party, with which, despite my sincerely doing however complete a justice to its ancient predominance as I have, my philosophy in reality contains no essential conciliation, unless there should be a complete transformation of the priesthood, which we must not count on.) (Positive Philosophy, preface) It is essential for a philosopher writing in French to persuade the reader that he is coming face-to-face with a certainty of such compactness that it would be impossible to doubt what is being said without harming the subject, except (but then we would know that we are dealing with a political opposition) by rejecting the whole without examination. Philosophical French is a language of ideological FRENCH 353 au sens de parties extensives, mais plutôt “partiaux” comme les intensités sous lesquelles une matière remplit toujours l’espace à des degrés divers (l’œil, la bouche, l’anus comme degrés de matière); pures multiplicités positives où tout est possible, sans exclusive ni négation, synthèses opérant sans plan, où les connexions sont transversales, les disjonctions incluses, les conjonctions polyvoques, indifférentes à leur support, puisque cette matière qui leur sert précisément de support n’est spécifiée sous aucune unité structurale ni personnelle, mais apparaît comme le corps sans organe qui remplit l’espace chaque fois qu’une intensité le remplit. (partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial [partiels] in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial [“partiaux”] like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter); pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it. ) (Deleuze and Guattari, L’anti-Œdipe) There is an obvious consonance between the énonciation qui se renonce (the enuciation that is a renunciation) and the disjonction incluse (an inclusive disjunction), between the conjonction polyvoque (the polyvocal conjunction) and the l’extinction qui luit encore (the extinction that still gleams), as though the slope of language upon hitting an oxymoron to make the thought pivot won out over the taking up of a position. It is as though, lying in ambush behind the concept, an invariable La Rochefoucauld had the idea to fuse the aphorism and to stretch the electric arc of the thought between poles distributed ahead of time by syntactic precision in the recognizable symmetry of Frenchstyle gardens. And it is not as though the French all think the same. Philosophy in French is the most violently polemical of all, ignoring consensus and even making little fuss over rational discussion, for, still opposed to the academy, it speaks (politically) to the public and not to colleagues. But this is because the French really speak the same language, which means that we appeal to the same artifices to give (public) power to our claims. And this identity is even stronger given that classical French, the only one that philosophy manages to speak despite the consistently abortive efforts to make it flow more wildly, only offers a restricted assortment of effects, all held in the primacy of syntax and univocity over semantics and polysemy. Someone philosophizing in French is forced to place the concept and its heirs onto the procrustean bed of a sort of sub-Latin. One thing will be said after another, and answer situated at another place in the Marxist works at our disposal, precisely the answer in which Marx declared that he had “inverted” the Hegelian dialectic. (Althusser and Balabar, Reading Capital) How we recognize the lengthening of the sentence, ordered to gather up the components of belief all at once, and the italics, blinking beacons for a navigation-reading that is utterly prescribed! How Althusser’s clarity carries with it the same insistence as the Sartrian dialectic! III. The Politics of French, Again: The Authority of the Language Is this “Marxist” style, then? Political totalization? Let us say, rather, that in French syntax politicizes every philosophical statement, including ones that are at the furthest remove from any explicit politicization, including those that (Lacan) locate their crafty charm between puns (an important national tradition, aimed at mocking and discrediting semantic equivocation, which the French loathe) and Mallarméan formulas. Witness how the authority of speech, its foundational political desire, runs through this type of broken melody, even into the usage of one of the most unique resources of French, the imperious interrogative—the question that strikes down its opponent, after which, so far has the subject gone in the earthquake of his speech, there is nothing more to say. And it is not for nothing that this French is appealed to straightaway and as such in the sentence (in order to “translate” Freud’s dictum: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” [Where the id was, the ego shall be]): But the French translation says: “là où c’était. ” Let us take advantage of the distinct imperfect it provides. Where it was just now, where it was for a short while, between an extinction that is still glowing and an opening up that stumbles, the I can [peut] come into being by disappearing from my statement [dit]. An enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs—what remains here if not the trace of what really must be in order to fall away from being? (Lacan, Écrits) How beautiful that all is! It is persuasive beauty, which is more important for any French writer-philosopher than exactitude. Or rather, it is a secondary exactitude, which must be reconstructed inside the beauty and guided by it yet leave it behind, as one must comply with syntactic constraint in order to achieve, just at the end, the release of the Idea. Stylistic commonality often wins out over doctrinal or personal antipathy, as we see in the way Deleuze’s vitalism is accentuated in the same way as its psychoanalytic adversary and in the way the same effervescent language is used to say that desire is a lack (Lacan) and that desire lacks nothing (the anti-Oedipal Deleuze–Guattari), since the aim is still, as with Sartre before, to hold opposite predications together in a grammatical formula, to make one fade into the next: objets partiels qui entrent dans des synthèses ou interactions indirectes, puisqu’ils ne sont pas partiels 354 FRENCH like a language; Lacan), that “la schize ne vient à l’existence que par un désir sans but et sans cause qui la trace et l’épouse” (the schize only comes into existence through desire without a goal or cause which traces and espouses it; Deleuze and Guattari), or that “la philosophie est ce lieu étrange où il ne se passe rien, rien que cette répétition du rien” (philosophy is that strange place where nothing happens, nothing but this repetition of nothing; Althusser). And there will be no end to the examination of the consequences of these maxims, or to the presentation, before captive audiences, of other axioms and other syntactic networks. Axiomatizing, deriving, and thereby even emptying speech of any individuality that sparkles too much, of any predication that is too colorful; purifying this speech, these excessive turns of phrase like repentances and uncertainties—these are the very acts of philosophy itself, once it orders its Idea in this material place that grasps it, runs through it: a language, this language, French. Alain Badiou REFS.: Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balabar. Reading Capital. Translated by B. Brewster. London: Verso, 1998. Althusser, Louis, Étienne Balabar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Baillet, Adrien. Le vie de Monsieur Descartes. Paris: Malassis, 2012. First published in 1691. Comte, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive. Paris: Hermann, 1975. Translation by Harriet Martineau: The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 1896. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. L’anti-Œdipe. Vol. 1 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Translation by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009. Descartes, Rene. Œuvres complètes. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch: Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Translation by Bruce Fink: Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Vol. 1 translation by A. Sheridan-Smith: Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso, 2004; Vol. 2 translation by Q. Hore: Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso, 2006. there will be no verbal exchanges except those authorized by the grammar of sequences and the regulation of univocities. We know of course (and this is a primary theme of this dictionary) that nothing peremptory can be said about languages that will not be disproven by some writer or poem or other. It is thus that rightly or wrongly we sometimes envy the power of German to lay out in an idolatrous semantics the depths offered by infinite exegesis. We also sometimes wish for the descriptive and ironic resources of English— this marvelous texture of the surface, the argumentation always circumscribed—which does not totalize anything since the grammar is never that of the here and now. And even the branching of Italian—when we stop thinking that it muddles everything at will and is running thirty different conversations at once, all erudite and mimetic, we admire its velocity and that when it affirms something, it keeps a clear eye on the other possible affirmation that a simple repentance over the sentence may bring to mind. But this is not the style of French. We could show how Heidegger, despite the sometimes pious style of his interpreters and translators, becomes, in French, invincibly clear and almost monotonous; how the empirical sensitivity of English turns inevitably flat if the translator is not creative; and how the quicksilver web of Italian prose becomes nothing more than a discouraging chatter. What French offers philosophy that is universal in character is always in the form of somewhat stiff maxims or badly nuanced derivations. Again, the latent style is that of a speech that aims to make an assembly, seduced, vote for someone without examining the details too much. One must accept this strength, or weakness. It enters into the composition of eternal philosophy, like that which, from the Greek source, retains mathematics rather than mythology, litigation rather than elegy, sophistical argumentation rather than prophetic utterance, democratic politics rather than tragic caesura. It will always be said in French that “l’homme est une passion inutile” (man is a useless passion; Sartre), that “l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage” (the unconscious is structured 355 As for English, we find the same threefold division with “sentiment.” Found in English since Chaucer, the word was also used as synonymous with “feeling,” “sensation,” and “opinion.” On the other hand, the term’s untranslatability in English comes mainly from the overdetermination of the word “sense,” which runs from perception to feeling, reason, reasonableness, and meaning, and from which the concepts, through Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Hume through Bentham, of “inner sense,” “internal sense,” “inward sense,” “common sense,” and “moral sense” are derived. Coste, the translator into French of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, did not run into any particular trouble over the translation of the English terms “sensation” and “sentiment.” In the first case the term is identical in the two languages, and in the second we can go easily from the English “sentiment” in the sense of “mental feeling” to the French sentiment. Coste thus translates “due sentiments of Wisdom and Goodness” (bk. I, chap. 7, § 6) by “justes sentiments de la sagesse et de la bonté,” and in bk. IV, chap. 1, § 4, “the first act of the Mind, when it has any sentiments of Ideas at all” by “le premier acte de l’esprit, lorsqu’il a quelque sentiment ou quelque idée.” Similarly, Coste finds a parallel usage in English to the specialized philosophical (or metaphysical) usage in French. When Locke writes, for example, “I do not say there is no Soul in a Man because he is not sensible of it in his sleep” (bk. II, chap. 1, § 10), Coste translates this as “Je ne dis pas qu’il n’y ait point d’âme dans l’homme parce que durant le sommeil l’homme n’en a aucun sentiment.” In philosophical German the essence of these issues was concentrated on the pair Gefühl/Empfindung, whose differentiation was the object of a long conceptual inquiry set against a background of ambivalence. The two terms cannot be translated except on a case-by-case basis and respecting what is untranslatable about them, that is, taking account of the redistribution of their relations, which itself depends on the way in which the different German philosophical discourses used them, strategically, to mark out differences with regard to the common uses of words. Indeed, as shown by Adelung’s dictionary or Eberhard’s Versuch einer allgemeinen deutschen Synonymik (Essay of general German synonymy), 1795, in the eighteenth century Gefühl and Empfindung were commonly considered synonyms and used more to refer to the perceptual immediacy of a representation. The two words were defined as “intuitive (anschauend) representations that participate in our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) to a certain degree” (Eberhard, Synonymik, 1:119). And Johann Nicolaus Tetens notes in 1777 in his Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung that “the words Gefühl and fühlen henceforth have a range of meaning almost as wide as that of the words Empfindung and empfinden” (1:167ff.). In doing so, he places emphasis simultaneously on the omnipresence of the two pairs of terms, on the GEFÜHL (GERMAN) ENGLISH feeling, sensation, sentiment, opinion FRENCH sentiment, sensation v. SENSE [FEELING], and AESTHETICS, BEGRIFF, COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, GOÛT, INTUITION, MORAL SENSE, PASSION [PATHOS], PERCEPTION The German pair Gefühl/Empfindung is not parallel to the traditional distinction between sentiment and sensation. Today the use of Gefühl is mostly reserved for the sphere of feelings and emotions, more or less corresponding to the use of the English “feeling,” whereas its companion, Empfindung, refers to both physiological sensation and feeling. This instability is no longer the source of any major philosophical difficulty. By contrast, analyzing the way in which the two terms were placed front and center, contrasted and debated in the eighteenth century, gives us a sort of X-ray of the vocabulary of the subject and of consciousness, from Wolff and Kant and his heirs through the writings of Johann Nicolaus Tetens. The philosophical stakes were at that time far greater than those pertaining to their English and French equivalents. From the theory of perception to that of moral sentiment, by way of the doctrines of consciousness as a feeling of self, the terms Gefühl and Empfindung, placed at the junction of the various anthropological, aesthetic, and psychological discourses, affect the whole of philosophical study. I. Gefühl/Empfindung, Sensation/Sentiment, “Opinion,” “Feeling”/“Sensation”/“Sentiment”: The Specificity of the German Pair Certain terms in French, English, and German, both common and philosophical, that express the difference between feeling and sensation, have, based on the variety of their uses, been highly unstable since the beginning of the modern period. In the case of contemporary French, the terms sensation and sentiment no longer overlap in meaning, as was the case in the classical period, when sentiment meant sensation, feeling, and opinion. Alongside this threefold division in meaning, there was also a properly philosophical usage of the term, both in Malebranche (in the sense of “internal sentiment”) and in Pascal, in the sense of intuitive synthetic vision (to prophesize is to speak of God, not by external proof, but by internal and immediate sentiment, cf. Pensées, Lafuma 328). This usage is clearly laid out in the eighteenth century in the Encyclopédie’s article “Sentiment”: it is the “intimate sentiment that each of us has of his own existence, and of what he feels in himself.” Sentiment is “the first source and first principle of truth available to us,” nor is it “in any way more immediate for us to say that the object of our thought exists with as much reality as our thought itself, since this object and this thought, and the intimate sentiment we have in ourselves, are really only ourselves thinking, existing, and having the feeling.” G difficulty of distinguishing them, and on the confusion reigning in their use. Similarly, in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General theory of the fine arts), J. A. Sulzer begins the article “Sinnlich” in these terms: In fact, we call sensory (sinnlich) what we feel (empfinden) by the intervention of the senses external to the body; but we have extended the meaning of the term to what we feel (empfinden) in our bare interiority (bloß innerlich) without the action of the bodily senses, as for example in the case of desire, love, etc. (Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 408) This admission of instability continuously accompanied the philosophical division of the two notions. Even in the most decisive works we still find many inconsistencies. It seems, for example, that from the start the terms Gefühl and Empfindung originate, philosophically speaking, in the field of sensus, whereas the related term Rührung (feeling, emotion), which in the eighteenth century was used commonly in both everyday and philosophical language, comes from the field of tactus, since anrühren and berühen both mean “to touch.” Yet Baumgarten, for example, suggests translating tactus by Gefühl (Metaphysica, § 536) and not by its literal (and standard) translation of Tastsinn—sense of touch—whereas he himself uses Tastsinn and Gefühl indifferently for tactus. In any case, it is clear that the internalization of Gefühl, or its derivation from the intimate sphere of subjectivity, only comes later, thanks to a need for terminological clarification. II. Gefühl and Empfindung: The Near Side of the Division between Receptivity and Reflexivity A. The twofold meaning of Empfindung in the Wolffian system In Christian Wolff’s philosophical system the notions of experience and knowledge interact and complement each other against a Leibnizian background of preestablished harmony, insofar as Wolff does not distinguish between a logical system of knowledge based on the a priori metaphysics of scholastic origin and the principles of an empiricist reading of the world. In this framework Empfindung is the very source of experience and hence of knowledge; in order to have access to the true being of things, it is therefore enough simply to be attentive. The thesis of Deutsche Logik (chap. 5, § 1), according to which “it is by paying attention to our Empfindungen that we have experience of everything that we know [Wir erfahren alles dasjenige, was wir erkennen, wenn wir auf unsere empfindungen acht haben],” is mirrored in the Deutsche Metaphysik (§ 325): “The knowledge we achieve when we pay attention to our Empfindungen and to the modifications of the soul, we customarily call experience.” If Empfindung is really untranslatable here, it is not because Wolff does not give equivalents; rather, it is because it refers to two philosophically sacred pairs: sentiment/sensation on one hand and sensation/perception on the other. Wolff thus writes in his Anmerkungen zu den vernünftigen Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt: I have explained here [§ 220] what I mean by the word Empfindung, namely the kind of perceptionum [sic] that is called sensationes in Latin. And insofar as we consider these sensationes as modifications of the soul by which we are conscious of things that act on our organa sensoria [sic], we can call them in Latin ideas rerum materialium praesentium. (Wolff, Anmerkungen, § 65) The equivalence between idea and sensation becomes explicit here by way of Latin. The sensation caused by things comes to be confused with the act of consciousness; sensation is simply a thought: Thoughts that have their causes in the modifications of the organs of our body and that are excited by bodily things outside of us, we call Empfindungen. (Wolff, Deutsche Metaphysik, § 220) Wolff does not hesitate to establish the following inferences: having a thought is the becoming aware of a modification of the soul. Thus, becoming conscious of an effect of things external to the soul is a thought; thus sensations are thoughts. And he adds: thoughts of objects insofar as they are present to our soul. There is thus no difference between feeling and knowing, between empfinden in the sense of feeling and erkennen in the sense of knowing, and it is on this basis that Baumgarten is able to develop his aesthetics, conceived as a science of knowledge (cognitio sensitiva, see AESTHETICS). Wolff insists especially on the coincidence between modifications of things and those of the soul, on which point he considers himself in agreement with Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz, defending himself again and again against the accusations of Spinozism leveled at him. The syncretism between a form of empiricism and an abstract system assured of the absolute pertinence of logically derived truths leads him to give the name Empfindung to the widest philosophical extension: the same term can thus mean the natural irreducibility of sensation (our hearing cannot be affected by the noise of thunder, etc.: cf. Anmerkungen, § 69), a modification of the soul, and the fact that it is perceptible to us, thus conscious. Empfindung is thus the hinge between soul and world, and makes possible the distinction between innerliche Empfindung (internal Empfindung), when we consider Empfindung as it occurs in the soul, and aüßere Empfindung (external Empfindung), when we consider Empfindung as caused by external objects (cf. Johann Friedrich Stiebritz, Erläuterungen der Wolffischen vernünftigen Gedancken von den Kräften des Menschenverstandes [Explanation of Wolff’s “Reasonable Thoughts” on the forces of human understanding], § 101). B. The truth of feeling For Sulzer, who aims to reconcile theoretical and aesthetic thought, the division is no longer, as it is for Wolff, between internal and external Empfindung, but between empfinden and erkennen. Baumgarten’s premise in favor of equal dignity for aesthetic or “sensible” knowledge and intellectual knowledge is radicalized in the form of a distinction between empfinden and erkennen, which is no longer a hierarchy but rather a division of labor. Whereas for Wolff Empfindung is a hinge between the I and the world, for Sulzer empfinden refers to the capacity to be affected by agreeable or disagreeable 356 GEFÜHL GEFÜHL 357 which he numbers among the “Gefühle des inneren Sinnes” (feelings of an internal sense), and which he conceives of as an equivalent to the cogito (Grundriss, vol. 1). This equivalence between feeling and knowledge is found again in Herder, who appeals to Wolff in his Kritische Wälder to define aesthetics as a “science of the feeling of beauty, that is, of sensible knowledge [eine Wissenschaft des Gefühls des Schönen, oder nach der Wolffischen Sprache, der sinnlichen Erkenntnis].” Radicalizing the Wolffian claim in a new way, Herder does not balk at the notion of a “feeling of mind” (geistige Empfindung) or at erasing any distinction between Empfindung and knowledge, as well as between Empfindung and Gefühl: No knowledge is possible without Empfindung, that is without a feeling (Gefühl) of good and evil. The knowledge of the soul is thus unthinkable without the feeling of well-being or doing badly, without the deeply intimate and intellectual sensation of the truth and of goodness. (Herder, “Vom Erkennen,” 236ff.) III. From Tetens to Kant: The Filtering of the Differences between Gefühl and Empfindung through the Theory of Faculties In the philosophy of Johann Nikolaus Tetens and in Kantian critical philosophy, the link between empiricism and abstraction is called into question, making possible a reflection on the difference between Gefühl and Empfindung. Tetens, relying, it seems, on sensualist principles of Lockean origin, filters Gefühl and Empfindung by emphasizing that the impingement of the external world on sensation is only ever a starting point and that we must therefore draw a distinction between the primary matter of sensation and its becomingrepresentation. To say that our ideas come from sensations for him means only that “sensations (Empfindungen) are the primary matter (Grundstoff) that is available to reason for representation, thinking, and ideas, the matter from which the activity of thought makes them come forward” (Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie, 49). Similarly, Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason that sensations are the “matter of our senses” (B 286/A 233–34), the effect of the object on the representational capacity (ibid., “Transcendental aesthetic”), and as such, “the matter of the phenomenon” (ibid., § 8; B 60/A 42–43). What distinguishes waking and dreaming despite their common source in sensations, Tetens argues, is that in the waking state “the capacity for thinking (Denkkraft) develops representations from sensations (Empfindungen)” (Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie). He adds, however, that even in the state of receptivity, the soul is never truly passive and that attention is already itself an activity of the soul. The contradiction between subject and object is thus resolved, insofar as the modifications of the soul that define Empfindung for Wolff or Sulzer presuppose a faculty (Vermögen) of the soul to be modified. If Empfindung is an effect (Wirkung) on the soul, “the capacities [of the soul] to be modified are, insofar as they are seated in the soul, participative faculties (mitwirkende Vermögen), and they have their source in those which are active” (Philosophische Versuche, vol. 1). It is the capacity of soul to animate itself that makes feelings and hence comes closer to emotion (Rührung). Empfinden thus falls unambiguously on the side of subjective knowledge and is contrasted with the objective pole of knowledge (erkennen). The article “Sinnlich (Schöne Künste)” of the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1786) presents this topic well: We say that we know (erkennen), that we grasp (fassen), or that we understand (begreifen) something when we have the clear perception (Wahrnehmung) of its nature (Beschaffenheit), and we have a clear knowledge of the things we are capable of explaining, or whose natures we can describe to others. In the state of knowledge, there is something that comes to place itself before our minds (Beym Erkennen schwebt also unserem Geist etwas vor), or we are conscious of something that we consider different from ourselves, that is, from our power of acting, and we call this thing an object of knowledge. Conversely, we say that we feel (empfinden) something when we are aware of a modification within our power itself. (Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie) The goal of the argument is in fact to show by and with the terminology of knowledge that there is thought in feeling. In order to affirm the dignity of aesthetic thought established by Baumgarten, then, Empfindung must be distinguished, as feeling of oneself by oneself, from the constitution of an object of knowledge, which can only take place if we are “spectators of what takes place” (Zuschauer dessen, was vorgeht), whereas “in feeling we are ourselves the object in which the change takes place [beym Empfinden sind wir selbst das Ding, mit dem etwas veränderliches vorgeht]” (ibid.). This feeling of oneself by oneself will enter not only into the vocabulary of perception but into that of consciousness as well: “Every time we feel something, we are conscious of a change in ourselves [bey jeder neuen Empfindung sind wir uns einer Veränderung in uns selbst bewußt]” (ibid.). The radical difference established by Sulzer between feeling (empfinden), as a resonance of oneself in oneself, and knowledge (erkennen), as separation of the observing consciousness from the objects of knowledge, leads then to the construction of two spheres of equal dignity. In feeling perception “thinks.” There is thus a “perceptual thought,” a “thought of the senses” (sinnliches Denken, ibid.), contrasting with “speculative thought” (das spekulative Denken, ibid.). From the point of view of the distinction between Gefühl and empfinden, the novelty introduced by the problem of perceptual consciousness is that “sensible” thought (which Sulzer is careful to distinguish from that which, in feeling, is only the feeling of feeling) becomes in his terminology the “full feeling” (das volle Gefühl) of feeling (Empfindung). There is, therefore, at the same time, on the basis of the newly constituted aesthetics, a promotion of feeling to the dignity of knowledge and the persistence of a “mirror” conception of reflection and perception. Thought is found in the folds of feeling. We may go further and elevate the dignity of this thoughtin-feeling, to the point of affirming that it is a cogito. This is indeed what G. E. Schulze does when he speaks in his Grundriss der philosophischen Wissenschaft of a Gefühl der Existenz, 358 GEFÜHL The contrast established here relies on the general notion of “representation” (Vorstellung), which acts as a middle term between Gefühl and Empfindung and presupposes among other things an equivalence between “objective sensation” (Empfindung) and what is usually translated as “perception,” Wahrnehmung (see PERCEPTION). Gefühl, understood as simply subjective feeling without a representation of the object (Kant’s theme in this part of the Critique of Judgment), corresponds nicely with the understanding of Gefühl as feeling a change in the soul without knowing its cause, as Tetens defines it in the passage from the Philosophische Versuche cited earlier, and which he sometimes calls Empfindnis precisely to distinguish it from Empfindung. But to say, as Kant does, that the color of a prairie is an “objective sensation” does not amount to saying that the materiality of a color is ignored, as objective reality, by any subjective determination, nor that sensation, insofar as it takes place in the subject, is only relative and arbitrary. The term “objective” here is the product of a break, that of the transcendental aesthetic, which Tetens had not made. For Kant, colors are not physical realities but modifications of our senses. They are “subjective” for this reason. But what affects the subject does not for all that belong to him, any more than space and time belong to him as a priori conditions of sensation—and in this respect they are, like Empfindung, “objective.” Thus, if it is permissible to split the term for sensation along the two axes of subject and object, it is just as necessary to distinguish clearly Empfindung, as what provides the hinge between the world and the individual, from Gefühl, as an internal subjective resonance and a signal from the subject to himself. If Tetens does not go so far in defining the principles of sensation (Sinnlichkeit) as Kant does in his Transcendental Aesthetic, where he designates them as formal a priori conditions of time and space, it is because for Tetens the philosophy of representation still falls under psychological analysis. IV. The Avatars of Moral Sentiment: Gefühl, Empfindsamkeit It is precisely this break that allows Kant to bring the term Gefühl into the moral domain, thus to transcend feeling, but without running the risk of erasing the difference between ethics and aesthetics: respect then becomes the unique “sentiment” (Gefühl) of practical reason. This usage of the term Gefühl is not in contradiction with the habit of the time. Almost all of the examples that Adelung’s dictionary provides for the use of the term Gefühl suggest ethical values (love of country, creator, feeling of happiness felt in the presence of a good friend), and they culminate in the following equivalence: “das moralische Gefühl, die Empfindung dessen, was gut und böse ist [moral sentiment (Gefühl), the feeling (Empfindung) of what is good and bad].” We may contrast with this sense of empfindend as “capable of moral sentiment” the term empfindsam and the question of Empfindsamkeit, whose history comes entirely from the domain of literature and which was institutionalized in German starting from some of Lessing’s remarks about the translation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey by J. J. Boder (Empfindsame Reise, 1768). This sense of empfindsam in the eighteenth century meant “capable of emotion” (Rührung). Adelung defines it as “fähig, leicht gerührt zu werden” (“ability to be easily reality accessible. But insofar as knowledge develops or works upon the material of sensation, it “expels it from the soul” and “places it in front of it” (ibid., vol. 1). Against this background Tetens seeks to remedy the linguistic confusion he perceives in the usage of Empfindung and Gefühl, reserving the active meaning for the latter (Gefühl is the act of feeling) and the connotation of a signal for the former: perception has indicative value with regard to its source. Thus: The words Gefühl and fühlen have a range of meaning almost as large as that of the words Empfindung and empfinden. And yet, it seems that we must admit a clear difference between them. Feeling (Fühlen) relates rather to the act of feeling (Aktus des Empfindens) than to the object itself; and insofar as we distinguish them from sensations (Empfindungen), there are feelings (Gefühle) when we feel a change in ourselves or exerted on us, without this impression permitting us to have knowledge of the object that caused it. To feel (empfinden) makes a sign toward an object (zeiget auf einen Gegenstand hin) that we feel (fühlen) in ourselves by the medium of the sensible impression and that we discover so to speak as a given. (Ibid., 1:167ff.) Like Tetens, Kant distinguishes Empfindung and Gefühl by submitting the relation between feeling and sensation to a rigorous analysis. In section 3 of part 1 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant, like Tetens, suggests bringing order to the vocabulary. The passage begins thus: “This at once affords a convenient opportunity for condemning and directing particular attention to a prevalent confusion of the double meaning of which the word ‘sensation’ is capable.” Of course, the context is no longer the same one as for Tetens, since here Kant wishes to contrast aesthetic pleasure that is free of all interest with the interested relation of hedonism toward the object of pleasure. However, the implications intersect: When a modification of the feeling (Gefühl) of pleasure or displeasure is termed sensation (Empfindung), this expression is given quite a different meaning to that which it bears when I call the representation (Vorstellung) of a thing (through sense as a receptivity pertaining to the faculty of knowledge) sensation. For in the latter case the representation is referred to the Object, but in the former it is referred solely to the Subject and is not available for any cognition, not even for that by which the Subject cognizes itself. Now, in the above definition the word sensation (Empfindung) is used to denote an objective representation of sense (eine objektive Vorstellung der Sinne); and, to avoid continually running the risk of misinterpretation, we shall call that which must always remain purely subjective, and is absolutely incapable of forming a representation of an object, by the familiar name of feeling (Gefühl). The green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation (gehört zur objektiven Empfindung), as the perception of an object of sense (Wahrnehmung eines Gegenstandes des Sinnes); but its agreeableness to subjective sensation, by which no object is represented. (Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 3) GEFÜHL 359 Herder, Johann Friedrich. “Kritische Wälder oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend, nach Maasgaben neuerer Schriften.” 33 vols. Vols. 3 and 4 edited by Bernhard Suphan, 1877–1912. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1967–68. First published in 1769. Translation by Gregory Moore: “Critical Forests (First & Fourth Groves).” In Selected Writings on Aesthetics, edited by Gregory Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. . “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele.” In Sämmtliche Werke, 33 vols. Vol. 8, edited by Bernhard Suphan, 1877–1913. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1967–68. First published in 1778. Translation by M. N. Forster: “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul.” In J.G. Herder: Philosophical Writings, edited by M. N. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 3 and 4. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by Paul Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . Kritik der Urteilskraft, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902–. Translation by James Creed Meredith: The Critique of Judgment, edited by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Kuehn, Manfred. Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987. Kukla, Rebecca, ed. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditsch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. First published in 1690. Matthews, Patricia M. The Significance of Beauty: Kant on Feeling and the System of the Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Schiller, Friedrich von. “Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 4. 50 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1967. First published in 1783. Translation by G. H. Noehden and J. Stoddart: Fiesco; or the Genoese conspiracy: a tragedy. London: Johnson, Edwards, Cadell and Davies, 1796. . “Über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 20. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962. First published in 1780. Translation with an introduction by J. Weiss: “Connection between Animal and Spiritual Nature in Man.” In The Philosophical and Aesthetic Letters and Essays. London: Chapman, 1845. . “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.” In Nationalausgabe, vol. 20. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962. First published in 1795. Translation by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby: On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Schlegel, Friedrich von. Europa. 2 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1963. First published in 1803–5. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Stuttgart: Reklam, 1997. First published in 1799. Translation by Richard Crouter: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, edited by Richard Crouter. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, ed. Deutsche Chronik: 1774–1777. 4 vols. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1975. Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. Grundriss des philosophischen Wissenschaft. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1970. First published in 1788–90. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and, Continuation of Bramine’s Journal: The Text and Notes. Edited by Melvyn New and W. G. Day. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2002. Stiebritz, Johann Friedrich. Erläuterungen der Vernünftigen Gedancken von den Kräfften des Menschlichen Verstandes Wolffs. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1977. First published in 1741. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: in einzeln nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter aufeinanderfolgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt. 5 vols. 2nd ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1994. First published in 1792–99. . “General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–1774): Selected Articles.” Edited and translated by Thomas Christensen. In Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Cristoph Koch, edited by Nancy Baker and Thomas Christensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tetens, Johann Nikolaus. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entiwicklung. 2 vols. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1979. First published in 1777. moved”), whereas Campe speaks of the ability to feel pleasure in emotive participation. For Kant and others Empfindsamkeit is denounced as whininess (Empfindelei, Empfindsamelei). But the term remains entirely bound to this period, and starting with the nineteenth century only Sentimentalität is spoken of. By thus mixing moral sentiment and the effusion of participation, we get the conceptual hybrid of the Mit-Gefühl, that is, a moral feeling of participation in a community, whose uses may be pedagogical (as in Herder, Ideen zur Philosophischen Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–95: the foundation of the community is familial Mit-Gefühl), or political— especially with the concept of Freiheitsgefühl in Schubart (Deutsche Chronik, 1775) or in Schiller’s Fiesko (1783). Friedrich von Schlegel gave the term an emphatic and conservative tone, attributing to the German character an innate feeling of freedom related to an intuitive feeling of legal justice (Rechtlichkeit), based on respect for morality and religion (F. von Schlegel, Europa), to which Heinrich Heine soon responded in the preface to the second edition of the Reisebilder (1831), contrasting a more French and Jacobin vision of politics with this communitarian conservatism of a “katholische Harmonie des Gefühls (Catholic harmony of feeling).” As for the philosopher of feeling par excellence in the so-called dispute over pantheism, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for him an objective and pure Gefühl is the basis of a philosophy conceived of as transcendental. This pure totality indissociable from Gefühl obliterates the boundaries between imagination and speech, literature and philosophy. Herder, Bouterwerk, Goethe, and Jacobi—all are in agreement as regards the absoluteness of feeling. For Goethe in particular, Gefühl is at the source of any discovery and any truth. It is similar, then, to the immediacy of Anschauung, of “intuition”—which is, even more, the dimension of genius. The absoluteness of Gefühl is similarly to be found in Schleiermacher, for whom the essence of religion is neither thought nor action, but “Anschauung und Gefühl” (Über die Religion, 120ff.). The literary absolute of the Romantics and of Hölderlin makes it the source of all poiêsis, all invention, and in the end all culture. Greek poetry, founded on the simplicity and purity of an originating Gefühl, becomes the mind’s holy site, against which the Hegelian dialectic eventually leads its antiparticularist crusade in the name of Vernünftigkeit—rationality. Jean-Pierre Dubost REFS.: Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. 7th ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1963. First published in 1779. Cohen, Ted, and Paul Guyer. Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Corr, Charles Anthony. “The Deutsche Metaphysik of Christian Wolff: Text and Transitions.” In History of Philosophy in the Making, edited by Linus J. Thro, 113–20. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982. Guyer, Paul, ed. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Heine, Heinrich. Reisebilder I. 1824–28. Vol. 5, Säkularausgabe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag / CNRS, 1970. Translation by Peter Wortsman: Travel Pictures. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2008. 360 GEGENSTAND objectification originating in the faculties (perception, imagination, understanding) and their functions, but the thing in itself remains its unknowable ontological foundation. A. The split between phenomenon and thing in itself In the Latin of Kant’s Dissertatio of 1770, we find two series of opposed ontological equations: objectivum=reale=intelligibile= subjecto irrelativum, subjectivum=ideale=sensibile=subjecto relativum. Objectivum is contrasted with subjectivum, what resides in or is relative to the subject, and is thus identified with the intelligible (which by contrast with the perceptual does not vary depending on the subject) and with realitas (contrasted with idealitas, which describes ideas or subjective representations but not existing objects). Thus Kant contrasts lex subjective, lex quaedam menti insita, or again the conditiones subjecto propriae (“subjective law,” “situated in the mind,” “conditions proper to the subject”: space and time, § 29), to conditio objectiva, for example, the “forma objectiva sive substantiarum coordinatio [the objective condition or objective form as coordination of substances].” Similarly, he refuses to grant space and time the status of “objectivum aliquid et reale [something objective, i.e., real]” (§ 14–15) but rather treats them as “coordinatio idealis et subjecti [an ideal, i.e., subjective, coordination].” Whence there results the double meaning of objectum, corresponding to the two etymological registers: on one side res, “existens in se,” “objectum intellectus,” thing in itself and intelligible cause of perceptual affections; on the other side the phaenomenon, “objectum sensuum”: Phaenomena ceu causata testantur de praesentia objecti, quod contra Idealismum. (In so far as [Phenomena] are sensory concepts or apprehensions, they are, as things caused, witnesses to the presence of an object, and this is opposed to idealism. [NB: praesentia has, in this refutation of idealism, the meaning of existentia and not that of manifestation.]) (Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, § 11; Form and Principles, 389) Quaecunque ad sensus nostros referuntur ut objecta, sunt Phaenomena. (Whatever, as object, relates to our senses is a phenomenon.) (Kant, De mundi, § 12; Form and Principles, 390) Despite this amphibology the term objectum already tends to be reserved for the appearing object and to be separate from the register of existence in itself: thus section 4, which deals with the formal principle of the intelligible world (with objects in themselves, in consequence), substitutes the terms res, substantia, aliquid, omnia for objectum. This is why, in the last cited passage, it is best to avoid translating quaecunque by “everything which” (“toutes les choses qui,” Fr. trans. P. Mouy, Vrin), which implies a reification of the phenomenon, and to reserve “thing” (chose) for res intelligibilis. This amphibology is reaffirmed in the Critical period, but with a decisive shift. The object of course retains its twofold meaning, that of thing in itself (referred to as Ding an sich, Objekt an sich, Gegenstand an sich, Noumenon, das Erscheinende, that is, “thing in itself,” “object in itself,” “noumenon,” “the . Über die allgemeine spekulativische Philosophie, edited by W. Uebele. In Neudrucke seltner philosophischer Werke, vol. 4. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1913. First published in 1775. Wolff, Christian, Freiherr von. Deutsche Logik. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1977. Translated as: Logic, or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding with Their Use and Application in the Knowledge and Search of Truth. London, 1770. . Deutsche Metaphysik: Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1983.