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

ABDICATUM: AUFHEBEN, AUFHEBUNG (GERMAN) FRENCH supprimer, suppression; abolir, abolition; sursumer, sursomption; assumer, assomption; dépasser, surpasser, abroger, sur-primer, mettre en grange; enlever, enlèvement; relever, relève v. DIALECTIC, and GERMAN, MOMENT, NEGATION, PLASTICITY, RUSSIAN, VERNEINUNG. Since 1939, when the first volume of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind translated into French by Jean Hyppolite was published, “aufheben” and “Aufhebung” have been revered as fetishes of the untranslatable. The “double meaning” (to adopt Hegel’s term) of a verb, aufheben, that means both “maintain, preserve” and “halt, end,” has not only been recognized by Hegel’s interpreters and specialists in German philosophy but has become simply part of today’s philosophical culture. Aufhebung refers to a turn of thought that consists in “transcending” a point of view without refuting it, in carrying out a “synthesis” while retaining the best part of the “thesis” and “antithesis” and at the same time “opening” onto broader perspectives. Perhaps aided by academic habits and the practice of the dissertation, and certainly favored by the penetration of Hegelianism in France after 1945, the debate regarding these two words is probably the most long lasting, the most documented, and the best known of all those that concern problems of philosophical translation. offenen Daseyn entnommen wird, um es zu erhalten.—So ist das Aufgehobene ein zugleich Aufbewahrtes, das nur seine Unmittelbarkeit verloren hat, aber darum nicht vernichtet ist.—Die angegebenen zwei Bestimmungen des Aufhebens können lexikalisch als zwei Bedeutungen dieses Wortes aufgeführt werden. Auffallend müßte es aber dabei seyn, daß es eine Sprache dazu gekommen ist, ein und dasselbe Wort für zwei entgegensetzte Bestimmungen zu gebrauchen. Für das spekulative Denken ist es erfreulich, in der Sprache Wörter zu finden, welche eine spekulative Bedeutung an ihnen selbst haben; die deutsche Sprache hat mehrere dergleichen. Der Doppelsinn des lateinischen: tollere (der durch den ciceronianischen Witz tollendum esse Octavium, berühmt geworden), geht nicht so weit, die affirmative Bedeutung geht nur bis zum Emporheben. (Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Sämtliche Werke, 1965, 4:119–20) (Remarque. Aufheben et le Aufgehobene [participe passé substantivé] (l’idéel) est l’un des concepts les plus importants de la philosophie, une détermination fondamentale qui revient purement et simplement partout, et dont il convient de saisir le sens de façon déterminée, en particulier en le distinguant du néant [Nichts].—Ce qui se aufhebt ne devient pas par là néant. Le néant est l’immédiat; en revanche, un Aufgehobenes est quelque chose de médiatisé, c’est le non-étant, mais comme résultat sorti d’un être; il a donc encore en lui la déterminité [Bestimmtheit] dont il provient. Aufheben a dans la langue un double sens qui fait qu’il signifie à la fois quelque chose comme conserver [aufbewahren], garder [erhalten], et quelque chose comme faire s’arrêter [aufhören lassen], mettre fin [ein Ende machen]. Le fait de garder inclut déjà en soi le négatif, au sens où quelque chose se trouve soustrait à son immédiateté et ainsi à un être-là [Dasein] ouvert aux influences extérieures afin de garder son être-là.—Ainsi le Aufgehobene est-il en même temps quelque chose de conservé, à ceci près qu’il a perdu son immédiateté, sans pour autant l’avoir anéantie [vernichtet].—Les deux déterminations de l’Aufheben données plus haut peuvent d’un point de vue lexical être présentées comme deux significations de ce mot. Pourtant, il faut s’étonner qu’une langue en soit venue à employer un seul et même mot pour deux déterminations opposées. Pour la pensée spéculative, il est réjouissant de trouver dans la langue des mots qui ont en eux-mêmes une signification spéculative; la langue allemande en a plusieurs de cette sorte. Le double sens du latin tollere (rendu célèbre par le jeu de mots de Cicéron : tollendum esse Octavium) ne va pas aussi loin, la détermination affirmative ne va que jusqu’à l’élévation.) (Hegel, Science de la logique [emphasis in original]) (Remark: The expression “To Sublate.” To sublate [aufheben], and the sublated [aufgehobene] (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy. It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout To draw up a complete list of the French translations of aufheben and Aufhebung would be a project in itself, which several scholars have already undertaken; here we will limit ourselves, in a first phase, to bringing it up to date. The most recent inventory (Pierre-Jean Labarrière, 1986, following Gilbert Kirscher, 1978) included, for aufheben, and in the order of their entrance on stage: supprimer (Jean Hyppolite, 1939) and its neologistic variant, sur-primer (Jean Wahl, 1966), abroger (Albert Baraquin, 1975), enlever (André Doz, 1976), mettre en grange (Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, 1977), conservé et dépassé for the past participle aufgehoben (Henri Denis, 1984, preceded by Xavier Tilliette, who in 1973 proposed dépasser or surpasser for the infinitive), assumer (Emmanuel Martineau, 1984). The candidates that have remained the most famous are relever (Jacques Derrida, 1972, adopted by Jean-Luc Nancy, 1973) and sursumer (following Yvon Gauthier, 1967, Pierre-Jean Labarrière and Gwendoline Jarczyk, first for the Wissenschaft der Logik that they translated beginning in 1972). In 1991 Jean-Pierre Lefebvre proposed abolir and abolition for the noun Aufhebung in the Phenomenology of Mind, while G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière used sursumer and sursomption in their translation of the Phenomenology in 1993. These proposals have not all been useful in translations of works or even particular texts by Hegel: it is the Hegelian Aufhebung in general, outside any context, that people seek to translate. This provides an initial illustration of the fetish status that aufheben and Aufhebung very rapidly took on: people debate one word (or two words), and everyone feels competent to propose something, without necessarily dealing with a particular textual content. That is what we have to understand first in the numerous declarations that make Aufhebung the main difficulty or the key to what is called “Hegelianism” (see, for example, J. Wahl, “Le rôle de A. Koyré”). I. Aufhebung and Its Text: The Remark on Aufheben in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–31) This decontextualization of aufheben has itself to be explained. We can show that it has its origin in Hegel himself. The word is discussed in the Wissenschaft der Logik in a note on terminology that has, as was probably inevitable, attracted all the exegesis of the Hegelian Aufhebung. We must therefore reread this text without, however, committing ourselves with regard to the translation of the word at issue: Anmerkung. Aufheben und das Aufgehobene (das Ideelle) ist einer der wichtigsten Begriffe der Philosophie, eine Grundbestimmung, die schlechthin allenthalben wiederkehrt, deren Sinn bestimmt aufzufassen und besonderes vom Nichts zu unterscheiden ist.—Was sich aufhebt wird dadurch nicht zu Nichts. Nichts ist das Unmittelbare; ein Aufgehobenes dagegen ist ein Vermitteltes, es ist das Nichtseyende, aber als Resultat, das von einem Seyn ausgegangen ist; es hat daher die Bestimmtheit, aus der es herkommt, noch an sich Aufheben hat in der Sprache den gedoppelten Sinn, daß es so viel als aufbewahren, erhalten bedeutet, und zugleich so viel als aufhören lassen, ein Ende machen. Das Aufbewahren selbst schließt schon das Negative in sich, daß etwas seiner Unmittelbarkeit und damit einem den äuß erlichen Einwirkungen AUFHEBEN 73 Aufhebung. Rather the reverse (ibid., 62), just as the recourse to the terms of the dialectic of being and nothingness in the Remark (in particular, the distinction that it makes between what is aufgehoben and nothingness, Nichts) should not lead us to believe that the concept of Aufhebung draws all its resources from this dialectic: if that were the case, it could not “recur everywhere” in philosophy. Thus not only is the meaning of aufheben made difficult by the coexistence of two meanings “from the lexical point of view” (in natural language) but the “speculative” sense of the word eludes our grasp even in the texts that are supposed to explain it (ibid., 78) and that reveal themselves instead, as Nancy shows, to be incapable of “following the straight line of a discourse” (ibid., 97). Thus we can better understand the way the debate has proceeded, its obsession with the word, or rather the name Aufhebung, whereas it is the verb that Hegel uses most often (in the table of contents of the Wissenschaft der Logik, this Remark is listed under the title “The expression [Ausdruck] aufheben”). As for the difficulty itself that is dealt with in this discussion, it is simple. The best formulation has been provided by J. Wahl, at a time (1966) when the translators’ controversies had not yet obscured the stakes: “It is very difficult to say at once ‘abolish and preserve’” (supprimer et conserver) (J. Wahl, “Le rôle de A. Koyré,” 22). II. Aufhebung between Positivity and Negativity The first question in the debate can be quite rapidly decided with the help of the Remark on aufheben in the Wissenschaft der Logik: the latter, by virtue of its very generality and its “disconnection” from any precise context (J.-L. Nancy, La remarque spéculative, 66) provides at least a good criterion for evaluating translation proposals. This criterion resides in the affirmation of a positivity of the process of aufheben, which excludes all translations marked by a negative or destructive meaning. The Remark expressly distinguishes aufheben from vernichten (“annihilate”) and from Nichts (“nothingness”): we have seen that what is aufgehoben is not abolished but remains or rather becomes something that the text calls “mediated” (ein vermitteltes). In the lexical network of the Remark, this definition of Aufhebung as a process of mediation draws on another distinction between nothingness (das Nichts) and the nonexisting (das Nichtseiende): there is no nothingness, there is the nonexistence of something, in other words, a determinate nonexistent, and not a void of determination, since nothingness in fact cannot be thought. Mediation and determination are thus the two characteristics of the process of Aufhebung and found its positivity. We can grant that here we are dealing with an exegetical achievement. P.-J. Labarrière has particularly emphasized this: “Such a positivity of the negative in the movement itself of its accomplishment—in the becoming that it engenders—is the most direct meaning of Aufhebung” (“Sursumer/ sursomption,” 107). That is why “all translations that privilege the aspect of negativity—supprimer, abolir, abroger—will be deficient from a speculative point of view” (ibid., 109). Labarrière then proposes sursumer (“sursume”), following Y. Gauthier, who created this neologism by contrast with the Kantian “subsume”: in Kant, “subsuming” is defined as the the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing [Nichts]. What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing. Nothing is immediate; what is sublated [aufgehobene], on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself the determinateness [Bestimmtheit] from which it originates. “To sublate” has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it means to preserve [aufbewahren], to maintain [erhalten], and equally it also means to cause to cease [aufhören lassen], to put an end to [ein Ende machen]. Even “to preserve” includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence [Dasein] which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated [aufgehobene] is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated [vernichtet]. The two definitions of “to sublate” [aufheben] which we have given can be quoted as two dictionary meanings of this word. But it is certainly remarkable to find that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. It is a delight to speculative thought to find in the language words which have in themselves a speculative meaning; the German language has a number of such. The double meaning of the Latin tollere (which has become famous through the Ciceronian pun: tollendum est Octavium) does not go so far; its affirmative determination signifies only a lifting-up.) (Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:106–7, trans. A.V. Miller) By reattaching it to its context, that of the beginning of The Doctrine of Being, where being and nothingness, far from being fixed points of reflection, merely pass into one another, and where the becoming that succeeds them in the unfolding of objective logic is not the “unity” of being and nothingness, but rather the very movement of their passage, J.-L. Nancy presents the text in its characteristic chiaroscuro (Nancy, La remarque spéculative, 107). The difficulty can be summed up this way: the effect of displaying the word, elicited by its particular treatment in a terminological note, is countered on the other side by the absence of any definition or even explanation of aufheben, whereas according to Hegel it is a “concept,” and moreover, “one of the most important in philosophy.” Nonetheless, this concept did not wait for the remark that is devoted to it in the text to act and constitute the operator of the dialectic of being and nothingness, but in a way that is itself difficult to assign. Hegel resorts from the outset to various names for action as substitutes for aufheben—übergehen (pass into), auflösen (dissolve), verschwinden (disappear)—each of which raises particular difficulties and does not allow us to determine exactly what aufheben is, its nature, and the object on which it operates (ibid., 42–58). Inversely, the explanations given in the Remark are not deducible from what precedes it. For Hegel aufheben does not mean “annihilate” (vernichten); the operation of Aufhebung produces something, a “result” that, in virtue of the very fact that it is a result, is something “mediated” (ein vermitteltes). From this, however, one cannot conclude that mediation defines 74 AUFHEBEN originally its own” (ibid., 106), that is, the negative preservation of immediacy Hegel talks about in the Remark. A still more pronounced interest in the realities of life outside is to be seen in the mettre en grange (“store up”) suggested by J.-L. VieillardBaron for aufheben, in the name of “Hegel’s Swabian and peasant background” (“Compte rendu,” 217). We could give other examples of the same kind (the Grimm brothers mention the ancient expression Teller aufheben (“change plates”): one plate disappears, another is set in its place), while at the same time wondering about the necessity of the operation: in German, speichern can mean “save a file to disk,” that is, “store,” and that usage is just as free of peasant motives as when we say in French that a company has engrangé bénéfices (stored up profits). We might also wonder about the widespread fascination with Swabia and its supposed influence on Hegel’s intellectual development (and on Heidegger’s as well, but Hegel, for his part, rather quickly left his native area). It is true that the region borders on France, and that this allows us to feel more at home. Generally speaking, this tendency to exaggerate rusticity betrays the embarrassment of all translation when confronted by catachreses—that is, metaphors made inaudible because they have been “naturalized” (the legs of a table)—in foreign languages. We can always say “both at once” (but there too ) so that the German reader no longer hears the barn and the jam in aufheben and that he nonetheless hears them a little bit: who can decide here? Moreover, the problem grows still more complicated when we inquire into the meaning of this naturalization regarding a term concerning which Hegel emphasizes that it provides philosophy—or at least his philosophy—with one of its most important concepts. Hegel’s statements concerning the relation between aufheben and natural language are in fact ambiguous: astonishment that “a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposed determinations” is not thematized by Hegel (though the expression “auffallend müßte es sein” does not deserve the abundant commentary that J.-L. Nancy devotes to it in La remarque spéculative, 72–73: the conditional müßte, far from being a marker of ambivalence, is called for by the adjective auffallend, which usually requires a modal), except to say that speculative thought finds in it a source of joy (“für das spekulative Denken ist es erfreulich”). The new preface Hegel added, a few days before his death, to the 1831 edition of the Wissenschaft der Logik appears to speak of a “joy” (Freude) that thought feels in noting the existence of a “speculative spirit of the language [ein spekulativer Geist der Sprache]” in words that have the “property of having meanings that are not only different [verschiedene] but also opposed [entgegengesezte],” as is the case with aufheben, which is, moreover, not mentioned here (Wissenschaft der Logik, 22). The status of the “speculative spirit of the language” is, however, not clear in either of the two texts (cf. J.-L. Nancy, La remarque spéculative, 81, on the undecidable question “of the anteriority—or the interiority—of a similar spirit with respect to the linguistic system”), and it is as though this spirit were scarcely able to attach itself except to words, dispersed here and there by a “stroke of luck” and “good fortune” (ibid., 73) that elicit the thinker’s “joy.” As for the question as to whether this “joy” is felt in some languages more than in others, it is more difficult than one might at first believe. The 1831 preface does say that the coexistence of opposed action of “distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis)” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Analytic of Principles,” Introduction, B 171), whereas Hegelian sursumption would designate, inversely, “the process of totalizing the part” (Y. Gauthier, “Logique hégélienne,” 152n5). It is striking that Emmanuel Martineau’s violent polemic against the Labarrière-Jarczyk solution was also waged in the name of the positivity of aufheben: to “sursume,” which is supposed to persist in “referring to supprimer and surmonter,” or again “the idea of an eviction of a less elevated term by a more elevated term” (E. Martineau, “Avertissement,” 17), we are asked to prefer assumer (“assume”), with the edifying and Marial assomption (“assumption”) for Aufhebung. It is surely here that the debate about Aufhebung in French goes astray, where it unveils the most clearly its strangeness: without realizing it, we have come to debate the nuances of a neologism that should have only those that its inventor gave it. But there is no doubt a reason why, once we have granted the common premise according to which aufheben has to be rendered by a verb that brings out its positivity, the competition persisted among proposed translations. Sursumer and relever, the two main candidates in recent Hegelian literature in French, seem to be of equal value, as do dépasser and assumer, at least insofar as they do not suggest suppression or annihilation (despite what P.-J. Labarrière says [“Sursumer/sursomption,” 116], we do not see what relever can add in the way of a negative meaning). On the one hand, however, we have a neologism; on the other, dictionary terms are used, taking greater or lesser liberties with what is supposed to be their definition (notably in the case of relever). We must now examine this new dividing line. III. The Idiomaticity of Aufheben: Between Natural Language and Peasant Folklore The point of departure is twofold: French has no word that means “both ‘abolish’ and ‘preserve’ ” (J. Wahl), and aufheben is a word that is, if not exactly everyday, at least perfectly ordinary in the German vocabulary. But we must also ask: what does it mean to say that this German word means “both ‘abolish’ and ‘preserve’ ”? The comparison Hegel makes with the Latin tollere on the basis of a pun (Witz, see INGENIUM) made by Cicero (Ad familiares, XI, 20) allows us to illustrate this. Tollere means either “raise” (to the highest office) or “eliminate, abolish): the Witz proceeds from the fact that Cicero succeeds in making this “second meaning,” which is threatening, heard in a passage that is apparently favorable to Octavian (“We must praise this young man, adorn him with all the virtues, tollere him”). On the other hand, aufheben means both “preserve” and “put an end to,” both at the same time and “both at once.” The first concern of French translators has been to understand how such a thing is possible. They thus set out to find communicative situations in which aufheben has both its meanings simultaneously, without leaving what P.-J. Labarrière calls its “ ‘natural’ site” (“Sursumer-sursomption,” 105). Hence on the basis of the supposedly idiomatic expression “Konfituren für den Winter aufheben,” the now famous example of jam jars and their contents, the fruit is aufgehoben, that is, modified “by a form of negation” that “makes it apt to subsist under other conditions than those which were AUFHEBEN 75 transformation of the word into a fetish, we have at the same time shown that the understanding of Aufhebung depends on that of a Hegelian philosophy of signification whose difficulties have been well known in France for the past thirty years. The translation of Aufhebung is thereby sent back to the explication of Hegel’s text: depending on the importance accorded to this type of exercise, this will be regarded as a consolation or a makeshift. Philippe Büttgen REFS.: Denis, Henri. Logique hégélienne et systèmes économiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Translation by A. Bass: Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Gauthier, Yvon. “Logique hégélienne et formalisation.” Dialogue. Revue canadienne de philosophie 5, no. 1 (1967): 151–65. Hamacher, Werner. Pleroma: Reading in Hegel: The Genesis and Structure of a Dialectical Hermeneutics in Hegel. Translated by N. Walker and S. Jarvis. London: Athlone Press, 1998. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Fenomenologia dello spirito. Edited by G. Schulze. Translated by A. Novelli. Naples: Rossi-Romano, 1863. . Fenomenologia dello spirito. Translated by E. de Negri. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2008. . Heidelberg Writings. Translated by B. Bowman and A. Speight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. . Phénoménologie de l’Esprit. Translated by J. Hyppolite. Paris: AubierMontaigne, 1939–41. . Phénoménologie de l’Esprit. Translated by J. P. Lefebvre. Paris: Aubier, 1991. . Phénoménologie de l’Esprit. Translated by G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1993; reedited Folio, 2002. . The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. London: Schwan Sonnenstein, 1910. . The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. . Recension des oeuvres de Jacobi. Translated by A. Droz. Paris: Vrin, 1976. . Sämtliche Werke. 20 vols. Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1957. . Science de la logique. Translated by Jankélévitch. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1949. . Science de la logique. Vol. 1 [La logique objective]. Book 1: L’Etre. Translated by P.-J. Labarrière and G. Jarczyk. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1972. . Science de la logique. Vol. 1 [La logique objective]. Book 2: La doctrine de l’Essence. Translated by P.-J. Labarrière and G. Jarczyk. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1976. . Science de la logique. “Préface de 1831.” Translated by C. Malabou. Philosophie, no. 21 (1990): 7–26. . The Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1969. Kirscher, Gilbert. “Compte rendu de G.W.F. Hegel. Recension des Oeuvres de Jacobi (trans. A. Droz. Paris: Vrin, 1976).” Hegel Studien 13 (1978): 290–91. Labarrière, Jean-Pierre. “Sursumer/sursomption.” In Hegeliana, edited by G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière, 102–20. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre. “Philosophie et philologie: La traduction du vocabulaire philosophique allemand.” Encyclopaedia Universalis, Symposium (1985): 110–19. Martineau, Emmanuel. “Avertissement du traducteur.” In La phénoménologie de l’Esprit de Hegel, by Martin Heidegger, 13–23. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1984. Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by A. Jolin and J. O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La remarque spéculative (un bon mot de Hegel). Paris: Galilée, 1973. Translation by C. Surprenant: The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel’s bons mots. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. meanings in several of its words constitutes a “privilege” of the German language “in comparison with other modern languages,” and Hegel seems to authorize only reluctantly the borrowing of “a few words” from foreign languages. However, a few pages further on, the Remark on aufheben no longer bears any trace of this praise of the German language. Above all, it defends the maintenance, in the “technical language of philosophy,” of “Latin expressions,” which Hegel regards as more apt to “recall the reflected” (das reflektierte, a Latinism precisely for das vermittelte given at the outset), than the “immediacy” of the “native language.” That is why, later in the Remark, Aufhebung itself, or more exactly its product, what is aufgehoben, can be described “in an appropriate manner” with the help of the “Latin” word Moment (see MOMENT). All these hesitations on Hegel’s part regarding the privilege of German, the use of everyday language, and the necessity of a philosophical terminology—in a word, regarding what a “speculative meaning” might be (J.-L. Nancy, La remarque spéculative, 76)—explain the difficulty of translating aufheben-Aufhebung as much and perhaps more than the simple observation of the absence of a word that can mean “both ‘abolish’ and ‘preserve’ ” in French. We will, in fact, always hesitate between a “technical” translation such as P.-J. Labarrière’s sursumer, which presents aufheben in its character as a “conventional logical operator” (Présentation de La Doctrine de l’essence [Science de la logique, I, 2], 1976, p. 29), and a translation more anchored in the idiom, such as relever or dépasser. And with these last two candidates we will still have to choose between the one that is in accord with etymology (heben in aufheben means “lift,” whence relever) and something more usual: dépasser, for example, a point of view, has become established in the language of argumentation without—and that is what constitutes its interest here—becoming a technical term; but on the other hand, se relever for sich aufheben is perhaps better than se dépasser, with its ethical-ascetic connotation. In other words, it is the definition itself of what we deem “idiomatic” that is at issue in each case here. And it is precisely this that the Hegelian use of aufheben puts in question in German itself, that is, in a language that he shakes up by bringing an ordinary term into the realm of philosophical terminology. That is very precisely what he does with Aufhebung. There is the Aufhebung that shares with other words the privilege of revealing the fertile contradiction of “opposite meanings” in the natural language, and there is the one that Hegel brings into the technical language of philosophy and that is thus associated with the “Latin” Moment. The difficulty derives from this duality that French is obliged to transpose onto the lexical level, or rather—to be more Hegelian—from the movement within the word that in French produces two words, the neologism (sursumer) and the “ordinary” word, which is always overdetermined (relever); for in fact it is the same aufheben, but that is what one can show only by referring it immediately to the German. Thus the translators’ debate can probably not come to a conclusion, if coming to a conclusion means finding the word that “corresponds” to Aufhebung, and it can do it all the less insofar as it concentrates, beforehand, on one word, aufheben or Aufhebung. However, by showing that it is the economy of Hegelian discourse that, by the simple fact that aufheben deserves a particular comment, is the first to carry out this 76 AUTHORITY to an I, an “alter ego” whose distance is to be gauged and whose difference is to be understood; on the other hand, a he or it of some kind, an “other” among others, representing a contingent variation of personal identity. The competition between these two ways of expressing alterity, moreover deriving from a single root differently modulated, exists in numerous European languages (cf. Eng. “other”/“else”), even if the difference in usage is not always easy to trace, both being usually finally rendered in French dictionaries by autrui. 1. On the Greek difference allos/heteros, and the entirely different “heterogeneous” represented by “barbarian,” see TO TRANSLATE. On the connection between alius and alienus, “who belongs to an other [in the juridical sense, alienare designates the transfer of the property right], foreign, improper, hostile, disadvantageous,” and the more modern sense, even if it is still connected with the juridical acceptation, of aliéné as irresponsible and foreign to itself, cf. MADNESS. As the RT: DHLF notes, aliénation began a new career with Sartre and his translation of Entfremdung—from fremd, “foreign”—in Hegel and Marx: cf. PRAXIS, SECULARIZATION, and APPROPRIATION, PROPERTY. 3. But the choice has been made to take up the whole of the network through the difference in German between Nebenmensch, which designates the neutral alterity of other individuals or “neighbors” as opposed to a postulated identical universal, and Mitmensch, which expresses a singularity irreducible to the tension between particular and universal and constitutes a modality structuring the relationship of an ego to the world: see MITMENSCH and NEIGHBOR; cf. IDENTITY, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, PERSON. 4. In Russian, drugoj [другой], the “other,” in the sense of “second,” heteros, is terminologically connected with drug [друг], “friend, comrade,” in a network of relationships in which friendship and familiar proximity reign (philia [φιλία]; see LOVE); see DRUGOJ, and cf. SOBORNOST’. v. CONSCIOUSNESS, HEIMAT, WELT Tilliette, Xavier. “Compte-rendu de G.W.F. Hegel Science de la logique, v.1, bk. 1, L’Etre (trans. P. J. Labarrière and G. Jarczyk. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1972).” Archives de philosophie 36, no. 3 (1973): 513–14. Vieillard-Baron, Jean-Louis. “Compte-rendu de G.W.F. Hegel Science de la logique, v.1, bk. 1, L’Etre, ed. de 1812 and v.1, bk. 2, La doctrine de l’essence (trans. P. J. Labarrière et G. Jarczyk (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1972 et 1976).” Hegel-Studien 12 (1977): 215–19. Wahl, Jean. “Le rôle de A. Koyré dans le développement des études hégéliennes en France.” Hegel-Studien, suppl. 3 (Bonn: Bouvier) 1966: 15–26. AUTHORITY “Authority” derives from the Latin auctoritas, from augere (to grow, increase): the auctor is a person who “increases confidence” and is the guarantor, the model, the source, the advisor, the founder, before he becomes the “author” in the modern sense of a writer; see ACTOR, and cf. LAW, PIETAS, RELIGION; cf. DOXA. Classically, authority (auctoritas) is distinguished from power (potestas): it is the modality of human command that has its source in a legitimate order and that, by right, dispenses with both constraint and persuasion. Here we find a significant example of the difficulties that modern and contemporary thought encounters in giving a content to this distinction with the analysis of the notion of Herrschaft, which translators of Max Weber sometimes render by “authority” and sometimes by “domination”: see HERRSCHAFT; cf. DOMINATION. v. DROIT, POWER, PRINCIPLE, WISDOM AUTRUI Autrui is the complement of autre, from Latin alter, which first meant, as the suffix of the comparative shows, “the other of two,” “one, the other, the second,” like the Greek heteros [ἕτεϱοϛ], whereas alius, corresponding to the Greek allos [ἄλλοϛ], designates “the other of several,” and provides the expression of reciprocity (Lat. alius, alium; Gr. allêlôn [ἀλλήλων]). On the one hand, the you opposed to an I, an “alter ego” whose distance is to be gauged and whose difference is to be understood; on the other hand, a he or it of some kind, an “other” among others, representing a contingent variation of personal identity. The competition between these two ways of expressing alterity, moreover deriving from a single root differently modulated, exists in numerous European languages (cf. Eng. “other”/“else”), even if the difference in usage is not always easy to trace, both being usually finally rendered in French dictionaries by autrui. 1. On the Greek difference allos/heteros, and the entirely different “heterogeneous” represented by “barbarian,” see TO TRANSLATE. On the connection between alius and alienus, “who belongs to an other [in the juridical sense, alienare designates the transfer of the property right], foreign, improper, hostile, disadvantageous,” and the more modern sense, even if it is still connected with the juridical acceptation, of aliéné as irresponsible and foreign to itself, cf. MADNESS. As the RT: DHLF notes, aliénation began a new career with Sartre and his translation of Entfremdung—from fremd, “foreign”—in Hegel and Marx: cf. PRAXIS, SECULARIZATION, and APPROPRIATION, PROPERTY. 3. But the choice has been made to take up the whole of the network through the difference in German between Nebenmensch, which designates the neutral alterity of other individuals or “neighbors” as opposed to a postulated identical universal, and Mitmensch, which expresses a singularity irreducible to the tension between particular and universal and constitutes a modality structuring the relationship of an ego to the world: see MITMENSCH and NEIGHBOR; cf. IDENTITY, I/ME/MYSELF, MENSCHHEIT, PERSON. 4. In Russian, drugoj [другой], the “other,” in the sense of “second,” heteros, is terminologically connected with drug [друг], “friend, comrade,” in a network of relationships in which friendship and familiar proximity reign (philia [φιλία]; see LOVE); see DRUGOJ, and cf. SOBORNOST’. v. CONSCIOUSNESS, HEIMAT, WELT BAROCCO: BAROQUE FRENCH baroque GERMAN Barock (n.), barock (adj.) PORTUGUESE barroco v. AESTHETICS, ARGUTEZZA, CLASSIC, CONCETTO, GOÛT, MANIERA, NEUZEIT, PORTUGUESE, ROMANTIC. The ease of translating the word “baroque” in European languages, whose corresponding words all come from a common Portuguese root, masks its multiple meanings resulting from successive displacements, contractions, and extensions that do not coincide over the five centuries of its trans-European history. Derived from a Portuguese jeweler’s term, barocco, which refers to irregular pearls, the term “baroque” initially had, in the seventeenth century, a pejorative connotation. In late nineteenthcentury German art history, “baroque” became a neutral adjective referring to the art of the Late Roman Empire and the postRenaissance, and was subsequently used, coupled with the word “classic,” in various attempts to construct a Kunstwissenschaft, a general and trans-historical aesthetics. But the term’s limits fluctuated over time, depending on the country and the domains concerned, leading to a great diversity of contents that intersect with, include, or exclude competing or neighboring notions: mannerism, classicism, rococo. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, “baroque” tended to become, like “Romanesque” or “Gothic,” a simple chronological adjective designating the seventeenth century, dislodging the term “classic” in French culture. A floating signifier, a portmanteau word , “baroque” is thus— depending on the context, the domain, the period, or even the speaker—an antonym or a synonym of “classic,” just as it can contain or succeed “mannerism” or “rococo.” In many texts, the word could be deleted without any loss of meaning, or be replaced by more precise and less ambiguous terms. However, the connotations associated with the original figurative sense, which is still alive, the realistic illusion, the nominalist temptation, and the always vigorous post-Hegelian resurgences, can lead to a return of repressed meanings. The step-by-step deconstruction of this linguistic palimpsest is probably the only effective antidote against this babelizing confusion. I. From the Literal to the Figurative Meaning In the course of five centuries, the word “baroque” traveled all over Europe. From the literal sense, which is attested in sixteenth-century Portuguese and later passed into French (RT: Dictionnaire universel, 1690: “jeweler’s term, used only for pearls that are not perfectly round”), derives a figurative sense, “irregular, bizarre, uneven,” registered in the 1740 edition of the RT: Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, the only meaning listed in the 1873 RT: Dictionnaire de la langue française by Littré and is still used today. In the context of the French aesthetics, both normative and idealist, of “good taste,” the word was used in the eighteenth century in the field of the fine arts to designate, with a pejorative connotation, heterodox, bizarre, or libertine forms: “[B]aroque is everything that does not follow norms and proportions, but only the artist’s caprice. In Tintoretto’s paintings, there is always something strange and unexpected, there is always something baroque” (RT: Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture et gravure, 1757); “baroque music: music whose harmony is confused, full of modulations and dissonances” (Rousseau, in L’Encyclopédie, supplement, 1776). In the RT: Encyclopédie méthodique, Architecture, vol. 1 (1788), Quatremer de Quincy uses the term with the same normative meaning: Baroque, adjective. In architecture, the baroque is a nuance of the bizarre. It is, so to speak, a refinement, or, dare we say, an abuse of the bizarre. Borromini provided the greatest models of bizarreness, Guarini can be considered the master of the baroque. The word passed into Italian and German, where it was used in the same way, a sign of France’s cultural domination in Enlightenment Europe. This first use of the word “baroque” in artistic aesthetics did not refer specifically, and still less generally, to the art of the seventeenth century; it could be used to describe Gothic ornaments and the painting of Tintoretto or El Greco as well as the architecture of Borromini or Guarini, but never the art of Rubens or Bernini. However, the use of the adjective “baroque” with reference to Guarini’s fanciful architecture paved the way for anchoring the word “baroque” in the Italian art of the Seicento, just as the monarchical propaganda that claimed that the century of Louis XIV equaled those of Pericles and Augustus anticipated the anchorage of the word “classic” in seventeenth-century French culture. II. From the Figurative to the Historical Meaning(s) When the discipline of the history of art was founded in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, after Romanticism’s break with the consensus based on “good taste,” the word barock was adopted to describe the late phases of ancient Roman art (von Sybel 1888) and the art of the Italian Renaissance (Burckhardt 1855, 1878; Gurlitt 1887). “It has become customary to use the term ‘baroque’ to describe the style into which the Renaissance resolved itself, or, as it is more commonly expressed, into which the Renaissance degenerated” (H. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barok, trans. K. Simon, Renaissance and Baroque). Distinguishing a series of formal criteria that form a system (painterly or “picturesque” style, grand style, effects of mass, movement), Heinrich Wölfflin makes the word lose its pejorative connotation. For Wölfflin, the baroque, a phenomenon peculiar to the Italian fine arts, covers two centuries, from the Renaissance to neoclassicism: it arose around 1520, arrived at full maturity in 1580, entered into a new phase around 1630, and came to an end about 1750, with the triumph of so-called neoclassical aesthetics (Ger. Klassizismus). But during the following century its historical and geographical field of application tends to be both restricted by the emergence or resistance of concurrent notions and extended to other countries and other arts. The example set by German art historians was soon followed by their foreign colleagues, who also used the word “baroque” to designate Italian art. But some of them extended its field of application to other geographical areas and other arts (Schubert 1908; Novák 1915), and some broadened its formal or cultural bases to the flourishing ornamental art (Weisbach 1924), post-Tridentine art (Weisbach 1921), or the art of absolute rule (Friedrich 1952). But in France the word collided with the idiomatic usage of the terms classique and classicisme to designate the art of the seventeenth century, a usage with nationalist connotations, whether these were old, in opposition to Italian taste, or, more recently, in opposition to German scholarship. In Spain, though more discreetly, it collided with other terms, such as siglo de oro for a somewhat different period (1550–60), or churriguerismo, after the name of the Churriguera family of architects active between 1650 and 1740. Later on, “baroque” interfered with “rococo,” used in France and Germany to designate not only decorative art but also, by extension, the architecture, painting, and sculpture of the first half of the eighteenth century: according to some scholars (from Wölfflin to Pevsner), rococo is only a late phase of the baroque; for others (from Kimball to Minguet), it is a specific, entirely different formal system. For the earlier period, the emergence of the notions of mannerism and antimannerism in painting (Dvorak 1920; Friedlander 1925), and then in architecture (Wittkower 1934), tended to limit baroque to the second phase that Wölfflin originally distinguished (Revel 1963; Zerner 1972). But some scholars, such as Emil Kaufmann, found in the architecture of the Renaissance, from Brunelleschi to Alberti, the bases of the baroque system of composition by gradation and hierarchy, whose extension then turns out to coincide with that of the “classical language of architecture” defined by John Summerson (The Classical Language of Architecture, 1963) or with classicism in the broad sense described by Louis Hautecoeur (Histoire de l’architecture classique en France, 1943–67). The word soon entered the field of music, where it designates a form of music that appeared around 1600 and was characterized by the use of basso continuo (Clercx 1948). It was also adopted by literary historians, who applied it to the period from 1560–80 to 1640, and defined it according to thematic or stylistic criteria such as the figures of Circe and the peacock or to the intensive use of metaphor (Mourgues 1953; Rousset 1953). All these shifts and overlappings blurred the initial definition proposed by Wölfflin, but they were masked by other new developments in the area of aesthetics. III. The Aesthetic Category of the Baroque: Realism or Nominalism After having defined in 1888 the characteristics of the post -Renaissance baroque style, and in 1899 those of the classical art of the high Italian Renaissance, in 1915 Wölfflin attempted, in his Principles of Art History, to define a Kunstwissenschaft by generalizing the observations made. He distinguished five pairs of fundamental principles of composition: linear/painterly, plane/recession, closed/ open form, multiplicity/unity, clearness/unclearness. The more abstract nature of these concepts, which is illustrated by examples borrowed not only from Italian art but also from the art of Northern Europe, paved the way for a transhistorical broadening that was already anticipated by the initial double historical anchorage that could easily be completed: the classical art of the fifth century BCE / Hellenistic art; Augustan classicism / flamboyant Gothic; Aemilian classicism / the baroque of Rubens; and the transhistorical generalization of the classic / baroque pair that sacrificed the contents. This thesis and others like it, connected with philosophicalmystical reveries about cyclical history or binary polarity, were able to delude people. They were supported by a return of the represented initial meaning, and by a reduction of Wölfflin’s subtle visual analyses to simplistic binary oppositions that intersected with other oppositions belonging to aesthetics (Apollinian/Dionysian) or to ancient stylistics (Atticism/ Asianism), or that were based on elementary distinctions (plain/ornamented, simple/complex). The semantic inflation of the word “baroque” was the source of endless confusion that explains its success. Once the word had been launched, it was thought that the baroque was an essence ante rem, and people asked whether this or that work was baroque, forgetting that the baroque had no existence outside the corpus that served to define it. When mannerism is evicted from the field of the baroque or, inversely, when it is made to include the French “grand style” or the German rococo, its meaning changes almost completely. The elaborations on the notion of baroque are as about as pertinent for the history of art and culture as are those that can be made on the signs of the Zodiac for human psychology. Like fauvism (Lebensztejn 1999), the baroque is an ill-founded notion conceived sometimes as a synchrony whose limits are very fluctuating, and sometimes as a diachronic stylistic system whose definition changes with the corpus concerned. French culture, which had specific reasons for developing the notion of a classical seventeenth century, was the last to resist the European triumph of the baroque, basing itself on certain specific features that were opposed to the baroque in the original, figurative sense of the term. The overcoming of this cultural blockage, of which Michel Butor’s novel La modification (1957) offers a premonitory novelistic expression, closely followed the signature of the Treaty of Rome and the establishment of the Common Market. Victor Tapié’s book Baroque et classicisme (1957) no doubt played a major role in the substitution of the word “baroque” for the word “classic” in France. Our generation saw Versailles, which had earlier been considered the masterpiece of French classicism, become the great theater of the baroque, and the Maisons-Lafitte château, a classic example of French architecture, perceived as a baroque orchestration of volumes. As the Italian term gotico replaced in the seventeenth century the term “modern” that had been used in the sixteenth century to describe the architecture of French cathedrals, the “Baroque Age” replaced the term 78 BAROQUE BEAUTY 79 Wittkower, Rudolph: “Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana.” Ars Bulletin (1934): 123–218. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance und Barok. Bâle, Ger.: Schwabe und Co., 1888. Translation by Kathrin Simon: Renaissance and Baroque. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966. . Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Bâle, Ger.: Schwabe und Co., 1915. Translation by M. D. Hottinger: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Zerner, Henri. “Observations on the Use of the Concept of Mannerism.” In The Meaning of Mannerism, edited by F. W. Robinson and S. G. Nichols, 107–9. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1972. “Classic Age” as French aligned itself with other European languages, and we now commonly speak of the “century of the Baroque” as we speak of the “century of the Enlightenment” in referring to the eighteenth century. Refs.: Burckhardt, Jakob. Der Cicerone. Bâle, Ger., 1855. Translation by A. H. Clough: The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for the Use of Travellers and Students. New York: Scribner, 1908. . Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien. Stuttgart: Ebner und Subert, 1878. Butor, Michel. La modification. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957. Clercx, Suzanne. Le Baroque et la musique: Essai d’esthétique musicale. Brussels: Éditions de la Librairie Encyclopédique, 1948. Dvorak, Max. “Über Greco und den Manierismus.” In Kunstgeschichte als Geistgeschichte. Munich: n.p., 1924. Essay first published in 1920. Translation by J. Hardy: “On El Greco and Mannerism.” In The History of Art as the History of Ideas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Friedlander, Walter. Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting. New York: Schocken Books, 1965. First German edition published in 1925. Friedrich, Carl J. The Age of the Baroque. New York: Harper, 1952. Gurlitt, Cornelius. Geschichte des Barockstiles in Italien. Stuttgart: n.p., 1887. Hautecoeur, Louis. Histoire de l’architecture classique en France. 6 vols. Paris: Picard, 1943–67. Kaufmann, Emil. Architecture in the Age of Reason, Baroque and Postbaroque in England, Italy and France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Kimball, Fiske. The Creation of the Rococo. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1943. Kurz, Otto. “Barocco: Storia di un concetto.” In Barocco europeo e barocco veneziano, edited by V. Branca. Florence: Sansoni, 1963. . Manierismo, barocco, rococo, concetti e termini. Rome, 1960. Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude. “Sol.” In Annexes de l’oeuvre d’art. Brussels: La Part de l’Oeil, 1999. Essay first published in 1967. Minguet, Philippe. Esthétique du rococo. Paris: Vrin, 1966. Mourgues, Odette de. Metaphysical Baroque and Precieux Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Novák, Arne. Praha barokní [Baroque Prague]. Prague: Manes, 1915. Ors, Eugenio d’. Lo barroco. Madrid: Tecnos, Alianza Editorial, 2002. Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Outline of European Architecture. New York: Penguin Books, 1942. Revel, Jean-François. “Une invention du vingtième siècle, le maniérisme.” L’Oeil 31 (1963): 2–14, 63–64. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dictionnaire de la musique. Geneva: Minkoff, 1998. First published by Veuve Duchesne Paris in 1768. Translation by W. Waring: A Complete Dictionary of Music: Consisting of a Copious Explanation of All Words Necessary to a True Knowledge and Understanding of Music. New York: AMS Press, 1975. First printed in London for J. French, 1775(?). An electronic version is available at http://archive.org/details/RousseausDictionaryOfMusic (last accessed 17 May 2013). Rousset, J. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Paris: Corti, 1953. Schönberger, Arno, and H. Soehner. The Age of Rococo. Translated by D. Woodward. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960. Schubert, O. Geschichte des Barocks in Spanien. Esslingen, Ger.: Neff, 1908. Summerson, John. The Classical Language of Architecture. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. Sybel, Ludwig von. Weltgeschichte der Kunst bis zur Erbaunung der Sophienkirche. Marburg, Ger.: Elwert, 1888. Tapié, Victor Louis. Baroque et classicisme. Paris: Pref. M. Fumaroli Librairie Générale Française, 1980. First published by Plon in 1957. Translation by A. Ross Williamson: The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. Weisbach, W. Der Barock als Kunst des Gegenreformation. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1921. . Die Kunst des Barock in Italien, Frankreich, Deutchsland und Spanien, Berlin: Propylaën, 1924. PULCHRUM. PVLCHRVM, BEAUTY beauté Schönheit ϰάλλος ϰαλόν] It. bellezza v. AESTHETICS, ART, CLASSIC, DISEGNO, GOÛT, IMAGE, LEGGIADRIA, LOVE, MIMÊSIS, PLEASURE, SUBLIME, UTILITY. The expressions beauté, beauty, bellezza, kallos [ϰάλλος], pulchritudo, and Schönheit present a twofold difficulty. The first difficulty is conceptual and is inherent in the metaphysics of the beautiful from Plato to Ficino, and in the whole history of aesthetics since the eighteenth century. The concept of the beautiful must satisfy the requirements of universality, necessity, and rationality specific to philosophical reflection, and also adequately designate productions that belong to the artistic domain and are multiple, singular, and without common denominator. The second difficulty has to do with the semantic peculiarities of European languages. For more than a millennium, Greek thinking about the beautiful was understood almost exclusively in Latin. Just as the meaning of the word mimêsis [μίμησις] has been reconceived in the term imitatio, kalon [ϰαλόν] has been reinterpreted through pulchrum and has been constantly reinterpreted in the context of new theoretical fields. Whereas pulchritudo as understood by Albert the Great and Aquinas assumed a specific comprehension of Aristotle, the same word, as it was understood in the Renaissance, clearly asserted a return to Plato, and especially to the Symposium. The transition to the vernacular language led to new transformations. The mingling of the themes and the frequently Neoplatonic inspiration does not allow us to avoid the play of multiple meanings, contradictions that are intentional and developed in accord with the mode of thought characteristic of the Renaissance. Bellezza does not truly render the meaning of pulchritudo (any more than it corresponds completely to the meaning of Schönheit, which is the philosophical and aesthetic reference point for most contemporary Italian theorists). Moreover, Schönheit is itself a very polysemous term. Thus Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Nietzsche’s uses of this term are not only dissimilar but incommensurable. As for the contemporary desire to reduce the beautiful to an axiological concept, and hence to a question of the logic of value judgments (often in order to disqualify both the beautiful and value), it has ended up making the meaning of the word far more complex and often more obscure, without succeeding in producing positive theoretical results. 80 BEAUTY ambiguous from the start, has always been a source of problems and logical contradictions that led to its being radically challenged by modern aesthetic thought. The definition of the word that Socrates attributes to the Sophists no doubt reflects common usage in the fifth century: “to kalon esti to di’ akoês te kai di’ opseôs hêdu [τò ϰαλόν ἐστι τò δι‘ άϰοῆς τε ϰαὶ δι‘ ὄψεως ἡδύ]” (The beautiful is the pleasure procured by hearing and vision; Hippias Major, 298a). But to kalon is already a generic term, because the Greek language has more technical terms—such as summetria [συμμετρία] (commensurability, proportion) to designate all forms of visible beauty, or harmonia [ἁρμονία] (adjustment, harmony) to characterize audible beauty—not to mention a large number of descriptive compounds formed with eu- [εὐ] (an adverb that expresses abundance, success, or facility, and that is often rendered by “well”; thus eueidês [εὐειδής] designates the beautiful as “beautiful to see,” as in the grace of a woman or a warrior, and euprepês [εὐπρεπής], “what is appropriate,” designates the beautiful as decent, suitable, distinguished, glorious). When Plato uses kalos, he is drawing on the multiple meanings of the word, so that the sense of “honest,” “just,” or “pure” can merge with the properly aesthetic sense of the term. The polysemy of kalos is at the heart of Hippias Major, in which several definitions of the beautiful are examined, and all turn out to be unsatisfactory. The distinction between beautiful things and the beautiful is also taken up in the Symposium, but in a quite different way. The ascending dialectic I. Metaphysics and Rhetoric: To Kallos, Pulchritudo Theorized by Plato and Neoplatonism, the idea of the beautiful was spread throughout Europe by the Latin language, and this means that τò ϰαλόν (nominalized adjective, “the beautiful”) and τò ϰάλλος (geminated noun, “beauty” — Chrysippos created the feminine ϰαλότης; see RT: Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.) were understood through Cicero’s writings, just as the work of Plotinus and Proclus were interpreted and disseminated by Marsilio Ficino’s commentaries. The theory of art was constructed during the Renaissance within the Latin language and then developed in Italian and French. In the theoreticians of Italian art, bellezza refers to a Platonism explicitly inspired by Cicero, that is, to a “kalon” entirely reworked on the basis of “pulchrum.” The metaphysical foundations of the beautiful Greek thought about the beautiful is subject to three essential orientations: (1) Ethical and metaphysical, through the identification of the beautiful, the true, and the good. The latter was amply developed during the Middle Ages (“Pulchrum perfectum est”). (2) Aesthetic, by privileging the visual domain from the outset. This conception was radicalized and fully developed in Renaissance thought, profoundly influencing the meaning of pulchritudo and bellezza through the primacy of the eye and vision. (3) Artistic. It was especially the latter meaning that was retained by European culture down to the nineteenth century. But the identification of art with the beautiful, which was extremely 1 Beautiful and good: Kalos kagathos v. VIRTÙ In Homer, the adjective kalos [ϰαλός] already designates both what we call physical beauty (Polyphemus tells Ulysses, who has blinded him: “I was expecting a tall, handsome mortal [μέγαν ϰαὶ ϰαλὸν]”; Odyssey, 9.513) and what we call moral beauty (the swineherd Eumaeus speaking to the suitor who refuses to give Ulysses something to eat because he is dressed in beggar’s garb: “What you say is not handsome for a noble (οὐ μὲν ϰαλὰ ϰαὶ ἐσθλὸς ἐὼν ἀγορεύεις)”; ibid., 18.381). It is opposed to aischros [αἰσχρός], which, like French vilain, designates both the ugly, the graceless, the deformed, and the vile, shameful, and dishonorable. This synergy between the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul, the inside and the outside, is manifest in the phrase kalos kagathos [ϰαλὸς ϰἀγαθός], which designates a kind of excellence (Xenophon, Cyropedia, 4.3.23) that ranges from birth to actions (ibid., 1.5.9) and determines and sums up all the others (RT: LSJ, quoting Herodotus, 1.30, explains that the term “denotes a perfect gentleman.” The portmanteau-words formed in the same way, such as kalokagatheô [ϰαλοϰἀγαθέω] and kalokagathia [ϰαλοϰἀγαθία] are part of this same conjunction, which could be called “social,” of nature, ethics, and politics; thus in Aristotle nobility or magnanimity (megalopsuchia [μεγαλοψυχία]) “is impossible without kalokagathia [perfect virtue]” (Nichomachean Ethics, 4.71124a; cf. 10.10.1179b 10). Moreover, Aristotle notes, “we may ask about the natural ruler, and the natural subject, whether they have the same or different virtues. For if a noble nature [kalokagathia] is equally required in both, why should one of them always rule, and the other always be ruled?” (Politics 1.13.1259b 34–36). In turn, agathos [ἀγαθός], in opposition to kakos [ϰαϰός] (bad, mean, cowardly), designates both physical valor, the warrior’s bravery, and nobility of birth and behavior: in each case, the outside testifies to the inside, and the inside manifests itself outside. We can understand why Socrates serves as a counter-model here, since he is an “ἄγαλμα,” one of the hollow statues given to the gods, an ugly bearded Silenus on the outside and bearing treasures on the inside (Plato, Symposium, 216d–e). And we can also see why Nietzsche interprets Platonism, which makes the body the tomb of the soul, as quintessentially anti-Greek: unlike Plato, the Greeks believed in “the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial— out of profundity” (preface to The Gay Science). Barbara Cassin REFS.: Aristotle. Politics. Translated by B. Jowett. In Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. Mckeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. Includes “Nietzsche’s Preface for the Second Edition” of the original work published in German in 1887. New York: Random House, 1974. In the myth in the Phaedrus, it is in the space of the beyond, that of heaven, that we could contemplate the truth in all its brilliance: “It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched” (hê gar achrômatos te kai aschêmatistos kai anaphês ousia antôs ousa [ἡ γὰρ ἀχρώματός τε ϰαὶ ἀσχημάτιστος ϰαὶ ἀναφὴς]; 247c), and where “Beauty was ours to see in all its brightness” (kallos de tot’ ên idein lampron [ϰάλλος δὲ τότ‘ ἦν ἰδεῖν λαμπρόν]; 250b), “most manifest to sense and most lovely of them all” (stilbon enargestata [στίλϐον ἐναϱγέστατα]; 250d). Clearly, it is by analogy with the intelligible world that the purest figures acquire meaning. Renaissance philosophers like Ficino and Bruno and the theoreticians of art all thought they were being faithful to the Platonic conception of the beautiful by exemplifying it in symbolic and allegorical representations. In the Renaissance, the theory of art was based on the paradox that consists in sometimes eclipsing, sometimes underestimating the intellectual primacy of the beautiful to the benefit of an analogical procedure constituted by sensible images, from the perfect proportions of geometrical figures to pure colors. The cult of Plato in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave rise to an interpretation of to kallos that was all the more important because it continued to spread until the nineteenth century: the eidos was gradually transformed into an ideal, and while the purity of geometrical figures has a major paradigmatic value, it does so in the function of the “golden number” and in relation to the Pythagorean heritage. When Marsilio Ficino writes, “Amor enim fruende pulchritudinis desiderium est. Pulchritudo autem splendor quidam est, humanum ad se rapiens” (For love is in fact a desire to enjoy beauty. But beauty is the splendor that attracts the human soul to itself), or again, “Praeterea rationalis anima proxime pendet ex mente divina et pulchritudinis ideam sibi illice impressam servat intus” (In addition, the rational soul is closely dependent on the divine mind and preserves in itself the idea of the beauty that the latter has imprinted upon it; Plotini Enneadis 1.66, in Opera omnia), his definition of beauty is incontestably Platonic in inspiration. But here pulchritudo is not equivalent to to kallos. In Ficino, as in many philosophers of the Renaissance, the meaning of pulchritudo is all the more difficult to determine because beneath its apparent unity it is deeply conditioned by a syncretism that juxtaposes Plato, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. Although the conception according to which love is the necessary mediator for gaining access to the beautiful remains in conformity with Platonic thought, the idea that terrestrial beauties reflect heavenly splendor owes much more to Plotinus than to Plato. When a Platonist like the artist and theoretician Lorenzo Ghiberti writes in his Commentarii (c. 1450): “La proportionalità solamente fa pulchritudine” (Proportionality alone makes beauty), proportion is surely one of the essential attributes of the beautiful, even its essence, but it is not determined by reference to Plato’s theory of solid bodies: in reality, it is borrowed from Vitruvius’s De architectura (first century BCE). Heir to Greek theories of architecture, Vitruvius’s aesthetic thought is centered on the concepts of diathesis of love rises from the beauty of bodies to that of souls, discourses, actions, and laws, then to the beauty of sciences, and finally attains the beautiful in itself (auto to kalon [αὐτò τò ϰαλòν]; 211d), the reality that “is the same on every hand [têi men kalon, têi d’aischron (τῇ μὲν ϰαλόν, τῇ δ’ αἰσχρόν)], the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshiper as it is to every other,” and that is not “something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is” (211a–b). In addition to this distinction between relative beauties and absolute beauty, Plato repeatedly makes another between the diverse forms of visible beauties, between living bodies, between paintings and geometrical figures, as in the Philebus: The beauty of figures [schêmatôn te gar kallos (σχημάτων τε γὰρ ϰάλλος)] which I am now trying to indicate is not what most people would understand as such, not the beauty of a living creature or a picture [ê zôiôn ê tinôn zôgraphêmatôn (ἢ ζᾠων ἤ τινων ζωγραφημάτων)]; what I mean, what the argument points to, is something straight, or round [euthu ti kai peripheres (εὐθύ τι ϰαὶ περιφερὲς)], and the surfaces and solids which a lathe, or a carpenter’s rule and square, produces from the straight and round. (Philebus, 51c) Without lingering over the Pythagorean heritage of these geometrical ideas, we must at least recall that the sense of the beauty of forms is inseparable here from their purity, which arises from abstraction from forms perceivable through the senses. The Sophists’ sensualist and relativist position, which emphasizes the subjectivity of perception connected with the infinite variety of colors and sensible forms, is opposed to Pythagorean philosophy and its aesthetic of numbers. Although Plato’s thought tends toward the latter conception, that does not mean that sensible qualities, colors, precious metals are absolutely without value: it is simply that they participate in a profoundly degraded world that is absorbed in the sensible. In the cosmological myth with which the Phaedo ends, the colors of the “real earth,” that of the ethereal heights, are described, as “more brilliant and more pure” (lamproterôn kai katharôterôn [λαμπροτέρων ϰαὶ ϰαθαρωτέρων]), to the point that this brilliance lends their variegated colors a unity of aspect, of “idea” (eidos [εἶδος]): There the whole earth is made up of such colors and others far brighter and purer still. One section is a marvelously beautiful [thaumastên to kallos (θαυμαστὴν τὸ ϰάλλος)] purple, and another is golden. All that is white of it is whiter than chalk or snow, and the rest is similarly made up of the other colors, still more and lovelier [pleionôn kai kallionôn (πλειόνων ϰαὶ ϰαλλιόνων)] than those which we have seen. Even these very hollows in the earth assume a kind of color as they gleam [chrômatos ti eidos stilbonta (χρώματός τι εἶδος στίλϐοντα)] amid the different hues around them, so that there appears to be one continuous surface of varied colors. (Phaedo, 110c) 82 BEAUTY B. The exclusive reign of pulchritudo In reality, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth century, the Platonic idea of the beautiful was often given as a supreme aesthetic argument only to make it say something else, indeed the contrary of what it actually said. One of the most famous authors of this philosophical inversion to the benefit of a conception of art was Cicero, the true father of the theory of art. In De finibus, Cicero writes: “Et quoniam haec deducuntur de corpore, quid est cur non recte pulchritudo etiam ipsa propter se expedanta ducatur?” (And since all that belongs to the corporal domain, why shouldn’t we consider that beauty deserves to be sought for itself?; 5.47). What does pulchritudo mean here? The word implies the twofold meaning of an achieved and perfect corporal beauty—which it expresses more strongly than the term forma—and a sort of moral excellence close to the Greek kalos kagathos. But the specifically aesthetic sense [διάθεσις] (the charm that arises from the composition of the parts), euruthmia [εὐρυθμία], and summetria (the agreement between the parts and the work as a whole). Despite their more or less overt Platonism, these determinations of the beautiful are relatively foreign to the speculations in the Philebus or the Timaeus. But from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on, they were so closely related to the concept of the beautiful, to its idea [ἰδέα], that down to the nineteenth century most theoreticians adopted them as such, though in each case they had to analyze and justify them and ground them in the body of a doctrine. Thus Hegel still defines them as categories constitutive of the beauty of abstract form. As transmitted by Vitruvius, pulchritudo claims to restitute all the meanings of kallos, and it is in relation to the Latin word that later authors were able to Platonize regarding the ideas of proportion, symmetry, and harmony as specific conditions of the beautiful. 2 The beautiful as participation in light and interiority: Plotinus v. LIGHT Without breaking with the ancient heritage, Plotinus’s philosophy developed a reflection on the beautiful, on mimêsis [μίμησις], and art that made it possible for the first time to harmonize the requirements of a metaphysics of the beautiful with those of a philosophy of art. For Plotinus, in contrast to Plato, the world of ideas is not separate from the visible world; radiant with the purest light, it participates in earthly realities through the mediation of the cosmic order. The divine light spreads over the world and truly gives form to chaotic, formless matter. The consequences are important: Plotinus does not deny that a stone or a tree can be beautiful, but they are beautiful only to the extent that they participate in light. In the material, corporeal order, nothing can be absolutely beautiful if the divine light does not exercise its action in giving form to everything. The other aspect that opposes Plotinus’s thought to Plato’s on the subject of the beautiful concerns the relations between the idea of the beautiful and the existence of art. For Plotinus, art is a mode of knowledge, and even of metaphysical knowledge insofar as it helps us come closer to the One. The main principle that defines the reality of a work of art is no longer mimêsis, doomed as it is to be a skilled and empty reproduction of earthly realities, but rather participation (methexis [μέθεξις]), now conceived as the cause of artistic activity. Artists are creative, not because they reproduce the forms of reality, even in accord with perfect proportions and harmony, but because they refer to an internal form within their minds. We must add that this internal form is not the expression of a creative subjectivity but the reflection of an ideal model of beauty (archetupon [ἀρχέτυπον]). In other words, this Neoplatonic metaphysics opened up perspectives that were crucial for thinking about art and the beautiful in the Middle Ages. It was to dominate reflection on art during the Renaissance and continue to be productive until the advent of German idealism and European romanticism. Plotinus’s critique of the idea of proportion was just as innovative and original. If proportion and symmetry are in fact beautiful, they are not beautiful as such, but to the extent to which they have their origin in an internal, ideal, and spiritual form. Then the classical theory of the beautiful, proceeding from harmony and proportion—that is, the conception that the whole of antiquity had developed as an immutable axiom—suddenly found itself transformed from top to bottom. This meant in particular that any realism, any objectivism of the beautiful was rejected in favor of a more spiritual conception: “Again, since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?” (Enneads 1.6.1). Though determinant for the existence of the beautiful, proportion and harmony are not measurable quantities but qualities that can be completely perceptible only through the purifying activity of the inner eye and after a specific kind of ascetic practice. That is why in Plotinus the word kallos does not designate a property belonging specifically to a determinate form but indicates a participation in the intelligible, even if it is apprehended in the contemplation of an imperfect being occupying a modest place in the hierarchy of terrestrial things. Having as its goal the world of ideas and the intelligible, the experience of the beautiful implies the conversion of the whole being with a view to a wholly internal perfection: “Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work” (Enneads, 1.6.9). From that point on, the experience of the beautiful merges with a metaphysical experience, so that the word “beautiful” applied to an object is meaningful only with a considerable extension that implies for the philosopher another way of life and what Pierre Hadot called a spiritual exercise. BEAUTY 83 not mean that aesthetic subjectivity, in the sense of sensual delight in the perception of the object, is rejected: Unde pulchrum in debita proportione consistit: quia sensu delectatur in rebus debite proportionatis, sicut in sibi similibus; nam et sensus ratio quaedam est, et omnis virtus cognoscitiva. (Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind—because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty.) (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica) The peculiar feature of pulchrum is that it implies an act of knowing, that is, an effort of judgment to understand the objective aesthetic properties inherent in the structure of reality and the world. Pulchrum means intellectual comprehension, including through the senses. Furthermore, qua transcendental, the beautiful possesses what Aquinas calls three properties: integritas sive perfectio, proportio sive consonantia, and claritas. These properties constitute the most durable meaning of the classical ideal in the arts and determined for a long time the most general categories of aesthetics. But whatever the ulterior meanings of pulchrum and pulchritudo as “transcendental” might be in Scholastic writers, or as “idea” in the theoreticians of the Renaissance, the words designating beauty in Romance languages remain profoundly marked by the contribution of ancient metaphysics and rhetoric. II. Bellezza in Renaissance Theories of Art It was by implicitly opposing this metaphysics that Alberti and Leonardo sought to construct the idea of beauty on the basis of a system of rules that had a completely autonomous theoretical value. Among the Renaissance theoreticians, bellezza is certainly not a translation of pulchritudo. But the considerable effort they made to transfer to the theory of art the theories of light and the Neoplatonic contemplation of the intelligible gave bellezza a more intellectual cast that deliberately exalted the primacy of vision, so that bellezza surely had a more visual meaning than beau or especially Schönheit were to have. In reality, contrary to pulchritudo, which was almost always used to express a metaphysical idea, even in the field of rhetoric, bellezza had to satisfy several contradictory requirements: it had to conform to the idea as a superior authority; it had to be realized in the work as an ideal system of proportions and measures, while at the same time exploiting the totality of the forms offered by empirical reality; and, finally, by basing itself on artistic rules set a priori and the actual practice of art, it showed that the work was a second creation of nature, a natura naturans, analogous to divine beauty. The word thus crystallized a set of tensions and aspirations that are often incompatible, at the risk of sometimes becoming almost unintelligible. Ficino’s cherished idea that beauty is by essence distant from corporeal matter could not be accepted by Alberti and Leonardo, because measure, proportion, and harmony must imperatively be objectified in a perfect work. appears clearly in a passage in De natura deorum where Cicero sets forth the Stoic cosmology: what occupies the soul of the world more than anything else, he writes, “is first of all that the world be made as well as possible to last, and then that it lack nothing, and especially that it have within it an eminent beauty [eximia pulchritudo] and all ornaments [omnis ornatus]” (2.22) (that is the meaning of kosmos [ϰόσμος]; see WORLD). Despite their semantic position in Latin, pulchrum and pulchritudo, unlike forma, venustus, elegans, and, naturally, bellus, were not taken over into the vocabularies of Romance languages. Nonetheless, it was pulchrum that, in classical Latin, was deemed most apt to render the universality and abstract rigor of the idea of the beautiful. In a famous passage in De oratore, Cicero defines the beautiful as an ideal: [T]here is no human production of any kind, so compleatly beautiful [tampulchrum], than which there is not a something still more beautiful, from which the other is copied like a portrait from real life, and which can be discerned neither by our eyes nor ears, nor any of our bodily senses, but is visible only to thought and imagination [cogitatione tantum et mente complectimur]. Though the statues, therefore, of Phidias, and the other images above-mentioned, are all so wonderfully charming, that nothing can be found which is more excellent of the kind; we may still, however, suppose a something which is more exquisite, and more compleat [cogitare tamen possumus pulchriora]. For it must not be thought that the ingenious artist, when he was sketching out the form of a Jupiter, or a Minerva, borrowed the likeness from any particular object;—but a certain admirable semblance of beauty [species pulchritudinis eximiae] was present to his mind [mente], which he viewed and dwelt upon, and by which his skill and his hand were guided. (Orator, 2.7) Despite its obvious contradiction of Plato’s thought, the adulteration of kallos by pulchrum is crucial, because it was to acquire authority and become a reference point for seventeenth-century theoreticians of art and even for the founder of aesthetics, Baumgarten. By identifying the Platonic idea of the beautiful, the to kallos, with the ideal of the beautiful, that is, with a sort of interior model, Cicero gave pulchrum a new meaning. From then on, the separation of the beautiful from the mimetic arts that Platonic metaphysics maintained was in large measure surmounted. It no longer subsisted except in Scholastic thought and in Ficino and Nifo. The meaning of pulchrum in Aquinas is determined first of all by his effort to resolve the problems raised by the antagonistic conceptions within Scholastic thought, namely, the realism of Platonic theories and the persistent subjectivism in aesthetic reflection, and especially the various orders in accord with which the word is used: the ontological or metaphysical order, the logical order, the anthropological order, and finally the specifically aesthetic order. Insofar as it assumes a proportional relation between matter and form, pulchrum has an ontological status that is inseparable from the structure of reality. Moreover, this conception explicitly excludes any idealist or subjectivist orientation, but this does 84 BEAUTY III. The Process of Subjectivizing the Beautiful: From the Artistic to the Aesthetic A. Beau and beauté: Attempts to synthesize the heterogeneous Before the eighteenth century, the French word beau was seldom nominalized, and its semantic diversity, which was very evident in the use of the adjective, was often foreign to any aesthetic preoccupation. In any case, in expressions such as le beau monde (high society) and le bel esprit (wit), the word expresses a certain idea of perfection and sometimes a nuance of irony. Moreover, compared with Italian, it is much more distant from any metaphysical or theological reference. It is particularly striking that beau has virtually no philosophical content and often tends to be no more than a predicate or even a neutral reference. The word appears in Mersenne in its most abstract usage: “To be sure, it is difficult to find or to imagine anything in the world that is more beautiful than light, since it seems that the beauty of all things depends on it” (Questions inouyes). The Neoplatonic connotation of the word is very meager here and depends on a relatively conventional usage. In a letter to Mersenne, Descartes writes: Regarding your question whether the reason for the beautiful can be established, it is the same as if you were to ask in advance why one sound is more pleasant than another, if not because the word “beautiful” seems to be more particularly related to the sense of sight. But in general neither the beautiful nor the pleasant signify anything more than a relationship between our judgment and the object; and because human judgments are The idea della bellezza remains a metaphysical authority that is recognized as immanent to the artist’s consciousness, but becomes intelligible only in the sovereignty of the regola. The proper application of the systems of relations and measures that constitute proportion thus becomes an a priori condition, necessary and sufficient, for the accomplishment of the work. As Francesco Scannelli puts it: The beauty [bellezza] we desire so much is only a reflection of the supreme light, a sort of divine emanation, and it seems to me to be constituted by a harmonious equilibrium of the parts [buona simmetria di parti] combined with sweetness [suavità] of colors that represent on Earth the relics and promises of heavenly, immortal life. (Microcosmo della pittura) Scannelli’s definition sums up all the goals of the classical ideal, but it was already anachronistic in the seventeenth century. The teleology of the “simmetria di parti,” which had reigned from the Pythagoreans to the Renaissance, the conception of the beautiful as a reflection of heavenly life that was still vigorously defended by Bellori and Poussin, was henceforth threatened. Ficino, Bruno, and the theoreticians of mannerism had already adopted the critique of proportion and, ultimately, of rules that is found in Plotinus. The appearance of taste as a new criterion, of genius, of the diversity of rules, ultimately destabilized the balance of the classical theory of the beautiful, as is shown by the first lines of Crousaz’s Traité du beau, published in 1715: “There are no doubt few terms that people use more often than ‘beautiful,’ and yet nothing is less determinate than its meaning, nothing is more vague than its idea.” 3 Bellezza and vaghezza A comparison of the two versions in which Alberti published his own treatise, one in Latin, the other in Italian, allows us to grasp the transformations introduced by the transition to the vernacular. In De pictura (bk. 3), Alberti writes regarding the painter Demetrius: At ex partibus omnibus non modo similitudinem rerum, verum etiam in primis ipsam pulchritudinem diligat. Nam est pulchritudo in pictura res non minus grata quam expetita. (Let him seek in all parts not only the resemblance of things, but first of all beauty itself. For in painting beauty is no less pleasant than sought.) The same injunction is expressed in Della pittura: Edi tutte le parti li piacerà non solo renderne similitudine, ma piu edgiugniervi bellezza; pero che nella pittura la vaghezza non meno è grata che richiesta. (It will please him not only to render all the elements with resemblance, but to add beauty to them; for in painting grace is pleasant as well as required.) Whereas the Latin uses the same term (pulchritudinem, pulchritudo), the Italian resorts to two different words, bellezza and then vaghezza, the latter of which Spencer, in his English edition of the Italian treatise, translates as “loveliness” (On Painting). Vaghezza is derived from the Latin vagus, which means “vague, indeterminate.” But it also takes on a positive sense, that of an indefinite charm that is closer to the idea of grace than to that of beauty. It is distinguished from bellezza, whose meaning here almost coincides with that of the Latin concinnitas, which is used in particular to designate the symmetry and harmony of a discourse (some philologists derive concinnitas from the adjective concinnus, which means “well-proportioned,” while others derive it from the verb concinnare, which means “organize, arrange, prepare”). Correggio’s figures, and of course the Mona Lisa, are the pictorial paradigms of vaghezza, whereas the plastic perfection of Raphael’s madonnas corresponds very closely to the idea of bellezza. BEAUTY 85 purely speculative and thus metaphysical procedure, theoreticians sought nothing less than to reconcile the singularity of the rule of art—modifiable in each of its applications—with the right to aesthetic universality. If the beautiful could be thus reactivated despite the philosophical crisis of which it was the object, it was by virtue of the intervention of an institutional discourse, that of the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648, one of whose functions was to produce artistic and aesthetic categories. Nevertheless, a solution in accord with the requirements of rationalism awaited its theoretician. It was for Boileau to realize this program corresponding to the horizon of expectations elicited by the classical doctrine. He gave the word beau a new meaning that was to be decisive for the subsequent development of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought: “Nothing is beautiful except the True, the True alone is pleasing” (Épître IX). The truth that must be at the heart of art’s beauty is not at all the expression of good sense or of a vague common sense, but rather what the artist’s genius should aim at insofar as its goal is to reach the point where reason and beauty, truth and nature, are one. The genius of art is thus to achieve a synthesis of these heterogeneous givens. The overproduction of metaphors, patent in Spain and Italy, was incapable of producing this synthesis because it transgressed the order of nature, and thus of the true, to the advantage of the imagination alone. But although Boileau conceived the beautiful as a diversity of authorities (nature, truth, a rational order) in the unity of the concept, he did not yet see the countless relations that constantly threaten the word’s univocal meaning. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Crousaz formulated the central difficulty that was to confront aesthetics: When we ask what the Beau is, we are not talking about an object that exists outside us, separate from any other, as we do when we ask what a Horse is, or what a Tree is. A Tree is a Tree, a Horse is a Horse, it is what it is absolutely, in itself, and without any necessity of comparing it with any of the other parts that the Universe contains. This is not the case with Beauté; this term is not absolute, but expresses the relationship of objects that we call beautiful with our ideas, or with our feelings, our intellectual abilities, our heart or, finally, with other objects that are different from us. So that to determine the idea of Beauty, we have to determine and examine in detail the relations to which we attach this name. (Traité du beau) In asserting that the concept of the beautiful is intelligible only through the analysis of a plurality of relations and determinations, Crousaz initiated a process that in the long run threatened to empty the notion of any productive content. In reality, reflections on the word beau clearly indicate a process of subjectivization based on psychological considerations. What does beau mean? For Abbé Trublet, “We say that anything that pleases us is beautiful, when the feeling of pleasure, although it is received by some bodily organ, is in the mind itself and not in that organ” (Essais sur divers sujets). For Voltaire, the subjectivity of the feeling of pleasure so different, we cannot say that either the beautiful or the pleasant have a determinate measure. (18 March 1630, in Œuvres) In other words, judgments regarding the beautiful are no more than the expression of a person, a subjective preference, and thus cannot be the object of any philosophical discussion. Spinoza is just as explicit when he writes that beauty (pulchritudo) “is not so much a quality of the object beheld as an effect [effectus] in him who beholds it,” narrowly determined by our condition and temperament (letter to Hugo Boxel, 1674). From Descartes to Voltaire, philosophical rationalism tends to make judgments regarding the beautiful, and to make the beautiful itself a product of subjectivity; and this subjectivity necessarily gives rise to an infinite relativism that destroys not only any possible objectivity of the beautiful, but also reduces it to the status of an illusion. In the seventeenth century, even before the birth of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, the latter’s most essential concept was thus already largely invalidated in the name of philosophical rationality. The first consequence of this is that the intelligibility of the beautiful can no longer be determined by philosophical reflection, and that it will, as it were, move into the field of the theory of art and the nascent art criticism. The word beau survives in its essential attributes and its metonymic determinations, namely, perfection, form, and systems of proportion. If the beautiful can no longer be conceived as transcendental in the Scholastic sense, as an idea to which the artist’s thought conforms, then it has to be defined in the immanence of the experience of art. Whether it is a matter of the creator or the spectator, each party is obliged to reflect on the criteria of the beautiful as they are given by proportion, harmony, and perfection, that is, in a perceptive experience that necessarily disqualifies a priori reasoning and deductive procedures. Only the exemplarity of the perfection of a picture, a poem, or a work of architecture allows us to verify positively the well-foundedness of the rules, so that the idea of a rule without possible reference, determined a priori as in the Italian theoreticians, is henceforth excluded. But this immanence implied by the attention given to rules and to the ideality of the great models in the relationship to works of art does not imply any kind of realism with regard to artistic properties. The idea that an artistic and aesthetic quality might subsist as a real property inherent in the object, independently of the application of the rule and the exercise of judgment, now appears highly problematic. Even Nicole, who was nonetheless determined to restore the beautiful in as rational a manner as possible, rejects any kind of objectivism and sees no solution other than in a logic of judgment. Humans, he writes, must “form an idea of the beautiful that can serve them as a rule in making judgments” (Traité de la beauté des ouvrages de l’esprit). Nicole’s precept is based on a theoretical demand that has become exorbitant, namely, the identification of the beautiful and the true, and the primacy of the understanding in the exercise of judgment, so that the theoretical solution he proposes is in real danger of becoming a new source of problems. A demand for the universality of systems of artistic rules was gradually substituted for the universality of the idea of the beautiful. Basing themselves on the rejection of a 86 BEAUTY relationships. Nonetheless, the number of relationships must not be infinitely great; and beauty does not follow this progression: we acknowledge in beautiful things only relationships that a good mind can clearly and easily perceive in them. (“Beau” [1751] in Œuvres esthétiques) Thus the establishment of aesthetics as an exclusively philosophical discipline that gave meaning to the category of “the beautiful” necessarily led to an upheaval in the traditional problematics. B. “Beauty” and “beautiful”: From moral excellence to aesthetic pleasure “Beauty” and “beautiful” are not reducible to the concept of beauty as it is constructed by the history of philosophy. The association linking beauty with excellence, which issued from the Platonic tradition and which refers to the Greek to kalon, is not central to reflection on this network. The use of the word “beauty” is very diverse. It brings in aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties, qualifies the object and its form, and recognizes a specific pleasure felt by the subject. In relation to the object, “beauty” is associated with “simplicity” or “grace”; in relation to the subject, it refers to “design” (intention) or “expression.” At first, the recourse to “beauty” or “beautiful” was inseparable from an analysis of the relation between the beautiful and the good. The idea of moral beauty arose in England around 1700, and combined a sense of beauty with moral is transformed into a radical relativism: “Ask a toad what beauty, great beauty, the to kalon is? He’ll answer that it’s his female toad, with her big round eyes starting out of her little head. Ask philosophers, finally, and they’ll respond with gobbledygook; they have to have something in conformity with the archetype of the beautiful in its essence, with the to kalon” (RT: Dictionnaire philosophique). By trying to save the concept by resorting to the imitation of “beautiful nature,” Batteux merely eludes the problem by systematically extending mimêsis to all the fine arts. For Diderot as for many other theoreticians, only reference to British writers, to the idea of the beautiful as an “inner feeling,” could make it possible to preserve an idea that was hard pressed by the hegemony of taste and a certain hostility to metaphysics. But this aesthetic feeling naturally implies a correlate that has to be determined in a system of relations and proportions. Diderot’s most precise definition of the beautiful requires him to avoid both La Mettrie’s relativism and the classical tradition’s objectivism. Aesthetic judgment has to overcome any kind of substantialism of qualities or objects while at the same time maintaining a principle of objectivity. The solution to this problem is entirely dependent on the idea of relationship, which is founded in both judgment and things. The sense of the beautiful has its origin in the perception of relationships: The beautiful [Le beau] that results from the perception of a single relationship is usually less than that which results from the perception of several 4 Beauty and grace The specificity of the theory of art, as it developed in the second half of the seventeenth century in France, resides in the will to overcome this tension between an ideality based on rules and an artistic perfection shown by works and empirical practices. Whence the temptation to deviate from purely rational principles and to derive the beautiful from proportion and symmetry as inherent, objective properties of the work, as for example Félibien does when he distinguishes between beauty and grace: Beauty arises from the proportion and symmetry that is found between the corporeal and material parts. And grace arises from the uniformity of internal movements caused by the affections and feelings of the soul. Thus when there is only a symmetry of the corporeal parts with one another, the resulting beauty is a beauty without grace. But when in addition to this beautiful proportion we see a relationship and a harmony of all the internal movements, which not only unite with the other parts of the body but animate them and make them act with a certain accord and a very exact and uniform cadence, then it engenders the grace that we admire in the most accomplished persons, and without it the most beautiful proportion of the members has not achieved its ultimate perfection. (Entretien no. 1) As manifested in a beautiful body or in a work of art, proportion and symmetry are constitutive of beauty, but of an abstract, normative, and inanimate beauty. Grace, on the other hand, is inseparable from what seventeenth-century art theorists call “expression,” namely, the body’s actions that make the movements of the soul visible. Far from being one quality among others, expression is that through which beauty acts on the spectator, touches and moves him or her. That is why it is an essential part of the painter’s and sculptor’s art. In this sense, we can define grace as the soul of beauty, the beauty of beauty. It consists, Félibien says, in a je ne sais quoi “that one cannot well express,” and that is “like a secret knot that links these two parts of the body and the mind.” Thus grace has become the necessary condition of aesthetic pleasure. And, unlike beauty, grace cannot be confined within rules: “What pleases,” the Chevalier de Méré writes, “consists in almost imperceptible things, such as a wink, a smile, and certain something [je ne sais quoi] that very easily escapes us and is not easily found when we look for it” (Des agréments). The debate about art and artistic categories, about the power of rules, thus really begins only with grace, which becomes a condition of the work of art’s perfection that requires the implementation of a technique of composing figures and forms, producing harmony and the je ne sais quoi without which the language of art remains a dead letter. -- victim of prejudices in favor of straight lines, of the geometricalization of space in the representation of the beauty of human forms. He proposes to make the serpentine or curved line central to painting as the line of beauty. Beauty is thus no longer associated with simplicity but rather with “grace,” the latter term emphasizing the infinite variety and complexity of forms, the attraction of the je ne sais quoi. Reflection on beauty leads to the necessity of defending the autonomy of artistic expression, the expressive development of painting. In addition, “beauty” is used to examine the cognitive and affective process that generates the idea of beauty in the perceiving mind. From this point of view, the conception of beauty and its perception in Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) proves essential. According to Hutcheson, humans have a faculty of perceiving ideas of beauty and harmony or an internal sense of beauty through which pleasure strikes us at exactly the same time as the idea of beauty. This “internal sense” is a passive faculty of receiving ideas of beauty from all objects in which there is unity in variety. “Regular” and “harmonious” are synonymous with “beautiful.” The assessment of beauty requires the functioning of an inner sense, but it also presupposes a rule of the beautiful, the foundation of the beauty of works of art residing in the unity of proportion among the parts and between each part and the whole. Hutcheson’s work made possible the emergence of categories specific to the judgment of the beautiful. A value peculiar to beauty could then be recognized. Beauty was increasingly connected with aesthetic value; then it became entirely possible to give beauty a large role in contemporary aesthetic thought (Mothersill, Beauty Restored; Zemach, Real Beauty). IV. Schönheit and Its Philosophical Goals It was in Baumgarten’s Latin that Kant first found a definition of the beautiful that he rejected in a way decisive for the whole history of aesthetics. The passage from pulchritudo, as it was used by Baumgarten, to Schönheit, in the sense given it by Kant, constitutes a fundamental break with all earlier conceptions of the beautiful, both those of the metaphysics of the beautiful and those of theories of art. Baumgarten’s project, set forth in his Metaphysica and his Aesthetica, was to construct a theory in which the beautiful became a genuine object of knowledge, expressing itself in accord with concepts and forms of sensibility specific to it: “Aesthetices finis est perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis, haec autem est pulchritudo” (The goal of aesthetics is the perfection of sense knowledge as such, that is, beauty; Aesthetica, 1.1 §14). This definition is very likely to be unintelligible if it is opposed at the outset to the central theses of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Baumgarten’s originality was to seek to provide the beautiful with a metaphysical foundation without at the same time breaking with the rhetorical and humanistic heritage. Defining beauty as the perfection of sense knowledge implies the possibility that the latter can be determined as truth of a certain type, namely, aesthetic truth. Aesthetic truth differs from logical truth but is not opposed to it; it participates in a cognitio inferior, that of the senses and perceptions. This explicitly cognitive position excludes any link with an empirical conception and, discernment. According to Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), people approach the absolute character of beauty by devoting themselves to selfknowledge (RT: Cooper, Characteristicks). Thus the soliloquy as interior dialogue expresses a proper sense of the beautiful and the good that reveals the depth of the soul, the order of the heart. Winckelmann, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Wieland continued to develop this archetypal form of moral beauty with the notion of the “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele). The originality of the English-language tradition lies in other occurrences of the term “beauty.” In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume introduces two conceptions of beauty, one anthropological or passional—“beauty is a form”—and the other social or practical—“beauty of interest.” Beauty is a form that produces pleasure. Closely connected with the ego, it becomes a source of pride and belongs to the domain of the passions. But it is also based on the convenience that provides pleasure: for instance, the functionality of a house, the luxury of a building, or the fertility of a field all belong to the register of beauty. The value of the beauty of objects resides in their use. The contemplation of the beautiful assumes a social interaction between an owner and a spectator, such that the spectator has an interest, through sympathy or through the easy communication of feelings, in an advantage that directly concerns the owner of the object. These two meanings of “beauty” are not based on a specifically artistic view of the term. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith emphasizes the importance of the beauty of self-interest by stressing the arrangement of objects that provides convenience and manifestly produces the feeling of utility in the spectator; such objects effectively satisfy the love of distinction that so promptly furnishes a satisfaction by sympathy with an owner who seems to be fortunately provided. In addition to Hume’s and Smith’s anthropological and social approaches, we must also mention more properly intra-aesthetic reflections regarding the determination of the subject or the object of the beautiful. Thus in Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Alison does not associate beauty with the qualities of objects. Objects are merely signs that produce an emotion. From the point of view of a history of the progress of the arts, the quality of the “design” (intention) is first of all productive of the feeling of beauty. Uniformity and regularity thus adequately express the existence of the “design” by making it possible to isolate in the object a resemblance of the parts that makes a regular form discernible. But the more the arts are imbued with talent, the more the feeling of beauty they can elicit has to do with the expression of passion and not with intention. The great criterion of excellence in beautiful forms is the character or expression that corresponds to the appearance or perception of a quality that affects us on the basis of the variety of forms. The superiority of “beauty of expression” over “beauty of design” is accompanied by something that can be a peculiarly artistic or even stylistic character of beauty: the contemplation of the free expressiveness of forms. Alison’s analyses of the arts can be explained by the painter Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), a work about what makes a painting beautiful. Beauty is understood on the basis of the rules regarding lines in painting. According to Hogarth, the spirit of painting has always been the 88 BEAUTY whole and of its particular disciplines. For us, the concept of the beautiful and of art is a presupposition given by the system of philosophy [Für uns ist der Begriff des Schönen und der Kunst eine durch das System des Philosophie gegebene Voraussetzung]. (Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik) This passage clearly develops what was already announced in “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (a manuscript Franz Rosenzweig found in 1917 among papers that had belonged to Hegel, and whose attribution remains uncertain): the reconciliation of art and philosophy, the identification of the beautiful and art, of thought and appearance, and especially of art and truth. However, problems inherent in Hegel’s aesthetic thought remain: How can the idea of artistic beauty, that is, the sole true beauty, be both rooted in metaphysics and the source from which the creative genius of every artist draws nourishment? And how can this metaphysical idea coincide with modes of appearance and manifestation that are as diverse as those of the work of art? In reality, a complete understanding of the concept of the beautiful would assume an infinite analytical regression of the presuppositions operative in the encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and an endless analysis of all the forms of expression through which the idea of the beautiful is actualized and manifests itself in the history of art. In many respects, Nietzsche’s aesthetic concepts— appearance, illusion, value as the conditions for preserving life—are derived from, or are rather a kind of distant echo, of Kant’s thought. Nothing is more conditional—or, let us say, narrower— than our feeling for beauty. Whosoever would think of it apart from man’s joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. “Beautiful in itself” is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty— and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty—alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty. [T]he judgment “beautiful” is the vanity of his species [das Urteil “schön” ist seine Gattungs-Eitelkeit]. (The Twilight of the Idols) Contrary to the last idealist aestheticians, such as Vischer or Lotze, and even to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche clearly distinguishes between art and the beautiful. Modern on this point, he makes the beautiful the effect of a belief, an illusion that is necessary insofar as it stimulates every aesthetic feeling. But this critique of idealism becomes inseparable from a rejection of any intellectualist conception of the idea of the beautiful, and this necessarily leads to the latter losing all content. The question of what the word Schönheit might still mean today is dealt with using arguments that belong to logic, sociology, and more rarely aesthetics proper, allowing us to discern a will to eliminate the concept, or else a desire of course, with any transcendental theory of aesthetic experience. Contrary to what is still often said, Baumgarten’s pulchritudo in no way constitutes a kind of stage necessarily leading to the solutions in Kant’s Critique of Judgment; it is the expression of an original thought that maintains the tension between the categories of ancient rhetoric, those of Leibnizian metaphysics and semiology, and philosophical demands. In Kant, the chief condition for the use of Schönheit is the rejection on principle of the word pulchritudo and all its philosophical implications. In the third Critique, every determination of the beautiful is in a way foreign to aesthetics as Baumgarten and Meier understood it. In Kant, Schönheit never refers to an idea of the beautiful or to an intellectualist conception, but rather to the problem of taste or to a critique of taste. One remark in the Nachlass clearly illustrates all the difficulties that the analytic of the beautiful had to resolve: The sensible form of a cognition pleases [gefällt] as a play of sensations, or as a form of intuition, or as a way of conceiving the good. In the first case, it is a matter of attraction [Reiz]; in the second, of sensible beauty [das sinnliche Schöne)] in the third, of the beautiful in itself [selbständigen Schönheit]. (Nachlass) In the analytic of the beautiful, the sole true attribute of the beautiful—that is, what is exclusively predicable of it—is the feeling of aesthetic pleasure itself, and not some possible property of the object. This feeling of pleasure is primary and rigorously irreducible to any rule or aesthetic idea. In order to transcend the aesthetic solipsism to which this conception of the experience of the beautiful threatens to lead, Kant posits a subjective universality inherent in the very form of judgments of taste. But this postulate is still the requirement of a right: the latter has to be expressed in a universal communicability that justifies aesthetic experience but is not its goal. In precritical writings as well as in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the specific meaning of Schönheit is inseparable from that of Geschmack as judicium or, more precisely, as reflective judgment, and thus as an affirmation of aesthetic subjectivity (see GOÛT). The post-Kantians’ relationship to Kant is marked by an explicit desire to break with him. In his System of Transcendental Philosophy (1800), Schelling shows that philosophical thought has to include art as a specific form of intellectual intuition, that is, as a mediation between freedom and nature. Kant had certainly seen the connections between freedom and nature in the beautiful, but not in the ontogenesis of art itself. This recognition of the functions and the metaphysical necessity of art is central to Hegel’s conception of beauty. Hegel seeks to show the internal necessity of the link between the historicity of art, and thus of the beautiful, and the systematic structure of his philosophical thought: Thus demonstrating the idea of the beautiful [die Idee des Schönen], which we take as our starting point, that is, deriving this idea as a necessary implication of the presuppositions that, for science, precede it and within which it arises, is not our goal here, but is rather a matter for an encyclopedic development of philosophy as a -- to preserve and sometimes restore a notion that others consider anachronistic or even reactionary. Today, any aesthetics that seeks to give a precise content to the concept of the beautiful is necessarily confronted by a choice: either resort to a metaphysical construction, at the risk of ending up in a position that is difficult to defend, or fulfill the conditions of a logical-semantic procedure that is nonetheless exposed to multiple self-contradictions. Thus Reinold Schmücker declares: “That art imitates nature, that beauty can be experienced and makes divine perfection perceptible, are no longer plausible claims in the era of waste-management plants and atheism” (Was ist Kunst?). Franz von Kutschera replies to these excessive statements with propositions that express the contemporary quandary more subtly: “Beauty is merely one aesthetic concept among others, but because of its vast field of application, it has often been considered the dominant concept of all aesthetic qualities, and aesthetic theory has been defined as the theory of the beautiful. This conception is typical of the old aesthetics” (Aesthetik). Given the extreme difficulty of defining exactly what an aesthetic quality is and rigorously theorizing a notion that persists in ordinary discourse as well as in philosophical discourse, we can say that the meaning of the words beau, Schönheit, “beauty,” etc. remains largely indeterminate. But that does not mean that they are empty of content, outdated, or unsuitable for conceptual treatment. Refs.: Félibien, André. Des agréments. In Œuvres. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930. . Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes: Livres I et II. Edited by René Démoris. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987. First published in 1668–88. Bourbon di Petrella, Fiametta. Il problema dell’arte et della belleza in Plotino. Florence: Le Monnier, 1956. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates and Foucault. Edited by A. Davidson. Translated by M. Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. . Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision. Translated by M. Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. O’Meara, Dominic. Plotinus: An Introduction to the “Enneads.” Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Plotinus. Enneads. Translated by S. MacKenna. Burdett, NY: Larson, 2004. Alberti, Leon Battista. De pictura. 1435. Della pittura. 1436. Edited by C. Grayson. Rome: Laterza, 1975. . On Painting. Edited and translated by J. R. Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956. Alison, Archibald. Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. 2nd ed. London, 1811. First published in 1790. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Aesthetica. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. First published in 1750. Boileau, Nicolas. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Translation by Des Maizeaux and N. Rowe: The Works of Monsieur Boileau. 2nd ed. London: W. Shropshire and Edward Littleton, 1736. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Digital Collections (by subscription). Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Ideal Orator. Translated by J. M. May. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. . Orator. Translated by E. Jones. In Cicero’s Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. London, 1776. Digital text at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org. Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de. Traité du beau. Reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1985. First published in 1715. Descartes, René. Oeuvres. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1897–1913. Reprint, Paris: Librairie Philosophique, J. Vrin, 1983. Diderot, Denis. Œuvres esthétiques. Paris: Garnier, 1956. Translation by J. Goodman: Diderot on Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Ficino, Marsilio. Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Edited by C. Salamn. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997. . Opera omnia. Basel, Switz., 1576. . Platonic Theology. Edited by J. Hankins. Translated by M.J.B. Allen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. . Three Books on Life. Edited and translated by C. V. Kaske and J. R. Clark. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1989. Ghiberti, Lorenzo. I commentarii. Edited by J. von Schlosser. Berlin: Julius Bard, 1912. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Translation by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. London: J. Reeves, 1753. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. In Philosophical Writings. London: Everyman, 1994. First published in 1725. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1968. Translation by P. Guyer and E. Matthews: Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. First published in 1790. . Nachlass. In vol. 21 of Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Akademia Ausgabe, 1936. Translation by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher: Notes and Fragments, edited by P. Guyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kutschera, Franz von. Aesthetik. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998. Lotze, Hermann. Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland. Munich: J. G. Cotta, 1868. . Outlines of Aesthetics: Dictated Portions of the Lectures of Hermann Lotze. Edited and translated by G. T. Ladd. Boston: Ginn, 1886. Meier, Georg Friedrich. Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften. Halle, Ger., 1748. Mersenne, Marin. Questions inouyes. In Corpus des œuvres de philosophie en langue française. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Monteil, Pierre. Le beau et le laid en latin. Paris: Klincksieck, 1964. Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Nicole, Pierre. An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which from Settled Principles Is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams. Translated by J. V. Cunningham. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1950. . Traité de la beauté des ouvrages de l’esprit. Toulouse, 1689. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1954. Norton, Robert E. The Beautiful Soul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Plato. Hippias Major. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Phaedo. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Phaedrus. Translated by R. Hackforth. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Philebus. Translated by R. Hackforth. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. . Symposium. Translated by Michael Joyce. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1961. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by S. Mackenna. Burdett, NY: Published for the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation by Larson Publications, 1992. Pouillon, Henri. “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les scolastiques (1220– 1270).” Archives de l’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen-Âge 15 (1946). Scannelli, Francesco. Microcosmo della pittura. Cesena, It., 1657. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. System of Transcendental Philosophy. Translated by P. Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Schmücker, Reinold. Was ist Kunst? Munich: Fink Verlag, 1998. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Spinoza, Baruch. Chief Works of Spinoza. Translated by R.H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover, 1951. Thomas Aquinas, Saint. Summa theologiae: Questions on God. Edited by B. Davies and B. Leftow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Trublet, Nicolas Charles Joseph. Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale. Paris: Briasso, 1735. Translation: Essays upon Several Subjects of Literature and Morality. London: J. Osborn, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Digital Collections (by subscription). Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. Reutlingen, Ger.: C. Macken, 1847–57. 2nd ed. Edited by R. Vischer. Munich: Meyer and Jessen, 1922–23. Vitruvius Pollo. Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by I. D. Rowland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Zemach, Eddy. Real Beauty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Compressum. Comprehension BEGRIFF, concept ϰατάληψιs v. CONCEPT [CONCEPTUS, CONCETTO], and AUFHEBEN, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, PERCEPTION, PLASTICITY, PREDICATION, REASON, SOUL, UNDERSTANDING. In its common usage, the German verb begreifen designates an understanding of an intellectual order. It is this sense of the “intellectual grasp of a thing or an idea” (in begreifen there are echoes of the verb greifen: “to seize, catch, capture”) that is found in Begriff: “Ich habe keinen Begriff davon” means that one has no access to the thing or idea in question. The inflections to which Begriff is subjected in philosophy are related to transformations in theories of knowledge. At first, Begriff had the strict sense of a function of understanding (Kant), but then it was given independent reality as a figure of knowledge that acquires consciousness in its journey toward absolute knowledge (Hegel). Finally, on the basis of a definition of Begriff that claims to be strictly logical, these different meanings were redefined as still too psychological, to the degree that they still contain something of the ordinary sense of the term (Frege). The current discussion of the possibility of reintellectualizing concepts continues to stumble over the difference in languages between a German Begriff that has retained part of its naturalness and an English “concept” that is totally unrelated to ordinary usage. I. Begreifen, Verstehen, Konzipieren (Kant): Varieties of Understanding It was with Immanuel Kant that Begriff acquired a specific philosophical meaning far removed from the general meaning forged by Christian Wolff (cf. Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedanken, 1.4: “any representation of a thing in our ideas [jede Vorstellung einer Sache in unseren Vorstellungen]”). In his Logic, which revised and transformed the vocabulary of German academic philosophy, Kant set this very general meaning of representation against a precise meaning that is part of a classification of the kinds of knowledge in which begreifen is distinguished from verstehen and konzipieren. Here is his definition of the “fifth degree” of knowledge: To understand [verstehen, intelligere] something, to cognize something through the understanding by means of concepts [durch den Verstand vermöge der Begriffe], or to conceive [konzipieren]. This is very different from comprehending something [begreifen]. One can conceive much, although one cannot comprehend it, e.g., a perpetuum mobile whose impossibility is shown by mechanics. (Lectures on Logic, trans. Young, 570) On the other hand, the seventh degree, “to grasp [begreifen, comprehendere] something,” means “to know through reason [durch die Vernunft] or a priori, to the extent that this is suitable for our purposes [in dem Grade als zu unserer Absicht hinreichend ist]” (Logik, Introduction, §8, in RT: Ak., 9:65; Kant, Lectures on Logic, trans. Young, 570). The classification proposed in the Logic is remarkable in that it dissociates the verb begreifen from the noun Begriff. BEGRIFF 91 1 Grasping: Katalêpsis and comprehensio v. CONCEPTUS, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, PHANTASIA, REPRÉSENTATION. Whereas the latter enters easily into the definition of verstehen as the fifth degree of knowledge (“cognize something through the understanding by means of concepts”), Kant reserves begreifen for the supreme degree of knowledge. It is as if Begriff were already neutralized by its technical usage, whereas the meaning of begreifen could still be debated. The reason for this is doubtless that the verb begreifen still connotes something of the act of grasping, and that Kant can see in it the most complete form of capturing or appropriating the object in question. The phenomenon is further accentuated by the presence in begreifen of the prefix be-, which signifies transitivity and implies, in this precise case, direct, full contact with the object. The Kantian classifications may vary, but they never alter this fundamental definition of begreifen. Elsewhere, Kant corrects the terminology earlier proposed by the Wolffian Georg Friedrich Meier by refusing to translate begreifen with concipere (conceive): begreifen has to be reserved for comprehendere, that is, for a mode of knowledge that makes use of an intuition “per apprehensionem” (Wiener Logik, in RT: Ak., 24:845). The detour through Latin is revealing: the idea of apprehensio—that is, grasping or capturing—naturally leads Kant to begreifen, which contains this idea in its etymology (greifen). To be sure, konzipieren, which is derived from the Latin capere, also includes the idea of capture, but the etymology is blurred, and the determination of begreifen passes precisely through a new translation or a new Latin equivalent, comprehendere, in which the meaning of prehension, of taking in hand, is more clearly heard. This is the distinction inherited by the term Begriff. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the Begriff becomes a function of the understanding (as opposed to the object of an intuition)—itself defined as a power of concepts. The Begriff is what gathers together, unites, and synthesizes the empirical manifold: The knowledge yielded by understanding, or at least by the human understanding, must therefore be by means of concepts, and so is not intuitive, but discursive. Whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. By “function” I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thought, sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions. (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in RT: Ak., 3:85–86, trans. Kemp-Smith, 105) II. Der Begriff: Concepts and the Concept (Hegel) The relative ease with which the use of the term Begriff in the Critique of Pure Reason can be translated (unlike its use in passages dealing with definitions, such as the one in the Logic) no doubt proceeds from the fact that Kant conceives Begriffe in their plurality: there are as many concepts as there are possible functions. On the other hand, the term becomes more difficult to understand when it is used exclusively in the singular—as it is in Hegel, whose philosophy is a philosophy of the Concept, the Begriff, without further determination. The passage from the plural to the singular also marks -- The Stoics distinguish among true representations those that are apprehensive (in the active sense of “capable of actively grasping objects or situations”) and those that are not. For them, an apprehensive representation, phantasia katalêptikê [φαντασία ϰαταληπτιϰή], is the most exact and precise, and the one that represents in the mind the peculiar characteristics of the thing represented: An apprehensive one is the one that is from a real thing and is stamped and impressed in accordance with just that real thing, and is of such a kind as could not come about from a thing that was not real. For since they trust this appearance to be capable of perfectly grasping the underlying things, and to be skillfully stamped with all the peculiarities attaching to them, they say that it has each of these as an attribute. (Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, 8.248–49, trans. Bett, 50) It is a representation so “plain and striking” that it “all but grabs us by the hair, and draws us into assent” (ibid., 8.257, trans. Bett, 52). The assent that we irresistibly give to such a representation leads to grasping or comprehension, katalêpsis [ϰατάληψιs]: Zeno professed to illustrate this by a piece of action; for when he stretched out his fingers, and showed the palm of his hand, “Perception,” said he, “is a thing like this.” Then, when he had a little closed his fingers, “Assent is like this.” Afterwards, when he had completely closed his hand, and held forth his fist, that, he said, was comprehension. From which simile he also gave that state a name which it had not before, and called it katalêpsis. But when he brought his left hand against his right, and with it took a firm and tight hold of his fist, knowledge, he said, was of that character; and that was what none but a wise man possessed. (Cicero, Academic Questions, 1.47, trans. Yonge) The clenched fist illustrates comprehension; the other hand gripping it tightly illustrates science, which stabilizes and preserves this comprehension. The act of prehension and grasping expressed by the verb comprehendere (and the noun comprehensio) is discernible in all uses of the term that include sensorial apprehension (e.g., Cicero, De legibus, 1.30) and all of the levels of taking possession intellectually: thus discourse is imprinted on the mind of the orator because he has first “grasped” the ideas that he will develop by means of images that remind him of them (Cicero, De oratore, 2.359). The words themselves “enclose” the thought that they have “grasped” (De oratore, 1.70), just as the oratorical period “includes” and “circumscribes” the thought (Brutus, 34). All of these possible translations of comprehendere allow us to glimpse the richness of the term that Cicero chose to render the Stoic katalêpsis: other terms were acceptable, which the Stoic in the dialogue De finibus (3.17) gives as equivalents of katalêpsis: cognitio and perceptio. But by choosing comprehendere, Cicero emphasizes the gesture Zeno used to describe the different levels of knowledge (and to illustrate as well the relation between rhetoric and dialectic [De finibus, 2.17; De oratore, 113]). The importance Cicero accords to this gesture, attested by him alone, gives its full weight to Zeno’s bending of the substantive katalêpsis, which before him had never been used to designate anything but a concrete grasping or capture. The hand gesture makes it possible to understand the unity of movement from representation (phantasis-visum)—the open hand—to comprehension—the closed fist— and then to science—the fist gripped by the other hand (Academic Questions, 2.145; see above). The hand is still active, but it exercises its activity on itself: the close interweaving of activity in the course of a process that is also a passive reception is stressed by Cicero’s translations of phantasia katalêptikê. The adjective katalêptikê [ϰαταληπτιϰή], generally interpreted as having an active sense, also has a passive sense: Cicero uses not katalêptikon [ϰαταληπτιϰόν] but katalêpton [ϰαταληπτόν], which means “grasp” or “what can be grasped” (Academic Questions, 1.41); he translates this term by comprehendibile, so that we understand more clearly, thanks to this translation, that representation is what permits grasping, because it can itself be grasped; the grasp becomes possession only when the representation has received assent and approval (“visum acceptum et approbatum”): [Zeno] did not give credit to everything which is perceived, but only to those which contain some especial character of those things which are seen; but he pronounced what was seen, when it was discerned on account of its own power, comprehensible after it had been received and approved, then he called it comprehension, resembling those things which are taken up [prehenduntur] in the hand. (Cicero, Academic Questions, 1.41, trans. Yonge) Thus strengthened by the explanation given to the Stoic “gesture” of katalêpsis, the classical meanings of the Latin comprehendere determined its subsequent philosophical uses. In the Middle Ages, the novelty of the Latin “conceptus” had to do with the fact that to the image of capture, still present in the word through the verb “con-capere,” was added another, that of giving birth (as in “conception”). From this resulted an entirely different representation of the system of the faculties and of the activity of knowledge (see CONCEPTUS). Clara Auvray-Assayas Frédérique Ildefonse REFS.: Cicero. Academic Questions. Translated by C. D. Yonge. London: H. G. Bohn, 1853. Facs. reprint, Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2010. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Logicians. Translated and edited by Richard Bett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. the passage from a philosophy of knowledge that associates concept and understanding with a philosophy that claims to be a Science, and to that end unites the Concept with Spirit. In French translations, the capital C is probably the most economical way of indicating the emphatic use Hegel makes of the term “Concept”; it would otherwise be difficult to render in French, which is accustomed to the plural (les concepts) or the indefinite (un concept). Hegel is in fact the philosopher who opposes the Concept to concepts in the plural (cf. Aesthetik 1, in Werke, 13:127: “In recent 92 BEGRIFF III. Begriff and the Linguistic Turn A. Begriffsschrift (Frege) Begriff also lends itself to a more strictly logical definition, that is, one in which the preceding meanings are contested as connected with a use that is still “psychological.” Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift undertakes a transformation of this kind, and the French translation of his title (Idéographie) is for that reason problematic. As Frege points out in his preface: My goal was to seek first of all to reduce the concept of succession [den Begriff der Anordnung] to a series of logical consequences, and then to advance toward the concept of number. To prevent something intuitive [etwas anschauliches] from being inadvertently introduced, the absence of gaps in the sequence of deductions had to be assured. That is why I abandoned any attempt to express anything that has no meaning for the deduction. In §3, I have designated as conceptual content [als begrifflichen Inhalt] what alone is important to me. This explanation must consequently always be kept in mind if one wants to understand correctly the essence of my formula language [Formelsprache]. From this also follows the name Begriffsschrift. The difficulty involved in using “concept” in translating the Begriffsschrift comes from the fact that in it, Frege proposes a definition of the concept (and thus of the conceptual content) that is inseparable from his view of logic and his principled antipsychologism. In the preface to Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The foundations of arithmetic), he defines the three principles guiding his approach: always clearly separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective; never ask what a word means by itself, but always in context; and never lose sight of the distinction between concept and object (der Unterschied zwischen Begriff und Gegenstand ist im Auge zu behalten: Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, x). The Begriff is not a psychological but a logical notion. The distinction between concept and object proceeds entirely from the new logic, according to which simple utterances are analyzed for their function and argument. For example, in the sentence “The Earth is a planet,” we can replace “Earth” by other proper nouns, and obtain in this way the sentences “Venus is a planet,” “Mars is a planet,” and so on. What remains invariant in these sentences is a function, which takes this or that object as its argument. A concept is a function at a place, what can be said of an object. We see that the notion of the concept, thus defined, is in no way psychological, and is independent of any idea of “grasping.” Moreover, as Frege explains in “Funktion und Begriff” (Function and concept), the concept thus defined is no longer closed or complete, but in need of an argument; it is “unsaturated” (ungesättigt: in Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, 29). In his article “Begriff und Gegenstand” (Concept and object), Frege replies to a few objections that had been addressed to him by Benno Kerry regarding his use of the concept of concept: The term “concept” [Begriff] has several uses; it is sometimes taken in the psychological sense, and sometimes in the logical sense, and perhaps also in a confused times, no concept has been as infirm as the Concept itself”). The Concept is thus considered to be a figure of knowledge: it is the absolutely simple and pure element in which truth has its existence (Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, vol. 3), and only its deployment, also called “the work of the concept” (Arbeit des Begriffs), provides access to “scientific understanding” (wissenschaftliche Einsicht). The Phenomenology of Mind makes the Begriff almost a dramatic figure by characterizing it as the “movement of knowledge,” a movement that is a “self-movement” (Selbstbewegung). This movement of the Concept, which can also be called a movement of self-reflection, but is already in the unity of being and reflection (cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, vol. 6), terminates in the unity of knowledge and its object (Phänomenologie), which is at the same time division, partition, separation between the different things that are “what they are through the activity of the Concept that dwells in them and reveals itself in them” (die Dinge sind das was sie sind durch die Tätigkeit des innewohnenden und in ihnen sich offenbarenden Begriffs: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 1, Die Wissenschaft der Logik, §163, add. 2, in Werke, 8:313). At the end of “Doctrine of the Concept” in Science of Logic, the Begriff is subsumed by the Idea (see AUFHEBEN), which is also in the singular: the Idea is “the adequate Concept, the objectively true or the true as such” (der adäquate Begriff, das objektive Wahre oder das Wahre als solches, Die Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, vol. 6). Nonetheless, it remains the “principle of philosophy,” and in this sense we find it again in the Philosophy of Mind in the Encyclopedia (cf. Philosophie des Geistes, in Werke, vol. 10). This speculative use of the term Begriff remains doubly faithful to the common use of the word, however. In the singular, der Begriff perhaps suggests above all the act of seizing or grasping, of taking everything to “inhabit” it and be “revealed” in it, as we have seen in Hegel. In addition, when Hegel speaks of the “Begriff des Begriffs” (in Werke, vol. 6), he adds to this play on the etymology a completely ordinary use of the word that makes it a synonym of Bestimmung, “definition.” Despite the inherently speculative aspect of this reduplication of terms, “Begriff des Begriffs” does not mean so much “concept of the concept” as “definition of the concept,” that is, its abridged idea, or, as Hegel puts it, its Abbreviatur, “abbreviation” (in Werke, vol. 5). The extended use of the term, between common language and technical vocabulary, makes it possible to take the same term in two different senses in the same expression. Thus in Kant and Hegel, the specificity of Begriff and begreifen resides in each case in grammatical peculiarities: the different uses that make the nominal form (Begriff) and the verbal form (begreifen) possible in Kant, and the singular and the plural of Begriff possible in Hegel. From one author to the other, the play on etymology shifts from the verb (Kant plays mainly on begreifen) to the noun (Hegel’s play on the majesty of the singular). In both cases, however, the theory of knowledge and the speculative doctrine of science are deployed in a close relationship with ordinary language, or at least with the phantasmal version provided by the etymology. It is this relationship that is lost as soon as the term is translated into French. BEGRIFF 93 concepts, in the sense of “mental representations.” There is, for example, current debate about “nonconceptual content,” that is, an intrinsic content of experience that is supposed to be a representation independent of concepts. Peacocke introduces his thought in A Study of Concepts this way: We need to be clear about the subject matter of a theory of concepts. The term “concept” has by now come to be something of a term of art. The word does not have in English a unique sense that is theoretically important. Peacocke then quotes Woody Allen, who has a character in his film Annie Hall say, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later turn it into an idea.” Peacocke implies here, in an interesting way, that the word “concept” in English no longer really has an ordinary use, and that it certainly does not refer, as he says later on, to the Fregean use. Hence he proposes a purely stipulative definition of concepts based on distinguishing them through their propositional content. We can imagine that it is the logicism of the Fregean conceptual notation and definitions that makes constantly possible, in the wake of analytical philosophy, new, more or less arbitrary definitions of the concept; nonetheless, by the roles that he assigns in his definitions to “functions” and their operativity, Frege maintains a naturalness in the use of Begriff that is probably lost in later English translations and the most contemporary uses of “concept.” Philippe Büttgen Marc Crépon Sandra Laugier REFS.: Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Frege, Gottlob. Begriffschrift und andere Aufsätze. Edited by I. Angelelli. 2nd ed. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1964. Translation by T. W. Bynum: Conceptual Notation, and Related Articles. Edited by T. W. Bynum. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. . Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy. Edited by B. McGuinness. Translated by M. Black, V. H. Dudman, P. Geach, H. Kaal, E.-H. W. Kluge, B. McGuinness, and R. H. Stoothoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. . Funktion, Begriff, Bedutung: Fünf logische Studien. Edited by G. Patzig. 4th ed. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1975. . Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Edited by C. Thiel. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988. . Logical Investigations. Translated by P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977. . Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Edited and translated by Peter Geach and Max Black. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Friedrich. The Hegel Reader. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. . Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. 20 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Kant, Immanuel. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995–. . Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp-Smith. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1929. . Lectures on Logic. Translated by J. M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Peacocke, Christopher. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Quine, W. V. O. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. acceptation that mixes the two. But this freedom has its natural limit; as soon as a certain use of the term is put in play, it is desirable that it should be maintained. For my part, I have chosen to adhere strictly to the purely logical use of the term. (“Begriff und Gegenstand,” in Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, 66) B. The analytical uses of “concept” Such a purely logical approach poses a problem, which Frege lucidly outlines in “Begriff und Gegenstand”: How can we talk about a concept (for example, when we say that it is clear, simple, general, and so on) without making it an object and thus violating the principles of Frege’s approach? The question, which was to obsess many twentieth-century philosophers of language, is that of predication. If an object is anything about which one can say something (and thus, anything one can make “fall under a” concept), we can speak of “a” concept, and that is what we do, very commonly in fact. Frege’s redefinitions have thus not eliminated, even in the analytical field, all work on the notion of the concept, and they have even elicited a new line of reflection on individuation and the distinction of concepts. The logicization and depsychologization of the concept of concept accomplished by Frege have certainly led, in a first phase, to a decay of the concept in favor of predication and objects (to which first Rudolf Carnap’s work and then W.V.O. Quine’s testifies, each in its own way). The term “concept” has been maintained, but in a rather vague sense, notably in the common expression “conceptual scheme” used by Quine (From a Logical Point of View, 44ff.) and his successors in the sense of the whole of our conception of the world, or the whole of our knowledge (“the conceptual scheme of science”): the expression acquires a special flavor from the fact that according to Quine, this conceptual scheme is inseparable from a language and an ontology that are themselves untranslatable into another language in an unequivocal way (see SENSE). The idea of a conceptual scheme is thus associated with the whole debate about incommensurability and relativism that has roiled analytical philosophy and epistemology since the 1960s. This is shown not only by Richard Rorty’s work, but also by Donald Davidson’s famous text, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in which Davidson vehemently criticizes the idea of a conceptual scheme and a “point of view” on the world as a source of “conceptual relativism” and associates it—following in that respect Quine himself—with the idea of linguistic difference and untranslatability. A conceptual scheme is language conceived as a source of the conception and categorization of the world. We see what difficulties the philosophy of language encounters in seeking to eliminate or resolve the question of conceptualization, difficulties that have led to a massive return, since the end of the twentieth century, to concepts: it was in fact the return of analytical philosophy to the philosophy of mind, against the antipsychological precepts of Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that allowed a resurgence of the term, this time generally in the plural and rementalized: that is the case in English philosopher Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts, which has been much discussed since the 1990s. Many recent discussions of concepts bear on the possession of 94 BEHAVIOR by a descriptive dimension. Hume defines human behavior as an observable physical manifestation, an empirical, experienceable phenomenon. It is this behavioral datum that was to found moral science and “naturalize” it by giving it a certitude comparable to that of the natural sciences. We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. (Hume, Treatise, I, Introduction, xxiii.) Here, “behavior” is immediately translated by conduite, which can raise questions since “conduct” is also very frequent in Hume, as well as the pair “behavior and conduct” (“Their whole conduct and behaviour,” Treatise, Part II, chap. 3). However, the coupling (analogous to that of “belief and assent,” see BELIEF) indicates the proximity of behavior and social custom or usage—both objects of observation and experimentation. Behavior thus proves to be the starting point for a naturalization of the social that is not a reduction to physical data but may produce knowledge that is of a quite different kind, and just as certain. II. “Conduct”/“Behavior”: Pragmatism and Behaviorism In the term “behavior” it becomes difficult to differentiate behavior as such from a problematics of good conduct, a set of social habits, or a product of character, virtues, and so forth. The problematics of “behavior” is very rich among nineteenth-century American pragmatists, and first of all in the work of William James. In his Talks to Teachers (1899), he defines the child as a “behaving organism” (rendered by the French translator as “L’enfant comme organisme tourné vers le pratique”). James tries to produce a nonmoral, functionalist, and cognitive concept, thus distinguishing it from conduct (emblematized by Emerson and his “Conduct of Life”). Hume’s pair, behavior/conduct, is split apart. “Behavior” is drawn toward a genuine scientific knowledge, and the latter is drawn toward a more socialized set of morals. But it is obviously the founding texts of behaviorism as a theory of psychology that produced the most explicit redefinition of “behavior,” and especially in John B. Watson’s famous article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (1913). This is a naturalistic credo that sought to make psychology a science of which the object and foundation is human (and, indissolubly, animal) behavior. Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation. Watson, who was influenced by John Dewey’s “functional psychology” tried, unlike the pragmatists, to separate the concept of behavior from that of consciousness (see CONSCIOUSNESS) and to associate it with the concepts of reflex arc, stimulus, habit, and disposition, all terms that BEHAVIOUR, BEHAVIOURISM conduit comportement béhaviourisme comportementalisme Verhalten, Behaviorismus It. comportamento, comportamentismo v. COMPORTMENT, and ACT, AGENCY, ENGLISH, EPISTEMOLOGY, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, INTENTION, LEIB, MANIERA, PRAXIS, SENSE, SOUL, SPEECH ACT, UNCONSCIOUS, WORLD The untranslatable character of H. P. Grice’s “behaviour” appears (1) in the hesitation between two translations of the term in French, conduite and comportement, with the transition (in 1908, with Henri Piéron’s reintroduction of the term in psychology) from the former to the latter, manifesting a desire to objectify and make scientific the “observable” notion of behavior; (2) in the contemporary choice of the French term béhaviorisme instead of comportmentalisme (rarer) to translate “behaviorism.” The same can be said of German, which uses “Behaviorism” (ein verkappter Behaviourist, “a behaviorist in disguise,” [L. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §307]). The French term behaviorisme, simply copied from the English, designates a given philosophical conception (dating historically from the beginning of the twentieth century in America and in John B. Watson’s theories, elaborated at the same time as those of Ivan Pavlov in Russia), according to which only the observation of so-called external behavior can be proved to provide a basis for the description of mental states. The term, introduced in a positive way, has now become pejorative, or at least negative: in French, behaviourisme, simplifying and scientistic, tends to be opposed to a possible true theory of behavior (cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement). We see that the difficulty also concerns the term comportement. This term, which since the fifteenth century has designated a way of acting, does not seem to correspond to the problematizations of behavior that have appeared successively in English-language philosophy, notably in the social and even moral dimensions of the English term, to which its classical translation by conduite testifies. It was only the behaviorist redefinition of comportement at the beginning of the twentieth century that forcibly united the problematic pair comportement/behavior. French reluctance to really translate “behaviorism” may in turn signal this gap with respect to conceptions and descriptions of comportement and “behavior.” I. “Empiricism,” “Naturalism,” “Behaviorism” The term “behavior” appears in the fifteenth century in English and has had from the outset the moral dimension of “conduct,” as is shown by the intransitive use of “to behave” (act in accordance with social norms). Thus in Hobbes we read the following: By manners, I mean not here, decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the small morals. (Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chap. 11) This normative and social dimension of “behavior” (associated with decency, manners, and morals) is transformed in the empiricists, notably in Hume, where it is complicated BEHAVIOR 95 The behaviorism which we shall make use of is more adequate than that of which Watson makes use. Behaviorism in this wider sense is simply an approach to the study of the experience of the individual from the point of view of his conduct, particularly, but not exclusively, the conduct as it is observable by others. (Mead, Mind, Self and Society) Linguistic behavior is thus no longer a special case, but the domain in which the social character of behavior appears, through the necessity of the individual’s inclusion in the group of co-locutors: We want to approach language not from the standpoint of inner meanings to be expressed, but in its larger context of cooperation in the group. Meaning appears within that process. Our behaviorism is a social behaviorism. Social psychology studies the activity or behavior of the individual as it lies within the social process; the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member. (Ibid.) Social behaviorism thus seems to rehabilitate the concept of conduct. In French, the term conduite was long preferred in describing behavior as a component of social relationships: Thus we see that the most useful observations on human intellectual and moral nature, collected, not by philosophers inclined to theories and systems, but by men truly endowed with the spirit of observation and disposed to grasp the practical side of things— moralists, historians, statesmen, legislators, schoolteachers—, have not in general resulted from solitary contemplation and inward-looking study of events in consciousness, but instead from an attentive study of the conduct (conduite) of men placed in various situations, subjected to passions and influences of all kinds from which the observer takes great care to free himself as much as possible. (A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances, 2:548–49) Thus comportement comes to be associated with a specific (nonsocial) conception of psychology. The introduction of the term comportement in a technical sense is exactly contemporaneous with the development of behaviorist psychology without being entirely dependent upon it. Empirical psychology, even before Pavlov’s work was known and at a time when American behaviorism was still being elaborated theoretically, was represented in France by Binet’s successor, Henri Piéron, who introduced the term comportement explicitly as a translation, defining the peculiar object of scientific psychology as the activity of beings and their sensory-motor relationships with their environment, what the Americans call “behavior,” Germans das Verhalten, Italians il comportamento, and what we can correctly call le comportement des organismes. (Piéron, “Leçon inaugurale à l’École pratique des hautes études,” 1908) were gradually to invade scientific psychology and lead it to reject data derived from introspection, common sense, or so-called popular psychology. In this context, linguistic behavior turns out to be an important dimension of behavior (Verbal Behavior is the title of an influential work by B. F. Skinner) that refers to language from the point of view of its observable productions (see SPEECH ACT). The Behaviorist asks: Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed, and formulate laws concerning only the observed things. Now, what can we observe? Well, we can observe behavior—what the organism does or says. And let me make this fundamental point at once: that saying is doing—that is, behaving. Speaking overtly or silently is just as objective a type of behavior as baseball. (Watson, “Behaviorism, the Modern Note in Psychology”) Behaviorism proves to be inseparable from a certain conception of behavior as observable and bodily or organic, denying the dimension of conduct and preserving in habit only the idea of conditioning. The stimulus-response schema thus becomes central to the definition of behavior. It is this apparently caricatural and restrictive conception of behavior that leads people to see in “behaviorism” a theory of behavior observed in the laboratory, whose most famous illustration is found in the experiments on conditioned reflexes conducted by Pavlov and his associates between 1900 and 1917. However, among some pragmatists, notably Dewey and George Herbert Mead, there is a critique of behaviorism understood in this way, and an attempt to reframe the term “behavior” in a way that remains faithful to Hume’s definition: experimentation and observation of behavior involve the environment as much as they do the organism. And the environment includes other human beings and complex social mediations. Only by analysis and selective abstraction can we differentiate the actual occurrence into two factors, one called organism and the other, environment. This fact militates strongly against any form of behaviorism that defines behavior in terms of the nervous system or body alone. (Dewey, “Conduct and Experience”) It is also in Dewey’s work that we find an interesting clarification of the necessary “seriality” of behavior, and see the appearance of the English terms “comportment/deportment” and the reappearance of “conduct”: Although the word “behavior” implies comportment, as well as deportment, the word “conduct” brings out the aspect of seriality better than does “behavior,” for it clearly involves the facts both of direction (or a vector property) and of conveying or conducing. (Ibid.) In Mead as well there is a shift from the notion of “behavior” to that of “conduct”: At first, behaviorism cohabited with the analytical philosophy that issued from the Austrian emigration, whose logical empiricism could be connected with behaviorism’s radical empiricism, at the cost of a few misunderstandings. For example, Clark Hull proposed, in his System of Behavior (1952), a reconstruction of the theoretical foundations of behaviorism carried out in collaboration with Otto Neurath. The failure of this attempt at systematization prefigured the crisis of behaviorism, which was displaced by the advent of cognitive psychology, the turning point coming with Noam Chomsky’s scathing 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. We can lament the fact that the justified criticisms of certain aspects of the behaviorist program led to a rejection of the behaviorist critique of mentalism, which was precisely what interested Wittgenstein. In his fascinating article “Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior?” Skinner rightly interpreted the decline of behaviorism as a return of mentalism. Discussing, shortly before his death, the history of behaviorism and the way in which psychology as a science of behavior was eclipsed by the cognitive sciences, Skinner notes, “Everyone could relax. Mind was back.” The philosophical rejection of behaviorism has sometimes led to an uncritical acceptance of a psychology that is just as scientistic, and mentalistic in addition. Willard Van Orman Quine, a central figure in analytical philosophy and the last behaviorist, promoted a minimal behaviorism borrowed from P. Ziff: “Behaviorism is not a metaphysical theory: it is a denial of a metaphysical theory. Consequently it asserts nothing” (Word and Object, 265). Behaviorism raises a problem particularly interesting for the philosophy of language: what is at our disposal, in matters of language, other than verbal behavior—ours and that of others? That is, what we say? In an unpublished lecture, “The Behavioral Limits of Meaning,” Quine noted, “In psychology, we can choose to be behaviorists or not, but in linguistics we don’t have that choice.” Behaviorism is the recognition of the immanent character of all linguistic research, and of the obligatory character of our starting point: ordinary language, “the social art” par excellence. In Quine or Wittgenstein, behaviorism turns out to be a reflection on the nature of the linguistic given. Thus this minimal behaviorism has to take into account the social character of behavior, which is ultimately coherent with Hume’s conception of “behaviour” (“we must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures” [Treatise, xxiii]). It should also be noted that despite American attempts, it is difficult to rid even the term “behavior” of any moral dimension, as is shown by the still-current use of the verb “to behave” in the sense of “conduct oneself well.” The subtle grammatical complications surrounding this usage surface in a famous exchange in G. Cukor’s film Philadelphia Story (1940). A character pontificates, “A woman has to behave, naturally,” and another (played by Cary Grant) retorts, “A woman has to behave naturally.” Here the meaning of “behavior” depends on a comma. Sandra Laugier Piéron, thus anticipating certain cognitivist conceptions, also corrects Watson’s behaviorism by contesting the stimulus-response pair and emphasizing physiological mechanisms. Nonetheless, the term comportement was henceforth associated with an empirical approach, and refers precisely to behaviorism, just as the adjective comportemental, introduced in French a little later (1949), translates “behavioral.” III. Behaviorism and the Philosophy of Mind: Criticisms of Behaviorism and Behaviorism as Criticism The resistance to behaviorism on the part of the French, discernible in the refusal to really translate the term, may be a sign of a refusal to extend the objectivist method— that of a pure “external description”—to psychology and to what Vincent Descombes calls “mental phenomena” (les phénomènes du mental). Over the past quarter century, behaviorism seems to have become a red flag. The term is clearly pejorative and now coexists in French with the less theoretical comportementalisme. Today the latter refers to rather specific ultra-empirical methods involving rigid conditioning (in connection with dog-trainers, internal relationships, managers in business, shock treatment, and the thérapies comportementalistes of cognitivo-comportementalisme). As for the term comportement, its uses extend beyond human behavior: physicists speak of the comportement des molécules, and linguists of the comportement of this or that verb. Today the negative connotation of behaviorism is no less current in English: behaviorism is the primary target of the philosophy of mind (see SOUL), which since the end of the twentieth century has developed largely by using it as a foil. The problem is that this mentalist backlash also involves a repression of behaviorism’s critical dimension, which was initially a challenge to a certain discourse on the mental and to the “myth of interiority.” Thus, when Ludwig Wittgenstein alludes to behaviorism and notes the behaviorist flavor of his remarks, he does so in part to draw attention to a “truth” of behaviorism, repeated obsessively in the Philosophical Investigations: to gain access to another person’s interiority we have nothing to go on other than what that person does and says (his exterior). Behaviorism is thus right insofar as it takes into account the limitation of our discourse on the mental. But it is wrong insofar as it seeks to take behavior as the criterion and foundation for knowledge of human nature, outside of any relationship to others or to society. But contemporary mentalist criticisms of behaviorism sometimes seem to see in it only its narrow scientism and naturalism, repressing the philosophical radicalness of its empiricist position. Two criticisms of behaviorism that are exact contraries coexist today, and can serve to outline the field of the philosophy of mind. The first, which continues Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s line of argument, refers to behavior as institutional and social (cf. Descombes): any acquisition of habits or dispositions is social, and the concept of behavior cannot be reduced to individual behavior. The second criticism is at the basis of neo-mentalism: the mental is irreducible to empirical behavior, the mind is certainly somewhere “inside,” even if this inside is physical (or neurophysiological). BELIEF 97 I. “Belief”/“Faith” “Belief” is related etymologically to German Glaube (via galauben, thirteenth to fourteenth century, then ileve-leve, the prefix be- being added by analogy with the verb bileve; cf. Middle English Dictionary). The first meaning of “belief,” which was identical with that of “faith” (cf. fides, pistis), belonged to the same semantic field as “reliance” and “confidence”; it referred to a mental or affective condition that was connected with confiding, passively relying on someone or something. Thus we read this in Hobbes: “Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give nor take away”), or in Cardinal Newman: “To have faith in God is to surrender oneself to God.” In addition to this theological dimension that closely associated the word first of all with faith, “belief” has a psychological or emotional meaning; it refers more to an affect than to a relation with a proposition. In its first meaning, “belief,” like Glaube, designated a sense of adhesion that did not need to be justified rationally (see GLAUBE). In the seventeenth century, “belief” and “faith” began gradually to diverge. “Faith” supplanted “belief” in the area of religion, the latter designating a process that differentiated itself from faith, on the one hand by a lesser intensity, and on the other hand by a more intellectual dimension, or even a judgment. This intellectualization of belief (which becomes a state or act of mind) that started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed without abandoning—and this is the interest of the way the semantic field of “belief” was constituted in English, and also a factor contributing to its untranslatability—the first meaning’s dimension of affect or passivity. The French term croyance, which is still used to translate “belief” even in its most sophisticated recent uses, raises a problem because it accounts for neither the sensible nor the objective dimension of “belief.” II. Belief and Feeling: Hume Does “belief” refer to a feeling or to a proposition? Is it subjective or objective? The interplay of these elements determines the term’s different senses. Thus it would be problematic to use contemporary distinctions to divide “belief” into psychological and propositional elements and to make belief a “mental state” belonging to the category of the propositional attitudes that Russell defines as associating a (mental or emotional) attitude with a “content” (a proposition or statement). For Hume, “belief” designates both a feeling and a judgment, indissolubly linked, and his use of the term has become a constant point of reference for contemporary theories of belief. The “belief ”/“assent” pair defines a set of problems that deviates from the traditional hierarchies of savoir/croyance and Wissen/Glaube. Thus it would be a mistake to think of “belief ” and “assent” as representing degrees of knowledge, even if probabilistic interpretations of belief tend in this direction. Hume’s notion of an intensity of belief that is variable though not measurable may be the origin of the term’s semantic deviations, along with his formulation of the problem of knowing “matters of fact,” which misleadingly associates the definition of “belief ” with the problems of skepticism and of confirming empirical knowledge. REFS.: Bouveresse, Jacques. Le Mythe de l’intériorité. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1976. Chomsky, Noam. “A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.” Language 35 (1959), 26–58. Cournot, Antoine-Augustin. Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances. Paris: Hachette, 1851. Descombes, Vincent. La Denrée Mentale. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1995. Translation by S. A. Schwartz The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. . Les Institutions du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1996. Dewey, John. “Conduct and Experience.” In Later Works, vol. 5, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. In The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 vols., edited by W. Molesworth. London: J. Bohn, 1839–45; reprinted by Routledge in 1992. First published in 1651. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by P. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. First published in 1740. James, William. “The Child as a Behaving Organism.” In Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, vol. 10 in The Works of William James, edited by F. Buckhardt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Talks to Teachers was first published in 1899. Mead, George Herbert: Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1934. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942. Translation by A. L. Fisher: The Structure of Behavior. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Skinner, Burrhus Frederic. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953. . Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1957. .“Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior?” In Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1989. Essay first published in 1987. Watson, John Broadus. “Behaviorism, the Modern Note in Psychology.” In The Battle of Behaviorism, edited by J. B. Watson and W. McDougall. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1928. . “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158–77. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe: Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. . Philosophische Untersuchungen. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, and R. Rhees. Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe: Philosophical Investigations. Oxford : Blackwell, 1953; reprinted in 2000. Wiff, Paul. “About Behaviorism.” Analysis 18 (1958): 132–36. CREDITUM BELIEF croyance Glaube v. CROYANCE, FAITH, and CLAIM, DOXA, GLAUBE, MATTER OF FACT, PERCEPTION, PROPOSITION, SOUL, TRUTH “Belief” has undergone an evolution characteristic of certain terms in English that pass from a mental and moral meaning (as affect or feeling) to a cognitive and propositional meaning (belief gradually detached from faith and assent). This process of objectivization was accompanied by major changes in the grammar of belief. The problem raised by the translation of “belief” has to do with the term’s lack of definition, which allows it to move from the emotional to the logical and from the epistemic (degree of conviction, subjective) to the cognitive (conditions of validity, objective). Most epistemological theories of belief seek instead to include it within knowledge, to objectify it as Frege did in proposing an objective conception of thoughts (Gedanken) as belonging to the mind, not to minds. Beliefs, exactly like Frege’s Gedanken, are seen as independent of the believer in the framework of a general theory of judgment. Thus Willard Van Orman Quine in his Pursuit of Truth: A perception is an event in just one percipient; a belief, on the other hand, can have many believers. Here, belief is propositional: a shareable statement to which one may adhere or not. Such a shift, which may be acrobatic and in any case involves a sharp break with Hume’s conception of belief, is illustrated by Russell’s procedures. At first, Russell viewed belief as a dual relation between a subject and a proposition conceived as “an objective entity which exists whether or not it is believed.” Thus the object of belief is identified with belief itself. The development that we have sketched here, from a “felt” belief (Hume) to a logical or “propositional” belief III. Belief, Causes, and Consequences The epistemological problem of the foundation of empirical knowledge, which is at the origin of most contemporary discussions of belief, determines two trends in the redefinition of belief: with regard to its causes, and with regard to its effects. A. Belief and justification After Hume, the first trend no longer concerns the empirical causes of belief (habit), but rather its justification, and hence its reasons (cf. the distinction, which has become omnipresent in the philosophical vocabulary, between “cause” and “reason”). The skeptical problem of the cause of our factual beliefs is retranslated into an epistemological problem of the objective conditions of the confirmation of empirical beliefs— in contemporary terms, the problem of induction—and this reintegrates belief into the croyance/savoir hierarchy. This is shown not only by the literature on the so-called “problem of induction” and of confirmation by experience, but also by the emergence of new expressions such as “justified belief” and “warranted belief.” Hume: “Belief”/“assent” To define belief, Hume starts out from the difference between idea and impression, the former being derived and copied from the latter, of which it is only a less intense version: belief is “a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 96), or else a “feeling or sentiment” (623) identified with the immediacy of the impression: “To believe is to feel an immediate impression of the senses.” This immediacy gives belief an assurance that the idea lacks, particularly in the domain of “matters of fact” (see MATTER OF FACT): There is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea, which we conceive, it follows, that it must lie in the manner, in which we conceive it. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature) Belief is a feeling of the existence of its object. Such an “assertion” of existence neither coincides with nor assumes the idea in order to yield a belief: belief is nothing other than a “way” of feeling or conceiving our ideas that gives them more or less force or influence— whence the difficulty of translating belief in French as croyance, which is closer to the English word “opinion” (cf. “opinion or belief,” Treatise) and can hardly be seen in French as an affect: “Belief does nothing but vary the manner in which we conceive any object.” To understand this point, we have to note the essential connection that Hume establishes between belief and assent, that is, the mind’s “strong propensity” (265) to affirm what it conceives. “Assent” is naturally connected with French sentir (it derives, oddly, from French assentir, during the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), and belongs to the order of feeling (that is, the order of the mind). “Assent”—cf. the associated term “consent,” as well as “approval” and “agreement”— designates an individual and collective feeling of acceptance. This assent is not a fürwahrhalten (an acceptance of a truth claim) and differs from the logical assent given to a proposition. The “belief”/“assent” pair is wholly defined by the immediacy and vivacity of impression, which can then constitute judgment and establish reasoning from cause to effect. Thus it appears that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present. ‘Tis merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it, when we trace the relation of cause and effect. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature) The “belief”/“assent” pair thus defines the semantic field of a sensitive mind difficult to relate to the French use of croyance or the German use of Glaube. It is all the more remarkable that Hume, in defining “belief”/ “assent,” problematizes judgment and inquires into the difference between believing and disbelieving a given proposition regarding matters of fact: “Wherein consists the difference betwixt incredulity and belief?” How can we determine the difference between assenting to a proposition about matters of fact and rejecting it, since this difference is not in the idea itself? The answer still has to do with the more forceful “manner” of conceiving the idea that is characteristic of belief. The “belief”/“assent” pair defines a feeling of natural and unavoidable belief (183) determined not by reason but by “custom,” a mental feeling that we cannot avoid any more than we can wholly elicit it, for it is not active, but passive, and acts on us by causing our actions. Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel Belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature) BELIEF 99 2 Popper and the attempt to separate knowledge and belief Karl Popper proposes to abandon Hume’s concept of belief, which he regards as too “subjectivist,” and to separate it from the objective concepts of knowledge and truth. The danger involved in taking belief into account is that knowledge and truth might be seen as “particular cases” of belief, those in which it is justified. If we start from our subjective experience of believing, and thus look upon knowledge as a special kind of belief, then we may indeed have to look upon truth as some even more special kind of belief : as one that is well founded and justified. (Popper, Conjectures and Refutations) For Popper, both verificationist theories (those that emphasize the empirical justification of beliefs, even in terms of probability) and psychologizing theories (those that are concerned with the causes and origins of our beliefs), because they cling to belief and its justification, have to abandon the objectivity of truth. They all say, more or less, that truth is what we are justified in believing or in accepting. (Ibid.) Popper therefore sets out to separate the domain of objective and even conjectural knowledge (which Popper, like Frege, calls “World 3”) from that of belief. Popper’s point of view is symptomatic, even if it runs counter to the redefinitions of belief (let us recall that he was not a native speaker of English). 3 Wittgenstein and Ramsey: Belief’s effects We can compare the influence of the FregeRussell conception of belief on F. P. Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Ramsey in his Foundations proposes the following definition: I prefer to deal with those beliefs which are expressed in words, consciously asserted or denied ; for these beliefs are the most proper subject for logical criticism. The mental factors of such a belief I take to be words, connected together and accompanied by a feeling or feelings of belief or disbelief. A footnote on the same page indicates Ramsey’s distance from Hume, but also the complexity of his relationship to empiricism: I speak throughout as if the differences between belief, disbelief, and mere consideration lay in the presence or absence of “feelings” but any other word may be substituted for “feeling,” e.g. “specific quality,” “act of assertion” and “act of denial.” Here Ramsey is attacking a logical problem considered in an astonishing way by Wittgenstein, notably in the Tractatus (5.54f.). Wittgenstein criticizes Russell’s theory of belief as relating a subject A and a proposition p in a compound proposition “A believes that p.” For Wittgenstein, such a conception suggests the possibility (which must be excluded) of thinking or judging nonsense: in the case in which p is meaningless, we would then have a meaningless element in a compound proposition that is itself meaningful, which is impossible; therefore the proposition is defective. See Tractatus (5.5422): “The correct explanation of the form of the proposition (Satz) “A makes the judgment p” (A urteilt p) must show that it is impossible for a judgment to be a piece of nonsense.” Here is the radical solution Wittgenstein proposes in the Tractatus: 5542. Es ist aber klar, dass “A glaubt dass p,” “A denkt p,” “A sagt p” von der Form “‘p’ sagt p” sind. (It is clear, however, that “A believes that p,” “A has the thought p,” and “A says p” are of the form “‘p’ says p.”) Propositions that bear on a belief do not coordinate a fact and an object (Gegenstand) that is the subject A (which would lead to nonsense [Unsinn], but instead coordinate two facts (“p”—the thought that p—and the fact p). This redefinition of belief (Glaube) has sometimes been interpreted in an antisubjectivist sense. Matters are perhaps more complicated: in 5.5421, Wittgenstein explains that his definition shows that “the soul—the subject, etc. as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day” are ein Unding, a non-thing. A composite soul would no longer be a soul. In reality, Wittgenstein is challenging the psychological idea of a unified subject—“A”—who is supposed to be the subject of assent: if there were a subject of the thought p, the subject would have himself to be composed, like p (would have to be a zusammengetzte Seele [a composite soul]), and decomposable into elements of thought. The principle of Wittgenstein’s extensionalism thus leads him to a complete depsychologization of belief and the “mind.” It is on the basis of this radical, nonpsychological conception of thought and belief that Ramsey posits once again, in his article “Facts and Propositions” in Foundations, the untranslatable Humean question of the difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition. After proposing his famous solution to the problem of truth (see TRUTH), Ramsey inquires into the equivalence—logically indispensable if we are still following Wittgenstein—of believing not-p and disbelieving p, “but to determine what we mean by this ‘equivalent’ is, to my mind, the central difficulty of the subject” (Foundations, as reprinted in Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, 43). Ramsey continues: “It seems to me that the equivalence between believing ‘not-p’ and disbelieving ‘p’ is to be defined in terms of causation.” Ramsey proposes to define belief in terms not of attitude but of causal properties (causes and especially effects of beliefs [Foundations]), while at the same time admitting, with a modesty that distinguishes him from his successors, that he scarcely sees how to determine them and that his definition remains imprecise. In “Truth and Probability” (reprinted in Philosophical Papers), Ramsey produces a theory of the degrees of belief and probability that played a founding role. Ramsey is not interested in the psychological degree or intensity of belief, but in “a measurement of belief qua basis of action” (67), and hence in probability. The connection between belief and probability, or between belief and the “problem of induction,” is thus constituted entirely differently from the way it appears in Hume, and separately from any examination or measure of feeling, since Ramsey wants to give a resolutely extensional definition of belief that will lead him to a whole reworking of the classical concept of probability. 100 BELIEF of “belief.” The recent evolution of the term leads us to ask whether it is so easy to understand it naturally in a physicomental sense, for example, as an intermediate state that is neither physical not mental but located at the intersection of the two, and capable of causing our actions and discourses. With “belief,” we have a case in which the noncritical transfer into French of contemporary English usage raises a problem (whence the difficulty in translating Ramsey), because the French term croyance is still more difficult to interpret as designating a causal state detachable from its object (“propositional” or other) than is “belief.” More generally, the flexibility of the use of “belief ” in English makes it easier to use in connection with the vocabulary of action than the corresponding terms in other languages. For example, “to act on a belief ” is a common expression in English, but it is difficult to translate into French, and so is the substantive “believer,” which is obviously not equivalent to the French croyant. French philosophers’ recent adoption of the term “belief,” conceived simultaneously as a statement, a disposition, a physical or mental state, a cause of action, and so on, was philosophically possible and fertile only because of the multiplicity and naturalness of the uses of “belief ” in English. The limits of this creativity are seen when we try to find equally pertinent uses in French or German. We can compare this with the difficulty of translating the expression “philosophy of mind” and even of constituting its field, and draw a parallel between the translation of “mind” by esprit and the translation of “belief” by croyance: in both cases, the French term suffers from strong associations with a thematics (at once spiritualist and psychologizing) that overdetermines translations and forces us to resort to a whole series of specific definitions, or even to invent an artificial language. IV. The Grammars of Belief: “Belief”/“Certainty”/Gewissheit Philosophical thought has attempted to divide the Humean conception, to separate assent from belief. In addition to the difficulties raised by causal theories, this has led to a neglect of a fundamental logical problem of belief: that of the nature of assent. Is it an adherence of the mind (the first meaning of “assent,” synonymous with “faith”), a disposition to assert the truth of what the mind conceives, or a “holding-for-true” (fürwahrhalten, usually rendered in translations of Kant and Frege as “assent,” or in French, as assentiment)? Is assent inseparable from judgment and its function, or is it added to judgment, like Russell’s assertion-sign? The grammar of assent is also that of belief, of certainty, and of knowledge (the distinction between savoir and connaissance does not exist in English; see EPISTEMOLOGY. It is this set of language games that has to be examined in order to see that it is really possible to abstract belief from the other terms—not only assent, but also certainty and knowledge—with which it is systematically connected. So is certainty a subjective or an objective state? This question, outlined in Newman, allows us to challenge mentalist and dispositionalist interpretations of certainty, and even of belief, which has a closer grammatical relationship with truth. Wittgenstein) would be relatively easy to describe if it were not complicated by the maintenance, and even the strengthening, of an emotional or psychological dimension of assent, since most contemporary thinkers on belief do not want to go as far as Wittgenstein and Ramsey in eliminating “attitude” and mind from belief. This is a rather curious point: the propositional (or enunciative) conception of belief has been able to coexist, and has even been associated in contemporary reflection on the status of beliefs and their relationships (notably in Davidson), with a repsychologization of assent, which brings back into the mental act or state of assent the “mind” or feeling that had been excluded by the logical program (which was perhaps hopeless) of what one might have called “proposition-belief.” B. Belief and propensity: Functionalism A second trend deals with beliefs as causes of our actions, interpreting beliefs, often in naturalistic terms, as dispositions or propensities to action that are based on habit (see Peirce, who inspired Ramsey). In such a dispositionalist theory, belief is generally conceived as a representation that is, in a sense, rather indeterminate. This view is often defined by referring to Ramsey’s fine expression asserting that belief is a “navigational chart” that tells us how to orient ourselves in our environment. Ramsey is obviously very prudent as to the causal determination that our beliefs might exercise on our actions and statements. Quine, a philosopher who was, however, clearly dispositionalist, wrote, “Manifestations of belief vary extravagantly with the belief and the circumstances of the believer” (The Pursuit of Truth). Considering belief as a representation that has past causes, notably sensorial and semantic, and future effects, notably on action and other representations, contemporary cognitivists have taken up and transformed Ramsey’s attempts. This “representationalist” point of view is found in the cognitive sciences, particularly in functionalism, which defines belief causally as a state brought about by sensorial inputs associated with dispositions to action, and thus stimulating behavioral outputs. Beliefs are supposed to correspond to concrete cerebral states that are not wholly determined (except in extreme functionalist programs) but can be associated with a set of behaviors that may be semantic. This is not the place to enter into the debates surrounding the question of (mental or semantic) holism. It is clear that since the recent development of the sciences of the brain/mind and their invasion of semantic and philosophical questions, we are now seeing a reformatting of the notion of belief, conceived alternatively, and even simultaneously, as a state that is mental, neurophysiological, physical, and so forth. It remains to discover whether the term “belief” can carry this whole new conceptual load, and whether such uses do not involve, as J. L. Austin would say, an excessive abuse of the ordinary use of the word “belief” by overdetermining its natural ambiguity. Because they insist on the passive character of belief and posit it as a source of action and representations, these redefinitions seem once again to revive Hume’s naturalism. But they are problematic. The acknowledged failure of functionalism is only one example of the theoretical difficulties encountered by causal theories of belief. However, that is only a symptom of a fundamental problem that concerns precisely the use BELIEF 101 4 Newman and the typology of “assents” J. H. Newman, in his extraordinary work An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), classifies kinds of assent, distinguishing “notional assent” (theological, inferential in nature) and “real assent” (“or belief” [63], which is stronger, involving unconditional acceptance, and is therefore religious in nature). He then differentiates “simple assent” (106; a more or less conscious mental assertion) from complex assent, which is voluntary and the result of thought, hence a judgment: “such assents as must be made consciously and deliberately, and which I shall call complex and reflex assents” (24). This typology of assents inevitably leads to an examination of the case in which reflective assent involves the assertion of a proposition as true. Let the proposition to which the assent is given be as absolutely true as the reflex act pronounces it to be, that is, objectively true as well as subjectively—then the assent may be called a perception, the conviction a certitude, the proposition or truth a certainty, or thing known, or a matter of knowledge, and to assent to it is to know. Here we must note the difference between “certitude” and “certainty,” the former designating a subjective state, the latter an objective condition dependent on knowledge. It is indeed a grammar of assent that Newman elaborates in his examination of the “language game” of belief and certitude, placing certitude, that is, reflective and thus indefectible assent, above “simple assent.” Religion demands a certitude: “This is why religion demands more than an assent to its truth; it requires a certitude.” Certitude is a mental act, subjective but reflective and founded, of adhesion to a truth (for Newman, a divine truth). The concept thus blends faith and truth in a remarkable way. All certitude is not true; however, when it is false, the error is not in the assent but in the reasoning that leads to it. There is no test for determining whether a certitude is “true,” whether it is a savoir, except the criteria of proof, of intellectual satisfaction and irreversibility. 5 Wittgenstein and certitude: Über Gewissheit / “On certainty” We must start over from Wittgenstein, using his critique of Russell’s concept of assertion and his reworking of Moore’s paradox. I can believe something that is not true, or not believe something that is true. But I cannot say (or rather, it is meaningless to say), “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it” (a). One therefore cannot separate, in the proposition “I believe p,” the proposition p and a (mental or logical) act of assertion. This has several consequences. To say “I believe p” is not a description of a psychological state or a disposition; otherwise (a) would not be paradoxical. “I believe p” is an expression (Aüsserung, Ausdruck [see CLAIM]; these terms could also be translated by “avowal”) like “I hurt.” Believing (croire, glauben) is therefore neither a state (mental, physical, or any other kind) nor a disposition (we cannot determine all its consequences and expressions). Wittgenstein thus challenges the idea that assent is an assertion added, in some way, to a proposition when I assert its truth. If (a) is paradoxical, that is because the statement p somehow produces its own affirmation, and this was already implicit in Ramsey’s “redundant” conception of truth, which preceded the definition of “belief” (cf. TRUTH). This observation ends up causing the implosion of the whole tradition summed up in the belief/assent pair, which is extended to interpretations of belief like that of William James (see Principles of Psychology, II, and The Will to Believe) and that of Russell. According to Wittgenstein, belief is not a feeling or an act of approval with regard to a proposition (no matter how powerful it might be: in James it creates truth), just as an assertion need not be an affirmative supplement, perhaps symbolized by a sign, to a proposition. Daß er das und das glaubt, ergibt sich für uns aus der Beobachtung seiner Person, aber die Aussage “Ich glaube” macht er nicht auf Grund der Selbstbeobachtung. Und darum kann “Ich glaube p” äquivalent sein der Behauptung von “p.” (That he believes such-and-such, we gather from observation of his person, but he does not make the statement “I believe. . .” on grounds of observation of himself. And that is why “I believe p” may be equivalent to the assertion of “p.”) (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I.§504) More generally, “believe” (croire-glauben) is systematically connected with the parent notions of certainty and knowledge, and thus constitute a language game in ordinary language that has to be taken into account. The point is made more precise in Wittgenstein’s last text, Über Gewissheit [On Certainty]. The French croire—like “certitude,” “certainty,” Gewissheit—is connected with savoir, not because it is a (more subjective or more intense) form of savoir, but because of its grammar. There are important grammatical differences between savoir and the other verbs. Saying je sais “p” does not guarantee that p is true, and thus that I really know p; I have to prove, in one way or another, that I know it; je sais “p” can thus be false or misleading, like je promets. “Ich weiss,” sagt man, wenn mann bereit ist, zwingende Gründe zu geben. “Ich weiss” bezieht sich auf eine Möglichkeit des Darthuns der Wahrheit. (One says “I know” when one is ready to give compelling grounds. “I know” relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth.) (Wittgenstein, On Certainty = Über Gewissheit [bilingual edition], trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, §243) On the other hand, “I believe p” and “I am certain that p” always have a subjective truth, and do not require external justification to be accepted. There is an asymmetry between glauben and wissen that corresponds in part to the difference between “expression” and “description,” which is often found in Wittgenstein. Es wäre richtig zu sagen: “Ich glaube . . .” hat subjektive Wahrheit; aber “Ich weiss . . .” nicht. “Ich glaube” ist ein Äusserung, nicht aber “ich weiss.” (It would be correct to say “I believe” has subjective truth, but not “I know.” (continued) 102 BELIEF functions (assertive and propositional, psychological and logical). It was Wittgenstein who most clearly challenged the neo-Humean dogma of the propositional attitude by showing, through the examination of “I believe” at the intersection of two languages, the genuine subtlety of the grammars of assent. REFS.: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London, 1651. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon, 1978. First published 1739. James, William. The Will to Believe. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1897. Vol. 6 in The Works of William James. 8 vols. Edited by F. Burckhardt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–88. . Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1890. Vol. 3 in The Works of William James. 8 vols. Edited by F. Burckhardt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–88. Newman, John Henry. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Reprint. London: Longman, Green and Company, 1903. First published in 1870. Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. 4th ed. rev. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. First published in 1963. Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Ramsey, Frank P. Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics. Edited by D. H. Mellor. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. First published in 1931. . Philosophical Papers. Edited by D. H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty = Über Gewissheit. Bilingual edition. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Reprint. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. . Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. Wright. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. . Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1994. For Wittgenstein, the feeling of certainty attached to “hinge propositions” is not so much a mental state (Seelenzustand; in Über Gewissheit [On Certainty], §356) as a feeling of peace or contentment that is not the unreflective acceptance (Vorschnellheit) that philosophers attribute to common sense, but rather a form of life: “Mein Leben besteht darin, dass ich mich mit manchem zufrieden gebe” (My life consists in my being content to accept many things; trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, Über Gewissheit = On Certainty [bilingual edition], §344). Wittgenstein himself acknowledges having the greatest difficulty in “expressing and thinking” the kind of “lived” certainty (Sicherheit) he refers to, which is neither objective nor subjective, and remarks, “Das ist sehr schlecht ausgedrückt, und wohl auch schlecht gedacht” (That is very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well; ibid. §358–59). Finally, Wittgenstein recognizes that the type of certainty he wants to describe is “something animal” (etwas animalisches, ibid. §359). This is less a nauralistic notation than a reference to the passive dimension of belief, which is in fact an essential element of Gewissheit. To explain it, Wittgenstein has to move into English, using the untranslatable expression “satisfied that”: “We are satisfied that the earth is round” (ibid., §299). Certain propositions’ very special status between Wissen and belief is complicated by various translation difficulties. In French, certitude is closer to croyance than to savoir, whereas German Gewissheit allows Wittgenstein connections with Wissen. In English “certain” allows, like “belief,” very flexible constructions. For example, we have the curious construction “a person is certain to do something,” which means not that the person is (subjectively) certain that he will do something, but that the fact that he is going to do it is certain (cf. “the town is certain to be taken”). Such constructions are possible only in a language game in which “certain” has a vague status located between the subjective and the objective that cannot, any more than “belief,” be divided into two “I believe” is an “expression,” but “I know” is not.) (Ibid., §179-80) But through its relationship with wissen (unlike the French certitude, which is closer to certain than to savoir, and which corresponds to German Sicherheit instead), Gewissheit has a special status. It is not a mental state, but neither is it a state of things. In Über Gewissheit, the term wissen (savoir) paradoxically acquires a status that is both subjective and objective: I am the one who knows. Wann aber ist etwas objektiv gewiss? Wenn ein Irrtum nicht möglich ist Muss der Irrtum nicht logisch ausgeschlossen sein? (But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible. Mustn’t mistake be logically excluded?) (Ibid., §194) Wittgenstein seems to distinguish Sichersein (a grammatically subjective state, but one that is connected with knowledge, §357) from Gewissheit. Propositions that are certain (gewiß) have a particular form of objectivity; they are the ones we do not doubt, not because they have been proved (one cannot prove them, any more than any empirical proposition), but because they are the “hinges” (Angeln) on which our questions and judgments pivot. Propositions that are certain, even when they are empirical, are part of our logic. D.h., die Fragen, die wir stellen, und unsere Zweifel beruhen darauf, dass gewisse Sätze vom Zweifel ausgenommen sind, gleichsam die Angeln, in welchen jene sich bewegen. D.h., es gehört zur Logik unserer wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen, dass Gewisses in der Tat nicht angezweifelt wird. (That is to say, the questions we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.) (Ibid., §341–42) (continued) BERUF 103 guarantor; now he becomes a partner. In the Septuagint, the word is not translated by the usual Greek word, spondê, but by diathêkê [διαθήϰη], which designates the last dispositions made by a dying person, and thus a testament. In turn, it was rendered in Latin by testamentum—which has remained in the “Old/New Testament.” On the other hand, the Vulgate prefers foedus or pactum—Italian patto. English “covenant” comes from French convenir, whose semantic field is different. The biblical covenant is historical; there is, however, nothing like it in Islam, which is why the term “covenant” is not used to describe the pact (mīṯāq [ميثاق ([through which humans, miraculously drawn from Adam’s loins, recognize Allah’s dominion (Qur’ān 7:172). This pact is situated in preeternity. Allah commits himself in no way, but man is bound by the pact even before he can ratify it in his temporal life.