The Grice Club: Thesaurus griceianum -- in twenty volumes, vol. i.

THESAURUS GRICEIANUM H. P. Grice, St. John’s, Oxford Compiled by H. P. Grice’s Play Group Deposited at the Bodliean. ABSTRACTUM. ablatum, absolutum, abnegatum, separatum. Fr. abstrait G. Entbildung Gr. ἀφαίϱεσις – cf. CATEGORY, EPOCHÊ, ESSENCE, FICTION, IMAGINATION, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, NEGATION, NOTHING, REALITY, RES, SEIN, SUBJECT, UNIVERSALS. While the meaning of the term “abstraction” is not a problem in formal logic, where it refers to the operation that makes it possible to construct, using an “abstractor,” a so-called “abstract” expression on the basis of another expression containing one or more free variables, the term’s semantic field in philosophy and the theory of knowledge is more difficult to organize. When Condillac (L’Art de penser I.viii) denounces “the abuse of constructed abstract notions,” and “in order to avoid this problem” asks that we look back to “the generation of all our abstract notions, a method that has been unknown to philosophers, who have sought to make up for it by means of definitions,” his aim is different from that of Aristotle when the latter mentions, under the rubric “abstract entities” or “things that exist in the abstract [τὰ ἐξ ἀφαιϱέσεως],” the forms that mathematical science deals with “by abstracting from their inherent matter” (Aristotle, De anima, 431b.13–17), and from that of Dionysius the Areopagite when he asks to be raised by thought to the superessential “through the aphairesis [ἀφαίϱεσις] of all beings.” Thus when speaking of “abstraction” we must distinguish the problem of the generation of abstract ideas insofar as it involves that of universals, that of the existence or nonexistence of general objects, and that of the practice of abstractive negation in the diverse fields—loglcal, epistemological, theological—where it occurs. The broad range of the term “abstraction” is well illustrated by the modern English usage of the terms “abstracta” and “abstract entities,” which are more or less synonymous with “universals,” and whose extension includes mathematical objects (numbers, classes, sets), geometrical figures, propositions, properties, and relations. Although English-language historiography has a tendency to regard Plato’s Ideas or Forms as the first occurrence of real, non-spatio-temporal “abstract” entities, instantiated or participated in by spatio-temporal objects, it seems more precise to reserve this term for “Aristotelian” ontology by distinguishing, as was done during the Middle Ages, separate entities (separata) from abstract entities (abstracta). I. Epagôgê and Aphairesis, Two Models of Abstraction according to Aristotle There are two models of abstraction in Aristotelianism. The first is that of “abstractive induction” (epagôgê [ἐπαγωγή]), which Aristotle describes this way: So out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated memories of the same thing develops experience; for a number of memories constitute a single experience. From experience again—i.e. from the universal now stabilized in its entirety within the soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity within them all—originate the skill of the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be and science in the sphere of being. (Posterior Analytics, I.§19) The second model is that of mathematical (chiefly geometrical) abstraction, which consists not in “bringing together” (epagein [ἐπάγειν]) similar elements and grouping them under a single concept, but in “stripping” (aphaireisthai [ἀφαιϱεῖσθαι]) the image or representation of a thing of its individualizing characteristics (essentially material). The conflict between these two models is a structural given, a major tendency in Aristotelianism, whose effects made themselves felt throughout the Middle Ages. Philosophers have never ceased to vacillate between the registration of resemblances (the basis of “resemblance nominalism”) and the neutralization of individualizing characteristics that are not pertinent for the type, though some have sought to find unlikely compromises between these poles. . II. The Peripatetic Theory of Aphairesis and Its Medieval Extensions: “Abstractionism” A. The classification of the sciences In his treatise De caelo (III.§1.299a 15–17), Aristotle uses the term “abstraction” to distinguish between “mathematical objects” (ta ex aphaireseôs [τὰ ἐξ ἀφαιϱέσεως], lit. “proceeding from a subtraction”) and “physical objects” (ta ek prostheseôs [τὰ ἐϰ πϱоσθέσεως], lit. “proceeding from an addition”). Nonetheless, it is only in De anima (III.§7.431b.12–16) that Aristotle explains how the intellect conceives abstractions: As for so-called “abstractions” (ta en aphairesei legomena [τὰ ἐν ἀφαιϱέσει λεγόμενα]), the intellect thinks of them as one would think of the snub-nosed (simon [σιμόν]): qua snub-nosed, one would think of it not as separate (ou kechôrismenôs [οὐ ϰεχωϱισμένως]) but as concave (ϰοῖλον), if one thought of it in action (energeiai [ἐνεϱγείᾳ]), one would think of it without the flesh in which the concavity is realized (aneu tês sarkos an enoei en hêi to koilon [ἄνευ τῆς σαϱϰòς ἂν ἐνóει ἐν ᾗ τò ϰοῖλον]): so is it when the intellect thinks of abstract terms, it thinks of mathematical things as if they were separate, even though they are not separate (ou kechôrismena hôs kechôrismena [οὐ ϰεχωϱισμένα ὡς ϰεχωϱισμένα]). In Michael Scot’s Latin translation of Averroës’s long commentary on De anima, the expressions used in De anima III.§4.429b.18–22 and III.§7.431b.12–16 are rendered respectively by “things that exist in mathesis” and “things that are said negatively.” Averroës notes that by “things that are said negatively” Aristotle “means mathematical things,” the word negation meaning “separation from matter.” Negation being, along with separation, ablation, suppression, and abstraction, one of the possible meanings of the Greek aphairesis, Averroës’s exegesis shows that he sees Aristotle’s thought as characterized by a kind of equation: things said negatively = beings separated from matter = mathematical entities. However, mathematical entities are not the only abstract entities. There are also universals, especially the universals of genus, species, and difference. How should we distinguish, from the point of view of abstraction, mathematical entities from universals? This problem occupied Aristotle’s commentators and interpreters from antiquity to the Middle Ages. As they are defined in the Metaphysics (VI.§1.1026a.10–16), the theoretical sciences can be classified in a combinatory manner, depending on whether the entities they concern are “movable” or “immovable,” on the one hand, and “separable” or “inseparable” from matter, on the other hand. But if there is something which is eternal and immovable and separable, clearly the knowledge of it belongs to a theoretical science—not, however, to physics (for physics deals with certain movable things) nor to mathematics, but to a science prior to both. For physics deals with things which exist separately (achôrista [ἀχώϱιστα]) but are not immovable, and some parts of mathematics deal with things which are immovable but presumably do not exist separately, but as embodied in matter (hôs en hulêi [ὡς ἐν ὕλῃ]); while the first science deals with things which both exist separately and are immovable (chôrista kai akinêta [χωϱιστὰ ϰαὶ ἀϰίνητα]). (trans. W. D. Ross, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle) In the eighteenth century, an anonymous work providing an introduction to philosophy, Philosophica disciplina, presents the same tripartite classification in an order that later became standard, an order of increasing “separation” determined by the “ontological value” of its objects: physics, mathematics, metaphysics. The things dealt with by speculative philosophy are either connected with (conjuncte) movement and matter in accord with being and knowledge, or are completely (omnino) separate. If they are considered in the first 1 Aphairesis/Entbildung/Abstractive Negation in mystical theology The term aphairesis [ἀφαίϱεσις] has a mystical or at least spiritual use in Neoplatonism. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite defines it as the instrument of unknowing knowledge (Nicholas of Cusa’s docta ignorantia): For that is what it means, in truth, to see and know and sing superessentially, in a hymn, the Superessential, through the abstractive negation of all beings (pantôn tôn ontôn aphaireseôs [πάντων τῶν ὄντων ἀφαιϱέσεως]), just as those who cause to emerge from a block of marble the statue that was latent in it remove all that prevented, by masking it, the pure vision of the hidden form, and cause the hidden beauty to show itself simply by taking away (kai auto eph’ heautou têi aphairesei monêi [ϰαὶ αὐτὸ ἐφ ’ ἑαυτοῦ τῇ ἀφαιϱέσει μονῇ]). The example of the “internal statue” is also attested in this context in Plotinus’s Enneads (I.6, 9): But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness? 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. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue. (trans. S. MacKenna, The Enneads) Although the translation of aphairesis as “abstractive negation” may seem ambiguous, medieval Latin offers at least four terms—ablatio, abstractio, absolutio, and abnegatio—that correspond to the meaning of the Greek term. In the Latin versions of Mystical Theology (RT: PG) the term ablatio is used to render (a) pantôn tôn ontôn aphaireseôs and (b) kai auto eph’ heautou têi aphairesei monêi. Hilduin: (a) per omnium existencium ablacionem and (b) et hoc in sui ipsius ablacione sola. John Scotus Erigena: (a) per omnium existentium ablationem and (b) et ipsam in seipsa ablatione sola. Jean Sarrazin: (a) per omnium exsistentium ablationem and (b) et ipsam in se ipsa ablatione sola. Robert Grosseteste: (a) per omnium entium ablationem and (b) et ipsam in se ipsa ablatione sola. The transition to the vernacular was accompanied by a few remarkable formulations. In Master Eckhart, the Latin ablatio becomes the Middle High German Entbildung. This is less a translation—ablatio does not “mean” Entbildung—than a transposition of the problematics of aphairesis to a new context, that of the image and the “form,” through the mediation of the term ablatio and its Latin synonyms. The stripping away of all images, the baring of the soul through “negative” askesis, the passage through images and mental copies, all converge under the term Entbildung, so confusing for the inquisitors during Eckhart’s trial that it was translated by a periphrasis, imagine denudari. 3 thesis on which abstractionism is based, explaining that “all concepts derived from things that are not conceived as they are arranged are not necessarily empty and false” (RT: PG, t. 64, col. 84B11–14). The problem assumed here is the one that thirteenth-century Aristotelians would later formulate in the Scholastic adage “Abtrahentium non est mendacium” (Abstraction is not a lie). In the context with which Boethius’s thesis is concerned, the opposition is the Neoplatonic one between authentic concepts (which have a basic reality) and empty or false concepts. The respective paths of abstraction and fiction thus intersect, in accord with an argumentative schema that continues down to the modern period. For Boethius, there is “false opinion” if and only if things are “composed by thought” that cannot exist “naturally joined.” That is the case, for example, when one combines in imagination a man and a horse to produce a Centaur (a traditional example of phantasia [φαντασία] among Greek commentators). Si enim quis componat atque conjungat intellectu id quod natura jungi non patiatur, illud falsum esse nullus ignorat: ut si quis equum atque hominem jungat imaginatione, atque effigiet Centaurum. (If in fact something is composed or combined by thought whose junction nature would not allow, everyone knows that it is false: for example, if the imagination combines a horse and a man, a centaur would be obtained [that is, something false = something that does not exist].) (RT: PG, t. 64, col. 84) But for all that, every concept of a thing “conceived differently from the way it is composed” is not a false concept. Therefore we must distinguish between a false concept and a concept derived from things by abstraction. A false concept, like that of the centaur, does not proceed from a thing conceived in a way different from that in which it is composed. It is not, strictly speaking, a derived concept. On the contrary, resulting from a mental combination of what “cannot” exist combined in nature, one can and must say that it is not derived from any “thing.” In contrast, in the case of a concept derived from things by abstraction, we are dealing with a derived concept that proceeds from a “division” or “abstraction” carried out on an authentically existing thing. Boethius’s abstraction is thus, as in Alexander of Aphrodisias, a separation or dissociation bearing on “incorporeals” (a Stoic term characteristic of Alexander’s syncretic Peripateticism): it is the act carried out by thought when, “receiving the incorporeals mixed with bodies, it divides the former from the latter in order to consider and contemplate them in themselves” (Boethius, ibid.). C. Discriminating attention: Intentio/attentio In the twelfth century, PeterAbelard introduced a theme that was to become central in modern empiricist and nominalist theories of abstraction: attention (intentio, attentio). For Abelard, the role of attention is determined on the basis of the hylemorphic ontology inherited from Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius. Matter and form never exist in isolation: way, then we have natural philosophy; if in the second way, mathematics; if in the third way, metaphysics. And that is why there are only three speculative sciences of things. (C. Lafleur, ed., Philosophica disciplina, in Quatre Introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe siècle) Whatever the classification adopted, one fact emerges: metaphysics deals with “separate” entities (separate substances or “intelligences,” God, “thought about thought,” even intellects traditionally called “poietic” or “active” and “hylic” or “possible”); mathematics deals with “abstract” entities. Where should universals be located in such a scheme? The answer is given, in an epoch-making manner, by Alexander of Aphrodisias, who formulated a doctrine that was to become part of the common Peripatetic language, and that modern interpreters designate by the term “abstractionism.” B. Abstractionism Abstractionism’s starting point is a thesis (extrapolated from De anima III.§7.431b.12–16) stipulating that abstraction is a mental operation that consists in conceiving as separate from matter things that are nonetheless not separate from matter. Two of Alexander’s texts, Peri psuchês [Πεϱὶ ψυχῆς] (De anima liber cum mantissa) and Quaestiones naturales et morales, give a precise elaboration of this thesis in the framework of an opposition between “incorporeal forms that are by themselves immaterial” (for Alexander, the separate Intellect, the unmoved First Mover) and “forms embodied in matter.” The latter, not being “by themselves” intelligible, become intelligible because an intellect “makes them intelligible by separating them from matter through thought, by apprehending them as if they were [separate] by themselves.” Alexander’s thesis does not bear prima facie on mathematical objects, but rather on all sorts of so-called “material” forms (that is, those that are embodied in matter). This is a generalization of the theory in De anima III.§.7, outside the context of mathematics, or rather geometry. This generalization, “abstractionism,” is made possible not only because geometrical possibilities are among abstract intelligibles in general, but also because geometrical intelligibles usually function as examples of abstract intelligibles. Regarding abstract universals’ mode of existence, Alexander of Aphrodisias formulates the main theorem of “abstractionism” this way: “The universal [that is] in all [particulars] does not exist in the same way that it is conceived.” The universal has two modes of being: one in things, the other as conceived. This distinction corresponds to that established by Scholasticism between the universal in re and the universal post rem. It seems to be based on a difference between “being” and “existing,” whose significance and scope remain to be historically determined, and which Alexander expresses, generally, by saying that universals have “being” (einai [εἶναι]) in thought, while ὑπόστασις/ὕπαϱξις has being in particulars (for hupostasis, see Quaestiones naturales et morales, 59, 7–8, and his In Aristotelis Topicorum libros octo commentaria, II.2, and for huparxis, see De anima liber cum mantissa, 90; see also SUBJECT and ESSENCE). At the dawn of the Middle Ages, Boethius, a Latin translator and commentator on Aristotle, formulated the second time considering him as an animal, man, or grammarian, my intellection bears only on characteristics that are part of his nature. However, and this is the second observation, in these cases my intellection does not bear upon all the characteristics present “in”: it ignores some of them in order to make itself present “to.” Thus for Abelard, abstraction is indeed the product of a movement of “focusing attention,” so that “directing one’s attention” toward this or that property of a nature implies that “attention is diverted” from others. This movement of attention has no ontological significance: When I say that I attend to the nature “only” insofar as it has this or that feature, the term “only” refers to the attention and not to the mode of subsisting. (P. Abelard, Logica, Super Porphyrium, 25; trans. P. Spade, “Glosses on Porphyry”) If the word “only” concerned nothing other than the mode of being, my intellection would be empty. But this is not the case: the way in which my intellection takes place does not imply that a given nature “possesses only” a given quality, it means that I “consider it only” insofar as it possesses that quality. Thus we can say with Boethius that in a sense abstractive intellection conceives a thing in a certain way other than it is, that is to say, not in the sense in which it would be conceived with another status, that is, another structure than its own, but in the sense in which the mode of its intellection is different from the mode of its subsistence. Now, intellection depends on my operation. Therefore we have to distinguish (1) the fact of being considered “separately” from that of being considered as “separate,” and (2) the fact of being “considered” separately from that of “existing” separately. III. The Modern Empiricist Critique of Abstraction A. Locke’s “general triangle” The problem of the origin of “ideas” or “abstract notions” is one of the special loci for the expression of “resemblance nominalism,” which is based on the elaboration of the supposed relationship between the use of “names” and the registration of “resemblances.” The standard formulation of resemblance nominalism is given by John Locke in a frequently discussed passage of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed., P. H. Nidditch, 415): But yet I think we may say, the sorting of them under names is the workmanship of the understanding, taking occasion, from the similitude it observes amongst them, to make abstract general ideas. To this description David Hume adds the idea of the name’s “abbreviative” function in relation to the plurality of particular ideas: When we have found a resemblance among several objects, that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degrees of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of they are always “mixed” with one another (Abelard, Logica, Super Porphyrium). However, the mind, or rather the reason, can consider them in three ways. It can “consider matter in itself,” “focus its attention on the form alone,” or “conceive the two as united.” The first two types of intellection are carried out “through abstraction,” the latter “through junction.” In Abelard, Boethius’s “abstractionist” thesis is reformulated: intellection through abstraction is not empty. Two new arguments are advanced: (1) this type of intellection does not attribute to a thing properties other than its own; (2) it limits itself to abstracting from some of them. Such understandings by “abstraction” perhaps seemed to be “false” or “empty” because they perceive the thing otherwise than as it subsists. But that is not so. If someone understands a thing otherwise than as it is in the sense that he attends to it in terms of a nature or characteristic that it does not have, that understanding is surely empty. But this does not happen with abstraction. (P. Abelard, Logica, Super Porphyrium, 25.5–22; trans. P. Spade, “Glosses on Porphyry”) Thus here abstraire means “abstract from, set aside”; or in ordinary language, “ignore” or “not take into account.” This common acceptation of an act that is elsewhere described in terms of the extraction of “incorporeals” from the matter in which they are entangled makes Abelard’s descriptions of the act of abstraction look like anticipations of John Stuart Mill’s. Thus Abelard opposes to the model of extraction basing itself on the presentation of abstraction as abstractive induction, a registration of resemblances or a coincidence of images, and surreptitiously drawing on canonical passages of the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics, a second model of discriminating attention that is present from the outset in the Peripatetic tradition but has been usually supplanted by the first model. It is clear that the model of attention has played a role in certain non-“inductivist” formulations by medieval philosophers, commentators on Aristotle arguing against the thesis of abstraction-induction and for an act of forming or producing the general “in a single example.” This thesis, attested in Averroës, consists in characterizing abstraction as a “neutralization” of a certain set of nonpertinent traits and a “focusing” on a single “pertinent” trait enabling the perception of a “co-specificity” among individuals of the same “type.” In this theory, the intelligible is not drawn from the perception of resemblances among images, it is the product of the “stripping-down” of a particular image. I do not produce the concept of man by abstracting from a plurality of images of particular men, but by stripping a particular image of everything that makes it particular. Averroës’s theory is continued by all the authors who conceive abstraction as possible “on the basis of a single example.” One of its major problems is the obscurity of the analysis of the respective roles of sensation, imagination, the “cogitative” faculty (see INTENTION), and the intellect (possible and active) in the process of “stripping down” the sensible “intention.” As Abelard describes it, the act of abstraction is simpler and less problematic than it is in the Averroist psychology. Here, for once, Abelard is close to common empirical intuitions. His first observation is that if I consider a given individual man as a substance or as a body, without at the same but all and none of these at once?’” He replies that “when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which ought not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral, nor scalenon, nor equicrural.” (§15), and that it is in any case impossible to form an abstract general idea of the triangle on the basis of incompatible elements (§16). There is not and cannot be a general idea of the triangle that is “neither oblique nor rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once” because the conjunction “oblique + rectangular + equilateral + isosceles + scalene” is an “inconsistent idea” (§16). To argue his claim, Berkeley stresses, in the process that Locke incorrectly describes as leading to the formation of a general abstract idea, a different element: attention. We must not confuse “forming a general abstract idea” with paying attention to some quality of a particular figure at the expense of another, producing a theoretical monster by combining the properties of different objects, all of which no one of them could possess, and isolating or setting aside from an object some of the properties that it in fact possesses. And here it must be acknowledged that a man may consider a figure merely as triangular, without attending to the particular qualities of the angles, or relations of the sides. So far he may abstract; but this will never prove that he can frame an abstract, general, inconsistent idea of a triangle. In like manner we may consider Peter so far forth as man, or so far forth as animal without framing the aforementioned abstract idea, either of man or of animal, inasmuch as all that is perceived is not considered. (Principles of Human Knowledge, §16) That is, Berkeley acknowledges the existence of a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. (§10) The terms “combination” and “separation” refer to the very origins of the notion of abstraction as elaborated in the Middle Ages from Boethius to Abelard, in the wake of Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias. Berkeley’s rejection of Lockean abstraction remains in fact immanent in the sphere of what might be called Peripatetic “abstractionism,” so that paradoxically, and obviously without his realizing it, Berkeley opposes to abstraction according to Locke a weak version of the theory proposed by Boethius and his medieval successors. that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is suppos’d to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea, which is immediately present to the mind; the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, but only touches the soul and revives that custom, which we have acquir’d by surveying them. The word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that custom produces any other individual one, for which we may have occasion. But as the production of all the ideas, to which the name may be apply’d, is in most cases impossible, we abridge that work by a more partial consideration, and find but few inconveniences to arise in our reasoning from that abridgment. (A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch) Thus we can say that Locke and Hume defend the same thesis regarding the empirical origin of general abstract ideas. On the other hand, the two philosophers differ on the second problem: the status of “general objects.” In the Essay, Locke refers to a “general idea of a triangle” that is supposed to have apparently incompatible properties: For example, does it not require some pains and skill to form the general Idea of a Triangle (which is yet none of the most abstract, comprehensive, and difficult), for it must be neither Oblique nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, VII.§9, ed. P. H. Nidditch) Locke does not claim that such an object exists. On the contrary, he notes that characterized in this way, a general triangle “is something imperfect, that cannot exist,” and adds that it is “an Idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent Ideas are put together” (it is noteworthy that Coste’s French translation of the Essay omits this passage). Locke’s general abstract triangle, an object that is imperfect in one case, contradictory in another, does not make a claim for existence, to use a concept found both in Leibniz (ad existentiam pretendere) and in Bolzano (“Anspruch auf Wirklichkeit machen,” in Paradoxien des Unendlichen, §13). However, “Locke’s general triangle” has become an obligatory philosophical reference point for all theoreticians of abstraction, drawing toward itself the most diverse critiques from Berkeley and Hume to Husserl. B. Junction, separation / power of representation: Berkeley and John Stuart Mill In his introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge (§13), George Berkeley transposes the problem raised by Locke’s general triangle onto a strictly empirical ground, pretending to inquire whether anyone “has, or can attain to have, an idea that shall correspond with the description that is here given of the general idea of a triangle, which is ‘neither oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural nor scalenon, either by representing at once all possible sizes and all possible qualities, or by representing no particular one at all. Now it having been esteemed absurd to defend the former proposition, as implying an infinite capacity in the mind, it has been commonly infer’d in favour of the latter: and our abstract ideas have been suppos’d to represent no particular degree either of quantity or quality. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.§1, chap. 7) In opposition to this fiction, Hume asserts that while “the mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each,” the mind is capable of forming “a notion of all possible degrees of quantity and quality, in such a manner at least, as, however imperfect, may serve all the purposes of reflection and conversation” (Treatise of Human Nature, I.§1, chap. 7). The first pseudo-requirement of the general abstract idea is thereby met, on a terrain different from that of Lockean abstraction, whereas, by a kind of mirror effect or reversal, the second is abandoned. Hume takes the opportunity to clarify the problem of the genesis of so-called general ideas, explaining how an idea particular in its nature becomes general in its power of representation. This is the place of custom, designated here by its Latin name habitus, through which Hume’s thesis connects both with the medieval thesis of “habitual knowledge” (notitia habitualis) and with its foundation in Ockhamist nominalism: the role of general terms in language as instruments recalling particular contents established by an enduring association and “re-mobilizable” in the form of the connected term: ‘tis certain that we form the idea of individuals, whenever we use any general term; that we seldom or never can exhaust these individuals; and that those, which remain, are only represented by means of that habit, by which we recall them, whenever any present occasion requires it. This then is the nature of our abstract ideas and general terms; and ’tis after this manner we account for the paradox, that some ideas are particular in their nature, but general in their representation. A particular idea becomes general by being annex’d to a general term; that is, to a term, which from a customary conjunction has a relation to many other particular ideas, and readily recalls them in the imagination. (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, I.§1, chap. 7) Recognizing that he is capable of abstracting in a certain sense (Principles, §10), Berkeley distinguishes between two kinds of abstraction: authentic abstraction and pseudoabstraction (the latter being, for him, the one that in Locke presides over the formation of general abstract ideas). Authentic abstraction occurs “when I consider some particular parts or qualities separated from others, with which, though they are united in some object, yet it is possible they may really exist without them.” Pseudo-abstraction occurs when I claim to abstract one from the other or to represent to myself separately qualities that could not exist separately from one another (Principles, §10). The same theory of attention is adopted, mutatis mutandis, by John Stuart Mill. In his book An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, Mill explains that abstraction is not a mental act consisting in the separation of certain attributes that are supposed to compose an object in order to conceive them as detached from all others, but rather an act that, assuming these attributes are conceived as parts of a larger whole, focuses attention on them to the detriment of the others with which they are combined. In his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (III.132–33), Hamilton defines the process of attention as antithetical and complementary to abstraction: an act of volition, called Attention, concentrates consciousness on the qualities thus recognised as similar; and that concentration, by attention, on them, involves an abstraction of consciousness from these which have been recognised and thrown aside as dissimilar; for the power of consciousness is limited, and it is clear or vivid precisely in proportion to the simplicity or oneness of the object. For Mill, who prefers to speak of “complex ideas of objects in the concrete,” rather than of “general concepts,” abstraction consists in attending “exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea” (An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 42). Hume’s critique of Locke follows more or less the same argument as Berkeley’s. However, Hume does not attribute to Locke the whole of the position considered absurd by all the adversaries of the “general triangle.” According to Hume, Locke did not maintain that it is possible to form an idea of an object constituted by the conjunction of quantitative or qualitative ideas that are mutually incompatible and represent them all, but rather than since that is impossible, and since there are nonetheless general abstract ideas, we have to accept the second part of the thesis: the possibility of forming an idea of an object stripped of all its characteristics, or rather an idea of an object that represents none of its quantitative or qualitative properties. The abstract idea of a man represents men of all sizes and qualities, and it can do so only by representing at once all possible sizes and qualities, or none of them in particular. Now, since it has been judged absurd to maintain the first proposition, because it implies an infinite capacity of the mind, writers usually have concluded in favor of the second proposition, and it has been supposed that our abstract ideas represent no particular degree of quantity and quality: The abstract idea of a man represents men of all sizes and all qualities; which ’tis concluded it cannot do, but -- Refs: Abelard. Logica, Super Porphyrium. Edited by B. Geyer. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1973. Translation by Paul Vincent Spade: “Glosses on Porphyry.” In Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals. Edited by P. Spade. New York: Hackett, 1994. Alexander of Aphrodisias. Peri psuchês [Πεϱὶ ψυχῆς] (De anima liber cum mantissa). Edited by I. Bruns. Berlin: Reimer, 1887. . In Aristotelis Topicorum libros octo commentaria. Edited by Maximilianus Wallies. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca. Berlin: Reimer, 1891. . Quaestiones naturales et morales. Edited by I. Bruns. Berlin: Reimer, 1892. Translation by R. Sharples: Quaestiones. London: Duckworth, 1992. .Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. . Posterior Analytics. Translated by G.R.G. Mure. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. First published in 1710–34. Bolzano, B. Paradoxien des Unendlichen. Edited by B. Van Rootselaar. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1975. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Traité de l’art de penser. Paris: Vrin, 1981. First published in Cours d’études, 1769–73. . Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Paris: Alive, 1998. First published in 1748. Translation by Hans Aarsleff: Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hamilton, William. Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic. 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861–66. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1888. Lafleur, C., ed. Philosophica disciplina, in Quatre Introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1988. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited and introduced by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. First published in 1689. Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Vol. 9 in Collected Works. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Examination first published in 1865. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1992. ABSURDUM . The absurd is what is dissonant or is not heard (cf. Lat. surdus), and is defined as a discord or disagreement with the understanding or reason, or with meaning, including the meaning of life. The term thus provides access to three main networks—logical, linguistic, and psychological. We will refer first to the English term “nonsense,” in which these three networks intersect, because it forces us to think about the positive dimension of this dissonance: see NONSENSE. I. The Absurd and Reason The absurd is contrary to reason as a faculty of the mind (see REASON and parts of the articles LOGOS and MADNESS). But beyond this general definition, the absurd designates an actual manifestation of the absence of reason; therefore to define it we have to specify the criteria of the rational, regarding either logical requirements (thus arguing “from the absurd” and reductio ad absurdum are based on noncontradiction; see PRINCIPLE) or practical values (see PRAXIS, PRUDENCE, and parts of PHRONÊSIS). The absurd is thus neither simply the false (see FALSE, TRUTH) nor the absence of good sense (see COMMON SENSE). It designates a radical disconnection with the facts (see MATTER OF FACT, SACHVERHALT). II. The Absurd and Meaning Beyond the logical question of contradiction there is that of the rules of language and the criteria of meaning (see SENSE, HOMONYM, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). The possession or endowment of meaning depends in particular on a syntax; apparently correct sentences can be nonsensical (unsinnig, as opposed to sinnlos [meaningless]). This is the case for metaphysical utterances, according to some philosophers (Wittgenstein, Carnap) who make critical use of nonsense, doing away with propositions and sentences that say nothing (see PROPOSITION). The Absurd and Existence. The absurd, as a sensation of the absence of meaning, is also something experienced (v. ERLEBEN). Defined by Albert Camus as the “mystery and strangeness of the world,” it belongs to the French vocabulary of existentialism, which we have explored in its German source (see DASEIN). It is an ontological affect broadly described in the works of Schelling, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Heidegger (see ANXIETY and, more generally, MALAISE) in connection with “facticity” (see TATSACHE, Box 1). In a specific, positive way, the three components of the absurd—logical, linguistic, and existential—are at work in the French word esprit; “nonsense” refers to a specific form of humor related in English to “wit” and in German to Witz (v. NONSENSE, WITTICISM). v. BELIEF, NOTHING. TAEDIUM. ACEDIA(SPANISH) FRENCH tristesse, acédie GREEK akêdeia [ἀϰήδεια], akêdia [ἀϰηδία] v. MALAISE [MELANCHOLY, SPLEEN], and DASEIN, DESENGAÑO, OIKEIÔSIS, SORGE, VERGÜENZA Through the intermediary of monastic Latin, acedia, “weariness, indifference” (Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum, 10.2.3; RT: PL, vol. 49, cols. 363–69), the rich Greek concept of akêdeia, a privative formed on kêdos [ϰῆδоς], “care,” and bearing the twofold meaning of lacking care (negligence) and absence of care (from lassitude or from serenity), established itself in the Spanish language in such a way as to create through three phonetic variations of a single term—acedia, acidia, accidia—a concept that belongs simultaneously to the communal and the moral registers. The Greek was originally associated with social rituals; in philosophical Latin from Seneca on, it was related to the moral virtue of intimacy, but its contemporary usage has returned it to a collective dimension. The Greek akêdeia is simultaneously part of the register of the obligations owed to others and part of the register of self-esteem: this breadth of meaning determines the later variations. On the social level, the substantive kêdos, “care, concern,” is specialized as early as Homer in two particular uses: mourning, the honors rendered to the dead, and union, family relationship through marriage or through alliance; kêdeia [ϰήδεια] (adj. kêdeos [ϰῆδεоς]) is the attention that must be paid to the dead, as well as the concern and care for allies, characteristic of this relationship of alliance, which is distinct from that of blood and also contributes to philia [φιλία], to the well-being of the city-state (Aristotle, Politics, 9.1280b 36; see LOVE and POLIS); ho kêdemôn [ὁ ϰηδεμών] refers to all those who protect, for example, tutelary gods (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 3.3.21). Akêdês [ἀϰηδής] qualifies in an active sense, in a positive way, someone who is exempt from care and anxiety (Hesiod, Theogony, 5.489, apropos of the “invincible and impassive” Zeus, but also, negatively, the serving woman or negligent man; Homer, Odyssey, 17.319; Plato, Laws, 913c); in the passive sense, from the adjective acedo, from Lat. acidus, “bitter, acid”) with the deprivation and need to which the poor are subject. The opposition between acedia and amor is often found in writers of the golden age, notably Cervantes: Mírala si se pone ahora sobre el uno, ahora sobre el otro pie, si te repite la respuesta que te diere dos veces, si la muda de blanda en áspera, de aceda en amorosa. (Should she be standing, observe whether she rests now on one foot and now on the other, if she repeats her reply two or three times, if she passes from gentleness to austerity, from asperity to tenderness.) Among the Spanish moralists of our time, Miguel de Unamuno and Pío Baroja seem to be the last to use the term acedia in this way, while at the same time situating it among those that express collective feelings of distress or spiritual decline: the absence of care for oneself thus appears as a phenomenon of society and culture that does not dare to confront the demands of the transformation of modern identity. This crisis situation makes acedia an equivalent of routine, the outcome of a tradition received in an uncritical way, incapable of bringing new personal and collective resources to bear on it. The tristeza de las cosas, the “sadness of things,” an expression of the feeling of ephemeralness, is a formula that, even though it goes back to late romanticism in Francisco Villaespesa, adds an aesthetic dimension. It involves the naturalization or loss of aura discussed by Walter Benjamin, who draws on Baudelaire’s notion of “spleen” and on the phenomenology of the consciousness of loss or collective distress that follows the great upheavals of modernization (Das Passagen-Werk). The sociological reception of acedia moves, starting with the interwar period, in two directions: the first works on the economic causes of contemporary distress and on the forms of revolt that follow from it (Deleito y Piñuela), the other on postmodern aesthetic pleasure (Eugenio d’Ors), with notions such as tedio opulento (opulent boredom). it designates a person who is neglected (Odyssey, 20.130) or abandoned without burial (like Hector, Iliad, 24.554). How can the lack of care, akêdeia, become a virtue of the reflexive type? The twofold sense of the term (transitive: care for others; reflexive: care for oneself) is maintained in the meaning of the Spanish word acedia. The first movement toward the ethics of intimacy is determined by practical philosophy’s reflection on the finitude of human life. The event represented by death produces a sadness that seems to have no consolation. The moral reaction to situations in which one finds oneself fearing such a finitude is presented in an active and critical way in the ethics developed by Seneca in the Consolations. Grace and purity can temper sadness (“Marcum blandissimum puerum, ad cujus conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia” [Marcus, this boy, so gentle, before whom no sadness can last]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 18.4). But above all, it is the effort of reason and study that can overcome any sadness (“liberalia studia: illa sanabunt vulnus tuum, illa omnem tristitiam tibi evellent” [these studies will heal your wound, will free you from any sadness]; De consolatione ad Helviam, 17.3). This view of internal control is foundational for a style rooted in the culture of the South: the sober acceptance of death, and more generally, of finitude. Acidia is conceived as having a twofold psychological and theological meaning. First of all, it is a passion of the animus and is therefore one of the four kinds of sadness, the other three being pigritia, “laziness,” tristitia, “sadness” properly so called, and taedium, “boredom.” In Christian monasticism of the fourth and fifth centuries, especially in Cassian and the eastern desert fathers, acedia is one of the seven or eight temptations with which the monks might have to struggle at one time or another. Usually mentioned between sadness and vainglory in a list that was to become that of the “seven deadly sins,” it is characterized by a pronounced distaste for spiritual life and the eremitic ideal, a discouragement and profound boredom that lead to a state of lethargy or to the abandonment of monastic life. It was designated by the expression “noonday demon,” which is supposed to come from verse 6 of Psalm 91. Thomas Aquinas opposes acedia to the joy that is inherent in the virtue of charity and makes it a specific sin, as a sadness with regard to spiritual goods (Summa theologica, IIa, IIae, q. 35). Fray Luis de Granada adopted this idea (Escritos espirituales, chap. 13), placing acedia among the seven deadly sins. If it is equivalent to the more widespread terms tedio (taedium) and pereza (pigritia), that is because it is the result of an excess of dispersion or idle chatter, and of the sadness and indifference (incuria) produced by the difficulty of obtaining spiritual goods. Thus desolación (desolatio) is supposed also to be a term related to acedia, and is often employed in spiritual and mystical literature—from Saint John of the Cross to Ignatius of Loyola—and it subsists in the vocabulary of moral sentiments. The secular sense that the word has acquired in modern Spanish can make acidia or acedia the result of a situation of crisis and social conflict. In his Historia de España, Juan de Mariana connects the common sense of acedia (derived REFS.: Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin: The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by John Ormsby, revised by J. R. Jones and K. Douglas. New York: Norton, 1981. De Granada, Luis. Chap. 13, in Escritos espirituales. Vol. 3 of Obras completas. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988. De Mariana, Juan. Historia de España. Saragosse: Ebro, 1964. Translation by John Stevens: The General History of Spain. London: R. Sare, 1699. Deleito y Piñuela, José. El Sentimiento de tristeza en la literatura contemporanea. Barcelona: Minerva, 1917. D’Ors, Eugenio. Oceanografia del tedio. Barcelona: Calpe, 1920. Meltzer, Françoise. “Acedia and Melancholia.” In Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Villaespesa, Francisco. Tristitiae rerum. Madrid: Imp. Arroyave, 1906. PERSONATUM. personare, persona -- PERSONA: ACTOR, THESPIAN, COMEDIAN FRENCH acteur, personnage, comédien GERMAN Schauplatz, Schauspieler, Akteur, Person GREEK prosôpon [πϱόσωπον], hupokritês [ὑποϰϱιτής] ITALIAN attore, comico, maschera LATIN persona, actor, histrio v. ACT, MIMÊSIS, PATHOS, PERSON, PRAXIS, SUBJECT In seventeenth-century French, the word acteur still referred both to the dramatic character who acts and whose actions the play “represents” (in conformity with the notion of mimêsis praxeôn [μίμησις πϱᾶξεων] in Aristotle’s Poetics), and to the person who plays the character onstage and whom we call the “actor.” The character was subsequently differentiated from the actor. In Italy, it was only in the eighteenth century, under the probable influence of the development in French, that the word attore, which up to that point had signified solely the character who acts, took on the meaning of a stage actor, whereas the word personnaggio was established to 10 ACTOR what Aristotle calls hupokrisis [ὑπόϰϱισις], the art of the tragic actor. The term comes from hupo-krinomai [ὑπо-ϰϱίνоμαι], “to reply,” which initially designated a rejoinder in a play, then came to indicate declamation and dissimulation: [Delivery (autê, sc. hê hupokrisis)] is, essentially, a matter of the right management of the voice to express the various emotions—of speaking loudly, softly, or between the two; of high, low, or intermediate pitch; of the various rhythms that suit various subjects and just as in drama the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political institutions. (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.1, 1403b26–35, in Complete Works, ed. Barnes) But this definition concerns only the forms of vocal expression, and not gestures, whose importance Aristotle recognizes, including among the poets: The poet should remember to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes [πϱὸ ὀμμάτων]. As far as may be, too, the poet should even act his story with the very gestures [tois skêmasin (τоῖς σϰήμασιν)] of his personages. Given the same natural qualifications, he who feels the emotions to be described will be the most convincing; distress and anger, for instance, are portrayed most truthfully by one who is feeling them at the moment. (Aristotle, Poetics 1455a22–32, in Complete Works, ed. Barnes) This helps to explain a certain hesitation among Latin authors regarding the term best suited to render this form of eloquence specific to rhetorical actio. Pronuntiatio, Quintilian notes, is generally considered equivalent to actio, but the former seems to refer to the voice (voce), the latter to gesture (gestu), for Cicero defines actio sometimes as “a form of speech” (quasi sermonem), and sometimes as “a kind of physical eloquence” (eloquentia quandam corporis). However, in his Institutio oratoria (11.3.1), Quintilian distinguishes within actio two elements that are the same as those found in oratorical delivery (pronuntiationis): voice and gesture (vocem atque motum). Thus the two terms can be used interchangeably. But starting with De oratore, Cicero uses chiefly actio, a preference that corresponds to the importance he places on visible and thus silent forms of physical eloquence in the techniques of persuasion. Redeveloped on the basis of a different conception of the action/passion pair that comes out of Descartes, the problematics of the rhetorical delivery were to play a fundamental role in a seventeenth-century theory of art. Theoreticians of art constantly use the word “action” in a technical, rhetorical sense, that is, in the sense of a physical actio, as in Charles Le Brun’s lecture on the expression of the passions: “Since it is true that most of the passions of the soul produce bodily actions, we must discover what physical actions express the passions, and what an action is” (lecture delivered on 7 April 1668, in Mérot, Les conférences). . designate what French calls a personnage and English a “character.” All of these shifts in meaning take place within the semantic field of the Latin language as it was constituted in the domain of rhetoric. The ambiguity and evolution of the word “actor” are in fact related to the term’s double heritage, theatrical and rhetorical: on the stage, the actor is the person who puts on a voice-amplifying mask (prosôpon [πϱόσωπоν]) and thus takes on the traits of the character he represents. In this sense, his action is a passion, he is inhabited by a character. But the actor is also an orator, whose actio, gestural and vocal, is an esteemed art: he acts out his text and his character, which without him would have no effect. He is then an actor in the active sense of the term, the coauthor of the effect produced. I. Actio and Hupokrisis Latin has several terms to designate the stage actor: histrio, actor, comoedus, tragoedus, etc. Histrio already includes all the pejorative values of the French word histrion or the English “histrionic.” It is opposed to actor, the stage actor who is trained in the great discipline of rhetoric and who can serve as a model for the orator. We see this in Cicero’s esteem for the actor Roscius, for whom he composed a plea. These exchanges between oratory art and dramatic art “reformed” in accord with rhetoric were implied by the identity of the terms that Latin used in referring to the theater and the courtroom. Actio designates the art of the actor, that of the orator, and a legal suit; actor designates the actor ennobled by his rhetorical training and the plaintiff in a legal case; agere is applied both to a procedure (agere causam) and to a theatrical role (agere fabulam), or to a social role assumed with responsibility and vigor. Actio (delivery), in the rhetorical sense of the term, belongs to what might be called corporeal eloquence. Cicero defines it this way: “Est enim actio quasi corporis quaedam eloquentia, cum constet e voce atque motu” (In fact, delivery is a kind of elocution of the body, since it consists in voice and gesture, De oratore 17.55). Even though delivery is only one of the five parts of rhetoric (the four others being invention, disposition, elocution, and memory), Cicero accords it first place among the means of persuasion: “Actio, inquam, in dicendo una dominatur. Sine hac sumus orator esse in numero nullo potest” (Delivery, I assert, is the dominant factor in oratory; without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any account at all, De oratore 3.56.213). It is through actio that the orator succeeds in moving his audience, in acting upon it, and thus in winning its support. The role attributed to oratorical actio is thus inseparable from the place accorded in Ciceronian rhetoric to movere, that is, to emotion or passion. To the emotionally moving body of the orator corresponds the deeply moved body of the audience. In this sense, the orator has much to learn from actors, as Cicero recognizes in speaking of Roscius. But the orator is not only an actor, he is also an auctor. As the author of his discourse, he is not a simple imitator who limits himself to reproducing gestures and intonations. His actio is effective only because it is the expression of a passion whose effects the orator is the first to feel. In this conception of rhetorical actio, we see te mark of Aristotle’s influence. As Cicero defines it, actio corresponds to -- Prosôpon, persona: From theater to grammar v. I / ME / MYSELF, SUBJECT. Since Homer, “[πϱόσωπоν,” etymologically “what is opposite the gaze,” has designated the human “face” in particular, and then, metaphorically, the “façade” of a building, and synechdochically, the whole “person” bearing the face. Another remarkable semantic extension is that of the theatrical “mask” (Aristotle, Poet. 1449a36), leading in turn to the meaning “character in a drama” (Alexandrian stage directions for dramatic works regularly included the list of the “πϱόσωπα τоῦ δϱάματоς”), and then to a narrative. Its Latin equivalent, “persona,” refers in its turn to the mask that makes the voice resonate (“personare”), before it designates a character, a personality, and a grammatical person (Varro). The meaning of the compound “πϱоσωπо-πоιεῖν,” “to compose in direct discourse,” that is, to make the characters speak themselves—clearly shows that the dramatic meaning of prosôpon had a particularly great influence on the history of the word. In any event, it seems quite likely that when grammarians adopted prosôpon to designate the grammatical “person,” they were thinking of the dialogue situation characteristic of the theatrical text, which makes use of the alternation “I-you”: the face-to-face encounter between person(age)s is rooted in the category of the “person.” Whereas terms like “tense” (χϱόνоς) and “case” (πτῶσις) are attested before they appear in strictly grammatical texts, this is not the case for “prosôpon” used to refer to the “person” as a linguistic category. On the other hand, in the earliest grammatical texts, and in a way that remains perfectly stable later on, prosôpon is adopted to describe both the protagonists of the dialogue and the marks, both pronomial and verbal, of their inscription in the linguistic material. In fact, the main difficulty encountered by grammarians regarding the notion of prosôpon seems to have been how properly to articulate reference to real persons occupying differentiated positions in linguistic exchange (emissor, recipiens, alius) with reference to the person as a grammatical mark. This difficulty occurs notably in a quarrel about definition. In the Technê attributed to Dionysius Thrax (Grammatici Graeci 1.1 [chap. 13, p. 51.3 Uhlig = 57.18 Lallot]), the verbal accident of prosôpon is defined as follows: Пϱόσωπα τϱία, πϱῶτоν, δεύτεϱоν, τϱίτоν· πϱῶτоν μὲν ἀφ’ оὗ ὁ λόγоς, δεύτεϱоν δὲ πϱὸς ὃν ὁ λόγоς, τϱίτоν δὲ πεϱὶ оὗ ὁ λόγоς. There are three persons: first, second, third. The first is the one FROM WHOM the utterance comes, the second, the one TO WHOM it is addressed, the third, the one ABOUT whom the emissor is communicating. This minimal definition clearly sets forth the two protagonists of the dialogue, distinguishing them by their position in the exchange, and introduces without special precaution a third position, characterized as constituting the subject matter of the utterance. The parallelism of the three definitions — a simple pronoun for each “person” — masks the lack of symmetry between the (real) first and second persons and the third person; the latter, as Benveniste pointed out in “Problèmes de linguistique générale,” may very well not be a “person” (or ‘self’) in the strictest sense (cf. Grice, “Personal identity.”) This definition, which remained canonical for several centuries, is attacked by Apollonius Dyscolus, who completed it as follows – after Choeroboscos [Grammatici Graeci 4.2 (p. 10.27 Uhlig)], a Byzantine witness to the Alexandrian master): πϱῶτоν μὲν ἀφ’ оὗ ὁ λόγоς πεϱὶ ἐμоῦ τоῦ πϱоσφωνоῦντоς, δεύτεϱоν δὲ πϱὸς ὃν ὁ λόγоς πεϱὶ αὐτоῦ τоῦ πϱоσφωνоυμένоυ, τϱίτоν δὲ πεϱὶ оὗ ὁ λόγоς μήτε πϱοσφωνοῦντος μήτε πϱоσφωνоυμένоυ. The first person is the one FROM WHOM the utterance comes meaning me, the emissor, the second, the one TO WHOM the utterance is addressed meaning the recipient himself, the third the one ABOUT WHOM the utterance speaks and who is neither the emissor nor the recipient. Apollonius’s arrangement contributes useful explanations. Each “person,” including the first two, can be the subject of the utterance. The third is defined negatively as being neither the first nor the second (which implicitly opens up the possibility that it is a “person” only in an extended usage, insofar as it does not need to be competent as an emissor or recipient). The overlap of enunciation and enunciated is explicit. There is a first person when the utterance refers to the enunciator-source, a second person when it refers to the addressee, and a third when it refers to someone or something else. Despite the incontestable advance represented by Apollonius’s revision, it nonetheless leaves an ambiguity regarding the designatum of prosôpon. Are we talking about extralinguistic entities, “persons” engaging in dialogue or not, or are we talking about linguistic entities, “accidents” of the conjugated verb and the pronomial paradigm (personal pronouns)? Apparently the former, which is surprising coming from a grammarian who prides himself on correcting another grammarian. In fact, there is hardly any doubt that in Apollonius, this ambiguity is still attached to the term prosôpon. Consider the following text, taken from Apollonius’s Syntax 3.59 (Grammatici Graeci 2.2 [p. 325.5–7 Uhlig]): τά γὰϱ μετειληφότα πϱόσωπα τоῦ πϱάγματоς εἰς πϱόσωπα ἀνεμεϱίσθη, πεϱιπατῶ, πεϱιπατεῖς, πεϱιπατεῖ. The persons who take part in the act of walking are distributed into persons: I walk, thou walkest, he walks. We can interpret this to mean that in a group of persons — extralinguistic entities — who are walking, every utterance concerning the walk will elicit the appearance of verb endings distributing the walkers among the three grammatical persons: such is the alchemy of Apollonius’s prosôpon. unity of the character represented by the thespian onstage is always interrupted by the reminder of the invisible text, and the thespian, by his bodily presence, recites and plays the text of another, absent person—of an author who has created the character. This vague and troubling difference between the thespian and the character is at the heart of Jean Rotrou’s Véritable Saint Genest (staged in 1645), a play written in the tradition of the play-within-a-play. A pagan thespian, Genest, plays the role of a Christian martyr, Adrian, in a play. In the scene where he represents Adrian’s conversion, the thespian suddenly becomes the character he is playing. “Heaven has made me its actor [acteur],” he says, the word acteur having here the twofold sense of someone who acts on behalf of an idea or a religious belief, and of a thespian who acts on the scene of the great theater of the world. Struck by grace, the thespian leaves his role to express himself in his own name: “This is no longer Adrian speaking, it is Genest who is expressing himself; / This play is no longer a play, but a truth / Where, myself the object and the actor [acteur] of myself, / I profess a law” (vv. 1324–30). The thespian becomes the author of his own text at the very moment in which he is acted upon by another text and speaks in the name of another author, the divine author. Playing on the reflexive structure of the play-within-a-play, Rotrou was able to represent in this drama the indeterminacy that characterizes all relations between the thespian and his character, as well as the considerable stakes that flow from this and that go so far as to involve, as an absent character, the supreme author. III. The Inventio of Italian Actors: Attore, Comico, Maschera At the beginning of the seventeenth century, attore still indicated the person who acts, who does things. The Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (1612) gives facitore as a synonym of attore, with, on the one hand, a reference to God as the “attore della batitudine” (the author or origin of beatitude), and on the other hand, a reference to the plaintiff, the person who pleads a case—a meaning still in use in modern Italian. One of the reasons that the Italian language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not actualize the meaning contained in the Latin word actor to designate the thespian has to do with the existence, starting in the middle of the sixteenth century, of troupes of professional thespians who wrote their own texts. The formation of these troupes is connected with the birth of the commedia dell’arte. These thespians had left the limited domain of actio in order to practice in that of inventio as well. In fact, the expression il comico, whose initial meaning indicates a relationship to the theater, includes the productive aspect of theatrical texts. In their work, these thespians practiced dispositio, elocutio, and memoria, thus covering the whole range of rhetorical creation. In addition, they were capable of representing on the stage any of the period’s theatrical genres. That was what distinguished them from the cruder players called buffoni, mimi, istrioni, and comedianti. Several theoretical texts written by professional thespians, such as Francesco Andreini’s Le bravure del Capitano Spavento (1607) or Niccolò Barbieri’s La supplica (1634), emphasize this difference, seeking to II. The Actor: Character and Thespian In seventeenth-century France, an acteur was primarily the character who is active, who is involved in a dramatic action (in accord with the etymology: acteur is derived from the Latin agere, “to do”). He is thus the “dramatic character” as such. It is in this sense that the words acteur and personnage, used more or less interchangeably, appear at the head of the list of the dramatis personae at the beginning of each play, but with a clear preference for the word acteur. In contrast to the imaginary acteur conceived by the author, the thespian is the person who mounts the boards and whose craft consists in acting out the drama in the broad sense of a “theatrical play composed in accord with the rules of the art” (RT: ¬Furetière, Dictionnaire universel) that the seventeenth century accorded to this expression. It is striking to see that it is precisely in the seventeenth century that the word acteur appears in French—though rarely as a synonym of comédien (actor). The word comédien remains connected with the profession of representing onstage, whereas the word acteur refers to the character involved in the dramatic action as well as to the person who plays him. Pierre Corneille employs both acteur and personnage in speaking about the characters in his plays, and François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, in his book La pratique du théâtre, entitles one of the chapters “Des personnages ou Acteurs, et ce que le Poète doit y observer” (251). The art of the thespian, the playwright, and theatrical literature in general was greatly stimulated by the rediscovery of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and the cult of Cicero, as well as by the seventeenth-century renovatio studii. This powerful network of Jesuit schools, which based its pedagogical activity on a Christianized version of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and on the Ratio studiorum, the basic document of Jesuit education, trained an audience familiar with the rhetorical disciplines. Eager to win the esteem of courts and academies, the thespians of the seventeenth century tried to distinguish themselves from more primitive players by emphasizing their complete mastery of oratorical delivery. A French thespian of the seventeenth century, and especially a tragedian, found himself in a situation analogous to that of the orator: not having a mask, he had to rely solely on the evocative magic of verbal figures to play his role. By studying characters and their bodily expression, gestural expression was also governed by customs of an ethological nature. Moreover, the ascetic simplicity of the tragic stage between 1630 and 1660 coincided with an increasing interest in questions of eloquence and rhetoric. The stage became a testing site for the powers of rhetorical discourse left to its own devices. The thespian’s delivery was thus almost as important as the power of the verbal figures that the playwright put into the text for him. This emphasis on delivery reveals the idea of an imminent power in the text that is reflected in the distribution of roles; only an excellent actor would be capable of realizing this potential in performance. But if the character’s written part contains a potentiality that has to be actualized, the thespian has to exhibit onstage this passage from written words to his body. Both the character and the thespian are therefore acteurs in the strong sense of the term. One of them acts on the other. Thus the fictive ACTOR 13 IV. Schauplatz, Schauspieler, Akteur, Person Unlike French and Italian, German accentuates, in the word Schauspieler, the idea of the person who creates and shows a play, a theatrical illusion. The word has been used in German since the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the actor was also designated by the expression die darstellende Person—the representing person. Starting in the first half of the eighteenth century, in German as in Italian, under the influence of French, the expressions der Akteur and die Aktrice were used, replacing the word Komödiant, which had taken on the pejorative sense of a person who feigns. But this use of the word Akteur is lost in modern German, where it still designates the person who is at the head of a political action. The word Schauspieler was definitively established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It derives from Schauspiel, used since the end of the sixteenth century in the general sense of shows presented before an audience, but also in the more restricted sense of theatrical representation. Schauspiel is connected with the word Schauplatz, which translates the Greek theatron [θέατρον], designating a platform set up and intended for juridical activities, plays, or ceremonies. Since the seventeenth century, this word has also had the sense of a dramatic setting. Thus at the beginning of Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius (1646): “Der Schauplatz ist Constantinopel” (The scene is Constantinople). In the same period, the word Schaubühne was used to designate a wooden scaffolding or platform set up for a show. But in the seventeenth century, people spoke simply of Bühne. In religious history, Schauplatz means “Calvary,” and its eschatological sense refers to the earthly site where the end of the world will be revealed. In his Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin wrote a few famous pages on this last meaning. The Schauplatz of the baroque period is for him the place where history is secularized and where the temporal process settles into a spatial image. As for the theatrical character, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is called die Person, die spielende Person. According to the Grimms, this usage derives from translations of the word persona, “mask,” which appears in Latin comedy (RT: Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v.). German thus does not distinguish between the real person and the fictive person. Marco Baschera Jacqueline Lichtenstein (I) ACTUM. “Act” comes from Latin actum, the nominalized passive past participle of agere, which means “to push ahead of oneself,” like the Greek agein [ἄγειν] (cf. agôn [ἀγών], struggle, trial); the Latin verb is differentiated, on the one hand, from ducere, “walk at the head of” (like Gr. archêin [ἄϱχειν]; cf. PRINCIPLE), and on the other hand from facere, “to do,” insofar as it implies duration, activity, and achievement rather than specific, instantaneous action (thus agere aetatem, vitam, pass time, life). Actus, the fact of moving, an action or the result of action, is a doublet of actio (same etymology), but the duality allows significant specializations: actus designates the action of a play (which Aristotle designates by the words prattein [πϱάττειν] or pragmata [πϱάγματα]) or its subdivision into acts, whereas actio is juridical and rhetorical (court action, oratorical action, pleading). Thus “actor” refers both to the character in a play and the person who plays that character: see ACTOR; cf. MIMÊSIS, PASSION. The vocabulary of “act” is drawn from three great pairs of oppositions—ontological, ethical, and pragmatic—which constantly intersect with each other. I. Ontology: Potential and Act 1. In Latin, the distinction between potentia and actus is used to translate the Aristotelian distinction between dunamis [δύναμιϛ] and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια]. Actus translates the two terms of the Greek differentiation between ergon [ἔϱγον] and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], which French has difficulty rendering without using two roots, œuvre for ergon (from *werg-; cf. Ger. Wirkung) and acte for energeia: for the Greek, see FORCE, Box 1, PRAXIS, Box 1, ESSENCE, TO BE, WORK. 2. On the ontological gradation between potential and act, see, in addition to the Aristotelian definition of movement (FORCE, Box 1): ESSENCE, ESTI, TO BE, PROPERTY; cf. TO TI ÊN EINAI and DYNAMIC. It culminates in the conception of god as “pure act”; see INTELLECTUS, and cf. GOD. On the way in which the Latin vocabulary of actuality is thus transposed into the register of reality, see REALITY (with the study of the doublet Realität/Wirklichkeit) and, for the Italian system, ATTUALITÀ; cf. RES. 3. Moreover, dunamis signifies both “potentiality” as the “not yet” of the act, and the “power” that results from it: on this difference, which Latin renders by means of the two terms potentia and potestas, see DYNAMIC and POWER [MACHT; cf. HERRSCHAFT]. 4. Potentiality can thus become not the absence of the act, but rather its eminent quality and the mark of the human, which makes the act a work. As for the “failed act” whose success depends precisely on the fact that it is failed, see INGENIUM, Box 3; cf. UNCONSCIOUS, WITTICISM [NONSENSE]. II. Ethics: Action and Passion 1. The distinction between action and passion has been one of the matrices of ethical thought ever since the philosophical schools of antiquity, which privileged the first term, though they sometimes interpreted it differently (one can be active with regard to oneself in the form of peace of mind); see PATHOS, PASSION, and cf. LOVE, WISDOM. The emergence of the vocabulary of the will as a desiring faculty intersects with the same problematics; see WILL, WILLKÜR, and LIBERTY (ELEUTHERIA, Box 2). 2. An exploration of the main systems valorizing action by extending moral action to historicity and politics will be found under PRAXIS and VIRTÙ. The Russian postupok [поступок] designates the ethical act carried out by a person (licˇnost’ [личность]; see RUSSIAN), and is characterized by responsibility and commitment; see POSTUPOK. Finally, the Fichtean neologism Tathandlung, which is irreducible to an Akt, beyond the simple paradigms of tun, handeln, and wirken (do, act, work), and beyond the Kantian Faktum (fact), reduplicates the posing of an act/ fact by the achievement of what is posed, in accord with the equation I = I (see TATSACHE) and opens the way to pragmatics. III. Pragmatics: Speaking and Acting 1. Contemporary developments, in particular, in analytical philosophy, have led to a reorganization of fields and disciplines around a problematics of action that owes much of its power to the polysemy of the English term “agency”; see AGENCY; see also AFFORDANCE. The domain of thought and language is its necessary condition and element; see SPEECH ACT; cf. INTENTION, SENSE, TRUTH. 2. On the way in which a philosophical idiom tends to develop its own pragmatics, we might refer to the example of Italian, which, even when it translates German idealism, preserves or renews a thematics of the actual (effetuale) truth of the thing that refers to its event-character rather than to its universal historicity or the performativity of discourse; see ATTUALITÀ. v. DASEIN, FACT, SOUL Refs.: Benveniste, Émile. “Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe.” Chap. 18 in Problèmes de linguistique générale, 225–36. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Translation by M. A. Meek: Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Grammatici Graeci. Edited by A. Hilgard, R. Schneider, G. Uhlig, and A. Lentz. Leipzig: Teubner, 1878–1902. Reprint, Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1965. Lallot, Jean. La grammaire de Denys le Thrace. Paris: Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1998. Refs.: Aristotle. Complete Works. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Benjamin, Walter. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Translation by J. Osborne: The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB, 1977. Brecht, Bertold. Schriften zum Theater. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1957. Translations by J. Willett: “A Dialogue about Acting” and “A Letter to an Actor.” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Fumaroli, Marc. L’âge de l’éloquence. Paris: Droz, 1980. . “Le statut du personnage dans la tragédie classique.” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre (July–Sept. 1972): 223–50. Goldoni, Carlo. Commedie. Edited by N. Magnini. Turin: Unione Tipografica-Editrice Torinese, 1971. ennoble the thespian’s profession and to present him in a positive light as an expert in the rules of rhetoric. The constraints of the theater market did not allow these professional thespians to produce the same play at the same place over an extended period of time. They were forced to produce new kinds of show. This is what was called at the time playing all’ improvviso or a soggeto. This technique clearly distinguished the Italians from other European troupes. The Italian thespians were accustomed to raiding and dismembering rhetorical treatises or literary texts in order to extract from them parti, roles, which they would then slip into a kind of personal collection that each thespian kept concerning a single type of character (primo amoroso, servant, old Venetian merchant, etc.). They distinguished two aspects in the character, one that changed from one play to the next, and another that remained invariable and was called la maschera. The use of half-masks in leather emphasized the fixed aspect of characters. The masks determined the way a personage dressed, spoke, gestured, and so on, but not the character traits, which varied in each representation, depending on the different plots and the agreement of the other thespians. The secret of the “masks” of commedia all’improvviso resided in a constantly varying, subtle equilibrium between the indetermination of the character of a personage and the rigid predetermination of all the other elements. Thus the thespian becomes the author of a text that is created at the very moment of its representation and vanishes immediately afterward. His representation consists in verbal action similar to that of the orator, where what is said is both subject to strict rules and completely uncertain. We can understand why Molière and Shakespeare took such an interest in the technique of thespians who were able to combine the repetitive elements of dramatic characters with a great versatility of forms. But soon the creative conjunction of the thespian and the author tended to become no more than an empty form. That is when there emerged a new conception of the thespian as attore, that is, as someone whose craft consisted in representing a text given in advance. Thus Carlo Goldoni, in his preface to the first collection of his comedies published in 1750, reproaches “mercenari comici nostri,” that is, the professional thespians in Italian troupes, for altering and disfiguring texts “recitandole all’improvviso” (Goldoni, Commedie, 66). Goldoni was one of the first to speak of attori, clearly distinguishing the latter from comici. In his comedies, he reintroduced individual psychology in his characters by doing away with the fixed character traits of the maschere. The theatrical reform begun by Goldoni gave the Italian theater a literary and “authorial” orientation; the thespian came after the fact to incarnate and actualize a text written by an author. From that point on, the word attore designates the thespian in general, the expression il comico being reserved for actors playing comic roles. Yet the productive aspect of the person who writes a comic theatrical text has remained. This meaning is preserved in the English “comedian,” which designates a particular type of actor-author who performs alone on a stage, with “actor” designating those who perform in works made for the theater or the cinema—but there are many actors who lay claim to the tradition of the comedian, such as Woody Allen. trivium on the basis of the modalities of aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics, which, in another work, he describes as follows: “The science of the mode of sensory knowledge and exposition is aesthetics; to the extent it aims at the slightest perfection of sensory thought and discourse, it is rhetoric; to the extent it aims at their greatest perfection, it is universal poetics” (Aesthetica, 533). However, as though the project of a universal poetics seemed too restricted, Baumgarten abandons this definition in the subsequent editions of his Aesthetica, ending up with, in the same paragraph, a formulation that is supposed to attest to the complete autonomy of aesthetics (7th ed., 1779): “The science of the sensible mode of knowledge and exposition is aesthetics (logic of the lower faculty of knowledge, philosophy of the graces and the muses, lower gnoseology, the art of the beauty of thought, art of the analogon of reason).” This is more or less the definition with which the Aesthetica of 1750 begins: “Aesthetics (or theory of liberal arts, lower gnoseology, art of the beauty of thought, art of the analogon of reason) is the science of sensible knowledge.” II. The Term “Aesthetics” in Latin, Greek, German, and Other Languages This characterization of aesthetics, which Baumgarten thinks of as global and able to subsume under a single concept not only beauty and artistic taste but also perceptual experience, does a poor job of masking a plurality of definitions whose coherence is, certainly, far from being clear. In fact, Baumgarten reveals the cognitive dimension of aesthetics by playing on the amphibolous character of the word, at the cost of redundancies that come close to pleonasm—“theory,” “science of knowledge,” “gnoseology.” He Latinizes the Greek adjective aisthêtikos as aesthetica, but he is also thinking of sentio, to perceive by the sense and (or) to perceive by the intellect, which is a way of reminding us, following Aristotle, that there are no aisthêta without noêta and that they cannot be dissociated, as Kant reminds us when he refers to the Greek adage: aisthêta kai noêta (the sensible and the intelligible, what can be sensed and what can be understood). But even this notion Baumgarten formulates, in his own way, in Latin: aesthetics is ars analogi rationis (art analogous to reason). Thus, an equivocation affects the term “aesthetics,” one which is all the more formidable since it is not evident, which reveals itself to be a source of difficulty and confusion even among those who use it and thus ratify its usage. While translators in European languages overcome their distress at a term with uncertain roots by trusting either IndoEuropean (aiein, to perceive) or Greek (aisthanomai, to feel), of which the Latin sentio is an acceptable equivalent according to Baumgarten, things are different for philosophers and thinkers who venture out to explore the field of aesthetics, which, as it is badly circumscribed, turns out to be unlimited. Kant is certainly one of the first to have attracted attention to the specific, typically Germanic usage of the term aesthetics. In the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason (trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, 1998) devoted to the “Transcendental Hédelin, François, abbé d’Aubignac. “Des personnages ou Acteurs, et ce que le Poète doit y observer.” In La pratique du théâtre [1657], edited by Hans-Jörg Neuschäfe. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wilhelm Fink, 1971. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. La couleur éloquente. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. Translation by E. McVarish: The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Rhetorical Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Mérot, Alain. Les conférences de l’académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996. Rotrou, Jean. Saint Genest and Venceslas. Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2011. Souiller, Didier, and Philippe Baron. L’acteur en son métier. Dijon, Fr.: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1997. Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. London: Methuen, 1988. Taviani, Ferdinando. Il Segreto della commedia dell’arte: La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII et XVIII secolo. Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982. AESTHETICS FRENCH esthétique GERMAN Ästhetik (n.), ästhetisch (adj.) GREEK aisthêtikos [αἰσθητιϰός] LATIN aesthetica v. ART, BEAUTY, EPISTEMOLOGY, ERSCHEINUNG, GOÛT, PERCEPTION, SENSE Because of its etymology, the term “aesthetics” does not appear to pose any special problem of translation in its transposition from one European language to another. Created by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), the neologism Ästhetik seemed, at least in the mind of the German philosopher, not to suffer from any ambiguity, and European philosophers, aware of its Greek origins and its insertion into Latin philosophical vocabulary, spontaneously adopted it widely. However, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it stirred fascination and mistrust in equal measure. The problems, variable from one language to another and from one country to another, concern both the delimitation of the field of knowledge bearing on art and the beautiful, as well as the specialization of knowledge, methods, and objects relative to the study of the sensible. The epistemological coherence that seems to guarantee the nearly identical circulation of a term that is perfectly identifiable from one language to the next—whether English or Romanian, modern Greek, Spanish, Italian, and so forth—thenceforth appears to be an illusion. I. Baumgarten and the Epistemology of a Science of the Sensible Starting from the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction—later taken over by the Church Fathers—between aisthêta (sensible things or facts of perception) and noêta (intelligible things or fact of intelligibility), A. G. Baumgarten has no doubt, as early as 1735, in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnulis ad poema pertinentibus, of the existence of a science of the perceptible world. “Noêta are the objects of Logic, aisthêta are the objects of aisthêtikê, or Aesthetics” (§116). At least, this is how the philosopher, fifteen years before the publication (in Latin) of his Aesthetica (between 1750 and 1758), clarifies the object of a discipline that does not exist yet and that he attempts to define later, with a few variations. These variations aim to determine progressively the epistemological framework of aesthetics. In the first edition of his Metaphysics (1739), Baumgarten reconstructs, along the lines of the scholastic tradition, a kind of AESTHETICS 15 whom the division of cognition into aisthêta kai noêta was very well known). Hegel evinces a similar suspicion regarding the German Ästhetik and doubts it can be adequately translated into English or French: “To us Germans the term is familiar; it is not known to other peoples” (Vorlesungen über Ästhetik [1935]; trans. Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art). He clarifies that the French say théorie des arts or belles-lettres, while the English, he says, referencing Henry Home’s (1690–1782) work Elements of Criticism, classify aesthetics under “criticism.” In his Aesthetics, Hegel finds the term “aesthetic” improper (unpassend) and superficial (oberflächlig). He mentions the neologism “callistics,” constructed from the Greek to kallos (beauty), which some had offered as an alternative, but finds it inadequate (ungenügend), since it refers to the beautiful in general and not the beautiful as artistic creation. Restricted to a term that has already “passed over into common speech” (in die gemeine Sprache übergegangen), he takes care to clarify that he does not mean to deal with the science of sense or sensation, nor with feelings such as pleasantness or fear, but with the philosophy of art, and notably with the philosophy of fine art (Philosophie der schönen Kunst). Aesthetic,” he indicates the peculiar meaning of the word, which, he points out, only the Germans use to refer to the philosophy of the beautiful. Implicitly, he indicates here the difficulty of a transposition of the word into a foreign language. Kant, hoping to make this particular meaning of aesthetic more precise (“science of all the a priori principles of perception”), notes the following (156): The Germans are the only ones who now employ the word “aesthetics” [Ä sthetik] to designate that which others call the critique of taste [Kritik des Geschmacks]. The ground for this is a failed hope, held by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science. But this effort is futile. For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed; rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former. For this reason it is advisable again to desist from the use of this term and to save it for that doctrine which is true science (whereby one would come closer to the language and the sense of the ancients, among 1 Ästhetik It is as a direct transcription of the German Ästhetik that the word esthétique enters a French dictionary for the first time, at the end of the eighteenth century. The Supplément à l’Encyclopédie, which was published in 1776, provides as a “new term” a note “Esthétique,” which is simply a quasi-literal translation of the article “Ästhetik” in J. G. Sulzer’s dictionary, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General theory of fine arts) (1771). The word, documented in French as early as 1753, but not to be found in the RT: Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in either the 1740 or 1762 editions, is thus elevated to lexicographical dignity. The translator of the note, who remains anonymous, comes from the milieu of the Berlin Academy, which played a central role in the exchanges between Germany and French encyclopedists. Sulzer may thus be considered a major agent in the linguistic exchanges in the domain of fine arts, and especially in the introduction of the Baumgartian theory into France. His name, somewhat eclipsed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s coming into fashion, is nevertheless regularly cited by French theorists of art, such as Quatremère de Quincy. Besides this simple lexical importation, it is the whole project of the Allgemeine Theorie that is thus presented and transposed in the Supplément, since Sulzer had made this note one of the matrices of his dictionary. The word’s presence in French dictionaries was nonetheless a short one. By 1792 it had disappeared from the section of the Encyclopedie méthodique devoted to fine arts. It does not make itself at home in French until the mid-nineteenth century, notably with the publication in 1843 of T. Jouffroy’s Cours d’esthétique. The comparison between the German note “Ästhetik” and its French translation in the Supplément also betrays some characteristic displacements of emphasis and interest. Though he remains relatively faithful to the original text, the translator nevertheless tends to attenuate Sulzer’s criticisms of J.-B. Du Bos, and, on the other hand, to temper the praise of Baumgarten. Where the German presents Baumgarten as “daring,” in a heroic gesture, to lay the first stones of this new science of aesthetics, the French, more skeptically, describes him as “hazardant [sic]”. In general, the initial balance of the German note between speculative analysis of the essence of art and concrete examination of its different techniques seems to be turned upside-down in the French version, where the practical part is made much more precise, more dynamic, and more programmatic than in the German version. Aesthetics, in the French version, thus remains, up until the Supplément, more directly related to an empiricist and practical approach. It presents itself as an examination of the technical modalities of the arts, rather than as a speculative analysis of the foundations of art. Thus, from the first crossing of the border, a Franco-German divide emerges with regard to the word “esthétique,” which the passage of time quickly accentuates. Élisabeth Décultot REFS.: Jouffroy, Théodore. Cours d’esthétique. Paris: Hachette, 1843. Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chysostome. An Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. Translated by J. C. Kent. New York: Garland, 1979. Saint-Girons, Baldine. Esthétique du XVIIIe siècle. Le modèle français. Paris: P. Sers, 1990. Sulzer, Johann Georg. “Ästhetik.” Pp. 35–38 in vol. 1 of Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künster, 4 vols. Edited by F. von Blankenburg. Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben and Reich, 1786–1787. First edition published in 1771. . Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch. Edited by N. Kovaleff Baker and T. Christensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Watelet, Claude-Henri, and Pierre-Charles Lévesque. Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure (Paris: Prault, 1792). The same concern with differentiating the domains of knowledge falling under aesthetics prompts twentieth-century philosophers to specify the nature and orientation of their work. “Aesthetics” thus loses its relational and interdisciplinary character, straddling different human sciences, and comes to mean rather a sort of generalist and referential metatheory or metadiscourse. Thus, Theodor Lipps takes care to clarify, as a subtitle, that his Ästhetik (1923) should be understood as a psychology of the beautiful and of art (Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst). To be sure, he adopts from the very beginning the classic definition, or at least the most commonly agreed-upon one, of aesthetics as the science of the beautiful: Aesthetics is the science of the beautiful and thus implicitly also that of the ugly. An object is qualified as beautiful if it is suited to arouse or to attempt to arouse in me a particular feeling, notably that which we have the habit of calling the “feeling of beauty.” Immediately afterward, however, he claims peremptorily that, on one hand, aesthetics may be considered as applied psychology, and on the other, that the historical science of art (historische Kunstwissenschaft) ventures into aesthetics only on pain of betraying its most essential scientific calling. Lipps is coming up against the difficult question of the status of aesthetics, considered sometimes as a general philosophical and theoretical discipline, sometimes as a discipline that is itself a part of another more general one, along with art criticism, art history, sociology, psychology, ethnology, and other disciplines concerning the arts as well as the experience that goes along with them. To mitigate this kind of difficulty, Max Dessoir (1906) attempts in the very title of his book to establish a double name, unlikely to be acceptable in another language: Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Aesthetics and the general knowledge of art). IV. Semantic Indeterminacy This operation that aims to join two distinct approaches—for example, the Hegelian type of philosophy of art and the more scientific and descriptive theories of a Riegl or a Wölfflin— within one discipline, may be congenial to German-speaking philosophers and aestheticians. The English and especially the French, however, are less convinced as to the pertinence of this doubling up within a rather cumbersome expression, especially since the translation of allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft by “general science of art” or science générale de l’art does not indicate in English or in French any particular method or definite object. In The Essentials of Aesthetics (1921), George Lansing Raymond dwells, as it happens, on the strangeness of importing the German word Ästhetik into English. By analogy with “mathematics,” “physics,” “mechanics,” and “ethics,” he justifies the plural use of “aesthetics,” rather than the singular “aesthetic”—(“this term seems to be out of analogy with the English usage”)—by the fact that the word refers to a plurality of disciplines in which similar methods produce “greatly varying results.” According to the author, the singular ending “ic” would wrongly relate “aesthetic” with “logic” or “music,” specific departments centered on a Hegel puts himself assuredly and deliberately at the opposite extreme from the Kantian double meaning of “aesthetic,” meaning both a study of a priori forms of perception and a critique of taste, the study of the feelings of pleasure and pain related to the faculty of judgment, whose domain of application is, according to Kant, art. Nevertheless, we know the paramount importance he gives to nature to the detriment of art in general and fine arts in particular. Similarly, the Hegelian notion of “aesthetics,” a term imposed by use and not fully accepted, distances itself from the sense given to it by the Kantian and Rousseauist Friedrich Schiller, in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where it is primarily a question of the “aesthetic disposition of the soul” (ästhetische Stimmung des Gemüts) in its aspiration to the unity of beauty, morality, and liberty. Finally, one would search in vain for a commonality of meaning, intention, or project between Hegel’s philosophy of art and the aesthetics of Jean Paul, the author of Vorschule zur Ästhetik (1804, 1813) (translated into English as Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics), where aesthetics is defined by the author himself as a “theory of foretaste” (Vor-Geschmackslehre), despite the fact that the term Geschmackslehre is deliberately formed as an equivalent of “aesthetics.” There is thus little chance, as Hegel points out, that the simple utterance of the word “aesthetic,” used as a noun or adjective, would mean the same thing in English, French, and German. Jean Paul, not without perspicacity and humor, brings up such distortions when he sharply criticizes the pseudoscientific constructions of his contemporaries and compatriots (“the modern transcendental aestheticians”) and offers an ambiguous homage to “English and French aestheticians” (he cites Home, Geattie, Fontenelle, and Voltaire), for whom, he adds, “the artist at least gains something.” “Each nation has its own aesthetic,” Jean Paul seems to lament, and he denounces the division of student-aestheticians of Leipzig (prettily named the “sons of the Muses”) according to whether they were French, Polish, Meissenish, or Saxon, on the model of the Parisian Collège des Quatre Nations (Horn of Oberon). III. Aesthetics and Kunstwissenschaft The term “aesthetics” seems from the nineteenth century on to be as necessary on epistemological and scientific levels as it seems superfluous on the linguistic one. Faced with this term, European translators, carried away by the urgency of transposition, can easily follow in Hegel’s footsteps and make use of the obvious etymological transposition of aisthêtikos into their own languages. However, on pain of missing important theoretical and philosophical issues, the translator must make sure of the field covered by the generic “aesthetics.” He has, more or less, the choice between “philosophy of art,” “philosophy of the beautiful,” “theory of taste,” “theory of art,” “theory of fine arts,” “theory” or “science” or “critique of the beautiful,” “theory or science of art,” not to mention some of their close equivalents from other languages, such as théorie des beaux-arts, Wissenschaft vom Schönen, Kunstlehre, Kunstkritik, or Kunstwissenschaft, the last of which is not always fully distinguished from Kunstgeschichte. in the world independent of the fact that they are perceived. The perception of affordances uses the information provided by perceptual systems because of their privileged resonance with a determinate environment. Action plays a major role in perception insofar as movement makes it possible to extract perceptual constants from the perceptual optical flux to which it gives rise. The word “affordance” poses a serious problem for the translator. English “to afford” (to do something) has the twofold sense of having access to sufficient resources and being in a position to act without risk. These two meanings are exploited in Gibson’s definition: “The affordances of the environment are what it provides to animals, what it gives them or furnishes them, for better or for worse” (Gibson, “Theory of Affordances”). Thus “affordances” could be rendered in French by ressources insofar as the English term covers both the targets of action and the obstacles or dangers connected with a given situation. The predominant usage is currently to retain the neologism transposed into French. Joëlle Proust REFS.: Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. . “The Theory of Affordances.” In Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by R. E. Shaw and J. Bransford, 67–82. New York: Wiley, 1977. Noë, Alva. “Experience and the Active Mind.” Synthese 129, no.1 (2001). AGENCY 17 unique object, in which scientific method produces similar results. From that point on, an expansive definition of “aesthetics” understood in the sense of a “science of beauty exemplified in art” allows the author to devote his reflection to themes and domains that come mostly from what Germans call Kunstwissenschaft and Kunstgeschichte, and the French sciences de l’art, rather than theoretical and philosophical aesthetics. A pure invention of an eighteenth-century philosopher, the term aisthêtike—linguistically irreproachable, as it happens— will no doubt retain some semantic indeterminacy for a long time, despite its apparent translatability. However, though it does not explain by itself how the shift from the Greek verb aisthanomai to the philosophy of the beautiful or the science of art came about, it is a continual reminder of the attempt to understand how “humble” sensations, objects of a gnoseologia inferior, form in man the ideas that he then reincarnates in what he calls “works of art.” Marc Jimenez REFS.: Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Aesthetica. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. First published in 1750. Dessoir, Max. Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Enke, 1906. Second edition published in 1923. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Jean Paul. Vorschule zur Ästhetik. Berlin: Holzinger, 2013. First published in 1804; second edition published in 1813. Translation by M. R. Hale: Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In vol. 6 of Kants Werke. Berlin: Gruyter, 1968. Book first published in 1781. Translation and editing by P. Guyer and A. Wood: Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lipps, Theodor. Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. Leipzig: Voss, 1923. Munro, Thomas. “Present Tendencies in American Esthetics.” In Philosophic Thought in France and the United States. New York: University of Buffalo-Farber, 1950. Raymond, George Lansing. The Essentials of Aesthetics. New York: Putnam, 1921. Schiller, Friedrich von. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Edited by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. GIBSON’S AFFORDANCE. Fr. disponibilité [of a resource], exploitabilité [of a situation] GERMAN affordanz v. DISPOSITION and ACT, ANIMAL, BEHAVIOR, CONSCIOUSNESS, LEIB, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, VORHANDEN. “Affordance” is a neologism coined by James J. Gibson to account for the way in which every organism perceives its environment. Ecological psychology (Gibson, Ecological Approach) and the theory of knowledge derived from it (Noë, “Experience”), contest the representationalist conception. According to the latter, the perceiving subject must form mental representations because he has access only to fragmentary and changing sense data. The ecological theory maintains on the contrary that what humans and animals perceive is affordances, that is, possibilities of acting, that exist objectively AGENCY. Fr. action, agent, agence, agir v. ACT, and ACTOR, ENGLISH, FORCE, INTENTION, LIBERTY, PATHOS, PRAXIS, SOUL, SPEECH ACT, SUBJECT The word “agency” appeared in English in the seventeenth century. When it was introduced into philosophy in the eighteenth century, it was initially used in a classically Aristotelian way, opposing action and passion, agent and patient. “Agency” can designate action (in the physical sense) or what modifies action (in contrast to being the object of action), or what modifies the agent (in contrast to the patient). Thanks to the operation of various expressions in English, “agency” came to sum up the difficulties of defining action and, in the contemporary period, of what makes it possible to act, no longer as a category opposed to passion, but as a “disposition” to action, a disposition that upsets the active/passive opposition. In agency, the agents themselves are no longer only the actors/authors of action; instead, they are also caught up in a system of relations that shifts the place and authority of action and modifies (or even completely muddies, notably in its use in economic theory) the definition of action. In its contemporary uses, “agency” is thus the point where the dualisms action/passion and agent/patient are erased and also where the subject/agent is defined in a new way. The French translation of “agency” as agir (which has now become standard and is made possible by the specificity of the infinitive in French but which introduces a unilaterally active character), or even as puissance d’agir (which strengthens still further the classical tonality by implicitly correlating agency/puissance with action/acte), remains the self may seem an undue restriction on agency they are in fact a prerequisite of agency” is translated as “[L]es limites du moi peuvent sans doute nous apparaître comme des restrictions indues de notre pouvoir d’action mais ces limites sont en fait la condition même de l’action.” The same fluctuations can be seen throughout the argument. In this transfer of the contemporary concept of agency into French, we must pay particular attention to the choices made by Paul Ricœur, who has discussed this question on several occasions in a dialogue with analytical philosophers’ “semantics.” Ricœur began by retaining the word “agency” in its original language: Richard Taylor, dans son œuvre récente, Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966) a développé toutes les implications de cette crise de l’idée de causalité lorsqu’elle est rapportée à l’agent et à son agency. L’agency de l’agent implique un certain nombre de traits diamétralement opposés à ceux que la notion moderne de cause a conquis. (Richard Taylor, in his recent work, Action and Purpose, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966) has developed all the implications of this crisis of the idea of causality when it is related to the agent and his agency. The agency of the agent implies a certain number of characteristics that are diametrically opposed to those that the modern notion of cause has taken on. (La sémantique de l’action) This allows Ricœur to move immediately to the apparently substitutable expression “la causalité de l’agent,” whose specific characteristics he discusses. On the other hand, in his later works, and especially in Soi-même comme un autre (which includes a long discussion on Davidson under the subhead “Troisième étude: une sémantique de l’action sans agent”), he explicitly proposes to translate “agency” by puissance d’agir. But he notes: “On pourrait attendre, sous ce titre, une analyse du pouvoir-faire de l’agent. Il n’en est rien; il est seulement question du critère distinctif des actions proprement dites (deeds and doings) par rapport aux événements qui ne sont que de simples occurrences (happenings), lorsque semble faire défaut le caractère intentionnel [Given the title one might expect an analysis of the agent’s power to act. There is nothing of the sort; instead it is solely a matter of the distinguishing criterion of acts in general (“deeds and doing”) in relation to events which are but mere happenings, when the intentional character appears to be lacking].” Ricœur’s translations or non-translations are thus always at the same time claims made regarding the essence of the question of the relationships between the “semantics of action” and the “philosophy of ‘subjectivity,’ ” which the uses of “agency” appear to unveil. An interesting counterexample is provided by reading a more recent essay by Vincent Descombes on “action” (“L’action”). Not only is Descombes familiar with analytical philosophers and discusses their common presuppositions (the pass uniformly given to the psychology of “will” to the advantage of sentences expressing the relationship of the subject to his action) and divergences (the structural point of view versus the causal point of view), but he clearly writes blind to such a development in usage and continues to be linked with a classical view of action and the agent. In many cases, “agent” would be more easily translated by sujet (and, in turn, “agency” translates sujet better than “subject” does). However, we should note that the French word agence is an adequate translation of “agency” when it designates, in a derived usage, an entity or institution endowed with a power of acting. This institutional usage (e.g., Agence nationale pour l’emploi, Central Intelligence Agency) is revealing, in both languages, of a complexity in the mode of action: agency (or the agent) being that which acts, but on behalf of another. “Agency,” which is today widely used in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, especially in America, is probably untranslatable in the primary, strict sense of the term; that is, it is impossible to make it correspond to one and the same term in French translations of the texts in which it figures. This problem is connected to syntactical properties of English that have been systematically exploited in constituting a “semantics of action.” Thus, examining this problem, and the more or less satisfactory solutions that translators and commentators have provided, may direct our attention toward a feature peculiar to the way in which a nominalist tradition that goes back at least as far as Hume, and that is illustrated today in the works of the post-Wittgensteinians, deals with the field of subjectivity. As often happens, the existence of alternative “paths” in modern philosophy proves to be inseparable from the interaction between concept and language. I. Examples of the Polysemy of “Agency” We can introduce the problem by examining Michael Sandel’s book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which was translated into French by Jean-Fabien Spitz. Sandel devotes a major portion of his work to discussing what he calls two moral “theories,” such as those developed in particular by John Rawls: “certain theories of community and agency at the foundation of justice,” which Spitz translates (or glosses?) as “certaines théories de la communauté et de la qualité d’agent au fondement même de la théorie de la justice” (Le libéralisme). A little further on, Sandel continues his discussion by saying that “[w]e need therefore to assess Rawls’ theory of the good, and in particular his accounts of community and agency, not only for their plausibility ,” and this time Spitz simplifies, rendering “agency” as agent: “Il nous faut donc évaluer la théorie rawlsienne du bien, et en particulier son analyse des notions de communauté et d’agent, non seulement pour apprécier leur plausibilité .” The subhead “Agency and the Role of Reflection” is rendered as “La qualité d’agent et le rôle de la réflexion,” the term “agency” once again being simplified to “agent,” which makes it possible to achieve the stylistic compression of a hendiadys (“For Rawls, the account of agency and ends falls under the conception of good” [Pour Rawls, l’analyse de l’agent et de ses fins est du ressort de la conception du bien]). But further on, Spitz has to resort once again to a gloss that makes explicit the position he has taken with regard to the term “agency”: “[T]he bounds of the self must be antecedently given in order to assure the agency of the subject, its capacity to choose its ends” is rendered as “[L]es limites du moi doivent être données au préalable pour garantir que le sujet soit bien un agent et qu’il ait la capacité de choisir ses fins.” However, immediately afterward, Spitz is forced to completely change his paradigm: “[W]hile the bounds of AGENCY 19 I begin with observing that the terms of efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connection, and productive quality, are all nearly synonymous; and therefore it is an absurdity to employ any of them in defining the rest. Upon the whole, we may conclude that it is impossible, in any one instance, to show the principle in which the force and agency of a cause is placed. (Treatise of Human Nature, pt. 1, §3) In Hume, causal agency is subject to skepticism for the same reason as causal connection: the common error made by philosophers, according to Hume, is to believe that the causal connection is in things and not in the mind (on “mind,” see SOUL) and to seek its first nature. Hume and British empiricism thus make possible the first situation of action within anthropology—by showing that it is a matter of mental, and not physical or metaphysical, connections. Such an anthropologization of action marks the term “agency.” Nonetheless, Hume closely connects agency and causality, and this has continued to characterize theories of action down to the contemporary period. But philosophers, who abstract from the effects of custom , instead of concluding that we have no idea of power or agency, separate from the mind and belonging to causes; I say, instead of drawing this conclusion, they frequently search for the qualities in which this agency consists. (Treatise of Human Nature, pt. 1, §4.) “Agency” as a Decentering of Action Contemporary thinking about agency questions the possibility of conceiving action in general terms of cause and effect or action and reaction. It is inseparable from an anthropologization, as is shown by the frequency of the expression “human agency” in contemporary philosophy in English (especially the philosophy of action and moral philosophy): agency is supposed to be what characterizes, among the events of the world, what belongs to the order of human action. Davidson posed the problem very clearly in his already classic essays on action and particularly in his article “Agency” (which was translated by P. Engel as “L’Agir,” where Engel translates “agency” sometimes by agir and sometimes by action): What events in the life of a person reveal agency; what are his deeds and his doings in contrast to mere happenings in his history: what is the mark that distinguishes his actions? Agency is a quality of events that makes them into actions, but it is not necessarily their material cause (even if Davidson ends up defining action in causal terms and, fundamentally, identifying it with the event). The difficulty of framing a general definition of agency is precisely the difficulty of classifying specific events under the category of action (ibid.): Philosophers often seem to think that there must be some simple grammatical litmus of agency, but none has been discovered. I drugged the sentry, I contracted malaria, I danced, I swooned, Jones was kicked by me, with English expressions in mind. That is why it is tempting to reconstitute behind one or another of his varied formulations the presence of a term like “agency” (which he never mentions) or the possibility of retranslating them by this term. But this is not always the case, and “agency” is here remarkably translated and absorbed into an overall view of the history of thinking about action. II. “Agency” as a Principle of Action “Agency” nonetheless has its own history. In The Invention of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind observes that the first occurrence of the term “agency” in its philosophical sense is found in Samuel Clarke’s Lectures. What Clarke calls the “Power of Agency or Free Choice” is the ability to act in accord with one’s knowledge of eternal ideas. Schneewind adds: The Oxford English Dictionary shows only one earlier use, in 1658, which is not clearly a philosophical one. It then gives a citation from Jonathan Edwards dated 1762, although Berkeley, Hume, and Price had all previously used the term. In 1731 Edmund Law, referring to Clarke, described the word as “generally including the power of beginning Thought as well as Motion.” (King, Essay, p. 156n). In classical English thought, “agency” designates a general and undefined property of acting closely connected with causality and efficacy: agency is thus the active force, the effective cause of action (cf. Ger. Wirkung, which differs from Handlung, action). In Hobbes, for instance, the conception of agency is classically Aristotelian, as is shown by the perfect agent/patient symmetry that structures his whole reflection on action: As when one body by putting forwards another body generates motion in it, it is called the AGENT; and the body in which motion is so generated, is called the PATIENT; so fire that warms the hand is the agent, and the hand, which is warmed, is the patient. (Elements of Philosophy, pt. 2, in Complete English Works, chap. 9) Thus agency is what characterizes action and the person who performs it and is related to the real and effective cause of action. For example, God may be the source of the agency of an agent, even if the latter seems to be the one performing it. [T]he agency of external objects is only from God; therefore all actions, even of free and voluntary agents, are necessary. (Hobbes, Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in Complete English Works) Here we find an interesting distinction between the author (as the subject of the will and of responsibility) and agency, the effective cause of action. It is clear that these classical uses of “agency” are indebted to an action/passion dualism and to a causal interpretation of action (that identifies action with physical efficacy). Hume, who denies the possibility of knowing any causal connection in action, thus clearly asserts the synonymy of agency and force or efficacy, and, even in his skepticism, identifies agency with causality: 20 AGENCY of human action—they do not come, as it were, after the fact, but are implicated in it. The variety of excuses shows the impossibility of defining agency generally, in a way other than in the detail and diversity of our modes of responsibility and explanation. Excuses show us, in a sense, what an action is. An action is precisely something that one can excuse, something one does not do exactly. Here we should refer to Austin’s underestimated article “Three Ways of Spilling Ink” and to the conclusion of his article “Pretending”: . [i]n the long-term project of classifying and clarifying all the possible ways of not exactly doing things, which has to be carried through if we are ever to understand properly what doing things is The existence of excuses shows, beyond the multiplicity and “humanness” of agency, its passivity, since an excuse always seeks to say in a certain way: “I’m not the agent.” As Stanley Cavell says apropos of Austin: Excuses are as essentially implicated in Austin’s view of human actions as slips and overdetermination are in Freud’s. What does it betoken about human actions that the reticulated constellation of predicates of excuse is made for them—that they can be done unintentionally, unwillingly, involuntarily, and so on? It betokens, we might say, the all but unending vulnerability of human action, its openness to the independence of the world and the preoccupation of the mind. (A Pitch of Philosophy) We see that the thematics of the excuse complicates rather than simplifies that of agency. Austin notes, for example, that we do not use just any excuse with just any action. One can excuse oneself for lighting a cigarette “out of habit,” but a murderer cannot excuse himself by saying that he acted “out of habit.” Finally, Austin says (“A Plea for Excuses”) there is a limit to the acts for which any given excuse will be accepted: “standards of the unacceptable” are a question intimately related to the nature of agency. Just as there is no universal excuse, so there is no type of the action, and agency is in no way a general qualification of action but rather the mark of its indefinability and its decentering. The interest of Austin’s thought on this point is that in any case it excludes—as does Wittgenstein in his writings on philosophy and psychology—the facile solution that consists in defining action, and a fortiori (human) agency by the presence of a metaphysical or subjective will, or of a “backstage artiste.” The problematics of “A Plea for Excuses” consists not only in saying that I am not the master of my actions, but even that I am not their author or subject. Thus agency forms an interesting couple with “performance,” another untranslatable term. The duality of success and failure that Austin establishes regarding the very special actions, neither active nor passive, constituted by speech acts, may define action and agency better than the Aristotelian categories that are invoked to explain and translate the word “agency.” Agency upsets the active/passive pair as well as the cause/ effect pair. The passive, whose role is much more important Smith was outlived by me: this is a series of examples designed to show that a person named as subject in sentences in the active or as object in sentences in the passive, may or may not be the agent of the event recorded. One way of defining action and agency would thus be to introduce the concept of intention (see INTENTION), as is done by a whole series of English-language philosophers concerned with action (Anscombe, Geach, Kenny), and to define agency, in structural terms, by intentionality. In Davidson, the question of agency is eliminated in favor of a reflection on the causality of actions and on the articulation of the mental and the physical. The debate between these two main schools of reflection on action bears, as Descombes observes (“L’action”), on the ontological reality of action: is action defined by a corporeal movement describable as an intentional act produced by a mental or physical state of the agent (the causal conception), or by the change intentionally caused in the patient by the agent within a certain narrative structure (the causative or structural conception)? But beyond this very interesting debate, or short of it, the question remains: is there a definition or a criterion of agency? This question is not only that of the nature of action, but also that of its subject: the variety of actions and modes of agency may be the most striking element of the English language (see ENGLISH), inseparable from a specific conception of subjectivity. This point has been particularly well treated by Austin in his seminal article “A Plea for Excuses,” which is an essential source of contemporary reflection on action and acting (it is frequently cited by Davidson in “Agency,” for example). Austin challenges precisely the point mentioned earlier by Hume: the idea of a characteristic or general definition of action. The subject of Austin’s article, and of the problematics of excuses, is first of all the profound differences between modes of action. The constant recourse to agency among English-language philosophers does not seek, contrary to the French terms used as equivalents (agir, puissance, agent), to erase these differences but rather to mark their irreducibility. Austin emphasizes both the differences between actions (“Is to sneeze to do an action?”) and what “doing something” really means. For Austin, we do not know what an action is, and philosophers who reflect on the question in general terms allow themselves to fall prey to the “myth of the verb,” according to which there would be some “thing,” “doing an action,” which makes manifest the essential characteristics of what is classified under the substitute “do an action.” Why excuses, then? Austin wants to invert the classical philosophical approach that begins by positing the action and then examines justifications and causes. In reality, it is excuses—what we say when it appears that we have acted wrongly (clumsily, inadequately, etc.)—that enable us to begin classifying what we bring together under the general expression, the “dummy” action. Excuses can help us define agency: what is common to an action that one has succeeded in doing and a failed action? Between an action done intentionally, deliberately, expressly, etc., and the same action done (as excuses say) unintentionally, not expressly, etc.? The existence of excuses is for Austin essential to the nature AGENCY 21 upsets the established relations between active and passive: the doctor/patient relationship, in which the patient is the principal and the doctor the agent (because of the doctor’s superior knowledge), and the case of torts, for example in the event of an accident: One individual takes an action which results in damage to another, for example, one automobile hitting another. Although it may seem an odd use of language, one has to consider the damager as the agent and the one damaged as the principal. (“Agency and the Market”) If the usage is odd, that is because in the normal case of agency, the agent is controlled by the principal and depends on him. B. “Agency” in Peirce We can see the two senses of “agency,” which are interesting in their very difference, in the work of C. S. Peirce: the first classically connected with the idea of cause (Peirce writes: “any cause or agency”). The second, more unusual, sense designates the particular authorities within a plurality of faculties, a usage characterized by the possibility of using the plural “agencies”: I wish philosophy to be a strict science, passionless and severely fair. I know very well that science is not the whole of life, but I believe in the division of labor among intellectual agencies. (Collected Papers, 5:536–7) C. The political sense In addition to the importance of the term in pragmatism, “agency” has acquired, in American English, a concrete political sense, becoming the function of the agent, and then an establishment or institution that has the power to act on behalf of someone (“an establishment for the purpose of doing business for another,” RT: Oxford English Dictionary). An unexpected sense appears in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the context of the conquest of the American West and the establishment of local authorities, designating their jurisdiction over the Indians: “agency” designates the political power, the office of this power, and by extension, the Indian territory subject to its jurisdiction. This usage, which shifts agency from the source of power and action to its field of application, clearly shows the tendency in the political uses of “agency” to make concrete and to embody power in the object on which it is exercised, a tendency we also see in the sole French use of agence. Here we find the erasure of the border between active and passive in the definition of agency and of power, which certainly has consequences for the definition of the political subject/agent. Here again we see the ambivalence of the term agent, which is central in English (in contrast to acteur, which is often preferred in French and is more clearly active). In any case, we see that it is impossible to set up a correspondence, even a very general one, between the English set “action”/“agency”/“agent” and the French set action/agir/ acteur (or the German set Handlung/Wirkung/Kraft), a fact all in English than in French, thus occupies a crucial place in the work of defining action through the concept of agency. In English, a passive utterance is not always the inversion of the active and does not describe an “undergoing,” as is shown by Davidson’s remark cited earlier: in the English passive, we often see the pure and simple disappearance of the agent, the passive becoming the privileged form of the exposition of an action. Such an erasure of the agent generalizes the phenomenon of recessive diathesis (the loss of the actor) of which Descombes, following Wittgenstein and Anscombe, now makes heavy use in his reflection on action (“L’action”). IV. Specific Uses A. “Agency” in law and economics The vocabulary of agency in the domain of law and economics allows us to describe modes of action that are in a sense “by proxy,” that is, carried out by someone in place of someone else. This is not the “action without a subject” that Ricœur reproaches Davidson for instituting (through the identification of action and event), but, more radically, it is an action whose subject is not where we think it is, in the agent. Thus we can describe the relation principal/agent in the market as conceived in the theory of economic agency. One of the ways most commonly used today to conceive economic organization is the relation between a principal and an agent (cf., e.g., Kenneth Arrow, “Agency and the Market”). The simplest organization is in fact the one that involves two parties, for example, an employer and a worker, a landowner and a farmer, a lawyer and his client. The principal (or constituent) delegates to the agent an action that may be more or less observable. It is this possibility of non-observability that is at the center of the theory of agency. The common element is the presence of two individuals. One (the agent) is to choose an action among a number of alternative possibilities. The action affects the welfare of the other, the principal, as well as that of the agent’s self. (Arrow, “Agency and the Market”) Thus we have the example of an action that has an effect on at least two persons, the agent and the principal, but in which the agent is the author only in an uncertain way. Agency is inseparable from this aspect of uncertainty: “The outcome is affected but not completely determined by the agent’s action” (ibid.). The principal has the additional function of prescribing rules and thus controlling the agent’s action. The interest of this model is that agency is not only the action of the agent but also a function of this mini-organization. In general, the action of the agent is only imperfectly visible. In fact, the result observed by the principal is the joint product of chance and an action that is known only to the agent (Laffont, Economics of Uncertainty). The ambiguity of the word “agent” is evident: “agent” has both a passive and an active sense (cf. French usages in agent du gouvernement, agent secret, notre agent à Hong Kong). There may be several agents for one principal. Arrow gives two examples in which the relation between principal and agent -- Davidson, Donald. “Agency.” In Essays on Actions and Events.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Translation by P. Engel: “L’agir.” In Actions et événements. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. Descombes, Vincent. “L’action.” In Notions de philosophie, vol. 2, edited by D. Kambouchner, 103–174. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Hobbes, Thomas. Complete English Works. London: Molesworth, 1869. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40. Laffont, Jean-Jacques. The Economics of Uncertainty and Information. Translated by J. P. Bonin and H. Bonin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–35. Ricœur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated by K. Blamey and J. B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. . La sémantique de l’action. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977. . “Troisième étude: Une sémantique de l’action sans agent.” In Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Translation by K. Blamey: Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. First published in 1982. Translation by J.-F. Spitz: Le libéralisme et les limites de la justice. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Schneewind, Jerome B. The Invention of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. the more surprising because in contemporary philosophy as it is written in these languages, these sets have defined the nature and the domain of subjective and collective action. REFS.: Arrow, Kenneth. “Agency and the Market.” In Handbook of Mathematical Economics, vol. 3, edited by K. Arrow and M. Intriligator. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1986. Austin, John L. “A Plea for Excuses.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. . “Pretending.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Barnes, Jonathan. Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Cohen, Tom. “Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man and Secret Agency in ‘The Aesthetic State.’” In Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, edited by Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hilis Miller, Andrjez Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. “Agency”/“instance” In the 1960s and 1970s, the French philosophers Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser both used the category “instance” in a manner that became typical of the structuralist moment. Its use was then widely expanded by their common disciples and involved a complex superimposition of notions of agency, demand, insistence, efficiency, decision, and hierarchy that could not be preserved in English translation. This syncretic formation made it possible to combine in various manners a triple legacy of Marx, Freud, and Saussure, drawing on the historical polysemy of the word instance in French. The lack of a match between French and English as far as this polysemy is concerned (especially where idiomatic nuances weigh in) brings out fundamental tensions nested in the structuralist paradigm and helps explain, at least to some extent, the paradigm’s logical fragility. Chronologically, the first use of instance appears in Lacan’s essay “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud,” published in 1957 (but, as was the case for most of Lacan’s scattered œuvre, influential only after its inclusion in the Écrits in 1966 and its 1977 English translation). The expression “L’instance de la lettre” in the essay’s title is counterposed in the body of the essay to the expression “l’instance du signifiant.” Attention is thus called to the model borrowed from Saussure’s binary signifier/signified (S/s), with emphasis placed on the paradoxical character of the signifier as something both material and formal. In English translation (at least the 1977 one published by Alan Sheridan with the title beginning “The Agency of the Letter”; Bruce Fink’s 2002 translation opts for “The Instance of the Letter,” obviously hewing more closely to the original French), the double character of signifiant is complicated by the double character of instance. With instance here rendered as “agency,” the translation privileges one connotation of the French word at the expense of the other. So, for example, in one sense the letter’s agency refers to its “efficacy” in producing the place where a subject thinks unconsciously (not the same as the place where it “exists” consciously). This meaning knocks out the sense of agency as an “insisting” of the signifying chain, or more precisely, the coercion of repetition of thoughts or symptoms. What becomes manifest in the latter is the “indestructibility” of unconscious desire of which the subject is the instrument, not the master. In 1962 Louis Althusser published an essay on Marxist dialectics, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” later incorporated into the volume For Marx. For the first time, he there explained his theory of the “overdetermination” of historical causality, a term explicitly borrowed from Freud’s analysis of the unconscious genesis of dreams and other symptoms but transferred to the field of history and politics (and applied specifically to the analysis of revolutions). Although instance (translated as “instance” by Brewster) plays an important role in Freud’s metapsychology, it was not used by Althusser with reference to psychoanalysis but rather to a phrase used by Engels when commenting on Marx’s “materialist conception of history.” Historical events and social configurations, he maintained, are determined by economic factors, albeit only “in the last instance” (in letzter Instanz). In Althusser’s criticism, this yielded the idea that a social formation is composed of several variously articulated “instances” (what Marx called the economic “infrastructure,” or “base,” as distinct from the ideological and political “superstructure” (Überbau). For Althusser, neither economic base nor ideological superstructure was reducible to the other, even if one retained causal primacy. In subsequent expositions of his theory of “structural causality” (particularly in the collective book Reading Capital), the “last instance” was defined not as the one that always overrides the other, but as the one that, secretly, distributes the “efficacy” (efficace or indice d’efficace) of the “dominant cause.” Althusser always preferred “instance” to other partial equivalents (such as “level,” “region,” or even “practice”) because none of these alternatives was as effective in combining a “topography” (topique) with a “causality.” Only “instance” made it possible to erase the Hegelian dialectical category of “moment” (das Moment) as used by Engels. With Lacan there is a recasting of psychoanalytic problems (ultimately deriving from Freud) by extending them through Saussurian linguistic concepts. Thus we arrive at the idea of the discursive structure of the unconscious. With Althusser there is a radical transformation (some would say denaturalization) of Marxian and Marxist dialectical categories, with the key notion of “contradiction” set up in analogy to Freudian models of interpretation. The multivalent connotations of Instanz in Freud (translated as instance in French, and “agency” in English by the Standard Edition), and the polysemy of “instance” in both French and English, are fully activated in both Lacanian and Althusserian discourses. “Instance” is a quite remarkable semantic unit. Derived from the Latin instantia, and therefore ultimately from the verb instare (literally “to stay in” or “to stay before”), and echoing the “frequentative” form insistere (to apply, to insist), it emerged almost simultaneously in French and English in the fourteenth century with the evolution of the two languages, displaying and hierarchizing four types of usage recorded by dictionaries: (1) “urgency, pressure, urging influence” (including the ideas to act “at the instance of” someone, and of “repeated solicitation”); (2) “instant time” (either in the present or at an indeterminate time); (3) an illustration, supporting argument or, on the contrary, an objection (in rhetoric or logic)—where the French uses par exemple, the English normally uses “for instance”; (4) “a process in a court of justice” (or this court itself), understood either institutionally or metaphorically (RT: Oxford English Dictionary; RT: Bloch and Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française). The first three uses are less oldfashioned in French than in English. On the other hand, as is typically the case, English has a verb form—“to insist,” “insisting”—for what in French exists only as a noun (which is now obsolete or technical). In German, Instanz (which is today a purely juridical term, except for its post-Freudian and post-Althusserian uses) also existed originally, but it was rapidly challenged by the quasi-homonymous and synonymous German term Instand (from stehen in), whence derives in particular the adverb inständig (insistently). Perhaps we can submit that the “invariant” running through the various uses is the idea of a repeated demand or contest before a tribunal (itself “instantiated”), whose very insistence produces more or less irreversible effects. In Freud’s writings, Instanz became a “systemic” concept only very late, when the results of the speculations on the “second topography” were presented in a pedagogic manner (Abriss der Psychoanalyse). This occurred in two steps, each of which calls for different associations and evokes a specific “scheme” of thought, but which never remain entirely separate. Initially (as early as the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams], 1900), Freud occasionally used the word Instanz to characterize the function of censorship, which in dreams and other psychic processes selects and represses some desires, pushing their expression into the unconscious. Freud even used the Kafkaesque metaphor of a “warden” standing at the gate separating the licit from the illicit. When the same function (now including “observation” and even “persecution” of the self) was retrieved in manias and obsessions and came to be associated with the Über-Ich, or superego, in 1923, it became the typical name for the instance that “splits” the Ich, or ego, in order to “judge” (and even “punish”) it from the inside. This is in contrast to punishment from the outside, which is typically carried out by various social authorities, especially the father, or more generally the parents (also called Elterninstanz, or “parental instance”). Generally, in the usage of this judiciary metaphor, the name “instance” was applied only to the superego and not to the other “regions” (Bezirke) or “systems” of the psyche. In a second step (essentially the Neue Folge Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse and the contemporary clinical studies on angst), another guiding metaphor, or scheme, comes into play. A conflict emerges in which the ego/subject is caught between the incompatible exigencies of several “masters.” The exigencies of pleasure (libido), originating from an infinite “reservoir” called the Es (the “it,” but translated as “id” by Strachey), battle the exigencies of the superego, which are linked to the “uneasy” process of moralization and civilization. There is some inconsistency in Freud’s presentation because sometimes the ego is the “miserable” common target of opposing masters, and sometimes it is “instantiated” as representative of a third kind of exigency: a potential source of anxiety for the subject, namely that of the “external world,” or “reality.” In Freud’s presentation of this structure of the psychic apparatus as a symmetrical interplay of conflictual forces (reminiscent of Plato), the translation of Instanz as “agency,” as chosen by James Strachey in the Standard Edition, makes more sense, provided the term is “depersonalized.” “Instance” in the sense of “urgency” would also be relevant, this time on the side of the id, whose “repeated entreaties” force the ego and the superego to erect interdictions and defenses. We now return to Althusser and Lacan. It is as if they had exploited opposite aspects of the Freudian metaphoric discourse, combining it with different notions of structure and conflict but opening up the possibility of a conversation that was then realized by their disciples. In Althusser’s case, it could seem that “instance” is only a nominal reference, used to bridge the gap between Marxian and Freudian notions of “conflict” or “conflicting forces.” The essential idea here was to import the latter’s model of complexity (“overdetermination”) into the former’s concept of the political. However, the continuous reference to Engels’s phrase “determination in last instance,” where the judiciary connotations are explicit, could not but evoke in the mind of such an assiduous reader of classical political theory the central question always asked by Hobbes in Leviathan, “Who shall be Judge?” This is the defining question of sovereignty, which as a consequence can be said to permanently haunt the discourse of “structural causality” itself. Perhaps it forms the unspeakable side of the “materialist” postulate according to which the productive forces (i.e., mainly the workers themselves) remain the driving motor of history, even if in an aporetic manner (“the lonely hour of the last instance never comes”; For Marx). An anonymous multiple sovereign—perhaps powerless—inhabits the Althusserian play of causes. In Lacan’s case, the driving motive is more explicitly referred to the idiomatic (and paradoxical) fusion of the judiciary process and the schemes of causal automatism (“L’instance, ai-je dit, de la lettre, et si j’emploie instance, c’est non sans raison [car ce mot] résonne aussi bien au niveau de la juridiction qu’à celui de l’insistance” [The instance, I have said, of the letter; and if I use the word instance it is not without reason, for it resonates just as well at the level of juridical utterance as it does at the level of insistence]; Je parle aux murs), but a key indication is also given by the subtitle of the celebrated 1957 essay: “La raison depuis Freud” (“Reason since Freud”). One is reminded that in the Kantian tradition, which towers over our conceptions of the subject, “reason” is presented as a “tribunal” that exercises a “critical” function or a function of judgment. The ultimate tribunal is not that of reason, however; it is that of the unconscious. This said, the unconscious itself is not some purely “irrational” agency. It results from the “other logic” of the signifier (or the “letter”) to which the subject is subjected or within which it must find a “place.” Agency therefore is only half of a good translation: though it marks the Freudian legacy of subjection by “autonomizing” the power of the signifier, it loses the semantic dimension of “structural causality.” In the systematization of Lacan’s doctrine proposed by the “Althusserian” Jacques-Alain Miller (author of the detailed index of Écrits), this structural element essentially amounted to a flirtation with Marxian notions of “materiality” and “domination.” This flirtation was eventually overcome, in Miller’s scheme, by Lacan’s concept of “the real” as an insistence of the void—the “thing” causing anxiety—that can never become symbolized. Interestingly, although perhaps not surprisingly, the vexed translation of instance into -- AEVUM. aeternitas, perpetuitas, aeviternitas, sempiternitas/tempus, αἰών, χϱόνοϛ, Fr. fluide vital, durée de vie, vie, âge, durée, génération, éternité/temps, G. Ewigkeit/Zeit, v. ETERNITY, TIME, and DASEIN, ERLEBEN, EVIGHED, GOD, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, LEIB, MOMENT, PRESENT, WORLD. If chronos χϱόνοϛ, symbolized by Kϱόνοϛ, the Greek god who devours his children, has all the characteristics of “time,” aiôn [αἰών], it is, on the other hand, a term without modern equivalent. In the Homeric poems it designates the vital fluid, hence a man’s lifespan and destiny, the intensity of a part of time. But when, in the Timaeus, Plato relates the aiôn to the life of the gods and no longer to the human lifespan, the sense of “eternity” comes in. Aristotle also uses this term for his Unmoved Mover, and Plotinus makes it Being’s mode of existence. Chronos becomes the “mobile image” of the aiôn and, in Neoplatonic interpretations, its “son.” The Greek opposition between aiôn and chronos thus does not coincide with any of the oppositions with which we are familiar, neither that between subjective experience of time and objective time, nor that between eternity and time. It refers instead to two models of time. There is first the model of the physical kosmos [ϰόσμοϛ], which can be dealt with through mathematics and to which chronos belongs, cosmic time, connected with the cyclical movement of the heavenly bodies and the sphere of the fixed stars, which Aristotle defined as a succession of instants (“now,” nun [νῦν]) and “the number of movement in respect of before and after” (Physics, 4). Then there is the model of life and time as experienced, linear, with a beginning and an end. Aiôn, transliterated in Latin as aevum, was adopted and adapted by Christian theology. For Aquinas, for instance, “strictly speaking aevum and aeternitas differ no more than anthrôpos and homo.” But in the thirteenth century, aevum was detached from aeternitas to designate an intermediary between time and eternity, a guarantee of “the order and connection of things” suitable for characterizing “eviternal” realities, such as angels, that have a beginning but not an end (aeternitatis ex parte post). Aiôn in the Greek philosophical lexicon, and aevum in Scholastic terminology, are among the terms most characteristic of the subtlety of the vocabulary of temporality, in the plurality—difficult for us to understand today—of its registers. I. Aiôn: From Vital Fluid to Eternal Life A. “Stuff of life” and the duration of an existence In Homer, the aiôn is first of all a vital fluid, “the sweet aiôn that flows away” (Iliad, 22.58; Odyssey, 5.160–61): tears, sweat, and later on, cerebral-spinal fluid, sperm, everything that makes life and strength, that melts when one weeps and disappears with the breath of the soul when one dies (“psuchê te kai aiôn [ψυχή τε ϰαὶ αἰών],” Iliad, 16.453)—the “stuff of life,” R. B. Onians calls it (Origins of European Thought). The temporal meaning of aiôn, “lifespan,” “existence,” is attested in Pindar (Pythian Odes, 8.97) and the tragic playwrights, particularly in the combination moira-aiôn [μοῖϱα-αἰών], indicating the “share of life” assigned to each person, the “lifespan imparted by fate” (Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis, 1507–8; see KÊR). That is probably the meaning with which Heraclitus is playing when he defines aiôn as “a child that gives birth to a child, who plays draughts” (RT: B.52 DK: “aiôn pais esti paizôn, pesseuôn [αἰὼν παῖϛ ἐστι παίζων, πεσσεύων]”): Bollack and Wismann (Héraclite ou la séparation, 182–85) argue that the iteration of the substantive pais [παῖϛ] (child) and the verb paizô [παίζω] (whose common meaning is “play like a child”) suggests the interpretation of aiôn as referring to the time of a “generation,” the time it takes for a child to become a father and play his own role. In this sense, aiôn is a limitation or delimitation of chronos [χϱόνοϛ], “time” in general: it is “the chronos of an individual life” (Festugière, “Le sens philosophique,” 271); thus aiôn is, to use Euripides’s expression, “the son of chronos” (“Aiôn te Chronou pais [Аἰών τε Хϱόνου παῖϛ],” Heracleidae 900). B. The divine aiôn: In time or outside time? 1. Time (chronos): A moving image of eternity (aiôn)? When the lifespan designated by aiôn is no longer that of a mortal but that of a god, the limits recede: that is how, English reveals in the cases of both Althusser and Lacan the enigma of the relationship between action, or agency, and the aporetic determinations of its subjectification. To discuss them in two languages instead of one adds precision, if not resolution, to the aporia. REFS.: Althusser, Louis. “Contradiction et surdétermination (Notes pour une recherche).” La Pensée 106 (1962): 3–22. Translation by B. Brewster: “Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation.” In For Marx. London: Verso 2005. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Lire le Capital. Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1965. Translation by B. Brewster: Reading Capital. London: Verso, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. Abriss der Psychoanalyse. Einführende Darstellung. Vol. 17 of Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940. Translation by J. Strachey: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. Vol. 23 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1960. . Neue Folge Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Vol. 15 of Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940. Translation by J. Strachey: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Vol. 22 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1960. Lacan, Jacques. “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud.” In Écrits, vol. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. First published in 1957. Translation by A. Sheridan: “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud.” In Écrits: A Selection. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Translation by B. Fink: “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud.” In Écrits: A Selection. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. . Je parle aux murs: Entretiens de la Chapelle de Sainte-Anne, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011. (continued) AIÔN 25 according to Festugière (“Le sens philosophique”), the transition to the meaning “eternity” takes place. That holds for the Homeric gods, who are “always living” (that is how Paul Mazon translates the expression “theoi aien eontes [θεοὶ αἰὲν ἐόντεϛ],” Iliad, 1.290), and also for Empedocles’s Sphairos [Σφαῖϱοϛ], whose “ineffable life” (aspetos aiôn [ἄσπετοϛ αἰών], RT: B16 DK = 118 Bollack) extends into the past and the future (“It once was, was already, and will be”). But with Plato’s Timaeus, a new conceptual distinction appears between this type of unlimited temporality, which extends through time, and an “eternity” that is outside time and may even generate time. “Eternity” is the customary translation of aiôn on the divine model, from which the demiurge took his inspiration in creating the world. The god is an “eternal living being” (“zôion aidion on [ζῷον ἀίδιον ὄν],” Timaeus, 37d2), concerning which we must say— exactly as we must say about Parmenides’s Being (8.5)—that it “is,” but not that it “was” or that it “will be” (Timaeus, 37e6–8). Time, chronos, is the name of a supplementary invention of the demiurge to make the world he has just created still more similar to the eternal god: it is, according to the famous expression, “a moving image of eternity” (“eikô kinêton tina aiônos [εἰϰὼ ϰινητόν τινα αἰῶνοϛ],” 37d5–6); but see Brague (“Pour en finir”), for whom this moving image is “heaven” and not time. Instead of remaining in unity, like the god, time moves in a circle according to number (“kat’ arithmon kukloumenou [ϰατ’ ἀϱιθμὸν ϰυϰλουμένου],” 38a7–8) and includes divisions or parts that participate in becoming (days, nights, months, seasons) and to which “was” and “will be” apply. Thus on the one hand Plato maintains the connection between life and aiôn: aiônios [αἰώνιοϛ], an adjective he probably created alongside the traditional aidios [ἀίδιοϛ], also applies to the living being that is the god-model (aiônios, 37d4; cf. διαιωνίαϛ, 38b8), as well as to time as an image (aiônion) connected with the living beings that are the world and the heavens—but we understand that it is not so simple to translate it by “eternal,” and that applied to time it means very literally “what has all the characteristics of the aiôn.” On the other hand, and at the same time, we move from an aiôn that is the son of chronos, a lifespan included within (limited) time or coextensive with time, to an aiôn that is properly called an “eternity,” outside time, for which it constitutes the model—Proclus was even to say that the aiôn is the “father of chronos” (cf. In Platonis Rem publicam commentarii, ed. Kroll, 2:17.10; Elements of Theology, prop. 52). In a rigorously anti-Platonic gesture, Marcus Aurelius reversed, term for term, the relationship between aiôn and chronos. The infinite time at time’s two extremities, abstract, unlimited, and corresponding to the void in its incorporeality close to nonbeing, takes the name of aiôn (“apeiron aiônos [ἄπειϱον αἰῶνοϛ],” 4.3.7), whereas the limited time of the present, which is always determined by the act that sets its extent (διάστημα), is associated with a “materialist” approach to chronos—both at the level of duration and insofar as the cosmic period thus torn out of the irreality of the aiôn is concerned (cf. Arius Didymus, Epitome, 26; RT: SVF, 2:509; with Goldschmidt’s commentary, Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps, 39–41; see also Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 78 and 190–94; and SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). 2. Time (chronos): The number of movement according to the anterior and the posterior? Aristotle uses etymology to confirm the extension of the meaning of aiôn as “lifespan” from mortals to god (De caelo, 1.9.279a22–28): “This word ‘duration’ [aiôn] possessed a divine significance for the ancients.” In fact, it is the word itself that encourages the passage from the lifespan of each individual to that of the heavens as a whole—or, more precisely, from “the limit that includes the time of each life” to “the limit that includes all time and infinity” (“to ton panta chronon kai tên apeirian periechon telos [τὸ τὸν πάντα χϱόνον ϰαὶ τὴν ἀπειϱίαν πεϱιέχον τέλοϛ]”; on to telos [τὸ τέλοϛ], “the end,” “the limit,” see PRINCIPLE, I.A). The life of the heavens is properly named aiôn “because it is aiei, always [apo tou aei einai tên epônumian eilêphôs (ἀπò τοῦ ἀεὶ εἶναι τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν εἰληφώς)] being immortal and divine [athanatos kai theios (ἀθάνατος ϰαὶ θεῖος)].” In the Metaphysics, the same holds for the Unmoved Mover as well: since the act or transformation of intelligence into an act (hê nou energeia [ἡ νοῦ ἐνέργεια) is life, and since the Unmoved Mover is this transformation into act, “we say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God, for this is God” (Metaphysics, 12.7.1072b28–30). Aristotle also confirms the break between aiôn and chronos, with aiôn for the world of the heavens, and chronos for the plurality of the sublunary world: “Things that are always are not, as such, in time [ouk estin en chronôi (οὐϰ ἔστιν ἐν χϱόνῳ)]” (Physics, 4.12.221b4–5). In fact, time-chronos belongs to the order of passivity and not of activity: it causes aging, consumes, leads to oblivion. Although indissolubly connected with generation and becoming, “time is by its nature the cause rather of decay, since it is the number of change, and change removes what is” (“arithmos gar kinêseôs, hê de kinêsis existêsi to huparchon [ἀϱιθμὸϛ γὰϱ ϰινήσεωϛ, ἡ δὲ ϰίνησιϛ ἐξίστησι τὸ ὑπάϱχον],” Physics, 221b1–3). This sentence, which is both arithmetic and existential, deserves closer examination. On the one hand, it refers to the mathematical definition of time: in Aristotle’s Physics, time is definitively able to be expressed in mathematics because it is definitely spatialized, connected with movement, which is itself connected with place: “For time is just this—number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’ ” (219b1–2). On the other hand, it refers to existence (existêsi [ἐξίστησι], from ex-istêmi [ἐξίστημι], “move, put outside oneself”; see DASEIN and ESSENCE) of the subject (to huparchon [τὸ ὑπάϱχον], from hup-archein [ὑπ-άϱχειν], “rule below, begin, present oneself, be available, be”; see SUBJECT), to the manner in which time acts on beings that are in time and, in particular, on us, humans who know how to count (“Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked,” 223a21–22). Aiôn and chronos can henceforth no longer be treated in the same way. C. From Neoplatonism to the Christian appropriation: Adiotês and the persistent polysemy of aiôn Plotinus’s interpretation of “always” (aei [ἀεί]) as rigorously nontemporal (ou chronikon [οὐ χϱονιϰόν]: cf. Enneads, 1.5.7; 3.7.2), which is justifiably based on Plato, provides the point of departure for a tradition that seeks to maintain the distinction between the adjectives aiônios and aidios to mark 26 AIÔN Pseudo-Dionysius notes with regret that the Scriptures “do not always reserve the epithet aiônios for what escapes all engenderment, for what exists in a truly eternal way, and not even for indestructible, immortal, immutable, and identical beings.” Even “the beings called eternal [aiônia (αἰώνια)] are not coeternal [συναΐδια] with God, who is prior to all eternity [pro aiônôn (πϱὸ αἰώνων)]; in following the Scriptures with all rigor, we must consider as intermediary between being and becoming everything that participates in both aiôn and chronos” (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus, 10.937C–940A). Knowing that aiôn was to be translated by aevum (translatio Saraceni; Dionysiaca, 1:492–93), it will be granted that Pseudo-Dionysius’s attempted lexical clarification was far from successful. II. A Multiplicity of Eternities: Aevum, Aeternitas, Sempiternitas, Perpetuitas At first sight, nothing seems simpler than to connect, as did medieval writers themselves, the Latin form aevum with the transliteration of the Greek aiôn, and thus to differentiate “eternity” from movement-time (chronos). According to Aquinas, “strictly speaking, aevum and aeternitas differ no more than anthrôpos and homo” (Liber de causis, prop. 2, lect. 2). The translation problem arises from the fact that the Scholastic lexicon made a rigorous distinction between aevum and aeternitas—though it did so belatedly. In the course of the thirteenth century, aevum detached itself from aeternitas, coming to designate an intermediary between time and eternity and characterizing certain realities called “eviternal” that have a beginning but not an end (aeternitatis ex parte post). But precisely because of the principle of correspondence between the measures of duration and the essence of beings, this purely extensive differentiation is contested. For eternity is not simply defined ex negativo as time without limit (from the point of view of its “continuity,” perpetuitas) or as an eternity of duration (which would be “always,” sempiternitas): it is first of all, positively, a permanence and presence itself that is atemporal and intensive (tota simul), as incommensurable as God himself. From here comes the essential instability of this intermediary figure, which has to include a temporal aspect in order to distinguish itself from atemporal eternity—without, however, being confused with time. A. Aeternitas/aevum: Eternity of God, eternity of angels (Augustine) Aevum does not designate the eminently simple eternity that is inseparable from the essence of God, but rather a “qualified,” “participated” eternity (aeternitas participata), which measures the duration of living creatures whose being is not variable and successive (like celestial bodies and separate substances: angels or rational souls), without, however, attaining immutability in the full and absolute sense: either it reintroduces a certain type of variability at the level of the operations of which it is the locus, or it reveals itself as potentially incomplete. Consequently, aevum signifies an “angelic” eternity that can be said to be eternal only insofar as it participates in divine eternity without being coeternal with God. the difference between “eternal” and “perpetual” (Enneads, 3.7.3). The Neoplatonic tradition thus introduces on the side of time-chronos and at a distance from aiôn-eternity, even though it derives from the latter, a perpetuity in becoming for which the term aidotês [ἀιδιότηϛ] was used only later on. Thus Damascius gives the name “complete time [ho sumpas chronos (ὁ σύμπαϛ χϱόνοϛ)]” to “time that always flows.” “Since this intermediary is related both to time and to eternity,” Simplicius remarks, “some philosophers have called it chronos and others aiôn” (Simplicius, Corollary on Place, ed. Diels, 776.10–12 and 779). And Proclus distinguishes between an eternal sense and a temporal sense of aidiotês (Elements of Theology, prop. 55), modeled on the double interpretation of aei: to chronikon [τὸ χϱονιϰόν] and to aiônion [τὸ αἰώνιον] (On the Timaeus, 1.239.2–3 and 3.3.9). Including the “life of eternity” qua “infinite life” without past or future, the life of the whole being present simultaneously, uniting in the atemporal (achronos [ἄχϱονοϛ]) life of the nous [νοῦϛ] the characteristics of the perfect living being of the Timaeus with those of the total being in the Sophist (pantelôs on [παντελῶϛ ὄν], 248e8), Plotinus establishes time in the soul as a “moving image of eternity” (Enneads, 3.7.11). An image without resemblance with regard to a divine presence that illuminates in its immanent life the reciprocal relation between “being” and “always” (on the identity of to on [τὸ ὄν], cf. ibid., 3.7.6), between the aiôn and the Intelligible, which posits the Intellect as a god (ibid., 5.8.3) whose beatitude is eternal because it is the very nature of eternity (ho ontôs aiôn [ὁ ὄντως αἰών], ibid., 5.1.4). That is why it is justifiable to call eternity “god who manifests himself and makes himself appear in his nature” (ibid., 3.7.5), in accord with an echo of the “Chaldaic” name of the god Aiôn as an autophanês [αὐτοφανήϛ] that loses here all cosmological meaning. “It was precisely this atemporal, ‘vertical’ notion, connected with the notions of life, presence, and divinity, that was later adopted”—and adapted—“by Christian theology through Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure . . .” (Leibovich, “L’AIÔN,” 99). But from a lexicographical point of view, the polysemy of the term aiôn remains present in all Greek patristic writing through the Septuagint (“generation”: Ws 14:6; “long period”: Ps 143 [142]; “Eternity”: Eccl 12:5) and the New Testament (“period” in general: Eph 2:7; “present age” in the sense of this world: Mt 13:39—often with strong pejorative connotation—and 1 Tm 6:17; “eternity,” especially in the extensive sense of “forever”: Jn 12:34 and Gal 1:5). After having referred to this polysemy, John of Damascus nonetheless enumerated six meanings of the word aiôn: (1) each individual’s lifespan; (2) a period of a thousand years; (3) the total duration of time and the world; (4) future life after the Resurrection; (5) each of the seven eras that constitute the history of the world, to which an eighth should be added, beginning after the Last Judgment; (6) according to a definition adopted by Gregory of Nazianzus (Orationes, 38.8, in RT: PG, vol. 36, col. 320), the aiôn is neither time nor part of time, but what “extends itself” (diastêma) with eternal realities, being for the latter what time is for temporal realities (John of Damascus, Expositio fidei, 15 [2.1], ed. Kotter, 43–44; the Latin translation renders aiôn not by aevum but rather by saeculum [translatio Burgundii, fifteenth century, ed. Buytaert, 66–68]). In the tenth chapter of Divine Names, AIÔN 27 eternal “always” (aeternitas), were already established in the De Trinitate, where Boethius inquires into the praedicatio in divinis, the question of what the conversion that affects categories in the application to God must be: The expression “God is ever” denotes a single Present, summing up His continual presence in all the past, in all the present—however that term be used—and in all the future. Philosophers say that “ever” may be applied to the life of the heavens and other immortal bodies. But as applied to God it has a different meaning. He is ever [semper], because “ever” is with Him a term of present time, and there is this great difference between “now” [nunc], which is our present, and the divine present. Our present connotes changing time and sempiternity [nostrum “nunc” quasi currens tempus facit et sempiternitatem]; God’s present, unmoved, and immovable, connotes eternity [“nunc” permanens neque movens sese atque consistens aeternitatem facit]. Add semper to eternity and you get the constant, incessant, and thereby perpetual course of our present time, that is to say, sempiternity [iugem indefessumque ac per hoc perpetuum cursum quod est sempiternitas]. (De Trinitate, 4.28–32) Thus Boethius establishes in a practically definitive way the distinction between an intensive conception of eternity grasped in the plenitude of its atemporal presence (“plenitudinem totam pariter totam pariter praesentiam”), in the immutable presence of a single instant, and an extensive conception of perpetuity referring to the infinity of a “worldly” time/times that cannot be coeternal with God in any way. The interminable (interminabilis) character of eternity, which medieval writers interpreted etymologically as extra terminos or sine termino, is only the negative (and still worldly) form of the simplicity and perfection that are the positive conditions of its immobility and simultaneity (unitotality). But the quoted definition of eternity implies still more than its atemporal or untemporal being: the eternity of God is a form of life, a life of thought, thought that includes In his De diversis quaestionibus (qu. 72: “De temporibus aeternis”), Saint Augustine (354–430) distinguishes two forms of eternity: the first belongs only to God through his absolute immutability; the second coincides with the totality of time. It is from this latter point of view that angels can be said to be “eternal,” since they have existed for all time, without nonetheless being coeternal with God because his immutability is beyond all time. In comparison with created time, which is susceptible to change (tempus mutabile), this derived eternity called aevum is thus presented as a “stable” form (illud stabile). In his City of God (12.16), Augustine wonders how God can “precede time,” or better yet, “precede all times”: “It is not in time that God precedes times; in that case, how could he have preceded all times? He precedes them from the height of his always-present eternity. He dominates all times to come, because they are to come and because, when they have come, they will be past. Our years pass and follow each other, and their number will be complete at the very moment when they will cease to be. God’s years are like a single day that is always present. It is eternity” (cf. Augustine, Œuvres, 745 n. 87). The aevum is thus an aeternitatis ex parte post, aeternitatis creata, or aeternitatis diminuta, as it was reformulated in the thirteenth century by Bonaventure and James of Viterbo. B. Aeternitas/sempiternitas: The eternity of God and that of the universe (Boethius) The second cardinal distinction that runs throughout the Latin Middle Ages is the one introduced by Boethius (470–524) between eternity proper (aeternitas) and sempiternity (sempiternitas): eternity as the “complete possession, simultaneous and perfect, of a life without limit” (“interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio,” in Consolation of Philosophy, 5.6.4), as opposed to sempiternitas, the eternity of the universe, subject to time, even if it knows neither beginning nor end. The chief distinctions between a temporal “now” and an eternal “now,” a temporal “always” (sempiternitas) and an 1 Boethius’s definition: “What is eternity?” Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of everlasting life [interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta perfectio]; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time. Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future [id praesens a praeteritis in futura procedit], and there is nothing set in time that can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life [totum vitae suae spatium pariter amplecti]: it is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday. In this life of today you do not live more fully than in that fleeting and transitory moment. Whatever, therefore, suffers the condition of being in time, even though it never had any beginning, never has any ending and its life extends into the infinity of time, as Aristotle thought was the case of the world, it is still not such that it may properly be considered eternal. Its life may be infinitely long but it does not embrace and comprehend its whole extent simultaneously [interminabilis vitae plenitudinem totam partier comprehendit atque complectitur]. It still lacks the future, while already having lost the past. So that which embraces and possesses simultaneously the future and has lost nothing of the past, that is what may properly be said to be eternal, of necessity it will always be present to itself, controlling itself, and have present the infinity of fleeting time [necesse est et sui compos praesens sibi semper adsistere et infinitatem mobilis temporis habere praesentem]. (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]) 28 AIÔN quantity in the same way as time. Just as in the case of the problem of unity, the necessity of coping with this dilemma runs throughout the Franciscan and Dominican schools and shapes the temporality of eviternal being. D. The Scotist break: The extension of aevum to permanent existence In the Scotist school, the notion of aevum underwent a fundamental transformation determined by the problems involved in the Aristotelian analysis of time associated with movement (and primarily the problem of the movement of the heavens), in order to account for the being of substances. If the aevum is a measure of permanent being that is potentially corruptible, isn’t it aevum that has to account for all forms of permanence, substantial as well as accidental, insofar as they depend in an invariable and uniform way on a single cause—namely, God (Duns Scotus, Sentences [Ordinatio], 2, dist. 2, p. 1, q. 4)? For movement is what is measured by time—not what precedes and receives it. Using this argument, John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) makes the aevum the measure of permanent existence as such, no longer recognizing, from this point of view, any difference between a stone and an angel: dico quod exsistentia angeli mensuratur aevo; et etiam exsistentia lapidis et omnis exsistentia quae uniformiter manet, dum manet, mensuratur aevo. Whence I say that the existence of angels is measured by the aevum; and also that the existence of stones and of all forms of existence that remain the same, while they remain, is measured by the aevum. (Sentences [Lectura], dist. 2, p. 1, q. 3) Thus freed from any essential reference to separate substances or to celestial bodies, the aevum can be defined functionally as the measure of the uniformity of permanent things in general, in their dependence on the “first cause,” which is alone capable of preserving them in being (Sentences, [Ordinatio] 2, dist. 3, p. 1, q. 4). This new model of the aevum (which coincides with the weakening of the Aristotelian cosmological paradigm to the point of authorizing the idea of a potential time of which the movement of the heavens, in its recognized uniformity, is only the actual representative) challenges the principle of ontological heterogeneity and hierarchy between celestial realities and the sublunary world. It spread far beyond the Scotist school. E. Ockham’s Razor: Aevum nihil est, “The aevum isn’t anything” Within the nominalist tradition, William of Ockham (1285/90–1347/49) emphasized the impossibility of conceiving the possibility that an angel might be annihilated after its creation, or that the life of one angel might be longer than that of another, without referring to a “coexisting” succession. Angelic duration, like any duration, must be measured only by the ordinary time of succession, the only one appropriate to it: “Time is the measure of the duration of angels, as it is the measure of movement” (tempus est mensura durationis angelorum, sicut est mensura motus, William of Ockham, Sentences [Reportatio], 3, q. 8 and q. 11; Tractatus de successivis, ed. Boehner, 96). everything that can be included all at once, as opposed to time, the condition of life for weaker minds, which can think things only one after the other. God thus lives in an eternal present, which is the model of the ordinary present (cf. Marenbon, Boethius, 134–38). C. The difficult place of the aevum between eternity and time Under the influence of Neoplatonism and especially of the Liber de causis, the term aevum, which until the thirteenth century had been commonly used in the sense of aeternitas or aetas perpetua, came to designate the duration intermediate between time and eternity, “post aeternitatem et supra tempus,” as Aquinas put it in his commentary on the Liber de causis: Omne esse superius aut est superius aeternitate et ante ipsam, aut est cum aeternitate, aut est post aeternitatem et supra tempus. Every superior being is either above eternity and before it, or with it, or after it and above time. (Liber de causis, 2.19) These three kinds of superior being correspond to the First Cause, the Intelligence, and the Soul, respectively. This classification is adopted, in a modified form, by medieval writers. For example, commenting on the formula “Deus est temporis et aevi causa” (God is the cause of time and the aevum), Albert the Great (1200–1280) explains: “Time is the image of the aevum, and the aevum is the image of eternity” (tempus est imago aevi et aevum est imago aeternitatis). The notion of aevum, thus detached from aeternitas and having been given an autonomous position intermediary between time and eternity, is perfectly characterized by Nicholas of Strasburg (ca. 1320): “Medio modo se habentibus oportet dare mensuram mediam inter aeternitatem simplicem et tempus. Haec autem non potest esse alia quam aevum” (It is important to give to entities whose status is intermediary a measure intermediary between simple eternity and time. The measure cannot be other than the aevum: On Time, 215 va.). This tripartite classification encountered several insurmountable difficulties, however, and did not succeed in establishing itself. For one thing, the fact that the realities measured by the aevum are heterogeneous (angels, rational souls, the heavens, and even sometimes first matter) seems to suggest that a single measure would be impossible. But since unity is the mark of perfection, is it conceivable that time would be one, whereas the aevum would be multiple? Is the argument that the aevum must be considered one in virtue of its cause and its participation in eternity sufficient to avoid any subjective deviation toward an angelic time that might soon come to be seen as a “quid ad placitum” (cf. Suarez-Nani, Tempo, 33–35)? Along with the question of the unity of the aevum, the problem of its simplicity and indivisibility was widely debated in the Scholastic literature around the turn of the fourteenth century. We can easily see why: if the aevum is absolutely simple and indivisible, its nature no longer differs from that of eternity; if, on the contrary, the aevum has extension and is composed of parts, it is a successive AIÔN 29 The Cartesian critique allows us to understand why the concept of aevum disappears from philosophical speculations in the seventeenth century and does not appear, despite commentators’ efforts to implant it there, where it has been thought to reemerge because of the “temporalization of eternity”: in Spinoza. In fact, Spinoza’s Ethics presents the clearest refusal to explain eternity “by continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end” (Ethics 1, expl. of def. 8: “per durationem, aut tempus explicari non potest, tametsi duratio principio, et fine carere concipiatur”). Eternity, which must be understood as “existence itself, insofar as it is conceived necessarily to follow from the definition of that which is eternal” (per aeternitatem intelligo ipsam existentiam quatenus ex sola rei aeternae definitione necessario sequi concepitur, Ethics, 1, def. 8), is conceived by Spinoza on the model of eternal truths, whose exemplary form is provided by mathematical truths (insofar as they are valid ab aeterno et in aeterno), whereas duration is identified with “the indefinite continuance of existing” (indefinita existendi continuatio, Ethics, 2, def. 5), “because it can never be determined on the basis of the nature itself of the existing thing” (Ethics, 2, expl. of def. 5). But the fact that duration can be divided into parts when it is measured by this “way of thinking” that is time, in accord with a movement of abstraction establishing “at will” (ad libitum) the universal reference-point of all durations (Spinoza, letter 12, ed. Gebhardt, 4:61 and 55) and making it possible in turn to insert them into the system of the laws of nature, does not in any way imply that one of them, an “affection” of things (duratio), can be reduced to the other, an imaginary being (tempus). For if the force through which a thing perseveres in existence (conatus) is nothing other than the power of God expressing itself in a finite, determinate form, the duration of a thing can be understood sub specie aeternitatis by conceiving it insofar as it endures “through the essence of God” (Spinoza, Ethics, 5, prop. 30, proof). It is by virtue of this immanence of divine power that duration is said to “flow [fluit] from eternal things,” as Spinoza puts it in letter 12 (ed. Gebhardt, 4:56). Ewigkeit and the ecstasy of time: Schelling Not until the post-Kantian period, when speculative philosophies of history appeared, and especially Schelling’s attempt to establish a “geneaology of time,” were the notions of aiôn and aevum re-represented, in an entirely different theoretical domain. “Eternity” (Ewigkeit), “in all eternity” (von Ewigkeit), were themselves rearticulated with the different figures of time: the “now,” but also the instant or decisive lightning-flash (Jetzt, Augenblick, Blitz), “lifetime” (Lebenzeit), the time or age of the world (Weltalter). It was Schelling who pushed furthest the project of rising to a “superior history,” in which a genuinely “historical” God is temporalized distinguishing the “times” or “ages” within it, in accord with a time that is “inner” (innere Zeit) and “organic.” The revival in a new context of the Augustinian question of the “beginning” (“What does it mean to begin? How can one make a beginning?”) leads Schelling to locate in God himself (“God in becoming and God to Thus aevum passes definitively from its unstable intermediary position, not to eternity (even as a “second” eternity), but to common, heterogeneous time, it being posited that “time properly so called” (tempus proprissime dictum), or “common time” (tempus commune), “no longer refers to the movement of the Unmoved Mover as its cause [ratio causalitatis] qua cause of all other movements, but in virtue of the character of uniformity that belongs to it ‘accidentally’ [accidit]” (William of Ockham, Quaestiones super libros physicorum, q. 45; cf. Duhem, Le système du monde, 7:379–92). So there exist only two ways of measuring duration: the clock-time conceived for created realities, and eternity for the divine essence alone—even though divine duration, qua infinite duration, cannot be “represented” without coexisting with the duration we conceive. Only René Descartes was able to take advantage of this last argument from the motus cogitationis, the movement of thought, in which the primacy of the thinking self is established in its persistence; but more broadly, it is the whole of the new physics that invests a conception of time that puts an end to the necessity of the aevum in its principle of convertibility between (difference in) being and (difference in) duration, after having invested and broadened all the antiAristotelian virtualities. III. The Paradoxes of Time and Eternity A. “Time,” “duration,” and “eternity” in the seventeenth century Freed from the Aristotelian cosmological paradigm as the idea of an arbitrary plurality of purely subjective times (ad placitum . . .), in the seventeenth century time is thus defined on the basis of an objective, functional representation and a universal form. The Cartesian criticism of “Scholastic opinion” (l’opinion de l’École) has its place in this movement of conceptual unification; if duration is always only “the way in which we conceive a thing insofar as it perseveres in being” (putemus durationem rei cuiusque esse tantum modum, sub quo concepimus rem istam, quatenus esse perseverat, Principles, 1.55 [in Œuvres, ed. Adam and Tannery, 8-1.26.12–15]), and if time is never more than the “way of conceiving” (modus cogitandi) of duration when we want to measure it (Principles, 1.57), then the same duration must be attributed to things that are moved and those that are not moved, because “the before and after of all durations, whatever they might be, appear to me through the before and after of the successive duration that I discover in my thought, with which other things are coexistent” (prius enim et posterius durationis cuiscunque mihi innotescit per prius et posterius durationis successivae, quam in cogitatione mea, cui res aliae coexistunt, deprehendo, Letter to Arnaud, 29 July 1648 [in Œuvres, ed. Adam and Tannery, 5.223.17–19]). As for eternity itself, it is tota simul “insofar as nothing could ever be added to the nature of God or taken away from it,” but “it is not all at once and once and for all insofar as it coexists, for since we can distinguish in it parts since the creation of the world, why could we not also distinguish parts in it before, since it is the same duration?” (sed non est simul et semel, quatenus simul existit, nam cum possimus in ea distinguere partes iam post mundi creationem, quidni illud etiam possemus facere ante eam, cum eadem duratio sit, Conversation with Burman [in Œuvres, ed. Adam and Tannery, 5.149]. 30 AIÔN . Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988. . Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Centenaire, Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Boethius. Theological Tractates. Translated by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand. London: Heinemann, 1918. Bollack, Jean. Empédocle. 4 vols. Paris: Minuit, 1965–69. Bollack, Jean, and Heinz Wismann. Héraclite ou la séparation. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Brague, Rémi. “Pour en finir avec ‘le temps, image mobile de l’éternité.’” In Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 11–71. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Courtine, Jean-François. “Histoire supérieure et système du temps.” In Extase de la raison: Essais sur Schelling, 237–59. Paris: Galilée, 1990. . “Temporalité et révélation.” In Le dernier Schelling: Raison et positivité, edited by J.-F. Courtine and J.-F. Marquet, 9–30. Paris: Vrin, 1990. Degani, Enzo. Aîon da Omero ad Aristotele. Padua, It.: Cedam, 1961. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York : Zone Books, 1988. . Logic of Sense. Translated by M. Lester with C. Stivale. Edited by C. V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “Ousia and grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by A. Bass, 29–67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Descartes, René. Œuvres. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Cerf, 1897–1910. Duhem, Pierre. Le système du monde. Vol. 7, La physique parisienne au XIVème siècle. Paris: Hermann, 1956. Empedocles. The Extant Fragments. Edited by R. M. Wright. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Festugière, André. “Le sens philosophique du mot AIÔN.” La Parola del Passato 11 (1949): 172–89. Reprinted in Études de philosophie grecque. Paris: Vrin, 1971. Galpérine, Marie-Claire. “Le temps intégral selon Damascius.” Les Études Philosophiques, no. 3 (1980): 307–41. Ganssle, Gregory E., and David M. Woodruff, eds. God and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Goldschmidt, Victor. Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps. Paris: Vrin, 1969. . Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote. Paris: Vrin, 1982. Hoffmann, Philippe. “Jamblique exégète du pythagoricien Archytas: Trois originalités d’une doctrine du temps.” Les Études Philosophiques, no. 3 (1980): 325–41. Homer. Iliade. Translated by Paul Mazon. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1975. Jaquet, Chantal. “Sub specie aeternitatis”: Étude de l’origine des concepts de temps, durée et éternité chez Spinoza. Paris: Kimé, 1997. come”) the principle of temporalization, that is, the “decisive separation” (Scheidung) that engenders the present, which splits off and frees itself from the past by opening up a future: “The future is what is peculiarly temporal in time” (Aphorismen, §214). Thus eternity can once again be seen as the “daughter of time”: “Eternity is not by itself, it is only through time; time therefore precedes eternity in accord with actuality” (Urfassungen, ed. Schröder, 73; The Ages of the World, trans. Wirth). Whatever the considerable differences in conceptualization, we can still discern in the term Ewigkeit, which etymology derives directly from aiôn and aevum (which Kluge links with Lebenzeit), the mark of the Homeric sense of aiôn as “life,” the force and duration of life. REFS.: Alliez, Éric. Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time. Translated by G. Van Den Abbeele. Foreword by G. Deleuze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Ancona Costa, Cristina. “Esse quod est supra eternitatem: La cause première, l’être et l’éternité dans le Liber de causis et dans ses sources.” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, no. 76 (1992): 41–62. Aristotle. Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . De diversis quaestionibus. Question 72: “De temporibus aeternis” [On the eternal times]. In Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, translated by Boniface Ramsey, edited by Raymond Canning. New York: New City Press, 2008. . Œuvres de saint Augustin. Edited by G. Bardy, J.-A. Beckaert, and J. Boutet. Bibliothéque Augustinienne 10. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952. Benveniste, Émile. “Expression indo-européenne de l’éternité.” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique Française, no. 38 (1937): 103–12. . Indo-European Language and Society. Translated by E. Palmer. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973. . “Latin tempus.” In Mélanges de philologie, de littérature et d’histoire anciennes offerts à Alfred Ernout, 11–16. Paris: Klincksieck, 1940. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity. Translated by L. Jacobson. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. 2 “Eternity of death” versus “living eternity”: The Bergsonian experience of durée It is by starting from Spinoza, namely from the irreducibility of duration (durée) to mathematical time, and from a certain “eternalization” of that duration, that we can best understand the notion of duration in Bergson’s thought. Beyond the ontological partitions of the aevum, the Bergsonian experience of duration rediscovers the vitality of the aiôn. Bergson opposes “conceptual eternity, which is an eternity of death” (immutable, immobile eternity) to an “eternity of life,” “a living and therefore still moving eternity in which our own particular duration would be included as the vibrations are in light; an eternity which would be the concentration of all duration, as materiality is its dispersion” (Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics” [1903]) . He conceives psychological duration only as an opening onto an ontological duration whose reality condition is that the All is never “given,” as differentiated, but is an élan vital, a movement of differentiation and duration. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), which continues the argument of Creative Evolution (1907), seeks to show that Duration is not called Life without a movement appearing that tends to free “man from the level proper to him to make of him a creator, adequate to the whole movement of creation” (Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme, 117). Thus Bergson clearly claims to give us the first and last reasons why “the measure of time never bears on duration qua duration” (La pensée, 3). REFS.: Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover, 1998. . Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1999. . La pensée et le mouvant. Paris: F. Alcan, 1934. . The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. PROPORTIONATUM. ἀναλоγία, v. COMPARISON, CONNOTATION, GOD, HOMONYM, IMAGE, LOGOS, PARONYM, PREDICATION, SENSE, SIGN, TO BE. The term “analogy” poses no translation problem in English, Italian, or German because its primary meaning is that of “ἀναλоγία,” which was initially rendered in Latin by “proportio.” It refers to a mathematical relationship between quantities or, more precisely, an equation of two relationships by quotient. The obvious meaning of “relationship of two parts to each other and to the whole” is thus found in Littré’s French dictionary as well as in Cicero (in his Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus) and Varro (De lingua latina, 8.32). However, this mathematical meaning of “relationship between relationships” was very soon superseded by that of “resemblance between relationships,” so that, as Michel Foucault pointed out, “an old concept, already familiar to Greek science and medieval thought,” was resituated in the more general register of “similitudes” and ends up occupying in the seventeenth century a separate site between the field of convenientia (“making possible the marvelous confrontation of resemblances across space”) and that of ethical and even aesthetic aemulatio (speaking of “adjacencies, bonds and joints”) and extending from a single given point “to an endless number of relationships” (Order of Things, 21). These multiple relationships justify the presence of the word “analogy”—always too easily translated—in a vocabulary of untranslatable words because of the multiplicity of fields that it silently coordinates through a series of power plays continued indefinitely by their very familiarity. Practically speaking, a translator of Plato’s Timaeus (31c, 32a–b) will have no difficulty in rendering the term analogia Plato uses to designate the “bond” or “mean” that makes it possible to order “in a beautiful composition” two “numbers, masses, or forces of any kind” through a third or “mean” (“which is to the last term what the first term is to it”). Nor will a translator of Aristotle’s Poetics have any difficulty in rendering the same term used to indicate the type of relationship in which “there are four terms so related that the second (B) is to the first (A), as the fourth (D) is to the third (C)” (Poetics, 1457b16–26). But the same can be said about a translator of A. G. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica when he encounters the expression analogia rationis, which allows this disciple of Christian Wolff to bring the domain of sensitivity and judgments of taste into the field of knowledge, or about a translator of the theologian Karl Barth or Paul Tillich, when he encounters the expressions “analogia fidei seu revelationis” (taken from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:6, where Paul says that the gift of prophecy must be practiced “in proportion to our faith”) and “analogia imaginis” (analogy of the image). The only translation problem raised by the Greco-Latin term analogia proceeds not from the absence of an equivalent in European philosophical languages, but from the consequences and stakes involved in applying it to the “problem of being” outside its original sphere, under the Scholastic title of analogia entis (analogy of being or analogy of the existent), and thus, by that very fact, from its “Greco-Latin” character. It is a translation that has already been made, and in a very precise field it raises questions for the philosopher and the historian of philosophy; it is a translation John of Damascus. Exposition fidei [De fide orthodoxa]. Edited by Bonifatius Kotter. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969. Translatio Burgundii [15th cent.], edited by E. M. Buytaert. New York: St. Bonaventure, 1955. Leibovich, E. “L’AIÔN et le temps dans le fragment B52 d’Héraclite.” Alter 2 (1994): 87–118. Leyden, W. [von]. “Time, Number and Eternity in Plato and Aristotle.” Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1964): 35–52. Marenbon, John. Boethius. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Margel, Serge. Le tombeau du Dieu artisan. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1995. O’Brien, Denis. “Temps et éternité dans la philosophie grecque.” In Mythes et représentations du temps, edited by D. Tiffenau, Actes du Colloque CNRS, 59–85. Paris: Édition du CNRS, 1985. Onians, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Owen, G.E.L. “Aiôn and aiônios.” Journal of Theological Studies, no. 37 (1936): 265–83 [aiôn] and 390–404 [aiônios]. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. In Complete Works, edited by J. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by S. MacKenna. London: Faber, 1966. Porro, Pasquele. Forme e modelli di durata nel pensiero medievale: L’Aevum, il tempo discreto, la categoria “quando.” Louvain, Belg.: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 1996. . The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy. Edited by P. Porro. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001. Proclus. Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Translated by Harold Tarrant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. . The Elements of Theology. Translated by E. R. Dodds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. . In Platonis Rem publicam commentarii. Edited by Wilhelm Kroll. Amsterdam, Neth.: Hakkert, 1965 Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Translated by Paul Rorem. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World. Translated by J. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. . Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie [Aphorisms as an introduction to the philosophy of nature]. In Sämtliche Werke, edited by K.F.A. Schelling, 1:291–329. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61. First published in 1806. Simplicius. In Aristotelis Physicorum libros quattuor priores commentaria. Edited by H. Diels. Berlin: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1882. Translation by J. O Urmson: Corollaries on Place and Time. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Sorabji, Richard. Time, Creation and the Continuum. London: Duckworth, 1983. Spinoza. Opera. Edited by Carl Gebhardt. 5 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925–87. Suarez-Nani, Tiziana. Tempo ed essere nell’autunno del medievo: Il De tempore di Nicolas de Strasburgo ed il senso del tempo agli inizi del XIV secolo. Amsterdam, Neth.: B. R. Grüner, 1989. William of Ockham. Philosophical Writings. Translated by Philotheus Boehner. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1990. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. ALLIANCE This is the traditional French translation of Hebrew běrit [ריתְ ּ ִב [which designates the covenant between the people and its god; see BERĪT. Cf. DUTY and EUROPE. Concerning the terminological networks that make it possible to conceive the relation between humans and the god(s), the entries have been chosen in each language in relation to the values that determine the singularities of each case, in particular: Greek, KÊR, THEMIS, then OIKONOMIA, see DESTINY, IMAGE; Latin, PIETAS, RELIGIO, see OBLIGATION; Russian BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, SOBORNOST᾿ ; German, BERUF, SOLLEN, see VOCATION. v. COMMUNITY, CONSENSUS, GOD, HUMANITY, PEOPLE, VALUE synthesis, the notion of a reduced homonymy was preferred, being used without any metaphysical preoccupation as a semantic concept connected with the interpretation of two standard logical problems of homonymy according to Aristotle: the elucidation of the distinction between homonyms and synonyms in the Categories, 1.1 and the analysis of the semantic mechanisms of fallacia aequivocationis in Sophistical Refutations, 17. Characteristic of this problem are the analysis of aequivocatio ex adiunctus by the Anonymus cantabrigiensis, based on three interpretations of the homonymy of sanum clearly taken from Topics, 1.15.106b34–38 and that of the Anonymi compendiosus tractatus de fallaciis, interpreting in terms of “consignification” the semantic variation presiding over the paralogism of “equivocalness ex adiunctis,” on the basis of the two senses of sanum mentioned in Topics, 1.15.106a5–9. At this stage of development, the question of homonymy had not yet produced a theory of the analogy of being: it remained within the limits of the fragments of Porphyry’s works transmitted by Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and the Aristotelian sources of the Logica vetus and the Logica nova. The metaphysical problem of the plurality of the meanings of being was not confronted as such. Neither did the notion of analogy continue to play an assignable role in the Greco-Roman metaphysics of Boethius’s time (aetas boetiana), in which until the end of the twelfth century the dominant problem was that of the transfer of categories, the transsumptio rationum, which marked all theological uses of the ten Aristotelian categories. In this universe of discourse, the Aristotelian question of the plurality of the meanings of being was occulted by that of the applicability of ontological categories in the domain of theology. Abundantly illustrated in the first medieval commentaries on Boethius’s De Trinitate, notably in Gilbert de Poitiers and the Porretains, the problem then dominant resided in a single question extrapolated from chapter 4 of Boethius’s work: given that “categories change meaning when they are applied to God,” is there a pure equivocalness, a metaphoric usage or a “transsumption” of categorial language when it is transposed from the natural domain to the divine domain? (see TO TRANSLATE). II. Denominativa, Convenientia, Analogia The Scholastic problem of analogy appears at the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the word and the notion of analoga begin, if not directly to replace, at least to overlap with Aristotle’s denominativa (or paronyms). This overlapping has a long earlier history: Simplicius (whose Commentary on the Categories was translated by William of Moerbeke in 1268) tells us that the Hellenophone interpreters of Aristotle very early on “combined in a single mode homonymy ab uno and homonymy ad finem,” and that other writers “posited them as intermediaries between homonyms and synonyms” (In praedicamenta Aristotelis). There is no lack of Latin witnesses to the substitution of the sequence homonyms-synonyms-analogues for the triad homonyms-synonyms-paronyms: the shift had been made as early as 1245, with the first university Lecturae of Aristotle’s Libri naturales. Albert the Great’s commentaries on the Logica vetus enable us to identify the professors’ source here: the Arab philosophers who that is, in a sense, too successful, and functions as a kind of screen between ancient philosophy, especially the Aristotelian tradition, and the various heirs of medieval Scholasticism. As a result, it is for readers of a work in which it does not appear as such—Aristotle’s Metaphysics—that analogia poses a problem whose multiple ambiguities can be dissipated only by a genealogy of an expression that is deliberately “saturated,” a genealogy that at the same time produces the “network” that has enabled it to make history. Here lexicography and theoretical innovation are inseparable, so that (and this makes analogia a singular, if not really isolated, case) the history of one can be truly written only through a philosophical archeology of the other. Given the importance of the “Thomist” phase in this “twofold” history, that is where we must begin. I. Forming the Theory of Analogy The theory known as the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) is a central element of Scholastic metaphysics, and is generally presented as an “Aristotelian” or “Aristotelian-Thomist” theory. This appellation should be abandoned. There are several Thomist formulations of the notion of analogy, some of them philosophical, in the commentaries on Aristotle, others theological, in the personal works (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, Summa contra gentiles, Summa theologica). The first of these are intended to resolve the Aristotelian problem of the “multiplicity of the meanings of being,” while the second return to the non-Aristotelian problem, raised by Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius, of the praedicatio in divinis as it is set forth in Boethius’s De Trinitate, 4, or, to put it another way, to the question of the “divine names.” In any case, the medieval notion of the “analogy of being” cannot claim to borrow directly from a positive theory that is aleady constituted as such in Aristotle; instead, it appears at the end of a long hermeneutic process that begins, it seems, as early as Alexander of Aphrodisias, and to which the Aristotelian interpretive tradition contributed throughout late antiquity, from Plotinus to Simplicius. Interpreted on the basis of the Aristotelian corpus, the formation of the medieval theory of analogy presents itself as the gradual fusion of at least six texts that differ in inspiration, scope, and meaning: the distinction between synonyms, homonyms, and paronyms in the first chapter of the Categories; the distinction between two types of homonymy (derived from things to their definitions) in the Topics, 1.15.107b6–12; the distinction among the different modes of error involving homonymy proposed in Sophistical Refutations, 17; the problematic distinction of three kinds of intentional homonyms introduced in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1.4.1096b26–31—a unity of origin or provenance, a unity of end or tendency, and a unity of analogy, in which “analogy” has its authentic Aristotelian sense of a mathematical proportion with four terms (a/b = c/d) (see HOMONYM); the theory of the unification of the multiplicity of the meanings of being set forth in book 4 of the Metaphysics on the basis of the meaning of the terms “healthy” and “medical,” itself complemented by the theory of the accident as an inflection of substance suggested by certain passages in book 7 of the Metaphysics (1.1028a15–25). The medieval theory of the analogy of being proceeded mainly from the encounter between the Categories, 1.1, the Nicomachean Ethics, 1.6, and the Metaphysics, 4.1. Before this the concept by reducing theological analogy to a simple analogy of extrinsic attribution based on an “analogy” in the strict sense of the term (a proportion with four elements): just as health exists only in an animal, there is no being except in God. The creature is a sign of God, as urine is the sign of health. However, the relationship between the sign and the thing signified being reflected in a relationship between cause and effect, the exact content of the theory of analogy is a theory of “analogical causality”: God is the creator and giver of being, hence the creature is; but the latter’s being, which is not rooted in itself, can be reduced to that of God and is no more than a sign of the latter. With the appearance of the “univocal concept of being” in Duns Scotus, the theory of analogy gradually evolves in the direction of a theory of the “analogical concept of being,” which the Thomists, and then the “Second Scholasticism,” tried to oppose to the Scotist theory. This development, which led beyond the Middle Ages, produced more or less syncretic formations of the ideas of analogy used by the Neo-Thomists and Neo-Scholastics: thus the model for Jacques Maritain’s notion of analogy is John of St. Thomas more than Thomas Aquinas. The discursive complex of analogia entis does not exhaust the whole of the field of analogia. Modern debates about the purely allegorical status of analogy (E. Cassirer) or, on the contrary, the “effect of metaphorical meaning” that surreptitiously plagues medieval theological analogy (P. Ricoeur) are nonetheless situated in the network defined by the encounter between the Aristotelian problem of “the multiplicity of the meanings of being” and the purely theological problem of “the divine names” inherited from late antique and medieval thought. Analogia is the heart of a system from which radiate and become relatively autonomous diverse fields that are necessarily connected by the founding act of inventio analogiae: metaphor, symbol, and category. REFS.: Ashworth, Earline Jennifer. “Analogy and Equivocation in Thirteenth-Century Logic: Aquinas in Context.” Mediaeval Studies 54 (1992): 94–135. . “Suarez and the Analogy of Being: Some Historical Background.” Vivarium 33 (1995): 50–75. Aubenque, Pierre. “Sur la naissance de la doctrine pseudo-aristotélicienne de l’analogie de l’être.” Les Etudes Philosophiques 3–4 (1989): 291–304. Baumbarten, A. G. Aesthetica, I–II. Frankfurt, 1750–58; repr. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1961. Brentano, Franz. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Hildesheim. Ger.: Olms, 1960. Translation by R. Georg: On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Courtine, Jean-François. Suarez et le système de la métaphysique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Translation by A. Sheridan: The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1994. Simplicius. “Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories.” In In praedicamenta Aristotelis. Edited by André Pattin and Willem Stuyven. Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1971. Vuillemin, Jules. De la logique à la théologie: Cinq études sur Aristote. Paris: Flammarion, 1967. 44–125. Wolfson, H. A. “The Amphibolous Terms in Aristotle, Arabic Philosophy and Maimonides.” Harvard Theological Review 31 (1938): 151–73. intercalated between univoca and aequivoca “what they call convenientia” in order to master conceptually the problem with the homonymy of being. Starting with Albert and the sources he mentions, al-Ghazali and Avicenna, we can call the theory of “the analogy of being” any theory that has the following elements: the interpretation of homonymy ad unum in terms of proportion; the application of this relation, which is oriented and not convertible like paronymy, to the relationship between substance and accident understood as a relationship between prius and posterius, primary (anterior) and secondary (derived, posterior); and the distinction between “three modes of analogy,” that is, three types of “relationships” governing the attribution of so-called analogical terms—proportio ad unum subiectum, which is equivalent to the term “being,” proportio ad unum efficiens actum, which is equivalent to the term “medical,” and finally porportio, which is equivalent to the term “healthy,” and is more or less clearly connected with final causality. Avicenna’s Metaphysics was known to Latins before Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and was thus for the Latin Middle Ages, according to Albert himself, the main source for the problem of the plurality of the meanings of being. It was Avicenna’s work that determined the reading of Aristotle’s works and established the view that the unity of the concept of being sought by Aristotle is a “convention in accord with ambiguity” (convenance selon l’ambiguïté) legible in terms of the “relation of the anterior to the posterior,” that is, in the more or less Platonizing framework of a theory of participation by degrees. Although the conception of analogy “in accord with the anterior and the posterior” in the Avicenna tradition dominated most logical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle up to 1250–60 (Nicolas of Paris, Summae metenses; Roger Bacon, Quaestiones alterae supra libros primae philosophiae Aristotelis, IV, q. 3–4), later theories became increasingly complex. III. Philosophical Analogy/Theological Analogy The distinction between philosophical and theological analogies explodes the initially unitary formulation. Since, given the absence of an assignable relationship or proportion, it was not possible to approach the problem of praedication in divinis in the framework of a theory of analogy “in accord with the anterior and the posterior” between God as creator and as infinite, on the one hand, and created, finite being on the other, Thomas Aquinas introduced, to compensate for this shortcoming, a distinction between analogy of proportion and analogy of proportionality, which has been well described by recent interpreters. Since Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica (2.40), “proportion” has meant a relationship between two terms, and “proportionality” has meant a relationship between two relationships, whereas by “analogy of proportion” Thomas accounts for what we now call the “focal meaning” of being (or rather of the word “being”): the diverse categorical meanings can be coordinated horizontally like those of the word “healthy.” The “analogy of proportionality” seeks to connect two relationships: a cognitive, conceptual relationship (secundum intentionem) and an ontological relationship (secundum esse). In the sixteenth century, Meister Eckhart virtually exhausts. ANIMAL. G. Animal, Bestie, Tier, animalisches Wesen, τὸ ζῷον, τὸ θηϱίον, v. AFFORDANCE, LEIB, LIFE/LEBEN, LOGOS, NATURE, PHANTASIA, SOUL, SUBJECT. Today, we tend to take the triad “human” / “animal” / “plant” for granted. Usage in Romance languages generally reserves “animal” for animals that lack reason but are mobile. However, if we take into account its etymological echo of the root “anima,” in the sense of the vital breath, “animal” also has an extended meaning that allows it to designate any living being. The Greek language offers us a still broader semantic configuration: ζῷον (from ζώω, “to live,” ζωή, “life”), which is usually rendered as “animal,” includes in many texts not only humans but also the stars and the gods, and sometimes plants. Moreover, the usual translation of the term “animal” in German, das Tier, refers to still another constellation of meanings. Close to θήϱ, with its derivative θηϱίον, which means “wild beast,” “predator of game”), the etymology of Tier reveals a proximity not with the soul, or even with life, but with brutality, savagery, bestial violence, and even death. Cf. Grice on ‘beast.’ This kind of inflection, which tends to turn toward a semantic opposition, thus leads French translators to render das Tier as bête (beast) rather than animal. Too narrow or too broad, the French word animal involves a projection onto other taxonomies. The Absence of the Animal among the Greeks: The Zôion. History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, and so on — Aristotle’s biological treatises seem to support the view that the concept “animal” functioned in the same way for the Greeks as it does for us. But the Greek term we translate as “animal” has a much broader meaning: to zôion, a neuter noun formed on ζώω, “to live”: “For everything that partakes of life may be truly called a living being” (Plato, Tim., 77b), even plants, but first of all the world itself (30b), the gods that are stars in the sky and those of Olympus (39e–f), and, of course, humans no less than our “animals.” However, in this hierarchy of the diversity of species, Aristotle often distinguishes ζῷα proper (noun) from zôntes ζῶντες (present participle of the verb) and ζωόι (nominalized adjective), viz. simple “living beings” situated at a lower rung on the ladder, those whose souls have the faculty of feeding themselves and reproducing (plants), but not of feeling, moving (our “animals”), reasoning (humans). “For nature passes from lifeless objects (τῶν ἀψύχων) to ζῷα in unbroken sequence, interposing between them beings that live (τῶν ζώντων) yet are not zôia” (Part. Anim., 681a12–13; see also De anima, 2.413b1–4). The difficulty in translating zôion is here at its greatest. Wolff’s suggestion that it be translated in French as animé (animate being: Wolff, “L’animal et le dieu”) avoids the confusion with our restricted sense of “animal,” but it encounters a new problem. In Aristotle there are animés (literally, ἔμψυχα, in contrast to apsucha, “inanimate beings” such as stones; cf. De Anima, 2.413a22) that are not zôia, “animals” (precisely, plants, τα φυτά), or concerning which it is difficult to decide, so intermediary is their nature (sponges, for instance: Part. Anim., 681a10–17). In any case, a translation as animé or “animal” erases the great chain that leads from simple “animate beings” to zôia, singular beings well defined by their increasingly differentiated activities. We will have no more success in adequately projecting our concept of “animal” on θήϱ or its derivative θηϱίον. Even if it happens that the thêrion is said to be “peaceful” (hêmeron: Plato, Republic, 588c) as well as “ferocious” (agrion), the word usually designates a “predator,” a “wild beast” that is hostile to humans (lions or boars that hunt and are hunted, and are more terrestrial than fish or birds), in contrast to domestic or tame animals. Although a human is by nature a zôion—more precisely, according to Aristotle’s related definitions, a ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, a rational animal or living being endowed with language, and a πολιτιϰòν ζῷον, a political animal living in a city-state (Politics, 1.1253a1–10) —in denaturing himself he becomes a thêrion. Thus just as someone who has no need to live in a community is a theos, “god,” so someone who is incapable of doing so is a thêrion, “beast,” “monster,” and no longer a human (ibid., 27–29). Similarly, θηϱιότης, “bestiality,” is something quite different from vice: it is the monstrous degradation of a species, seen, for example, among barbarians (Nicomachean Ethics, 7.1; cf. Bodéüs, “Les considérations”). This tripartite classification, which situates man between the animal (thêrion) and the god and is constitutive of ethics and politics, structures the continuist ontology of the living, zôos and zôion, which is determinant in biology and cosmology. But none of the Greek terms correspond to the same portion of the world as our word “animal.” The Invention of the Animal in the Christian Era: “Animal,” Animus, Anima. In the era when Christianity was emerging, following the lineage of a sacrificial Judaism, animals were both endowed with the status of creatures on an equal footing with humans and devalued because of their alleged lack of a soul. In the context of a discontinuist ontology based on the metaphysical tripartite division matter/life/spirituality, the animal was situated among the living beings deprived of soul or spirit. Augustine was the first to systematize this philosophical position: although refusing them any spiritual principle, he granted them the vital principle (the anima, the ψυχή), that is, mobility. However, he reserved the animus (the soul that knows) and the πνεῦμα for humans alone. The sequence animal / life / living being is constituted, and in the seventeenth century the Cartesians found it easy, on this basis, to define animals in relation to the mind and rationality, whether they were “for” (Gassendi, La Fontaine, Leibniz) or “against” (Descartes himself, La Mettrie, et al.). The debate between mechanism and vitalism (Do animals have souls?) thus has its source in Augustinianism, which connects “animal” and anima, and disconnects “animal” and animus, thus ratifying for a long time a sharp break between the living and the spiritual. III. Conceiving the Beast in Relation to the Animal The humanist position that arises in the Christian era creates this break between the living animal and humans, who have spirit/mind, and gives birth to the idea that the animal corresponds to a unitary genus that coincides with the category of the living. The presence in German not only of the word Bestie, but of two additional terms, Tier and Animal, that can both be translated into English as “animal” thus poses once again the question, already raised by Greek usage, whether “animal” really refers to a unified category, that is, “a homogeneous genus.” “Animal” is in fact the most common translation of Tier, whether we are dealing with a Haustier (domestic animal, pet), a Pelztier (fur-bearing animal), a Zugtier (draft animal), or a Reittier (saddle animal). We also speak of the “animal kingdom” (Tierreich), the “small animal” (Tierchen), and even of “animality” (Tiernatur¸ tierisches Wesen). But the latent Latin root is also used to translate the noun “animality” (Animalität) and the corresponding adjective (animalisch). In French, there are only two words, animal and bête. So why is Tier usually rendered as animal and not as bête? Does this reflect, through the Latin lexical connection, a humanist prejudice? Tier indicates a semantic polarity that is connected etymologically with the Greek thêrion (wild beast) and, further back, with the Sanskrit dheu (Dastur), which is said to combine in a single term the original interrelationship of life and death. In some contemporary phenomenological studies, the term Tier has been uncritically rendered by animal and not by bête, even if in the same texts we also find Animal and animalisches Wesen (Husserl). This kind of translation problem obviously involves the relationship between humans and animals— namely, the problem of the humanization of the animal (if Tier is rendered as animal, in which the soul is indicated)—as much as it does that of the animalization, or rather the bestialization, of humans (when Tier is translated as bête, which indicates brutal or savage nature). Homo sacer (sacred man) is a Latin term borrowed from archaic Roman law by Giorgio Agamben to discuss a range of political and philosophical issues. In its original sense, homo sacer designated an individual who was banished in response to a grave trespass. From the moment of his ritual pronouncement as homo sacer, this person could be killed with impunity, but could not be employed in sacrificial rituals that required the taking of a life. The term is first discussed in Agamben’s Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995), where it is presented as a paradigm for understanding contemporary political and biopolitical situations ranging from Nazi concentration camps to everyday life in Western democracies. The first thing to note about this figure of a “sacred man” in Roman law is that he was not sacred in any reverential sense—in fact, he was far closer to the opposite. Removed from the continuum of social activity and civil legislation, the only law that still applied to him was the one that irrevocably cast him out of the communal sphere. In Homo sacer and its sequels, Agamben stresses the enigmatic, paradoxical, and “paradigmatic” status of this figure from archaic Roman law. As Freud, Benveniste, and others have demonstrated, the term “sacred” has displayed in its history a remarkable degree of semantic ambiguity. Emblematically, Agamben’s titular figure amply partakes of this ambiguity. To explore the homo sacer’s paradoxical status, Agamben turns to Greek conceptions of “life,” beginning with the two Greek words for life, bios and zôê. The former concerns a life seen in function of its various activities and attributes, the latter refers to the life shared by all the living. It is in light of this distinction that Agamben develops a paradox inherent in the definition of the homo sacer. From the perspective of the community that has banished him, the homo sacer is stripped of the customary forms or qualifications of a specific life (what the Greeks called bios). What remains is an individual utterly without status, seen by the community that cast him out as reduced to bare life (what the Greeks called zôê). Agamben’s interest in this figure is not primarily historiographical, and though such banishment was doubtless a terrible fate for an individual, it is not the psychological suffering or sociological implications of this practice that Agamben is endeavoring to understand. For him, this figure from the most remote past of Western legal history bears a message—an ominous one—for today’s societies. The explicit goal of the Homo sacer project is to explore what Agamben calls “the essential function” of this figure “in modern politics.” In the wake of Foucault’s studies of “biopolitics” and Arendt’s work on related matters, Agamben sees an increasing tendency on the part of societies, both totalitarian and democratic, to discipline and control their subjects through minute observation, definition, and documentation. This subtle control of the activities and attributes of an individual life (bios) is coupled with an extremely disturbing set of cases where individuals are stripped not only of legal rights, but of all attributes except that of their mere physical existence (zôê). This process, writ large in the Nazi concentration camps, is one that Agamben sees writ small elsewhere and is the reason why he appeals to his readers’ vigilance in the face of contemporary political trends. “If today,” Agamben writes in Homo sacer, “there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually [virtualmente] homines sacri” (Homo sacer, 127; trans. HellerRoazen, 115). This is a “virtually” that commentators such as Slavoj Žižek have tended to ignore; but what bears noting is that for Agamben, the present historical situation shows signs of this exceptional figure returning on a global scale. In sum, Agamben’s homo sacer is a figure from the remote past that brings into focus a disturbing element in our political present—and points toward a possible future that Agamben sees as our principal duty to avert. Bare life (It. la nuda vita; G. das bloße Leben) “Bare life” is a central term in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy designating a life stripped of all activities, attributes, qualities, and qualifications. Early in his book Homo sacer, Agamben announces that “the protagonist of this book is bare life” (11; trans. Heller-Roazen, 8). That book’s reader might well wonder, however, what this “bare life” is and in what sense it is bared. Is it a good thing, on the order of a purification; a bad thing, such as a deprivation; or neither? The answers Agamben gives to these questions are to be found in the subtle genealogy he offers of conceptions— philosophical and other—of “life” from ancient Greece to the present day. “Bare life” presents a translation difficulty that should be noted—namely, the English translation given in Homo sacer for Agamben’s expression la nuda vita. The history of this translation is more complicated than it might first appear. In a brief discussion of the idea of the sacred at the end of Language and Death, Agamben wrote that “even the sacralization of life derives from sacrifice: from this point of view it simply abandons the naked natural life [la nuda vita] to its own violence and its own unspeakableness” (133; trans. Pinkus, 106). This suggestive use of the term la nuda vita— literally, “naked life”—does not, however, prepare us for the role it will play in Agamben’s later thought. In an essay from 1993, “Bartleby o Della contingenza,” Agamben again invokes la nuda vita, and in a widely read translation of that essay three years later, the term is again rendered as “naked life.” Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translation of Homo sacer chooses a different translation for la nuda vita: “bare life.” Bare and naked are indeed often synonymous, and this divergence might seem, at first sight, a negligible one reflecting a mere stylistic preference. It is, however, more than this, as la nuda vita is not a term of Agamben’s own invention. It, too, is a translation—a quotation without quotation marks from the work of Walter Benjamin. In “Destiny and Character,” Benjamin introduces the term das bloße Leben, “bare life,” and employs it again in “The Critique of Violence” (see Gesammelte Schriften, 2:175 and 2:199–200). That Agamben conceived la nuda vita as a translation of Benjamin’s das bloße Leben is not made clear to his reader in Language and Death, in the 1993 “Bartleby o Della contingenza,” or in any of the other essays leading up to Homo sacer. Nor, for that matter, is it made clear in the opening sections of Homo sacer. At the end of part 1, however, Agamben turns to Benjamin’s analyses of law and life and there underlines the relation of the one formulation to the other: “nuda vita [bloße Leben].” Nuda vita—naked or bare life—is thus, for Agamben, another way of saying bloße Leben—bare life— and knowing this allows us to understand better not only Heller-Roazen’s translation but also Homo sacer’s protagonist. Benjamin’s expression das bloße Leben designates a life shorn of all qualification and conceived of as independent of its traditional attributes. Although Benjamin does not offer further directions for how it is to be understood, it is clear that “bare life” is not an initial state so much as what becomes visible through a stripping away of predicates and attributes. It is best understood in relation to Agamben’s discussion of the two Greek terms for life, bios [βíος] and zôê [ζωή]. As Agamben observes, for the Greeks the term zôê designated “life” in the sense of “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods),” and for this reason it tellingly admitted of no plural form (Homo sacer, 3; trans. Heller-Roazen, 1). Zôê was then life in its most general sense, a sense every bit as general as “being.” The second term, bios, referred to the forms our lives take—to “the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (Homo sacer, 3; trans. Heller-Roazen, 1). In addition to the undifferentiated fact of a thing being alive—zôê—there is a specific way of living—bios. This distinction corresponded to a fundamental division in the Greeks’ political landscape. For them, “simple, natural life” (zôê) was not the affair of the city (polis), but instead of the home (oikos), whereas bios was the life that concerned the polis. In the very words the Greeks used to express the divisions of their culture, there was a distinction between the life that was the concern of the (city-)state and the private life that lay beyond its province. In Agamben’s hands, bare life is linked both to an ideal conception—one where individual lives are not weighed, measured, judged, or valued against their fulfillment of certain criteria (being red, Communist, Italian, etc.)—and to a potentially dangerous one, as in instances where individuals and groups are stripped of all rights associated with such belonging and reduced to a mere nude or bare life, subjected to unqualified suffering. Refs.: Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby o Della contingenza.” In Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, Bartleby: La formula della creazione. Macerata, It.: Quodlibet, 1993. Translation by Daniel Heller-Roazen: “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” In Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. . Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Turin, It.: Einaudi, 1995. Translation by Daniel Heller-Roazen: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. . Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività. Turin, It.: Einaudi, 1982. Translation by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974–89. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will [De libero arbitrio]. Translated by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993. Bodéüs, Richard. “Les considérations aristotéliciennes sur la bestialité.” In L’Animal dans l’antiquité, edited by B. Cassin and J.-L. Labarrière, 247–58. Paris: Vrin, 1997. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Turin, It.: Einaudi, 1995. Translation by Daniel Heller-Roazen: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Cabestan, Philippe. “La constitution de l’animal dans les Ideen.” Alter 3 (1995): 39–81. Dastur, Françoise. “Pour une zoologie privative.” Alter 3 (1995): 281–319. Depraz, Natalie. “Y a-t-il une animalité transcendantale?” Alter 3 (1995): 81–115. Fonenay, Elisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Husserl, Edmund. “La crise de l’humanité européenne et la philosophie.” Alter 3 (1995): 167–219. Texts by Husserl (appendix 12 of Ideas and text no. 35 in Husserliana 15). . Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1989. Lotz, Christian. “Psyche or Person? Husserl’s Phenomenology of Animals.” In Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Dirk Fonfara, 190–202. Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2006. Wolff, Francis. “L’animal et le dieu: Deux modèles pour l’homme. Remarques pouvant servir à comprendre l’invention de l’animal.” In L’animal dans l’antiquité, edited by B. Cassin and J.-L Labarrière, 157–80. Paris: Vrin, 1997. CLARUM. H. P. GRICE’S DESIDERATUM OF CONVERSATIONAL CLARITY. ANSCHAULICHKEIT (GERMAN) ENGLISH clarity, openness to view, visualizability FRENCH caractère intuitif v. INTUITION and ANALOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY, ERSCHEINUNG, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SACHVERHALT, SIGN. Since the 1930s the German term Anschaulichkeit has presented a typical case of untranslatability, to the point that its importance for philosophical reflection on science has only recently been rediscovered. Deriving from the Kantian tradition, the term’s meaning has been radically modified by quantum theory. Although it is not listed in the Kantian lexicon proper (where we find Anschauung and Anschauungsformen), the term does belong to the tradition inspired by Kant that marks all the work done by German mathematicians, physicists, and physiologists of the second half of the nineteenth century. Anschaulichkeit designates what is translated inaccurately in French as the caractère intuitif or in English by the “visualizability” or “clarity” of a physical theory, but in fact it refers to the possibility of giving phenomena and objects a “spatiotemporal representation,” that is, an image in ordinary space and time. With the appearance of quantum theory, this possibility, and this demand, had to be abandoned, whence a drastic change in the use of the term Anschaulichkeit, a change that took place in two stages. First, Niels Bohr abandoned the maintenance, in the atomic physics, of “spatiotemporal representations through which up to this point we have tried to describe natural phenomena” (“Über die Wirkung von Atomen bei Stossen”), introducing instead of Anschaulichkeit the notion of “symbolic analogy” (symbolische Analogie), the only possible approach to objects that cannot be described in spatio-temporal terms. In a second stage the term Anschaulichkeit is taken up again but redefined in a way that emphasizes, on the one hand, the role of experimental procedures in the definition of a theory’s fundamental concepts (W. Heisenberg, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt”), and on the other hand—elaborating the Helmholtzian idea of Anschaubarkeit (translated in English by “intuitability”), which, applied to mathematics, appears in Helmholtz’s 1878 lecture entitled “Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung” (“Facts of Perception”)—the necessary abstraction that the physicist has to carry out with regard to his usual mental images: “The new system of concepts also gives the intuitive content [der anschauliche Inhalt] of the new theory. We must thus ask of an intuitive theory in this sense only that it be in itself free of contradiction and that it allow us to predict without ambiguity the results of all imaginable experiments in its domain” (Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan, “Zur Quantenmechanik”). In the late 1920s these changes in the meaning of the term Anschaulichkeit had the effect of breaking out of the original Kantian context. The difficulty of translating the term into other languages can thus be easily explained: to understand it, one has to follow the twofold process of the formation and implosion of a vocabulary specifically associated with the history of German philosophy. Catherine Chevalley REFS.: Bohr, Niels. “Über die Wirkung von Atomen bei Stossen.” Zeitschrift für Physik 34 (1925): 142–57, postscriptum. Born, M., W. Heisenberg, and P. Jordan, “Zur Quantenmechanik.” Zeitschrift für Physik 35 (1926): 557–615. Chevalley, Catherine. “Niels Bohr’s Words and Atlantis of Kantianism.” In Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by J. Faye and H. Folse, 33–57. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer, 1994. Darrigol, Oivier. From c-Numbers to q-Numbers. The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Heisenberg, Werner. “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik.” Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927): 172–98. “The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics” in Quantum Theory and Measurement, edited by J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek, 62–84. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Heisenberg, Werner, and Max Born. “La mécanique des quanta.” In Electrons et photons, 143–81. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1928. Helmholtz, Herman von. “The Facts of Perception.” In Selected Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Miller, Arthur. “Visualization Lost and Regained: The Genesis of Quantum Theory in the Period 1913–1927.” In On Aesthetics in Science, edited by J. Wechsler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978. ANGUSTIA -- ANXIETY DANISH Angest FRENCH angoisse GERMAN Angst v. CARE, DASEIN, IL Y A, MALAISE, NEGATION, NOTHING, SORGE, TO BE The term “anxiety” is etymologically related to that of “narrowness,” or “tightening,” as are the corresponding Romance and Germanic words, and this can still be sensed in the works of Friedrich Schelling and Jakob Böhme. However, it is above all its elective relationship with nothingness (as non-being) and the possibility of the pure state that Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, will emphasize. That Angst, unlike Furcht (fear), is “without object” is no less crucial for psychoanalysis. 38 ANXIETY to do with something determinate or very precise (bestemt), we are anxious “for nothing” (for Intet). This leads Kierkegaard to define “anxiety” this way: “Anxiety is the reality [Dan. Virkelighed = Ger. Wirklichkeit] of freedom as the possibility offered to possibility” (Angest er Frihedens Virkelighed som Mulighed for Muligheden; Begrebet Angest, chap. 1, §5). In innocent Adam, in whom the prohibition on eating the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gn 2:17) awakens the possibility of freedom, the “nothingness of anxiety” (Angestens Intet) is transformed into “den oenstende Mulighed af at kunne” (the dreadful possibility of power), not, to be sure, the power to choose good or evil, but simply to be able—“Mulighed er at kunne” (possibility consists in being able; Begrebet Angest, chap. 1, §6). The specific contribution of Heidegger is to have combined Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s definitions of anxiety in his concept of Angst, understood as constraint and relationship to Nothing. Into the “bright night” of Nothing, which Heidegger recognizes in his 1929 inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” as an initiatory gateway into metaphysics, pierces Nothing, as non-being REFS.: Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Vol. 2 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. . “Was ist Metaphysik?” In vol. 9 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Translation by D. F. Krell: “What Is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Kierkegaard, Søren. Begrebet Angest. Edited by V. Sørensen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1960. Translation by Reidar Thomte: The Concept of Anxiety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. The Ages of the World. Translated by J. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. . Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by J. Love and J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. . Sämtliche Werke. Munich: Schröter, 1965. In a note in section 40 of Being and Time, Heidegger refers to Kierkegaard’s 1844 book, The Concept of Anxiety, declaring that no one had gone as far as Kierkegaard in the analysis of this phenomenon as it appears in the theological context of a “psychological” exposition of the problem of hereditary sin. In his book (chap. 2, §1), Kierkegaard himself refers to Schelling’s non-anthropomorphic use of Angst, seeing in it “the sufferings of the divinity longing for creation.” Following Böhme, Schelling understands Angst in its relationship with Enge (“narrowness,” “restriction,” from the Gr. agchô, “tighten,” “constrain,” “suffocate,” and Lat. angustia, usually used in the plural, angustiae; cf. the Fr. angoisse/angine—“that which oppresses, chokes”) as a centrifugal movement peculiar to a being that feels stifled or restricted (beengt) within himself: The anxiety of life itself pushes man outside the center in which he was created. [T]o be able to live there man is almost necessarily tempted to leave the center to escape toward the periphery. (Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7) It is less from this concept of anxiety in Schelling’s 1809 Untersuchungen that Kierkegaard seeks to distance himself than from that in Die Weltalter (Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8), where “the sufferings of the divinity longing for creation” characterize a divine anxiety whose anthropomorphism Kierkegaard stresses. As for the relationship Angst/Enge, it still remains present in German, even if it is muted. It is no accident that Heidegger frequently uses the verb beengen in analyzing the phenomenon of anxiety: “What oppresses [lit., ‘constrains’ or ‘makes narrow’] is the world itself” (Was beengt ist die Welt selbst; Sein und Zeit, §40). In Kierkegaard, the relationship anxiety/constraint is less determinant than the relationship of anxiety to nothingness and to possibility. Anxiety (Angest) is entirely distinct from fear (aldeles forskjelligt fra Frygt)—and this distinction Angest/Frygt is found in Heidegger as the distinction Angst/Furcht (cf. “Was ist Metaphysik?”)—for if fear has 1 Angst and anxiety in psychoanalysis v. DRIVE, ES, HEIMAT, SUBJECT, VERNEINUNG, WUNSCH. The two Freudian theories of anxiety Sigmund Freud worked out two theories regarding anxiety. The first goes back to the beginning of his work and presents anxiety as a “transformation of the libido” (Angst als Umwandlung von Libido). This transformation of the libido into anxiety takes place when “the accumulated psychic tension attains the threshold that allows it to elicit a psychic affect, but for some reason, the psychic connection that is offered to it remains insufficient; the psychic affect cannot be produced, because certain psychic conditions are partially lacking, whence the transformation into anxiety of the tension which has not been psychically ‘bound’” (Manuscript E, “Wie die Angst entsteht,” in Briefe an Wilhelm Fleiss). Freud’s second theory of anxiety is presented in Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (1925). Anxiety is conceived first of all as “something felt” (etwas Empfundenes), an “affective state” (Affektszustand) that appears “as a reaction to a state of danger” (als Reaktion auf einen Zustand der Gefahr). It is understood as a “signal” proceeding from the Ego, since only the Ego can judge situations of danger (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14; see ES). Anxiety is a reaction—a signal—confronted with the “danger of losing the object” (Reaktion auf die Gefahr des Objektverlust; ibid.). Freud presents several forms of the loss of an object that are merely attenuated versions of the “helplessness” (Hilfslosigkeit) of trauma and constitute the core of the situation of danger (ibid.). We also note an essential modification of the Freudian development relating to repression: “[I]t is anxiety that produces repression, not, as we thought, the reverse” (“Angst und Triebleben” [1932], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15). Freud distinguishes two kinds of anxiety: “anxiety about the real” (Realangst) and “neurotic anxiety” (neurotische Angst). “Real danger [Realgefahr] is a danger we know, and real anxiety [Realangst] is anxiety regarding such a known danger. Neurotic danger [die neurotische Angst] is anxiety regarding a danger we do not know,” and neurotic danger is “a pulsional danger” (eine Triebgefahr; Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14; see also Die Angst, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11). So far as the notion of danger is concerned, Freud distinguishes between “real danger” (Realgefahr), a threat posed by an external object, and neurotic danger, which proceeds from “pulsional demand” (Triebanspruch; ibid.). II. Translation problems Freud’s texts on anxiety pose a few translation problems because of the twofold meaning of Angst in German, which can mean “anxiety,” but also “to be afraid of,” followed in this case by the preposition vor (Angst haben vor etwas). Freud himself tried to define the difference between these two meanings: “Fright,” “fear,” and “anxiety” are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger. “Anxiety” describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. “Fear” requires a definite object of which to be afraid. “Fright,” however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). In Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, Freud emphasizes that anxiety is “characterized by indetermination [Unbestimmtheit] and the absence of an object [Objektlösigkeit]; a correct use of the language even changes its name when it has found an object, and replaces it by fear [Furcht].” The difficulty persists, despite this remark; neither Freud nor the German language commonly makes this distinction, as is shown by the Duden dictionary (RT: Duden: Deutsches Universalwörterbuch) and the RT: Historisches Wôrterbuch der Philosophie. In the latter dictionary’s article “Angst,” we read: “A broad distinction between Angst as being without object, a free, dispersed feeling, and Furcht as something that is attached to an object, is made neither in the literature as a whole nor in common usage.” In addition, the article “Obsessions et Phobies,” which Freud wrote in French, offers an opportunity to see that the meaning of the word in question is not univocal: Freud uses both the words angoisse and anxiété to render the German Angst and also uses the expression névrose anxieuse to render Angstneurose (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1). Faced with this problem, French translators use either a version of the original German or an interpretation of the contexts in which Freud used the word Angst. Thus the French version of Hemmung, Symptom und Angst translates Angst and Angst haben vor etwas by angoisse and avoir angoisse devant quelque chose, respectively. On the other hand, the translators of the Conférences d’introduction à la psychanalyse and the Nouvelles conférences d’introduction à la psychanalyse, for example, translate the term in a different way. The English version makes the same choice, translating Angst by “anxiety” or, depending on the context, by “fear,” “afraid,” “alarm,” etc. In The Standard Edition (Strachey, vol. 20, translator’s note), however, there is some question as to whether the English “anxiety” still retains a semantic connection with the German Angst. The Spanish translation renders Angst by angustia but occasionally resorts to other terms, such as miedo (LopezBallesteros y de Torres, Obras completas, vol. 2). III. Jacques Lacan: Anxiety “is not without an object” Lacan devoted a whole seminar to the subject of anxiety (L’Angoisse), but important remarks on this subject are already found in his earlier seminar on identification: “It is not impossible that you encounter the desire of the other as such, of the real Other. It is here that anxiety arises. Anxiety is the sensation of the Other’s desire” (L’Identification, 4 April). For Lacan as much as for Freud, anxiety is a signal, but a signal of the presence of the Other’s desire as “real” and no longer “symbolic.” The Other’s desire as “symbolic” presupposes the phallus, which is, Lacan says, the “name” of the Other’s desire, that is, it is included in the signifier (see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). At the same time, the phallus is a lack, a “structuring void” around which is established every possibility of signification (cf. “La signification du phallus,” Écrits, and L’angoisse, 12 December). Anxiety makes its appearance at the moment when the phallus, which governs the relations between the subject and the enigma of the Other’s desire, is lacking. Lacan declares: “[T]here is a fear of losing the phallus, because only the phallus can give desire its own field” (Lacan, L’Identification, 4 April). Thus anxiety corresponds to “the lack of the lack,” which implies a direct encounter with the desire of the “real Other” (cf. L’Angoisse, 28 November and 5 December). These reflections led Lacan to undertake a “rectification” of the concept of anxiety with respect to the Freudian position and a certain philosophical tradition: anxiety, he says, “is not without an object” (ibid., 9 January 1963) and for that reason it is the only affect that “does not deceive” (ibid., 19 December 1962). The discussion of anxiety thus paves the way for the elaboration of the concept of the objet petit a, the “object causing desire,” which he was to announce in the following year’s seminar (Les quatre concepts). Elisabete Thamer REFS.: Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Freud Reader, edited by P. Gay, translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. . Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess. Edited by Jeffrey Masson. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. Translation by Jeffrey Masson: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986. . Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. Translation by James Strachey: The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Vintage, 2001. Translation by Luis Lopez-Ballesteros y de Torres: Obras completas. 17 vols. Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1968. First published in 1923. Lacan, Jacques. L’Angoisse. Vol. 10 of Le séminaire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. . L’Identification. Vol. 9 of Le séminaire. Unpublished. . Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Vol. 11 of Le séminaire, edited by J.-A. Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Translation by Alan Sheridan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1998. SENSE-DATUM. APPEARANCE. The word “appearance” is ambiguous from the outset, since it sometimes points toward the phenomenon, the objectivity of what appears on its own, and sometimes toward illusion and deception. I. Appearance-Apparition “Appearance” and “apparition” are modeled on Late Latin apparentia and apparitio (themselves connected with appareo, which means “appear,” but also “be in the service of,” just as pareo means “come forth” and “obey”), synonyms in Church Latin, which uses apparitio to render the Greek epiphaneia [ἐπιφάνεια] (manifestation, epiphany). “Appearance-apparition” refers to what appears in full light, the manifestation or phainomenon [φαινόμενον] in the original sense of the Greek verb φαίνω, to appear), from the same root as the Greek phôs [φῶϛ] (light): see PHANTASIA, I, LIGHT, and PHÉNOMÈNE. II. Appearance-Illusion “Appearance” also refers to false appearance or illusion (as in “don’t trust appearances”). This illusion may be connected with individual subjectivity and may concern an error made by the senses, imagination, or judgment (see DOXA, PERCEPTION, PHANTASIA, REPRÉSENTATION). It can also be conceived as having to do with a transcendental subjectivity, and it may be connected with the opposition between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself (see ERSCHEINUNG; REALITY, with the difference Realität/Wirklichkeit; see also GEGENSTAND). III. The Ambiguities of Greek and German The interweaving of both positive and negative meanings is particularly marked in Greek and German. Consider the breadth of the term doxa [δόξα], which refers to the appearance of what appears, to right opinion (δοϰεῖ μοι,, “it seems to me”), and to general opinion, with its rhetorical meaning (v. ἔνδοξον, “acceptable,” under DOXA, II.C; cf. COMMONPLACE and EIDÔLON), and finally to the glory of God and its radiance; but in opposition to alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] (see TRUTH), it continues to designate at the same time mortals’ error and illusion. Similarly, note the proximity in German of Schein and Scheinen, of simple appearance and deceptive appearance (Anschein), and of the appearing of what shows itself in its full radiance, which “has just appeared” (zum Vorschein kommt): die Sonne scheint (the sun shines) or der Mondschein (moonlight) (see ERSCHEINUNG). To illustrate this connection, we may cite Gorgias and Hegel: [ἔλεγε δὲ τὸ μὲν εἶναι ἀφανὲϛ μὴ τυχὸν τοῦ δοϰεῖν, τὸ δὲ δοϰεῖν ἀσθενὲϛ μὴ τυχὸν τοῦ εἶναι] ([H]e said that being was invisible if it did not encounter appearance, and the appearance was without power if it did not encounter being.) (Gorgias, 82.B.26 DK) Das Wesen muß erscheinen. ([T]he essence must appear [appearance is not inessential, it is part of the essence itself].) So erscheint das Wesen. (That is how essence appears,) (Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Bk. II, §2). IV. Aesthetic Meanings See IMAGE and, in part, EIDÔLON and MIMÊSIS. v. AESTHETICS, ESSENCE, IMAGINATION, OBJECT, RES, SUBJECT, TABLEAU, TO BE APPROPRIATION 1. “Appropriation,” borrowed from Late Latin appropriatio, was used especially in medicine (in the sense of assimilation) and in chemistry (in the sense of catalysis), before being adopted by philosophy as one of the possible translations of the German word Ereignis (from the adjective eigen, own, characteristic) as it is used by Heidegger; see EREIGNIS; cf. DESTINY and EVENT. 2. Moreover, it is also the literal translation of a key term in Stoic ethics, oikeiôsis [οἰϰείωσιϛ], which designates our (extendable) relationship to that with which nature has made us familiar and which is peculiar to us (oikeios [οἰϰεῖοϛ], domestic); see OIKEIÔSIS; cf. OIKONOMIA, ECONOMY, and COMMUNITY, POLIS, POLITICS. 3. More generally, on ways of expressing what is one’s “own” and property, see PROPERTY. Finally, on the propriety of terms and discourses in grammar or rhetoric, see COMMONPLACE, COMPARISON, HOMONYM, MIMÊSIS, TROPE; cf. STYLE. v. RES, TO BE, WISDOM ARGUTEZZA (ITALIAN) FRENCH subtilité ingénieuse SPANISH agudeza v. WITTICISM, AND BAROQUE, COMPARISON, CONCETTO, GENIUS, GOÛT, IMAGE, IMAGINATION, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS In seventeenth-century Italian theory of art, argutezza refers to the activity of the imagination and understanding that tends to show the greatest metaphorical ingenuity. From the outset, the word presents significant translation problems because it designates in a language that is itself metaphorical and ingenious, the necessary conditions for the most “subtle” and “witty” modes of signification, and it is practiced in a very broad domain that ranges from sign systems that are discourses to symbolic figures (allegories, emblems, devices, tableaux). The problem of argutezza is inseparable from the so-called baroque aesthetics that developed in Italy. As it appears in Emanuele Tesauro’s Ilcannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian telescope, 1654), argutezza refers to the idea of “ingenious ARGUTEZZA 41 subtlety”; that is, the act par excellence of metaphorical thought, and it implies extremely complex goals that are irreducible to simple “acuity” or “witticism”—although “ingenious subtlety” is accurate enough to render agudeza as used by Baltasar Gracián (Agudeza y arte), the Spanish remaining closer to the Latin acutus. Like most seventeenth-century theories, Tesauro’s draws not only on rhetoric and poetics, but also on Aristotle’s whole philosophy, of which it is an application and extension to multiple systems of representation. The network consisting of argutezza, concetto, and ingegno is central in the theory of baroque art: it governs, more or less directly, every conception of metaphor, of the figurability of ideas and inventions, both poetic and graphic. Contrary to the Spanish term agudeza, which belongs solely to literary or political discourse, an argutezza, in Tesauro’s sense, can appear in allegories, verbal enigmas, and devices, in a text and in an architectural work, in an inscription, and in the composition of a picture or the expression of a sculpture. What is argutezza according to Tesauro? “[U]n divin parto dell’ingegno” (a divine part of the mind); the “ultimo sforzo dell’intelletto” (the ultimate effort of the intellect); the “spirito vitale delle morte pagine” (the living spirit of the dead page). Through the power of this divine Pythia, the discourse of ingenious men (ingegnosi) differs as much from that of the crowd as the discourse of the angels differs from that of men; these ingenious men have the miraculous power to make mute things to speak, incurable people to revive, and the dead to rise again; this enchantress of souls gives a voice to tombs, to marbles, to statues; and ingenious men who speak ingeniously give them spirit (spirito) and movement (movimento) (Il cannocchiale aristotelico, chap. 1). In this sense, argutezza goes deeper than concetto, since it is a faculty of the mind that is between understanding and imagination. One of the essential reasons that the word has no equivalent in other European languages—including Latin, into which the main texts of the period were translated—is that it emphasizes all the metaphorical possibilities of thought by extending it to all the figures peculiar to the visual field, that is, to the plastic arts and to ballet. Thus argutia and argutezza are in fact the necessary conditions for the production of any symbolic composition and thus transcend the frameworks of traditional mimêsis. Seventeenth-century French theoreticians, such as Le Moyne or Ménestrier, never translate the Italian word: they render or express it by means of periphrasis, as in the forms représentation ingénieuse, invention spirituelle, image savante. The untranslatability of the word is thus patent; but argutezza, like concetto, had to be “rendered,” that is, transposed by circumlocution, as the project of a philosophy of symbolic images was elaborated in France during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Based in the first place on the primacy of the image and the metaphorical nature of thought, this “philosophy” often shows clearly sophistical tendencies in its conception of language and its rehabilitation of myth, of which we still find echoes in Vico. The failure of translation was compensated for by many theoretical achievements illustrating what is implied by the very concept of argutezza. The empty place left by the untranslatability of the word had the effect of renewing, in ¬European texts, the problem of the image, of invention, and of metaphor and imitation, leading to the elaboration of theories far more rigorous than the preceding ones. Thus, starting in the seventeenth century, a whole semantic sequence was contaminated by this new triumph of concettism, ranging from the notions of the image, representation, and the sign as such to that of the figure (the Latin figura here recovering its full meaning). This tradition persisted in Europe, especially in Germany, down to Herder, despite the hostile rationalist criticism to which it was subjected by the Enlightenment. This figurability, which was inherent in concetto as well as in argutezza, that is, in the creativity of the imagination and the understanding, is one reason that both German and English are put to the test by the act of translation. In German, contemporary philologists and historians encounter a difficulty that sometimes increases their “anti-figurative” prejudices. After having proposed geistreiche Einfälle (witty ideas) and witzige Spielereien (witty play) as translations of argutezza, E. Curtius (RT: La littérature européenne et le Moyen-Âge latin) adopts the French word pointe, which can only produce further ambiguity. To render argutezza as pointe—instead of the German Geistreicheleien (subtleties), for example—in order to preserve the idea of acutus and argutus is to return to 1 Agudeza and acutezza/argutezza To designate acuity of mind and its ingenious inventions—witticisms, quips, sallies—Spanish has only one word: agudeza. Italian has two, which are often difficult to distinguish: acutezza and argutezza, the former deriving from acutus, “sharp,” “keen”; the latter from arguere, “bring to light,” “demonstrate.” These two words are almost synonymous for Tesauro and the Italian theoreticians. Argutezza also includes discursive metaphors, the concetti that can be found in sermons or inscriptions, as well as figurative representations such as emblems, ballets, and allegories. Acutezza is a term that is itself metaphorical, designating the metaphorical activity of the mind as a subtle, ingenious, clever faculty of expression. Although we often find argutezza used in the same sense, acutezza strongly emphasizes the pointed, penetrating, and trenchant quality of this subtlety that is peculiar to the spirit of the concetto. We also find in Tesauro the term acuto, which in his work refers to the idea of a strong, precise expression, contrary to the Latin acutus, which designated a simple style without rhetorical figures. As for argutia, which Tesauro sometimes writes arguzia, it is often used in the sense of subtlety. 42 ART the French translation of the seventeenth century, which is extremely reductive since it denies the fecundity of concettism by reducing it to a pure play of the wit, that is, to a certain conception of the mind that is implicitly classical and rationalist, and thus French. As for the untranslatability of argutezza, the deep metaphoricity of the language is, after all, only one difficulty among others. This metaphoricity is a site of confrontation and privileged comparison that arose from the eighteenth century’s rationalist desire to eliminate concettism. Must we finally resign ourselves to including argutezza among the untranslatables that are a dominant phenomenon of baroque culture? In reality, we have to resituate the concept not only in the semantic networks of European theories of art but also in comparison to other topoi: those of the theology of the image (still active in the seventeenth century) and those of theories of language down to Vico, Hamann, and Jean Paul. This presupposes that we find connections among networks that may at first appear historically and theoretically heterogeneous. Refs: Gracián, Baltasar. Agudeza y arte de ingenio en que se explican todos los modos y diferencias. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996. First published in 1648. Grady, Hugh H. “Rhetoric, Wit and Art in Gracián’s Agudeza.” Modern Language Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1980): 21–37. Kircher, Athanasius. Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Rome, 1653. . Polygraphia nova. Rome, 1663. Lange, Klaus-Peter. Theoretiker des literarischen Manierismus. Munich: Fink, 1968. Marino, Giambattista. Dicerie sacre. Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Masen, Jakob. Speculum imaginum veritatis occultae. Cologne, 1650. Ménestrier, Claude François. La philosophie des images. Paris, 1682. . La philosophie des images énigmatiques. Lyon, 1694. Pellegrini, Matteo. Delle acutezze, che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti, volgarmente si appellano. Geneva, 1639. Proctor, Robert E. “Emanuele Tesauro: A Theory of the Conceit.” Modern Language Notes 88, no. 1 (1973): 68–94. Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico o sia Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elucuzione che serve à tutta l’arte oratoria, lapidaria et simbolica esaminata co’principi del divino Aristotele. Turin: Einaudi, 1978. First published in 1654. . Idea delle perfette imprese. 1629. Vuilleumier-Laurens, Florence. La raison des figures symboliques à la Renaissance et à l’âge classique. Geneva: Droz, 2000. ARS. It. arte, ART, G. Kunst, τέχνη -- v. AESTHETICS, BEAUTY, BILDUNG, GENIUS, GOÛT, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, NATURE, PHANTASIA, TABLEAU. The Latin word “ars has a general sense, that of a way of being or doing (“the art of pleasing”). It becomes more precise when it is associated with the idea of a specialization of know-how implying rules that are peculiar to it (“the art of cooking”); and it is still further specified when it designates a set of human practices, those of artists, “men who have devoted themselves to expression in art” (Baudelaire, Salon de 1859). The movement into this lexical funnel was also a historical process, a long sociocultural maturation marked by the influence of the notions of technê [τέχνη], ars, art, and Kunst, the transitory influence of the terms “fine arts,” beaux arts, schöne Künsten, and so on, and the return, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of the term “art” in the singular, the meaning of which had changed in the interim. The Space of Technê. Know-how. Reflecting on the history of the word “art,” R. G. Collingwood notes that the “aesthetic sense of the word” is “very recent in origin”; ars in Latin and technê in Greek, terms that we regularly translate by “art,” signify “a craft or specialized form of skill, like carpentry or smithying or surgery” (Principles of Art, 5). No distinction is made between the artist and the artisan, or more precisely, the man of art. The ancient Greeks thus had no term to isolate what we now call “art.” Technê, like ars, covers a much wider field, ranging from know-how in a craft to deception, trickery, and more generally, a way of doing something, a means (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.). Nonetheless, the thematics of imitation allows us to approach the “modern” sense of “art”—or at least to project it more or less well in a certain number of contexts. We can delimit the meaning of technê by its situation between simple experience or empirical practice (ἐμπειϱία) on the one hand, and science (ἐπιστήμη) on the other. Plato and Aristotle superimpose a conceptual action on the state of the lexicon. Plato initiates and generalizes the use of adjectives in the feminine (-ikos, -ikê, -ikon indicate relationship) to designate multiple technai: in the Gorgias, we thus find, alongside weaving or music (ἡ ὑφαντιϰή, ἡ μουσιϰή, 449d), drawing, arithmetic, reasoning, and geometry (ἡ γραφιϰή, ἀϱιθμητιϰή, λογιστιϰή, γεωμετϱιϰή, 450d), and a large number of obvious neologisms: eristic, antilogic, dialectic, sophistic, politics, and rhetoric (ἡ ἐϱιστιϰή, ἡ ἀντιλογιϰή, ἡ διαλεϰτιϰή, ἡ σοφιστιϰή, ἡ πολιτιϰή, ἡ ῥητοϱιϰή), the last being the one that gives its subtitle to the dialogue, Πεϱὶ τῆϛ ῥητοϱιϰῆϛ). It is in this paradoxical dialogue, which deals with the technê rhetorikê, the art of speaking, that Plato defines technê the most precisely, the better to deny rhetoric the status of technê: unlike a simple “routine and a knack” (empeiria kai tribê [ἐμπειϱία ϰαὶ τϱιϐή], the former meaning literally “rubbing,” 463b), art examines the nature and cause (τὴν φύσιν, τὴν αἰτίαν) of that with which it deals, and accounts for them (λόγον ἔχει, 465a, 501a). Ultimately, rhetoric and cookery are put in the same category, that of the image (εἴδωλον) and flattery (ϰολαϰεία), which Art of the Ancients, art of the Moderns: The rules of art v. LOGOS, PRAXIS, VIRTUE Modern descriptions of art constantly mix two great conceptual legacies. The legacy of the Ancients is interested in the process of making any object or work; the aesthetics of the Moderns is interested in the sensations that the object produces for the beholder. The two perspectives do not precisely coincide. The “art” of the Ancients includes every kind of making, and thus what we would call “technique” or “technology.” The Moderns’ aesthetics include every kind of admirable beauty, and thus the beauty of natural phenomena (the sublimity of volcanoes). When studying the art-technique of the Ancients, we have to abandon as false oppositions antinomies that are legitimate from the point of view of Moderns. Art did not have the beautiful as its exclusive domain, and technique was not limited to the useful. Art was not the realm of mysterious things and “artistic” vagueness, as opposed to technique as the realm of serious things, rigorous procedures, and guaranteed results. Clarifying the vocabulary was as important as relativizing, as a dictatorship or caricature, any scientific view of rationality modeled on industry and, later on, techno-science. The ancient theory of art does not seem to have aroused great debates or challenges, in any case not before the end of the eighteenth century—that is, before the dawn of the industrial revolutions. For the Ancients, and so long as people thought with Latin, art and technique were one and the same thing: Latin ars (from the root *er-, which provides in particular Gr. ἄϱθϱον, “articulation,” and Lat. armus, “upper arm,” but which also appears in Lat. ritus, “rite,” and Gr. ἀϱιθμόϛ,“number”) equals Greek τέχνη (from the root *teks-, “construct,” “make”). Since art and technique are defined by the production of an object, the question is what guarantees the success of the finished product, and the classic answer is the worker’s skill, which is the necessary result of long training: “By the work, one knows the worker.” The fundamental concepts of this theory are those of Aristotle, whose presentation is synthesized in a short chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (6.4.1140a1–24). Technical art is concerned with the production of objects or “works of art,” Greek poiêsis [ποίησιϛ], Latin fabricatio or fictio. Thus in Greek, the artist-craftsman is called a “poet,” in classical Latin a faber or fictor, and in Late Latin factor or operator (cf. the French expression facteur d’orgues). Fabrication is the sole specific character of art. Very generally, art is an “excellence” or “virtue” (arêtê [ἀϱητή]): “a disposition accompanied by a true (or right) rule.” The disposition is rendered as εξις in Greek, habitus in Latin. (See “with a rule”: μετὰ λόγου, Gr. λόγοϛ, Lat. ratio; “true” or “right”: Gr. ἀληθήϛ or ὀϱθόϛ, Lat. vera or recta.) Finally, technical art moves in the domain of the contingent, of what might be other than what it is. This character is not peculiar to it. The contingent is also the domain of “prudence” (phronêsis [φϱόνησιϛ]), which is, so to speak, the production of actions, Greek praxis [πϱάξιϛ]. Technical art and prudence are thus opposed to the intellectual virtues, such as science or epistêmê [ἐπιστήμη], which seek to know the necessary (for example, geometry or astronomy). As Thomas Aquinas sums it up, technical art is recta ratio factibilium, and prudence is recta ratio agibilium (Summa theologica, 2a–2ae, q. 47, art. 5). To understand what kind of rationality is referred to here, we have to explain the idea of true logos or “right reason,” recta ratio. The word recta refers to the idea of a rule, from regula, “regulation,” that is, etymologically from regere, “to rule” (less “to correct” than “to direct”). The rule of art—as of prudence—is not so much a norm as a fixed reference point in a world of movement. This can be seen in the application of the rules as well as in their discovery. On the one hand, the rule makes it possible to escape from the contingent. The rule of art must be applied if one wants to obtain a specific result. As defined by the Scholastics, it is a “via certa et determinata.” From this point of view, there is no uncertainty in the arts and techniques, neither in the rule nor in the product obtained by applying the rule. This holds for the fabrication in accord with the rules of a knife, a ship, or a house. In these domains, uncertainty and the unpredictable can be reduced almost to zero. The adjective certus signifies that the rule has been objectified, expressed, visualized by the intelligence, so to speak, and that we are no longer groping our way by means of an instinctive practice. The logos alêthês [λόγоς ἀληθής] of the technician-artist is an increasingly clear and distinct awareness of his means. The clearer the rule, the less difficult it is to transmit it and have it applied by others. On the other hand, the rules of art have to be discovered. As Aristotle insists at the beginning of the Metaphysics, it is by observing particulars that one can arrive at general or even universal rules by induction (A.1). Besides the physician, the canonical example of the technician is the ship’s pilot. The sea is more powerful than he is, and it is far from being perfectly predictable. Aristotle lived in a maritime world, where nature made people conscious of how much they were neither its masters nor its possessors. However, far from leading to fatalism, this only made the role of the pilot more important. It is not the sea or the world that is rational, but he. If the rule is a stable reference point in a moving world, it is on the side of the subject, the regulating intelligence. It is the formal element in the operation. The moving world is on the side of the object, of that to which the rule is applied: it is the material element. Aristotle attributes contingency to the object alone, not to the subject—to the result, not to the rule. Modern technical triumphs have caused to be considered “true” only those rules that have been validated by the predictability of the results. But in Aristotle and Aquinas, the absence of guaranteed results does not signify an absence of rules, of rationality. To speak of medicine as an art is now considered a way of emphasizing the irreducible contingency of medicine, which cannot achieve the status of a “true” science. For the Ancients, it was instead a way of emphasizing medicine’s ability to find rules, something stable. We look for stability in the material, they sought it in the intelligible. For the production of things in which technique triumphs, the two points of view merge. For techniques that remain, like medicine, an art, the divergence is only a matter of emphasis. But for the fine arts, the divergence is at its maximum. They push to the limit a conception of rationality that seems to us paradoxical, and that dares to assert that the absence of guaranteed results goes hand in hand with the presence of infallible rules. Francis Goyet impersonate the corresponding technê (464c–d). Thus technê is characterized by the presence of the semantic trait “knowledge,” to the point that one might often hesitate about which noun to add: ἡ πολιτιϰή (technê: Gorgias, 464b or Protagoras, 319a, Statesman, 267d; epistêmê: Statesman, 303e). consists of bringing into existence things “whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made,” Nicomachean Ethics, 6.4.1140a13–14). But that always also implies that art provides the concepts necessary for thinking about nature. Aristotle elaborates his physical theory of the four causes with reference to making and doing things (Physics, 2.2 and 3): for each natural being, we will seek, on the model precisely of a statue, what is its matter (to ex hou [τὸ ἐξ οὗ]: bronze, the cause of the statue), its form “τὸ εἶδοϛ ϰαὶ τὸ παϱάδειγμα”: Athena, who serves as a model for the statue), its efficient cause (the sculptor Polykleitos), and its purpose (to adorn a temple, to bring the city into existence). From this comes the famous complement: “Generally art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish [epitelei ha hê phusis adunatei apergasasthai (ἐπιτελεῖ ἃ ἡ φύσιϛ ἀδυνατεῖ ἀπεϱγάσασθαι)], and partly imitates her” (Physics 2.8.199a15–16). Art displays both its dependency on the model by imitating it, and a certain superiority in realizing what the model, even though it is prior, was not able to produce. We understand why in his Poetics Aristotle regards positively the pleasure that we derive from what we would call the arts, those that represent (imitate in images, mimountai apeikazontes [μιμοῦνταί ἀπειϰάζοντεϛ], 1.1447a19) with colors and figures, or that use rhythm, melody, or language, in prose or in verse—music, painting, or poetry. Pleasure (to chairein [τὸ χαίϱειν], see PLEASURE) is of two kinds. First there is an intellectual pleasure: on looking at an image, we learn to know something, to recognize it for what it is (“The reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things” [“theôrountas manthanein kai sullogizesthai ti hekaston (θεωϱοῦνταϛ μανθάνειν ϰαὶ συλλογίζεσθαι τί ἕϰαστον)”], Poetics, 4.1448b15–17). But there is also what we would call an aesthetic pleasure: “It will be due to the execution or coloring or some such other cause” (4.6). The field of technê can thus include all values from divine demiurgy (artifex mundi, the Romans called it) to human power or faculty, which is rational and useful, but obviously susceptible to Promethean excess and trickery. If we try to isolate in it the premises of what we now call art, value judgments are ontologically, as well as politically and socially, amplified: The Greeks could say in one and the same breath: “He who has not seen the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia has lived in vain” and “People like Phidias, namely sculptors, are unfit for citizenship.” (Arendt, Between Past and Future, 216–17) II. Ars, Kunst: The Practical and the Intellectual The Latin notion of ars, and the notion of art (and its European equivalents) up to the seventeenth century, is qualified by the adjunction of antonymic adjectives (liberal/ mechanical, noble/servile). Ars is largely a matter of “making,” but it also covers more intellectual attitudes. Similarly, the German notion of Kunst wavers between ability (können) and knowing (kennen). It remained for Aristotle—for whom, contrary to Plato, rhetoric is in fact a technê, and even a power of “theorizing” (theôrêsai [θεωϱῆσαι], Rhetoric, 1.2.1355b32) and of reflecting on causes and means by distinguishing the true from the apparent (1.1.1355b10–16)—to make the distinction by the criterion of the field of application: art, like action (v. PRAXIS for the difference between praxis and poiêsis [πϱάξιϛ/ ποίησιϛ]), deals with the contingent, whereas science deals with the necessary. Once the orbit of the meanings of technê in its original consistency has been sketched, how should we conceive its relationship with what we moderns call “art”? We need to resort to another defining trait, μίμησιϛ. Valorizations and devalorizations. Technê and φύσιϛ, art and nature, are conceived in a relationship of imitation or reciprocal representation that is constantly reversed, both regarding the term imitated (Which is primary, nature or art?) and regarding the value of imitation itself, depending on the system in question (v. MIMÊSIS). Something approaching a modern meaning of “art” can found at the end of Plato’s Sophist. “Mimesis” is defined as the production of images (poiêsis tis [ποίησίϛ τίϛ], eidôlôn mentoi [εἰδώλων μέντοι], 265b) and not of the things themselves. It can be divine or human. In fact, the divine produces not only things in nature (humans, fire), but also the image that accompanies each thing (“to parakolouthoun eidôlon hekastôi [τὸ παϱαϰολουθοῦν εἴδωλον ἑϰάστῳ],” 266c, phantasmata [φαντάσματα]—dreams, shadows, reflections; see EIDÔLON, PHANTASIA); and even humans produce not only works (the house produced by the mason’s art), but also images (“In building it produces an actual house, and in painting [graphikêi] a house of a different sort, as it were a manmade dream for waking eyes,” 266c); and these images can be identical copies, reproductions (τὸ εἰϰαστιϰόν, or ἡ εἰϰαστιϰή, the art of making εἰϰόνεϛ, 235d, 266d), or relative copies, which include point of view or perspective, trompe l’oeil (to phantastikon [τὸ φανταστιϰόν] or hê phantastikê [ἡ φανταστιϰή], the art of making phantasmata, 236b–c, 266d). Something like visual art is thus isolated in order to serve as a model for the distinctions to be introduced in the art of speaking, but it is not explored as such. Its main characteristic is ontological: in the Republic (book 10), the art of illusory appearance, painting (graphê [γϱαφή]), considered as situated at a distance of three degrees from the truth, proves to be ontologically inferior to carpentry, which takes its models directly from ideas (597a). For each “art,” the question is whether a principle other than imitation can save it from the regress that it implies: thus music has a privileged place, given its relation to mathematics—though there is a bad kind of music, which, acting on our senses, softens the mind, and a good kind of music, which is regulated by the principles of mathematical epistêmê (3.401d; Protagoras, 326a–b). “Art imitates nature [hê technê mimeitai tên phusin (ἡ τέχνη μιμεῖται τὴν φύσιν)].” That means that nature is primary, present first, composed of a plurality of beings that have in themselves the principle of their movement (technê ART 45 (magna opera), but he does not use the word ars. On the other hand, the word appears in the second part of the analogy, when the process of induction that rises from several real women to the ideal model of the woman is applied to rhetoric, called ars dicendi. As Erwin Panofsky showed in Idea (1924), the development of the modern notion of art and artists passed by way of a conjunction of the inductive model of De inventione and the deductive model of Brutus, in which, this time, Cicero seeks the model for the ars dicendi in the example of Phidias sculpting the image of Zeus on the basis of the idea that he forms of him in his mind. Here, ars qualifies the activity of the artist turned toward his internal eye (see SPECIES): contemplabatur aliquem, e quo similitudinem duceret, sed ipsius in mente insidebat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedam, quam intuens in eaque defixus, ad illius similitudinem artem et manum dirigebat. It was in his own mind that resided a separate vision of beauty that he contemplated and on which he fixed his gaze, guiding his art and his hand by resemblance with this vision. (Cicero, Brutus, 2.7–8) A crucial aspect of the development of the notion of art thus resides in the appearance in the Renaissance of “a new type of artist essentially different from the artisan of old, in that he was conscious of his intellectual and creative powers” (Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 31). The signs of art, which appear in large numbers at that time, no longer have the sporadic character seen in antiquity; they are given concrete form, notably by the inclusion of artists in humanistic culture. The centrifugal force of the process of becoming autonomous is inseparable from the centripetal force that subjects the artist to an intellectual and political dependency. Thus Albrecht Dürer owed his career to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III, called the Wise, who, through the mediation of the poet and humanist Conrad Celtis, brought him into the Round Table of the learned men of Nuremberg. The reference to Dürer is particular instructive here. The shift in the meaning of Kunst on the basis of its original double meaning allows us to understand how the artisan was transformed into the artist. As Panofsky notes: Like ars in Latin and “art” in English, the German word Kunst had originally two different meanings, the second of which is now all but extinct. On the one hand, it denoted “ability” [können], that is, man’s ability purposely to produce things or effects. On the other hand, it denoted “knowledge” [kennen], that is, theoretical knowledge or insight as opposed to practice. In the second, or narrower, sense—which still survives in the expression Die freien Künste or “The Liberal Arts”—astronomy could be called Künst der Sterne (“art of the stars”); and when Dürer wished to express the idea that a good painter needed both theoretical insight and practical skill he could do it by saying that he had to combine Kunst and Brauch. (Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer) Rome never admitted the visual arts into the cycle of the liberal arts, the artes liberales, or, in other words, into the body of theoretical knowledge which a freeman was expected to master. The liberal arts remained the corner-stone of Christian education and this implied the exclusion of the visual arts from the higher sphere throughout the Middle Ages. (Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 7–8) These remarks direct our analysis of the meaning of the terms ars, arte, art, and Kunst in two directions: on the one hand, the status of the artist and that of his activity, and on the other, the criterion for his social legitimation. The vocabulary the authors of Latin antiquity used to classify diverse human practices is significant in this regard. They distinguished the artes liberales (Pliny, Seneca), honestae (Cicero), and ingenuae (Quintilian) from the artes illiberales or sordidae (Cicero). The artes liberales are intellectual activities such as grammar and rhetoric, the studia liberalia Seneca talks about in his letter 88, which have no goal other than the cultivation of the mind, and are alone worthy of a free man. (In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville derived the word liberatis from liber.) The artes illiberales are manual activities, the artes mechanicae are reserved for slaves or are remunerated by wages; they include painting and sculpture, but not music, which is considered a mathematical discipline. In the Middle Ages, the number of the liberal arts was set at seven: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The first four constituted the so-called quadrivium, the last three the trivium. Starting in the Renaissance, painters and sculptors no longer wanted to be confused with artisans. The battle they fought ensured that their activity would no longer be regarded as a mercenary craft, but would gain the dignity that was the privilege of the liberal arts. Far from challenging the distinction between mechanical arts and liberal arts, the battle testifies to the permanence of that division, which persisted at least until the eighteenth century. A definition like that given by Jacques Bénigne Bossuet shows the continuing influence of Greek and Latin notions: “The liberal and mechanical arts are distinguished by the fact that the former work with the mind rather than with the hand; and the others, whose success depends on routine rather than on science, work more with the hand than with the mind” (Connaissance de Dieu, 1.15). In the Latin vocabulary, ars, in addition to having the very general meaning of a way of being or behaving, was applied in three domains: that involving the object of a “making,” of a manual trade; that which requires know-how; and that which has to do with the application of rules: carpentry, rhetoric, and grammar are thus subsumed under a single category. It is therefore the most specific rules, notably of painting, that make it possible to distinguish the arts in the modern sense. The beginning of De inventione (1.1–4), where Cicero takes up, with an intention different from Plato’s, the parallel between discourse and painting, offers a significant example of this. Commenting on the commission the inhabitants of Croton gave to Zeuxis for a portrait of Helen, Cicero mentions the “very large number of pictures [tabulas]” painted by the artist, and speaks of “embellishing the temple of Juno with unmatched pictures [picturis]” and masterpieces With Immanuel Kant, the philosophical determination of the specificity of art turns in a quite different direction. Taste, he writes in the Critique of Judgment, “is merely a judging and not a productive faculty, and what is appropriate to it is therefore not a work of beautiful art [der schönen Künsten]. It can only be a product belonging to useful and mechanical art [nützlichen und mechanischen Kunst] or even to science [Wissenschaft], produced according to definite rules that can be learned and must be exactly followed” (§48). Although a poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery, and so on, belong to the class of the beaux arts, a table service or a sermon is excluded from it. However, this criterion of classification is not sufficient: there is in addition or opposition a notion involving what art does in the work, which depends on an entirely different principle. Works allegedly assigned to the beaux arts, Kant says in §49, cannot lack “spirit” (Geist), the principle that “animates the soul” (“das belebende Prinzip im Gemüte”): “A poem may be very neat and elegant, but without spirit.” The same holds for a narrative, a “festal discourse,” or a conversation. In other words, a work of art may lack art, whereas a production that is not a work of art may correspond to the principle of art. In addition to this chiasmus, there is also the chiasmus of taste and genius: there can be genius without taste as well as taste without genius. The aesthetic definition of art is thus superimposed upon its artistic determination. The spirit that makes art “is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.” It is the free play of the faculties, of the understanding and the imagination, that defines pure aesthetic judgment. The principle that animates art, Kant adds, is “that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Guyer and Matthews). The concept dedicates the work to an external or internal goal and manifests the mechanical rules of the art. A work of fine art, instead of being reducible to the concept of a rule, must appear as nature, as the product of genius, that is, “the natural talent [ingenium] that gives the rule to art [die angeborene Gemütsanlage (ingenium), durch welche die Natur der Kunst die Regel gibt]” (§46). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the meanings associated with the beaux arts gradually passed into the words “art” (French and English), Kunst, arte, and so on. G.W.F. Hegel put his philosophical signature on this transfer with his famous Lectures on Aesthetics (1820–29), which were poorly named, since in fact they concern, as he himself said, not aesthetics, but a philosophy of art (Philosophie der Kunst). The discipline that he founded confirms the Kantian rejection of the reduction of art to know-how, but deviates from the theory of taste and separates art from nature. This modern sense of the word “art” and its equivalents in various European languages was then added to an old sense (which persisted, obviously), but also soon rose up to oppose it. Artistic interest could no longer be reduced to a vocational This distinction between Kunst and Brauch (custom, practical sense) allows us to connect Kunst with human activities that more or less imply theoretical foundations. But in other texts, Dürer turns the meaning of Kunst in another direction, like a scale that he tips to suit his interest. Thus when he speaks of the rules of art in his Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (Four Books on Measurement), it is in the most instrumental sense, as the standard measure of magnitudes. III. The Arts, the Beaux Arts, and Art in the Modern Sense In a context in which the opposition, which is Latin in origin, between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts continues to be dominant, the notion of the “fine arts” was used to carry out a transformation of and around the notion of art until the latter was identified with art as such. Extrinsic legitimation, especially intellectual legitimation through science or philosophy, is a stage in the artist’s slow conquest of autonomy. But although this process continued in the seventeenth century, it did so in conjunction with a gradual separation from certain arts whose goals were cognitive. The intellectual criterion made it possible to elevate art, in the hierarchy that governed legitimation, to the dignity of a liberal art: “To judge beauty is to judge order, proportion, and rightness, things that only the mind can perceive,” wrote Bossuet in Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même (1670); but this criterion of beauty also made it possible to put into a distinct class some of the arts that benefited from this ennobling. It is important always to keep in mind this twofold movement through which the accession to liberal status was accompanied by a concentration on the specificity of art. More or less concomitantly, the notions of fine arts, beaux arts, schöne Künste, and belle arti, which had appeared when art began to be institutionalized in the seventeenth century (in the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, for instance), show the convergence of the European vocabulary toward a common concept. We must also note, however, an inverse process that appeared later on, in RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers: the recognition that even the mechanical arts involve mental activity. The latter reflected or led to a rehabilitation of manual trades in the framework of the encyclopedic treatment of human practices sanctioned by the Encyclopédie article “Art.” In this article, Diderot denounces the incoherence of a definition that assimilates liberal art to a purely mental activity, ignoring the fact that it is an art, that is, an activity that involves making or doing. Precisely to the extent that art assumes the execution of an object, it is distinguished from the pure mental activity expressed in science. Inversely, Diderot rejects the traditional, equally erroneous conception of mechanical art that denies this form of activity any connection with intelligence. In art, execution is based on rules: one can adopt either a practical attitude that consists in operating in accord with the rules without reflecting on them, or a theoretical, “inoperative” attitude that consists in reflecting on the rules. “Every art has its speculation and its practice,” Diderot writes (RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire, s.v.), thus restoring to the word “art” a sense rather close to that of the Latin ars. ART 47 Furley, David J., and Alexander Nehamas, eds. Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Goldschmidt, Victor. Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote. Paris: Vrin, 1982. Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. In Werke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. First published in 1822–29. Translation by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Husain, Martha. Ontology and the Art of Tragedy: An Approach to Aristotle’s Poetics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kraut, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ledbetter, Grace. Poetics before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Michel, Pierre-Henri. De Pythagore à Euclide. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1950. Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Translated by J. S. Peake. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. . The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1934–35. Plato. Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Reinach, Adolphe. La peinture ancienne. Recueil Milliet. Paris: Macula, Deucalion Collection, 1985. Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime. Platon et l’art de son temps: Arts Plastiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952. Wittkower, Rudolph, and Margot Wittkower. Born under Saturn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. activity, but rather required an individual’s total commitment. This figure of the artist inherited from the Renaissance proliferated with Romanticism and the doctrine of art for art’s sake: Art, for these gentlemen, is everything—poetry, painting, etc.; they are in love with art, and scorn anyone who does not work for art, spend their lives talking about art, speaking art. (Revue de Paris, January 1833)..Refs.: Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking, 2006. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by D. Ross. Revised by J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. . Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes, vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Aubenque, Pierre. Le problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Baudelaire, Charles. Le salon de 1859. Edited by Wolfgang Drost, with Ulrike Riechers. Paris: H. Champion, 2006. Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne. Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même. In Œuvres, vol. 34. Versailles, Fr.: Imprimerie de J. A. Lebel, 1818. First published in 1670. Collingwood, Robin George. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon, 1938. 2 Plastic, the plastic arts, bildende Künste v. PLASTICITY, and BILD, FICTION, HISTORY, TRUTH Plasticity has long characterized the arts of modeling. The Greek plassein [πλάσσειν], “shape, fashion, form,” is built on a root that means “spread a thin layer, coat” (whence “plaster”; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.). It provides the specific vocabulary for working with clay and modeling, and serves in particular to describe the activity of Prometheus, “of whom it is said that he fashioned us, along with other living beings” (Philemon, 89.1), and also that of Hephaistos shaping Pandora, the very paradigm of deception and trickery, a beautiful virgin molded out of earth dampened with water and unleashed among men to open the jar containing all evils (Hesiod, Works and Days, 70ff.). From this comes its use relating to literary creation, to fiction assumed to be capable of deceiving—the plasticity of words: in his Encomium of Helen (82.B11 DK, §11), Gorgias mentions all those who “have persuaded and persuade by fashioning a false discourse [pseudê logon plasantes (ψευδῆ λόγον πλάσαντεϛ)].” Thus in the vocabulary of the historians, plasma [πλάσμα] comes to designate fiction, that is, “things that have not happened, but that are narrated like those that have,” the false recounted as true, in contrast to muthos [μῦθοϛ] and historia [ἱστοϱία], myth (the false recounted as false) and history (the true recounted as true); cf. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 263–64. And in the Latin rhetorical terminology, plasma becomes argumentum, whereas plassein is rendered by fingere (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.8.18–21). On all of this, see Cassin, L’effet sophistique, 470–512. But until the eighteenth century, the material-formal sense was dominant as the criterion for distinguishing a kind of art, as is shown by the article in the Encyclopédie (RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire), alongside which appears, without apparent connection, another article with the curious title “PLASTIQUE (Métaphysique) nature plastique, a principle that some philosophers claim serves to form organized bodies, & which is different from the life of animals.” However, at the very beginning of the century, Lord Shaftesbury had already established the link. For him, the expression “plastic nature,” a concept that emerged from the theosophy of the Cambridge Platonists of the second half of the seventeenth century, designated both the unconscious vegetative state of the growth of beings (a tree or a fetus) and a human power that was free, internal, and conscious, and reflected the principle of nature while transcending determinism. In his Advice to an Author (1710; RT: Characteristicks of Men, 1:207), Shaftesbury compares the poet and his ability to shape a unitary, organic work to Prometheus, “that sovereign artist, or Universal Plastic Nature.” In his Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art, an unfinished work that was published in part, and on which he worked in 1712–13, the idea is applied to the plastic arts explicitly designated as such: the painter, who works materia plastica, “begins by working first within. Here the imagery! Here the plastic work! First he makes forms, fashions, corrects, amplifies, contracts, unites, modifies, assimilates, adapts, conforms, polishes, refines, etc., forms his ideas: then his hand: his strokes” (in Shaftesbury, Second Characters, 142). Thus it happens that the term “plastic arts” makes a fleeting and remarkable appearance. Shaftesbury’s intuition was developed much later in France, notably by Lamennais (Esquisse d’une philosophie [1840]) and Taine (continued)

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