gramsci: a. political
leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Communist
Party had the ironical result of sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to
better articulate his distinctive political philosophy. Gramsci welcomes the
Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution against Capital” rather than against
capitalism: as a revolution refuting the deterministic Marxism according to
which socialism could arise only by the gradual evolution of capitalism, and
confirming the possibility of the radical transformation of social
institutions. In 1 he supported creation of the
Communist Party; as its general secretary from 4, he tried to reorganize
it along more democratic lines. In 6 the Fascists outlawed all opposition
parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in various prisons, where he wrote
more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a few lines to chapterlength
essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major interpretive challenge, but they
reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind grappling with important social and
political problems. The most common interpretation stems from Palmiro
Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of the
Communists. After the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II,
Togliatti read into Gramsci the so-called
road to socialism: a strategy for attaining the traditional Marxist
goals of the classless society and the nationalization of the means of
production by cultural means, such as education and persuasion. In contrast to
Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social institutions, and then their
control would yield the desired economic and political changes. This democratic
theory of Marxist revolution was long regarded by many as especially relevant
to Western industrial societies, and so for this and other reasons Gramsci is a
key figure of Western Marxism. The same theory is often called Gramsci’s theory
of hegemony, referring to a relationship between two political units where one
dominates the other with the consent of that other. This interpretation was a
political reconstruction, based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement
and on highly selective passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on
exaggerating the influence on Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and
minimizing influences like Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new
consensus has emerged yet; it would have to be based on analytical and
historical spadework barely begun. One main interpretive issue is whether
Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also led to question the ends of
traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to rational persuasion,
political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much
deeper than his inclinations toward the classless society, the abolition of
private property, the bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in
particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a
way of thinking, a concept he adapted from Hegel through Croce. Antonio Gramsci,
nome completo, così come registrato nell'atto di battesimo, Antonio Sebastiano
Francesco Gramsci[1] (Ales, 22 gennaio 1891 – Roma, 27 aprile 1937), è stato un
politico, filosofo, politologo, giornalista, linguista e critico letterario
italiano. Nel 1921 fu tra i fondatori del Partito Comunista d'Italia, divenendone
esponente di primo piano e segretario dal 1924 al 1927, ma nel 1926 venne
ristretto dal regime fascista nel carcere di Turi. Nel 1934, in seguito al
grave deterioramento delle sue condizioni di salute, ottenne la libertà
condizionata e fu ricoverato in clinica, dove trascorse gli ultimi anni di
vita. Considerato uno dei più importanti pensatori del XX secolo, nei
suoi scritti, tra i più originali della tradizione filosofica marxista, Gramsci
analizzò la struttura culturale e politica della società. Elaborò in
particolare il concetto di egemonia, secondo il quale le classi dominanti
impongono i propri valori politici, intellettuali e morali a tutta la società,
con l'obiettivo di saldare e gestire il potere intorno a un senso comune
condiviso da tutte le classi sociali, comprese quelle subalterne. Gli
antenati paterni di Antonio Gramsci erano originari della città di Gramshi in
Albania, e potrebbero essere giunti in Italia fin dal XVI secolo, durante la
diaspora albanese causata dall'invasione turca. Documenti d'archivio attestano
che nel Settecento il trisavolo Gennaro Gramsci, sposato con Domenica Blajotta,
possedeva a Plataci, comunità ‘’arbëreshë’’ del distretto di Castrovillari,
delle terre poi ereditate da Nicola Gramsci (1769-1824). Questi sposò Maria
Francesca Fabbricatore, e dal loro matrimonio nacque a Plataci Gennaro Gramsci
(1812-1873), che intraprese la carriera militare nella gendarmeria del Regno di
Napoli e, quando era di stanza a Gaeta, sposò Teresa Gonzales, figlia di un
avvocato napoletano di origini spagnole. Il loro secondo figlio fu Francesco
(1860-1937), il padre di Antonio Gramsci.[2][3] Le origini albanesi erano
conosciute dallo stesso Antonio Gramsci, che tuttavia le immaginava più
recenti, come scriverà alla cognata Tatiana Schucht dal carcere di Turi, il 12
ottobre del 1931: «[...] io stesso non ho alcuna razza; mio padre è di
origine albanese (la famiglia scappò dall'Epiro durante la guerra del 1821, ma
si italianizzò rapidamente). Tuttavia la mia cultura è italiana, fondamentalmente
questo è il mio mondo; non mi sono mai accorto di essere dilaniato tra due
mondi. L'essere io oriundo albanese non fu messo in giuoco perché anche Crispi
era albanese, educato in un collegio albanese.» Ghilarza: casa
museo Antonio Gramsci Francesco era studente in legge quando morì il padre;
dovendo trovare subito un lavoro, nel 1881 partì per la Sardegna per impiegarsi
nell'Ufficio del registro di Ghilarza. In questo paese, che allora contava
circa 2.200 abitanti, conobbe Giuseppina Marcias (1861-1932), figlia di un
esattore delle imposte e proprietario di alcune terre. La sposò nel 1883,
malgrado l'opposizione dei familiari, rimasti in Campania, che consideravano i
Marcias una famiglia di rango inferiore alla propria dal punto di vista sociale
e culturale: Giuseppina aveva studiato fino alla terza elementare. Dal
matrimonio nascerà Gennaro (1884-1965) e, dopo che Francesco Gramsci fu
trasferito da Ghilarza ad Ales, Grazietta (1887-1962), Emma (1889-1920).[1]
Antonio Gramsci nasce ad Ales secondo il registro delle nascite dello stato
civile del comune il 22 gennaio 1891 e registrato con i nomi di Antonio,
Francesco; secondo il registro dei battesimi della parrocchia di San Pietro e
Paolo nasce il giorno dopo, il 23 gennaio 1891, e viene registrato con i nomi
di Antonio, Sebastiano, Francesco.[4] Sette mesi dopo la nascita di
Antonio, Francesco Gramsci fu trasferito, come gerente dell'Ufficio del
Registro, a Sorgono e qui nacquero gli altri figli, Mario (1893-1945), Teresina
(1895-1976) e Carlo (1897-1968).[5] Antonio a due anni si ammalò del morbo di
Pott, una tubercolosi ossea che in pochi anni gli deformò la colonna vertebrale
e gli impedì una normale crescita: adulto, Gramsci non supererà il metro e
mezzo di altezza; i genitori pensavano che la sua deformità fosse la
conseguenza di una caduta e anche Antonio rimase convinto di quella
spiegazione. Ebbe sempre una salute delicata: a quattro anni, soffrendo di
emorragie e convulsioni, fu dato per spacciato dai medici, tanto che la madre
comprò la bara e il vestito per la sepoltura.[6] Il padre Francesco fu
arrestato il 9 agosto 1898, con l'accusa di peculato, concussione e falsità in
atti, e il 27 ottobre 1900 venne condannato al minimo della pena con
l'attenuante del «lieve valore»: 5 anni, 8 mesi e 22 giorni di carcere, da
scontare a Gaeta; priva del sostegno dello stipendio del padre, la famiglia
Gramsci trascorse anni di estrema miseria, che la madre affrontò vendendo la
sua parte di eredità, tenendo a pensione il veterinario del paese e guadagnando
qualche soldo cucendo camicie.[7] Proprio per le sue delicate condizioni
di salute Antonio cominciò a frequentare la scuola elementare soltanto a sette
anni: la concluse nel 1903 con il massimo dei voti, ma la situazione familiare
non gli permise di iscriversi al ginnasio. Già dall'estate precedente aveva
iniziato a dare il suo contributo all'economia domestica lavorando 10 ore al
giorno nell'Ufficio del catasto di Ghilarza per 9 lire al mese - l'equivalente
di un chilo di pane al giorno - smuovendo «registri che pesavano più di me e
molte notti piangevo di nascosto perché mi doleva tutto il corpo».[8]
Antonio Gramsci nel 1906 Il 31 gennaio 1904 Francesco Gramsci, grazie a
un'amnistia, anticipò di tre mesi la fine della sua pena: inizialmente guadagnò
qualcosa come segretario in un'assicurazione agricola, poi, riabilitato, fece
il patrocinante in conciliatura e infine fu riassunto come scrivano nel vecchio
Ufficio del catasto, dove lavorò per il resto della sua vita. Così, pur
affrontando gli abituali sacrifici, i genitori poterono iscrivere il
quindicenne Antonio nel Ginnasio comunale di Santu Lussurgiu, a 18 chilometri
da Ghilarza, «un piccolo ginnasio in cui tre sedicenti professori sbrigavano,
con molta faccia tosta, tutto l'insegnamento delle cinque classi».[9] Con
tale preparazione un poco avventurosa, riuscì tuttavia a prendere la licenza
ginnasiale a Oristano nell'estate del 1908 e a iscriversi al Liceo classico
Giovanni Maria Dettori di Cagliari, stando a pensione, prima in un appartamento
in via Principe Amedeo 24, poi, l'anno dopo, in corso Vittorio Emanuele 149,
insieme con il fratello Gennaro, il quale, terminato il servizio di leva a
Torino, lavorava per cento lire al mese in una fabbrica di ghiaccio del
capoluogo sardo. La modesta preparazione ricevuta nel ginnasio si fece
sentire, perché inizialmente Gramsci nelle diverse materie ottenne appena la
sufficienza, ma riuscì a recuperare in fretta: del resto, leggere e studiare
erano i suoi impegni costanti. Non si concedeva distrazioni, non soltanto
perché avrebbe potuto permettersele solo con grandi sacrifici, ma anche perché
l'unico vestito che possedeva, per lo più liso, non lo incoraggiava a
frequentare né gli amici, né i locali pubblici.[10] A scuola, mostrò uno
spiccato interesse per le discipline umanistiche e per lo studio della storia,
anche perché il cattivo insegnamento ricevuto in matematica gli fece perdere
l'interesse per la materia[11]. Nel frattempo, il giovane Gramsci, iniziò
a seguire le vicende politiche. Il fratello Gennaro, che era tornato in
Sardegna militante socialista, ai primi del 1911 divenne cassiere della Camera
del lavoro e segretario della sezione socialista di Cagliari: «Una grande
quantità di materiale propagandistico, libri, giornali, opuscoli, finiva a
casa. Nino, che il più delle volte passava le sere chiuso in casa senza neanche
un'uscita di pochi momenti, ci metteva poco a leggere quei libri e quei
giornali».[12] Leggeva anche i romanzi popolari di Carolina Invernizio, di
Anton Giulio Barrili e quelli di Grazia Deledda, ma questi ultimi non li
apprezzava, considerando folkloristica la visione che della Sardegna aveva la
scrittrice sarda; leggeva Il Marzocco e La Voce di Giuseppe Prezzolini, Papini,
Emilio Cecchi «ma in cima alle sue raccomandazioni, quando mi chiedeva di
ritagliare gli articoli e di custodirli nella cartella, stavano sempre Croce e
Salvemini».[13] Alla fine della seconda classe liceale, alla cattedra di
lettere italiane del Liceo salì il professor Raffa Garzia, radicale e
anticlericale, direttore de L'Unione Sarda, quotidiano legato alle istanze
sarde, rappresentate, in Parlamento da Francesco Cocco-Ortu, allora impegnato
in una dura opposizione al ministero di Luigi Luzzatti.[14] Gramsci instaurò
con il Garzia un buon rapporto, che andava oltre il naturale discepolato:
invitato ogni tanto a visitare la redazione del giornale, ricevette nell'estate
del 1910 la tessera di giornalista, con l'invito a «inviare tutte le notizie di
pubblico interesse»: e il 25 luglio Gramsci ebbe la soddisfazione di vedersi
stampato il suo primo scritto pubblico, venticinque righe di cronaca ironica su
un fatto avvenuto nel paese di Aidomaggiore.[15] In un tema dell'ultimo
anno di liceo, che ci è conservato, Gramsci scriveva, tra l'altro, che «Le
guerre sono fatte per il commercio, non per la civiltà [...] la Rivoluzione
francese ha abbattuto molti privilegi, ha sollevato molti oppressi; ma non ha
fatto che sostituire una classe all'altra nel dominio. Però ha lasciato un
grande ammaestramento: che i privilegi e le differenze sociali, essendo
prodotto della società e non della natura, possono essere sorpassate».[16] La
sua concezione socialista, qui chiaramente espressa, va unita, in questo
periodo, all'adesione all'indipendentismo sardo[17], nel quale egli esprimeva,
insieme con la denuncia delle condizioni di arretratezza dell'isola e delle
disuguaglianze sociali, l'ostilità verso le classi privilegiate del continente,
fra le quali venivano compresi, secondo una polemica mentalità di origine
contadina, gli stessi operai, concepiti come una corporazione elitaria fra i
lavoratori salariati.[18][19] Poco dopo Gramsci conoscerà da vicino la
realtà operaia di una grande città del Nord: nell'estate del 1911, il
conseguimento della licenza liceale con una buona votazione - tutti otto e un
nove in italiano - gli prospetta la possibilità di continuare gli studi
all'Università. Nell'autunno del 1911, il Collegio Carlo Alberto di Torino
bandì un concorso, riservato a tutti gli studenti poveri licenziati dai Licei
del Regno, offrendo 39 borse di studio, ciascuna equivalente a 70 lire al mese
per 10 mesi, per poter frequentare l'Università di Torino: Gramsci fu uno dei
due studenti di Cagliari ammessi a sostenere gli esami a Torino. «Partii
per Torino come se fossi in stato di sonnambulismo. Avevo 55 lire in tasca;
avevo speso 45 lire per il viaggio in terza classe delle 100 avute da casa». Il
27 ottobre 1911 conclude gli esami: li supera classificandosi nono; al secondo
posto è uno studente genovese venuto da Sassari, Palmiro Togliatti. Si
iscrive alla Facoltà di Lettere, ma le settanta lire al mese non bastano
nemmeno per le spese di prima necessità: oltre alle tasse universitarie, deve
pagare venticinque lire al mese per l'affitto della stanza di Lungo Dora
Firenze 57, nel popolare quartiere di Porta Palazzo, e il costo della luce,
della pulizia della biancheria, della carta e dell'inchiostro, e ci sono i
pasti - «non meno di due lire alla più modesta trattoria» - e la legna e il
carbone per il riscaldamento: privo anche di un cappotto, «la preoccupazione
del freddo non mi permette di studiare, perché o passeggio nella camera per
scaldarmi i piedi oppure devo stare imbacuccato perché non riesco a sostenere
la prima gelata».[20] Sono frequenti le richieste di denaro alla famiglia che
però, da parte sua, non se la passava di certo molto meglio. L'Università
degli Studi di Torino vantava professori di alto livello e di diversa
formazione: Luigi Einaudi, Francesco Ruffini, Vincenzo Manzini, Pietro Toesca,
Achille Loria, Gioele Solari e poi il giovane linguista Matteo Bartoli,[21] che
si legò di amicizia con Gramsci, come fece anche l'incaricato di letteratura
italiana Umberto Cosmo, contro il quale, nel 1920, indirizzò però un articolo
violentemente polemico. Anni dopo, durante la dura esperienza in carcere,
continuò comunque a ricordarlo con simpatia - «serbo del Cosmo un ricordo pieno
di affetto e direi di venerazione [...] era e credo sia tuttora di una grande
sincerità e dirittura morale con molte striature di quella ingenuità nativa che
è propria dei grandi eruditi e studiosi»[22] - ricordando anche che, con questi
e con molti altri intellettuali dei primi quindici anni del secolo, malgrado
divergenze di varia natura, egli avesse questo in comune: «partecipavamo in
tutto o in parte al movimento di riforma morale e intellettuale promosso in
Italia da Benedetto Croce, il cui primo punto era questo, che l'uomo moderno
può e deve vivere senza religione rivelata o positiva o mitologica o come altro
si vuol dire. Questo punto anche oggi mi pare il maggior contributo alla
cultura mondiale che abbiano dato gli intellettuali moderni
italiani».[23] Angelo Tasca Gramsci si ritrovò a casa per le
elezioni politiche del 26 ottobre 1913, dopo la fine della guerra italo-turca
contro l'Impero ottomano per la conquista della Libia; votavano per la prima
volta anche gli analfabeti, ma la corruzione e le intimidazioni erano le stesse
delle elezioni precedenti. In Sardegna, il timore che l'allargamento della base
elettorale favorisse i socialisti portò al blocco delle candidature di tutte le
forze politiche contro i candidati socialisti, indicati come il comune nemico
da battere. In quest'obiettivo, "sardisti" e "non-sardisti"
si trovarono d'accordo e deposero le vecchie polemiche. Gramsci scrisse di
quest'esperienza elettorale al compagno di studi Angelo Tasca, giovane
dirigente socialista torinese, il quale affermò che Gramsci «era stato molto
colpito dalla trasformazione prodotta in quell'ambiente dalla partecipazione
delle masse contadine alle elezioni, benché non sapessero e non potessero
ancora servirsi per conto loro della nuova arma. Fu questo spettacolo, e la
meditazione su di esso, che fece definitivamente di Gramsci un
socialista».[24] Tornò a Torino ai primi di novembre del 1913, andando ad
affittare una stanza all'ultimo piano del palazzo di via San Massimo 14, oggi
Monumento nazionale; dovrebbe datarsi a questo periodo la sua iscrizione al
Partito socialista. Si trovò in ritardo con gli esami, con il rischio di
perdere il contributo della borsa di studio, a causa di «una forma di anemia
cerebrale che mi toglie la memoria, che mi devasta il cervello, che mi fa
impazzire ora per ora, senza che mi riesca di trovare requie né passeggiando,
né disteso sul letto, né disteso per terra a rotolarmi in certi momenti come un
furibondo». Riconosciuto «afflitto da grave nevrosi» gli fu concesso di
recuperare gli esami nella sessione di primavera.[25] Prese anche lezioni
private di filosofia dal professore Annibale Pastore, il quale scrisse poi che
«il suo orientamento era originalmente crociano ma già mordeva il freno e non
sapeva ancora come e perché staccarsi [...] voleva rendersi conto del processo
formativo della cultura agli scopi della rivoluzione [...] come fa il pensare a
far agire [...] come le idee diventano forze pratiche». Gramsci stesso scriverà
di aver sentito anche la necessità di «superare un modo di vivere e di pensare
arretrato, come quello che era proprio di un sardo del principio del secolo,
per appropriarsi un modo di vivere e di pensare non più regionale e da
villaggio, ma nazionale» ma anche «di provocare nella classe operaia il
superamento di quel provincialismo alla rovescia della palla di piombo [come il
Sud Italia era generalmente considerato nel Nord] che aveva le sue profonde
radici nella tradizione riformistica e corporativa del movimento
socialista».[26] L'iscrizione al partito gli permise di superare in parte
un lungo periodo di solitudine: ora frequentava i giovani compagni di partito,
fra i quali erano Tasca, Togliatti, Terracini: «uscivamo spesso dalle riunioni
di partito [...] mentre gli ultimi nottambuli si fermavano a sogguardarci [...]
continuavamo le nostre discussioni, intramezzandole di propositi feroci, di
scroscianti risate, di galoppate nel regno dell'impossibile e del sogno».[27]
Nell'Italia che ha dichiarato la propria neutralità nella Prima guerra mondiale
in corso - neutralità affermata anche dal Partito socialista - scrive per la
prima volta sul settimanale socialista torinese Il Grido del Popolo, il 31
ottobre 1914, l'articolo Neutralità attiva e operante in risposta a quello
apparso il 18 ottobre sull'Avanti! di Mussolini Dalla neutralità assoluta alla
neutralità attiva e operante,[28] senza però poter comprendere quale svolta
politica stesse preparando l'allora importante e popolare esponente
socialista. Sostenne il 13 aprile 1915 quello che sarà, senza che lo
sapesse ancora, il suo ultimo esame all'Università; il suo impegno politico si
fece crescente con l'entrata in guerra dell'Italia e con il suo ingresso nella
redazione torinese dell'Avanti!. Dal 1916 Gramsci trascorse gran parte
delle sue giornate all'ultimo piano nel palazzo dell'Alleanza Cooperativa
Torinese al numero 12 di corso Siccardi (oggi Galileo Ferraris), dove, in tre
stanze, erano situate la sezione giovanile del partito socialista e le
redazioni de Il Grido del Popolo e del foglio piemontese dell'Avanti!, che
comprendeva la rubrica della cronaca torinese, Sotto la Mole; in entrambi i
giornali Gramsci pubblicava di tutto, dai commenti sulla situazione interna ed
estera agli interventi sulla vita di partito, dagli articoli di polemica
politica alle note di costume, dalle recensioni dei libri alla critica
teatrale.[29] Dirà più tardi di aver scritto in dieci anni di giornalismo
«tante righe da poter costituire quindici o venti volumi di quattrocento
pagine, ma esse erano scritte alla giornata e dovevano morire dopo la
giornata»[30] e di aver contribuito «molto prima di Adriano Tilgher» a rendere
popolare il teatro di Pirandello: «ho scritto sul Pirandello, dal 1915 al 1920,
tanto da mettere insieme un volumetto di duecento pagine e allora le mie
affermazioni erano originali e senza esempio: il Pirandello era o sopportato
amabilmente o apertamente deriso».[31] Della commedia di Pirandello
Pensaci, Giacomino! scrisse che «è tutto uno sfogo di virtuosismo, di abilità
letteraria, di luccichii discorsivi.[32] I tre atti corrono su un solo binario.
I personaggi sono oggetto di fotografia piuttosto che di approfondimento
psicologico: sono ritratti nella loro esteriorità più che in una intima
ricreazione del loro essere morale. È questa del resto la caratteristica
dell'arte di Luigi Pirandello, che coglie della vita la smorfia, più che il
sorriso, il ridicolo, più che il comico: che osserva la vita con l'occhio fisico
del letterato, più che con l'occhio simpatico dell'uomo artista e la deforma
per un'abitudine ironica che è l'abitudine professionale più che visione
sincera e spontanea», mentre considerò Liolà[33] «il prodotto migliore
dell'energia letteraria di Luigi Pirandello. In esso il Pirandello è riuscito a
spogliarsi delle sue abitudini retoriche. Il Pirandello è un umorista per
partito preso [...] troppo spesso la prima intuizione dei suoi lavori viene a
sommergersi in una palude retorica di una moralità inconsciamente predicatoria,
e di molta verbosità inutile». Il fu Mattia Pascal, secondo Gramsci, è
una sorta di prima stesura del Liolà che, liberato dalla zavorra moralistica
della vita, si è rinnovato diventando una pura rappresentazione, «una farsa che
si riattacca ai drammi satireschi della Grecia antica, e che ha il suo
corrispondente pittorico nell'arte figurativa vascolare [...] è una vita
ingenua, rudemente sincera [...] una efflorescenza di paganesimo naturalistico,
per il quale la vita, tutta la vita è bella, il lavoro è un'opera lieta, e la
fecondità irresistibile prorompe da tutta la materia organica». Severo fu
invece il giudizio sul Così è (se vi pare):[34] dalla tesi - pseudologistica -
che la verità in sé non esista, Pirandello «non ha saputo trarre dramma [...] e
neppure motivo a rappresentazione viva e artistica di caratteri, di persone
vive che abbiano un significato fantastico, se non logico. I tre atti di
Pirandello sono un semplice fatto di letteratura [...] puro e semplice
aggregato di parole che non creano né una verità né un'immagine [...] il vero
dramma l'autore l'ha solo adombrato, l'ha accennato: è nei due pseudopazzi che
non rappresentano però la loro vera vita, l'intima necessità dei loro
atteggiamenti esteriori, ma sono presentati come pedine della dimostrazione
logica». Rivolgendosi ai giovani, scrisse da solo il numero unico del
giornale dei giovani socialisti La Città futura, uscito l'11 febbraio 1917. Qui
mostra la sua intransigenza politica, la sua ironia, anche contro i socialisti
riformisti, il fastidio verso ogni espressione retorica ma anche la sua
formazione idealistica, i suoi debiti culturali nei confronti di Croce,
superiori perfino a quelli dovuti a Marx: «in quel tempo» - scriverà - «il
concetto di unità di teoria e pratica, di filosofia e politica, non era chiaro
in me e io ero tendenzialmente crociano».[35] Nel marzo 1917 lo zar di
Russia Nicola II è facilmente rovesciato da pochi giorni di manifestazioni
popolari, per lo più spontanee, che chiedono pane e la fine dell'autocrazia:
viene instaurato un moderato governo liberale e, insieme, si ricostituiscono i
Soviet, forme di rappresentanza su base popolare già creati nella precedente
Rivoluzione russa del 1905; le notizie giungono in Italia parziali e confuse: i
quotidiani «borghesi» sostengono che si tratta dell'avviamento di un processo
di democratizzazione in Russia, sull'esempio della grande Rivoluzione francese,
mentre Gramsci è convinto che «la rivoluzione russa è [...] un atto proletario
ed essa naturalmente deve sfociare nel regime socialista [...] i rivoluzionari
socialisti non possono essere giacobini: essi in Russia hanno solo attualmente
il compito di controllare che gli organismi borghesi [...] non facciano essi
del giacobinismo».[36] Con il ritorno in Russia di Lenin, che pone subito
il problema della pace immediata e della consegna del potere ai Soviet, la
lotta politica si radicalizza. Gramsci è convinto che Lenin abbia «suscitato
energie che più non morranno. Egli e i suoi compagni bolscevichi sono persuasi
che sia possibile in ogni momento realizzare il socialismo». Gramsci nega
esplicitamente la necessità dell'esistenza di condizioni obiettive affinché una
rivoluzione trionfi, quando scrive che i bolscevichi «sono nutriti di pensiero
marxista. Sono rivoluzionari, non evoluzionisti. E il pensiero rivoluzionario
nega il tempo come fattore di progresso. Nega che tutte le esperienze
intermedie tra la concezione del socialismo e la sua realizzazione debbano
avere nel tempo e nello spazio una riprova assoluta e integrale».[37] È
l'anticipazione dell'articolo, più famoso, che scriverà subito dopo la notizia
del successo della Rivoluzione d'ottobre. Anche in Italia la guerra
interminabile, costata già centinaia di migliaia di morti e di mutilati, la
penuria dei generi alimentari, la sconfitta di Caporetto e la stessa eco
provocata dalla rivoluzione russa portarono a insofferenze che a Torino
sfociarono, il 23 agosto 1917, in un'autentica sommossa spontanea duramente
repressa dal governo: oltre 50 morti, più di duecento feriti, la città
dichiarata zona di guerra con la conseguente applicazione della legge marziale,
arresti a catena che colpirono non solo i diretti responsabili ma,
indiscriminatamente, anche gli elementi politici d'opposizione e segnatamente
l'intero nucleo della sezione socialista, con l'accusa di istigazione alla
rivoluzione. In conseguenza dell'emergenza venutasi a creare, la direzione
della Sezione socialista torinese venne assunta da un comitato di dodici
persone, del quale fece parte anche Gramsci, il quale rimane l'unico redattore
de Il Grido del Popolo che cesserà le pubblicazioni il 19 ottobre 1918.
Gramsci nel 1922 I bolscevichi avevano preso il potere in Russia il 7
novembre 1917, ma per settimane in Europa giunsero solo notizie deformate,
confuse e censurate, finché il 24 novembre l'edizione nazionale dell'Avanti!
uscì con un editoriale dal titolo La rivoluzione contro il Capitale, firmato da
Gramsci:[38] «La rivoluzione dei bolscevichi è materiata di ideologia più
che di fatti [...] essa è la rivoluzione contro il Capitale di Carlo Marx. Il
Capitale di Marx era, in Russia, il libro dei borghesi, più che dei proletari.
Era la dimostrazione critica della fatale necessità che in Russia si formasse
una borghesia, si iniziasse un'era capitalistica, si instaurasse una civiltà di
tipo occidentale prima che il proletariato potesse neppure pensare alla sua
riscossa, alle sue rivendicazioni di classe, alla sua rivoluzione. I fatti
hanno superato le ideologie. I fatti hanno fatto scoppiare gli schemi critici
entro i quali la storia della Russia avrebbe dovuto svolgersi secondo i canoni
del materialismo storico [...] se i bolscevichi rinnegano alcune affermazioni
del Capitale, non ne rinnegano il pensiero immanente, vivificatore. Essi non
sono «marxisti», ecco tutto; non hanno compilato sulle opere del Maestro una
dottrina esteriore di affermazioni dogmatiche e indiscutibili. Vivono il
pensiero marxista, quello che non muore mai, che è la continuazione del
pensiero idealistico italiano e tedesco, che in Marx si era contaminato di
incrostazioni positivistiche e naturalistiche».[39] In realtà Marx,
almeno negli ultimi anni, non aveva escluso che un Paese arretrato potesse
giungere al socialismo saltando fasi di sviluppo capitalistico:[40] ma qui interessa
rilevare tanto la visione di Gramsci ancora idealistica, volontaristica,
dell'azione politica, quanto la critica che di fatto Gramsci rivolgeva ai
dirigenti socialisti europei, e italiani in particolare, di concepire lo
sviluppo storico in modo meccanicistico. Finita la guerra e usciti dal
carcere i dirigenti torinesi del partito, dal 5 dicembre 1918 Gramsci lavorò
unicamente all'edizione piemontese dell'Avanti!, che allora si stampava in via
Arcivescovado 3, insieme con alcuni giovani colleghi: Giuseppe Amoretti,
Alfonso Leonetti, Mario Montagnana, Felice Platone; ma egli e altri giovani
socialisti torinesi, come Tasca, Togliatti e Terracini, intendevano ormai
esprimere, dopo l'esperienza della rivoluzione russa, esigenze nuove
nell'attività politica, che non sentivano rappresentate dalla Direzione
nazionale del partito: «L'unico sentimento che ci unisse, in quelle nostre
riunioni, era quello suscitato da una vaga passione di una vaga cultura
proletaria; volevamo fare, fare, fare; ci sentivamo angustiati, senza un
orientamento, tuffati nell'ardente vita di quei mesi dopo l'armistizio, quando
pareva immediato il cataclisma della società italiana».[41] Il 1º maggio 1919
uscì il primo numero dell'Ordine nuovo con Gramsci segretario di redazione e
animatore della rivista. La rivista ebbe un avvio incerto: all'inizio «il
programma fu l'assenza di un programma concreto, per una vana e vaga
aspirazione ai problemi concreti [...] nessuna idea centrale, nessuna
organizzazione intima del materiale letterario pubblicato» Tasca intendeva
farne una pubblicazione culturale: «per "cultura" intendeva
"ricordare", non intendeva "pensare", e intendeva
"ricordare" cose fruste, cose logore, la paccottiglia del pensiero
operaio [...] fu una rassegna di cultura astratta, di informazione astratta,
con la tendenza a pubblicare novelline orripilanti e xilografie bene
intenzionate; ecco cosa fu l'Ordine nuovo nei suoi primi numeri
[...]».[42] Gramsci intendeva invece definirlo su posizioni nettamente
operaistiche, ponendo all'ordine del giorno la necessità d'introdurre nelle
fabbriche italiane nuove forme di potere operaio, i consigli di fabbrica,
sull'esempio dei Soviet russi: «Ordimmo, io e Togliatti, un colpo di Stato
redazionale; il problema delle commissioni interne fu impostato esplicitamente
nel n. 7 della rassegna [...] il problema dello sviluppo della commissione
interna divenne problema centrale, divenne l'idea dell'Ordine nuovo; era esso
posto come problema fondamentale della rivoluzione operaia, era il problema
della "libertà" proletaria. L'Ordine nuovo divenne, per noi e per
quanti ci seguivano, "il giornale dei Consigli di fabbrica"; gli
operai amarono l'Ordine nuovo [...] perché negli articoli del giornale
ritrovavano una parte di se stessi, la parte migliore di se stessi; perché
sentivano gli articoli dell'Ordine nuovo pervasi dallo stesso loro spirito di
ricerca interiore: "Come possiamo diventar liberi? Come possiamo diventare
noi stessi?". Perché gli articoli dell'Ordine nuovo non erano fredde
architetture intellettuali, ma sgorgavano dalla discussione nostra con gli
operai migliori, elaboravano sentimenti, volontà, passioni reali».[42]
Diversamente dalle Commissioni interne, già esistenti all'interno dalle
fabbriche, che venivano elette soltanto dagli operai iscritti ai diversi
sindacati, i Consigli dovevano essere eletti indistintamente da tutti gli
operai e avrebbero dovuto, nel progetto degli ordinovisti, non tanto occuparsi
dei consueti problemi sindacali, ma porsi problemi politici, fino al problema
della stessa organizzazione, della gestione operaia della fabbrica,
sostituendosi al capitalista: nel settembre 1919, alla FIAT furono eletti i
primi Consigli. La Confindustria, nella sua Conferenza nazionale del
marzo 1920, espresse chiaramente «la necessità che la borghesia del lavoro
attinga in se stessa [...] il mezzo per un'energica azione contro deviazioni e
illusioni»[43] e il 20 marzo i tre maggiori industriali torinesi, Olivetti, De
Benedetti e Agnelli fecero presente al prefetto Taddei la loro volontà di ricorrere
all'arma della serrata delle fabbriche contro «l'indisciplina e le continue
esorbitanti pretese degli operai».[44] Così quando in occasione di una
controversia sindacale nelle Industrie Metallurgiche tre membri delle
commissioni interne furono licenziati e gli operai protestarono con lo
sciopero, l'Associazione degli industriali metalmeccanici rispose il 29 marzo
con la serrata di tutte le fabbriche torinesi. La lotta si estese fino allo
sciopero generale proclamato a Torino il 15 aprile e in alcune province
piemontesi, mentre il governo presidiava il capoluogo con migliaia di soldati.
I tentativi degli ordinovisti di allargare la protesta, se non in tutta
l'Italia, almeno nei maggiori centri industriali del paese, fallì e alla fine
d'aprile gli operai furono costretti a riprendere il lavoro senza avere
ottenuto nulla. Lo sciopero fallì per la resistenza degli industriali ma
anche per l'isolamento in cui la Camera del Lavoro, controllata dai socialisti
riformisti, contrari alla costituzione dei Consigli operai, e lo stesso Partito
socialista lasciarono i lavoratori torinesi; l'8 maggio Gramsci pubblicò
sull'Ordine Nuovo una sua relazione,[45] approvata dalla Federazione torinese,
che denunciava l'inefficienza e l'inerzia del Partito. Dopo aver sostenuto che
era matura la trasformazione dell'«ordine attuale di produzione e di
distribuzione» in un nuovo ordine che desse «alla classe degli operai
industriali e agricoli il potere di iniziativa nella produzione», alla quale si
opponevano gli industriali e i proprietari terrieri, appoggiati dallo Stato,
Gramsci rilevava che «le forze operaie e contadine mancano di coordinamento e
di concentrazione rivoluzionaria perché gli organismi direttivi del Partito
socialista hanno rivelato di non comprendere assolutamente nulla della fase di
sviluppo che la storia nazionale e internazionale attraversa nell'attuale
periodo [...] il Partito socialista assiste da spettatore allo svolgersi degli
eventi, non ha mai un'opinione sua da esprimere [...] non lancia parole
d'ordine che possano essere raccolte dalle masse, dare un indirizzo generale,
unificare e concentrare l'azione rivoluzionaria [...] il Partito socialista è
rimasto, anche dopo il Congresso di Bologna,[46] un mero partito parlamentare,
che si mantiene immobile entro i limiti angusti della democrazia borghese
[...]». Il numero dell'11 dicembre 1920 Rilevò la mancanza di
omogeneità nella composizione del partito, in cui continuavano a essere
presenti riformisti e «opportunisti», contrari agli indirizzi della III Internazionale.
Non solo: «mentre la maggioranza rivoluzionaria del partito non ha avuto una
espressione del suo pensiero e un esecutore della sua volontà nella direzione e
nel giornale, gli elementi opportunisti invece si sono fortemente organizzati e
hanno sfruttato il prestigio e l'autorità del Partito per consolidare le loro
posizioni parlamentari e sindacali [...] se il Partito non realizza l'unità e
la simultaneità degli sforzi, se il Partito si rivela un mero organismo
burocratico, senza anima e senza volontà, la classe operaia istintivamente
tende a costituirsi un altro partito e si sposta verso tendenze anarchiche
[...]». Il Partito socialista non svolge alcuna funzione di educazione e
di spiegazione di quanto sta avvenendo nella scena internazionale, dalla quale
esso è assente, non partecipando nemmeno alle riunioni dell'Internazionale
comunista, le cui tesi non sono riportate nell'Avanti!. Analogamente, le
edizioni socialiste non stampano le pubblicazioni comuniste: «valga per tutte
il volume di Lenin Stato e rivoluzione». Occorre pertanto, secondo Gramsci, che
il Partito socialista acquisti «una sua figura precisa e distinta: da partito
parlamentare piccolo borghese deve diventare il partito del proletariato
rivoluzionario che lotta per l'avvenire della società comunista [...] i non
comunisti rivoluzionari devono essere eliminati dal Partito [...] ogni
avvenimento della vita proletaria nazionale e internazionale deve essere
immediatamente commentata [...] per trarne argomenti di propaganda comunista e
di educazione delle coscienze rivoluzionarie [...] le sezioni devono promuovere
in tutte le fabbriche, nei sindacati, nelle cooperative, nelle caserme la
costituzione di gruppi comunisti [...] l'esistenza di un Partito comunista
coeso e fortemente disciplinato [...] è la condizione fondamentale e
indispensabile per tentare qualsiasi esperimento di Soviet [...] il Partito
deve lanciare un manifesto nel quale la conquista rivoluzionaria del potere
politico sia posta in modo esplicito [...]».[47] La risoluzione
dell'Internazionale comunista che chiedeva ai partiti socialisti
l'allontanamento dei riformisti, venne disattesa dal Partito Socialista
Italiano. Infatti, a dispetto dell'approvazione e dell'avallo ottenuto dagli
ordinovisti da parte di Lenin nel corso del II Congresso
dell'Internazionale,[48] alla quale il PSI aveva aderito con il congresso di
Bologna tenuto nell'ottobre del 1919, i vecchi dirigenti del partito erano
riluttanti di fronte alla svolta politica e sociale realizzatasi nel
dopoguerra. In Italia, le rivendicazioni salariali, rese necessarie
dall'elevato indice d'inflazione, non trovavano accoglienza presso gli
industriali. Il 30 agosto 1920, a Milano, a seguito della serrata dell'Alfa
Romeo, 300 fabbriche furono occupate dagli operai: la FIOM appoggiò
l'iniziativa, ordinando l'occupazione di tutte le fabbriche metalmeccaniche
d'Italia, con la speranza che una tale, estrema iniziativa provocasse
l'intervento del governo a favore di una soluzione delle trattative. All'inizio
di settembre tutte le maggiori fabbriche d'Italia erano occupate da mezzo
milione di operai, parte dei quali armati, sia pure in modo rudimentale; alla
FIAT di Torino, tuttavia, ci fu una novità: dell'ufficio di Giovanni Agnelli
prese possesso l'operaio comunista Giovanni Parodi e i Consigli di fabbrica
decisero di continuare la produzione, per dimostrare che una grande fabbrica
poteva funzionare anche in assenza del proprietario. Giovanni
Giolitti Di fronte alla neutralità del governo Giolitti e alla decisione della
Confindustria di non cedere, il 10 settembre, nell'assemblea milanese che vide
riuniti i dirigenti del Partito socialista e della Camera del Lavoro, questi
ultimi si dimisero lasciando la gestione della difficile situazione al Partito,
che tuttavia non aveva alcuna intenzione di prolungare l'agitazione: la
proposta estrema dell'allargamento delle occupazioni a tutte le fabbriche del
paese e alle campagne fu respinta dalla maggioranza dei rappresentanti. Un
accordo salariale raggiunto con la mediazione di Giolitti pose termine, alla
fine di settembre, alle occupazioni delle fabbriche. Quell'esperienza
dimostrò tanto la mancanza di una strategia dei dirigenti socialisti quanto
l'impreparazione degli stessi operai a iniziative rivoluzionarie, per le quali
occorrevano organizzazione e disciplina. In previsione del prossimo XVII
Congresso del Partito socialista, Gramsci scrisse[49] che «la costituzione del
Partito comunista crea le condizioni per intensificare e approfondire l'opera
nostra: liberati dal peso morto degli scettici, dei chiacchieroni, degli
irresponsabili, liberati dall'assillo di dover continuamente, nel seno del
Partito, lottare contro i riformisti e gli opportunisti, di dover sventare le
loro insidie, di dover analizzare e criticare i loro atteggiamenti equivoci e
la loro fraseologia pseudo-rivoluzionaria, noi potremo dedicarci interamente al
lavoro positivo, all'espansione del nostro programma di rinnovamento, di
organizzazione, di risveglio delle coscienze e delle volontà».
Nell'ottobre 1920 si riunì a Milano il gruppo favorevole alla costituzione di
un partito comunista e Amadeo Bordiga, Luigi Repossi, Bruno Fortichiari,
Gramsci, Nicola Bombacci, Francesco Misiano e Umberto Terracini costituirono il
Comitato provvisorio della frazione comunista del Partito Socialista. La
fondazione del Partito comunista Il congresso di Livorno La scissione si
realizzò il 21 gennaio 1921, nel Teatro San Marco di Livorno, con la nascita
del «Partito Comunista d'Italia, sezione italiana dell'Internazionale». Il
comitato centrale fu composto dagli astensionisti (Amadeo Bordiga, Ruggero
Grieco, Giovanni Parodi, Cesare Sessa, Ludovico Tarsia e Bruno Fortichiari),
dagli ex-massimalisti (Nicola Bombacci, Ambrogio Belloni, Egidio Gennari,
Francesco Misiano, Anselmo Marabini, Luigi Repossi e Luigi Polano) e dagli
ordinovisti Gramsci e Terracini. Dal 1º gennaio 1921 Gramsci diresse
l'Ordine nuovo, divenuto ora uno dei quotidiani comunisti insieme con Il
Lavoratore di Trieste e Il Comunista di Roma, quest'ultimo diretto da Togliatti.
Non venne eletto deputato alle elezioni del 15 maggio: Gramsci non ha capacità
oratorie, è ancora giovane e anche la sua conformazione fisica non lo agevola
nell'apprezzamento di molti elettori. Alla fine di maggio partì per
Mosca, designato a rappresentare il Partito italiano nell'esecutivo
dell'Internazionale comunista. Vi arrivò già malato e nell'estate fu ricoverato
in un sanatorio per malattie nervose di Mosca. Qui conobbe una degente russa,
Eugenia Schucht, membro del Partito, figlia di Apollon Schucht, dirigente del
Pcus e amico personale di Lenin,[50] che aveva vissuto alcuni anni in Italia e,
attraverso di lei, la sorella Giulia (Julka) (1896-1980) che, violinista, aveva
abitato diversi anni a Roma diplomandosi al Conservatorio Santa Cecilia.
Giulia, ventiseienne, è bella, alta, ha un aspetto romantico; Gramsci ne è
conquistato: ricorderà «il primo giorno che [...] non osavo entrare nella tua
stanza perché mi avevi intimidito [...] al giorno che sei partita a piedi e io
ti ho accompagnato fino alla grande strada attraverso la foresta e sono rimasto
tanto tempo fermo per vederti allontanare tutta sola, col tuo carico da
viandante, per la grande strada, verso il mondo grande e terribile [...] ho
molto pensato a te, che sei entrata nella mia vita e mi hai dato l'amore e mi
hai dato ciò che mi era sempre mancato e mi faceva spesso cattivo e
torbido».[51] E quell'immagine di lei, viandante in un mondo grande e
terribile, con il suo senso doloroso di distacco, ritornerà ancora dal carcere:
«Ricordi quando sei ripartita dal bosco d'argento [...] ti ho accompagnata fino
all'orlo della strada maestra e sono rimasto a lungo a vederti allontanare
[...] così ti vedo sempre mentre ti allontani a passi brevi, col violino in una
mano e nell'altra la tua borsa da viaggio, così pittoresca».[52] Si sposano nel
1923 e avranno due figli, Delio, nato il 10 agosto 1924, e Giuliano, nato il 30
agosto 1926. Il figlio di quest'ultimo (nato nel 1965), porta il nome del
nonno, vive a Mosca e pratica la musica medievale.[53] Giulia diverrà nel 1924
membro della OGPU, il servizio di Sicurezza sovietico.[54] La
moglie di Gramsci e i figli Delio e Giuliano A differenza di Bordiga, tutto
inteso a salvaguardare la «purezza» programmatica del partito, e perciò
contrario a qualunque iniziativa al di fuori della dittatura del proletariato,
Gramsci guardava anche a obiettivi democratici, intermedi, raggiungibili
utilizzando le contraddizioni presenti negli strati sociali e le forze che
potevano rappresentare elementi di rottura, come il movimento sindacale
cattolico di Guido Miglioli e l'intellettualità progressista liberale di cui
Piero Gobetti è allora tra i maggiori rappresentanti.[55] Tuttavia nei suoi
scritti fino al 1926 ribadisce che l'obiettivo finale era la eliminazione dello
stato borghese e la dittatura del proletariato e anche nei suoi scritti
successivi non si riscontrano critiche al regime sovietico. Nel III
Congresso dell'Internazionale comunista, di fronte al riflusso dell'ondata
rivoluzionaria rappresentata dalle sconfitte delle esperienze comuniste in
Germania e in Ungheria, si decise la tattica del fronte unito con la
socialdemocrazia. Bordiga e la maggioranza dei dirigenti comunisti italiani si
oppose, elaborando le Tesi di Roma, base programmatica del II Congresso del
Partito, tenuto a Roma nel marzo del 1922. Gramsci vi aderì ma scrisse di aver
«accettato le tesi di Amadeo perché esse erano presentate come una opinione per
il Quarto Congresso [dell'Internazionale comunista] e non come un indirizzo di
azione. Ritenevamo di mantenere così unito il partito attorno al suo nucleo
fondamentale, pensavamo che si potesse fare ad Amadeo questa concessione [...]
senza nuove crisi e nuove minacce di scissione nel seno del nostro
movimento».[56] Nel IV Congresso dell'Internazionale, tenutosi dal 5
novembre al 5 dicembre 1922, di fronte all'avvento al potere di Mussolini, ai
delegati comunisti italiani fu posta con ancora maggior forza la necessità di
fondersi con corrente socialista degli internazionalisti, capeggiata da Giacinto
Menotti Serrati, e di costituire un nuovo Esecutivo, mettendo in minoranza
Bordiga, sempre contrario a ogni accordo. Lo stesso Bordiga fu arrestato al suo
rientro in Italia nel febbraio 1923 e, in settembre, a Milano, furono
incarcerati anche i rappresentanti del nuovo Esecutivo: Gramsci restò così il
massimo dirigente del Partito e nel novembre del 1923 si trasferì a Vienna per
seguire più da vicino la situazione italiana. Fu allora che egli ritenne
necessario rompere con la politica di Bordiga: «Il suo stesso carattere
inflessibile e tenace fino all'assurdo ci obbliga [...] a prospettarci il
problema di costruire il partito ed il centro di esso anche senza di lui e
contro di lui. Penso che sulle quistioni di principio non dobbiamo più fare
compromessi come nel passato: vale meglio la polemica chiara, leale, fino in
fondo, che giova al partito e lo prepara ad ogni evenienza».[57] Il 12
febbraio 1924 uscì a Milano il primo numero del nuovo quotidiano comunista
l'Unità e dal primo marzo la nuova serie del quindicinale l'Ordine nuovo. Il
titolo del giornale, da lui scelto, venne giustificato dalla necessità
dell'«unità di tutta la classe operaia intorno al partito, unità degli operai e
dei contadini, unità del Nord e del Mezzogiorno, unità di tutto il popolo italiano
nella lotta contro il fascismo».Alle elezioni del 6 aprile venne eletto
deputato al parlamento, potendo così rientrare a Roma, protetto dall'immunità
parlamentare, il 12 maggio 1924. Quello stesso mese, nei dintorni di Como, si
tenne un convegno illegale dei dirigenti delle Federazioni comuniste italiane:
pubblicamente, si fingevano dipendenti di un'azienda milanese in gita
turistica, con tanto di pubblici discorsi fascisti e inni a Mussolini,[58]
mentre, a parte, discutevano dei problemi del partito. Nel convegno si
affrontò il «caso Bordiga», il quale aveva rifiutato la candidatura al
Parlamento, era in rotta con la maggioranza dell'Internazionale e rifiutava
ogni azione politica comune con le altre forze politiche di sinistra. Delle tre
mozioni presentate, che rispecchiavano le tre correnti in seno al Partito, la
corrente di destra di Tasca, di centro di Gramsci e Togliatti, e di sinistra di
Bordiga, questa raccolse l'adesione della grande maggioranza dei delegati,
confermando la notevole importanza di cui il rivoluzionario napoletano godeva
nel Partito. Il 10 giugno un gruppo di fascisti rapì e uccise il deputato
socialista Giacomo Matteotti; sembrò allora che il fascismo stesse per crollare
per l'indignazione morale che in quei giorni percorse il Paese, ma non fu così;
l'opposizione parlamentare scelse la linea sterile di abbandonare il
Parlamento, dando luogo alla cosiddetta Secessione dell'Aventino: i liberali
speravano in un appoggio della Monarchia, che non venne, i cattolici erano
ostili tanto ai fascisti che ai socialisti e questi ultimi erano ostili a
tutti, comunisti compresi. Gramsci avanzò al «Comitato dei sedici» - il nucleo
dirigente dei gruppi aventiniani - la proposta di proclamare lo sciopero
generale che però fu respinta; i comunisti uscirono allora dal «Comitato delle
opposizioni» aventiniane il quale, secondo Gramsci, non aveva alcuna volontà di
agire: ha una «paura incredibile che noi prendessimo la mano e quindi manovra
per costringerci ad abbandonare la riunione».[59] Giacomo Matteotti
Malgrado le divisioni dell'opposizione antifascista, Gramsci credeva che la
caduta del regime fosse imminente: «Il regime fascista muore perché non solo
non è riuscito ad arrestare, ma anzi ha contribuito ad accelerare la crisi
delle classi medie iniziatasi dopo la guerra. L'aspetto economico di questa
crisi consiste nella rovina della piccola e media azienda [...] il monopolio
del credito, il regime fiscale, la legislazione sugli affitti hanno stritolato
la piccola impresa commerciale e industriale: un vero e proprio passaggio di
ricchezza si è verificato dalla piccola e media alla grande borghesia [...]
L'apparato industriale ristretto ha potuto salvarsi dal completo sfacelo solo
per un abbassamento del livello di vita della classe operaia premuta dalla
diminuzione dei salari, dall'aumento della giornata di lavoro [...] La
disgregazione sociale e politica del regime fascista ha avuto la sua piena
manifestazione di massa nelle elezioni del 6 aprile. Il fascismo è stato messo
nettamente in minoranza nella zona industriale [...] Le elezioni del 6 aprile
[...] segnarono l'inizio di quella ondata democratica che culminò nei giorni
immediatamente successivi all'assassinio dell'on. Matteotti [...] le
opposizioni avevano acquistato dopo le elezioni un'importanza politica enorme;
l'agitazione da esse condotta nei giornali e nel Parlamento per discutere e
negare la legittimità del governo fascista [...] si ripercuoteva nel seno dello
stesso Partito nazionale fascista, incrinava la maggioranza parlamentare. Di
qui l'inaudita campagna di minacce contro le opposizioni e l'assassinio del
deputato unitario [...]» «Il delitto Matteotti dette la prova provata che il
Partito fascista non riuscirà mai a diventare un normale partito di governo,
che Mussolini non possiede dello statista e del dittatore altro che alcune
pittoresche pose esteriori; egli non è un elemento della vita nazionale, è un
fenomeno di folklore paesano, destinato a passare alla storia nell'ordine delle
diverse maschere provinciali italiane, più che nell'ordine dei Cromwell, dei
Bolívar, dei Garibaldi».[60] S'ingannava, perché l'inerzia
dell'opposizione non riuscì a dare alternative del blocco sociale in cui la
piccola borghesia teme il «salto nel buio» della caduta del regime e i fascisti
riprendono coraggio e ricominciano le violenze squadriste: in una delle tante
viene aggredito anche Gobetti. E dopo il 12 settembre, quando il militante
comunista Giovanni Corvi uccide in un tram il deputato fascista Armando
Casalini, per vendicare la morte di Matteotti, la repressione s'inasprisce. Il
20 ottobre Gramsci propose vanamente che l'opposizione aventiniana si
costituisca in «Antiparlamento», in modo da segnare nettamente la distanza e
svuotare di significato un Parlamento di soli fascisti; il 26 partì per la
Sardegna, per intervenire al Congresso regionale del partito e per rivedere i
famigliari. Il 6 novembre si congedò dalla madre, che non avrebbe più
rivisto. Benito Mussolini Il 12 novembre 1924 il deputato comunista
Luigi Repossi rientrò in Parlamento, dove sedevano solo i deputati fascisti e i
loro alleati, per commemorare Matteotti a nome di tutto il suo partito; il 26
vi rientrò anche tutto il gruppo parlamentare comunista, a segnare l'inutilità
dell'esperienza aventiniana. Il 27 dicembre 1924 il quotidiano di Giovanni
Amendola Il Mondo pubblicò le dichiarazioni di Cesare Rossi, già capo ufficio
stampa di Mussolini, a proposito del delitto Matteotti: «Tutto quanto è
successo è avvenuto sempre per la volontà diretta o per l'approvazione o per la
complicità del duce» e il 3 gennaio 1925 Mussolini, in un discorso rimasto
famoso, a confermare quella testimonianza, dichiara alla Camera dei deputati di
assumersi «la responsabilità politica, morale, storica di tutto quanto è
avvenuto», dando il via a una nuova azione repressiva. In febbraio
Gramsci andò a Mosca, per stare con la moglie e conoscere finalmente il figlio
Delio. Tornato in Italia a maggio, il 16 tenne il suo primo - e unico -
discorso in Parlamento[61], davanti all'ex compagno di partito Mussolini, ora
Primo ministro, che aveva descritto l'anno prima come un capo che «è
divinizzato, è dichiarato infallibile, è preconizzato organizzatore e
ispiratore di un rinato Sacro Romano Impero [...] Conosciamo quel viso:
conosciamo quel roteare degli occhi nelle orbite che nel passato dovevano, con
la loro ferocia meccanica, far venire i vermi alla borghesia e oggi al
proletariato. Conosciamo quel pugno sempre chiuso alla minaccia [...] Mussolini
[...] è il tipo concentrato del piccolo-borghese italiano, rabbioso, feroce
impasto di tutti i detriti lasciati sul suolo nazionale da vari secoli di
dominazione degli stranieri e dei preti: non poteva essere il capo del
proletariato; divenne il dittatore della borghesia, che ama le facce feroci
quando ridiventa borbonica».[62][63] Con il pretesto di colpire la
Massoneria, il governo aveva predisposto un disegno di legge per disciplinare
l'attività di associazioni, enti e istituti: continuamente interrotto, Gramsci
respinse il pretesto che il governo si era dato, «perché la Massoneria passerà
in massa al Partito fascista e ne costituirà una tendenza, è chiaro che con
questa legge voi sperate di impedire lo sviluppo di grandi organizzazioni
operaie e contadine». E ironizzando: «Qualche fascista ricorda ancora nebulosamente
gli insegnamenti dei suoi vecchi maestri, di quando era rivoluzionario e
socialista, e crede che una classe non possa rimanere tale permanentemente e
svilupparsi fino alla conquista del potere, senza che essa abbia un partito e
un'organizzazione che ne riassuma la parte migliore e più cosciente. C'è
qualcosa di vero, in questa torbida perversione degli insegnamenti
marxisti». Concluse: «Voi potete conquistare lo Stato, potete modificare
i codici, potete cercar di impedire alle organizzazioni di esistere nella forma
in cui sono esistite fino adesso ma non potete prevalere sulle condizioni
obbiettive in cui siete costretti a muovervi. Voi non farete che costringere il
proletariato a ricercare un indirizzo diverso da quello fin oggi più diffuso
nel campo dell'organizzazione di massa. Ciò noi vogliamo dire al proletariato e
alle masse contadine italiane, da questa tribuna: che le forze rivoluzionarie
italiane non si lasceranno schiantare, il vostro torbido sogno non riuscirà a
realizzarsi». Dal 20 al 26 gennaio 1926 si svolse clandestinamente a Lione
il III Congresso del Partito.[64] Vi parteciparono 70 delegati, con tutti i
maggiori responsabili, Bordiga, Gramsci, Tasca, Togliatti, Grieco, Leonetti,
Scoccimarro: vi era anche Serrati, che aveva lasciato da poco il Partito
socialista di cui era stato a lungo dirigente di primo piano. Assisteva, a nome
dell'Internazionale, Jules Humbert-Droz.[65] Gramsci presentò le Tesi
congressuali elaborate insieme con Togliatti.[66] Con un capitalismo
debole e l'agricoltura base dell'economia nazionale, in Italia si assiste al
compromesso fra industriali del Nord e proprietari fondiari del Sud, ai danni
degli interessi generali della maggioranza della popolazione. Il proletariato,
in quanto forza sociale omogenea e organizzata rispetto alla piccola borghesia
urbana e rurale, che ha interessi differenziati, viene visto, nelle Tesi, «come
l'unico elemento che per la sua natura ha una funzione unificatrice e
coordinatrice di tutta la società.»[67] Secondo Gramsci il fascismo non
è, come invece ritiene Bordiga, l'espressione di tutta la classe dominante, ma
è il frutto politico della piccola borghesia urbana e della reazione degli
agrari che ha consegnato il potere alla grande borghesia, e la sua tendenza
imperialistica è l'espressione della necessità, da parte delle classi
industriali e agrarie, «di trovare fuori del campo nazionale gli elementi per
la risoluzione della crisi della società italiana» che tuttavia permette, per
la sua natura oppressiva e reazionaria, una soluzione rivoluzionaria delle
contraddizioni sociali e politiche; le due forze sociali idonee a dar luogo a
questa soluzione sono il proletariato del Nord e i contadini del
Mezzogiorno.[68] A questo scopo, il Partito andrà bolscevizzato, ossia
organizzato per cellule di fabbrica caratterizzate da una "disciplina di
ferro" negando al suo interno la possibilità dell'esistenza delle
frazioni. Il Congresso approvò le Tesi a grande maggioranza (oltre il
90%) ed elesse il Comitato centrale con Gramsci segretario del Partito.[69] Da
allora, la sinistra comunista di Bordiga non ebbe più un ruolo influente nel
Partito. Le Tesi di Lione, realizzate da Gramsci, ribadirono con una certa
durezza le posizioni del Pcd’I «la socialdemocrazia sebbene abbia ancora la sua
base sociale, per gran parte, nel proletariato per quanto riguarda la sua
ideologia e la sua funzione politica cui adempie, deve essere considerata non
come un'ala destra del movimento operaio, ma come un'ala sinistra della
borghesia e come tale deve essere smascherata». In questa relazione venne
sviluppata la cosiddetta bolscevizzazione del partito: «spetti al partito russo
una funzione predominante e direttiva nella costruzione di una Internazionale
comunista… La organizzazione di un partito bolscevico deve essere, in ogni
momento della vita del partito, una organizzazione centralizzata, diretta dal
Comitato centrale non solo a parole, ma nei fatti. Una disciplina proletaria di
ferro deve regnare nelle sue file… La centralizzazione e la compattezza del
partito esigono che non esistano nel suo seno gruppi organizzati i quali
assumano carattere di frazione. Un partito bolscevico si differenzia per questo
profondamente dai partiti socialdemocratici».[70] Tornato a Roma - da via
Vesalio si era trasferito in via Morgagni - ebbe il tempo di passare alcuni
mesi con la famiglia - la moglie Giulia e il piccolo Delio, oltre alle cognate
Eugenia e Tatiana - che abitano tuttavia in un altro appartamento, in via
Trapani: le squadre fasciste, superato da tempo lo smarrimento provocato dal
delitto Matteotti, avevano piena libertà d'azione e non era prudente
coinvolgere i familiari in loro possibili aggressioni; il 4 ottobre, a Firenze,
era stato ucciso l'ex-deputato socialista Gaetano Pilati, la stessa casa di
Gramsci era stata messa a soqquadro dalla polizia il 20 ottobre. Mentre gli
esponenti dell'opposizione antifascista prendevano la via dell'emigrazione -
Gobetti, che muore il 6 febbraio 1926, venticinquenne, a Parigi, in conseguenza
delle bastonate squadriste, Amendola, Salvemini - un processo farsa condannava
a una pena simbolica gli assassini di Matteotti, difesi dal capo-squadrista
Roberto Farinacci. La moglie Giulia, che aspettava il secondo figlio
Giuliano, lasciò l'Italia il 7 agosto e il mese dopo fu la volta della cognata
Eugenia a tornare a Mosca con il figlio Delio: Gramsci non l'avrebbe più
rivisto. Giustino Fortunato Elaborando temi già affrontati nelle
Tesi di Lione, in settembre Gramsci iniziò a scrivere un saggio sulla questione
meridionale, intitolato Alcuni temi sulla quistione meridionale, in cui
analizzò il periodo dello sviluppo politico italiano dal 1894, anno dei moti
dei contadini siciliani, seguito nel 1898 dall'insurrezione di Milano repressa
a cannonate dal governo Di Rudinì. Secondo Gramsci, la borghesia italiana,
impersonata politicamente da Giovanni Giolitti, di fronte all'insofferenza
delle classi emarginate dei contadini meridionali e degli operai del Nord,
piuttosto che allearsi con le forze agrarie, cosa che avrebbe dovuto comportare
una politica di libero scambio e di bassi prezzi industriali, scelse di
favorire il blocco industriale-operaio, con la conseguente scelta del
protezionismo doganale, unita a concessione di libertà sindacali. Di
fronte alla persistenza dell'opposizione operaia, manifestatasi anche contro i
dirigenti socialisti riformisti, Giolitti cercò un accordo con i contadini
cattolici del Centro-Nord. Il problema è allora, per Gramsci, di perseguire una
politica di opposizione che rompa l'alleanza borghesia-contadini, facendo convergere
questi ultimi in un'alleanza con la classe operaia. La società
meridionale, secondo Gramsci, è costituita da tre classi fondamentali:
braccianti e contadini poveri, politicamente inconsapevoli; piccoli e medi
contadini, che non lavorano la terra ma dalla quale ricavano un reddito che
permette loro di vivere in città, spesso come impiegati statali: costoro
disprezzano e temono il lavoratore della terra, e fanno da intermediari al
consenso fra i contadini poveri e la terza classe, costituita dai grandi
proprietari terrieri, i quali a loro volta contribuiscono alla formazione
dell'intellettualità nazionale, con personalità del valore di Benedetto Croce e
di Giustino Fortunato e sono, con quelli, i principali e più raffinati
sostenitori della conservazione di questo blocco agrario. Croce e Fortunato
sono, per Gramsci, «i reazionari più operosi della penisola»,[71] «le chiavi di
volta del sistema meridionale e, in un certo senso, sono le due più grandi
figure della reazione italiana».[72] Per poter spezzare questo blocco
occorrerebbe la formazione di un ceto di intellettuali medi che interrompa il
flusso del consenso fra le due classi estreme, favorendo così l'alleanza dei
contadini poveri con il proletariato urbano. Tuttavia Gramsci non aveva
un'opinione positiva sui contadini, nel 1926 scrisse: «Il solo organizzatore
possibile della massa contadina meridionale è l'operaio industriale,
rappresentato dal nostro partito»[73] «Non ho mai voluto mutare le mie
opinioni, per le quali sarei disposto a dare la vita e non solo a stare in
prigione [...] vorrei consolarti di questo dispiacere che ti ho dato: ma non
potevo fare diversamente. La vita è così, molto dura, e i figli qualche volta
devono dare dei grandi dolori alle loro mamme, se vogliono conservare il loro onore
e la loro dignità di uomini» (Antonio Gramsci, Lettera alla madre, 10
maggio 1928) In Unione Sovietica è in corso la lotta fra la maggioranza di
Stalin e Bucharin e la minoranza di sinistra del Partito comunista, guidata da
Trotskij, Zinov'ev e Kamenev, che critica la politica della NEP, la quale
favorisce i contadini ricchi a svantaggio degli operai, e la rinuncia alla
rivoluzione socialista mondiale attraverso la costruzione del «socialismo in un
solo paese» che porterebbe all'involuzione del movimento rivoluzionario.[74] Il
dissidio, che porta all'esclusione di Zinov'ev dall'Ufficio politico del
Partito sovietico, si era fatto sempre più aspro con la costituzione in
frazione della minoranza[75] e si era esteso anche all'interno del Partito
comunista tedesco, provocando una scissione. [senza fonte] Il 18 ottobre 1926
il New York Times, forse su ispirazione di Lev Trotsky, pubblicava il
testamento di Lenin, con i suoi noti rilievi sul carattere di Stalin e sul
pericolo rappresentato dal troppo potere che la carica di segretario del
Partito gli concedeva.[76] Su incarico dell'Ufficio politico, Gramsci
scrisse a metà ottobre una lettera al Comitato centrale del Partito
sovietico.[77] Egli si mostra preoccupato per «l'acutezza delle polemiche» che
potrebbero portare a una scissione che «può avere le più gravi ripercussioni,
non solo se la minoranza di opposizione non accetta con la massima lealtà i
principi fondamentali della disciplina rivoluzionaria di Partito, ma anche se
essa, nel condurre la sua lotta, oltrepassa certi limiti che sono superiori a
tutte le democrazie formali». Riconosciuto ai dirigenti sovietici il merito di
essere stati «l'elemento organizzatore e propulsore delle forze rivoluzionarie
di tutti i paesi», li rimprovera di star «distruggendo l'opera vostra, voi
degradate e correte il rischio di annullare la funzione dirigente che il
partito comunista dell'URSS aveva conquistato per l'impulso di Lenin: ci pare
che la passione violenta delle quistioni russe vi faccia perdere di vista gli aspetti
internazionali delle quistioni russe stesse, vi faccia dimenticare che i vostri
doveri di militanti russi possono e debbono essere adempiuti solo nel quadro
degli interessi del proletariato internazionale». Palmiro Togliatti
Nel merito del fondamento del contrasto - la contraddizione di un proletariato
formalmente «dominante» in URSS, ma in condizioni economiche molto inferiori
alla classe «dominata» - Gramsci appoggia la posizione della maggioranza,
rilevando che «è facile fare della demagogia su questo terreno ed è difficile
non farla quando la quistione è stata messa nei termini dello spirito
corporativo e non in quelli del leninismo, della dottrina dell'egemonia del
proletariato [...] è in questo elemento la radice degli errori del blocco delle
opposizioni e l'origine dei pericoli latenti che nella sua attività sono
contenuti. Nella ideologia e nella pratica del blocco delle opposizioni rinasce
in pieno tutta la tradizione della socialdemocrazia e del sindacalismo che ha
impedito finora al proletariato occidentale di organizzarsi in classe
dirigente». Gramsci concludeva esortando all'unità: «I compagni Zinov'ev,
Trockij, Kamenev hanno contribuito potentemente a educarci per la rivoluzione
[...] sono stati tra i nostri maestri. A loro specialmente ci rivolgiamo come
ai maggiori responsabili dell'attuale situazione perché vogliamo essere sicuri
che la maggioranza del comitato centrale del partito comunista dell'URSS non
intenda stravincere nella lotta e sia disposta a evitare le misure eccessive. L'untà
del nostro partito fratello di Russia è necessaria per lo sviluppo e il trionfo
delle forze rivoluzionarie mondiali; a questa necessità ogni comunista e
internazionalista deve essere disposto a fare maggiori sacrifizi. I danni di un
errore compiuto dal partito unito sono facilmente superabili; i danni di una
scissione o di una prolungata condizione di scissione latente possono essere
irreparabili e mortali».[78] Togliatti, allora a Mosca quale
rappresentante italiano all'Internazionale, criticò le ultime considerazioni
che ripartivano, seppure in modo diseguale, le responsabilità delle due
fazioni, credendo ancora nella illusoria possibilità di una compattezza del
gruppo dirigente sovietico: a suo avviso, invece, «d'ora in poi l'unità della
vecchia guardia leninista non sarà più o sarà assai difficilmente realizzata in
modo continuo».[79] Non ci sarà tempo e occasione per approfondire la
questione: lo stesso giorno in cui il Comitato centrale comunista doveva
riunirsi clandestinamente a Genova, il 31 ottobre 1926, Mussolini subì a
Bologna un attentato senza conseguenze personali, che provoca una tale
pressione poliziesca da far fallire il convegno. L'attentato Zamboni costituì
il pretesto per l'eliminazione degli ultimi, minimi residui di democrazia: il 5
novembre il governo sciolse i partiti politici di opposizione e soppresse la
libertà di stampa. L'8 novembre, in violazione dell'immunità parlamentare,
Gramsci venne arrestato nella sua casa e rinchiuso nel carcere di Regina
Coeli.[80] Il giorno successivo fu dichiarato decaduto, insieme agli altri
deputati aventiniani.[81] Dopo un periodo di confino a Ustica, dove
ritrovò, tra gli altri, Bordiga, il 7 febbraio 1927 fu detenuto nel carcere
milanese di San Vittore. Qui ricevette, in agosto, la visita del fratello
Mario, le cui scelte politiche erano state opposte alle sue - già federale di
Varese, ora si occupava di commercio - e, soprattutto, quella della cognata
Tatiana, la persona che si manterrà sempre, per quanto possibile, in contatto
con lui. L'istruttoria andò per le lunghe, perché vi erano difficoltà a montare
su di lui accuse credibili: fu anche fatto avvicinare da due agenti provocatori
- prima un tale Dante Romani e poi un certo Corrado Melani - ma senza
successo.[82] Il processo a ventidue imputati comunisti, fra i quali
Umberto Terracini, Mauro Scoccimarro e Giovanni Roveda, iniziò finalmente a
Roma il 28 maggio 1928; Mussolini aveva istituito il 1º febbraio 1927 il
Tribunale Speciale Fascista. Presidente è un generale, Alessandro Saporiti, giurati
sono cinque consoli della milizia fascista, relatore l'avvocato Giacomo
Buccafurri e accusatore l'avvocato Michele Isgrò, tutti in uniforme; intorno
all'aula, «un doppio cordone di militi in elmetto nero, il pugnale sul fianco
ed i moschetti con la baionetta in canna»[83] Gramsci è accusato di attività
cospirativa, istigazione alla guerra civile, apologia di reato e incitamento
all'odio di classe.[84] Il pubblico ministero Isgrò concluse la sua
requisitoria con una frase rimasta famosa: «Bisogna impedire a questo cervello
di funzionare per venti anni»;[85] e infatti Gramsci, il 4 giugno, venne
condannato a venti anni, quattro mesi e cinque giorni di reclusione;[86] il 19
luglio raggiunse il carcere di Turi, in provincia di Bari. Fin da quando
si trovava in carcere a Milano, Gramsci era intenzionato a occuparsi
«intensamente e sistematicamente di qualche soggetto» che lo «assorbisse e
centralizzasse la sua vita interiore».[87] L'8 febbraio 1929, nel carcere di
Turi, il detenuto 7.047 ottenne finalmente l'occorrente per scrivere e iniziò
la stesura dei suoi Quaderni del carcere. Il primo quaderno si apre proprio con
una bozza di 16 argomenti, alcuni dei quali saranno abbandonati, altri inseriti
e altri ancora svolti solo in parte. Caratteristico era il suo modo di
lavorare: quasi tutti i giorni, per alcune ore, camminando all'interno della
cella, rifletteva sulle frasi da scrivere e poi si chinava sul tavolino,
scrivendo senza sedersi, un ginocchio appoggiato sullo sgabello, per riprendere
a camminare e a pensare.[88] A fare da tramite tra Gramsci e il mondo esterno,
e in particolare con Piero Sraffa e tramite questi col Pcus e il PCd'I, fu la
cognata Tatiana Schucht, essendo la moglie di Gramsci tornata in Unione
Sovietica. Intanto, il VI Congresso dell'Internazionale comunista,
tenutosi a Mosca dal luglio al settembre 1928, aveva stabilito l'impossibilità
di accordi con la socialdemocrazia, che veniva anzi assimilata allo stesso
fascismo.[89] Era la tesi di Stalin il quale, liquidata l'opposizione di Trockij,
eliminava anche l'influenza di Bucharin che, già suo alleato contro la sinistra
di Trockij, era rimasto il suo principale oppositore da destra.[90] Al nuovo
orientamento dell'Internazionale, riaffermato nel X Plenum del Comitato
esecutivo nel luglio 1929, dovevano adeguarsi i Partiti nazionali, espellendo,
se necessario, i dissidenti.[89] Il Partito comunista d'Italia si adeguò alle
scelte dell'Internazionale, espellendo Angelo Tasca in settembre e in
successione, ma con l'accusa di trotskismo, prima, il 30 marzo del 1930,
Bordiga,[91] poi, il 9 giugno, fu la volta di Alfonso Leonetti, Pietro Tresso e
Paolo Ravazzoli.[92] Gramsci teneva, durante l'ora d'aria, dei
"colloqui-lezioni" con i compagni di partito: non esistono dirette
testimonianze delle opinioni espresse da Gramsci riguardo alla «svolta»
politica del movimento comunista, ma può costituire un indiretto riferimento un
rapporto che un suo compagno di carcere, Athos Lisa, amnistiato nel 1933, inviò
subito al Centro estero comunista.[93] Secondo quella relazione, Gramsci riferì
la teoria della necessità dell'alleanza fra operai del Nord e contadini
meridionali che già stava elaborando nei suoi Quaderni: «L'azione per la
conquista degli alleati diviene per il proletariato cosa estremamente delicata e
difficile. D'altra parte, senza la conquista di questi alleati, è precluso al
proletariato ogni serio movimento rivoluzionario». Qui s'intende che il
proletariato - la classe operaia - debba allearsi con i contadini e la piccola
borghesia: «Se si tiene conto delle particolari condizioni nei limiti delle
quali va visto il grado di sviluppo politico degli strati contadini e piccoli
borghesi in Italia, è facile comprendere come la conquista di questi strati
sociali comporti per il partito una particolare azione [...]» Foto
segnaletica di Gramsci del 1933 «La lotta per la conquista diretta del potere è
un passo al quale questi strati sociali potranno solo accedere per gradi [...]
il primo passo attraverso il quale bisogna condurre questi strati sociali è quello
che li porti a pronunciarsi sul problema istituzionale e costituzionale.
L'inutilità della Monarchia è ormai compresa da tutti i lavoratori [...] a
questo obiettivo deve improntarsi la tattica del partito senza tema di apparire
poco rivoluzionario. Deve fare sua prima degli altri partiti in lotta contro il
fascismo la parola d'ordine della Costituente». Ma l'azione del partito «deve
essere intesa a svalutare tutti i programmi di riforma pacifica dimostrando
alla classe lavoratrice come la sola soluzione possibile in Italia risieda
nella rivoluzione proletaria». La richiesta di una Costituente, e dunque
di un'iniziativa politica che si ponesse obiettivi intermedi, avrebbe
comportato necessariamente una convergenza, per quanto temporanea, con altre
forze antifasciste, e se è difficile considerare tale linea politica come
«socialdemocratica», durante le discussioni nel cortile del carcere qualche suo
compagno arrivò a sostenere che egli era ormai fuori del Partito comunista:
probabilmente le reazioni di alcuni «erano esasperate dal clima di detenzione»
ma certo le posizioni di Gramsci dovevano apparire «in contrasto con la linea
politica indicata in quegli anni dal Partito comunista».[94] È in questo
periodo che Gramsci venne a contatto con Sandro Pertini, esponente del PSI e
detenuto anch'egli alla Casa Penale di Turi. I due, nonostante i pensieri
politici differenti, divennero grandi amici e Pertini, anche dopo la
scarcerazione, ricordò spesso nei suoi discorsi il compagno di prigionia e le
tristi condizioni di salute che lo stroncavano[95]. Dal 1931 Gramsci, oltre al
morbo di Pott di cui soffriva fin dall'infanzia, fu colpito da arteriosclerosi
e poté così ottenere una cella individuale; cercò di reagire alla detenzione
studiando ed elaborando le proprie riflessioni politiche, filosofiche e
storiche, tuttavia le condizioni di salute continuarono a peggiorare e in
agosto ebbe un'improvvisa e grave emorragia. La tomba di Gramsci
nel Cimitero acattolico di Roma Anche la moglie Giulia, in Russia, era sofferente
di una seria forma di depressione e rare erano le sue lettere al marito che,
all'oscuro dei motivi dei suoi lunghi silenzi, sentiva crescere intorno a sé il
senso di un opprimente isolamento. Scriveva alla cognata: «Non credere che il
sentimento di essere personalmente isolato mi getti nella disperazione [...] io
non ho mai sentito il bisogno di un apporto esteriore di forze morali per
vivere fortemente la mia vita [...] tanto meno oggi, quando sento che le mie
forze volitive hanno acquistato un più alto grado di concretezza e di validità.
Ma mentre nel passato mi sentivo quasi orgoglioso di sentirmi isolato, ora
invece sento tutta la meschinità, l'aridità, la grettezza di una vita che sia
esclusivamente volontà».[96] Quando la madre morì, il 30 dicembre 1932, i
familiari preferirono non informarlo; il 7 marzo 1933 ebbe una seconda grave
crisi, con allucinazioni e deliri. Si riprese a fatica, senza farsi illusioni
sul suo immediato futuro: «Fino a qualche tempo fa io ero, per così dire,
pessimista con l'intelligenza e ottimista con la volontà [...] Oggi non penso
più così. Ciò non vuol dire che abbia deciso di arrendermi, per così dire. Ma
significa che non vedo più nessuna uscita concreta e non posso più contare su
nessuna riserva di forze».[97] Eppure lo stesso codice penale dell'epoca,
all'art. 176, prevedeva la concessione della libertà condizionata ai carcerati
in gravi condizioni di salute. A Parigi si costituì un comitato, di cui fecero
parte, fra gli altri, Romain Rolland e Henri Barbusse, per ottenere la
liberazione sua e di altri detenuti politici, ma solo il 19 novembre Gramsci
venne trasferito nell'infermeria del carcere di Civitavecchia e poi, il 7
dicembre, nella clinica del dottor Cusumano a Formia, sorvegliato in camera e
all'esterno. Il 25 ottobre 1934 Mussolini accolse finalmente la richiesta di
libertà condizionata, ma Gramsci non rimase libero nei suoi movimenti, tanto
che gli fu impedito di andare a curarsi altrove, perché il governo temeva una
sua fuga all'estero; solo il 24 agosto 1935 poté essere trasferito nella
clinica "Quisisana" di Roma, dove giunse in gravi condizioni, poiché
oltre al morbo di Pott e all'arteriosclerosi soffriva di ipertensione e di
gotta. Il 21 aprile 1937 Gramsci passò dalla libertà condizionata alla
piena libertà, ma era ormai in gravissime condizioni: morì all'alba del 27
aprile, a quarantasei anni, di emorragia cerebrale, nella stessa clinica
Quisisana.[98] Il giorno seguente la cremazione si svolsero i funerali, cui
parteciparono soltanto il fratello Carlo e la cognata Tatiana: le ceneri,
inumate nel cimitero del Verano, furono trasferite l'anno seguente nel Cimitero
acattolico di Roma, nel Campo Cestio. I 33 Quaderni del carcere, non destinati
da Gramsci alla pubblicazione, contengono riflessioni e appunti elaborati
durante la reclusione; iniziati l'8 febbraio 1929, furono definitivamente
interrotti nell'agosto 1935 a causa della gravità delle sue condizioni di
salute. Furono numerati, senza tener conto della loro cronologia, dalla cognata
Tatiana Schucht, che li affidò all'Ambasciata sovietica a Roma da dove furono
inviati a Mosca e, successivamente, consegnati a Palmiro Togliatti.[99]
Dopo la fine della guerra i Quaderni, curati dal dirigente comunista Felice
Platone sotto la supervisione di Palmiro Togliatti, furono pubblicati
dall'editore Einaudi – unitamente alle sue Lettere dal carcere indirizzate ai
familiari – in sei volumi, ordinati per argomenti omogenei, con i titoli:
Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, nel 1948 Gli intellettuali
e l'organizzazione della cultura, nel 1949 Il Risorgimento, nel 1949 Note sul
Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo Stato moderno, nel 1949 Letteratura e vita
nazionale, nel 1950 Passato e presente, nel 1951 Nel 1975 i Quaderni furono
pubblicati a cura di Valentino Gerratana secondo l'ordine cronologico della
loro elaborazione. Sono stati raccolti in volume anche tutti gli articoli
scritti da Gramsci nell'Avanti!, ne Il Grido del Popolo e ne L'Ordine
Nuovo. Il pensiero di Gramsci L'egemonia Magnifying glass icon mgx2.svg
Lo stesso argomento in dettaglio: Egemonia culturale. Conquistare la
maggioranza politica di un Paese vuol dire che le forze sociali, che di tale
maggioranza sono espressione, dirigono la politica di quel determinato paese e
dominano le forze sociali che a tale politica si oppongono: significa ottenere
l'egemonia. Vi è distinzione fra direzione – egemonia intellettuale e
morale – e dominio – esercizio della forza repressiva: «Un gruppo sociale è
dominante dei gruppi avversari che tende a liquidare o a sottomettere anche con
la forza armata, ed è dirigente dei gruppi affini e alleati. Un gruppo sociale
può e anzi deve essere dirigente già prima di conquistare il potere governativo
(è questa una delle condizioni principali per la stessa conquista del potere);
dopo, quando esercita il potere ed anche se lo tiene fortemente in pugno,
diventa dominante ma deve continuare ad essere anche dirigente».[100] La
crisi dell'egemonia si manifesta quando, anche mantenendo il proprio dominio,
le classi sociali politicamente dominanti non riescono più a essere dirigenti
di tutte le classi sociali, non riuscendo più a risolvere i problemi di tutta
la collettività e a imporre la propria concezione del mondo. A quel punto, la
classe sociale subalterna, se riesce a indicare concrete soluzioni ai problemi
lasciati irrisolti dalla classe dominante, può diventare dirigente e,
allargando la propria concezione del mondo anche ad altri strati sociali, può
creare un nuovo «blocco sociale», cioè una nuova alleanza di forze sociali,
divenendo egemone. Il cambiamento dell'esercizio dell'egemonia è un momento
rivoluzionario che inizialmente avviene a livello della sovrastruttura – in
senso marxiano, ossia politico, culturale, ideale, morale –, ma poi trapassa
nella società nel suo complesso investendo anche la struttura economica, e
dunque tutto il «blocco storico», termine che in Gramsci indica l'insieme della
struttura e della sovrastruttura, ossia i rapporti sociali di produzione e i
loro riflessi ideologici. Analizzando la storia italiana e il Risorgimento
in particolare, Gramsci rileva che la classe popolare non trovò un proprio
spazio politico e una propria identità, poiché la politica dei liberali di
Cavour concepì «l'unità nazionale come allargamento dello Stato piemontese e
del patrimonio della dinastia, non come movimento nazionale dal basso, ma come
conquista regia».[101] Gramsci ritiene che l'azione della borghesia avrebbe
potuto assumere un carattere rivoluzionario se avesse acquisito l'appoggio di
vaste masse popolari, in particolare dei contadini, che costituivano la
maggioranza della popolazione. Il limite della rivoluzione borghese in Italia
consistette nel non essere capeggiata da un partito giacobino, come in Francia,
dove le campagne, appoggiando la Rivoluzione, furono decisive per la sconfitta
delle forze della reazione aristocratica. Cavour Il partito
politico italiano allora più avanzato fu il Partito d'Azione di Mazzini e
Garibaldi, che non seppe impostare il problema dell'alleanza delle forze
borghesi progressive con la classe contadina: Garibaldi in Sicilia distribuì le
terre demaniali ai contadini, ma gli stessi garibaldini repressero le rivolte
contadine contro i baroni latifondisti. Per conquistare l'egemonia contro i
moderati guidati da Cavour, il Partito d'Azione avrebbe dovuto «legarsi alle
masse rurali, specialmente meridionali, essere giacobino [...] specialmente per
il contenuto economico-sociale: il collegamento delle diverse classi rurali che
si realizzava in un blocco reazionario attraverso i diversi ceti intellettuali
legittimisti-clericali poteva essere dissolto per addivenire ad una nuova
formazione liberale-nazionale solo se si faceva forza in due direzioni: sui
contadini di base, accettandone le rivendicazione di base [...] e sugli intellettuali
degli strati medi e inferiori».[102] Al contrario, i cavourriani seppero
mettersi alla testa della rivoluzione borghese, assorbendo tanto i radicali che
una parte dei loro stessi avversari. Questo avvenne perché i moderati
cavourriani ebbero un rapporto organico con i loro intellettuali che erano
proprietari terrieri e dirigenti industriali come i politici che essi
rappresentavano. Le masse popolari restarono passive nel raggiunto compromesso
fra i capitalisti del Nord e i latifondisti del Sud. Il Piemonte assunse
la funzione di classe dirigente, anche se esistevano altri nuclei di classe
dirigente favorevoli all'unificazione: ma «questi nuclei non volevano dirigere
nessuno, cioè non volevano accordare i loro interessi e aspirazioni con gli interessi
e aspirazioni di altri gruppi. Volevano dominare, non dirigere e ancora:
volevano che dominassero i loro interessi, non le loro persone, cioè volevano
che una forza nuova, indipendente da ogni compromesso e condizione, divenisse
arbitra della Nazione: questa forza fu il Piemonte», che ebbe una funzione
paragonabile a quella di un partito. «Questo fatto è della massima
importanza per il concetto di rivoluzione passiva, che cioè non un gruppo
sociale sia il dirigente di altri gruppi, ma che uno Stato, sia pure limitato
come potenza, sia il dirigente del gruppo che di esso dovrebbe essere dirigente
e possa porre a disposizione di questo un esercito e una forza
politica-diplomatica». Che uno Stato si sostituisca ai gruppi sociali locali
nel dirigere la lotta di rinnovamento «è uno dei casi in cui si ha la funzione
di dominio e non di dirigenza di questi gruppi: dittatura senza egemonia».[103]
E dunque per Gramsci il concetto di egemonia si distingue da quello di
dittatura: questa è solo dominio, quella è capacità di direzione. Nei suoi
scritti tuttavia Gramsci non prese mai posizione contro la dittatura del
proletariato né espresse critiche significative al regime sovietico in
Russia. Le classi subalterne Gustave Courbet, Lo spaccapietre Le classi
subalterne - sottoproletariato, proletariato urbano, rurale e anche parte della
piccola borghesia - non sono unificate e la loro unificazione avviene solo
quando giungono a dirigere lo Stato, altrimenti svolgono una funzione
discontinua e disgregata nella storia della società civile dei singoli Stati,
subendo l'iniziativa dei gruppi dominanti anche quando ad essi si
ribellano. Il "blocco sociale", l'alleanza politica di classi
sociali diverse, formato, in Italia, da industriali, proprietari terrieri,
classi medie, parte della piccola borghesia, non è omogeneo, essendo
attraversato da interessi divergenti, ma una politica opportuna, una cultura e
un'ideologia o un sistema di ideologie impediscono che quei contrasti di
interessi, permanenti anche quando siano latenti, esplodano provocando la crisi
dell'ideologia dominante e la conseguente crisi politica dell'intero sistema di
potere. In Italia, l'esercizio dell'egemonia delle classi dominanti è ed
è stata parziale: tra le forze che contribuiscono alla conservazione di tale
blocco sociale è la Chiesa cattolica, che si batte per mantenere l'unione
dottrinale tra fedeli colti e incolti, tra intellettuali e semplici, tra
dominanti e dominati, in modo da evitare fratture irrimediabili che tuttavia
esistono e che essa non è in realtà in grado di sanare, ma solo di controllare:
«la Chiesa romana è sempre stata la più tenace nella lotta per impedire che
ufficialmente si formino due religioni, quella degli intellettuali e quella
delle anime semplici », una lotta che ha fatto risaltare «la capacità
organizzatrice nella sfera della cultura del clero» che ha dato «certe
soddisfazioni alle esigenze della scienza e della filosofia, ma con un ritmo
così lento e metodico che le mutazioni non sono percepite dalla massa dei
semplici, sebbene esse appaiano "rivoluzionarie" e demagogiche agli
"integralisti" ».[104] Anche la dominante cultura d'impronta
idealistica, esercitata dalle scuole filosofiche crociane e gentiliane, non ha
«saputo creare una unità ideologica tra il basso e l'alto, tra i semplici e gli
intellettuali», tanto che essa, anche se ha sempre considerato la religione una
mitologia, non ha nemmeno «tentato di costruire una concezione che potesse
sostituire la religione nell'educazione infantile», e questi pedagogisti, pur essendo
non religiosi, non confessionali e atei, «concedono l'insegnamento della
religione perché la religione è la filosofia dell'infanzia dell'umanità, che si
rinnova in ogni infanzia non metaforica».[105] La cultura laica dominante
utilizza la religione proprio perché non si pone il problema di elevare le
classi popolari al livello di quelle dominanti ma, al contrario, intende
mantenerle in una posizione di subalternità. Le classi dominanti hanno
derubricato a folklore la cultura delle classi subalterne. Gramsci annota l'8
febbraio 1929, nel I Quaderno, che il folklore «non deve essere concepito come
una bizzarria, una stranezza, una cosa ridicola, una cosa tutt'al più
pittoresca; ma deve essere concepito come una cosa molto seria e da prendere
sul serio», e va studiato in quanto «concezione del mondo e della vita [...] di
certi strati della società [...] determinati nel tempo e nello spazio», cioè
del popolo inteso come «l'insieme delle classi strumentali e subalterne di ogni
forma di società finora esistita». È dunque necessario «mutare lo spirito delle
ricerche folkloriche, oltre che approfondirle ed estenderle».[106][107]
La coscienza di classe Karl Marx La frattura tra gli intellettuali e i
semplici può essere sanata da quella politica che «non tende a mantenere i
semplici nella loro filosofia primitiva del senso comune, ma invece a condurli
a una concezione superiore della vita». L'azione politica realizzata dalla
«filosofia della prassi» - così Gramsci chiama il marxismo, non solo per
l'esigenza di celare quanto scrive alla repressiva censura carceraria -
opponendosi alle culture dominanti della Chiesa e dell'idealismo, può condurre
i subalterni a una «superiore concezione della vita. Se afferma l'esigenza del
contatto tra intellettuali e semplici non è per limitare l'attività scientifica
e per mantenere una unità al basso livello delle masse, ma appunto per
costruire un blocco intellettuale-morale che renda politicamente possibile un
progresso intellettuale di massa e non solo di scarsi gruppi intellettuali».[108]
La via che conduce all'egemonia del proletariato passa dunque per una riforma
culturale e morale della società. Tuttavia l'uomo attivo di massa - cioè
la classe operaia, - non è, in generale, consapevole né della funzione che può
svolgere né della sua condizione reale di subordinazione, Il proletariato,
scrive Gramsci, «non ha una chiara coscienza teorica di questo suo operare che
pure è un conoscere il mondo in quanto lo trasforma. La sua coscienza teorica
anzi può essere in contrasto col suo operare»; esso opera praticamente e nello
stesso tempo ha una coscienza teorica ereditata dal passato, accolta per lo più
in modo acritico. La reale comprensione critica di sé avviene «attraverso una
lotta di egemonie politiche, di direzioni contrastanti, prima nel campo
dell'etica, poi della politica per giungere a una elaborazione superiore della
propria concezione del reale». La coscienza politica, cioè l'essere parte di
una determinata forza egemonica, «è la prima fase per una ulteriore e
progressiva autocoscienza dove teoria e pratica finalmente si
unificano».[108] Ma autocoscienza critica significa creazione di un
gruppo di intellettuali, organici alla classe, perché per distinguersi e
rendersi indipendenti occorre organizzarsi, e non esiste organizzazione senza
intellettuali, «uno strato di persone specializzate nell'elaborazione
concettuale e filosofica».[109] Già Machiavelli indicava nei moderni
Stati unitari europei l'esperienza che l'Italia avrebbe dovuto far propria per
superare la drammatica crisi emersa nelle guerre che devastarono la penisola
dalla fine del Quattrocento. Il Principe di Machiavelli «non esisteva nella
realtà storica, non si presentava al popolo italiano con caratteri di
immediatezza obiettiva, ma era una pura astrazione dottrinaria, il simbolo del
capo, del condottiero ideale; ma gli elementi passionali, mitici [...] si
riassumono e diventano vivi nella conclusione, nell'invocazione di un principe
realmente esistente».[110] Niccolò Machiavelli In Italia non si ebbe
una monarchia assoluta che unificasse la nazione perché dalla dissoluzione
della borghesia comunale si creò una situazione interna economico-corporativa,
politicamente «la peggiore delle forme di società feudale, la forma meno
progressiva e più stagnante: mancò sempre, e non poteva costituirsi, una forza
giacobina efficiente, la forza appunto che nelle altre nazioni ha suscitato e
organizzato la volontà collettiva nazional-popolare e ha fondato gli Stati
moderni».[111] A questa forza progressiva si oppose in Italia la
«borghesia rurale, eredità di parassitismo lasciata ai tempi moderni dallo
sfacelo, come classe, della borghesia comunale». Forze progressive sono i
gruppi sociali urbani con un determinato livello di cultura politica, ma non
sarà possibile la formazione di una volontà collettiva nazionale-popolare, «se
le grandi masse dei contadini lavoratori non irrompono simultaneamente nella
vita politica. Ciò intendeva il Machiavelli attraverso la riforma della
milizia, ciò fecero i giacobini nella Rivoluzione francese; in questa
comprensione è da identificare un giacobinismo precoce del Machiavelli, il
germe, più o meno fecondo, della sua concezione della rivoluzione
nazionale».[111] Modernamente, il Principe invocato dal Machiavelli non
può essere un individuo reale, concreto, ma un organismo e «questo organismo è
già dato dallo sviluppo storico ed è il partito politico: la prima cellula in
cui si riassumono dei germi di volontà collettiva che tendono a divenire
universali e totali»; il partito è l'organizzatore di una riforma intellettuale
e morale, che concretamente si manifesta con un programma di riforma economica,
divenendo così «la base di un laicismo moderno e di una completa laicizzazione
di tutta la vita e di tutti i rapporti di costume».[105] Perché un partito
esista, e diventi storicamente necessario, devono confluire in esso tre
elementi fondamentali: «Un elemento diffuso, di uomini comuni, medi, la
cui partecipazione è offerta dalla disciplina e dalla fedeltà, non dallo
spirito creativo ed altamente organizzativo [...] essi sono una forza in quanto
c'è chi li centralizza, organizza, disciplina, ma in assenza di questa forza
coesiva si sparpaglierebbero e si annullerebbero in un pulviscolo impotente»
«L'elemento coesivo principale [...] dotato di forza altamente coesiva,
centralizzatrice e disciplinatrice e anche, anzi forse per questo, inventiva
[...] da solo questo elemento non formerebbe un partito, tuttavia lo formerebbe
più che il primo elemento considerato. Si parla di capitani senza esercito, ma
in realtà è più facile formare un esercito che formare dei capitani» «Un
elemento medio, che articoli il primo col secondo elemento, che li metta a
contatto, non solo fisico, ma morale e intellettuale».[112] Gramsci negli
scritti compresi fra il 1919 e il 1926 ribadì i principi espressi dalla Terza
Internazionale, insistendo sulla "disciplina ferrea" del partito e
contestando qualsiasi forma di "frazionismo". Socialisti e
sindacalisti venivano pesantemente criticati e messi sullo stesso piano del
regime fascista. Per Gramsci, tutti gli uomini sono intellettuali, dal
momento che «non c'è attività umana da cui si possa escludere ogni intervento
intellettuale, non si può separare l'homo faber dall'homo sapiens»,[113] in
quanto, indipendentemente della sua professione specifica, ognuno è a suo modo
«un filosofo, un artista, un uomo di gusto, partecipa di una concezione del
mondo, ha una consapevole linea di condotta morale», ma non tutti gli uomini
hanno nella società la funzione di intellettuali. Storicamente si formano
particolari categorie di intellettuali, «specialmente in connessione coi gruppi
sociali più importanti e subiscono elaborazioni più estese e complesse in
connessione col gruppo sociale dominante». Un gruppo sociale che tende
all'egemonia lotta «per l'assimilazione e la conquista ideologica degli
intellettuali tradizionali [...] tanto più rapida ed efficace quanto più il
gruppo dato elabora simultaneamente i propri intellettuali
organici».[111] L'intellettuale tradizionale è il letterato, il filosofo,
l'artista e perciò, nota Gramsci, «i giornalisti, che ritengono di essere
letterati, filosofi, artisti, ritengono anche di essere i veri intellettuali»,
mentre modernamente è la formazione tecnica a formare la base del nuovo tipo di
intellettuale, un costruttore, organizzatore, persuasore - ma non assolutamente
il vecchio oratore, formatosi sullo studio dell'eloquenza «motrice esteriore e
momentanea degli affetti e delle passioni» - il quale deve giungere «dalla
tecnica-lavoro alla tecnica-scienza e alla concezione umanistica storica, senza
la quale si rimane specialista e non si diventa dirigente».[114] Il
gruppo sociale emergente, che lotta per conquistare l'egemonia politica, tende
a conquistare alla propria ideologia l'intellettuale tradizionale mentre, nello
stesso tempo, forma i propri intellettuali organici. L'organicità degli
intellettuali si misura con la maggiore o minore connessione con il gruppo
sociale cui essi fanno riferimento: essi operano tanto nella società civile -
l'insieme degli organismi privati in cui si dibattono e si diffondono le
ideologie necessarie all'acquisizione del consenso, apparentemente dato
spontaneamente dalle grandi masse della popolazione alle scelte del gruppo
sociale dominante - quanto nella società politica, dove si esercita il «dominio
diretto o di comando che si esprime nello Stato e nel governo giuridico». Gli
intellettuali sono così «i commessi del gruppo dominante per l'esercizio delle
funzioni subalterne dell'egemonia sociale e del governo politico, cioè: 1) del
consenso spontaneo dato dalle grandi masse della popolazione all'indirizzo
impresso alla vita sociale dal gruppo fondamentale dominante [...] 2)
dell'apparato di coercizione statale che assicura legalmente la disciplina di
quei gruppi che non consentono».[115] Come lo Stato, nella società
politica, tende a unificare gli intellettuali tradizionali con quelli organici,
così nella società civile il partito politico, ancor più compiutamente e
organicamente dello Stato, elabora «i propri componenti, elementi di un gruppo
sociale nato e sviluppatosi come economico, fino a farli diventare
intellettuali politici qualificati, dirigenti, organizzatori di tutte le
attività e le funzioni inerenti all'organico sviluppo di una società integrale,
civile e politica».[109] Il compito della “riforma intellettuale e morale” non
potrà che essere ancora degli intellettuali organici, non cristallizzati, che
la determineranno e organizzeranno, adeguando la cultura anche alle sue
funzioni pratiche, addivenendo a una nuova organizzazione della cultura. Il
partito comunista si pone, per Gramsci, come sintesi attiva di questo processo:
intellettuale collettivo di avanguardia, la direzione politica di classe
lotterà per l'egemonia. Il partito comunista, per Gramsci, è intellettuale collettivo;
e l'intellettuale comunista è organico alla classe e dunque a questo collettivo
perché fa parte del blocco storico-sociale che deve costruire il nuovo
mondo. Pur essendo sempre stati legati alle classi dominanti, ottenendone
spesso onori e prestigio, gli intellettuali italiani non si sono mai sentiti
organici, hanno sempre rifiutato, in nome di un loro astratto cosmopolitismo,
ogni legame con il popolo, del quale non hanno mai voluto riconoscere le
esigenze né interpretare i bisogni culturali. In molte lingue - in russo,
in tedesco, in francese - il significato dei termini «nazionale» e «popolare»
coincidono: «in Italia, il termine nazionale ha un significato molto ristretto
ideologicamente e in ogni caso non coincide con popolare, perché in Italia gli
intellettuali sono lontani dal popolo, cioè dalla nazione e sono invece legati
a una tradizione di casta, che non è mai stata rotta da un forte movimento
popolare o nazionale dal basso: la tradizione è libresca e astratta e
l'intellettuale tipico moderno si sente più legato ad Annibal Caro o a Ippolito
Pindemonte che a un contadino pugliese o siciliano».[116] Dall'Ottocento,
in Europa, si è assistito a un fiorire della letteratura popolare, dai romanzi
di appendice del Sue o di Ponson du Terrail, ad Alexandre Dumas, ai racconti
polizieschi inglesi e americani; con maggior dignità artistica, alle opere del
Chesterton e di Dickens, a quelle di Victor Hugo, di Émile Zola e di Honoré de
Balzac, fino ai capolavori di Fëdor Michajlovič Dostoevskij e di Lev Tolstoj.
Nulla di tutto questo in Italia: qui la letteratura non si è diffusa e non è
stata popolare, per la mancanza di un blocco nazionale intellettuale e morale
tanto che l'elemento intellettuale italiano è avvertito come più straniero
degli stranieri stessi. Fa eccezione, per Gramsci, il melodramma, che ha tenuto
in qualche modo in Italia il ruolo nazionale-popolare sostenuto altrove dalla
letteratura. Alessandro Manzoni ritratto da Francesco Hayez Il
pubblico italiano cerca la sua letteratura all'estero perché la sente più sua
di quella nazionale: è questa la dimostrazione del distacco, in Italia, fra
pubblico e scrittori: «Ogni popolo ha la sua letteratura, ma essa può venirgli
da un altro popolo [...] può essere subordinato all'egemonia intellettuale e
morale di altri popoli. È questo spesso il paradosso più stridente per molte
tendenze monopolistiche di carattere nazionalistico e repressivo: che mentre si
costruiscono piani grandiosi di egemonia, non ci si accorge di essere oggetto
di egemonie straniere; così come, mentre si fanno piani imperialistici, in
realtà si è oggetto di altri imperialismi». Hanno fallito nel compito di
elaborare la coscienza morale del popolo, non diffondendo in esso un moderno
umanesimo, tanto gli intellettuali laici quanto i cattolici: la loro
insufficienza è «uno degli indizi più espressivi dell'intima rottura che esiste
tra la religione e il popolo: questo si trova in uno stato miserrimo di
indifferentismo e di assenza di una vivace vita spirituale; la religione è rimasta
allo stato di superstizione [...] l'Italia popolare è ancora nelle condizioni
create immediatamente dalla Controriforma: la religione, tutt'al più, si è
combinata col folclore pagano ed è rimasta in questo stadio».[117] Sono
rimaste famose le note di Gramsci sul Manzoni: lo scrittore più autorevole, più
studiato nelle scuole e probabilmente il più popolare, è una dimostrazione del
carattere non nazionale-popolare della letteratura italiana; ecco le parole dai
Quaderni del carcere, confrontandolo con Tolstoj: «Il carattere aristocratico
del cattolicismo manzoniano appare dal compatimento scherzoso verso le figure
di uomini del popolo (ciò che non appare in Tolstoj), come fra Galdino (in
confronto di frate Cristoforo), il sarto, Renzo, Agnese, Perpetua, la stessa
Lucia [...] i popolani, per il Manzoni, non hanno vita interiore, non hanno
personalità morale profonda; essi sono animali e il Manzoni è benevolo verso di
loro proprio della benevolenza di una cattolica società di protezione di
animali [...] niente dello spirito popolare di Tolstoi, cioè dello spirito
evangelico del cristianesimo primitivo. L'atteggiamento del Manzoni verso i
suoi popolani è l'atteggiamento della Chiesa Cattolica verso il popolo: di
condiscendente benevolenza, non di immediatezza umana [...] vede con occhio
severo tutto il popolo, mentre vede con occhio severo i più di coloro che non
sono popolo; egli trova magnanimità, alti pensieri, grandi sentimenti, solo in
alcuni della classe alta, in nessuno del popolo [...] non c'è popolano che non
venga preso in giro e canzonato [...] Vita interiore hanno solo i signori: fra
Cristoforo, il Borromeo, l'Innominato, lo stesso don Rodrigo [...] il suo
atteggiamento verso il popolo non è popolare-nazionale ma
aristocratico».[118] Una classe che muova alla conquista dell'egemonia
non può non creare una nuova cultura, che è essa stessa espressione di una
nuova vita morale, un nuovo modo di vedere e rappresentare la realtà;
naturalmente, non si possono creare artificialmente artisti che interpretino questo
nuovo mondo culturale, ma «un nuovo gruppo sociale che entra nella vita storica
con atteggiamento egemonico, con una sicurezza di sé che prima non aveva, non
può non suscitare dal suo seno personalità che prima non avrebbero trovato una
forza sufficiente per esprimersi compiutamente». Intanto, nella creazione di
una nuova cultura, è parte la critica della civiltà letteraria presente, e
Gramsci vede nella critica svolta da Francesco De Sanctis un esempio
privilegiato: Francesco De Sanctis ritratto da Saverio Altamura «La
critica del De Sanctis è militante, non frigidamente estetica, è la critica di
un periodo di lotte culturali, di contrasti tra concezioni della vita
antagonistiche. Le analisi del contenuto, la critica della struttura delle
opere, cioè della coerenza logica e storica-attuale delle masse di sentimenti
rappresentati artisticamente, sono legate a questa lotta culturale: proprio in
ciò pare consista la profonda umanità e l'umanesimo del De Sanctis [...] Piace
sentire in lui il fervore appassionato dell'uomo di parte che ha saldi
convincimenti morali e politici e non li nasconde». Il De Sanctis opera nel
periodo risorgimentale, in cui si lotta per creare una nuova cultura: di qui la
differenza con il Croce, che vive sì gli stessi motivi culturali, ma nel
periodo della loro affermazione, per cui «la passione e il fervore romantico si
sono composti nella serenità superiore e nell'indulgenza piena di bonomia».
Quando poi quei valori culturali, così affermatisi, sono messi in discussione,
allora in Croce «subentra una fase in cui la serenità e l'indulgenza
s'incrinano e affiora l'acrimonia e la collera a stento repressa: fase
difensiva non aggressiva e fervida, e pertanto non confrontabile con quella del
De Sanctis».[119] Per Gramsci, una critica letteraria marxistica può
avere nel critico campano un esempio, dal momento che essa deve fondere, come
De Sanctis fece, la critica estetica con la lotta per una cultura nuova,
criticando il costume, i sentimenti e le ideologie espresse nella storia della
letteratura, individuandone le radici nella società in cui quegli scrittori si
trovavano a operare. Non a caso, Gramsci progettava nei suoi Quaderni un
saggio che intendeva intitolare «I nipotini di padre Bresciani», dal nome del
gesuita Antonio Bresciani (1798-1862), tra i fondatori e direttore della
rivista La Civiltà Cattolica e scrittore di romanzi popolari d'impronta
reazionaria; uno di essi, L'ebreo di Verona, fu stroncato in un famoso saggio
del De Sanctis. I nipotini di padre Bresciani sono, per Gramsci, gli
intellettuali e i letterati contemporanei portatori di una ideologia
reazionaria, sia essa cattolica che laica, con un «carattere tendenzioso e
propagandistico apertamente confessato».[120] Fra i «nipotini» Gramsci
individua, oltre a molti scrittori ormai dimenticati, Antonio Beltramelli, Ugo
Ojetti - «la codardia intellettuale dell'uomo supera ogni misura normale» -
Alfredo Panzini, Goffredo Bellonci, Massimo Bontempelli, Umberto Fracchia,
Adelchi Baratono - «l'agnosticismo del Baratono non è altro che vigliaccheria
morale e civile [...] Baratono teorizza solo la propria impotenza estetica e
filosofica e la propria coniglieria» - Riccardo Bacchelli - «nel Bacchelli c'è
molto brescianesimo, non solo politico-sociale, ma anche letterario: la Ronda
fu una manifestazione di gesuitismo artistico» - Salvator Gotta, «di Salvator
Gotta si può dire ciò che il Carducci scrisse del Rapisardi: Oremus sull'altare
e flatulenze in sagrestia; tutta la sua produzione letteraria è brescianesca»,
Giuseppe Ungaretti. Secondo Gramsci «la vecchia generazione degli
intellettuali è fallita (Papini, Prezzolini, Soffici, ecc.) ma ha avuto una
giovinezza. La generazione attuale non ha neanche questa età delle brillanti
promesse, Titta Rosa, Angioletti, Malaparte, ecc.). Asini brutti anche da
piccoletti».[121] Benedetto Croce, il più autorevole intellettuale
dell'epoca, secondo Gramsci aveva dato alla borghesia italiana gli strumenti
culturali più raffinati per delimitare i confini fra gli intellettuali e la
cultura italiana, da una parte, e il movimento operaio e socialista dall'altra;
è allora necessario mostrare e combattere la sua funzione di maggior
rappresentante dell'egemonia culturale che il blocco sociale dominante esercita
nei confronti del movimento operaio italiano. Come tale, il Croce combatte il
marxismo, cercando di negarne validità nell'elemento che egli individua come
decisivo: quello dell'economia; Il Capitale di Marx sarebbe per lui un'opera di
morale e non di scienza, un tentativo di dimostrare che la società
capitalistica è immorale, diversamente dalla comunista, in cui si realizzerebbe
la piena moralità umana e sociale. La non scientificità dell'opera maggiore di
Marx sarebbe dimostrata dal concetto del plusvalore: per Croce, solo da un
punto di vista morale si può parlare di plusvalore, rispetto al valore,
legittimo concetto economico. Benedetto Croce Questa critica del
Croce è in realtà un semplice sofisma: il plusvalore è esso stesso valore, è la
differenza tra il valore delle merci prodotte dal lavoratore e il valore della
forza-lavoro del lavoratore stesso. Del resto, la teoria del valore di Marx
deriva direttamente da quella dell'economista liberale inglese David Ricardo la
cui teoria del valore-lavoro «non sollevò nessuno scandalo quando fu espressa,
perché allora non rappresentava nessun pericolo, appariva solo, come era, una
constatazione puramente oggettiva e scientifica. Il valore polemico e di
educazione morale e politica, pur senza perdere la sua oggettività, doveva
acquistarla solo con la Economia critica [Il Capitale di Marx]».[122] La
filosofia crociana si qualifica come storicismo, ossia, seguendo il Vico, la
realtà è storia e tutto ciò che esiste è necessariamente storico ma,
conformemente alla natura idealistica della sua filosofia, la storia è storia
dello Spirito, dunque storia speculativa, di astrazioni - storia della libertà,
della cultura, del progresso - non è la storia concreta delle nazioni e delle
classi: «La storia speculativa può essere considerata come un ritorno, in forme
letterarie rese più scaltre e meno ingenue dallo sviluppo della capacità
critica, a modi di storia già caduti in discredito come vuoti e retorici e
registrati in diversi libri dello stesso Croce. La storia etico-politica, in
quanto prescinde dal concetto di blocco storico, in cui contenuto
economico-sociale e forma etico-politica si identificano concretamente nella
ricostruzione dei vari periodi storici, è niente altro che una presentazione
polemica di filosofemi più o meno interessanti, ma non è storia [...] la storia
del Croce rappresenta figure disossate, senza scheletro, dalle carni flaccide e
cascanti anche sotto il belletto delle veneri letterarie dello
scrittore».[123] L'operazione conservatrice del Croce storico fa il paio
con quella del Croce filosofo: se la dialettica dell'idealista Hegel era una
dialettica dei contrari - uno svolgimento della storia che procede per
contraddizioni - la dialettica crociana è una dialettica dei distinti:
commutare la contraddizione in distinzione significa operare un'attenuazione,
se non un annullamento dei contrasti che nella storia, e dunque nelle società,
si presentano. Tale operazione si manifesta nelle opere storiche del Croce: la
sua Storia d'Europa, iniziando dal 1815 e tagliando fuori il periodo della
Rivoluzione francese e quello napoleonico, «non è altro che un frammento di
storia, l'aspetto passivo della grande rivoluzione che si iniziò in Francia nel
1789, traboccò nel resto d'Europa con le armate repubblicane e napoleoniche,
dando una potente spallata ai vecchi regimi e determinandone non il crollo
immediato come in Francia, ma la corrosione riformistica che durò fino al
1870».[124] Analoga è l'operazione operata dal Croce nella sua Storia d'Italia
dal 1871 al 1915 la quale affronta unicamente il periodo del consolidamento del
regime dell'Italia unita e si «prescinde dal momento della lotta, dal momento
in cui si elaborano e radunano e schierano le forze in contrasto [...] in cui
un sistema etico-politico si dissolve e un altro si elabora [...] in cui un
sistema di rapporti sociali si sconnette e decade e un altro sistema sorge e si
afferma, e invece [Croce] assume placidamente come storia il momento
dell'espansione culturale o etico-politico» Gramsci, fin dagli anni
universitari, fu un deciso oppositore di quella concezione fatalistica e
positivistica del marxismo, presente nel vecchio partito socialista, per la
quale il capitalismo necessariamente era destinato a crollare da sé, facendo
posto a una società socialista. Questa concezione mascherava l'impotenza politica
del partito della classe subalterna, incapace di prendere l'iniziativa per la
conquista dell'egemonia. Anche il manuale del bolscevico russo Nikolaj
Bucharin, edito nel 1921, La teoria del materialismo storico manuale popolare
di sociologia, si colloca nel filone positivistico: «la sociologia è stata un
tentativo di creare un metodo della scienza storico-politica, in dipendenza di
un sistema filosofico già elaborato, il positivismo evoluzionistico [...] è
diventata la filosofia dei non filosofi, un tentativo di descrivere e
classificare schematicamente i fatti storici, secondo criteri costruiti sul
modello delle scienze naturali. La sociologia è dunque un tentativo di ricavare
sperimentalmente le leggi di evoluzione della società umana in modo da prevedere
l'avvenire con la stessa certezza con cui si prevede che da una ghianda si
svilupperà una quercia. L'evoluzionismo volgare è alla base della sociologia
che non può conoscere il principio dialettico col passaggio dalla quantità alla
qualità, passaggio che turba ogni evoluzione e ogni legge di uniformità intesa
in senso volgarmente evoluzionistico».[125] La comprensione della realtà
come sviluppo della storia umana è solo possibile utilizzando la dialettica
marxiana - della quale non vi è traccia nel Manuale del Bucharin - perché essa
coglie tanto il senso delle vicende umane quanto la loro provvisorietà, la loro
storicità determinata dalla prassi, dall'azione politica che trasforma le
società. Le società non si trasformano da sé: già Marx aveva rilevato
come nessuna società si ponga compiti per la cui soluzione non esistano già le
condizioni almeno in via di apparizione né essa si dissolve, se prima non ha
svolto tutte le forme di vita che le sono implicite. Il rivoluzionario si pone
il problema di individuare esattamente i rapporti tra struttura e
sovrastruttura per giungere a una corretta analisi delle forze che operano
nella storia di un determinato periodo. L'azione politica rivoluzionaria, la
prassi, per Gramsci è anche catarsi che segna «il passaggio dal momento
meramente economico (o egoistico-passionale) al momento etico-politico cioè
l'elaborazione superiore della struttura in superstruttura nella coscienza
degli uomini. Ciò significa anche il passaggio dall'oggettivo al soggettivo e
dalla necessità alla libertà. La struttura, da forza esteriore che schiaccia
l'uomo, lo assimila a sé, lo rende passivo, si trasforma in mezzo di libertà,
in strumento per creare una nuova forma etico-politica, in origine di nuove
iniziative. La fissazione del momento catartico diventa così, mi pare, il punto
di partenza di tutta la filosofia della prassi; il processo catartico coincide
con la catena di sintesi che sono risultate dallo svolgimento
dialettico». Friedrich Engels La dialettica è dunque strumento di
indagine storica, che supera la visione naturalistica e meccanicistica della
realtà, è unione di teoria e prassi, di conoscenza e azione. La dialettica è
«dottrina della conoscenza e sostanza midollare della storiografia e della
scienza della politica» e può essere compresa solo concependo il marxismo «come
una filosofia integrale e originale che inizia una nuova fase nella storia e
nello sviluppo mondiale in quanto supera (e superando ne include in sé gli
elementi vitali) sia l'idealismo che il materialismo tradizionali espressione
delle vecchie società. Se la filosofia della prassi [il marxismo] non è pensata
che subordinatamente a un'altra filosofia, non si può concepire la nuova
dialettica, nella quale appunto quel superamento si effettua e si esprime».[126]
Il vecchio materialismo è metafisica; per il senso comune la realtà oggettiva,
esistente indipendentemente dall'uomo, è un ovvio assioma, confortato
dall'affermazione della religione per la quale il mondo, creato da Dio, si
trova già dato di fronte a noi. Ma per Gramsci va rifiutata «la concezione
della realtà oggettiva del mondo esterno nella sua forma più triviale e
acritica» dal momento che «a questa può essere mossa l'obbiezione di
misticismo».[127] Se noi conosciamo la realtà in quanto uomini, ed essendo noi
stessi un divenire storico, anche la conoscenza e la realtà stessa sono un
divenire. Come potrebbe esistere un'oggettività extrastorica ed
extraumana e chi giudicherà di tale oggettività? «La formulazione di Engels che
l'unità del mondo consiste nella sua materialità dimostrata dal lungo e
laborioso sviluppo della filosofia e delle scienze naturali contiene appunto il
germe della concezione giusta, perché si ricorre alla storia e all'uomo per
dimostrare la realtà oggettiva. Oggettivo significa sempre umanamente
oggettivo, ciò che può corrispondere esattamente a storicamente soggettivo
[...] . L'uomo conosce oggettivamente in quanto la conoscenza è reale per tutto
il genere umano storicamente unificato in un sistema culturale unitario; ma
questo processo di unificazione storica avviene con la sparizione delle
contraddizioni interne che dilaniano la società umana, contraddizioni che sono
la condizione della formazione dei gruppi e della nascita delle ideologie
[...]. C'è dunque una lotta per l'oggettività (per liberarsi dalle ideologie
parziali e fallaci) e questa lotta è la stessa lotta per l'unificazione
culturale del genere umano. Ciò che gli idealisti chiamano spirito non è un
punto di partenza ma di arrivo, l'insieme delle soprastrutture in divenire
verso l'unificazione concreta e oggettivamente universale e non già un
presupposto unitario».[128] La formazione linguistica di Antonio Gramsci
inizia durante gli anni universitari a Torino con la frequentazione delle
lezioni di linguistica generale del prof. Matteo Bartoli. Dal Bartoli Gramsci
apprende che la lingua è un "prodotto sociale" e che non può essere
studiata senza tenere conto della storia generale: ciò vuol dire che non è
possibile comprendere i mutamenti di una data lingua senza riflettere sui
mutamenti sociali, culturali e politici del popolo che la parla.[129] È stato
notato che Gramsci fece aderire le teorie apprese dal Bartoli alle letture
filosofiche che lo formarono politicamente; in primo luogo all'Ideologia
Tedesca di Karl Marx, dove il filosofo affermava che la lingua, come la
coscienza, appartiene alla sfera degli istituti sovrastrutturali, cioè al mondo
dell'organizzazione politica e giuridica della società.[129] Le più
interessanti riflessioni linguistiche gramsciane sono contenute nei Quaderni
del carcere e riguardano da una parte la questione della lingua in Italia,
ovvero lo studio delle ragioni che hanno reso difficile la diffusione di una
lingua nazionale italiana, dall'altra il tema dell'insegnamento linguistico
nelle scuole primarie. Soprattutto il secondo tema è di fondamentale importanza
per Gramsci, perché riguarda direttamente il riscatto culturale delle grandi
masse popolari e la creazione di uno spirito nazionale in grado di superare
ogni forma di particolarismo regionale. L'indagine storica I Quaderni del
carcere sono costellati in maniera asistematica di molte note dedicate a
problemi di caratteri linguistico; queste note tracciano una vera e propria
storia della lingua italiana e racchiudono le riflessioni di Gramsci in merito
alla cosiddetta questione della lingua in Italia. Questo tipo di argomento si
riallaccia a un altro importante tema dei Quaderni ovvero lo studio delle
responsabilità degli intellettuali italiani per la formazione di uno spirito
nazionale unitario. A tal proposito Gramsci scrive: «mi pare che, intesa la
lingua come elemento della cultura e quindi della storia generale e come
manifestazione precipua della nazionalità e popolarità degli intellettuali,
questo studio non sia ozioso e puramente erudito».[130] Nell'affrontare
una ricostruzione storica delle vicende linguistiche italiane Gramsci cerca dei
termini di confronto con altri paesi europei come la Francia: mentre in Francia
il volgare viene usato per la prima volta nella storia per redigere un
documento ufficiale di carattere politico-istituzionale, in Italia il volgare
appare per la registrazione di documenti privati legati al commercio o a
questioni giuridiche: «l'origine della differenziazione storica tra
Italia e Francia si può trovare testimoniata nel giuramento di Strasburgo
(verso l'841), cioè nel fatto che il popolo partecipa attivamente alla storia
(il popolo-esercito) diventando il garante dell'osservanza dei trattati tra i
discendenti di Carlo Magno; il popolo-esercito garantisce giurando in volgare,
cioè introduce nella storia nazionale la sua lingua, assumendo una funzione
politica di primo piano, presentandosi come volontà collettiva, come elemento
di una democrazia nazionale. Questo fatto demagogico dei Carolingi di appellarsi
al popolo nella loro politica estera è molto significativo per comprendere lo
sviluppo della storia francese e la funzione che vi ebbe la monarchia come
fattore nazionale. In Italia i primi documenti di volgare sono dei giuramenti
individuali per fissare la proprietà su certe terre dei conventi, o hanno un
carattere antipopolare («Traite, traite, fili de le putte»).» (A.
Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975,
p. 646.) In Francia i gruppi dirigenti si rendono conto dell'importanza del
popolo negli affari di Stato: la demagogia di cui parla Gramsci è da intendere,
oltre che come strumento di propaganda, anche come un nuovo atteggiamento
politico in grado di crearsi «una propria civiltà statale integrale»,[131] in
cui si stabilisce un rapporto diretto tra governati e governanti: il popolo
diventa testimone di un fatto storico legittimato dal suo giuramento.
Gramsci ricorda nei suoi appunti come in Italia l'uso del volgare si diffonda
con l'avvento dell'età comunale, non solo per la redazione di documenti
privati, tipo atti notarili o giuramenti, ma anche per la creazione di opere
letterarie: in particolare, il volgare toscano, lingua della borghesia, ottiene
un certo successo anche nelle altre regioni. Gramsci scrive: «fino al
Cinquecento Firenze esercita una egemonia culturale, connessa alla sua egemonia
commerciale e finanziaria (papa Bonifazio VIII diceva che i fiorentini erano il
quinto elemento del mondo) e c'è uno sviluppo linguistico unitario dal basso,
dal popolo alle persone colte, rinforzato dai grandi scrittori fiorentini e
toscani. Dopo la decadenza di Firenze, l'italiano diventa sempre più la lingua
di una casta chiusa, senza contatto vivo con una parlata storica».[132]
Da questo momento si verifica una cristallizzazione della lingua. I promotori
del nuovo volgare, provenienti dalla borghesia, non scrivono più nella lingua
della loro classe d'origine perché con essa non intrattengono più nessun
rapporto, nella visione di Gramsci essi «vengono assorbiti dalle classi
reazionarie, dalle corti, non sono letterati borghesi, ma aulici».[133] In
questo senso, Gramsci vede sciupata l'occasione di una diffusione graduale del
volgare toscano su scala nazionale, occasione compromessa soprattutto dalla
frammentazione politica della penisola e dal carattere elitario dei ceti
intellettuali italiani. Gramsci affronta con maggior vigore la questione
della lingua italiana in relazione al periodo post-unitario; nella seconda metà
dell'Ottocento il nuovo Stato Italiano era per gran parte dialettofono, mentre
l'italiano veniva usato solo a livello letterario e come lingua delle
istituzioni. La scarsa diffusione di una lingua nazionale testimoniava la
frammentazione politica e culturale del popolo italiano; questo fenomeno veniva
avvertito come un problema politico, soprattutto da molti intellettuali di
tendenze democratiche come Alessandro Manzoni. Nella sua ricostruzione
storica Gramsci scrive che «anche la questione della lingua posta dal Manzoni
riflette questo problema, il problema della unità intellettuale e morale della
nazione e dello Stato, ricercato nell'unità della lingua»;[134] eppure, sebbene
Gramsci riconosca al Manzoni di aver compreso la questione linguistica italiana
come una questione politica e sociale, si distingue dall'autore lombardo nel
modo di interpretare la risoluzione del problema. Graziadio Isaia
Ascoli Durante il suo apprendistato glottologico presso il professor Bartoli a
Torino Gramsci aveva avuto modo di confrontare le posizioni del Manzoni con
quelle di Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, autore del Proemio al primo numero
dell'Archivio Glottologico italiano del 1873. Mentre Manzoni prevedeva la
diffusione di una lingua nazionale sul modello fiorentino imposta per decreto
statale e per mezzo di maestri di scuola di origine toscana, Ascoli concepiva
la nascita di una lingua nazionale come il frutto di un'unificazione culturale
prima ancora che linguistica. Secondo Ascoli l'unità culturale e
linguistica, prima di tutto, deve avere un centro irradiante, cioè un determinato
'municipio' in cui si concentrano e da cui provengono gli elementi essenziali
della vita nazionale: beni di consumo, stimoli culturali, mode, ritrovati della
tecnica, istituti statali e giuridici, ecc. Se quel dato municipio riuscirà a
stabilire un primato politico, economico e culturale su tutta la nazione,
riuscirà anche a diffondere, per conseguenza, il suo particolare idioma. Per
Ascoli «una lingua nazionale altro non può e non deve essere, se non l'idioma
vivo di una data città; deve cioè per ogni parte coincidere con l'idioma
spontaneamente parlato dagli abitatori contemporanei di quel dato municipio,
che per questo capo viene a farsi principe, o quasi stromento livellatore,
dell'intiera nazione».[135] Ascoli, nel suo Proemio, prende la Francia come
esempio per avvalorare la sua tesi; infatti l'unità linguistica francese
corrisponde all'egemonia politico-culturale della città di Parigi: «La
Francia attinge da Parigi la unità della sua favella, perché Parigi è il gran
crogiuolo in cui si è fusa e si fonde l'intelligenza della Francia intera. Dal
vertiginoso movimento del municipio parigino parte ogni impulso dell'universa
civiltà francese; [...] viene da Parigi il nome, perché da Parigi vien la cosa.
E la Francia avendo in questo municipio l'unità assorbente del suo pensiero, vi
ha naturalmente pur quella dell'animo suo; e non solo studia e lavora, ma si
commuove, e in pianto e in riso, così come la metropoli vuole; e quindi è
necessariamente dell'intiera Francia l'intiera favella di Parigi».» (G. I.
Ascoli, Proemio, AGI, n. I, 1873, p. X) Gramsci ricalca la lezione ascoliana
nei suoi Quaderni, dove scrive: «poiché il processo di formazione, di
diffusione, e di sviluppo di una lingua nazionale unitaria avviene attraverso
tutto un complesso di processi molecolari, è utile avere consapevolezza di
tutto il processo nel suo complesso, per essere in grado di intervenire
attivamente in esso col massimo di risultato. Questo intervento non bisogna
considerarlo come decisivo e immaginare che i fini proposti saranno tutti
raggiunti nei loro particolari, che cioè si otterrà una determinata lingua
unitaria: si otterrà una lingua unitaria, se essa è una necessità e
l'intervento organizzato accelererà i tempi del processo già esistente; quale
sia per essere questa lingua non si può prevedere e stabilire
[...]».[136] L'insegnamento linguistico Gramsci, nel Quaderno 29 alla
nota Focolai di irradiazione linguistiche nella tradizione e di un conformismo
nazionale linguistico nelle grandi masse compila un elenco di tutti gli
strumenti utili alla diffusione di una lingua unitaria: «1) La scuola; 2) i
giornali; 3) gli scrittori d'arte e quelli popolari; 4) il teatro e il
cinematografo sonoro; 5) la radio; 6) le riunioni pubbliche di ogni genere,
comprese quelle religiose; 7) i rapporti di conversazione tra i vari strati
della popolazione più colti e meno colti [...] ; 8) i dialetti locali, intesi
in sensi diversi (dai dialetti più localizzati a quelli che abbracciano
complessi regionali più o meno vasti: così il napoletano per l'Italia
meridionale, il palermitano o il catanese per la Sicilia ecc.)».[137] Al
primo posto di questo elenco troviamo la scuola; per tradizione, a scuola, gli
insegnanti introducono gli alunni allo studio di una lingua attraverso la
grammatica normativa. Gramsci definisce la grammatica normativa come una «fase
esemplare, come la sola degna di diventare, organicamente e totalitarmente, la
lingua comune di una nazione, in lotta e in concorrenza con le altre fasi e
tipi o schemi che esistono già [...]».[138] Le riflessioni gramsciane in
materia di grammatica si pongono in netto contrasto con la riforma della scuola
realizzata da Giovanni Gentile nel 1923. La riforma, in linea con l'impianto
filosofico idealista gentiliano, prevedeva che l'apprendimento della lingua
nazionale nelle classi elementari si basasse sull'espressione viva o parlata e
non sulla grammatica, considerata questa come una disciplina astratta e
meccanica. Nell'ottica gramsciana questo metodo apparentemente liberale
racchiude uno spiccato carattere classista, in quanto gli scolari appartenenti
alle classi sociali più alte sono avvantaggiati dal fatto che apprendono
l'italiano in famiglia, mentre gli scolari del basso popolo possono contare su
una comunicazione familiare realizzata esclusivamente in dialetto. In questo
senso lo studio della grammatica si presenta come uno strumento in grado di
livellare le differenze sociali degli scolari permettendo a tutti la conoscenza
della lingua nazionale. Secondo Gramsci la conoscenza della lingua nazionale
presso le classi subalterne è fondamentale per la loro organizzazione politica.
Un proletariato dialettofono non può partecipare alla vita politica di una
nazione e non può sperare di crearsi un ceto intellettuale in grado di
competere con i ceti intellettuali tradizionali. I dialetti non devono sparire,
ma restare funzionali a un tipo di comunicazione familiare che non può
garantire, per cause interne al suo sistema, «la comunicazione di contenuti
culturali universali, caratteristici della nuova cultura esercitata dal
proletariato»[139] Gramsci prestò attenzione anche alle lingue
morte. Da giovane espresse in più occasioni l'idea che lo studio del latino e
del greco fosse particolarmente utile nella formazione scolastica degli individui,
in quanto esse potevano abituare gli alunni allo studio rigoroso ed educarli a
pensare storicamente. Inoltre, contestò il nazionalismo degli studi e criticò
ripetutamente gli intellettuali che, durante la prima guerra mondiale,
chiedevano che fossero messe al bando le edizioni dei testi antichi e le
grammatiche greche e latine compilate da autori tedeschi[140]. Anche nei
Quaderni del carcere si soffermò sulla questione e ribadì l'utilità intrinseca
del latino e del greco, osservando che erano strumenti importanti nella fase
della formazione scolastica nella quale è necessario un insegnamento
"disinteressato", cioè non legato a questioni pratiche. Gramsci,
però, sottolineò anche che in futuro lo studio delle lingue morte avrebbe
dovuto essere sostituito da altre materie: era un cambiamento difficile, ma
necessario, per promuovere la formazione di un nuovo tipo di
intellettuale.[141] Scrisse nel Quaderno 12: Bisognerà sostituire il
latino e il greco come fulcro della scuola formativa e lo si sostituirà, ma non
sarà agevole disporre la nuova materia o la nuova serie di materie in un ordine
didattico che dia risultati equivalenti di educazione e formazione generale
della personalità, partendo dal fanciullo fino alla soglia della scelta
professionale. In questo periodo infatti lo studio o la parte maggio re dello
studio deve essere (e apparire ai discenti) disinteressato, non avere cioè
scopi pratici immediati o troppo immediati, deve essere formativo, anche se
«istruttivo», cioè ricco di nozioni concrete. (A. Gramsci, Quaderni del
Carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, p. 1546)Influenze sul
pensiero di Gramsci Fiabe intrecciate, 2007, Omaggio a Antonio Gramsci,
di Maria Lai, Piazzale del Museo Stazione dell'arte Niccolò Machiavelli —
influenzò fortemente la teoria dello Stato di Gramsci. Karl Marx — filosofo,
storico, critico dell'economia politica e fondatore del materialismo storico
Friedrich Engels Lenin Antonio Labriola — primo notevole teorico marxista
italiano, riteneva che la principale caratteristica del marxismo fosse quella
di aver creato uno stretto nesso fra la storia e la filosofia Georges Sorel —
sindacalista francese e scrittore che ha respinto il principio
dell'inevitabilità del progresso storico. Vilfredo Pareto — economista e
sociologo italiano, noto per la sua teoria sull'interazione fra masse ed élite.
Benedetto Croce — liberale italiano, filosofo anti-marxista e idealista il cui
pensiero fu sottoposto da Gramsci a critica attenta e approfondita. Pensatori
influenzati da Gramsci Magnifying glass icon mgx2.svg Lo stesso argomento in
dettaglio: Gramscianesimo. Zackie Achmat · Eqbal Ahmad · Jalal Al-e-Ahmad ·
Louis Althusser · Perry Anderson · Giulio Angioni · Michael Apple · Giovanni
Arrighi · Zygmunt Bauman · Homi K. Bhabha · Gordon Brown · Alberto Burgio ·
Judith Butler · Alex Callinicos · Partha Chatterjee · Marilena Chauí · Noam
Chomsky · Alberto Mario Cirese · Hugo Costa · Robert W. Cox · Alain de Benoist
· Biagio de Giovanni · Ernesto de Martino · Umberto Eco · John Fiske · Michel
Foucault · Paulo Freire · Eugenio Garin · Eugene D. Genovese · Stephen Gill ·
Paul Gottfried · Stuart Hall · Michael Hardt · Chris Harman · David Harvey ·
Hamish Henderson · Eric Hobsbawm · Samuel P. Huntington · Alfredo Jaar · Bob
Jessop · Ernesto Laclau · Subcomandante Marcos · José Carlos Mariátegui ·
Chantal Mouffe · Antonio Negri · Luigi Nono · Michael Omi · Pier Paolo Pasolini
· Antonio Pigliaru · Michelangelo Pira · Juan Carlos Portantiero · Nicos
Poulantzas · Gyan Prakash · William I. Robinson · Edward Saïd · Ato Sekyi-Otu ·
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · Piero Sraffa · Edward Palmer Thompson · Giuseppe
Vacca · Paolo Virno · Cornel West · Raymond Williams · Howard Winant · Ludwig
Wittgenstein · Eric Wolf · Howard Zinn Gramsci al cinema e in televisione
Il delitto Matteotti, regia di Florestano Vancini, (1973) Antonio Gramsci - I
giorni del carcere, regia di Lino Del Fra, (1977) Vita di Antonio Gramsci,
regia di Raffaele Maiello - serie TV (1981) Gramsci, film in forma di rosa,
regia di Gabriele Morleo - cortometraggio (2005) Gramsci 44, regia di Emiliano
Barbucci (2016) Nel mondo grande e terribile, regia di Daniele Maggioni, Maria
Grazia Perria e Laura Perini (2017) Gramsci nel teatro Compagno Gramsci, di
Maricla Boggio e Franco Cuomo, regia di Maricla Boggio, (1971-72) Gramsci nella
musica Quello lì (compagno Gramsci), canzone di Claudio Lolli contenuta
nell'album Un uomo in crisi. Canzoni di morte. Canzoni di vita (1973) Piazza
Fontana, canzone dei Yu Kung contenuta nell'album Pietre della mia gente (1975)
Nino, canzone dei Gang contenuta nell'album Sangue e Cenere (2015) Gramsci, il
teatro e la musica È nota la passione di Gramsci per il teatro e per la musica,
che si può leggere nelle lettere scritte a Tania[142]. Egli ha scritto circa il
melodrama “verdiano” che per lui segnava l’apertura dei teatri al pubblico,
svolgendo una funzione conoscitiva, pedagogica e politica in senso generale.
Per Gramsci l’opera diviene l’arte più popolare e i teatri aperti i luoghi dove
si esercitava parte del conflitto politico. Una frase quasi ironica di
Gramsci da citare, per quanto riguarda l’importanza dell’opera per l’Italia:
“siccome il popolo non è letterato e di letteratura conosce solo il libretto
d'opera ottocentesco, avviene che gli uomini del popolo melodrammatizzino”[143].
Nelle sue lettere si può leggere anche riguardo alla moda europea del jazz;
egli sostiene che questa musica aveva conquistato uno strato dell’Europa colta
e aveva creato un vero fanatismo[144].Opere Alcuni temi della questione
meridionale, in Lo Stato Operaio, a. IV, n. 1, gennaio 1930, ma ottobre 1926.
Opere di Antonio Gramsci (12 voll.) Lettere dal carcere, Torino, Einaudi, 1947;
premio Viareggio[145], con centodiciannove lettere inedite, 1965. I quaderni
dal carcere Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Torino,
Einaudi, 1948. Gli intellettuali e l'organizzazione della cultura, Torino,
Einaudi, 1948. Il Risorgimento, Torino, Einaudi, 1949. Note sul Machiavelli
sulla politica e sullo stato moderno, Torino, Einaudi, 1949. Letteratura e vita
nazionale, Torino, Einaudi, 1950. Passato e presente, Torino, Einaudi, 1951.
L'Ordine Nuovo. 1919-1920, Torino, Einaudi, 1954. Scritti giovanili. 1914-1918,
Torino, Einaudi, 1958. Sotto la mole. 1916-1920, Torino, Einaudi, 1960.
Socialismo e fascismo. L'Ordine Nuovo 1921-1922, Torino, Einaudi, 1966. La
costruzione del Partito comunista. 1923-1926, Torino, Einaudi, 1971. L'albero
del riccio, Milano, Milano-sera, 1948. Americanismo e fordismo, Milano, Ed.
cooperativa Libro popolare, 1949. Ultimo discorso alla Camera. 16 maggio 1925,
Padova, R. Guerrini, 1958. Antologia popolare degli scritti e delle lettere di
Antonio Gramsci, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1957. Il Vaticano e l'Italia, Roma,
Editori Riuniti, 1961. Note sulla situazione italiana 1922-1924, Milano,
Rivista storica del socialismo, 1962. 2000 pagine di Gramsci Nel tempo della
lotta. 1914-1926, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1964. Lettere edite e inedite.
1912-1937, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1964. Elementi di politica, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1964. La formazione dell'uomo. Scritti di pedagogia, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1967. Scritti politici La guerra, la rivoluzione russa e i nuovi
problemi del socialismo italiano, 1916-1919, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1967. Il
Biennio rosso, la crisi del socialismo e la nascita del Partito comunista,
1919-1921, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1967. Il nuovo partito della classe operaia e
il suo programma. La lotta contro il fascismo, 1921-1926, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1973. Scritti 1915-1921, Milano, I quaderni de Il corpo, 1968. Dibattito
sui Consigli di fabbrica, Roma, La nuova sinistra, 1971. Paolo Spriano (a cura
di), Scritti politici, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1971. L'alternativa pedagogica,
Firenze, La nuova Italia, 1972. I consigli e la critica operaia alla
produzione, Milano, Servire il popolo, 1972. La lotta per l'edificazione del
Partito comunista, Milano, Servire il popolo, 1972. Il pensiero di Gramsci,
Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1972. Il pensiero filosofico e storiografico di Antonio
Gramsci, Palermo, Palumbo, 1972. Resoconto dei lavori del III congresso del
P.C.D.I. (Lione, 26 gennaio 1926), Milano, Cooperativa editrice distributrice
proletaria, 1972. Scritti sul sindacato, Milano, Sapere, 1972. Sul fascismo,
Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1973. Quaderni del carcere Quaderni 1-5. (1929-1932),
Torino, Einaudi, 1975. Quaderni 6-11. (1930-1933), Torino, Einaudi, 1975.
Quaderni 12-29. (1932-1935), Torino, Einaudi, 1975. Apparato critico, Torino,
Einaudi, 1975. La rivoluzione italiana, Roma, Newton Compton, 1976. Arte e
folclore, Roma, Newton Compton, 1976. Scritti 1915-1921. Inediti da Il Grido
del Popolo e dall'Avanti. Con una antologia da Il Grido del Popolo, Milano,
Moizzi, 1976. Ricordi politici e civili, Pavia 1977. Scritti nella lotta. Dai
consigli di fabbrica, alla fondazione del partito, al Congresso di Lione,
Livorno, Edizioni Gramsci, 1977. Scritti sul sindacato, Roma, Nuove edizioni
operaie, 1977. A Delio e Giuliano, Milano, N. Milano, 1978. I consigli di
fabbrica, Milano, Amici della casa Gramsci di Ghilarza, Centro milanese, 1978.
Favole di libertà, Firenze, Vallecchi, 1980. Scritti 1913-1926 Cronache
torinesi. 1913-1917, Torino, Einaudi, 1980. La città futura. 1917-1918, Torino,
Einaudi, 1982. Il nostro Marx. 1918-1919, Torino, Einaudi, 1984. L'Ordine
nuovo, 1919-1920, Torino, Einaudi, 1987. Nuove lettere di Antonio Gramsci. Con
altre lettere di Piero Sraffa, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1986. Forse rimarrai
lontana.... Lettere a Iulca, 1922-1937, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1987. Gramsci al
confino di Ustica. Nelle lettere di Gramsci, di Berti e di Bordiga, Roma,
Editori Riuniti, 1987. Le sue idee nel nostro tempo, Milano, l'Unità, 1987.
Lettere dal carcere, con nuove lettere in parte inedite, 2 voll., Roma,
l'Unità, 1988. Il rivoluzionario qualificato. Scritti 1916-1925, Roma, Delotti,
1988. Il giornalismo, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1991. Lettere, 1908-1926, Torino,
Einaudi, 1992. Per una preparazione ideologica di massa: introduzione al primo
corso della scuola interna di partito, aprile-maggio 1925, Napoli, Laboratorio
politico, 1994. Scritti di economia politica, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1994.
Vita attraverso le lettere, 1908-1937, Torino, Einaudi, 1994. Disgregazione
sociale e rivoluzione. Scritti sul Mezzogiorno, Napoli, Liguori, 1996. Piove,
Governo ladro. Satire e polemiche sul costume degli italiani, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1996. Contro la legge sulle associazioni segrete, Roma,
Manifestolibri, 1997. Lettere, 1926-1935, Torino, Einaudi, 1997. Le opere,
Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1997. Critica letteraria e linguistica, Roma, Lithos,
1998. Il lettore in catene. La critica letteraria nei Quaderni, Roma, Carocci,
2004. La nostra città futura. Scritti torinesi, 1911-1922, Roma, Carocci, 2004.
Pensare l'Italia, Roma, Nuova iniziativa editoriale, 2004. Scritti sulla
Sardegna. La memoria familiare, l'analisi della questione sarda, Nuoro, Ilisso,
2008. Scritti rivoluzionari. Dal biennio rosso al Congresso di Lione
(1919-1926), a cura di Orlando Micucci, Camerano, Gwynplaine, 2008. Quaderni
del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, 18 voll., Roma, Istituto
della Enciclopedia Italiana-Cagliari-L'Unione Sarda, 2009. Epistolario
1906-1922, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009. Epistolario
gennaio-novembre 1923, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011.
Antologia, a cura di Antonio A. Santucci, prefazione di Guido Liguori, Roma,
Editori Riuniti university press, 2012. Il teatro lancia bombe nei cervelli.
Articoli, critiche, recensioni 1915-1920, a cura di Fabio Francione, Mimesis
Edizioni 2017. La taglia della storia. Idea e prassi della rivoluzione,
NovaEuropa Edizioni, 2018.Note Luigi Manias, Antonio Sebastiano Francesco
Gramsci, Marmilla Cultura, 28 gennaio 2018. URL consultato il 17 aprile 2019. ^
International Gramsci Society, su internationalgramscisociety.org. ^ Genealogia
dei Gramsci (JPG), su albanianews.it. ^ Luigi Manias, Ma quando è nato Antonio
Gramsci?, Marmilla Cultura, 21 gennaio 2018. URL consultato il 17 aprile 2019.
^ Luigi Manias, Ales. La sua storia. I suoi problemi, Marmilla Cultura, 14
marzo 2018. URL consultato il 17 aprile 2019. ^ Così Gramsci ricordava con
ironia l'episodio, nella lettera dal carcere alla cognata Tatiana, il 7
settembre 1931, aggiungendo che «una zia sosteneva che ero risuscitato quando
lei mi unse i piedini con l'olio di una lampada dedicata a una Madonna e
perciò, quando mi rifiutavo di compiere gli atti religiosi, mi rimproverava
aspramente, ricordando che alla Madonna dovevo la vita» ^ «Noi eravamo tutti
molto piccoli. Lei dunque doveva anche accudire alla casa. Trovava il tempo per
i lavori di cucito rinunziando al sonno». Così ricordava quegli anni la sorella
Teresina Gramsci, in Fiori, 1995, p. 18 ^ Lettera a Tatiana Schucht, 3 ottobre
1932: così Gramsci scriveva per invitare la cognata a non eccedere nelle sue
preoccupazioni sulla sua vita di carcerato. La lettera prosegue infatti: «Ho
conosciuto quasi sempre solo l'aspetto più brutale della vita e me la sono
sempre cavata, bene o male» ^ Lettera a Tatiana Schucht, 12 settembre 1932 ^
Numerose sono le richieste di denaro al padre: il 10 febbraio 1910 gli scrive
di essere «proprio indecente con questa giacca che ha già due anni ed è
spelacchiata e lucida [...] oggi non sono andato a scuola perché mi son dovuto
risuolare le scarpe» e, il 16 febbraio, che «per non farvi vergognare non sono
uscito di casa per dieci giorni interi» ^ Fonzo, pp. 15-22. ^ Testimonianza in
Fiori, 1995, p. 65 ^ Testimonianza della sorella Teresina in Fiori, 1995, p. 66
^ Fiori, 1995, p. 66. ^ L'articolo è riportato in Fiori, 1995, p. 69. ^
Riportato in A. Gramsci, Scritti politici, p. 53-55. ^ Antonio Gramsci,
Dizionario di Storia, Treccani ^ [...] «io pensavo allora che bisognava lottare
per l'indipendenza nazionale della regione: "Al mare i continentali".
Poi ho conosciuto la classe operaia di una città industriale e ho capito ciò
che realmente significavano le cose di Marx che avevo letto prima per curiosità
intellettuale». Cfr. A. Gramsci, lettera a Giulia Schucht, 6 marzo 1924, in A.
Gramsci, Lettere 1908-1926, 1992, pp. 271-273. ^ Gramsci e l'isola laboratorio,
La Nuova Sardegna ^ A. Gramsci. Lettere. 1908-1926, p. 55 ^ Progettando, in
carcere, uno studio di linguistica comparata, mai realizzato, in una lettera
dal carcere del 19 marzo 1927 alla cognata Tatiana, ricorda come «uno dei
maggiori "rimorsi" intellettuali della mia vita è il dolore profondo
che ho procurato al mio buon professor Bartoli dell'Università di Torino, il
quale era persuaso essere io l'arcangelo destinato a profligare definitivamente
i "neogrammatici"» della linguistica. Tuttavia già nel 2003 l'economista
Amartya Sen aveva avanzato l'ipotesi che il passaggio ai giochi linguistici di
Ludwig Wittgenstein nelle Ricerche filosofiche fosse stato ispirato dai
Quaderni dal carcere. Nel suo recente studio Gramsci and Wittgenstein: an
intriguing connection, Franco Lo Pipero ha aggiunto nuovi elementi che
dimostrano il collegamento fra Gramsci e Wittgenstein tramite Piero Sraffa.
Infatti il filosofo viennese venne a conoscenza del Quaderno 29 nel 1935,
grazie proprio al suo amico Sraffa che aveva conosciuto a Cambridge nel 1929 ^
Lettera dal carcere del 23 febbraio 1931: in essa Gramsci ricorda ancora un
simpatico e patetico episodio. Dopo la rottura avvenuta ala fine del 1920, a
causa di quell'articolo che fece «piangere come un bambino e stette chiuso in casa
[il Cosmo] per alcuni giorni», essi s'incontrarono nel 1922 nell'Ambasciata
d'Italia a Berlino, dove il professore era segretario: «il Cosmo mi si
precipitò addosso, inondandomi di lacrime e di barba e dicendo a ogni momento:
Tu capisci perché! Tu capisci perché! Era in preda a una commozione che mi
sbalordì, ma mi fece capire quanto dolore gli avessi procurato nel 1920 e come
egli intendesse l'amicizia per i suoi allievi di scuola» ^ Lettera dal carcere
a Tatiana Schucht del 17 agosto 1931 ^ In Fiori, 1995, p. 103 ^ In Fiori, 1995,
p. 105 ^ In Fiori, 1995, pp. 108-9 ^ In Fiori, 1995, p. 112 ^ In A. Gramsci,
Scritti politici, I, p. 56-59 ^ Davico, p. 12. ^ Lettera dal carcere a Tatiana
Schucht del 7 settembre 1931 ^ Lettera dal carcere a Tatiana Schucht del 19
marzo 1927 ^ Recensione del 24 marzo 1917 ^ Recensione del 4 aprile 1917 ^
Recensione del 5 ottobre 1917 ^ Spriano, 1972, pp. 373. ^ Note sulla
rivoluzione russa, ne Il Grido del Popolo, 29 aprile 1917, in Gramsci, 1971,
pp. 59-60 ^ I massimalisti russi, ne Il Grido del Popolo, 28 luglio 1917, in
Gramsci, 1971, p. 66 ^ Spriano, 1972, p. 260. ^ La rivoluzione contro il
«Capitale», nell'Avanti!, 24 novembre 1918, in Gramsci, 1971, pp. 80-1 ^ Nella
lettera dell'8 marzo 1881 Marx scriveva a Vera Zasulič che la tipica proprietà
comune agricola russa poteva essere salvata dalla distruzione minacciata dallo
sviluppo dei rapporti capitalistici: «Per salvare la comune russa, occorre una
rivoluzione russa. Se la rivoluzione scoppierà a tempo opportuno, se l'intelligencija
concentrerà tutte le forze «vive del paese» nell'assicurare alla comune
agricola un libero spiegamento, allora la comune ben presto evolverà come
elemento di rigenerazione della società russa e, insieme, di superiorità sui
paesi ancora asserviti dal regime capitalistico». Inoltre, nella prefazione
all'edizione russa del Manifesto del 1882, Marx ed Engels avevano scritto che
«l'odierna proprietà comune potrà servire di partenza per una evoluzione
comunista». È anche vero, tuttavia, almeno nel caso della lettera alla Zasulič,
che Gramsci all'epoca non poteva conoscerne il contenuto, perché il documento
sarebbe stato reso pubblico solo nel 1924. (Cfr. Ettore Cinella, L'altro Marx,
Della Porta Editori, Pisa-Genova, 2014, pp.142-143). ^ A. Gramsci, Ordine
Nuovo, 14 agosto 1920 A. Gramsci, ibidem ^ Corriere della Sera, 9 marzo
1920 ^ Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Min. Int., Dir. Gen. PS, 1920, C 2, b 50
^ Ordine Nuovo, 8 maggio 1920, in Scritti politici, II, pp. 102-108 ^ Concluso
l'8 ottobre 1919 con un ordine del giorno che prospettava la conquista violenta
del potere e la dittatura del proletariato ^ Per un rinnovamento del Partito
socialista, ne L’ordine Nuovo, 8 maggio 1920, in Gramsci, 1971, pp. 315-21 ^ Il
30 luglio Lenin, nel suo discorso all'Internazionale Comunista, invitando a
espellere dal partito socialista l'ala destra riformista, disse che
«all'indirizzo dell'Internazionale Comunista corrisponde l'indirizzo dei
militanti dell'Ordine Nuovo e non l'indirizzo dell'attuale maggioranza dei dirigenti
del partito socialista e del loro gruppo parlamentare». Lenin, Opere, XXV,
p.355 ^ Ordine Nuovo, 4 dicembre 1920, in Scritti politici, II, p. 172 ^
GRAMSCI La sposa mandata da Lenin ^ Lettera del 30 giugno 1924, in A. Gramsci,
Lettere 1908-1926 ^ Lettera dal carcere del 18 aprile 1927 ^ Un profilo di
Antonio Gramsci junior, su channelingstudio.ru. ^ Su alcune note di uno
sconosciuto bolscevico Vladimir Diogot - che sosteneva, fra l'altro, di essere
a conoscenza di un tentativo di rovesciamento della monarchia italiana da parte
di Nitti in accordo con i socialisti - lo storico Jaroslav Leontiev ha
sostenuto nel 1999 che la conoscenza tra Gramsci e la Schucht sia stata
"pilotata" da Lenin in persona: cfr. Link archivio del Corriere ^
Amendola, pp. 13 e 97. ^ In Togliatti, 1974, pp. 272-3 ^ In Togliatti, 1974, p.
255 ^ Lettera di Gramsci a Giulia Schucht, 21 luglio 1924 ^ Lettera a Giulia
Schucht, 22 giugno 1924 ^ La crisi italiana, ne L’Ordine Nuovo, 1º settembre
1924, in Gramsci, 1971, pp. 577-9 ^ Camera dei Deputati, XXVII legislatura del
Regno d'Italia, Tornata di sabato 16 maggio 1925 (PDF). ^ "Capo"
(PDF), in L'Ordine Nuovo, 1º marzo 1924; pubblicato successivamente col titolo
di Lenin capo rivoluzionario, in l'Unità, 6 novembre 1924. ^ «Capo», ne L’ordine
Nuovo, 1º marzo 1924, in Gramsci, 1971, pp. 540-3 ^ Anche alle autorità
francesi fu nascosto lo svolgimento del Congresso. Sul III Congresso, P.
Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, I, capp. 29-30 ^ Spriano,
1976(1), pp. 498-500. ^ Spriano, 1976(1), p. 490. ^ Spriano, 1976(1), pp.
491-2. ^ Spriano, 1976(1), pp. 492-4. ^ Spriano, 1976(1), p. 511. ^ Antonio
Gramsci, Tesi di Lione, Lione, 1925. ^ Antonio Gramsci, La questione
meridionale, Editori Riuniti, 2005, p.184 ^ «Alcuni temi della quistione
meridionale». Stato operaio, gennaio 1930. Citato in Rosario Villari, Il Sud
nella Storia d'Italia. Antologia della Questione meridionale, Roma-Bari,
Laterza, 1981, p. 480 ^ Antonio Gramsci, Cinque anni di vita del partito,
L'Unità, 1926. ^ Fiori, 1995, p. 247. ^ Spriano, 1976(2), pp. 43-5. ^ Aurelio
Lepre, Il prigioniero. Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Editori Laterza, Bari, 1998, p.
84. ^ La lettera, non datata, si ritiene scritta il 14 ottobre: fu pubblicata
per la prima volta in Francia da Tasca nel 1938. Su tutta la questione della
lotta interna nel partito comunista sovietico di questo periodo, P. Spriano,
cit., II, capp. 3 e 5 ^ A. Gramsci, Lettere 1908-1926, cit., pp. 455-462. ^
Lettera di Togliatti a Gramsci, 18 ottobre 1926 ^ Commissione di assegnazione
al confino di Roma, ordinanza del 18.11.1926 contro Antonio Gramsci (“Dirigenti
e deputati del PCd'I dichiarati decaduti il 2 novembre 1926”). In: Adriano Dal
Pont, Simonetta Carolini, L'Italia al confino 1926-1943. Le ordinanze di
assegnazione al confino emesse dalle Commissioni provinciali dal novembre 1926
al luglio 1943, Milano 1983 (ANPPIA/La Pietra), vol. IV, p. 1312 ^ Tornata di
martedì 9 novembre 1926 (PDF), Camera dei deputati, p. 6389-6394. URL
consultato il 23 marzo 2015. ^ Fiori, 1995, cap. 23. ^ In Fiori, 1995, cap. 24
^ Sentenza n. 58 del 20.2.1928 contro Antonio Gramsci e altri (“Ricostituzione
di partito disciolto, propaganda, cospirazione, istigazione alla lotta armata
ecc.”). In: Adriano Dal Pont, Simonetta Carolini, L'Italia dissidente e
antifascista. Le ordinanze, le Sentenze istruttorie e le Sentenze in Camera di
consiglio emesse dal Tribunale speciale fascista contro gli imputati di
antifascismo dall'anno 1927 al 1943, Milano 1980 (ANPPIA/La Pietra), vol. I, p.
260-261 ^ Amendola, p. 142. ^ Spriano, 1977, p. 41. ^ Lettera a Tatiana Schucht
del 19 marzo 1927 ^ Fiori, 1995, cap. 26. Fiori, 1995, p. 289. ^ Fiori,
1995, p. 288. ^ Risoluzione per l'espulsione di Amedeo Bordiga ^ Fiori, 1995,
p. 291. ^ Pubblicato in «Rinascita», 12 dicembre 1964 ^ In «Rinascita», cit. ^
Dalla biografia di Pertini pubblicata nel sito web del Circolo Sandro Pertini
di Genova: «Chiesi al maresciallo dei carabinieri che comandava la scorta se
poteva dirmi dove mi portavano. Quando questi fece il nome di Turi me ne
rallegrai. Ero contento perché sapevo che là avrei incontrato Antonio Gramsci,
un uomo che avevo sempre ammirato per il suo coraggio». «A Turi incontrai
Gramsci in un angolo del cortile dove coltivava un'aiuola di fiori; era piccolo
di statura e con due gobbe: una davanti ed una di dietro. Mi avvicinai a lui,
mi presentai, gli affermai che venivo da Santo Stefano e che ero onorato di
fare la sua conoscenza. Gli davo del lei e lo chiamavo Onorevole Gramsci. Lui
si mise a ridere, dicendomi: "Perché mi dai del lei? Siamo antifascisti,
vittime del Tribunale speciale tutti e due", "Io gli ricordai che per
loro, i comunisti, noi eravamo dei social-traditori". Gramsci disse di
lasciar stare quella polemica penosa. Ci vedemmo dopo qualche giorno e Gramsci
parlò di Turati e Treves in maniera che mi sembrò offensiva ed io risposi con
durezza. Il giorno dopo Gramsci si scusò, dicendo che il suo era un giudizio
politico, non aveva avuto intenzione di offendere le persone, e capiva la mia
reazione in favore di due compagni che si trovavano in Francia. Da allora
diventammo buoni amici. Parlavamo a lungo insieme anche perché era stato
isolato dai suoi. Per certi versi costoro lo consideravano un traditore e
chiedevano la sua espulsione dal partito, come poi fecero anche con Camilla
Ravera. In cella Gramsci era perseguitato dai carcerieri: credo che l'ordine di
non lasciarlo dormire arrivasse direttamente da Roma. Io andai dal direttore
del carcere a protestare perché i carcerieri, ogni volta che Gramsci si
addormentava, lo svegliavano facendo scorrere sulle sbarre della finestra dei
bastoni, con la scusa di controllare che le sbarre non fossero state segate per
un'evasione. Dissi al direttore che se la situazione non fosse cambiata, avrei
scritto una lettera al ministero. Il risultato fu che Gramsci, già gravemente
malato di tubercolosi poté dormire tranquillo. Le mie proteste costrinsero il
direttore del carcere di Turi a concedere a Gramsci anche alcuni quaderni,
delle matite, un tavolino ed una sedia. Così poterono nascere i quaderni dal
carcere. La mia amicizia con Gramsci mi mise in contrasto con il direttore del
carcere e forse non fu estraneo al mio trasferimento a Pianosa, all'inizio del
1932». ^ Lettera a Tatiana Schucht, 3 agosto 1931 ^ Lettera a Tatiana Schucht,
29 maggio 1933 ^ Alla fine degli anni settanta cominciò a circolare la voce
secondo la quale Gramsci in punto di morte si sarebbe convertito alla fede
cattolica. Tale affermazione venne però ritrattata dallo stesso religioso che
l’aveva inavvertitamente messa in circolazione, chiamando a supporto della
smentita l’allora cappellano della clinica Quisisana. Nonostante le chiare
argomentazioni della rettifica, trent’anni dopo la medesima tesi fu riproposta
da un altro sacerdote. Essendo priva di riscontri documentali e di prove
testimoniali, la teoria della conversione di Gramsci non è mai stata avvalorata
dagli storici. Cfr. S.Fio., Antonio Gramsci e il sacerdote pentito, La
Repubblica, 27 novembre 2008. URL consultato il 17 giugno 2019. e Il Vaticano:
«Gramsci trovò la fede», Il Corriere della Sera, 25 novembre 2008. URL
consultato il 17 giugno 2019. ^ C. Daniele (a cura di), Togliatti editore di
Gramsci, Carocci, 2005, pp. 14-29 ^ Quaderni del carcere, Il Risorgimento,
p. 70 ^ Antonio Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, Einaudi, Torino, 1949, p. 46. ^
Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 81 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., pp. 106-107 ^
Quaderni del carcere, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto
Croce, p. 7-8 Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 8 ^ Quaderni del carcere,
ed. Gerratana, 89, pp. 2311-2317. ^ Cirese, 1976, p. 65 e ss.; Baratta, 2007;
Giulio Angioni, Gramsci e il folklore come cosa seria, in Fare, dire, sentire.
L'identico e il diverso nelle culture, Il Maestrale, 2011, pp. 206-221.
Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 11 Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 12 ^
Quaderni del carcere, Note sul Machiavelli, pp. 3-4 Quaderni del carcere,
cit., p. 7 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., pp. 23-24 ^ Quaderni del carcere, Gli
intellettuali e l'organizzazione della cultura, p.6 ^ Quaderni del carcere,
cit., p.7 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 9 ^ Quaderni del carcere,
Letteratura e vita nazionale, p. 127 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 131 ^
Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 86 e segg. ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., pp. 5-6
^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 179 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 185 ^
Quaderni del carcere, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto
Croce, p. 210 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 204 ^ Quaderni del carcere,
cit., p. 192-193 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 125 ^ Quaderno del carcere,
cit., p. 132 ^ Quaderni del carcere, cit., pp. 141-142 ^ Quaderni del carcere,
cit., p. 142 L. Rosiello, Problemi e orientamenti linguistici negli
scritti di Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dell'Istituto di glottologia di Bologna,
1957, p. 39 ^ A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino,
Einaudi, 1975, p. 355. ^ A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V.
Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975, p. 646. ^ A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a
cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975, p. 2237. ^ A. Gramsci, Quaderni
del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975, p. 789. ^ A.
Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975,
p. 2188. ^ G. I. Ascoli, Proemio, AGI, n. I, 1873, p. IX ^ A. Gramsci,
'Quaderni del carcere', a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975, p. 2345.
^ A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi,
1975, p. 2345. ^ A. Gramsci, 'Quaderni del carcere', a cura di V. Gerratana,
Torino, Einaudi, 1975, p. 2343. ^ L. Rosiello, Lingua nazione egemonia,
Rinascita - Il Contemporaneo, 51-2, p. 24 ^ Rapone, Leonardo, 1952-, Cinque
anni che paiono secoli : Antonio Gramsci dal socialismo al comunismo (1914-
1919), 1a ed, Carocci, 2011, ISBN 9788843060900, OCLC 760053895. URL consultato
il 17 marzo 2019. ^ Fonzo, pp. 33-49. ^ Maria Luisa Bosi, Antonio Gramsci, su
www.scuolalodivecchio.it. URL consultato il 25 aprile 2017. ^
giovannicarpinelli, Gramsci e la musica, su Palomar, 18 aprile 2017. URL
consultato il 25 aprile 2017. ^ La passione sconosciuta di Gramsci per la
musica, in L’Huffington Post. URL consultato il 25 aprile 2017. ^ Premio
letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci, su premioletterarioviareggiorepaci.it. URL
consultato il 9 agosto 2019.Bibliografia Giorgio Amendola, Storia del Partito
comunista italiano 1921-1943, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1978. Perry Anderson,
Ambiguità di Gramsci, Bari, Laterza, 1978. Giulio Angioni, Gramsci e il
folklore come cosa seria, in Fare, dire, sentire. L'identico e il diverso nelle
culture, Il Maestrale, 2011. ISBN 978-88-6429-020-1 Francesco Aqueci, Il
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Gramsci, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1990. ISBN 978-88-07-10135-9 Franco Calamandrei e
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21, 24 gennaio 1953. Mauro Canali, Il tradimento. Gramsci, Togliatti e la
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editore, 2006. ISBN 88-8353-470-0 Alberto Mario Cirese, Intellettuali,
folklore, istinto di classe, Torino, Einaudi, 1976. Marco Clementi, Le ceneri
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Bonino, Gramsci e il teatro, Torino, Einaudi, 1972.*Biagio De Giovanni e altri,
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978-88-6288-085-5 Giuseppe Fiori, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Bari, Laterza, 1995
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Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1991. Voci correlate Casa museo Antonio Gramsci
Comunismo Gramscianesimo Benedetto Croce Francesco De Sanctis Egemonia
culturale Friedrich Engels Antonio Labriola Lenin Karl Marx Marxismo Marxismo
occidentale Partito Comunista Italiano Quaderni del carcere Risorgimento Tesi
di Lione Palmiro Togliatti Unione Sovietica L'Unità Altri progetti Collabora a
Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Antonio Gramsci Collabora
a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene citazioni di o su Antonio Gramsci Collabora a
Wikibooks Wikibooks contiene testi o manuali su Antonio Gramsci Collabora a
Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Antonio
Gramsci Collegamenti esterni Antonio Gramsci, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on
line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Antonio Gramsci
/ Antonio Gramsci (altra versione), in Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Antonio Gramsci, in Dizionario
di storia, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2010. Modifica su Wikidata (EN)
Antonio Gramsci, su Enciclopedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Modifica su Wikidata Antonio Gramsci, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Antonio Gramsci, su
BeWeb, Conferenza Episcopale Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Antonio
Gramsci, su Find a Grave. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Antonio Gramsci, su
Liber Liber. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Antonio Gramsci, su openMLOL, Horizons
Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere di Antonio Gramsci, su Open
Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata (FR) Pubblicazioni di Antonio
Gramsci, su Persée, Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et
de l'Innovation. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere riguardanti Antonio Gramsci,
su Open Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Antonio Gramsci,
su Goodreads. Modifica su Wikidata Antonio Gramsci, su storia.camera.it, Camera
dei deputati. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Antonio Gramsci, su Internet Movie
Database, IMDb.com. Modifica su Wikidata Casa museo Antonio Gramsci a Ghilarza,
su casamuseogramsci.it. Antonio Gramsci: un intellettuale fra due
totalitarismi, su lastoriasiamonoi.rai.it. URL consultato il 16 ottobre 2012 (archiviato
dall'url originale il 21 dicembre 2012). Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, su
fondazionegramsci.org. Opere di Gramsci, su marxists.org. L. Canfora, La
lezione di libertà di Antonio Gramsci, su letteratura.rai.it. "I Quaderni
del carcere" con link intertestuali ai nomi, agli eventi, ai movimenti
culturali e politici e note di lettura a cura di Luigi Anepeta M. Vincenzi,
Gramsci a New York, su repubblica.it. Gramsci, La questione meridionale, su
archive.org. Antonio Gramsci, il grande intellettuale dimenticato, in Il
fascino degli intellettuali, 31 luglio 2016. URL consultato il 01-10-2016
Gramsci, pagina web di note e articoli di argomento gramsciano a cura di
Francesco Aqueci Predecessore Segretario
del Partito Comunista d'Italia Successore
Amadeo Bordiga 1924
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1891Morti nel 1937Nati il 22 gennaioMorti il 27 aprileNati ad AlesMorti a
RomaAntonio GramsciGiornalisti italiani del XX secoloLinguisti italianiCritici
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narrativaMembri del Comitato esecutivo del CominternStudenti dell'Università
degli Studi di TorinoSecession isti dell'Aventino[altre]
green: t. h., Grice:
“The rather idiotic German philosopher at Oxford, Schiller, thought that
Dodgson meant Green when he said that the snark may be served with greens.” -- absolute idealist and social philosopher. The
son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was
to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing
knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy
introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and
morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, “Prolegomena
to Ethics,” Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings
and impulses whose source was an eternal consciousness to constitute objects of
knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents
seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions.
This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to
act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation Green
transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no
intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the
conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction.
gregorio
magno: Grice: “Poor Gregorio Magno had to fight with the Lonbards, and the sad
thing is he lost!” -- I, Saint, called Gregory the Great, a pope and Roman political leader. Born a
patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570.
In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to
Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in
590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off.
Constantinople would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as
secular ruler of what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal
jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His
writings include important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of
Job summarizing Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of
the clergy for the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the
immortality of the soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without
awaiting the Last Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal,
but was much quoted in the Middle Ages. Grice takes inspiration on Shropshire’s
argument for the immortality of the soul from Gregorio Magno (Dialogo, IV).
gregory
of
Nyssa, Saint, Grecian theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism
with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed
orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related
the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He
followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory
of Nyssa 354 354 nature was due to the
fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all
souls, including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.
wodeham, adam. Obviously born at Wodeham,
or Woodham as the current spelling goes (“But I prefer the old, vide Occam” –
Grice). Like Gregorio da Rimini, obsessed with the complexe significabile,
“which has obvious connections with what I call the propositional complexus.”
grice: as a count noun –
“Lots of grice in the fields.” – One Scots to another -- count noun, a noun
that can occur syntactically a with quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘few’,
‘several’, and numerals; b with the indefinite article, ‘an’; and c in the
plural form. The following are examples of count nouns CNs, paired with
semantically similar mass nouns MNs: ‘each dollar / silver’, ‘one composition /
music’, ‘a bed / furniture’, ‘instructions / advice’. MNs but not CNs can occur
with the quantifiers ‘much’ and ‘little’: ‘much poetry / poems’, ‘little bread
/ loaf’. Both CNs and MNs may occur with ‘all’, ‘most’, and ‘some’.
Semantically, CNs but not MNs refer distributively, providing a counting
criterion. It makes sense to ask how many CNs?: ‘How many coins / gold?’ MNs
but not CNs refer collectively. It makes sense to ask how much MN?: ‘How much
gold / coins?’ One problem is that these syntactic and semantic criteria yield
different classifications; another problem is to provide logical forms and
truth conditions for sentences containing mass nouns.
grice: English philosopher, born in
Harborne, “in the middle of nowhere,” as Strawson put it – (“He was from
London, Strawson was”) -- whose work concerns perception and philosophy of
language, and whose most influential contribution is the concept of a conversational
implicaturum and the associated theoretical machinery of conversational
‘postulates.’ The concept of a conversational implicaturum is first used in his
‘presentation’ on the causal theory of perception and reference. Grice
distinguishes between the ‘meaning’ of the words used in a sentence and what is
implied by the utterer’s choice of words. If someone says “It looks as if there
is a red pillar box in front of me,” the choice of words implies that there is
some doubt about the pillar box being red. But, Grice argues, that is a matter
of word choice and the sentence itself does not ‘impl’ that there is doubt. The term ‘conversational
implicaturum’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures published in 8
and used to defend the use of the material implication as a logical translation
of ‘if’. With Strawson “In Defence of Dogma”, Grice gives a spirited defense of
the analyticsynthetic distinction against Quine’s criticisms. In subsequent
systematic papers Grice attempts, among other things, to give a theoretical
grounding of the distinction. Grice’s oeuvre is part of the Oxford ordinary
language tradition, if formal and theoretical. He also explores metaphysics,
especially the concept of absolute value. There is the H. P. Grice Society –
Other organisations Grice-related are “The Grice Club,” “The Grice Circle,” and
“H. P. Grice’s Playgroup.”
grice’s complexe significabile, plural: -- Grice used
to say jocularly that he wasn’t commited to propositions; only to propositional
complexes -- complexe significabilia, also called complexum significabile, in
medieval philosophy, what is signified only by a complexum a statement or
declarative sentence, by a that-clause, or by a dictum an accusative !
infinitive construction, as in: ‘I want him to go’. It is analogous to the
modern proposition. The doctrine seems to have originated with Adam de Wodeham
in the early fourteenth century, but is usually associated with Gregory of
Rimini slightly later. Complexe significabilia do not fall under any of the Aristotelian
categories, and so do not “exist” in the ordinary way. Still, they are somehow
real. For before creation nothing existed except God, but even then God knew
that the world was going to exist. The object of this knowledge cannot have
been God himself since God is necessary, but the world’s existence is
contingent, and yet did not “exist” before creation. Nevertheless, it was real
enough to be an object of knowledge. Some authors who maintained such a view
held that these entities were not only signifiable in a complex way by a
statement, but were themselves complex in their inner structure; the term
‘complexum significabile’ is unique to their theories. The theory of complexe
significabilia was vehemently criticized by late medieval nominalists. Refs.: The main reference is in ‘Reply to
Richards.’ But there is “Sentence semantics and propositional complexes,” c.
9-f. 12, BANC.
grice’s
combinatory logic, a branch of logic
that deals with formal systems designed for the study of certain basic operations
for constructing and manipulating functions as rules, i.e. as rules of
calculation expressed by definitions. The notion of a function was fundamental
in the development of modern formal or mathematical logic that was initiated by
Frege, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, and others. Frege was the first to introduce a
generalization of the mathematical notion of a function to include
propositional functions, and he used the general notion for formally
representing logical notions such as those of a concept, object, relation,
generality, and judgment. Frege’s proposal to replace the traditional logical
notions of subject and predicate by argument and function, and thus to conceive
predication as functional application, marks a turning point in the history of
formal logic. In most modern logical systems, the notation used to express
functions, including propositional functions, is essentially that used in
ordinary mathematics. As in ordinary mathematics, certain basic notions are
taken for granted, such as the use of variables to indicate processes of
substitution. Like the original systems for modern formal logic, the systems of
combinatory logic were designed to give a foundation for mathematics. But
combinatory logic arose as an effort to carry the foundational aims further and
deeper. It undertook an analysis of notions taken for granted in the original
systems, in particular of the notions of substitution and of the use of
variables. In this respect combinatory logic was conceived by one of its
founders, H. B. Curry, to be concerned with the ultimate foundations and with
notions that constitute a “prelogic.” It was hoped that an analysis of this
prelogic would disclose the true source of the difficulties connected with the
logical paradoxes. The operation of applying a function to one of its
arguments, called application, is a primitive operation in all systems of
combinatory logic. If f is a function and x a possible argument, then the
result of the application operation is denoted fx. In mathematics this is usually
written fx, but the notation fx is more convenient in combinatory logic. The G.
logician M. Schönfinkel, who started combinatory logic in 4, observed that it
is not necessary to introduce color realism combinatory logic functions of more
than one variable, provided that the idea of a function is enlarged so that
functions can be arguments as well as values of other functions. A function
Fx,y is represented with the function f, which when applied to the argument x
has, as a value, the function fx, which, when applied to y, yields Fx,y, i.e.
fxy % Fx,y. It is therefore convenient to omit parentheses with association to
the left so that fx1 . . . xn is used for
. . . fx1 . . . xn. Schönfinkel’s main result was to show how to make
the class of functions studied closed under explicit definition by introducing
two specific primitive functions, the combinators S and K, with the rules Kxy %
x, and Sxyz % xzyz. To illustrate the effect of S in ordinary mathematical
notation, let f and g be functions of two and one arguments, respectively; then
Sfg is the function such that Sfgx % fx,gx. Generally, if ax1, . . . ,xn is an
expression built up from constants and the variables shown by means of the
application operation, then there is a function F constructed out of constants
including the combinators S and K, such that Fx1 . . . xn % ax1, . . . , xn.
This is essentially the meaning of the combinatory completeness of the theory
of combinators in the terminology of H. B. Curry and R. Feys, Combinatory Logic
8; and H. B. Curry, J. R. Hindley, and J. P. Seldin, Combinatory Logic, vol. II
2. The system of combinatory logic with S and K as the only primitive functions
is the simplest equation calculus that is essentially undecidable. It is a
type-free theory that allows the formation of the term ff, i.e.
self-application, which has given rise to problems of interpretation. There are
also type theories based on combinatory logic. The systems obtained by
extending the theory of combinators with functions representing more familiar
logical notions such as negation, implication, and generality, or by adding a
device for expressing inclusion in logical categories, are studied in illative
combinatory logic. The theory of combinators exists in another, equivalent
form, namely as the type-free l-calculus created by Church in 2. Like the
theory of combinators, it was designed as a formalism for representing
functions as rules of calculation, and it was originally part of a more general
system of functions intended as a foundation for mathematics. The l-calculus
has application as a primitive operation, but instead of building up new
functions from some primitive ones by application, new functions are here
obtained by functional abstraction. If ax is an expression built up by means of
application from constants and the variable x, then ax is considered to define
a function denoted lx.a x, whose value for the argument b is ab, i.e. lx.a xb %
ab. The function lx.ax is obtained from ax by functional abstraction. The
property of combinatory completeness or closure under explicit definition is
postulated in the form of functional abstraction. The combinators can be
defined using functional abstraction i.e., K % lx.ly.x and S % lx.ly.lz.xzyz,
and conversely, in the theory of combinators, functional abstraction can be
defined. A detailed presentation of the l-calculus is found in H. Barendregt,
The Lambda Calculus, Its Syntax and Semantics 1. It is possible to represent
the series of natural numbers by a sequence of closed terms in the lcalculus.
Certain expressions in the l-calculus will then represent functions on the
natural numbers, and these l-definable functions are exactly the general
recursive functions or the Turing computable functions. The equivalence of
l-definability and general recursiveness was one of the arguments used by
Church for what is known as Church’s thesis, i.e., the identification of the
effectively computable functions and the recursive functions. The first problem
about recursive undecidability was expressed by Church as a problem about
expressions in the l calculus. The l-calculus thus played a historically
important role in the original development of recursion theory. Due to the
emphasis in combinatory logic on the computational aspect of functions, it is
natural that its method has been found useful in proof theory and in the
development of systems of constructive mathematics. For the same reason it has
found several applications in computer science in the construction and analysis
of programming languages. The techniques of combinatory logic have also been
applied in theoretical linguistics, e.g. in so-called Montague grammar. In
recent decades combinatory logic, like other domains of mathematical logic, has
developed into a specialized branch of mathematics, in which the original
philosophical and foundational aims and motives are of little and often no
importance. One reason for this is the discovery of the new technical
applications, which were not intended originally, and which have turned the
interest toward several new mathematical problems. Thus, the original motives
are often felt to be less urgent and only of historical significance. Another
reason for the decline of the original philosophical and foundational aims may
be a growing awareness in the philosophy of mathematics of the limitations of
formal and mathematical methods as tools for conceptual combinatory logic
combinatory logic clarification, as tools for reaching “ultimate
foundations.”
grice’s “The
Three-Year-Old’s Guide to Russell’s Theory of Types,” with an advice to parents
by P. F. Starwson -- type theory,
broadly, any theory according to which the things that exist fall into natural,
perhaps mutually exclusive, categories or types. In most modern discussions,
‘type theory’ refers to the theory of logical types first sketched by Russell
in The Principles of Mathematics 3. It is a theory of logical types insofar as
it purports only to classify things into the most general categories that must
be presupposed by an adequate logical theory. Russell proposed his theory in
response to his discovery of the now-famous paradox that bears his name. The
paradox is this. Common sense suggests that some classes are members of
themselves e.g., the class of all classes, while others are not e.g., the class
of philosophers. Let R be the class whose membership consists of exactly those
classes of the latter sort, i.e., those that are not members of themselves. Is
R a member of itself? If so, then it is a member of the class of all classes
that are not members of themselves, and hence is not a member of itself. If, on
the other hand, it is not a member of itself, then it satisfies its own
membership conditions, and hence is a member of itself after all. Either way
there is a contradiction. The source of the paradox, Russell suggested, is the
assumption that classes and their members form a single, homogeneous logical
type. To the contrary, he proposed that the logical universe is stratified into
a regimented hierarchy of types. Individuals constitute the lowest type in the
hierarchy, type 0. For purposes of exposition, individuals can be taken to be
ordinary objects like chairs and persons. Type 1 consists of classes of
individuals, type 2 of classes of classes of individuals, type 3 classes of
classes of classes of individuals, and so on. Unlike the homogeneous universe,
then, in the type hierarchy the members of a given class must all be drawn from
a single logical type n, and the class itself must reside in the next higher
type n ! 1. Russell’s sketch in the Principles differs from this account in
certain details. Russell’s paradox cannot arise in this conception of the
universe of classes. Because the members of a class must all be of the same
logical type, there is no such class as R, whose definition cuts across all types.
Rather, there is only, for each type n, the class Rn of all non-self-membered
classes of that type. Since Rn itself is of type n ! 1, the paradox breaks
down: from the assumption that Rn is not a member of itself as in fact it is
not in the type hierarchy, it no longer follows that it satisfies its own
membership conditions, since those conditions apply only to objects of type n.
Most formal type theories, including Russell’s own, enforce the class
membership restrictions of simple type theory syntactically such that a can be
asserted to be a member of b only if b is of the next higher type than a. In
such theories, the definition of R, hence the paradox itself, cannot even be
expressed. Numerous paradoxes remain unscathed by the simple type hierarchy. Of
these, the most prominent are the semantic paradoxes, so called because they
explicitly involve semantic notions like truth, as in the following version of
the liar paradox. Suppose Epimenides asserts that all the propositions he
asserts today are false; suppose also that that is the only proposition he
asserts today. It follows immediately that, under those conditions, the
proposition he asserts is true if and only if it is false. To address such
paradoxes, Russell was led to the more refined and substantially more
complicated system known as ramified type theory, developed in detail in his 8
paper “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” In the ramified
theory, propositions and properties or propositional functions, in Russell’s
jargon come to play the central roles in the type-theoretic universe.
Propositions are best construed as the metaphysical and semantical counterparts
of sentences what sentences express and properties as the counterparts of “open
sentences” like ‘x is a philosopher’ that contain a variable ‘x’ in place of a
noun phrase. To distinguish linguistic expressions from their semantic
counterparts, the property expressed by, say, ‘x is a philosopher’, will be
denoted by ‘x ^ is a philosopher’, and the proposition expressed by ‘Aristotle
is a philosopher’ will be denoted by ‘Aristotle is a philosopher’. A property .
. .x ^ . . . is said to be true of an individual a if . . . a . . . is a true
proposition, and false of a if . . . a . . . is a false proposition where ‘. .
. a . . .’ is the result of replacing ‘x ^ ’ with ‘a’ in ‘. . . x ^ . . .’. So,
e.g., x ^ is a philosopher is true of Aristotle. The range of significance of a
property P is the collection of objects of which P is true or false. a is a
possible argument for P if it is in P’s range of significance. In the ramified
theory, the hierarchy of classes is supplanted by a hierarchy of properties:
first, properties of individuals i.e., properties whose range of significance
is restricted to individuals, then properties of properties of individuals, and
so on. Parallel to the simple theory, then, the type of a property must exceed
the type of its possible arguments by one. Thus, Russell’s paradox with R now
in the guise of the property x ^ is a property that is not true of itself is avoided along analogous lines. Following
the mathematician Henri Poincaré,
Russell traced the type theory type theory 935
935 source of the semantic paradoxes to a kind of illicit
self-reference. So, for example, in the liar paradox, Epimenides ostensibly
asserts a proposition p about all propositions, p itself among them, namely
that they are false if asserted by him today. p thus refers to itself in the
sense that it or more exactly, the
sentence that expresses it quantifies
over i.e., refers generally to all or some of the elements of a collection of
entities among which p itself is included. The source of semantic paradox thus
isolated, Russell formulated the vicious circle principle VCP, which proscribes
all such self-reference in properties and propositions generally. The liar
proposition p and its ilk were thus effectively banished from the realm of
legitimate propositions and so the semantic paradoxes could not arise. Wedded
to the restrictions of simple type theory, the VCP generates a ramified
hierarchy based on a more complicated form of typing. The key notion is that of
an object’s order. The order of an individual, like its type, is 0. However,
the order of a property must exceed the order not only of its possible
arguments, as in simple type theory, but also the orders of the things it
quantifies over. Thus, type 1 properties like x ^ is a philosopher and x ^ is
as wise as all other philosophers are first-order properties, since they are
true of and, in the second instance, quantify over, individuals only.
Properties like these whose order exceeds the order of their possible arguments
by one are called predicative, and are of the lowest possible order relative to
their range of significance. Consider, by contrast, the property call it Q x ^
has all the first-order properties of a great philosopher. Like those above, Q
also is a property of individuals. However, since Q quantifies over first-order
properties, by the VDP, it cannot be counted among them. Accordingly, in the
ramified hierarchy, Q is a second-order property of individuals, and hence
non-predicative or impredicative. Like Q, the property x ^ is a first-order
property of all great philosophers is also second-order, since its range of
significance consists of objects of order 1 and it quantifies only over objects
of order 0; but since it is a property of first-order properties, it is
predicative. In like manner it is possible to define third-order properties of
individuals, third-order properties of first-order properties, third-order
properties of second-order properties of individuals, third-order properties of
secondorder properties of first-order properties, and then, in the same
fashion, fourth-order properties, fifth-order properties, and so on ad
infinitum. A serious shortcoming of ramified type theory, from Russell’s
perspective, is that it is an inadequate foundation for classical mathematics.
The most prominent difficulty is that many classical theorems appeal to
definitions that, though consistent, violate the VCP. For instance, a wellknown
theorem of real analysis asserts that every bounded set of real numbers has a
least upper bound. In the ramified theory, real numbers are identified with
certain predicative properties of rationals. Under such an identification, the usual
procedure is to define the least upper bound of a bounded set S of reals to be
the property call it b some real number in S is true of x ^ , and then prove
that this property is itself a real number with the requisite characteristics.
However, b quantifies over the real numbers. Hence, by the VCP, b cannot itself
be taken to be a real number: although of the same type as the reals, and
although true of the right things, b must be assigned a higher order than the
reals. So, contrary to the classical theorem, S fails to have a least upper
bound. Russell introduced a special axiom to obviate this difficulty: the axiom
of reducibility. Reducibility says, in effect, that for any property P, there
is a predicative property Q that is true of exactly the same things as P.
Reducibility thus assures that there is a predicative property bH true of the
same rational numbers as b. Since the reals are predicative, hence of the same
order as bH, it turns out that bH is a real number, and hence that S has a
least upper bound after all, as required by the classical theorem. The general
role of reducibility is thus to undo the draconian mathematical effects of
ramification without undermining its capacity to fend off the semantic
paradoxes.
grice’s
play group -- H. P. Grice’s playgroup: after the death of J. L. Austin, Grice
kept the routine of the Saturday morning with a few new rules. 1. Freedom. 2.
Freedom, and 3. Freedom.
grice’s theory-theory: Grice’s word for ‘first
philosophy.’ – ‘striking originality, eh?’
grice’s personalism: Grice: “I finished
the thing and did not know what to title – my mother said, “Try ‘personal
identity.’ She was a personal trinitarian.” -- a version of personal idealism
that flourished in the United States principally at Boston from the late nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne 1847 0
and three of his students: Albert Knudson 18733; Ralph Flewelling 18710, who
founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman 43.
Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in
philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to
Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all
reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground
or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in
the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves
empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting
point, but this experience involves a fundamental knowledge of the self as a
personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence,
order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the
uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical
theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed
as both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually
gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is
intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out
of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier 550, Maritain, and Gilson
identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite
person God and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They
did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal.
grice’s personhood: Grice: “I finished the
thing and did not know how to title. My mother, a confessed personal
trinitarian, suggested, ‘personal identity.’’ -- the condition or property of
being a person, especially when this is considered to entail moral and/or
metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve various traits,
including moral agency; reason or rationality; language, or the cognitive
skills language may support such as intentionality and self-consciousness; and
ability to enter into suitable relations with other persons viewed as members
of a self-defining group. Buber emphasized the difference between the I-It
relationship holding between oneself and an object, and the IThou relationship,
which holds between oneself and another person who can be addressed. Dennett
has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,” which involves
explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.
Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have been central to
debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since personhood has often
been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s possession of special
moral status.
griceian. Grice disliked
the spelling “Gricean” that some people in the New World use. “Surely my
grandmother was right when she said she had become a Griceian by marrying a
Grice!”
brown, S. author of the
Dictionary of British Philosophers (“I first thought of writing a dictionary of
English philosophers, but then I thought that Russell would be out – he was
born in Wales!.”
grice: g. r. – Welsh
philosopher who taught at Norwich. Since H. P. Grice and G. R. Grice both wrote
on the contract and morality, one has to be careful.
Griceian
elenchus: a cross-examination or
refutation. Typically in Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates has a conversation
with someone who claims to have some sort of knowledge, and Socrates refutes
this claim by showing the interlocutor that what he thinks he knows is
inconsistent with his other opinions. This refutation Grice calls a
‘conversational elenchus.’ “It is not entirely negative, for awareness of his
own ignorance is supposed to spur one’s conversational interlocutor to further
inquiry, and the concepts and assumptions employed in the refutations serve as
the basis for positive Griceian, and implicatural, treatments of the same
topic.” “Now, in contrast, I’ll grant you that a type of “sophistic elenchi”
that one sometimes sees at Oxford, usually displayed by Rhode scholars from the New World or the
Colonies, under the tutelage of me or others in my group, may be merely eristic.”
“They aim simply at the refutation of an opponent by any means.” “That is why,
incidentally, why Aristotle calls a fallacy that only *appear* to be a
refutation a “sophistici elenchi.” Cf.
‘eristic.’ And Grice on the epagoge/diagoge distinction.
Grice’s
“sc.”: as the elliptical
disimplicaturum -- ellipsis as implicaturum: an expression from which a ‘part’
has been deleted.. “I distinguish between the expression-whole and the
expression-part.” The term Grice uses for ‘part’ is ‘incomplete’ versus
‘complete,’ and it’s always for metabolical ascriptions primarily. Thus Grice
has "x (utterance-type) means '. . .' " which is a specification of
timeless meaning for an utterance-type ad which can be either (i a) “complete”
or (i b) non-complete (partial) or incomplete]. He also has "x
(utterance-type) meant here '...'", which is a specification of applied
timeless meaning for an utterance-type which again can be either (2a) complete
or (2b) partial, non-complete, or incomplete. So ellipsis can now be redefined
in terms of the complete-incomplete distinction. “Smith is” is incomplete.
“Smith is clever” is complete. “Uusually
for conciseness.” As Grice notes, “an elliptical or incomplete sentence is
often used to answer a questions without repeating material occurring in the
question; e. g. ‘Grice’ may be the
answer to the question of the authorship of “The grounds of morality” or to the
question of the authorship of “Studies in the Way of Words.” ‘Grice’ can be seen
as an ‘elliptical’ name when used as an ellipsis of ‘G. R. Grice’ or “H. P.
Grice” and “Grice” can be seen as an elliptical *sentence* when used as an
ellipsis for ‘G. R. Grice is the author of ‘The Grounds of Morality”” or “H. P.
Grice is the author of Studies in the Way of Words.’Other typical elliptical
sentences are: ‘Grice is a father of two [+> children]’, ‘Grice, or Godot,
arrived for the tutorial past twelve [+> midnight]’. A typical ellipsis that
occurs in discussion of ellipses involves citing the elliptical sentences with
the deleted material added in brackets often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’ – “Grice
is a father of two (sc. Children),” Grice, or Godot, as we tutees call him,
arrived for the tutorial past twelve (sc. midnight)” -- instead of also
presenting the complete sentence. As Grice notes, ellipsis can also occurs
above the sentential level, e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the
course of argumentation, as in “Grice is an Englishman; he is, therefore,
brave.” ‘Enthymeme,’ literally, ‘in-the-breast,’ designates an elliptical
argument expression from which one or more premise-expressions have been
deleted, “or merely implicated.” -- ‘elliptic ambiguity’ designates ambiguity
arising from ellipsis, as does ‘elliptic implicaturum.’ “Sc.” Grice calls
“elliptical disimplicaturum.”
Grice’s ego: “Oddly, while I and we, and thou and you are persons,
‘it’ is not – the “THIRD” person is a joke!” -- “I follow Buber in
distinguishing ‘ego’ from ‘tu.’ With conversation, there’s the ‘we,’ too.” “If you were the only girl in the world,
there would not be a need for the personal pronoun ‘ego’” – Grice to his wife,
on the day of their engagement. “I went to Oxford. You went to Cambridge. He
went to the London School of Economics.” egocentric particular, a word whose
denotation is determined by identity of the speaker and/or the time, place, and
audience of his utterance. Examples are generally thought to include ‘I,’
‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’.
The term ‘egocentric particular’ was introduced by Russell in An Inquiry into
Meaning and Truth 0. In an earlier work, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”
Monist, 819, Russell called such words “emphatic particulars.” Some important
questions arise regarding egocentric particulars. Are some egocentric
particulars more basic than others so that the rest can be correctly defined in
terms of them but they cannot be correctly defined in terms of the rest?
Russell thought all egocentric particulars can be defined by ‘this’; ‘I’, for
example, has the same meaning as ‘the biography to which this belongs’, where
‘this’ denotes a sense-datum experienced by the speaker. Yet, at the same time,
‘this’ can be defined by the combination ‘what I-now notice’. Must we use at
least some egocentric particulars to give a complete description of the world?
Our ability to describe the world from a speaker-neutral perspective, so that
the denotations of the terms in our description are independent of when, where,
and by whom they are used, depends on our ability to describe the world without
using egocentric particulars. Russell held that egocentric particulars are not
needed in any part of the description of the world. -- egocentric predicament, each person’s
apparently problematic position as an experiencing subject, assuming that all
our experiences are private in that no one else can have them. Two problems
concern our ability to gain empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to see how
we gain empirical knowledge of what others experience, if all experience is
private. We cannot have their experience to see what it is like, for any
experience we have is our experience and so not theirs. Second, it is hard to
see how we gain empirical knowledge of how the external world is, independently
of our experience. All our empirically justified beliefs seem to rest
ultimately on what is given in experience, and if the empirically given is
private, it seems it can only support justified beliefs about the world as we
experience it. A third major problem concerns our ability to communicate with
others. It is hard to see how we describe the world in a language others
understand. We give meaning to some of our words by defining them by other
words that already have meaning, and this process of definition appears to end
with words we define ostensively; i.e., we use them to name something given in
experience. If experiences are private, no one else can grasp the meaning of
our ostensively defined words or any words we use them to define. No one else
can understand our attempts to describe the world. Egoism: cf. H. P. Grice, “The principle of
conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence,” any
view that, in a certain way, makes the self central. There are several
different versions of egoism, all of which have to do with how actions relate
to the self. Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to do what is in
their own selfinterest. Psychological egoism is a view about people’s motives,
inclinations, or dispositions. One statement of psychological egoism says that,
as a matter of fact, people always do what they believe is in their
self-interest and, human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise.
Another says that people never desire anything for its own sake except what
they believe is in their own self-interest. Altruism is the opposite of egoism.
Any ethical view that implies that people sometimes ought to do what is in the
interest of others and not in their self-interest can be considered a form of
ethical altruism. The view that, human nature being what it is, people can do
what they do not believe to be in their self-interest might be called
psychological altruism. Different species of ethical and psychological egoism
result from different interpretations of self-interest and of acting from self-interest,
respectively. Some people have a broad conception of acting from self-interest
such that people acting from a desire to help others can be said to be acting
out of self-interest, provided they think doing so will not, on balance, take
away from their own good. Others have a narrower conception of acting from
selfinterest such that one acts from self-interest only if one acts from the
desire to further one’s own happiness or good. Butler identified self-love with
the desire to further one’s own happiness or good and self-interested action
with action performed from that desire alone. Since we obviously have other
particular desires, such as the desires for honor, for power, for revenge, and
to promote the good of others, he concluded that psychological egoism was
false. People with a broader conception of acting from self-interest would ask
whether anyone with those particular desires would act on them if they believed
that, on balance, acting on them would result in a loss of happiness or good for
themselves. If some would, then psychological egoism is false, but if, given
human nature as it is, no one would, it is true even if self-love is not the
only source of motivation in human beings. Just as there are broader and
narrower conceptions of acting from self-interest, there are broader and
narrower conceptions of self-interest itself, as well as subjective and
objective conceptions of self-interest. Subjective conceptions relate a
person’s self-interest solely to the satisfaction of his desires or to what
that person believes will make his life go best for him. Objective conceptions
see self-interest, at least in part, as independent of the person’s desires and
beliefs. Some conceptions of self-interest are narrower than others, allowing
that the satisfaction of only certain desires is in a person’s self-interest,
e.g., desires whose satisfaction makes that person’s life go better for her.
And some conceptions of self-interest count only the satisfaction of idealized
desires, ones that someone would have after reflection about the nature of
those desires and what they typically lead to, as furthering a person’s
self-interest. See index to all Grice’s
books with index – the first three of them.
Grice’s
genitorial programme
– A type of ideal observer theory -- demiurge from Grecian demiourgos,
‘artisan’, ‘craftsman’, a deity who shapes the material world from the
preexisting chaos. Plato introduces the demiurge in his Timaeus. Because he is
perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the
Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of
these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result.
Although the demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes, he should not
be identified with the God of theism. His ontological and axiological status is
lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. He is also
limited. The material he employs is not created by him. Furthermore, it is
disorderly and indeterminate, and thus partially resists his rational ordering.
In gnosticism, the demiurge is the ignorant, weak, and evil or else morally
limited cause of the cosmos. In the modern era the term has occasionally been
used for a deity who is limited in power or knowledge. Its first occurrence in
this sense appears to be in J. S. Mill’s Theism 1874.
gricese: While Grice presented Gricese as refutation of Vitters’s
idea of a private language “I soon found out that my wife and my two children
were speaking Gricese, as was my brother Derek!” -- english, being
English or the genius of the ordinary. H. P. Grice refers to “The English
tongue.” A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic
of classical Eng. Phil. from
Ireland-born Berkeley to Scotland-born Hume, Scotland-born Reid, and very
English Jeremy Bentham and New-World Phil. , whether in transcendentalism
Emerson, Thoreau or in pragmatism from James to Rorty. But this orientation did
not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by
Vienna-born Witters, translated by C. K. Ogden, very English Brighton-born
Ryle, and especially J. L. Austin and his best companion at the Play Group, H.
P. Grice, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of a phrase
Grice lauged at: “‘ordinary’-language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse
to the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the
English Midlanders such as H. P. Grice, such as the gerund that often make it
difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to
emphasize this paradox because English Midlander philosopher, such as H. P.
Grice, claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as
an important philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth
century, due mainly to the efforts of H. P. Grice. English, but especially
Oxonian Phil. has a specific
relationship to ‘ordinary’ language (even though for Grice, “Greek and Latin
were always more ordinary to me – and people who came to read Eng. at Oxford
were laughed at!”), as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is
not limited to the theories of the Phil.
of language, in which an Eng. philosopher such as H. P. Grice appears as
a pioneer. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical
speculation that is, Met. and always prefers to return to its original home, as
Witters puts it: the natural environment of everyday words Philosophical
Investigations. Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the ordinary
in Scots Hume, Irish Berkeley, Scots Reid, and very English Jeremy Bentham and
what will become in Irish London-born G. E. Moore and Witters after he started
using English, at least orally and then J. L. Austin’s and H. P. Grice’s
‘ordinary’-language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several areas.
First, in the exploitation of all the resources of the language, which is
considered as a source of information and is valid in itself. Second, in the
attention given to the specificities—and even the defects, or ‘implicatura,’ as
Grice calls them —of the vernacular --
which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can
learn. Finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made
in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the
technical language of Philosophy —the former being the object of an agreement
deeper than the latter. Then there’s The Variety of Modes of Action. The
passive. There are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of
the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in tr.. Agency is
a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate
the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the
act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself v. AGENCY. A classic
difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from J. Stuart Mill’s To
gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to
examine a couple of newspaper headlines. “Killer’s Car Found” On a retrouvé la
voiture du tueur, “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead.” On craint la mort du fils Kennedy;
or the titles of a philosophical essay, “Epistemology Naturalized,”
L’Épistémologie naturalisée; Tr. J.
Largeault as L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle; a famous article by Quine that
was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American Phil. and “Consciousness Explained” La conscience
expliquée by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this PASSIVE
VOICE kind of construction—which seems so awkward in Fr. compared with the active voice— is perceived
by its Eng. users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More
generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of Eng. so profound
that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse
récessive the loss of the agent has become a characteristic of the Eng.
language itself, and not only of the passive. Thus, e. g. , a Fr. reader irresistibly gains the impression that
a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions. “This book reads
well.” ce livre se lit agréablement. “His poems do not translate well.” ses
poèmes se traduisent difficilement. “The door opens.” la porte s’ouvre. “The
man will hang.” l’homme sera pendu. In reality, here again, Eng. simply does
not need to mark by means of the reflexive pronoun se the presence of an active
agent. Do, make, have Eng. has several terms to translate the single Fr. word faire, which it can render by to do, to
make, or to have, depending on the type of agency required by the context.
Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and
repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a
particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of
examples of tr. problems in the Oxonian seminars by J. L. Austin. In Sense and
Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say
that” p. To translate such a passive construction, Fr. is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun
on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” je as if it were
considered from the outside: On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que p. But at
the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified,
and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject
of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Philosophical language
also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we
can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented
by Chomsky’s discovery Syntactic Structures,
of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the
necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is
not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an undergoing, as
is shown by the example She was offered a bunch of flowers. In particular,
language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the
ellipsis of the agent as is shown by the common expression Eng. spoken. For a
philosopher, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its
agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus
without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use
five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in Fr. only by on, an indeterminate subject defined
as differentiated from moi. “It is clearly implied, that “Now this, at least if
it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as
examples, familiar objects The expression is not further defined On sous-entend
clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici
l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des objets familiers On n’approfondit
pas la définition de l’expression . . . 1 Langage, langue, parole: A virtual
distinction. Contrary to what is too often believed, the Eng. language does not
conflate under the term language what Fr.
distinguishes following Saussure with the terms langage, langue, and
parole. In reality, Eng. also has a series of three terms whose semantic
distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as Fr. : First there’s
Grice’s “tongue,”which serves to designate a specific language by opposition to
another; speech, which refers more specifically to parole but which is often
translated in Fr. by discours; and
language in the sense of faculté de langage. Nonetheless, Fr. ’s set of
systematic distinctions can only remain fundamentally virtual in English, notably
because the latter refuses to radically detach langue from parole. Thus in
Chrestomathia, Bentham uses “tongue” (Bentham’s tongue – in Chrestomathia) and
language interchangeably and sometimes uses language in the sense of langue:
“Of all known languages the Grecian [Griceian] is assuredly, in its structure,
the most plastic and most manageable. Bentham even uses speech and language as
equivalents, since he speaks of parts of speech. But on the contrary, he
sometimes emphasizes differences that he ignores here. And he proceeds exactly
like Hume in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, where we find, e. g. , But it
must also be allowed, that some part of the seeming harmony in morals may be
accounted for from the very nature of language. The word, virtue, with its
equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of vice does blame. REFS.:
Bentham, Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M.
J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, . Hume, D. . Of the Standard of
Taste. In Four Dissertations. London: Thoemmes Continuum, . First published in
175 Saussure, F. de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. by Bally and Sechehaye. Tr. R. Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, . First
published in circulation among these forms. This formal continuity promotes a
great methodological inventiveness through the interplay among the various
grammatical entities that it enables.
The gerund: The form of -ing that is the most difficult to translate
Eng. is a nominalizing language. Any verb can be nominalized, and this ability
gives the Eng. philosophical language great creative power. “Nominalization,”
as Grice calls it, is in fact a substantivization without substantivization:
the verb is not substantivized in order to refer to action, to make it an
object of discourse which is possible in any language, notably in philosophical
Fr. and G. , but rather to nominalize
the verb while at the same time preserving its quality as a verb, and even to
nominalize whole clauses. Fr. can, of
course, nominalize faire, toucher, and sentir le faire, le toucher, even le
sentir, and one can do the same, in a still more systematic manner, in G. .
However, these forms will not have the naturalness of the Eng. expressions: the
making and unmaking the doing and undoing, the feeling, the feeling Byzantine,
the meaning. Above all, in these languages it is hard to construct expressions
parallel to, e. g. , the making of, the making use of, my doing wrongly, “my
meaning this,” (SIGNIFICATUM, COMMUNICATUM), his feeling pain, etc., that is,
mixtures of noun and verb having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of
the gerund — the external distribution of a nominal expression and the internal
distribution of a verbal expression. These forms are so common that they
characterize, in addition to a large proportion of book titles e. g. , The
Making of the Eng. Working Class, by E. P. Thomson; or, in Phil. , The Taming
of Chance, or The taming of the true, by I. Hacking, the language of classical
Eng. Phil. . The gerund functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger
between grammatical forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic
by introducing into it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the
language itself, a kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the
translator finds awkward when he understands the message without being able to
retain its lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks,
regarding the idea, of the manner of its being conceived, which a Fr. translator might render as sa façon d’être
conçue or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not
quite the same thing. And we v. agency and the gerund connected in a language
like that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb
and noun: much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having
yet been brought within the reach of the Eng. reader ChrestomathiTranslators
often feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le
fait de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its
gerund, Eng. avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and
arguing only on that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by Fr. when it translates the Eng. gerund is all the
more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when
Eng. uses the fact or the case from when it uses the gerund. The importance of
the event, along with the distinction between trial, case, and event, on the
one hand and happening on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim
that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its
negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the
doctrine that we do perceive material things. Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous
devons embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses
matérielles. Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative,
which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of do and on its sense of
action, a duality that v.ms to be at the origin of the theory of the
performative, I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife—as uttered in
the course of the marriage ceremony Oui à savoir: je prends cette femme pour
épouse’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words. On
the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, Eng. uses to
make and to have—He made Mary open her bags il lui fit ouvrir sa valise; He had
Mary pour him a drink il se fit verser un verre—with this difference: that make
can indicate, as we v., coercion, whereas have presupposes that there is no
resistance, a difference that Fr. can
only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century Eng.
philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences
and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in A Plea for Excuses,
Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression doing something, and
the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of
action—Is to sneeze to do an action? There is indeed a vague and comforting
idea that doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements.
Further, we need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal
machinery we use in acting. Philosophical Papers No matter how partial they may
be, these opening remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation
between ordinary language and philosophical language in English language Phil.
. This enables us to better understand why the most Oxonian philosophers are so
comfortable resorting to idiomatic expressions cf. H. Putnam and even to
clearly popular usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head.” It ain’t necessarily so.As
for the title of Manx-ancestry Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of
View, which at first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a
logical point of view, Always marry women uglier than you. The Operator -ing:
Properties and Antimetaphysical Consequences -ing: A multifunctional operator
Although grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of
-ing—present participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what
strikes the reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the
free in Phil. , You are v.ing something Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding
a stick in water; I really am perceiving the familiar objects Ayer, Foundations
of Empirical Knowledge. The passage to the form be + verb + -ing indicates,
then, not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the
metalanguage peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of
perception. The sole exception is, curiously, to know, which is practically
never used in the progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and
epistemological literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or he was knowing, as
if knowledge could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great
variety of what are customarily called aspects, through which the status of the
action is marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in Fr. or G. , once again because of the -ing
ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what
happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of
verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb to be with a verb ending in
-ing imperfect or progressive, by opposition to the simple present or past
perfect. Moreover, Grice mixes several aspects in a single expression:
iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in it cannot fail to have been
noticed Austin, How to Do Things. These are nuances, or implicate, as Labov and
then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written
Eng. but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or
allegedly ungrammatical. The vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on
this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working” —that is, between
having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment,
standard usage being limited to “he is working” Pinker, Language Instinct.
Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in Eng. there
is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of
completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads Oxonian
philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising
inventions, such as that of ‘implicaturum,’ or ‘visum,’ or ‘disimplicaturum.’
The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance Fictive entities Thus the verb + -ing
operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the
same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb,
that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the
substantiality of the I think asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually
all the Eng. philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity
can be constituted by the making our distant perceptions influence each other,
and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, it does not require positing a substance: the
substantivization of making and giving meets the need. We can also consider the
way in which Russell Analysis of Matter, ch.27 makes his reader understand far
more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category
of an epistemological obstacle, that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a
series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in
discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes
operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on
subjective probability, is based on this status of the happening, the event
conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its
expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at
which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be
computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now
pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses -ing, a
new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An
interesting case of tr. difficulty is, e. g. , the one posed by Austin
precisely when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to
distinguish between the sentence and the act of saying it, between statement
and utterance: there are utterances, such as the uttering of the sentence is,
or is part of, the doing of an action How to Do Things. The tr. difficulty here
is caused by the combination in the construction in -ing of the syntactical
flexibility of the gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the -ing construction
indicate the act, or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to
choose to translate “On Referring” P. F. Strawson as De la référence rather
than as De l’action de référer. Should one translate On Denoting Russell as De
la dénotation the usual tr. or as Du dénoter? The progressive in the strict
sense—be + verb + -ing— indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has
already begun but is not yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to
gauge the ease of Eng. in the whole of these operations. “To utter the sentence
is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be
doing. The Fr. tr. gives, correctly:
Énoncer la phrase, ce n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je
suis en train de faire en parlant ainsi, but this remains unsatisfying at best,
because of the awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de
is simply not suitable insofar as the -ing does not indicate duration: e. g. ,
in At last I am v.ing . It is interesting to examine from this point of view
the famous category of verbs of perception, verbum percipiendi. It is
remarkable that these verbs v., hear can be in some cases used with the
construction be + verb + -ing, since it is generally said even in grammar books
that they can be used only in the present or simple past and not in the progressive.
This rule probably is thought to be connected with something like the immediacy
of perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the verbs to know and
to understand are also almost always in the present or the simple past, as if
the operations of the understanding could not be presented in the progressive
form and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the contrary, they
transcended the course of time. In reality, there are counterexamples. “I don’t
know if I’m understanding you correctly”; You are hearing voices; and often
Oxonian Phil. , which makes their tr. particularly indigestible, especially in
Fr. , where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to the classifications
translated. In addition to the famous term realism, which has been the object
of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates over past decades that
it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention some common but
particularly obscure for anyone not familiar with the theoretical context
terms: “cognitivism,” noncognitivism, coherentism, eliminativism,
consequentialism, connectionism, etSuch terms in which moral Phil. is particularly fertile are in general
transposed into Fr. without change in a
sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost forgone tr..
More generally, in Eng. as in G. , words can be composed by joining two other
words far more easily than in Fr. —without specifying the logical connections
between the terms: toothbrush, pickpocket, lowlife, knownothing; or, for more
philosophical terms: aspect-blind, language-dependent, rule-following,
meaning-holism, observer-relative, which are translatable, of course, but not
without considerable awkwardness.
Oxonian philosophese. Oxonian
Phil. seems to establish a language that
is stylistically neutral and appears to be transparently translatable. Certain
specific problems—the tr. of compound words and constructions that are more
flexible in Eng. and omnipresent in current philosophical discourse, such as
the thesis that la thèse selon laquelle, the question whether la question de
savoir si, and my saying that le fait que je dise que—make Fr. tr.s of contemporary Eng. philosophical texts
very awkward, even when the author writes in a neutral, commonplace style.
Instead, these difficulties, along with the ease of construction peculiar to
English, tend to encourage non-Oxonian analytical philosophers to write
directly in Gricese, following the example of many of their European
colleagues, or else to make use of a technical vernacular we have noted the
-isms and compounds that is frequently heavy going and not very inventive when
transRomang terms which are usually transliterated. This situation is certainly
attributable to the paradoxical character of Gricese, which established itself
as a philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century: it is
a language that is apparently simple and accessible and that thus claims a kind
of universality but that is structured, both linguistically and
philosophically, around major stumbling blocks to do, -ing, etthat often make
it untranslatable. It is paradoxically this untranslatability, and not its
pseudo-transparency, that plays a crucial role in the process of
universalization. . IThe Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Phil. The proximity of ordinary language and
philosophical language, which is rooted in classical English-language Phil. ,
was theorized in the twentieth century by Austin and can be summed up in the
expression “‘ordinary’-language philosophy”. Ordinary language Phil. is interested This sort of overall
preeminence in Eng. of the verbal and the subjective over the nominal and the
objective is clear in the difference in the logic that governs the discourse of
affectivity in Fr. and in English. How
would something that one is correspond to something that one has, as in the
case of fear in Fr. avoir peur? It
follows that a Fr. man—who takes it for granted that fear is something that one
feels or senses—cannot feel at home with the difference that Eng. naturally
makes between something that has no objective correlative because it concerns
only feeling like fear; and what is available to sensation, implying that what
is felt through it has the status of an object. Thus in Eng. something is
immediately grasped that in Fr. v.ms a
strange paradox, viz. that passion, as Bentham notes in Deontology, is a
fictive entity. Thus what sounds in Fr.
like a nominalist provocation is implicated in the folds of the Eng.
language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus more easily undertaken in
Eng. than in Fr. , and if an ontological conception of affectivity had to be
formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would be encountered. Reversible derivations Another particularity
of English, which is not without consequences in Phil. , is that its poverty
from the point of view of inflectional morphology is compensated for by the
freedom and facility it offers for the construction of all sorts of
derivatives. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using suffixes such as
-ity, -hood, -ness, -y. The resulting compounds are very difficult to
differentiate in Fr. and to translate in
general, which has led, in contemporary Fr.
tr.s, to various incoherent makeshifts. To list the most common
stumbling blocks: privacy privé-ité, innerness intériorité, not in the same
sense as interiority, vagueness caractère vague, goodness bonté, in the sense
of caractère bon, rightness justesse, “sameness,” similarité, in the sense of
mêmeté, ordinariness, “appropriateness,” caractère ordinaire, approprié,
unaccountability caractère de ce dont il est impossible de rendre compte.
Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous suffixes: -ful, -ous, -y,
-ic, -ish, -al e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic, attitudinal, behavioral. Verbal
derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with the suffixes -ize, -ify, -ate
naturalize, mentalize, falsify, and even without suffixes when possible e.g.,
the title of an article “How Not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau,” i.e., how not to
Russell Carnap’s Aufbau. d. Polycategorial derivatives based on verbs, using
suffixes such as -able, -er, -age, -ismrefutable, truthmaker. The reversibility
of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential result of
preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more difficult
to avoid in Fr. and G. , where
nominalization hardens and freezes notions compare intériorité and innerness,
which designates more a quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an
entity or a domain. But this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip
side: the proliferation of -isms in liberties with the natural uses of the
language. The philosophers ask, e. g. , how they can know that there is a real
object there, but the question How do I know? can be asked in ordinary language
only in certain contexts, that is, where it is always possible, at least in
theory, to eliminate doubt. The doubt or question But is it a real one? has
always must have a special basis, there must be some reason for suggesting that
it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way in which it is suggested that
this experience or item may be phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists
in asking Is it a real table? a kind of object which has no obvious way of
being phoney and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that
I feel at a loss how to prove it is a real one. It is the use of the word real
in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that real has a single
meaning the real world, material objects, and that a highly profound and
puzzling one. Austin, Philosophical Papers This analysis of real is taken up
again in Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticizes the notion of a sense
datum and also a certain way of raising problems supposedly on the basis of
common opinion e. g. , the common opinion that we really perceive things—but in
reality on the basis of a pure construction. To state the case in this way,
Austin says, is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the
subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing
to him, the so-called philosophers’ view. Phil. ’s frequent recourse to the
ordinary is characterized by a certain condescension toward the common man. The
error or deception consists in arguing the philosopher’s position against the
ordinary position, because if the in what we should say when. It is, in other
words, a Phil. of language, but on the
condition that we never forget that we are looking not merely at words or ‘meanings,’
whatever they may be but also at the realities we use the words to talk about,
as Austin emphasizes A Plea for Excuses, in Philosophical Papers. During the
twentieth century or more precisely, between the 1940s and the s, there was a
division of the paradigms of the Phil.
of language between the logical clarification of ordinary language, on
the one hand, and the immanent examination of ordinary language, on the other.
The question of ordinary language and the type of treatment that it should be
given—a normative clarification or an internal examination—is present in and
even constitutive of the legacy of logical positivism. Wittgenstein’s work
testifies to this through the movement that it manifests and performs, from the
first task of the Phil. of language the
creation of an ideal or formal language to clarify everyday language to the
second the concern to examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses. The
break thus accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement
in his preface to The Linguistic Turn that the only difference between Ideal
Language Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement
about which language is ideal. In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal
language, or a norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective
that consists in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that
is omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current
analytical Phil. . Critique of language and Phil. More generally, Austin criticizes traditional
Phil. for its perverse use of ordinary
language. He constantly denounces Phil. ’s abuse of ordinary language—not so
much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A defect in
the Eng. language? Between according to Bentham Eng. philosophers are not very
inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it
is in G. or even in Fr. and discourages a certain kind of commentary.
There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the
words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., -- cf. Grice on “to” and “or” – “Does
it make sense to speak of the ‘sense’ of ‘to’?” -- through which Eng.
constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topiLet us take
the case of between, which Fr. can render
only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre imply the
number three in Fr. , since what is entre intervenes as a third term between
two others which it separates or brings closer in Lat., in-ter; in Fr., en
tiers; as a third. This is not the case in English, which constructs between in
accord with the number two in conformity with the etymology of this word, by
tween, in pairs, to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it
involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comon between three?
relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the
very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is
asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the
use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but
a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one
that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually compared.
The Eng. language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared in this
particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar to it. By
the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word between
i.e., by twain, the number of the objects, to which this operation is
represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Roman
inter—by its Fr. derivation entre—no
such limitation v.ms to be expressed. Chrestomathia REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy.
ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H.
Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come
to an agreement on what we should say when such and such a thing, though I
grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is
what is missing in Phil. : a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the
outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists
regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been
using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice.
Performatif-Constatif Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: Ordinary language cannot claim to have the
last word. Only remember, it is the first word Philosophical Papers. The
exploration of language is also an exploration of the inherited experience and
acumen of many generations of men ibid..
Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found
worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations. These are certainly more
subtle and solid than any that you or I are likely to think up in our
arm-chairs of an afternoon ibid.. It is this ability to indicate differences
that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the
world. Who is we? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical Phil. ,
especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved
away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain
kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all
the more powerful and surprising the return to Austin advocated by Stanley
Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language Phil. that is emerging in his work and in contemporary
American Phil. . What right do we have to refer to our uses? And who is this we
so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All we have, as we
have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We determine the
meaning of a given word by its uses, and for Austin, it is nonsensical to ask
the question of meaning for instance, in a general way or looking for an
entity; v. NONSENSE. The quest for agreement is founded on something quite
different from signification or the determination of the common meaning. The
agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an intersubjective
consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual agreements. It is an
agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears as much on language
as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this agreement? Where does it
come from, and why should so much importance be accorded to it? That is the
question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We Say? and then in The Claim
of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Witters to say what they say about
what we say? A claim is certainly involved here. That is what Witters means by
our agreement in judgments, and in language it is based only on itself, on the
latter exists, it is not on the same level. The philosopher introduces into the
opinion of the common man particular entities, in order then to reject, amend,
or explain it. The method of ordinary language: Be your size. Small Men.
Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our ordinary use of ordinary
words that have been confiscated by Phil. , such as ‘true’ and ‘real,’ in order
to raise the question of truth: Fact that is a phrase designed for use in
situations where the distinction between a true statement and the state of affairs
about which it is a truth is neglected; as it often is with advantage in
ordinary life, though seldom in Phil. . So speaking about the fact that is a
compendious way of speaking about a situation involving both words and world.
Philosophical Papers We can, of course, maintain along with a whole trend in
analytical Phil. from Frege to Quine
that these are considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any
conclusions at all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to
determine the nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary
language as a relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s
approach: the foot of the letter is the foot of the ladder ibid.. For Austin,
ordinary words are part of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful
objects is their complexity, their refinement as tools ibid.: We use words to
inform ourselves about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if
that v.ms too naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the
situation in which we find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this
claim possible is the proximity of dimension, of size, between words and
ordinary objects. Thus philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is
a substance, a quality, or a relation, take something more nearly their own
size to strain at ibid.. The Fr.
translators render size by mesure, which v.ms excessively theoretical;
the reference is to size in the material, ordinary sense. One cannot know
everything, so why not try something else? Advantages of slowness and
cooperation. Be your size. Small Men. Conversation cited by Urmson in A
Symposium Austin emphasizes that this technique of examining words which he
ended up calling linguistic phenomenology (and Grice linguistic botany) is not
new and that it has existed since Socrates, producing its slow successes. But
Grice is the first to make a systematic application of such a method, which is
based, on the one hand, on the manageability and familiarity of the objects
concerned and, on the other hand, on the common agreement at which it arrives
in each of its stages. The problem is how to agree on a starting point, that
is, on a given. This given or datum, for Grice, is Gricese, not as a corpus
consisting of utterances or words, but as the site of agreement about what we
should say when. Austin regards language as an empirical datum or experimental
dat -- Bayes, T. . An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of
Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two
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published in 195 . Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 195 we,
as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of tr. we
have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts,
and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into
further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place in
particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules,
just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same projections.
That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and
feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and ‑of significance and of
fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a
rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal,
when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Witterscalls forms of life. Human
speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing
less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is and because it is terrifying. Must We Mean What We Say? The
fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a reason
for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the
revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize:
the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new
understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its
ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of
ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he
establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American
thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature,
finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements
reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of
the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s
Americanization of ordinary language Phil.
there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But
isn’t this ordinary, e. g. , that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one
that the whole of Eng. Phil. has been
trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can
compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like Experience or Essays in
Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss
experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal
dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more
available to the senses. J.-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L.
How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Performatif-Constatif. In
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and L. Beck. : Editions du Minuit, . Tr. in Performative-Constative. In
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Press, . . Philosophical Papers. Ed. by
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and
SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Ayer, J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge.
London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by
means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the
hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the
economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract an
established price to execute a project collection of taxes, supply of an army,
a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction, assuming the
hazards related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices
that became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century.
Let us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in
his project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur
translated in various ways into English: by contractor if the stress is placed
on the engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to
conditions negotiated in advance a certain time, a fixed price, firm price,
tenant farming; by undertaker now rare in this sense when we focus on the
engagement in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical
realization, the setting in motion of the transaction; and by adventurer,
enterpriser, and projector, to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At
the end of the eighteenth century, the Fr.
word entreprise acquired the new meaning of an industrial establishment.
Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a
business of production superintendent, employer, manager. In France, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political
connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades
denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de
Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, the largest trial ever conducted by
pen against the big financiers, entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom, who
take advantage of its good administration its political economy in the name of
the entrepreneurs of commerce and industry, who contribute to the increase in
its wealth. Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or
tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to
create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. Chance in Business: Risk and
Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in
Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale Essay on the nature of
commerce in general. Having shown that all the classes and all the men of a
State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land bk. 1,
ch.12, he suggests that the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise,
like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly
bk. 1, of ch.1 He then describes in detail what composes the uncertain aspect
of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts according to his ideas and
without being able to predict, in which he conceives and executes his plans
surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits
turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption
of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—naturally
independent, Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of
breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Roman enuntiare to express, divulge; from ex
out and nuntiare to make known; a nuntius is a messenger, a nuncio, ranges over
the same type of entity as do proposition and phrase: it is a basic unit of
syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth
values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the
networks they constitute in different languages especially in English:
sentence, statement, utterance, appears under PROPOSITION. V. also DICTUM and
LOGOS, both of which may be acceptably Tr.
énoncé. Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD especially WORD,
Box The essential feature of an énoncé
is that it is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with
its énonciation: v. SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN,
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v.
DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR FR. ENG.
adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager,
projector, undertaker, superintendent v.
ACT, AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY. Refs.:
G. J. Warnock, “English philosophy,” H. P. Grice, “Gricese,” BANC.
griceian casuistry: the case-analysis
approach to the interpretation of general moral rules. Casuistry starts with
paradigm cases of how and when a given general moral rule should be applied,
and then reasons by analogy to cases in which the proper application of the
rule is less obvious e.g., a case in
which lying is the only way for a priest not to betray a secret revealed in
confession. The point of considering the series of cases is to ascertain the
morally relevant similarities and differences between cases. Casuistry’s heyday
was the first half of the seventeenth century. Reacting against casuistry’s
popularity with the Jesuits and against its tendency to qualify general moral
rules, Pascal penned a polemic against casuistry from which the term never
recovered see his Provincial Letters, 1656. But the kind of reasoning to which
the term refers is flourishing in contemporary practical ethics.
grice’s handwave. A sort of handwave can mean in a one-off act of
communication something. It’s the example he uses. By a sort of handwave, the
emissor communicates either that he knows the route or that he is about to
leave the addressee. Handwave signals. Code. Cfr. the Beatles’s HELP.
Explicatum: We need some body – Implicaturum: Not just Any Body. Why does this
matter to the philosopher? The thing is as follows. Grice was provoked by
Austin. To defeat Austin, Grice needs a ‘theory of communication.’ This theory
applies his early reflections on the intentional side to an act of
communication. This allows him to explain the explicatum versus the implicaturum.
By analysing each, Grice notes that there is no need to refer to linguistic
entities. So, the centrality of the handwave is an offshoot of his theory
designed to defeat Austin. Gice: “Blame Paget for my obsession with the hand.”
– Refs.: Paget, “Ta-ta: when the hands are full, use your mouth.” – H. P.
Grice, The utterer’s hand-wave.”
grice’s
creatures: the pirots. The programme he
calls ‘creature construction.’ “I could have used the ‘grice,’ which was
extinct by the time I was born.”
grice’s myth. Or Griceian myths – The Handbook of Griceian mythology. At
one point Grice suggests that his ‘genitorial programme’ a kind of
ideal-observer theory is meant as ‘didactic,’ and for expository purposes. It
seems easier, as , as Grice and Plato would agree, to answer a question
about the genitorial programme rather than use a first-person approach and
appeal to introspection. Grice refers to the social
contract as a ‘myth,’ which may still explain, as ‘meaning’ does. G. R. Grice
built his career on this myth. This is G. R. Grice, of the social-contract
fame. Cf. Strawson and Wiggins comparing Grice’s myth with Plato’s, and they
know what they are talking about.
grice’s
martian chronicle -- Twin-Earth – as
opposed to Mars -- a fictitious planet first visited by Hilary Putnam in a
thought experiment inspired by H. P. Grice in “Some remarks about the senses”
-- designed to show, among other things, that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the
head” “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 5. Twin-Earth is exactly like Earth with one
notable exception: ponds, rivers, and ice trays on Twin-Earth contain, not H2O,
but XYZ, a liquid superficially indistinguishable from water but with a
different chemical constitution. According to Putnam, although some inhabitants
of Twin-Earth closely resemble inhabitants of Earth, ‘water’, when uttered by a
Twin-Earthling, does not mean water. Water is H2O, and, on Twin-Earth, the word
‘water’ designates a different substance, XYZ, Twin-water. The moral drawn by
Putnam is that the meanings of at least some of our words, and the significance
of some of our thoughts, depend, in part, on how things stand outside our
heads. Two “molecular duplicates,” two agents with qualitatively similar mental
lives, might mean very different things by their utterances and think very
different thoughts. Although Twin-Earth has become a popular stopping-off place
for philosophers en route to theories of meaning and mental content, others
regard Twin-Earth as hopelessly remote, doubting that useful conclusions can be
drawn about our Earthly circumstances from research conducted there. Suppose that long-awaited invasion of the
Martians takes place, that they turn out to be friendly creatures and teach us
their language. We get on all right, except that we find no verb in their
language which unquestionably corresponds to our verb “see.” Instead we find
two verbs which we decide to render as “x” and “y”: we find that (in their
tongue) they speak of themselves as x-ing, and also as y-ing, things to be of
this and that color, size, and shape. Further, in physical appearance they are
more or less like ourselves, except that in their heads they have, one above
the other, two pairs of organs, not perhaps exactly like one another, but each
pair more or less like our eyes: each pair of organs is found to be sensitive
to light waves. It turns out that for them x-ing is dependent on the operation
of the upper organs, and y-ing on that of the lower organs. The question which
it seems natural to ask is this: Are x-ing and y-ing both cases of seeing, the
difference between them being that x-ing is seeing with the upper organs, and
y-ing is seeing with the lower organs? Or alternatively, do one or both of
these accomplishments constitute the exercise of a new sense, other than that
of sight? If we adopt, to distinguish the senses, a combination of suggestion
(I) with one or both of suggestions (III) or (IV), the answer seems clear: both
x-ing and y-ing are seeing, with different pairs of organs. But is the question
really to be settled so easily? Would we not in fact want to ask whether x-ing
something to be round was like y-ing it to be round, or whether when something
x-ed blue to them this was like or unlike its y-ing blue to them? If in answer
to such questions as these they said, “Oh no, there’s all the difference in the
world!” then I think we should be inclined to say that either x-ing or y-ing
(if not both) must be something other than seeing: we might of course be quite
unable to decide which (if either) was seeing. (I am aware that here those
whose approach is more Wittgensteinian than my own might complain that unless
something more can be said about how the difference between x-ing and y-ing
might “come out” or show itself in publicly observable phenomena, then the
claim by the supposed Martians that x-ing and y-ing are different would be one
of which nothing could be made, which would leave one at a loss how to
understand it. First, I am not convinced of the need for “introspectible”
differences to show themselves in the way this approach demands (I shall not
discuss this point further); second, I think that if I have to meet this
demand, I can. One can suppose that one or more of these Martians acquired the
use of the lower y-ing organs at some comparatively late date in their careers,
and that at the same time (perhaps for experimental purposes) the operation of
the upper x-ing organs was inhibited. One might now be ready to allow that a
difference between Some Remarks about the Senses 47 x-ing and y-ing would have
shown itself if in such a situation the creatures using their y-ing organs for
the first time were unable straightaway, without any learning process, to use
their “color”-words fluently and correctly to describe what they detected
through the use of those organs.) It might be argued at this point that we have
not yet disposed of the idea that the senses can be distinguished by an amalgam
of suggestions (I), (III), and (IV); for it is not clear that in the example of
the Martians the condition imposed by suggestion (I) is fulfilled. The thesis,
it might be said, is only upset if x-ing and y-ing are accepted as being the
exercise of different senses; and if they are, then the Martians’ color-words
could be said to have a concealed ambiguity. Much as “sweet” in English may
mean “sweet-smelling” or “sweet-tasting,” so “blue” in Martian may mean
“blue-x-ing” or “blue-y-ing.” But if this is so, then the Martians after all do
not detect by x-ing just those properties of things which they detect by y-ing.
To this line of argument there are two replies: (1) The defender of the thesis
is in no position to use this argument; for he cannot start by making the
question whether x-ing and y-ing are exercises of the same sense turn on the question
(inter alia) whether or not a single group of characteristics is detected by
both, and then make the question of individuation of the group turn on the
question whether putative members of the group are detected by one, or by more
than one, sense. He would be saying in effect, “Whether, in x-ing and y-ing,
different senses are exercised depends (inter alia) on whether the same
properties are detected by x-ing as by y-ing; but whether a certain x-ed
property is the same as a certain y-ed property depends on whether x-ing and
y-ing are or are not the exercise of a single sense.” This reply seems fatal.
For the circularity could only be avoided by making the question whether “blue”
in Martian names a single property depend either on whether the kinds of experience
involved in x-ing and y-ing are different, which would be to reintroduce
suggestion (II), or on whether the mechanisms involved in x-ing and y-ing are
different (in this case whether the upper organs are importantly unlike the
lower organs): and to adopt this alternative would, I think, lead to treating
the differentiation of the senses as being solely a matter of their mechanisms,
thereby making suggestion (I) otiose. (2) Independently of its legitimacy or
illegitimacy in the present context, we must reject the idea that if it is
accepted that in x-ing and y-ing different senses are being exercised, then
Martian color-words will be ambiguous. For ex hypothesi there will be a very
close correlation between things x-ing blue and their y-ing blue, far closer 48
H. P. Grice than that between things smelling sweet and their tasting sweet.
This being so, it is only to be expected that x-ing and y-ing should share the
position of arbiters concerning the color of things: that is, “blue” would be
the name of a single property, determinable equally by x-ing and y-ing. After
all, is this not just like the actual position with regard to shape, which is
doubly determinable, by sight and by touch? While I would not wish to quarrel
with the main terms of this second reply, I should like briefly to indicate why
I think that this final quite natural comparison with the case of shape will
not do. It is quite conceivable that the correlation between x-ing and y-ing ,
in the case supposed, might be close enough to ensure that Martian color-words
designated doubly determinable properties, and yet that this correlation should
break down in a limited class of cases: for instance, owing to some differences
between the two pairs of organs, objects which transmitted light of a particular
wavelength might (in standard conditions) x blue but y black. I suggest, then,
that given the existence of an object which, for the Martians, standardly x-ed
blue but y-ed black (its real color being undecidable), no conclusion could be
drawn to the effect that other objects do, or could as a matter of practiSome
Remarks about the Senses 51 cal possibility be made to, x one way and y another
way either in respect of color or in respect of some other feature within the
joint province of x-ing and y-ing. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Some remarks about the
senses,” in WoW --. Coady, “The senses of the Martians.”
Grice’s
folksy psychology:
Grice loved Ramsey, “But Ramsey was born before folk-psychology, so his
‘Theories’ is very dense.”” one sense, a putative network of principles
constituting a commonsense theory that allegedly underlies everyday
explanations of human behavior; the theory assigns a central role to mental
states like belief, desire, and intention. Consider an example of an everyday
commonsense psychological explanation: Jane went to the refrigerator because
she wanted a beer and she believed there was beer in the refrigerator. Like
many such explanations, this adverts to a so-called propositional attitude a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘believe’
plus a that-clause, whose intentional content is propositional. It also adverts
to a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘want’ plus a direct-object phrase,
whose intentional content appears not to be propositional. In another, related
sense, folk psychology is a network of social practices that includes ascribing
such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of
human behavior that advert to these states. The two senses need distinguishing
because some philosophers who acknowledge the existence of folk psychology in
the second sense hold that commonsense psychological explanations do not employ
empirical generalizations, and hence that there is no such theory as folk
psychology. Henceforth, ‘FP’ will abbreviate ‘folk psychology’ in the first
sense; the unabbreviated phrase will be used in the second sense. Eliminativism
in philosophy of mind asserts that FP is an empirical theory; that FP is
therefore subject to potential scientific falsification; and that mature
science very probably will establish that FP is so radically false that humans
simply do not undergo mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. One
kind of eliminativist argument first sets forth certain methodological
strictures about how FP would have to integrate with mature science in order to
be true e.g., being smoothly reducible to neuroscience, or being absorbed into
mature cognitive science, and then contends that these strictures are unlikely
to be met. Another kind of argument first claims that FP embodies certain
strong empirical commitments e.g., to mental representations with languagelike
syntactic structure, and then contends that such empirical presuppositions are
likely to turn out false. One influential version of folk psychological realism
largely agrees with eliminativism about what is required to vindicate folk
psychology, but also holds that mature science is likely to provide such
vindication. Realists of this persuasion typically argue, for instance, that
mature cognitive science will very likely incorporate FP, and also will very
likely treat beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes as states with
languagelike syntactic structure. Other versions of folkpsychological realism
take issue, in one way or another, with either i the eliminativists’ claims
about FP’s empirical commitments, or ii the eliminativists’ strictures about
how FP must mesh with mature science in order to be true, or both. Concerning
i, for instance, some philosophers maintain that FP per se is not committed to
the existence of languagelike mental representations. If mature cognitive
science turns out not to posit a “language of thought,” they contend, this
would not necessarily show that FP is radically false; instead it might only
show that propositional attitudes are subserved in some other way than via
languagelike representational structures. Concerning ii, some philosophers hold
that FP can be true without being as tightly connected to mature scientific
theories as the eliminativists require. For instance, the demand that the
special sciences be smoothly reducible to the fundamental natural sciences is
widely considered an excessively stringent criterion of intertheoretic
compatibility; so perhaps FP could be true without being smoothly reducible to
neuroscience. Similarly, the demand that FP be directly absorbable into
empirical cognitive science is sometimes considered too stringent as a criterion
either of FP’s truth, or of the soundness of its ontology of beliefs, desires,
and other propositional attitudes, or of the legitimacy of FP-based
explanations of behavior. Perhaps FP is a true theory, and explanatorily
legitimate, even if it is not destined to become a part of science. Even if
FP’s ontological categories are not scientific natural kinds, perhaps its
generalizations are like generalizations about clothing: true, explanatorily
usable, and ontologically sound. No one doubts the existence of hats, coats, or
scarves. No one doubts the truth or explanatory utility of generalizations like
‘Coats made of heavy material tend to keep the body warm in cold weather’, even
though these generalizations are not laws of any science. Yet another approach
to folk psychology, often wedded to realism about beliefs and desires although
sometimes wedded to instrumentalism, maintains that folk psychology does not
employ empirical generalizations, and hence is not a theory at all. One variant
denies that folk psychology employs any generalizations, empirical or
otherwise. Another variant concedes that there are folk-psychological
generalizations, but denies that they are empirical; instead they are held to
be analytic truths, or norms of rationality, or both at once. Advocates of
non-theory views typically regard folk psychology as a hermeneutic, or
interpretive, enterprise. They often claim too that the attribution of
propositional attitudes, and also the proffering and grasping of
folk-psychological explanations, is a matter of imaginatively projecting
oneself into another person’s situation, and then experiencing a kind of
empathic understanding, or Verstehen, of the person’s actions and the motives
behind them. A more recent, hi-tech, formulation of this idea is that the
interpreter “runs a cognitive simulation” of the person whose actions are to be
explained. Philosophers who defend folk-psychological realism, in one or
another of the ways just canvassed, also sometimes employ arguments based on
the allegedly self-stultifying nature of eliminativism. One such argument
begins from the premise that the notion of action is folk-psychological that a behavioral event counts as an action
only if it is caused by propositional attitudes that rationalize it under some
suitable actdescription. If so, and if humans never really undergo
propositional attitudes, then they never really act either. In particular, they
never really assert anything, or argue for anything since asserting and arguing
are species of action. So if eliminativism is true, the argument concludes,
then eliminativists can neither assert it nor argue for it an allegedly intolerable pragmatic paradox.
Eliminativists generally react to such arguments with breathtaking equanimity.
A typical reply is that although our present concept of action might well be
folk-psychological, this does not preclude the possibility of a future
successor concept, purged of any commitment to beliefs and desires, that could
inherit much of the role of our current, folk-psychologically tainted, concept
of action.
grice’s
computatio sive logica --
computability, roughly, the possibility of computation on a Turing machine. The
first convincing general definition, A. N. Turing’s 6, has been proved
equivalent to the known plausible alternatives, so that the concept of
computability is generally recognized as an absolute one. Turing’s definition
referred to computations by imaginary tape-processing machines that we now know
to be capable of computing the same functions whether simple sums and products
or highly complex, esoteric functions that modern digital computing machines
could compute if provided with sufficient storage capacity. In the form ‘Any
function that is computable at all is computable on a Turing machine’, this
absoluteness claim is called Turing’s thesis. A comparable claim for Alonzo
Church’s 5 concept of lcomputability is called Church’s thesis. Similar theses
are enunciated for Markov algorithms, for S. C. Kleene’s notion of general
recursiveness, etc. It has been proved that the same functions are computable
in all of these ways. There is no hope of proving any of those theses, for such
a proof would require a definition of ‘computable’ a definition that would simply be a further
item in the list, the subject of a further thesis. But since computations of
new kinds might be recognizable as genuine in particular cases, Turing’s thesis
and its equivalents, if false, might be decisively refuted by discovery of a
particular function, a way of computing it, and a proof that no Turing machine
can compute it. The halting problem for say Turing machines is the problem of
devising a Turing machine that computes the function hm, n % 1 or 0 depending
on whether or not Turing machine number m ever halts, once started with the
number n on its tape. This problem is unsolvable, for a machine that computed h
could be modified to compute a function gn, which is undefined the machine goes
into an endless loop when hn, n % 1, and otherwise agrees with hn, n. But this
modified machine Turing machine number
k, say would have contradictory
properties: started with k on its tape, it would eventually halt if and only if
it does not. Turing proved unsolvability of the decision problem for logic the
problem of devising a Turing machine that, applied to argument number n in
logical notation, correctly classifies it as valid or invalid by reducing the
halting problem to the decision problem, i.e., showing how any solution to the
latter could be used to solve the former problem, which we know to be
unsolvable. computer theory, the theory
of the design, uses, powers, and limits of modern electronic digital computers.
It has important bearings on philosophy, as may be seen from the many
philosophical references herein. Modern computers are a radically new kind of
machine, for they are active physical realizations of formal languages of logic
and arithmetic. Computers employ sophisticated languages, and they have
reasoning powers many orders of magnitude greater than those of any prior machines.
Because they are far superior to humans in many important tasks, they have
produced a revolution in society that is as profound as the industrial
revolution and is advancing much more rapidly. Furthermore, computers
themselves are evolving rapidly. When a computer is augmented with devices for
sensing and acting, it becomes a powerful control system, or a robot. To
understand the implications of computers for philosophy, one should imagine a
robot that has basic goals and volitions built into it, including conflicting
goals and competing desires. This concept first appeared in Karel C v apek’s
play Rossum’s Universal Robots 0, where the word ‘robot’ originated. A computer
has two aspects, hardware and programming languages. The theory of each is
relevant to philosophy. The software and hardware aspects of a computer are
somewhat analogous to the human mind and body. This analogy is especially
strong if we follow Peirce and consider all information processing in nature
and in human organisms, not just the conscious use of language. Evolution has
produced a succession of levels of sign usage and information processing:
self-copying chemicals, self-reproducing cells, genetic programs directing the
production of organic forms, chemical and neuronal signals in organisms,
unconscious human information processing, ordinary languages, and technical
languages. But each level evolved gradually from its predecessors, so that the
line between body and mind is vague. The hardware of a computer is typically
organized into three general blocks: memory, processor arithmetic unit and
control, and various inputoutput devices for communication between machine and
environment. The memory stores the data to be processed as well as the program
that directs the processing. The processor has an arithmetic-logic unit for
transforming data, and a control for executing the program. Memory, processor,
and input-output communicate to each other through a fast switching system. The
memory and processor are constructed from registers, adders, switches, cables,
and various other building blocks. These in turn are composed of electronic
components: transistors, resistors, and wires. The input and output devices
employ mechanical and electromechanical technologies as well as electronics.
Some input-output devices also serve as auxiliary memories; floppy disks and
magnetic tapes are examples. For theoretical purposes it is useful to imagine
that the computer has an indefinitely expandable storage tape. So imagined, a
computer is a physical realization of a Turing machine. The idea of an
indefinitely expandable memory is similar to the logician’s concept of an
axiomatic formal language that has an unlimited number of proofs and theorems.
The software of a modern electronic computer is written in a hierarchy of
programming languages. The higher-level languages are designed for use by human
programmers, operators, and maintenance personnel. The “machine language” is
the basic hardware language, interpreted and executed by the control. Its words
are sequences of binary digits or bits. Programs written in intermediate-level
languages are used by the computer to translate the languages employed by human
users into the machine language for execution. A programming language has
instructional means for carrying out three kinds of operations: data operations
and transfers, transfers of control from one part of the program to the other,
and program self-modification. Von Neumann designed the first modern
programming language. A programming language is general purpose, and an
electronic computer that executes it can in principle carry out any algorithm
or effective procedure, including the simulation of any other computer. Thus
the modern electronic computer is a practical realization of the abstract
concept of a universal Turing machine. What can actually be computed in
practice depends, of course, on the state of computer technology and its
resources. It is common for computers at many different spatial locations to be
interconnected into complex networks by telephone, radio, and satellite
communication systems. Insofar as users in one part of the network can control
other parts, either legitimately or illegitimately e.g., by means of a
“computer virus”, a global network of computers is really a global computer.
Such vast computers greatly increase societal interdependence, a fact of
importance for social philosophy. The theory of computers has two branches,
corresponding to the hardware and software aspects of computers. The
fundamental concept of hardware theory is that of a finite automaton, which may
be expressed either as an idealized logical network of simple computer
primitives, or as the corresponding temporal system of input, output, and
internal states. A finite automaton may be specified as a logical net of
truth-functional switches and simple memory elements, connected to one another
by computer theory computer theory idealized wires. These elements function
synchronously, each wire being in a binary state 0 or 1 at each moment of time
t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . Each switching element or “gate” executes a simple
truth-functional operation not, or, and, nor, not-and, etc. and is imagined to
operate instantaneously compare the notions of sentential connective and truth
table. A memory element flip-flop, binary counter, unit delay line preserves
its input bit for one or more time-steps. A well-formed net of switches and
memory elements may not have cycles through switches only, but it typically has
feedback cycles through memory elements. The wires of a logical net are of
three kinds: input, internal, and output. Correspondingly, at each moment of
time a logical net has an input state, an internal state, and an output state.
A logical net or automaton need not have any input wires, in which case it is a
closed system. The complete history of a logical net is described by a
deterministic law: at each moment of time t, the input and internal states of
the net determine its output state and its next internal state. This leads to
the second definition of ‘finite automaton’: it is a deterministic finite-state
system characterized by two tables. The transition table gives the next
internal state produced by each pair of input and internal states. The output
table gives the output state produced by each input state and internal state.
The state analysis approach to computer hardware is of practical value only for
systems with a few elements e.g., a binary-coded decimal counter, because the
number of states increases as a power of the number of elements. Such a rapid
rate of increase of complexity with size is called the combinatorial explosion,
and it applies to many discrete systems. However, the state approach to finite
automata does yield abstract models of law-governed systems that are of
interest to logic and philosophy. A correctly operating digital computer is a
finite automaton. Alan Turing defined the finite part of what we now call a
Turing machine in terms of states. It seems doubtful that a human organism has
more computing power than a finite automaton. A closed finite automaton
illustrates Nietzsche’s law of eternal return. Since a finite automaton has a
finite number of internal states, at least one of its internal states must
occur infinitely many times in any infinite state history. And since a closed
finite automaton is deterministic and has no inputs, a repeated state must be
followed by the same sequence of states each time it occurs. Hence the history
of a closed finite automaton is periodic, as in the law of eternal return.
Idealized neurons are sometimes used as the primitive elements of logical nets,
and it is plausible that for any brain and central nervous system there is a
logical network that behaves the same and performs the same functions. This
shows the close relation of finite automata to the brain and central nervous
system. The switches and memory elements of a finite automaton may be made
probabilistic, yielding a probabilistic automaton. These automata are models of
indeterministic systems. Von Neumann showed how to extend deterministic logical
nets to systems that contain selfreproducing automata. This is a very basic
logical design relevant to the nature of life. The part of computer programming
theory most relevant to philosophy contains the answer to Leibniz’s conjecture
concerning his characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator. He held
that “all our reasoning is nothing but the joining and substitution of
characters, whether these characters be words or symbols or pictures.” He
thought therefore that one could construct a universal, arithmetic language
with two properties of great philosophical importance. First, every atomic
concept would be represented by a prime number. Second, the truth-value of any
logically true-or-false statement expressed in the characteristica universalis
could be calculated arithmetically, and so any rational dispute could be
resolved by calculation. Leibniz expected to do the computation by hand with
the help of a calculating machine; today we would do it on an electronic
computer. However, we know now that Leibniz’s proposed language cannot exist,
for no computer or computer program can calculate the truth-value of every
logically true-orfalse statement given to it. This fact follows from a logical
theorem about the limits of what computer programs can do. Let E be a modern
electronic computer with an indefinitely expandable memory, so that E has the
power of a universal Turing machine. And let L be any formal language in which
every arithmetic statement can be expressed, and which is consistent. Leibniz’s
proposed characteristica universalis would be such a language. Now a computer
that is operating correctly is an active formal language, carrying out the
instructions of its program deductively. Accordingly, Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems for formal arithmetic apply to computer E. It follows from these
theorems that no program can enable computer E to decide of an arbitrary
statecomputer theory computer theory 166
166 ment of L whether or not that statement is true. More strongly,
there cannot even be a program that will enable E to enumerate the truths of
language L one after another. Therefore Leibniz’s characteristica universalis
cannot exist. Electronic computers are the first active or “live” mathematical
systems. They are the latest addition to a long historical series of
mathematical tools for inquiry: geometry, algebra, calculus and differential
equations, probability and statistics, and modern mathematics. The most
effective use of computer programs is to instruct computers in tasks for which
they are superior to humans. Computers are being designed and programmed to
cooperate with humans so that the calculation, storage, and judgment
capabilities of the two are synthesized. The powers of such humancomputer
combines will increase at an exponential rate as computers continue to become
faster, more powerful, and easier to use, while at the same time becoming
smaller and cheaper. The social implications of this are very important. The
modern electronic computer is a new tool for the logic of discovery Peirce’s
abduction. An inquirer or inquirers operating a computer interactively can use
it as a universal simulator, dynamically modeling systems that are too complex
to study by traditional mathematical methods, including non-linear systems.
Simulation is used to explain known empirical results, and also to develop new
hypotheses to be tested by observation. Computer models and simulations are
unique in several ways: complexity, dynamism, controllability, and visual
presentability. These properties make them important new tools for modeling and
thereby relevant to some important philosophical problems. A humancomputer
combine is especially suited for the study of complex holistic and hierarchical
systems with feedback cf. cybernetics, including adaptive goal-directed
systems. A hierarchical-feedback system is a dynamic structure organized into
several levels, with the compounds of one level being the atoms or building
blocks of the next higher level, and with cyclic paths of influence operating
both on and between levels. For example, a complex human institution has
several levels, and the people in it are themselves hierarchical organizations
of selfcopying chemicals, cells, organs, and such systems as the pulmonary and
the central nervous system. The behaviors of these systems are in general much
more complex than, e.g., the behaviors of traditional systems of mechanics.
Contrast an organism, society, or ecology with our planetary system as
characterized by Kepler and Newton. Simple formulas ellipses describe the
orbits of the planets. More basically, the planetary system is stable in the
sense that a small perturbation of it produces a relatively small variation in
its subsequent history. In contrast, a small change in the state of a holistic
hierarchical feedback system often amplifies into a very large difference in
behavior, a concern of chaos theory. For this reason it is helpful to model
such systems on a computer and run sample histories. The operator searches for
representative cases, interesting phenomena, and general principles of
operation. The humancomputer method of inquiry should be a useful tool for the
study of biological evolution, the actual historical development of complex
adaptive goal-directed systems. Evolution is a logical and communication
process as well as a physical and chemical process. But evolution is
statistical rather than deterministic, because a single temporal state of the
system results in a probabilistic distribution of histories, rather than in a
single history. The genetic operators of mutation and crossover, e.g., are
probabilistic operators. But though it is stochastic, evolution cannot be
understood in terms of limiting relative frequencies, for the important
developments are the repeated emergence of new phenomena, and there may be no
evolutionary convergence toward a final state or limit. Rather, to understand
evolution the investigator must simulate the statistical spectra of histories
covering critical stages of the process. Many important evolutionary phenomena
should be studied by using simulation along with observation and experiment.
Evolution has produced a succession of levels of organization: selfcopying
chemicals, self-reproducing cells, communities of cells, simple organisms,
haploid sexual reproduction, diploid sexuality with genetic dominance and
recessiveness, organisms composed of organs, societies of organisms, humans,
and societies of humans. Most of these systems are complex hierarchical
feedback systems, and it is of interest to understand how they emerged from
earlier systems. Also, the interaction of competition and cooperation at all
stages of evolution is an important subject, of relevance to social philosophy
and ethics. Some basic epistemological and metaphysical concepts enter into
computer modeling. A model is a well-developed concept of its object,
representing characteristics like structure and funccomputer theory computer
theory 167 167 tion. A model is similar
to its object in important respects, but simpler; in mathematical terminology,
a model is homomorphic to its object but not isomorphic to it. However, it is
often useful to think of a model as isomorphic to an embedded subsystem of the
system it models. For example, a gas is a complicated system of microstates of
particles, but these microstates can be grouped into macrostates, each with a
pressure, volume, and temperature satisfying the gas law PV % kT. The
derivation of this law from the detailed mechanics of the gas is a reduction of
the embedded subsystem to the underlying system. In many cases it is adequate
to work with the simpler embedded subsystem, but in other cases one must work
with the more complex but complete underlying system. The law of an embedded
subsystem may be different in kind from the law of the underlying system. Consider,
e.g., a machine tossing a coin randomly. The sequence of tosses obeys a simple
probability law, while the complex underlying mechanical system is
deterministic. The random sequence of tosses is a probabilistic system embedded
in a deterministic system, and a mathematical account of this embedding
relation constitutes a reduction of the probabilistic system to a deterministic
system. Compare the compatibilist’s claim that free choice can be embedded in a
deterministic system. Compare also a pseudorandom sequence, which is a
deterministic sequence with adequate randomness for a given finite simulation.
Note finally that the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics underlies the
deterministic system of mechanics. The ways in which models are used by goaldirected
systems to solve problems and adapt to their environments are currently being
modeled by humancomputer combines. Since computer software can be converted
into hardware, successful simulations of adaptive uses of models could be
incorporated into the design of a robot. Human intentionality involves the use
of a model of oneself in relation to others and the environment. A
problem-solving robot using such a model would constitute an important step
toward a robot with full human powers. These considerations lead to the central
thesis of the philosophy of logical mechanism: a finite deterministic automaton
can perform all human functions. This seems plausible in principle and is
treated in detail in Merrilee Salmon, ed., The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism:
Essays in Honor of Arthur W. Burks,0. A digital computer has reasoning and
memory powers. Robots have sensory inputs for collecting information from the
environment, and they have moving and acting devices. To obtain a robot with
human powers, one would need to put these abilities under the direction of a
system of desires, purposes, and goals. Logical mechanism is a form of
mechanism or materialism, but differs from traditional forms of these doctrines
in its reliance on the logical powers of computers and the logical nature of
evolution and its products. The modern computer is a kind of complex
hierarchical physical system, a system with memory, processor, and control that
employs a hierarchy of programming languages. Humans are complex hierarchical
systems designed by evolution with
structural levels of chemicals, cells, organs, and systems e.g., circulatory,
neural, immune and linguistic levels of genes, enzymes, neural signals, and
immune recognition. Traditional materialists did not have this model of a
computer nor the contemporary understanding of evolution, and never gave an
adequate account of logic and reasoning and such phenomena as goaldirectedness
and self-modeling.
conatum: Aristotle distinguishes three types of living beings:
vegetables, φυτά, which possess only the ability to nourish themselves τὸ
θϱεπτιϰόν; animals, ζαῷ, which possess the faculty of sensing τὸ αἰσθητιϰόν,
which opens onto that of desiring, τὸ ὀϱεϰτιϰόν, to orektikon, (desdideratum);
and man and — he says—any other similar or superior being, who possess in
addition the ability to think, “τὸ διανοητιϰόν τε ϰαὶ νοῦς.” -- De An., 414a
29-b.orme,
the technical Stoic definition of πάθος, viz. as a particular kind
of conation, or
impulse (ορμή). ... 4 ' This definition (amorem ipsum conatum amicitiae faeiendae
ex ... emotion and moral self-management in Galen's philosophical psychology', ..cōnātum , i, usu. in plur.: cōnāta , ōrum, n., v. conor.. The term is used by an the Wilde Reader at Oxford,
that Grice once followed – until he became a neo-Prichardian instead.(philosophy) The power or act which directs or impels to effort of any kind,
whether muscular or psychical. quotations 1899, George
Frederick Stout, A Manual of Psychology, page 234:Any pleasing sense-experience,
when it has once taken place, will, on subsequent occasions, give rise to
a conation, when its
conditions are only partially repeated...
grice’s
four conversational categories – the category of conversational mode: Only Kant would
call it function. While Grice could be jocular, in an English way, about the
number of maxims within each category – he surely would not like to joke as far
as to be cavalier about the NUMBER of categories: Four was the number of
functions from which the twelve categories rramify, Kant, or “Ariskant,” but
Grice takes the function for the category -- four is for Ariskantian Grice.
This is Aristotle’s hexis. This category posed a special conceptual problem to
Grice. Recall that his categories are invoked only by their power to generate
conversational implciata. But a conversational implicaturum is non-detachable.
That is, being based on universalistic principles of general rationality, it
cannot attach to an EXPRESSION, less so to the ‘meaning’ of an EXPRESSION: “if”
and “provided” are REALISATIONS of the concept of the conditionality. Now, the
conversational supra-maxim, ‘be perspicuous’ [sic], is supposed to apply NOT to
the content, or matter, but to the FORM. (Strictly, quantitas and qualitas
applies to matter, RELATIO applies to the link between at least two matters).
Grice tweaks things in such a way that he is happy, and so am I. This is a pun
on Aristkant’s Kategorie (Ammonius, tropos, Boëthius,
modus, Kant Modalitat). Gesichtspuncte der Modalität in assertorische,
apodiktische und problematische hat sich aus der Aristotelischen Eintheilung
hervorgebildet (Anal. Dr. 1, 2): 7@ợc gócois atv n 100 incozy h kỹ kvayxns
Úndozav û toù {VJÉZEo fai Úndozev: Doch geht diese Aristotelische Stelle
vielmehr auf die analogen objectiven Verhältnisse, als auf den subjectiven
Gewissheitsgrad. Der Zusatz Svvatóv, įvsezóuevov, és åviyans, jedoch auch eine
adverbiale Bestimmung wie taméws in dem Satze ý σελήνη ταχέως αποκαθίσταται,
heisst bei Ammonius τρόπος (zu περί ερμ. Cap. 12) und bei Boëthius modus. Kant
(Kritik der r. Vern. § 9-11; Prolegom. $ 21, Log. § 30) gründet die Eintheilung
nach der Modalität auf die modalen Kategorien: Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit,
Dasein und Nichtsein, Nothwendigkeit und Zufälligkeit, wobei jedoch die Zusammenstellung
der Unmöglichkeit, die eine negative Nothwendigkeit ist, mit der Möglichkeit,
und ebenso der Zufälligkeit, die das nicht als nothwendig erkannte Dasein
bezeichnet, mit der Nothwendigkeit eine Ungenauigkeit enthält: die Erkenntniss
der Unmöglichkeit ist nicht ein problematisches, sondern ein (negativ-)
apodiktisches Urtheil (was Kant in der Anwendung selbst anerkennt, indem er z.
B. Krit. der r. V. S. 191 die Formel: es ist unmöglich etc. als Ausdruck einer
apodiktischen Gewissheit betrachtet), und die Erkenntniss des Zufälligen ist
nicht ein apodiktisches, sondern ein assertorisches Urtheil. Ausserdem aber hat
Kant das subjective und objective Element in den Kategorien der Qualität und
Modalität nicht bestimmt genug unterschieden.
grice’s four conversational
categories – the category of conversational quality: Only Kant would
call it ‘function.’ While Grice could be cavalier about the number of maxims
falling under the category of conversational quality, he surely would not be
cavalier about the number of categories themselves. Four were the functions
from which the twelve categories ramify for Ariskant, and four were for Grice:
he takes the function from Kant, but the spirit from Aristotle. This is Aristotle’s universal, poiotes. This
was originally the desideratum of conversational candour. At that point, there
was no Kantian scheme of categories in the horizon. Candour Grice arbitrarily
contrasts with clarity – and so the desideratum of conversational candour
sometimes clashes with the desideratum of conversational clarity. One may not
be able to provide a less convoluted utterance (“It is raining”) but use the
less clear, but more candid, “It might be raining, for all I know.” A pun on
Aristkan’s Kategorie, poiotes, qualitas, Qualitat. Expressions which are in no way composite
signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state,
action, or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance are
'man' or 'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three
cubits long', of quality, such attributes as 'white', 'grammatical'.
grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational quantity: Only Kant would
call it function. While Grice could be cavalier about the number of maxims
falling under quantity, he was not about the number of categories itself. Four
was the number of functions out of which the twelve categories spring for
Ariskant, and four was for Grice. He takes the function (the letter) from Kant,
but the spirit from Aristotle. This is Aristotle’s universal, posotes. Grice
would often use ‘a fortiori,’ and then it dawned on him. “All I need is a
principle of conversational fortitude. This will give the Oxonians the
Graeco-Roman pedigree they deserve.’ a
pun on Ariskant’s Kategorie, posotes, quantitas, Quantitat. Grice expands this
as ‘quantity of information,’ or ‘informative content’ – which then as he
recognises overlaps with the category of conversational quality, because ‘false
information’ is a misnomer. Expressions which are in no way composite signify
substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action,
or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance are 'man' or
'the horse', of quantity, such terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three cubits
long'
grice’s four
conversational categories – the category of conversational relation: Only Kant would
call it function. While Grice could be cavalier about the number of maxims
under the category of relation, he was not about the number of categories: four
were the number of functions out of which the twelve categories spring for
Ariskant and four were for Grice: he takes the letter (function) from Kant, and
the spirit from Aristotle. This is Aristotle’s ‘pros ti.’ f there are
categories of being, and categories of thought, and categories of expression,
surely there is room for the ‘conversational category.’ A pun on Ariskant’s
Kategorie (pros ti, ad aliquid, Relation). Surely a move has to relate to the
previous move, and should include a tag as to what move will relate.
Expressions which are in no way composite signify substance, quantity, quality,
relation, place, time, position, state, action, or affection. To sketch my
meaning roughly, examples of substance are 'man' or 'the horse', of quantity,
such terms as 'two cubits long' or 'three cubits long', of quality, such
attributes as 'white', 'grammatical'. 'Double', 'half', 'greater', fall under
the category of relation.
grice’s predicament. S draws a pic- "one-off predicament"). ... Clarendon, 1976); and Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) ... But there is an obvious way of emending the
account. Grice points
out. ... Blackburn helpfully
suggests that we can cut through much of this complexity by ... The above
account is intended to capture the notion of one-off meaning. Walking in a forest, having gone some way
ahead of the rest of the party, I draw an arrow at a fork of a path, meaning
that those who are following me should go straight on. Gricean considerations may be safely ignored. Only when
trying to communicate by nonconventional means ("one-off predicament," Blackburn, 1984, chap. Blackburn's mission
is to promote the philosophy of language as a pivotal enquiry ... and
dismissed; the Gricean model
might be suitable to explain one-off acts.
The Gricean mechanism
with its complex communicative intentions has a clear point in what Blackburn calls “a one-off predicament” - a
situation in which an ...
grice’s shaggy-dog story: While Grice would like to say that it should be in the
range of a rational creature to refer and to predicate, what about the hand
wave? By his handwave, the emissor means that _HE_ (subject) is a knower of the
road (or roate), the predicate after the copula or that he, the emissor,
subject, is (the copula) about to leave his emissee – but there is nothing IN
THE MATTER (the handwave) that can be ‘de-composed’ like that. The FORM
attaches to the communicatum directly. This is strange, but not impossible, and
shows Grice’s programme. Because his idea is that a communicatum need not a
vehicile which is syntactically structured (as “Fido is shaggy”). This is the
story that Grice tells in his lecture. He uses a ‘shaggy-dog’ story to explain
TWO main notions: that of ‘reference’ or denotatio, and that of predicatio. He
had explored that earlier when discussing, giving an illustration “Smith is
happy”, the idea of ‘value,’ as correspondence, where he adds the terms for
‘denote’ and ‘predicatio,’ or actually, ‘designatio’ and ‘indicatio’, need to
be “explained within the theory.” In the utterance ‘Smith is happy,’ the
utterer DESIGNATES an item, Smith. The utterer also INDICATES some class,
‘being happy.’ Grice introduces a shorthand, ‘assign’, or ‘assignatio,’ previous
to the value-satisfaction, to involve both the ‘designatio’ and the
‘indicatio’. U assigns the item Smith to the class ‘being happy.’ U’s intention
involves A’s belief that U believes that “the item belongs to the class, or
that he ASSIGNS the item to the class. A predicate, such as
'shaggy,' in my shaggy-dog story, is a part of a bottom-up, or top-bottom, as I
prefer, analysis of this or that sentences, and a predicate, such as 'shaggy,'
is the only indispensable 'part,' or 'element,' as I prefer, since a
predicate is the only 'pars orationis,' to use the old phrase, that must
appear in every sentence. In a later lecture he ventures with ‘reference.’ Lewis
and Short have “rĕferre,” rendered as “to bear, carry, bring, draw, or give
back,” in a “transf.” usage, they render as “to make a reference, to refer
(class.),” asa in “de rebus et obscuris et incertis ad Apollinem censeo
referendum; “ad quem etiam Athenienses publice de majoribus rebus semper
rettulerunt,” Cic. Div. 1, 54, 122.” While Grice uses ‘Fido,’ he could have
used ‘Pegasus’ (Martin’s cat, as it happens) and apply Quine’s adage: we could
have appealed to the ex hypothesi unanalyzable, irreducible attribute of being
Pegasus, adopting, for its expression, the verb 'is-Pegasus', or 'pegasizes'. And
Grice could have played with ‘predicatio’ and ‘subjectio.’ Grice on subject.
Lewis and Short have “sūbĭcĭo,” (less correctly subjĭcĭo ; post-Aug.
sometimes sŭb- ), jēci, jectum, 3, v. a. sub-jacio. which they render as “to throw, lay, place,
or bring under or near (cf. subdo),” and in philosophy, “subjectum , i, n. (sc.
verbum), as “that which is spoken of, the foundation or subject of a
proposition;” “omne quicquid dicimus aut
subjectum est aut de subjecto aut in subjecto est. Subjectum est prima substantia,
quod ipsum nulli accidit alii inseparabiliter, etc.,” Mart. Cap. 4, § 361; App.
Dogm. Plat. 3, p. 34, 4 et saep.—.” Note that for Mart. Cap. the ‘subject,’
unlike the ‘predicate’ is not a ‘syntactical category.’ “Subjectum est prima
substantia,” The subject is a prote ousia. As for correlation, Grice ends up
with a reductive analysis. By uttering utterance-token V, the utterer U
correlates predicate P1 with (and only with) each member of P2 ≡ (∃R)(∃R') (1) U effects that (∀x)(R P1x ≡
x ∈ P1) and (2) U
intends (1), and (3) U intends that (∀y)(R'
P1y ≡ y ∈
P1), where R' P1 is an expression-type such that utterance-token V is a
sequence consisting of an expression-token p1 of expression-type P1 and an
expression-token p2 of expression-type P2, the R-co-relatum of which is a
set of which y is a member. And he is back with ‘denotare. Lewis and Short have
“dēnŏtare,” which they render as “to mark, set a mark on, with chalk, color,
etc.: “pedes venalium creta,”
It is interesting to trace Grice’s earliest investigations on this. Grice and
Strawson stage a number of joint seminars on topics related to the notions of
meaning, categories, and logical form. Grice and Strawson engage in systematic
and unsystematic philosophical exploration. From these discussions springs work
on predication and categories, one or two reflections of which are acknowledge
at two places (re: the reductive analysis of a ‘particular,’ “the tallest man
that did, does, or will exist” --) in Strawson’s “Particular and general” for
The Aristotelian Society – and “visible” as Grice puts it, but not
acknowledged, in Strawson’s “Individuals: an essay in descriptive
metaphysics.””
grice’s theory-theory: “I am perhaps not too happy with the word ‘theory,’ as
applied to this, but that’s Ramsey for you” (WoW: 285). Grice’s theory-theory: A theory of mind concerning how we come to know
about the propositional attitudes of others. It tries to explain the nature of
ascribing certain thoughts, beliefs, or intentions to other persons in order to
explain their actions. The theory-theory holds that in ascribing beliefs to
others we are tacitly (check) applying a theory that enables us to make
inferences about the beliefs behind the actions of others. The theory that is
applied is a set of rules embedded in folk psychology. Hence, to anticipate and
predict the behavior of others, one engages in an intellectual process moving by inference from one set of beliefs
to another. This position contrasts with another theory of mind, the simulation
theory, which holds that we need to make use of our own motivational and
emotional resources and capacities for practical reasoning in explaining
actions of others. “So called ‘theory-theorists’ maintain that the ability to
explain and predict behaviour is underpinned by a folk-psychological theory of
the structure and functioning of the mind – where the theory in question may be
innate and modularised, learned individually, or acquired through a process of
enculturation.” Carruthers and Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. Grice
needs a theory. For those into implicatura and conversation as rational
cooperation, when introducing the implicaturum he mentions ‘pre-theoretical
adequacy’ of the model. So he is thinking of the conversational theory as a
theory in the strict sense, with ‘explanatory’ and not merely taxonomical
power. So one task is to examine in which way the conversational theory is a
theory that explains, rather than merely ad hoc ex post facto commentary. Not so much for his approach to mean. He
polemises with Rountree, of Somerville, that you dont need a thory to analyse
mean. Indeed, you cannot have a theory to analyse mean, because mean is a
matter of intuition, not a theoretical concept. But Grice appeals to theory,
when dealing with willing. He knows what willing means because he relies on a
concept of folk-science. In this folk-science, willing is a theoretical
concept. Grice arrived at this conclusion by avoiding the adjective souly, and
seeing that there is no word to describe willing other than by saying it is a
psychoLOGICAL concept, i.e. part of a law within that theory of folk-science.
That law will include, by way of ramsified naming or describing willing as a
predicate-constant. Now, this is related to metaphysics. His liberal or
ecunmenical metaphysics is best developed in terms of his ontological marxism
presented just after he has expanded on this idea of willing as a theoretical
concept, within a law involving willing (say, Grices Optimism-cum-Pesimism
law), within the folk-science of psychology that explains his behaviour. For
Aristotle, a theoria, was quite a different animal, but it had to do with
contemplatio, hence the theoretical (vita contemplativa) versus the practical
(vita activa). Grices sticking to Aristotle’srare use of theory inspires him to
develop his fascinating theory of the theory-theory. Grice realised that there is no way to refer
to things like intending except with psychological, which he takes to mean,
belonging to a pscyhological theory. Grice was keen to theorise on
theorising. He thought that Aristotle’s first philosophy (prote
philosophia) is best rendered as Theory-theory. Grice kept using Oxonian
English spelling, theorising, except when he did not! Grice calls himself
folksy: his theories, even if Subjects to various types of Ramseyfication, are
popular in kind! And ceteris paribus! Metaphysical construction is
disciplined and the best theorising the philosopher can hope for! The way
Grice conceives of his theory-theory is interesting to revisit. A route by
which Grice hopes to show the centrality of metaphysics (as prote philosophia)
involves taking seriously a few ideas. If any region of enquiry is to be
successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be
expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of
theory. A characterisation of the nature and range of a possible kind of
theory θ is needed. Such a body of characterisation must itself
be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify
whatever requirement it lays down for any theory θ in
general. The characterisation must itself be expressible as a
theory θ, to be called, if you like, Grice politely puts it,
theory-theory, or meta-theory, θ2. Now, the specification and
justification of the ideas and material presupposed
by any theory θ, whether such account falls within the bounds of
Theory-theory, θ2 would be properly called prote philosophia (first
philosophy) and may turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as
belonging to the Subjects matter of metaphysics. It might, for example,
turn out to be establishable that any theory θ has to relate to a
certain range of this or that Subjects item, has to attribute to each item this
or that predicate or attribute, which in turn has to fall within one or another
of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead
to recognised metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of
application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of
categories. Met. , philosophical eschatology, and Platos Republic,
Thrasymachus, social justice, Socrates, along with notes on Zeno, and topics
for pursuit, repr.in Part II, Explorations in semantics and metaphysics
to WOW , metaphysics, philosophical eschatology, Platos Republic, Socrates,
Thrasymachus, justice, moral right, legal right, Athenian dialectic.
Philosophical eschatology is a sub-discipline of metaphysics concerned with
what Grice calls a category shift. Grice, having applied such a technique to
Aristotle’s aporia on philos (friend) as alter ego, uses it now to tackle
Socratess view, against Thrasymachus, that right applies primarily to morality,
and secondarily to legality. Grice has a specific reason to include this in his
WOW Grices exegesis of Plato on justice displays Grices take on the fact that
metaphysics needs to be subdivided into ontology proper and what he calls
philosophical eschatology, for the study of things like category shift and
other construction routines. The exploration of Platos Politeia thus becomes an
application of Grices philosophically eschatological approach to the item just,
as used by Socrates (morally just) and Thrasymachus (legally just). Grice has
one specific essay on Aristotle in PPQ. So he thought Plato merited his own
essay, too! Grices focus is on Plato’s exploration of dike. Grice is concerned
with a neo-Socratic (versus neo-Thrasymachean) account of moral justice as conceptually
(or axiologically) prior to legal justice. In the proceeding, he creates
philosophical eschatology as the other branch to metaphysics, along with good
ol ontology. To say that just crosses a categorial barrier (from the moral
to the legal) is to make a metaphysical, strictly eschatological,
pronouncement. The Grice Papers locate the Plato essay in s. II, the Socrates essay in s. III, and the Thrasymachus essay, under social
justice, in s. V. Grice is well aware that in his account of fairness, Rawls
makes use of his ideas on personal identity. The philosophical elucidation of
fairness is of great concern for Grice. He had been in touch with such
explorations as Nozicks and Nagels along anti-Rawlsian lines. Grices ideas on
rationality guide his exploration of social justice. Grice keeps revising the
Socrates notes. The Plato essay he actually dates. As it happens, Grices most
extensive published account of Socrates is in this commentary on Platos
Republic: an eschatological commentary, as he puts it. In an entertaining
fashion, Grice has Socrates, and neo-Socrates, exploring the logic and grammar
of just against the attack by Thrasymachus and neo-Thrasymachus. Grices point
is that, while the legal just may be conceptually prior to the moral just, the
moral just is evaluationally or axiologically prior. Refs.: There is a specific
essay on ‘theorising’ in the Grice Papers, but there are scattered sources
elsewhere, such as “Method” (repr. in “Conception”), BANC.
grice’s
three-year-old’s guide to Russell’s theory of types, with an advice to parents
by Strawson: Grice put
forward the empirical hypothesis that a three-year old CAN understand Russell’s
theory of types. “In more than one way.” This brought confusion in the
household, with some members saying they could not – “And I trust few of your
tutees do!” Russell’s influential solution to the problem of logical paradoxes.
The theory was developed in particular to overcome Russell’s paradox, which
seemed to destroy the possibility of Frege’s logicist program of deriving
mathematics from logic. Suppose we ask whether the set of all sets which are
not members of themselves is a member of itself. If it is, then it is not, but
if it is not, then it is. The theory of types suggests classifying objects,
properties, relations, and sets into a hierarchy of types. For example, a class
of type 0 has members that are ordinary objects; type 1 has members that are
properties of objects of type 0; type 2 has members that are properties of the
properties in type 1; and so on. What can be true or false of items of one type
can not significantly be said about those of another type and is simply
nonsense. If we observe the prohibitions against classes containing members of
different types, Russell’s paradox and similar paradoxes can be avoided. The
theory of types has two variants. The simple theory of types classifies
different objects and properties, while the ramified theory of types further
sorts types into levels and adds a hierarchy of levels to that of types. By
restricting predicates to those that relate to items of lower types or lower
levels within their own type, predicates giving rise to paradox are excluded.
The simple theory of types is sufficient for solving logical paradoxes, while
the ramified theory of type is introduced to solve semantic paradoxes, that is,
paradoxes depending on notions such as reference and truth. “Any expression
containing an apparent variable is of higher type than that variable. This is
the fundamental principles of the doctrines of types.” Russell, Logic and
Knowledge. Grice’s commentary in “In defense
of a dogma,” The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
grice’s
complementary class: the class of all
things not in a given class. For example, if C is the class of all red things,
then its complementary class is the class containing everything that is not
red. This latter class includes even non-colored things, like numbers and the
class C itself. Often, the context will determine a less inclusive
complementary class. If B 0 A, then the complement of B with respect to A is
A B. For example, if A is the class of
physical objects, and B is the class of red physical objects, then the complement
of B with respect to A is the class of non-red physical objects.
griceism. Gricese. At Oxford, it was usual to refer to Austin’s
idiolect as Austinese. In analogy with Grecism, we have a Gricism, a Griceian
cliché. Cf. a ‘grice’ and ‘griceful’ in ‘philosopher’s lexicon.’ Gricese is a
Latinism, from -ese, word-forming element, from Old French -eis (Modern French -ois, -ais), from Vulgar Latin, from Latin -ensem, -ensis "belonging
to" or "originating in."
grecianism: why was Grice obsessed with Socrates’s convesations? He
does not say. But he implicates it. For the Athenian dialecticians, it is all a
matter of ta legomena. Ditto for the Oxonian dialecticians. Ta legomena becomes
ordinary language. And the task of the philosopher is to provide reductive
analysis of this or that concept in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. Cf. Hospers. Grices review of the history of philosophy (Philosophy
is but footnotes to Zeno.). Grice enjoyed Zenos answer, What is a friend? Alter
ego, Allego. ("Only it was the other Zeno." Grice tried to apply the
Socratic method during his tutorials. "Nothing like a heartfelt dedication
to the Socratic art of mid-wifery, seeking to bring forth error and to strangle
it at birth.” μαιεύομαι (A.“μαῖα”), ‘to serve as a midwife, act a; “ἡ
Ἄρτεμις μ.” Luc. D Deor.26.2. 2. cause delivery to take place, “ἱκανὴ ἔκπληξις
μαιεύσασθαι πρὸ τῆς ὥρας” Philostr. VA1.5. 3. c. acc., bring to the birth,
Marin.Procl.6; ὄρνιθας μ. hatch chickens, Anon. ap. Suid.; αἰετὸν κάνθαρος
μαιεύσομαι, prov. of taking vengeance on a powerful enemy, Ar. Lys.695 (cf.
Sch.). 4. deliver a woman, esp. metaph. in Pl. of the Socratic method, Tht.
149b. II. Act., Poll. 4.208, Sch. OH.4.506. Pass., τὰ ὑπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μαιευθέντα
brought into the world by me, Pl. Tht. 150e, cf. Philostr.VA5.13. Refs.: the
obvious references are Grice’s allusions to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno,
The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
grosseteste: Grice was a
member of the Grosseteste Society. Like Grice’s friend, G. J. Warnock,
Grosseteste was chancellor of Oxford. Only that by the time of Warnock, the
monarch is the chancellor by default, so “Warnock had to allow to be called
‘vice-chancelor’ to Elizabeth II.” “I would never have read Aristotle had it
not been by this great head that grosseteste (“Greathead” is a common surname
in Suffolk).” – H. P. Grice. English philosopher who began life on the bottom
rung of feudal society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential
figures in pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, obtaining an “M. A.,”
like Grice. Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de
Vere, of Hereford. Grosseteste associated with the elite at Hereford, several
of whose members were part of an advanced philosophical tradition. It was a
centre for the study of liberal arts. This explains his interest in dialectics.
After a sojourn in Paris, he becomes the first chancellor of Oxford. He was a secular
lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It
was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Grecian an unusual endeavour for an Oxonian schoolman
then. He later moved to Lincoln. As a
scholar, Grosseteste is an original thinker who used Aristotelian and
Augustinian theses as points of departure. Grosseteste (or “Greathead,” as he
was called by the town – if not the gown) believes, with Aristotle, that sense
is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense is our discovery of
the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believes,
with Augustine, that light plays an important role in creation. Thus he
maintained that God produced the world by first creating prime matter (“materia
prima”) from which issued a point of light lux, the first corporeal form or
power, one of whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this
light resulted in extension or tri-dimensionality in the form of the nine
concentric celestial spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air,
water, and earth. According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place
in accordance with laws of mathematical proportionality geometry. Everything,
therefore, is a manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently
indispensable to science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste
employs to support his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the De luce, and the De lineis, angulis et
figuris. He worked in areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology.
Grosseteste is one of the first to take an interest in and introduce into the
Oxford curriculum newly recovered Aristotelian texts, along with commentaries
on them. His work and interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible,
and languages profoundly influenced Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of
the Franciscan order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas.
Grice’s
grue and grellow, -- and bleen: H. P. Grice was fascinated by Goodman’s
‘grue’ paradox and kept looking for the crucial implicaturum. “The paradox is
believed to be mainly as arising within the theory of induction, but I’ve seen
Strawson struggling with gruesome consequences in his theory of deduction,
too.” According to Nelson Goodman, “a philosopher from the New World,” every
intuitively acceptable inductive argument, call it A, may be mimicked by
indefinitely many other inductive arguments
each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as acceptable,
yet each nonetheless intuitively *unacceptable*, and each yielding a conclusion
contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently many and
varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined which is the
only circumstance in which A is of interest. “Goodman then asks us to suppose an
intuitively acceptable inductive argument.”A1 every hitherto observed EMERALD
is GREEN; therefore, every emerald is green. Now introduce the totally
unnatural colour predicate ‘grue’ – a portmanteau of blue and green – as in
Welsh ‘glas’ -- where for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal interval T
an object is ‘grue’ provided it has the property of being green and first
examined before T OR blue and NOT first
examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: A2 every hitherto
observed EMERALD is GRUE; therefore, every emerald is grue. The premise is
true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively unacceptable. If
there is an emerald UNexamined before T, he conclusion of A2 says that this
emerald is blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that every emerald is green!
Granted, other counter-intuitive competing arguments could be given, e.g.: A3. Every
hitherto observed emerald is grellow; therefore, every emeralds is grellow. where
an object is ‘grellow’ provided it is green and located on the earth or yellow
otherwise. It would seem, therefore, that some restriction on induction is
required. “Goodman’s alleged of induction offers two challenges. First, state
the restriction i.e., demarcate the
intuitively acceptable inductions from the unacceptable ones, in some general
way, without constant appeal to intuition.”“Second, justify our preference for
the one group of inductions over the other.”“These two parts of the paradox
are, alas, often conflated.”But it is at least conceivable that one might solve
the analytical, demarcative part without solving the justificatory part, and,
perhaps, vice versa. It will not do to rule out, a priori gruesome” variances
in nature. H2O varies in its physical state along the parameter of temperature.
If so, why might not one emerald vary in colour along the parameter of time of
first examination? One approach to the problem of restriction is to focus on
the conclusions of inductive arguments e.g., every emerald is green, every
emerald is grue and to distinguish those which may legitimately so serve called
“projectible hypotheses” from those which may not. The question then arises
whether only non-gruesome hypotheses those which do not contain gruesome
predicates are projectible. Aside from the task of defining ‘gruesome
predicate’ which could be done structurally relative to a preferred language,
the answer is no. Consider the predicate ‘x is solid and less than 0; C, or liquid
and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or gaseous and more than 100; C.’This is
gruesome on any plausible structural account of gruesomeness. Note the
similarity to the ‘grue’ equivalent: green and first examined before T, or blue
and not first examined before T. Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is
pure H2O at one atmosphere of pressure save that which is in a transitional
state, i.e., melting/freezing or boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C, we
happily project the hypothesis that all non-transitional water falls under the
above gruesome predicate. Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection
about non-transitional water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses i water at less than 0; C is solid, ii water
at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and iii water at more than
100; C is gaseous we note that iiii are
all supported there are known positive instances; whereas if we rewrite the
gruesome projection about the emerald as a conjunction of non-gruesome
hypotheses i* every emerald first
examined before T is green, and ii* every emerald NOT first examined before T
is blue we note that ii* is as yet
unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of
non-gruesome hypotheses, each of which is supported.
grundnorm: Grice knows about
the ground and the common ground – and then there’s the ground norm -- also
called basic norm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal
validity of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide,
e.g., that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The
validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social
fact such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some group within a
society. Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must
be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The
idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen.
H
H:
SUBJECT INDEX
H: NAME INDEX – ITALIAN
H: NAME INDEX – ITALIAN
DON’T
EXPECT AN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHER HERE.
H:
NAME INDEX – ENGLISHMEN (Oxonian philosophy dons)
HAMPSHIRE
HARE
HART
bradley’s
thatness: :The investing of
the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904’ If thought
asserted the existence of any content which was not an actual or possible
object of thought—certainly that assertion in my judgment would contradict
itself. But the Other which I maintain, is not any such content, nor is it
another separated “ what,” nor in any case do I suggest that it lies outside
intelligence. Everything, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, and
must be called intelligible. This is certain; but, if so, what becomes of the
Other? If we fall back on the mere “ that,” thatness itself seems a distinction
made by thought. And we have to face this difficulty: If the Other exists, it
must be something; and if it is nothing, it certainly does not exist. There is only one way to get rid
of contradiction, and that way is by dissolution. Instead of one subject
distracted, we get a larger subject with distinctions, and so the tension is
removed. We have at first A, which possesses the qualities c and b,
inconsistent adjectives which collide; and we go on to produce harmony by
making a distinction within this subject. That was really not mere A, but
either a complex within A, or (rather here) a wider whole in which A is
included. The real subject is A + D; and this subject contains the
contradiction made harmless by division, since A is c and D is b. This is the
general principle, and I will attempt here to apply it in particular. Let us
suppose the reality to be X (abcdefg . . .), and that we are able only to get
partial views of this reality. Let us first take such a view as “ X (ab) is b.”
This (rightly or wrongly) we should probably call a true view. For the content
b does plainly belong to the subject; and, further, the appearance also—in
other words, the separation of b in the predicate—can partly be explained. For,
answering to this separation, we postulate now another adjective in the subject:
let us call it *. The “ thatness,” the psychical existence of the predicate,
which at first was neglected, has now also itself been included in the subject.
We may hence write the subject as X (ab*); and in this way we seem to avoid
contradiction. Let us go further on the same line, and, having dealt with a
truth, pass next to an error. Take the subject once more as X (abcde . . .),
and let us now say “ X (ab) is d.”
To be different from another is to have already transcended one’s own
being; and all finite existence is thus incurably relative and ideal. Its
quality falls, more or less, outside its particular “ thatness”; and, whether
as the same or again as diverse, it is equally made what it is by community
with others.
hic,
the hæc, and the hoc, the – “Scotus was being clever. Since he wanted an
abstract noun, and abstract nouns are feminine in both Greek and Latin
(‘ippotes, eqquitas’), he chose the feminine ‘haec,’ to turn into a ‘thisness.’
But we should expand his rather sexist view to apply to ‘hic’ and ‘hoc,’ too.
In Anglo-Saxon, there is only ‘this,’ with ‘thisness’ first used by Pope
George. The OED first registers ‘thisness’ in 1643.” – cf. OED: "It is at its such-&-suchness,
at its
character -- in other words, at the
_universal_ in it -- that we have to
look. the first cite in the
OED for 'thisness' also features 'thatness': "thisness,” from
"this" + "-ness": rendering ‘haecceitas,’ the quality of
being 'this' (as distinct from anything else): = haecceity. First cite:
"It is evident that [...] THISness, and THATness belong[...] not to matter
by itself, but onely as [matter] is distinguished & individuated by the
form." The two further quotes for 'thisness' being: 1837 Whewell Hist
Induct Sc 1857 I 244: "Which his school called ‘HAECcceity’ – from the
feminine form of the demonstrative masculine ‘hic,’ in Roman, neutre ‘hoc’
(Scotus uses the femine because ‘-ity- is a feminine ending) -- or ‘thisness.’",
and 1895 Rashdall Universities II 532: "An individuating form called by
the later Scotists its ‘haecceitas’ or its `thisness'"). "The investing of the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904 868/2. -- OED, 'thatness'. Trudgill writes in _The Dialects of England_
(Oxford: Blackwell), that Grice would often consult (he was from Harborne and
had a special interest in this – “I seem to have lost my dialect when I moved
to Corpus.” The 'this'-'that' demonstrative system is a two-way system which
distinguishes between things which are distant and things which are near.
Interestingly, however, a number of traditional dialects in England (if not
Oxford) differ from this system in having what Grice called a Griceian _three_-way
distinction. The Yorkshire dialect, for example, has ‘this’ (sing., near),
‘thir’ (pl. near), ‘that’ (sing. Medial) ‘tho’ (plural, medial), thon (sing.
distal) and ‘thon’ (pl., distal). The Mercian Anglian dialect has ‘these’
(sing. near), ‘theys’ (plural, near), ‘that’ (sing. medial), ‘they’ (pl.,
medial), ‘thik’ (sing./pl., distal). “The northern dialect is better in that it
distinguishes between the singular and the plural form for the distal, unlike
the southern dialect which has ‘thik’ for either.” Grice. Still, Grice likes the
sound of ‘thik’ and quotes from his friend M. Wakelin, _The Southwest of England_.
"When I awoke one May day morn/I found an urge within me born/To see the
beauteous countryside/That's all round wher'I do bide./So I set out wi' dog
& stick,/ My head were just a trifle thick./But good ole' fresh air had his
say/& blowed thik trouble clean away." -- B. Green, in _The Dorset
Year Book_. Dorset: Society of Dorset Men. “Some like Russell, but Bradley’s MY
man.” – H. P. Grice: Grice: "Russell is
pretentious; Bradley, an English angel, is not!" "Bradley can use 'thatness' freely; Russell uses it after
Bradley and artificially."
all the rest of the
watery bulk : but return back those few drops from whence they were
taken, and the glass-full that even now had an individuation by itself,
loseth that, and groweth one and the same with the other main stock : yet
if you fill your glass again, wheresoever you take it up, so it be
of the same uniform bulk of water you had before, it is the same glassfuU
of water that you had. But as I said before, this example fitteth
entirely no more than the other did. In such abstracted speculations,
where we must consider matter without form, (which hath no actual being,)
we must not expect adequated examples in nature. But enough is said to
make a speculative man see, that if God should join the soul of a
lately dead man, (even whilst his dead corpse should lie en- tire in his
windingsheet here,) unto a body made of earth, taken from some mountain in
America; it were most true and certain, that the body he should then live
by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death, and
late resurrection. It is evident, that sameness, thisness, and
that- ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general indiffer-
ence runneth through it all,) but only as it is distinguished and
individuated by the form. Which in our case, whensoever the same soul
doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and body.”
(Browne, 1643). Grice. Corbin says that English is such a
plastic language, “unlike Roman,” but then there’s haec, and hæcceitas -- Duns
Scotus, J., Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He
lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still
venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of
being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to
demonstrate God as the Infinite Being revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”,
whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God
fashioned each creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally
distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of
its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both
objectively real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for
scientific knowledge that Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought
many of Augustine’s insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the
mainstream of the Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s
“supersufficient potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be
reconciled with Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the
controDuhem thesis Duns Scotus, John 247
247 versial principle that “whatever is moved is moved by another.”
Paradoxically, Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies
prove the rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only
rational faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of
creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting
determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with
active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the will, acting “with
reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature” and “will”
represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding
roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is
his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or
“affection”: one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows
the will with an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and actualization of
self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other
natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively
according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this “affection for
justice” inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom
from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be
supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity, inclining us to love
God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the
virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source
of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive
intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a
hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological
condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual
intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such
as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham,
Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology,
nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance
material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through
the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct
peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We
know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary
conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion
and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John
Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual
intuition to explain our “experience of God.”
haecceity from Latin haec, ‘this’, 1 loosely, thisness; more
specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an
existent entity; or 2 an individual essence, a property an object has
necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the
individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the
history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated
with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was discussed
in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves as a
primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In the
seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which Duns
Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of an
individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics
uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Duns
Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities
in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate
particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual
world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a
consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its
haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only
the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds.
A further corollary since the possession
of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence
involved in the individual essence of any complex object is the doctrine of mereological essentialism:
every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of
particular proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed
or replaced. Grice was more familiar with the thatness than the thisness
(“Having had to read Bradley for my metaphysics paper!”).
hales: from Alexander of
Halesowen, Salop (on the border with Worcs.).. Grice called William of Occam
“Occam,” William of Sherwood, “Shyrewood,” and Alexander of Hales “Hales,” –
why, I wish people would call me “Harborne,” and not Grice!” – Grice. English
Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor Irrefragabilis. The first to teach
theology by lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis
on speculative theology initiated the golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander
wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels; his chief works include his
Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum, Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset
frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales. Alexander did not complete the Summa
fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV ordered the Franciscans to complete the
Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of theology in 1222, Alexander played an
important role in the history of Paris, writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens
scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate the peace between England and
France. He gave up his position as canon of Lichfield and archdeacon of
Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first Franciscan master of theology; his
was the original Franciscan chair of theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans,
his most prominent disciples include St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of
Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he resigned his chair in theology
near the end of his life. Hales wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics,
on the multiplicity of being, that Grice found fascinating. Vide “Summa halensis.”
hampshireism: His second wife was from the New World. His first wife
wasn’t. He married Renée Orde-Lees, the daughter of the very English Thomas
Orde-Lees, in 1961, and had two children, a son, Julian, and a daughter. To add
to the philosophers’ mistakes. There’s Austin (in “Plea for Excuses” and “Other
Minds”), Strawson (in “Truth” and “Introduction to Logical Theory,” and “On
referring”), Hart (in conversation, on ‘carefully,”), Hare (“To say ‘x is good’
is to recommend x”) and Hampshire (“Intention and certainty”). For Grice, the
certainty is merely implicated and on occasion, only. Cited by Grice as a member of the play group.
Hampshire would dine once a week with Grice. He would discuss and find very
amusing to discuss with Grice on post-war Oxford philosophy. Unlike Grice,
Hampshire attended Austin’s Thursday evening meetings at All Souls. Grice wrote
“Intention and uncertainty” in part as a response to Hampshire and Hart,
Intention and certainty. But Grice brought the issue back to an earlier
generation, to a polemic between Stout (who held a certainty-based view) and
Prichard.
hare: r. m. cited by H.
P. Grice, “Hare’s neustrics”. b.9, English philosopher who is one of the most
influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of
prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then
served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of
war in Burma. In 7 he took a position at Balliol and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the of Oxford in 6. On
retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the of Florida 393. His major books are Language
of Morals 3, Freedom and Reason 3, Moral Thinking 1, and Sorting Out Ethics 7.
Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other
leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 8 Hare and Critics,
eds. Seanor and Fotion. According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature
of our moral concepts reveals that nonironic judgments about what one morally
ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are
subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are
prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply
with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal
prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for
them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences.
Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other
people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen
to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for
themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of
not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new
preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What
we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this
amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral
judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like
most other utilitarians, he argued that the best way to maximize utility is to
have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian
dispositions such as dispositions not to
hurt others or steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special
responsibility for one’s own family, and so on. Then there’s Hare’s
phrastic: It is convenient to take Grice mocking Hare in Prolegomena. “To say
‘x is good’ is to recommend x.’ An implicaturum: annullable: “x is good but I don’t recommend it.” Hare
was well aware of the implicaturum. Loving Grice’s account of ‘or,’ Hare gives
the example: “Post the letter: therefore; post the letter or burn it.” Grice
mainly quotes Hare’s duet, the phrastic and the neustic, and spends some time
exploring what the phrastic actually is. He seems to prefer ‘radix.’ But then
Hare also has then the ‘neustic,’ that Grice is not so concerned with since he
has his own terminology for it. And for Urmson’s festschrift, Hare comes up
with the tropic and the clistic. So each has a Griceian correlate. Then there’s Hareian supervenience: a dependence
relation between properties or facts of one type, and properties or facts of
another type. In the other place, G. E. Moore, for instance, holds that the
property intrinsic value is dependent in the relevant way on certain non-moral
properties. Moore did not employ the expression ‘supervenience’. As Moore puts
it, “if a given thing possesses any kind of intrinsic value in a certain
degree, not only must that same thing
possess it, under all circumstances, in the same degree, but also anything exactly
like it, must, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same degree”
(Philosophical Studies, 2). The concept of supervenience, as a relation between
properties, is essentially this: A poperties of type A is supervenient (or
better, as Grice prefesrs, supervenes) on a property of type B if and only if
two objects cannot differ with respect to their A-properties without also
differing with respect to their B-properties. Properties that allegedly are
supervenient on others are often called consequential properties, especially in
ethics; the idea is that if something instantiates a moral property, then it
does so in virtue of, i.e., as a non-causal consequence of, instantiating some
lower-level property on which the moral property supervenes. In another,
related sense, supervenience is a feature of discourse of one type, vis-à-vis
discourse of another type. ‘Supervenience’ is so used by Hare. “First, let us
take that characteristic of “good” which has been called its ‘supervenience.’”
Grice: “Hare has a good ear for the neologism: he loved my ‘implicature,’ and
used in an essay he submitted to “Mind,” way before I ventured to publish the
thing!” – “Suppose that we say, “St. Francis is a good man.” It is logically
impossible to say this and to maintain at the same time that there might have
been another man placed exactly in the same circumstances as St. Francis, and
who behaved in exactly the same way, but who differed from St. Francis in this
respect only, that it is NOT the case that this man is a good man.” (“The
Language of Morals”). Here the idea is that it would be a misuse of moral
language, a violation of the “logic of moral discourse,” to apply ‘good’ to one
thing but not to something else exactly similar in all pertinent non-moral
respects. Hare is a meta-ethical irrealist. He denies that there are moral
properties or facts. So for him, supervenience is a ‘category of expression,’ a
feature of discourse and judgment, not a relation between properties or facts
of two types. The notion of supervenience has come to be used quite widely in
metaphysics and philosophical philosophy, usually in the way explained above.
This use is heralded by Davidson in articulating a position about the relation
between a physical property and a property of the ‘soul,’ or statet-ypes, that
eschews the reducibility of mental properties to physical ones. “Although the
position I describe denies there are psycho-physical laws, it is consistent
with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient,
or plainly supervene on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be
taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects
but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some
mental respects without altering in some physical respects. Dependence or
supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or
definition. “Mental Events.” A variety of supervenience theses have been
propounded in metaphysics and philosophical psychology, usually although not
always in conjunction with attempts to formulate metaphysical positions that
are naturalistic, in some way, without being strongly reductionistic, if
reductive. E. g. it is often asserted that mental properties and facts are supervenient
on neurobiological properties, and/or on physicochemical properties and facts.
And it is often claimed, more generally, that all properties and facts are
supervenient on the properties and facts of the kind described by physics. Much
attention has been directed at how to formulate the desired supervenience
theses, and thus how to characterize supervenience itself. A distinction has
been drawn between weak supervenience, asserting that in any single possible
world w, any two individuals in w that differ in their A-properties also differ
in their B-properties; and strong supervenience, asserting that for any two
individuals i and j, either within a single possible world or in two distinct
ones, if i and j differ in A-properties then they also differ in Bproperties.
It is sometimes alleged that traditional formulations of supervenience, like
Moore’s or Hare’s, articulate only weak supervenience, whereas strong
supervenience is needed to express the relevant kind of determination or
dependence. It is sometimes replied, however, that the traditional
natural-language formulations do in fact express strong supervenience and that formalizations expressing mere weak
supervenience are mistranslations. Questions about how best to formulate
supervenience theses also arise in connection with intrinsic and non-intrinsic
properties. For instance, the property being a bank, instantiated by the brick
building on Main Street, is not supervenient on intrinsic physical properties
of the building itself; rather, the building’s having this social-institutional
property depends on a considerably broader range of facts and features, some of
which are involved in subserving the social practice of banking. The term
‘supervenience base’ is frequently used to denote the range of entities and
happenings whose lowerlevel properties and relations jointly underlie the
instantiation of some higher-level property like being a bank by some
individual like the brick building on Main Street. Supervenience theses are
sometimes formulated so as to smoothly accommodate properties and facts with
broad supervenience bases. For instance, the idea that the physical facts
determine all the facts is sometimes expressed as global supervenience, which
asserts that any two physically possible worlds differing in some respect also
differ in some physical respect. Or, sometimes this idea is expressed as the
stronger thesis of regional supervenience, which asserts that for any two
spatiotemporal regions r and s, either within a single physically possible world
or in two distinct ones, if r and s differ in some intrinsic respect then they
also differ in some intrinsic physical respect. H. P. Grice, “Hare on
supervenience.” H. P. Grice, “Supervenience in my method in philosophical
psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.” H. P. Grice, “Supervenience and the
devil of scientism.”
harris: philosopher of language – classical. Grice adored him, and
he was quite happy that few knew about Harris! Cf. Tooke. Cf. Priestley and
Hartley – all pre-Griceian philosohers of language that are somehow outside the
canon, when they shouldn’t. They are very Old World, and it’s the influence of
the New World that has made them sort of disappear! That’s what Grice said!
hart: h. l. a. – cited
by Grice, “Hare on ‘carefully.’ Philosopher of European ancestry born in
Yorkshire, principally responsible for the revival of legal and political
philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence,
Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he
was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous
mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John
Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can
deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary
connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law 1 he
critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from
a political community’s “sovereign” some
person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to
no other human and developed the more
complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed
that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules,
restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent
“power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a
legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and
authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as
“rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the
system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of
determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of
answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’
claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are
available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing
the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first
book was an influential study with A. M. Honoré of Causation in the Law 9. His
inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in
Jurisprudence” 3, initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in
Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory 2 and in
Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy 3. He defended liberal public policies.
In Law, Liberty and Morality 3 he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a
society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might
be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law 5 and in Punishment and Responsibility
8, Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of
crime and punishment.
Hartley, British philosopher. Although the
notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the
founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities
between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system
independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay 1699 1745.
Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the
mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting
association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by
Bain. His major work, Observations on Man 1749, pictured mental events and
neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause
mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished like Hume between
sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s
conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance
within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain
corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the
brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of
association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for
the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring
together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between
simultaneous association, the link between ideas that occur at the same
harmony, preestablished Hartley, David 362
AM 362 moment, and successive
association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive
associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward
associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental
study of memory.
Hartley, Joseph – philosopher. Hartmann: philosopher
who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The
most important of his essays is “Philosophie des Unbewussten.” For Hartmann
both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute
“thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in
natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life.
Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and
the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.”
The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation
of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas
indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the
unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed
considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative
idealist and philosopher of science defending vitalism and attacking
mechanistic materialism; his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of
redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism
that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his
earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as
“transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was tr. into
English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 4. There is little doubt that his
metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the
unconscious mind.
hazzing: under conjunctum, we see that the terminology is varied.
There is the copulatum. But Grice prefers to restrict to use of the copulatum
to izzing and hazzing. Oddly Grice sees hazzing as a predicate which he
formalizes as Hxy. To be read x hazzes y, although sometimes he uses ‘x hazz
y.’ Vide ‘accidentia.’ For Grice the role of métier is basic since it shows
finality in nature. Homo sapiens, qua pirot, is to be rational.
Plactivm
-- hedonism,
the view that pleasure including the absence of pain is the sole intrinsic good
in life. The hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons
inevitably do seek pleasure psychological hedonism; that, questions of
psychology aside, morally we should seek pleasure ethical hedonism; or that we
inevitably do, and ought to, seek pleasure ethical and psychological hedonism
combined. Psychological hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms.
One may hold, e.g., that all motivation is based on the prospect of present or
future pleasure. More plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices
of future actions are based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the
thought of doing one act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism with roots in empirical psychology is that the attainment of pleasure is the
primary drive of a wide range of organisms including human beings and is
responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations.
Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological
hedonism to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of
psychological hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable but not false. As a value theory a theory of
what is ultimately good, ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other
of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of
moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their
consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by
the amount of pleasure they produce for all sentient beings; on some
formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for
one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded
to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of
claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious
issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure with prominent candidates including
philosophical and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of
beauty, and activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” Most
philosophical hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not
espoused sensual pleasure. Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is
whether such different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality as
well as quantity. Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say,
e.g., that the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to
those of watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we
departing from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really
based on pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism both psychological and ethical exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for
both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows.
Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life of love, of child rearing, of
work seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for
reasons other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we
always in fact seek or value only pleasure, but also dubious that the best way
to achieve pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns
happiness and its relation to pleasure.
In the tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something
like well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end
of all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than
‘pleasure’, insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling,
whereas ‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to
be normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought
that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve,
certain things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of
course, such achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings;
but, just as characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment
of activities where, as Aristotle first
pointed out, there are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing
of the activity itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the
natural end of all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend
much support to hedonism psychological
or ethical.
plathegel
and ariskant
– Hegel, “one of the most influential and systematic of the idealists” (Grice),
also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life
and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son
of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His
mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology
seminary or Stift attached to the at
Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became
friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the
great genius of G. Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he
accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797
for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the
freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to
establish himself in a position. In
1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the town of Jena, already widely known as the
home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few
years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays
had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture,
and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the G. Romantics
many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European
Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still
enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity,
“absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal
political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of
new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that
legion of G. intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority
of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and
legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena,
however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of
Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the
critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the
work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more
influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s
search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated
and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way,
was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness,
interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite
prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free,
self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and
other agents. In his early years at Jena especially before Schelling left in
1803, he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic
philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world
and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on
commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible,
principles. In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a
“Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.” After 1803,
however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication,
what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of
its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books.
Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 365 AM 365 what would be eventually called The
Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil.
During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard
would give birth to his illegitimate son. Ludwig was born in February 1807. And
he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day
Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In
conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively
more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast,
heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology
to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there
is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether
it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem,
Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles
to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal
kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his career at Jena in those times looked out of
the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in
the following year began an eight-year stint 180816 as headmaster and
philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium or secondary school at Nürnberg. During this
period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also
wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to
as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which
attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all
possible kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair
in philosophy at the of Heidelberg,
where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the
“logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated categories
in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding and
evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more
prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in
1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence
over G. letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing
political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial
book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the were later published as his philosophy of
history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy.
Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to
a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events.
Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as
much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence
any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic
position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms
of genuine social solidarity in the G. states and in modernity generally, and
his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of
the day their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority, led
him to various attempts to make use of the Grecian polis and classical art, as
well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk
religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also
regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless
classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and
confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus
rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come
to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the
legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all
sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern
criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully
understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an
attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would
experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content
of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is
as much alienation Entfremdung as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the
product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results
in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally
unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed.
Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the
Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of
self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine
“speculation” roughly Schelling’s position and began to champion a unique kind
of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all
the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he
also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions
were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of
various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be
some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere
partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive
teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing
attempts in the development of other human practices.Through understanding the
“logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications
of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the
potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such
influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position
became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter
of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition
of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the
“whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also
always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was
the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of
human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective
self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy
the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what
is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the
logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and
political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves
that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite
or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity
theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in
the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to
understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs
together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and
“logical” sense. In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion
lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself
would be over. Several elements in this general position have inspired a good
deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had
to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought:
the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption
means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to
other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into
existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With
respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common
tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are
also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming
such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is
simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by
individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the
priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or
Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the
assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be
“coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue
against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual
will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the
formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular
intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance
that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a
“logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at
self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute
Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt
to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman
transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance
all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or
reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and
thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on
one another even for their very identity, even while they maintain their
independence, is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a
dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of
past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in
philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, idealism/materialism,
universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such
incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete
perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his
more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not
be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination,
independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual
opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued
for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about
the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism.
Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical
imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding it
could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions, and that the
“moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to
which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms
of morality could be overcome in ethical life Sittlichkeit, those modern social
institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true “objects” of a
rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society, and the state,
did not require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but
were rather experienced as the “realization” of our individual free will. It
has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational
self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for
happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators have noted
that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was
as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt
the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves.
In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to
claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible
when thought together within some higher-order “Notion” Begriff that resolved
or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could
actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a “positing” of such a
notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own “negating,” and that it
was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a
sublation, or Aufhebung a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in G.
‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’. This claim for a dialectical
development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely criticized in
Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual
change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops
the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or
related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s
Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize
anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt that both
“negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,” and then
that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of
“Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to
show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of
the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of syllogistic and
finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand
design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy.
Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the
popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” with
Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in
1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and
were never used as terms of art by Hegel. Others have argued that the tensions
Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader
analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions
are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the
empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic
conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised
questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied
in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about
the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations Kant had written that
“intuitions without concepts are blind”. Hegel charges that Kant did not draw
sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he
should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was
given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is
confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot
be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given
particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368
AM 368 be apprehended in the
first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance
with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has
much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that
particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of
concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural
world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s
Encyclopedia. This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are
really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental substance,
and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of conceptual
necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by Hermann
Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth century. It is
a much-disputed reading. Such critics are especially concerned with the
implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the great modern
opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to this same
logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in and only in
the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s political
philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis of a
fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life
the categorically distinct realm of political life in modernity, or the
independence of the “State” from the social world of private individuals
engaged in competition and private association “civil society”. But, on the
other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of these domains in the
State, or that individuals could only be said to be free in allegiance to a
State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most criticized aspects of his
philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently target the underlying intention
behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long insistence on finding some basic unity
among the many fragmented spheres of modern thought and existence, and his
demand that this unity be articulated in a discursive account, that it not be
merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated in edifying speculation.
PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of any such intimations of a
whole for modern experience, and have argued that, with the destruction of the
premodern world, we simply have to content ourselves with the disconnected,
autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his lecture courses these basic
themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the basic institutions of
cultural history. History itself is treated as fundamentally political history,
and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major epochs of political history are
claimed to be as they were because of the internal inadequacies of past epochs,
all until some final political semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art
is treated equally developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through
“classical,” to the most intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic
subjectivity, romantic art. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody
these themes in some of the most controversial ways, since Hegel often treats
religion and its development as a kind of picture or accessible
“representation” of his own views about the relation of thought to being, the
proper understanding of human finitude and “infinity,” and the essentially
social or communal nature of religious life. This has inspired a characteristic
debate among Hegel scholars, with some arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of
religion shows that his own themes are essentially religious if an odd,
pantheistic version of Christianity, while others argue that he has so
Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively religious
left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the
post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there
was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on
political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic
defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were
interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional
Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to
change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss 180874,
Feuerbach 180472, Bruno Bauer 180982, and Arnold Ruge 180380, who emphasized
the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion,
rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary
political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the
productive activity of human spirit eventually focusing on labor rather than
intellectual and cultural life. Strauss himself characterized the fight as
between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was
critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of
Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially
during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen
Jahrbücher 1844. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
369 AM
369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and
utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part
of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up
some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of
issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy.
The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were
Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in
many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be
a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all
particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell
waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism
and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and
in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel or what was left
of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions. In G.y, Hegel has
continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes
itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or
“critical theory” group especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And he has
been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a
brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel
in the 0s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty
and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but
his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human
selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices
and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism.
Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in
“communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to
conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for
many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive
tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social
nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often
interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.
Heno-theism, allegiance to one supreme
deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry,
incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground
between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods
save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic
phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities albeit condemning their
worship, en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of
progress from polytheism through henotheism to monotheism is a rationalizing
construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any
historical religion, including that of ancient Israel.
heraclitus fl. c.500 B.C., Grice
on Heraclitus: They told me,
Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,/They brought me bitter news to hear and
bitter tears to shed./I wept as I remembered how often you and I/Had tired the
sun with talking and sent him down the sky./And now that thou art lying, my
dear old Carian guest,/A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,/Still
are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;/For Death, he taketh all
away, but them he cannot take. Grecian philosopher. A transition figure between the
Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in
the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical
transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire
changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single
source or arche of natural substances, namely fire. But he also observes that
natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold,
wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and
without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war
is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden
harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the
attunement of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view
is that there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the
underlying unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the
transience of physical substances and the importance of processes and
qualities. Moreover, his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of
process and opposition; thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and
the reality of process. Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and
Xenophanes for doing research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should
listen to the logos, which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a
principle of order and knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain
ignorant of it, like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All
things come to pass according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or
at least its expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into
sections on cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however,
he did not provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrammatic remarks
meant to reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language.
Although he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may
have stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth
century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine
according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge
of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the
sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine
of flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in
Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles.
interpretatum:
h
“While ‘heremneia’ sounds poetic and sweet, ‘interpretatio’ sounds thomistic
and rough!” – H. P. Grice. “Plus ‘hermeneia is metaphorical.’ hermeneia: hermeneutics,
the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that
starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly
with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance
in its historical development and finally became a philosophical position in
twentieth-century G. philosophy. There are two competing positions in
hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or
Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows
Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between
interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood.
Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really”
meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the
law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the
law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this
process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the
interpretation of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the
unproblematic everyday understanding and communication cannot be assumed.
Schleiermacher’s analysis of understanding and expression related to texts and
speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific
methodology. This emphasis on methodology continues in nineteenth-century
historicism and culminates in Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in
a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly
verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method
of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human
beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology
for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the
nineteenth century was the recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed
by Schleiermacher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of
parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the
interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger
sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the
circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped.
Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize
this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing it as a feature of all knowledge
and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer the method of the human sciences but
“universal,” and interpretation is part of the finite and situated character of
all human knowing. “Philosophical hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian
foundationalism in epistemology and Enlightenment universalism in ethics,
seeing science as a cultural practice and prejudices or prejudgments as
ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it emphasizes understanding as
continuing a historical tradition, as well as dialogical openness, in which
prejudices are challenged and horizons broadened.
hermetism, also hermeticism, a
philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that
human salvation depends on revealed knowledge gnosis of God and of the human
and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian
version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth
century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Grecian and Latin is a
product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature
exist in Grecian, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of
a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record
hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but
surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy,
magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early
Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan
philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic
figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had
its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists
of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the
Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of
Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Grecian discourses in the main body
of the Corpus Hermeticum as distinct from the many Grecian fragments preserved
by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino. Ficino was willing to move so quickly to
Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the
“ancient theology” prisca theologia, a tradition of pagan revelation that ran
parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through
Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he
called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which
he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation.
The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples,
Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and
others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Grecian
Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the
nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline
in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614
that the Grecian Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of
primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion
with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of
the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures
even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science,
so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd,
whose opponents Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi turned away from the Hermetica and
similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth
century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom,
but he was then rediscovered by G. students of Christianity and Hellenistic
religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 4.
The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 654 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J.
Festugière.
heuristics, a rule or
solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby
reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an
algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a
heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may provide
an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between domains; the
resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about system design.
Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of possible
positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal move.
Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate moves,
relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the king,
material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria simplifies the
problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic guides,
reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result will be
the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for competent
chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of judgmental
infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically violates
standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size, and
correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental
heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree
to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category.
Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited
validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased
and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of
these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative
standard.
habitus:
hexis
Grecian, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’, a good or bad condition,
disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ Latin habitus, is
misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely
repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of
mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain
way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the
view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the
Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions pathe and faculties
dunamis of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he
sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His
capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his
makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed
him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise,
one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be
said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are
commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of
‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories.
Bradwardine, fellow of Merton.
tisberi -- Heytesbury: w. also
called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi before, English philosopher and
chancellor of Oxford . He wrote Sophismata “Sophisms”, Regulae solvendi
sophismata “Rules for Solving Sophisms”, and De sensu composito et diviso “On
the Composite and Divided Sense”. Other works are doubtfully attributed to him.
Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and
Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford
Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington
but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to
logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion,
acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most
influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work
makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical
impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially
strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely
and commented on many times.
hierarchy, a division of mathematical
objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their
complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the
“descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of
classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G
hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability
(most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies
(the arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals (identified
with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations between this
work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J. Addison. Other
sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of logic. All these
so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they divide a class of
mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural well-founded ordering
(e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a sense specific to the
hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they contain. What follows
describes several hierarchies from the study of definability. (For more
historical and mathematical information see Descriptive Set Theory by Y.
Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1) Hierarchies of formulas.
Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and ‘D’. Given a set B of
formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that treats the members of B
as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of formulas have been
defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1 . . . Qmumw when
u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all ‘E’, m M 1, and w
1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1, . . . , Qm all
‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of arithmetic.
Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i) Let L0 % the
first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place
predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for successor,
addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound variables are all
first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free second-order variables
(ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B % the set of bounded
formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using connectives and bounded
quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w) and Du(u ‹ t & w).
(ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic (formed from L0 by
allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of formulas in which no
second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . , um as above to be
second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets. (i) The Arithmetic
Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing ‘a real’) A : A 1 P0
n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the standard model of arithmetic
(i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0, etc., and with the first-order
variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a formula of L0 in Pn
[respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n Thus: In fact, all
these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the reals simple enough
to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Example: ‘Dy x % y ! y’ defines the set
even of even natural numbers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0 1; even is also
defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1. In fact, S0 1 %
the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class of recursive
reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy reflects
complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in terms of a
notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of comparative
computational complexity; but there are connections between these
classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a
free second-order variable in defining sentences). Example: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y
% x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that
set 1 S0 1.The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and
only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order
variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn
(respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a
set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted
0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have
analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions.The subscripted ‘n’ in
‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is
extended “upward” into the transfinite by the ramified-analytical hierarchy.
Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the
class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order
variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes ramification.
For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % UaThe above hierarchies arise in arithmetic.
Similar hierarchies arise in pure set theory; e.g. by transferring the
“process” that produced the ramified analytical hierarchy to pure set theory we
obtain the constructible hierarchy, defined by Gödel in his 1939 monograph on
the continuum hypothesis.
Grice’s
formalists:
Hilbert, D. – G. mathematician and philosopher of mathematics. Born in
Königsberg, he also studied and served on the faculty there, accepting Weber’s
chair in mathematics at Göttingen in 1895. He made important contributions to
many different areas of mathematics and was renowned for his grasp of the
entire discipline. His more philosophical work was divided into two parts. The
focus of the first, which occupied approximately ten years beginning in the
early 1890s, was the foundations of geometry and culminated in his celebrated
Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899). This is a rich and complex work that pursues a
variety of different projects simultaneously. Prominent among these is one
whose aim is to determine the role played in geometrical reasoning by
principles of continuity. Hilbert’s interest in this project was rooted in
Kantian concerns, as is confirmed by the inscription, in the Grundlagen, of
Kant’s synopsis of his critical philosophy: “Thus all human knowledge begins
with intuition, goes from there to concepts and ends with ideas.” Kant believed
that the continuous could not be represented in intuition and must therefore be
regarded as an idea of pure reason – i.e., as a device playing a purely
regulative role in the development of our geometrical knowledge (i.e., our
knowledge of the spatial manifold of sensory experience). Hilbert was deeply
influenced by this view of Kant’s and his work in the foundations of geometry
can be seen, in large part, as an attempt to test it by determining whether (or
to what extent) pure geometry can be developed without appeal to principles
concerning the nature of the continuous. To a considerable extent, Hilbert’s
work confirmed Kant’s view – showing, in a manner more precise than any Kant
had managed, that appeals to the continuous can indeed be eliminated from much
of our geometrical reasoning. The same basic Kantian orientation also governed
the second phase of Hilbert’s foundational work, where the focus was changed
from geometry to arithmetic and analysis. This is the phase during which
Hilbert’s Program was developed. This project began to take shape in the 1917
essay “Axiomatisches Denken.” (The 1904 paper “Über die Grundlagen der Logik
und Arithmetik,” which turned away from geometry and toward arithmetic, does
not yet contain more than a glimmer of the ideas that would later become
central to Hilbert’s proof theory.) It reached its philosophically most mature
form in the 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,” the 1926 address “Die Grundlagen
der Mathematik,” and the somewhat more popular 1930 paper “Naturerkennen und
Logik.” (From a technical as opposed to a philosophical vantage, the classical
statement is probably the 1922 essay “Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste
Mitteilung.”) The key elements of the program are (i) a distinction between
real and ideal propositions and methods of proof or derivation; (ii) the idea
that the so-called ideal methods, though, again, playing the role of Kantian
regulative devices (as Hilbert explicitly and emphatically declared in the 1925
paper), are nonetheless indispensable for a reasonably efficient development of
our mathematical knowledge; and (iii) the demand that the reliability of the
ideal methods be established by real (or finitary) means. As is well known,
Hilbert’s Program soon came under heavy attack from Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems (especially the second), which have commonly been regarded as showing
that the third element of Hilbert’s Program (i.e., the one calling for a
finitary proof of the reliability of the ideal systems of classical
mathematics) cannot be carried out. Hilbert’s Program, a proposal in the
foundations of mathematics, named for its developer, the German
mathematician-philosopher David Hilbert, who first formulated it fully in the
1920s. Its aim was to justify classical mathematics (in particular, classical
analysis and set theory), though only as a Kantian regulative device and not as
descriptive science. The justification thus presupposed a division of classical
mathematics into two parts: the part (termed real mathematics by Hilbert) to be
regulated, and the part (termed ideal mathematics by Hilbert) serving as
regulator. Real mathematics was taken to consist of the meaningful, true
propositions of mathematics and their justifying proofs. These proofs –
commonly known as finitary proofs – were taken to be of an especially
elementary epistemic character, reducing, ultimately, to quasi-perceptual
intuitions concerning finite assemblages of perceptually intuitable signs
regarded from the point of view of their shapes and sequential arrangement.
Ideal mathematics, on the other hand, was taken to consist of sentences that do
not express genuine propositions and derivations that do not constitute genuine
proofs or justifications. The epistemic utility of ideal sentences (typically
referred to as ideal propositions, though, as noted above, they do not express
genuine propositions at all) and proofs was taken to derive not from their
meaning and/or evidentness, but rather from the role they play in some formal
algebraic or calculary scheme intended to identify or locate the real truths.
It is thus a metatheoretic function of the formal or algebraic properties
induced on those propositions and proofs by their positions in a larger
derivational scheme. Hilbert’s ideal mathematics was thus intended to bear the
same relation to his real mathematics as Kant’s faculty of pure reason was
intended to bear to his faculty of understanding. It was to be a regulative
device whose proper function is to guide and facilitate the development of our
system of real judgments. Indeed, in his 1925 essay “Über das Unendliche,”
Hilbert made just this point, noting that ideal elements do not correspond to
anything in reality but serve only as ideas “if, following Kant’s terminology,
one understands as an idea a concept of reason which transcends all experience
and by means of which the concrete is to be completed into a totality.” The
structure of Hilbert’s scheme, however, involves more than just the division of
classical mathematics into real and ideal propositions and proofs. It uses, in
addition, a subdivision of the real propositions into the problematic and the
unproblematic. Indeed, it is this subdivision of the reals that is at bottom
responsible for the introduction of the ideals. Unproblematic real
propositions, described by Hilbert as the basic equalities and inequalities of
arithmetic (e.g., ‘3 ( 2’, ‘2 ‹ 3’, ‘2 ! 3 % 3 ! 2’) together with their
sentential (and certain of their bounded quantificational) compounds, are the
evidentially most basic judgments of mathematics. They are immediately
intelligible and decidable by finitary intuition. More importantly, they can be
logically manipulated in all the ways that classical logic allows without
leading outside the class of real propositions. The characteristic feature of
the problematic reals, on the other hand, is that they cannot be so
manipulated. Hilbert gave two kinds of examples of problematic real
propositions. One consisted of universal generalizations like ‘for any
non-negative integer a, a ! 1 % 1 ! a’, which Hilbert termed hypothetical
judgments. Such propositions are problematic because their denials do not bound
the search for counterexamples. Hence, the instance of the (classical) law of
excluded middle that is obtained by disjoining it with its denial is not itself
a real proposition. Consequently, it cannot be manipulated in all the ways
permitted by classical logic without going outside the class of real
propositions. Similarly for the other kind of problematic real discussed by
Hilbert, which was a bounded existential quantification. Every such sentence
has as one of its classical consequents an unbounded existential quantification
of the same matrix. Hence, since the latter is not a real proposition, the
former is not a real proposition that can be fully manipulated by classical
logical means without going outside the class of real propositions. It is
therefore “problematic.” The question why full classical logical manipulability
should be given such weight points up an important element in Hilbert’s
thinking: namely, that classical logic is regarded as the preferred logic of
human thinking – the logic of the optimally functioning human epistemic engine,
the logic according to which the human mind most naturally and efficiently
conducts its inferential affairs. It therefore has a special psychological
status and it is because of this that the right to its continued use must be
preserved. As just indicated, however, preservation of this right requires
addition of ideal propositions and proofs to their real counterparts, since
applying classical logic to the truths of real mathematics leads to a system
that contains ideal as well as real elements. Hilbert believed that to justify
such an addition, all that was necessary was to show it to be consistent with
real mathematics (i.e., to show that it proves no real proposition that is
itself refutable by real means). Moreover, Hilbert believed that this must be
done by finitary means. The proof of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem in
1931 brought considerable pressure to bear on this part of Hilbert’s Program
even though it may not have demonstrated its unattainability.
“what-is-hinted”
-- hint hinting. Don’t expect Cicero
used this. It’s Germanic and related to ‘hunt,’ to ‘seize.’ As if you throw
something in the air, and expect your recipient will seize it. Grice spends
quite a long section in “Retrospective epilogue” to elucidate “Emissor E
communicates that p via a hint,” versus “Emissor E communicates that p via a
suggestion.” Some level of explicitness (vide candour) is necessary. If it is
too obscure it cannot be held to have been ‘communicated’ in the first place!
Cf. Holdcroft, “Some forms of indirect communication” for the Journal of
Rhetoric. Grice had to do a bit of linguistic botany for his “E implicates that
p”: To do duty for ‘imply,’ suggest, indicate, hint, mean, -- “etc.” indirectly
or implicitly convey.
hippocrates, philosopher from Cos. Some
sixty treatises survive under his name, but it is doubtful whether he was the
author of any of them. The Hippocratic corpus contains material from a wide
variety of standpoints, ranging from an extreme empiricism that rejected all
grand theory (On Ancient Medicine) to highly speculative theoretical physiology
(On the Nature of Man, On Regimen). Many treatises were concerned with the
accurate observation and classification of diseases (Epidemics) rather than
treatment. Some texts (On the Art) defended the claims of medicine to
scientific status against those who pointed to its inaccuracies and conjectural
status; others (Oath, On Decorum) sketch a code of professional ethics. Almost
all his treatises were notable for their materialism and rejection of
supernatural “explanations”; their emphasis on observation; and their concern
with the isolation of causal factors. A large number of texts are devoted to
gynecology. The Hippocratic corpus became the standard against which later
doctors measured themselves; and, via Galen’s rehabilitation and extension of
Hippocratic method, it became the basis for Western medicine for two millennia.
Historia -- historicism, the doctrine that
knowledge of human affairs has an irreducibly historical character and that
there can be no ahistorical perspective for an understanding of human nature
and society. What is needed instead is a philosophical explication of
historical knowledge that will yield the rationale for all sound knowledge of
human activities. So construed, historicism is a philosophical doctrine
originating in the methodological and epistemological presuppositions of
critical historiography. In the mid-nineteenth century certain German thinkers
(Dilthey most centrally), reacting against positivist ideals of science and
knowledge, rejected scientistic models of knowledge, replacing them with
historical ones. They applied this not only to the discipline of history but to
economics, law, political theory, and large areas of philosophy. Initially
concerned with methodological issues in particular disciplines, historicism, as
it developed, sought to work out a common philosophical doctrine that would
inform all these disciplines. What is essential to achieve knowledge in the
human sciences is to employ the ways of understanding used in historical
studies. There should in the human sciences be no search for natural laws;
knowledge there will be interpretive and rooted in concrete historical
occurrences. As such it will be inescapably perspectival and contextual
(contextualism). This raises the issue of whether historicism is a form of
historical relativism. Historicism appears to be committed to the thesis that
what for a given people is warrantedly assertible is determined by the
distinctive historical perspective in which they view life and society. The
stress on uniqueness and concrete specificity and the rejection of any appeal
to universal laws of human development reinforce that. But the emphasis on
cumulative development into larger contexts of our historical knowledge puts in
doubt an identification of historicism and historical relativism. The above
account of historicism is that of its main proponents: Meinecke, Croce,
Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim. But in the twentieth century, with
Popper and Hayek, a very different conception of historicism gained some
currency. For them, to be a historicist is to believe that there are
“historical laws,” indeed even a “law of historical development,” such that
history has a pattern and even an end, that it is the central task of social
science to discover it, and that these laws should determine the direction of
political action and social policy. They attributed (incorrectly) this doctrine
to Marx but rightly denounced it as pseudo-science. However, some later
Marxists (Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci) were historicists in the original
nonPopperian sense as was the critical theorist Adorno and hermeneuticists such
as Gadamer.
heterological: Grice and Thomson go heterological. Grice was
fascinated by Baron Russell’s remarks on heterological and its implicate. Grice
is particularly interested in Russell’s philosophy because of the usual Oxonian
antipathy towards his type of philosophising. Being an irreverent
conservative rationalist, Grice found in Russell a good point for
dissent! If paradoxes were always sets of propositions or arguments or
conclusions, they would always be meaningful. But some paradoxes are
semantically flawed and some have answers that are backed by a pseudo-argument
employing a defective lemma that lacks a truth-value. Grellings paradox,
for instance, opens with a distinction between autological and heterological
words. An autological word describes itself, e.g., polysyllabic is
polysllabic, English is English, noun is a noun, etc. A heterological word
does not describe itself, e.g., monosyllabic is not monosyllabic, Chinese is
not Chinese, verb is not a verb, etc. Now for the riddle: Is
heterological heterological or autological? If heterological is
heterological, since it describes itself, it is autological. But if
heterological is autological, since it is a word that does not describe itself,
it is heterological. The common solution to this puzzle is that
heterological, as defined by Grelling, is not what Grice a genuine
predicate ‒ Gricing is!In other words, Is heterological
heterological? is without meaning. That does not mean that an utterer, such as
Baron Russell, may implicate that he is being very witty by uttering the
Grelling paradox! There can be no predicate that applies to all and only those
predicates it does not apply to for the same reason that there can be no barber
who shaves all and only those people who do not shave themselves. Grice
seems to be relying on his friend at Christ Church, Thomson in On Some
Paradoxes, in the same volume where Grice published his Remarks about the
senses, Analytical Philosophy, Butler (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford,
104–119. Grice thought that Thomson was a genius, if ever there is one!
Plus, Grice thought that, after St. Johns, Christ Church was the second most
beautiful venue in the city of dreaming spires. On top, it is what makes Oxford
a city, and not, as villagers call it, a town. Refs.: the main source is
Grice’s essay on ‘heterologicality,’ but the keyword ‘paradox’ is useful, too,
especially as applied to Grice’s own paradox and to what, after Moore, Grice
refers to as the philosopher’s paradoxes. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
hobbesian
implicatura -- hobbes:
“Hobbes is a Griceian” – Grice. Grice was a member of the Hobbes Society -- Thomas.
English philosopher whose writings, especially the English version of Leviathan
(1651), strongly influenced all of subsequent English moral and political
philosophy. He also wrote a trilogy comprising De Cive (1642; English version,
Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651), De Corpore
(On the Body, 1655), and De Homine (On Man, 1658). Together with Leviathan (the
revised Latin version of which was published in 1668), these are his major
philosophical works. However, an early draft of his thoughts, The Elements of
Law, Natural and Political(also known as Human Nature and De Corpore Politico),
was published without permission in 1650. Many of the misinterpretations of
Hobbes’s views on human nature come from mistaking this early work as
representing his mature views. Hobbes was influential not only in England, but
also on the Continent. He is the author of the third set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus was deeply
influenced by Hobbes, not only in its political views but also in the way it
dealt with Scripture. Hobbes was not merely a philosopher; he was mathematical
tutor to Charles II and also a classical scholar. His first published work was
a translation of Thucydides (1628), and among his latest, about a half-century
later, were translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hobbes’s philosophical
views have a remarkably contemporary sound. In metaphysics, he holds a strong
materialist view, sometimes viewing mental phenomena as epiphenomenal, but
later moving toward a reductive or eliminative view. In epistemology he held a
sophisticated empiricism, which emphasized the importance of language for
knowledge. If not the originator of the contemporary compatibilist view of the
relationship between free will and determinism (see The Questions Concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656), he was one of the primary influences. He
also was one of the most important philosophers of language, explicitly noting
that language is used not only to describe the world but to express attitudes
and, performatively, to make promises and contracts. One of Hobbes’s
outstanding characteristics is his intellectual honesty. Though he may have
been timid (he himself claims that he was, explaining that his mother gave
birth to him because of fright over the coming of the Spanish Armada), his
writing shows no trace of it. During more than half his long lifetime he
engaged in many philosophical controversies, which required considerably more
courage in Hobbes’s day than at present. Both the Roman Catholic church and
Oxford University banned the reading of his books and there was talk not only
of burning his books but of burning Hobbes himself. An adequate interpretation
of Hobbes requires careful attention to his accounts of human nature, reason,
morality, and law. Although he was not completely consistent, his moral and
political philosophy is remarkably coherent. His political theory is often
thought to require an egoistic psychology, whereas it actually requires only
that most persons be concerned with their own self-interest, especially their
own preservation. It does not require that most not be concerned with other
persons as well. All that Hobbes denies is an undifferentiated natural
benevolence: “For if by nature one man should love another (that is) as man,
there could no reason be returned why every man should not equally love every
man, as being equally man.” His argument is that limited benevolence is not an
adequate foundation upon which to build a state. Hobbes’s political theory does
not require the denial of limited benevolence, he indeed includes benevolence
in his list of the passions in Leviathan: “Desire of good to another,
BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.”
Psychological egoism not only denies benevolent action, it also denies action
done from a moral sense, i.e., action done because one believes it is the
morally right thing to do. But Hobbes denies neither kind of action. But when
the words [’just’ and ‘unjust’] are applied to persons, to be just signifies as
much as to be delighted in just dealing, to study how to do righteousness, or
to endeavor in all things to do that which is just; and to be unjust is to
neglect righteous dealing, or to think it is to be measured not according to my
contract, but some present benefit. Hobbes’s pessimism about the number of just
people is primarily due to his awareness of the strength of the passions and
his conviction that most people have not been properly educated and
disciplined. Hobbes is one of the few philosophers to realize that to talk of
that part of human nature which involves the passions is to talk about human
populations. He says, “though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet
because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting,
heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self-defending, ever incident to the most
honest and fairest conditioned.” Though we may be aware of small communities in
which mutual trust and respect make law enforcement unnecessary, this is never
the case when we are dealing with a large group of people. Hobbes’s point is
that if a large group of people are to live together, there must be a common
power set up to enforce the rules of the society. That there is not now, nor
has there ever been, any large group of people living together without such a
common power is sufficient to establish his point. Often overlooked is Hobbes’s
distinction between people considered as if they were simply animals, not
modified in any way by education or discipline, and civilized people. Though
obviously an abstraction, people as animals are fairly well exemplified by
children. “Unless you give children all they ask for, they are peevish, and
cry, aye and strike their parents sometimes; and all this they have from
nature.” In the state of nature, people have no education or training, so there
is “continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, [is]
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But real people have been brought
up in families; they are, at least to some degree, civilized persons, and how
they will behave depends on how they are brought up. Hobbes does not say that
society is a collection of misfits and that this is why we have all the trouble
that we do – a position congenial to the psychological egoist. But he does
acknowledge that “many also (perhaps most men) either through defect of mind,
or want of education, remain unfit during the whole course of their lives; yet have
they, infants as well as those of riper years, a human nature; wherefore man is
made fit for society not by nature, but by education.” Education and training
may change people so that they act out of genuine moral motives. That is why it
is one of the most important functions of the sovereign to provide for the
proper training and education of the citizens. In the current debate between
nature and nurture, on the question of behavior Hobbes would come down strongly
on the side of nurture. Hobbes’s concept of reason has more in common with the
classical philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle, where
reason sets the ends of behavior, than with the modern tradition stemming from
Hume where the only function of reason is to discover the best means to ends
set by the passions. For Hobbes, reason is very complex; it has a goal, lasting
selfpreservation, and it seeks the way to this goal. It also discovers the
means to ends set by the passions, but it governs the passions, or tries to, so
that its own goal is not threatened. Since its goal is the same in all people,
it is the source of rules applying to all people. All of this is surprisingly
close to the generally accepted account of rationality. We generally agree that
those who follow their passions when they threaten their life are acting
irrationally. We also believe that everyone always ought to act rationally,
though we know that few always do so. Perhaps it was just the closeness of
Hobbes’s account of reason to the ordinary view of the matter that has led to
its being so completely overlooked. The failure to recognize that the avoidance
of violent death is the primary goal of reason has distorted almost all
accounts of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, yet it is a point on which
Hobbes is completely clear and consistent. He explicitly says that reason
“teaches every man to fly a contra-natural dissolution [mortem violentam] as
the greatest mischief that can arrive to nature.” He continually points out
that it is a dictate of right reason to seek peace when possible because people
cannot “expect any lasting preservation continuing thus in the state of nature,
that is, of war.” And he calls temperance and fortitude precepts of reason
because they tend to one’s preservation. It has not generally been recognized
that Hobbes regarded it as an end of reason to avoid violent death because he
often talks of the avoidance of death in a way that makes it seem merely an
object of a passion. But it is reason that dictates that one take all those measures
necessary for one’s preservation; peace if possible, if not, defense. Reason’s
dictates are categorical; it would be a travesty of Hobbes’s view to regard the
dictates of reason as hypothetical judgments addressed to those whose desire
for their own preservation happens to be greater than any conflicting desire.
He explicitly deplores the power of the irrational appetites and expressly
declares that it is a dictate of reason that one not scorn others because “most
men would rather lose their lives (that I say not, their peace) than suffer
slander.” He does not say if you would rather die than suffer slander, it is
rational to do so. Hobbes, following Aristotle, regards morality as concerned
with character traits or habits. Since morality is objective, it is only those
habits that are called good by reason that are moral virtues. “Reason declaring
peace to be good, it follows by the same reason, that all the necessary means
to peace be good also; and therefore that modesty, equity, trust, humanity, mercy
(which we have demonstrated to be necessary to peace), are good manners or
habits, that is, virtues.” Moral virtues are those habits of acting that the
reason of all people must praise. It is interesting to note that it is only in
De Homine that Hobbes explicitly acknowledges that on this account, prudence,
temperance, and courage are not moral virtues. In De Cive he distinguishes
temperance and fortitude from the other virtues and does not call them moral,
but he does not explicitly deny that they are moral virtues. But in De Homine,
he explicitly points out that one should not “demand that the courage and
prudence of the private man, if useful only to himself, be praised or held as a
virtue by states or by any other men whatsoever to whom these same are not
useful.” That morality is determined by reason and that reason has as its goal
self-preservation seems to lead to the conclusion that morality also has as its
goal self-preservation. But it is not the selfpreservation of an individual
person that is the goal of morality, but of people as citizens of a state. That
is, moral virtues are those habits of persons that make it rational for all
other people to praise them. These habits are not those that merely lead to an
individual’s own preservation, but to the preservation of all; i.e., to peace
and a stable society. Thus, “Good dispositions are those that are suitable for
entering into civil society; and good manners (that is, moral virtues) are
those whereby what was entered upon can be best preserved.” And in De Cive,
when talking of morality, he says, “The goodness of actions consist[s] in this,
that it [is] in order to peace, and the evil in this, that it [is] related to
discord.” The nature of morality is a complex and vexing question. If, like
Hobbes, we regard morality as applying primarily to those manners or habits
that lead to peace, then his view seems satisfactory. It yields, as he notes,
all of the moral virtues that are ordinarily considered such, and further, it
allows one to distinguish courage, prudence, and temperance from the moral
virtues. Perhaps most important, it provides, in almost self-evident fashion,
the justification of morality. For what is it to justify morality but to show
that reason favors it? Reason, seeking self-preservation, must favor morality,
which seeks peace and a stable society. For reason knows that peace and a
stable society are essential for lasting preservation. This simple and elegant
justification of morality does not reduce morality to prudence; rather it is an
attempt, in a great philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, to reconcile
reason or rational self-interest and morality. In the state of nature every
person is and ought to be governed only by their own reason. Reason dictates
that they seek peace, which yields the laws of nature, but it also allows them
to use any means they believe will best preserve themselves, which is what
Hobbes calls The Right of Nature. Hobbes’s insight is to see that, except when
one is in clear and present danger, in which case one has an inalienable right
to defend oneself, the best way to guarantee one’s longterm preservation is to
give up one’s right to act on one’s own decisions about what is the best way to
guarantee one’s long-term preservation and agree to act on the decisions of
that single person or group who is the sovereign. If all individuals and groups
are allowed to act on the decisions they regard as best, not accepting the
commands of the sovereign, i.e., the laws, as the overriding guide for their
actions, the result is anarchy and civil war. Except in rare and unusual cases,
uniformity of action following the decision of the sovereign is more likely to
lead to long-term preservation than diverse actions following diverse
decisions. And this is true even if each one of the diverse decisions, if
accepted by the sovereign as its decision, would have been more likely to lead
to long-term preservation than the actual decision that the sovereign made.
This argument explains why Hobbes holds that sovereigns cannot commit
injustice. Only injustice can properly be punished. Hobbes does not deny that
sovereigns can be immoral, but he does deny that the immorality of sovereigns
can properly be punished. This is important, for otherwise any immoral act by
the sovereign would serve as a pretext for punishing the sovereign, i.e., for
civil war. What is just and unjust is determined by the laws of the state, what
is moral and immoral is not. Morality is a wider concept than that of justice
and is determined by what leads to peace and stability. However, to let justice
be determined by what the reason of the people takes to lead to peace and
stability, rather than by what the reason of the sovereign decides, would be to
invite discord and civil war, which is contrary to the goal of morality: a
stable society and peace. One can create an air of paradox by saying that for
Hobbes it is immoral to attempt to punish some immoral acts, namely, those of
the sovereign. Hobbes is willing to accept this seeming paradox for he never
loses sight of the goal of morality, which is peace. To summarize Hobbes’s
system: people, insofar as they are rational, want to live out their natural
lives in peace and security. To do this, they must come together into cities or
states of sufficient size to deter attack by any group. But when people come
together in such a large group there will always be some that cannot be
trusted, and thus it is necessary to set up a government with the power to make
and enforce laws. This government, which gets both its right to govern and its
power to do so from the consent of the governed, has as its primary duty the
people’s safety. As long as the government provides this safety the citizens
are obliged to obey the laws of the state in all things. Thus, the rationality
of seeking lasting preservation requires seeking peace; this in turn requires
setting up a state with sufficient power to keep the peace. Anything that
threatens the stability of the state is to be avoided. As a practical matter,
Hobbes took God and religion very seriously, for he thought they provided some
of the strongest motives for action. Half of Leviathan is devoted to trying to
show that his moral and political views are supported by Scripture, and to
discredit those religious views that may lead to civil strife. But accepting
the sincerity of Hobbes’s religious views does not require holding that Hobbes
regarded God as the foundation of morality. He explicitly denies that atheists
and deists are subject to the commands of God, but he never denies that they
are subject to the laws of nature or of the civil state. Once one recognizes
that, for Hobbes, reason itself provides a guide to conduct to be followed by
all people, there is absolutely no need to bring in God. For in his moral and
political theory there is nothing that God can do that is not already done by
reason. Grice read most of Hobbes, both in Latin (for his Lit. Hum.) and in
English. When in “Meaning,” Grice says “this is what people are getting at with
their natural versus artificial signs” – he means Hobbes.
Hobson’s choice: willkür –
Hobson’s choice. One of Grice’s favourite words from Kant – “It’s so Kantish!”
I told Pears about this, and having found it’s cognate with English ‘choose,’
he immediately set to write an essay on the topic!” f., ‘option, discretion,
caprice,’ from MidHG. willekür,
f., ‘free choice, free will’; gee kiesen and Kur-kiesen, verb, ‘to select,’ from Middle
High German kiesen, Old
High German chiosan, ‘to
test, try, taste for the purpose of testing, test by tasting, select after
strict examination.’ Gothic kiusan,
Anglo-Saxon ceósan,
English to choose.
Teutonic root kus (with
the change of s into r, kur in the participle erkoren, see also Kur,
‘choice’), from pre-Teutonic gus,
in Latin gus-tus, gus-tare, Greek γεύω for γεύσω, Indian root juš, ‘to select, be fond of.’
Teutonic kausjun passed
as kusiti into
Slavonic. There is an oil portrait of Thomas Hobson, in the National Portrait
Gallery, London. He looks straight to the artist and is dressed in typical
Tudor dress, with a heavy coat, a ruff, and tie tails Thomas Hobson, a portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery, London. A Hobson's choice is a free choice in
which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is
offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one
may "take it or leave it". The
phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery
stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either
taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge
Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the
appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of
mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to
choose the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best
horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become
overused.[1] Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St
Catharine's College, Cambridge. Early
appearances in writing According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first
known written usage of this phrase is in The rustick's alarm to the Rabbies,
written by Samuel Fisher in 1660:[3] If
in this Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice...which
is, chuse whether you will have this or none.
It also appears in Joseph Addison's paper The Spectator (No. 509 of 14
October 1712); and in Thomas Ward's 1688 poem "England's
Reformation", not published until after Ward's death. Ward wrote: Where to elect there is but one, 'Tis
Hobson's choice—take that, or none. The term "Hobson's choice" is
often used to mean an illusion of choice, but it is not a choice between two
equivalent options, which is a Morton's fork, nor is it a choice between two
undesirable options, which is a dilemma. Hobson's choice is one between
something or nothing. John Stuart Mill,
in his book Considerations on Representative Government, refers to Hobson's
choice: When the individuals composing
the majority would no longer be reduced to Hobson's choice, of either voting
for the person brought forward by their local leaders, or not voting at all. In
another of his books, The Subjection of Women, Mill discusses marriage: Those who attempt to force women into
marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a
similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's
thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's
choice, 'that or none'.... And if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right in point of mere policy, in
leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been
done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a
mistake. They should have never been allowed to receive a literary
education.[7] A Hobson's choice is
different from: Dilemma: a choice
between two or more options, none of which is attractive. False dilemma: only
certain choices are considered, when in fact there are others. Catch-22: a
logical paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something
that can only be acquired by not being in that very situation. Morton's fork,
and a double bind: choices yield equivalent, and often undesirable, results.
Blackmail and extortion: the choice between paying money (or some non-monetary
good or deed) or risk suffering an unpleasant action. A common error is to use
the phrase "Hobbesian choice" instead of "Hobson's choice",
confusing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes with the relatively obscure Thomas
Hobson (It's possible they may be
confusing "Hobson's choice" with "Hobbesian trap", which
refers to the trap into which a state falls when it attacks another out of
fear).[11] Notwithstanding that confused usage, the phrase "Hobbesian
choice" is historically incorrect. Common law In Immigration and
Naturalization Service v. Chadha (1983), Justice Byron White dissented and
classified the majority's decision to strike down the "one-house
veto" as unconstitutional as leaving Congress with a Hobson's choice. Congress
may choose between "refrain[ing] from delegating the necessary authority,
leaving itself with a hopeless task of writing laws with the requisite
specificity to cover endless special circumstances across the entire policy
landscape, or in the alternative, to abdicate its lawmaking function to the
executive branch and independent agency".
In Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617 (1978),[15] the majority
opinion ruled that a New Jersey law which prohibited the importation of solid
or liquid waste from other states into New Jersey was unconstitutional based on
the Commerce Clause. The majority reasoned that New Jersey cannot discriminate
between the intrastate waste and the interstate waste with out due
justification. In dissent, Justice Rehnquist stated: [According to the Court,] New Jersey must
either prohibit all landfill operations, leaving itself to cast about for a
presently nonexistent solution to the serious problem of disposing of the waste
generated within its own borders, or it must accept waste from every portion of
the United States, thereby multiplying the health and safety problems which
would result if it dealt only with such wastes generated within the State.
Because past precedents establish that the Commerce Clause does not present
appellees with such a Hobson's choice, I dissent. In Monell v. Department of Social Services of
the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978)[16] the judgement of the court was
that [T]here was ample support for
Blair's view that the Sherman Amendment, by putting municipalities to the
Hobson's choice of keeping the peace or paying civil damages, attempted to
impose obligations to municipalities by indirection that could not be imposed
directly, thereby threatening to "destroy the government of the states". In the South African Constitutional Case MEC
for Education, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Others v Pillay, 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC)[17]
Chief Justice Langa for the majority of the Court (in Paragraph 62 of the
judgement) writes that: The traditional
basis for invalidating laws that prohibit the exercise of an obligatory
religious practice is that it confronts the adherents with a Hobson's choice
between observance of their faith and adherence to the law. There is however
more to the protection of religious and cultural practices than saving
believers from hard choices. As stated above, religious and cultural practices
are protected because they are central to human identity and hence to human
dignity which is in turn central to equality. Are voluntary practices any less
a part of a person's identity or do they affect human dignity any less
seriously because they are not mandatory?
In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissented and added in one of the footnotes that the petitioners "faced a
Hobson’s choice: accept arbitration on their employer’s terms or give up their
jobs". In Trump et al v. Mazars
USA, LLP, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia No. 19-5142, 49
(D.C. Cir. 11 October 2019) ("[w]orse still, the dissent’s novel approach
would now impose upon the courts the job of ordering the cessation of the
legislative function and putting Congress to the Hobson’s Choice of impeachment
or nothing."). Popular culture
Hobson's Choice is a full-length stage comedy written by Harold Brighouse in
1915. At the end of the play, the central character, Henry Horatio Hobson,
formerly a wealthy, self-made businessman but now a sick and broken man, faces
the unpalatable prospect of being looked after by his daughter Maggie and her
husband Will Mossop, who used to be one of Hobson's underlings. His other
daughters have refused to take him in, so he has no choice but to accept
Maggie's offer which comes with the condition that he must surrender control of
his entire business to her and her husband, Will. The play was adapted for film several times,
including versions from 1920 by Percy Nash, 1931 by Thomas Bentley, 1954 by
David Lean and a 1983 TV movie. Alfred
Bester's 1952 short story Hobson's Choice describes a world in which time
travel is possible, and the option is to travel or to stay in one's native
time. In the 1951 Robert Heinlein book
Between Planets, the main character Don Harvey incorrectly mentions he has a
Hobson's choice. While on a space station orbiting Earth, Don needs to get to
Mars, where his parents are. The only rockets available are back to Earth
(where he is not welcome) or on to Venus.
In The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket, the Baudelaire orphans and Fiona
are said to be faced with a Hobson's Choice when they are trapped by the Medusoid
Mycelium Mushrooms in the Gorgonian Grotto: "We can wait until the
mushrooms disappear, or we can find ourselves poisoned".In Bram Stoker's
short story "The Burial of Rats", the narrator advises he has a case
of Hobson's Choice while being chased by villains. The story was written around
1874. The Terminal Experiment, a 1995
science fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, was originally serialised under the
title Hobson's Choice. Half-Life, a
video game created in 1998 by Valve includes a Hobson's Choice in the final
chapter. A human-like entity, known only as the 'G-Man', offers the protagonist
Gordon Freeman a job, working under his control. If Gordon were to refuse this
offer, he would be killed in an unwinnable battle, thus creating the 'illusion of
free choice'. In Early Edition, the lead
character Gary Hobson is named after the choices he regularly makes during his
adventures. In an episode of Inspector
George Gently, a character claims her resignation was a Hobson's choice,
prompting a debate among other police officers as to who Hobson is. In "Cape May" (The Blacklist season
3, episode 19), Raymond Reddington describes having faced a Hobson's choice in
the previous episode where he was faced with the choice of saving Elizabeth
Keen's baby and losing Elizabeth Keen or losing them both. In his 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice,
Robert A. Heinlein's protagonist is said to have Hobson's Choice when he has
the options of boarding the wrong cruise ship or staying on the island. Remarking about the 1909 Ford Model T, US
industrialist Henry Ford is credited as saying “Any customer can have a car
painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”[19] In 'The Jolly Boys' Outing', a 1989 Christmas
Special episode of Only Fools and Horses, Alan states they are left with
Hobson's Choice after their coach has blown up (due to a dodgy radio, supplied
by Del). There's a rail strike, the last bus has gone, and their coach is out
of action. They can't hitch-hike as there's 27 of them, and the replacement coach
doesn't come till the next morning, thus their only choice is to stay in
Margate for the night. See also
Buckley's Chance Buridan's ass Boulwarism Death and Taxes Locus of control
Morton's fork No-win situation Standard form contract Sophie's Choice Zugzwang
References Barrett, Grant.
"Hobson's Choice", A Way with Words
"Thomas Hobson: Hobson's Choice and Hobson's Conduit".
Historyworks. See Samuel Fisher.
"Rusticus ad academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis
quatuor the rustick's alarm to the rabbies or The country correcting the
university and clergy, and ... contesting for the truth ... : in four
apologeticall and expostulatory exercitations : wherein is contained, as well a
general account to all enquirers, as a general answer to all opposers of the
most truly catholike and most truly Christ-like Chistians called Quakers, and
of the true divinity of their doctrine : by way of entire entercourse held in
special with four of the clergies chieftanes, viz, John Owen ... Tho. Danson
... John Tombes ... Rich. Baxter ." Europeana. Retrieved 8 August
2014. See The Spectator with Notes and
General Index, the Twelve Volumes Comprised in Two. Philadelphia: J.J.
Woodward. 1832. p. 272. Retrieved 4 August 2014. via Google Books Ward, Thomas (1853). English Reformation, A
Poem. New York: D.& J. Sadlier & Co. p. 373. Retrieved 8 August 2014.
via Internet Archive See Mill, John
Stuart (1861). Considerations on Representative Government (1 ed.). London:
Parker, Son, & Bourn. p. 145. Retrieved 23 June 2014. via Google Books Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of
Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer. pp. 51–2.
Retrieved 28 July 2014. Hobbes, Thomas
(1982) [1651]. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil. New York: Viking Press. Martinich, A. P. (1999). Hobbes: A Biography.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-49583-7. Martin, Gary. "Hobson's Choice".
The Phrase Finder. Archived from the original on 6 March 2009. Retrieved 7
August 2010. "The Hobbesian
Trap" (PDF). 21 September 2010. Retrieved 8 April 2012. "Sunday Lexico-Neuroticism". boaltalk.blogspot.com.
27 July 2008. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
Levy, Jacob (10 June 2003). "The Volokh Conspiracy".
volokh.com. Retrieved 7 August 2010.
Oxford English Dictionary, Editor: "Amazingly, some writers have
confused the obscure Thomas Hobson with his famous contemporary, the
philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The resulting malapropism is beautifully grotesque".
Garner, Bryan (1995). A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2nd ed.). Oxford
University Press. pp. 404–405.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/437/617/ "Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs. -
436 U.S. 658 (1978)". justicia.com. US Supreme Court. 6 June 1978. 436
U.S. 658. Retrieved 19 February 2014.
"MEC for Education: Kwazulu-Natal and Others v Pillay (CCT 51/06)
[2007] ZACC 21; 2008 (1) SA 474 (CC); 2008 (2) BCLR 99 (CC) (5 October
2007)". www.saflii.org. Snicket,
Lemony (2004) The Grim Grotto, New York: HarperCollins Publishers p.145 -
147 Henry Ford in collaboration with
Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 External links Chisholm,
Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hobson's Choice" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 13
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 553. Categories: English-language
idiomsFree willMetaphors referring to peopleDilemmas. Refs.: H. P. Grice and D.
F. Pears, The philosophy of action, Pears, Choosing and deciding. The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
Totum
– Those who are inclined to Grecianisms will use “holism,” but unlike
‘totum,’ ‘holos,’ being from EASTERN Europe, did not develop in Western Europe,
whereas ‘totum’ gives us plenty of cognates in Grice’s vernacular, via
Anglo-Norman, ‘totality,’ for example. From Grecian ‘holon,’ Latin ‘totum.’ “One
of Quine’s dogma of empiricism – the one I and Sir Peter had not the slightest
intereset in!” – Grice. Holism is one of a wide variety of theses that in one
way or another affirm the equal or greater reality or the explanatory necessity
of the whole of some system in relation to its parts. In philosophy, the issues
of holism (the word is more reasonably, but less often, spelled ‘wholism’) have
appeared Hohenheim, Theophrastus Bombastus von holism 390 4065h-l.qxd
08/02/1999 7:39 AM Page 390 traditionally in the philosophy of biology, of
psychology, and especially of the human sciences. In the context of
description, holism with respect to some system maintains that the whole has
some properties that its parts lack. This doctrine will ordinarily be trivially
true unless it is further held, in the thesis of descriptive emergentism, that
these properties of the whole cannot be defined by properties of the parts. The
view that all properties of the wholes in question can be so defined is
descriptive individualism. In the context of explanation, holism with respect
to some object or system maintains either (1) that the laws of the more complex
cases in it are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of
coexistence from the laws of the less complex cases (e.g., that the laws of the
behavior of people in groups are not deducible by composition laws or laws of
coexistence from the laws of solitary behavior), or (2) that all the variables
that constitute the system interact with each other. This denial of
deducibility is known also as metaphysical or methodological holism, whereas
affirming the deducibility is methodological individualism. In a special case
of explanatory holism that presupposes descriptive emergentism, holism is sometimes
understood as the thesis that with respect to some system the whole has
properties that interact “back” with the properties of its parts. In the
philosophy of biology, any of these forms of holism may be known as vitalism,
while in the philosophy of psychology they have been called Gestalt doctrine.
In the philosophy of the social sciences, where ‘holism’ has had its most
common use in philosophy, the many issues have often been reduced to that of
metaphysical holism versus methodological individualism. This terminology
reflected the positivists’ belief that holism was non-empirical in postulating
social “wholes” or the reality of society beyond individual persons and their
properties and relations (as in Durkheim and other, mostly Continental, thinkers),
while individualism was non-metaphysical (i.e., empirical) in relying
ultimately only on observable properties in describing and explaining social
phenomena. More recently, ‘holism’ has acquired additional uses in philosophy,
especially in epistemology and philosophy of language. Doxastic or epistemic
holism are theses about the “web of belief,” usually something to the effect
that a person’s beliefs are so connected that their change on any topic may
affect their content on any other topic or, perhaps, that the beliefs of a
rational person are so connected. Semantic or meaning holism have both been
used to denote either the thesis that the meanings of all terms (or sentences)
in a language are so connected that any change of meaning in one of them may change
any other meaning, or the thesis that changes of belief entail changes of
meaning. Cited by Grice, “In defense of a dogma” “My defense of the other dogma
must be left for another longer day” Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie, physicist who
wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science. Like Georg Helm,
Wilhelm Ostwald, and others, he was an energeticist, believing generalized
thermodynamics to be the foundation of all of physics and chemistry. Duhem
spent his whole scientific life advancing energetics, from his failed
dissertation in physics a version of which was accepted as a dissertation in
mathematics, published as Le potentiel thermodynamique 6, to his mature
treatise, Traité d’énergétique 1. His scientific legacy includes the Gibbs-Duhem
and DuhemMargules equations. Possibly because his work was considered
threatening by the Parisian scientific establishment or because of his
right-wing politics and fervent Catholicism, he never obtained the position he
merited in the intellectual world of Paris. He taught at the provincial
universities of Lille, Rennes, and, finally, Bordeaux. Duhem’s work in the
history and philosophy of science can be viewed as a defense of the aims and
methods of energetics; whatever Duhem’s initial motivation, his historical and
philosophical work took on a life of its own. Topics of interest to him
included the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, the
nature of conceptual change, the historical structure of scientific knowledge,
and the relation between science and religion. Duhem was an anti-atomist or
anti-Cartesian; in the contemporary debates about light and magnetism, Duhem’s
anti-atomist stance was also directed against the work of Maxwell. According to
Duhem, atomists resolve the bodies perceived by the senses into smaller,
imperceptible bodies. The explanation of observable phenomena is then referred
to these imperceptible bodies and their motions, suitably combined. Duhem’s
rejection of atomism was based on his instrumentalism or fictionalism: physical
theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true
nature of matter, but give general rules of which laws are particular cases;
theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient.
An important reason for treating physics as nonexplanatory was Duhem’s claim
that there is general consensus in physics and none in metaphysics thus his insistence on the autonomy of
physics from metaphysics. But he also thought that scientific representations
become more complete over time until they gain the status of a natural
classification. Accordingly, Duhem attacked the use of models by some
scientists, e.g. Faraday and Maxwell. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was coupled
with a rejection of inductivism, the doctrine that the only physical principles
are general laws known through induction, based on observation of facts.
Duhem’s rejection forms a series of theses collectively known as the Duhem
thesis: experiments in physics are observations of phenomena accompanied by
interpretations; physicists therefore do not submit single hypotheses, but
whole groups of them, to the control of experiment; thus, experimental evidence
alone cannot conclusively falsify hypotheses. For similar reasons, Duhem
rejected the possibility of a crucial experiment. In his historical studies,
Duhem argued that there were no abrupt discontinuities between medieval and
early modern science the so-called
continuity thesis; that religion played a positive role in the development of
science in the Latin West; and that the history of physics could be seen as a
cumulative whole, defining the direction in which progress could be expected.
Duhem’s philosophical works were discussed by the founders of twentieth-century
philosophy of science, including Mach, Poincaré, the members of the Vienna
Circle, and Popper. A revival of interest in Duhem’s philosophy began with
Quine’s reference in 3 to the Duhem thesis also known as the Duhem-Quine
thesis. As a result, Duhem’s philosophical works were tr. into English as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory 4
and To Save the Phenomena 9. By contrast, few of Duhem’s extensive historical
works Les origines de la statique 2 vols.,
608, Études sur Léonard de Vinci 3 vols., 613, and Système du monde 10 vols.,
359, e.g. have been tr., with five
volumes of the Système du monde actually remaining in manuscript form until
459. Unlike his philosophical work, Duhem’s historical work was not
sympathetically received by his influential contemporaries, notably George
Sarton. His supposed main conclusions were rejected by the next generation of
historians of science, who presented modern science as discontinuous with that
of the Middle Ages. This view was echoed by historically oriented philosophers
of science who, from the early 0s, emphasized discontinuities as a recurrent
feature of change in science e.g. Kuhn
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2.
hologram: the image of an
object in three dimensions created and reproduced by the use of lasers.
Holography is a method for recording and reproducing such images. Holograms are
remarkable in that, unlike normal photographs, every part of them contains the
complete image but in reduced detail. Thus a small square cut from a hologram
can still be laser-illuminated to reveal the whole scene originally
holographed, albeit with loss of resolution. This feature made the hologram
attractive to proponents of the thesis of distribution of function in the
brain, who argued that memories are like holograms, not being located in a
single precise engram – as claimed by advocates of localization of function –
but distributed across perhaps all of the cortex. Although intriguing, the
holographic model of memory storage failed to gain acceptance. Current views
favor D. O. Hebb’s “cell assembly” concept, in which memories are stored in the
connections between a group of neurons.
HOMO-CLITIC
-- The homoclitical/heteroclitical distinction, the: heteroclitical
implicaturum:--
Greek κλιτικός (klitikós, “inflexional”, but
transliterated as ‘heterocliticum’) -- signifying a stem which alternates
between more than one form when declined for grammatical case. Examples of
heteroclitic noun stems in Proto-Indo-European include *wod-r/n-
"water" (nominoaccusative *wódr; genitive *udnés; locative *udén) and
*yékw-r/n- "liver" (nominoaccusative *yékwr, genitive *ikwnés). In
Proto-Indo-European, heteroclitic stems tend to be noun stems with grammatically
inanimate gender. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The heteroclitical implicaturum:
implicaturum, implicitum, explicatum, explicitum: what I learned at Clifton,
and why.”
homœmerum:
an
adjective Grice adored, from Grecian homoiomeres, ‘of like parts’). Aristotle: “A lump of bronze differs
from a statue in being homoeo-merous. The lump of bronze is
divisible into at least two partial lumps of bronze, whereas the statue is not
divisible into statues.” Having parts, no matter how small, that share
the constitutive properties of the whole. The derivative abstract noun is
‘homœomeria’. The Grecian forms of the adjective and of its corresponding
privative ‘anhomoeomerous’ are used by Aristotle to distinguish between (a) non-uniform
parts of living things, e.g., limbs and organs, and (b) biological stuffs,
e.g., blood, bone, sap. In spite of being composed of the four elements, each
biological stuff, when taken individually and without admixtures, is
through-and-through F, where F represents the cluster of the constitutive
properties of that stuff. Thus, if a certain physical volume qualifies as
blood, all its mathematically possible sub-volumes, regardless of size, also
qualify as blood. Blood is thus homoeomerous. By contrast, a face or a stomach
or a leaf are an-homoeomerous: the parts of a face are not a face, etc. In Aristotle’s
system, the homœomeria of the biological stuff is tied to his doctrine of the
infinite divisibility of matter. The homœomerum-heterormerum distinction is
prefigured in Plato (Protagoras 329d). ‘Homœomerous’ is narrow in its application
than ‘homogeneous’ and ‘uniform’. We speak of a homogeneous entity even if the
properties at issue are identically present only in samples that fall above a
certain size. The colour of the sea can be homogeneously or uniformly blue; but
it is heteromerously blue. “homoiomeres” and “homoiomereia” also occur –in the ancient
sources for a pre-Aristotelian philosopher, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, with
reference to the constituent things (“chremata”) involved in his scheme of
universal mixture. Moreover, homœeomeria plays a significant role outside
ancient Grecian (or Griceian) philosophy, notably in twentieth-century accounts
of the contrast between mass terms and count terms or sortals, and the
discussion was introduced by Grice. ANAXAGORAS' THEORY OF MATTER-I. 17 homoeomerous in Anaxagoras' system falls into one of
these three class. (I. 834), for example, says: 'When he ... by FM Cornford - 1930. Refs. Grice, “Cornford on Anaxagoras.”
homomorphism: cf. isomorphism
-- in Grice’s model theory of conversation, a structure-preserving mapping from
one structure to another: thus the demonstratum is isomorph with the implicaturum,
since every conversational implicaturum can be arrived via an argumentum. A structure
consists of a domain of objects together with a function specifying
interpretations, with respect to that domain, of the relation symbols, function
symbols, and individual symbols of a given calculus. Relations, functions, and
individuals in different structures for a system like System GHP correspond to
one another if they are interpretations of the same symbol of GHP. To call a
mapping “structure-preserving” is to say, first, that if objects in the first
structure bear a certain relation to one another, then their images in the
second structure (under the mapping) bear the corresponding relation to one
another; second, that the value of a function for a given object (or ntuple of
objects) in the first structure has as its image under the mapping the value of
the corresponding function for the image of the object (or n-tuple of images)
in the second structure; and third, that the image in the second structure of
an object in the first is the corresponding object. An isomorphism is a
homomorphism that is oneto-one and whose inverse is also a homomorphism.
co-substantia: homoousios.
Athanasius -- early Christian father, bishop, and a leading protagonist in the disputes
concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the Incarnation,
Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius contributed
greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Opposing
all forms of Arianism, which denies Christ’s divinity and reduced him to what
Grice would call a “creature,” Athanasius teaches, in the language of the
Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy Spirit, are of the
same being as God the Father, cosubstantialis, “homoousios.” Thus with
terminology and concepts drawn from Grecian and Graeco-Roman philosophy,
Athanasius helps to forge the distinctly Christian and un-Hellenistic doctrine
of the eternal tri-une God (“credo quia absurdum est”) who became enfleshed in
time and matter and restored humanity to immortality, forfeited through sin, by
involvement in its condition of corruption and decay. Homoousios (Greek, ‘of
the same substance’), a concept central to the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, enshrined in the Nicene Creed (Nicaea, “Holy, Holy, Holy”). It attests
that God the Son (and by extension the Spirit) is of one and the same being or
substance (ousia) as the Father. Reflecting the insistence of Athanasius
against Arianism that Christ is God’s eternal, co-equal Son and not a “creature,”
as Grice uses the term, the Nicene “homoousios” is also to be differentiated
from a rival formula, “homoiousios” (Grecian, ‘of SIMILAR substance’), which affirms
merely the Son’s LIKENESS in being to God. Though notoriously and superficially
an argument over one Greek iota, the issue was philosophically profound and crucial
whether or not Jesus of Nazareth incarnated God’s own being, revealed God’s own
truth, and mediated God’s own salvation. If x=x, x is like x. A horse is like a
horse. Grice on implicaturum. “There is only an implicaturum to the effect that
if a horse is a horse a horse is not like a horse.” “Similarly for Christ and
God.” Cicero saw this when he philosophised on ‘idem’ and ‘similis.’
homuncularism
-- Grice on the ‘fallacia homunculi’ Grice borrows ‘homunculus’ from St. Augustine,
for a miniature ‘homo’ held to inhabit the brain (or some other organ) who
perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the commands to
the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an infinite
regress (what Grice, after Augustine, calls the ‘fallacia homunculi’) since we
can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible for
his perception and action, and so on. Many familiar views of the mind and its
activities seem to require a homunculus. E. g. models of visual perception that
posit an inner picture as its product apparently require a homunculus to look
at the picture, and models of action that treat intentions as commands to the
muscles apparently require a homunculus to issue the commands. It is never an
easy matter to determine whether a theory is committed to the existence of a
homunculus that vitiates the theory, and in some circumstances, a homunculus
can be legitimately posited at intermediate levels of theory. As Grice says, a
homunculus is, shall we say, a bogey-man (to use a New-World expression) only if
he duplicates entire the talents he is rung in to explain. If one can get a
relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculus to produce the intelligent
behaviour of the whole, this is progress. Grice calls a theory (in philosophoical
psychology) that posit such a homunculus “homuncular functionalism.” Paracelsus is credited with the first mention of the
homunculus in De homunculis (c. 1529–1532),
and De natura rerum (1537).
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Paracelsus.”
natura
– natura humana -- human nature – Grice distinguishes very sharply
between a human and a person – a human becomes a person via transubstantiation,
a metaphysical routine – human nature is a quality or group of qualities,
belonging to all and only humans, that explains the kind of being we are. We
are all two-footed and featherless, but ‘featherless biped’ does not explain
our socially significant characteristics. We are also all both animals and
rational beings (at least potentially), and ‘rational animal’ might explain the
special features we have that other kinds of beings, such as angels, do not.
The belief that there is a human nature is part of the wider thesis that all
natural kinds have essences. Acceptance of this position is compatible with
many views about the specific qualities that constitute human nature. In
addition to rationality and embodiment, philosophers have said that it is part
of our nature to be wholly selfinterested, benevolent, envious, sociable,
fearful of others, able to speak and to laugh, and desirous of immortality.
Philosophers disagree about how we are to discover our nature. Some think
metaphysical insight into eternal forms or truths is required, others that we
can learn it from observation of biology or of behavior. Most have assumed that
only males display human nature fully, and that females, even at their best,
are imperfect or incomplete exemplars. Philosophers also disagree on whether
human nature determines morality. Some think that by noting our distinctive
features we can infer what God wills us to do. Others think that our nature
shows at most the limits of what morality can require, since it would plainly
be pointless to direct us to ways of living that our nature makes impossible.
Some philosophers have argued that human nature is plastic and can be shaped in
different ways. Others hold that it is not helpful to think in terms of human
nature. They think that although we share features as members of a biological
species, our other qualities are socially constructed. If the differences
between male and female reflect cultural patterns of child rearing, work, and
the distribution of power, our biologically common features do not explain our
important characteristics and so do not constitute a nature.
Grice
and the humboldts:
Born in Potsdam, Wilhelm, with his brother Alexander, was educated by private
tutors in the enlightened style thought suitable for a Prussian philosopher.This
included Grice’s stuff: philosophy and the two classical languages, with a bit
of ancient and modern history. After his university studies in law at Frankfurt
an der Oder and Göttingen, Humboldt’s career was divided among assorted posts,
philosophising on a broad range of topics, notably his first loves, like
Grice’s: philosophy and the classical languages. Humboldt’s broad-ranging works
reveal the important influences of Herder in his conception of history and
culture, Kant and Fichte in philosophy, and the French “Ideologues” in semiotics.
His most enduring work has proved to be the Introduction to his massive study
of language. Humboldt maintains that language, as a vital and dynamic
“organism,” is the key to understanding both the operations of the soul. A
language such as Latin possesses a distinctive inner form that shapes, in a way
reminiscent of Kant’s more general categories, the subjective experience, the
world-view, and ultimately the institutions of Rome. While all philosophers are
indebted to both his empirical studies and his theoretical insights on culture,
such philosophers as Dilthey and Cassirer acknowledge him as establishing the
Latin language as a central concern for the humanities. H. P. Grice, “Alexander
and all the Humboldts.”
Materia-forma
distinction, the: One
of Grice’s twelve labours is against Materialism -- Cicero’s translation of
hyle, ancient Greek term for matter. Aristotle brought the word into use in
philosophy by contrast with the term for form, and as designating one of the
four causes. By hyle Aristotle usually means ‘that out of which something has
been made’, but he can also mean by it ‘that which has form’. In Aristotelian
philosophy hyle is sometimes also identified with potentiality and with
substrate. Neoplatonists identified hyle with the receptacle of Plato. Materia-forma distinction, the forma:
Grice always found ‘logical form’ redundant (“Surely we are not into ‘matter’ –
that would be cheap!”) – “‘materia-forma’ is the unity, as the Grecians well
knew.”- hylomorphism, the doctrine, first taught by Aristotle, that concrete
substance consists of form in matter (hyle). The details of this theory are
explored in the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Zeta, Eta, and
Theta). Materia-forma
distinction, the. Then there’s hylozoism: from Greek hyle, ‘matter’, and zoe,
‘life’), the doctrine that matter is intrinsically alive, or that all bodies,
from the world as a whole down to the smallest corpuscle, have some degree or
some kind of life. It differs from panpsychism though the distinction is
sometimes blurred – in upholding the universal presence of life per se, rather
than of soul or of psychic attributes. Inasmuch as it may also hold that there
are no living entities not constituted of matter, hylozoism is often criticized
by theistic philosophers as a form of atheism. The term was introduced
polemically by Ralph Cudworth, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist, to
help define a position that is significantly in contrast to soul–body dualism
(Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes), reductive materialism (Democritus, Hobbes), and
Aristotelian hylomorphism. So understood, hylozoism had many advocates in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among both scientists and naturalistically
minded philosophers. In the twentieth century, the term has come to be used,
rather unhelpfully, to characterize the animistic and naive-vitalist views of
the early Greek philosophers, especially Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and
Empedocles – who could hardly count as hylozoists in Cudworth’s sophisticated
sense.
substantia – hypostasis, the
process of regarding a concept or abstraction as an independent or real entity.
The verb forms ‘hypostatize’ and ‘reify’ designate the acts of positing objects
of a certain sort for the purposes of one’s theory. It is sometimes implied
that a fallacy is involved in so describing these processes or acts, as in
‘Plato was guilty of the reification of universals’. The issue turns largely on
criteria of ontological commitment. The exact Greek transliteration is “hypostasis”
Arianism, diverse but related teachings in early Christianity that subordinated
the Son to God the Father. In reaction the church developed its doctrine of the
Trinity, whereby the Son and Holy Spirit, though distinct persons hypostases,
share with the Father, as his ontological equals, the one being or substance
ousia of God. Arius taught in Alexandria, where, on the hierarchical model of
Middle Platonism, he sharply distinguished Scripture’s transcendent God from
the Logos or Son incarnate in Jesus. The latter, subject to suffering and
humanly obedient to God, is inferior to the immutable Creator, the object of
that obedience. God alone is eternal and ungenerated; the Son, divine not by
nature but by God’s choosing, is generated, with a beginning: the unique
creature, through whom all else is made. The Council of Nicea, in 325,
condemned Arius and favored his enemy Athanasius, affirming the Son’s
creatorhood and full deity, having the same being or substance homoousios as the
Father. Arianism still flourished, evolving into the extreme view that the
Son’s being was neither the same as the Father’s nor like it homoiousios, but
unlike it anomoios. This too was anathematized, by the Council of 381 at
Constantinople, which, ratifying what is commonly called the Nicene Creed,
sealed orthodox Trinitarianism and the equality of the three persons against
Arian subordinationism.
suppositum – Cicero for
‘hypothesis’, as in ‘hypothetico-deductive’ – a hypothetico-deductive method, a
method of testing hypotheses. Thought to be preferable to the method of
enumerative induction, whose limitations had been decisively demonstrated by
Hume, the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method has been viewed by many as the
ideal scientific method. It is applied by introducing an explanatory hypothesis
resulting from earlier inductions, a guess, or an act of creative imagination.
The hypothesis is logically conjoined with a statement of initial conditions.
The purely deductive consequences of this conjunction are derived as
predictions, and the statements asserting them are subjected to experimental or
observational test. More formally, given (H • A) P O, H is the hypothesis, A a
statement of initial conditions, and O one of the testable consequences of (H •
A). If the hypothesis is ‘all lead is malleable’, and ‘this piece of lead is
now being hammered’ states the initial conditions, it follows deductively that
‘this piece of lead will change shape’. In deductive logic the schema is
formally invalid, committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.
But repeated occurrences of O can be said to confirm the conjunction of H and
A, or to render it more probable. On the other hand, the schema is deductively
valid (the argument form modus tollens). For this reason, Karl Popper and his
followers think that the H-D method is best employed in seeking falsifications
of theoretical hypotheses. Criticisms of the method point out that infinitely
many hypotheses can explain, in the H-D mode, a given body of data, so that
successful predictions are not probative, and that (following Duhem) it is
impossible to test isolated singular hypotheses because they are always
contained in complex theories any one of whose parts is eliminable in the face
of negative evidence.
campsall: a village in Yorkshire, Richard
– of Balliol, semantics. Cf. Ricardus de Campsalle obtained a MA from Balliol
and then became a Fellow of Merton.
Trutfetter
affirmo-nego distinction, the: Grice:
“There is a delightful asymmetry in ‘affirmo’/’nego’ as yielding a square. For
the –o in affirmo is immaterial, whereas the ‘o’ in nego is not! Who was the
stupid monk who deviced this? Most importantly, ‘affirmo’ and ‘nego’ account
for the QUALITY, not the quantity. Surely the ‘a’ and ‘i’, but not the ‘o’ of
affirmo can stand for ‘affirmative’, and the ‘e’ and ‘o’ of nego can stand for
negative. But surely there is no correspondence to a and e being universal and
I and o being particular. Barbara
celarent darii ferio baralipton Celantes dabitis fapesmo frisesomorum; Cesare
campestres festino baroco; darapti Felapton disamis datisi bocardo
ferison. Vowels & particular
consonants have particular meaning. A –
universalis affirmativa (i.e. affirmo)
E– universalis negativa (i.e. nego) I – particularis affirmativa (i.e.
affirmo) O – particularis negativa (i.e. nego) S is for simplex in – conversio
simplex.P is ‘per accidens’ in conversio
per accidens. c – is contradiction in ‘reductio rad contradictionem m is for metathesis–(, conversio per
contrapositionem). “b” is for ‘barbara’
in – reductio ad Modus Barbara. C –is
for celarent in reductio ad Modus
Celarent. D is for darii in – reductio ad Modus Darii. F is for ferio in –
reductio ad Modus Ferio.I: particularis dedicativa.. See Grice, “Circling the
Square of Opposition Affirmo-nego
distinction, the: Grice: “There is a delightful asymmetry in ‘affirmo’/’nego’
as yielding a square. For the –o in affirmo is immaterial, whereas the ‘o’ in
nego is not! Who was the stupid monk who deviced this? Most importantly,
‘affirmo’ and ‘nego’ account for the QUALITY, not the quantity. Surely the ‘a’
and ‘i’, but not the ‘o’ of affirmo can stand for ‘affirmative’, and the ‘e’ and
‘o’ of nego can stand for negative. But surely there is no correspondence to a
and e being universal and I and o being particular. --
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necesse – Grice: “The archaic Romans had ‘necessum,’ which they turned
to ‘necessum.’ The etymology is not clear [perh. Sanscr. naç, obtain; Gr. root ἐνεκ-; cf. ἀνάγκη; v. Georg
Curtius Gr. Etym. 424]. ichthyological necessity: topic-neutral:
Originally, Ryle’s term for logical constants, such as “of ” “not,” “every.”
They are not endowed with special meanings, and are applicable to discourse
about any subject-matter. They do not refer to any external object but function
to organize meaningful discourse. J. J. C. Smart calls a term topic-neutral if
it is noncommittal about designating something mental or something physical.
Instead, it simply describes an event without judging the question of its
intrinsic nature. In his central-state theory of mind, Smart develops a
topic-neutral analysis of mental expressions and argues that it is possible to
account for the situations described by mental concepts in purely physical and
topic-neutral terms. “In this respect, statements like ‘I am thinking now’ are,
as J. J. C. Smart puts it, topic-neutral. They say that something is going on
within us, something apt for the causing of certain sorts of behaviour, but
they say nothing of the nature of this process.” D. Armstrong, A Materialist
Theory of the Mind
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