CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, IDENTITY, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SELF, SUBJECTÇA
The French demonstrative pronoun ça, a contraction of cela, is the widely accepted translation of the German es, a third-person singular neuter pronoun that Freud uses, in his second topology, to designate the third construct ( id ) of the psychic apparatus alongside the Ich ( ego ) and the Über-Ich ( superego ): see ES, and DRIVE, I/ME/MYSELF, UNCONSCIOUS, WUNSCH; cf. ANXIETY, ENTSTELLUNG, LOVE, PLEASURE, VERNEINUNG.
Es is also used in the German expression es gibt, which French renders as il y a. See ES GIBT, ESTI, IL Y A.
CONSCIOUSNESS, DASEIN, ERLEBEN, IDENTITY, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SELF, SUBJECT
CARE
| FRENCH | souci, soin, sollicitude | ||
| GERMAN | Sorge, Fürsorge, Besorgen |
SOUCI and ANXIETY, AUTRUI, DASEIN, GENDER, LAW, LOVE, MALAISE, MORALS, SECURITAS, SEX, SORGE, VERGÜENZA
The word “care” has recently been used with increasing frequency in English philosophy, but its translation into other languages raises a problem for two reasons in particular. First, it is used to translate the Heideggerian term Sorge ( Sein und Zeit ), and second, it appears in the expression “the ethics of care,” which feminists oppose to the impartiality of “masculine justice” ( Gilligan, Different Voice; Young, Justice ). In both cases, it is impossible to translate “care” into French.
I. The Translation of Sorge by “Care”
We must note first that “care” does not derive from Latin cura but rather from Old High German or Gothic Kara, which means “care,” “lament,” “sorrow.” The word initially designated a painful mental state such as concern or anxiety, and it was indeed appropriate to use “care” to render the German Sorge as it is used by Heidegger. For Heidegger the very Being of Dasein is “care” ( Sorge ) ( Sein und Zeit ), so that the latter is in the world in the form of Besorgen ( concern ). Cares, tribulations, and melancholias are distinct states, but they are part of the ontological structure of Sorge: “Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue” ( Being and Time, 274 ).
The word “care” also designates the effort to anticipate a danger or to protect oneself from the uncertainties of the future by acting responsibly. That is the most common meaning of the term in English, and here again we see how well the importance of temporality in “care” corresponds to Heideggerian concerns: “The ontological meaning of care is temporality” ( ibid. ). But the deficiencies of the English translation of Sorge by “care” rapidly make themselves felt because the element of nothingness is absent in “care”: “Death, conscience, and guilt are anchored in the phenomenon of care.”
Finally, Heidegger connects Sorge with curiosity, which leads him to retranslate Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to see” ( pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei ) ( ibid. )—taking eidenai in the original sense of “to see” and connecting oregontai ( lit., “seek” ) with Sorge, “care.” And he translates Aristotle in these terms: “The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being.” Thus he makes an association between “seeing” and “thinking” in Western metaphysics that the English translation as “care” cannot render. There is no possibility of making the connotations specific to the German Sorge flow into the English “care,” and the current development of the meaning of “care” that is drawing this word in the direction of interpersonal relations and concern about others makes the translation of Heidegger given here in English rather enigmatic.
II. “Care” and “Solicitude”
German distinguishes more clearly than English or French between care for oneself or Selbstsorge ( which, Heidegger says, is “tautological,” Being and Time, 366 ), on the one hand, and on the other Fürsorge or “care for the other,” which Macquarrie and Robinson translate not by “care” but by “solicitude” and which the French translator renders as assistance. Solicitude, which is “an affectionate care for others,” has a meaning different from “care” and must be attached to a different register, that of action in matters of help and social aid. “Care” designates the whole set of public arrangements necessary for the welfare of the population in a welfare state. That is a meaning for which there is no French equivalent. For example, the expressions “prenatal care” and “postnatal care” refer particularly to the responsibilities of public health agencies with regard to pregnant women and infants. Caregivers are people who, whether as volunteers or not, take care of the elderly or anyone in need.
Since in many countries the great majority of caregivers are women, feminists have offered a critique of the ethics of justice in the name of the virtues attributed to these disinterested, noncompetitive, nonquantifiable, nonpossessive behaviors that constitute most of women’s nonremunerated work: caring for children and the elderly, efforts to keep the family group intact, etc. Thus these militants seek to oppose to the “masculine” ideal of an ethics of impartiality and justice an “ethics of care.” Without taking a position regarding the “feminine” character of the values in question, we can say that these feminists’ reflections have led to a genuine “deconstruction” of universalist morality and the principle of identity, in accord with a trajectory that merges with the Heideggerian heritage of Sorge, though we cannot say that the common use of the word “care” has played a role in this matter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1953. First Published in 1927. Translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
CATEGORY
“Category” is derived, via Vulgar Latin, from the Greek katêgoria [ϰατηγορία], ( kata [ϰατά], against, on, and agoreuô [ἀγορεύω], speak in public ), which designates both the prosecution in a trial and the attribution in a logical proposition—that is, the questions that must be asked with regard to a subject and the answers that can be given. From Aristotle to Kant and beyond, logic has therefore determined a list of “categories” that are as well operations of judgment ( cf. JUSTICE ); see ESTI ( esp. Box 1 ) and HOMONYM. On the lexical networks implied by this ontological systematics, see BEGRIFF, MERKMAL, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SUBJECT, and cf. ESSENCE, PROPERTY, TO BE, TRUTH, UNIVERSALS.
AUFHEBEN, GENRE, OBJECT, PRINCIPLE, WHOLE
CATHARSIS, KATHARSIS [ϰάθαϱσις] ( GREEK )
| FRENCH | purgation, purification |
ART, MELANCOLY, MIMÊSIS, MITMENSCH, BOX 1, NATURE, BOX 1, NEIGHBOR, PATHOS, PLEASURE, PROPERTY, SUBLIME
The word katharsis initially was connected with rituals of purification before becoming a Hippocratic term in the theory of humors. Aristotle’s Poetics inflected its meaning by maintaining, in opposition to Plato, that tragedy and theater can care for the soul by giving it pleasure. In the traditional translation as “purgation,” it was part of French classical discourse on tragedy ( Corneille, 1660 ) before reappearing in its Greek form in Lessing’s works criticizing Corneille’s criticism of Aristotle ( the Greek word, which was already present in English, then returned in nineteenth-century discussions of Lessing; see RT: DHLF, s.v. “Catharsis” ). In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the “cathartic method” that Freud gradually disengaged from its association with hypnosis is connected with abreaction, the emotional discharge that makes it possible, through language, to eliminate the affect bound up with a traumatic event. The word’s oscillation between the meanings “purification” and “purgation” while remaining constant through various languages has continually provided material for polemics and reinterpretations.
I. From Scapegoat to Tragic Pleasure
The adjective katharos [ϰαθαϱός] associates material cleanliness, that of the body ( Homer calls it an “uncovered place”; it is applied to water, to grain; cf. RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ), with the moral or religious purity of the soul—thus Empedocles’s Purifications contains both a project of perpetual peace, constructed around metempsychosis, and alimentary prohibitions. Katharsis [ϰάθαϱσις] is an action noun corresponding to the verb kathairô [ϰαθαίϱω] ( clean, purify, purge ). Initially it had the religious sense of “purification,” and referred particularly to the ritual of expulsion practiced in Athens on the eve of the Thargelia. During these festivals traditionally dedicated to Artemis and Apollo, a loaf of bread, the thargêlos [θάϱγηλος], made from the first grain harvested that year, was offered; but beforehand the city had to be purified by expelling criminals from it ( cf. Harpocration’s lexicon: “The Athenians, during the Thargelia, drove two men, as purifying exorcisms, out of the city, one for the men, the other for the women,” and then scapegoats, according to the ritual of the pharmakos [φαϱμαϰός] ). Apollo himself is called katharsios [ϰαθάϱσιος], “purifier,” and moreover is forced to purify himself after killing Python in Delphi. According to Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus, he is fittingly named apolouôn [ἀπολούων], “the washer,” insofar as the music, medicine, and divination that characterize him are so many katharseis [ϰαθάϱσεις] and katharmoi [ϰαθαϱμοί], practices of purification ( 405a–c ).
According to the kathairontes [ϰαθαίϱοντες], the “purgers,” “the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles [ta empodizonta . . . tis ekbalêi [τὰ ἐμποδίζοντα . . . τις ἐϰϐάλῃ] have been removed” ( Plato, Sophist, 230c ). The purgative method that works for the body also works for the soul, which cannot assimilate knowledge before it has been purged of its opinions by elegchos [ἔλεγχος], “refutation”; the patient “must be purged of his prejudices and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more” ( 230d ). But there is a still more radical purification that Plato transposes from the religious domain, Orphic and Pythagorean, to philosophy ( cf. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, chaps. 3 and 5 ): “purification consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body” ( Phaedo, 67c ); if only the pure, purified thought can take possession of the pure, the unmixed ( to eilikrines [τὸ εἰλιϰϱινές] ) that is truth, mustn’t the soul leave the body?
Katharsis connects purification with separation and purging, not only in the religious, but also in the political ( Plato, in the Laws [5.735b–736a], describes painful purges as the only efficacious ones ) and the medical domains. In Hippocratic medicine, katharsis was connected with the theory of the humors and names the process of physical purgation through which harmful secretions are expelled, naturally or artificially, through the upper or the lower orifices: the term can designate not only purging as such, but also defecation, diarrhea, vomiting, and menstruation ( Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 5.36; 5.60; cf. De mulierum affectibus ). This Hippocratic meaning is valid in Aristotle’s whole naturalist corpus ( in the Historia animialium, 7.10.587b, for example, the term designates the rupture of the amniotic sac, various bodily discharges, etc.; cf. RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v. ). However, as a remedy—Greek to pharmakon [τὸ φάϱμαϰον], the same word, in the neuter gender, as the one designating the scapegoat—katharsis implies more precisely the idea of a homeopathic medicine: purgation is a way of curing harm by harm, the same by the same, and it is also why every pharmakon is a “poison” as much as a “remedy,” the dosage of the harmful thing alone producing a good result ( see NATURE, Box 1 ).
Here we have one of the possible keys to the rhetorical, poetic, and aesthetic meaning of katharsis, which Lausberg characterizes as “a homeopathic hygiene for the soul” ( RT: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, §1222 ). This kind of cure is connected with the katharsis produced by sacred melodies, mentioned in Aristotle’s Politics. There are enthusiastic, possessed individuals who “fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a result of the sacred melodies—when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy ( tois exorgiazousi . . . melesi [τοῖς ἐξοϱγιάζουσι . . . μέλεσι] )—restored as though they had found healing and purgation ( iatreias . . . kai katharseôs [ἰατϱείας . . . ϰαὶ ϰαθάϱσεως] )” ( 7.1342a 7–11 ). More generally, for Aristotle ( who here goes beyond a Plato, whom he salutes but subverts; cf. Republic, 3, starting at 398 ) katharsis is one of the functions of music, along with education and a good way of life, and with leisure and a relaxation of tension: for all those in the grip of passion “are in a manner purged and their souls lightened and delighted ( kouphizesthai meth’ hêdonês [ϰουφίζεσθαι μεθ ήδονῆς] ).” The purgative melodies likewise give humans an innocent pleasure ( charan ablabê [χαϱὰν ἀϐλαϐῆ] ) ( Politics, 7.1342a 14–16 ).
This homeopathic meaning is maintained in the Poetics: tragedy includes “incidents of pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis ( katharsin [ϰάθαϱσιν] ) of such emotions” ( 6.1449b 27–28 ). This is a purgation of the same by the same, or rather by the representation of the same. But unlike participants in Corybantic rites that seek to cure the soul of a furious madness, the spectator of tragedy is in full command of his faculties; he has no need to be cured. Whence a second meaning, which is in a way allopathic: the passions are purified by the spectator’s seeing them, to the extent to which the poet shows him things that have themselves been purified and transformed by mimêsis [μίμησις]: “The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.. . . The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear, and the poet has to produce it by a work of imitation” ( 14.1453b 4–13 ). Purgation, that is, the representation of diagrams by means of a musical or poetic work, substitutes pleasure for pain. Ultimately it is pleasure that purifies the passions, lightens them, relieves them of their excessive, invasive character, and resituates them in a point of equilibrium.
Finally, to radicalize catharsis, we have to follow the skeptical physician Sextus Empiricus in choosing for the soul as for the body a remedy capable of “eliminating itself at the same time that it eliminates the humors” or dogmas: the skeptical modes of expression are thus in their very form, which includes doubt, relativity, relationship, and questioning, self-purging ( Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.206; cf. 2.188; cf. Voelke, “Soigner par le logos” ).
II. Purgation of the Passions and Purification of Morals in the Classical Theater
This twofold meaning connecting the remedy with pleasure is the basis for the ambiguity and at the same time the richness of later interpretations. The influence exercised by Aristotle’s Poetics on the French theory of the dramatic poem was accompanied by a reworking of the ancient problematics in relation to new concerns connected with a profoundly different conception of the passions. From a Christian point of view, it is the passions themselves, and not merely their excesses, that are considered bad. It is no longer a matter of purifying the passions but of purifying oneself of passions, that is, of purifying morals. What seventeenth-century authors meant by “purgation of the passions” thus does not have quite the sense that katharsis had in Aristotle. The French emphasize the moral and especially the pedagogical aspect attached to the idea of theatrical katharsis. “The main goal of poetry is to benefit . . . by purifying morals,” Father Rapin wrote ( Réflexions sur la Poétique, 9 ). “Poetry is an art that was invented for the instruction of men. . . . The ill are treated, and tragedy is the only remedy from which they are able to benefit, for it is the only amusement in which they can find the pleasant and the useful,” Dacier wrote in the preface to his French translation of Aristotle’s Poetics ( 1692 ). Although it appeals to Aristotle’s authority on this point, this way of conceiving the purgation of the passions in the theater has little to do with Aristotelian katharsis. Corneille makes the same error when he criticizes Aristotle on this point, rejecting the idea that tragedy can purify the spectators’ passions: he thinks he is deviating from Aristotle, whereas he is merely opposing the interpretation his contemporaries gave of him. Racine is one of the few writers to remain faithful to Aristotle: “Tragedy,” he wrote, “exciting pity and terror, purges and tempers these sorts of passions, that is, by arousing these passions, it deprives them of what is excessive and vicious in them, and returns them to a state that is moderate and in conformity with reason” ( Œuvres complètes, quoted by J. Tricot in his translation of Aristotle’s Politics ). It is true that unlike Corneille, Racine understood Greek, and translated and annotated whole passages of the Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics.
■ See Box 1.
|
From Aristotle to Corneille and back Corneille’s criticism of the idea of theatrical catharsis illustrates the way his contemporaries transformed this problem. The purgation of the passions in the sense in which Corneille thought Aristotle understood it is for him purely “imaginary”: tragedy, he wrote, has the particular “utility” that by means of pity and fear it purges such passions. These are the terms Aristotle uses in his definition, and they tell us two things: first, that it [catharsis] excites pity and fear, and second, that by means of them, it purges similar passions. He explains the first at some length, but he says not a word about the latter, and of all the conditions he uses in this definition, this is the only one he does not explain. . . . If the purgation of the passions happens in tragedy, I hold that it must happen in the manner that I say; but I doubt that it ever happens, even in those that meet the conditions set by Aristotle. They are met in Le Cid and caused its great success: Rodrigue and Chimène have the probity subject to passions and these passions cause their misfortune because they are as unhappy as they are passionate for one another . . . their misfortune elicits pity, that is certain, and it cost the audience enough tears to make that incontestable. This pity must make us fear that we will fall into a similar misfortune and purge the excessive love that causes their misfortune and make us feel sorry for them, but I do not know whether pity gives it to us or if it purges it, and I fear that Aristotle’s reasoning on this point is just a fine idea that has never actually produced its effect. I leave this up to those who have seen the performances: they can examine it in the secrecy of their hearts and go over what moved them in the theater, in order to see if in this way they arrived at reflective fear, and whether it rectified in them the passion that caused the disgrace that they so lamented. Discours de la tragédie, 1660 In his Hamburg Dramaturgy ( 1767–68 ), Lessing reproached Corneille precisely for not having understood the sentence in chapter 6 of the Poetics and of having unfairly criticized Aristotle: Finally, as for the moral goal that Aristotle assigns to tragedy, and that he thought he had to include in his definition, we know how many debates about it have arisen, particularly recently. I feel sure that I can show that those who have blamed Aristotle on this point have not understood him. They have lent him their own thoughts before finding out what his were. They are battling chimeras with which they are themselves obsessed, and flatter themselves that they victoriously refute the philosopher when they defeat the phantoms of their own brains. 48th Evening BIBLIOGRAPHY Corneille, Pierre. Discours de la tragédie. In Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published by 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. |
Relying on Corneille’s criticism, but at the same time respecting convention and what he thought was Aristotle’s thought, Du Bos developed a rather confused reflection on this subject that concludes as follows: “Thus tragedy purges the passions rather as remedies cure, and as defensive weapons protect against offensive ones. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does!” ( Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture [1719], §44, “Que les poèmes dramatiques purgent les passions” ).
III. The “Carthartic Method” in Psychoanalysis
The “cathartic method” is part of the prehistory of psychoanalysis. It was developed by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud on the basis of their research on the etiology of symptoms of hysteria, as they explain in their work Studien über Hysterie ( Studies on Hysteria, 1895 ). In seeking the causes of the pathological phenomena of hysteria, the two Viennese physicians noticed that their patients’ symptoms were causally connected with a traumatic situation that the patient could not consciously remember ( cf. “Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene” [“On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,” 1893], in Studien über Hysterie ). The affect involved in this “psychic trauma [psychische Trauma],” “blocked” ( eingeklemmte ) and not discharged through the normal channels, is transformed into a hysterical conversion. “Catharsis” is produced when under treatment the path leading to consciousness and the normal discharge of the affect [normale Entladung des Affekts] is opened up ( “Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie” [Psychoanalysis and Theory of the Libido] [1922] ). The “cathartic procedure,” as Breuer called it, consists in using hypnosis to treat the patient through catharsis. The narrative of the “psychic trauma” is in fact usually followed by a discharge of affect ( abreaction ) that constitutes “catharsis” proper ( cf. Selbstdarstellung [Self-representation], 1924 ).
After the publication of Studien über Hysterie, the two collaborators’ positions regarding the etiology of hysteria diverged: “Breuer gave priority to what might be called a physiological theory,” whereas Freud confirmed the sexual content at the origin of hysterical phenomena, also pointing out the importance of “the differentiation between unconscious and conscious mental acts” ( Selbstdarstellung ). Later on, Freud abandoned hypnosis and suggestion in favor of free association, thus creating “psychoanalysis.” However, the effectiveness of catharsis allowed him to confirm two fundamental results, which were subsequently confirmed, as he says himself:
First, hysterical systems have meaning and significance because they are substitutes for normal mental acts; and second, the disclosure of this unknown meaning coincides with the suppression of the symptoms, and thus here scientific research and therapeutic effort coincide.
Studien über Hysterie
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by J. Barnes, vol. 2, 2316–3240. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
. Politics. Translated by J. Tricot. Paris: Vrin, 1970.
Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasure: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Bernays, Jacob. Zwei Abhandlungen über die aristotelische Theorie des Drama. Berlin: W. Herz, 1880 ; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.
Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963.
. Chief Plays. Translated by L. Lockert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Dacier, André. La poétique d’Aristote. Barbin, 1692.
. The Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1959. First published in 1705.
Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1994. First published in 1719. Translation by T. Nugent: Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music: With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients. London: Printed for J. Nourse, 1748.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalyse” und “Libidotheorie.” Vol. 13 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922.
. Selbstdarstellung. Vol. 14 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1922.
. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press–Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74.
. Studien über Hysterie. Vol. 1 in Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. First published in 1895.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Edited by K. L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. First published in 1767–68. Translation by V. Lange: Hamburg Dramaturgy. New York: Dover Publications, 1962.
Papanoutsos, Evangelios P. La catharsis des passions d’après Aristote. Athens: Collection de l’Institut français d’Athènes, 1953.
Plato. Sophist. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Racine, Jean. Complete Plays. Translated by S. Solomon. New York: Random House, 1967.
. Œuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952.
Rapin, René. Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote, et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes. Edited by E. T. Dubois. Geneva: Droz, 1970. First published in 1674. Translation by M. Rymer: Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie. London, 1694.
Voelke, André Jean. “Soigner par le logos: la thérapeuthique de Sextus Empiricus.” In Le Scepticisme antique. Perspectives historiques et systématiques. Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 15. Geneva, 1990.
“Certitude,” from ecclesiastical medieval Latin certitudo, designating in particular “Christian conviction,” is heir to two meanings of the adjective certus, one “objective” and the other “subjective”: “beyond doubt, fixed, positive, real,” regarding a thing or knowledge, or “firm in his resolutions, decided, sure, authentic,” regarding an individual. Although certitudo has no Greek equivalent, the Latin verb cerno, cernere, from which certus is derived, has the concrete meaning of “pass through a sieve, discern,” like the Greek krinein [ϰρίνειν] ( select, sieve, judge ), which comes from the same root. Thus begins the relationship between certitude, judgment, and truth, which since Descartes has been connected with the problematics of the subject and of self-certainty. The whole terminological system of truth is thus involved, from unveiling and adequation to certitude and obviousness: see TRUTH, and ISTINA, PRAVDA.
I. Certainty, Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Linguistic Systems
1. The objective aspect manifests itself first, certitudo translating for example the “determined nature” of objects or known properties ( as in Arab commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics translated into Latin ), or the incontestably true nature of principles: see TRUTH, Box 6; cf. RES ( and THING ), PRINCIPLE.
2. With the revolution of the subject inaugurated by Cartesian philosophy, the second aspect comes to the fore: some “reasons,” “ideas,” or “propositions” are “true and certain,” or “true and evident,” but the most certain and the most evident of all, and thus in a sense the truest, is the certitude of my own existence, a certainty that the subject attributes to itself: see SUBJECT and I/ME/MYSELF, SELBST. The thematics of certainty precedes that of consciousness both historically and logically, but it ends up being incorporated and subordinated by it: see CONSCIOUSNESS; cf. ES and UNCONSCIOUS.
3. Certainty thus becomes a quality or disposition of the subject that reproduces, in the field of rational knowledge, the security or assurance that the believer finds in religious faith, and that shields him from the wavering of the soul, see CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE]; cf. DASEIN, MALAISE, and esp. LIFE/LEBEN, SEHNSUCHT.
4. It will be noted that French retains the possibility of reversing the perspective by exploiting the Latin etymology, as Descartes does in the Principles of Philosophy when he transforms the certitudo probabilis of the Scholastics ( Aquinas ) into “moral certainty.” On the other hand, English tends to objectify certainty to the maximum in opposition to belief ( see BELIEF ), whereas German hears in the term Gewissheit the root wissen ( to know, to have learned ) and situates it in a series with Bewusstsein and Gewissen ( see CONSCIOUSNESS ), clearly marking the constitutive relationship to the subject in opposition to Glaube on the one hand, and to Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit ( lit., “appearance of truth,” i.e., “probability” ) on the other ( see TRUTH, II.B ).
II. Knots of Problems
1. On the relations between certainty and belief, the modalities of subjective experience, see CROYANCE.
2. On the relation between individual certainty and the wise man’s constancy, see PHRONÊSIS and PIETAS; cf. MORALS, VIRTÙ, WISDOM.
3. On the relations between certainty and truth, the confrontation between subjectivity and objectivity in the development of knowledge, see—in addition to TRUTH—ANSCHAULICHKEIT, EXPERIENCE, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION.
4. On the relations between certainty and probability, the modalities of objective knowledge insofar as it is related to a subject’s experience, see—in addition to PROBABILITY—CHANCE, DUTY, DOXA, SENS COMMUN [COMMON SENSE, SENSUS COMMUNIS], MATTER OF FACT.
CHANCE / PROBABILITY
| FRENCH | chance, probabilité, avantage |
PROBABILITY, and DESTINY, ENGLISH, HISTORY, UTILITY
The English notions of chance and probability, which were long confused with each other, each took on a specific meaning with their entry into the field of mathematical calculation, which made it necessary to distinguish them as early as the second half of the eighteenth century and to distinguish them even more clearly in the nineteenth century. No doubt there were some cases in the eighteenth century where “chance” had exactly the same meaning as “probability.” For example, in his Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances ( 1763 ), Thomas Bayes declares that “[b]y chance I mean the same as probability,” even though his work brilliantly demonstrated that they are not the same. Chance clearly retains the “subjective” spirit of arbitrary randomness, since we speak of the “chance of being right” ( in assigning a degree of probability between two selected degrees ); thus it represents, in the tradition of J. Bernoulli’s Ars conjectandi, a fraction of certainty. On the other hand, probability is clearly “objective” in that it seems to apply more directly to events. In dice, the probability of rolling an ace is one in six; it seems to be a property of the situation. Nonetheless, the preceding proposition can also be interpreted and formulated as follows: the chance of being right when one says that an ace will be rolled is one in six.
I. Probability of Chances and Probability of Causes
Between the 1650s, when Pascal, along with Fermat, invented the “geometry of chance” ( géométrie du hasard ) and tried to enumerate the chances and to calculate odds ( calculer le parti ), and the end of the eighteenth century, “chance” and “probability” had time to change meaning. The last chapter of La logique de Port-Royal—of which Pascal was at least the inspiration, if not the author—determines probability by calculating the odds ( of winning if a given event occurs ). At each step in the complex gaming situation he is analyzing, Pascal calculates the players’ odds, that is, the amount each would have to be paid if the game were to stop before chance determined the winner in accord with the rules. Nonetheless, “calculating the odds” is taken as a verb, whereas “probability” is usually taken by Pascal and in the La logique de Port-Royal as the equivalent of “chance.” In 1739, Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, grasped the two major axes along which the two notions are divided when they are not considered synonyms. The first opposes the “probability of chances” to the “probability of causes.” When in a given situation we can draw up a table of all the possible outcomes and calculate that a given situation will occur rather than another, we speak of the “probability of chances.” Thus, in calculating the odds in a game, we tend to speak of the “probability of chances” because the mind can make a concise inventory of all the situation’s possible outcomes. The Pascalian term hasard is perfectly rendered by the English word “chance” ( Maistrov, Probability Theory ).
We speak of the “probability of causes” in very different circumstances, which Hume clearly distinguishes: if a sequence of similar events A1B1, A2B2, A3B3 . . . AnBn has been witnessed by one or more persons and an event of type A occurs, we can use Newton’s binomial to calculate the probability that an event B will occur; in this case we will speak of the “probability of causes.” Note that on the basis of an event of the type B, we could have calculated in the same way the probability that an event A preceded it. It is clear that, borrowing Hume’s image, the probability of causes is assessed not by making a complete count in a system of cases that have to be inventoried in every direction, but more linearly, in the way that one plows a furrow in a single direction. Although the weight of past cases bears on the determination of the probability of a cause or an effect in a present situation, taking into account past situations in the situation of a game ( of chance ) has nothing at all to do with the probability of chances and constitutes a genuine epistemological obstacle to its evaluation.
II. Subjective Probability ( Chance ) and Objective Probability ( Probability )
Cutting across this first opposition between the “probability of chances” and the “probability of causes” and contradicting it to some extent, there is another opposition that has been even more influential not only in mathematics, but also in the domains of religion, economics, jurisprudence, and society: the one that distinguishes subjective probability ( generally called chance ) and objective probability ( generally called probability ). Price is correct in saying that Bayes ( An Essay ) deviated from common usage on this point. If I roll a mathematician’s six-sided die that is well balanced and not loaded and that clearly shows one of its faces when it has finished rolling, the probability of obtaining an ace, or indeed any other face, is one in six. Probability seems here to apply directly to the event, even if that is not the case and if it is a pure fiction connected with the discourse that allows us to make a prediction. But if I am in a situation where I am drawing winning and losing lots from an urn, I calculate the value of the relation between the number of losing lots and the number of winning lots that it contains on the basis of the drawings I have already made, and I attribute a probability to the outcome of the drawing I am about to make with a chance of being right or wrong. Bayes’s rule relates the probability that an event will occur to the chance of being mistaken when I calculate it. His rule calculates, as Price puts it, borrowing Bayes’s own expression:
. . . the chance that the probability for the happening of an event perfectly unknown should be between any two named degrees of probability, antecedently to any experiments made about it.
Chance no longer bears directly on the event but, rather, indirectly on my estimate of its probability. In a given initial situation, I can decide as I wish to situate between two degrees the probability that an event will occur; the “chance of being right” changes, of course, as this situation develops, that is, as I collect new information regarding the event in question. The degree of chance is calculated by an understanding that measures the value of a decision in relation to the probability of a given event in a given situation or at various stages of that situation. Curiously, since in this new function it is difficult to use the term “chance” in the plural, an author like Price substitutes the word “odds” for it and speaks of the “odds of chance” or the “odds of probability” ( An Essay ). The point is all the more remarkable because for a long time the English word “odds” was used only in the singular. Although “odds” clearly takes on the meaning of the French word cote in a wager that can receive a cardinal number, “odds” initially designated the strangeness of an event, the unexpected characteristic that made it an unusual, even unparalleled, event; but this does not mean that the word has no relation to arithmetic, since we commonly speak of odd numbers. In its singularity, the event is incommensurable, but in a contradictory fashion it thereby acquires the status of a unit constitutive of a number that preserves its character of being imperfect, odd, and difficult to divide.
III. The Importance of the Distinction between Chance and Probability in Religious and Juridical Debates
We can now see why the reversal of a “subjective” interpretation of the arguments of natural religion, which had been previously based on analogies ( e.g., God is to the universe as an architect is to a building ) turned out to be particularly devastating. The “chance of being right” evaluates various competing hypotheses; it does not limit itself to the examination of a single analogy whose terms are considered without showing any imagination. This technique of argumentation, which does not always adopt Bayes’s terminology, is that of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.
The shift from a perspective that is allegedly de re ( bearing directly on things ) to one that is de dicto ( by chance ) proved to be very efficacious in the juridical domain, especially in criminal law. Jacques Bernoulli, who in his Ars conjectandi defined probability as a fraction of certainty, saw very early on the interest of probabilities for economic, juridical, political, and social calculations; but it was the Bayesian perspective, which was to be that of Bentham’s utilitarianism down to our own time, and also that of Laplace and Poisson, that gave these calculations their true value. If society, not only as the guardian of the laws, of order, and of security but also of justice, has an interest in such and such a crime or offense being punished, we can calculate our chances of being right in attributing this crime or offense to such and such a person whom we are preparing to punish, and at the same time evaluate, on that basis, whether it is just to proceed with this punishment ( see EIDÔLON, Box 1 ).
IV. Probability, Chance, Expectation
Our difficulty in translating the terms “probability” and “chance” can thus proceed from certain contradictions in the use of “chance”: in the first opposition between chances and causes, it has an essentially objective meaning connected with counting up situations, whereas in the second opposition, it has the subjective meaning of a relationship of values; the context will always indicate which type of opposition is concerned.
Nevertheless, the notion of expectation, which is very close to those of probability and chance, adds to the difficulty. Although it is usually appropriate to avoid translating “expectation” by the French word attente in contexts where it clearly refers to an evaluation of probability and to prefer the term espérance, we have to acknowledge that the latter term lacks clarity. Pascal, whom we have presented as the author par excellence of the “probability of chances,” reasons less on probability than on expectation; however, it is a question of calculations that belong precisely to the domain of objective probabilities. Subjective probabilities, on the other hand, were later to be characterized by a fundamental use of expectation on the basis of which probability alone is defined, as we see in Bayes ( An Essay ), who posits the probability of an event as the relation between the expectation attached to this event and the benefit one hopes to realize if it occurs:
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.
This is the place to note that the idea of subjective probability arose in a language that allowed this complicated formation by means of gerunds that cannot really be translated into French ( see ENGLISH )—even if, a few years later, Continental mathematicians dealt with this idea with the same ease as mathematicians working in English.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. La logique de Port-Royal. 1662. Translation by James Dickoff and Patricia James: The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Bayes, Thomas. An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. New York, Hafner: 1963. First published in 1763.
Bernoulli, Jakob. Ars conjectandi ( opus posthumum ). “Pars Quarta ( tradens usum & applicationem praecedentis Doctrinae Civilibus, Moralibus Oeconomicus ).” Basel: Thurnisiorum fratrum, 1713. Translation by E. Dudley Sylla: The Art of Conjecturing, Together with Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1779.
. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40.
Laplace, Pierre-Simon de. Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements. In vol. 8 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891.
. Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Translated by A. I. Dale. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995.
. Théorie analytique des probabilités. Paris: Courcier, 1814.
Maistrov, Leonid E. Probability Theory. A Historical Sketch. Translated and edited by S. Kotz. New York: Academic Press, 1974. First published in 1967.
Moivre, Abraham de. The Doctrine of Chances. Guilford: Frank Cass, 1967. First published in 1718.
Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963.
. Pensées and Other Writing. Translated by H. Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Poisson, Siméon-Denis. Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile précédées des règles générales du calcul des probabilités. Paris: Bachelier, 1837.
Todhunter, Isaac. A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to That of Laplace. New York: Chelsea, 1965. First published in 1865.
CHÔRA [χώϱα] ( GREEK )
DESCRIPTION, FORM, GREEK, LIEU, POLIS, REASON, TO TRANSLATE, WORLD
Inasmuch as chôra has no meaning—at least not in this classical sense—it is intrinsically untranslatable. It is such as to disrupt the very operation of translation. —Sallis, Chorology
In general, where it is used in Plato’s Dialogues, the word chôra [χώϱα] has, according to the context, the commonplace meaning of “land,” “place,” “space,” or “room” ( Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought ). As Casey points out, its primary connotation is “occupied space,” as in “a field full of crops or a room replete with things” ( Casey, The Fate of Place ). This is the signification of the first appearance of the word in the Timaeus, where Socrates is characterizing the country outside the city proper ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶19 ). Such a sense of extraterritoriality and extension certainly anticipates the way in which it is used later in the dialogue. But in the following creation story, narrated by Timaeus, Plato endows chôra with a special significance, and a corresponding ambiguity, which has been debated ever since, from Aristotle to Derrida.
The Timaeus as a whole is concerned with foundation of the just city, and with the corresponding idea of beginning, starting with the creation of the cosmos itself. The dialogue purportedly takes place following a conversation the day before concerning the perfect city—a summary of the conversation by Socrates makes a clear reference to the central aspects of the city outlined in the Republic; but Socrates professes to be dissatisfied with the static and abstract nature of the picture drawn so far. He demands a livelier image, one that sets the city in motion so to speak, and Critias suggests that the heroic story of the war between ancient Athens and Atlantis would supply the requisite action. But before a narrative of city foundation, Timaeus, with his astronomical knowledge, proposes to establish the story of cosmic becoming. This then is the context for the elaboration of the concept of chôra.
The word chôra itself first appears in its newly ambiguous, but philosophical, form in paragraph 52b of the Timaeus. But its appearance has been prepared for by Plato some paragraphs before. In brief, the argument up to the introduction of chôra goes something like this: Timaeus has, in the first part of the dialogue, given an account of how the universe “came into being” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶27 ), distinguishing between two states: “that which is always real and has no becoming” and “that which is always becoming but is never real.” The former is “apprehensible by the intelligence with the aid of reasoning,” the latter is an “object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28 ). Thus separating out the unchanging ( rational ) reality, from the changing ( sensible ), lived, reality, Timaeus uses this well-known Platonic distinction between the ideal primary reality and the physical secondary reality to sketch out the steps taken by the demiurge ( dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός], “maker,” “father,” “constructor” ) as he “keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product.” This is so that he can ensure a “good” result, for whenever he looks to “something which has come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28 ). Timaeus uses the word kalos [ϰαλός], which can mean “good,” but also “satisfactory,” “desirable,” and, of course, “beautiful.” In this way, as Francis Cornford notes, “the visible world . . . is a changing image or likeness ( eikon ) of an eternal model” ( Plato’s Cosmology ). A postulate that raises as many questions as it answers: if something is in a state of becoming, does it begin at any one point? Or, what might be the “cause” of such becoming, as opposed to the state of being, or the same? Or, finally, is the “real,” as copy, really real, or simply a dream or shadow of the real? Plato compounds these difficulties by having Timaeus state that what he is describing is no more than a “likely story,” for mortals are in the end “unable to render an account at all points entirely consistent with itself and exact . . . ( or ) furnish accounts no less likely than any other” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶29c ). And, as Derrida will note, the problem extends not only to reasonable stories, but also to naming. Even the “Heaven,” “world,” or “cosmos” may take different names: “let us call it,” says Timaeus, “by whatsoever name may be most acceptable to it” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶28b ).
This, then, is the procedure of the “demiurge,” compared by Plato to a craftsman ( dêmiourgos [δημιουϱγός] ), who as “intelligence” itself, “framed the universe,” fashioning “reason within soul, and soul within body,” as a living creature. Not a god, or “God,” the demiurge operates like a craftsman on materials he did not himself create, with reason guiding his design. Out of the four primary bodies—fire, air, water, and earth—he fashions a universe bound together by proportion and thereby “visible and tangible” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶32b ). The aesthetics of this work, “a living being whole and complete, of complete parts . . . single, nothing being left over,” “a single whole consisting of all these wholes” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33a ), has had a long history in Neoplatonism and neoclassicism: this “shape rounded and spherical, equidistant every way from center to periphery—a figure the most perfect and uniform of all . . . perfectly smooth” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶33b ) has held a privileged position in the theory of ideal forms. Endowed with a centrally positioned world-soul, itself the embodiment of reason and harmony, and incorporating, like some perfect armillary, the motions of the seven planetary rings, this world incorporates time within its circularity, marked by the differential motions of the planets.
Such was the world constructed as Plato recounts “by the craftsmanship of Reason” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶47e ); but it failed to take note of a second equally powerful cause, that of Necessity ( anankê [ἀνάνϰη] ). Here Plato makes it clear that his “demiurge” is by no means the omnipotent creator of everything out of nothing construed by later religions. Rather his craftsman works with materials already at hand—fire, water, air, and earth “before the generation of the Heaven” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48b ), materials whose prior existence has not been explained by Reason’s work, and that demand what Plato terms an “errant cause” as “origin.” But this origin is immediately subject to question, for as Plato states, “‘first principle or ‘principles’—or whatever name men choose to employ” are exceedingly difficult to explain. Indeed, Timaeus affirms that the explanation should not be demanded of him, as it poses too “great a task”; rather he promises to give “the worth of a probable account,” one “no less probable than any other, but more so” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶48d ).
In beginning again, then, “once more” and in moving toward “the conclusion that probability dictates,” in starting over with his account of creation, Plato acknowledges the impossibility of certainty for the first time. If one can be certain about the forms of Reason, those of Necessity demand a more speculative approach. The need for this fresh beginning, principle, or starting-point arises from this intrusion of the irrational, that which can be controlled by Reason, but that Reason did not bring into being. Here then is the already uncertain context into which chôra is introduced.
For in starting again to describe the universe, Plato now joins to his two principal orders of existence—the unchanging intelligible model and the changing and visible copy—a third, a medium of sorts that supports the two. This medium is of a “form difficult and obscure” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶49 ) but its nature can be stated as that of the “receptacle ( hupodochê [ὑποδόχη] )—as it were, the nurse—of all Becoming.” Such a “receptacle” unlike its contents—fire, water, air, and earth that are in a perpetual state of change—is unchanging and permanent. Plato, as Cornford notes, somewhat misleadingly, compares it to the gold out of which one makes all kinds of figures. The receptacle “must be called always the same; for it never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50b ). It is, Plato explains, a kind of “matrix” for everything, that, although it is changed by the things that enter it, and may appear to have different qualities at different times, is in itself always the same.
In a passage that much later had implications for feminist readings, Plato, always trying to explain that “which is hard to express,” seeks another comparison through gender: “the ( intelligible ) model in whose likeness that which becomes is born,” is compared to a father; “that which becomes ( the copy )” is like an offspring, and “that in which it becomes” ( the receptacle ) inevitably takes on the characteristics of a mother ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶50 c–d ). This apparently simple simile, one that gives the character of generation to the receptacle, is, however, immediately contradicted in what follows: for Plato insists that the receptacle, whatever else it is, is “invisible and characterless, all receiving,” a “nature” that, precisely because it is free of all the characters that come from elsewhere, enter into it, and pass out of it, cannot be endowed with a specific gender. Plato compares this lack of character to the liquid base used by the makers of perfumes that is as odorless as possible: “Thus it is, in the first place, for the perfumes that one prepares artistically, in order to give them a good odor. The perfume makers avoid first of all as much as possible all odor in the liquid base which must receive them” ( Timaeus, 50e ). It should be noted here, as Derrida will observe in his essay “La Pharmacie de Platon,” that “the pharmakon also means perfume. Perfume without essence, as we said above, drug without substance. It transforms order into ornament, the cosmos into cosmetic.” Would this mean that, by the same token, Plato is comparing the “receptacle,” not yet named chôra, to a pharmakon [φάϱμαϰον], a drug that, without smell, receives all smells that pass into, through, and out of it, with the implication that such smells are transformed into dangerous perfumes? At this point we are better taking Plato at his word when, even as he struggles for comparisons and mixes his metaphors, he states baldly that this receptacle partakes “in some very puzzling way of the intelligible” and is “very hard to apprehend” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶51b ).
What is certain is that Plato has determined the need for three things: the unchanging “Form,” “ungenerated and indestructible”; that which “bears the same name and . . . is sensible”; and a third, previously called the receptacle, but which now gains a name: chôra ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52 ). Chôra is now finally “defined” as “everlasting, not admitting destruction,” somewhat like the Form, but different in that it can be apprehended. Its apprehension, however, is not by reason or the senses, but by what Plato calls “a sort of bastard reasoning” with a status somewhere between the two; you have to think about it, but nevertheless it is in the visible world, invisibly ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b ). We apprehend chôra then as “in a dream” forcing ourselves to acknowledge that “anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room, and that which is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52b ). This very act of recognizing that all objects demand situation, Plato argues, leads to the “hybrid” or “bastard” reasoning that in turn forces recognition of chôra.
The ambiguity of chôra’s nature is further complicated by Plato’s next analogy, advanced to explain the emergence of chaos, a chaos readying itself for the reasoning work of the demiurge. Chôra once again becomes the “nurse of becoming,” but a nurse immediately transformed into a winnowing basket that is shaken by its contents and in turn shakes them: “just when things are shaken and winnowed by means of winnowing-baskets and other instruments for cleaning corn, the dense and heavy things go one way, while the rare and light are carried to another place” ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Timaeus, ¶52d ). In this way were like and unlike things separated, and made ready for the demiurge.
At this point in his attempt to characterize the invisible chôra, Plato has assembled a number of apparently contradictory “images” or what were later to be called “metaphors,” drawn from the arts of fabrication ( technê [τέχνη] ) as if to underline the action of the demiurge. Yet the chôra anticipates the arrival of this grand artisan—chôra is, so to speak, always already there. It is at once all-receiving, a receptacle, and something that harbors, shelters, nurtures, and gives birth. It is infinitely malleable like gold, and it is a matrix for all things. As things shake, it winnows like a basket, separating out the chaff from the grain. What is clear, as Cornford points out, is that the chôra, while not a void, is not “matter” in itself, as subsequent interpreters will have it. ( Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology ).
When resituated in the context of the city narratives of the Timaeus and Critias, it becomes clear that Plato’s use of the word’s ambiguities is consistent with the need to provide a firm and original foundation, one that originally emerged out of the earth and the cosmos, not only for ancient Athens but for a renewed city that could be projected as emerging out of and within a chôra that was ever-ready to receive and nurture, and that in all its connotations was connected to a content-filled and cultivated land, with room for the polis.
In subsequent rereadings and reinterpretations, the Platonic chôra was subjected to oversimplification ( Aristotle ) and overinterpretation ( Chrysippus, Proclus ). In Aristotle, place ( topos [τόπος] ) takes precedence over Plato’s semi-mystical creation fables—as Casey remarks, “Chôra yields to Topos, the bountiful to the bounded” ( Casey, The Fate of Space; and Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought ). Indeed, Aristotle’s reading of the Timaeus explicitly ( and perhaps deliberately ) identifies the receptacle with the chôra, and thence the chôra with matter, going on to conflate chôra with topos ( Aristotle, Physics, 4.209b; cited in Sallis, Verge of Philosophy ). For Epicurus, however, chôra retains a certain Platonic energy; the root verb is chôrein, “to go” or “to roam.” As Sextus Empiricus explains, Epicurus distinguished among “void” ( kenon [ϰενόν] ), “place” ( topos ), and “room” ( chôra ), where “room” affords the space for the constant motion of the atoms, the “spielraum of atomic bodies,” as Casey calls it. The Stoic Chrysippus goes further, characterizing such a “room” or chôra as space for both roaming and also extension, a connotation followed by the Neoplatonist Syrianus ( Casey, The Fate of Space ), and thence by Proclus in his exhaustive commentary on the Timaeus.
Since Proclus’s commentary, and throughout the myriad subsequent textual analyses that have ranged in their emphasis from Pythagorean geometry, cosmological symbolism, and biological geneticism, to the form of the ideal polis, the search for the lost Atlantis, and the mythologies of ancient Athens, little or nothing indicated chôra as a keyword, beyond the indices accompanying the translation of many such terms in Plato. Indeed, John Sallis, in his attempt to describe or found a “chorology” after Plato is hard pressed to find, save by omission and post-Derridean inference, a problematic role for, or even a mention of, the word.
Nevertheless, the word chôra gained ground as a keyword in philosophy in the 1970s. Its status as a term to be confronted by and for deconstruction was tagged by Derrida in 1968, adopted within semiotics by Kristeva in 1974, and taken by Irigaray and others as a point of departure for a questioning of gender categories. In 1985 it was presented by Derrida as a problem for ( Peter Eisenman’s ) architecture, thence to become a moment for reflection on architecture’s gender in the work of Anne Bergren, on deconstruction and architecture in Jeffrey Kipnis, and on the grounding of architecture itself in Eisenman and Derrida’s project for a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s La Villette. Taken back into philosophy by Derrida in 1987 and 1993, chôra was re-inscribed within Neoplatonic interpretation by John Sallis in 1999.
It was Derrida, who, in a sideways glance at the word in his discussion of “La Pharmacie de Platon” ( “Plato’s Pharmacy” ) first opened up a question that has since developed into a critical field of inquiry of its own. The context is significant. The essay is concerned with another word whose meaning is obscured by multiple uses, significations, and ( mis ) translations, but which nevertheless, when identified as a sign, stands out as a mark of Plato’s deep ambiguity toward writing, a pharmakon that might be at once a “drug” or “remedy,” dangerous or helpful. Speaking of the untranslatability of the word pharmakon in the Phaedo ( but also everywhere that it appears in Plato ), Derrida writes of “this regulated polysemy which has allowed, by ineptness, indetermination or over determination, but without contradiction, the translation of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ philter,’ etc.” Such errancy in definition and translation has indeed undermined “the plastic unity of this concept, its very rule, and the strange logic which links it to its signifier” in such a way that it has “been dispersed, masked, obliterated, struck with a relative unreadability, by the imprudence or empiricism of the translators, certainly, but first and foremost by the redoubtable and irreducible difficulty of translation.” But this is the result, Derrida argues, less of the difficulties of passing from one language to another, or even from one philosophical language to another, and more of a question within the Greek language itself, of that “violent” tradition whereby a non-philosophical language is transferred into a philosophical one. “With this problem of translation,” Derrida notes, “we will be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage to philosophy.” And later he concludes: “La khôra est grosse de tout ce qui se dissémine ici” ( chôra is pregnant with everything that is disseminated here ). For Derrida, indeed, chôra was “grosse,” a word that indicated the difficulty of naming, categorizing, or even writing the “origin,” or at least that “origin” posited by Plato, before the entry of the demiurge in order to shape the world.
Derrida was already engaged in writing his essay “Khôra” in homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant. Here he takes on the apparent confusion of “metaphors”—he prefers not to call them metaphors for reasons he will later divulge—used by Plato to describe, characterize, or define chôra, or the “receptacle,” in order to demonstrate that these turns of phrase are irreducible questions of writing. In a long citation from Albert Rivaud’s edition of the Timaeus, Derrida demonstrates the confusion surrounding the word and question of “place,” or chôra ( citing Rivaud, Platon ). Rivaud had noted the proliferation of what he called “metaphors for chôra, metaphors for the ‘place,’ the ‘site,’ ‘this in which’ things appear, ‘this on which’ they manifest themselves, the ‘receptacle,’ the ‘matrix,’ the ‘mother,’ the ‘nurse’—it is container and contained at the same time, ‘the space that contains the things.’ ” Rivaud himself translates chôra as a “porte-empreinte,” literally “carrier of the imprints” ( as in porte-parole, “carrier of the word” ), the “excipient,” or, “the entirely de-odorized substance, or the gold with which the jeweller can impress a quantity of different figures.” Derrida exposes the ambiguity of Plato’s introduction of the “third genre” of being.
Derrida, however, was inevitably dissatisfied with the notion of “metaphor,” and “comparison,” working rather to identify the aporias in Plato’s own discourse. The paradox is clear: what is named “chôra” or “place” cannot itself be situated or “assigned a home”; “it is more situator than situated.” Indeed, Derrida resists all attempts to define the word, translate the word, or supply additional metaphors or comparisons for the word. Indeed, the “interminable theory of exegeses” ( Derrida, Khôra ) that surrounds chôra “seems to reproduce that which, following the discourse of the Timaeus, would happen not with Plato’s text, but with khôra herself.” All translations, he writes, remain “on the level of interpretation” and thereby subject to anachronism. There is, therefore, no question of proposing “le mot juste” for chôra; rather than reducing it falsely to a name or essence, it has to be understood as a structure. As Derrida concludes, “one cannot even say of it that it is neither this, nor that, or that it is at the same time this and that.” Marking the continuing ambiguity, Derrida and Sallis engaged in a friendly debate as to whether the word should be written without an article ( khôra ) as Derrida insisted, or with an article ( the chôra ) as Sallis preferred. For Derrida the article “presupposes the essence of the thing,” which had no such essence in Plato’s usage; for Sallis omitting the article “would risk effacing all difference between the word and that of which the word would speak” ( Sallis, Verge of Philosophy ). Chôra, indeed, remained elusive to the end and still, as a recent commentator notes, the question remains “multilayered” and “incoherent” ( Sayre, “Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle” ).
But perhaps the problem of chôra would not have surfaced in so poignant a form if, as he recounts, Derrida had not been introduced by the architect Bernard Tschumi to the architect Peter Eisenman in 1985, and suggested that a concept on which he was writing a paper would perhaps serve to open a discussion that would launch their collaboration in the design of a garden for Parc La Villette. The concept was named “chôra”; in common translation, the special nature of this term, taken from Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, was rendered “place” or “space.” Apparently an innocent enough suggestion, the debates over the “meaning” of the word extended into seven taped discussions, seemingly replicating the Socratic model of the original, and eventually a book of transcriptions, drawings, and the translation of a version of Derrida’s own essay on chôra appeared. In this way, a word, long-forgotten in the footnotes of Plato translation and exegesis was launched into a veritable, architectural discourse, not perhaps as a solution to any “space of deconstruction,” but rather as an insoluble conundrum set by the philosopher for the architect, to test the capacity of architecture to signify its own origins, its groundings in chôra.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Algra, Keimpe. Concepts of Space in Greek Thought. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Bergren, Anne. “Architecture Gender Philosophy.” In Strategies in Architectural Thinking. Edited by J. Whiteman, J. Kipnis, and R. Burdett. Chicago: The Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism and MIT Press, 1992.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Cornford, Francis. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. London: Routledge, 1935.
Derrida, Jacques. “La Pharmacie de Platon.” Tel Quel 32–33 ( 1968 ); repr. in La dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972.
. “Khôra.” In Poikilia. Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1987.
. Khôra. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. Translation by J. Kipnis and T. Lesser: Chora L. Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1974.
Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974.
Plato. ŒUvres completes. Timée, Critias. Edited by Albert Rivaud. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001.
Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
. The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Sayre, Kenneth. “The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle.” In Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, edited by Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
CIVIL RIGHTS
| FRENCH | droits civils, droits civiques |
DROIT, and CIVIL SOCIETY, CIVILTÀ, LAW, MENSCHHEIT, POLITICS, RULE OF LAW, STATE
The expression “civil rights” can be rendered in French by both droits civils and droits civiques. In the first case, the reference is to the customary classifications of rights that distinguish civil rights ( such as property ) from political rights or social rights. In the second case, the reference is to the meaning acquired by “civil rights” in the context of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, whose main goal was to put an end to racial segregation and, more generally, to the discrimination of which minorities were the victims.
If we want to understand why English speaks of “civil rights” ( including the right to vote ) and even of “civic rights” ( i.e., citizens’ rights ), where we might think the “rights of man” or “human rights” ought to be in play, we have to refer to American constitutional history. After the Civil War, the United States adopted three amendments to the Constitution that should have put an end to slavery and its aftereffects. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment states that
[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens’ right to vote against any restriction based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But the juridical and political development of the United States led to these amendments being deprived of much of their substance by racial segregation and various artifices designed to deprive blacks of their right to vote on various pretexts ( e.g., literacy tests ); moreover, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to prohibit racial discrimination in public rights, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in deciding a set of civil rights cases in 1883. To the extent that the fight against discrimination, relying on the new liberal orientation of the 1960s Supreme Court, sought to restore the full scope to the rights of American citizens, and not simply to guarantee the rights of individuals, it was natural that it would present itself as a movement for civic rights. Its goal was not only to guarantee human rights, but also to see to it that black Americans would be recognized as full-fledged citizens.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balkin, Jack, ed. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Boxill, Bernard. Blacks and Social Justice. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992.
Holmes, Stephen, and Cass Sunstein. The Cost of Rights. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Kersch, Kenneth. Constructing Civil Liberties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Waldron, Jeremy. Liberal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
| ENGLISH | civil society, political society | ||
| GERMAN | bürgerliche Gesellschaft | ||
| GREEK | koinonia politike [ϰоινωνία πоλιτιϰή] | ||
| LATIN | societas civilis |
BILDUNG, CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVILTÀ, DROIT, ECONOMY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, LAW, OIKONOMIA, PEOPLE, POLIS, POLITICS, SECULARIZATION, STATE
Far from simply designating a recent notion introduced by Hegel or Marx in the wake of Anglo-Scottish economists, the expression “civil society” ( societas civilis, société civile, bürgerliche Gesellschaft ) belongs to the most classical vocabulary of political philosophy. Originally, it corresponded to the Latin ( and then French ) translation of Aristotle’s koinonia politike [ϰоινωνία πоλιτιϰή] ( political community ). It thus initially designated the form of human existence that prevails when men live under political or civil laws. The same situation persists with modern contractualist theories, in which “civil society” is opposed to the state of nature ( Hobbes ) and fuses with political society ( Locke ) or even in authors like Kant, for whom civil society is another name for the state. The distinction between civil society and the state, which seems obvious since Hegel and Marx, should thus be understood as the fruit of a complex and paradoxical history. And the history of these concepts is inseparable from that of their translation.
I. Koinonia Politike and Societas Civilis
In order to understand the history of the concept of civil society, our first obligation is to avoid confusing the Aristotelian lexicon for political community with that for society, by identifying, for example, man’s character as a “political animal” with a simple natural sociability. The political community described in book 1 of the Politics is not the simple product of sympathy or of the incapacity of each individual to suffice on its own, since it is distinguished essentially from such other forms of community as the couple, the family, or the village. The domestic community is characterized by an unequal relation of authority in which the head of family commands those who are by nature destined to obey him, whereas in the “political community” ( he polis kai he koinonia he politike [ἡ πόλις ϰαὶ ἡ ϰоινωνία ἡ πоλιτιϰή] ), authority is exercised over free and equal men who, in various ways, participate in public affairs. Understood in such terms, the city is first in nature because it is what makes it possible to “live well” and for man to realize fully his nature, but it is encountered only under certain conditions, which are not to be found, for instance, in despotic regimes or empires. Aristotle’s thought on political community is thus strictly derived from the political experience of the Greek city-state. And it can be easily understood that the translation of Aristotle’s concepts posed some difficulties in the Roman—and subsequently Christian—world. Conventionally, in keeping with a usage to be found in medieval translators of Aristotle, polis [πόλις] was translated as societas civilis while maintaining as synonyms the city-state, the political community thus become civil society, and the republic ( civitas sive societas civilis sive republica ), but the Latin plainly has different connotations from the Greek. Societas designates a juridical link that is not necessarily political and is defined above all by consensus and the pursuit of common ends. Latin authors like Cicero also evoke the Stoic idea of a society of the human race ( societas generis humani ) that could certainly not consititute a political community in the Aristotelian sense. Civis, civilis, and civitas thus acquire a universalist dimension, linked to Rome and Roman law’s capacity to spread citizenship quite broadly, in a manner unknown in the classical Greece of the city-states ( Moatti, La Raison de Rome ). The properly French notion of contemporary civil society, which evokes the universality of the juridical bond between individuals more than a shared belonging to a particular civic entity, continues to bear the trace of that transformation.
■ See Box 1.
|
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society Even if the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which was introduced in sociological theory by Ferdinand Tönnies ( Community and Society ), has no true equivalent in the prior history of political philosophy ( Pasquino, “Communauté et société” ), it can be compared to certain major themes introduced in Germany by political romanticism and the School of Law: where German jurists distinguished two modes for the formation of law ( “natural” and spontaneous or, on the contrary, “artificial” and deliberate ), Tönnies opposes two types of human collectivity. Community ( Gemeinschaft ), in which familial economy and agriculture predominate, rests on unanimous and spontaneous adherence to substantial values, whereas society ( Gesellschaft ), which is commercial and industrial, is based on an individualization of interests, a quest for compromise, and voluntary association. Gemeinschaft evokes themes out of romanticism, and the model of Gesellschaft is furnished by the anthropology of Hobbes. It is not merely types but also stages of cultural development that follow each other according to a logic that runs the gamut from unconscious to deliberate: “the age of society follows that of community. The latter is characterized by social will as concord, custom, and religion; the former by social will as political convention and public opinion” ( Tönnies, Community and Society ). Tönnies, however, is not a simple nostalgic conservative: he is rather in search of a way of moving beyond the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which explains his interest in modern socialism, which, while expressing the conflicts in society, shows the necessity of reconstructing a lost unity. The distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be connected with other couplings of similar concepts in the sociological tradition, such as the organic and critical epochs in Auguste Comte, the dual—mechanical and organic—forms of solidarity in Durkheim, or, more recently, the holistic and individualistic societies of Louis Dumont. Max Weber offered a reconstruction of the opposition in individualistic terms, through his distinction between Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, which puts the accent on the type of activity—affective and traditional or, on the contrary, rational—predominating in social relations ( Raynaud, Dictionnaire de philosophie politique ); but most contemporary representatives of methodological individualism tend to reject Tönnies’s conceptions, bringing to the fore the conflictual or calculating dimension of communitarian bonds ( see RT: Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie, s.v. “Communauté” ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. Edited and translated by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964. |
II. City of God and Civil Society
The fate of civil society derives equally from an intellectual and moral revolution favored by Roman experience, the spread of Christianity, and particularly the theory of two cities defended by Saint Augustine in The City of God.
For Saint Augustine, civil society is assuredly a natural reality, participating in the goodness of the created world, but the corruption of human nature that followed the Fall prevents attributing full self-sufficiency to him and renders precarious in advance all efforts to attain happiness on earth, which is nonetheless the object of the earthly city. While awaiting the Last Judgment, the two cities coexist in humanity ( like the elect and the reprobate ), and their relation cannot be resolved by the pure political abstention of the just. On the one hand, the Christian must indeed obey the civil power and accomplish his civic duties, but on the other, he can and must not forget that the natural societas is linked to original sin and that it is grounded in self-love pressed to the point of contempt of God, the heavenly city being alone able to establish true communication between men. Even if the visible church does not coincide with the celestial city ( since it contains sinners and reprobates ), that complex relation between the two orders of nature and grace manifests itself in the church’s ambivalent relation to the state: the church must acknowledge the specific consistency of civil society, but it must also act in the earthly city to help men attain their natural and supernatural ends. The medieval posterity of Saint Augustine would explore the possible solutions to this theologico-political dilemma, which went from pontifical theocracy to Luther’s doctrine of the two realms by way of theories favorable to the primacy of the emperor or the king ( Quillet, Les Clefs du pouvoir au Moyen Age ). In the evolution of modern thought, one can schematically distinguish five solutions to the problem of the relations between civil society and the city of God. The first is that of the Catholic Church, which is remarkably stable and consists of positing simultaneously the consistency proper to civil society and its essential incompletion, which implies an acceptance of the civil power, but also the affirmation of a minimal ( and eminently variable ) political competence of the church. This is why, even today, the expression “civil society” is synonymous, for political theologians, with “political order.” That position can be distinguished simultaneously from Luther’s ( which insisted on the essentially repressive role of the political power while affirming the principle of inner liberty ) and from the doctrines of the Catholic Counter-Reformation ( Bonald, de Maistre ), which led to the negation of any autonomy of civil society, all to the benefit of the church. The millenarian tendencies of the Thomas Münzer sort ( violently opposed by Martin Luther ) can, for their part, be considered attempts to achieve the city of God on earth, to the detriment of all the institutions of civil society, such as marriage and property. The fascination exercised by Thomas Münzer on Marxist thinkers, from F. Engels to E. Bloch, thus connects them to fanatical currents hostile to civil society ( Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism ). Finally, the philosophies of history issuing from German idealism are the fruit of an effort to think the continuity between civil society ( or the state ) and the heavenly city: thus it is that for Hegel the true Christian state is the one that fully ensures the autonomy of the political order—on the condition, to be sure, of its distinctness from civil society.
III. State and Civil Society
If the Roman invention of the societas permitted a certain affirmation of the universality of law, it could do so only by insisting on the law’s foundational capacity, which, in the case of Rome ( whose tradition on this matter was quite different from what prevailed in canon law ), was not without a certain artificiality ( see, for instance, Thomas, “Fictio legis,” on the importance of fictio in Roman law ). It also had the effect of undoing the bond, affirmed by Aristotle, between the political community and political freedom, following a logic amplified by the Christian transformation of the political order: the universality of humanity is emphatically proclaimed by Christianity, but Christian monarchies ( in which power, to be sure, is not exercised over free and equal men ) are fully accomplished forms of civil society. Whatever the case, despite the distance separating the political community of Aristotle from the civil society of the Christians, the two notions share the feature of designating a natural reality which, even if it may entail an internal hierarchy, fully coincides with the human political order; and it was precisely on these two points that the subsequent transformations of the concept of civil society would bear.
Contractualist theories of modern natural law fully maintain the equivalence between civil society and the political condition or the Republic, and that feature would be maintained in the Continental tradition up to and including Kant’s Doctrine of Right. But the dominant trend in modern political philosophy, embodied by Hobbes, is also clearly artificialist, in that it is opposed to the Aristotelian idea of the naturalness of the political bond, which is not without consequences for the status of civil society. The logic at work here leads, in fact, on the one hand, to making of the preservation of subjective freedom the aim of political association, and thus of affirming the eminent value of what is today called the private sphere, all the while entrusting to political power the protection and even the definition of the rights of the members of the civil association. This is why, on the one hand, thinkers as statist in orientation as Hobbes or Rousseau are also individualists and, on the other, a philosopher like Kant affirms the necessary primacy of public law while considering as rational and irreducible the distinction between private and public law. It thus is possible, on the basis of the distinction between private and public law that guarantees it, to think something like an opposition between civil society and the state, even if, for example, Kant calls natural society the sphere of private relations in order to reserve the title of civil society ( societas civilis ) for public law and the state ( Ferry, “L’émergence du couple État/société” ).
The genesis of the contemporary concept of a civil society essentially distinct from the state thus passes through the invention of new schemata, native to English-language philosophy, on the basis of an idiosyncratic experience and juridical categories quite different from those of the law and philosophy of the Continent. The most familiar aspect of that invention is the formation of political economy accompanying the expansion of mercantile relations: modern economics leads to seeing in society the fruit of an indefinite quantity of political behaviors, which brings one to “a new conception of society, as opposed to the idea of a political nature of man ( Aristotle ) as it is to a sociality constructed against nature ( contractualist theories )” ( Collot-Thélène, “État et société civile” ). Now that experience is all the more easy to conceptualize in the framework of English thought in that that thought disposes ( with “common law” ) of juridical categories that allow one to distinguish with relative ease between law and statute law ( i.e., such law as is advanced by a legislator ) and to recognize the necessity of a power of constraint to force respect of the law without for as much according it a pre-eminent role in the formation of law. “Civil society” thus includes institutions that are already political, such as tribunals, because its “other” is less the state than the government, which is not the sole source of law.
Anglo-Scottish reflection on civil society also presents another extremely important aspect, developed by Ferguson ( An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1759 ), by Millar, and by Hume: civil society has a history, which passes through the affirmation of civility and leads to a general progress of civilization. That history shows how, in modern Europe, the growth of mercantile exchanges permitted the enrichment of human experience while reducing the importance of constraint and military force in the government of societies. It is inseparable from the great modern debate over the respective merits of ( modern ) “commerce” and ( ancient ) civic virtue, in which, moreover, Ferguson and even Smith have more nuanced positions than is usually believed ( Gauthier, L’Invention de la société civile; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History ). Finally, it encounters the thought of Montesquieu, for whom the apology of the British regime was inseparable from the idea that the ancient civic sense belonged to a past long gone. It was by way of this motif that the “English” problematic of civil society was to have an echo in all of European philosophy, including among authors with an investment in the traditional identification between civil societyand the state ( see, for example, Kant, Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View, 1784 ).
The extraordinary power of the reconstruction effected by Hegel is evident in his Principles of the Philosophy of Law, in which one finds both the heritage of antiquity and that of Christianity, the contribution of modern natural law and that of the Anglo-Saxon thinkers or Montesquieu ( including the opposition virtue/commerce ). We have already seen how Hegel’s philosophy can be considered as a legitimization of the process of secularization of modern societies, as a truth of the Christian state; in the same manner, the distinction between civil society and the state allows one to surmount the antinomy of ancient virtue and modern commerce, even while making of civil and political existence the guarantor and truth of the “right to subjective freedom” that lies at the core of the modern world. Civil society in the strict sense, which succeeds the family, allows the individual to surpass the immediate naturalness of familial relations and is comprised of three moments: the system of needs ( which corresponds to the world of political economy ), the protection of freedom and property by the administration of law, and finally the police and corporation ( understood as organs of economic regulation and not only of maintenance of political order ), which are necessary to correct the spontaneous effects of mercantile economy. Civil society thus itself calls for a superior unity, which will be given in the state, which alone allows man to lead a universal life. Thus, even as it is the point in which the greatest split between the particular and the individual is effected, civil society is also what permits that higher unity of the individual and the whole that endows modernity with its meaning. Significantly, Hegel, moreover, indicates that civil society is the privileged terrain of the development of culture ( Bildung ), which indicates simultaneously its debt to the English problematic of civilization and its will to distinguish itself from it ( Bildung is said to be more internal than civilization ).
Starting with Hegel, the meaning of the notion of civil society appears to be more or less fixed, a circumstance that in no way prevented it from being the object of profound meditations. This is not the place, for instance, to show the extent of Marx’s originality, concerning which we will offer but a few brief terminological remarks. The first concerns the perpetual interplay of two notions that Marx distinguishes quite well, but often takes pleasure in fusing: civil society ( bürgerliche Gesellschaft ) cannot be reduced to bourgeois society, even if it is the emancipation of property that allowed the state to acquire “a specific existence alongside civil society and outside it.” That interplay shows Marx’s ambivalence regarding the notion of civil society: of the original English concept he scarcely retains anything but the economic aspect ( “the conditions of material existence” ) since he makes juridical relations elements of the superstructure. On another front, Marx—from the Critique of Hegelian Political Right to The Civil War in France ( 1871 )—was always a determined adversary of the state, for whose final reabsorption in a regenerated civil society he called. Historical materialism thus appears to be a radicalization of English political economy, pressed into the service of a radical critique of the divisions of the human city. It remains for the reader to determine whether we are confronted with a fertile reversal of juridical idealism or a radical negation of the juridical and political conditions of civil society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abramson, Jeffrey. Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Colas, Dominique. Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Colliot-Thélène, Catherine. “État et société civile.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Ferry, Luc. “L’émergence du couple État/société.” In Histoire de la philosophie politique, edited by Alain Renaut. Vol. 4, Les Critiques de la modernité politique. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999.
Gautier, Claude. L’Invention de la société civile: lectures anglo-écossaises: Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
Hammond, Scott J. Political Theory: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary and Classic Terms. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009.
Moatti, Claudia. La Raison de Rome: naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
Pasquino, Pasquale. “Communauté et société.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Quillet, Jeanine. Les Clefs du pouvoir au Moyen Age. Paris: Flammarion, 1972.
. “Augustin. Saint Augustin et l’augustinisme médiéval.” In Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Edited by P. Raynaud and S. Rials. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Raynaud, Philippe. Max Weber et les dilemmes de la raison moderne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.
Thomas, Yan. “Fictio legis. L’empire de la fiction romaine et ses limites médiévales.” Droits 21. La Fiction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.
CIVILITY
“Civility” derives from Latin civilitas, which means first of all everything that has to do with the city, civitas, and the citizen, civis; for example, civilitas is the term Quintilian chooses ( 2.15.25 ) to translate Plato’s hê politikê [ἡ πολιτιϰή]. But the Latin word also designates a certain kind of relationship, gentle and ennobled, among people ( clementiae civilitatisque, “his clemency and courtesy,” Suetonius says [Augustus, 51.1] ); see MENSCHHEIT, Box 1; cf. PARDON.
In the eighteenth century, “civility” thus became a synonym of “politeness,” with various subtle variations depending on the authors. Here we examine mainly:
1. Italian thought on civility and politeness; see CIVILTÀ, “civility/civilization,” and CIVILIZATION, SPREZZATURA.
2. The way in which “civility” continues to spread in “civil society”; see CIVIL SOCIETY.
On the more general relationship to politics and progress, see CIVILIZATION.
BEHAVIOR, CULTURE, INGENIUM, PRUDENCE, WITTICISM
CIVILIZATION
“Civilization” is a word that emerged in the eighteenth century ( Mirabeau the elder, L’Ami des hommes, 1758 ) to designate dynamically what civility designated “statically” ( see CIVILITY ): civilization is a process through which humans become “civil” by overcoming primitive barbarity through gentler customs and the establishment of “civic” ties.
I. “CIVILIZATION,” CIVILISATION, CIVILTÀ, ZIVILISATION
Here we have chosen to give priority to the following:
1. Italian thought about civiltà, a single term to designate what French calls civilité and civilisation ( cf. SPREZZATURA and VIRTÙ ).
2. The German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, discussed in the entry on BILDUNG ( see CULTURE ).
II. Civilization and Politics
On the relation between politics and “civil/civic,” see CIVIL SOCIETY. More particularly, see the following:
• on the Greek notion of political community and its connection with the humanity of man, see POLIS and LOGOS, II.A;
• on “barbarity,” see TO TRANSLATE, Box 1;
• on Latin civitas, see LEX;
• on civil society, see LIBERAL, and the difference between “politics” and “policy” in POLITICS.
See also DROIT, JUSTICE, and LAW.
On the relationship to progress, see CORSO, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, PERFECTIBILITY, PROGRESS, SECULARIZATION; cf. DESTINY, GLÜCK, MENSCHHEIT.
CIVILTÀ ( ITALIAN )
| ENGLISH | civility, civilization | ||
| FRENCH | civilité, civilisation | ||
| GREEK | asteiosunê [ἀστειοσύνη], paideia [παιδεία], politeia [πολιτεία] | ||
| ITALIAN | cortesia, urbanità, gentilezza, buona creanza | ||
| LATIN | civilitas, urbanitas |
BILDUNG, CIVILITY, and CIVILIZATION, and INGENIUM, POLIS, SPREZZATURA, STATE, WITTICISM
In French, two different words, civilité and civilisation, correspond to two distinct notions, whereas in Italian, a single word, civiltà, covers a broad semantic field that includes them both. Here we will seek, if not to explain this divergence from a common origin ( Lat. civis and its derivatives ), at least to show how reflection on this terminological proximity and distance sheds light on the way in which Western societies have conceived their historical destiny.
I. The Connection between Politics and Ethics
The Italian word civiltà and the French words civilité and civilisation have common etymological roots: the Latin civis ( free member of a city, citizen ), its abstract derivative civitas ( citizenship, citizenry, city ), the adjective civilis ( relating to a citizen, civil; concerning the citizenry as a whole, politics; what is suitable for citizens; popular, affable, benevolent, gentle ), the noun civilitas ( quality of being a citizen, sociability, courtesy ), and the adverb civiliter ( as a citizen, as a good citizen; lawful; with moderation, with gentleness ). In all of these uses, we must note the twofold connotation: one political, referring to the particular way of organizing life in common represented by the ancient city-state, and the other moral and psychological, referring to the moderation of manners that life in a city is supposed to produce. The second meaning is also expressed by the term urbanitas, which alludes to the urbs, the city in its concrete reality, understood as a place where individuals are in permanent contact, thanks to which manners and language lose their “rusticity” ( from rus, “countryside” ), Rome being the City par excellence, the Urbs. Moreover, in the semantic field of Greek, we can note the same group of meanings. Civitas corresponds to polis [πóλις], civis to politês [πολίτης], civilis to politikos [πολιτιϰóς] ( the latter meaning “what concerns citizens,” “what concerns the state,” and also “capable of living in society,” “sociable” ). In addition, astu [ἄστυ] designates, like urbs, the city as opposed to the countryside, and often, when used without an article, Athens. The adjective asteios [ἀστεῖος], “regarding a citizen,” qualifies “what is in good taste, cultivated, elegant,” and, speaking of language and style, “subtle, witty” ( asteia are bons mots ). It is worth pointing out here that the French word politesse does not derive, as is often thought, from Greek polis, but from Italian polito ( smooth, clean ), which is itself derived from Latin politus ( made smooth, clean, by polishing ). We find the same duality in the Italian, French, and Spanish words derived from the Latin root.
In contemporary Italian, civiltà ( formerly civilità ) designates on the one hand “the state of a people that has reached a certain degree of technical and intellectual progress,” “all human achievements in the political, social, and cultural domain,” “all the manifestations of the economic, social, and moral life of a people at a given point in its history” ( RT: Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, s.v. ). In the first two senses ( the third being modern ), the word was already used by Torquato Tasso, in his verse play Aminta ( 1573 ), for example. Giambattista Vico speaks of “laws suitable for domesticating a barbarous people to lead it to un’ umana civiltà” ( La scienza nuova, §100 ), but in general he uses instead the word umanità, which in his work does not designate “the human species,” but rather both the process through which nations cease to be “barbarian” and become “fully human,” and the final result of this process. On the other hand, civiltà also designates a behavior characterizing social life, that of “a cultivated, educated person with elevated feelings.” In this case, the word is synonymous with cortesia, urbanità, gentilezza, and buona creanza.
A comparison with French is instructive. Civilité is first attested in the fourteenth century, in Nicole Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, where it is defined as “the manner, ordering, and government of a city or community” ( 2.1.9 ). Here the word retains its first Latin meaning, which is political. But as early as the following century, by a shift already found in Latin, as we have seen, the meaning becomes moral and psychological, designating a certain quality of the relations between members of a community. Thus Antoine Furetière, in his Dictionnaire universel, defined civilité as “a decent, gentle, and polite way of acting or conversing together” ( RT: Dictionnaire universel, s.v. ). A century later, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie noted that “civility and politeness are a certain decorum in manners and words tending to please and to show the respect that we have for each other” ( RT: Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire, s.v. ). The word continued to have this meaning, though it was used increasingly less frequently. According to the dictionaries ( e.g., RT: Le nouveau petit Robert, s.v. ), civilité is an “old-fashioned” word. However, at the present time there seems to be a renewed interest in the term, which better expresses the “citizen” ( citoyen ) aspect ( the word citoyen now being used, contrary to its classical use, adjectivally with a view to supplanting civique ) of the felt need to return to a minimal politeness.
II. When “Civilization” Separates from “Civility”
The question is when and how, if not why, the word civilisation appeared in the French language ( especially since it is so close in form and etymology to civilité, though it has a different meaning ), whereas in Italian civiltà continues to express a semantic content that is now divided between two different words in French.
The history of the French word civilisation is well known. If we grant that this noun appears for the first time in a work by the Marquis de Mirabeau, L’Ami des hommes ou traité de la population ( 1757 ), it is interesting to note that in this author’s writing, the neologism still has a meaning very close to that of civilité, since Mirabeau writes elsewhere that “civilisation is the moderation of manners, urbanity, politeness, and knowledge disseminated in such a way that decorum is observed and takes the place of detailed laws” ( L’Ami des femmes ou traité de civilisation, draft for a book, cited in Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 7 ). It was only a little later that civilisation acquired the meaning that it still has in French, the definition of which we can take from François Guizot, who wrote Histoire de la civilisation en Europe ( 1828 ). For Guizot, civilization was a “fact,” “a fact like others, that can be studied, described, narrated,” but also a fact that is not like others, because it is “a fact of progress, of development,” so that “the idea of progress, of development” seemed to him “the fundamental idea contained in the word civilisation” ( trans. Hazlitt, 12, 16 ).
The French linguist Émile Benveniste, in his article “Civilisation,” has shown how civilité’s ending in -té made it a static term that no longer sufficed to express an idea that was becoming established in the second half of the seventeenth century, the idea of a general progress of human society through time, and how civilisation, by its ending in -isation, corresponded better, by its very form, to the dynamic aspect of this development. This explains the ease with which people at the end of the century of Enlightenment adopted the Marquis de Mirabeau’s neologism. However, we must note the significant resistance of the English writer Samuel Johnson, who, in 1773, as his biographer James Boswell tells us, refused to include the word “civilization” in his famous Dictionary, because “civility” sufficed ( Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson ).
Italian, we might say, agrees with Johnson. As we have seen, it has preserved civiltà in the sense of “civility” and “civilization.” The less frequently used term incivilimento expresses the dynamic movement of which civiltà is the result. Civilizzazione, modeled on the French civilisation, was introduced into Italian in the early nineteenth century, and is found in Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi, but it never became really established, for revealing reasons. Around 1860, for example, Filippo Ugolini wrote: “Civilizzazione; let us leave this word to the French, and let us be satisfied with our incivilimento, from costume, or with vivere civile, from civiltà. We had these words long before the French had either the word civilisation or the state that corresponds to it” ( Ugolini, Vocabulario di parole e modi errati ). This remark, which is obviously polemical, was inspired by Italians’ exacerbated nationalism at the time, but it is also connected with an older trend of thought, the equivalent of which is found in Germany. It was France, the country of the Enlightenment and then of the Revolution, that was in question. France is reproached for its political, ideological, and linguistic expansion, and more profoundly, for its dry rationalism, its conception of progress based solely on scientific, technical, and economic values, its loss of the sense of historical values, of tradition, of popular roots. In contrast, Italian civiltà refers, if not to ancient Rome, at least to the Renaissance, a period in which Italy was a model for Europe as a whole. It is the bearer of humanistic values and expresses itself in every domain, from politics and morals to aesthetics. Less oriented toward the future than toward a certain past considered as a model, exempt from hubris, it emphasized the improvement of humans as individuals and still more as social beings ( whence the very important dimension of “civility,” rather than mastery over nature, in the notion of civiltà ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benveniste, Émile. “Civilisation: Contribution à l’histoire du mot.” In Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1966. Translation by M. E. Meek: “Civilization: Contribution to the History of the Word.” In Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Edited by R. W. Chapman and Pat Rogers. Rev. ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. First published in 1791.
Febvre, Lucien. “Civilisation: Évolution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’idées.” In Civilisation: Le mot et l’idée, Première semaine internationale de synthèse, 2nd fasc. Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1930.
Guizot, François. Histoire de la civilisation en Europe. Paris: Hachette, Pluriel, 1985. First published in 1828. Translation by W. Hazlitt: The History of Civilization in Europe. Introduction by L. Siedentop. London: Penguin, 1997.
Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, Marquis de. L’Ami des hommes ou traité de la population. Reprint, Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010. First published in 1757.
Oresme, Nicole. Le livre des Éthiques d’Aristote. Edited by A. D. Menut. New York: G. E. Stechert, 1940.
Starobinski, Jean. Blessings in Disguise. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
. “Le mot civilisation.” In Le temps de la réflexion, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1983.
Ugolini, Filippo. Vocabulario di parole e modi errati. Naples, It.: G. de Stefano, 1860.
Vico, Giambattista. La scienza nuova. In Opere, edited by A. Battistini. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. First published in 1744. Translation by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
CLAIM
| FRENCH | exigence, revendication | ||
| GERMAN | Anspruch |
EXIGENCY, and DROIT, DUTY, ENGLISH, LAW, POWER, VOICE
Derived from Old French clamer ( in Latin, clamare, from the same semantic field as clarus, “clear, strong” ), the verb “to claim” initially meant, in its first historically recorded uses, “to call, cry, proclaim” ( call loudly ). However, the current uses of the English verb “claim” and the noun “claim” lack equivalents in French. Contemporary French translations of “claim”, such as revendication, réclamation, and pretention, all have a tone that is, if not pejorative, in any case negative, as if the demand expressed in “claim” needed to be supplemented by a justification ( as in the French expression revendication légitime ). But in its initial usages, juridical or political, “claim” posits the demand as founded, in nature if not in right, and it could be adequately translated in French by titre: thus we have to explore the complex relationship between “claim” and “right” ( droit ), a notion which, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, emerged later on and of which “claim” ( a demand founded on a need ) might have constituted an early form, thus raising the problem of rights itself. This juridical use has persisted in contemporary Anglo-Saxon discussions of the philosophy of law, of which it constitutes one of the specific features.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “claim” moved from the political and juridical fields to that of the theory of knowledge, and then more generally to the philosophy of language. “Claim” becomes a “claim to know” and then a “thesis.” The use of the term raises first the problem, which emerged from English empiricism and was then taken up by Kant, of the legitimacy of knowledge, of my claims to know and say. There is an equivalent in German ( Anspruch ), but none in French. Finally, “claim,” as in Stanley Cavell ( The Claim of Reason ), becomes a “statement” to be maintained or claimed ( “my claim is” ).
I. “Claim” as a Juridical and Political Demand
A. “Claim about,” “claim to”: A demand for something that is owed, the demand for a right
The noun “claim” and the verb associated with it designate a demand for something as owed: “Not to beg and accept as a favor but to exact as a due.” Then “claim” is rendered in French by exigence or titre. But this raises the question of the legitimacy of the demand, whereas “claim” acquires a juridical ( and philosophical ) meaning only with the emergence, apparently relatively late, of the term “right.” Its meaning then becomes more specific: “an assertion of a right to something” ( RT: Oxford English Dictionary ). A whole juridical vocabulary develops around “claim,” as is shown by a multitude of expressions such as “lay claim,” “make a claim,” “enter a claim,” and so forth.
The development of the uses of “claim” raises essential problems connected with the nature of rights. “Claim” originally designated a fundamental demand, the satisfaction of a physical need, or the recuperation of a vital good that has been taken away ( which is the use we find in Shakespeare: in King John, a character claims his wife when she has been taken away by another ). But this raises the question of the naturalness and the possession of rights.
One reason why claims about goods necessary for rational agency are so different from claims to the possession of rights is that the latter in fact presuppose, as the former do not, the existence of a socially established set of rules. . . . [T]he existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance. . . . Lacking any such social form, the making of a claim to a right would be like presenting a check for payment in a social order that lacked the institution of money.
( A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 67 )
Thus is raised the problem of the status of property claims or titles, which has become central in Anglo-Saxon juridical and political thought: a claim is a demand and a title to ownership of an object that one already legitimately owns. It is, moreover, noteworthy that the use of the term underwent a concrete extension precisely at the time when pioneers were conquering new territories. In America and in Australia, a claim designated a parcel of land acquired by occupation ( and not granted or inherited ), for example, by miners. This “local” American sense of the word “claim” underlies a certain conception of the claim to property rights as fundamental, and perhaps also to rights in general as ( re )taking possession of one’s own territory ( a territory later claimed by Native Americans was called an “Indian claim” ). This clarifies a meaning of “claim to a right”: I demand what is mine and always has been.
It is obvious that a certain conception of claims is based on these earlier senses of the word, and that the latter, far from having been erased or integrated into “right,” remains in competition with it. We see the result of this in the numerous recent discussions of W. N. Holfeld’s book Fundamental Legal Conceptions ( 1919 ), in which a claim becomes the right par excellence, defined as a privilege or immunity, a “perimeter of protection” ( cf. J. Y. Goffi, Le philosophe et ses animaux ). A “right-claim” is more than a simple right, for it is not merely the permission to perform a certain act ( tolerance ), or even a prohibition on preventing someone from performing it ( right ), but implies society’s obligation to see to it that the claim is respected, to make the act possible. The theoretician of the norm, Von Wright, shows in Norm and Action ( 86f. ) that deontic logic cannot function in accord with two contradictory terms A/non-A, for example, prohibited/authorized, but it is necessary to posit a third term, a supplementary degree of authorization, or of the right, which is the claim. A claim, far from being absorbed into the idea of right, is thus a radicalization of the latter, which explains the anti-authority and territorial form taken too often by questions of right( s ) when they have the status of a claim.
B. “Claim on”: Locke, or the possible illegitimacy of the political “claim”
This radical, possessive dimension is found in another use of “claim,” in the sense of a “claim on” someone. The political sense of “claim” exists in neither Hume nor Hobbes, though it is widespread in Locke. In Hume, a right ( that of property, for instance, or that of a sovereign over his subjects ) is connected with a conventional agreement or contract that does not need to be founded on anything other than custom and habit. Conversely, Locke calls a “claim” the ruler’s authority over a subject, and differentiates it from paternal authority. “Governments claim no power over the son because of that they had over the father” ( Second Treatise on Civil Government, §118 ).
Here we encounter an idea of a claim that applies to the person the originary concept of a claim, but—and this is the specificity of Locke and his heirs—redefines it. The claim to power over a subject must always be explained and justified in terms of natural law: it is because of this justification that it is necessarily a claim, and not a natural authority. Thus in Locke a claim can be illegitimate, made without the people’s consent and against its interests, and in fact it is usually in this sense that Locke uses the term.
If anyone shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by its own authority, and without consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government [emphasis added].
( Ibid., §140 )
The one who holds power is not a lawgiver, but a mere representative of the law ( executor ), and has a right to be obeyed only in this capacity; he cannot claim it for himself:
Allegiance being nothing but an obedience according to law, which, when he violates, he has no right to obedience, nor can claim it otherwise than as the public person vested with the power of law.
( Ibid., §150 )
Locke’s theory can thus be interpreted as an attempt to bring claims into the field of rights, and to subordinate the claim to power to natural law. That is what determines, for him, the possibility of the people rejecting authority. A bad ruler who “claims that power without the direction of the law, as a prerogative belonging to him by right of his office” ( ibid., §164 ), thus gives the people a reason to “claim their right and limit that power.” A claim therefore requires a right, and is no longer a foundation or origin but a demand that itself has to be grounded.
Thus in Locke we find for the first time the curious verb “disclaim” ( ibid., §191 ): I can disclaim my membership in the community governed by law and withdraw from it ( I will then be outside its jurisdiction, losing the rights inherent in that membership ). Whence the later appearance of the expression “to issue a disclaimer” ( symmetrical with “enter a claim” ), which means to reject a responsibility or to renounce a right and thus one’s membership. Thus in and with the notion of a claim, a twofold problem is posed: that of the foundation of authority, of entitlement, and that of the recognition of this authority by its subjects: here we move from the political question to the more general question of the community.
II. “Claim” as a Demand for Knowledge
The problem of authority, of the claim to power, moves from the political field to that of knowledge and argumentation, but the political question still underlies the epistemological problem. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell explores this semantic transfer and remarkably develops the relationship of the juridical to the cognitive, and then to the linguistic.
The cognitive concept, like its political ancestor, emerges from discussions of empiricism. What is the question of empiricism, and correlatively, of skepticism? It is the question of legitimacy, of the right to know. What allows us to say that we know? Hume examines our claim to know by reasoning on the basis of experience ( note that when in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he asks “what is the foundation of all reasoning and conclusions from experience?” he uses, not “claim,” but “pretension” ). We “claim” to know, but with what right? The question is taken up again by Kant, in whose work we can discern the emergence of an equivalent of “claim”: Anspruch, which designates the claim of reason to ask questions that are beyond its power but are legitimate and natural. The legal sense of “claim” can thus be found in the Kantian quid juris. The problem of reason is the problem of the claim: a demand that is both inevitable and impossible to satisfy, and is thus fated to remain a claim forever.
Cavell develops this tension between the arrogance and the legitimacy of the philosophical pretension indicated by “claim.” At the outset, The Claim of Reason defines “claims” as “claims to community.” Underlying the question of the basis for knowledge is the political and not solely epistemological question of the foundation of our common use of language. For Cavell, my claim to know masks a prior claim: the claim to speak for others, and to accept that others speak in my name.
The philosophical appeal to “what we say,” and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community. And a claim to community is always a search for the basis on which it can be, or has been, established.
( Cavell, The Claim of Reason )
The juridical and gnoseological problems raised by “claim” are transformed into a question about our common criteria, our agreements in language.
When I remarked that the philosophical search for our criteria is a search for community, I was in effect answering the second question I uncovered in the face of the claim to speak for “the group”—the question, namely, about how I could have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know what they are.
( Ibid. )
The question is that of my membership in the community of language, and also that of my representativeness: where do I get the right or claim to speak for others? According to Cavell, this question is the very one that ordinary language philosophers like Austin and Wittgenstein ask. The meaning of “claim” is inseparable from the possibility of losing my representativeness or membership, of being reduced to silence.
For all Wittgenstein’s claims about what we say, he is always at the same time aware that others might not agree, that a given person or group ( a “tribe” ) might not share our criteria.
( Ibid. )
Thus Cavell offers an analysis of Rousseau in terms of claims:
What he claims to know is his relation to society, and to take as a philosophical datum the fact that men ( that he ) can speak for society and that society can speak for him.
( Ibid. )
My society must be my expression. That is what the theoreticians of democracy always hope, and it is the illusion that Cavell denounces in the work of John Rawls, for instance: if others silence my voice, claim to speak for me, in what way have I agreed to this?
To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff—on some occasions, perhaps once for all—of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff—on some occasions, perhaps once for all—those who claimed to be speaking for you.
( Ibid. )
The social contract implies the constant possibility of withdrawing from ( “disclaiming,” Locke said ) the community. Linguistic or political agreement among humans, precisely because it is still a claim, is as fragile as it is profound. This essential fragility of political agreement, which is always threatened by skepticism, constitutes the linguistic sense of “claim.”
III. “Claim,” The Voice of Ordinary Language
Political agreement is of the same nature as linguistic agreement, which Wittgenstein called Übereinstimmung ( Philosophical Investigations, §241 ), and which is translated in French as either concorde or accord, the better to indicate the presence of the voice, the Stimme ( see STIMMUNG ). This agreement exists only insofar as it is claimed, invoked, appealed to. Thus, along with “claim” is defined an agreement that is neither psychological nor intersubjective and is founded on nothing other than the validity of a voice ( Stimme ): my individual voice claims to be, and is, a “universal voice.”
With the appeal to the voice, we encounter the first sense of “claim” ( clamare, “to cry out, to call” ). The concept of voice turns out always to underlie the technical concept of “claim.” A voice claims when it asserts, on the basis of itself alone, a universal assent—a claim that, no matter how exorbitant it might be, Cavell seeks to formulate in a still more shocking way, without basing it, as in Kant, on something transcendental, or on some rational condition.
To show how the concept of “claim” rethought in this way provides a reply to skepticism, we can point to the universality characteristic of aesthetic judgment in Kant. In his earlier book Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell shows how close the approaches of ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin are to Kant’s: for them, I always appeal to myself to say what we say, and this can be rendered only by “claim,” or Anspruch. To understand this, we have to see what the ordinary language philosophers’ approach consists in, on the basis of “what we say when”:
I will suggest that aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs.
( Cavell, The Claim of Reason )
It is Kant who offers the deepest thinking about “claim.” The idea of a universal agreement based on my individual voice makes its appearance in the famous §8 of the Third Critique. In aesthetic judgment, Kant discovers “a property of our cognitive faculty,” “a claim [Anspruch] to the universal validity [Allgemeingültigkeit] of its judgment,” so that “satisfaction in the object is imputed to everyone” ( trans. Bernard, Critique of Judgment, §8, 49 ). We know how Kant distinguishes the pleasing from the beautiful ( which claims universal assent ) in terms of private versus public judgment. How can a judgment that has all the characteristics of the private claim to be public? That is the problem raised by the notion of a claim. Judgments of taste require and demand universal assent; “in fact it imputes this to everyone for each of its judgments of taste, without the persons that judge disputing as to the possibility of such a claim [Anspruch]” ( ibid. §8, 49 ). In such a claim, “nothing is postulated but a . . . universal voice ( allgemeine Stimme )” ( ibid., §8, 50 ). This is the “voice” that is heard in übereinstimmen, the verb Wittgenstein uses with regard to our agreement ( “in language,” cf. Philosophical Investigations, §241 ).
The proximity of the Kantian universal voice and the theses of ordinary language philosophy appear with this final sense of “claim,” simultaneously Anspruch and Stimme: a claim that is empirically unfounded and thus threatened by and pointed out by skepticism, to speak in the name of everyone. Kant’s “universal voice” is what we hear in Cavell’s claims about “what we say” ( Must We Mean What We Say? 94 ).
By redefining “claim” in this way, Cavell brings together the diverse semantic traditions. My assertions or theses—claims—are always based on an agreement in language, on a claim to my representativeness, which is itself political and legal in nature—hence on my voice as singular and universal. To recognize the close connection between all these senses of the word “claim” is to recognize that language, expression—in the cognitive as well as in the political domain—is always also a voice that wants to make itself heard.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Pres, 1979.
. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
. A Pitch of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Goffi, Jean-Yves. Le philosophe et ses animaux. Nîmes, Fr.: Jeanine Chambon, 1994.
Holfield, Wesley Newcomb. Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919; reprint, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. First published in 1748.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner-Macmillan, 1951.
Larrère, Catherine. “De l’illicite au licite, prescription et permission,” CREDIMI 16 ( 1996 ): 59–78.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Civil Government. Edited by J. W. Gough. Oxford: Blackwell, 1946. First published in 1690.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
Wright, Georg Henrik von. Norm and Action. London: Macmillan, 1963.
CLASSIC, CLASSICISM NEOCLASSIC, NEOCLASSICISM
| FRENCH | classique, classicisme; néoclassique, néoclassicisme | ||
| GERMAN | klassik, Klassizismus | ||
| ITALIAN | classicismo; neoclassico, neoclassicismo | ||
| LATIN | classicus |
AESTHETICS, BAROQUE, GOÛT, MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, NEUZEIT, ROMANTIC
The ease of translating the term “classic” into all European languages, which is due to a common Latin root ( classicus ), masks differences in content depending on the languages and cultures concerned. The adjective classicus ( first-class ) was used by Aulus Gellius to designate the best authors, from Demosthenes to Virgil, the ones humanist educators used in their classes ( whence an amusing false etymology, still given in Furetière’s dictionary [RT: Dictionnaire universel] ). The word is used in this sense in all European languages, each of which has its own “classics.” It is also used more specifically to designate the artistic works inspired by antiquity ( the classical language of architecture, classical sculptures and ornaments ) that the romantics opposed.
But two derived and divergent uses—in France, on the one hand, to qualify the art of the century of Louis XIV, considered as the period of a perfection equal to that of the centuries of Pericles and Augustus, and on the other hand in Germany, to designate the formal system of the Italian High Renaissance in opposition to that of the baroque—eventually created a semantic nexus that was complicated still further by a final difference between the German use of Klassizmus, the reaction to Rococo that itself came to be opposed to romanticism, and other Europeans’ use of “neoclassicism” ( néoclassicisme, neoclassicismo ) to describe the renewal of taste connected with the discovery of Pompeii, Greece, and Egypt.
I. The Adjective “Classic”
In seventeenth-century France, only the adjective classique was used: “it is used almost exclusively to describe the authors read in classes, or who enjoy great authority,” Furetière notes in his RT: Dictionnaire universel ( 1690 ). Following Aulus Gellius, he cites, among these good classical authors, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, and Horace, “who lived in the time of the Republic and toward the end of Augustus, when good Latin was still written, before it began to be corrupted in the time of the Antonines,” thus suggesting a threefold link between the idea of the classic and the authority of the ancients, the purity of the language, and teaching.
But in his Discourse on Theophrastus, which is situated in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, La Bruyère observes, “We who are moderns, will be ancients in a few centuries.” As early as the eighteenth century, the word is extended to good French authors, “whose perfect models should be imitated as much as possible”; “you have given me great pleasure,” Voltaire writes, “in telling me that the Academy is going to do France and Europe the favor of publishing a collection of our classic authors, with notes that will stabilize language and taste” ( see 1761 letter from Selected Letters of Voltaire, trans. L. C. Syms, 150 ). We find again here the role of authority—in this case, of the Academy—and the concern for the preservation of a good state of the language and for the imitation of good models. The lectures given at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, in which the works in the king’s collection ( especially those by Poussin, considered the leader of the French School of painting ), on the one hand, and on the other the courses given by Jacques François Blondel, who celebrated the works of François Mansart, paved the way for the extension to the fine arts of this notion of “French classics,” and particularly the “classics” of the century of Louis XIV.
This development was not limited to France: the preface to the first volume of the Literary History of France published by the Benedictines in 1733 emphasizes that “[w]e have seen several foreign nations, far less studious than ours, priding themselves on collecting in a library all the authors they have given to the Republic of Letters.”
II. How French Classicism Became Baroque
The French word classicisme was created on the basis of the adjective classique in the context of the battle with romanticism. In 1873 Émile Littré still considered it a neologism, and defined it as the “system of the exclusive partisans of the writers of antiquity or of the classic authors of the seventeenth century.” The word is also used in a related sense in the field of the fine arts: works that “claim to imitate the works of ancient statuary” are called classique, and David’s “new school” is called the école classique because its “compositions are regular and imitate the Greeks.”
In Germany, the term Klassizismus is still used to designate the international movement at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, which in France is called néoclassicisme, a more accurate term because the source of classicism, the imitation of the ancients, was renewed at that time by the discovery of Greek architecture and by the rationality of the Enlightenment.
In French culture, on the contrary, the notion of classicism was shifted to the art and literature of the second half of the seventeenth century. In the aftermath of the battle over romanticism, instruction in the universities and schools tried to make French literature of the seventeenth century the expression of the French genius: clearness of expression, sober elegance, nobility, and decorous sentiments. This notion was extended to the fine arts, and it was claimed that the same qualities could be found in the works of Poussin, Le Sueur, and Lebrun. Since this period corresponded to the reign of Louis XIV, it was called the “Classic Age,” as the Spanish speak of the “Golden Age.”
However, writers on German art history adopted the term Barock, which had up to that point been pejorative ( see BAROQUE ) in referring to the art of the Seicento ( H. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barok ), and, on the other hand, they constructed a visual analysis on the basis of the contrast between the classical aesthetics of the early Cinquecento and the baroque aesthetics of the Seicento ( H. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915 ). French classicism was thus contemporaneous with Italian baroque.
Certain national specificities ( it was forgotten that they were not peculiar to the century ) and the existence of lively debates regarding the role of ornament or antique models ( it was forgotten that they cut across the two cultures ) made it possible for a time to maintain the opposition between ( French ) classicism and ( Italian ) baroque. But when the notion of baroque was broadened on cultural ( stile trentino ) or formal ( the “grand style” ) bases, it was difficult not to see that some aspects of French art in the seventeenth century, from Simon Vouet’s decorative lyricism to the grand style of Hardouin-Mansart, belonged to this international model. Describing French classical art as baroque reversed the way it was read, leading to a rediscovery of the theatricality of works that had earlier been admired for their balance and clarity, and of the baroque grandiloquence of Versailles, previously celebrated for its classical moderation—whence the necessity of introducing other notions like that of Atticism ( Merot, Éloge de la clarté, 1998 ). Roland Barthes discerned a dark Racine who might have read Sade, and Anthony Blunt found in François Mansart a paranoid anxiety about the perfect form that relates him to Borromini. The internal tensions within the two cultures were rediscovered in their common reference point, which was, however, differentiated from that of antiquity: the tense expression of Pierre Puget’s statue of Milo of Croton, conceived in emulation of the ancient Laocoön, is contrasted with the calm gestures of the nymphs in Girardon’s sculpture Les bains d’Apollon, which is inspired by the Apollo of Belvedere; Bernini takes the same statue as his starting point, giving it life in his “Apollo and Daphne,” whereas Poussin, inversely, idealizes the figures or the models that pose for him.
For literature as for the arts, classicism is not a doctrine but a horizon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mérot, Alain. Éloge de la clarté, un courant artistique au temps de Mazarin, 1640–1660. Dijon-Le Mans, Fr.: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998.
Summerson, John. The Classical Language of Architecture. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1963.
Voltaire. Selected Letters of Voltaire. Translated by L. C. Syms. New York: American Book Company, 1900.
Wölfflin, Heinrich. Die Klassische Kunst, eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance. Munich: Bruckmann, 1899. Translation by P. and L. Murray: Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1994.
. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. Munich: Bruckmann, 1915. Translation by M. D. Hottinger: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. New York: Dover, 1950.
. Renaissance und Barok. Bâle, Ger.: Schwabe, 1888. Translation by K. Simon: Renaissance and Baroque. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
A “Particle Metaphysics” in German
GERMAN, and DESTINY, ENGLISH, FRENCH, TO BE, TO TRANSLATE
While the use of any linguistic system is based on a double operation of selection ( paradigmatic ) and combination ( syntagmatic ), the German language is characterized by the great importance of combination, both at the systemic level and as a process of semantic innovation. This “Lego set” functions both in everyday language and within each code or subsystem. We also find it in philosophical language, where the omnipresence of combinations plays a crucial role in conceptualization. That certainly does not mean that speakers of German spontaneously become “philosophers” or theoreticians merely by virtue of their language, but it remains that in German one can, quite differently from in French, conceptualize on the basis of the language’s basic rules and, as it were, “do philosophy with grammar.”
But the philosophical use of German grammar is based on a paradox. On the one hand, philosophical language seems to seek to make manifest language’s ontological implications, and on the other, it extracts itself from the natural gangue of language by using the flexibility inherent in writing to bring out the difference between the concept and the linguistic given, thus emphasizing the emergence of the concept. Without claiming to offer a historical account or a rigorous study of the properly linguistic aspect of this question, we will first examine briefly the role played by combination at the level of individual words and then bring out, using the extreme example of the language games peculiar to Heidegger, the simultaneously linguistic and philosophical conditions of the translatability and untranslatability of the concept of Gestell. Then we will show how, by creating the concept of Gefährt, the philosopher Hans-Dieter Bahr rewrites and unwrites the Heideggerian Gestell by giving language still another twist.
I. Combinations and Conceptual Resources
A. The double register of combinations
The German language constantly uses a double register of combinations. The first register corresponds to the mechanism that Saussure called, in chapter 6 of his Course on General Linguistics, “syntagmatic interdependence,” and which is a generalizable phenomenon of the constitution of meaning. The second register is completely specific to German and entails important consequences regarding the nature of philosophical writing.
By “syntagmatic interdependence” Saussure refers to the fact that in any arrangement of signs, the combination of elements functions as a mathematical “product” insofar as combination creates meaning independently of the original meaning of the elements it arranges. He speaks of a “combination of interdependent elements, their value deriving solely from their mutual contributions within a higher unit” ( see RT: Cours de linguistique générale; English trans. here by Roy Harris ) and gives as an example désir-eux, which is not a semantic addition of two elements—désir and eux, but rather the mathematical “product” of their juxtaposition.
But for word construction German uses a parallel type of construction in which, at the end of the process of combination, each original element retains more or less completely its literal meaning. Whence the impression that German is more “motivated” than French, that is, that the sign is less arbitrary in German because the relation between signifier and signified is more constantly discernible. Thus a railway station or yard is called a Bahnhof ( Bahn = way [cf. Eisenbahn ( railway )] + Hof = court or yard ), whereas Bauernhof ( Bauer = farmer + Hof ), that is, a farm, is verbatim a “peasant’s yard,” and Gasthof ( inn ) is the combination of Gast ( guest ) and Hof, etc. Similarly, a restaurant in a railway station is a Bahnhofgaststätte, that is, a railway ( Bahn ) + court ( Hof ) + guest ( Gast ) + place ( Stätte ).
Of course, the rules of combination are governed by numerous constraints, whether within the words or in their arrangement; it remains that the resources of combination in German are particularly rich in comparison with those of other European languages. They are even virtually unlimited, and the result is constant linguistic innovation. Although German has retained a certain number of combinations that eventually join the reservoir of words reflected by a given historical state of the dictionary, creation is incessant. New combinations can be invented at any time, no matter what later happens to them.
We could say that in a certain sense combination is more important than selection, or that it draws selection to it, or that it exercises a pressure on it, with the result that a few elements make it possible to deploy a multiplicity of meanings. For example, it suffices to take verbs as polyvalent as those corresponding to mettre and poser in French—setzen, legen, and stellen—and to combine them with prepositions such as an, aus, ab, vor, etc., or with verbal particles such as dar, ver, zu, ent, um, etc., in order to deploy, by combining verb and preverb, a considerable number of meanings that in French would require recourse to an equally considerable number of different verbs. If we actuate the combinatorial process that governs the syntagmatic environment of the verbs legen, stellen, and sitzen alone, we obtain the following translations—and here we are limiting ourselves to indicating just a few of their common arrangements—sich auf etwas einstellen, “adapt to something” ( whereas “to meddle or be involved in something” is expressed by sich mit etwas abgeben ); etwas umstellen, “invert or rearrange something”; sich umstellen, “adapt to a new situation”; seine Uhr umstellen, “reset one’s watch”; auf ein Pferd setzen, “bet on a horse”; Wert auf etwas legen, “assign value to something”; zulegen, “speed up”; eine Platte auflegen, “put a record on”; etwas verstellen, “mislay something”; sich verstellen, “dissimulate”; sich einsetzen, “go to bat for something or someone”; sich durchsetzen, “assert oneself” or “pay dearly for something”; etwas jemandem zustellen, “mail something to someone”; Vieh umlegen, “slaughter livestock”; sich auf etwas hinsetzen, “sit down on something”; jemandem etwas hinstellen, “deposit or put something somewhere for someone,” etc.
It has to be emphasized that in German determination by particles and preverbs is very clearly spatial in nature: for example, the preverb an is formed on the basis of the preposition an, which indicates the idea of contiguity, whereas the particle um is formed on the basis of the preposition um, which means “around.” But an also has a temporal, inchoative value, and the preverb um can indicate a process of change ( seine Uhr umstellen, “to reset one’s watch”; sich umstellen, “to adapt”; etwas umwerfen, “overturn something” ); the idea of a Freudian Verschiebung ( displacement ) is already in the particle ver-, which itself indicates movement or delay, just as Entstellung is semantically invoked by the particle ent-, itself indicating an idea of deformation, etc. Not only is the concrete and spatial aspect usually more visible than it is in French, whose Latin substrate is not in principle obvious and requires a knowledge of etymology ( for example, to discern the Latin preposition ad in apporter, from ad and portare, or inde in emporter, from inde and portare ), but the rise from the empirical to the transcendental is implicit in the play of combination in German, since it allows the passage from the spatial to the temporal, from the concrete to the conceptual, and from the representable to the idea.
B. The resources made available to philosophical language by ordinary combination
These procedures, which are particularly effective at the level of the linguistic system, offer conceptualization and philosophical language unlimited resources.
It suffices, in fact, to repeat this movement of language by reusing its elements and the rules of their combination to promote the word to the status of a concept. But moreover, this reuse of grammar is never limited to a simple repetition. There is repetition and differentiation.
In his book on Freud’s language, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt states, not without forcing things a bit:
There is nothing simpler or more immediate than the philosophical vocabulary. Chapter 1 of the Phenomenology of Mind, “Die sinnliche Gewißheit” ( “Sense-certainty”; it is true that German can hardly differentiate between “sensible,” “sensorial,” and “sensual” ), consists from beginning to end of words familiar to a five-year-old child ( with perhaps the exception of Vermittlung, “mediation,” and Unmittelbarkeit, “immediacy” ).
( G. A. Goldschmidt, Quand Freud voit la mer )
There is something profoundly true in this exaggeration, and it is hardly exaggerated to say that the most common, everyday German is very often potentially the German of ontology. For example, when one wants to say that someone is undergoing withdrawal ( from drugs, etc. ), one says that er leidet unter ( he suffers under ) Entzugserscheinung. Erscheinung also means “apparition,” “phenomenon” in the philosophical sense, and Entzug, which here means “weaning,” also means “withdrawal.” Suffering is thus expressed by the same words that serve to refer to the withdrawal of Being.
It would, of course, be a kind of fetishization to conclude that German, like Greek, is from the outset and by nature the language of metaphysics ( the shame-faced French version ) or, worse yet, that one can philosophize only in German ( the triumphalist German version ).
All the examples just mentioned show that two effects are in fact conjoined: at the lexical level we see the possibility of an immediate passage from ordinary language to philosophical language—as if the latter “mirrored” the everyday, and vice versa; and at the syntactical level, combinatorial procedures that are particularly effective for language proper offer major resources for conceptualization and philosophical language.
Let us emphasize once again that this does not mean that we move immediately from everyday language to the language of philosophy. There is both repetition and differentiation. There is repetition because it suffices to reduplicate processes of linguistic combination, reusing their elements and rules to extract the concept from a preconceptual discourse. But the repetition is marked as both repetition and difference. To give a famous example, the noun Aufhebung does exist in language in its normal and normed state, but it does not have the double meaning that Hegel gives it, whereas the verb aufheben can in fact mean “preserve,” “raise,” or “cancel.” The properly dialectical meaning that Hegel gives the noun Aufhebung is as distant from the norm in German ( because normally Aufhebung means simply “abolition,” “suspension [of a session]” ) as it is irremediably untranslatable in French. On the other hand, Hegel himself often uses the verb aufheben in the completely customary sense of “cancel.” The concept deepens the gap between ordinary language and philosophical language but without there being any need to invent a new terminology ( see AUFHEBEN ).
It is here that we encounter the problem of the Fremdwort, that is, the use of a foreign term, usually of Latin or French origin, in order to express what German can say by means of the procedures we have just isolated. Concepts of foreign origin, precisely because they are outside the ordinary language / philosophical language circuit, are perceived as odd, arbitrary, even incomprehensible. Thus Willkür, from Wille, “will,” and Kür, “choice,” hence “free will,” but the word Arbitrarität is “not well-received.” It is spontaneously rejected.
C. Untranslatability and the evolution of translations
Taken all together, these phenomena are prodigiously effective for German philosophical writing and constitute one of the main reasons why a large part of its vocabulary cannot be translated word for word. The latitude that German grants combination contrasts very strongly with the situation of French, where the irreducible distance between one word and another requires conceptual creation to take quite a different path: the concept of writing cannot mean the same thing in German and French because the processes of conceptualization do not take place on the same stage.
The result is a strange to-and-fro between German and French, the direction of which can be totally reversed over time. Thus, it is striking to note that in the nineteenth century French translations of German philosophical texts had a strong tendency to Gallicize the text, whereas in the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, the tendency was on the contrary to “Germanize” French philosophical language. Under the pressure of this new habitus, we are no longer surprised to read chosification ( modeled on Verdinglichung ) or déterminité ( modeled on Bestimmtheit ). The effect of contamination is obvious and in no way disconfirms what has just been said. In this case, although the words are French, it is a question of a peculiarly German philosophical idiom that has been acclimated in the philosophical language. Generalized, it would lead to an idiom completely separate from everyday French, whereas for the German philosophical language the same phenomena have their very distant source in the abandonment of Latin as the scholarly language in modern Germany, especially since the eighteenth century.
II. An Extreme and Revealing Example: The Heideggerian Ge-Stell
A. The terminological constellation of technology
Let us take, as an extreme illustration, the case of Heidegger. In Die Technik und die Kehre, he sets forth his philosophy of technology on the basis of a small group of words whose treatment illustrates perfectly the mechanisms under discussion: the concept is dissociated from ordinary language in accord with principles of combination and re-marking. The word Kehre, which was used from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and meant “turn,” “return” ( like the plow at the end of the furrow ) or, in a Pietist context, “( spiritual ) conversion,” has disappeared from ordinary language, which uses the forms of kehr- only in the form of a combinatory element—for example, Rückkehr, “return from,” Abkehr, “the act of turning away from,” Verkehr, “commerce, traffic,” Wiederkehr, “return, comeback,” etc.—or of kehrt- ( for example, kehrtmachen, “make a U-turn, turn back” ). The linguistic “turn” represented by die Kehre, the “twist” that Heidegger gives language, thus consists in fabricating a word, die Kehre, by analogy with die Wende, “the turning point, the reversal,” with the strong connotations of temporality that the word implies, especially in the sense of “historical turning point” or “reversal of the sequence of events.”
The twist to which Heidegger subjects the language leads him to a deliberate overdetermination: die Kehre is a return( ing ), a turning like returning. Heidegger designates thereby the return/anamnesis of Being manifested and concealed by technology, or a new way of conceiving technology in its nontechnological essence.
The two other verbs that provide the linguistic core of conceptualization in this text are bergen and stellen. Bergen, stellen, Ge-Stell, Kehre, to which is added Bestand ( from the verb bestehen, “exist” ), form a constellation of words on the basis of which Heidegger conceptualizes technology’s relation to Being.
B. The re-marking of Ge-stell
In the case of Ge-stell, a typical example of the untranslatable, Heidegger, who is well aware that the word he is creating is unusual, excuses himself for the challenge that his creation represents and feels obliged to explain it in order not to be incomprehensible. “Wir wagen es, dieses Wort in einem bisher völlig ungewohnten Sinne zu gebrauchen” ( “We dare to use this word in a way completely unusual up to now”; Die Technik und die Kehre, 1978, p. 19 ). After reminding us that the Platonic term eidos is far more daring than Ge-Stell, he concludes by saying that the use he makes of the latter almost demands too much of language and thus might lead to misunderstandings.
■ See Box 1.
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Gestell In German, the word Gestell usually means frame( work ), mount, setting. As Heidegger remarks, “In ordinary usage, the word Gestell refers to some kind of apparatus, for example, a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a skeleton” ( Question concerning Technology ). The word entered the philosophical vocabulary in Heidegger’s work—probably in the 1953 lecture “The Question of Technology,” where it characterized the essence of modern technology—or technology as such. Although it is not a neologism, the term must nonetheless be understood as a neologism in view of the fact that it is used by Heidegger in a broad, unexpected, unusual sense to designate the whole or the collection ( which is indicated by the prefix Ge- ) of all the modes of setting ( Ger. stellen ) that causes man’s way of wanting to impose modern technology on the whole planet ultimately to enslave him as the servant of what he intended to have at his service. Starting in the 1950s, Heidegger called Gestell what in the 1930s he had called Machenschaft—not, of course, in the common sense of “machination,” but as “the realm of doing” or even “efficiency.” Regarding the choice of the term Gestell, Heidegger told the German news magazine Der Spiegel: Das Wesen der Technik sehe ich in dem, was ich das “Ge-Stell” nenne. Der Name, beim ersten Hören leicht mißverständlich, recht bedacht, weist, was er meint, in die innerste Geschichte der Metaphysik zurück, die heute noch unser Dasein bestimmt. Das Walten des Ge-Stells besagt: Der Mensch ist gestellt, beansprucht und herausgefordert von einer Macht, die im Wesen der Technik offenbar wird. ( I see the essence of technology in what I call the Ge-Stell. This term, which is easily misunderstood when first heard, when correctly conceived refers what it designates back to the innermost history of metaphysics, which still determines our existence. The reign of the Ge-stell means: man is subject to the control, the demands, and the provocation of a power that is manifested in the essence of technology. ) ( “Martin Heidegger im Gespräch,” in Antwort; M. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges ) As he remarked as early as a lecture given in 1953, Heidegger proposes to interpret Gestell in a “completely unusual” ( völlig ungewohnt ) way, on the model of Gebirg ( mountain range ) or Gemüt. Let us attempt here a brief comparison of two French translations of the term Gestell. Arraisonnement, a public-health term, means “a careful examination of a ship that is suspect for health reasons” ( Littré ), and arraisonner un navire also means, in a maritime and hygienic context, “to find out where a vessel is coming from and where it is going.” But, in addition, arraisonner means “to seek to persuade by giving arguments.” It is this twofold meaning that A. Préau has in mind when he justifies his translation: “Technology calls nature to account, boards and inspects it [l’arraisonne], requires that everything justify itself before the tribunal of reason and in accord with its norms” ( translator’s note in “La question de la technique,” tr. Préau, 26 ). The translation of Gestell by arraisonnement is certainly a discovery that stimulates thought by situating the essence—or rather the site of modern technology—in the realm of reason and the principle of reason, rationem reddere. But it is also open to criticism because the Gestell does not express itself using the vocabulary of reason. “A good translation” and at the same time one that is “eminently interpretive,” says F. Fédier, and in addition one that “lets us glimpse what the word Gestell means as Heidegger uses it,” but only on condition that the word arraisonnement be understood “to express a rational, systematic treatment in which everything is already grasped in the framework of arrangements to be made in order to provide a solution for problems” ( Regarder voir, pp. 206–8 ). Fédier himself proposes dispositif ( apparatus ) as a translation for Gestell or, in a more developed way, dispositif unitaire de la consommation, meaning by that “all the prior measures by means of which everything is made available in advance in the framework of a putting in order.” Here all explicit reference to reason has disappeared. On the other hand, the root stell of the verb stellen ( set, set up ) has a prominent place in the apparatus. Nonetheless, a circumlocution is necessary to render the meaning of the German collective prefix Ge- : unitaire and the cum in consommation indicate it doubly. Pascal David BIBLIOGRAPHY Fédier, François. Regarder voir. Les Belles Lettres/Archimbaud, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Antwort—Martin Heidegger im Gespräch. Pfullingen, Ger.: Neske, 1988. . “The Question concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. . “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger.” In Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker, edited by T. Sheehan, 45–67. Chicago: Precedent, 1981. . Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. In Gesammtausgabe, vol. 16. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. |
Ge-Stell, an untranslatable term par excellence, has unfortunately been acclimated in French in the form of the term arraisonnement. In André Préau’s translation of Heidegger’s Essais et Conférences, we find the following note ( p. 26 ), which seeks to justify the choice of the term:
We have seen this root figure in a small group of verbs designating either fundamental operations of reason and science ( following the trace, presenting, highlighting, representing, explaining ) or measures of technology’s authority ( questioning, requiring, deciding, committing, setting up, ensuring, etc. ). Stellen is at the center of this group; here it is “to stop someone in the street to demand an explanation, to force him to rationem reddere” ( Heid. ), that is, to ask for his sufficient reason. The idea is taken up again in Der Satz vom Grund ( 1957 ). Technology calls nature to account, boards and inspects it [l’arraisonne], requires that everything justify itself before the tribunal of reason and in accord with its norms.
In Questions IV, the translator’s note on p. 155 is hardly more illuminating, and translators, who rightly challenge the translation given in Essais et Conférences, clear themselves of responsibility by concluding that the term is untranslatable:
And they add: “It seemed to us impossible to find in French a word corresponding to Stellen and rendering all the derivations Heidegger attaches to the verb stellen: Gestell, Nachstellen, nachstellen, verstellen, Bestellen.
There is, of course, no single verb that translates the German stellen in all cases and in such a way that one could find it in all the combinations of the original. But there are other factors that help make Ge-stell untranslatable. To lay out the logic of the concept insofar as it arises in and through writing, we can start from the place in the text where Heidegger explains the reasons for his choice. He writes:
Wir nennen jetzt jenen herausfordernden Anspruch, der den Menschen dahin versammelt, das Sichentbergende als Bestand zu bestellen—das Ge-Stell . . . . Ge-Stell heißt das Versammelnde jenes Stellens, das den Menschen stellt, d.h. herausfordert, das Wirkliche in der Weise des Bestellens als Bestand zu entbergen. Ge-Stell heißt die Weise des Entbergens, die im Wesen der modernen Technik waltet und selber nichts Technisches ist. Zum Technischen gehört dagegen alles, was wir als Gestänge und Geschiebe und Gerüste kennen und was als Betandstück dessen ist, was man Montage nennt.
Here is André Préau‘s French translation of this passage in Essais et Conférences:
Maintenant cet appel pro-voquant qui rassemble l’homme ( autour de la tâche ) de commettre comme fonds ce qui se dévoile, nous l’appelons—l’Arraisonnement . . . . Ainsi appelons-nous le rassemblant de cette interpellation qui requiert l’homme, c’est-à-dire le pro-voque à dévoiler le réel comme fonds dans le mode du « commettre ». Ainsi appelons-nous le mode de dévoilement qui régit l’essence de la technique moderne et n’est lui-même rien de technique. Fait en revanche partie de ce qui est technique tout ce que nous connaissons en fait de tiges, de pistons, d’échafaudages, tout ce qui est pièce constitutive de ce que l’on appelle un montage. ( 28–29 )
Here we can make three observations:
1. Heidegger clearly distinguishes between the technicity of technology, represented by the terms for which he gives the generic principle of construction, and thus technology as a material procedure functioning by means of machine-like arrangement, from the nontechnical essence of technology, which is the object of his reflection. This distinction itself corresponds to a double use of language: the normal use, which describes technology as machinery, and the term Ge-Stell, which reconstructs language by combining two elements against their nature: Ge, which refers to the seme of construction ( the act of putting together, assembling ) and stell, torn away from the usual semantics of the word Gestell, which can mean, for instance, “scaffolding, rack, skeleton” ( these are Heidegger’s own examples ). There is a layering, and the product thus obtained becomes useless for ordinary use—whence Heidegger’s fears of being misunderstood. The word is uprooted, and the usual rules of combination ( Ge + stell ) have produced a surplus of meaning well indicated by Heidegger’s way of writing the word with the dash characteristic of re-marking.
2. When Heidegger writes: “What originally unfolds mountains in lines and runs all through them in the fold of their cohesion is this collector we call a ‘mountain range’ ” ( Was die Berge ursprünglich zu Bergzügen entfaltet und sie in ihrem gefalteten Beisammen durchzieht, ist das Versammelnde, das wir Gebirg nennen ) ( Die Technik und die Kehre ), this sentence is difficult to understand if one does not see in it the play of oppositions between traits ( Bergzügen, translated here as “lines” [lignes] ), fold ( entfaltet, “unfolds,” and gefaltet, “folded,” with all the Leibnizian and Goethean connotations of Vielfalt and Mannigfaltigkeit, “multiplicity” and “diversity” ), and cohesion ( Beisammen ). In this semantic constellation the Ge- in Gebirge ( der Berg, “mountain,” das Gebirge, “mountain range” ) is equivalent to the seme Totality ( a collecting totality ). Just as the range is what “runs through” and collects the diverse, the Ge- in Ge-stell attracts attention to what, beyond the functionality of machine-like construction, is the whole—an ideal, nonpresentable whole that merges with Being and masks it in and through its function and state. That is what all French translators note, following in the footsteps of Heidegger ( Essais et Conférences, 26n1 and 348n2; Etre et temps, 355n1 ). It is clear that the French term arraisonnement in no way reflects these remarks, unlike Fédier’s dispositif unitaire.
3. The semantic derivation of Gestell on the model of Gebirge ( the idea of collection ) and not of Gestänge or Geschiebe ( assembly or collection ) thus moves the seme “assembly” toward the seme “collection.” But this holds only for the Ge- in Ge-stell. The second part of the term has to be related to the system of conceptual marks that Heidegger elaborates around stellen, and which it is not impossible to describe, despite what the translators of Questions IV say. The meaning of stellen that André Préau borrows from Heidegger and cites in his note ( “to stop someone on the street to demand an explanation, to force him to rationem reddere” ) might provide support for the idea of arraisonnement. But in Der Satz vom Grund, Heidegger gives a quite different commentary on the relation between stellen and rationem reddere. As always in his work, the commentary gives rise to new expansions of the conceptual constellation. Everything turns on the meaning of reddere. Heidegger emphasizes that ratio is ratio reddenda, reason is a rendering. After proposing as German translations for reddere the words zurückgeben, “to render, give back,” and herbeibringen, “to bring,” he adds zu-stellen, with the hyphen of the philosophical re-mark. The postal analogy is explicit: “Wir sprechen von der Zustellung der Post. Die ratio ist ratio reddenda” ( We are speaking of delivering the mail. Reason is ratio reddenda ) ( Der Satz vom Grund, 47 ). “Delivering the mail”: we are far from the pirate metaphor of boarding and inspecting ( arraisonnement ); instead, we are concerned with the logic of the return to sender. Reason sends the world back to itself and thereby renders account of it. The spatial metaphor ( return to sender ) can be related systematically to the thematics of Being as “a sending” ( Schickung or Geschick ), rendered in French as envoi, a word that plays cleverly ( let us note in passing that “cleverly” can be translated as geschickt, mit viel Geschick ) on the semantic ambivalence between destiny ( see SCHICKSAL ) and sending, which in Heidegger is systematically related—but in a rhizomatic way—with history and historicity ( see GESCHICHTLICH ). Heidegger never ceases to zu-stellen. In the lines following the paragraph quoted above, he says explicitly that he includes in the verb stellen the connotations of her-stellen, “fabricate, produce,” and dar-stellen, “represent,” both referring to poiêsis. If then Ge-Stell brings together the whole of the construction, it produces and represents. It is the essence of technological construction as presenting totality. But in order to present Being, technology penetrates it. It opens it up, pierces it, transforms it, redistributes it, and in that way brings it out, reveals it—that is the concept of Entbergen.
The constellation of concepts grouped around the verb bergen—which is central for Heidegger, since it is explicitly developed elsewhere to explain the concept of truth as Unverborgenheit, on the basis of the Greek alêtheia—refers in German to an original ambivalence given by language. Like the famous verb aufheben at the origin of Hegelian thinking, the verb bergen is ambiguous from the outset, because it means both “conceal” ( like verbergen ) and “bring out” ( for example, victims buried under ruins ). Heidegger recomposes the Greek alêtheia by resorting to the concept of Unverborgenheit, constructed on the basis of the verb verbergen ( “conceal,” but also “hide from our sight” ). Thus alêtheia is the essence of what was hidden from our sight ( verborgen ) and appears as if unburied, un-concealed. That is why the “poïetic” part of Ge-Stell refers to the ambivalence of technology, which brings out Being but at the same time veils it, since reason receives back only its own image, which it sends to itself.
However, since each displacement, each condensation of the term, encounters not words belonging to the “natural” state of language but ones that have already been displaced, uprooted from their meaning, things are still more complicated. For example, there is bestellen, which is caught up in the rhizomatic links surrounding -stell and Ge-stell, and in no way corresponds to the normal sense.
Normally, to bestellen something means to “order something” ( as one orders an article from a catalogue ), or to “reserve” ( for example, a theater seat ), or again “ask someone to come somewhere, summon,” not to mention other uses, such as schlecht bestellt sein um jemanden, “someone is in a bad way.” But in Heidegger, and especially in the context of Die Technik und die Kehre, the verb bestellen means something else. Its use, which is completely unusual and in reality incorrect in all its occurrences, elicits each time, and always indirectly, the idea of having something at one’s disposal, of using an apparatus or being dependent on it. As such, bestellen is thus opposed to Bestand, “inventory,” as Ge-Stell is opposed to the idea of construction; the opposition is anchored in part in language, through the opposition between stehen, “to stand,” and stellen, “to set up.” Bestellen is the act of “putting in” ( put in an order, put in place, put in cultivation, etc. ). Reason catches nature in a trap and by doing so is caught in its own trap.
The technological availability of the world thus catches Being in a trap, tracks it down; entities are thus sought, observed, invented; nature is pursued in an apparatus of representation until the object ( Gegenstand: that which is [steht] before [gegen] the eyes ) disappears as an object and, becoming inconsistent ( gegenstandlos ), it reappears as a simple inventory, as consistency ( Bestand ): it is the movement from Gegenstand to Bestand ( see OBJECT ). In ordinary language Bestand corresponds to being appropriated and possessed ( patrimony, inventory, substance, list ), to whatever constitutes some existing thing in the mode of belonging. To constitute a Bestand is to store up such things, in and through technology.
Ge-Stell is thus the part of Being that we have made available ( bestellbar, in Heidegger’s vocabulary ) and which manifests it by disguising it as Bestand. That is why, as Heidegger says toward the end of the text, if the fate of being ( das Geschick ), its sending, reigns in the mode of the Ge-Stell, then we are “in the greatest danger.” But this conclusion differs from the view of the ecology movement because the famous “return/turning point” ( Kehre ), the “conversion” with which Heidegger’s reflection ends, is the recognition that the greatest danger is also the greatest good fortune—even the salvation that is evoked by Hölderlin’s verses quoted by Heidegger: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” Salvation consists in turning toward that which—in technology, but beyond its Ge-Stell and the narcissistic trap of its apparatus—manifests the sending/destiny of Being.
The Ge-Stell is thus not an arraisonnement. It might be better to render Ge-Stell as “un-hiding” or even “hide and seek.”
III. Gefährt and Gestell: Hans-Dieter Bahr’s reply to Heidegger
Heidegger’s language constitutes a limit-state for philosophical writing, and if the contagion of the operation of re-marking is unlimited in his work—the term “rhizome” is clearly not excessive to describe what happens in it—it would be wrong to believe that the contagion is limited to the margins of his work. In philosophy, as in literature, a text never comes along all by itself. From Adorno to Ernst Bloch or Ulrich Sonnemann, to mention only them, there is no lack of examples that would show the permanence of a philosophical writing that contrasts strongly with the pompous waffling of certain contemporary German philosophers, who consider the excess of personal writing style peculiar to Heidegger as inseparable from his political compromises and who have inevitably concluded that precision of thought involves giving up a personal style. The following few lines by Hans Dieter Bahr, one of the young German philosophers who have not given up on a personal writing style, shows that the reply is never long in coming. In the essay from which these lines are taken, which appeared in 1985 under the title Sätze ins Nichts ( Sentences [cast] into Nothingness, or Leaps into Nothingness ) and which is devoted to the subject of the city, Bahr replies, in a very beautiful language whose richness makes most of the terms untranslatable into French, to the Heideggerian Ge-stell.
Das Gefährt . . . Aus mehreren Gründen scheint mir das Technische genauer als Gefährt denn als “Gestell” verstehbar zu sein. Beschreibt Heidegger auch durchaus Fahrt und Gefahr der Technik, so doch zu sehr an eine enge Dialektik unbeständiger Bestandssicherung gebunden, als verfügten wir bereits über eine neue Schrift, die jene Technik wiedergebe. Über das Technische der Verfügungen, Sicherungen und steuernden Verschickungen hinaus mit all ihren katastrophalen Entgleisungen, ist Technik zudem Trans-Mission, schwappt über sich als Sendung und Nachricht, als Zutragung und Zuständigkeit hinaus, schreibt sich über unser Können und Verstehen hinaus, in Schriften, die man nicht weniger mühevoll dechiffriren wird als jene der Natur, schwerer vielleicht, zumal wenn sich das genealogische Vertrauen vorschiebt und technische Dinge als irgendwie menschliche Kinder, Ausdruck unserer selbst, unserer Triebe und Willen oder als Geburten artungleicher Befruchtungen zwischen Natur und Menschen begriffen werden sollen.
( The vehicle . . . For many reasons, it seems to me that technology is more precisely understood as Gefährt [vehicle] than as Gestell. Heidegger does refer to technology as a journey and a danger, but in doing so remains too closely bound to a narrow dialectic of the erratic [unbeständigter] preservation of what has been acquired [Bestandssicherung: “preservation of the status quo, of a stock of goods”] as if we already had a new writing style that renders this technology. Beyond the technology of controlling, securing, and regulating sendings, with all its catastrophic derailments, technology is also trans-mission, it exceeds its sendings and reports, its deliveries and its jurisdiction, and writes itself beyond our capacities and our understanding, in writings that humans will decipher with no less difficulty than those of nature, perhaps even more, especially if trust in genealogy shoulders its way in and technological things are seen as a kind of human children, an expression of ourselves, our drives and our wills, or as the progeny of unnatural cross-fertilizations between humans and nature. )
( Sätze ins Nichts )
Here Gefährt is played against Gestell. But it is not enough to note the substitution of one term for the other; we also have to look into the use of language that makes the substitution possible. Hans Dieter Bahr, who refuses to continue thinking technology on the basis of the idea of “collection” ( Versammlung ), prepares his operation of destitution by thematizing—using the example of the description of Greek vases based, from Aristotle to Heidegger by way of Simmel, on the concept of collection—their multiple function as “trans-lators.” The word “trans-lation” ( Übertragung ) does not mean “transport” in the sense that the distance between two places is abolished. The translation carried out by the recipient is a vehicular movement, in that it accompanies what it moves, and the history of its sending is one of the dangers that lie in wait for both its content and its goal. The vehicle/recipient is not only the bearer of changing contents, but is itself borne, it is the bearer/borne, and its content is as ambivalent as its being since it can both “bring misfortune by transporting the damage, the poison, or even the ashes of the dead or a simple emptiness, after being robbed on the way.” Whereas in the Interpretation of Dreams Freud uses the two different concepts, Übertragung ( “translation,” and then “transfer” ) and Verschiebung ( displacement ) to make a distinction between the transportation of one entity into another, Bahr connects them. This connection, and the semantic renewal that it produces, is based on what claims to be a literal interpretation of the verb übertragen: über-tragen means movement ( über ) and carrying ( tragen ), and thus Übertragung is a kind of “passage-support.” For Bahr the trans-lation ( Über-tragung ) carried out by the recipient is a vehicular movement insofar as it accompanies what it moves.
Although the content of the text runs counter to Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, whose “narrow dialectic” it criticizes, the counter-thesis remains inseparable from a subversion of the writing style, which consists in disengaging the Heideggerian Gestell from its semantic interconnections and in displacing it, as it were, in situ. This is precisely the idea of displacement that then proceeds to disturb the play of Heideggerian style and to destabilize its stakes.
Das Gefährt is the vehicle. The word in ordinary language would be Fahrzeug or in technical language, Vehikel, and the term Gefährt is, moreover, old-fashioned. But once it has been torn out of the register to which usage has limited it, it “de-dialecticalizes” that which, in the Heideggerian Gestell, referred multiplicity and arbitrariness to the fate of Being. Language, no less inventive and filled, by its very richness, with untranslatables, is open to the world as the thematics it sets forth, namely, a technology that is, like language, a mode of writing, and to which it would be vain to think that we can ever get the key in advance.
Heidegger is no doubt the one who has made the most vertiginous use of the procedures described here, and few German philosophers currently use the resources of German style to as much effect as Hans Dieter Bahr. The question remains open to what point this extreme tendency shown by Heideggerian writing reconnects with a kind of writing whose tracks lead back to the mystics of the Rhineland, and also to what extent it is connected with the affirmation of a specifically German philosophical tradition whose appearance coincided with the need to distinguish itself from both the use of Latin and the literary use of the language. There are many studies on this question, and research is far from complete. The role of Christian Wolff in the eighteenth century and his explicit project of constituting a linguistic artificiality drawing its resources exclusively from German, notably by elaborating adequate artifices, Künstwörter, were crucial for the specific development of German philosophical writing. But we also have to take into account the archeology of the German philosophical language and the play of exchange and differentiation between linguistic procedure and conceptual procedure proper that we have described here. No doubt this work remains largely to be done.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahr, Hans Dieter. Sätze ins Nichts. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1985.
Belaval, Yvon. Les philosophes et leur langage. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1952.
Dubost, Jean-Pierre, and Winfried Busse. Französisches Verblexikon: Die Konstruktion der Verben im Französischen. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1983.
Goldschmidt, Georges Arthur. Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande. Paris: Buchet-Castel, 1988. Reprinted 2006.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
. Essais et conférences. French translation by A. Préau. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1958.
. Etre et temps. Translated by Claude Roëls and Jean Lauxerois. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1986.
. Questions IV. French translation by F. Beaufret. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976. Translation by A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul: Four Seminars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
. Der Satz vom Grund. Pflullingen: Neske, 1957. French translation by A. Préau. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Translation by R. Lilly: The Principle of Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
. Die Technik und die Kehre. Pfullingen: Neske, 1978. Translation by W. Lovitt: “The Turning.” In The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, 36–49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1982.
Rousseau, André. “Fonctionnement des préverbes allemands.” In Les préverbes dans les langues d’Europe. Introductions à l’étude de la préverbation, 127–88. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1995.
COMMON SENSE ( ENGLISH )
| FRENCH | sens commun | ||
| LATIN | sensus communis |
SENS COMMUN, and ENGLISH, MORALS, PHRONÊSIS, POLITICS, PRINCIPLE, SENSE, TRUTH
The clearest philosophical uses of the expression “common sense” date from the early eighteenth century and especially the work of Shaftesbury and Thomas Reid. The tradition of commonsense philosophy that begins with eighteenth-century English and Scottish writers starts from the meaning of “common sense” as a shared way of feeling and assessing ( sensorium commune ) to find its origin in an evocation of sociability, a sense of community ( sensus communis ). But English-language philosophy also defends the possibility of common sense as a true judgment or opinion that serves as the foundation for philosophy. Philosophical discourse is thus based on principles that are obvious truths for common sense and are preliminary to any knowledge. Reflection on common sense assumes that ordinary life has truth-value.
I. The Concept of “Common Sense”
Common sense, according to a minimal definition, is not a philosophical term. It designates a form of popular good sense. When one says, “Just use your common sense!” one is referring to the possibility of a practical wisdom, an ordinary apprehension of things. Thus to help people better understand love, marriage, children, and so on, there exist books with titles like The Common Sense Book of Love and Marriage and The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. “Common sense” can also refer to the register of shared opinion. In David Hume, recourse to the general opinion of humanity, which prevents philosophy from going astray, functions like a common sense: “The general opinion of mankind has some authority in all cases; but in this of morals ’tis perfectly infallible” ( Treatise of Human Nature, 552 ). Though the general opinion of mankind defines a common sense necessary for the establishment of a moral philosophy, the resort to common sense is sometimes more ambiguous; thus Hume mentions the truth of the proverb about the pointlessness of arguments about taste: “And thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the sceptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision” ( Essays, 235 ). Even if common sense is part of a relationship to the world different from that of philosophy, it sometimes allows us to save philosophy from the dangers of metaphysical uses by bringing it back to the ordinary uses of discourse. In other words, common sense serves as a point of anchorage in the usual, in the ordinary, in order to invoke the position of opinion with regard to a philosophical question: “Are there any irreducibly social goods? . . . Common Sense is divided on the issue, and confused” ( Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 127 ). We might say that this recourse to the sensus communis has existed since Greek antiquity and does not constitute something specific to common sense. The originality of the tradition of common sense resides in the concern to move from a simple appeal to common sense to a concept of common sense. That is the goal of Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor. The work begins with an account of an entertaining conversation on morals, politics, and religion. Among the different participants, some occasionally take “the liberty to appeal to common sense” ( Characteristics of Men ). Next, common sense is defined:
But notwithstanding the different Judgments of Mankind in most Subjects, there were some however in which ’twas suppos’d they all agreed, and had the same Thoughts in common.
However, this definition of common sense is not developed further, because the emphasis is put on the impossibility of finding fundamental principles or common ideas of religion, morals, or politics. How could common sense help construct a practical philosophy?
II. The Sense of the Common Good
Shaftesbury, who was a great reader of the Stoics, took an interest in the use of “common sense” as sensus communis. In the works of Marcus Aurelius ( Meditations, 1.16 ), sensus communis, which translates the Greek hê koinonoêmosunê [ἡ ϰοινονοημοσύνη], designates a sense of community, a sociability. Shaftesbury adopts this heritage and then gives priority to common ( what is common to a community, the common good ) over sense ( the sensorial or cognitive faculty ). “Common sense” refers to critical work performed on our representations to make them conform to the common good. Common sense expresses the “sense of publick weal, and of the common interest, the love for community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species” ( Characteristics of Men ). It is both a moral and a social sense of reason, structured by a virtue that consecrates the profound nature of man, honesty: “Men’s first thoughts, in this matter, are generally better than their second; their natural notions better than those refined by study, or consultation with casuists. According to common speech, as well as common sense, Honesty is the best policy” ( Characteristics of Men ). Common sense differs from good sense to the extent that the latter, as the natural faculty of distinguishing the true from the false, is a factor of knowledge rather than of practical philosophy. Common sense is the social and political equivalent of moral sense. The latter designates a disposition or ability to form adequate ideas of the moral good. In contrast, common sense designates a disposition to form adequate ideas of the common interest. It presupposes the idea of a public space or public sphere. It is this meaning of “common sense,” which is particularly present in English-language philosophy, that Michael Walzer discusses in Interpretation and Social Criticism. The definition of the apprehension of the social world in the mode of social criticism continues this tradition of the sense of the common interest.
III. The Epistemology of “Common Sense”
It remains that common sense is also a fundamental concept for the theory of knowledge. The thought of Thomas Reid presupposes a rational comprehension of sense as judgment in order to establish an epistemological role for common sense:
In common language sense always implies judgment. . . . Good sense is good judgment. . . . Common sense is that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business.
( Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 426 )
In this case, common sense is close to good sense. Common sense as good sense is a judgment: it designates the part of reason that includes the primitive and natural judgments common to all humanity. It is, in a way, a common intelligence that spontaneously bears upon a certain number of objects of knowledge. From this point of view, this activity of the mind or exercise of judgment is more or less developed in each of us, depending on whether we are more or less experienced in making such judgments, more or less gifted:
Common sense is . . . an exercise of the judgment unaided by any Art or system of rules: such an exercise as we must necessarily employ in numberless cases of daily occurrence. . . . He who is eminently skillful in doing this, is said to possess a superior degree of Common Sense.
( Whately, Elements of Logic, preface )
Not having common sense does not amount here to a lack of wisdom in life’s ordinary affairs; according to both Whately and Reid, it is, in a way, to lack intelligence, to deprive oneself of an a priori undetermined mode of judgment. Common sense constitutes the practical precondition for any knowledge, the whole of the pre-knowledge that is taken for granted and that it is harmful to put into doubt. It is embodied in principles that simply affirm the existence of our different ways of knowing. That is the case for the principle of the reality of the phenomena of consciousness: it has to be considered self-evident that people think, remember, and so on ( Essays ). The existence of the knowing subject is a factual truth, a principle of common sense or a natural judgment that is common to humanity and can thus be produced by anyone.
IV. Common Knowledge and Ordinary Life
Common sense is thus part of a philosophy and an epistemology through which, according to G. E. Moore, a commonsense view of the world can be achieved. It is not that common sense does not contain some false propositions, but the massive certainties that it contains, taken all together, constitute the truth of the commonsense view of the world. In a way, in conformity with Thomas Reid’s philosophy, the mind can have immediate knowledge of the existence of objects, of matter, of other minds, that defines true beliefs for which it is pointless to provide a justification. Common sense is the mental authority through which we know with certainty that many very ordinary propositions are true. In the register of the definition of a theory of knowledge, the question of common sense suggests a way of approaching a common fund of knowledge, a common knowledge in which anyone with judgment can share. There is a community of judgments that can reconcile us all, despite doctrinal philosophical differences. Common sense suggests the possibility of a philosophical communicability:
There is this advantage in putting questions from the point of view of Common Sense: that it is, in some degree, in the minds of us all, even of the metaphysicians whose conclusions are most opposed to it.
( Sidgwick, Philosophy, 42 )
The philosophical meaning of “common sense” presupposes a defense of common sense. Reflection on common sense is in part continued by reflection on ordinary life in contemporary American philosophy—for example, in the work of Stanley Cavell ( In Quest of the Ordinary ), who does not limit himself to saying that the formulations of ordinary life are true in their ordinary sense. He tries to determine what their ordinary sense means—just as the philosophy of common sense seeks the meaning of common sense.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Hume, David. Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985. First published in 1777.
. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. First published in 1739–40.
Moore, George Edward. Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959.
Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. First published in 1785. In Thomas Reid: Philosophical Works, edited by Derek Brookes, 8th ed. Edinburgh, Scot.: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
Schulthess, Daniel. Philosophie et sens commun chez Thomas Reid. Bern: Lang, 1983.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Sigdwick, Henry. Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations. London: Macmillan, 1902.
Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Walzer, Michael. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Whately, Richard. Elements of Logic. 9th ed. London: John W. Parker, 1851.
COMMONPLACE
| FRENCH | lieu commun | ||
| GREEK | topos [τόπος], topêgoria [τοπηγοϱία], deinôsis [δείνωσις] | ||
| LATIN | locus communis, indignatio |
COMPARISON, CONCETTO, CONSENSUS, DESTINY, DOXA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, PATHOS, PROBABILITY, SUBLIME, TRUTH
The modern expression “commonplace,” in the sense of a cliché or banal saying, has a history going back at least three centuries. If it has a pejorative connotation nowadays, for a long time it had a positive meaning, as an essential element of one’s intellectual and artistic development. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, lieu commun, or “commonplace,” was a technical term in France and across Europe. Broadly speaking, it had two very distinct meanings, which are both in their own way present in the modern sense of the term. On the one hand, “commonplace” was an element of oratorical training; on the other, it referred to the different headings of a catalogue. These two senses in turn go back to the sense of topos [τόπος] in ancient rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as “that which groups together a multiplicity of enthymemes” ( Rhetoric, 2.26.1403a16–17 ), those syllogisms of probability that characterize rhetoric.
I. Topos: The Commonplace as a Reservoir of Premises
The first of the three meanings goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The Greek word was simply topos [τόπος], “place” ( or lieu in French, which was how Médéric Dufour translated it in his edition, Aristote, introducing in French a distinction between lieux propres or lieux spécifiques [particular or specific expressions] and lieux communs [commonplace or general expressions] in 1.2.1358a13ff., and in 2.22.1396b28 ). The topos, according to Aristotle, is a stoicheion, an element of the enthymemes: “It is that which groups together a multiplicity of enthymemes” ( eis ho polla enthumêmata empiptei [εἰς ὃ πολλὰ ἐνθυμήματα ἐμπίπτει], 2.26.1403a17 ). This is why, unlike premises, or “protases,” which are specific to only one of the oratorical genres—the deliberative, the judicial, and the epideictic; so, for example, the useful or honest instead of the deliberative—a “place” or generality is always “common” ( houtoi hoi koinoi [οὗτοι οἱ ϰοινοί], or koinêi [ϰοινῇ]: “generalities are the commonplaces of law, of physics, of politics”; 1358a13–14 ), for example, “the generality of the more or less.” As Jacques Brunschwig emphasizes, “the topos is a machine that produces premises from a given conclusion, so that one and the same generality has to be able to deal with a multiplicity of different propositions, and one and the same proposition must be able to be to dealt with by a multiplicity of generalities” ( preface to his edition of the Topics ). In the subsequent history of rhetoric, this first meaning of “commonplace” will obviously not be forgotten. In Latin rhetoric, that of both the ancients and the moderns, locus communis is contrasted, in a way that is clearer and more pedagogical than in Aristotle, to the “particular” expressions of each of the three genres. “Commonplace” refers, then, to a list that has almost no variants, which goes from the Definition ( then the Etymology, the Enumeratio partium, etc. ) to “Adjoining expressions” ( Adjuncta ), by way of expressions of Opposition and of Comparison. As in Aristotle, these expressions are, by hypothesis, “general invented expressions.” Every generality is indeed a reservoir, a “place-to-find” arguments ( see COMPARISON ). Moreover, Aristotle did not invent the term topos, which in all probability goes back to the arts of memory. But his distinctive gesture was to have completely reconceived, as he so often did, a term that the usage of the Greek language gave to him in an unelaborated form. So it is logical that all the subsequent topics should refer topos as a concept back to the Rhetoric, and even more so to the Artistotelian Topics.
■ See Box 1.
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Rhetorics of the topos, rhetorics of the kairos Rhetoric, or rhêtorikê <technê> [ῥητοϱιϰή <τέχνη>], is a term that appeared for the first time in Plato’s Gorgias. It only appears for its claim to be an art, technê, to be discredited, and reduced to the paradoxical status of alogon pragma [ἄλογον πϱᾶγμα] ( a thing deprived of logos [λόγος], or if one prefers, a “practice without reason”; 465a ). It is thus the eloquence of Gorgias and of the Sophists ( their oratorical success and their teaching ) that is excluded from philosophical discourse and rationality. A good rhetoric still needs to be invented: the philosophizing rhetoric of Phaedrus, that is, the “dialectic,” “the art of dividing and gathering together” ( 266b ), whose aim is not to persuade but to elevate the soul ( this is what was termed “psychagogy”; 261b ). The subsequent elaboration of rhetoric in Plato, as well as in Aristotle, consisted in devaluing, even prohibiting, a certain type of rhetoric in favor of another type. Deprived of art and of reason, this rhetoric deals with time and speech ( a rhetoric of improvisation, schedioi logoi [σχέδιοι λόγοι], or “hurried,” ex tempore speech; a rhetoric of the kairos [ϰαιϱός], or the “opportune moment,” which is able to exploit the paradoxes of speech with these kataballontes [ϰαταϐαλλόντες] invented by Protagoras, or catastrophic arguments that are inverted as soon as they are spoken ). This rhetoric is valued as authentic and truly technical; it focuses on what is said, and it brings time back to the space being dominated. Described by the philosophers, discourse was an organism that was widespread and finely articulated, and one had to be able to “divide it up” while respecting its overall plan ( cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 265b ). It was made up of a hierarchy of sun [σύν], “with,” which went from predicative syntax to the syllogisms, and conformed to the norms of hama [ἅμα], or “at the same time,” as prescribed by the principle of noncontradiction. It thus privileged stability of meaning over the disruptive effects of the signifier, of homonymy, of puns ( the entire organon, Aristotle’s metaphysical and logical apparatus from the Metaphysics Γ to the Sophistical Refutations ); it described “periods” ( literally, “complete turns” that could be taken in with a single glance; Rhetoric, 3.9.1409b1 ) and used visual figures of speech ( “metaphor,” which carries across, and “metonymy,” which takes the part for the whole ) at the expense of auditory ones ( those alliterations that claim to be poetic; 3.1.404a24–29 ). The importance accorded to topos [τόπος], or “place,” was obviously an essential part of this system. It is easy to see how the power of place could fire the imagination of commentators, and they proposed a whole series of rich metaphors relating to space in order to define this term: mold, matrix, seam or vein, circle, sphere, region, well, arsenal, reservoir, seat, store, treasure house, and not forgetting Ross’s “pigeon-hole” ( Brunschwig, preface to Topics ). With topos, philosophizing rhetoric spatialized the temporality of speech, and succeeded in turning even invention into a kind of thesaurus. BIBLIOGRAPHY Cassin, Barbara. L’effet sophistique [Part 3]. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1995. McCoy, Marina. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Poulakos, John. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. |
II. The Latin Locus Communis: The Commonplace as a Part of Oratorical Training
This second sense bears the trace of the other great thinker on rhetoric, Cicero, even if this meaning was already present in the Rhetoric to Herennius. In the Latin Europe of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it was the predominant meaning, and also paradoxically the one we have lost from sight. On first analysis, it appears not to fit with the Aristotelian topos. Even though it is also linked to doxa and to the general, its essential difference is that it cannot be defined solely in terms of invention. The topos is not a set of propositions ( or of sentences, if one prefers ), but the means by which propositions are produced. The locus communis in Cicero’s sense of the term is first of all an often very oratorical embellishment, or quite simply a passage in a speech, or even what is commonly known as a tirade ( so in Aristotelian terms, a set of propositions, of arguments, etc. ). It is only very distantly and indirectly a “place.” Whatever the case may be, it would be best at this point to treat this new concept or object as a simple homonym of its Greek predecessor.
The Ciceronian locus communis has three characteristics. The first is the fact that it gathers up received ideas, or doxa. The second is that it speaks in general terms, generaliter. Finally, this generalization is extensive; it is not limited to a brief statement, or to a proverbial saying. One of the clearest texts on this is without doubt Cicero’s On Invention, at the end of book 1, §100–105. In a legal context, the canonical moment for the commonplace expression is the peroration. This is the moment when the prosecution makes its closing speech, and when the accuser speaks no longer against the accused he is facing, but against the crime in general—when our prosecutors inveigh no longer against Mr. so-and-so who has raped or killed, but against rape or murder in general. In ancient treatises, the usual example was parricide, which in Rome was the unforgiveable crime par excellence: in Cicero’s For Milon, the classic example is the praise of self-defense.
As for the doxa, it is immediately apparent how serious the stakes are. Of course doxa is a matter of mere opinion, not of truth. But for the rhetorician, the fact that the doxa is not true does not mean it has no value. On the contrary, it is heavy with gravitas. We thus encounter one of the meanings of the word doxa in Greek, the positive meaning of “reputation, fame”: the doxa is all of the values that are current in a given society, and it is defined most clearly whenever these values are treated with contempt. Parricide aroused particular indignation among the Romans—and indignatio is precisely one of the words Cicero uses to refer to the commonplace. This new word has the advantage of being less formal than the expression locus communis, which for rhetoricians used to the very idea of “place” is grammatically incorrect. In-dignatio allows us to reformulate what is at work, since within the word we find dignitas or “dignity”, or even the “decency” of decet and non decet, which are close etymologically, that is, the notion of “decorum” ( see MIMÊSIS, Box 6; and the article “Decorum” in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik ). Parricide, racism, even rape, shatter the decorum or, in the French of the seventeenth century, the bienséance ( rules of social propriety ), that is, they threaten the entire edifice of social relations.
In this legal context, this shift to the general also takes on a particular significance. By generalizing, a lawyer “elevates” the debate, as we still say, quite justifiably. This elevating movement also elevates emotion, raising it to a higher level, since in raising up we appeal to the great and general principles. General principles move the general public, by arousing great feelings. We are at the height of the effects that rhetorical art is capable of producing, what Cicero named movere, and which translates the Greek pathos [πάθος]. And once the movement of generalization is a movement that raises up, at its highest point we inevitably find the question of the political. In Cicero himself, we go very quickly from parricide trials to properly political trials, whose theme is that one’s homeland is in danger. When Verrès crucifies a Roman citizen in Sicily with his eyes turned toward Italy, he is assassinating the very idea of Roman citizenship. As Quintilian notes, with this example we reach not only the highest point, or summum, but in a way what is above the highest point, the supra summum ( “non modo ad summum, sed quodam modo supra summum”; Institutes of Oratory, 8.4.4 ). We are at the highest point of emotion and of the intolerable, that is, the height of the sublime.
The third and final trait of the commonplace relates to another term that is no less important for rhetoric, particularly in Latin: length or extent, copia. It is not just a matter of long, flowing speech, of quantitative length, since copia is above all qualitative. Formed from opes ( forces, particularly military forces ), copia is an army of arguments, a Roman army. Depending on which of the images Cicero happens to like, copia is either a river that has burst its banks or a devastating fire. In both cases, it is irresistible. It is not for nothing that the canonical moment of indignation is the peroration. The end of the river-speech sweeps one up and finishes one off; the last remaining dikes of resistance collapse. Indignation against the accused and pity for the victims are the two essential loci communes, typical of peroration, for which Cicero’s De inventione gives a list of particular “places,” this time in the canonical sense of argument. One could ultimately compare such oratorical arguments with a great aria from an opera rather than with a tirade. What people expect the most is not the least enjoyable and arouses no less applause. Great emotion unites a public, and even more so a community. It can even, as in the case of Verdi, lead to the birth of a nation. So pathos is not vulgar, but worthy of that beautiful name common, which has indeed, since Cicero, been one of the connotations of locus communis.
It is clear, then, that the Ciceronian locus communis is in no way a synonym for the Aristotelian topos. The same word refers to two quite distinct realities. Now that these two senses have been identified, one might wonder what the Greek equivalent is for locus communis or indignatio in Aristotle, and the Greek rhetoricians generally. It would indeed be surprising if Aristotle’s Rhetoric paid no attention to such an important phenomenon.
For the later Greek rhetoricians, and in particular those who came after Cicero, the answer is easy. As a technical term, the strict equivalent of indignatio is deinôsis [δείνωσις]. A very full history of this term can be found in the article “Deinotes” in RT: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, in particular, column 468: “der früheste rhetorische Terminus, der mit deinos verwandt ist, ist deinôsis ( = lat. Indignatio ).” The emblematic figure for deinôsis was Demosthenes; for example, when Quintilian quotes in Greek the word deinôsis and associates it with indignus and indignitas ( 6.2.24; see also 8.3.88 and 9.2.104 ); or in Longinus ( 12.5 in particular: “Demosthenes is sublime in the deinôseis [ἐν ταῖς δείνωσεις]” ). Denys of Halicarnassus more than anyone, in his Demosthenes, attributed deinotês [δεινότης] to his hero as one of his major qualities. The deinos was, first and foremost, the terrifying appearance of the sacred, the equivalent of the Latin terribile—so Phoebus Apollo’s bow that sent down a plague was described as deinos ( Iliad, 1.49 ). From there the meaning shifts to “powerful” and also “skillful,” used for any artisan who is a master of his art, and, in particular, for the rhetorician or the Sophist. The artisan who is deinos, as a master of his art, is like a god whose techniques are hidden and whose effects are spectacular. How to become deinos is the only thing that Gorgias promises to teach ( Plato, Meno, 95c ). The adjective denotes an entire program: power and skill, mastery of the effects on the public, a “huge” success, all of the truly terrifying and sacred promises of rhetoric are condensed into this one word—the art of making oneself a master and possessor of the hearts of men.
So when Demosthenes is deinos, he is no longer an orator, but a god who paralyzes and galvanizes his audience, who does what he wants with them, irresistibly. This is no longer a “tirade,” but what one might call a thunderous “exit,” a cataclysmic lightning bolt hurled down by Jupiter. So deinôsis limits the locus communis to its most visible dimension, that of the prosecution, and forgets pity ( which in Cicero is also a construction, a commonplace ). From this limitation we even move on to a further one. Longinus describes deinôsis solely in terms of its brevity, so as to contrast it with the particular form of the Ciceronian sublime, which involves extension or copia. On the one hand, the thunderous “exit,” on the other the devastating river of the Ciceronian commonplace: these are the two modalities of the same sublime. What is more, when Longinus writes in Greek to a Roman he invents the neologism topêgoria [τοπηγοϱία], which would never actually pass into general usage, to designate Cicero’s locus communis. The term was formed from topos, but with a suffix that referred to public speaking, or agora ( agoreuein [ἀγοϱευείν], “to speak in front of the Assembly” ); On the Sublime, 12.5: Demosthenes is sublime “in the deinôseis and the violent passions,” Cicero “in the topêgoriai and the perorations.”
As for Aristotle, his Rhetoric only uses deinôsis incidentally, four times according to the Belles Lettres edition, which quite rightly translates the term as a “feeling of revolt, indignation, exaggeration.” This incidental usage underlines the fact that Aristotle, for once, has not reformulated the term as a concept. He takes the usage as it is given to him and does nothing more with it. The usage he records is rather interesting since on the face of it, it is already codified by rhetoric: either pity or deinôsis ( ê oikton ê deinôsin [ἢ οἶϰτον ἢ δείνωσιν] ) ( 3.16.1417a13 ); “the passions ( pathê [πάθη] ) to be aroused when the facts are established are pity, deinôsis, anger ( eleos kai deinôsis kai orgê [ἔλεος ϰαὶ δείνωσις ϰαὶ ὀϱγὴ] )” ( 3.19.1419b26 ). We again find the crucial moment of the peroration, once the facts are established ( see also its use in 2.24.1301b3 ), as well as the fundamental vacillation of the prosecution between pity for the client and indignation for his accuser. This vacillation is already in Plato, who also records the usage of his time: “pity and deinôsis [ἐλεινολογίας ϰαὶ δεινώσεως] ( Phaedrus, 272a ). The vacillation recalls, in Aristotle’s Poetics ( 6.1449b28 ), the famous passage on katharsis ( purification, purging ), in which “pity and phobos [φόϐος]” serve as emblems and as a condensed form of other passions [ἐλέου ϰαὶ φόϐου] ( see also Poetics, 13; and in 19.1456b1: “and the others of this kind”; cf. CATHARSIS ).
This detour through the Poetics is useful in putting our investigation onto the right track. Four incidental usages do not constitute a theory. But there is one place where the Rhetoric systematically discusses indignatio, but gives a completely different name than deinôsis; this is in 2.9, which is the precise counterpart to 2.8, on pity. We are in the moment of fundamental vacillation, between pity and then sacred terror. The clue that Aristotle is at this point rethinking the trivial notion of deinôsis is in the change of vocabulary. In 2.9 he names it nemesis [νέμεσις], as the goddess or incarnation of Justice. Most of the Latin translations of Aristotle are quite content to render it as indignatio, along with its derived terms, as is the French Belles Lettres translation, which talks of “indignation.” The immediate opening of the chapter underlines the fact, as if it were necessary, that the use of such a highly charged term relates to the sacred: “if we attribute indignation to the gods” ( nemesan [νεμεσᾶν]; 1386b14 ), it is because the gods feel this sentiment when they see that those who do not deserve to be, who are thus unworthy of it, are happy. Such a divine emotion is clearly distinguished from the more human envy, or phthonos [φθόνος], that we feel toward the happiness of our equals and rivals, which in our eyes is undeserved. Indeed, like spectators in a tragedy, we will be like gods if in this respect we have “no personal interest” ( 1386b15–20 ). That we are clearly dealing here with a work of conceptualization is again emphasized by the comparison with the Nichomachean Ethics ( 7.1108b1 ), where it is once again stated that nemesis is to envy what true courage is to temerity. Nemesis is the “happy medium” of indignation, it is a just form of indignation.
By reformulating the concept, Aristotle draws out what is truly at stake. His description is clearly informed by that of deinôsis, like Demosthenes’ “exit” or Cicero’s peroration. But the sacred quality of deinos could always be suspect, and anyone who places himself in the divine role of prosecutor could be motivated by personal interests. The fundamental question is: who made you the prosecutor? In order to reach the truly sublime, the one who thunders must by this very fact be inhabited by a god, who for both Demosthenes and Cicero is the god of the homeland in danger. Or to put it another way, he has to have Justice with him, he has to be able to appear as the very incarnation of Justice. Here as elsewhere, Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows that it is truly an ethics, much like Quintilian’s ( who makes a number of remarks along the same lines ).
In the seventeenth century, the Christian rereading of this chapter is not entirely self-evident. Is one not, in feeling indignant toward those who are unworthy ( indigne in French ), acting as if one were God himself, and doubting his Providence, which mysteriously rewards those on this earth who do not deserve it? A professor of rhetoric such as Christoph Schrader ( at the University of Helmstedt ) argues for the rights of Christian indignation in the choices that depend on human free will. One should not, for example, in use and in public office “prefer the unworthy to the worthy ( ne indigni dignis praeferantur )” ( commentary ad loc, 332: this opens up the question of merit or worthiness ). But other than this, and from a more metaphysical point of view ( De rhetoricorum Aristotelis sententia et vsv commentarius ), he uses Aristotle’s chapter as an incitement to asceticism, for example, toward the goods listed in 1387a12, “riches, power,” as well as the gifts one is born with, which is in fact everything that comes from Fortuna or Providence. At that point we need to hold back our desire for indignatio, and leave this feeling to God alone. We are not Nemesis, and this is a way of emphasizing the extent to which the sublime that is described here, from Aristotle to Longinus, is a manifestly pagan sublime.
III. Commonplaces as Categories of an Index
This is again a homonym. In the sixteenth century, “commonplaces” in the plural was used to designate the categories under which a reader would classify the quotations that for him seemed noteworthy. So it was a sort of filing system, or index, or repertoire. This pedagogical tool had two objectives: to train one’s memory, and to develop one’s judgment.
One term from this period expressed this dual ambition, the verb “to digest,” and the noun “digest” is still used to convey this idea in English. Technically speaking, the verb refers to the idea of classifying a quotation under such and such a category: digerere means to distribute elements, each one into the box where it belongs. The usual expression designating this sorting out of commonplaces is thus “per locos communes digesta” ( each thing in its own category ). The word “digest” has to do with the body, but also with the mind. The mind will retain better what it has digested better. This is the meaning of the famous image of the bee that Seneca uses in his letter 84 to Lucilius, the terms of which are endlessly cited and reworked by Erasmus throughout his work—Erasmus himself transforms it into a real cliché that is constantly borrowed and adapted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The bee gathers pollen from flowers: this is the moment when a pupil notes down in his notebooks or on a slate the “flowers” of literature and history ( cf. Hamlet noting down in his “common-place book” that his uncle is a “villain,” just after he has seen the ghost! ). When the bee is back in the hive, the pollen that has been gathered is redistributed into the different alveoli of the hive: this is the moment of “digestion,” of distribution, when the pupil copies out onto the large in-folio of blank pages that he keeps at home. It is then that the mind can make its own honey and incorporate knowledge from outside.
It is clear that without any judgment or critical perspective this act could turn into one of pure compilation. This was strongly emphasized by the Reformer Melanchthon ( 1497–1560 ), who was rector of the celebrated university at Wittenberg after Luther. The pernicious double of digerere was congerere: to accumulate for the sake of accumulating. The solution was order at every moment of the process ( see the booklet De locis communibus ratio ). Order reigns, both in reading and in writing: to classify well was to think well, was to write well. One of the aims of commonplaces was to educate oneself in the field of knowledge one decided principally to pursue. As far as reading was concerned, for Melanchthon the category-words had to be organized in analytical order, which he preferred to the jumble of alphabetical order. The model was the encyclopedia, as a tree with branches. Whatever his domain, a student would develop his memory and his critical faculties by organizing his collection of commonplaces according to the big and then small categories of his discipline. As for writing, his discourse would also benefit from this same order, since without a well-conceived plan it could turn into a compilation of arguments. One has only to reread Quintilian’s comments on dispositio to find the same aversion to what is, precisely, difficult to digest: “a copious abundance of ideas, no matter how large, would merely provide a heap or a kind of congestion [cumulum atque congestum], if they were not put into order by this same disposition [in ordinem digestus]” ( 7, prologue 1 ).
As an essential element of the pedagogy of the Jesuits, this method played a very important role in the organization of study across Europe and in all fields of knowledge. For commonplaces in the sense of categories was by no means confined to literature, or even to the humanities more broadly speaking. The method was an often explicit adaptation of the first tool of Aristotle’s Topics ( 1.14.105a ff. ), that is, the idea of collecting premises, commonly accepted propositions ( endoxai [ἔνδοξαι] ). Aristotle himself earned the sobriquet of “reader” because of this: read everything, index everything. This was how he wrote The History of Animals or Politics, beginning by drawing up an inventory and classifying—by “digesting”—all the available information. This was also how Bodin wrote his République in the sixteenth century: the vast compilation of all the existing constitutions was a prelude to his induction, which for Bodin would then reveal a new concept of sovereignty.
What is the relationship between oratorical training and an index of categories? We might turn again to Melanchthon for the answer. We should first of all emphasize the context, which was not rhetorical but theological. His Lieux communs de théologie ( Commonplaces of theology ), which appeared in 1521, was conceived as a manual, and we can see it as one of the first comprehensive works of Lutheranism. The main doctrinal questions were addressed systematically and provided a coherent body of doctrine that was contrasted with the previous one. Order here was only necessary because of the context of theological controversy. If one’s principles were not good, one could not formulate good discourses, and if Melanchthon drew attention to the term “commonplace,” it was because the Reformer had read Cicero very well. He understood that for Cicero the movement toward generality was at the heart of his rhetoric. The movement upward from the particular to the general produced the essential ideas, the framework, and the overall articulation, and these ideas organized the arguments of the speech and aroused the moments of most intense emotion.
IV. The Commonplace in the Modern Era
The commonplace in the modern sense is both a faux ami, which looks deceptively like the word in its classical sense, and a true heir. It is a faux ami in a text as apparently simple as the following, written by Pierre Bayle in 1686:
C’est ce que je réponds au lieu commun qui a été si rebattu par les ignorants, que le changement de religion entraîne avec lui le changement de gouvernement, et qu’ainsi il faut soigneusement empêcher que l’on n’innove.
( This is what I reply to the commonplace, which has become so worn out from use by ignorant people, that the change of religion brings with it a change of government, and that therefore we have to be careful to prevent any innovation. )
( Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ )
The proximity of lieu commun and rebattu gives the impression that we are already dealing with its contemporary meaning. We are already, it is true, in generality, and even political conservatism, the very kind that Flaubert scorns so joyously in his Dictionary of Received Ideas. But what the faux ami prevents us from seeing is that Bayle is here referring to an entire historical development. Those who are ignorant have for a long time, passionately, discussed the question that concerns, as in Cicero, the homeland in danger. The category-word is something like “Government” or ‘Dangerous Innovations,” and on this subject arguments and quotations have been collected eagerly since it is known in advance that they can be reused. The author only gives us the substance of these long developments on a question of principle. He is the one who abbreviates it, and who gives us the false impression that the commonplace is reduced to one or two expressions, to what we nowadays understand as “cliché.”
And yet the very possibility of such a reduction is not unfaithful. A cliché only needs to be expanded, just as the expansion itself can be abbreviated. This is not the main point, which is rather the excessive visibility that the method of commonplaces has given to the commonplace. Bayle is not reproaching the commonplace for being overused, but for being worn out through overuse by ignorant people. What we reproach the cliché for, following Flaubert, is to be overused, period, by intelligent as well as by ignorant people. In other words, if the commonplace in the modern sense is truly the distant heir of former meanings of the term, it is that the legacy itself has become too ponderous. Doxa was once near to Wisdom, and we now find it closer to Stupidity.
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. The “Art” of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
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. Topiques. Edited and translated by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007. First published in 1967.
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Cicero. De invention. De optimo genera oratorum: Topica. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
. The Treatise on Rhetorical Invention. In The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, vol. 4, translated by C. D. Yonge. New York: Dodo Press, 2008.
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. “Hamlet, étudiant du XVIe siècle.” Poétique 113 ( 1998 ): 3–15.
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. Poetics. Edited and translated by W. H. Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library, 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
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Summers, David. “ ‘The Proverb Is Something Musty’: The Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies 20 ( 1998 ): 9–34.
COMMUNITY
“Common” derives from Latin communis, “what belongs to everyone,” from cum, “with,” and munis, “what fulfills its task, its duty” ( related to munus, office, gift ); it corresponds to Greek koinos [ϰοινόϛ], “common, public,” in which we probably see the same root as in the Latin cum, and which contrasts with idios [ἴδιοϛ], “peculiar, private.” “Community” designates the fact of being in common, what is held in common, and the group or institution that shares what is held in common.
I. Common and Community
1. What is held in common is opposed to what is one’s own and to property: see PROPERTY.
2. “Common” can be used in reference to different levels of community. It can refer to humanity as a whole: see LOGOS, SENS COMMUN, UNIVERSALS, as well as AUTRUI, HUMANITY [MENSCHHEIT], IDENTITY, [I/ME/MYSELF, SAMOST’, SELBST]. Or it can refer to a particular human community defined as a people ( see PEOPLE and NAROD; cf. HEIMAT ), or as a culture ( see BILDUNG, CIVILTÀ, CULTURE, TO TRANSLATE ) considered distinctive because of some privileged trait ( see MALAISE ).
II. Political Community and Society
1. The entry CIVIL SOCIETY explores the main systems used to describe the community, as opposed to society and the state. For Greek, in addition to koinônia politikê [ϰοινωνία πολιτιϰή] ( CIVIL SOCIETY, I ), see the entries for POLIS, OIKEIÔSIS, OIKONOMIA. For Latin, in addition to societas civilis ( CIVIL SOCIETY, I ), see PIETAS, RELIGIO, and cf. LEX. On the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in German, see CIVIL SOCIETY, Box 1.
2. In mir [мир], Russian has a special constellation that refers simultaneously to peace, the world, and the peasant community; see MIR and SOBORNOST’ ( conciliarity, communion ), and cf. NAROD ( people ); cf. CONCILIARITY.
3. The contemporary avatars of the political promotion of the community are considered in the entry LIBERAL, Box 3.
ALLIANCE, CONSENSUS, OBLIGATION, STATE
COMPARISON
| FRENCH | comparaison | ||
| GREEK | sugkrisis [σύγϰρισιϛ], antithesis [ἀντίθεσιϛ], parathesis [παράθεσιϛ] | ||
| ITALIAN | paragone | ||
| LATIN | comparatio, contrapositum, adpositum |
ANALOGY, COMMONPLACE, CONCETTO, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, PROPERTY
Comparison or simile has suffered by the recent success of metaphor. It has served as a foil for its brilliant alter ego. To restore its interest, we have only to recall that the apparently canonical comparatio-metaphora pair is deceptive. This pair comes from a passage in Quintilian that has been taken out of context. In Latin, comparatio designates only in a marginal way a similarity introduced by a word such as “like.” It refers to a mental operation: making a parallel between x and y in order to bring out resemblances and differences. The expression comparaison n’est pas raison ( comparison is not reason ) reminds us both that comparison is an instrument for producing intelligibility and that this instrument works well, almost too well: from here comes the need to be prudent in using the extremely fertile method of comparatisme ( comparative studies ).
I. Comparatio, Sugkrisis, “Parallel”
Comparison is an image or figure of speech in a specialized and marginal sense. In the whole of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria ( The Orator’s Education ), this sense appears only once among the twelve occurrences of the words comparatio and comparativus listed in the index of the Belles Lettres edition. In a massive, generic way, comparatio designates a parallel: the comparison of x and y in order to discern their resemblances and differences, and often to emphasize the superiority of one over the other. In Greek, the equivalent word is sugkrisis [σύγϰρισιϛ], which is frequently used with this meaning, but in the late period ( from Philodemus to Plutarch ). As sugkrisis suggests, the point is to exercise one’s judgment, to judge one thing in relation to another—sug-krisis [σύγ-ϰρίσιϛ] is put together from sun ( with ) and krisis ( judgment ). The result is not a little formula tossed off in passing, a figure of style, but a long, complete development.
Thus comparatio is one of the preliminary exercises given in rhetoric classes ( Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.4.21 ). It has the length of an academic “assignment,” and as such, it was part of the baggage of every cultivated person from antiquity to the ancien régime. In this culture, to make a comparison was also to provide oneself with the means to construct a whole development. Thus comparison is a “figure of thought,” or more literally, a “figure of sentences” ( Lat. figura sententiarium ), that is, one that extended over one or more sentences. Similarly, comparison is related to conception and invention: considering something in a nutshell and then developing what one has seen in all its consequences. A visionary like Victor Hugo was well aware of its virtually endless possibilities. For example, in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, the formula “Ceci tuera cela” ( This will kill that, 5.2 ) launches the extensive comparatio between x, the book, and y, the cathedral.
One example of a class assignment with its possible developments is found in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria ( 8.4.14; cf. 8.4.9–14 ). Discussing one of Cicero’s speeches, Quintilian notes that “here Catiline is compared to Gracchus, the constitution of the state to the whole world, a slight change for the worse to fire and sword and desolation, and a private citizen to the consuls, all comparisons affording ample opportunity for further individual expansion, if anyone should desire to do so.” This allows us to understand better the most common specialized sense of sugkrisis. The Greek word designated a classic exercise in literary criticism: a parallel between two authors or two works, the better to differentiate them. There again, academic culture long retained the memory of this: we recall the classic assignment on Racine and Corneille, people as they are and as they should be. Longinus’s On the Sublime includes a number of such exercises, whether the parallel/difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey, between Plato and Lysias, or between Demosthenes and Cicero. A pairing like Demosthenes and Cicero, developed at greater length, is the basis for Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Plutarch concludes the discussion of almost every pair of men with what he calls literally a sugkrisis: a comparison of Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, and so on.
II. Eikôn and Metaphora, Similitudo and Tralatio: The Status of “Like”
With respect to this fundamental meaning, a comparison in the modern sense is called a “simile”; the English renders the Latin similitudo, which itself rendered the Greek eikôn, “icon” or “image.” Moreover, the idea that metaphor is an abbreviated simile comes from Quintilian ( Institutio oratoria, 8.6.8 ). Quintilian takes from Aristotle the excessively famous example of “Achilles is like a lion,” as opposed to “Achilles is a lion” ( Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.4.1406b20–24; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.9 ). Aristotle distinguishes between eikôn [εἰϰών] and metaphora [μεταφορά] ( Rhetoric, 3.4.1406b20–23 ), and Quintilian between similitudo and tra[ns]latio, the latter word being itself the Latin equivalent of the Greek metaphora, which Quintilian also uses:
Aristotle |
Quintilian |
|
eikôn |
= |
similitudo |
metaphora |
= |
tra[ns]latio |
■ See Box 1.
|
Reminder: Aristotle’s definition of “metaphor” The recent success of metaphor draws its title of nobility from Aristotle. Metaphor, unlike comparison or simile, is a trope, a “figure of words,” namely, according to its canonical definition in the Poetics, “giving a thing a name that belongs to something else” ( onomatos allotriou epiphora [ὀνóματος ἀλλοτϱίоυ ἐπιφоϱά], 1457b7–8, trans. Bywater, 1476 ). This may be done by moving from the genus to the species, from species to species, or, finally and especially, in accord with a relationship of “analogy”: a metaphorical expression then abbreviates and summarizes a proportional relationship ( to call the evening “day’s old age” is to imply that evening is to day as old age is to life ). Whereas for Quintilian, metaphors are “abbreviated similes,” for Aristotle “comparisons [eikones ( εἰϰόνεϛ )] are metaphors that need logos [logou deomenai ( λόγου δεόμεναι )],” that is, as Dufour and Wartelle translate it, that “need to be developed” ( Rhetoric, 3.4.1407a14–15 ), but “just because it is longer, it is less attractive” ( 3.10.1410b18–19 ). Both metaphor and simile are mental operations. So far as metaphor is concerned, “when the poet calls old age a ‘withered stalk,’ he conveys a new idea, a new fact [epoiêsen mathêsin kai gnôsin ( ἐποίησεν μάθησιν ϰαὶ γνῶσιν )] to us by means of the general notion of ‘lost bloom’ which is common to both things” ( 3.10.1410b15–16 ). And “in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances [to homoion theôrein ( τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν )] even in things far apart” ( 3.11.1412a12–13 ). The success of a metaphor, even in the form of a witticism ( asteion [ἀστεῖον], 3.11.1411b22–24 ), has to do with the brilliance of the connection it makes between philosophy and poetry. One of our problems with the passage from Aristotle to Quintilian is a problem of translation, namely, a difference in the way the Greek is rendered in Latin and in French: Quintilian translates eikôn, the other word Aristotle uses for “metaphor,” which is generally translated in French by comparaison, as similitudo and not comparatio. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Ingram Bywater. In Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. . Rhetorique. Edited by M. Dufour and A. Wartelle. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980. |
Note that the concept of comparatio is not part of this table—of this register of concepts. Quintilian imports the noun comparatio for explanatory purposes, to show what happens in a simile and thus also in a metaphor. In his work, comparatio is hardly more than a deverbal noun derived from the verb comparare, which he had initially used. A simile is “like” a parallel/difference, the latter being as familiar to readers of Quintilian—or Aristotle—as it is unfamiliar today:
In totum autem metaphora brevior et similitudo, eoque distat quod illa comparatur rei quam volumus exprimere, haec pro ipsa re dicitur. Comparatio est cum dico fecisse quid hominem “ut leo,” tralatio cum dico de homine “leo est.”
( On the whole metaphor is a shortened form of simile, while there is this further difference, that in the latter we compare some object to the thing which we wish to describe, whereas in the former this object is actually substituted for the thing. It is a comparison when I say that a man did something like a lion, it is a metaphor when I say of him, “He is a lion.” )
( Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.8–9, trans. Russell )
From comparare to comparatio, the verb and noun are there to make it understood that the essential point is not the presence or absence of the word “like.” The point is that a parallel between Achilles and a lion would develop at length everything that belongs to the hero and everything that belongs to the animal to discriminate between them by means of a parallel/difference. This very intellectual process is thus the inverse of metaphor. The simile maintains the distance between Achilles and the lion ( see here the verb distat, which is typical of comparatio ), whereas metaphor fuses these two poles in a flash of intuition. Length in one case and brevity in the other merely indicate the difference between these two mental processes. On the whole, the presence of “like,” which has so hypnotized criticism, is just the tip of the iceberg. It emblematizes the essential, since the “like” forestalls complete assimilation. But making it the absolute criterion for distinguishing between simile and metaphor is erroneous and leads to many disappointments: this criterion doesn’t work.
So let us set aside comparison in the modern sense. In “comparison” in the sense of parallel/difference, the point is to juxtapose two elements that then correspond—without ever being conflated. Let us take an example. In his chapter on the verbal figures, Quintilian deals with an effect of repetition taken from Cicero. Here the repetition involves the first words of the parts of the period, “you” and “him,” in a parallel between you the jurist and him the military leader—a famous parallel because, contrary to all expectations, Cicero gives the advantage to the military man:
Vigilas tu de nocte ut tuis consultoribus respondeas, ille ut eo quo intendit mature cum exercitu perveniat; te gallorum, illum bucinarum cantus exsuscitat; tu actionem instituis, ille aciem instruit; tu caves ne tui consultores, ille ne urbes aut castra capiantur
( You pass wakeful nights that you may be able to reply to your clients; he that he and his army may arrive betimes at their destination. You are roused by cockcrow, he by the bugle’s reveillé. You draw up your legal pleas, he sets the battle in array. You are on the watch that your clients be not taken at a disadvantage, he that cities or camps be not so taken. )
( Cicero, Pro Murena, 22, quoted in Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.3.32, trans. Cousin )
This is a good example of the possible length: the parallel extends over ten paragraphs, from §19 to §28. Moreover, it is accompanied by another that serves as its conclusion, the parallel between the orator and the jurist, the orator being just as superior to the jurist as the military leader is ( §29–30 ). Quintilian quotes this passage and comments: “In antitheses and comparisons [in contrapositis vel comparativis], the first words of alternate phrases are frequently repeated to produce correspondence [solet respondere primorum verborum alterna repetitio]” ( 9.3.32 ).
Contra-positum: this is not far from the Italian word contrapunto, “counterpoint,” and the French contraste, one of the words by which French rhetorical textbooks of the eighteenth century retranslate comparatio.
III. Contrapositio and Antithesis
Contrapositio is the Latin word that Quintilian uses in the same chapter 3 of book 9 to render the Greek antitheton [ἀντίθετον] in referring very specifically to the verbal figure called “antithesis.” In all of these words, the prefixes anti- [ἀντί] or contra- largely determine the meaning. The Greek word for “antithesis” can designate any kind of parallel. It refers literally to the act of setting one thing next to another, -positum translating -theton, and contra- translating anti-. In this very general sense, antithesis is a special case of parathesis. When two elements are set opposite each other, they correspond either by being similar, symmetrical ( para [παρά], parallelism, parathesis, adposita; cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.10.86: “Adposita vel comparativa” ) or by being dissimilar, opposed ( anti-, contrast, antithesis, contraposita ). Furthermore, anti- does not necessarily signify the exact contrary: the island of Anticythera is simply the one that is across from Cythera; x and y face each other. We could say the same about the prefix para-; parallêlos [παράλληλοϛ] is constructed on the basis of allêloi [ἀλλήλοι], “one and the other”: to juxtapose. One of the words in the entry on sugkrisis in Hesychius of Alexandria’s Greek dictionary even combines the two prefixes anti- and para-. This word is antiparathesis [ἀνθιπαράθεσιϛ], which is used, for example, by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to designate, very simply, a parallel/difference—in short, a contrast, in this case between the bad Hegesias and the excellent Homer ( On Literary Composition, 6.18.24 ). Elsewhere, Quintilian says again that he translates the Greek antistasis [ἀντίστασιϛ] by comparatio: this clearly emphasizes that the essential element is the prefix ( Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 7.4.12 ).
IV. Comparison and Comparatism: Double Attention and the Aesthetics of Counterpoint
This terminological complex thus allows us to broaden the brief article “Comparaison” in Lalande’s Vocabulary ( RT: Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, s.v. ). The latter refers, rightly, to Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and his school. The quotation from Condillac’s Logique ( 1.7 ) is interesting:
As we give our attention to an object, we can give it to two at once. Then, instead of one exclusive sensation, we experience two, and we say that we are comparing them, because we experience them exclusively in order to observe them side by side, without being distracted by other sensations: and this is exactly what the word “compare” means. Comparison is thus only a double attention.
This quotation reminds us in a remarkable way of the following passage in Petrarch, which Condillac probably did not know. Petrarch develops his long and famous parallel, or comparatio, between solitude and urban life ( On the Solitary Life, 1.1.8 ). He notes:
I think that I shall describe all this better if I do not devote separate developments to everything that it seems to me could be said about these two ways of life; I shall on the contrary mix them, referring by turns to a given aspect of one of them, so that attention [animus] is directed now to one side, now to the other, and that it can gauge, looking from the right and from the left as one does with an alternate movement of the eyes, the difference that separates the most dissimilar objects placed next to each other.
This quotation show how reductive it would be to limit oneself to Condillac alone. The philosopher elaborates in his own idiom, explicating a notion that he finds in “ordinary” language—a notion that was elaborated a long time before and that he inherited from the whole rhetorical culture of his time. Before Condillac there was at least Aristotle. In his Topics, comparison is involved in two of the four instruments, or organa, that provide an abundant source of propositions. These are the third and fourth instruments: attention directed toward differences and then resemblances ( Topics, 1.16.107b–17.108a ).
■ See Box 2.
|
The comparison of the arts The comparison of the arts is a literary genre that began in the Renaissance and continued throughout the classical period. It took several forms. The first and most important was a parallel between the arts of the visible and those of discourse: painting and sculpture on the one hand, poetic arts on the other. On the basis of this comparison, which is in a way generic, more specific forms of comparison emerged—comparisons between painting and sculpture, or between painting and music. The Italian word paragone, which means “comparison” in general, was used in all European languages to designate the comparison between painting and sculpture that gave rise to many debates in the sixteenth century. The comparison between painting and music ( the analogy between sound and color, reflections on the notion of harmony ) was also present in the Renaissance and in the classical age. It was revived in the twentieth century with the birth of abstract art. The comparison between the arts of the eye and those of the ear is part of a long tradition that, according to Plato, goes back to Simonides, and that was spread during the Renaissance through the reading of Horace. In the Art of Poetry, Horace says, “What is heard, not seen, is weaker in the mind than what the eyes record faithfully as it happens” ( Art of Poetry, trans. Raffel ). But it is another remark of Horace that was to play a crucial historical role, the one in which he drew a parallel between painting and poetry: “ut pictura poesis erit,” a poem is like a picture ( ibid. ). Adopted by the theoreticians of the Renaissance, this comparison is at the origin of what has been called the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. But this doctrine is based on a misunderstanding, or rather an inversion: whereas Horace compared poetry to painting, relating the arts of language to those of the image, Renaissance authors inverted the direction of the comparison. “A poem is like a picture” became “a picture is like a poem.” The phrase ut pictura poesis, as it was understood in the field of discourse on art, always consisted in defining painting, in determining its value, in relation to criteria of the poetic arts. This doctrine was unquestionably fertile for several centuries; it played an essential role in helping painting acquire the dignity of the liberal arts ( see ART ). Through this comparison, the painter was able to accede to the rank of the poet and the orator. The expressions pictura loquens and muta poesis are topoi that serve to qualify poetry and painting, the latter being often represented in engravings by a figure wearing a blindfold or holding a finger to its mouth. Painting is a “mute poetry” and poetry is a “speaking picture.” Seventeenth-century French writers called them “sisters” ( sœurs; the English called them the “sister arts” ) and described them as united in a constant relationship of reciprocal emulation. Thus André Félibien, in his work Le songe de Philomathe, stages ut pictura poesis by means of a dialogue between two sisters, one blonde, the other brunette, the former expressing herself in verse, the latter in prose ( published in 1683, reprinted as an appendix to book 10 of the Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, 1666–88 ). Ut pictura poesis did not limit itself to changing the image and status of the painter; it also transformed the definition of the painter by imposing on him the categories of poetics and rhetoric ( inventio, dispositio ) and by attributing a narrative goal to him. The doctrine of ut pictura poesis also triumphed in history painting, long considered the most noble kind of painting. But very early on, reservations were expressed with regard to a comparison that subjected painting a little too much to the order of discourse. Thus Leonardo da Vinci preferred to describe poetry as blind painting rather than as speaking painting, to maintain the equality between the two arts: “Painting is a mute poetry and poetry a blind painting; both seek to imitate nature in accord with their means” ( Traité de la peinture, trans. Chastel, 90 ). But Gotthold Lessing, in his Laocoön ( 1766 ), was the first to provide a systematic critique of the doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Disqualifying the very idea of a comparison between the arts, Lessing insists on their differences and the limits that separate them, as is shown explicitly by his book’s subtitle: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. The rejection of the parallel in the name of the argument for specificity was extensively developed in the nineteenth century, following Charles Baudelaire, by all the defenders of “modernity.” This argument has played a major role in the contemporary analysis of art. In 1940, Clement Greenberg published in the Partisan Review an article, “Towards a New Laocoön,” that was to become one of the main texts of “modernist” criticism. Appealing specifically to Lessing, Greenberg writes: “The avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its ‘legitimate’ boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy” ( 1:32 ). Jacqueline Lichtenstein BIBLIOGRAPHY Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a New Laocoön.” In Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by J. O’Brian, 1:23–37. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Horace. The Art of Poetry. Translated by B. Raffel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Lee, Rensselaer Wright. Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Leonardo da Vinci. Traité de la peinture. Translated by A. Chastel. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1987. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay of the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by E. A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. |
As Aristotle described it, comparison serves first of all to make inductions: to bring out the universal by comparing individual cases ( Topics, 1.18.108b ). By whatever mediation, the idea of comparatio is at the origin of all the comparative disciplines that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Comparative anatomy was inaugurated by Georges Cuvier’s Leçons d’anatomie comparée ( 1800–1805 ), and was soon followed by comparative physiology ( 1833 ), comparative embryology, and so on. François Raynouard’s Grammaire comparée des langues de l’Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours ( 1821 ) provided the foundation for the discipline of Romanistik founded by Friedrich Diez some fifteen years later. Comparative geography was inaugurated by Carl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde im Verhaeltnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen oder allgemeine vergleichende Geographie ( 1817–59 ), part of which was translated into French by Eugène Buret and Édouard Desor as Géographie générale comparée ( 1835–36 ). In his anthology, Cours de littérature comparée ( 1816–24 ), François Noël limited himself to juxtaposing texts in French, Latin, English, and Italian. In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe ( 1848–50 ), Chateaubriand went so far as to call his Essai sur les révolutions, originally published in 1797, “a comparative work on revolutions [un ouvrage sur les révolutions comparées].” The general movement is in fact that of the “double attention” Condillac talked about. More than comparé ( compared ), this should be called comparant ( comparing ), as in German ( vergleichend ), or “comparative,” as in English. What counts is not so much the two objects juxtaposed as the intellectual act of bringing them together.
The fact that comparison does not always provide proof in no way deprives the method of interest: because it is inherently plural, comparison elicits thought. To put the point in the old terms, comparison is part of topics, which is a matter of invention and not of criticism, which concerns judgment. First invenire, then iudicare. First find, produce results, then weigh and reweigh, decide what the results mean. To reject the comparative method because some of its results are unacceptable is to fail to understand its role as an instrument, a tool. This negative judgment generally goes hand-in-hand with an inability to explain one’s own topics, one’s way of collecting the materials for thought.
Comparison thus understood can be used not only as an intellectual tool but also as an aesthetic means. We have seen this in the quotation from Cicero’s Pro Murena, in which the alternating repetition of the first words produces a figure, a sort of rhythm, “you . . . him.” Here are two further examples.
In musical terms, contrast or contraposition is somewhat like counterpoint. The Greek word sugkrisis is attested, in the Septuagint, in the very specialized sense of “musical concert”: Ecclesiasticus ( Sirach ) 32 ( 35 ):7. Here we are in a context of harmony: the person presiding over the banquet is asked not to “strike a false note” by inappropriately lecturing people who want to party. Good taste consists, on the contrary, in being like “a carbuncle seal on a ring,” like “a musical concert during a banquet”—that is, the ornament that crowns everything. The Vulgate translates this as “et comparatio musicorum in convivio vini.” Although very specialized, this meaning is within the logic of the terms sugkrisis and comparatio. Whether it be music as harmony or social harmony as music, in both cases the idea is that each element should be in its proper place. It is a matter of decorum, that is to say, of appropriateness ( see MIMÊSIS, Box 6 ). The focus of attention is shifted from the parts to the whole. It is no longer a double attention, but, so to speak, a triple one. If intellectual contrast serves to examine each of the two elements, to illuminate each by the other, contrapuntal harmony seeks to merge them into a whole that simultaneously transcends and respects them. Then the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts in turn are enhanced by the light that their comparison yields. Taken as a whole, the aesthetic dimension is the pleasure of com-prehending in the sense of holding the two contrapuntal lines together.
The other example reminds us that this phenomenon is exceedingly classical. This example is poetry. In this case, what does it mean to set two things face to face so that they correspond to each other? The effect of contrasted symmetry is emblematic of the Italian sonnet. First, there are the two quatrains. Not only is each symmetrical in itself, ab and then ba, but also and especially the two quatrains correspond to each other. The repetition of rhymes is not in itself very important. The essential fact is that this repetition is accompanied by a general schema in which everything tends toward symmetry: to comparatio. All of the variations of symmetry are then possible, whether the poet draws the symmetry from resemblance or from difference, from the adpositum or from the contrapositum. Joachim Du Bellay’s L’Olive reintroduced the sonnet in France in 1550; the same year, Pierre Ronsard’s Odes broadened the practice. The imitation of the Pindaric model made it possible to make two segments and not merely two quatrains correspond to each other: strophe and antistrophe. In Greek poetics, the antistrophe corresponded to the strophe in having the same metrical scheme; the chorus chanted the strophe while dancing in one direction, and the antistrophe while dancing in the opposite direction. In the Ronsardian ode, though the rhyme scheme is the same in the strophe and the antistrophe, the rhymes themselves are not the same, unlike those in the quatrains of the Italian sonnet. This underlines the essential fact. The symmetry has to do not with the repetition of rhymes but with the will to symmetry: with the pure fact of counterpoint, of setting two elements beside one another, of comparing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities. Translated by E. Cary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–50.
Hesychius Alexandrinus. Lexicon. Edited by M. Schmidt. Halle, Ger.: Dufft, 1861. Reprinted Amsterdam, Neth.: Hakkert, 1965.
Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. Revised by D. Russell. In Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Petrarca, Franscesco. De vita solitaria: The Life of Solitude. Translated by J. Zeitlin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924.
Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. French translation by Jean Cousin: Institution oratoire. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975–80.
Ronsard, Pierre. Odes. In Œuvres complètes, edited by J. Céard, D. Ménager, and M. Simonin. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1993–94.
. Poems of Pierre de Ronsard. Translated and edited by N. Kilmer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
COMPORTMENT
“Comportment” corresponds to the French comportement, which, along with conduite, serves as the standard translations of the English “behavior.” Adjacent to “behavior,” “comportment” particularly emphasizes the objective, observable aspect of ways of acting, as reactions to the world and manifestations of internal dispositions. The article BEHAVIOR studies the differences between behaviorism and the psychology of comport( e )ment.
Regarding the relation between an organism and its environment, see AFFORDANCE, DISPOSITION.
On modalities of action, see ACT, AGENCY, PRAXIS. On the relation between the mind or the mental and the corporeal, see particularly CATHARSIS, CONSCIOUSNESS, DRIVE, FLESH, MALAISE, PATHOS, SOUL, UNCONSCIOUS.
On the specificity of the human, see HUMANITY; cf. ANIMAL, ERLEBEN.
DASEIN, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, STRUCTURE
CONCEPT
“Concept” is borrowed from the Latin conceptus, based on concipere ( cum-capere, take entirely, contain ). The conceptus is what one conceives in two senses of the term, the product of an internal gestation ( the concept is mind’s fetus ) and collection in a unit, generality: CONCEPTUS; cf. INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, SOUL, UNDERSTANDING. On the difference between “nominalism” and “conceptualism,” see TERM.
Only the act of intellectual grasp subsists in Begriff, which corresponds to comprehendere and comprehensio, and belongs to the Stoic idiolect katalepsis [ϰατάληψιϛ] ( BEGRIFF, Box 1 ); see BEGRIFF, where the development of terminologies of understanding is analyzed through German and English; cf. AUFHEBEN, MERKMAL, PERCEPTION.
Finally, Italian concetto has a very special status. It is an ingenious invention situated between aesthetic design and witticism; see CONCETTO; cf. ARGUTEZZA, DISEGNO, INGENIUM.
CATEGORY, EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTICE, REASON
CONCEPTUS ( LATIN )
| ENGLISH | concept | ||
| FRENCH | concept |
BEGRIFF, CONCEPT, CONCETTO, and INTELLECT, INTELLECTUS, INTENTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SIGN, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, SPECIES, TERM, UNDERSTANDING, UNIVERSALS, WORD
The Latin masculine noun conceptus ( genitive: conceptus ) came to occupy a distinctive place in Western philosophical terminology only in the second half of the thirteenth century. Meaning literally “fetus,” it had been used figuratively since Roman antiquity to designate an intellectual representation developing in the mind ( Macrobius, Priscian ). But it was with Thomas Aquinas ( ca. 1255–74 ) that the noun conceptus became prominent and then spread among epistemologists. This rapid success can be explained by two factors. First is the ambiguity of the term that had previously been dominant, intellectus, which designated both the intellectual faculty and the units it represented—and sometimes even the meanings of words. Second and above all is the very semantics of conceptus: on the one hand, it denotes, in the literal sense, the product of internal gestation; on the other hand, its etymology ( con-capere, “take together” ) alludes to the collection of a plurality of elements in a single perception, that is, nothing less than the notion of generality. The internal production of thought on the one hand, and generality on the other: these are the two key components of conceptus. Though the later use of “concept,” or Begriff, oscillates between reference to an abstract, entirely depsychologized object ( as in Frege ) and reference to a mental representation ( as in the cognitive sciences ), the medieval notion surely belongs far more to the second of these two approaches.
I. Intellectus/Conceptus
The Latin used in medieval schools had numerous terms for the mental unit of intellectual representation. Intellectus designated the understanding itself, of course, but often also the internal objects of understanding. Species intelligibilis—paired with species sensibilis—put the accent on the representation of the thing in thought, the term species initially signifying something like aspect, appearance, or image ( see SPECIES ). Verbum mentis or verbum cordis—literally, the mind’s or heart’s word—related, in the wake of Augustine, to the comparison of human thought with the divine Word. Intentio often refers to the unit of thought insofar as it is directed toward some external object ( from which comes the famous theme of intentionality ). As for conceptus, which at the end of the Middle Ages became the key term in this semantic field, it referred first of all to something produced internally.
Literally, conceptus designates the fetus conceived in the womb of the mother, but already Macrobius ( fifth century ) used it in the derivative sense to say that intentions are born from a mental concept ( conceptus mentis, in Saturnales, 1.18.17 ). But especially the grammarian Priscian ( sixth century ) wrote, in a passage that was very influential in the Middle Ages, that the spoken word ( vox, see WORD ) indicates a mental concept ( mentis conceptum ), which he also called cogitatio ( Institutiones grammaticae, 11.7 ). But this use remained metaphorical and marginal. The term was not part of Augustine’s usual vocabulary ( though he often uses—especially in De Trinitate—the corresponding verb concipere to designate the mental act giving rise to a “mental verb” within itself ). Boethius, translating and commenting on Aristotle’s logic in the early sixth century, resorted to intellectus to refer to units of intellection ( and to render the Greek noêma [νóημα] ). Intellectus is also frequently used in the same sense during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—especially by Abelard. Bonaventure and Albert the Great, for example, much prefer to use conceptus for what we would now call a “concept.”
In the first half of the thirteenth century, in fact, conceptus used in the abstract sense seems to appear regularly only in direct or indirect relationship with the passage in Priscian mentioned above, according to which the spoken word signifies a “mental concept.” In this case, it is opposed to affectus, grammarians and logicians ( for example, Peter of Spain, Syncategoreumata, 2.2, and 8.6 ) distinguishing between signifying in the mode of the concept ( “per modum conceptus” ) and signifying in the mode of affect ( “per modum affectus” ) ( cf. Rosier, La parole comme acte, chaps. 2, 3, and 5 ). But even in this limited context, when one encounters the form conceptum—the most frequent, and the one that appears in Priscian—it is not always easy to decide whether it is the accusative of the noun conceptus or the past participle of the verb concipere. The difference between these two possibilities is large, because taken as a past participle ( nominalized or not ), conceptus—or conceptum—normally refers to the thing conceived and not to a mental unit. Roger Bacon in particular proposes to interpret Priscian’s work this way, and consequently sees in it the idea that the word signifies the thing itself rather than a mental concept ( Compendium studii theologiae, 61 ).
It is with Aquinas, between about 1255 and 1274, that the noun conceptus becomes really prominent in the philosophical vocabulary. A half-century later, at the time of William of Ockham, it was in widespread use among epistemologists. In fact, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the ambiguity of intellectus, which denoted both the intellectual faculty and its units of representation, and sometimes even the meaning of words, became all the more intolerable because the ambient Aristotelianism distinguished not only various types of intellectual representation ( “intellectus simplex” and “intellectus compositus,” for example ), but also various types of intellect, or in any case, various functions of the intellect ( “intellectus agens,” “intellectus possibilis,” “intellectus adeptus,” “intellectus speculativus,” “intellectus practicus,” etc.; see INTELLECTUS ); using a single word obviously risked leading to the most complete imbroglio. Conceptus, related to the verb concipere, which was already current in the philosophical vocabulary, had a twofold semantic peculiarity that was particularly attractive in this context: on the one hand, it denoted, in the literal sense, the product—or sometimes the process—of internal gestation; on the other hand, its etymology ( con-capere: “take together” ) itself suggested the unification of a plurality in a common apprehension. But a major epistemological problem faced by Aquinas and his contemporaries was precisely how to join the Augustinian doctrine of verbum mentis ( literally, “mental speech” ) that was so important in theology and that emphasized the mind’s engenderment of an internal, prelinguistic thought, with the Aristotelian theory of abstraction that was taught in the faculty of arts on the basis of De anima, and that was supposed to account for the formation of general ideas in the mind.
II. Mental Speech and Internal Discourse
For Aquinas, the conceptus—which he also calls conceptio, ratio, or verbum mentis—is a purely ideal object, an internal product existing in the mind in an “intentional” rather than a real way, and representing some external reality in the order of the intelligible. The metaphorical relationship between this conceptus and the fetus, often forgotten in modern translations, has to do precisely with the fact that the intellect has to give birth to the conceptus within itself, as Aquinas clearly explains: “And when it is in the act of understanding, our intellect forms something intelligible that is, so to speak, its child [proles], and that for this reason we call a mental concept [mentis conceptus]” ( De rationibus fidei, chap. 3 ).
This recourse to conceptus understood in this way was very controversial at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. Several authors, especially Franciscans such as Pierre de Jean Olivi and William of Ware, complained that Aquinas had introduced between the act of understanding and the external thing that is its true object a useless and harmful intermediary that could act as a screen ( cf. Panaccio, Le discours intérieur, chap. 6 ). Gauthier Burley, for example, is very explicit: “There are in the understanding no such concepts that are formed by the act of understanding and are at the same time representations of things [similitudines rerum]” ( Quaestiones in librum Perihermeneias, 3.8 ). But for all that, the word conceptus was not abandoned, even by Thomism’s adversaries. Ultimately, the main debate was about whether conceptus, understood as an intellectual representation, had to be seen as a purely ideal object that was the mental correlate of the act of understanding, as Aquinas maintained, or as this act itself. Medieval thinkers were thus very aware of an ambiguity that was long to affect ideas like “concept,” “understanding,” and “representation,” suggesting sometimes a process or an episode ( an “act,” the Scholastics said ) and sometimes its object or result ( occasionally seen as a purely intelligible entity ).
After a few hesitations, William of Ockham ended up adopting the theory of the act. From this point of view, the terminus conceptus—or just conceptus—loses its status of intentional object and is identified with a mental quality of the individual subject, a quality endowed with a real existence in the mind ( like that of “a white spot on a wall,” Ockham explains ), and in this school of thought, the original idea of an ideal product of the understanding fades away.
Starting in the fourteenth century, the remaining element common to most schools’ use of the widespread term conceptus was the idea of a general intellectual representation that could appear as either subject or predicate in true or false mental propositions and play certain precise roles in reasoning. William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and their followers made abundant use of conceptus to designate the simplest unit of mental discourse ( “oratio mentalis” ), in which they saw a natural sign that could have various semantic properties ( significatio, connotatio, suppositio ). Logical and semiotic functions thus become more important in this vocabulary than the mental dynamics. But the psychological dimension was not eliminated—far from it: contrary to the Fregean Begriff, the medieval conceptus is always mental; it exists, in one form or another, only in individual minds.
The common English translation of conceptus by “concept” remains, of course, the best available choice, but the very obviousness of this simple transposition usually conceals the complexity and diversity of characteristics that were simultaneously or successively associated with this term in the Middle Ages, from the relationship to the vocabulary of childbirth to the crucial insertion of the word into the very heart of the logic called “terminist” and seen as a grammar of thought.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. On the Trinity. Translated by A. W. Haddan. Revised by W.G.T. Shedd. In Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, edited by W. J. Oates, 2:667–878. New York: Random House, 1948.
Bacon, Roger. Compendium of the Study of Theology. Edited and translated by T. S. Maloney. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1988.
Boethius. First and Second Commentaries. In On Aristotle On Interpretation 9, edited by David L. Blank, translated by N. Kretzmann and David L. Blank. London: Duckworth, 1998.
. In librum Aristotelis Peri Hermenias. Edited by C. Meiser. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1877–80.
Gauthier, Burley. Quaestiones in librum Perihermeneias. Edited by S. F. Brown. Franciscan Studies 34 ( 1974 ): 200–295. First published in 1301.
Macrobius. The Saturnalia. Translated by P. V. Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Panaccio, Claude. Le discours intérieur: De Platon à Guillaume d’Ockham. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.
. Ockham on Concepts. London: Ashgate, 2004.
Peter of Spain. Syncategoreumata. Edited by L. M. de Rijk. English translation by J. Spruyt. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1992.
Priscian. Institutionum grammaticarum libri XVIII. Edited by M. Hertz. In Grammatici latini, vols. 2–3. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1961.
Rosier, Irène. La parole comme acte: Sur la grammaire de la sémantique au XIIème siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1994.
Thomas Aquinas. An Aquinas Reader. Edited by M. Clark. 3rd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
. De rationibus fidei ad Cantorem Antichenum. In Opera omnia, vol. 40. Rome: Leonine, 1969.
. Quaestiones disputatae de potentia. In Quaestiones disputatae, edited by P. Bazzi, M. Calcaterra, T. S. Centi, E. Odetto, and P. M. Pession, vol. 2. Turin: Marietti, 1965.
. Quaestiones disputatae de veritate. In Opera omnia, vol. 22. Rome: Leonine, 1970.
. Summa contra Gentiles. In Opera omnia, vols. 13–15. Rome: Leonine, 1918–30. Translation by A. C. Pegis: On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa contra Gentiles. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955–57.
. Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.
William of Ockham. Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part 1 of the Summa logicae. Translated and with an introduction by M. J. Loux. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974.
. Ockham’s Theory of Propositions: Part 2 of the Summa logicae. Translated by A. J. Freddoso and H. Schuurman, introduction by A. J. Freddoso. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998.
. Summa logicae ( 1325 ). In Guillelmi de Ockham Opera philosophica, edited by P. Boehner, G. Gál, and S. Brown, vol. 1. New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1974.
CONCETTO ( ITALIAN )
| ENGLISH | conceit, concept, idea, thought, representation | ||
| FRENCH | concept, idée, pensée, représentation | ||
| GERMAN | Begriff | ||
| LATIN | conceptus |
BEGRIFF, CONCEPT, CONCEPTUS, and ARGUTEZZA, COMPARISON, DISEGNO, GENIUS, IDEA, IMAGE, INGENIUM, MIMÊSIS, REPRÉSENTATION, SPECIES, STRUCTURE
The word concetto presents no particular difficulties in contemporary Italian philosophical discourse insofar as, like the word concept in French, its meaning is presently strongly determined by the massive contribution of German philosophical texts. Since Immanuel Kant, French and Italian have reelaborated their definitions of concept and concetto with reference to Begriff. But this modern equivalence threatens to obscure the fact that in the Italian tradition from Dante to Benedetto Croce, concetto, indissolubly philosophical and rhetorical, refers both to the ingenious invention at work in the image and in the idea, and to the operation of the understanding involved in what we call the “concept.” Only since the nineteenth century has the word referred almost exclusively to the operations of generalization and abstraction as we understand them today. In fact, neither Giordano Bruno, nor Tommaso Campanella, nor Giambattista Vico saw in the concetto an act having to do with the intellect alone and with its logical and cognitive functions.
I. The Semantic Autonomy of Concetto with Respect to Conceptus
At a time when Latin ( that is, the Latin of the Scholastics ) constituted almost the whole of the intellectual language, Dante’s use of the word concetto already raised most of the problems we encounter in philosophical language proper. This is all the more remarkable because it was only starting in the fourteenth century that the word was gradually affected by the rhetorical tradition, the aesthetic and artistic thought of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, and the Aristotelianism of the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. In Dante, concetto shows an amazing autonomy with respect to the Latin conceptus, as if there were no interpenetration between Scholastic discourse and poetic discourse. Thus in the Paradiso ( in the Divine Comedy ), Dante offers us a number of ways to use the term; for example:
1. “Ne’ mirabili aspetti vostri risplende non so che vi trasmuta da’ primi concetti” ( In your admirable appearance something divine shines forth that transmutes your earlier image ).
2. “Queste sustanze . . . non bisogna / rememorer per concetto divisa” ( These substances . . . need not / be remembered by separate ideas ).
3. “O quanto è corto il dire e come fioco al mio concetto!” ( O how inadequate is speech and how dim my thought! ).
( Paradiso, 3.58–59, 29.79–81, 33.121–22, trans. Sisson )
Idea, concept, thought, image, intention ( in the sense of an intellectual and artistic project ), an act of the creative imagination, the concetto thus tends very early on to designate a number of intellectual activities, in an extension that produces an exceptional polysemy.
■ See Box 1.
|
The concetto, an aesthetic rival of “idea” Although they seem far from a philosophical procedure, Michelangelo’s two verses cited by Erwin Panofsky in Italian in his book Idea perfectly exemplify the difficulties that translators still encounter: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto ch’un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva col suo soverchio” ( The excellent artist has no concetto that a marble alone does not include with its superabundance: Le rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti ). The Italian text is rendered by the French translator of Panofsky’s book this way: “L’artiste excellent n’a aucun concept qu’un marbre seul en soi ne circonscrive de sa masse” ( Panofsky, Idea, trans. Joly ). We could point out to the translator that the word concept does not reflect Michelangelo’s obvious Neoplatonism, and that the word idée would have already been more adequate. But above all, we must explain that concept cannot really illuminate the problematics at work in concetto as it is encountered in Renaissance theoreticians of art, so that the word concept means almost the opposite of what Michelangelo intended. The German translator Karl Frey ( Die Dichtungen des Michelangelo Buonarroti [1897] ) shows that he is better informed and more prudent when he renders “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto” as “Im Geiste kann nicht mal der grösste Meister ein Bild sich machen” ( literally, “The greatest master cannot form an image in his mind” ). Of course, “ein Bild sich machen” lacks Platonic overtones, suggesting activity that is more properly psychological than aesthetic and metaphysical. In reality, a satisfactory understanding of the ways in which the word is used by Italian theorists would require a more precise knowledge of their own philosophical reference points. Even in Michelangelo, the question of whether he takes concetto in a Neoplatonic or an Aristotelian sense is controversial ( Panofksy and Götz Pochat are opposed on this point ). This divergence in interpretation regarding concetto already appears among Michelangelo’s contemporaries. Fortunately, we have a text written during the author’s lifetime by an academician, Benedetto Varchi, that correctly analyzes Michelangelo’s text from a philological point of view. Even if we take into account Varchi’s tendency to Platonize the sense of Michelangelo’s poem, as a philologist and historian he confirms the correspondence—or even equivalence ( which is more debatable )—between concetto and idea: As our poet uses it, concetto corresponds to what the Greeks called idea, the Romans exemplar, and what we call modello, that is, the form [forma] or representation [imagine], called by some “intention,” that we have in the imagination [fantasia], of everything we intend to do or say; which intention is spiritual . . . and serves as an efficient cause for everything we say or do. ( La lezzione di Benedetto Varchi sopra il sottoscritto sonnetto di Michelangelo Buonarroti, in Barocchi, Scritti d’arte, 2:1330 ) Through the tension it maintains between a poorly elucidated Platonism and an Aristotelianism that holds that the artist realizes his concetto in matter, Varchi’s analysis has the merit of showing the extraordinary plasticity of the word, its fundamental polysemy that proves to be very fertile in the expression of intellectual functions. The definitions Varchi gives are simply possible interpretations of the word as it might have been understood by a Renaissance humanist who was especially concerned to show that the aesthetic thought of the period was in perfect harmony, in Italian, with Neoplatonic ideas. |
II. The Productivity of Concetto
In the sixteenth century, the word concetto tends to bring out the originality of the production of schemas and representations by showing in actu, as it were, the activity of the mind, which can be the ingegno or the intelletto. From this comes the gradual extension of concetto, which, while claiming to be the expression of the idea, shows ostensibly the activity of the imagination, the subtlety of the mind in the metaphorical comprehension of the world that is specific to conceptismo. The semantic polyvalence of the word, which is used in extremely heterogeneous fields of application, can proliferate in a single text ( the Platonic or pictural, symbolic, or metaphysical meaning, as in Giordano Bruno ) and end inevitably in ambiguities. But these semantic ambiguities are not derived from etymological contingencies; on the contrary, they are carefully maintained and favored by authors insofar as the goal is precisely to substitute for the idea the more subtle nuances of the concetto. That is why it is ultimately not important to know that concetto is derived from concepire in the sense of “conceive” or “imagine,” since only the multiple goals in the service of which the word is used matter.
The diversity of uses, intentions, and meanings is such that German translators of the word concetto, particularly when used in reference to the baroque, usually retain the Italian word, except, of course, in the case of poetic texts. In the case of philosophical texts, French translations of con-cetto by concept, idée, or pensée are merely arbitrary solutions and are seldom satisfactory. Thus, to translate a sentence from Campanella, “Il mondo è il libro dove il sénno eterno scrisse i propri concetti” ( La città del sole [1623], in Seroni, 326 ), we can propose, “The world is a book in which eternal reason writes its own thoughts” or “. . . its own ideas.” But we will never be able to translate propri concetti by “its own concepts,” because the divine intellect, which is identified with universal reason, does not really express itself through concepts, but through ideas. Moreover, the topos of the Book of the World refers back to the idea that the totality of the objects in the universe constitutes a system of signs expressing God’s thought, which cannot be treated as simple concepts.
The difficulties regarding the possible translation of concetto as a specific expression of the modalities of thought culminate in the work of Giordano Bruno. In De gl’heroici furori ( On heroic furor ), Bruno’s philosophical and sapiential thought is usually analogic: he sets forth his ideas most precisely in the interpretations of allegories, emblems, and devices around which the dialogues are articulated. The text tends to exemplify all the modalities of the idea insofar as it is based on a symbolic image and is fully intelligible in relation to the latter. Bruno usually calls this idea a concetto, as in this passage:
On the doubtful road of uncertain reason and affection to which Pythagoras’s letter refers, where on the right appears the difficult path, thornier, rougher, and more deserted, on which the hunter unleashes his hounds and mastiffs to track down wild beasts, which are the intelligible species of ideal concepts [le specie intelligibili de concetti ideali].
( De gl’heroici furori [1585], 1.4 )
Because we cannot use the word “idea” to translate concetti ideali, the translator has to content himself with rendering the Italian literally. The difficulty is not that truth and beauty can be adequately designated only in the allegorical mode ( in this case, the allegory of the myth of Acteon ), but that concetti ideali can be attained only through a symbolic image. The notion of an ideal concept, which is already vague, is not capable of making it clear how concetto has a connotation that is in a way figurative and closely connected with the activity of the imagination.
Another example, also from Bruno, shows the proximity of the concetto and the idea:
High and deep, and always alert, o my thoughts [pensieri], ready to leave the maternal lap of the suffering soul, you, archers well-armed to hit the target from which the sublime idea [alto concetto] is born, along these rough paths Heaven does not allow you to encounter a cruel beast.
( Ibid. )
This passage describes symbolically how the soul, seeking reconciliation with the heart, must call upon archers whose function is to drive away the seductions of the senses, those of sight, so as to allow access to a superior beauty. These archers must in addition repress their own sight, close their eyes, the better to flush out the alto concetto, well rendered by “sublime idea” insofar as it is a matter of a quest for the beautiful and the true in a perspective inspired by Neoplatonism in the wake of Marsilio Ficino.
We see here how concetto expresses an allegorical, symbolic, and philosophical procedure that results in an increasingly redoubtable polysemy. Two currents glorify still further the productivity of the concetto: on the one hand, the theory of art, whose paradigm, after Alberti’s De pictura, remained Cicero’s De oratore, which emphasizes artistic invention; and on the other hand, conceptismo, which connects the activity of the mind solely with language as such.
III. Concetto in Theories of Art
In Georgio Vasari, the word concetto is close to the idea considered as a general representation:
Da questa cognizione nasce un certo concetto e giudizio, che si forma nella mente quella tal cosa che poi espressa con le mani si chiama disegno.
( From this apprehension is formed a concept, a reason engendered in the mind by the object, whose manual expression is called drawing. )
( Vasari, Le vite [1568] )
In Vasari, concetto denotes a particularly active intellectual act, a conception, whose function is to promote the art of drawing as a form of thought. The idea of the beautiful in the sense of “ideal” is the ultimate reference point of the artist’s thought, and the concetto becomes the mark of the activity of the intelletto, which, through its ingenuity and fecundity, makes it possible to construct a priori the system of rules governing the production of artworks. The clear desire to intellectualize the theory of art rapidly eventuates, at the end of the sixteenth century—that is, with the generation that followed Vasari—in a semantic inflation of the word concetto that could only produce further ambiguities. From then on, no art was conceivable without the productive activity of the intelletto, of the ingegno ( in the sense of ingenuity or genius ), so that the concetto tends to slowly eclipse the idea in metaphysical reflection on art. This ascension of the act of conceiving ends up including metaphysics, theology, and thought about art, as is shown, for example, by Federico Zuccaro’s theory of disegno:
Ben è vero che per questo nome di disegno interno io non intendo solamente il concetto interno formato nella mente del pittore, ma enco quel concetto che forma qual si voglia intelletto.
( It is quite true that by this name of disegno interno I mean not only the internal concept formed in the mind of the painter, but also this concept that any intellect can form. )
( L’idea de’ pittori, scultori e architetti [1607] )
Disegno is almost identified with concetto in the sense of an original conception of the intellect, since it is a matter of analyzing the faculties that make artistic creation possible. Thus concetto is deliberately distanced from the idea in the Platonic sense and becomes the intellectual act of a creative freedom exercised on signs, forms, representations. But sometimes the concetto is so strongly imbued with divine ideas that it is no longer a product of the intelletto, but rather a form of the intellect’s participation in God, as Zuccaro says explicitly:
In questo modo essendo l’intelletto e i sensi soggetti al Disegno e al concetto, possiamo dire, che esso Disegno, come Principe, rettore e governatore di essi se ne serva come cosa sua propria.
( In this way the intellect and the senses being subjected to the disegno and to the concetto, we can say that this disegno, as the Prince, orator, and governor, makes use of them as its own property. )
( Ibid. )
In this case, we could translate concetto as “ideal representation” or even “ideal and ingenious representation.” With Zuccaro’s generation and the first treatises written by the Jesuit theoreticians of the seventeenth century, the concetto acquires the remarkable characteristic of being both very close to the idea as the principle of the production of forms, and very distant from it because it breaks with any reference point, and especially with any possible resemblance, to become only a mental, plastic, figurative, and symbolic expression. From this comes the confusion of translators—for example, those of the seventeenth century—who limited themselves to terms that were frequently too general, such as conception d’esprit, pensée, or imagination, as did Nathanaël Düez in his Dictionnaire italien-français ( 1670 ). At the opposite pole from the idea, which retained its prestige as a metaphysical authority, the concetto gained a field of application extending beyond ingenious inventions ( all the symbolic figures: allegories, emblems, devices, graphic enigmas ) as far as the language of the angels ( i concetti divini ) and even the coded language of God that transforms the world into a vast system of enigmatic, allegorical, emblematic signs. From that point on, the possible ways of translating concetto become steadily more limited and should lead us to resort to the equivalents proposed by French theoreticians of the seventeenth century: idées ingénieuses, représentations savantes, and even inventions savantes.
IV. Concetto and Conceptismo
From the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, concettismo ( Italian ) or conceptismo ( Spanish ) was an effort to radicalize the rhetorical tradition in the sense of an almost exclusive primacy of metaphorical thought that was developed both in the order of discourse ( the art of the witticism ) and in that of plastic or symbolic representations. The authors sought to extend all forms of eloquence as far as possible, from discourse to pictorial representation, in order to glorify the resources of the ingegno.
The theoreticians of mannerism and the Jesuits tried to reconcile the Ciceronian ideal of eloquence with the philosophical categories of Aristotle and Aquinas. The expression of the idea henceforth demanded a more witty, more concettoso discourse, more subtle than really conceptual. The concettosità of an ingeniously formulated idea is precision of thought insofar as it succeeds in realizing itself in an analogical and metaphorical mode. Conceptismo as it was theorized by Jesuit pedagogy postulates very explicitly that every thought and every language are originally metaphorical, so that the existence of a literal meaning of a proposition or even of an image seems not only prosaic or illusory, improbable or deficient, but also a form of potential symbolism. And that means that every concetto, that is, every concetto ingegnoso, presupposes a conception of metaphor and figure situated in a kind of general semiotics. To think in a concettosa manner is to know how to reconcile the austere rigor of the concept with the inventiveness of metaphor. That is why the word “concept” cannot adequately translate concetto. The concetto della bellezza cannot be rendered precisely by the “concept of the beautiful,” because the English word remains in conformity with the Latin conceptus, that is, it is incapable of rendering the productivity of the imagination and the aesthetic inventiveness peculiar to the Italian word. In authors like Matteo Peregrini and Emanuele Tesauro, who were theoreticians of metaphor, symbolic expression, and the witticism, the concetto was subjected to the new requirements of argutezza, an infinite source of ingenious expression. Argutezza became the supreme faculty of inventions and symbolic creations in most of the arts of discourse and plastic arts, so that in his Cannochiale aristotelico ( 1654 ), Tesauro declared it the “gran madre d’ogni ’ngnoso concetto” ( grandmother of every ingenious concetto ). The word concetto refers to what consciousness produces in its metaphorical activity and to any representation that contains wit and subtlety. Here, the problematics of the concetto are completely absorbed by the hegemony of the rhetorical and sophistic problematics of the argutezza.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barocchi, Paola, ed. Scritti d’arte del cinquecento. Milan: Ricciardi, 1971.
Bruno, Giordano. De gl’heroici furori. Milan: Mondadori, 2011. First published in 1585.
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Edited by D. H. Higgins. Translated by C. H. Sisson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Düez, Nathanaël. Dittionario italiano e francese—Dictionnaire italien-français. Leiden, Neth.: Jean Elsevier, 1670.
. Oxford-Paravia Italian Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lange, Klaus Peter. Theoretiker des literarischen Manierismus. Munich: Fink, 1968.
Michelangelo. Die Dichtungen des Michelangelo Buonarroti. Translated by Karl Frey. Berlin: Grote, 1897.
. The Poetry of Michelangelo. Annotated and translated by James M. Saslow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Panofsky, Erwin. Idea, ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924. English translation by J.J.S. Peake: Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. French translation by Henri Joly: Idea. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1989.
Peregrini, Matteo. Delle acutezze, che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti, volgarmente si appellano. Genoa, It.: Ferroni, 1639.
Pochat, Götz. Geschichte der Äesthetik und Kunsttheorie. Cologne, Ger.: Du Mont, 1986.
Seroni, Adriano, ed. La città del sole e Scelta d’alcune poesie filosofiche. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962.
Tesauro, Emanuele. Il cannocchiale aristotelico. Turin: Bartolomeo Zauatta, 1654.
Vasari, Georgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. Florence: Appresso I Giunti, 1568. Translation by J. Conaway Bondanella and P. Bondanella: The Lives of the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Zuccaro, Federico. L’idea de’ pittori, scultori e architetti. Turin: Disserolio, 1607.
This is the customary translation of the Russian sobornost’ [соборность], which designates the type of solidarity and community connected with the Russian Orthodox Church; see OBLIGATION and SOBORNOST’; see also NAROD ( people ) and PRAVDA ( truth, justice ), and cf. BOGOČELOVEČESTVO ( theandry ), MIR ( peace, world, peasant community ), SVET ( world-light ).
Cf. Hebrew BERĪT [יתרִבְּ], which designates the pact between the people and its god; see BERĪT, ALLIANCE; cf. DUTY and EUROPE.
COMMUNITY, CONSENSUS, GOD, HUMANITY
CONNOTATION
| FRENCH | connotation | ||
| GERMAN | Konnotation | ||
| LATIN | connotatio, consignificatio |
ANALOGY, HOMONYM, PARONYM, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, SENSE, SUBJECT, SUPPOSITION
Commonly used in linguistics since L. Bloomfield ( 1933 ), theorized by Hjelmslev, abundantly exploited by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, and central to semiotics and the theory of the text, the notion of connotation has a number of remarkable ambiguities that can be described, if not completely mastered, by considering the term’s slow maturation, opposed to that of “denotation” ( Fr. dénotation, Ger. Denotation ), at the heart of the system of notions that articulate, in modern philosophy, the fields of ontology, semantics, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of language.
The first documented uses of the word connotation in French designate the confused meaning of a word or a concept, as opposed to a clear meaning ( Port-Royal ). This French sense of the word corresponds to the stress put on an element that was initially present in the semantic field of the medieval Latin connotatio—the derivative or secondary aspect, also marked in the synonymous term consignificatio—as if the confused/distinct pair were superimposed on the more general derived/direct pair. The original meaning of the Latin connotatio, which is also found in the English expression “associative meaning” ( equivalent to “connotative meaning” ) poses no particular problem. Linguists and theoreticians of literary texts both oppose the “contextual coloring” ( coloration contextuelle ) or “implications” that a term can have in a given context ( i.e., its “connotation” ) to its so-called referential, conceptual, or cognitive meaning indicated by the term “denotation.” However, the idea of connotation involves a philosophical difficulty because of the possible interferences between the system of direct ( distinct ) and secondary ( confused ) signification on the one hand, and on the other the Fregean system of Sinn and Bedeutung, whose discordant translations ( “sense” vs. “reference,” or “sense” vs. “denotation” ) are a source of troublesome ambiguities.
I. Connotation/Clear or Primary Meaning and Connotation/Denotation
The sense of “confused meaning” was introduced in the Grammaire de Port-Royal ( 1676 ):
the reason that a noun cannot subsist by itself is that in addition to its distinct meaning, there is another confused meaning that can be called the connotation of something associated with the distinct meaning. Thus the distinct meaning of “red” is redness. But it signifies it by indistinctly marking the subject with this redness, and that is why it does not subsist alone in discourse, because it must be implicit in the word that signifies this subject. Just as this connotation makes the adjective, when it is separated from words that signify accidents, substantives are made from them, as from coloré, couleur; from rouge, rougeur; from dur, dureté; from prudent, prudence, etc. And when on the contrary we add to words that signify substances this connotation or confused meaning of something with which these substances are connected, we make adjectives of them: from homme, humain; genre humain, vertu humaine, etc. The Greeks and Romans have an infinite number of such words, ferreus, aureus, bovinus, vitulinus, etc. But Hebrew, French, and other vulgar languages have fewer of them. French explains it by a de, d’or, de boeuf, etc. If these adjectives based on the names of substances are stripped of their connotation, they are made into new substantives, called abstract or separate. Thus homme having made humain, from humain we make humanité, etc.
In English, we find the same opposition in John Stuart Mill, where it is colored by an additional trait, the opposition between the comprehension and the extension of a concept or a term, which enables him to define denotation as “the things an expression applies to,” connotation being the complementary “information” that any common noun normally “brings to mind” regarding the objects that it “denotes.” The problem raised by the use of connotation in philosophy is that its opposite, “denotation,” has gradually merged with the German Bedeutung taken in its Fregean meaning. As a result, there is a danger of confusing two oppositions that do not necessarily coincide: denotation ( Bedeutung ) and meaning ( Sinn ), on the one hand, and primary meaning ( significatio prima, principalis ) and secondary meaning ( significatio secundaria, ex consequenti, connotatio ) on the other. Even if English tends to use the term “denotation” to explain that two expressions applying to the same thing ( i.e., having the same denotation ) can differ in meaning, we must avoid identifying, by means of the word “connotation,” this meaning with Frege’s Sinn. A quick examination of the origins of the term “connotation” shows that this tendency or temptation is connected with the polysemy of the Latin connotatio, which, from the outset and through the diversity of disciplines in which the notion is used, mingles inextricably the logical, linguistic, and ontological registers.
The Latin term connotatio appeared in the twelfth century, and its first use was essentially theological, in the domain of Trinitarian semantics. The verbs used to express the idea of connotation ( notare, connotare, consignificare, innuere ) all refer to the same idea: making something different known with ( cum ) itself—whence the specialization of connotation in the sense of “secondary meaning of a word” and the close connection of the various terms expressing this idea with the idea of consignification ( consignificatio ) or co-intellection ( cointellectio ).
■ See Box 1.
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Denotatio/connotatio in medieval logic In medieval logic, the distinction between “connotation” and “denotation” does not exist in the form of an opposition between connotatio and denotatio. The verb denotare emerged along with terminist logic. It is found in Peter of Spain, for instance. Analyzing the sentence “sedentem possibile est ambulare” ( it is possible that the person who is seated walks ), Peter notes that the participle “refers to” or “includes a simultaneity” ( importat concomitantiam ). This concomitantia can be signified either in relation to the verb ambulare ( in the sense of “dum sedeo, me ambulare est possible” [while I am sitting, I can walk] ), which is false, or denoted relative to the predicate ( in the sense of “dum sedet, potentiam habet ad ambulandeum postea” [while he is sitting, he has the capacity to walk later], which is true. Peter therefore observes, in a more general way, that Quando denotatur concomitantia respectu hujus verbi ambulare, tunc ponitur possibilitas supra totum dictum, et sic est falsa; quando autem denotatur concomitantia respectu praedicati, tunc possibilitas ponitur supra subjectum dicti, et sic est vera. ( When simultaneity is denoted in relation to the verb “to walk,” then the possibility bears on the whole of the dictum, and the proposition is false; when it is denoted in relation to the predicate, it concerns the subject of the dictum, and the proposition is true. ) Tractatus, 7.70 This example suffices to show that denotare was not initially opposed to connotare, as “denotation” is opposed to “connotation” in modern linguistics. In Peter of Spain’s text the verb denotare/denotari is a simple synonym of significare/significari. BIBLIOGRAPHY Peter of Spain. Tractatus Called Afterwards “Summulae Logicales.” Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth: Van Gorcum, 1972. |
In the late Middle Ages, the analysis of connotatio focused on a more specific phenomenon: the meaning of “denominative” terms ( denominativa; see PARONYM ), that is, concrete accidental terms ( like “white” ), and finally ended up in Ockham’s distinction between absolute and connotative terms. This shift explains in part the diversity of the problems the Middle Ages encountered with the notion of connotation: the distinction between signification in itself and accidental signification ( significatio per se and significatio per aliud ), primary signification and secondary signification ( principaliter significare and secundario significare ), direct signification ( in recto ) and indirect signification ( in obliquo ), signification according to the anterior and the posterior ( secundum prius et posterius ) or analogical ( see ANALOGY )—all combined with the problems involved in the semantic distinction between signification ( significatio ) and reference ( suppositio, appellatio ).
II. Connotatio and Consignificatio
Secondary meaning, as opposed to primary meaning, was at first designated by the term consignificatio and the corresponding verb, consignificare. These terms were used for different problems:
1. “Secondary signification” is used for tense, which is “consignified” and not signified by the verb, and also for composition, or the predicative function ( prossêmainein [πϱοσσημαίνειν] in Aristotle )—the questions of contingent future tenses, of divine prescience, and of the unity of the articles of faith could all benefit from this notion of consignification because it made it possible, for example, to posit a unity of the articles of faith independently of the accidental, temporally determined forms in which they were formulated ( Christ will be born / is born / was born ).
2. It is also said that the denominative term ( or paronym ) consignifies the subject ( e.g., album signifies whiteness primarily, and consignifies the subject of the whiteness ).
3. In the Platonizing analyses of the early twelfth century, the paronyms “whiteness” ( albedo ), “whitish” ( albet ), and “white” ( albus ) are said to signify the same quality, or form, or idea, but in different ways, and hence with different consignifications ( cf. Bernard of Chartres: “ ‘whiteness’ signifies a pure virgin, ‘whitish’ the same entering a bed chamber or lying on a bed, ‘white’ again the same, but deflowered” ).
4. “Consignification” is used for all parts of speech that are neither subject nor predicate, those that are “consignificant” ( consignificantia, consignificativa ) or syncategorematic; then it is said that not everything signifies the universal, but consignifies universally.
We can mention two other less important meanings:
5. Consignificare can also be equivalent to “signify the same thing,” as when one says that in a proposition the subject and the predicate “consignify.”
6. It is also said that the parts of a compound noun “consignify,” for example, equus ( horse ) and ferrus ( savage ) in the compound equiferrus because they retain something of their meanings, but do not signify strictly speaking because these meanings merge in a single meaning, which is that of the compound.
By extension on the basis of ( 1 ), most grammatical accidents will be described, starting in the twelfth century, as consignifications ( person, number, etc. ) because they are properties that are accidental with regard to the primary grammatical meaning that makes it possible to define the word as belonging to this or that part of speech. The Modists of the thirteenth century maintained that all grammatical properties, both essential ( defining the class of words and its species ) and accidental, were consignified because they corresponded to different ways of apprehending the thing signified. The modes of signifying ( or modes of consignifying ) are here opposed to the lexical meaning, whereas earlier consignificata were only a part of the latter, the accidents. The term consignificare can thus have two distinct meanings, either “signify with” ( significare cum ), as when one says that the verb consignifies the tense ( it refers to its signified with a secondary temporal meaning ), or “signify in such a way” ( significare sic ), as when one says that the noun motus signifies movement in the mode of substance, the verb movere signifies it in the mode of movement, etc. It was only in the first sense that consignificare was replaced, notably in the logical tradition, by connotare; in the fourteenth century, for instance, writers referred to a verb’s temporal connotation ( cf. Maierù, Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica ).
The notion of consignificatio is a useful tool for distinguishing between terms that are clearly related on the semantic level without being synonyms. This holds for the first three meanings listed above, and for their extensions: the noun cursus ( race ) and the verb currit ( he runs ) have the same meaning, but they differ because only the second consignifies time; the denominative “white” signifies the same thing as the corresponding abstract noun “whiteness,” but by connoting the subject of the quality; the noun “suffering,” the verb “to suffer,” and the interjection “ow!” all mean the same thing, but signify different real properties that are indicated by membership in different grammatical categories.
III. Connotatio in Theology
Theologians are confronted by the problem of distinguishing not between terms that are close in form and differ only partly in meaning, but between terms that are “identical” when they are used to speak of created realities and God. Moreover, they have to explain why different attributes can be predicated of God, signified by different words, whereas God himself is simple and indistinct. The notions of consignificatio and connotatio proved to be useful tools for coping with these two problems.
Starting in the second half of the twelfth century, theologians believed that it did not suffice to oppose a predication regarding God to the same predication regarding a created reality—as in the example of Boethius’s De Trinitate: “God is just/ man is just,” where they said that in the latter case the usage is correct because it is in conformity with the first meaning of the term, whereas in the former case we are dealing with a figurative, transferred, equivocal usage ( see TO TRANSLATE ). In “God is just” and “God is good,” the same divine essence is predicated, but these statements are not identical in meaning because something different is consignified or “compredicated,” for example, that God is the cause of justice, on the one hand, and that he is the cause of goodness on the other. Analogously, “God is just,” in which “just” consignifies that God is the cause of justice, can be contrasted with “man is just,” where the same adjective consignifies that man is the effect of divine justice. Thus it was possible to maintain that every predicate amounts to attributing to God the same divine essence, which is “essentially signified,” but that it “signifies secondarily” or consignifies a different effect in the creature. This explains why different attributes are not synonymous when they are attributed to God: even if “just” and “merciful” signify the same thing in God, in the sense that there is no distinction between justice and mercy in God, who is an absolutely simple entity, it is not tautological or redundant to say “God is just and merciful” because the two adjectives have different connotations, since the effects of justice and mercy on human beings are different. From this two rules regarding the functioning of conjunction are drawn: in ordinary statements ( e.g., “Man is just and courageous” ) conjunction associates the signifieds; in theological statements ( e.g., “God is just and merciful” ) it associates ( copulat ) the “consignifieds” ( consignificata ), namely, the effects that are “compredicated” in this proposition, but not the divine essence, which is identically “predicated” by each of the two adjectives. The problem of co-reference raised by statements such as “Deus est justus et talis est Petrus” ( God is just and so is Peter ) is resolved in an analogous way: even if divine justice and Peter’s justice have nothing in common, they can be compared because the comparison is made solely on the level of consignification. The identity of predicates in God thus becomes compatible with the diversity of names that designate them and the meanings that are conventionally associated with them. This theory of consignification allowed Prévostin to propose the idea that there is a univocatio et non equivocatio ( see HOMONYM ) in the statements “God is just” and “man is just,” precisely because the two predications have something in common. Toward the end of the twelfth century, the terms connotare/connotatio were used instead of consignificare/consignificatio, which nonetheless continued to be used in the logical and grammatical traditions. We note as well the use of compraedicare and coassertare to distinguish between primary and secondary predication.
However, the ad hoc character of this idea of connotation elicited criticisms. It was appealed to whenever there was a need to distinguish within a single term something identical and something different; it could even be used to demonstrate the doctrinal unity of the “authorities” that are supposed to be strictly speaking contradictory since one had only to say that the controversial pages use the same words with different “connotations.” At the turn of the thirteenth century, there were lively debates about how to determine this difference indicated by connotation: should connotation be thought from the point of view of God ( the cause ) or from that of the creature ( the effect ) ( connotatio a parte rei/a parte creaturae )? Should one acknowledge that relational nouns, even when predicated of God ( e.g., “Deus est creator” ), connote something about creatures, but not about God? Indeed, why not attribute all names to God since he is the cause of all the things they signify? These difficulties eventually undermined the theory of connotation, and first Albert the Great, then Aquinas, found new solutions to the same problems. ( Cf. Rosier, “Res significata et modus significandi”; Valente, “Justus et misericors” )
■ See Box 2.
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Connotatio in the work of Roger Bacon In De signis and then in the Compendium studii theologicae, Roger Bacon developed a sophisticated analysis of connotation. For him, the different modes of connotation are based on analogy: connotation is produced when a term signifies, by imposition, one thing, and one or more things are associated with it through a relation of natural signification, so that several things are “made readable” by the same word. The word thus signifies one thing “conventionally,” but because of the different natural relations that exist between that thing and other things, it can “naturally” signify these other things. Because of the conventional relation of the word to the thing signified, and because of the natural consequent relation between the thing signified and the thing connoted, we can say that the word naturally implies the latter. Roger Bacon distinguishes seven modes of connotation: 1. non-being is understood in being by privation; 2. the names relating to God connote the creature ( the Latin word creator signifies secondarily the creature, which is the result of the relation of creation ); 3. the names of creatures imply the creator, because of their dependence on him ( whence the valid inference: “there is a creature, therefore there is a creator” ); 4. the accident connotes the substance, and vice versa; 5. the universal implies the vague particular ( “man exists, therefore a man exists” ) or the particular in disjunction ( “man exists, therefore Socrates or Plato or ... exists” ); 6. an essential part ( e.g., a roof ) implies another essential part ( e.g., a wall )—this example is taken from Avicenna and al-Ghazālī; 7. the name of a relative implies its correlative ( e.g., father-son ). In a statement, the word signifies only its primary signified ( “double” does not signify “half” ) and the statement is verified only for this primary signified. However, the speaker can do as he pleases ( ad placitum ) by reimposing the word, changing its meaning, so that the secondary signified becomes the primary signified and that the word then signifies the latter ad placitum. It is interesting to note that Bacon does not use the term connotare in De signis, although in the Compendium he uses it with the same examples, calling attention to the theological origin of this term: The name given to a single thing outside the soul may signify several things outside the soul at the same time, and these are what philosophers call cointellecta and theologians call connotata. In fact, all things that follow by natural and necessary implication from the name of another thing are understood with it ( cointellecta ) and connoted by it, for otherwise we could not say that they follow from it necessarily, for example, “creature therefore creator” and “creator therefore God,” since only God creates. And every specific accident connotes its subject, thus “capable of laughter, therefore man.” Among the examples we find words that clearly indicate this theological origin of the notion, such as “creator,” which was also to be the case in the work of William of Ockham. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bacon, Roger. Compendium studii theologiae. Edited by T. Maloney. Leiden, Neith.: Brill, 1988. |
IV. Connotative Terms
For William of Ockham, the classification of categorematic terms into absolute and connotative terms is central, and is based on the same criteria as before. The connotative name “is one that signifies something in a primary way [primario] and signifies something else in a secondary way [secundario].” The absolute name is one that does not signify something in a secondary way, and is thus such that it signifies everything it signifies primarily and in recto. Thus “animal” signifies an ox, an ass, etc.; it signifies and thus constitutes a reference ( suppositio ) to each of the individuals of whom it may be true to say “this is an animal.” It corresponds to “natural kind terms.” The category of absolute name includes all the nouns ( abstract and concrete ) of the category of substance, and the abstract nouns of the category of quality ( William of Ockham, Summa logicae, I, chap. 10 ).
Absolute nouns have no nominal definition ( definitio quid nominis ) but only a real definition ( definitio qui rei ); conversely, connotative nouns have no real definition ( because they cannot be defined by reference to a particular class of objects ) but only a nominal definition that accounts for their hierarchized semantic structure, composed of at least one word in the nominative ( in recto ) and one word in an oblique case ( in obliquo ). They include, first, the concrete categorematic terms of the category of quality, the denominatives ( denominativa/paronyma ). Thus “white” means “something formless informed by whiteness” or “possessing whiteness”; it signifies primarily individual substances that are white, and connotes secondarily their individual whitenesses: what is in recto in the definition designates the significatum ( something ), and what is in obliquo designates the connotatum ( whiteness ). Relational nouns like “father” are also connotative; in a propositional context, “father” refers to the individuals of whom it is true to say “this is a father,” but in addition it connotes something else, namely, the individuals who have a father, and this implies that a relational term cannot receive a complete definition without the intervention of its correlative, and vice versa ( “father” = a sensible substance having a child; cf. Summa logicae, III–3, chap. 26 ); the two correlatives do not have the same nominal definition and thus are not synonyms since what intervenes in recto in the definition of one is found in obliquo in the definition of the other, and vice versa. Also included among the connotatives are categorematic terms belonging to categories other than those of substance and quality, negative expressions ( e.g., “immaterial” ) and philosophical terms such as “true,” “good,” “intellect,” “will,” and so on. This notion of connotation also allows Ockham to defend the fundamental idea of an extensionalist conception of reference, according to which all categorematic terms signify and refer to particular substances or qualities. One of the points that has been controversial among Ockham’s interpreters is whether there were connotative terms in mental language or whether they could always be eliminated from mental language if a nominal definition that included only absolute terms was substituted for them ( Paul Spade ). A crucial argument against this claim is based on relational terms ( e.g., “father” ) whose nominal definition necessarily includes their correlative, as we have seen; this shows that it is impossible to totally eliminate connotatives from mental language ( Claude Panaccio ).
According to Spade, since a connotative term could always be substituted for its nominal definition, which contained only absolute terms ( if the first nominal definition contained a connotative term, the latter could in its turn be replaced by its nominal definition until there were no longer any connotative terms ), there was no need to postulate connotative terms in mental language. Panaccio has opposed this analysis, on the one hand by pointing to passages clearly indicating that for Ockham there were connotative terms ( notably relational terms ) in mental language, and on the other hand by showing that this was an essential part of Ockham’s theory. The previously mentioned argument based on relational terms is crucial: since the nominal definition of a relational term necessarily contains another connotative term, namely, its correlative, this implies that relational terms, and thus connotative terms, cannot be totally replaced by absolute terms at the level of mental language, and thus that they exist in mental language ( cf. Panaccio, “Guillaume d’Ockham” ).
We find interesting elements in other medieval logicians. Buridan in particular attributes a referential function both to what is signified ( the suppositio ) and to what is connoted ( the appelatio ): the connotative term ( e.g., “white” ) connotes that to which the corresponding abstract term ( “whiteness” ) refers; it “refers to” what it signifies primarily and “calls” what it connotes ( see SUPPOSITION ). Elsewhere, Buridan explains:
There is essential predication between two terms when neither of them adds to the signification of the other a connotation extraneous [extranea] to that to which the terms refer. There is non-essential or paronymic predication when one of the terms adds to the signification of the other a foreign connotation, like “white,” which refers to a man and calls up ( that is, connotes ) whiteness insofar as it is added to it. Therefore: the proposition “Man is [an] animal” is essential, whereas “Man is white” or “Man is capable of laughter,” is paronymic.
Summulae de dialecta, III–3, chap. 26; cf. Klima, John Buridan
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buridan, Jean. Sophismata. Critical edition by T. K. Scott. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977.
Klima, Gyula. John Buridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Maierù, Alfonso. Terminologia logica della tarde scolastica. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1972.
Panaccio, Claude. “Guillaume d’Ockham, les connotatifs et le langage mental.” Documenti e studi sulla traditione filosofica medievale 11 ( 2000 ): 297–316.
. Le discours intérieur: De Platon à Guillaume d’Ockham. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.
. Ockham on Concepts. Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2004.
Rosier, Irène. “Res significata et modus significandi. Les enjeux linguistiques et théologiques d’une distinction médiévale.” In Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, edited by S. Ebbesen, 135–68. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1995.
Spade, Paul V., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ockham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
. Thoughts, Words, and Things: An Introduction to Late Medieval Logic and Semantic Theory. http://pvspade.com/logic/docs/thoughts1_1a.pdf.
Valente, Luisa. “Justus et misericors: L’usage théologique des notions de consignificatio et connotatio dans la seconde moitiédu XIIe siècle.” In Vestigia, Imagines, Verba: Semiotics and Logic in Medieval Theological Texts ( 1150–1450 ), edited by C. Marmo, 38–59. Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1997.
William of Ockham. Ockham’s Theory of Terms, Part I of the Summa logicae. Translated by M. J. Loux. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974.
. Ockham’s Theory of Propositions: Part II of the Summa logicae. Translated by A. J. Freddoso and H. Schuurman; introduction by A. J. Freddoso. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998 ).
CONSCIOUSNESS, CONSCIENCE, AWARENESS
| DUTCH | innerlijke medewetingh, innerlijckste bewustheyt, meêwustigheyt | ||
| FRENCH | conscience | ||
| GERMAN | Bewusstheit, Bewusstsein, Gewissen, Gewissheit | ||
| GREEK | sunaisthêsis [συναίσθησις], suneidêsis [συνείδησις], sunesis [σύνεσις], suntêrêsis [συντήϱησις] | ||
| ITALIAN | consapevolezza, coscienza | ||
| LATIN | conscientia |
ACT, CROYANCE [BELIEF, GLAUBE], FAITH, I/ME/MYSELF, PERCEPTION, SENSE, SOUL, SUBJECT, UNCONSCIOUS
Although it was created by philosophers, the concept of consciousness has become absolutely commonplace, denoting the individual’s or the group’s relation to itself. Thus it refers to what the philosopher and the “common man” have in common, and as a result, like “criticism” or “wisdom,” it can designate philosophy itself. The same was not true of the ancient terms ( suneidêsis or even conscientia ), which are usually given as its equivalents. Thus modern European philosophy has endowed itself with a common past, though it cannot establish a complete equivalence between essentially untranslatable paradigms. After distinguishing the effects of retroversion associated with the Greco-Roman heritage proper, we will show how, starting in the sixteenth century, three great episodes in the European invention of consciousness followed one another. The mark they left is visible everywhere: the religious and political institution of “freedom of conscience” that led to the identification of the latter with the “citizen subject”; the construction of a theory of consciousness as a general faculty of knowledge by John Locke and his successors ( Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant ); the conflict of metaphysics of personal identity and of self-consciousness ( Selbstbewusstsein ).
The circulation of concepts and the relative unification of terminologies obtained by the early nineteenth century, when philosophical modernity sought new foundations for itself, did not erase major differences among Romance languages, German ( Gewissen and Gewissheit, Bewusstsein and Bewusstheit ), and English ( “consciousness” and “awareness” ), without which it would be difficult to understand the way in which the heritage of transcendental philosophy and the new field of the “cognitive sciences” or the “philosophy of mind” are developing today. This is what makes it possible to foresee, if not an end of consciousness, at least a change in its referents and in the possibilities of translating it.
In France, the national point of view gives rise to an illusion that the different senses of the French word conscience are distributed over two or more corresponding words in other languages or that the French term unifies what other languages divide. But it is not clear that the semantic fields of other languages are divided, or that they are all included in what French calls conscience. It may be that taken together they effect a displacement in usage, which is broader than any one of them, but more restrictive than their sum. This illusion goes hand in hand with a question peculiar to French, which is whether the apparent unity of the word conscience should be considered a simple homonym or an analogy, the expression of a kernel of signification circulating among particular meanings. Dictionaries do not take a single view on this point, and they are evolving. Obviously, these fluctuations are related to the history, which is itself transnational, of linguistic innovation in the area of “thought about thought.” Here we find ourselves confronted by a privileged case for the study of what Renée Balibar calls “European co-lingualism.”
I. The Legacy of Antiquity and Scholasticism
In Romance and Germanic languages, the main terms derive from two main roots: on the one hand, scire, scientia, whence conscius ( and its antonyms nescius and inscius ), conscientia, conscient and conscience, and so on; on the other hand, wissen, whence gewiss, Gewissen and Gewissheit, bewusst ( unbewusst ) and Bewusstsein, Bewusstheit, and so on. It has become customary to say that the meanings of the modern French word conscience are connected with different uses of the Latin conscientia and the Greek suneidêsis.
As far as the Greek word is concerned, this clearly involves retroversion on the basis of correspondences established by Romans seeking to create their own moral terminology. From the poets to the philosophers, the Greek terminology for the relationship to oneself in the order of knowledge and ethics is much more complex. Thus it was only in the Hellenistic period that suneidêsis came into common use in the schools of ethics to designate the way in which the individual, “[alone] with himself,” evaluates the worthiness of his conduct and the value of his person, in this life or in anticipation of death. The question remains whether St. Paul had such a meaning in mind in important passages in his epistles such as this one:
They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness [summarturousês autôn tês suneidêseôs ( συμμαϱτυϱούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως )] and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men [ta krupta tôn anthrôpôn ( τὰ ϰϱυπτὰ τῶν ἀνθϱώπων )] by Christ Jesus.
( Romans 2:15 )
However that may be, it was on the basis of these formulations and metaphors they share with the Stoic tradition ( the “inner voice,” the “stage” on which each person makes his acts appear, or the court before which he “bears witness” for or against himself, etc. ) that the age-old dialectic between the “natural” and “supernatural” character of the moral consciousness was carried out.
■ See Box 1.
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The Greek for “consciousness”: Retroversions It is said that the Greeks did not know about consciousness. In fact, there is no Greek word corresponding to “consciousness,” but there is a great variety of terms and expressions onto which “consciousness” is projected, and that sometimes refer to a relationship to the self, sometimes to a moral judgment, and sometimes to a perception, often producing a crossing or derivation among several of these meanings. From the Homeric poems to the Socratic dialogues by way of tragic dramaturgy, every Greek hero essentially carries on a conversation with himself, and in doing so he thinks his thoughts, feels his emotions, and debates courses of action. The “organs of consciousness” ( RT: Origins of European Thought, chap. 2 ) of the Homeric hero are words that we find very difficult to translate because they refer to a physiology loaded with meaning: kêr [ϰῆϱ], or kradiê/kardia [ϰϱαδίη/ϰαϱδία], the “heart” or even the “stomach,” as an organ that can be pierced; êtor [ἦτοϱ], the “heart” as the seat of emotions and intelligence. But it is especially the thumos [θυμός], which is lodged in the phrên [φϱήν] or the phrenes [φϱένες] ( the entrails, the diaphragm, the lungs, but the word belongs to the family of phronein [φϱονεῖν], “to be informed, think” ), which is also rendered by “heart,” that constitutes the privileged interlocutor in the dialogue of the self with itself. The thumos is both an impulse ( Chantraine connects it with thuô [θύω], “to rush forward with fury”; RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque ) and the breath of life, a vapor or spirit connected with hot and boiling blood ( Boisacq [RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque] derives it from the Sanskrit dhûma-, whence the Greek thumiaô [θυμιάω], “make smoke” [Latin fumus], which must be clearly distinguished from psuchê [ψυχή], the breath of the “soul” that escapes from the mouth of the dead and goes to reside in Hades, whereas the thumos is eaten and dissipates ) ( RT: Origins of European Thought, chap. 3 ). Thus, when he is about to abandon Patroclus’s body, Menelaus “speaks to his magnanimous thumos” and “launches [these words] through his phrên and his thumos” ( Iliad 17.90, 106 ). The philosophical outcome of this reflexive conversation is the Platonic definition of thought ( dianoia [διάνοια] ) as “the internal dialogue of the soul with itself, without voice [entos tês psuchês pros hautên dialogos aneu phônês ( ἐντὸς τῆς ψυχῆς πϱὸς αὑτὴν διάλογος ἄνευ φωνῆς )]” ( Sophist 263e; cf. Theatetus 189e ), which opens out, through the Socratic demand for “the agreement of the self with itself [homologein autos heautôi ( ὁμολογεῖν αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ )]” ( Protagoras 339c ), onto the moral dimension of self-consciousness. To the individual who never ceases to refute Socrates and to shame him, “his closest relative, who lives in the same place,” “centuries to come were to give . . . the name of consciousness” ( Hippias Maior 304d ). There is no Greek term that brings together all of the values of this dialogue of the self with itself, but we see the concurrence of several words in sun- ( con- ) followed by a verbal action whose meaning varies considerably depending on context, and which is translated by “consciousness.” In the domain of perception-apperception, sunaisthêsis [συναίσθησις] is, particularly in Plotinus ( Enneads 3.8.4 ), translated by “self-consciousness” ( RT: LSJ, s.v. ): as Bréhier put it, the “intelligence” ( sunêsis [σύνεσις], another candidate for “consciousness” ) and “self-knowledge” ( sunaisthêsis ) allow nature to see and produce what is around it. But the term is in competition, even in Plotinus, with the sequence “to aisthanesthai kai parakolouthein hautôi [τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι ϰαὶ παϱαϰολουθεῖν αὑτῷ]” ( in Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie: “feeling and self-consciousness”—literally, “the accompanying of oneself” ) that characterizes wisdom when it refers, no longer to this nature that is to us as a sleeper is to a person who is awake, but rather to the wise man himself, concerning whom the Stoics wondered whether he remained happy when he was sleeping. Furthermore, we should note that in Aristotle in particular, it is aisthanes-thai [αἰσθάνεσθαι] ( to feel ) alone that is most commonly translated as “to be aware of” ( Tricot, referring precisely to the apperceptive function of “common sense,” translates it this way in the Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, where the question is whether the happy man needs friends ), whereas sunaisthanesthai [συναισθάνεσθαι] means very explicitly “feel with,” like “eat with,” or “live with,” not with oneself, but with other selves that are one’s friends ( see Eudemian Ethics 7.12, 1244b26 and 1245b25 ). We move imperceptibly from the epistemic to the ethical with sunesis ( from sun-eimi [σύν-ειμι], says Cratylus 412b, “to go with, accompany,” or from sun-iêmi [συν-ίημι], “to throw together, bring closer,” and in both cases, “understand” ), whose meaning ranges from sagacity to the awareness of wrong. Thus sunesis, translated as “intelligence,” is, with eusunesia or “perspicacity,” the critical virtue of those who know how to use “prudence” ( phronêsis [φϱόνησις]; see PHRONÊSIS ), because they learn quickly ( Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.11 ); but Dumont chooses conscience in translating in Democritus ( B77 DK: “Fame and riches without consciousness are fragile possessions” ), and here is how Méridier translates Orestes’s reply to Menelaus when the latter asks what illness is killing him: “Ma conscience. Je sens l’horreur de mon forfait” ( hê sunesis [ή σύνεσις]—literally, “the awareness that I know [sunoida ( σύνοιδα )] I have committed terrible acts,” Euripides, Orestes 396 ). Finally, suneidêsis ( from sun-oida, precisely ) is retrospectively the best calque for consciousness. Democritus uses it to designate “the awareness of the badness of a life” that arouses fear and encourages the invention of eschatological fictions ( B297 ). The sense of the noun ( which is not found in Plato ) becomes clearer starting in the Hellenistic period, especially in the Stoic doctrine of oikeiôsis [οἰϰείωσις]. Thus, regarding the animal’s primitive inclination to preserve itself, nature attaching it to itself from the outset, Diogenes Laertius ( 7.85, trans. Yonge ) quotes this comment of Chrysippus, in the first book of his treatise De finibus: “The first and dearest object [oikeion ( οἰϰεῖον )] to every animal is its own existence [tên hautou sustasin ( τὴν αὑτοῦ σύστασιν )], and its consciousness of that existence [tên tautês suneidêsin ( τὴν ταύτης συνείδησιν )]. For that it is not natural for any animal to be alienated from itself [allotriôsai ( ἀλλοτϱιῶσαι )].” Its scope, from the Stoics to the New Testament, ranges from the appropriate relation to oneself to the awareness of good and evil. None of these terms, of course, shows as well as the Homeric descriptions how much the Greek “subject” speaks to himself at the same time that he thinks and acts. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Éthique à Nicomaque. Translated by J. Tricot. Rev. ed. Paris: Vrin. 1994. Bréhier, Émile. Histoire de la philosophie. Vol. 1: L’antiquité et le Moyen Age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Cancrini, Antonia. Suneidêsis: Il tema semantico della “con-scienti” nella Grecia antica. Lessico intellettuale Europeo 6. Rome: Ateneo, 1970. Diogenes Laertius. Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by Charles Duke Yonge. Riverside, CA: Ulan, 2012. |
Although it still poses problems, the history of the Latin conscientia is better known. Before Cicero made it a key term in humanitas, the uses of the word developed in the two directions in which cum can be interpreted ( cf. C. S. Lewis, “Conscience and Conscious” ): on the one hand, the direction that connotes appropriation and achievement ( know well, be well informed about ); on the other hand, the one that connotes a private or secret “sharing.” From that point on, there was the idea of a knowledge reserved for a few people, each of whom “confided in himself.” This meaning led to the fundamental representation of an internal testimony given to oneself ( whence Quintilian’s famous formula: “conscientia mille testes” [conscience is as good as a thousand witnesses] ), and finally to the idea of a “judgment” that is made within us with regard to our acts and thoughts. This is the source of an authority that can be opposed to that of any institution: at once the “interior master” and a guarantee of autonomy. This union of contraries, to which the Augustinian tradition was to give an ontological weight, has persisted down to our own time.
■ See Box 2.
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Conscientia The language of Latin philosophy, even though it is marked by the spread of Stoicism ( see Box 1 ), was elaborated at the same time that Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca were helping to write a critical history of philosophy. That is why the uses of conscientia in classical Latin present—synchronically—the different historical and literary strata that constituted the experience of and ways of expressing consciousness. In many of its occurrences, conscientia designates the experience of having done something wrong ( the latter is often made explicit by a genitive: conscientia scelerum ) and the remorse that flows from it: these uses have to be related to those we find in juridical contexts, where conscientia and conscius designate recognized guilt and the sentence handed down. As a form of remorse, conscientia appears in the lists of the passions ( “ardentes tum cupiditate, tum metu, tum conscientia,” “inflamed by passion, fear, remorse,” Cicero, De legibus 2.43, trans. Keyes ) and is the object of topical descriptions derived from tragedy: “conscius ipse animus se forte remordet” ( The soul that knows itself to be guilty torments itself: Lucretius, De rerum natura 4.1135 ). Thus the noun includes both the tragic moment of the self’s knowledge of itself through the suffering of the body ( gnawing, burning, suffocating ) and the interpretation that Hellenistic philosophies gave of this moment: “Mens sibi conscia factis / praemetuens adhibet stimulos torretque flagellis” ( The conscience-stricken mind through boding fears applies to itself goads and frightens itself with whips: Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.1018, trans. Munro, 134 ). Lucretius’s analysis is also found in Cicero’s De legibus ( 1.40 ): “Non ardentibus taedis sicut in fabulis sed angore conscientiae fraudisque cruciatus” ( [The guilty are not pursued] by flaming torches but by the fear to which their fear gives rise and by the crime that tortures them ). More positively, conscientia coincides with the experience of self that is not immediately given but is constructed in ( re )collection, recapitulation, memory ( which is suggested by the formation of the word, cum-scire )—that is, what Cicero refers to in De re publica ( 6.8 ), “sapientibus conscientia ipsa factorum egregiorum amplissimum virtutis est praemium” ( For the wise, the simple awareness of having performed remarkable acts constitutes the highest reward of their virtue ), and in De senectute ( 9 ), “conscientia bene actae vitae multorumque bene factorum recordatio iucundissima est” ( Nothing more pleasant than the consciousness of having led one’s life well and the memory of many good acts that one has done ). This movement of self-evaluation is also clearly marked in a second series of occurrences in which the term appears especially in expressions that explain the origin of moral evaluation: conscientia deorum / conscientia hominum ( Cicero, De finibus 1.51: “qui satis sibi contra hominum conscientiam saepti esse et muniti videntur, deorum tamen horrent” [Those who think themselves sufficiently protected and sealed off to escape the judgment of men are nonetheless afraid of the gods’ judgment] ). Taking others’ judgment into account in evaluating responsibility gives conscientia a meaning close to that of pudor ( aidôs [αἰδώς] ): the internalization of this judgment ( which may or may not be emphasized in the syntagma conscientia animi ) is developed in two divergent directions. Either one appropriates external norms of judgment, in accord with a split point of view that tends to be expressed in metaphors of an internal theater ( one judges oneself, one provides a spectacle for oneself ), or one opposes one’s own criteria of evaluation to those of external authorities: images of barriers and roofs delimit a space of interiority that protects the rectitude of judgment and its inalienable character against fama and opinio. The first direction can be seen in the following remarks by Cicero: “nullum theatrum virtuti conscientia maius est” ( Virtue has no greater theater than the conscience: Tusculan Disputations 2.64, trans. King ); and by Seneca: “conscientia aliud agere non patitur ac subinde respondere ad se cogit” ( The guilt [that tyrants feel] does not allow them to amuse themselves: it constantly forces them to answer for their acts before its tribunal: Epistulae 105.7, trans. Gummere ), “bona conscientia prodire vult et conspici ad se cogit” ( Good conscience wants to show itself and subject itself to public view: ibid., 97.12 ). The second direction can be seen in these remarks: “dicitur gratus qui bono animo accepit beneficium, bono debet; hic intra conscientiam clusus est” ( It is said that a man who gladly receives a favor and gladly returns it is grateful: he is grateful in the innermost chamber of his conscience: Seneca, De beneficiis 4.21 ); “mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo” ( In my opinion my conscience is worth more than what everyone else says: Cicero, Ad Atticum 12.28.2 ). Between these two aspects of internalization, we cannot see the lines of an evolution any more than we can rigorously divide the uses of the genitive or the dative in the phrases conscientia animi / scelerum / hominum—conscius sibi. On the contrary, the uses of conscientia—and their networks of metaphors—suggest at the same time interiority and exteriority, at the moment when the fundamental question of ethics concerns the validity and the scope of natural norms. Then we grasp, in the unceasing back-and-forth movement, the historical and philosophical moment in which the subject can be constructed. Clara Auvray-Assayas BIBLIOGRAPHY Cicero. De re publica, De legibus. Translated by Clinton Walker Keyes. London: Heinemann, 1928. . On Moral Ends. Translated by Raphael Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. . On Old Age and Friendship. Translated by W. A. Falconer. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1923. . Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1927. Munro, H.A.J. The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers. New York: Modern Library, 1957. Seneca. Moral Epistles. Translated by Richard Gummere. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1917–25. |
The Church Fathers identified conscientia with the soul that had to confront its creator, and it was thus not only judge but judged. In Augustine, conscientia is subordinated to a more fundamental notion, memoria, the true name of the self-presence that has always already confessed God’s Word: by questioning the “secrets of his conscience” in his “innermost depths” ( “interior intimio meo,” Augustine says in his Confessions [book 3] ), man does nothing less than discover transcendent truth in himself ( “superior summo meo,” “higher than all my height” ). St. Jerome says that the spark of conscience put within us, scintilla conscientiae, continues to burn even in criminals and sinners ( Commentary on Ezekiel, in RT: PL ).
As for Scholasticism’s speculative developments of the term, they also proceed from Jerome, but through a stunning error: copyists, thinking they had found in his text a word suntêrêsis [συντήρησις], interpreted it at first as a derivative of têrêsis [τήϱησις], conservatio ( preservation ), then as a derivative of hairesis [αἵϱεσις], electio ( choice ). Thus was forged a fictive Greek word, synderesis, that performed the essential task of making double use of consciousness as a passive faculty ( a trace of divine creation ) and an active faculty ( operating under conditions of sin, after the Fall ). Scholastic theologians then formulated the “practical syllogism” of the process through which Revelation illuminates our actions and guides them: ( 1 ) syntheresis, ( 2 ) conscientia, ( 3 ) conclusio ( cf. Chollet, “Conscience” ). This is a fundamental intellectualist scheme of thought that continued to be influential after its theological justification evaporated: without referring to it, it would be difficult to understand the place that consciousness occupies in G.W.F. Hegel as the middle term of the spirit’s becoming, between universality and singularity.
With the Reformation, however, syntheresis ( or sunderesis, or synderesis ) fell into disuse, and the immediacy of conscientia as the inner testimony of morality and a sign of grace won out: it became in German ( Luther ) the Gewissen, with its own certainty ( Gewissheit ), in French ( Calvin ) the conscience associated with the systematic practice of the examen de conscience. Thus we find ourselves at the starting point of the drama in three episodes that led to making “self-consciousness” the privileged expression of the philosophical idea of “subjectivity” in the West: in it we witness the European invention of consciousness.
■ See Box 3.
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Conscientia and Gewissen in Luther Luther has been called “the inventor of the Gewissen” ( Hermann, Luthers Theologie ), and Lutheranism the “religion of Gewissen” ( Holl, “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?” ). For many people, Luther, the first theoretician of Gewissen in the German language, is also the first modern theoretician of the conscience. That is what his famous 1521 reply at the Diet of Worms is supposed to proclaim, in a heroic mode, when he states the reasons that prevented him from retracting when confronted by the Church of Rome: Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures or evident reason ( for I believe neither in the Pope nor councils alone, since it has been established that they have often erred and contradicted themselves ), I am bound by the Scriptures adduced by me, and my conscience [Gewissen] has been taken captive by the Word of God, and I am neither able nor willing to recant, since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen. ( Verhandlungen mit D. Martin Luther auf dem Reichstage zu Worms [1521], in Dr Martin Luthers Werke 7:838.2–9 ) This refusal has often been seen as an appeal to freedom of conscience and thus as the birth certificate of modernity. On reading the text, however, one may be astonished by this view: What is this conscientia that Luther invokes as an inalienable good but that he says has been “taken captive by the Word of God”? 1. In the wake of the historical debate regarding the birth of modernity, the debate about Luther’s notion of conscience has often concerned the latter’s autonomy. Without being explicitly rejected, the distinction between suntheresis and conscientia henceforth becomes secondary. This is Luther’s conceptual innovation in relation to Scholastic theories of conscience: for him there is now only one conscience, defined as “the origin or site of the strongest affects” ( Hirsch, Lutherstudien ), that a person can experience. Confronted by the Law, by the Promise, the conscience alternately rejoices, hopes, worries, gets frightened, despairs: Luther’s conception of conscience involves first of all descriptions of states, feelings, affects. These analyses, which we could call “psychological” if we were sure that they were ultimately based on a concept of the psyche, show that conscience is no longer so much a faculty of the mind tending toward the good as the precise site where the relation between man and God is produced. It is there that man is destroyed or raised before God ( cf. Vorlesung über den Römerbrief [1515–16], in Werke, 56:526.31–32 ). Thus Luther did not conceive of the conscience as autonomous. If it is defined as “something higher than Heaven and Earth,” that is only by virtue of its tendency to be “killed by sin” or, on the contrary, “given life by the Word of Christ,” depending on the nature of the relation between man and God ( Vorlesungen über 1. Mose [1535–45], in Werke, 44:546.30–31 ). At no time is man alone with his conscience. The latter is in no way productive, it is only the reflection or “bearer” ( Träger: Hirsch, Lutherstudien ) of a relationship whose establishment does not depend on it. That is why Luther’s statements regarding conscience vary so much. He also calls it an “evil beast” ( mala bestia ) that “makes man oppose himself” when it persuades him to put his trust in good works rather than in faith to gain salvation ( Vorlesungen über 1. Mose, in Werke, 44:545.16–17 ). The conscience may be praised or blamed, depending on whether it is Christ or the Devil who controls it: in both cases, it is not free in the sense that it constitutes an original site of freedom. 2. Beyond these contradictory judgments, according to Luther the conscience is nonetheless unified by a certain number of conceptual decisions and linguistic usages. Luther’s other great innovation is in fact to have established conscience in a paradigm that also includes “faith” and “certainty.” He breaks with the intellectualism of Scholastic theories by associating conscience with “faith” and the “heart” ( cf., e.g., Invokavitpredigten [1522], in Werke, 10/3:23–24 ). The principle is this: as faith is, so is conscience, so are the works; or, only faith can give conscience the certainty that the works accomplished are good ( cf. Von den Guten Werken [1520], in Werke 6.205.1–13 ). In at least three ways, the relation between conscience and certainty is central to Luther’s theory of conscience. Conscience is defined first of all by a need for certainty: it is this need that Luther objects to in what he considers to be Erasmus’s skepticism ( De servo arbitrio [1525], in Werke, 18:603.23–24 ). Second, conscience is the site of certainty, on the condition that it has been previously invested with faith ( cf. Das schöne confitemini . . . [1530], in Werke, 31/1:176–77: “Ein hertz, das . . . fur Gott von allem dinge gewis urteilen und recht reden kan . . . ein froelich, sicher, muetig gewissen” [A heart that . . . can judge with certainty and speak correctly of all things . . . a joyous, sure, courageous conscience], once again associating faith with the heart ). Finally, the conscience serves as a refuge from the uncertainty of faith, and in that very way, as the ultimate certainty: no one is ever certain ( gewis ) of having faith, but everyone has to rely on the Gewissen that tells him that faith alone provides salvation ( cf. the important text in Von der Wiedertaufe an zwei Pfarrherrn [1528], in Werke, 26:155.14–28, in the context of the Anabaptist polemic ). It is in this perspective that we must understand the famous theory of “freedom of conscience,” which is, according to Luther, synonymous with “Christian or Evangelical freedom.” Luther’s conscientia is in no way a principle of action; it is “not a faculty for performing works, but a faculty of judging these works” ( De votis monasticis [1521], in Werke, 8:606.30–35 ). Here, internalization is pushed so far that freedom of conscience can coexist with the servile will ( see ELEUTHERIA, Box 2 ). This is because conscience does not draw its freedom from itself: here, we find once again the motif of its heteronomy. However, the most important thing is that in Luther, freedom of conscience merges with its certitude: a conscience is free only if faith has made it sure ( cf. Vom Abendmahl Christi. Bekenntnis [1528], in Werke, 26:505.34 : “frey und sicher ym gewissen” ). In Luther’s German, the association of conscience with certainty, gewiss with Gewissen, is immediate: it will be found again, raised to a concept, in Hegel, Gewissheit replacing the adverb gewiss, to which Luther usually limits himself ( cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 6.C.c ). However, we must avoid concluding that it is the proximity of the words that led Luther to associate the ideas, to the point of imbuing certainty with his concept of conscience. It is remarkable that Luther’s Latin makes exactly the same connection, this time without an echo effect, between conscientia and certitudo: from Latin to German, Luther’s concept of conscience does not vary ( cf., e.g., De servo arbitrio, in Werke, 18:620.3: “certitudines conscientiae” ). From such a convergence, we might conclude that Luther’s Latin is “completely imbued with his German” ( Bornkamm, Luther’s World of Thought ): in writing conscientia, Luther might have been thinking Gewissen. Without trying resolve this question of precedence ( did Luther think first in German or in Latin? ), we can suggest that Luther’s theological invention, the establishment of the Glauben-Gewissen-Gewissheit paradigm, was taken over by the potentialities of the German language, which were in turn more than exploited, and this time explicitly, by the tradition that the Wissen-Gewissen-Gewissheit paradigm followed in philosophy from Kant to Wittgenstein. By reattaching Luther’s invention to its antecedents ( first of all, the theological debates of the thinkers of the Middle Ages and the Reformation regarding the certainty of salvation ), we would gain the means to give a long historical account of conscience that would at the same time be a history of bilingualism ( in this case, German/Latin ) in European philosophy. Philippe Büttgen BIBLIOGRAPHY Bayer, Oswald. Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation. Translated by T. H. Trapp. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2008. Baylor, Michael G. Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1977. Bornkamm, Heinrich. Luther’s World of Thought. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2005. Hermann, Rudolf. Luthers Theologie. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967. Hirsch, Emanuel. Lutherstudien. Vol. 1. Gütersloh, Ger.: Bertelsmann, 1954. Holl, Karl. “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1948. Jacob, Günter. Der Gewissensbegriff in der Theologie Luthers. Tübingen: Mohr, 1929. Lohse, Bernhard. “Gewissen und Autorität bei Luther.” In Evangelium in der Geschichte. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988. . Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Translated by R. A. Harrisville. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999. Luther, Martin. Dr Martin Luthers Werke. 121 vols. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar, Ger.: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1883–2009. . Works of Martin Luther. Edited by Henry Eyster Jacobs and Rudolph Spaeth. Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1943. |
II. The European Invention of Consciousness
The first episode in the drama corresponds to the debates aroused by the Reformation concerning “freedom of conscience”; the second leads to an identification of the “self” with the mind’s reflective activity, to which Locke gave the name “consciousness”; the third, at the turning point of the eighteenth century, led to a reinterpretation of the principles of knowledge and morality as expressions of Selbstbewusstsein.
A. The metonymy of conscience
The first episode is here named the “metonymy of conscience” because its most striking achievement was the possibility of using the French word conscience to designate not only a faculty of the mind, even personified or identified with the internal testimony of a double of the subject, but as the other name of a single individual. This personification is manifested in the possibility of qualifying consciousness-subjects with regard to their actions and experiences: a conscience noble, conscience éclairée, conscience malheureuse, conscience déchirée, and so on ( following a procedure that under other circumstances can also be applied to the soul, the mind, the heart, and the understanding ). Such a potentiality is exercised especially in the languages in which the Calvinist Reformation, humanist irenicism, skepticism, and Neostoicism collided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a period when absolutism was developing and the first demands for citizen’s “rights” were being heard.
Everything begins with John Calvin’s definition of conscience: identified with the Christian’s faith, which resides in his “innermost heart” ( for intérieur ), it expresses in itself the mystery of an absolute submission that is at the same time a liberation because it subjects the individual only to grace. The metonymy is already common in Calvin: “I say that these remedies and reliefs are too narrow and frivolous for troubled consciences that are downcast, afflicted, and frightened by the horror of their sin” ( Institution de la religion chrétienne, 4.41 ). Nonetheless, it is the experience of political struggle that puts this metonymic play at the heart of the uses of the word conscience by making the for intérieur also a “fort” and a “force” ( whose concept competed throughout the seventeenth century with those of “mind” and “genius” to designate the principle of individuality ). Whereas the Anabaptists invented the “objection of conscience,” Calvin defended the “adhesion of conscience.” The English Puritans of the seventeenth century subjected all their actions to the absolute command of conscience from which conviction proceeds ( “convinced in conscience of the righteousness of the Parliament’s cause,” quoted in Walzer, Revolution of the Saints ). The corresponding adjective is “conscientious.”
The Wars of Religion also produced the idea of a withdrawal into the for intérieur when people were called to account by states and churches. The two representatives of the European irenicist trend that played a decisive role here are Sebastian Castellion and Dirck Coornhert. The former, who translated the Rhineland mystics into Latin and French, was the great theoretician of freedom of conscience, understood as an inalienable individual right. He established its originary character by adopting the classical form of the elegchos [ἔλεγχος]:
I find that the first and efficient cause of . . . the sedition and war that torments you is necessarily [a matter] of consciences. . . . I am sure that the cause that I am now dealing with would be voided by a single word of evident truth, and that no one would dare to contradict it even a little. For all one has to say to those who compel other people’s consciences is: “Would you want yours to be compelled?” And suddenly their own consciences, which are worth more than a thousand witnesses, would convince them so fully that they would all be struck dumb.
( Conseil à la France désolée, 1562 )
As for Coornhert, in 1582 he published Synodus van der Conscientien vryheyt ( Synod on freedom of conscience ). Arguing against both rigorous Calvinism and the Neostoic reason of state, he naturalized in a very Latinized Dutch the “compulsion of consciences” as “dwang der conscientien” and became the master of “Christians without a church” all over northwestern Europe. Traces of his “individualism” or “subjectivism” are still found even in some late seventeenth-century German Socinians—in the sect of the Gewissene or “conscientious people,” for whom conscience was the sole authority in matters of faith ( Glauben ) or certitude ( Gewissheit ) ( Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens ). The connection between the two may be found in the pages of Louis Meyer’s Philosophia sacrae scripturae interpres ( 1666 ), in which Meyer, who was a friend of Spinoza’s, appealed to “clear and distinct perception” to reject both literalist interpretations of the Scriptures and the inspired “enthusiasm” of the Quakers. In the Dutch version of his book, Meyer himself sought equivalents of the Latin conscientia: innerlijke medewetingh, innerlijckste bewustheyt, meêwustigheyt.
Finally, we should mention the itinerary followed by the skeptics, of whom the most brilliant is Montaigne, who began from a philosophy inspired by Stoicism to create an unprecedented mode of public confession. Jean Starobinski ( Montaigne in Movement ) showed how personal identity is infinitely sought here in the movement of writing, which in Montaigne becomes the real basis of consciousness:
Let me excuse here what I often say, that I rarely repent and that my conscience is content with itself—not as the conscience of an angel or a horse, but as the conscience of a man. . . . I speak as an ignorant inquirer, referring the decision purely and simply to the common and authorized beliefs. I do not teach, I tell.
( Essays of Montaigne, 3.2, trans. Frame )
In politics, Montaigne was a conservative, an admirer of Justus Lipsius. In his work, conscience is related to inscience and opposed to “faith” ( “an enormous distinction between devoutness and conscience”: ibid., 3.12 ). If we do not keep these facts in mind, we can understand neither the effects of the Cartesian revolution nor Hobbes’s attack on the idea of conscience. In his Leviathan, Hobbes relates the word “conscious” to its Latin etymology ( con-scire, “to know together” ) and identifies “conscience” with “opinion.” Such a notion is intermediary between the concept of judgment and what we would now call “ideology.” It allows us to understand why the “plea of Conscience” must be absolutely rejected by the state, and dissociated from the for intérieur:
And last of all, men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions . . . gave those their opinions also that reverenced name of Conscience, as if they would have it seem unlawfull, to change or speak against them; and so pretend to know they are true, when they know at most, but that they think so.
( Leviathan, 1.7 )
Hobbes’s citizen constructs his personality not on the basis of consciousness/conscience, but on “will” and “authority” or on representation.
B. Knowledge and ignorance of the “self”
Historians of philosophy tell us that the major moment when consciousness begins to designate the essence of subjectivity coincides with a return to the metaphysical foundation of the faculty of judgment summed up in the Cartesian cogito. The reality is more complex, as is shown by a remarkable series of semantic shifts and lexical inventions. René Descartes was not the “inventor of consciousness.” The French word conscience never appears in his work, either in the texts he wrote himself or in translations of them that he read and revised. And conscientia in Latin comes up only once, in a paragraph in the Principia philosophiae ( 1.9 ) devoted to the definition of “thought” ( cogitatio ). The equivalent of conscius esse that Descartes accepted was simply connaître, which was here close to sentir. The philosophy of the Meditations is not that of consciousness but of “certitude” and its modalities. Descartes nonetheless played a role in the invention of consciousness in the seventeenth century because of his thesis that “the mind always thinks,” on which he founded the idea that the soul or mind is “easier to know than the body.” As Geneviève Lewis has shown, the term conscience was spread by the first Cartesians, who were in reality mainly “Augustino-Cartesians,” though they were no more faithful to Augustine’s question ( How does God make himself felt in the “innermost part” of my soul? ) than to Descartes’s ( Who am I, I who am certain of my thinking existence? ). The first of these followers was Louis de La Forge, author of the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme ( 1667 ). In this work he described the “admirable function” of thought as “the perception, consciousness or internal knowledge that each of us feels immediately by himself when he perceives what he is doing or what is happening in him.” Antoine Arnauld identified the Latin conscius esse with the “reflection that may be called virtual and that is found in all our perceptions,” and that allows us to define thought as “essentially reflecting on itself” ( Des vraies et des fausses idées, 1683 ). In this sense, the Cartesians are the true inventors of what Wolff was to call “rational psychology.” This first trend in the ( re )definition of consciousness is at the origin of the tradition of French spiritualisme ( cf. Victor Cousin ), the influence of which has never really disappeared.
Far more important is the English development manifested in the invention of the neologism “consciousness.” The first to use it was Ralph Cudworth, in The True Intellectual System of the Universe ( 1678 ): this is a refutation of atomism and materialism, to which the leader of the Cambridge Platonists opposed a monism based on Neoplatonism. For Cudworth, nature can be understood as a hierarchy of beings based on the sole principle of the formation of individuals in which vital force and thought are two successive degrees. It is to mark the passage from one to the other that Cudworth forged the word “consciousness” ( itself part of the series Con-sense, Consciousness, Animadversion, Attention, Self-Perception ), merging Plotinus’s terms sunaisthêsis and sunesis. Consciousness is thus the highest form of the feeling or perception of the self ( which is also a “self-enjoyment” ) that characterizes all life. Of course, it does not belong essentially to human beings, but eminently characterizes the divine spirit. In opposition to Cartesian dualism, Cudworth maintains that the obscure or dormant forms of consciousness begin below humanity, just as its lucid or purely intellectual forms extend beyond the human mind. That is why he also uses the term “inconscious.” His influence was to be considerable, especially on Gottfried Leibniz, to whom he transmitted Plotinus’s term “monad.”
Locke appears to be far more Cartesian. The drafts of the Essay on Human Understanding ( 1690; 2nd enlarged ed., 1694 ) show that the word “consciousness” was not part of his vocabulary before Cudworth published his work. In the final version, however, he sums up the essence of the gap between the immediacy of sensation and the reflection by which the mind perceives its own operations, giving the definition that was to become famous: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind” ( 2.1.19 ). From this proceed all the developments of Locke’s philosophy of mind, from the reformulation of the Cartesian idea that the mind cannot think without knowing, to the description of “the experience of consciousness”: an uneasy movement in the course of which all knowledge is formed. In a supplementary chapter in the second edition ( 2.27, “Of Identity and Diversity” ), loaded with allusions to the controversies of the time regarding the immortality of the soul and the perspective of the Last Judgment, he makes consciousness the criterion of personal identity and responsibility. In this chapter, Locke deepens his conception of the relations between consciousness and the “inner sense,” described as essentially an internal memory, in a kind of secularization of Augustinian theses. Consciousness, which is self-identical in the continual flux of its perceptions, can thus function as the operator of a self-recognition: it is through consciousness that an individual can consider “himself as the same,” that is, as a Self.
The French translation of “consciousness” as conscience could not, as is now acknowledged, be taken for granted: it collided with the linguistic habit that reserved this term for a moral faculty, and conflicted with the new uses introduced by the Cartesians and by Malebranche. That is why Locke’s first translators ( J. Le Clerc, P. Coste ) preferred at first to render “to be conscious” by concevoir or être convaincu, and “consciousness” by sentiment or conviction. It took a semantic revolution to re-create the word conscience in French with a new meaning. But this revolution put European philosophy on a new path ( because in the eighteenth century, the whole “Republic of Letters” read Locke in Coste’s French translation ), where the conflict between psychologism and transcendental philosophies would eventually arise.
■ See Box 4.
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Consciousness and con-science: The role of Coste’s translation Produced in close collaboration with the author and reprinted several times between 1700 and 1755, the translation of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by the Protestant Pierre Coste is still the only complete French version available. Two translator’s notes concerning new terms necessary to translate “the Self” and “consciousness” indicate the difficulty of finding in French, at the end of the seventeenth century, an equivalent for the neologism created by Cudworth and Locke: The English word is “consciousness,” which could be expressed in Latin by conscientia. . . . In French, we have, in my opinion, only the words sentiment and conviction that correspond to some extent to this idea. But in several places in this chapter they can express only imperfectly Mr. Locke’s thought, which makes personal identity depend absolutely on this act of Man quo sibi est conscius. . . . After having reflected for some time on ways of remedying this difficulty, I found nothing better than to use the term conscience to express this very act. . . . But, it will be said, it is a strange license, to turn a word away from its ordinary meaning and give it one that it has never been given in our language. . . . I see finally that I could have simply used our word conscience in the sense that Mr. Locke used it [“consciousness”] in this chapter and elsewhere, since one of our best writers, the famous Father Malebranche, did not scruple to make use of it in this same meaning in several places in La recherche de la vérité. ( Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain, 2.27.9n ) In her study Conscience as Consciousness, Davies shows that here we see not only important evidence for the formation of the modern conception of “consciousness,” but also an actual moment of that formation. Why did Coste render the definition in 2.1.19 by “cette conviction n’est autre chose que la perception de ce qui se passe dans l’âme de l’Homme” before suddenly changing in 2.27.9 to render “since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes everyone to be, what he calls self,” as “puisque la conscience accompagne toujours la pensée, et que c’est là ce qui fait que chacun est ce qu’il nomme soi-même”? The only evidence provided by the context is the collocation in the same sentence of the two fundamental theoretical terms that are henceforth correlative: “the self” and “consciousness.” Coste thus invents con-science at the precise moment when he is forced by the theoretical matter to create not one but two neologisms, one lexical, the other semantic. An enigma arises here, however. If the term conscience in the sense of pure self-knowledge already existed, why did Coste allow himself a neologism? In reality, this is one and the same problem. If Locke’s translator, obliged to create con-science, has to try to differentiate himself from Malebranche at the same time that he appeals to him as a precedent, that is because the meanings of conscience as Malebranche uses it and Locke’s “consciousness” are in reality in conflict. The notion of conscience that Malebranche identifies with the “inner feeling” ( Recherche de la vérité, 3.7, ed. Lewis ) is ultimately anti-Cartesian: it is the imperfect knowledge we have of the soul ( “we know of our soul only what we feel happen in us” ), thoroughly mixed with the “feeling of what is happening in our body,” and liable to all sorts of illusions. Malebranche is well aware that he is thereby destroying the very heart of Cartesianism: I have said in several places, and I believe I have sufficiently proved . . . that we have no clear idea of our soul, but only conscience or inner feeling; that thus we know it much more imperfectly than we do extension. This seems to me so evident that I did not believe it was necessary to prove it at length. But the authority of M. Descartes, who says positively . . . that the nature of the mind is better known than anything else, has so preoccupied some of his disciples that what I have written has served only to make me seem to them a weak person who cannot take a clear position and hold firm to abstract truths. ( XIe Éclaircissement, in Recherche de la vérité, 3:98ff. ) Thus Malebranche’s conscience has to do less with knowledge than with ignorance of oneself, whereas Locke, for his part, is opposed to Descartes not epistemologically but ontologically. His “consciousness” is not ignorance but, on the contrary, the immediate recognition by the mind of its own operations on the inner “stage” of which it is the spectator. What Locke inaugurates is the turning of the Cartesian idea of self-knowledge against the idea of the mind or soul ( mens ) as substance. For all that, the ignorance of the self inherent in consciousness will not disappear: it reemerges, notably in Kant’s analysis of the “paralogism of rational psychology” that opens the critical phase of transcendental philosophy and bases it on the idea of an originary ambivalence inherent in the subject’s relationship to itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY Davies, Catherine Glyn. Conscience as Consciousness: The Idea of Self-Awareness in French Philosophical Writing from Descartes to Diderot. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1990. Malebranche, Nicolas de la. Recherche de la vérité. Edited by Geneviève Lewis. Paris: Vrin, 1945–. |
In the end, not until Condillac did conscience become a full-fledged metaphysical term. Condillac made no reference to Descartes; he introduced, in addition to the concept of consciousness, that of attention, which is a differential consciousness, an “additional consciousness” accorded to some perceptions and not to others. Following Locke, and so to speak in the margins of his text, Condillac arrived at “the feeling of my being,” the recognition of the permanence of a “being that is constantly the same,” the identity of the “self of today” with the “self of yesterday.” Consciousness then became in French as well a concept designating the perception of an internal unity subsisting through the succession of its own representations, but also capable of splitting into “multiple personalities” ( Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines ).
C. A conflict in continental philosophy: Selbstbewusstsein or sens intime
Locke himself uses “self-consciousness” just once:
For as to this point of being the same self, it matters not whether this present self be made up of the same or other Substances, I being as much concern’d, and as justly accountable for any Action that was done a thousand years since, appropriated to me now by this self-consciousness, as I am for what I did the last moment.
( Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.27.16 )
This formulation, which closely links ( self- )consciousness, memory, and responsibility, is in the logic of equivalence that it constructs between the problematics of self and of consciousness. But it is especially significant retrospectively, insofar as it marks for us the starting point of the conflicts in modern philosophy. Coste was not able or willing to translate, but added in a note: “Self-consciousness: an expressive word in English that cannot be rendered in French in all its force. I put it here for the benefit of those who understand English.”
The difference between the psychological and the transcendental that is latent here could be made explicit only in another language. Bewusstsein ( a nominalized infinitive, at first written Bewusst sein to translate the Latin [sibi] conscium esse ) was invented by Wolff only in 1719, while he was writing works that wrenched the term Psychologie away from its first meaning of the theory of specters or spirits to make it a “science of the inner sense” ( Psychologia empirica, 1732; Psychologia rationalis, 1734 ). In this neologism, introduced alongside the traditional Gewissen as the term corresponding to conscientia, we can see, more than a transposition of the Cartesian conscientia-cogito ( as is usually thought ), a response to Locke’s distinction between “conscience” and “consciousness.” From then on, Bewusstsein was used in Germany both by the metaphysicians of the Aufklärung ( Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten ) and by the theorists of a more empirical anthropology ( Johannes Niklaus Tetens ).
For Kant, Bewusstsein, whether empirical or pure, is always a knowledge of our representations of objects, that is, a connection between the elements that constitute them: intuitions and concepts. The underlying link is basically a speculative interpretation of the conjunction of sunaisthêsis and suneidêsis, which Kant understands negatively, in the famous formula: “Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions blind” ( Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood ). To sense-consciousness must be added an intellectual consciousness to produce the mechanism typical of transcendental consciousness, which is capable of grasping its own form ( or of “thinking thought” in its conditions of possibility, in accord with the ancient Aristotelian ideal of a noêsis noêseôs [νόησιϛ νοήσεως] ).
■ See Box 5.
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Consciousness, self-consciousness, and “apperception” In the Critique of Pure Reason ( 1781 ), Kant makes Selbstbewusstsein the supreme principle of knowledge and, at the same time, its own critical judge. Such an act of thought must therefore be considered a “transcendental apperception,” that is, a grasping by the understanding itself of the pure form of the unity that it imposes on every representation of an object. This is another translinguistic equivalence that conceals, however, a syntactical and historical difficulty. This difficulty begins with Leibniz, who, confronted by the Cartesian conception, had taken a position opposite that of Locke: for innate ideas, but against the idea that the mind can know itself through its own thinking. In his correspondence with Arnauld, Leibniz still referred to conscience ( associated with expérience intérieure, pensée, and réminiscence ). But in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain ( 2.27 ), he retranslates “consciousness” as consciosité or conscienciosité, rejecting Coste’s neologism. This attempt, which was not adopted by others, clearly shows the tension between the two aspects of the notion of “consciousness”: “self-presence” and “self-knowledge.” For Leibniz, however, the only really adequate notion is that of “apperception” ( from the verb apercevoir, or rather from s’apercevoir ); it makes it possible to hierarchize perceptions: a clear perception is not necessarily distinct, that is, it does not necessarily include a knowledge of its own constitution ( Monadologie, §14 ). Leibnizian apperception is the mind’s perception of the representations that develop ( or unfold ) in front of it the world of which it is a part, so that it can situate itself in it. The Kantian transzendentale Apperzeption, on the other hand, is only the way the consciousness reflects its own invariant form through the diversity of objective contents. But in exchange, it immediately raises itself to universality; it is the condition of all possible experience, individual or collective. Must we then render Selbstbewusstsein in French by conscience de soi or, as translators like Pierre-Jean Labarrière and Gwendolen Jarczyk, who have reflected at length on Hegel’s use of the term, prefer, by auto-conscience? It seems that in Kant’s text ( and notably in the “Transcendental Deduction” section of the Critique of Pure Reason ), we can find a significant difference between the notions of the “Bewusstsein [der Identität] seiner [meiner] selbst,” and Selbstbewusstsein: the homonymy of the psychological and the transcendental is constitutive. In Hegel, on the contrary—as Derathé emphasizes ( 96 ) in his translation of the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts ( 1821 )—the “play” between Selbstbewusstsein and Bewusstsein von sich occupies an important place, but refers rather to the subtle distinction between conscience de soi and conscience du soi ( or du moi ) ( “self-consciousness” and “consciousness of the self” ). Note that this can be translated into Italian without apparent problems by autocoscienza—and by coscienza di se—with a clearer connotation of “consciousness of the self,” which consapevole suffices to express in practice. English, obviously, uses “self-consciousness.” These variants are connected with a more general problem in expressing reflexivity on the basis of Greek and Latin models ( auto-, sui ). BIBLIOGRAPHY Hegel, G.W.F. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Translated into French by R. Derathé. Paris: Vrin, 1975. English translation by T. M. Knox: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. English translation by H. B. Bisnet: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. |
The difficulties of “self-consciousness” constitute both a point of contact and a source of permanent misunderstandings between the German and French traditions in the philosophy of the subject. The “same” expressions take on values that are in fact profoundly different.
The Selbst- that is part of constructions such as Selbst-achtung, Selbst-bewegung, Selbst-bestimmung, and Selbst-bewusstsein, is understood sometimes in a subjective sense, sometimes in an objective sense: as spontaneous self-expression or as a capacity for being affected by something that is “oneself.” Thus Kant immediately turns around the question from which the concept of transcendental apperception emerged. He asks not only how we can separate the pure form of an “I think” ( Ich denke ) from the empirical consciousness and its contents, but also how our activity of thinking affects us ourselves, in the “inner sense.” How does the “I think” know itself or perceive itself thinking? This auto-affection is still a Selbst-bewusstsein, this time in the sense of a consciousness ( of the activity of ) the self, that is, of an experience ( which is sensible in a way, even though it refers to any content of consciousness ). Kant identifies it with the pure experience of time and is concerned to show that it must never be confused with the concept of transcendental apperception, since it constitutes the Ich as a phenomenon. But he also shows that the confusion is constantly induced by the very structure of thought ( “Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood ). This aporia is the starting point for all of the discussions of German idealism concerning the “experience of consciousness” torn between truth and illusion, infinitude and finitude, interiority and exteriority.
The question raised by Maine de Biran ( Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie [1811], published in 1859 ), and after him by a French tradition that extends to Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is quite different. For Maine de Biran, self-consciousness ( for which he also uses the Latin expressions conscium sui and compos sui ), “an original fact of the inner sense” that founds all philosophy, is an individual feeling ( as in Malebranche ) and has as its prototype the “immediate apperception” of one’s own body. He expresses the irreducibility of the union of mind and body as it is experienced in particular in “effort”; this feeling contains immediately the positing of an antithesis between the self and the external world to which it is opposed. Thinking about self-consciousness is thus thinking about the two terms of this antithesis, their separation and their complementarity insofar as they are part of the same lived experience. The problem Maine de Biran raises is thus at the origin of French existentialism, and in this sense explains why French philosophy has never ceased to “translate” into existential terms the problems of the relation between psychology, phenomenology, and the transcendental dialectic of consciousness. But correlatively, the detour through Bewusst-sein ( a way of writing it introduced in the twentieth century in analogy with the Heideggerian Da-sein ) allows us to understand what is at stake in the post-Kantian aporia of “auto-affection” as well as in the post-Biranian questioning of the duality of the “simple fact”: a reflection on the being of the “conscious being.”
III. Contemporary Theoretical and Semantic Problems
Since the invention of consciousness, two problems have dominated the expression of the subject in the three great European philosophical languages and maintain permanent gaps among them, bordering on untranslatability, whereas the equivalences are in theory fixed. The first problem concerns the gap between the German paradigm of Wissen and the French paradigm of science. The second concerns the difficulties inherent in psychological discourse, as shown in the problem of translating the English words “consciousness” and “awareness.” They develop in opposite directions, but in both cases they illustrate the latent competition between the dichotomous oppositions of which philosophy is so fond ( the moral point of view versus the psychological point of view ) and more complex derivations that better reflect the mutual influence of language and concept.
A. “Conscience” and “certitude”: Gewissen, Gewissheit, and Bewusstsein from Kant to Wittgenstein
The paradigm of wissen ( Gr. oida [οἶδα], Lat. scire ) is of fundamental importance for modern philosophy as a whole. In general, it does not have the same structure as that of the French savoir ( as is shown by the different uses of science and Wissenschaft ). But the correspondence between conscience and Bewusstsein raises specific problems. This has to do first with the fact that Bewusstsein’s etymology implies a more explicit decomposition than the one found in conscientia ( cum + scire ). Present from the start ( in Wolff ) in the competition between Bewusst sein and Bewusstsein, this latent decomposition is still at work in philosophical writing. It is reinforced by the parallelism between the active and the passive forms: bewusst werden ( become conscious ) thus corresponds to bewusst sein ( to be conscious ), which connotes the result or the faculty ( consciousness ). Whereas rational and later experimental psychology takes the new substantive for an equivalent of the English term “consciousness,” Hegel and his followers restored the ontological emphasis on Sein. From this comes Karl Marx’s formula: “Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything other than the conscious being [das bewusste Sein]” ( Marx, The German Ideology ). Martin Heidegger also played on this, but turned it around, opposing to the Bewusst-sein of the critical tradition simply Da-sein, “being there,” thrown into the world, rather than “being conscious” or being as consciousness. On the contrary, the transcendental tradition from Kant to the Marburg School and Edmund Husserl tried to erase this ontological mark and retain only the idea of faculty or function. In the end, it had to situate this denegation in the terminology itself: it seems that Bewusstheit, a substantive of quality that escapes the question of “being” and is basically a German transposition of Leibniz’s consciosité or conscienciosité, was introduced by Paul Gerhard Natorp and at the same time by Wilhelm Wundt ( on this point, see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, “Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Erkenntnislehre,” part 2, “Remark on the Translation of Certain Terms” ). The Bewusstheit/Bewusstsein pair separates in the negative: die Unbewusstheit corresponds to “unawareness” ( which would be rendered in French by inconscience ), whereas das Unbewusste corresponds to “the unconscious” ( which would be rendered in French by l’inconscient ) ( Ellenberger, Histoire de la découverte de l’inconscient, 728n ).
But the most interesting point lies elsewhere. The paradigm of wissen is broader than that of scire: it includes not only Gewissen and Bewusstsein, but also Gewissheit, taken as an equivalent of the Latin certitudo. Thus here we should abandon the idea that all the relevant meanings are included in the field of the French conscience. For German philosophy, it is not from outside that certitude intervenes in consciousness: from the outset, it is part of the same kernel of meanings, which philosophers organize in different ways. Keeping in mind the theological background ( gewiss and Gewissheit are essential signifiers in the Lutheran faith, closely linked to the anti-intellectualism of the Reformation; see Box 3 ), we will discuss four configurations. In Kant, the fundamental problem concerning Bewusstsein resides, as we have seen, in the distinction between an empirical phenomenon and a transcendental condition for the possibility of thought ( “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all of my representations,” Critique of Pure Reason, §16, trans. Guyer and Wood ), followed by the return to the empirical in the form of the subject’s self-perception. Selbstbewusstsein thus connotes simultaneously an auto-affection of the subject, an “internal sensibility,” and the pure logical form of self-identity ( for which Johann Gottlieb Fichte later created the formula Ich = Ich ). The possibility of this critical distinction rests not only on the abstract opposition of two heterogeneous modes of representation ( transcendental apperception and the inner sense ), but also on the actual discovery of forms of consciousness that are concerned solely with pure thought: in the area of theory, the experience of the apodictic certainty of judgments; in the area of practice, the experience of the categorical imperative or the moral consciousness. It is remarkable that these two concepts are defined by Kant using symmetrical formulas that attach both of them to Bewusstsein as the “common name” of transcendental subjectivity. Gewissheit is defined as “consciousness of the necessity [Bewusstsein der Notwendigkeit] of judgments” ( Logic, Introduction, 9 ). Gewissen is defined as “consciousness [Bewusstsein] of a free submission of the will to the law” ( Critique of Pure Reason ), or else as “the consciousness [Bewusstsein] of a tribunal within man” ( Metaphysics of Morals ), and so on. The complete organization of the notions is thus as follows: Bewusstsein, insofar as it grasps itself as a pure form, is the transcendental unity of Apperzeption; insofar as it is the theoretical consciousness of necessity, it is Gewissheit ( we might say “pure logical feeling” ); insofar as it is the practical consciousness of the law, it is Gewissen; finally, in one or another of these modalities, the subject affects itself, “from the inside,” as a psychological Selbstbewusstsein. This semantic organization is ternary, not binary.
The Hegelian organization is entirely different, particularly as it is set forth in the Phenomenology of Mind. There, Hegel offers an account of the genesis of Bewusstsein from Gewissheit, taking the latter’s modalities as a guiding thread. From “sense certainty” to “the mind’s certainty of itself,” Gewissheit is Bewusstsein’s active relationship to itself, which explains why consciousness can experience itself as truth in each of its experiences, and why it must nonetheless repeatedly divest itself of itself in discovering its error. As a concept, Bewusstsein can emerge only with a first negation of Gewissheit, of perception; but on the other hand, the problem of Gewissheit can be taken beyond Bewusstsein, or better yet, it can take consciousness beyond itself, into the concept of absolute Spirit or Knowledge. In this context, the question of the Gewissen is treated in a localized way, as a particular figure of consciousness ( Bewusstsein ) and of its own Gewissheit ( certitude ). But this figure is privileged: it is the key moment in which Bewusstsein knows ( weiss ) itself as a pure subject ( the concept of a pure subject is thus fundamentally a moral concept ), and conceives itself essentially as Selbstbewusstsein, having only itself as its “object.” This subjective figure of truth, which is deeply illusory, is entirely imbued with a self-referential Gewissheit.
■ See Box 6.
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Translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind It is remarkable that none of the three French translations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind has adopted the same equivalent for Gewissen. Each has recognized the difficulty and chosen to draw the system in a different direction. J. Hyppolite ( 1939 ) translates Gewissen as conscience morale or bonne conscience, in order to “avoid the possible confusion of Bewusstsein and Gewissen.” J.-P. Lefebvre ( 1991 ) is the only translator who has noted “the connotation of certainty that is associated with [Gewissen]” and translated it as conviction morale, “so as to indicate the intimate dimension of Gewissen” ( in your soul and conscience ) by reserving persuasion for Überzeugung. Finally, G. Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière ( 1993 )—who proposed that Selbstbewusstsein be rendered as auto-conscience ( see Box 5 )—render Gewissen as certitude-morale, which fuses the two concepts, but give the tautology “la certitude inflexible de la certitude-morale” as a translation of “die unwankende Gewissheit des Gewissens”—reserving conviction for Überzeugung. For his part, in a note to his translation of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts ( 168 ), Derathé offers this comment on the difficulty: The German language distinguishes between Gewissen and Bewusstsein. It thus has two words to designate what we call in French la conscience. For Hegel, the words Bewusstsein and Selbstbewusstsein ( self-consciousness ) are related to Wissen, to scientific knowledge or to knowledge in general. On the other hand, Hegel regards Gewissen as a form of Gewissheit, of certainty, or, more exactly, of self-certainty: “This pure self-certainty, Hegel says, pushed to its extreme limit, is manifested in two forms, one of which passes immediately into the other in the form of conscience and in the form of evil . . .” ( Encyclopaedia, §511 ). To avoid confusion, Gewissen is often rendered in French by conscience morale and Bewusstsein by conscience. I prefer to follow the example of Bayle and Rousseau and translate Gewissen simply by conscience without further qualification. However, let us recall that for Rousseau, conscience is “the infallible judge of good and evil, which makes man like God,” whereas for Hegel, it is simply a subjective certainty that can deviate from the truth and take evil for good. That is why Hegel raises the question ( Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §137 ) of true or veridical conscience [Gewissen], which is the disposition to want that which is good in itself and for oneself and that, for Hegel, appears only at the level of ethical life or Sittlichkeit. |
In Sein und Zeit ( §§54–55 ), Heidegger centers his analysis of the Gewissen on the common expression “the voice of conscience.” Contrary to the “metaphor of the tribunal,” it is supposed to refer to an originary characteristic of Dasein: interpellation, the “call” ( Ruf, Anruf ) to responsibility ( Schuld ), to “being oneself” ( Selbstsein ). Such a voice by which “Dasein calls to itself” is always already of the order of discourse ( Rede ), even though it is essentially quiet or speaks only by keeping silent, that is, it determines no task or duty ( Pflicht ). This description is thus opposed term-for-term to Kant’s definitions. Neither Gewissheit nor Bewusstsein plays any role in it. They are concepts basically foreign to Heidegger’s thought, which reserves them for the description of the metaphysical moment of subjectivity that was opened up historically by Cartesianism and culminates in Hegel. It is hard to imagine that this phenomenology did not play a role in the way Jacques Derrida “deconstructed” the Husserlian conception of consciousness, in a chapter entitled “The Voice That Keeps Silence,” writing, for example, that “it is this universality that ensures that, structurally and by right, no consciousness is possible without the voice. The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as con-sciousness [con-science]” ( La voix et le phénomène, 89 ). Thus Derrida plays in French on the etymology and connotations of a German concept, but at the same time he diverts them and to some extent can authorize criticism of them. His “con-sciousness” ( which he writes as Coste did when translating Locke ) is a Bewusstsein haunted by the Heideggerian analytic of Gewissen, which makes the certainties of phenomenological experience vacillate in a special Ungewissheit. We might quote partly similar remarks from Paul Ricœur’s Soi-même comme un autre ( 1990 ).
Our last witness is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here again, Bewusstsein is no longer central, but for reasons different from Heidegger’s. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus replaced this term with Gefühl, moving it entirely into the realm of subjectivism and even of “mysticism” ( §6.45 ). And the posthumous collection Über Gewissheit reduces Bewusstsein completely to the latter term, understood in its subjective meaning. The whole book is constructed around the question of what Ich weiss ( I know ) means, and thus around the relationship between wissen and Gewissheit in various language games. Something of the battle Wittgenstein’s aphorisms wage against tautology is irremediably lost as soon as we pass into French or English:
And in fact, isn’t the use of the word “know” [wissen] as a preeminently philosophical word altogether wrong? . . . “I believe I know” [Ich glaube es zu wissen] would not need to express a lesser degree of certainty [Gewissheit].
( Über Gewissheit, trans. Paul and Anscombe )
Against the heritage of “Cartesianism,” we need to return here to a very close examination of Descartes’s own language.
B. Consciousness or experience
The translation of the terms “awareness” and “consciousness” has the interest of bringing out a theoretical difficulty of which insular philosophers may themselves not be aware. “Aware” is an old English word meaning “to be awake, on one’s guard, recognize.” On the other hand, “awareness” does not appear before the nineteenth century ( RT: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ). Short of a paraphrase, it can, of course, be translated into French by conscience when the term is used by itself. The difficulties begin when it is necessary to render “consciousness” and “awareness” in the same context ( expressions such as “conscious awareness” even occur ). The situation becomes critical when statements in the form of definitions risk turning into tautologies: “Conscious experience names the class of mental states that involve awareness” ( Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered ); “This consciousness, in the 20th century, has come to mean a ‘full, active awareness’ including feeling as well as thought” ( Scott, “The Evidence of Experience” ). Then translators hesitate between indicating the English term in parentheses ( Dennett, Consciousness Explained ) and the introduction of expressions that particularize usage and suggest philosophical interpretations ( connaissance immédiate for “awareness”: Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind )
Thus we can understand why, in his own French adaptation of his famous lecture “Does Consciousness Really Exist?” ( 1912 ), William James used the French word aperception, which current French translators no longer dare to use. The essence of the problem seems to be the following: The uses of “awareness” and “consciousness” are obviously not distinct, and even less codified. On the other hand, they are dominated by recurrent questions regarding the pertinence of the concept of consciousness inherited from classical philosophy: ontological problems ( as James Mark Baldwin put it, “It is the point of division between mind and not mind,” Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology ), or problems bearing on the ability of the neurosciences to “explain consciousness”—that is, to objectivize the subject—or on the connection between consciousness and personal identity. The contexts show that the term “awareness” sometimes constitutes a nontechnical equivalent of “consciousness,” which is supposed to provide access to a common experience and serve as a point of reference for the elaboration of a scientific concept, and sometimes the name of an elementary phenomenon to which the enigma of the specificity of psychic phenomena might be reduced. It is a question of simultaneously showing the circular nature of the definitions of consciousness and trying to break it. Then we see that the argumentative structure of the expositions generally consists ( with or without a classification of the forms or degrees of consciousness, as in Ryle [The Concept of Mind] or Flanagan [Consciousness Reconsidered] ) in situating the field of the phenomena of consciousness between the two extreme poles of “awareness” and “the self.” For the whole of this field, a metonymic term is necessary, one that transcends the difference between “awareness” and “consciousness,” while at the same time expressing their intrinsic relationship: this term is generally “experience,” which thus represents, as in Locke, Hegel, or James, the most general name of subjectivity.
This remark leads to another. Since awareness forms the first anchoring point for consciousness within experience, its meaning is obviously not unequivocal: it depends on theoretical positions that are mutually contradictory, oscillating between the idea of the necessary presence of a personal subject and that of the latter’s absence. However, what remains constant is the argumentative function of refutation or elegchos performed by the reference to awareness. In fact, “aware” is synonymous with “not unconscious”: consciousness is that which is not unconscious, thus aware, or present to itself. As always in philosophy, double negation tends to connote the originary. The semantic structure ( awareness + consciousness = experience ) is not at all limited to cognitive contexts. On the contrary, it appears in the same way in the contexts of moral and political philosophy. Thus it shows the dependency of all these domains in relation to a single implicit phenomenology.
But furthermore, it competes with a second, formally similar structure that seems to be more or less reserved for the adversaries of cognitivism ( like Searle [Minds, Brains and Science] ), and that is based on the interpretation of experience in terms of consciousness + intentionality. This seems to pose no problems of translation. But our desire to resolve the problem ( which is basically insoluble ) raised by the doublet “consciousness”/“awareness” can thereby only be whetted. The symmetry of these two constructions competing with “experience” corresponds to the fact that from an “objectivist” point of view, the problem is the immediate relation of the subject to himself ( designated by “awareness” ), whereas from a “subjectivist” point of view, the problem is the immediate relation of the subject to objects ( designated by “intentionality” ). On closer inspection, we see that here “intentional” and “intentionality” are based on the same “double negation” as “aware” and “awareness”: it is a matter of naming the “not-unconscious.” This amounts to saying that in all cases, the “definitions” of “consciousness” that want to avoid self-reference rely on the attempt to find a word to express this limit of thought.
IV. The Borders of Conscience and Linguistic Clues
Ever since consciousness was invented, the expression of the problems it has synthesized has constantly been racked by the gaps between linguistic paradigms. The plurality of meaning we have described is clearly not a defect, but the source of a continually renewed dynamics of thought that plays with the possibilities of problematization that are concealed by words in other languages that are more or less equivalent to the French word conscience. This process can change reference points, but it cannot stop. Its meaning has been temporarily masked by the way in which the philosophy of the first part of the twentieth century ( Léon Brunschvicg, Ernst Cassirer ) brought the various “manifestations” or “degrees” of la conscience into a figure of a great progress, which was ultimately identical to humanity’s march toward the realization of its own essence, conceived on the classical European model. The debates aroused by psychoanalysis ( attached by Freud to the expression das Unbewusste, “the unconscious,” which was forged by the Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century ), or by the “deconstruction of the subject” in the twentieth century after Heidegger and the various structuralisms, did not alter significantly the feeling that it was unequivocal. The same will not be the case, probably, for the two phenomena that are going to mark the coming years: the intensification of confrontations between the ways of conceiving of individuality, personality, the psychic apparatus, knowledge, and so on in Western and non-Western cultures and systems of thought, and the diffusion and development of the paradigm of the cognitive sciences. These two phenomena ( which are perhaps connected ) will go hand-in-hand with a new revolution in the economy of linguistic exchanges, both in the sense of a multiplication of translations between European and extra-European idioms, and in the sense of the imposition of a new technical-conceptual koinê, basic Anglo-American. The question of what place the words and notions “conscience,” “consciousness,” and “awareness,” Bewusstsein, Gewissheit, and Gewissen, will have at the point where philosophy, the sciences, ethics, and even mysticism intersect, in common language and in scientific languages, now seems wide open.
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CONSENSUS
“Consensus” is a direct borrowing from the Latin, which means “agreement, unanimous judgment” ( from cum, with, together, and sentire, perceive, feel, think, judge ), and translates the Greek sumpatheia [συμπάθεια] ( sun- [σύν], with, like the Latin cum-, and paschein [πάσχειν], to be affected, undergo, suffer ). It was used in particular by the Stoics to designate agreement, conspiracy, and a certain number of things between the two, and it was adopted by physiology to designate the interdependence of bodily organs ( cf. IMPLICATION, OIKEIÔSIS, PATHOS ). But “consensus” is also, at least in English and French, a good translation of Greek terms such as homonoia [ὁμόνоια] ( literally, identity of thought, whence unanimity, concord ), and even homologia [ὁμоλоγία] ( identity of discourse, whence agreement ), which opens out onto the city and the constitution of politics; see LOGOS, II.A, LOVE, II.B.2, SPEECH ACT ( esp. Box 1 ); cf. POLIS, POLITICS ( cf. IMPLICATION, OIKEIÔSIS, PATHOS ).
Consensus clearly points toward “common sense,” that to which everyone can adhere: see SENS COMMUN [SENSUS COMMUNIS, COMMON SENSE] and SENSE, as well as COMMONPLACE and DOXA.
In contemporary usage, “consensus” designates not only agreement but the human community that is based on it beyond its divisions, whether the unifying element is civil or religious: see ALLIANCE, CIVIL SOCIETY, PEOPLE, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION ( esp. Box 1 ), SOBORNOST’; cf. COMMUNITY, DROIT, WELTANSCHAUUNG.
CONSERVATIVE
The word “conservative” derives from the Latin conservare ( to preserve, respect, save ), which designates the fact of preserving and faithfully observing: see PIETAS, RELIGIO.
Here we will focus, as in the entry for “liberal,” on the difference between modern political uses of the term in French and English. The English term “conservative” originally designated one of the great traditional parties in Great Britain, occupying the place that would in France be that of the “right” ( droite ), and later referring to a more general political and even moral position hostile to the most antitraditional aspects of modern society. In any case, the position of the “conservatives” is always understood in a relative way, as is shown by the two series of oppositions analyzed here: see WHIG/TORY, for the birth of the modern British political system, and LIBERAL, for the contemporary usage that divides the main political currents into conservative, liberal, and radical.
CIVIL SOCIETY, LAW, LIBERTY, POLITICS
CONTINUITET / CONTINUERLIGHED / CONTINUERLIGT ( DANISH )
| ENGLISH | continuity, continual | ||
| FRENCH | continuité, continuellement/continûment | ||
| GERMAN | Kontinuität, Kontinuierlichkeit/kontinuierlich |
CONTINUITY, and AIÔN, DASEIN, LEIB, PERSON, PLUDSELIGHED, PRESENT, TIME
To render the idea of continuity, the Kierkegaardian lexicon uses two terms: Continuitet and Continuerlighed, which are denoted in the following by “continuity ( A )” and “continuity ( B ).” In French and English, there is a subtle difference between continûment/“continuously” ( without interruption ) and continuellement/“continually” ( possibly repeatable ). In some cases, either of the two Danish concepts can be used, and yet one can recognize in the use of the second one ( Continuerlighed ) a concern to emphasize the dialectical particularity of the existential continuity, to oppose it to permanence and to the stability of nature.
Continuity ( B ) designates the fact that an existing individual is continuous in becoming by virtue of a decision that has the value of an origin. For nature or for ordinary existence, time is only “the dialectic that comes from outside.” On the other hand, for the individual who lives his existence on the basis of himself, who is “originally dialectical in himself,” time operates in such a way as to bring out “the metamorphosis of the most precisely determined continuity as process, succession, continuous transformation through the years.”
Continuity ( B ) characterizes the cohesion of ethical life in harmony with the requirements of social reality, of life that escapes dissolution, diffusion ( dœmrer ) in the humors, and momentary affective tonalities. This concrete continuity, which “masters the humors [Stemning]” ( see STIMMUNG ), is described in contrast to the abstract continuity of the mystic. The ethical choice of oneself involves becoming-oneself as a task of existence in its continuity in accord with duration. That is the origin of “the concrete person in continuity [A].” Ethical triumph has to do with the “fact of being continuous”—continuity ( B ); it is the fact of being at once hope and memory. In fact, the unhappy relationship to the past and to the future of man deprived of presence is at the opposite pole from the positivity of movement backward ( repentance ) and forward ( desire ), which characterizes the purity of heart of the person who desires the One. “Repentance must have its time,” which is nothing other than the return to a past marked by the lack of this desire. It works in favor of the cohesion of life animated by movement forward.
Aside from continuity ( A ) as the permanence of humanity, that is, “descent as continuity in the history of the species,” recourse to this notion appears especially when there are figures or situations whose traits are marked by an absence of continuity. That is the case for the aesthetician, the ironist, who has no continuity ( A ) other than boredom. Kierkegaard was inspired here by the ironic negativity that Hegel dealt with in his Aesthetics apropos of romantic art. ( It also anticipates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who is “tired of poets.” ) The ironist frees himself from continuity ( A ) with the real conditions of a temporal existence; he lives an “eternity without content,” a felicity without joy, a superficial depth of the being at the same time starved and sated. He lacks continuity; being prey to successive humors “that instantly succeed one another,” he is, as it were, confusedly diffused in them. To that is connected, in Either/Or, “the poetic infinity” of boredom or of the void characteristic of “demonic pantheism” ( ibid. ), or again, of the unhappy eternity of the bookkeeper, sketched in counterpoint to the happy eternity of “a voluptuously beautiful woman in a harem, reclining on a sofa in all her allure” ( ibid.; see PLUDSELIGHED ).
The interruption of continuity also has a gnoseological meaning. For instance, when faced by becoming in its diverse forms, it is not bodies of knowledge in continuity with each other but, rather, “opposed passions” that are established. That is the case of faith and doubt, which are dependent not on conclusions but on a decision. The loss of “continuity with oneself” marks the “new creature” constituted by the believer, who is, as it were, born a second time. The demonic and this believer are thus two antagonistic figures with respect to continuity. Alongside the properly theological development of the continuity of sin and eternity, the Christian theory of the instant is the occasion for a barely veiled critique of Hegelianism. It denounces the reduction to this “simple continuity [A]” that is carried out by thinking that ignores the instant as a “plenitude of time.” It consists in believing that the meaning of the past can be brought out, not on the basis of what it really was ( incarnation, redemption ), but in a relationship of “simple continuity” with the future, namely, progress and history in conformity with the Weltgeist. Similarly, to think we can access the future not on the basis of what it will be ( resurrection, judgment ) but in continuity with the historical present is to underestimate the import of the instant instituted by Christianity.
The most explicit discussions of continuity and discontinuity with respect to the rhythm of thought are found in the great “theoretical” work of 1846, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. When thought believes it can find a foundation in the “solidity of the continuous,” it feels sure of itself, and consequently directly communicable sub specie aeterni. Like Socrates, the existent aware of “the deceptive life” in which he interacts with the idea finds himself “isolated,” having only an “extremely private relationship with it.” The possibility of death, which foils infinity’s deceptions, casts doubt on any kind of positive assurance. The consciousness of finite time impedes continuous thought and situates man in the time of becoming. Time imposes its law and prevents this “abstract continuity which is not a continuity” from being prolonged. Thought’s passion is opposed to the false continuity of abstract thought, because it is the “momentaneous continuity [B] that both slows the movement and is its impetus.” Time, which cannot fail to affect thought, imposes on it a discontinuous rhythm, suspends the immanent continuity of conceptual sequences. It is in the staccato temporality of individual existence and not in the great continuity of world history that the relationship to the Absolute is played out, a relationship that consists of suffering and tribulation. Whereas in the ethical order temptations and tests attack temporal existence at its weak points, ( religious ) tribulations are like “Nemesis bearing on the powerful instant of the absolute relationship.” Continuity ( B ) is broken when “the real resistance of the Absolute” is expressed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Edited by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. 25 vol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
CONTINUITY
“Continuity” ( from tenere [to hold, last, persist] and cum [with, together] ) designates an uninterrupted persistence in time and also in space. Kierkegaard’s proposal of original terminological distinctions in Danish is discussed in CONTINUITET; we will complete the Kierkegaardian lexicon concerning time in the articles PLUDSELIGHED ( suddenness-without-consequence ), MOMENT, Box 3, and NEUZEIT, Box 1.
We have also studied the expression of continuity through the “aspect” of verbs, which denotes the mode in which action develops: see ASPECT.
More broadly, see TIME [AIÔN, MEMORY, PRESENT].
EPISTEMOLOGY, FORCE, PERCEPTION
CORSO, RICORSO ( ITALIAN )
| ENGLISH | course, return, recurrence | ||
| FRENCH | cours, retour, récurrence |
RÉVOLUTION, TIME, and AIÔN, AUFHEBEN, CIVILTÀ, DESTINY, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, MENSCHHEIT, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION, PERFECTIBILITY
Two words in everyday Italian, corso and ricorso, have acquired philosophical status because of Giambattista Vico’s use of them in his Scienza nuova ( 1744 ). These words are associated with the idea of a cyclical conception of history that Vico is supposed to have defended at a time when the linear conception of an indefinite progress of humanity was being established. For a long time, Vico’s work has been generally known only from this point of view, but an attentive study of his texts shows that it is very questionable whether in his Scienza nuova Vico merely adopts the ancient theme of the cyclical nature of time. This superficial and even erroneous interpretation of what he calls the corso and ricorso of nations prevents us from seeing the depth and originality of his thought.
I. Neither Cycle nor Spiral
The Italian word corso derives from Latin cursus ( from currere ), which designates a race, the act of running, and figuratively the course or itinerary followed by something ( cursus rerum, cursus vitae ). Vico uses it in the expression corso che fanno le nazioni ( the course followed by nations ), which serves as the title of Book Four of the Scienza nuova, designating the development of nations through time ( Vico speaks only of “nations,” which are concrete realities, and not of “humanity,” an abstract term designating the human species ). The “scientific” study of this necessary, universal evolution and unfolding is the Scienza nuova’s chief goal: “since these institutions have been established by divine providence, the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” ( §348 ). This is what Vico calls “eternal ideal history” ( storia ideal’ eterna ). The actual history of nations is thus governed by a law of succession and can be divided into three “ages,” that of the gods, that of heroes, and that of men. In the course of this history human beings, starting from a virtually animal state, develop the seeds of “humanity” that exist in them. The last state is that of “reason completely developed” ( ragion tutta spiegata ), with the appearance and flourishing of abstract thought, of philosophy and science. On the political level, it coincides with the emergence of the popular republic or democracy.
Thus we might think that corso so defined is a kind of constant progress leading, as Vico puts it, to an akmê ( culmination ). But history, with the examples of Greece and especially Rome, on which Vico concentrated his analyses almost exclusively, shows that it is difficult if not impossible for nations to maintain themselves in this state of complete perfection of their humanity, and that, as is shown by the paradigmatic fate of Rome, the principle of freedom, which is that of democracy, makes the latter degenerate into anarchy and corruption.
This is where Vico’s text has to be examined very closely. For this state of disorder in which cities then find themselves, divine providence has three remedies, according to Vico. The first is the appearance of a monarch who, like Augustus, holds the institutions and the laws in his hands, makes order and equity reign, and makes subject peoples content with their fate. The second is that degenerate populations fall into the hands of better populations and are reduced to the status of provinces. The third and most radical occurs when the first two have proven impossible. When the social disintegration provoked by the “barbarity of reflection” ( barbarie della riflessione ) has reached its extreme, nations return to the primitive state of “barbarity of sensation” ( barbarie del senso ) from which they had long before emerged. A new corso begins, which Vico calls a ricorso, and it will repeat, not in their events, but in their temporal structure, the three stages of the corso defined through the study of the history of Greece and Rome. The fifth and last book of the Scienza nuova, which is devoted to the ricorso delle cose umane ( the ricorso of human affairs ), thus offers a panorama of the history of Western nations taken as a whole and seen as one and the same nation after the fall of the Roman Empire. The West moves from an “age of the gods,” then from an “age of heroes”—which coincides with what we call the Middle Ages and what Vico calls “the barbarous times come again” ( tempi barbari ritornati )—to an“age of men” ( età degli uomini ), which is the modern world.
As we see, the word ricorso does not refer, as is often believed, to a backward movement, to a regression, a process of involution that makes nations retrace their steps and brings them back to their point of departure ( understood in that way, the ricorso would be the inverse of the corso ). The return to the starting point comes at the end of a corso, and makes it possible for another corso ( ri-corso ), identical in its general structure, to begin.
Before inquiring into the view of the history of nations that emerges from these analyses, we must note two important points. On the one hand, Vico does not speak of the “ricorso of human affairs” in the first edition of the Scienza nuova ( 1725 ), in which the principles of his “science” are already laid out, which proves that the question is not essential for him, and that it is merely a confirmation of the general validity of these principles. And on the other hand, he never uses, in the final version of his work, the words corso and ricorso in the plural, which disconfirms the common interpretation that holds that for Vico history offers the spectacle of a series of corsi and ricorsi indefinitely succeeding each other—unless, to give this succession the appearance of a progress, these cycles are seen as a spiral; but neither this image nor the idea connected with it is found in Vico’s work.
Corso can be translated into French by cours, but the translation of ricorso is more delicate. Recours ( recourse, appeal ) appears in the juridical vocabulary, and if we can acknowledge that Vico’s ricorso does indeed have the meaning of an “appeal” that nations might make before the tribunal of history, it does not refer, or no longer refers, to the repetition of a course, of a run ( the verb recourir, in one of its common meanings, preserves this idea, and a course that has not been properly run has to be rerun ). Jules Michelet translates ricorso by retour, but we might also suggest récurrence as a rendering.
II. Is the Ricorso Inevitable?
While the common interpretation of ricorso in Vico as merely a simple ( and regrettable, according to some writers ) borrowing of the old theme, naturalistic in origin, of the cycle of life and death, here applied to nations, is not defensible, the Scienza nuova nonetheless raises questions that are difficult to answer. However, a careful reading allows us to arrive at some reasonable conclusions. For Vico, the corso followed by nations is an “idea” realizing itself in time, an idea inferred from an informed observation of the history of various nations, and whose specifically “scientific” value derives from the fact that it can be deduced, in an axiomatic way, from the study of fallen human nature after original sin. This idea allows us to understand the temporal destiny of all nations, and has at the same time an heuristic value: thus Vico “discovers” the true identity of Homer ( Book 3 of the Scienza nuova is entitled “Discovery of the True Homer ), and between the first and last editions of his work, he “discovers” that the Middle Ages is simply a repetition of the “divine” and “heroic” ages of Greek and Roman antiquity. An idea cannot be pluralized; it is unique, and this implies, as we have seen, that all nations that have existed, or now exist, or will exist, have had, have, and will have a history whose general movement follows the corso outlined by Vico. Ultimately, and in a more concrete way, Vico merely affirms that the emergence and development of all human societies are based on religious, moral, juridical, and political values embodied in institutions whose form changes in accord with an immutable temporal order, as the nature of fallen man changes and transforms itself, “humanizes itself,” without the effects of the original Fall ever completely disappearing.
Does that mean that at the end of the corso followed by each nation there is necessarily a final decadence and dissolution, and that to save humankind providence must always use its ultimate means, which is to bring nations violently back to their principles, which are also their beginnings, in order to allow them to begin all over again? This is not certain. Vico offers few explanations on this point, but in any case we find nowhere in his work the idea of a mechanical or organic necessity that would condemn nations to an ineluctable death, other nations taking their place in order to follow the same process. In the case of Rome, the final dissolution was the result of the failure, due to humans themselves, of the first remedy that providence provided them, namely the establishment of a rational monarchy. Was this failure inevitable? Are “human” times, those of “completely developed” reason, always condemned to corruption and death? The question remains open, and Vico himself gave no categorical response to it. When at the end of the Scienza nuova he speaks of the situation of modern Europe, he appears to think that “today a complete humanity [umanità, in the sense of “civilization”] seems to be spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples” ( §1089 ). But this declared optimism is counterbalanced by a severe judgment on modern culture, and in particular on the philosophy of his period, whose dominant trends seem to Vico to adopt the positions of those who, in antiquity, participated in the general corruption by preaching a dissolving individualism ( Skeptics, Epicureans, Stoics ). But he never predicts the final catastrophe, even if he fears it. The world of nations, he repeats, is not prey to the casus ( accident ) or to the fatum ( fate ). The “new science” he claims to have founded permits him, as he says in a passage in the 1725 edition, only to offer a “diagnosis” of the state of the nations, to call them to the order of freedom and justice, with respect for the founding principles of every society, religion, and the family. So far as the rest is concerned, nations hold their destiny in their own hands, under the watchful eye of the providence that wants to “preserve the human race upon this earth” ( §1108 ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Vico, Giambattista. The First New Science. Translated by L. Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The first edition of Scienza nuova was published in 1725, with subsequent editions in 1744 and 1774.
. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translation of the third edition ( 1774 ) with the addition of “Practice of the New Science.” Edited by T. Goddard Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
CROYANCE
The French word croyance derives from the Latin credere, which means “to confide in,” “believe, think,” and, in an intransitive sense, “to be confident” or “to believe, have faith.” The term is thus capable of combining two heterogeneous notions: a logical and epistemological one of opinion and assent, and another religious or even superstitious one of faith.
I. Croyance and Foi: Der Glaube
The two registers are not, however, differentiated in the same way in all languages. While French can choose to oppose croyance and foi, as English opposes “belief” and “faith,” the German expression der Glaube ( belief, faith ) cannot by itself indicate the distinction between logical assent and adherence to a religious content. Whence the difficulty encountered by French and English translators in making intelligible both the Kantian adage “I had to limit knowledge [Wissen] to make room for belief/faith [Glauben]” and the transition to the Hegelian problem of the relations between “faith” and “knowledge” after the Enlightenment: see GLAUBE. See also FAITH, RELIGION, SECULARIZATION.
II. Croyance and Assentiment
1. The English term “belief,” which is derived from Germanic Glaube, gradually detached itself from “faith” ( from Latin fides [faith, confidence, sincerity, protection] ) to designate, from Hume to Wittgenstein, the whole field of a “grammar of assent” on the basis of the polarity of feeling and judgment. See BELIEF.
2. On the degrees of assent and the relationship to the object or to reality, see DOXA, PERCEPTION, Box 3, REPRÉSENTATION, TRUTH, WILL. See also VERNEINUNG; cf. CERTITUDE, PROBABILITY, REASON.
3. On the belief in the external world, the existence of the object, and the “suspension” demanded by skepticism and phenomenology, see EPOCHÊ; cf. BEGRIFF, Box 1, GREEK, OBJECT.
CLAIM, EPISTEMOLOGY, MATTER OF FACT
CULTURE
The French word culture, like its analogues in various European languages, comes from the Latin cultura, which designates agriculture and the transformation of nature, implying a relationship to places and to gods ( colere, the verb from which it derives, also means “inhabit” and “worship” ), and, starting with Cicero, the cultivation of the mind and the education of the individual. It denotes a tension between the natural and art or artifice, on the one hand, and between the human universal and particularity or singularity on the other.
I. Cultura ( Lat. ), Paideia ( Gr. ), Bildung ( Ger. )
The Latin cultura, which concerns the harmonious adaptation of nature, proposes a model entirely different from that of the Greek paideia [παιδεία], in which we hear the Promethean art of making a little man ( pais [παῖϛ] ), or rather a little Hellene ( see BILDUNG, Box 1, TO TRANSLATE, I, and ART, I ). The term, which is exceptionally rich and full of connotations, is connected with Bild, “image” ( see BILD and IMAGE ), with Einbildungskraft, “imagination” ( see IMAGINATION ), and refers to “formation” ( bilden ) and “plasticity” ( see PLASTICITY and ART, Box 2 ).
II. Bildung/Kultur/Zivilisation ( Ger. ), Culture/Civilisation ( Fr. ), Civiltà ( Ital. )
Bildung, which retains the element of particularity in the notion of individual formation, is distinguished from both Kultur and Zivilisation in an unparalleled triplet. See BILDUNG for the evolution of these three terms from the Enlightenment onward ( cf. LIGHT ).
See the same entry for the way in which the Franco-German relationship has been determined by the meaning and value of the French word civilisation in relation to the German Kultur. Finally, Italian civiltà refers both to “civilization” and “civility”; see CIVILTÀ.
III. Culture/Cultures
On the tension between universal civilization and particular culture, see MENSCHHEIT, Box 1; TO TRANSLATE, Box 2; cf. EUROPE, LOGOS, NAROD, PEOPLE.
IV. The Great Interactions
1. On the relation between culture and nature, see ART, BILDUNG, FATHERLAND, GENIUS, INGENIUM, NATURE.
2. On the relation between culture and history, see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, SECULARIZATION.
3. On the relation between culture and art, see ART, KITSCH, MIMÊSIS ( and BILDUNG, Box 1, for mimêsis rhêtorikê [μίμησιϛ ῥητоριϰή] ).