ACT, DISPOSITION, EVENTFACT
“Fact” derives from the Latin factum, the neuter nominalized participle of facere, “to make, to do” ( from the same root as the Greek tithêmi [τίθημι], “to put, to place” ). Facts are distinguished by their positive character, independent of fiction or norms.
I. Fact/Fiction
The term “fact” refers first to what is given, especially in experience as a phenomenon, or in history as an event, and is thus distinguished from the illusory or fictional. We have chosen to study and compare two particular networks: the English network, which we look at on the basis of its idiomatic expressions—see MATTER OF FACT, cf. ENGLISH; and German terminology, which is built up in translation of and in counterpoint to English empiricism: see TATSACHE. TATSACHE, Box 1, examines the study of existential reinvestment of the Kantian Faktum, by way of Kierkegaard’s Danish.
More generally, on the objective status of facts, see APPEARANCE, PHÉNOMÈNE, [ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND, OBJECT, REALITY, RES], THING.
On the language to which it gives rise, see FALSE, FICTION [ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY], TRUTH. On facts as statements of a present ( infectum ) by contrast with a “perfect” ( perfectum ), see ASPECT; cf. PRESENT.
II. Fact/Law
The order of facts is contrasted with the order of law. Facts deal with the empirical and the contingent, in accordance with nature or culture, in contrast with logico-mathematical necessity and the norms of practice and law. The intricate relations between the truth of facts and practical and legal norms is especially salient in Russian: see PRAVDA. The relations between truth value ( validity ) and moral value ( value ) are especially visible in German: see WERT.
On the relationship to knowledge, see, besides ISTINA and TRUTH, EPISTEMOLOGY, GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN.
On the notion of experience, and experience of self, see CONSCIOUSNESS, EPOCHÊ, EXPERIMENT, and cf. CULTURE, EXPERIENCE.
On the relation to ethics, see DUTY, MORALS, SOLLEN.
On the question quid facti / quid iuris? see DROIT, LAW [RIGHT, LEX, TORAH, THEMIS], cf. DESTINY, FAIR.
FACTURE
From the Latin factura ( fabrication ), derived from facere ( to make ), the word refers to the way in which a work of art is made, and the French word facteur refers to, among other things, a maker of musical instruments. We have focused on the Russian term faktura [ϕактура], which acquires remarkable importance in the early twentieth century ( see FAKTURA ).
On its relations to material, see ART ( esp. Box 2 ), DISEGNO, FORM, PLASTICITY.
On artistic style, see MANIERA, MIMÊSIS, STYLE.
AESTHETICS, DESSEIN, DESSIN, DICHTUNG
FAIR / FAIRNESS / EQUITY
JUSTICE, LAW [LEX], PHRONÊSIS, PRUDENTIAL, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, UTILITY, VERGÜENZA
The untranslatable “fairness” is of renewed contemporary interest thanks to the original use made of it by the American philosopher John Rawls. In the French translation of his work A Theory of Justice, “fairness” was translated as équité. Rawls seeks to establish a contrast between a moral “deontological” conception, like his own, in which respect for individual rights and fair treatment are of primary importance, and a teleological conception, in which rights and justice may be sacrificed for the realization of the supreme Good, the ultimate telos, as in utilitarian philosophy. Above all, he makes justice the result of an agreement between the parties to a social contract on the model of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. He completely rejects the idea that justice may be the object of an intellectual intuition as held by intuitionist doctrines. This is why the expression “procedural justice” is often associated with this representation of justice as fairness. But the English term “fairness” combines several semantic fields in such a peculiar way that some languages, like German, have opted to take over the term as such without translating it. French, indeed, has adopted the expression “fair play” but must otherwise be content with near equivalents, none of which articulates the central ideas of honesty, impartiality, justice, and equity in the same way as “fairness.”
I. Common Uses
In nonphilosophical language, “fair” intersects with several distinct fields. The oldest is that of color, in which “fair” refers to whatever is light, agreeable, or bodes well, as opposed to “foul,” which refers to the dark, ugly, and what bodes ill. Thus, in Shakespeare, the “fair maiden” is a pretty girl with blond hair and a light complexion. Similarly, today, “fair weather” is pleasant. In a second semantic field, “fair” refers to what is morally untarnished, honest and without stain, and irreproachable, as when we speak of a clear conscience. Third, a more recent sense, which goes beyond the individual, his character, or his consciousness, characterizes action, conduct, and the general rules of action; “fair” thus lays the emphasis on the absence of fraud and dishonesty, whence the expression “fair play,” which refers to a respect for the rules of the game. It is at this level that the notions of honesty and impartiality meet. An action, a method, or a kind of reasoning is fair if it rejects arbitrary preferences, undue favor, or partiality and if it does not aim to win out by dishonest means or by force. Thus, in a fourth sense, the term “fairness” becomes an essential component of the idea of justice: the result of its procedures, methods, reasoning, or decisions is itself fair, that is, justified and deserved, when we take its conditions into account. It is just in the sense that it satisfies the formula “to each his due.” The final sense of “fairness” is one according to which, alongside the impartiality of a procedure, a treatment, a decision, and the conformity of their results with justice, we find the idea of measure, of a quantity that is moderate but sufficient.
II. “Fairness” and “Equity”
In philosophical language, the translation of “fairness” by a cognate of “equity” is problematic since in English the term “equity” already exists, coming from the Latin aequitas as a translation for Aristotelian “equity,” and has been preserved in technical language, kept relatively apart from the semantic field of fairness. Indeed, the term used by Aristotle refers to a different idea—that of a conflict between the letter and the spirit of the law: “the equitable is just but not the legally just but a correction of legal justice” ( Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.10.1137b; see THEMIS, IV ). There is thus a jurisdiction in English law ( the equity jurisdiction ) whose task is to justify exceptions where the law is faulty or too rigid—what legal vocabulary calls “cases of equity” ( cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, §38 ). This worry about equity in the Aristotelian sense lies behind the tradition of common law and the latitude it gives to judges in their interpretation of laws. We thus see how Aristotelian “equity” and Rawlsian “fairness” could come to be opposed to one another.
III. “Fairness” and Impartiality: The Duty of Fair Play
While equity may correct justice, fairness is at the heart of it insofar as it requires impartial treatment of people. This contemporary philosophical meaning goes back to Henry Sidgwick and his attempt to synthesize Kant and utilitarianism, and it stipulates that
it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are two different individuals, and without there being any differences between the natures or the circumstances of the two which can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment. . . . The principle just discussed, which seems to be more or less clearly implied in the common notion of “fairness” or “equity,” is obtained by considering the similarity of the individuals that make up a Logical Whole or Genus.
( Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. 3, chap. 13, §3 )
What is original is Sidgwick’s extension of the term, which prefigures Rawls’s account of fairness. He interprets it in an intersubjective sense as the principle that consists in treating equally “all parts of our conscious life”: “I ought not prefer a present lesser good to a future greater good” ( ibid. ). By the same reasoning, he extends it intersubjectively to the principle of universal benevolence ( ibid. ), the utilitarian principle that demands that we maximize the general happiness
by considering the relation of the integrant parts to the whole and to each other, I obtain the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ( if I may say so ) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other. And it is evident to me that as a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally,—so far as it is attainable by my efforts.
IV. “Fairness” and Justice
For Sidgwick, the term “fairness” comes to encapsulate a general theory not only of justice but also of rightness, of moral duty. This development reaches maturity in Rawls’s account, in which “justice” is defined as fairness in the sense of an equal respect to which all rational beings have a right, that is, in the sense of the Kantian categorical imperative: “the principles of justice are . . . analogous to the categorical imperative” ( Rawls, Theory of Justice, §40 ). As with Kant, but for other reasons, this conception of justice is procedural—it applies first to processes, not to an atemporal order. First, it characterizes a certain way of acting toward other humans and living beings in general. Second, it is itself a result of procedures; it does not exist “in itself” or by conformity with an external criterion:
One must give up the conception of justice as an executive decision altogether and refer to the notion of justice as fairness: that participants in a common practice be regarded as having an original and equal liberty and that their common practices be considered unjust unless they accord with principles which persons so circumscribed and related could freely acknowledge before one another, and so could accept as fair. Once the emphasis is put upon the concept of the mutual recognition of principles by participants in a common practice the rules of which are to define their several relations and give form to their claims on one another, then it is clear that the granting of a claim the principle of which could not be acknowledged by each in the general position ( that is, in the position in which the parties propose and acknowledge principles before one another ) is not a reason for adopting a practice.
( Rawls, “Justice as Fairness” )
Thus, when we examine distributive justice or social justice in the economic domain of exchanges, contracts, salaries, and prices of the market, the term “fairness” takes its meaning as justice in distribution, in pricing, in salaries; these are not just “in themselves” as Aristotle says, but the most just in relation to the special conditions of competition:
[I]ncome and wages will be just once a ( workably ) competitive price system is properly organized and embedded in a just basic structure. . . . The distribution that results is a case of background justice on the analogy with the outcome of a fair game.
( Rawls, Theory of Justice, §47 )
Thus, when philosophers wish to think about justice, they have two registers in which they may work: the first is that of fairness and procedural justice, that is, impartiality and honesty, as well as equity in decisions, procedures, exchanges, distributions, contracts, and so on, without independent criteria for evaluating the results. The other is that of just and right, which imply conformity with an external and independent criterion, obligation, and moral and legal duty, with reference to an ideal of objectivity and truth. In philosophical usage, “justice” tends to be applied more to the results of procedural fairness ( Barry, Theories of Justice ). But the differences are often simply a question of use.
We can thus understand why, if we wish to construct an entirely conventional account of justice, as in Hume, which would nevertheless not be arbitrary, the term “fairness” and its anthropocentric aspects may be a legitimate choice. By way of the associated theory, the philosophical meaning retains the reference to human situations in which rational partners attempt to resolve their differences, as in the signature of a contract, without appealing to independent criteria. Rawls’s theory is especially interesting from this point of view, since it attempts to achieve equality and social justice on the basis of a procedure rather than imposing them as independent criteria, as is almost always the case. Rawls often uses the terms “just” and “fair” interchangeably, which we may see as resulting from a desire to dispense with all moral realism and to discover principles of justice in the dialectic of interests and passions alone. Indeed, Rawls compares the theory of justice with the pure theory of prices or market equilibrium in such a way that his conception of the first is fully contractualist, in the same sense as for Rousseau—namely, that the just is a result of universal suffrage, that is, from the contract each person has with everyone else. The equitable and the just do not exist in themselves; they result, rather, from an agreement on the conditions of liberty, equality, and impartiality collected under the metaphor of the “veil of ignorance.” Any intervention inspired by an external criterion, whether from the threat of force or from an ideology such as equality, would make the decision come out wrong.
V. “Fairness” and Equality
We see, then, that unlike in the second register of just and right, “fairness” does refer to justice, but without the idea of equality playing a role as an independent criterion. In a theory of justice that is itself egalitarian, inequalities may be justified or fair if and only if they are the result of conditions or principles which are themselves fair ( Rawls’s second principle ). Equality is thus indeed a component of justice, but as a result of the procedure rather than as a condition imposed a priori. In his use of “fairness,” Rawls announces that it is no longer possible to speak of justice independently of human judgment and procedure. “Fairness” combines impartiality of the conditions of choice, honesty of procedure, and equity with regard to those entering contracts and thus makes it possible to construct a theory of justice that is purely procedural.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristole. Nicomachean Ethics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1984.
Barry, Brian. Theories of Justice. London: Harvester, 1989.
Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published 1739–40.
Rawls, John. “Justice as Fairness.” Philosophical Review 67 ( 1958 ): 164–94.
. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 6th ed. London: MacMillan, 1901; 7th ed., preface, J. Rawls. London: Hackett Publishing, 1981. First published in 1874.
FAITH
Faith comes from the Latin fides, which refers to the confidence one inspires ( the “credit” or “credibility” of a speech ) and that which one grants, taking its entire extension from the language of law: “solemn engagement, guarantee, oath” ( cf. foedus, “treaty” ), “good faith, fidelity.” The same Indo-European root *bheidh-, “to rely upon, persuade,” is found in the Greek peithomai [πείθομαι], “to obey,” and in the active peithô [πείθω], “to persuade.” Christian Latin makes the term more specialized, using it as a noun for credo, “to believe,” in the sense of trust in God.
Different modern languages do not all separate in the same way the legal, rhetorical, and logical network on the one hand—credit and credibility, confidence and belief—and the religious network of “faith,” properly speaking, on the other. German, in particular, with der Glaube, translated by “faith” or “belief,” does not offer this distinction: see BELIEF, GLAUBE, CROYANCE.
More generally, for the relationships to the logical network, see ISTINA and TRUTH, PRAVDA, but also CERTITUDE, DUTY, EIDÔLON, Box 1, FICTION, INTENTION, PROBABILITY.
For the religious network, see especially PIETAS, RELIGION; cf. ALLIANCE, DESTINY, LEX.
FAKTURA [ϕактура] ( RUSSIAN )
| ENGLISH | workmanship, texture | ||
| LATIN | factura |
FACTURE, and ART, MANIERA, PLASTICITY, STYLE
In the traditional sense of the term—which is derived from the Latin factura ( manufacture )—faktura is the combination of characteristics of paintings or sculptures that relate to the ways in which the material has been worked by the artist and that constitutes the concrete element of style. It is thus a nonnegligible result, but one whose value remains secondary. Nevertheless, in the 1910s and 1920s in Russia, the term faktura [ϕактура], which is normally translated as “facture” or “texture,” acquired unprecedented conceptual and ideological importance.
Zaoum ( Russ. zaum [ᴈаум] )—a poetic form that refuses submission to meaning in order to give priority to the qualities of the verbal material itself—and the possibilities opened up by pictorial abstraction prompted intense reflection on the role of the components of a work. Thus, different typologies of the “plastic elements” appeared. In the Russian context, especially among the constructivists, adepts of a substantial materialism, the “culture of materials” took on a decisive importance. Vladimir Markov was one of the pioneers of this new attention being given to workmanship ( faktura [ϕактура] ) with reference to the material: “The love of material is an incitement for man. To ornament it and work it yields the possibility of obtaining all the forms that belong to it, the ‘resonances’ that we call faktura” ( “Principes de la création” ).
Several years later, Nicolas Tarabukin made faktura autonomous, and hence a plastic element in its own right:
All of the originality of the textural aspect of contemporary painting comes from what has been detached from the ensemble of pictorial problems and transformed into a particular problem, thus creating a whole school of texturalists.
( “Pour une théorie de la peinture” )
Plastic experimentation with various materials in effect led Tatlin and some other Russian artists to create pictorial reliefs or three-dimensional constructions, such as counter-reliefs, which prompt the viewer to dissociate the “texture” ( faktura ) from the other elements with which it is presented, especially, in the case of painting, color. If, as Tarabukin claims, “it is the material that dictates the form to the artist and not the reverse” ( ibid. ), the study of the material being put to work—that is, the study of texture—opens up new possibilities: when the material and the form remain fixed entities, the texture creates a dynamic link between them. Coming from the flow, it displays and records the enlivening energy of a dialectic in action.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gan, Aleksei. Konstruktivizm. Tverï: Tverskoe izd-vo, 1922.
Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. Reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Markov, Vladimir. “Principes de la création dans les arts plastiques. La Facture.” 1914. In Le constructivisme dans les arts plastiques. Vol. 1 of Le constructivisme Russe, edited by G. Conio. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1987.
Tarabukin, Nicolas. “Pour une théorie de la peinture.” 1923. In Le constructivisme dans les arts plastiques. Vol. 1 of Le constructivisme Russe, edited by G. Conio. Lausanne, Switz.: L’Âge d’Homme, 1987.
FALSE
“False,” like “fault,” comes from the Latin fallo, which means “to deceive” and, in the passive, “to be deceived” ( falsus [false, deceptive, someone deceived], probably from the same etymology as the Greek sphallô [σφάλλω], meaning “I cause to fall”; see PARDON, II ). The false, like the true, involves two registers, linguistic and ontological, and the distinction between the two leads into ethics. The reader will find under TRUTH, IV a note on the evolution of the antonyms of “true,” by way of Greek ( pseudês [ψευδής], “false” and “deceptive” ) to Latin ( fallax, “false”/mendax, “lying” ). In a general way, each characterization of the truth comprises a characterization of its antonym: see ISTINA, PRAVDA.
I. Logic: False, Proposition, Speech
1. To speak falsely is to say things as they are not. From the point of view of traditional logic, an isolated word cannot be true or false as such, but rather requires “composition”: see under PROPOSITION the exploration of the terminology for what is capable of being true and false. See also DICTUM, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, and SUBJECT. For a comparison with the minimal unit, which is the correlate of meaning but not of the true or the false, see SIGN, WORD, and cf. SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED. And with the all-encompassing unit of speech, see LANGUAGE, LOGOS.
2. On the content of propositions, their “import” and the object of judgment, see SACHVERHALT; cf. TATSACHE; on what makes a proposition true or false, see SPEECH ACT.
3. The difference between what is false and what lacks meaning altogether is discussed in the context of the English word NONSENSE; see also SENSE.
4. On the logical principles, especially the principle of noncontradiction, which govern truth and error, see PRINCIPLE; cf. HOMONYM.
5. On the validity of demonstrations and their value, see IMPLICATION.
II. Ontology: The False and the Real
1. To speak falsely is also, more radically, to say things that are not. The false is not just a logical issue, but an ontological one as well. The problem of the false thus cuts across that of appearances, as opposed to reality and its objects: see APPEARANCE [DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG], PHÉNOMÈNE, NOTHING. Some languages combine the veridical with the perceptual, thus the German Wahrnehmung ( PERCEPTION, Box 3 ); cf. REPRÉSENTATION.
2. We are thus referred to the objectivity of the object, to the reality of the real; see especially ESSENCE, GEGENSTAND, IL Y A, OBJECT, REALITY, THING, TO BE.
3. We are also led to the problems of images and imagination, and the ambiguous value of aesthetic illusion: see IMAGE [BILD, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MIMÊSIS.
III. Ethics: The False and Fault
1. The direct relationship in some languages between the “false” and “fault” is studied under DUTY, III.
2. The difference between “being deceived” and “deceiving” comes, not in what is said, but in the use made of what is said and the intentions behind it. The Greek pseudês does not distinguish them, unlike the nonfixed Latin pair fallax/mendax ( see TRUTH, IV ). On the complexity of intention, see INTENTION, and WILL, WILLKÜR; cf. DESTINY, LIBERTY, MORALS. See also LIE.
3. Further, we may speak of things that do not exist without the intention of deceiving, see SENSE; cf. HOMONYM. We then find the problem for speech of aesthetic illusion ( see section II.3 above ), which deals with the network of fiction: see DECEPTION, TRUTH, Box 3, and DESENGAÑO, FICTION, HISTORY, SPEECH ACT.
4. Finally, it is possible not to speak while speaking; see in particular VERNEINUNG, cf. NEGATION; and, for German words that indicate privation or failure, see COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION.
FANCY / IMAGINATION
IMAGINATION [PHANTASIA], and BILDUNG, ERSCHEINUNG, FEELING, GENIUS, IMAGE [BILD], MADNESS, MIMÊSIS, SUBLIME
At the beginning of chapter 4 of the Salon of 1859, “Le gouvernement de l’imagination,” Baudelaire cites in English and immediately translates into French a text by Catherine Crow that he sees as confirming one of his own ideas but in which it is also possible to discern a distinction already long at work in English theoretical texts: “By imagination, I do not simply mean to convey the common notion implied by that much abused word, which is only fancy, but the constructive imagination, which is a much higher function, and which, in as much as man is made in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by which the Creator projects, creates and upholds his universe” ( Œuvres complètes, 2:623–24 ). Though he does not specify which edition he looked at—it may be that of 1848 or 1853—Baudelaire explicitly refers to The Night Side of Nature, which was first published in London.
This distinction appealed to by Baudelaire goes back to the middle of the fifteenth century, when “fancy” was formed as a contraction of “fantasy” ( see RT: Dictionarium Britanicum, 1730 ). It was thus in use for a long time among those English-speaking authors who were sensitive to their language and careful about thinking. It corresponds to two etymologies, one Greek and one Latin “fancy,” from phantasia [φαντασία] and “imagination” ( imaginatio ), the former referring to the creative force of appearance and the latter to reproduction and images. We thus find in English the same kind of pair as in German ( see BILD ). The words “imagination” and “fancy” thus only appear to cover the same idea, and we can see their difference by looking at some important texts of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, this awareness of an imperfect synonymy, which may go as far as complete opposition, does not at all help us to resolve problems of translation.
■ See Box 1.
|
Fancy Before Samuel Taylor Coleridge intervened, aesthetic theory tended to synonymize “fancy” and “imagination” to denote either a residual image from the decay of sense ( Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 2 ) or, more positively, the mind’s inventive play. Appealing to the Greek phantasia, in distinction to the Latin imaginatio, Coleridge delimited “fancy” to productions shaped by accidents and contingencies of sense data. In Biographia Literaria ( 1817, chap. 4 ), he cites Lear’s exclamation to a bedraggled beggar on the stormy heath as “Imagination”: “What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?” ( King Lear, 3.4 ). This is a totalized traumatic psychology—misery can have no other cause for Lear. What may be “contra-distinguished as fancy” ( Coleridge, Biographia Literaria ) is a delirium from Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved: “[l]utes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber”—a disarray of sense-data and normal referents. Coleridge returns to his distinction at the end of chapter 13. Where Imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create, . . . to idealize and unify,” fancy plays with the ready-made “fixities and definites” of memory “emancipated from the order of time and space.” Coleridge focuses on the process; Wordsworth ponders the affective impression. If imagination is “the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements,” fancy is “the power by which pleasure and surprize are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery” ( note in Lyrical Ballads, 1800 ). Leigh Hunt’s Imagination and Fancy ( 1845 ) preferred an affective scale: fancy is “a lighter play of imagination, or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with fairy ornament.” With his painter’s eye, John Ruskin distinguished in terms of detail: fancy renders “a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail. The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in . . . outer detail” ( Modern Painters, vol. 2, 1851 ). John Keats’s last lifetime volume ( Poems ) joins the traditions of fancy as superficial play to charged feminine personifications: Fancy, the charming cheat. While his iconic poem Fancy exhorts, “Ever let the Fancy roam, / Pleasure never is at home” ( 1–2 ), the poet of Lamia speaks of unlocking “Fancy’s casket” for “rich gifts” ( 1.19–20 )—a store with a hint of Pandoran peril. In The Eve of St. Agnes, superstitious Madeline is “hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort” to the dangerous world around her ( 8 ). In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats bid a determined, if wistful, adieu to the charm: “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” ( 8 ). In his copy of Paradise Lost, he underscored the verse in which Adam explains this she-trickery to a dream-disturbed Eve. While in daylight, “Fansie” may serve “Reason” by forming “Imaginations Aerie shapes” into “knowledge or opinion,” in dream-retreat from nature, she merely mimics, while subverting, Reason: ”misjoyning shapes, / Wilde work produces . . . / Ill matching words and deeds” ( 5.102–13 ). Susan J. Wolfson BIBLIOGRAPHY Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. Hunt, Leigh. Imagination and Fancy. London: Routledge, 1995. Keats, John. Poems Published in 1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. London: Smith, Elder, 1851. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman, 1992. |
The distinction between “fancy” and “imagination” is often rendered in French by the contrast between fantaisie and imagination. It is not always wrong to translate “fancy” as fantaisie. We find in Bentham, for example, the expression “principle of caprice or groundless fancy” ( principe du caprice ou de la chimère sans fondement; this translation by chimère could equally well be given by fantaisie; Deontology, §304 ). However, even if we wish to relate fantaisie with its Greek sense and set aside the more peculiar sense of “more or less unhinged improvisation,” which it has acquired, we must note that this distinction almost never captures the sense of the English pair.
I. Imagination and Fancy: The Commonalities
Whether we call the process “imagination” or “fancy,” the commonalities are clear once we understand imagination not so much as a faculty but instead as the ideological resolution of conflicts that are naturally or socially impossible to live with or feel. “Imagination,” like “fancy,” seems to suggest a solution, but this suggestion is already, in a way, a solution. Thus Hume often sprinkles his remarks about the origins of an institution or power with a phrase like “This is founded on a very singular quality of our thought and imagination” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). Imagination is thus indeed a “mistress of error”—as long as we note, as Pascal did with great subtlety, that this is “all the more deceitful as it is not always so.” Imagination is accused of “error” ( ibid. ) as often as fancy. When Hume writes: “ ’Tis natural for one, that does not examine objects with a strict philosophical eye, to imagine that those objects of the mind are entirely the same, which produce not a different sensation, and are not immediately distinguishable to the feeling and perception” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ); “to imagine” has the clear sense of “conceive falsely.” The same is the case when he writes, concerning the symbolic import of a key, a stone, a handful of earth or wheat, that “the suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of this sensible delivery, deceive the mind and make it fancy that it conceives the mysterious transition of the property” ( ibid. ). On both sides, the relation with the passions is treated symmetrically. Something may “satisfy the fancy,” just—and just as often—as it may be “agreeable to the imagination” ( ibid. ).
If imagination and fancy conceive wrongly, however, this implies that they are both capable of conceiving: Hume speaks of the conception of fancy and offers as equivalent “imagination or understanding, call it which you please” ( ibid. ).
II. The Game of Alliances: The Topics of “Imagination” and the Dynamics of “Fancy”
Where, then, are the differences, when they exist? The words “and” and “or” have the philosophical function of weaving alliances between notions into a shifting whole, since an alliance at one point and from one perspective will not necessarily be the same at another point and perspective. The game of alliances is the following.
Statistically—although the argument cannot be ignored in a philosophy whose method consists more in enumerating and weighing cases than in the use of the critical scalpel—“fancy” tends to involve the more fantastical aspects of the imagination. Je me figure telle chose would be rendered by “I fancy” rather than by “I imagine.” The chimerical and system-building philosophers are the ones who, attacking the feminine virtues of modesty and chastity with great vehemence, “fancy that they have gone very far in detecting popular errors” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). Alexander, wherever he saw men “fancied he had found subjects” ( ibid. ). This should not lead us to underestimate the “frivolous” dimension of the imagination: “imagination of the more frivolous properties of our thought” ( ibid. ). However, we would certainly have more difficulty in assimilating “fancy” to “judgment” than to “imagination,” as Hume does. The less intellectual connotation of “fancy” relative to “imagination” is also seen in the comparison of “fancy” with “taste,” which we often find in the Treatise.
Finally, there is a second statistical means of distinguishing the two terms, which becomes fixed in philosophical English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the joint effects of the development of probability theory and dynamic conceptions of mind. “Imagination” refers to the act by which, from a present situation that we are to consider either with respect to its eventual effects or as the result of concurrent causes, we make a list of situations, in the direction of either the past or the future. Imagination performs a sort of abstraction of the dimensions of time, considered as objective points of reference. Imagination thus takes on a topical sense and refers to the ability of our mind to recognize its current situation among others of a greater or lesser number. Imagination implies a kind of tracking that is often as systematic as that of the understanding, even though it may be cursory, less reliable, and less rapid: imagination “conceives” ( ibid. ).
“Fancy” is less systematic and refers rather to the particular act of referring to a situation in which one does not actually find oneself. This is why we speak of laws or of “principles of the imagination” ( ibid. ), which may be said almost without irony to govern men rather than the “laws of fancy,” an expression whose unbearable contradiction is immediately obvious. No doubt it is often a question, for Hume, of the “force” of the imagination, of the effect of events on it, of the flow that carries imagination and fancy both; no doubt “imagination moves” ( ibid. ). However, “imagination” is more phoronomic than dynamic. By contrast, “fancy” more readily and more consciously calls psychic forces to mind; it implies that a furrow has been dug in a given direction: “ ’Tis certain that the tendency of bodies, continually operating upon our senses, must produce, from custom, a like tendency in the fancy” ( ibid. ). Further, the contrast between “imagination” and “fancy” is clear and distinct when Hume writes in the Treatise:
[E]very thing, which invigorates and inlivens the soul, whether by touching the passions or imagination, naturally conveys to the fancy this inclination for ascent, and determines it to run against the natural stream of its thoughts and conceptions.
In conformity with their etymologies, we may thus prefer to speak of imagination when we are concerned with images and their reciprocal relations in space and time, and of fancy with regard to dynamic imagination, which is the springing up of images rather than the images themselves. Fancy does not stop at any particular image; that is precisely where we find its whimsical and “fantastical” aspect, which misleads us if we use it as a starting point. However, it borrows from belief and reality a sort of vividness that imagination does not have. Curiously, imagination, supposedly less fantastical than fancy, is the less credible of the two, precisely because, being closer to understanding, it is also more easily scrutinized in relation to the true and hence appears more false than fancy, which deals with a logic of fiction escaping the domain of both truth and falsity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1976.
Bentham, Jeremy. Deontology, Together with a Table of the Springs of Action, and an Article on Utilitarianism. Edited by A. Goldworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Crowe, Catherine. The Night Side of Nature, or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers. London: T. C. Newby, 1848; New York: Redfield, 1853.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published in 1739–40.
Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1954.
. Pensées and Other Writings. Translated by H. Levi. Introduction by A. Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
FATHERLAND
The Latin patria, like the Greek hê patris [ἡ πατϱίς], means “the land of the father”; cf. PIETAS and RELIGIO. More broadly, see PEOPLE, with the terminological networks that imply soil and blood in contradistinction to those that imply language, culture, politics, and cf. COMMUNITY, STATE.
The German doublet of Vaterland, Heimat, has other connotations, particularly as used by Heidegger; see HEIMAT. On the way the political community in ancient Greece is designated, see POLIS. On the relationship to oikos [οἶϰος], the “specific,” the “familiar,” see, on the one hand, ECONOMY, OIKONOMIA, and on the other, OIKEIÔSIS, a moral conception characteristic of Stoicism, which is rendered by “appropriation” ( cf. APPROPRIATION ).
ANXIETY, GENDER, LIBERTY, LOVE, PROPERTY
FEELING / PASSION / EMOTION / SENTIMENT / SENSATION / AFFECTION / SENSE
| FRENCH | sentir, passion, émotion, sentiment, sensation, impression, affection, sens |
COMMON SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, ENGLISH, GEFÜHL, IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MORAL SENSE, PATHOS, PERCEPTION, SENSE, STIMMUNG
There is a very complex relationship between the English term “feeling,” a word of Saxon origin, and its counterparts in Romance languages. In French, the substantival infinitive le sentir is sometimes used, but with little conviction that it can be a consistently used equivalent. For French translators, moreover, the whole cluster of terms around feeling—“passion,” “emotion,” “sentiment,” “sensation,” “affection,” “sense”—has posed such serious challenges that they sometimes prefer either to leave the English words in parentheses or to create verbal overlays like passion, émotion, sentiment, sensation, impression, affection, or sens. The untranslatability of “feeling” in French reveals the peculiarities of a philosophy of affectivity or, at the least, a way of philosophizing, in English.
I. The Distribution of the English Terms
The definitions that seem to fix the meanings of terms do not refer to stable objects. Thus, Hume contrasts “impressions of sensation” with “impressions of reflection.” The former, or original impressions “are such as without any antecedent perception arise in the soul, from the constitution of the body, from the animal spirits, or from the application of objects to the external organs.” The latter, or secondary impressions, “are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of an idea” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). But no sooner has Hume made these distinctions than he calls, without compunction, “sensation” what he has just picked out as “reflexion” and seems to enter into a relativist spiral that gives no term a chance to stand still. In addition, the connotation of the English terms does not coincide at all in this domain with the French terms. The situation thus contains a twofold discrepancy, one between the signs and their referents, and the other between the system of signs in French and that in English.
The place of “feeling” in the company of “sensation,” “sentiment,” “passion,” “emotion,” “affection,” and “sense” causes problems precisely because French has no analogue for it and thus requires a different delimitation of the homologous terms. The gap that separates “feeling” from the other words clearly derives from its etymology, which owes nothing to Latin but is derived from the Old Saxon folian and Old High German, which gives us fühlen. The Old English felan initially meant “to perceive,” “to touch,” “to grasp.” It is clear that its meaning derived much from “touch” by way of the affective domain. However, we would be wrong to believe that “feeling” took its place among the other terms of affect by filling in an empty space alongside them. We would be equally wrong to expect, moving from English to French, a simply different distribution of the territory of affect, as though affect could be considered a homogenous object with sensations on one side and sentiments on the other, as well as emotions, passions, and sense, the last of which is more normative than any of the others. The words display different attitudes in the understanding of affect rather than different territories. Hence, nothing in itself is referred to by “sensation,” any more than by “sentiment,” “feeling,” or “sense.”
The main divisions in English-language philosophies of the passions that make use of them as of a code are along the following lines: structural meanings versus those that come from an instantaneous and event-related affect; normative meanings versus factual ones; finally, meanings that imply a cognitive grasping versus those that do not.
II. Structure and Event
A. “Sensation” and “feeling” / “passion” and “sentiment”
We may speak, in English or in French, with regard to the sense organs, of sensation ( sensation ) of red or green, of heat or dryness, of hunger or sexual desire. However, English also allows for speaking, especially in Hume’s idiom, of the “sensation” of one or another passion, to refer to the latter not by its structure but as a felt event, by its own particular experienced quality of pleasure and/or pain. The sensation of a passion is distinguished from sentiment, which is the systematic framework of passion, composed of an object, a subject, qualities, causes, a context, of a trajectory of development and a sort of destiny. This structural or structuring character is clearly seen in phrases like: “These are the sentiments of my spleen and indolence” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ), where we understand that “spleen” and “indolence” are less sentiments than something under which sentiments lie ( the sentence should probably be translated: “Tels sont les sentiments qui sous-tendent ma mélancolie et mon indolence” ). We may conceive and even establish, according to Hume’s turn of phrase, a system of sentiment or of passion ( “constant and established passion”; ibid. ); there could not be one for sensation or feeling. One sentiment can oppose another, be contrary to another, but a sensation is only indirectly contrary to another sensation, by the contrariety of the sentiment of which it is the momentary and intermittent experience. So much so that sentiment may well remain unconscious, insensate, and only become experienced at certain phases which make its presence known. Hume notes, for example, that “the passage from one moment to another is scarce felt” ( ibid. ).
Similarly, while passion is structured by the twofold association of impressions and ideas, it is not always obvious that we are “sensible of it” ( ibid. ), even if the passion is violent. In this sense, the noun “sensation” remains close in English to the adjective “sensible,” which is often correctly rendered into French as conscient.
While the terms “sentiment,” “affection,” and “passion” clearly have a structural connotation, the word “feeling” on the other hand is, along with “sensation,” no less clearly on the side of lived experience ( “feeling or experience” and “feeling and experience”; ibid. ). Thus Hume can speak in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, without any redundancy, though to the despair of translators, of “feelings of sentiment.” M. Malherbe speaks of “ce qui s’éprouve par sentiment”; R. Bouveresse, of “impressions du sentiment”; G. Robel of “émotions du sentiment.” None of these solutions is convincing, but is there any way to solve the problem?
B. “Sensation” and “feeling” distinguished by the status of their object
“Sensation” and “feeling” cannot however be substituted for one another indifferently. Unlike Latin or French, English has no verb that, like sentir, corresponds to “sensation.” Thus the word effects a sort of transcendence of lived experience much more fully than does “feeling,” whose proximity to “feel” gives us a simple verbal mode. “Sensation” detaches its object, like a conclusion is detached from its reasoning—which allows Hume to treat “probable reasoning” as “a species of sensation” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). “Feeling” does not posit its object the way “sensation” does. We can even “feel a reverse sensation from the happiness and misery of others” ( ibid. ). “Feeling” barely has any consistency independent of what it feels, since it has no means of conceiving, imagining, or representing. “To feel” marks a collaboration in a process; it plays along either in an immanent or an adherent way, unlike sensation, which is more instantaneous and event-like—so much so that “to feel” is often expressed in the passive, without indicating what is doing the feeling. “Something felt” is said in English, instead of quelque chose de senti, as it must be said in French. Hume goes so far as to say that “[a]n idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea” ( ibid. ).
The impossibility for “feeling” to have an object in the same way that “sensation” has is not without consequences. “Feeling” cannot have truth like “sensation,” if only because sensations can still be felt. If it has truth, it cannot be a truth in conformity with an object, but rather the rightness of an internal relation, which Hume calls “reflexion.” The objects of “feeling” do not necessarily have reality and are usually fictions such as what we call our self, a force, a passage, an inclination, a propensity, a virtuality ( “I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure”; ibid. ), a probability, a difference ( of social condition ), and so on, and one must learn to be on guard against their apparent reality. I feel an inclination in the way I say I feel my mind ( “I feel my mind . . . and am naturally inclin’d”; ibid. ); that is, as I feel something happening inside it, where the expression “in it” does not have a direct representational value.
III. The Normative Aspect: “Sense”
However, when it does not mean a sense organ, it is the word “sense” that attracts the collection of normative characteristics of an internal impression ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). One speaks of a sense of beauty, a sense of sympathy, or a moral sense, even at the cost of showing at the same time that there is no moral sense ( see MORAL SENSE ). We even sometimes use “sense” with the meaning of “good sense” or “reason” ( see COMMON SENSE ). The term “sense” implies a dimension of appreciation that does not necessarily fit with feeling or sensation. When Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste, gives the floor to the skeptic, the latter’s argument maintains that sentiment, sensation, or feeling are always true as long as they are really felt; Hume’s response consists in distinguishing truth from reality and emphasizing that “sense” implies an internal normativity: “Though this axiom [there is no arguing with taste], by passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction of common sense; there is certainly a species of common sense which opposes it, at least serves to modify and restrain it.”
IV. The Cognitive Aspect: “Sentiment,” “Sense”/“Feeling,” “Sensation”
There remains a final semantic gap with regard to affect in English. In relation to cognition, “sentiment” is clearly close to “sense,” unlike “feeling,” and certainly unlike “sensation.”
Sensations are what they are; they are real but not necessarily true for all that: “All sensations are felt by the mind, such as they really are” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). To attribute truth to them solely by virtue of their existence is to commit an error, confusing truth with reality.
On the other hand, “sentiment” is often equivalent to “opinion” and “judgment” ( ibid. ). At least, in the combination of the two concepts that Hume advances so often in his philosophy, “sentiment” frequently shows up near words that impute cognitive character to it. And while “sentiment” is not always equivalent to “opinion,” it is in any case an intellectual posture or attitude, an inclination to opine. The essay Of the Standard of Taste, which distinguishes sentiment from opinion, nevertheless points out that sentiment is capable of being right, while distinguishing, as against “a species of philosophy, which . . . represents the impossibility of ever attaining any standard of taste,” its rightness from its reality, as though it were enough for it to be right ( see GOÛT and RIGHT/JUST/GOOD ).
Some notions that strongly resemble one another when looked at in one perspective can differ dramatically when looked at from another, no less pertinent one with regard to affect. Hume, who gladly joins notions together, comes up with every possible grouping ( “feeling or sentiment” [A Treatise of Human Nature]; “impression or feeling” [ibid.] ), not to mark their equivalence, but rather to show in each case what they contrast with as a pair.
Such a system could never be ontologically stable. Notions are distributed differently depending on the perspective adopted. Thus Hume can write “imagination feels that . . . ,” or “fancy feels that . . . ,” “judgement feels that . . . ,” or “the spirit feels that . . . ” ( A Treatise of Human Nature ). He thinks he can express laws with ontological weight concerning affect by emphasizing, like Bowlby in Attachment and Loss, that “being felt . . . is a phase of the process itself” ( S. Langer, quoted by Bowlby; italics in original ), whereas in fact he only manages to make the semantic tricks of his language work properly, or, at most, to explain them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1, Attachment. London: Hogarth, 1969.
Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by D. Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published in 1779.
. Essays, Moral, Political and Literary. Vol. 3 of The Philosophical Works of David Hume, edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985. First published in 1777.
. Of the Standard of Taste. Vol. 3 of Philosophical Works of David Hume, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. London: Longmans, 1874–75. Translation by M. Malherbe: De la règle du goût, in Essais et traités sur plusieurs sujets: Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires. Paris: Vrin, 1999. Translation by R. Bouveresse: Les essais esthétiques. Paris: Vrin, 1974. Translation by G. Robel: Essais moraux, politiques et littéraires et autres essais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
FICAR
| ENGLISH | to stay, to be, to become |
The Iberian verbs ser and estar have important nuances in their copulative use with respect to the condition of the relation between subject and attribute, whether permanent or transitory, essential or accidental, abstract or concrete, etc. Portuguese adds yet another difference since it has an additional verb for expressing the relation of subject and attribute: the verb ficar, which implants and fixes the attributes onto the subject.
I. The Concrete Origin of the Copula in Ficar
We rarely feel the concrete verbal meaning of a copulative verb, no doubt because of the semantic force of the attributes that tend to hide it or place it in the role of a simple articulation, even though the metaphysical consequences may be considerable. For the Portuguese verb ficar this concrete sense is easier to see. This is in part because of its rather clear etymology and the coexistence alongside it of a non-copulative meaning.
Ficar comes from the Latin figicare or fixicare, frequentative of figere, “to drive down,” “to implant,” “to fix,” as in this expression of the irrevocability of speech: “Fixum et statutum est” ( It is fixed and stabilized ) ( Cicero, Pro L. Murena, 62 ). In this sense it appears as a suffix in some French or English words, such as “crucifix,” crucifier, “crucify.” The use of ficar, which is translated as “to remain,” more or less retains this sense of a verb of state: “There, well beyond the mouth of the river, . . . she remained ( ficou ), full of fear” ( Guimarães Rosa, Magma ). When the sense of remaining or fixing is transposed from the subject to the relation between the subject and its qualities, we have an attributive phrase. In the preceding example, we may simply remove the comma between the verb “remained” ( ficou ) and the complement “full of fear” to perform the transformation. The referent changes, obviously, since the attribute becomes the more important element of the predication: “ela ficou cheia de medo [elle était remplie de crainte]” ( she remained full of fear ). It is as though the attributes were affixed to the subject in a very concrete movement of being hooked onto it. Or rather, as though the subject froze momentarily in certain conditions, qualities, etc. We thus can understand the perfective aspect of the attribution, which results from this fixing.
II. The Aspectual Differences between Ser, Estar, and Ficar
H. Santos Dias da Silva speaks of the “concretizing necessity possessed by the Portuguese mind” ( Expressão linguística da realidade e da potencialidade; cited in Quadros, “Da lingua portuguesa” ):
Deus é bom [God is good]: this is the only admissible phrase since God is an eternal subject independent of space and time, that is, non-limited; if we change the subject, and pick a limitable one or one in space or time, with a conditioned existence, the copula may be expressed by verbs other than ser [to be]: a ) o homem é bom; b ) o homem está bom; c ) o homem fica bom.
By comparing the different ways of attributing the adjective “good” to the subject “man,” we may see how the different verbs used for the copula transform the meaning of the sentence by their aspectual modulation:
A. Ser: “O homem é bom”
There is no problem translating it as “the man is good.” This means that he is morally good, that he acts honestly, or that his flesh is tasty. His essence, his soul, or his consistency, his flesh—whatever pertains to him specifically, or universally if we speak of man as such—that is good. The verb ser in Portuguese expresses this idea of essential attribution.
B. Estar: “O homem está bom”
The verb estar, by contrast, denotes an instantaneous and momentary aspect, or an imperfect ( infectum ) one, especially if we add gerundives to make verbal phrases that are common and very concrete, such as estar sendo, “to be in the course of being.” Translation requires a context in order to reconstruct the aspectual information. If the man in question was sick or convalescent, for example, we would translate está bom by “he is well.” If we used “the man is good” for “o homem está bom” or “o homem está sendo bom,” this would be because he is doing an action well, such as his work. If we wish to specify that he is good now, but that no one knows how he will be tomorrow, we may translate “he is keeping well” or “he is holding up.” But this translation is not always accurate, as in the famous case of the minister and philosopher E. Portela, who, asked about his selection as the Brazilian minister of culture, declared: “Eu nãu sou minstro, estou ministro.” The concision of the reply is untranslatable since to specify the aspect we would have to add two adverbial phrases: “I am not a minister eternally, I am only the minister at the moment,” where this expression does not connote any political weakness.
With estar, it is rare to have a universal attribute. The verb estar can only speak of universals if it is a matter of conditions, with circumstantial complements, or adjectives determining dispositions, as if they were the circumstances of mind: “O homem é um vivente que está sempre atento à própria morte” ( Man is a living being whose condition is to be constantly attentive to his own death ). This does not prevent the verb, then, from paradoxically expressing the universal condition of the completion of each particularity, the existential condition of a being that is never completed as long as it is there—está—of a being at the moment of circumstance. Whence the importance of the verb estar in discussing the problems of existence in Iberian languages.
C. Ficar: “O homem fica bom”
Here the attribution has a perfective aspect. If the verb were in the perfect, ficou bom ( he has been good ), we would be back at the previous case: the verb ficar replaces the verb estar in the perfect without a problem. There would in addition be an idea of completed transformation, of becoming, which in French would either require a noncopulative verb: “O homem ficou bom,” “L’homme a recouvré la santé” ( The man regained his health ); or a present perfect: “Et moi, de penser à tout cela, j’ai été [fiquei] encore une fois moins heureux. . . . J’ai été [fiquei] sombre et malade et saturnien comme un jour où toute la journée le tonnerre se prépare mais n’arrive même pas le soir” ( And I, thinking about all that, I have been [fiquei] again less happy. . . . I have been [fiquei] somber and sick and saturnine like a day where thunder is being readied all day but never arrives even at night” ( Pessoa, Poemas ). But in Portuguese, if the sentence with ficar is in the present, it still seems incomplete—it requires circumstantial complements as mentioned above: Portuguese requires that the circumstances be precise since ficar can only perform its copulative task in a precise, definite, and concrete environment. Where, when, how? The categories of time, place, cause, manner, and so on must structure the circumstance of the attribution: “O homem fica bom” ( the man is good ) . . . “quando educado” ( when he is well brought-up ), . . . “se está só” ( if he is alone ) . . . “durante o verão” ( in the summer ). We may see even more clearly the circumstantial and perfective aspect in the common expression “ficar com alguém,” literally, “to have been with someone,” which indicates a quick sexual affair, usually consisting of a single meeting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cicero. Selected Political Speeches. Penguin Classics, 1977.
Guimarães Rosa, João. Magma. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1997.
Pessoa, Fernando. Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. 10th ed. Lisbon: Ática, 1993.
Quadros, António. O espírito da cultura portuguesa. Lisbon: Soc. De Expansão Cultural, 1967.
. “Da lingua portuguesa para a filosofia portuguesa.” In Seminário de literatura e filosofia portuguesa ( actas ). Lisbon: Fundação Lusíada, 2001.
Santos Dias da Silva, Hernani. Expressão linguística da realidade e da potencialidade. Braga: Ed. Fac de Filosofia, 1955.
FICTION
“Fiction” comes from fingo ( in the supine, fictum ), whose proper meaning is “to model in clay,” like the Greek plassô [πλάσσω], which also refers to the activity of inventing fiction, as opposed to writing history. Fiction and plasticity are thus semantically linked: see ART, Box 2, HISTORY, Box 3, and PLASTICITY.
In addition, the proximity of factum, “fact” ( from the Latin facere, “to make,” Indo-European root *dhē-, like the Greek tithêmi [τίθημι], “to place,” which yields, for example, faktura [ϕактура]; see FAKTURA ), and fictum ( from the Latin fingo, Indo-European root *dheig’h-, which yields, for example, figura ), consistently evokes the relation between fact and fiction, human fabrication ( on the relation to Vico, see DICHTUNG, Box 1; Lacan, for example, in L’étourdit [in Autres écrits ( Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001 )], suggests the portmanteau spelling fixion ). See also the Portuguese FICAR, which fixes predicates onto subjects.
I. Fiction, Language, and Truth
On the discursive status of fiction, see DECEPTION, DESCRIPTION, DICHTUNG ( and as a complement, PRAXIS, on the singularity of Greek poiêsis [ποίησις] as the poet’s “fabrication”; see POETRY ), ERZÄHLEN, HISTORY. See also RÉCIT and STYLE.
More generally, for the relation to human practice, see ACT, PRAXIS, SPEECH ACT.
For the relation to truth and the real, see DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, REALITY, RES, TRUTH; cf. FALSE, INTENTION, LIE, THING.
II. Fiction, Image, and Art
Fiction is related to images and the faculty of imagination; see IMAGE [BILD, BILDUNG, EIDÔLON], IMAGINATION [FANCY, PHANTASIA], MIMÊSIS.
For its relationships to artistic activity, see ART, BEAUTY; and regarding its invention, see ARGUTEZZA, CONCETTO, GENIUS, INGENIUM.
“Flesh” translates the French word chair, which comes from the Latin caro, carnis, which is connected with the Indo-European root *( s )ker-, “to cut or share” ( cf. Gr. sarx [σάϱξ], “flesh,” and keirô [ϰείϱω], “I cut” ) and originally meant “piece of meat.”
“Flesh” is one of the possible translations of German Leib, insofar as it is coupled not only with Seele ( soul ) but also with Körper ( inert body ). But unlike Fleisch, whose literal meaning is “flesh” in the sense of “meat,” Leib is connected with Leben, “life.” In the entry LEIB is found a study of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew systems that constitute the matrices of this set and the meaning of their phenomenological reinvestment. To complete the German system, see ERLEBEN and GESCHLECHT. For the phenomenological and existentialist side, see DASEIN, EPOCHÊ, INTENTION. See also, on incarnation, BILD, BOGOČELOVEČESTVO, and OIKONOMIA.
ANIMAL, GOD, HUMANITY, LIFE, SOUL
FORCE / ENERGY
| FRENCH | force, énergie | ||
| GERMAN | Kraft, Energie, Wirkung | ||
| GREEK | dunamis [δύναμις], energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια] | ||
| LATIN | vis, virtus |
ACT, EPISTEMOLOGY, MACHT, MOMENT, POWER, REALITY, STRENGTH, VIRTUE
In every European language, the word “force” ( English ) / force ( French ) / Kraft ( German ) underwent an abrupt transformation with the publication in 1847 of the dissertation “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft” [On the conservation of force] by Hermann von Helmholtz. More precisely, whereas in its vernacular usage, the word remained synonymous with power in the vague sense of the term ( as in the expressions “having the force of law,” “la forza del destino” ), its conceptual usage, which until then had been just as vague, was suddenly, “by the force of mathematics,” radicalized. After 1847 the word may have two translations: “force”/force/Kraft ( directed action producing or tending to produce movement, in conformity with the laws of Newtonian dynamics ), and “energy”/énergie/Energie ( scalar, that is, nondirected, magnitude obeying a metaphysical principle of conservation, just like “matter” ). The different manners of referring in German to the conservation of energy ( “die Erhaltung der Kraft” / “die Konstanz der Energie” / “Energiesatz” ) are traces left by the difficult development of this notion.
I. “Force,” “Energy,” and “Conservation” in German-Language Physics
The word “energy” followed an evolution that was the reverse of the evolution of “force.” It is derived from the Greek energeia [ἐνέϱγεια]; we know that Aristotle, in his study of movement, contrasts energy with potentiality and that this duality deeply marked the development of European philosophy and science until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the word “energy” came to be used only in literature, “force” having supplanted it in discussions of the natural world.
■ See Box 1.
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Dunamis, energeia, entelecheia, and the Aristotelian definition of motion
We find a common translation in dictionaries for dunamis [δύναμις] and energeia [ἐνέϱγεια], namely, “force”: dunamis is rendered by “power, force” and energeia by “force in action, action, act” ( both may be said, for example, of the force of a speech; cf. RT: Bailly, Dictionnaire grec français, s.v. dunamis, III, and s.v. energeia, II.2 ). The difference between these two “forces” is nevertheless a cornerstone of Aristotle’s physical ( Physics, esp. book 3 ) and metaphysical ( Metaphysics Θ ) terminology: The object of his inquiry is dynamis and energeia, potentia and actus in the Latin translation, Vermögen and Verwirklichung ( power and realization ) in the German, or also Möglichkeit and Wirklichkeit ( possibility and reality ). ( Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3, trans. Brogan and Warnek, 13 ) Aristotle bases the study of physics as a science ( epistêmê theôrêtikê [ἐπιστήμη θεωϱητιϰή], “theoretical science,” Metaphysics E.1, 1025b18–28 ) on a few fundamental principles and definitions. Strangely, some remain obvious for us, whereas others, even canonical ones such as that of movement, have become literally unintelligible. Nature, phusis [φύσις], with which the Physics is concerned, is defined by movement. All natural beings ( ta phusei onta panta [τὰ φύσει ὄντα πάντα] ), says Aristotle, have in themselves immediately and essentially a principle of movement and fixity ( archên kinêseôs kai staseôs [ἀϱχὴν ϰινήσεως ϰαὶ στάσεως], Physics 2.1, 192b13–14 ): a tree grows, unlike the products of crafts like a bed or a coat ( see ART )—it is a “self-mover.” Self-motion in the Aristotelian sense does not necessarily imply, as it does for us, locomotion: kinêsis, namely, kata topon [ϰατὰ τόπον], according to the pou [ποῦ], the “where,” is only for Aristotle a species of the genus kinêsis [ϰίνησις], movement in the wide sense ( a genus that, in a very Aristotelian way, is named after the most important species ). This movement ( kinêsis ) he also calls change, metabolê [μεταϐολή], formed from ballô [βάλλω], “to throw,” and meta, indicating a further place or time. Thus, as Heidegger says, “Umschlag von etwas zu etwas” ( a change from something into something, in “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις,” trans. Sheehan, 191 ), movement or change includes, besides displacement: —generation and destruction, genesis kai phthora [γένεσις ϰαὶ φθοϱά], or movement according to ousia [οὐσία], the “essence”; —alteration, alloiôsis [ἀλλοίωσις], movement according to poion [ποῖον], the “what”; —growth or diminution, auxêsis kai phthisis [αὔξησις ϰαὶ φθίσις], movement according to poson [ποσόν], the “how much” ( Physics 2, 192b14–16; 7.7, 261a27–36 ). It is with the general definition of movement, given at the beginning of book 3, that we come across energy and potentiality, or, more literally, entelechy, entelecheia [ἐντελέχεια], and power, dunamis. Here is the celebrated definition, subject to so many glosses and such close scrutiny: hê tou dunamei ontοs entelecheia hêi toiouton kinêsis estin [ἡ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος ἐντελέχεια ᾗ τοιοῦτον κίνησίς ἐστιν]. We have distinguished in respect of each class between what is in fulfillment and what is potentially; thus the fulfillment of what is potentially, as such, is motion. ( Physics 3.1, 201a10–11, ed. Barnes, 1:343 ) We must weigh the ontological freight of this pair, potency and act. It constitutes in effect one of the four senses of being: “Being” has several meanings, of which one was seen to be the accidental, and another the true ( “nonbeing” being the false ), while besides these there are the figures of predication ( e.g., the “what,” quality, quantity, place, time, and any similar meanings which “being” may have ), and again besides all these there is that which “is” potentially or actually. ( Metaphysics E.2, 1026a32–b2, trans. Barnes ) Aristotle’s physics is thus from the start metaphysical through and through. The first example of movement makes it possible to measure the distance with our kinetics: When what is buildable, insofar as we call it such, is in fulfillment, it is being built, and that is building. ( Physics 3.1, 201a16–18 ) It is the transition from power to act, the energy of the potency that deploys itself throughout the time of the actualization ( “neither before nor after,” 201b7 ), that constitutes motion, thus neither pure and inactive potentiality, nor the uncompleted result ( “When there is a house [οἰϰία], there is no longer the buildable [οὐϰέτ’ οἰϰοδομητόν],” 201b11 ). Movement is thus energeia atelês [ἐνέϱγεια ἀτελής], a putting to work that has not achieved its goal ( “an act, but incomplete” or “imperfect,” Physics 3.2, 201b32; cf. Metaphysics Θ.6, 1048b29 ) or entelecheia atelês [ἐντελέχεια ἀτελής], an incomplete fulfillment ( Physics 8.5, 257b8–9 ). Aristotle thus uses the terms energeia ( from ergon [ἔϱγον], “work,” and its product, a faculty and its exercise; see PRAXIS ) and entelecheia ( from telos [τέλος], the “end” and goal; see PRINCIPLE ) to refer to this progressive attainment of the end, the realization of self, which leads to rest. As noted at Metaphysics Θ.8, 1050a21–23: The ergon is the telos, and the energeia is the ergon; this is why the word energeia is made from ergon and tends to mean entelecheia. J. Tricot translates: L’œuvre est la fin, et l’acte est l’œuvre; de ce fait aussi le mot acte, qui est dérivé d’œuvre, tend vers le sens d’entéléchie. And Bonitz comments ( RT: Index aristotelicus, s.v. entelecheia ): Whereas energeia is the action by which something is led from possibility to the full and perfect essence, entelecheia refers to this perfection itself. By contrast with physical substances ( hai phusikai ousiai [αἱ φυσιϰαὶ οὐσίαι] ), God, whose substance is only act or energy ( hê ousia energeia [ἡ οὐσία ἐνέϱγεια] ) ( Metaphysics Λ.6, 1071b20 )—more precisely, “energy of mind ( hê nou energeia [ἡ νοῦ ἐνέϱγεια] )” and hence “the best and eternal life” ( b26–28; see UNDERSTANDING, Box 1 )—is necessarily immobile: as the prime mover, he is “that which moves without being moved [ho ou kinoumenon kinei ( ὃ οὐ ϰινούμενον ϰινεῖ )]” ( 1072a25 ). For the same reason, in our sublunary world, dunamis is a sovereign and complex notion. It refers first, as early as Homer, to potestas, physical or moral force, the power of men or gods, political power. The term can also apply to the value of a word, the power of a number that is squared, armed forces, and then refers to what we could call an effective reality. But dunamis also means potentia, that is, a “not yet,” a pure virtuality, this “potential Hermes that the sculptor perceives in the wood” ( Metaphysics Θ.6, 1048a32–33 ), and virtus, a faculty ( “when we call scientific even one who does not speculate if he has the faculty of speculation [kai ton mê theôrounta an dunatos êi theôrêsai ( ϰαὶ τὸν μὴ θεωϱοῦντα ἂν δυνατὸς ᾖ θεωϱῆσαι )],” 1048a34–35 ), which Aristotle discusses by way of its pairing with activity. Potentia thus touches possibilitas, the logical concept opposed to adunaton [ἀδύνατον], to impossibility in the sense of contradictory. That which is in actuality capable, however, is that for which nothing more is unattainable once it sets itself to work as that for which it is claimed to be well equipped. ( Metaphysics Θ.3, 1047a24–26; see also, for analysis of the senses of dunamis, Metaphysics Δ.12 ) The connection between physics, metaphysics, and logic at work in all aspects of human life, from politics to art, rests on this dynamic. But this dynamic is only itself dynamic, in motion, because energeia or entelecheia is proteron [πϱότεϱον], “prior” to potentiality, or “first” with respect to it ( Metaphysics Θ.8, 1049b5 ): in Aristotle, as Heidegger points out, we do not move from potentia to actualitas; according to the proposition that becomes possible with Latinization, “in order for something to be real . . . it must first be possible” ( Die Physis bei Aristoteles ). On the contrary, the energy or the act must be already present to attract the power or the force; energy is more ousia than potentiality, just as God is with regard to the other beings—or the morphê [μοϱφή], “form,” with regard to hulê [ὕλη], “matter,” within the composite substance ( Physics 2.1, 193b7–9 ). This complex terminology, so subtly developed, related to a cosmology destroyed by modernity, nevertheless continues to evolve, notably through Leibnizian dynamics, coming to encode our new universe as well. Barbara Cassin BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vols. 1–2. Edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. Aristoteles Metaphysik Θ 1–3: Vom Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft, Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 33: 1931 lecture course. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981. Translation by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. . Die Physis bei Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967. . “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics В, I.” In Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. |
Nevertheless, this eclipse was of short duration: a century later, “energy” makes a noticeable comeback, in the precise physico-mathematical context of rational mechanics. In 1807, Thomas Young writes: “The term energy may be applied, with great propriety, to the product of the mass or weight of a body, into the square of the numbers expressing its velocity” ( A Course of Lectures, 1:59 ). The word acquires its definitive theoretical status with Helmholtz’s 1847 essay “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft,” in which it did not appear, but which nevertheless established its current definition. For an isolated system, it is the quantity that maintains a constant value throughout the physical processes taking place within. The meaning of the word in vernacular speech then expands, and it acquires a vague technical sense—even, in the last thirty years, a technocratic one. It is amusing to note that in this register of language that claims scientific exactitude, the sense of the word is completely denatured—as in the expression “energy economizing,” which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction, since a quantity that by definition is “conserved” cannot be “economized.”
This failure to abide by the basic rules of logic has the virtue of revealing a theoretical difficulty: the idea of conservation is one that is just as erudite as, if not more than, that of energy, and as such, it is inevitably misused by common language. The idea that energy might ( and indeed must ) be economized in the same way as water, money, or food, as though there were a risk of one day running out of it, is much more natural ( and in agreement with the economic morality of the day ) than that of a magnitude that is conserved, come what may. The comparison with commonly used French expressions such as “être à bout de force” ( to have run out of strength ) or “économiser ses forces” ( to save up one’s strength ) shows that the interplay between force and énergie is actually a three-word game, the rules of which are set by conservation. It would not be possible to study the pair of force/énergie ( or Kraft/Energie ) independent of each word’s constitutive relation to the word conservation ( Erhaltung ). Once this is established, a significant difference immediately appears between English and French on the one hand ( along with the other Latin-based languages ), and German on the other: although the word conservation was not affected by Helmholtz’s 1847 article, the word Erhaltung, usually translated in French and English as “conservation,” fell out of use ( as a scientific term ), replaced by Konstanz by Helmholtz himself in 1881, in the edition of his Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen. The completely German expression “die Erhaltung der Kraft” was changed by its own author into one that he judged to be better upon reflection. We may assess the difficulty presented by the idea of conservation/constancy in German by the fact that today, what the other languages call “conservation of energy” is simply called Energiesatz or Energieprinzip ( law or principle of energy ), a surgical way of resolving the question.
We may hypothesize, then, that the difficulties faced by the German language in speaking of “conservation of energy” come from the fact that the historical development of this notion was effected by German-speaking physicists: basically Gottfried Leibniz, who laid the foundation, and Helmholtz, who brought it to a conclusion that today seems as though it must be definitive. Because the conceptual difficulties posed by this notion were first expressed by Germans in their own language, in words that necessarily were not scientific in origin, but borrowed from everyday language, they only remained truly meaningful in that language. The other European languages had to be satisfied with conventional translations—to which they were all the more entitled, as the mathematical formulation of the law of “conservation of energy” is itself utterly unambiguous. We may try to verify this hypothesis by showing that the focus on Kraft and Erhaltung gives rise, from the words’ very usage in ordinary German, to peculiarities that the confrontation between “force” and “conservation” cannot suggest in English, let alone French. Thus, the ambiguities of the word Kraft are not, and never will be, rigorously the same as those pertaining to the French and English word “force.”
II. The Indeterminacies of Physical Definitions of Force in the Mechanistic Tradition: Internal/External Conservation/Change
In the mechanistic tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the meaning of the word “force” was subject to an indeterminacy of which physicists before 1847 were fully aware without being able to specify its exact nature ( unlike us who were brought up under a strict distinction between the concepts of force and energy ). It is particularly flagrant in the 1760 Letters to a German Princess, which Leonhard Euler devotes to the question of force ( note that the author is a German writing in French, the language of scientific communication at the time ):
The sun and all the planets are endowed with a similar virtue of attraction by which all bodies are attracted. . . . If the body of the Earth were larger or smaller, the gravity or weight of bodies would also be greater or smaller. From which we understand that all the other large bodies in the Universe, like the sun, the planets, and the moon, are endowed with a similar attractive force, but one which is greater or lesser depending on whether they are themselves larger or smaller.
Le soleil et toutes les planètes sont doués d’une semblable vertu d’attraction par laquelle tous les corps sont attirés. . . . Si le corps de la terre était plus grand ou plus petit, la gravité ou la pesanteur des corps serait aussi plus grande ou plus petite. D’où l’on comprend que tous les autres grands corps de l’univers, comme le soleil, les planètes et la lune, sont doués d’une force attractive semblable, mais plus ou moins grande suivant qu’ils sont eux-mêmes plus ou moins grands.
( Letters 53 and 55, trans. Hunter [emphasis added] )
Force is thus a virtue, a property of bodies, a power that they possess because of their bodily nature itself. Force is thus a property of matter.
The question therefore arises of what the nature of this power possessed by matter is, how it is exercised, how it is manifested, what its effect is, how it is expressed. Note first of all the confusion of the French language, which stutters and is at a loss for words on this point. It would not be the same in German, where the word Kraft is unmistakably associated with wirken, Wirkung ( simply look at the corresponding entries in any German dictionary: Kraft defines Wirkung and Wirkung defines Kraft ). In other words, the German language has a word for referring to the actualization of a power, a force, and this word is lacking in Latin-based languages. The response given by Euler to the question of the determination of the power that must be associated with the word “force” ( “a term in common use, although many by whom it is employed have but a very imperfect idea of it” ) is simple ( Letter 76, trans. Hunter ): “We understand by the word force whatever is capable of changing the state of a body.” ( Euler is not clear in this passage, but the state at issue is that of motion, in conformity with the Newtonian doctrine he is promulgating. ) We need not seek far: the important word here is “change.” “Change,” which is the opposite of . . . conservation.
However, to conserve, “conserve itself in the same state, whether rest or motion,” is another quality of bodies ( unless it is the same one, a question that is only dealt with in 1916 with the theory of general relativity ), also related to their bodily natures, which is called “inertia,” but which, for Euler, cannot be identified with force without violating language, since it is “rather the contrary,” by virtue of the earlier definition of force. Moreover, inertia exists in the body itself ( it is insita, according to Isaac Newton’s adjective ), whereas force, as Euler understands it ( what Newton calls vis impressa ), is necessarily external to the body whose state it changes:
Each time a state of a body is changed, we must never seek the cause in the body itself; it always exists outside the body, and that is the correct idea we must have of a force.
Toutes les fois que l’état d’un corps est changé, il n’en faut jamais chercher la cause dans le corps même; elle existe toujours hors du corps, et c’est la juste idée qu’on doit se former d’une force.
( Letter 74, trans. Hunter )
It is plain that the concept of force described by Euler, a defender of Newtonian ideas, is much more complex than what the simplified teaching of Newtonian mechanics suggests: it is first and foremost a power of bodies, which they exercise on other bodies. It is certainly important that this power is directional, and thus that force in this case is mathematically represented by a vector, but this is secondary, in the sense that this is not part of the definition—it results from Newton’s second law, which establishes that the power in question has the effect of modifying the quantity of movement, a directed magnitude.
Let us return to Euler and the “correct idea” that must be formed of a force, in virtue of which he is against Leibniz and the system of monads:
It is false that the elements of matter, or monads, if there are any, are endowed with a force for changing their state. It is rather the opposite which is true, that they have the quality of conserving themselves in the same state.
Il est faux que les éléments de matière, ou les monades, s’il y en a, soient pourvues d’une force de changer leur état. Le contraire est plutôt vrai, qu’elles ont la qualité de se conserver dans le même état.
( Letter 76, trans. Hunter )
The controversy between Newtonians and Leibnizians is thus over the effect of “force,” not its existence as a power of bodies. The question is whether a force is capable of changing the state of the body possessing it, or only that of other bodies to which it is external.
I say therefore something which will seem strange, that the same faculty of bodies by which they attempt to conserve themselves in the same state is capable of providing forces which change the states of others.
Je dis donc ce qui paraîtra bien étrange, que la même faculté des corps par laquelle ils s’efforcent de se conserver dans le même état est capable de fournir des forces qui changent l’état des autres.
( Letter 76, trans. Hunter )
The question is thus twofold, or repeated, dealing with two pairs of opposites: internal/external and conservation/change.
Should we, then, like Euler, suppose that the causes of changes of states in bodies are external to them, and thus consider only forces that are necessarily external? ( Newton also does so to some extent; though he does not hesitate to speak of vis insita with regard to inertia, he nevertheless specifies that a body only exercises this internal force if another external force, vis impressa, attempts to make it change its state of motion. ) This conception held sway for two centuries, despite the logical difficulties that Euler modestly characterizes as strange, and that are the source of its demise. We know that the strangeness in question disappears once we admit that, as in general relativity, inertia and gravitation are two aspects of a single phenomenon: the interaction of bodies in a space that is itself considered a physical entity. For a modern physicist, after 1916, “force” is synonymous with “correlation.” As Hermann Weyl writes, “Force is the expression of an independent power that connects the bodies according to their inner nature and their relative position and motion” ( Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, trans. Helmer, 149 ).
Or, should we think with Leibniz that bodies can change their state as the effect of an internal cause, to which it would also be fitting to apply the concept of “force”? The fact that this conception, that of monads, is closer to the modern notion of force—insofar as it implies that a body only exists to the extent that it is related to others, and that it does not exempt itself from space—does not make it superior with regard to what concerns us here, namely the evolution of the word “force”/force/Kraft. It is interesting rather because it leads naturally to the question of conservation, which we said earlier was intrinsically related to that of force. Indeed, in a conception where the change by which the effect of force is measured affects the state of all bodies, it becomes crucial to look for what remains constant in all this change. Before going further into the examination of what meaning must be given to the word “conservation,” we should note that it does not appear explicitly in Newton. The question of whether the idea is there implicitly, hidden in the consequences of the “third law of motion,” which states that to every action there corresponds an opposite reaction, is still debated today. We shall stick here, for once, to the “facts”: the word does not appear in Newton. We shall restrict ourselves then to examining its meaning where it does appear, namely in the Leibnizian tradition.
III. The Leibnizian Metaphysics of Force: Force and Substance
A. Vis or virtus and act
“Force” is not subject in Leibniz to the same type of definition as that given by Newton or Euler. The word does not refer to a physical phenomenon characterizing “bodies,” but to a metaphysical concept, aimed at clarifying the metaphysical notion of “substance”:
I will say for the present that the concept of forces or powers [vis or virtus], which the Germans call Kraft and the French la force, and for whose explanation I have set up a distinct science of Dynamics, brings the strongest light to bear upon our understanding of the true concept of substance.
Je dirai que la notion de vis ou virtus ( que les Allemands appellent Kraft, les Français la force ), à laquelle je destine pour l’expliquer la science particulière de la Dynamique, apporte beaucoup de lumière à la vraie notion de substance.
( “De la réforme de la philosophie première et de la notion de substance” [1694], trans. Loemker )
Because it is so intimately related to “substance” ( etymologically, what lies beneath, what is preserved ), force is related to the notion of conservation from the start. However, nothing proves that this conservation is of the same sort as that which, according to Newton, characterizes the state of motion of a body in which no external force is being exercised. In any case, this conservation is not static at all; it is not an inertia, a passive resistance ( which is only active if a vis impressa is opposed to it ). Force, for Leibniz, is above all and essentially active: “It contains a certain act or entelechy and is intermediate between the faculty of acting and action itself.” It is a “power of acting,” inherent to any substance, such that “some act is always coming from it.” This is where, as already noted, an essential difference with force in the Newtonian sense lies ( besides the fact that force is related to “bodies” for Newton, but to “substances” for Leibniz ).
B. Force and action, Wirkung
The word “act” appears in Leibniz as indissociable from the notion of force. It is clearly borrowed from the scholastic tradition. However, it is noticeable that, in this text as in others, Leibniz makes a free use of it, playing with its cognates: action, agir, terms borrowed from ordinary language. It is thus not surprising to see a notion ( destined for great things in mathematical physics ) appear under the name of action over the course of the development of Leibnizian dynamics—as, for example, in the title of an opuscule in 1692: “Essai de dynamique sur les lois du mouvement, où il est montré qu’il ne se conserve pas la même quantité du mouvement, mais la même force absolue, ou bien la même quantité de l’action motrice” [Essay in dynamics on the laws of motion, in which it is shown that the same quantity of motion is not conserved, but rather the same absolute force, or the same quantity of moving action]. Action, however, is the translation of Wirkung. The translation is necessarily imperfect, since there is no strict equivalent of Wirkung in French, but it does have the merit, for a German-speaking philosopher writing in French, of introducing the concept of action as “naturally” related to that of force. It goes without saying that this link between the words Kraft and Wirkung, insofar as it rests on an implication, a translation of undertones, is not in the least obvious for a French-speaking reader. Subsequent generations of French-speaking mathematical physicists wondered why action ( appearing in technical expressions such as the principle of least action, quantum of action, and so on ) bears this name, and accepted it as a convention. This lack of obviousness of the link between action and force ( being strong, fort, is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting ) is probably due to the fact that French has only one word, force, where German—and English, thanks to its joint Latin and Saxon origins—has Kraft and Stärke ( “force” and “strength” ), which allows it to distinguish between power and vigor ( see STRENGTH ).
Nevertheless, action ( or moving action ) is defined by Leibniz as a double product: product of the “formal [or essential] effect” of movement—which itself “consists in what is changed . . . that is, in the quantity of mass that has been displaced and in the space, or the length by which this mass was transferred”—and the speed with which the change takes place. Leibniz has no trouble justifying the fact that the formal effect is not by itself sufficient for characterizing the action ( in the sense of Wirkung ) of the absolute force on the basis of everyday language ( French this time, however ): “It is clear that that which produces the same formal effect in less time acts more.” As to why the action is what gives the measure of absolute force, bringing in speed and even dynamics, rather than the formal effect, which is outside of time, purely static, Leibniz, appealing to the argument he has used countless times according to which matter is not reducible to its extension, explains it thus: “The formal effect consists in the body in motion, taken by itself, and does not consume the force at all.” Without entering into the details of this argument, which would require saying more about Leibnizian dynamics, let us simply note the verb used here: consumer, to consume—the force is consumed. And Leibniz continues: the action, unlike the formal effect, consumes force—in perfect conformity with the association suggested in German between Kraft and Wirkung.
C. Maintaining force
Here is where an “axiom of higher philosophy” comes in, which “cannot be geometrically demonstrated,” and which, for this reason, would today naturally be described as “meta-physical”: “The effect is always equal in force to its cause, or, what is the same thing, the same force is always conserved” ( Leibniz, Theodicy [1710], 3.346 ). This is an expression of the principle of congruity, “that is, the choice of wisdom.” Let us make this choice, and remember that force is consumed. In order for it to be preserved, it must, like a flame, be maintained. It must be watched over ( as in the ritual expression “Gott erhält die Welt” ), as an obligation ( “Die Selbsterhaltung als Pflicht” [Schiller] ), and we must contribute to its maintenance, as we would a dancer or a gigolo; we must conserve it in the same sense as museum curators; in sum, we must act, be active, inject enough action into it. In order for force to be conserved, there must, as Leibniz says, “be during this hour as much motive action in the universe or in given bodies, acting only on each other, as there would be during any other hour we might choose.”
Passing by way of action thus makes it possible to specify what we must understand by conservation in Leibniz; it is simply the translation of Erhaltung in French; entretien ( maintenance ) would probably have been better.
IV. Die Erhaltung der Kraft: From Conservation to Constancy and from Force to Energy
When the young Helmholtz ( he was 26, not long finished with his studies ) uses the word Erhaltung in 1847, he places himself, knowingly or not, willingly or not, directly in line with the Leibnizian tradition. Not that he was Leibnizian: like all of his contemporaries, he was firmly convinced of the validity of the Newtonian conception of movement and the operational character of Newton’s laws. However, according to Max Planck ( Das Prinzip der Erhaltung der Energie ), the idea—Cartesian in origin but amply used and illustrated by Leibniz—that there is a fundamental entity preserved in all physical processes, from which all movement may be derived, was a commonplace in the German mechanistic tradition:
As long as there was no clear notion connected with the word “Kraft” any dispute over the quantity of this “Kraft” was without a proper theme. Yet it must be admitted that this dispute had a much deeper content at its foundation; for, the parties to the dispute were to some extent united, even if they did not express this very clearly and often, as to what they wanted to understand under the word “Kraft.” Descartes as well as Leibniz, had certainly some, even if not very precise, notion about a principle, which expresses the unchangeability and indestructibility of that from which all motion and action in the world emanates.
( Cited by Elkana, Discovery of the Conservation of Energy, 98 )
In sum, the idea of conservation ( in the sense of Erhaltung ) was tucked away in everyone’s minds, even when the reference to Leibniz ( or René Descartes ) had been forgotten. In these conditions, it is not surprising that Helmholtz titled his dissertation “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft”—especially since, despite his young age, Helmholtz had already worked for seven years in the domain of physiology, where the idea of an entity from which the mechanical powers of a living organism are derived, as well as what we may call its vital heat, was defended, among others, by Justus von Liebig. The even vaster idea that the phenomena of nature could all be reduced to a single “force,” an idea developed by Kant in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, though not rigorously synonymous with that of conservation, is nevertheless close to it, insofar as both presuppose a unity of the physical world that would be confirmed by the existence of a conserved quantity.
Helmholtz, whose ambition was thus to show that the phenomena known at his time could be unified under the aegis of a conserved entity, proceeds in order from the simplest to the most complex. It is therefore utterly natural that he titles the first section ( of six ) of his essay “Conservation of Living Force [lebendige Kraft].” This magnitude, as everyone knew indeed since Leibniz, is conserved in elastic collisions between bodies, which may be considered the simplest case of a physical phenomenon. Helmholtz then proceeds, in section 2, to a generalization of the first section and shows that, in the more complicated case of a body that moves from one position to another in the course of its movement, it is possible to establish an equivalence between the variation of what we call today its kinetic energy ( product of the mass by the square of the velocity ) and another magnitude Helmholtz calls “the sum of the forces of tension [Spannkräfte] between these two positions.” More precisely, the variation of kinetic energy is equal to the opposite of the sum of the forces of tension, where that “sum” ( today we would say “the definite integral” ) can itself be expressed differentially, and hence as a change in a certain magnitude. It goes without saying that this “force” of tension does not have the dimension of a Newtonian force, since it has the status of what we would now call “work,” which is itself the product of a Newtonian force by a displacement. This hardly bothers Helmholtz, as, like his contemporaries, he is used to giving the word Kraft, in a general context, the sense of power, a quantity that is poorly defined but scalar in nature, and in a Newtonian context, the sense of a directed action, hence vectorial in nature.
The important point here is that the equation derived does not deal with two magnitudes but with their variations between a certain initial state and a certain final state; and these variations have opposite signs. Yet, if two magnitudes undergo in a certain process equal changes of opposite sign, this is because their sum does not vary; it remains constant. Helmholtz gives this sum the name Kraft, which is fully justified by the procedure of generalization from lebendige Kraft, to which he has just appealed. However, can we call this second section Erhaltung der Kraft, as he does, without twisting the meaning of Erhaltung? The entity that he has just identified as Kraft is not conserved, in the sense of being maintained; it is or remains constant, in the sense that it undergoes no variation, which is not the same. Helmholtz’s force, from this point of view, is closer to matter, which remains self-identical even when it undergoes transformations, than it is to Leibnizian living force, for which the word Erhaltung was perfectly adequate. This comparison with matter that takes various forms ( solid, liquid, gas ) while remaining basically constant is in fact pursued by Helmholtz in the last four sections of his essay, where he studies in succession the “force-equivalent” of heat, electrical processes, magnetism, and electromagnetism, before concluding with a few words concerning physiological processes. Throughout this part of the 1847 essay, the governing idea is that of conversion—conversion of one form of energy into another—which the word Erhaltung does not convey at all. It is thus appropriate that in 1881, Helmholtz replaces it with Konstanz, doubtless more exact.
We might think that, on the other hand, the simultaneous transformation of Kraft into Energie does not correspond to any correction of meaning, and that it is purely conventional. After all, Helmholtz is only giving a different name to the magnitude whose conservation he had demonstrated in 1847 in order to avoid the confusion of two different magnitudes: the scalar magnitude updated by Helmholtz, and Newtonian force, a vectorial magnitude. It is not certain that this name change only follows considerations of convenience. Perhaps we might think that the peculiar construction of the German language in fact plays an essential role. This construction is indeed such that in Erhaltung we clearly hear halten, which is why Helmholtz could not keep it to refer to the process by which a certain magnitude keeps the same value. However, it is just as impossible, given the almost cliché expression of Erhaltung der Kraft, to reserve Kraft to refer to this new magnitude that remains constant. Kraft is inevitably associated in Helmholtz’s mind, and in those of his contemporaries, with Erhaltung, and it was impossible for him to speak of the constancy of force ( Konstanz der Kraft ). Kraft had to disappear along with Erhaltung.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Elkana, Y. The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Euler, Leonhard. Letters of Euler to a German Princess, on Different Subjects in Physics and Philosophy. Translated by H. Hunter. 2nd ed. London: Murray and Highley, 1802.
Helmholtz, Hermann von. Epistemological Writings: The Paul Hertz / Moritz Schlick Centenary Edition of 1921, with Notes and Commentary by the Editors. Translated by M. F. Lowe. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1977.
. “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft.” In Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, 1:12–85. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1895. First published in 1847.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “De la réforme de la philosophie première et de la notion de la substance.” First published in 1694. In Œuvres choisies, edited by L. Prenant. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1939. Translation by Leroy Loemker: “On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance.” In Philosophical Papers and Letters. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1970.
. Essay on Dynamics. In Leibniz and Dynamics: The Texts of 1692. Edited by P. Costabel. Translated by R.E.W. Maddison. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.
. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Edited with an introduction by Austin Farrer. Translated by E. M. Huggard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952.
Planck, Max. Das Prinzip der Erhaltung der Energie. Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1913.
Weyl, Hermann. Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft. 4th ed. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1976. First published in 1927. Translation by O. Helmer: Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Young, Thomas. A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts. 2 vols. London: Taylor and Walton, 1845.
FORM
“Form” comes from the Latin forma, itself possibly borrowed, by way of Etruscan, from the Greek morphê [μορφή], which means “form, beautiful form” and concretely refers both to the mold and to the shape of the resulting object, whether the word concerns arts and techniques ( the form of a shoe, the plan of a house, the frame of a painting ), norms ( a legal formula, the imprint on a coin ), or speech ( a grammatical form, a stylistic device ). The term is especially plastic in French, as in Latin, since it was able to serve to translate the Greek words eidos [εἶδος], “idea” ( in contrast to eidôlon [εἴδωλον], “image” ) or “form” ( in contrast to hulê [ὕλη], “matter” ); morphê [μορφή], “aspect, contour”; schêma [σχῆμα], “shape, manner of being”; ousia [οὐσία], “essence”; to ti esti [τὸ τί ἔστι] and even to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], “quiddity”; paradeigma [παράδειγμα], “model”; or charaktêr [χαραϰτήϱ], “mark, distinctive sign.”
I. Physical and Metaphysical Aspects
The article SPECIES compares the collection of Latin and Greek networks related to “form.” Complementary consideration appears under ESTI and TO TI ÊN EINAI, regarding the more Aristotelian terminology of ontology ( see also FORCE, Box 1 ).
On the relation between form, substance, and subject, see SUBJECT.
On “formal ontology,” see INTENTION, REALITY, RES, and SACHVERHALT; cf. MERKMAL.
On the relation between form and phenomenon, see ERSCHEINUNG, cf. AESTHETICS, PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION, SUBLIME.
II. Aesthetic Aspects
For the relation, essential to Platonic ontology, between form-model and image-copy, see EIDÔLON ( see IMAGE ) and MIMÊSIS.
Besides SPECIES, see also CONCETTO, Box 1, DISEGNO, PLASTICITY; cf. ART.
III. Forms and Formalism
For the notion of “form” in grammar, see WORD, II.B and Box 2 ); for “form” in rhetoric, see STYLE, I.
On logical formalism, see especially IMPLICATION.
On legal formalism, see especially LAW and RULE OF LAW.
On moral formalism, see SOLLEN; cf. MORALS, WILLKÜR.
IV. Form and Gestalt Theory
For the study of psychological theory centered on the notion of “form,” see STRUCTURE.
FRENCH
Language Stripped Bare by Its Philosophers
CIVIL SOCIETY, COMBINATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION, COMMON SENSE, ENGLISH, ERZÄHLEN, EUROPE, GERMAN, GREEK, ITALIAN, LOGOS, PEOPLE, POLITICS, PORTUGUESE, REASON, RUSSIAN, SEX, TO BE, WORD ORDER
The establishment of thought in the French language took on a political meaning from the start: the privilege given to French does not derive from any intrinsic character of the language, but instead from the possibility of a universal and democratic philosophical communication. A language of women and the working class rather than of scientists, philosophical French relies on the belief that the act of thinking is open to everyone; its intimate relation with literary writing has no other reason behind it. Against a fascination with words and etymology, that is, with origin and substance, French sets the primacy of syntax, that is, of relation and assertion. This is why, once again, philosophy in French is political: between axioms and sentences, against consensus and ambiguity, French plants its certainty and its authority, which are also the source of its persuasive beauty.
In 1637 Descartes published Discours de la méthode in French anonymously. This was four years earlier than the publication of Meditationes de prima philosophia ( Meditations ), which was in Latin. Descartes never translated the Discours into Latin ( that was done by Étienne de Courcelles in 1644 ), but neither did he persist in defending the Latin of the Meditations. He consistently said that the French translation by the Duke of Luynes, followed by that of the Objections and Responses by Clerselier, which he thoroughly reviewed, could serve as a reference, or as Baillet said later, that it gave un grand relief of his thought ( made it stand out clearly ) and that it was extremely important to support reading by those who, “lacking the use of scientific language, would not fail to have a love and a disposition for philosophy” ( Vie de Monsieur Descartes ).
Descartes’ linguistic strategy is unambiguous. It gives primacy to French, while nonetheless demonstrating to “Messieurs the deans and doctors of the sacred faculty of theology of Paris,” the addressees of the prudent and defensive preface of the Meditations, that he knows his way around the official scientific language and that he can, like everyone else, praise the authority of the “name of Sorbonne” in decadent Latin.
Similarly, in the twentieth century, the major creative figures in philosophy in French—Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, Lacan—all claimed the right to write in their native language, in sum the right to freedom of language, despite seeking at the same time to show the academy their technical competence. It says much about the strength of this initial intention, which established philosophy in accordance with an undisguised desire to write freely in the mother tongue without seeking an anarchistic break with scholarly institutions.
The problem is understanding what, for Descartes and his successors, the properly philosophical stake of this initiation of thought in the French language was, which was also the beginning of an openly declared equivocation, at the risk of being cursed and cast out by the learned, between the status of philosopher and that of a writer.
I. The Politics of French: The Democratic Communication of Philosophy
The whole point, however, whose consequences are still with us today, is that the privilege given to French had nothing to do with the language as such. Unlike what happened little by little—much later—with German and what had taken place in antiquity with Greek, the connection between philosophical technicality and the French language was not accompanied by any speculation about the philosophical characteristics of French. Even better: Descartes was profoundly convinced that the force of thought has nothing to do either with language or with rhetoric:
Those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton.
( Discourse on Method, part 1, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 )
In other words, the transmission of thought is indifferent to language. It had, for Descartes, three extralinguistic criteria:
1. Reasoning—the ability to string together thoughts on the basis of indubitable axioms, the paradigm of which is geometrical writing, travels across languages universally.
2. The internalization ( the “digestion” ) of ideas, which is their intimate clarification ( Boileau’s “that which is well-conceived” ) and whose utterance is only a consequence. But internal thinking, which is the intuition of immanent ideas, is nonlinguistic.
3. Clear and intelligible transcription, which, if criteria 1 and 2 are satisfied, may proceed in any dialect ( Low Breton, for example ) and persuade any mind.
This last item is of great importance. One of the reasons why, in Descartes’s eyes, it would be disastrous to have to scrutinize the singularities of language reflects a principled universalism. No linguistic condition may be attached to the formation of true thoughts, nor to their transmission, nor to their reception. This is one of the meanings of the famous axiom about good sense, that it is “the most equitably shared thing in the world.” This is in effect a universalist egalitarian axiom, as Descartes was careful to make clear: “[T]he power of judging well and distinguishing the true from the false . . . is naturally equal in all men,” and as for reason, it is “whole in each person” ( Discourse on Method ).
The desire to express philosophy in French is thus related not to a consideration of an appropriation by French of the adequate expression of thoughts, let alone a speculative national doctrine concerning the coincidence of Being and language ( German, Greek ), but rather to a conclusion that is democratic in origin and concerns the formation and destination of thought. It is a matter of speaking the same language as “everyone”—in France, French—not that it will have special benefits either for concepts ( which are themselves indifferent to language ) or for the language itself ( since French would not acquire any special privileges ).
What is more, a point that seems empirical, though we have reasons to believe that it is not at all so, beginning with Descartes and linked to the choice of French, the conviction arose that philosophical discourse must be addressed to women, that the conversation of intelligent women is a means of approval or validation that is much more important that all the decrees of the learned. As Descartes marveled, “Such a varied and complete knowledge of all is to be found not in some aged pedant who has spent many years in contemplation but in a young princess whose beauty and youth call to mind one of the Graces rather than gray-eyed Minerva or any of the Muses” ( Dedication to Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 ). This moment of princesses is in reality a basic democratic intention that turns philosophical discourse toward discussion and seduction, toward Venus rather than Minerva, moving it as far away as possible from academic or scientific entrenchment. This intention will be repeated by all the notable French philosophers, who comprise a significant anthology: Rousseau, and also in his own way Auguste Comte, and then Sartre, as well as Lacan. All of them wished to be heard and admired by women and knew that they must be courted neither in Latin nor in the language of pedants.
We may say that, once philosophy in France became linguistically “nationalized,” it followed the path of sociability, ease, and immediate universalism, rather than considering the materiality or the history of languages. It was neither a matter of their being rooted in some mode of original speech that had more or less been forgotten ( traditional logic ), nor of what rhetoric had imposed in terms of cadence or forms necessary for the deployment of thought ( sophistic logic ).
The thesis may be put simply: the reason philosophers, starting with Descartes, began writing in French is one that was in their eyes political in nature. It is only a matter of answering two questions: Where does philosophy come from? and Who is it for? The answer to the first is that philosophy has no particular single source and may come from anywhere by a free act of which any mind is capable; and to the second, that philosophy is aimed at everyone, which in the end means, as Comte says “systematically” ( faithful here to Descartes and Rousseau and anticipating Sartre and Deleuze ), at women and the working class.
To whom, further, is philosophy not addressed? To the learned, to the Sorbonne. Just writing in French is not enough to prove this. One must write this “modern” French, this writer’s French, this literary French, which is distinguished from the “academized,” or “correct,” French transmitted in universities. Even a philosopher as calm as Bergson established himself with a style that, while certainly fluid and relaxed, was also loaded with comparisons, caught up in an imperious movement, and in the end resonant with the “artistic” language of the end of the nineteenth century. Nor did the learned fail to make fun of the beautiful ladies in furs hurrying to hear his lectures at the Collège de France. Compare more modern work: Lacan’s Mallarméan prose, Sartre’s novels, Deleuze’s scintillation. And earlier, Diderot’s dynamic force and Rousseau’s invention of the Romantic sentence. And even earlier, Pascal’s aphorisms. This is proof that fulfilling the democratic calling of philosophy requires placing thought into literary French, even into the written language “of the day.” This carries a risk as well: that by a dialectical reversal familiar to French democracy, philosophy could become an especially aristocratic discipline, or at least snobbish. This is a risk to which the learned have always said that French philosophy would absolutely succumb, even if it meant, in order to excommunicate the “jargon” of a Derrida or a Lacan, claiming for oneself a Cartesian clarity—which is in reality only the foundation of a national link between philosophical exposition and literary writing, one to which Lacan and Derrida are attempting to be faithful as well.
II. Syntax versus Substance: French as a Thin Language
The real question concerns the consequences for philosophy of its being placed in the language of writers, which is itself a paradoxical effect of a choice that was democratic in spirit.
We have already said that a result of this choice was a sort of royal indifference to the philosophical particularities of the national dialect. Despite the most vehement importunities, nothing managed to impel philosophy in France toward the hard German labor of opening words up, deriving their Indo-European roots, entreating them to mean “being” or “community.” Nothing ever destined the language to anything other than its immediate savor on the tongue and finally, to the bewitching ease, even when sophisticated, of its style. The principal rule, as Corneille said of the theater, is to please and not to ensure, with a slightly priestly gravity, that one’s language is indeed the transcendent of thought’s promise or the chosen medium of a shattering truth. France always laughed at what Paulhan called “proof by etymology.” Its pride does not take it in the direction of believing that French is philosophically evoked by its origins, but rather toward the idea, also in a way a national one though very different, that a language in the hands of a writer can say exactly what it wishes and, in addition, by its charm seduce and rally those to whom it is addressed. It is true—and even the most tortured French prose ( Mallarmé, Lacan, the drugged Sartre of the Critique de la raison dialectique ) is no exception ( on the contrary )—that what is at stake is a transparency to the Idea, and not depth, or a complicity between the thickness of the language and its content.
This is because the latent universalism of any use of French, from Descartes to the present, rests entirely on the belief that the essence of language is syntax. Classical French, as it developed after Montaigne or Rabelais and was smoothed out and “compacted” by the joint efforts of policing by the precious salons and the centralized state, is a language that leaves little room for semantic ambiguity, since it subordinates everything to the most energetic, shortest, and most cadenced syntactic placement. This language—whose heart is in La Rochefoucauld’s or Pascal’s aphorisms, on one hand, and Racine’s alexandrines on the other—presents itself to the philosopher as incredibly concentrated around verbs and liaisons, or successions. Unlike English, it is not a language of the phenomenon, of nuance, of descriptive subtlety. Its semantic field is narrow; abstraction is natural to it. Accordingly, neither empiricism nor even phenomenology suit it. It is a language of decision, of principle and consequence. Neither is it a language of hesitation, repentance, of the slow questioning ascent toward the dark and saturated point of origins. In truth, it is a language made impatient by questions that hastens toward affirmation, solution, the end of the analysis.
The perfect order that the ( French ) adherents of intuition, the perceptual life of creative disorder, imposed on their writings is notable. When Bergson rails against the discontinuous and abstract side of linguistic or scientific intelligence ( but accurately; in fact, he is speaking about characteristics of French—its discretion, its abstraction ), when he praises immediate data, the continuous élan, or unseparated intuition, he does so in a language exemplary in its transparency and order, where well-defined phrases abound and where all the distinctions, all the binary oppositions, are displayed with unique clarity. And conversely, when Lacan or Mallarmé seem to bring logical rationalism toward a staccato language that is violently discontinuous and whose meaning must be reconstructed, it is decisively the spirit of the maxim that wins out when it concentrates ( “la Femme n’existe pas” [Woman does not exist; Lacan] or “toute pensée émet un coup de dés” [every thought sends out a throw of the dice; Mallarmé] ) what was first submitted to the test of allusive syntax.
In the end, whether one accepts the vital continuum or semantic discretion, French imposes the syntactic primacy of relations over substances, of composite phrases over terms. No one escapes the order of reasons, since language itself conforms to it. Or at least that is the natural tendency, such that one who wishes to descend into vital intuition must persuade us in the opposite element of symmetrical constructions and grammatical subordinations.
French leads to the hollowing out of all substantiality. For, even if it pauses over the density of a noun ( as may be the case for morceau de cire [piece of wax], or racine de marronnier [root of a chestnut tree], or prolétaire [proletarian] ), it is in each case only to reduce, bit by bit, its visible singularity in a predicational and relational network so invasive that in the end the initial noun is only an example, easily replaceable, of a conceptual place. Thus Descartes reduces the piece of wax to geometrical extension; Sartre turns the root of the chestnut into the pure surging of a being-in-itself without qualities; and Comte’s proletarian may just as well, if accompanied by the epithet “systematic,” refer to any philosopher. Even for a thinker oriented toward singularity as much as Deleuze is, the pack of hounds is only a rhizome in motion, and the rhizome is a conceptual placeholder for any multiple, “horizontal” agency removed from the form of binary arborescence.
The rule of syntax in French does not really authorize descriptive delectation or the unsoundable becoming of the Absolute. It is a thin language whose saturation requires a long range of phrases supported by powerful propositional connections.
None perceived and practiced this better than Auguste Comte, no doubt because he wrote an extremely articulated and somewhat pompous language that schoolteachers later imposed on country folk for decades: a precise language no doubt, but one so brutishly declarative that it is always, like an acceptance speech for an awards ceremony, at the edges of ridicule. It is moving, as well, since it attempts ( as is already Descartes’s goal ) to do literary justice to the speaker as well as to what is said. It is a language, in sum, that juxtaposes in philosophemes the speech of the flesh and that of the confession, an improbable bastard of Bossuet and Fénelon; for example, Comte writes:
Il serait certes superflu d’indiquer ici expressément que je ne devrai jamais attendre que d’actives persécutions, d’ailleurs patentes ou secrètes, de la part du parti théologique, avec lequel, quelque complète justice que j’aie sincèrement rendu à son antique prépondérance, ma philosophie ne comporte réellement aucune conciliation essentielle, à moins d’une entière transformation sacerdotale, sur laquelle il ne faut pas compter.
( It would no doubt be superfluous to indicate expressly here that I should never expect anything but active persecutions, obvious or secret, from the theological party, with which, despite my sincerely doing however complete a justice to its ancient predominance as I have, my philosophy in reality contains no essential conciliation, unless there should be a complete transformation of the priesthood, which we must not count on. )
( Positive Philosophy, preface )
It is essential for a philosopher writing in French to persuade the reader that he is coming face-to-face with a certainty of such compactness that it would be impossible to doubt what is being said without harming the subject, except ( but then we would know that we are dealing with a political opposition ) by rejecting the whole without examination. Philosophical French is a language of ideological conflict much more than of attentive descriptions, sophistical refutations, or infinite speculations. This is why Comte flanks every noun with an adjective that consolidates it, which is like its subjective bodyguard, just as he rigs out the sentence with robust adverbial padding ( expressément, sincèrement, réellement ), which is to the verbal edifice what the Doric columns are to a temple.
We would be wrong to believe that these are singularities exclusive to the half-mad Comte. When Sartre attempts, in the Critique de la raison dialectique, to explore the category of dynamic totality, and thus the apprehension of the movement of totalization and detotalization—when he must, in sum, return to the language what he calls “detotalized totality”—he spontaneously picks up the long, didactic, many-jointed sentences of positivism, given his need, he says, to express the dialectical components of the process all at once. Syntactic heaviness comes to unify semantic contraries at the risk of losing sight of the substantial or empirical singularity and of imposing a uniform rhythm on dialectic that bit by bit drains the historicity of the examples of their color and prosodic amplitude, leaving only, at a distance, the recognizable stamp of verbs and their sequences. To take a phrase from among a thousand ( one concerning the workers’ riots against Réveillon in April 1789 ):
Even if, from the depths of the initial and contagional march, negative unity as a future totality was already occasioning being-together [être-ensemble] ( that is to say, everyone’s non-serial relation to the group as a milieu of freedom ) as a possibility which was perceived in seriality and which presented itself as the negation of seriality, the objective of the march was still indeterminate: it appeared both as seriality itself as a reaction to the situation, and as an equally serial attempt at display.
( Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 )
There is in the language an almost heroic effort to make the trumpet of history sound again in the very midst of the conceptual tangle. And the pathos Comte gives for this purpose to adverbs and adjectives, as much as to the syntactic riveting, is here clearly accomplished by a vertiginous stretching of the verbal “dough,” in the midst of which we hope that the reader will notice the illicit punctuation provided in the form of the italicized words. However, it is not true that this phrasing—bizarrely similar to continuous Wagnerian melody—pursues different goals from those to which Descartes assigned the philosophical use of French at the beginning. The point here is, again, an instrumental ( and not a thematic ) use of the language, whose unique purpose is to extract agreement from the readers as a result of their having seen the thought create and expose itself completely, according to its proper declarative force. What is more contrary in appearance to Sartrian totalization than Althusser’s grand style, the militant chivalry of the pure concept placed under the ideal of science? And yet:
To speak plainly, it was only possible to pose to the practical political analyses Lenin gives us of the conditions for the revolutionary explosion of 1917 the question of the specificity of the Marxist dialectic on the basis of an answer which lacked the proximity of its question, an answer situated at another place in the Marxist works at our disposal, precisely the answer in which Marx declared that he had “inverted” the Hegelian dialectic.
( Althusser and Balabar, Reading Capital )
How we recognize the lengthening of the sentence, ordered to gather up the components of belief all at once, and the italics, blinking beacons for a navigation-reading that is utterly prescribed! How Althusser’s clarity carries with it the same insistence as the Sartrian dialectic!
III. The Politics of French, Again: The Authority of the Language
Is this “Marxist” style, then? Political totalization? Let us say, rather, that in French syntax politicizes every philosophical statement, including ones that are at the furthest remove from any explicit politicization, including those that ( Lacan ) locate their crafty charm between puns ( an important national tradition, aimed at mocking and discrediting semantic equivocation, which the French loathe ) and Mallarméan formulas. Witness how the authority of speech, its foundational political desire, runs through this type of broken melody, even into the usage of one of the most unique resources of French, the imperious interrogative—the question that strikes down its opponent, after which, so far has the subject gone in the earthquake of his speech, there is nothing more to say. And it is not for nothing that this French is appealed to straightaway and as such in the sentence ( in order to “translate” Freud’s dictum: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” [Where the id was, the ego shall be] ):
But the French translation says: “là où c’était. . . . ” Let us take advantage of the distinct imperfect it provides. Where it was just now, where it was for a short while, between an extinction that is still glowing and an opening up that stumbles, the I can [peut] come into being by disappearing from my statement [dit].
An enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs—what remains here if not the trace of what really must be in order to fall away from being?
( Lacan, Écrits )
How beautiful that all is! It is persuasive beauty, which is more important for any French writer-philosopher than exactitude. Or rather, it is a secondary exactitude, which must be reconstructed inside the beauty and guided by it yet leave it behind, as one must comply with syntactic constraint in order to achieve, just at the end, the release of the Idea. Stylistic commonality often wins out over doctrinal or personal antipathy, as we see in the way Deleuze’s vitalism is accentuated in the same way as its psychoanalytic adversary and in the way the same effervescent language is used to say that desire is a lack ( Lacan ) and that desire lacks nothing ( the anti-Oedipal Deleuze–Guattari ), since the aim is still, as with Sartre before, to hold opposite predications together in a grammatical formula, to make one fade into the next:
. . . objets partiels qui entrent dans des synthèses ou interactions indirectes, puisqu’ils ne sont pas partiels au sens de parties extensives, mais plutôt “partiaux” comme les intensités sous lesquelles une matière remplit toujours l’espace à des degrés divers ( l’œil, la bouche, l’anus comme degrés de matière ); pures multiplicités positives où tout est possible, sans exclusive ni négation, synthèses opérant sans plan, où les connexions sont transversales, les disjonctions incluses, les conjonctions polyvoques, indifférentes à leur support, puisque cette matière qui leur sert précisément de support n’est spécifiée sous aucune unité structurale ni personnelle, mais apparaît comme le corps sans organe qui remplit l’espace chaque fois qu’une intensité le remplit. . . .
( . . . partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial [partiels] in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial [“partiaux”] like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees ( the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter ); pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it. . . . )
( Deleuze and Guattari, L’anti-Œdipe )
There is an obvious consonance between the énonciation qui se renonce ( the enuciation that is a renunciation ) and the disjonction incluse ( an inclusive disjunction ), between the conjonction polyvoque ( the polyvocal conjunction ) and the l’extinction qui luit encore ( the extinction that still gleams ), as though the slope of language upon hitting an oxymoron to make the thought pivot won out over the taking up of a position. It is as though, lying in ambush behind the concept, an invariable La Rochefoucauld had the idea to fuse the aphorism and to stretch the electric arc of the thought between poles distributed ahead of time by syntactic precision in the recognizable symmetry of French-style gardens.
And it is not as though the French all think the same. Philosophy in French is the most violently polemical of all, ignoring consensus and even making little fuss over rational discussion, for, still opposed to the academy, it speaks ( politically ) to the public and not to colleagues. But this is because the French really speak the same language, which means that we appeal to the same artifices to give ( public ) power to our claims. And this identity is even stronger given that classical French, the only one that philosophy manages to speak despite the consistently abortive efforts to make it flow more wildly, only offers a restricted assortment of effects, all held in the primacy of syntax and univocity over semantics and polysemy.
Someone philosophizing in French is forced to place the concept and its heirs onto the procrustean bed of a sort of sub-Latin. One thing will be said after another, and there will be no verbal exchanges except those authorized by the grammar of sequences and the regulation of univocities.
We know of course ( and this is a primary theme of this dictionary ) that nothing peremptory can be said about languages that will not be disproven by some writer or poem or other. It is thus that rightly or wrongly we sometimes envy the power of German to lay out in an idolatrous semantics the depths offered by infinite exegesis. We also sometimes wish for the descriptive and ironic resources of English—this marvelous texture of the surface, the argumentation always circumscribed—which does not totalize anything since the grammar is never that of the here and now. And even the branching of Italian—when we stop thinking that it muddles everything at will and is running thirty different conversations at once, all erudite and mimetic, we admire its velocity and that when it affirms something, it keeps a clear eye on the other possible affirmation that a simple repentance over the sentence may bring to mind.
But this is not the style of French. We could show how Heidegger, despite the sometimes pious style of his interpreters and translators, becomes, in French, invincibly clear and almost monotonous; how the empirical sensitivity of English turns inevitably flat if the translator is not creative; and how the quicksilver web of Italian prose becomes nothing more than a discouraging chatter.
What French offers philosophy that is universal in character is always in the form of somewhat stiff maxims or badly nuanced derivations. Again, the latent style is that of a speech that aims to make an assembly, seduced, vote for someone without examining the details too much. One must accept this strength, or weakness. It enters into the composition of eternal philosophy, like that which, from the Greek source, retains mathematics rather than mythology, litigation rather than elegy, sophistical argumentation rather than prophetic utterance, democratic politics rather than tragic caesura.
It will always be said in French that “l’homme est une passion inutile” ( man is a useless passion; Sartre ), that “l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage” ( the unconscious is structured like a language; Lacan ), that “la schize ne vient à l’existence que par un désir sans but et sans cause qui la trace et l’épouse” ( the schize only comes into existence through desire without a goal or cause which traces and espouses it; Deleuze and Guattari ), or that “la philosophie est ce lieu étrange où il ne se passe rien, rien que cette répétition du rien” ( philosophy is that strange place where nothing happens, nothing but this repetition of nothing; Althusser ). And there will be no end to the examination of the consequences of these maxims, or to the presentation, before captive audiences, of other axioms and other syntactic networks.
Axiomatizing, deriving, and thereby even emptying speech of any individuality that sparkles too much, of any predication that is too colorful; purifying this speech, these excessive turns of phrase like repentances and uncertainties—these are the very acts of philosophy itself, once it orders its Idea in this material place that grasps it, runs through it: a language, this language, French.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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